Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
XMM-Newton survey of two Upper Scorpius regions (Argiroffi+ 2006)

Aims. We studied X-ray emission from young stars by analyzing the deep XMM-Newton observations of two regions of the Upper Scorpius association with an age of 5 Myr. Methods. Based on near infrared and optical photometry we identified 22 Upper Scorpius photometric members among the 224 detected X-ray sources. We derived coronal properties of Upper Scorpius stars by performing X-ray spectral and timing analyses. The study of four strong and isolated stellar flares allowed us to derive the length of the flaring loops. Results. Among the 22 Upper Scorpius stars, 13 were identified as Upper Scorpius photometric members for the first time. The sample includes 7 weak-line T Tauri stars and 1 classical T Tauri star, while the nature of the remaining sources is unknown. Except for the intermediate mass star HD 142578, all the detected USco sources are low-mass stars of spectral types ranging from G to late M. The X-ray emission spectrum of the most intense Upper Scorpius sources indicates metal depleted plasma with temperature of ∼10 MK, resembling the typical coronal emission of active main sequence stars. At least 59% of the detected members of the association have variable X-ray emission, and the flaring coronal structures appear shorter than or comparable to the stellar radii already at the Upper Scorpius age. We also found indications of increasing plasma metallicity (up to a factor 20) during strong flares. We identified a new galaxy cluster among the 224 X-ray source detected: the X-ray spectrum of its intra cluster medium indicates a redshift of ∼0.41 ± 0.02.
Convergence of Wnt and FGF signals in the genesis of posterior neural plate through activation of the Sox2 enhancer N-1

The expression of the transcription factor gene Sox2 precisely marks the neural plate in various vertebrate species. We previously showed that the Sox2 expression prevailing in the neural plate of chicken embryos is actually regulated by the coordination of five phylogenetically conserved enhancers having discrete regional coverage, among which the 420-bp long enhancer N-1, active in the node-proximal region, is probably involved directly in the genesis of the posterior neural plate. We investigated the signaling systems regulating this enhancer, first identifying the 56-bp N-1 core enhancer (N-1c), which in a trimeric form recapitulates the activity of the enhancer N-1. Mutational analysis identified five blocks, A to E, that regulate the enhancer N-1c. Functional analysis of these blocks indicated that Wnt and FGF signals synergistically activate the enhancer through Blocks A-B, bound by Lef1, and Block D, respectively. Fgf8b and Wnt8c expressed in the organizer-primitive streak region account for the activity in the embryo. Block E is essential for the repression of the enhancer N-1c activity in the mesendodermal precursors. The enhancer N-1c is not affected by BMP signals. Thus, Wnt and FGF signals converge to activate Sox2 expression through the enhancer N-1c, revealing the direct involvement of the Wnt signal in the initiation of neural plate development.
Oral reading fluency in second language reading

This study investigated the role of oral reading fluency in second language reading. Two hundred and fifty-five high school students in South Korea were assessed on three oral reading fluency (ORF) variables and six other reading predictors. The relationship between ORF and other reading predictors was examined through an exploratory factor analysis (EFA). Next, the contribution of ORF to silent reading comprehension was investigated through multiple regression analyses (MRA) with ORF variables as predictors of reading comprehension. EFA identified two factors (fluency and comprehension) and showed that passage reading fluency crossloaded with both factors. MRA results indicated that the three ORF variables collectively explained 21.2% of variance in silent reading comprehension. Oral passage reading fluency alone explained 20.9% of variance in silent reading comprehension. After controlling for pseudoword reading and word reading fluency, oral passage reading fluency still accounted for an additional 12.4% of the remaining reading variance.
Obesity: a disease or a biological adaptation?

The increase in obesity prevalence is problematic as this condition is associated with health complications such as diabetes and cardiovascular diseases, more particularly when the excess body fat is stored in the deep abdominal region. On the other hand, obesity facilitates the maintenance of body homeostasis probably because of an increased hormonal gradient which favours the regulation of energy balance, to give but one example. The regulation potential of excess body fat is particularly apparent in the reduced‐obese state where a reduction of energy expenditure, fat oxidation and some immune system markers, as well as an increase in appetite, stress vulnerability and circulating and adipose tissue organochlorines have been observed. These constitute another category of risk factors which can certainly favour the accumulation of body fat to reestablish body homeostasis on other fronts. Under such conditions, obesity is perceived by the physiologist as a necessary biological adaptation rather than a disease. For health professionals, this emphasizes the importance to seek a reasonable compromise between the favourable reduction of risk to develop metabolic complications by body weight loss and the physiological vulnerability which is also generated by such an intervention.
Countermovement jump in performance diagnostics: Use of the correct jumping technique

Abstract The aim of this study was to examine the effects of arm-swing and sporting activity on jump height and jump height variability of countermovement jumps in adolescent students to inform correct jumping technique in different settings. Altogether, 324 students (grades 5–11) performed three countermovement jumps with bilateral arm-swings and three countermovement jumps without arm-swings on a force platform. The participants were divided into three groups based on sporting activity. The groups with the most (“active group”; more than 6 h formal athletics in a sport club per week) and least active (“sedentary group”; less than 3 h formal athletics in a sport club per week) participants were compared. Jump height was calculated for all jumps, and the best trial of three was used for further analysis. Jump height variability was indicated by the coefficient of variation over three jumps. The reliability of jump height was determined using the intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC) over three trials of each jumping technique. The reliability of jump height was very high for all conditions (ICC: 0.90–0.96). Jump height was significantly higher for countermovement jumps with than without arm-swings for both groups. Jump height in the active group was significantly greater than in the sedentary group for both jumping techniques. A significant interaction between jumping technique and sporting activity indicates a greater benefit of arm-swing in the active than in the sedentary participants. No significant differences between groups were observed for jump height variability. Jump height can be measured reliably in active and sedentary adolescent individuals for both jumping techniques. The relevant jumping technique should be chosen with respect to the context of its application and based on its suitability for the individual and task of interest.
The distribution of substance P, enkephalin, and serotonin immunoreactivities in the area postrema of the rat and cat

With the use of the peroxidase‐antiperoxidase technique the distribution of substance P (SP), enkephalin (ENK), and serotonin (5HT) immunoreactivities were described in the area postrema of the rat and cat. In both species, immunoreactivity in the area postrema was differentially distributed as either fibers only, or cell bodies and fibers. In the rat and cat, ENK had the greatest accumulation of immunoreactive fibers, followed by 5HT and SP. In the area postrema of the rat the majority of SP‐, ENK‐, and 5HT‐immunoreactive fibers were along the ventral and ventrolateral borders, with fewer immunostained fibers at the dorsal surface. The area postrema of the cat had the majority of SP‐, ENK‐, and 5HT‐immunoreactive fibers at the ventral and lateral borders, with fewer immunostained fibers at the dorsal and medial borders. In both species, the area postrema's central region contained the fewest immunostained fibers. In general, for each putative neurotransmitter examined, immunostained fibers in both species progressively decreased in number rostrocaudally. Serotonin‐ and ENK‐immunoreactive cell bodies were found in the rat area postrema; in the cat area postrema only ENK‐immunoreactive cell bodies were present. The area postrema of both species lacked SP‐immunoreactive cell bodies. The heterogeneous distribution of immunoreactive fibers and cell bodies within the area postrema of the rat and cat may reflect the different functions of the area postrema in both species.
Consensus-based Sequence Training for Video Captioning

Captioning models are typically trained using the cross-entropy loss. However, their performance is evaluated on other metrics designed to better correlate with human assessments. Recently, it has been shown that reinforcement learning (RL) can directly optimize these metrics in tasks such as captioning. However, this is computationally costly and requires specifying a baseline reward at each step to make training converge. We propose a fast approach to optimize one's objective of interest through the REINFORCE algorithm. First we show that, by replacing model samples with ground-truth sentences, RL training can be seen as a form of weighted cross-entropy loss, giving a fast, RL-based pre-training algorithm. Second, we propose to use the consensus among ground-truth captions of the same video as the baseline reward. This can be computed very efficiently. We call the complete proposal Consensus-based Sequence Training (CST). Applied to the MSRVTT video captioning benchmark, our proposals train significantly faster than comparable methods and establish a new state-of-the-art on the task, improving the CIDEr score from 47.3 to 54.2.
Direct Behavior Rating

Direct behavior rating (DBR) offers users a flexible, feasible method for the collection of behavioral data. Previous research has supported the validity of using DBR to rate three target behaviors: academic engagement, disruptive behavior, and compliance. However, the effect of the base rate of behavior on rater accuracy has not been established. In addition, although teachers report frequent use of DBR-like tools, little is known about what type of training is necessary to ensure accurate usage. The present study sought to determine (a) whether training with practice and feedback improves rater accuracy when rating academic engagement, disruptive behavior, and compliance and (b) whether rater accuracy varies at low, medium, and high levels of these behaviors. Participants (N = 67) were randomly assigned to one of three training conditions: brief familiarization, brief training with practice and feedback, or extensive training with practice and feedback. Following training, participants watched videos of elementary students and rated behavior with DBRs. Results indicated that practice with feedback improved rater accuracy for disruptive behavior but not for the behaviors of academic engagement and compliance. In addition, rater accuracy was found to vary significantly at different levels of behavior. Academic engagement was rated most accurately when high rates of the behavior were displayed. Disruptive behavior and compliance were rated most accurately at low or high base rates, while raters had more difficulty rating medium levels of behaviors. Limitations, implications, and future directions for research are discussed.
Paradoxical Actions of the Serotonin Precursor 5-hydroxytryptophan on the Activity of Identified Serotonergic Neurons in a Simple Motor Circuit

Neurotransmitter synthesis is regulated by a variety of factors, yet the effect of altering transmitter content on the operation of neuronal circuits has been relatively unexplored. We used electrophysiological, electrochemical, and immunohistochemical techniques to investigate the effects of augmenting the serotonin (5-HT) content of identified serotonergic neurons embedded in a simple motor circuit. The dorsal swim interneurons (DSIs) are serotonergic neurons intrinsic to the central pattern generator (CPG) for swimming in the mollusc Tritonia diomedea. As expected, treatment with the serotonin precursor 5-hydroxytryptophan (5-HTP) increased the intensity of serotonin immunolabeling and enhanced the potency of synaptic and modulatory actions elicited by the DSIs. It also greatly enhanced the ability of the DSIs to evoke rhythmic CPG activity. After 5-HTP treatment, microvoltammetric measurements indicated an increase in a putative 5-HT electrochemical signal during swim CPG activation. Paradoxically, the spiking activity of the serotonergic neurons decreased to a single burst at the onset of the rhythmic motor program, whereas the overall duration of the episode remained about the same. 5-HTP treatment gradually reduced the rhythmicity of the CPG output. Thus, more serotonin did not result in a more robust swim motor program, suggesting that serotonin synthesis must be kept within certain limits for the circuit to function correctly and indicating that altering neurotransmitter synthesis can have serious consequences for the output of neural networks.
Stereo Matching Using Tree Filtering

Matching cost aggregation is one of the oldest and still popular methods for stereo correspondence. While effective and efficient, cost aggregation methods typically aggregate the matching cost by summing/averaging over a user-specified, local support region. This is obviously only locally-optimal, and the computational complexity of the full-kernel implementation usually depends on the region size. In this paper, the cost aggregation problem is re-examined and a non-local solution is proposed. The matching cost values are aggregated adaptively based on pixel similarity on a tree structure derived from the stereo image pair to preserve depth edges. The nodes of this tree are all the image pixels, and the edges are all the edges between the nearest neighboring pixels. The similarity between any two pixels is decided by their shortest distance on the tree. The proposed method is non-local as every node receives supports from all other nodes on the tree. The proposed method can be naturally extended to the time domain for enforcing temporal coherence. Unlike previous methods, the non-local property guarantees that the depth edges will be preserved when the temporal coherency between all the video frames are considered. A non-local weighted median filter is also proposed based on the non-local cost aggregation algorithm. It has been demonstrated to outperform all local weighted median filters on disparity/depth upsampling and refinement.
Quantitative Examination of the Bottlenose Dolphin Cerebellum

Neuroanatomical research into the brain of the bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus) has revealed striking similarities with the human brain in terms of size and complexity. However, the dolphin brain also contains unique allometric relationships. When compared to the human brain, the dolphin cerebellum is noticeably larger. Upon closer examination, the lobule composition of the cerebellum is distinct between the two species. In this study, we used magnetic resonance imaging to analyze cerebellar anatomy in the bottlenose dolphin and measure the volume of the separate cerebellar lobules in the bottlenose dolphin and human. Lobule identification was assisted by three‐dimensional modeling. We find that lobules VI, VIIb, VIII, and IX are the largest lobules of the bottlenose dolphin cerebellum, while the anterior lobe (I–V), crus I, crus II, and the flocculonodular lobe are smaller. Different lobule sizes may have functional implications. Auditory‐associated lobules VIIb, VIII, IX are likely large in the bottlenose dolphin due to echolocation abilities. Our study provides quantitative information on cerebellar anatomy that substantiates previous reports based on gross observation and subjective analysis. This study is part of a continuing effort toward providing explicit descriptions of cetacean neuroanatomy to support the interpretation of behavioral studies on cetacean cognition. Anat Rec, 2013. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Cultivating energy literacy: results from a longitudinal living lab study of a home energy management system

This paper presents results of a three-year research project focused on the emplacement of Home Energy Management Systems (HEMS) in a living lab setting with seven households. The HEMS used in this study allowed householders to monitor energy consumption both in real-time and in retrospective on the TV and on mobile devices. Contrasting with existing research focused on how technology persuades people to consume less energy, our study uses a grounded approach to analyze HEMS emplacement. As an important result, we present here the issue of 'energy literacy'. Our study reveals that, by using HEMS, participants became increasingly literate in understanding domestic electricity consumption. We discuss the role HEMS played in that process and how the acquired literacy changed energy consumption patterns. We conclude that literacy in energy consumption has value on its own and explain how eco feedback system designs can benefit from this understanding.
Augmented distinctive features for efficient image matching

Finding corresponding image points is a challenging computer vision problem, especially for confusing scenes with surfaces of low textures or repeated patterns. Despite the well-known challenges of extracting conceptually meaningful high-level matching primitives, many recent works describe high-level image features such as edge groups, lines and regions, which are more distinctive than traditional local appearance based features, to tackle such difficult scenes. In this paper, we propose a different and more general approach, which treats the image matching problem as a recognition problem of spatially related image patch sets. We construct augmented semi-global descriptors (ordinal codes) based on subsets of scale and orientation invariant local keypoint descriptors. Tied ranking problem of ordinal codes is handled by increasingly keypoint sampling around image patch sets. Finally, similarities of augmented features are measured using Spearman correlation coefficient. Our proposed method is compatible with a large range of existing local image descriptors. Experimental results based on standard benchmark datasets and SURF descriptors have demonstrated its distinctiveness and effectiveness.
Deferring to Clarity, Parsimony, and Evidence in Reply to Ward, Yates, and Willis

We thank Ward, Yates, and Willis (this issue, p. 94) for their commentary to our earlier piece (Andrews, Bonta, & Wormith, 2011) comparing risk, need, and responsivity (RNR) to the good lives model (GLM) and appreciate the opportunity to respond. Our reply is written, sadly, without the contribution of our original lead author and mentor, Donald Andrews (see Bonta, 2011; Wormith, 2011). Ward et al. proclaim that our characterization of GLM is inaccurate on many fronts and go to great length to elaborate their position. Regardless, upon close review, it is clear that there are some fundamental differences, as well as similarities, both between our models and between our conceptualizations of our counterparts' models. We have three distinct reactions to Ward et al. and will address them accordingly. One pertains to the nature of their critique, and we will address only what we believe to be some of the important themes in their review. The second raises a valued principle of science, parsimony, and how it relates to the comparison between RNR and GLM. The third concerns a mantra that we have professed throughout our careers and is barely addressed by Ward et al. (this issue), "Let's consider the evidence. " Themes from Ward, Yates, and Willis: To begin, we are mindful of and concerned about this interchange descending into a "we-said/they-said" exchange, which serves no purpose and only alienates interested readers who are seeking resolution, or at least guidelines, for their own research and practice. So we have resisted the impulse to provide a point-by-point rebuttal. However, we do believe that a few key points are in order. First, the current interchange leads us to suggest that the proponents of both RNR and GLM should acknowledge that both models are moving targets. This, it appears, has led to some confusion and difficulty of … Language: en
Traditional and new principles of perceptual grouping

Perceptual grouping refers to the process of determining which regions and parts of the visual scene belong together as parts of higher order perceptual units such as objects or patterns. In the early 20th century, Gestalt psychologists identified a set of classic grouping principles which specified how some image features lead to grouping between elements given that all other factors were held constant. Modern vision scientists have expanded this list to cover a wide range of image features but have also expanded the importance of learning and other non-image factors. Unlike early Gestalt accounts which were based largely on visual demonstrations, modern theories are often explicitly quantitative and involve detailed models of how various image features modulate grouping. Work has also been done to understand the rules by which different grouping principles integrate to form a final percept. This chapter gives an overview of the classic principles, modern developments in understanding them, and new principles and the evidence for them. There is also discussion of some of the larger theoretical issues about grouping such as at what stage of visual processing it occurs and what types of neural mechanisms may implement grouping principles.
A discourse analysis of collaboration between academic and student affairs in community colleges

ABSTRACT The purpose of this study was to understand the nature of collaboration between academic affairs and student affairs units in the community college context from a qualitative perspective. A discourse analysis study was conducted to explore the ways in which collaborative practice was discussed and understood by chief and midlevel academic and student affairs practitioners in three different community college settings. By using their actual practice and desired practice to understand collaboration in this setting, this article offers a definition for academic and student affairs collaboration that has been absent from most literature on the topic.