Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Tourette Syndrome: Complementary Insights from Measures of Cognitive Control, Eyeblink Rate, and Pupil Diameter

Some individuals with Tourette syndrome (TS) have severe motoric and vocal tics that interfere with all aspects of their lives, while others have mild tics that pose few problems. We hypothesize that observed tic severity reflects a combination of factors, including the degree to which dopaminergic (DA) and/or noradrenergic (NE) neurotransmitter systems have been affected by the disorder, and the degree to which the child can exert cognitive control to suppress unwanted tics. To explore these hypotheses, we collected behavioral and eyetracking data from 26 patients with TS and 26 controls between ages 7 and 14, both at rest and while they performed a test of cognitive control. To our knowledge, this is the first study to use eyetracking measures in patients with TS. We measured spontaneous eyeblink rate as well as pupil diameter, which have been linked, respectively, to DA and NE levels in the central nervous system. Here, we report a number of key findings that held when we restricted analyses to unmedicated patients. First, patients’ accuracy on our test of cognitive control accounted for fully 50% of the variance in parentally reported tic severity. Second, patients exhibited elevated spontaneous eyeblink rates compared to controls, both during task performance and at rest, consistent with heightened DA transmission. Third, although neither task-evoked pupil dilation nor resting pupil diameter differed between TS patients and controls, pupil diameter was positively related to parentally reported anxiety levels in patients, suggesting heightened NE transmission in patients with comorbid anxiety. Thus, with the behavioral and eyetracking data gathered from a single task, we can gather objective data that are related both to tic severity and anxiety levels in pediatric patients with TS, and that likely reflect patients’ underlying neurochemical disturbances.
Using Information Theory to Improve the Robustness of Trust Systems

Unfair rating attacks to trust systems can affect the accuracy of trust evaluation when trust ratings (recommendations) about trustee agents are sought by truster agents from others (advisor agents). A robust trust system should remain accurate, even under the worst-case attacks which yield the least useful recommendations. In this work, we base on information theory to quantify the utility of recommendations. We analyse models where the advisors have the worst-case behaviour. With these models, we formally prove that if the fraction of dishonest advisors exceeds a certain threshold, recommendations become completely useless (in the worst case). Our evaluations on several popular trust models show that they cannot provide accurate trust evaluation under the worst-case as well as many other types of unfair rating attacks. Our way of explicitly modelling dishonest advisors induces a method of computing trust accurately, which can serve to improve the robustness of the trust models.
Influence of Oxygen Content and Microstructure on the Mechanical Properties and Biocompatibility of Ti–15 wt%Mo Alloy Used for Biomedical Applications

The Ti–15Mo alloy has its mechanical properties strongly altered by heat treatments and by addition of interstitial elements, such as, oxygen, for example. In this sense, the objective of this paper is to analyze the effect of the introduction of oxygen in selected mechanical properties and the biocompatibility of Ti–15Mo alloy. The samples used in this study were prepared by arc-melting and characterized by density measurements, X-ray diffraction, scanning electron microscopy, microhardness, modulus of elasticity, and biocompatibility tests. Hardness measurements were shown to be sensitive to concentration of oxygen. The modulus results showed interstitial influence in value; this was verified under several conditions to which the samples were exposed. Cytotoxicity tests conducted in vitro showed that the various processing conditions did not alter the biocompatibility of the material.
Epidemiological appraisal of studies of residential exposure to power frequency magnetic fields and adult cancers.

OBJECTIVES: To appraise epidemiological evidence of the purported association between residential exposure to power frequency magnetic fields and adult cancers. METHODS: Literature review and epidemiological evaluation. RESULTS: Seven epidemiological studies have been conducted on the risk of cancer among adults in relation to residential exposure to power frequency magnetic fields. Leukaemia was positively associated with magnetic fields in three case-control studies. The other two case-control studies and two cohort studies did not show such a link. Brain tumours and breast cancer have rarely been examined by these studies. Based on the epidemiological results, the analysis of the role of chance and bias, and the criteria for causal inferences, it seems that the evidence is not strong enough to support the putative causal relation between residential exposure to magnetic fields and adult leukaemia, brain tumours, or breast cancer. Inadequate statistical power is far more a concern than selection bias, information bias, and confounding in interpreting the results from these studies, and in explaining inconsistencies between studies. CONCLUSIONS: Our reviews suggested that the only way to answer whether residential exposure to magnetic fields is capable of increasing the risks of adult cancers is to conduct more studies carefully avoiding methodological flaws, in particular small sample size. We also suggested that the risk of female breast cancer should be the object of additional investigations, and that future studies should attempt to include information on exposure to magnetic fields from workplaces as well as residential exposure to estimate the effects of overall exposure to magnetic fields.
Regulation of 53BP1 Protein Stability by RNF8 and RNF168 Is Important for Efficient DNA Double-Strand Break Repair

53BP1 regulates DNA double-strand break (DSB) repair. In functional assays for specific DSB repair pathways, we found that 53BP1 was important in the conservative non-homologous end-joining (C-NHEJ) pathway, and this activity was dependent upon RNF8 and RNF168. We observed that 53BP1 protein was diffusely abundant in nuclei, and upon ionizing radiation, 53BP1 was everywhere degraded except at DNA damage sites. Depletion of RNF8 or RNF168 blocked the degradation of the diffusely localized nuclear 53BP1, and ionizing radiation induced foci (IRIF) did not form. Furthermore, when 53BP1 degradation was inhibited, a subset of 53BP1 was bound to DNA damage sites but bulk, unbound 53BP1 remained in the nucleoplasm, and localization of its downstream effector RIF1 at DSBs was abolished. Our data suggest a novel mechanism for responding to DSB that upon ionizing radiation, 53BP1 was divided into two populations, ensuring functional DSB repair: damage site-bound 53BP1 whose binding signal is known to be generated by RNF8 and RNF168; and unbound bulk 53BP1 whose ensuing degradation is regulated by RNF8 and RNF168.
The relationship between the processes involved in reading and spelling in adults

Reading and spelling are learned abilities that require the recognition and processing of words. Several models of word recognition have been developed to show how skilled readers recognise words. The dual-route model is the most comprehensive model and involves two processing routes or mechanisms for recognizing printed words; the lexical route and the non-lexical route. Differences in the reliance on lexical and non-lexical processes used to read regular words, irregular words, and nonwords have been found in both normally functioning and impaired readers (Baron, 1979; Baron & Treiman, 1980; Freebody & Byrne, 1988; Byrne, Freebody, & Gates, 1992). Having identified such patterns in reading, researchers have begun to investigate whether spelling involves similar processes to reading and whether similar patterns of reliance exist. Spelling is considered the inverse of reading, with reading involving the conversion of an orthographic representation to a phonological representation, while spelling involves the transformation from phonology to orthography (Ellis, 1982). It has been found that readers who differ in reliance on lexical and non-lexical processes have a corresponding difference in their spelling styles (Baron, Treiman, Wilf, & Kellman, 1980). In order to determine whether spelling uses the same processes as reading future research could explore whether reading and spelling are similarly affected by word frequency and reading age.
Latent aspect rating analysis without aspect keyword supervision

Mining detailed opinions buried in the vast amount of review text data is an important, yet quite challenging task with widespread applications in multiple domains. Latent Aspect Rating Analysis (LARA) refers to the task of inferring both opinion ratings on topical aspects (e.g., location, service of a hotel) and the relative weights reviewers have placed on each aspect based on review content and the associated overall ratings. A major limitation of previous work on LARA is the assumption of pre-specified aspects by keywords. However, the aspect information is not always available, and it may be difficult to pre-define appropriate aspects without a good knowledge about what aspects are actually commented on in the reviews. In this paper, we propose a unified generative model for LARA, which does not need pre-specified aspect keywords and simultaneously mines 1) latent topical aspects, 2) ratings on each identified aspect, and 3) weights placed on different aspects by a reviewer. Experiment results on two different review data sets demonstrate that the proposed model can effectively perform the Latent Aspect Rating Analysis task without the supervision of aspect keywords. Because of its generality, the proposed model can be applied to explore all kinds of opinionated text data containing overall sentiment judgments and support a wide range of interesting application tasks, such as aspect-based opinion summarization, personalized entity ranking and recommendation, and reviewer behavior analysis.
Suicidal thinking and psychological distress: The role of personality and cognitive factors

Objectives. This thesis aimed to examine a series of personality and cognitive factors as prospective predictors of suicidal thinking and psychological distress. A secondary objective was to examine any causal relationship between rumination and attentional biases. Method. In order to achieve the above objectives, a series of four studies were conducted. Studies one and three were prospective studies, using analogue samples, to examine the role of personality and cognitive factors in distress and suicidal thinking. In addition, study one also investigated the effect on attentional bias of manipulating rumination. Study two was an experimental study in which two different methods of manipulating attentional bias were piloted. The final study in this thesis employed a clinical sample of general hospital parasuicide patients to investigate whether relationships between personality and cognitive factors were replicable in a clinical population. Results. The personality and cognitive factors understudy were investigated within a research framework to examine their interactive effects. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed a number of moderating and mediating relationships between these personality and cognitive factors to prospectively predict both suicidal thinking and psychological distress. In addition, rumination was found to have a causal influence on positive attentional bias. Conclusions. Evidence from this thesis links personality and cognitive factors to both suicidal thinking and psychological distress in a series of moderating and mediating relationships. These are discussed in relation to the possible theoretical and clinical implications.
Heterochromatin: stable and unstable invasions at home and abroad.

One of the most vibrant areas of biology at present concerns elucidation of the “epigenetic” molecular mechanisms underlying how genomes are packaged to facilitate heritable gene expression patterns. An explosion of recent findings reveals how various components of chromatin regulate this process. Especially exciting is the dynamic role played by histone posttranslational modifications, which some have termed the “histone code” (Strahl and Allis 2000; Jenuwein and Allis 2001; Kouzarides 2002). Equally important are the proteins that read this code and interpret the signals to modulate transcriptional potential (Eissenberg and Elgin 2000; Lachner et al. 2001). Much of what we have learned about these molecular parameters has come from the study of large regions of DNA packaged into, and heritably transmitted as, permanently transcriptionally silenced regions termed constitutive heterochromatin (Wakimoto 1998; Grewal and Elgin 2002). In classic studies with Drosophila, molecular determinants have been elucidated to explain variegated patterns of heritable gene expression, or position effect variegation (PEV), which emerge when a gene that normally resides in active euchromatin is translocated into such heterochromatin (Wallrath and Elgin 1995; Wakimoto 1998; Grewal and Elgin 2002). In this issue of Genes & Development, a clever experimental system initially designed to explore the role of heterochromatin in the silencing of specific genes unexpectedly reveals that the opposite situation, invasion of heterochromatin into a euchromatic region, also triggers a variegated pattern of heritable gene silencing (Ayyanathan et al. 2003). These findings have important ramifications for gene expression in settings of both normal and pathological cellular function.
Effective face pose classification method

In this paper we present a novel Appearance based approach to the problem of face pose classification. This method suggests the subject-independent pose classification of face images using bilateral filtering and wavelet transform as preprocessing and Isometric Projection based subspace learning for the extracting of discriminant feature vectors. Our Proposed method is evaluated on a large Image set of about 5000 face poses, drawn from the standard FERET database with inherent in-plane rotations and some manually added translations. The training set consists of 500 images equally distributed among frontal, approximately 22.5″ rotated left and right quarter profile, and approximately 67.5″ rotated left and right half profile and similarly the test set consists of 4500 images equally distributed among the five different types of poses. Experimental results show the effectiveness of our proposed method document.
Can individual budgets have an impact on carers and the caring role?

ABSTRACT The introduction of cash-for-care schemes such as individual or personal budgets in England has been seen as central to the personalisation agenda for reforming the delivery of adult social care. However, despite there being 5.2 million carers in England and Wales, the initiative concentrates predominantly on the needs of the service user. The implementation of individual budgets (IBs) was piloted within 13 local authorities during 2005–2007 and the Department of Health commissioned an independent evaluation of this pilot (IBSEN). The focus was only on the service user in the evaluation and therefore a separate but linked study was set up to evaluate the impact and outcomes of IBs on carers. Carers of service users who had consented to take part in the main IBSEN study were identified and invited to participate in a follow-up study aimed at exploring how IBs impacted on carers and the caring role. The study found that the receipt of the budget was significantly associated with positive impacts on carers' reported quality of life and, when other factors were taken into account, with social care outcomes. These outcome gains were achieved despite no higher costs being incurred to the public purse, thus suggesting that IBs for service users are cost-effective for carers.
Evaluation of the somatosensory evoked blink response in patients with neurological disorders.

BACKGROUND--The somatosensory evoked blink response (SBR) is a characteristic reflex blink elicited by electrical stimulation of peripheral nerves or other anatomical sites. METHODS--139 patients with neurological disorders were examined for presence of the SBR. Although the SBR was not usually elicitable, it was present in a subset of patients with Parkinson's disease and with hemifacial spasm. It was also present in a patient with Guillain-Barré syndrome before the recovery phase. The latency of the EMG activities responsible for the SBR was significantly shorter than that of the startle blink. CONCLUSIONS--The SBR is not a variant of the startle blink, but is a release phenomenon transmitted via the brainstem reticular formation. This response may be clinically relevant in disorders associated with brainstem lesions and abnormal blinking.
Somatosensory Space Abridged: Rapid Change in Tactile Localization Using a Motion Stimulus

Introduction Organization of tactile input into somatotopic maps enables us to localize stimuli on the skin. Temporal relationships between stimuli are important in maintaining the maps and influence perceived locations of discrete stimuli. This points to the spatiotemporal stimulation sequences experienced as motion as a potential powerful organizing principle for spatial maps. We ask whether continuity of the motion determines perceived location of areas in the motion path using a novel tactile stimulus designed to ‘convince’ the brain that a patch of skin does not exist by rapidly skipping over it. Method Two brushes, fixed 9 cm apart, moved back and forth along the forearm (at 14.5 cm s−1), crossing a 10-cm long ‘occluder’, which prevented skin stimulation in the middle of the motion path. Crucially, only one brush contacted the skin at any one time, and the occluder was traversed almost instantaneously. Participants pointed with the other arm towards the felt location of the brush when it was briefly halted during repetitive motion, and also reported where they felt they had been brushed. Results Participants did not report the 10-cm gap in stimulation – the motion path was perceptually completed. Pointing results showed that brush path was ‘abridged’: locations immediately on either side of the occluder, as well as location at the ends of the brush path, were perceived to be >3 cm closer to each other than in the control condition (F(1,9) = 7.19; p = . 025 and F(1,9) = 6.02, p = . 037 respectively). This bias increased with prolonged stimulation. Conclusions An illusion of completion induced by our Abridging stimulus is accompanied by gross mislocalization, suggesting that motion determines perceived locations. The effect reveals the operation of Gestalt principles in touch and suggests the existence of dynamic maps that quickly adjust to the current input pattern.
Tissue arrays as fiducial markers for section alignment in 3‐D reconstruction technology

Combination of conventional histology and the three‐dimensional spatial view of tissue structures offers new prospects for understanding and diagnosing nature and development of human diseases. The essential technical problem related to three‐dimensional reconstruction in histopathology is represented by the correct alignment of serial sections. During the past years several methods have been proposed but failed to become popular because of their limits in terms of time consume and restricted applicability. We aimed to overcome this problem by applying the technology of Tissue Array, thus by positioning adequate fiducial markers from specific “donor” blocks into the “recipient” paraffin block of interest. Digitized pictures of serially cut sections were aligned according to the tissue markers embedded by Tissue Array, and then processed with specific softwares for three‐dimensional reconstruction. Thirteen models, including fetal hearts, breast and thyroid carcinomas, were elaborated. We found the procedure to be easy, fast and reproducible. Moreover, by selectively embedding the fiducial markers according to specific angles, the Tissue Arrays can be exploited in order to establish the distance between sections. This original methodology of incorporating Tissue Arrays into paraffin blocks as fiducial markers for three‐dimensional reconstruction has a potential impact on histology for research purposes and diagnostic applications.
Spatial and Temporal Attractiveness Analysis Through Geo-Referenced Photo Alignment

This paper presents a system to create a spatiotemporal attractiveness GIS layer for mountainous areas brought about by the implementation of novel image processing and pattern matching algorithms. We utilize the freely available Digital Terrain Model of the planet provided by NASA [1] to generate a three-dimensional synthetic model around a viewer's location. Using an array of image processing algorithms we then align photographs to this model. We will demonstrate the accuracy of the resulting system through the overlaying of geo-referenced content, such as mountain names and then we will suggest ways in which visitors/photographers can exploit the results of this research, such as suggesting temporally appropriate photo-hotspots close to their current location.
Level-r Model with Adaptive and Sophisticated Learning

In standard models of iterative thinking, there is a fixed rule hierarchy and every player chooses a fixed rule level. Nonequilibrium behavior emerges when some players do not perform enough thinking steps. Existing approaches however are inherently static. In this paper, we generalize models of iterative thinking to incorporate adaptive and sophisticated learning. Our model has three key features. First, the rule hierarchy is dynamic, i.e., the action that corresponds to each rule level can evolve over time depending on historical game plays. Second, players’ rule levels are dynamic. Specifically, players update beliefs about opponents’ rule levels in each round and change their rule level in order to maximize payoff. Third, our model accommodates a continuous rule hierarchy, so that every possible observed action can be directly interpreted as a real-numbered rule level r. The proposed model unifies and generalizes two seemingly distinct streams of nonequilibrium models (level-k and belief learning models) and as a consequence nests several well-known nonequilibrium models as special cases. When both the rule hierarchy and players’ rule levels are fixed, we have a static level-r model (which generalizes the standard level-k model). When only players’ rule levels are fixed, our model reduces to a static level-r model with dynamic rule hierarchy and captures adaptive learning. When only the rule hierarchy is fixed, our model reduces to a dynamic level-r model and captures sophisticated learning. Since our model always converges to the iterative dominance solution, it can serve as a model of the equilibration process. Using experimental data on p-beauty contests, we show that our model describes subjects’ dynamic behavior better than all its special cases. In addition, we collect new experimental data on a generalized price matching game and the estimation results show that it is crucial to allow for both adaptive and sophisticated learning in predicting dynamic choice behaviors across games. (JEL A12, A13, C72, D63)