Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Interpersonal motor resonance in autism spectrum disorder: evidence against a global “mirror system” deficit

The mirror neuron hypothesis of autism is highly controversial, in part because there are conflicting reports as to whether putative indices of mirror system activity are actually deficient in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Recent evidence suggests that a typical putative mirror system response may be seen in people with an ASD when there is a degree of social relevance to the visual stimuli used to elicit that response. Individuals with ASD (n = 32) and matched neurotypical controls (n = 32) completed a transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) experiment in which the left primary motor cortex (M1) was stimulated during the observation of static hands, individual (i.e., one person) hand actions, and interactive (i.e., two person) hand actions. Motor-evoked potentials (MEP) were recorded from the contralateral first dorsal interosseous, and used to generate an index of interpersonal motor resonance (IMR; a putative measure of mirror system activity) during action observation. There was no difference between ASD and NT groups in the level of IMR during the observation of these actions. These findings provide evidence against a global mirror system deficit in ASD, and this evidence appears to extend beyond stimuli that have social relevance. Attentional and visual processing influences may be important for understanding the apparent role of IMR in the pathophysiology of ASD.
Perceived User Experience of Animated Transitions in Mobile User Interfaces

Animated transitions are an important part of graphical user interface design practice. They can help to guide users' attention and highlight changes in the interface. However, there is only little empirical research on how such animated transitions influence the users' perception of an interface. We therefore aim to investigate how different animation principles for animated transitions in mobile applications influence perceived user experience. In this late breaking work we present the results of a pilot study in which we tested the suitability of different animated transitions for our main study. Moreover, we outline a tentative design and procedure of the main study. We plan to recruit over 250 participants that will rate different styles of animated transitions in regard to perceived pragmatic and hedonic quality. Our findings are expected to provide insights in users' perception of animation styles and therefore to have implications for graphical user interface design practice.
Unexpected Positive Buoyancy in Deep Sea Sharks, Hexanchus griseus, and a Echinorhinus cookei

We do not expect non air-breathing aquatic animals to exhibit positive buoyancy. Sharks, for example, rely on oil-filled livers instead of gas-filled swim bladders to increase their buoyancy, but are nonetheless ubiquitously regarded as either negatively or neutrally buoyant. Deep-sea sharks have particularly large, oil-filled livers, and are believed to be neutrally buoyant in their natural habitat, but this has never been confirmed. To empirically determine the buoyancy status of two species of deep-sea sharks (bluntnose sixgill sharks, Hexanchus griseus, and a prickly shark, Echinorhinus cookei) in their natural habitat, we used accelerometer-magnetometer data loggers to measure their swimming performance. Both species of deep-sea sharks showed similar diel vertical migrations: they swam at depths of 200–300 m at night and deeper than 500 m during the day. Ambient water temperature was around 15°C at 200–300 m but below 7°C at depths greater than 500 m. During vertical movements, all deep-sea sharks showed higher swimming efforts during descent than ascent to maintain a given swimming speed, and were able to glide uphill for extended periods (several minutes), indicating that these deep-sea sharks are in fact positively buoyant in their natural habitats. This positive buoyancy may adaptive for stealthy hunting (i.e. upward gliding to surprise prey from underneath) or may facilitate evening upward migrations when muscle temperatures are coolest, and swimming most sluggish, after spending the day in deep, cold water. Positive buoyancy could potentially be widespread in fish conducting daily vertical migration in deep-sea habitats.
BioNLP 2011 Task Bacteria Biotope – The Alvis system

This paper describes the system of the INRA Bibliome research group applied to the Bacteria Biotope (BB) task of the BioNLP 2011 shared tasks. Bacteria, geographical locations and host entities were processed by a pattern-based approach and domain lexical resources. For the extraction of environment locations, we propose a framework based on semantic analysis supported by an ontology of the biotope domain. Domain-specific rules were developed for dealing with Bacteria anaphora. Official results show that our Alvis system achieves the best performance of participating systems.
Cell wall O-glycoproteins and N-glycoproteins: aspects of biosynthesis and function

Cell wall O-glycoproteins and N-glycoproteins are two types of glycomolecules whose glycans are structurally complex. They are both assembled and modified within the endomembrane system, i.e., the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) and the Golgi apparatus, before their transport to their final locations within or outside the cell. In contrast to extensins (EXTs), the O-glycan chains of arabinogalactan proteins (AGPs) are highly heterogeneous consisting mostly of (i) a short oligo-arabinoside chain of three to four residues, and (ii) a larger β-1,3-linked galactan backbone with β-1,6-linked side chains containing galactose, arabinose and, often, fucose, rhamnose, or glucuronic acid. The fine structure of arabinogalactan chains varies between, and within plant species, and is important for the functional activities of the glycoproteins. With regards to N-glycans, ER-synthesizing events are highly conserved in all eukaryotes studied so far since they are essential for efficient protein folding. In contrast, evolutionary adaptation of N-glycan processing in the Golgi apparatus has given rise to a variety of organism-specific complex structures. Therefore, plant complex-type N-glycans contain specific glyco-epitopes such as core β,2-xylose, core α1,3-fucose residues, and Lewisa substitutions on the terminal position of the antenna. Like O-glycans, N-glycans of proteins are essential for their stability and function. Mutants affected in the glycan metabolic pathways have provided valuable information on the role of N-/O-glycoproteins in the control of growth, morphogenesis and adaptation to biotic and abiotic stresses. With regards to O-glycoproteins, only EXTs and AGPs are considered herein. The biosynthesis of these glycoproteins and functional aspects are presented and discussed in this review.
Group Therapy for Eating Disorders: A Retrospective Case Study

An increasing amount of research supports group therapy as an effective treatment option for eating disorders (Moreno, 1994). In an attempt to further delineate therapeutic factors associated with productive group work, this study represents an exploratory, descriptive analysis of client and therapist perspectives on group process and outcome. Specifically, this retrospective study investigated what clients and their therapist considered important, helpful, and problematic in an aftercare group for hospitalized patients with eating disorders. The therapist and client perspectives were considered separately. These data were then classified into four categories: importance, benefits, problems, and critical incidents. A follow-up discussion explores similarities and differences between therapist and client perspectives. Implications for practice and research are presented.
An Unsupervised Framework of Exploring Events on Twitter: Filtering, Extraction and Categorization

Twitter, as a popular microblogging service, has become a new information channel for users to receive and exchange the mostup-to-date information on current events. However, since there is no control on how users can publish messages on Twitter, finding newsworthy events from Twitter becomes a difficult task like "finding a needle in a haystack". In this paper we propose a general unsupervised framework to explore events from tweets, which consists of a pipeline process of filtering, extraction and categorization. To filter out noisy tweets, the filtering step exploits a lexicon-based approach to separate tweets that are event-related from those that are not. Then, based on these event-related tweets, the structured representations of events are extracted and categorized automatically using an unsupervised Bayesian model without the use of any labelled data. Moreover, the categorized events are assigned with the event type labels without human intervention. The proposed framework has been evaluated on over 60 millions tweets which were collected for one month in December 2010. A precision of 70.49% is achieved in event extraction, outperforming a competitive baseline by nearly 6%. Events are also clustered into coherence groups with the automatically assigned event type label.
Educating students with disabilities in regional independent Christian schools of Queensland: An analysis of school policies

In recent decades, in Australia as elsewhere, students with disabilities (SWD) have been increasingly introduced to mainstream schools. This reflects both changes in social attitudes towards young people with a disability and changes in the policy environment for disability and education. At the same time, independent schools in Australia have been growing both in number and rate; but, as Prasser (2009a) has indicated, the numbers of SWD in independent schools are not growing at a proportional rate. In Christian independent schools, policy issues with regard to SWD collide with central tenets of the Christian faith and the business models in which these schools operate; and these may generate tensions and problems with regard to educating these students. This study sought to explore the issues surrounding educating SWD in a number of regional independent schools in the state of Queensland, Australia. It sought to uncover uniquely Christian approaches to educating SWD by exploring: (a) the perspectives of Principals of these independent Christian schools, (b) tensions between faith and policy and (c) issues surrounding the mainstreaming of SWD. ; Submitted in the fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, University of the Sunshine Coast, 2014.
Water Woes in Zimbabwe's Urban Areas in the Middist Of Plenty: 2000 -Present

Zimbabwe’s urban areas are choking under the weight of over-crowdedness amidstdilapidated infrastructure that is characterised by constant service failure. The water andsewer systems of the country’s major urban centres are on the verge of collapse, thusputting millions of people in danger of consuming contaminated water, including thatfrom underground sources. Waste management and water supply problems manifestthemselves as challenges bedevilling many an urban area in the country. The quality andquantity of water supplied in Zimbabwe’s urban centres has plummeted in recent yearsand has assumed crisis proportions owing to the difficult economic situation and otherchallenges faced by the country. The situation is desperate and dire, as is evidenced by thepoor quality of delivered water, severe water rationing and the outbreak of water-bornediseases in the urban areas dotted across the country. The situation demands and dictatesthat solutions be proffered as a matter of urgency.The recent outbreak of epidemics hasbeen blamed on lack of access to safe water and poor sanitation, two crucial factors incontrolling the spread of diseases. An overly bureaucratic environment, where decisionsand processes take longer, makes life complicated for poor urban residents. Such ascenario motivated the researchers to examine the problem with a view to suggest waysand means of intervening to mitigate and resolve the problem. It emerged from thefindings that the problem is multifaceted in nature, hence a whole range of measures needto be adopted if a long-term solution is to be provided.
An iterative hard thresholding approach to ℓ0 sparse Hellinger NMF

Performance of Non-negative Matrix Factorisation (NMF) can be diminished when the underlying factors consist of elements that overlap in the matrix to be factorised. The use of ℓ0 sparsity may improve NMF, however such approaches are generally limited to Euclidean distance. We have previously proposed a stepwise ℓ0 method for Hellinger distance, leading to improved sparse NMF. We extend sparse Hellinger NMF by proposing an alternative Iterative Hard Thresholding sparse approximation method. Experimental validation of the proposed approach is given, with a large improvement over NMF methods when learning is performed on a large dataset.
Tax Increment Financing

Executive Summary Since the first TIF law passed in California in 1952, tax increment financing (TIF) has spread throughout the nation to become a useful, effective tool for local governments to finance capital projects in support of economic development. Though TIF laws are on the books in 48 states and the District of Columbia, the application of generic TIF principles varies greatly across states. TIF was originally designed and justified as a local method of self-financing the redevelopment of blighted urban areas. TIF has successfully fulfilled its original intent by spurring the redevelopment of several blighted areas. Now, the use of TIF to raise project finance money has expanded into other areas. TIF bond proceeds commonly finance projects in non-blighted, as well as blighted areas, and for a variety of purposes associated with redevelopment, development, or related physical infrastructure improvements, such as elementary and secondary educational facilities, roads, bridges, parking facilities, recreational facilities, water and wastewater facilities, and electrical power plants. TIF has financed a wide variety of successful commercial and industrial projects. In addition, TIF projects have been successful at building affordable housing, assisting in the revitalization of low-income and moderate-income neighborhoods, and tackling modern, technical redevelopment problems, like redeveloping contaminated sites such as brownfields. TIF is also a fiscal tool used to overcome problems associated with local fiscal stress. TIF has been adopted by cities facing various forms of fiscal stress, including tax and expenditure limitations, infrastructure demands from population growth, and declines in intergovernmental aid. TIF has been used in communities with a wide range of socioeconomic characteristics, demonstrating its breadth as a development tool. In addition, there is empirical evidence that TIF programs in Michigan accelerated property 1 value growth, and TIF programs in Indiana raised property values and employment levels. TIF has the revenue raising ability to finance projects by itself, but it is flexible enough to be used as a part of a larger package of financial incentives to retain and expand businesses or attract new business to the community. [TIF and alternative economic development techniques, particularly impact fees. ] Though TIF is most often thought of as a financing tool, it is also a land development and improvement tool. The TIF plan, usually referred to as a redevelopment plan, provides governments and community stakeholders with a forum and process to mange their redevelopment and growth for years to come. In the process, TIF provides …
Hybrid master oscillator power amplifier system providing 10 mJ, 32 W, and 50 MW pulses for optical parametric chirped-pulse amplification pumping

We present a high-energy, high-average-power picosecond laser system based on a hybrid chain in a master oscillator power amplifier configuration. The chain is seeded by a Ti:sapphire oscillator, followed by a Yb-doped fiber preamplifier, a Nd:YAG-based regenerate amplifier, and a Nd:YVO4-based single-pass amplifier. The final diode-pumped, solid-state amplifier is detailed and produces pulses with more than 10 mJ energy at 32 W average power with 207 ps duration, corresponding to 50 MW peak power. The picosecond pulse output is seeded and optically synchronized with the sub-5-fs oscillator for optical parametric chirped-pulse amplification pumping.
Electronic Properties of TiO2 Nanoparticles Films and the Effect on Apatite-Forming Ability

Nanoparticle-covered electrodes have altered properties as compared to conventional electrodes with same chemical composition. The changes originate from the large surface area and enhanced conduction. To test the mineralization capacity of such materials, TiO2 nanoparticles were deposited on titanium and gold substrates. The electrochemical properties were investigated using cyclic voltammetry and impedance spectroscopy while the mineralization was tested by immersion in simulated body fluid. Two types of nucleation and growth behaviours were observed. For smooth nanoparticle surfaces, the initial nucleation is fast with the formation of few small nuclei of hydroxyapatite. With time, an amorphous 2D film develops with a Ca/P ratio close to 1.5. For the rougher surfaces, the nucleation is delayed but once it starts, thick layers are formed. Also the electronic properties of the oxides were shown to be important. Both density of states (DOS) in the bandgap of TiO2 and the active area were determined. The maximum in DOS was found to correlate with the donor density (N d) and the active surface area. The results clearly show that a rough surface with high conductivity is beneficial for formation of thick apatite layers, while the nanoparticle covered electrodes show early nucleation but limited apatite formation.
Alternative splicing networks regulated by signaling in human T Material

The formation and execution of a productive immune response requires the maturation of competent T cells and a robust change in cellular activity upon antigen challenge. Such changes in cellular function depend on regulated alterations to protein expression. Previous research has focused on defining transcriptional changes that regulate protein expression during T-cell maturation and antigen stimulation. Here, we globally analyze another critical process in gene regulation during T-cell stimulation, alternative splicing. Specifically, we use RNA-seq profiling to identify 178 exons in 168 genes that exhibit robust changes in inclusion in response to stimulation of a human T-cell line. Supporting an important role for the global coordination of alternative splicing following T-cell stimulation, these signal-responsive exons are significantly enriched in genes with functional annotations specifically related to immune response. The vast majority of these genes also exhibit differential alternative splicing between naive and activated primary T cells. Comparison of the responsiveness of splicing to various stimuli in the cultured and primary T cells further reveals at least three distinct networks of signal-induced alternative splicing events. Importantly, we find that each regulatory network is specifically associated with distinct sequence features, suggesting that they are controlled by independent regulatory mechanisms. These results thus provide a basis for elucidating mechanisms of signal pathway–specific regulation of alternative splicing during T-cell stimulation.
Group III muscle afferents evoke reflex depressor responses to repetitive muscle contractions in rabbits.

Repetitive-twitch contraction of the hindlimb muscles in anesthetized rabbits consistently evokes a reflex depressor response, whereas this type of contraction in anesthetized cats evokes a reflex pressor response in about one-half of the preparations tested. Rapidly conducting group III fibers appear to comprise the afferent arm of the reflex arc, evoking the depressor response to twitch contraction in rabbits because electrical stimulation of their axons reflexly decreases arterial pressure. In contrast, electrical stimulation of the axons of slowly conducting group III and group IV afferents reflexly increases arterial pressure in rabbits. In the present study, we examined the discharge properties of group III and IV muscle afferents and found that the former (i.e., 13 of 20), but not the latter (i.e., 0 of 10), were stimulated by 5 min of repetitive-twitch contraction (1 Hz) of the rabbit triceps surae muscles. Moreover, most of the group III afferents responding to contraction appeared to be mechanically sensitive, discharging in synchrony with the muscle twitch. On average, rapidly conducting group III afferents responded for the 5-min duration of 1-Hz repetitive-twitch contraction, whereas slowly conducting group III afferents responded only for the first 2 min of contraction. We conclude that rapidly conducting group III afferents, which are mechanically sensitive, are primarily responsible for evoking the reflex depressor response to repetitive-twitch contractions in anesthetized rabbits.
Flame Retardancy of Sorbitol Based Bioepoxy via Combined Solid and Gas Phase Action

Flame-retarded bioepoxy resins were prepared with the application of commercially available sorbitol polyglycidyl ether (SPE). The additive-type flame retardancy of the cycloaliphatic amine-cured SPE was investigated. Three-percent phosphorus (P)-containing samples were prepared with the application of the liquid resorcinol bis(diphenyl phosphate) (RDP), the solid ammonium polyphosphate (APP), and by combining them. Synergistic effect was found between the inorganic APP and the organophosphorus RDP, when applied in combination: formulations applying RDP or APP alone showed increased limiting oxygen index (LOI) values, however, their UL-94 standard ratings remained HB. When the same amount of P originated from the two additives, V-0, self-extinguishing rating and LOI value of 34% (v/v) was reached. By the combined approach the heat release rate of SPE could be lowered by approximately 60%. The assumed balanced solid and gas phase mechanism was confirmed by thermogravimetric analysis, Fourier transform infrared spectrometry (FTIR) analysis (of the gases formed during laser pyrolysis), attenuated total reflection-infrared spectrometry (ATR-IR) analysis (of the charred residues), as well as by mechanical testing (of the char obtained after combustion).
Work Hours Instability in Canada

Numerous studies of working hours have drawn important conclusions from cross-sectional surveys. For example, the share of individuals working long hours is quite large at any given point in time. Moreover, this appears to have increased over the past two decades, raising the call for policies designed to alleviate working hours discrepancies among workers, or reduce working time overall. However, if work hours vary substantially at the individual level over time, then conclusions based upon studies of cross-sectional data may be incomplete. Using longitudinal data from the Canadian Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics, we find that there is substantial variation in annual working hours at the individual level. In fact, as much as half of the cross-sectional inequality in annual work hours can be explained by individual-level instability in hours. Moreover, very few individuals work chronically long hours. Instability in work hours is shown to be related to low-job quality, non-standard work, low-income levels, stress and bad health. This indicates that working variable work hours is not likely done by choice; rather, it is more likely that these workers are unable to secure more stable employment. The lack of persistence in long work hours, plus the high level of individual work hours instability undermines the equity based arguments behind working time reduction policies. Furthermore, this research points out that policies designed to reduce hours instability could benefit workers.