Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Role for the Basal Forebrain Cholinergic System in Estrogen-Induced Disinhibition of Hippocampal Pyramidal Cells

Estrogen transiently disinhibits hippocampal CA1 pyramidal cells in adult female rats and prolongs the decay time of IPSCs in these cells. Estrogen-induced changes in synaptic inhibition are likely to be causally related to subsequent enhancements in excitatory synaptic function in CA1 pyramidal cells. Currently, it is unknown how or on what cells estrogen acts to regulate synaptic inhibition in the hippocampus. We used whole-cell voltage-clamp recording of synaptically evoked IPSCs, spontaneous IPSCs, and miniature IPSCs in CA1 pyramidal cells to evaluate estrogen-induced changes in synaptic inhibition in ovariectomized rats that either were pretreated with the estrogen receptor (ER) antagonist tamoxifen or in which basal forebrain cholinergic neurons were eliminated by previous infusion of 192IgG-saporin toxin into the medial septum. We found that estrogen-induced disinhibition and prolongation of IPSCs are entirely dependent on a tamoxifen-sensitive ER. Estrogen-induced disinhibition is partially dependent on basal forebrain cholinergic neurons, but the prolongation of IPSCs is not at all dependent on these cells. Paired-pulse experiments and recordings of action potential-related spontaneous IPSCs suggest that estrogen-induced disinhibition is associated with a decrease in probability of release at GABAergic synapses, which decreases the amplitude of IPSCs produced by inhibitory neuron action potentials. Our findings lend novel insights into estrogen regulation of inhibitory synapses in the hippocampus and point to estrogen action on basal forebrain cholinergic neurons as critically involved in mediating the effects of estrogen in the hippocampus.
Give unto others: genetically unrelated cotton-top tamarin monkeys preferentially give food to those who altruistically give food back

Altruistic food giving among genetically unrelated individuals is rare in nature. The few examples that exist suggest that when animals give food to unrelated others, they may do so on the basis of mutualistic or reciprocally altruistic relationships. We present the results of four experiments designed to tease apart the factors mediating food giving among genetically unrelated cotton-top tamarins (Saguinus oedipus), a cooperatively breeding New World primate. In experiment 1 we show that individuals give significantly more food to a trained conspecific who unilaterally gives food than to a conspecific who unilaterally never gives food. The apparent contingency of the tamarins' food–giving behaviour motivated the design of experiments 2–4. Results from all three experiments show that altruistic food giving is mediated by prior acts of altruistic food giving by a conspecific. Specifically, tamarins do not give food to unrelated others when the food received in the past represents the by–product of another's selfish actions (experiments 2 and 3) or when a human experimenter gives them food (experiment 4) as did the unilateral altruist in experiment 1. By contrast, if one tamarin gives another food without obtaining any immediate benefit, then the recipient is more likely to give food in return. Overall, results show that tamarins altruistically give food to genetically unrelated conspecifics, discriminate between altruistic and selfish actions, and give more food to those who give food back. Tamarins therefore have the psychological capacity for reciprocally mediated altruism.
Near-Infrared Properties of Moderate-Redshift Galaxy Clusters. II. Halo Occupation Number, Mass-to-Light Ratios, and Ωm

Using K-band imaging for 15 of the Canadian Network for Observational Cosmology (CNOC1) clusters we examine the near-infrared properties of moderate-redshift (0.19 < z < 0.55) galaxy clusters. We find that the number of K-band selected cluster galaxies within R500 (the halo occupation number, HON) is well correlated with the cluster dynamical mass (M 500) and X-ray temperature (TX); however, the intrinsic scatter in these scaling relations is 37% and 46%, respectively. Comparison with clusters in the local universe shows that the HON-M500 relation does not evolve significantly between z = 0 and z ~ 0.3. This suggests that if dark matter halos are disrupted or undergo significant tidal stripping in high-density regions as seen in numerical simulations, the stellar mass within the halos is tightly bound, and not removed during the process. The total K-band cluster light (L200,K) and K-band-selected richness (parameterized by Bgc,K) are also correlated with both the cluster TX and M200. The total (intrinsic) scatter in the L200,K-M200 and Bgc,K-M200 relations are 43% (31%) and 35% (18%), respectively, and indicates that for massive clusters both L200,K and Bgc,K can predict M200 with accuracy similar to that of TX, LX, or optical richness (Bgc). Examination of the mass-to-light ratios of the clusters shows that similarly to local clusters, the K-band mass-to-light ratio is an increasing function of halo mass. Using the K-band mass-to-light ratios of the clusters, we apply the Oort technique and find Ωm,0 = 0.22 ± 0.02, which agrees well with recent combined concordance cosmology parameters, but, similarly to previous cluster studies, is on the low-density end of preferred values.
Translation of Decision Tables

Decomposition and conversion algorithms for translating decision tables are surveyed and contrasted under two broad categories: the mask rule technique and the network technique. Also, decision table structure is briefly covered, including checks for redundancy, contradiction, and completeness; decision table notation and terminology; and decision table types and apphcations. Extensive hterature citations are provided.
Developing Learners' Academic Writing Skills in Higher Education: A Study for Educational Reform

L2 writers are known to face problems in developing their writing skills at the university level. These problems are even more accentuated with L1 Arabic non-native speakers of English in required English composition courses. Some research has shown that with low motivation levels the process can further be a very difficult and unrewarding one for both the learner and the teacher. However, students need to develop their writing skills in order to cope with their university coursework in the medium of English. This necessitates the search for learning tasks that meet student needs in a wider educational context. This paper outlines some of the writing theories proposed by researchers that have contributed to current L2 teaching/learning classroom methodologies. Drawing upon the insights gained from these theories, one EFL freshman composition classroom learning experience in doing practical research with L1 Arabic non-native speakers of English is described. Results indicated that the experience was not only a very highly motivating basis for developing students' writing skills but also a valuable one for students in acquiring necessary academic research know-how. Implications are made for the teaching/learning of writing and programme development in light of the post-war educational reform in Lebanon.
The Centre Acknowledges Financial Support from the Leverhulme Trust under Programme Grant F114/bf Centre for Research on Globalisation and Labour Markets Wages, Productivity and Foreign Ownership in Uk Manufacturing Wages, Productivity and Foreign Ownership in Uk Manufacturing

Acknowledgements The authors gratefully acknowledge financial support from The Leverhulme Trust under Programme Grant F114/BF. Abstract The presumed higher productivity of foreign firms and the resulting potential for spillovers to domestic firms has led governments to offer financial incentives to foreign firms to locate in their country. We investigate if there is any productivity or wage gap between foreign and domestic firms in the UK and if the presence of foreign firms in a sector raises the productivity of domestic firms in that sector. We then relate the size of the spillover parameter to some firm and industry characteristics. Our results indicate that foreign firms do have higher productivity than domestic firms and they pay higher wages even after controlling for the sectors in which they are located and the size of affiliates. This differential is around 5% in terms of total factor productivity and wages once productivity differences are accounted for. However, we find no aggregate evidence of intra-industry spillovers, although sector and firm characteristics influence how they affect individual firms. Firms with low productivity relative to the sector average gain less from foreign firms, as do firms in sectors with low skills and low levels of foreign competition.
Acoustic model adaptation for recognition of dysarthric speech

Speech production errors characteristic of dysarthria are chiefly responsible for the low accuracy of automatic speech recognition (ASR) when used by people diagnosed with it. The results of the small number of speech recognition studies, mostly conducted by assistive technology researchers, are a testimony to this statement. In the engineering community, substantial research has been conducted to find algorithms that adapt models of speech acoustics trained on one dataset for use with another. They are mostly mathematically motivated. A person with dysarthria produces speech in a rather reduced acoustic working space, causing typical measures of speech acoustics to have values in ranges very different from those characterizing unimpaired speech. It is unlikely then that models trained on unimpaired speech will be able to adjust to this mismatch when acted on by one of the above-mentioned adaptation algorithms. The creation of acoustic models trained exclusively on pathological speech too is a task difficult to achieve: members of this population find it tiring to pursue physical activities for sustained periods of time, including speech production. While this makes speaker adaptation an approach worthy of pursuit, almost no research has been conducted so far on acoustic model adaptation methods for recognition of dysarthric speech. This dissertation presents a study of acoustic model adaptation for recognition of dysarthric speech. First, it investigates the efficacy of a popular adaptation algorithm for dysarthric speech recognition. It then proposes an additional step in the adaptation process, to separately model 'normal' and pathology–induced variations in speech characterisitics; and does so by trying to account for a recently proposed view of the acoustics of motor speech disorders in the clinical research community. Results show that explicitly addressing the population mismatch helps to increase the recognition accuracy. ii To my mother Kumkum Sharma, and my father Krishna Kant Sharma. iii Acknowledgments
Noise-induced transport at zero temperature

We consider a particle in the over-damped regime at zero temperature under the influence of a saw-tooth potential and of a noisy force, which is correlated in time. A current occurs, even if the mean of the noisy force vanishes. We calculate the stationary probability distribution and the stationary current. We discuss how these items depend on the characteristic parameters of the underlying stochastic process. A formal expansion of the current around the white-noise limit not always gives the correct asymptotic behaviour. We improve the expansion for some simple but representative cases.
Novel synthetic molecules targeting the bacterial RNA polymerase assembly.

OBJECTIVES Despite extensive functional screening of the bacterial RNA polymerase (RNAP) over the past years, very few novel inhibitors have been reported. We have, therefore, decided to screen with a radically different, non-enzymic, protein-protein interaction assay. Our target is the highly conserved RNAP-sigma interaction that is essential for transcription. METHODS Small molecule inhibitors of the RNAP-sigma interaction were tested for their activity on transcription and on bacteria. RESULTS These compounds have antibacterial activity against Gram-positive bacteria including multiresistant clinical isolates. CONCLUSIONS This is, to our knowledge, the first example of a small molecule inhibitor of this interaction.
Arctic Sea Ice Variability in the Context of Recent Atmospheric Circulation Trends

Abstract Forty years (1958–97) of reanalysis products and corresponding sea ice concentration data are used to document Arctic sea ice variability and its association with surface air temperature (SAT) and sea level pressure (SLP) throughout the Northern Hemisphere extratropics. The dominant mode of winter (January–March) sea ice variability exhibits out-of-phase fluctuations between the western and eastern North Atlantic, together with a weaker dipole in the North Pacific. The time series of this mode has a high winter-to-winter autocorrelation (0.69) and is dominated by decadal-scale variations and a longer-term trend of diminishing ice cover east of Greenland and increasing ice cover west of Greenland. Associated with the dominant pattern of winter sea ice variability are large-scale changes in SAT and SLP that closely resemble the North Atlantic oscillation. The associated SAT and surface sensible and latent heat flux anomalies are largest over the portions of the marginal sea ice zone in which the tr.
Design of Complex FIR Filters With Reduced Group Delay Error Using Semidefinite Programming

This letter proposes an improved method for designing complex finite impulse response (FIR) filters with reduced group delays using semidefinite programming. A key step in the proposed method is to directly impose a group delay constraint, which is formulated as a linear matrix inequality constraint with some reasonable approximations. The main advantage of the proposed design method is the significant reduction in group delay error at the expense of the slight increase in magnitude error. The effectiveness of the proposed design method is illustrated with an example
Learning to Be Overconfident

We develop a multiperiod market model describing both the process by which traders learn about their ability and how a bias in this learning can create overconfident traders. A trader in our model initially does not know his own ability. He infers this ability from his successes and failures. In assessing his ability the trader takes too much credit for his successes. This leads him to become overconfident. A trader's expected level of overconfidence increases in the early stages of his career. Then, with more experience, he comes to better recognize his own ability. The patterns in trading volume, expected profits, price volatility, and expected prices resulting from this endogenous overconfidence are analyzed. Article published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Financial Studies in its journal, The Review of Financial Studies.
Children, Childhood and Social Capital: Exploring the Links

This article is concerned with exploring how children develop and utilize stocks of social capital. It draws on two research projects illustrating children’s family, peer and community networks. In the burgeoning literature on social capital, children’s accounts remain under-researched. Indeed most of the literature operates with a simplistic view of adults passing social capital assets on to children without a subsequent consideration of how children perceive and make use of existing networks and create and manage additional networks. The article will examine the limited treatment of children and childhood in the conceptualization of social capital put forward by Putnam, Coleman and Bourdieu. One of the most important attributes of social capital is its supposed ability to be converted into other forms of capital. A focus on children’s networks calls into question the ease with which social capital can be transformed into other types of capital.
LOCS: a low overhead profiler-driven design flow for security of MPSoCs

Security is a growing concern in processor based systems and hence requires immediate attention. New paradigms in the design of MPSoCs must be found, with security as one of the primary objectives. Software attacks like Code Injection Attacks exploit vulnerabilities in "trusted" code. Previous countermeasures addressing code injection attacks in MPSoCs have significant performance overheads and do not check every single line of code. The work described in this paper has reduced performance overhead and ensures that all the lines in the program code are checked. We propose an MPSoC system where one processor (which we call a MONITOR processor) is responsible for supervising all other application processors. Our design flow, LOCS, instruments and profiles the execution of basic blocks in the program. LOCS subsequently uses the profiler output to re-instrument the source files to minimize runtime overheads. LOCS also aids in the design of hardware customizations required by the MONITOR. At runtime, the MONITOR checks the validity of the control flow transitions and the execution time of basic blocks. We implemented our system on a commercial extensible processor, Xtensa LX2, and tested it on three multimedia benchmarks. The experiments show that our system has the worst-case performance degradation of about 24% and an area overhead of approximately 40%. LOCS has smaller performance, area and code size overheads than all previous code injection countermeasures for MPSoCs.
Experimental Evaluation of Seed Limitation in Alpine Snowbed Plants

Background The distribution and abundance of plants is controlled by the availability of seeds and of sites suitable for establishment. The relative importance of these two constraints is still contentious and possibly varies among species and ecosystems. In alpine landscapes, the role of seed limitation has traditionally been neglected, and the role of abiotic gradients emphasized. Methodology/Principal Findings We evaluated the importance of seed limitation for the incidence of four alpine snowbed species (Achillea atrata L., Achillea clusiana Tausch, Arabis caerulea L., Gnaphalium hoppeanum W. D. J. Koch) in local plant communities by comparing seedling emergence, seedling, juvenile and adult survival, juvenile and adult growth, flowering frequency as well as population growth rates λ of experimental plants transplanted into snowbed patches which were either occupied or unoccupied by the focal species. In addition, we accounted for possible effects of competition or facilitation on these rates by including a measure of neighbourhood biomass into the analysis. We found that only A. caerulea had significantly lower seedling and adult survival as well as a lower population growth rate in unoccupied sites whereas the vital rates of the other three species did not differ among occupied and unoccupied sites. By contrast, all species were sensitive to competitive effects of the surrounding vegetation in terms of at least one of the studied rates. Conclusions/Significance We conclude that seed and site limitation jointly determine the species composition of these snowbed plant communities and that constraining site factors include both abiotic conditions and biotic interactions. The traditional focus on abiotic gradients for explaining alpine plant distribution hence appears lopsided. The influence of seed limitation on the current distribution of these plants casts doubt on their ability to readily track shifting habitats under climate change unless seed production is considerably enhanced under a warmer climate.
Selection of Den Sites by Black Bears in the Southern Appalachians

Abstract We evaluated selection of den sites by American black bears (Ursus americanus) in the Pisgah Bear Sanctuary, western North Carolina, by comparing characteristics of dens at 53 den sites with availability of habitat characteristics in annual home ranges of bears and in the study area. We also tested whether den-site selection differed by sex, age, and reproductive status of bears. In addition, we evaluated whether the den component of an existing habitat model for black bears predicted where bears would select den sites. We found bears selected den sites far from gravel roads, on steep slopes, and at high elevations relative to what was available in both annual home ranges and in the study area. Den-site selection did not differ by sex or age, but it differed by reproductive status. Adult females with cubs preferred to den in areas that were relatively far from gravel roads, but adult females without cubs did not. The habitat model overestimated the value of areas near gravel roads, underestimated the value of moderately steep areas, and did not include elevation as a predictor variable. Our results highlight the importance of evaluating den selection in terms of both use and availability of den characteristics.
Global Protocols as First Class Entities for Self-Adaptive Agents

We describe a framework for top-down centralized self-adaptive MASs where adaptive agents are "protocol-driven" and adaptation consists in runtime protocol switch. Protocol specifications take a global, rather than a local, perspective and each agent, before starting to follow a new (global) protocol, projects it for obtaining a local version. If all the agents in the MAS are driven by the same global protocol, the compliance of the MAS execution to the protocol is obtained by construction.
Price, Promotion, and Availability of Nutrition Information: A Descriptive Study of a Popular Fast Food Chain in New York City

Legislation in NYC requires chain restaurants to post calorie information on menu boards in an effort to help consumers make more informed decisions about food and beverage items they are purchasing. While this is a step in the right direction in light of the current obesity epidemic, there are other issues that warrant attention in a fast food setting, namely the pricing of healthy food options, promotional strategies, and access to comprehensive nutrition information. This study focused on a popular fast-food chain in NYC. The study’s aims were threefold: (1) to determine the cost differential between the healthiest meal item on the chain’s general menu and meal items available specifically on a reduced cost menu for one dollar (US$1.00); (2) to identify and describe the promotions advertised in the windows of these restaurants, as well as the nutrition content of promoted items; and (3) to ascertain availability of comprehensive nutrition information to consumers within the restaurants. We found the healthiest meal item to be significantly higher in price than less nutritious meal items available for $1.00 (t = 146.9, p < .001), with the mean cost differential equal to $4.33 (95% CI $4.27, $4.39). Window promotions generally advertised less healthful menu items, which may aid in priming customers to purchase these versus more healthful options. Comprehensive nutrition information beyond calorie counts was not readily accessible prior to purchasing. In addition to improving access to comprehensive nutrition information, advertising more of and lowering the prices of nutritious options may encourage consumers to purchase healthier foods in a fast food setting. Additional research in this area is needed in other geographic locations and restaurant chains.