Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Neural similarity between mentalizing and live social interaction during the transition to adolescence

Social interactions are essential for human development, yet little neuroimaging research has examined their underlying neurocognitive mechanisms using socially interactive paradigms during childhood and adolescence. Recent neuroimaging research has revealed activity in the mentalizing network when children engage with a live social partner, even when mentalizing is not required. While this finding suggests that social‐interactive contexts may spontaneously engage mentalizing, it is not a direct test of how similarly the brain responds to these two contexts. The current study used representational similarity analysis on data from 8‐ to 14‐year‐olds who made mental and nonmental judgments about an abstract character and a live interaction partner during fMRI. A within‐subject, 2 (Mental/Nonmental) × 2 (Peer/Character) design enabled us to examine response pattern similarity between conditions, and estimate fit to three conceptual models of how the two contexts relate: (1) social interaction and mentalizing about an abstract character are represented similarly; (2) interactive peers and abstract characters are represented differently regardless of the evaluation type; and (3) mental and nonmental states are represented dissimilarly regardless of target. We found that the temporal poles represent mentalizing and peer interactions similarly (Model 1), suggesting a neurocognitive link between the two in these regions. Much of the rest of the social brain exhibits different representations of interactive peers and abstract characters (Model 2). Our findings highlight the importance of studying social‐cognitive processes using interactive approaches, and the utility of pattern‐based analyses for understanding how social‐cognitive processes relate to each other.
1 CONVERSION OF WASTE WOOL TO PROTEIN USING A SIMPLE OXIDATION METHOD

Amin Shavandi , Alan Carne , Adnan A. Bekhit , Alaa El-Din A. Bekhit , * Department of Food Sciences, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand 2 Department of Biochemistry, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry, Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Alexandria, Alexandria, Egypt ABSTRACTWool keratin is a potentially important natural source of renewable protein with many applications. Dissolution of keratin is the major challenge for utilization of wool waste. The yield of keratin from peracetic acid (PA) treatment was investigated using 6, 12, 24 and 36% PA for 1, 2, or 3 days of treatment time. PA at 24% and 2 days resulted in the generation of water soluble (WSK) (57%) and insoluble keratin (ISK) (40%) and was found to be the optimum processing condition. The physiochemical properties of the obtained samples were determined using SEM, XRD, FTIR, SDSPAGE. Extracted keratin samples showed no toxicity to fibroblast (L929) cells up to a concentration of 2.5 mg/ml. Both WSK and ISK had a fibrous microscopic structure and when analysed by FTIR the extracts showed a high content of cysteine-Ssulfonated residues and SDS-PAGE confirmed that the extracts contained proteins in the 40-60 kDa molecular weight range.
Is There a Home Field Advantage in Global Markets?

International equity mutual funds increasingly hire managers from countries linked to their geographic mandate. We show that these funds with “home-linked managers” exhibit a strong bias to invest in stocks of that country and they attract more flows. Portfolios of stocks from countries in which a fund has a home-field advantage outperform those managed by funds without home-linked managers. We are unable to identify specific sources of an information advantage associated with the home-linked managers performance. But an analysis of fund flows reveals a role for investor trust in home-linked managers earned primarily through past superior performance.
Beyond Varieties of Capitalism: Conflict, Contradictions, and Complementarities in the European Economy

Since the early 1990s, Europe's economies have been facing several new challenges: the single market programme, the collapse of the Berlin wall and eastward enlargement, and monetary unification. Building on the influential Varieties of Capitalism (VoC) perspective, first elaboarted in detail in the book Varieties of Capitalism (OUP, 2001), this book critically analyzes these developments in the European political economy and their effects on the continental European economies. Leading political economists from Europe and the US debate how VoC can help understand the political-economic challenges that Europe is facing today and how understanding these new challenges can in turn enrich and enhance the VoC perspective. Thematically, the contributions to this volume are organised in four sections: * how the macro-economics of EMU have influenced different European models of capitalism, * how the Single Market programme was received in the different institutional regimes in European capitalism, * how welfare and labour market reforms are debated and implemented, * how European capitalism travelled east after 1989. Preceding this is a spirited defence of the VoC approach by Peter Hall, and an introduction from the volume editors, considering the approach, and proposing extensions and amendments. This book demonstrates that the VoC approach remains, as the editors put it in their introduction, a rich seam to mine, capable of accommodating new developments, and theoretically flexible enough to produce new and innovative hypotheses and arguments. Contributors to this volume - Alexander Borsch, Boston Consulting, Magnus Feldmann, Harvard University, Michel Goyer, Warwick University, Peter Hall, Harvard University, Bob Hancke, London School of Economics and Political Science, Anke Hassel, International University Bremen, Andrea Herrmann, European University Institute, Torben Iversen, Harvard University, Lawrence King,Yale University, Oscar Molina, European University Institute, Vlad Mykhnenko, University of Glasgow, Martin Rhodes, European University Institute, Florence, David Soskice, WZB, Duke University, and London School of Economics and Political Science, Mark Thatcher London School of Economics and Political Science.
Does Working Capital Management Affect Profitability of Belgian Firms

The relation between working capital management and corporate profitablity is investigated for a sample of 1,009 large Belgian non-financial firms for the 1992-1996 period. Trade credit policy and inventory policy are measured by number of days accounts receivable, accounts payable and inventories, and the cash conversion cycle is used as a comprehensice measure of working capital management. The results suggest that managers can increase corporate profitablity by reducing the number of days accounts receivable and inventories. Less profitable firms wait longer to pay their bills. Copyright Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2003.
System Design Towards Higher Availability for Large Distributed Control Systems

Large distributed control systems for particle accelerators present a complex system engineering challenge. The system, with its significant quantity of components and their complex interactions, must be able to support reliable accelerator operations while providing the flexibility to accommodate changing requirements. System design and architecture focused on required data flow are key to ensuring high control system availability. Using examples from the operational experience of the Spallation Neutron Source at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, recommendations will be presented for leveraging current technologies to design systems for high availability in future large scale projects.
Corrosion Study of Implanted Tin Electrodes Using Excessive Electrical Stimulation in Minipigs

(1) Background: Titanium nitride (TiN) electrodes have been used for implantable stimulation and sensing electrodes for decades. Nevertheless, there still is a discrepancy between the in vitro and in vivo determined safe charge injection limits. This study investigated the consequences of pulsing implanted electrodes beyond the in vivo safe charge injection limits. (2) Methods: The electrodes were implanted for a month and then pulsed at 20 mA and 50 mA and 200 Hz and 400 Hz. Afterwards, the electrodes were investigated using electrochemical and analytical methods to evaluate whether electrode degradation had occurred. (3) Results: Electrochemical tests showed that electrodes that pulsed at 20 mA and 200 Hz (lowest electrical dose) had a significantly lower charge injection capacity and higher impedance than the other used and unused electrodes. (4) Conclusions: The electrodes pulsed at the lowest electrical dose, for which no tissue damage was found, appeared to have degraded. Electrodes pulsed at higher electrical doses for which tissue damage did occur, on the other hand, show no significant degradation in electrochemical tests compared to unused implanted and not implanted electrodes. It is thus clear that the tissue surrounding the electrode has an influence on the charge injection properties of the electrodes and vice versa.
Graphical Contrastive Losses for Scene Graph Parsing

Most scene graph parsers use a two-stage pipeline to detect visual relationships: the first stage detects entities, and the second predicts the predicate for each entity pair using a softmax distribution. We find that such pipelines, trained with only a cross entropy loss over predicate classes, suffer from two common errors. The first, Entity Instance Confusion, occurs when the model confuses multiple instances of the same type of entity (e.g. multiple cups). The second, Proximal Relationship Ambiguity, arises when multiple subject-predicate-object triplets appear in close proximity with the same predicate, and the model struggles to infer the correct subject-object pairings (e.g. mis-pairing musicians and their instruments). We propose a set of contrastive loss formulations that specifically target these types of errors within the scene graph parsing problem, collectively termed the Graphical Contrastive Losses. These losses explicitly force the model to disambiguate related and unrelated instances through margin constraints specific to each type of confusion. We further construct a relationship detector, called RelDN, using the aforementioned pipeline to demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed losses. Our model outperforms the winning method of the OpenImages Relationship Detection Challenge by 4.7\% (16.5\% relatively) on the test set. We also show improved results over the best previous methods on the Visual Genome and Visual Relationship Detection datasets.
Developmental shifts in computations used to detect environmental controllability

Accurate assessment of environmental controllability enables individuals to adaptively adjust their behavior—exploiting rewards when desirable outcomes are contingent upon their actions and minimizing costly deliberation when their actions are inconsequential. However, it remains unclear how estimation of environmental controllability changes from childhood to adulthood. Ninety participants (ages 8–25) completed a task that covertly alternated between controllable and uncontrollable conditions, requiring them to explore different actions to discover the current degree of environmental controllability. We found that while children were able to distinguish controllable and uncontrollable conditions, accuracy of controllability assessments improved with age. Computational modeling revealed that whereas younger participants’ controllability assessments relied on evidence gleaned through random exploration, older participants more effectively recruited their task structure knowledge to make highly informative interventions. Age-related improvements in working memory mediated this qualitative shift toward increased use of an inferential strategy. Collectively, these findings reveal an age-related shift in the cognitive processes engaged to assess environmental controllability. Improved detection of environmental controllability may foster increasingly adaptive behavior over development by revealing when actions can be leveraged for one’s benefit.
Probing Late-type T Dwarf J − H Color Outliers for Signs of Age

We present the results of a Keck/NIRSPEC follow-up survey of 13 late-type T dwarfs (T6–T9), 12 of which have unusually red or blue J − H colors. Previous work suggests that J − H color outliers may represent the high-gravity, low-metallicity (old) and low-gravity, solar-metallicity (young) extremes of the late-type T dwarf population. We use medium-resolution Y- and H-band spectroscopy to probe regions of T dwarf atmospheres that are more sensitive to gravity and metallicity variations than the J band. We find that the spectral morphologies of our sample are largely homogeneous, with peak-normalized, Y- and H-band morphologies consistent with spectral standards. However, three objects stand out as potentially old, with overluminous Y-band spectra compared to their respective spectral standards, and a fourth object stands out as potentially young, with an underluminous Y band. Of these four objects, three have been previously identified as potential metallicity/gravity outliers, including the one object in our sample with a normal J − H color. We fit publicly available atmospheric model grids to our spectra and find that the best-fit physical parameters vary depending on the model used. As we continue to probe the characteristics of the late-T population, differences in synthetic spectra of ∼10%–20% in the blue wing of the Y band and ∼45% at 1.65 μm, for the same physical parameters, must be reconciled. Further development and public availability of nonsolar metallicity models is also recommended. Future progress toward deciphering the impacts of gravity, metallicity, and variability in the late-type T dwarf population will also require high signal-to-noise, multiwavelength and multi-epoch photometry and spectroscopy.
Linking rapid magma reservoir assembly and eruption trigger mechanisms at evolved Yellowstone-type supervolcanoes

The geological record contains evidence of volcanic eruptions that were as much as two orders of magnitude larger than the most voluminous eruption experienced by modern civilizations, the A.D. 1815 Tambora (Indonesia) eruption. Perhaps nowhere on Earth are deposits of such supereruptions more prominent than in the Snake River Plain–Yellowstone Plateau (SRP-YP) volcanic province (northwest United States). While magmatic activity at Yellowstone is still ongoing, the Heise volcanic field in eastern Idaho represents the youngest complete caldera cycle in the SRP-YP, and thus is particularly instructive for current and future volcanic activity at Yellowstone. The Heise caldera cycle culminated 4.5 Ma ago in the eruption of the ∼1800 km3 Kilgore Tuff. Accessory zircons in the Kilgore Tuff display significant intercrystalline and intracrystalline oxygen isotopic heterogeneity, and the vast majority are 18O depleted. This suggests that zircons crystallized from isotopically distinct magma batches that were generated by remelting of subcaldera silicic rocks previously altered by low-δ18O meteoric-hydrothermal fluids. Prior to eruption these magma batches were assembled and homogenized into a single voluminous reservoir. U-Pb geochronology of isotopically diverse zircons using chemical abrasion–isotope dilution–thermal ionization mass spectrometry yielded indistinguishable crystallization ages with a weighted mean 206Pb/238U date of 4.4876 ± 0.0023 Ma (MSWD = 1.5; n = 24). These zircon crystallization ages are also indistinguishable from the sanidine 40Ar/39Ar dates, and thus zircons crystallized close to eruption. This requires that shallow crustal melting, assembly of isolated batches into a supervolcanic magma reservoir, homogenization, and eruption occurred extremely rapidly, within the resolution of our geochronology (103–104 yr). The crystal-scale image of the reservoir configuration, with several isolated magma batches, is very similar to the reservoir configurations inferred from seismic data at active supervolcanoes. The connection of magma batches vertically distributed over several kilometers in the upper crust would cause a substantial increase of buoyancy overpressure, providing an eruption trigger mechanism that is the direct consequence of the reservoir assembly process.
Mechanical micronization of lipoaspirates for treatment of bleomycin-induced scleroderma in nude mice

Background Scleroderma is a chronic autoimmune disease that causes hardening of the skin. Adipose tissue is used as a regenerative treatment for scleroderma, and mechanical micronization of adipose tissue can concentrate stem cells, improving its therapeutic efficacy. Stromal vascular fraction gel (SVF gel) is produced by subjecting lipoaspirates to a series of mechanical processes. The present study aimed to assess the therapeutic effect of SVF gel on dermal scleroderma. Methods Scleroderma was induced in nude mice by daily subcutaneous injections of bleomycin (BLM) for 4 weeks. SVF gel, cell-enriched lipoaspirates (CAL), or Coleman fat (CF) (0.1 mL) was injected subcutaneously into local sclerosis lesions. Histological analyses, TUNEL assay, and qRT-PCR were conducted 4 weeks post-transplantation. Results SVF gel, CAL, and CV decreased dermal thickness in the scleroderma model (P < 0.05), and sclerosis was significantly decreased in the SVF gel and CAL groups. SVF gel and CAL decreased macrophage infiltration, pro-inflammatory cytokine levels, and fibrosis in transferred fat and/or skin lesions (P < 0.05). This revealed anti-inflammatory and anti-fibrotic effects of adipose-derived stem cells (ASCs) therapy in scleroderma (P < 0.05). SVF gel exhibited the most potent anti-inflammatory and anti-fibrotic effects among treatment groups (P < 0.05). Conclusion SVF gel and CAL significantly reversed dermal sclerosis, and were more effective than CF. The SVF gel group exhibited the lowest inflammation both in transferred fat and in skin lesions, and also the lowest fibrosis among the three groups. This study suggested that SVF gel was a more suitable adipose-based therapy for topical treatment of scleroderma patients.
Surface Passivation of CIGS Solar Cells by Atomic Layer Deposition

Thin film solar cells, such as Cu(In,Ga)Se2, have a large potential for cost reductions, due to their reduced material consumption. However, the lack in commercial success of thin film solar cells can be explained by lower efficiency compared to wafer-based solar cells. In this work, we have investigated the aluminum oxide as a passivation layer to reduce recombination losses in Cu(In,Ga)Se2 solar cells to increase their efficiency. Aluminum oxides have been deposited using spatial atomic layer deposition. Blistering caused by post-deposition annealing of thick enough alumina layer was suggested to make randomly arranged point contacts to provide an electrical conduction path through the device. Techniques such as current-voltage measurement, photoluminescence and external quantum efficiency were performed to measure the effectiveness of aluminum oxide as a passivation layer. Very high photoluminescence intensity was obtained for alumina layer between Cu(In,Ga)Se2/CdS hetero-junction after a heat treatment, which shows a reduction of defects at the absorber/buffer layers of the device.
Phase- and intensity-resolved measurements of above threshold ionization by few-cycle pulses

We investigate the carrier-envelope phase (CEP) and intensity dependence of the longitudinal momentum distribution of photoelectrons resulting from above threshold ionization of argon by few-cycle laser pulses. The intensity of the pulses with a center wavelength of 750 nm is varied in a range between 0.7 × 1014 and 5.5 × 10 14 W cm − 2 . Our measurements reveal a prominent maximum in the CEP-dependent asymmetry at photoelectron energies of 2 UP (UP being the ponderomotive potential), that is persistent over the entire intensity range. Further local maxima are observed around 0.3 and 0.8 UP. The experimental results are in good agreement with theoretical results obtained by solving the three-dimensional time-dependent Schrödinger equation. We show that for few-cycle pulses, the amplitude of the CEP-dependent asymmetry provides a reliable measure for the peak intensity on target. Moreover, the measured asymmetry amplitude exhibits an intensity-dependent interference structure at low photoelectron energy, which could be used to benchmark model potentials for complex atoms.
Achieving Flatness: Honeywords Generation Method for Passwords based on user behaviours

Honeywords (decoy passwords) have been proposed to detect attacks against hashed password databases. For each user account, the original password is stored with many honeywords in order to thwart any adversary. The honeywords are selected deliberately such that a cyber-attacker who steals a file of hashed passwords cannot be sure, if it is the real password or a honeyword for any account. Moreover, entering with a honeyword to login will trigger an alarm notifying the administrator about a password file breach. At the expense of increasing the storage requirement by 24 times, the authors introduce a simple and effective solution to the detection of password file disclosure events. In this study, we scrutinise the honeyword system and highlight possible weak points. Also, we suggest an alternative approach that selects the honeywords from existing user information, a generic password list, dictionary attack, and by shuffling the characters. Four sets of honeywords are added to the system that resembles the real passwords, thereby achieving an extremely flat honeywords generation method. To measure the human behaviours in relation to trying to crack the password, a testbed engaged with by 820 people was created to determine the appropriate words for the traditional and proposed methods. The results show that under the new method it is harder to obtain any indication of the real password (high flatness) when compared with traditional approaches and the probability of choosing the real password is 1/k, where k = number of honeywords plus the real password.
Superradiance in static black hole spacetimes

We investigate the absorption of a massive and charged scalar field in a Reissner-Nordstr\"om background. We compare our numerical results for the absorption cross section, obtained for arbitrary frequencies, with the low- and high-frequency limits. We find, in particular, that the total absorption cross section can be negative, showing that planar scalar waves can be superradiantly amplified by black holes.
MASS DISTRIBUTION OF SPUTTERED CATHODE MATERIAL IN THE REFLEX DISCHARGE ALONG THE MAGNETIC FIELD MIRROR CONFIGURATION

The paper is concerned with the distribution of cathode material sputtered under the action of the pulsed reflex discharge plasma and deposited on the anode surface (vacuum chamber) by means of a set of discrete receiving plates. Correlative relationship has been found between the weight gain increase of the receiving plates due to the deposition of cathode material (Ti) particles on them and the increasing magnetic field regions. The maximum possible sputtering yield Ycurr has been evaluated. The authors have deduced parametric dependences of the sputtering ratio on the power function exponent that determines the shape of the radial plasma-density profile, and also, on the magnetic field induction value.