Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Common oxytocin receptor gene (OXTR) polymorphism and social support interact to reduce stress in humans

The neuropeptide oxytocin has played an essential role in the regulation of social behavior and attachment throughout mammalian evolution. Because recent studies in humans have shown that oxytocin administration reduces stress responses and increases prosocial behavior, we investigated whether a common single nucleotide polymorphism (rs53576) in the oxytocin receptor gene (OXTR) might interact with stress-protective effects of social support. Salivary cortisol samples and subjective stress ratings were obtained from 194 healthy male participants before, during, and after a standardized psychosocial laboratory stress procedure. Participants were randomly assigned either to prepare alone or to receive social support from their female partner or close female friend while preparing for the stressful task. Differential stress responses between the genotype groups were observed depending on the presence or absence of social support. Only individuals with one or two copies of the G allele of rs53576 showed lower cortisol responses to stress after social support, compared with individuals with the same genotype receiving no social support. These results indicate that genetic variation of the oxytocin system modulates the effectiveness of positive social interaction as a protective buffer against a stressful experience.
A Nonsense Mutation in Mouse Tardbp Affects TDP43 Alternative Splicing Activity and Causes Limb-Clasping and Body Tone Defects

Mutations in TARDBP, encoding Tar DNA binding protein-43 (TDP43), cause amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD). Attempts to model TDP43 dysfunction in mice have used knockouts or transgenic overexpressors, which have revealed the difficulties of manipulating TDP43, whose level is tightly controlled by auto-regulation. In a complementary approach, to create useful mouse models for the dissection of TDP43 function and pathology, we have identified a nonsense mutation in the endogenous mouse Tardbp gene through screening an N-ethyl-N-nitrosourea (ENU) mutant mouse archive. The mutation is predicted to cause a Q101X truncation in TDP43. We have characterised TardbpQ101X mice to investigate this mutation in perturbing TDP43 biology at endogenous expression levels. We found the TardbpQ101X mutation is homozygous embryonic lethal, highlighting the importance of TDP43 in early development. Heterozygotes (Tardbp+/Q101X) have abnormal levels of mutant transcript, but we find no evidence of the truncated protein and mice have similar full-length TDP43 protein levels as wildtype littermates. Nevertheless, Tardbp+/Q101X mice have abnormal alternative splicing of downstream gene targets, and limb-clasp and body tone phenotypes. Thus the nonsense mutation in Tardbp causes a mild loss-of-function phenotype and behavioural assessment suggests underlying neurological abnormalities. Due to the role of TDP43 in ALS, we investigated potential interactions with another known causative gene, mutant superoxide dismutase 1 (SOD1). Tardbp+/Q101X mice were crossed with the SOD1G93Adl transgenic mouse model of ALS. Behavioural and physiological assessment did not reveal modifying effects on the progression of ALS-like symptoms in the double mutant progeny from this cross. In summary, the TardbpQ101X mutant mice are a useful tool for the dissection of TDP43 protein regulation, effects on splicing, embryonic development and neuromuscular phenotypes. These mice are freely available to the community.
Inter-Call Mobility model: A spatio-temporal refinement of Call Data Records using a Gaussian mixture model

With global mobile phone penetration nearing 100%, cellular Call Data Records (CDRs) provide a large-scale and ubiquitous, but also sparse and skewed snapshot of human mobility. It may be difficult or inappropriate to reach strong conclusions about user movement based on such data without proper understanding of user movement between call records. Based on an analysis of a real-world trace, we propose a novel, probabilistic Inter-Call Mobility (ICM) model of users' position in between calls. The ICM model combines Gaussian mixtures to build a general, comprehensive spatio-temporal refinement of CDRs.We demonstrate that ICM model's application yields strikingly different conclusions to the existing models when applied to basic CDR analyses, such as user proximity probability.
Studying DAC capacitor-array degradation in charge-redistribution SAR ADCs

In this paper, system-level behavioural models are used to simulate the aging-related degradation effects in the DAC capacitor array of a charge-redistribution successive approximation register (SAR) ADC because of the large calculation time of transistor-level aging simulators. A performance-analysis system based on the degraded models has been implemented in the LabVIEW environment in order to study the aging effects in static and dynamic performance parameters. A comparison of results from the degradation in the buffer and comparator with reference to the degradation in the capacitor array has also been conducted. Most of the static and dynamic performance parameters are severely affected by the DAC capacitor-array degradations. Whereas, in case of the buffer and comparator degradations, only offset from the static performance parameters and all of the dynamic performance parameters are severely affected. The simulation results can be used in advance by electronic designers to come to a more reliable design, especially in aging-critical technology nodes.
Signal Extraction in Economics

This study theoretically shows that prize promotions work as firms’ commitments that resolve their various time-inconsistency problems. Prize promotions are the best commitment tool, since they are equivalent to costless credible announcements on the firm’s future policy: the firm can implement the first best commitment equilibrium at no cost. The key lies in the dynamic supply of lottery tickets—the seller has an incentive to distribute more tickets in order to increase the number of winners among the current buyers at the expense of the past buyers. If lottery tickets are attached to products (prize promotions), then the firm can credibly commit to future expansion of production. A network externality model is considered as an example.
RCC-3D: Qualitative Spatial Reasoning in 3D

Qualitative Spatial Reasoning (QSR) theories have applications in areas such as Geographic Information Systems (GIS), robotics, biomedicine, and engineering. However, existing QSR theories primarily have been applied only to 2D data. Herein we introduce a 3D reasoning system that is based on Generalized 2D Region Connection Calculus (GRCC). Our theory, RCC-3D, supports a priori knowledge of the extent of each object. It also provides occlusion support by considering the projections of 3D objects on 2D space. Further, we demonstrate how this model is applied to a particular domain such as anatomy.
Tissue‐specific reactions to positional discontinuities in the regenerating axolotl limb

Abstract We investigated cellular contributions to intercalary regenerates and 180o supernumerary limbs during axolotl limb regeneration using the cell autonomous green fluorescent protein marker and exchanged blastemas between white and green fluorescent protein animals. After distal blastemas were grafted to proximal levels tissues of the intercalary regenerate behaved independently with regard to the law of distal transformation; graft epidermis was replaced by stump epidermis, muscle‐derived cells, blood vessels, and Schwann cells of the distal blastema moved proximally to the stylopodium and cartilage and dermal cells conformed to the law. After 180o rotation, blastemas showed contributions from stump tissues which failed to alter patterning of the blastema. Supernumerary limbs were composed of stump and graft tissues and extensive contributions of stump tissues generated inversions or duplications of polarity to produce limbs of mixed handedness. Tail skeletal muscle and cardiac muscle broke the law with cells derived from these tissues exhibiting an apparent anteroposterior polarity as they migrated to the anterior side of the blastema. We attribute this behavior to the possible presence of a chemotactic factor from the wound epidermis.
Night Monkey Hybrids Exhibit De Novo Genomic and Karyotypic Alterations: The First Such Case in Primates

Using molecular chromosomal analyses, we discovered night monkey hybrids produced in captivity from matings between a female Aotus azarae boliviensis (2n = 50) and a male Aotus lemurinus griseimembra (2n = 53). The parents produced seven offspring in total, including one male and six females—a pattern consistent with Haldane’s rule. Chromosomal studies were conducted on four of the hybrid offspring. Two of them showed relatively “simple” mixture karyotypes, including different chromosome numbers (2n = 51, 52), which were formed because of a heteromorphic autosome pair in the father (n = 26, 27). The other two hybrid monkeys exhibited de novo genomic and karyotypic alterations. Detailed analysis of the alterations revealed that one individual carried a mixture karyotype of the two parental species and an X chromosome trisomy (53,XXX). The second individual displayed trisomy of chromosome 18 (52,XX,+18) and a reciprocal translocation between autosomes 21 and 23 (52,XX,+18,t(21;23)). Interestingly, the second monkey exhibited mosaicism among blood cells (mos52,XX,+18[87]/52,XX,+18,t(21;23)[85]), but only a single karyotype (52,XX,+18) in skin fibroblast cells. The X- and 18-trisomies were derived from a doubling of the mother’s chromosomes in early embryonic cell division, and the reciprocal translocation likely developed in the bone marrow of the offspring, considering that it was observed only in blood cells. Such occurrence of trisomies in hybrid individuals is a unique finding in placental mammals.
IMPULSIVITY AND PERFECTIONISM 1 Too strict or too loose ? Perfectionism and impulsivity : the relation with eating disorder symptoms using a person-centered approach

Although both perfectionism (i.e. personal standards perfectionism and evaluative concerns perfectionism) and impulsivity have been shown to be implicated in eating disorders, no previous studies have examined the interplay between both personality dimensions in their association with eating disorder symptoms. This is the first study to investigate relationships between empirically derived personality subtypes based on perfectionism and impulsivity and eating disorder symptoms (i.e., dietary restraint, and concerns over eating, weight and shape). Cluster analysis was used to establish naturally occurring combinations of perfectionism and impulsivity in adolescent boys and girls (N = 460; M age = 14.2 years, SD = 0.90). Evidence was obtained for four personality profiles: (1) a resilient subtype (low on perfectionism and impulsivity), (2) pure impulsivity subtype (high on impulsivity only), (3) pure perfectionism subtype (high on perfectionism only), and (4) combined perfectionism/impulsivity subtype (high on both perfectionism and impulsivity). Participants in these four clusters showed differences in terms of eating disorder symptoms in that participants with a combination of high perfectionism and high impulsivity (rather than the presence of one of these two characteristics alone) had the highest levels of ED symptoms. These findings shed new light on extant theories concerning ED.
Enhanced Small-Scale Faraday Rotation in the Galactic Spiral Arms

We present an analysis of the rotation measures (RMs) of polarized extragalactic point sources in the Southern Galactic Plane Survey. This work demonstrates that the statistics of fluctuations in RM differ for the spiral arms and the interarm regions. Structure functions of RM are flat in the spiral arms, while they increase in the interarms. This indicates that there are no correlated RM fluctuations in the magnetoionized interstellar medium in the spiral arms on scales larger than ~0. °5, corresponding to ~17 pc in the nearest spiral arm probed. The nonzero slopes in interarm regions imply a much larger scale of RM fluctuations. We conclude that fluctuations in the magnetoionic medium in the Milky Way spiral arms are not dominated by the mainly supernova-driven turbulent cascade in the global ISM but are probably due to a different source, most likely H II regions.
Hierarchical Program Paths

Complete dynamic control flow is a fundamental kind of execution profile about program executions with a wide range of applications. Tracing the dynamic control flow of program executions for a brief period easily generates a trace consisting of billions of control flow events. The number of events in such a trace is large, making both path tracing and path querying to incur significant slowdowns. A major class of path tracing techniques is to design novel trace representations that can be generated efficiently, and encode the inputted sequences of such events so that the inputted sequences are still derivable from the encoded and smaller representations. The control flow semantics in such representations have, however, become obscure, which makes implementing path queries on such a representation inefficient and the design of such queries complicated. We propose a novel two-phase path tracing framework—Hierarchical Program Path (HPP)—to model the complete dynamic control flow of an arbitrary number of executions of a program. In Phase 1, HPP monitors each execution, and efficiently generates a stream of events, namely HPPTree, representing a novel tree-based representation of control flow for each thread of control in the execution. In Phase 2, given a set of such event streams, HPP identifies all the equivalent instances of the same exercised interprocedural path in all the corresponding HPPTree instances, and represents each such equivalent set of paths with a single subgraph, resulting in our compositional graph-based trace representation, namely, HPPDAG. Thus, an HPPDAG instance has the potential to be significantly smaller in size than the corresponding HPPTree instances, and still completely preserves the control flow semantics of the traced executions. Control flow queries over all the traced executions can also be directly performed on the single HPPDAG instance instead of separately processing the trace representation of each execution followed by aggregating their results. We validate HPP using the SPLASH2 and SPECint 2006 benchmarks. Compared to the existing technique, named BLPT (Ball-Larus-based Path Tracing), HPP generates significantly smaller trace representations and incurs fewer slowdowns to the native executions in online tracing of Phase 1. The HPPDAG instances generated in Phase 2 are significantly smaller than their corresponding BLPT and HPPTree traces. We show that HPPDAG supports efficient backtrace querying, which is a representative path query based on complete control flow trace. Finally, we illustrate the ease of use of HPPDAG by building a novel and highly efficient path profiling technique to demonstrate the applicability of HPPDAG.
Respondent-Driven Sampling for Characterizing Unstructured Overlays

short-lived or high degree peers due to the dynamics of peer participation or the heterogeneity of peer degrees, respectively. This paper presents Respondent-Driven Sampling (RDS) as a promising technique for sampling unstructured P2P overlays. This allows one to accurately estimate the distribution of a desired peer property without capturing the entire overlay structure. RDS is a variant of snowball sampling that has been proposed and used in the social sciences to characterize hidden population in a society [9], [13]. We apply the RDS technique to unstructured P2P network and evaluate its performance over a wide range of static and dynamic graphs as well as a widely deployed P2P system. Throughout our evaluation, we compare and contrast the performance of the RDS technique with another sampling technique, namely Metropolized Random Walk (MRW), that we developed in our earlier work [16]. Our main findings can be summarized as follows: First, RDS outperforms MRW across all scenarios. In particular, RDS exhibits a significantly better performance than MRW when the overlay structure exhibits a combination of highly skewed node degrees and highly skewed (local) clustering coefficients. Second, our simulation and empirical evaluations reveal that both the RDS and MRW techniques can accurately estimate key peer properties over dynamic unstructured overlays. Third, our empirical evaluations suggest that the efficiency of the two sampling techniques in practice is lower than in our simulations involving synthetic graphs. We attribute this to our inability to capture accurate reference snapshots. The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section II presents an overview of both the RDS and MRW techniques, and sketches our evaluation methodology. We examine both techniques over variety of static and dynamic graphs in Section III and IV, respectively. Section V presents the empirical evaluation of the two sampling techniques over Gnutella network.
The effects of discrete emotions on risky decision making

THE EFFECTS OF DISCRETE EMOTIONS ON RISKY DECISION MAKING by Hoeun Sim Contrary to the dominant view that generally equates feelings with poor thinking, converging evidence indicates that decisions – including those involving risk – are influenced by affective experiences. Research, however, is limited to studies on undifferentiated, global positive versus negative mood states; less is known about the influence of discrete emotions. The purpose of this research was to extend the affectcognition literature by (a) examining the effects of discrete emotions varying along the dimensions of valence and arousal, and (b) identifying the systematic ways that discrete emotions underlie risky decision making. We used a set of emotion-laden IAPS images to elicit and compare the impact of incidental emotions on risky decision making. One hundred and twenty-two undergraduate students were randomly assigned to one of the four affective conditions: excitement, contentment, fear, and sadness. Following the emotion induction procedure, participants completed the Choice Dilemmas Questionnaire (CDQ) to assess their risk-taking propensity. Results indicated an interaction effect between valence and arousal for positive emotions, such that excited participants were significantly more risky in their decision making compared to contented participants. The discussion focuses on the theoretical and practical health implications of these findings. We recommend that future research capitalize on the insights gained from emotion research and use it favorably to improve decision making under risk.
An efficient key management scheme for mobile agents in distributed networks

In recent years, the Elliptic Curve Cryptosystem (ECC) has attracted a great deal of attention due to its advantages. In this paper, a new ECC based scheme in a hierarchical mobile agent framework is presented. In the proposed scheme legality of agents is verified by hosts to avoid the masquerade attack. Analyzing the security criteria and performance reports the suitability of the proposed scheme for mobile agent environments.
A Safety-Critical Java Technology Compatibility Kit

In order to claim conformance with a given Java Specification Request (JSR), a Java implementation has to pass all tests in an associated Technology Compatibility Kit (TCK). This paper presents development of test cases and tools for the draft Safety-Critical Java (SCJ) specification. In previous work we have shown how the Java Modeling Language (JML) is applied to specify conformance constraints for SCJ, and how JML-related tools may assist in generating and executing tests. Here we extend this work with a layout for concrete test cases including checking of results in a simplified version of JUnit. The simplifications makes the test suite executable on resource constrained platforms. Also, the design of the suite is made more portable to other VMs with a SCJ implementation.
Classification of Test Subjects and its Taste Characteristic based on Experimental Results of “Kawaii” Color

Recently, the word “kawaii” is getting familiar to many people. They have greater opportunities to use “kawaii” in their conversations, and so, the meaning contained in “kawaii” have become diverse with confusion. In despite of this situation, it seems like there are a lot of cases that pink is the typical color representative of “kawaii” on product planning. In this study, it is intended to classify the test subjects and clarify the taste characteristic of each cluster from the aspect of “kawaii”. We conducted the survey to 360 women in their students to 30’s by using the panel of 48 colors. As a result, six clusters of “kawaii” color were obtained. We found out that there are variations of “kawaii”, and the point where people feel “kawaii”, including colors, images and values differs from one type to another.
Alloreactive cloned T cell lines. I. Interactions between cloned amplifier and cytolytic T cell lines

Several T cell clones have been derived by limiting dilution of secondary mixed leukocyte culture cells stimulated by H-2- and M locus (Mls)-disparate spleen cells. When examined for the expression of cytolytic activity and the ability to proliferate, these cell clones can be classified into two major categories. One type of cell is noncytolytic; when cultured with irradiated spleen cells, such clones proliferate in response to Mls determinants. Some, but not all, of these clones express Lyt-1 alloantigens. The other type of cell is cytolytic; these clones do not proliferate when cultured with irradiated allogeneic spleen cells unless supernatant fluid (SF) is added. These cytolytic clones express Lyt-2 alloantigens. Some cytolytic clones are specific for H-2Kd and others for H-2Dd alloantigens. Still other cytolytic cell clones exhibit cross-reactive lysis of different H-2-bearing tumor and Con A blast target cells. Noncytolytic T cell clones, when stimulated by Mls antigens, were examined for their ability to promote proliferation of cytolytic T cell clones. All of the noncytolytic cell clones tested were able to promote proliferation of cytolytic cell clones with the concomitant expression of cytolytic activity directed toward the original stimulating alloantigen (H-2d). Amplification of cytolytic activity was dependent upon stimulation of the noncytolytic amplifier T cell clones by Mls antigens. Specific alloantigen (signal 1), however, was not required for proliferation of the cytolytic cell clones; the amplifying signal (signal 2), delivered by the amplifier cell clones, was sufficient alone to promote proliferation of the cytolytic cell clones. Whereas proliferation of the amplifier cells was radiosensitive, the generation of the soluble amplifying signal was radioresistant. Amplification of cytolytic activity was observed when either amplifier cells were physically separated from responding cytolytic cells in Marbrook cultures or when cytolytic cells were cultured with SF collected from amplifier cell cultures. The amplifying factors were neither antigen specific nor strain specific and could be produced by Lyt-1- cells. The availability of cloned T cell lines that retain specific biologic function offers unique opportunities to characterize cell surface proteins and cell-cell interactions.