Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Appraisal of Brain Connectivity in Radiologically Isolated Syndrome by Modeling Imaging Measures

We hypothesized that appraisal of brain connectivity may shed light on the substrate of the radiologically isolated syndrome (RIS), a term applied to asymptomatic subjects with brain MRI abnormalities highly suggestive of multiple sclerosis. We thus used a multimodal MRI approach on the human brain by modeling measures of microstructural integrity of white matter (WM) tracts with those of functional connectivity (FC) at the level of resting state networks in RIS subjects, demographically matched normal controls (NC), and relapsing-remitting (RR) MS patients, also matched with RIS for brain macrostructural damage (i.e., lesions and atrophy). Compared with NC, in both RIS subjects and MS patients altered integrity of WM tracts was present. However, RIS subjects showed, at a less conservative threshold, lower diffusivities than RRMS patients in distinct cerebral associative, commissural, projection, and cerebellar WM tracts, suggesting a relatively better anatomical connectivity. FC was similar in NC and RIS subjects, even in the presence of important risk factors for MS (spinal cord lesions, oligoclonal bands, and dissemination in time on MRI) and increased in RRMS patients in two clinically relevant networks subserving “processing” (sensorimotor) and “control” (working memory) functions. In RIS, the lack of functional reorganization in key brain networks may represent a model of “functional reserve,” which may become upregulated, with an adaptive or maladaptive role, only at a later stage in case of occurrence of clinical deficit.
Digging into Commodities ∗

We investigate the determinants of aggregate commodity returns and establish the following findings. (1) Common predictors of bond and stock returns, such as the short rate and the yield spread, also predict commodity returns. A high yield spread predicts low commodity returns, consistent with commodities being a hedge for market fluctuations. (2) Even controlling for these common predictors, a low aggregate basis (the ratio of futures to spot price averaged across commodities) predicts high returns on being long commodity futures, consistent with the theory of backwardation. A low aggregate basis also predicts low spot-price growth, consistent with the theory of storage. The component of aggregate basis that is orthogonal to these common predictors does not predict bond or stock returns, suggesting that aggregate basis is a predictor that is local to the commodity market. (3) Aggregate basis explains as much of the variation in expected commodity returns as the common predictors. (4) Recent evidence suggests that aggregate basis has become a more important determinant of commodity returns relative to the common predictors. JEL classification: G12; G13; E31; E37
Corporate Financing Activities and Business Cycle Fluctuations

We use statement of cash flow information to construct a bottom-up measure of corporate financing activities (CFA) and find that it contains substantial predictive content about future economic activity, with the predictability concentrated in a portfolio of firms that are bound by capital constraints. This ―constrained CFA index‖ outperforms asset price indices with strong predictive power, such as the GZ spread (Gilchrist and Zakrajsek 2012), in both in-sample and out-of-sample forecasting tests, especially over a longer horizon (from two to four quarters). Impulse responses from a structural vector autoregression show that unexpected decreases in the constrained CFA index cause a large and persistent contraction in economic activity. Additional analysis finds that the constrained CFA index positively comoves with the profitability of the financial sector over business cycles. Taken together, our results suggest that a simple portfoliobased CFA measure conveys information about the supply of capital from the financial to the real sector, which has important implications for the macroeconomy.
Genetically-Based Olfactory Signatures Persist Despite Dietary Variation

Individual mice have a unique odor, or odortype, that facilitates individual recognition. Odortypes, like other phenotypes, can be influenced by genetic and environmental variation. The genetic influence derives in part from genes of the major histocompatibility complex (MHC). A major environmental influence is diet, which could obscure the genetic contribution to odortype. Because odortype stability is a prerequisite for individual recognition under normal behavioral conditions, we investigated whether MHC-determined urinary odortypes of inbred mice can be identified in the face of large diet-induced variation. Mice trained to discriminate urines from panels of mice that differed both in diet and MHC type found the diet odor more salient in generalization trials. Nevertheless, when mice were trained to discriminate mice with only MHC differences (but on the same diet), they recognized the MHC difference when tested with urines from mice on a different diet. This indicates that MHC odor profiles remain despite large dietary variation. Chemical analyses of urinary volatile organic compounds (VOCs) extracted by solid phase microextraction (SPME) and analyzed by gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC/MS) are consistent with this inference. Although diet influenced VOC variation more than MHC, with algorithmic training (supervised classification) MHC types could be accurately discriminated across different diets. Thus, although there are clear diet effects on urinary volatile profiles, they do not obscure MHC effects.
Maturation of Synaptic Transmission at End-Bulb Synapses of the Cochlear Nucleus

Neurons of the avian nucleus magnocellularis transmit phase-locked action potentials of the auditory nerve in a pathway that contributes to sound localization based on interaural timing differences. We studied developmental changes in synaptic transmission that enable the end-bulb synapse to function as a synaptic relay. In chick, although the auditory system begins to function early in embryonic development, maturation of audition around the time of hatching suggested that synaptic transmission in the cochlear nucleus of young chicks may undergo further developmental changes. Synaptic physiology was investigated via patch-clamp recordings from bushy cells in brainstem slices during stimulation of auditory nerve fibers at 35°C. Compared with embryonic synapses (embryonic day 18), post-hatch chicks (post-hatch days 1–11) exhibited high probability of firing a well timed postsynaptic action potential during high-frequency stimulation of the auditory nerve. Improvements in reliability and timing of postsynaptic spikes were accompanied by a developmental increase in steady-state EPSCs during stimulus trains and a decline in the extent of synaptic depression. Synchrony of EPSCs during stimulus trains improved with age. An increased pool of synaptic vesicles, lower release probability, larger and faster transmitter quanta, and reduced AMPA receptor desensitization contributed to these changes. Together, these factors improve the ability of cochlear nucleus magnocellularis neurons to faithfully transmit timing information encoded by the auditory nerve.
Alleviating Parental Concerns for Children's Online Privacy: A Value Sensitive Design Investigation

The objective of this research is to address the acute privacy challenge of protecting children’s online safety by proposing a technological solution to empower parental control over their child’s personal information disclosed online. As a preliminary conceptual investigation, this paper draws on the social, psychological, and legal perspectives of privacy to derive three design principles. We propose that, the technical systems for protecting children’s online privacy (a) should protect children’s personal information online while enabling their access to appropriate online content, (b) should maximally facilitate parental involvement of their children’s online activities, and (c) should comply with legal requirements in terms of notice, choice, access and security. This study reported here is novel to the extent that existing IS research has not systematically examined the privacy issues from the VSD perspective. We believe that, using the groundwork laid down in this study, future research along these directions could contribute significantly to addressing parental concerns for children’s online safety.
What Causes the Anti-Flynn Effect? A Data Synthesis and Analysis of Predictors

Anti-Flynn effects (i.e., secular declines in IQ) have been noted in a few countries. Much speculation exists about the causes of these trends; however, little progress has been made toward comprehensively testing these. A synthetic literature search yielded a total of 66 observations of secular IQ decline from 13 countries, with a combined sample size of 302,234 and study midyears spanning 87 years, from 1920.5 to 2007.5. Multilevel modeling (MLM) was used to examine the effect of study midyear, and (after controlling for this and other factors) hierarchical general linear modeling (GLM) was used to examine the following sequence of predictors: domain “g-ness” (a rank-order measure of g saturation) Index of Biological State (IBS; a measure of relaxed/reversed selection operating on g), per capita immigration, and the 2-way interactions IBS × g-ness and Immigration × g-ness. The MLM revealed that the anti-Flynn effect has strengthened in more recent years. Net of this, the GLM found that g-ness was a positive predictor; that is, less aggregately g-loaded measures exhibited bigger IQ declines; IBS was not a significant predictor; however immigration predicted the decline, indicating that high levels of immigration promote the anti-Flynn effect. Among the interactions there was a negative effect of the Immigration × g-ness interaction, indicating that immigration promotes IQ decline the most when the measure is higher in g-ness. The model accounted for 37.1% of the variance among the observations.
Markovian segmentation and parameter estimation on graphics hardware

In this paper, we show how Markovian strategies used to solve well-known segmentation problems such as motion estima- tion, motion detection, motion segmentation, stereovision, and color segmentation can be significantly accelerated when implemented on programmable graphics hardware. More precisely, we expose how the parallel abilities of a standard graphics processing unit usu- ally devoted to image synthesis can be used to infer the labels of a segmentation map. The problems we address are stated in the sense of the maximum a posteriori with an energy-based or proba- bilistic formulation, depending on the application. In every case, the label field is inferred with an optimization algorithm such as iterated conditional mode (ICM) or simulated annealing. In the case of probabilistic segmentation, mixture parameters are estimated with the K-means and the iterative conditional estimation (ICE) proce- dure. For both the optimization and the parameter estimation algo- rithms, the graphics processor unit's (GPU's) fragment processor is used to update in parallel every labels of the segmentation map, while rendering passes and graphics textures are used to simulate optimization iterations. The hardware results obtained with a mid- end graphics card, show that these Markovian applications can be accelerated by a factor of 4 to 200 without requiring any advanced skills in hardware programming. © 2006 SPIE and
Hubungan Antara Kemandirian Dengan Penyesuaian Diri Dalam Lingkungan Kampus Pada Mahasiswa

Mahasiswa tentunya memiliki tugas perkembangan yang harus dipenuhi. Salah satu tugas perkembangan masa remaja yang tersulit adalah yang berhubungan dengan penyesuaian sosial (Hurlock, 1990). Mahasiswa yang memiliki tingkat kemandirian yang tinggi akan dapat mengatasi tantangan-tantangan yang muncul selama penyesuaian diri di lingkungan kampus dengan efektif karena memiliki kontrol yang besar terhadap hidup, perasaan, dan sikapnya (Noom, 1999; dalam Stewart & Podbury, 1999; dalam Rahmalia, 2013). Penelitian ini dilakukan untuk melihat hubungan antara kemandirian dengan kemampuan penyesuaian diri dalam lingkungan kampus atau social adjustment pada mahasiswa Fakultas Psikologi Unpad Angkatan 2014. Sampel dalam penelitian ini sebanyak 72 orang dengan menggunakan simple random sampling dalam penentuan sampelnya. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa umumnya mahasiswa memiliki tingkat kemandirian tinggi (100%) dan kemampuan penyesuaian diri dalam lingkungan kampus atau social adjustment yang tinggi (100%). Koefisien korelasi yang didapatkan sebesar 0,733 (sig dalam ? =0.05) menggunakan uji korelasi Rank Spearman dalam software SPSS 17.0. Nilai ini menunjukkan bahwa semakin tinggi kemampuan penyesuaian diri dalam lingkungan kampus maka semakin tinggi pula tingkat kemandirian mahasiswa Fakultas Psikologi Unpad angkatan 2014. Terdapat hubungan yang signifikan antara kemandirian dan kemampuan penyesuaian diri dalam lingkungan kampus.
The Impact of Self-Control on Investment Decisions

This paper explores how reduced self-control affects individual investment behavior in two laboratory tasks. For this purpose, I exogenously reduce subjects’ self-control using a well-established psychological treatment. In each task, I find no significant main treatment effect, but secondary effects consistent with findings on self-control from other studies and self-control’s potential relevance in financial markets. In experiment 1, I find no significant change in the disposition effect following the manipulation. However, treated participants trade fewer different shares per round. In experiment 2, I look at the effect of self-control on myopic loss aversion by implementing a 2×2 design by varying investment horizon and self-control in a repeated lottery environment. Average behavior suggests that reduced self-control increases framing effects, but I cannot reject the null hypothesis of equal investment levels between the self-control treatments within each investment frame. Analyzing the dynamics of decision making in more detail, self-control depleted participants in the narrow frame reduce their investment levels on average over time which seems to be driven by more intense reactions to investment experiences.
The “sweet” side of a long pentraxin: how glycosylation affects PTX3 functions in innate immunity and inflammation

Innate immunity represents the first line of defense against pathogens and plays key roles in activation and orientation of the adaptive immune response. The innate immune system comprises both a cellular and a humoral arm. Components of the humoral arm include soluble pattern recognition molecules (PRMs) that recognize pathogen-associated molecular patterns and initiate the immune response in coordination with the cellular arm, therefore acting as functional ancestors of antibodies. The long pentraxin PTX3 is a prototypic soluble PRM that is produced at sites of infection and inflammation by both somatic and immune cells. Gene targeting of this evolutionarily conserved protein has revealed a non-redundant role in resistance to selected pathogens. Moreover, PTX3 exerts important functions at the crossroad between innate immunity, inflammation, and female fertility. The human PTX3 protein contains a single N-glycosylation site that is fully occupied by complex type oligosaccharides, mainly fucosylated and sialylated biantennary glycans. Glycosylation has been implicated in a number of PTX3 activities, including neutralization of influenza viruses, modulation of the complement system, and attenuation of leukocyte recruitment. Therefore, this post translational modification might act as a fine tuner of PTX3 functions in native immunity and inflammation. Here we review the studies on PTX3, with emphasis on the glycan-dependent mechanisms underlying pathogen recognition and crosstalk with other components of the innate immune system.
Moderate relationship between isoinertial muscle strength and ballistic movement performance

The purposes of this study were 1) to examine the relationship between maximal isoinertial muscle strength and ballistic movement performance, and 2) to examine the effect of body size on the strength-performance relationship. Seventy-nine physical education students were tested on two isoinertial strength tests (back squat and bench press) and seven ballistic performance tests (squat jump, countermovement jump, standing long jump, sprint 20 m, instep kick, throwing ball, and seated medicine ball throw). Significant, but moderate (R = 0.40-0.62 ; p < 0.001) relationships between both isoinertial strength tests and ballistic movement performance were found. When body mass was held constant, strength-performance relationship remained generally unchanged for all tests, except for throws, where there was a (non-significant) trend in reduction of the relationship to muscle strength. We conclude that isoinertial squat and bench press have low external validity when predicting ballistic movement performance in physically active men.
Synthetic microlensing maps of the Galactic bulge

We present synthetic maps of the microlensing optical depth, event rate and time-scales over an area of 195 deg 2 towards the Galactic bulge. The maps are computed from stellar population synthesis catalogues generated from the Besancon Galaxy Model, which comprises four stellar populations and a three-dimensional extinction map calibrated against the Two-Micron All-Sky Survey. The microlensing maps have a resolution of 15 arcmin, corresponding to the angular resolution of the extinction map. We compute optical depth and event rate maps for all resolved sources above I = 19, for unresolved 'difference image' (DIA) sources magnified above this limit, and for bright 'standard candle' sources. The resulting optical depth and rate contours are dominated by extinction effects, in contrast to previous theoretical microlensing maps, and underscore the need to include realistic extinction modelling. Comparison of optical depth measurements to the Besancon model favours a bulge mass of ∼1.3 x 10 10 M ⊙ . The microlensing maps exhibit a systematically higher optical depth for DIA sources, in line with experimental determinations. The predicted contours of the microlensing rate show very good correspondence with the field positions of the OGLE-III survey, illustrating how they have been optimized to maximize microlensing yields. We also show how the event distribution for hypothetical J and K-band microlensing surveys, using existing ground-based facilities such as VISTA, UKIRT or CFHT, would be much less affected by extinction, especially in the K band. The near infrared provides a substantial sensitivity increase over current I-band surveys and a more faithful tracer of the underlying stellar distribution, something which upcoming variability surveys such as Vista Variables in the Via Lactea (VVV) will be able to exploit. Only a fraction of current data sets has been employed for Galactic structure studies and more detailed models will be required to fully exploit the full catalogue of current survey samples, not to mention those coming online in the near future. Synthetic population modelling offers a promising way forward towards high-precision Galactic structure studies using microlensing.
Paper : The Restricted and the Bounded Fixpoint Closures of the Nested Relational Algebra are Equivalent

The nested model is an extension of the traditional, \ at" relational model in which relations can also have relation-valued entries. Its \default" query language, the nested algebra, is rather weak, unfortunately, since it is only a conservative extension of the traditional, \ at" relational algebra, and thus can only express a small fraction of the polynomial-time queries. Therefore, it was proposed to extend the nested algebra with a leastxpoint construct, but the resulting language turned out to be too powerful: many inherently exponential queries could also be expressed. Two polynomial-time restrictions of the leastxpoint closure of the nested algebra were proposed: the restricted leastxpoint closure (by Gyssens and Van Gucht) and the bounded xpoint closure (by Suciu). Here, we prove that both restrictions are equivalent in expressive power. We also exhibit a proof technique, called type substitution, by which we reduce our result to its obvious counterpart in the \ at" relational model; thus emphasizing the inherent weakness of the nested algebra.
Interaction Of Cache Coherency And Media Access Protocols In The Optically Interconnected Distributed Memory Environment

The objective of this paper is to develop a tool to study the interaction between the cache coherence protocol and the media access protocol for a multiprocessor system in a wavelength division multiplexed starcoupled configuration. This simulation is modular for easy swapping of component functional specifications, and inter-module communication is achieved through a message passing facility. By writing simulations in this way, it is faster and more reliable to create simulations for comparison purposes. This tool is applied to the simulation of an Optically Interconnected DbtributedSharedMemory system. It employs aphotonic network using Wavelength Division Multiple Access to create multiple channels on a single optical fiber as an interconnection network in support of memory accesses. This paper considers two variants of a directory basedcachecoherenceprotocol. A synthetic address trace generation model which is independent of the system architecture and with great flexibility in characterizing various workloads is used as an input to the system.
Improving statistical word alignment with various clues

This paper proposes a method to improve word alignment by combining various clues. Our method first trains a baseline statistical IBM word alignment model. Then we improve it with various clues, which are mainly based on features such as lemmatization, translation dictionary, named entities, and chunks. We incorporate these features into an unified framework. Experimental results show that our method improves word alignment quality by achieving a relative error rate reduction of 39.8%. We also conduct phrase-based machine translation based on the word alignment results. Using BLEU as an evaluation metric, our method achieves an absolute improvement of about 0.02 (about 18% relative) over a baseline method.
Benefits of swimming pools in two remote Aboriginal communities in Western Australia: intervention study

Abstract Objective To determine the health impact of swimming pools built with the aim of improving quality of life and reducing high rates of pyoderma and otitis media. Design Intervention study assessing prevalence of ear disease and skin infections before and at six monthly intervals after opening of swimming pools. Setting Two remote Aboriginal communities in Western Australia. Participants 84 boys and 78 girls aged < 17 years. Main outcome measures Changes in prevalence and severity of pyoderma and perforation of tympanic membranes with or without otorrhoea over 18 months after opening of pools. Results In community A, 61 children were seen before the pool was opened, and 41, 46, and 33 children were seen at the second, third, and fourth surveys. Equivalent figures for community B were 60, 35, 39, and 45. Prevalence of pyoderma declined significantly from 62% to 18% in community A and from 70% to 20% in community B during the 18 months after the pools opened. Over the same period, prevalence of severe pyoderma fell from 30% to 15% in community A and from 48% to 0% in community B. Prevalence of perforations of the tympanic membrane fell from 32% in both communities to 13% in community A and 18% in community B. School attendance improved in community A. Conclusion Swimming pools in remote communities were associated with reduction in prevalence of pyoderma and tympanic membrane perforations, which could result in long term benefits through reduction in chronic disease burden and improved educational and social outcomes.