Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Role of Visual Cues in Microgravity Spatial Orientation

In weightlessness, astronauts must rely on vision to remain spatially oriented. Although gravitational "down" cues are missing. most astronauts maintain a "subjective vestical"-a subjective sensc of which way is up. This is evidenced by anecdotal reports of crewmembers feeling upside down (inversion illusions) or feeling that a floor has become a ceiling and vice versa (visual reorientation illusions). Instability in the subjective vertical direction can trigger disorientation and space motion sickness. On Neurolab, a virtual environment display system was used to conduct five interrelated experiments, which quantified: (a) how the direction of each person's subjective tlertical depends on the orientation of the surrounding visual environment, (b) whether rolling the virtual visual environment produces stronger illusions of circular self-motion (circular vection) and more visual reorientation illusions than on Earth, (c ) whether a virtual scene moving past the subject produces a stronger linear self-motion illusion (linear vection), and (d) whether deliberate manipulation of the subjective ve~lical changes a crewmember's interpretation of shading or the ability to recognize objects. None of the crew's subjective vertical indications became more independent of environmental cues in weightlessness. Three who were either strongly dependent on or independent of stationary visual cues in preflight tesls remained so inflight. One other became more visually dependent inflight, but recovered postflight. Susceptibility to illusions of circular self-motion increased in flight. The time to the onset of linear self-motion illusions decreased and the illusion magnitude significantly increased for most subjects while free floating in weightlessness. These decreased toward one-G levels when the subject "stood up" in weightlessness by wearing constant force springs. For several subjects, changing the relative direction of the subjective vertical in weightlessness-either by body rotation or by simply cognitivelp initiating a visual reorientation-altered the illusion of convexity produccd when viewing a flat, shaded disc. It changed at least one person's ability to recognize previously presented two-dimensional shapes. Overall, results show that most astronauts become more depcndent on dynamic visual motion cues and some become responsive to stationary orientation cues. The direction of the subjective vertical is labile in the absence of gravity. This can interfere with the ability to properly interpret shading, or to recognize complex objects in different orientations.
Quadratic placement with single-iteration linear system solver

In this work we develop a new quadratic placement technique where we prematurely interrupt the linear system solver to interleave the spreading forces saving runtime. This has low impact in the placement flow due to the expand-contract phenomena intrinsic to the ICCG solver outlined in this paper. A coloring scheme for placement, useful for comparing visually placement results, is described. The coloring scheme is then used to create a partitioning strategy that provides a better global view to our placement technique. Our placer based on the ideas developed in this paper is 25% faster for the largest ISPD 2002 benchmarks than FastPlace 3 with no significant penalty in wirelength.
Random forest Gini importance favours SNPs with large minor allele frequency: impact, sources and recommendations

The use of random forests is increasingly common in genetic association studies. The variable importance measure (VIM) that is automatically calculated as a by-product of the algorithm is often used to rank polymorphisms with respect to their ability to predict the investigated phenotype. Here, we investigate a characteristic of this methodology that may be considered as an important pitfall, namely that common variants are systematically favoured by the widely used Gini VIM. As a consequence, researchers may overlook rare variants that contribute to the missing heritability. The goal of the present article is 3-fold: (i) to assess this effect quantitatively using simulation studies for different types of random forests (classical random forests and conditional inference forests, that employ unbiased variable selection criteria) as well as for different importance measures (Gini and permutation based); (ii) to explore the trees and to compare the behaviour of random forests and the standard logistic regression model in order to understand the statistical mechanisms behind the preference for common variants; and (iii) to summarize these results and previously investigated properties of random forest VIMs in the context of genetic association studies and to make practical recommendations regarding the choice of the random forest and variable importance type. All our analyses can be reproduced using R code available from the companion website: http://www.ibe. med.uni-muenchen.de/organisation/mitarbeiter/020_professuren/boulesteix/ginibias/.
Reagent Strips are Reliable and Valid Measure in Defining Status of (de)Hydration Among Male Junior Boxers

The dehydration is a common weight-manipulating technique in boxing, which is already known as a serious health-threatening behavior. Investigations confirmed urine-specific-gravity (USG) as the most reliable and applicable indicator of the body hydration status. In this study we have investigated reliability and concurrent validity of the reagent strips Medi – Test Combi 10 (RSC) as a method for the evaluation of hydration in elite junior boxers. As a gold standard refractometric measurement (RF) is used. The sample of subjects comprised 14 male junior boxers from Croatia and Germany (all national team members ; 16, 57±1, 15 years ; 67, 33±14, 97 kg and 176, 14±7, 98 cm). The RSC measurement was done by two examiners, while the urine sample was simultaneously used for RF analysis. The Sperman range correlations between evaluators was high for three variable BLR, pH SPU of the 10 parameters evidenced by RSC, namely RSC-SPU (r = 0.92). Since RSC-SPU was highly correlated to RF (0.85 and 0.84 for first and second examiner, respectively), this study confirmed appropriate concurrent validity of the RSC-SPU measurement in evidencing the dehydration-status of the junior boxing athletes.
Expectation Backpropagation: Parameter-Free Training of Multilayer Neural Networks with Continuous or Discrete Weights

Multilayer Neural Networks (MNNs) are commonly trained using gradient descent-based methods, such as BackPropagation (BP). Inference in probabilistic graphical models is often done using variational Bayes methods, such as Expectation Propagation (EP). We show how an EP based approach can also be used to train deterministic MNNs. Specifically, we approximate the posterior of the weights given the data using a "mean-field" factorized distribution, in an online setting. Using online EP and the central limit theorem we find an analytical approximation to the Bayes update of this posterior, as well as the resulting Bayes estimates of the weights and outputs. Despite a different origin, the resulting algorithm, Expectation BackPropagation (EBP), is very similar to BP in form and efficiency. However, it has several additional advantages: (1) Training is parameter-free, given initial conditions (prior) and the MNN architecture. This is useful for large-scale problems, where parameter tuning is a major challenge. (2) The weights can be restricted to have discrete values. This is especially useful for implementing trained MNNs in precision limited hardware chips, thus improving their speed and energy efficiency by several orders of magnitude. We test the EBP algorithm numerically in eight binary text classification tasks. In all tasks, EBP outperforms: (1) standard BP with the optimal constant learning rate (2) previously reported state of the art. Interestingly, EBP-trained MNNs with binary weights usually perform better than MNNs with continuous (real) weights - if we average the MNN output using the inferred posterior.
Alternate-Day High-Fat Diet Induces an Increase in Mitochondrial Enzyme Activities and Protein Content in Rat Skeletal Muscle

Long-term high-fat diet increases muscle mitochondrial enzyme activity and endurance performance. However, excessive calorie intake causes intra-abdominal fat accumulation and metabolic syndrome. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of an alternating day high-fat diet on muscle mitochondrial enzyme activities, protein content, and intra-abdominal fat mass in rats. Male Wistar rats were given a standard chow diet (CON), high-fat diet (HFD), or alternate-day high-fat diet (ALT) for 4 weeks. Rats in the ALT group were fed a high-fat diet and standard chow every other day for 4 weeks. After the dietary intervention, mitochondrial enzyme activities and protein content in skeletal muscle were measured. Although body weight did not differ among groups, the epididymal fat mass in the HFD group was higher than those of the CON and ALT groups. Citrate synthase and beta-hydroxyacyl CoA dehydrogenase activities in the plantaris muscle of rats in HFD and ALT were significantly higher than that in CON rats, whereas there was no difference between HFD and ALT groups. No significant difference was observed in muscle glycogen concentration or glucose transporter-4 protein content among the three groups. These results suggest that an alternate-day high-fat diet induces increases in mitochondrial enzyme activities and protein content in rat skeletal muscle without intra-abdominal fat accumulation.
Anytime Point Based Approximations for Interactive Pomdps Anytime Point Based Approximations for Interactive Pomdps

Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) have been largely accepted as a rich-framework for planning and control problems. In settings where multiple agents interact POMDPs prove to be inadequate. The interactive partially observable Markov decision process (I-POMDP) is a new paradigm that extends POMDPs to multiagent settings. The added complexity of this model due to the modeling of other agents beliefs and posible actions makes exact methods in this framework even harder to compute. Thus, a need arises for good approximation methods that could find solutions and in shorter periods of time than what has been developed so far. We develop a point based method for solving finitely nested interactive POMDPs approximately. The method mantains a set of belief points and form value functions including only the value vectors that are optimal at these belief points. Since I-POMDPs computation depends on the prediction of the actions of other agents in multiagent settings, an interactive generalization of the point based value iteration (PBVI) methods needed to be developed. We present some empirical results in domains on the literature, propose a new domain, and discuss computational savings. Index words: Markov Decision Process, Multiagent systems, Decision making, POMDP Anytime Point Based Approximations for Interactive POMDPs
Free probability of type B: analytic interpretation and applications

In this paper we give an analytic interpretation of free convolution of type $B$, and provide a new formula for its computation. This formula allows us to show that free additive convolution of type $B$ is essentially a re-casting of conditionally free convolution. We put in evidence several aspects of this operation, the most significant being its apparition as an ``intertwiner'' between derivation and free convolution of type $A$. We also show connections between several limit theorems in type $A$ and type $B$ free probability. Moreover, we show that the analytical picture fits very well with the idea of considering type $B$ random variables as infinitesimal deformations to ordinary non-commutative random variables.
Emergency Department Use by Released Prisoners with HIV: An Observational Longitudinal Study

Background Many people living with HIV access healthcare systems through the emergency department (ED), and increased ED use may be indicative of disenfranchisement with primary HIV care, under-managed comorbid disease, or coincide with use of other healthcare resources. The goal of this study was to investigate ED use by HIV-infected prisoners transitioning to communities. Methods We evaluated ED use by 151 HIV-infected released prisoners who were enrolled in a randomized controlled trial of directly administered versus self-administered antiretroviral therapy in Connecticut. Primary outcomes were quantity and type of ED visits and correlates of ED use were evaluated with multivariate models by Poisson regression. Results In the 12 months post-release, there were 227 unique ED contacts made by 85/151 (56%) subjects. ED visits were primarily for acute febrile syndromes (32.6%) or pain (20.3%), followed by substance use issues (19.4%), trauma (18%), mental illness (11%), and social access issues (4.4%). Compared to those not utilizing the ED, users were more likely to be white, older, and unmarried, with less trust in their physician and poorer perceived physical health but greater social support. In multivariate models, ED use was correlated with moderate to severe depression (IRR = 1.80), being temporarily housed (IRR = 0.54), and alcohol addiction severity (IRR = 0.21) but not any surrogates of HIV severity. Conclusions EDs are frequent sources of care after prison-release with visits often reflective of social and psychiatric instability. Future interventions should attempt to fill resource gaps, engage released prisoners in continuous HIV care, and address these substantial needs.
Studying vertebrate topoisomerase 2 function using a conditional knockdown system in DT40 cells

DT40 is a B-cell lymphoma-derived avian cell line widely used to study cell autonomous gene function because of the high rates with which DNA constructs are homologously recombined into its genome. Here, we demonstrate that the power of the DT40 system can be extended yet further through the use of RNA interference as an alternative to gene targeting. We have generated and characterized stable DT40 transfectants in which both topo 2 genes have been in situ tagged using gene targeting, and from which the mRNA of both topoisomerase 2 isoforms can be conditionally depleted through the tetracycline-induced expression of short hairpin RNAs. The cell cycle phenotype of topo 2-depleted DT40 cells has been compared with that previously reported for other vertebrate cells depleted either of topo 2α through gene targeting, or depleted of both isoforms simultaneously by transient RNAi. In addition, the DT40 knockdown system has been used to explore whether excess catenation arising through topo 2 depletion is sufficient to trigger the G2 catenation (or decatenation) checkpoint, proposed to exist in differentiated vertebrate cells.
Novel PET/SPECT Probes for Imaging of Tau in Alzheimer's Disease

As the world's population ages, the number of patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) is predicted to increase rapidly. The presence of neurofibrillary tangles (NFTs), composed of hyperphosphorylated tau protein, is one of the neuropathological hallmarks of AD brain. Since the presence of NFTs is well correlated with neurodegeneration and cognitive decline in AD, imaging of tau using positron emission tomography (PET) and single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) is useful for presymptomatic diagnosis and monitoring of the progression of AD. Therefore, novel PET/SPECT probes for the imaging of tau have been developed. More recently, several probes were tested clinically and evaluated for their utility. This paper reviews the current state of research on the development and evaluation of PET/SPECT probes for the imaging of tau in AD brain.
Price Discovery in Auction Markets: A Look Inside the Black Box

Opening mechanisms play a crucial role in information aggregation following the overnight nontrading period. This article examines the process of price discovery at the New York Stock Exchange single-price opening auction. We develop a theoretical model to explain the determinants of the opening price and test the model using order-level data. We show that the presence of designated dealers facilitates price discovery relative to a fully automated call auction market. This is consistent with specialists extracting information from observing the evolution of the limit order book. In addition, the specialist's opening trade reflects noninformational factors such as price stabilization requirements. Article published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Financial Studies in its journal, The Review of Financial Studies.
Surveillance for Seasonal Influenza Virus Prevalence in Hospitalized Children with Lower Respiratory Tract Infection in Guangzhou, China during the Post-Pandemic Era

Background Influenza A(H1N1)pdm09, A(H3N2) and B viruses have co-circulated in the human population since the swine-origin human H1N1 pandemic in 2009. While infections of these subtypes generally cause mild illnesses, lower respiratory tract infection (LRTI) occurs in a portion of children and required hospitalization. The aim of our study was to estimate the prevalence of these three subtypes and compare the clinical manifestations in hospitalized children with LRTI in Guangzhou, China during the post-pandemic period. Methods Children hospitalized with LRTI from January 2010 to December 2012 were tested for influenza A/B virus infection from their throat swab specimens using real-time PCR and the clinical features of the positive cases were analyzed. Results Of 3637 hospitalized children, 216 (5.9%) were identified as influenza A or B positive. Infection of influenza virus peaked around March in Guangzhou each year from 2010 to 2012, and there were distinct epidemics of each subtype. Influenza A(H3N2) infection was more frequently detected than A(H1N1)pdm09 and B, overall. The mean age of children with influenza A virus (H1N1/H3N2) infection was younger than those with influenza B (34.4 months/32.5 months versus 45 months old; p<0.005). Co-infections of influenza A/ B with mycoplasma pneumoniae were found in 44/216 (20.3%) children. Conclusions This study contributes the understanding to the prevalence of seasonal influenza viruses in hospitalized children with LRTI in Guangzhou, China during the post pandemic period. High rate of mycoplasma pneumoniae co-infection with influenza viruses might contribute to severe disease in the hospitalized children.
Coupling of Metabotropic Glutamate Receptor 8 to N-Type Ca2+ Channels in Rat Sympathetic Neurons

Group III metabotropic glutamate receptors (mGluRs; mGluR4, 6, 7, and 8) couple to the Gαi/o-containing G protein heterotrimers and act as autoreceptors to regulate glutamate release, probably by inhibiting voltage-gated Ca2+ channels. Although most mGluRs have been functionally expressed in a variety of systems, few studies have demonstrated robust coupling of mGluR8 to downstream effectors. We therefore tested whether activation of mGluR8 inhibited Ca2+ channels. Both l-glutamate (l-Glu) and l-2-amino-4-phosphonobutyric acid (l-AP4), a selective agonist for group III mGluRs, inhibited N-type Ca2+ current in rat superior cervical ganglion neurons previously injected with a cDNA encoding mGluR8a/b. l-AP4 was ∼100-fold more potent (IC50 = 0.1 μM) than l-Glu (∼10 μM), but it had efficacy similar to that of l-Glu (∼50% maximal inhibition). The potency and efficacy of l-AP4 and l-Glu were similar for both splice variants. Agonist-induced inhibition was abolished by pretreatment with (R,S)-α-cyclopropyl-4-phosphonophenylglycine, a selective group III mGluR antagonist, and pertussis toxin. Deletion of either a calmodulin (CaM) binding motif in the C terminus or the entire C terminus of mGluR8 did not affect mGluR8-mediated response. Our studies indicate that both mGluR8a and 8b are capable of inhibiting N-type Ca2+ channel, suggesting a role as presynaptic autoreceptors to regulate neuronal excitability. The studies also imply that the potential CaM binding domain is not required for the mGluR8-mediated Ca2+ channel inhibition and the C terminus of mGluR8a is dispensable for receptor coupling to N-type Ca2+ channels.
Artificial Language Training Reveals the Neural Substrates Underlying Addressed and Assembled Phonologies

Although behavioral and neuropsychological studies have suggested two distinct routes of phonological access, their neural substrates have not been clearly elucidated. Here, we designed an artificial language (based on Korean Hangul) that can be read either through addressed (i.e., whole word mapping) or assembled (i.e., grapheme-to-phoneme mapping) phonology. Two matched groups of native English-speaking participants were trained in one of the two conditions, one hour per day for eight days. Behavioral results showed that both groups correctly named more than 90% of the trained words after training. At the neural level, we found a clear dissociation of the neural pathways for addressed and assembled phonologies: There was greater involvement of the anterior cingulate cortex, posterior cingulate cortex, right orbital frontal cortex, angular gyrus and middle temporal gyrus for addressed phonology, but stronger activation in the left precentral gyrus/inferior frontal gyrus and supramarginal gyrus for assembled phonology. Furthermore, we found evidence supporting the strategy-shift hypothesis, which postulates that, with practice, reading strategy shifts from assembled to addressed phonology. Specifically, compared to untrained words, trained words in the assembled phonology group showed stronger activation in the addressed phonology network and less activation in the assembled phonology network. Our results provide clear brain-imaging evidence for the dual-route models of reading.
Proximity versus Comparative Advantage : A Quantitative Theory of Trade and Multinational Production ( PRELIMINARY AND INCOMPLETE ) ∗

We develop a monopolistic competition model of trade and multinational production (MP). Firms receive an idiosyncratic vector of productivities for different locations from a multivariate distribution. They also face distance related trade and MP costs. Thus, individual firms face a proximity– versus– comparative advantage trade-off to serve individual locations from close-by or high productivity locations. The model gives simple structural expressions for bilateral trade and MP. We use these expressions to calibrate the model across a set of OECD countries. We quantify the implications of openness to trade and MP on the allocation of employment between production and innovation, as well as the implications for wages, profits and overall welfare. ∗We thank Pol Antras, Arnaud Costinot, Jonathan Eaton, Gene Grossman, Samuel Kortum, and Felix Titelnot, as well as seminar participants at Arizona State University, Boston University, the Cowles Foundation, MIT, Penn State, Princeton, Stanford, University of Oregon, and Yale for insightful comments. We also thank Treb Allen for excellent research assistance and the Human Capital Foundation (http://www.hcfoundation.ru) for support. All remaining errors are our own. The statistical analysis of firm-level data on U.S. multinational corporations reported in this study was conducted at the International Investment Division, U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, under arrangements that maintained legal confidentiality requirements. Views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Bureau of Economic Analysis.