Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Rhythmic auditory stimulation influences syntactic processing in children with developmental language disorders.

OBJECTIVE Children with developmental language disorders have been shown to be impaired not only in language processing (including syntax), but also in rhythm and meter perception. Our study tested the influence of external rhythmic auditory stimulation (i.e., musical rhythm) on syntax processing in children with specific language impairment (SLI; Experiment 1A) and dyslexia (Experiment 1B). METHOD Children listened to either regular or irregular musical prime sequences followed by blocks of grammatically correct and incorrect sentences. They were required to perform grammaticality judgments for each auditorily presented sentence. RESULTS Performance of all children (SLI, dyslexia, and controls) in the grammaticality judgments was better after regular prime sequences than after irregular prime sequences, as shown by d' data. The benefit of the regular prime was stronger for SLI children (partial η2 = .34) than for dyslexic children (partial η2 = .14), who reached higher performance levels. CONCLUSION Together with previous findings on deficits in temporal processing and sequencing, as well as with the recent proposition of a temporal sampling (oscillatory) framework for developmental language disorders (U. A. Goswami, 2011, Temporal sampling framework for developmental dyslexia, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Vol. 15, pp. 3-10), our results point to potential avenues in using rhythmic structures (even in nonverbal materials) to boost linguistic structure processing.
The Last Word: An Interview With Harris Cooper-Research, Policies, Tips, and Current Perspectives on Homework

Cooper: In 1989, I defined homework as “tasks assigned to students by school teachers that are meant to be carried out during nonschool hours” (p. 7). I’m now unhappy with the qualifier “during nonschool hours” because secondary school students often work on homework assignments during the school day—in study hall, for example. So, more recently I have substituted the qualifier “during noninstructional time” for “nonschool hours. ” This definition explicitly excludes (a) in-school or out-ofschool guided study (e.g., test preparation classes) or tutoring; (b) home study courses (delivered through the mail, television, on audio or video disc, or over the Internet); and (c) extracurricular activities such as sports teams and clubs.
THE LIMITED POTENTIAL OF TRAINING FOR LEARNER DRIVERS: A VIEW FROM THE PSYCHOLOGISTS' LAB

There is substantial evidence and wide acceptance that young or, more accurately, inexperienced drivers represent a significant crash risk compared to older or more experienced drivers. Certainly in Victoria, results published by the Accident Research Centre using crash data, exposure data based on road-side surveys, and age as a surrogate for experience underscore the high risk of crash involvement for inexperienced drivers (Diamantopoulou, Skalova, Dyte, & Cameron, 1996). Similar findings have been reported for Victorian drivers by Procko (1996) at the Transport Research Centre.
A Study of the Relational Aspects of the Culture of Academic Medicine

Purpose The impact of medical school culture on medical students has been well studied, but little documentation exists regarding how medical faculty experience the culture in which they work. In an ongoing project, the National Initiative on Gender, Culture and Leadership in Medicine, the authors are investigating how the existing culture of academic medical institutions supports all faculty members’ ability to function at their highest potential. Method The authors conducted a qualitative study of faculty in five disparate U.S. medical schools. Faculty in different career stages and diverse specialties were interviewed regarding their perceptions and experiences in academic medicine. Analysis was inductive and data driven. Results Relational aspects of the culture emerged as a central theme for both genders across all career categories. Positive relationships were most evident with patients and learners. Negative relational attributes among faculty and leadership included disconnection, competitive individualism, undervaluing of humanistic qualities, deprecation, disrespect, and the erosion of trust. Conclusions The data suggest that serious problems exist in the relational culture and that such problems may affect medical faculty vitality, professionalism, and general productivity and are linked to retention. Efforts to create and support trusting relationships in medical schools might enhance all faculty members’ efforts to optimally contribute to the clinical, education, and research missions of academic medicine. Future work will document the outcomes of a five-school collaboration to facilitate change in the culture to support the productivity of all medical faculty.
Why electoral systems don’t always matter

A significant and influential body of research suggests that electoral systems influence legislators’ behaviour. Yet, individual legislators are potentially motivated by other concerns, such as policy and office. What happens when competing goals predict contradictory behaviour, for example, when electoral incentives clash with enticements to win prized post-election positions (mega-seats)? When party leaders cartelize the allocation of mega-seats, the anticipated effects of the electoral system on legislators’ behaviour may dissolve – creating strong parties in the legislature despite a candidate-centred electoral system. New data on mega-seats and voting behaviour in the Irish parliament between 1980 and 2010 supports the notion that mega-seat considerations trump the impact of the electoral system on roll-call behaviour. The implication is that what goes on within the legislature may be more important for influencing legislators’ behaviour than what goes on at the ballot box.
An advanced stochastic model for mucociliary particle clearance in cystic fibrosis lungs.

BACKGROUND A mathematical model describing mucociliary clearance in cystic fibrosis (CF) patients and its development with progressing course of the disease was developed. The approach should support the prediction of the disease state on the basis of measured bronchial clearance efficiencies. METHODS The approach is based on the assumption of a steady-state steady-flow mucus transport through the tracheobronchial tree which enables the determination of airway generation-specific mucus velocities by using a measured tracheal mucus velocity and a realistic morphometric dataset of the human lung. Architecture of the tracheobronchial tree was approximated by a stochastic model, reflecting the intra-subject variability of geometric parameters within a given lung generation. RESULTS As predicted by the appropriately validated mathematical approach, mucociliary clearance efficiency in CF patients is partly significantly decreased with respect to healthy controls. 24-h retention of patients with mild CF (FEV(1) >70% of predicted) is reduced by 10% compared to healthy subjects, whilst 24-h retention of patients with moderate to severe CF (FEV(1) <70% of predicted) differs by 25% from that of the healthy controls. These discrepancies are further enhanced with continuation of the clearance process. CONCLUSIONS The theoretical results lead to the conclusion that CF patients have a higher risk of inhaled particle accumulation and related particle overload in specific lung compartments than healthy subjects.
Comparison of lyophilized plasmas with fresh plasmas for calibration of thromboplastin reagents in oral anticoagulant control

In a multicentre study of four thromboplastin reference materials (three from rabbit brain and one from bovine brain combined with adsorbed bovine plasma), three types of lyophilized plasmas were included. One was a pooled normal plasma, another was made by pooling plasmas of coumarin‐treated patients, and the third was prepared by adsorption of vitamin K dependent clotting factors (artificially depleted). The purpose of this study was to investigate whether these lyophilized plasmas could be used for reliable calibration of the four thromboplastins. Calibration line slopes were calculated for the lyophilized plasmas and compared to the slopes based on fresh plasmas. When a rabbit thromboplastin was calibrated against a similar but not identical reagent (like‐to‐like comparison), the slopes for lyophilized plasmas and for fresh plasmas were the same. However, significant differences between lyophilized and fresh plasmas were observed in the calibration of unlike thromboplastins. The deviation of the slope with artificially depleted plasma was greater than that with lyophilized coumarin plasma. Indiscriminate use of these lyophilized plasmas for thromboplastin calibration should be avoided.
Mapping Uncharted Waters: Exploratory Analysis, Visualization, and Clustering of Oceanographic Data

In this paper we describe an interdisciplinary collaboration between researchers in machine learning and oceanography. The collaboration was formed to study the problem of open ocean biome classification. Biomes are regions on Earth with similar climate (e.g., temperature and rainfall) and vegetation structure (e.g., grasslands, coniferous forests, and deserts). To discover biomes in the open ocean, we apply leading methods in high dimensional data analysis, clustering, and visualization to oceanographic measurements culled from multiple existing databases. We compare traditional approaches, such as k-means clustering and principal component analysis, to newer approaches such as Isomap and maximum variance unfolding. Our work provides the first quantitative classification of open ocean biomes from an automated statistical analysis of multivariate data. It also provides a valuable case study in the use (and misuse) of recently developed algorithms for high dimensional data analysis.
A robust music genre classification approach for global and regional music datasets evaluation

This paper deals with two problems: (1) the selection of a set of music features in order to achieve high genre classification accuracies; (2) the absence of a representative music dataset of regional Brazilian music. In this paper, we propose a set of features to classify genres of music. The features proposed were obtained by a methodical selection of important features used in the literature of Music Information Retrieval (MIR) and Music Emotion Recognition (MER). Besides, we propose a new music dataset called BMD (Brazilian Music Dataset)1, containing 120 songs labeled in 7 musical genres: FoFFó, Rock, Repente, MPB(Música Popular Brasileira — Brazilian Popular Music), Brega, Sertanejo and Disco. An important characteristic of this new dataset compared with others, is the presence of three popular genres in Brazil Northeast region: Repente, Brega and a characteristic genre similar to MPB, which we also call as MPB. We evaluated our proposed features on both datasets: GTZAN and BMD. The proposed approach achieved average accuracy (after 30 runs of 5-fold-cross-validations) of 79.7% for GTZAN and 86.11% for the BMD. Another important contribution of this work is random repetition of cross-validation executions. Most of the papers performs only a single n-fold cross-validation. We criticize that practice and propose, at least, 30 random executions to compute the average accuracy.
The optimization of protein secondary structure determination with infrared and circular dichroism spectra.

We have used the circular dichroism and infrared spectra of a specially designed 50 protein database [Oberg, K.A. , Ruysschaert, J.M. & Goormaghtigh, E. (2003) Protein Sci. 12, 2015-2031] in order to optimize the accuracy of spectroscopic protein secondary structure determination using multivariate statistical analysis methods. The results demonstrate that when the proteins are carefully selected for the diversity in their structure, no smaller subset of the database contains the necessary information to describe the entire set. One conclusion of the paper is therefore that large protein databases, observing stringent selection criteria, are necessary for the prediction of unknown proteins. A second important conclusion is that only the comparison of analyses run on circular dichroism and infrared spectra independently is able to identify failed solutions in the absence of known structure. Interestingly, it was also found in the course of this study that the amide II band has high information content and could be used alone for secondary structure prediction in place of amide I.
Translation initiation: a critical signalling node in cancer

Mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR) is a master regulator of translation initiation that controls the recruitment of ribosomes to mRNA templates in response to intracellular and extracellular cues. Evidence suggests that mTOR and its direct downstream targets, S6K and eIF4E/4E-BP, play significant roles in oncogenesis, and that inhibiting this pathway holds promise as an anti-proliferative approach. Recent genome-wide analyses of mutations in human cancers indicate that transformed cells activate a handful of processes and signalling pathways that are major contributors to their phenotype. Here we review the current literature implicating mTOR and translation initiation downstream of many of these various signalling pathways and processes usurped in human cancers. This review highlights the widespread activation of mTOR/eIF4E following acquisition of oncogenic lesions and its implication in promoting the transformation phenotype and indicates that targeting the control of translation initiation makes logical sense as a broad-acting therapeutic approach.
Efficacy of epidural analgesia with ropivacaine on labor , maternal , and neonatal : a meta-analysis of prospective and retrospective studies

Background: Epidural analgesia is generally accepted as the most effective method for pain relief during labor. However, results of published studies regarding the efficacy of epidural analgesia with ropivacaine on the modes of delivery, labor progression, need for oxytocin, maternal and neonatal outcomes are inconsistent. Objective: We conducted a comprehensive meta-analysis to appraise the efficacy and security of ropivacaine epidural analgesia on labor, maternal and neonatal. Methods: Databases of the PubMed, Embase, and Cochrane Library were searched independently by 2 reviewers to retrieve eligible studies that compare the influence of ropivacaine epidural analgesia (REA) on labor, maternal and neonatal with non-epidural analgesia (NEA) in parturients. Primary outcomes were the modes of labor, duration of labor and the need for oxytocin, and secondary outcomes were maternal outcomes (pain scores, nausea, vomiting and pruritus), and neonatal outcomes (Apgar scores, umbilical artery pH). Standardised mean difference (SMD) or odds ratio (OR) with their 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were calculated by fixedor random-effects models, depending upon the heterogeneity of the included trials. Sensitivity analyses and subgroup analyses were also performed. Newcastle-Ottawa Scale (NOS) was applied to assess the qualities of all included studies. Results: A total of eight studies (four prospective and four retrospective studies) with ten trials involving 18832 parturients were included in this analysis. Comparing with the NEA, the rate of spontaneous vaginal delivery was decreased, the risk of instrumental delivery was increased, and the second stage of labor was prolonged in the REA group (OR 0.61, 95% CI 0.43-0.87, P=0.006, I2=84%; OR 2.2, 95% CI 1.93-2.54, P=0.000, I2=13%; SMD 0.58, 95% CI 0.41-0.75, P=0.000, I2=89%, respectively). There were no statistical differences of the rate of cesarean delivery (OR 1.26, 95% CI 0.82-1.96, P=0.296, I2=83%), the need for oxytocin (OR 1.43, 95% CI 0.95-2.13, P=0.09, I2=95%), and the first stage of labor (SMD 0.27, 95% CI -0.40-0.93, P=0.427, I2=99%) between two groups. Pain scores were significantly lower in parturients receiving epidural ropivacaine when comparing to those with non-epidural method of relieving pain or those with no any way for pain relief in labour. No differences concerning maternal outcomes (nausea, vomiting and pruritus) and neonatal adverse events (Apgar scores, umbilical artery pH) were observed. Conclusions: This meta-analysis shows that REA increases the rate of instrumental delivery and the duration of the second stage of labor, and decreases rate of spontaneous vaginal delivery. However, REA does not affect the rate of cesarean delivery, the need for oxytocin and the first stage of labor. However, all the results should be interpreted cautiously, as heterogeneous data are used for analyzing.
Clustering via Similarity Functions : Theoretical Foundations and Algorithms ∗

Problems of clustering data from pairwise similarity information arise in many different fields. Yet the question of which algorithm is best to use under what conditions, and how good a notion of similarity does one need in order to cluster accurately remains poorly understood. In this work we propose a new general framework for analyzing clustering from similarity information that directly addresses this question of what properties of a similarity measure are sufficient to cluster accurately and by what kinds of algorithms. We show that in our framework a wide variety of interesting learning-theoretic and game-theoretic properties, including properties motivated by mathematical biology, can be used to cluster well, and we design new efficient algorithms that are able to take advantage of them. We consider two natural clustering objectives: (a) list clustering, where the algorithm’s goal is to produce a small list of clusterings such that at least one of them is approximately correct, and (b) hierarchical clustering, where the algorithm’s goal is to produce a hierarchy such that desired clustering is some pruning of this tree (which a user could navigate). We develop a notion of the clustering complexity of a given property, analogous to notions of capacity in learning theory, that characterizes information-theoretic usefulness for clustering. We analyze this quantity for a wide range of properties, giving tight upper and lower bounds. We also show how our algorithms can be extended to the inductive case, i.e., by using just a constant-sized sample, as in property testing. While our algorithms for this setting remain very efficient, proving correctness requires subtle analysis based on regularity-type results. Our framework can be viewed as an analog for clustering of discriminative models for supervised classification (i.e., the Statistical Learning Theory framework and the PAC learning model), where our goal is to cluster accurately given a property or relation the similarity function is believed to satisfy with respect to the ground truth clustering. More specifically our framework is analogous to that of data-dependent concept classes in supervised learning, where conditions such as the large margin property have been central in the analysis of kernel methods.
Expression of Wilms' tumor suppressor in the liver with cirrhosis: Relation to hepatocyte nuclear factor 4 and hepatocellular function

The Wilms' tumor suppressor WT1 is a transcriptional regulator present in the fetal but not in the mature liver. Its expression and functional role in liver diseases remains unexplored. In this study, we analyzed WT1 expression by reverse‐transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT‐PCR) and by immunohistochemistry in normal and diseased livers. In addition, we performed in vitro studies in isolated rat hepatocytes to investigate WT1 regulation and function. We detected WT1 messenger RNA (mRNA) in 18% of normal livers, 17% of chronic hepatitis with minimal fibrosis, 49% of chronic hepatitis with bridging fibrosis, and 71% of cirrhotic livers. In cirrhosis, WT1 immunoreactivity was localized to the nucleus of hepatocytes. WT1 mRNA abundance correlated inversely with prothrombin time (P = .04) and directly with serum bilirubin (P = .002) and with the MELD score (P = .001) of disease severity. In rats, WT1 expression was present in fetal hepatocytes and in the cirrhotic liver but not in normal hepatic tissue. In vitro studies showed that isolated primary hepatocytes express WT1 when stimulated with transforming growth factor β (TGF‐β) or when the cells undergo dedifferentiation in culture. Moreover, we found that WT1 down‐regulates hepatocyte nuclear factor 4 (HNF‐4), a factor that is essential to maintain liver function and metabolic regulation in the mature organ. Hepatic expression of HNF‐4 was impaired in advanced human cirrhosis and negatively correlated with WT1 mRNA levels (P = .001). In conclusion, we show that WT1 is induced by TGF‐β and down‐regulates HNF‐4 in liver cells. WT1 is reexpressed in the cirrhotic liver in relation to disease progression and may play a role in the development of hepatic insufficiency in cirrhosis.
Attosecond dynamics through a Fano resonance: Monitoring the birth of a photoelectron

Watching as helium goes topsy-turvy Theorists have long pondered the underpinnings of the Fano resonance, a spectral feature that resembles adjacent rightside-up and upside-down peaks. An especially well-studied instance of this feature appears in the electronic spectrum of helium as a transient state undergoes delayed ionization. Two studies have now traced the dynamics of this state in real time. Gruson et al. used photoelectron spectroscopy to extract the amplitude and phase of the electron wave packet after inducing its interference with reference wave packets tuned into resonance at variable delays. Kaldun et al. used extreme ultraviolet absorption spectroscopy to probe the transient state while variably forcing ionization with a strong near-infrared field. Science, this issue pp. 734 and 738 Ultrafast spectroscopy traces the dynamics of a transient excited state in helium underlying appearance of a Fano resonance. The dynamics of quantum systems are encoded in the amplitude and phase of wave packets. However, the rapidity of electron dynamics on the attosecond scale has precluded the complete characterization of electron wave packets in the time domain. Using spectrally resolved electron interferometry, we were able to measure the amplitude and phase of a photoelectron wave packet created through a Fano autoionizing resonance in helium. In our setup, replicas obtained by two-photon transitions interfere with reference wave packets that are formed through smooth continua, allowing the full temporal reconstruction, purely from experimental data, of the resonant wave packet released in the continuum. In turn, this resolves the buildup of the autoionizing resonance on an attosecond time scale. Our results, in excellent agreement with ab initio time-dependent calculations, raise prospects for detailed investigations of ultrafast photoemission dynamics governed by electron correlation, as well as coherent control over structured electron wave packets.