Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Rapid X-Ray Flare in the Radio-loud Narrow-Line Quasar PKS 0558–504

We report the detection of a very short timescale flare in the radio-loud narrow-line quasar PKS 0558-504 that was observed using ASCA. The X-ray count rates increased and decreased by a factor of 2 in 33 minutes and possibly by 40% in as short a time period as 2 minutes during this flare, confirming with imaging detectors that such a flare event does occur in this object. The implied largest rate of change in luminosity in 0.8-10 keV alone, dL/dt ≃ (1.8 ± 0.4) × 1042 ergs s-2, is several times higher than the limit set for the isotropic emitting plasma around a Kerr black hole. Emission from either a relativistic boosting jet or a magnetic heated corona may explain such high radiative efficiency. A magnetic field with a strength of at least a few times 104 G is required in the latter case. The spectrum during this flare is significantly harder than an average spectrum. Three radio-loud narrow-line active galactic nuclei (AGNs) possess considerably smaller black holes than the radio-loud AGNs in bright-quasar survey, indicating that they are still in a rapid-growth phase of the black hole by accretion.
Capital Flows to Developing Countries: Long- and Short-Term Determinants

This article focuses on the determinants of the large portfolio flows from the United States to Latin American and Asian countries during 1988-92. Cointegration techniques reveal that both domestic and global factors explain bond and equity flows to developing countries and represent significant long-run determinants of portfolio flows. The article also investigates the dynamics of portfolio flows by estimating seemingly unrelated error-correction models. Global and country-specific factors are equally important in determining the long-run movements in equity flows for both Asian and Latin American countries, while global factors are much more important than domestic factors in explaining the dynamics of bond flows. U.S. interest rates are a particularly important determinant of the short-run dynamics of portfolio, especially bond flows to developing countries. Copyright 1997 by Oxford University Press.
Neovascular Niche for Human Myeloma Cells in Immunodeficient Mouse Bone

The interaction with bone marrow (BM) plays a crucial role in pathophysiological features of multiple myeloma (MM), including cell proliferation, chemoresistance, and bone lesion progression. To characterize the MM-BM interactions, we utilized an in vivo experimental model for human MM in which a GFP-expressing human MM cell line is transplanted into NOG mice (the NOG-hMM model). Transplanted MM cells preferentially engrafted at the metaphyseal region of the BM endosteum and formed a complex with osteoblasts and osteoclasts. A subpopulation of MM cells expressed VE-cadherin after transplantation and formed endothelial-like structures in the BM. CD138+ myeloma cells in the BM were reduced by p53-dependent apoptosis following administration of the nitrogen mustard derivative bendamustine to mice in the NOG-hMM model. Bendamustine maintained the osteoblast lining on the bone surface and protected extracellular matrix structures. Furthermore, bendamustine suppressed the growth of osteoclasts and mesenchymal cells in the NOG-hMM model. Since VE-cadherin+ MM cells were chemoresistant, hypoxic, and HIF-2α-positive compared to the VE-cadherin− population, VE-cadherin induction might depend on the oxygenation status. The NOG-hMM model described here is a useful system to analyze the dynamics of MM pathophysiology, interactions of MM cells with other cellular compartments, and the utility of novel anti-MM therapies.
Effect of prostate volume on the peripheral nerve block anesthesia in the prostate biopsy

Objective: The objective of this study was to evaluate the anesthetic efficacy of periprostatic nerve block (PNB) in transrectal ultrasound (TRUS)-guided biopsy on different prostate volume. Methods: A total of 568 patients received prostate biopsy in our hospital from May 2013 to September 2015 and were retrospectively studied. All patients were divided into local anesthesia group (LAG) and nerve block group (NBG). Then each group was subdivided into 4 subgroups (20–40, 40–60, 60–100, and >100 mL groups) according to different prostate volume range. Visual analogue scale (VAS) and visual numeric scale (VNS) were used to assess the patient's pain and quantify their satisfaction. The scores and complications were compared between the groups. Results: The age and serum prostate-specific antigen (PSA) level before biopsy had no significant differences at intergroup or intragroup level. The VAS scores were significantly lower in the NBG than those in the LAG in terms of prostate volume (1 (1–2) versus 2 (1–3), 2 (1–3) versus 2 (2–4), 2 (2–3) versus 3 (2–5), 4 (3–5) versus 5 (4–7), all P < 0.05). Conversely, the VNS scores were higher in the NBG (4 (3–4) versus 3.5 (3–4), 3 (3–4) versus 3 (3–3), 3 (2–4) versus 3 (2–3), 2 (2–2) versus 1 (1–2), all P < 0.05). Patients with smaller prostate volume undergoing PNB or local anesthesia experienced significantly lower pain and higher satisfaction scores than those with large prostate. Whether in PNB or local anesthesia group, patients with large prostate volume had more chance to have hematuria, hemospermia, urinary retention than smaller one except infection (P < 0.05). Those complications had no significant differences between LAG and NBG (P > 0.05). Conclusion: Compared with local anesthesia, ultrasound-guided PNB has superior analgesic effect and equal safety, but for patients with a large prostate volume, the analgesic effect is inefficient.
Body-image and -size perception after a single session of HIIT body work in healthy adult men

It was our objective to analyze the effects of a single session of whole body HIIT on body-image and -scheme parameters of healthy adult men. Twenty-one active, healthy adults performed high-intensity intermittent training based on full body exercise. The training session involved 20 sets of 30 second all-out exercise and 30 seconds of passive recovery between sets. All subjects underwent blood lactate measurement, rate of perceived exertion, feeling scale and body image assessment and perception of body size measurements. Significant differences (p<0.001) were found on blood lactate but not in feeling scale. The values of current and adequate silhouette did not differ between each other and the real silhouette. Significant differences were found on Image Marking Procedure (IMP) (p< 0.003). Additionally, significant differences (p= 0.009) were found on prevalence of adequate, hypoeschematic and hypeschematic. Although alteration was not found on self-perception of body image, a single session of HIIT body work promoted alteration on body size perception in healthy adult men.
Amino Acids That Centrally Influence Blood Pressure and Regional Blood Flow in Conscious Rats

Functional roles of amino acids have increasingly become the focus of research. This paper summarizes amino acids that influence cardiovascular system via the brain of conscious rats. This paper firstly describes why amino acids are selected and outlines how the brain regulates blood pressure and regional blood flow. This section includes a concise history of amino acid neurotransmitters in cardiovascular research and summarizes brain areas where chemical stimulations produce blood pressure changes mainly in anesthetized animals. This is followed by comments about findings regarding several newly examined amino acids with intracisternal stimulation in conscious rats that produce changes in blood pressure. The same pressor or depressor response to central amino acid stimulations can be produced by distinct mechanisms at central and peripheral levels, which will be briefly explained. Thereafter, cardiovascular actions of some of amino acids at the mechanism level will be discussed based upon findings of pharmacological and regional blood flow measurements. Several examined amino acids in addition to the established neurotransmitter amino acids appear to differentially activate brain structures to produce changes in blood pressure and regional blood flows. They may have physiological roles in the healthy brain, but pathological roles in the brain with cerebral vascular diseases such as stroke where the blood-brain barrier is broken.
Dual Local-Global Contextual Pathways for Recognition in Aerial Imagery

Visual context is important in object recognition and it is still an open problem in computer vision. Along with the advent of deep convolutional neural networks (CNN), using contextual information with such systems starts to receive attention in the literature. At the same time, aerial imagery is gaining momentum. While advances in deep learning make good progress in aerial image analysis, this problem still poses many great challenges. Aerial images are often taken under poor lighting conditions and contain low resolution objects, many times occluded by trees or taller buildings. In this domain, in particular, visual context could be of great help, but there are still very few papers that consider context in aerial image understanding. Here we introduce context as a complementary way of recognizing objects. We propose a dual-stream deep neural network model that processes information along two independent pathways, one for local and another for global visual reasoning. The two are later combined in the final layers of processing. Our model learns to combine local object appearance as well as information from the larger scene at the same time and in a complementary way, such that together they form a powerful classifier. We test our dual-stream network on the task of segmentation of buildings and roads in aerial images and obtain state-of-the-art results on the Massachusetts Buildings Dataset. We also introduce two new datasets, for buildings and road segmentation, respectively, and study the relative importance of local appearance vs. the larger scene, as well as their performance in combination. While our local-global model could also be useful in general recognition tasks, we clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of visual context in conjunction with deep nets for aerial image understanding.
Liver DNA methylation analysis in adult female C57BL/6JxFVB mice following perinatal exposure to bisphenol A

Liver DNA methylation analysis in adult female C57BL/6JxFVB mice following perinatal exposure to bisphenol A Abstract Bisphenol A (BPA) is a compound released from plastics and other consumer products used in everyday life. BPA exposure early in fetal development is proposed to contribute to programming of chronic diseases like obesity and diabetes, by affecting DNA methylation levels. Previously, we showed that in utero and lactational exposure of C57BL/6JxFVB hybrid mice via maternal feed using a dose range of 0–3000 µg/kg body weight/day (µg/kg bw/d) resulted in a sex-dependent altered metabolic phenotype in offspring at 23 weeks of age. The most univocal effects were observed in females, with reduced body weights and related metabolic effects associated with perinatal BPA exposure. To identify whether the effects of BPA in females are associated with changes in DNA methylation, this was analyzed in liver, which is important in energy homeostasis. Measurement of global DNA methylation did not show any changes. Genome-wide DNA methylation analysis at specific CpG sites in control and 3000 µg/kg bw/d females with the digital restriction enzyme analysis of methylation (DREAM) assay revealed potential differences, that could, however, not be confirmed by bisulfite pyrosequencing. Overall, we demonstrated that the observed altered metabolic phenotype in female offspring after maternal exposure to BPA was not detectably associated with liver DNA methylation changes. Still, other tissues may be more informative.
Locus Coeruleus Activation Facilitates Memory Encoding and Induces Hippocampal LTD that Depends on β-Adrenergic Receptor Activation

Spatial memory formation is enabled through synaptic information processing, in the form of persistent strengthening and weakening of synapses, within the hippocampus. It is, however, unclear how relevant spatial information is selected for encoding, in preference to less pertinent information. As the noradrenergic locus coeruleus (LC) becomes active in response to novel experiences, we hypothesized that the LC may provide the saliency signal required to promote hippocampal encoding of relevant information through changes in synaptic strength. Test pulse stimulation evoked stable basal synaptic transmission at Schaffer collateral (SC)–CA1 stratum radiatum synapses in freely behaving adult rats. Coupling of these test pulses with electrical stimulation of the LC induced long-term depression (LTD) at SC–CA1 synapses and induced a transient suppression of theta-frequency oscillations. Effects were N-methyl-D-aspartate and β-adrenergic receptor dependent. Activation of the LC also increased CA1 noradrenalin levels and facilitated the encoding of spatial memory for a single episode via a β-adrenoceptor–dependent mechanism. Our results demonstrate that the LC plays a key role in the induction of hippocampal LTD and in promoting the encoding of spatial information. This LC–hippocampal interaction may reflect a means by which salient information is distinguished for subsequent synaptic processing.
Doppelgänger: A cache for approximate computing

Modern processors contain large last level caches (LLCs) that consume substantial energy and area yet are imperative for high performance. Cache designs have improved dramatically by considering reference locality. Data values are also a source of optimization. Compression and deduplication exploit data values to use cache storage more efficiently resulting in smaller caches without sacrificing performance. In multi-megabyte LLCs, many identical or similar values may be cached across multiple blocks simultaneously. This redundancy effectively wastes cache capacity. We observe that a large fraction of cache values exhibit approximate similarity. More specifically, values across cache blocks are not identical but are similar. Coupled with approximate computing which observes that some applications can tolerate error or inexactness, we leverage approximate similarity to design a novel LLC architecture: the Doppelganger cache. The Doppelganger cache associates the tags of multiple similar blocks with a single data array entry to reduce the amount of data stored. Our design achieves 1.55×, 2.55× and 1.41 × reductions in LLC area, dynamic energy and leakage energy without harming performance nor incurring high application error.
Smartphones distract parents from cultivating feelings of connection when spending time with their children

In the U.S., 95% of smartphone users admit to having used their smartphones during their latest social gathering. Although smartphones are designed to connect us with others, such smartphone use may create a source of distraction that disconnects us from the people in our immediate social environment. Focusing on one fundamental social relationship—between parents and their children—we examined whether smartphones made parents feel distracted, thereby undermining key benefits parents reap when spending time with their children. Ina field experiment at a science museum (Study 1), we randomly assigned parents to use their phones frequently or infrequently. Frequent phone use led parents to feel more distracted, which in turn impaired feelings of social connection and the meaning that parents derived when spending time with their children. In an additional weeklong diary study (Study 2), we found further evidence that smartphones can distract parents from reaping a sense of social connection when spending time with their children. These studies suggest that being constantly connected to the Internet may carry subtle costs for the fabric of social life.
Selection of the Most Relevant Physiological Features for Classifying Emotion

With the development of wearable physiological sensors, emotion estimation becomes a hot topic in the literature. Databases of physiological signals recorded during emotional stimulation are acquired and machine learning algorithms are used. Yet, which are the most relevant signals to detect emotions is still a question to be answered. In order to better understand the contribution of each signal, and thus sensor, to the emotion estimation problem, several feature selection algorithms were implemented on two databases freely available to the research community (DEAP and MANHOB-HCI). Both databases manipulate emotions by showing participants short videos (video clips or part of movies respectively). Features extracted from Galvanic Skin response were found to be relevant for arousal estimation in both databases. Other relevant features were eye closing rate for arousal, variance of zygomatic EMG for valence (those features being only available for DEAP). The hearth rate variability power in three frequency bands also appeared to be very relevant, but only for MANHOB-HCI database where heat rate was measured using ECG (whereas DEAP used PPG). This suggests that PPG is not accurate enough to estimate HRV precisely. Finally we showed on DEAP database that emotion classifiers need just a few well selected features to obtain similar performances to literature classifiers using more features.
INTERNATIONAL GREAT INFLATION AND COMMON MONETARY POLICY

We study whether monetary authorities in the G7 countries were changing their responses to inflation in a similar manner during and following the Great Inflation era. We find that the common to the G7 countries inflation pattern during the Great Inflation period could be associated with a common pattern in the monetary policy response to inflation: we find that until the early 1980s monetary authorities in the G7 countries responded mildly to inflation, systematically fought it throughout the 1980s and lessened again their response during the 2000s. The estimated Taylor rule coefficients on inflation are co-integrated, implying the existence of a long-run relationship in the responses to inflation during and after the Great Inflation period. At the same time, principal component analysis of the residuals of the estimated Taylor rules indicates that the shocks' structure cannot account enough for the monetary policies' co-movements. We interpret these findings as suggestive of common monetary policy patterns.
School Climate, Student Engagement, and Academic Achievement: A Latent Variable, Multilevel Multi-Informant Examination

This study tested the authoritative school climate theory that schools characterized by high structure and student support have greater levels of student engagement and that these factors are associated with higher academic achievement, as indicated by school graduation rates and school performance on state-mandated testing. The model was tested through a multilevel multi-informant structural model on a statewide sample of 60,441 students and 11,442 teachers in 298 high schools. Consistent with the authoritative school climate model, both structure and student support were associated with higher student engagement in schools. Moreover, student engagement was directly associated with academic achievement and operated as an intervening factor. Results provide new evidence that an authoritative school climate is associated with high school academic achievement.
Concentration, diversity, and consequences: Privileging independent over major record labels

Abstract The field of popular music studies has long been interested in the relationships between record labels and the music they make available to consumers. At the micro level, research on record labels provides insight into the tensions between art and commerce and those between individuals and institutions. At the macro level, this research illuminates changes in socio-economic trends, music industry structures and structural inequalities. A meta-analysis of this literature reveals an ‘indie prejudice’: a preference for (and even a bias in favour of) independent labels coupled with a dismissive approach to the study of major labels and musical mainstreams that impacts our ability, as a scholarly field, to speak with authority about the largest segments of the commercial record industries. What larger implications for our scholarship might confronting this prejudice reveal? What master narratives have structured popular music studies’ preference of independent over major record labels? In this article, I argue that the art/commerce dichotomy has remained influential, although it can have unintended and dangerous side effects if it becomes a guiding assumption.
A novel approach for Online signature verification using fisher based probabilistic neural network

The rapid advancements in communication, networking and mobility have entailed an urgency to further develop basic biometric capabilities to face security challenges. Online signature authentication is increasingly gaining interest thanks to the advent of high quality signature devices. In this paper, we propose a new approach for automatic authentication using dynamic signature. The key features consist in using a powerful combination of linear discriminant analysis (LDA) and probabibilistic neural network (PNN) model together with an appropriate decision making process. LDA is used to reduce the dimensionality of the feature space while maintining discrimination between users. Based on its results, a PNN model is constructed and used for matching purposes. Then a decision making process relying on an appropriate decision rule is performed to accept or reject a claimed identity. Data sets from SVC 2004 have been used to assess the performance of the proposed system. The results show that the proposed method competes with and even outperforms existing methods.
AUTHOR’S SELF-REPRESENTATION IN RESEARCH ARTICLES BY ANGLOPHONE AND SLOVAK LINGUISTS

The tension between the need to present oneself in academic discourse unobtrusively on the one hand and promotionally on the other hand results in a range of options of hiding and revealing authorial presence in the text. The choice from among these options is, among other factors, determined by cultural background. This paper explores how Anglophone writers and Slovak authors writing in Slovak and in non-native English position themselves in linguistic research papers as individuals or as part of a society, and as participants or non-participants of the given communicative exchange. The study concludes that English academic culture is largely individualistic while Slovak academic culture is largely collectivist, a trait that Slovak authors also transmit into their writing in English for a mainly local audience.