Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Mesolimbic Dopamine Transients in Motivated Behaviors: Focus on Maternal Behavior

Phasic activity of the mesolimbic dopamine pathway – burst-firing of dopamine neurons and the resulting dopamine release events at striatal targets – have been associated with a variety of motivational events, such as novelty, salient stimuli, social interaction, and reward prediction. Over the past decade, advances in electrochemical techniques have allowed measurement of naturally occurring dopamine release events, or dopamine transients, in awake animals during ongoing behavior. Thus, a growing body of studies has revealed dynamic dopamine input to ventral striatum during motivated behavior in a variety of experimental paradigms. We propose that dopamine transients may be important neural signals in pup-directed aspects of maternal behavior, as preliminary data suggest that dopamine transients in dams are associated with pup cues. Measurements of dopamine transients may be useful to investigate not only typical maternal behavior but also maternal inattention induced by drug exposure or stress.
Lithospheric structure beneath the northern Central Andean Plateau from the joint inversion of ambient noise and earthquake‐generated surface waves

The Central Andean Plateau (CAP), as defined by elevations in excess of 3 km, extends over 1800 km along the active South American Cordilleran margin making it the second largest active orogenic plateau on Earth. The uplift history of this high Plateau, with an average elevation around 4 km above sea level, remains uncertain as paleoelevation studies along the CAP suggest a complex, nonuniform uplift history. As part of the Central Andean Uplift and the Geodynamics of High Topography (CAUGHT) project, we image the S wave velocity structure of the crust and upper mantle using surface waves measured from ambient noise and teleseismic earthquakes to investigate the upper mantle component of plateau uplift. We observe three main features in our S wave velocity model including (1) a positive velocity perturbation associated with the subducting Nazca slab; (2) a negative velocity perturbation below the sub‐Andean crust that we interpret as anisotropic Brazilian cratonic lithosphere; and (3) a high‐velocity feature in the mantle above the slab that extends along the length of the Altiplano from the base of the Moho to a depth of ~120 km. A strong spatial correlation exists between the lateral extent of this high‐velocity feature and the relatively lower elevations of the Altiplano basin suggesting a potential relationship. Determining if this high‐velocity feature represents a small lithospheric root or foundering of orogenic lithosphere requires more integration of observations, but either interpretation implies a strong geodynamic connection with the uppermost mantle and the current topography of the northern CAP.
Copy number variant syndromes are frequent in schizophrenia: Progressing towards a CNV-schizophrenia model

The genetic underpinnings of schizophrenia (SCZ) remain unclear. SCZ genetic studies thus far have only identified numerous single nucleotide polymorphisms with small effect sizes and a handful of copy number variants (CNVs). This study investigates the prevalence of well-characterized CNV syndromes and candidate CNVs within a cohort of 348 SCZ patients, and explores correlations to their phenotypic findings. There was an enrichment of syndromic CNVs in the cohort, as well as brain-related and immune pathway genes within the detected CNVs. SCZ patients with brain-related CNVs had increased CNV burden, neurodevelopmental features, and types of hallucinations. Based on these results, we propose a CNV-SCZ model wherein specific phenotypic profiles should be prioritized for CNV screening within the SCZ patient population.
An Empirical Analysis of User Content Generation and Usage Behavior in the Mobile Internet

We quantify how users’ mobile Internet use is related to some unique characteristics of the mobile Internet space like usage-based data pricing, the extent of their geographical mobility and their social network behavior. We use a unique panel dataset consisting of individual-level mobile Internet usage data encompassing their multimedia content uploading and downloading behavior along with detailed data on their voice and text calls, and demographics. We build and estimate an individual-level simultaneous equations panel data model using three-stage least-squares (3SLS) after controlling for the endogeneity of the social network. We find that there exists negative temporal interdependence between the content generation and usage behavior for a given user. While the extent of geographical mobility of users is positively associated with their mobile Internet activities, users more frequently engage in content downloading compared to content uploading when they travel. We find statistically significant social network effects that are robust across model specifications. We compare the impact of different kinds of social networks – voice call based social networks, text message-based social network and offline locationbased spatial network. The impact of the voice call-based social network on is higher than the impact of location-based spatial network. Furthermore, the impact of the overlapping network (that is, combination of the social and spatial networks) is larger than that of either the social network or spatial network. We use our empirical estimates to measure the incremental value to firms from negative temporal interdependence and mobility. Implications for stimulating users’ mobile Internet usage, mobile advertising, and targeting of social networks are discussed.
Prokka: rapid prokaryotic genome annotation

UNLABELLED The multiplex capability and high yield of current day DNA-sequencing instruments has made bacterial whole genome sequencing a routine affair. The subsequent de novo assembly of reads into contigs has been well addressed. The final step of annotating all relevant genomic features on those contigs can be achieved slowly using existing web- and email-based systems, but these are not applicable for sensitive data or integrating into computational pipelines. Here we introduce Prokka, a command line software tool to fully annotate a draft bacterial genome in about 10 min on a typical desktop computer. It produces standards-compliant output files for further analysis or viewing in genome browsers. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION Prokka is implemented in Perl and is freely available under an open source GPLv2 license from http://vicbioinformatics.com/.
CUNY Academic

Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) is an online crowdsourcing service where anonymous online workers complete web-based tasks for small sums of money. The service has attracted attention from experimental psychologists interested in gathering human subject data more efficiently. However, relative to traditional laboratory studies, many aspects of the testing environment are not under the experimenter’s control. In this paper, we attempt to empirically evaluate the fidelity of the AMT system for use in cognitive behavioral experiments. These types of experiment differ from simple surveys in that they require multiple trials, sustained attention from participants, comprehension of complex instructions
A Comparison of Dimensionality Reduction Techniques for Web Structure Mining

In many domains, dimensionality reduction techniques have been shown to be very effective for elucidating the underlying semantics of data. Thus, in this paper we investigate the use of various dimensionality reduction techniques (DRTs) to extract the implicit structures hidden in the Web hyperlink connectivity. We apply and compare four DRTs, namely, principal component analysis (PCA), non-negative matrix factorization (NMF), independent component analysis (ICA) and random projection (RP). Experiments conducted on three datasets allow us to assert the following: NMF outperforms PCA and ICA in terms of stability and interpretability of the discovered structures; the well- known WebKb dataset used in a large number of works about the analysis of the hyperlink connectivity seems to be not adapted for this task and we suggest rather to use the recent Wikipedia dataset which is better suited.
Studies on the effect of sowing methods, fertility levels and weed management practices on rainfed maize (Zea mays L.)

A field experiment, “Studies on the effect of sowin g methods, fertility levels and weed management practices on the rainfed maize ( Zea mays L.)” was conducted at Dryland ( Karewa) Agricultural Research Station, Sher-e-Kashmir University of Agricultural Science Technology of Ka shmir, Budgam during Kharif 2011 and 2012 on clay loam soil low in available N, medium in potassium and medium in phosphorus with neutral pH. The exper iment comprising of three factor (two sowing methods), three fertility levels and four weed management practices was laid out in split plot design with so wing methods and fertility levels in main plot and weed control practices in subplot and replicated thrice. The results obtained on various growth and yield parame ters of rainfed maize are briefed as follows; ridge sowing significantly incr eased various growth characters viz; plant height, number of functional leaves, lea f areas index, dry matter accumulation and days to reach different phenologic al stages over flat sowing method. Fertilizer levels F 3 at par with F2 significantly increased all the growth characters over F 1. Among weed management practices W 2 significantly increased the growth parameters over other weed control pract ices but was at par with W 3. Various yield contributing characters such as cobs per plant, cob diameter, grains per cob and 100-seed weight were significantly impr oved under ridge sown crop. Name of the student : Shamim Gul Registration No. : 2010-294-D Major Subject : Agronomy Minor Subject : Plant Physiology/Soil Science Major Advisor : Dr. Bashir Ahmad Khanday Associate Director Research , Dryland (Karewa) Research Station, SKUAST-Kashmir Title of the Thesis : “Studies on the effect of sowing methods, fertility levels and weed management practices on rainfed maize ( Zea mays L.)”
Isolation par l'extérieur enduits plastiques

L'enduit ne doit etre mis en œuvre que lorsque la temperature est comprise entre 5°C et 30°C. Le but de l'etude est de faire connaitre aux entreprises qualifiees le poids reel de cette contrainte; elle porte sur la region parisienne. L'etude quantifie la contrainte en evaluant a une centaine de jours environ par an l'impossibilite de mise en œuvre. L'intervention sous abri, plus couteuse, permet d'elargir la plage de temperature imposees en raison de la nature meme des enduits. Ne peut-on imaginer d'autres enduits?
ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University

Digital inequality is one of the most critical issues in the knowledge economy. The private and public sectors have devoted tremendous resources to address such inequality, yet the results are inconclusive. Theoretically grounded empirical research is needed both to expand our understanding of digital inequality and to inform effective policy making and intervention. The context of our investigation is a city government project, known as the LaGrange Internet TV initiative, which allowed all city residents to access the Internet via their cable televisions at no additional cost. We examine the residents’ post-implementation continued use intentions through a decomposed theory of planned behavior perspective, which is elaborated to include personal network exposure. Differences in the behavioral models between socio-economically advantaged and disadvantaged users who have direct usage experience are theorized and empirically tested. The results reveal distinct behavioral models and isolate the key factors that differentially impact the two groups. The advantaged group has a higher tendency to respond to personal network exposure. Enjoyment and confidence in using information and communication technologies, availability, and perceived behavioral control are more powerful in shaping continued ICT use intention for the disadvantaged. Implications for research and practice are discussed.
eview he roles of the reward system in sleep and dreaming

The mesolimbic dopaminergic system (ML-DA) allows adapted interactions with the environment and is therefore of critical significance for the individual’s survival. The ML-DA system is implicated in reward and emotional functions, and it is perturbed in schizophrenia, addiction, and depression. The ML-DA reward system is not only recruited during wakeful behaviors, it is also active during sleep. Here, we introduce the Reward Activation Model (RAM) for sleep and dreaming, according to which activation of the ML-DA reward system during sleep contributes to memory processes, to the regulation of rapid-eye movement (REM) sleep, and to the generation and motivational content of dreams. In particular, the engagement of ML-DA and associated limbic structures prioritizes information with high emotional or motivational relevance for (re)processing during sleep and dreaming. The RAM provides testable predic-
Comparison of CNN based and self-similarity based denoising methods

Convolutional networks and traditional self-similarity based methods are both state-of-the-art denoising methods. We implement the BM3D model and DnCNN network and show their favorable performance for denoising a Gaussian noise at a given noise level, compared to NLM. We also make use of dilated convolution in DnCNN and show that in this way we can achieve comparable denoising performance while greatly reducing the computational cost. We have also trained a DnCNN-b network for blind denoising for all noise levels between 0 and 55, which shows similar denoising results without knowledge of what the actual noise level is in the noisy image.
The USTC System for Blizzard Challenge 2017

This paper introduces the details of the speech synthesis system developed by the USTC team for Blizzard Challenge 2017. A 6.5-hour corpus of highly expressive children’s audiobook was released to the participants this year. A parametric system that modeling speech waveforms was built for the task. Firstly, long short term memory (LSTM)-based recurrent neural networks (RNN) were adopted for the baseline system, including tone and breaking indices (ToBI) prediction, duration modeling and acoustic modeling. Then, we proposed a generative adversarial network (GAN) based post-filtering to relieve the oversmoothing in acoustic modeling and compensate for the differences between natural and synthetic spectrum in the baseline system. At last, a WaveNet based neural vocoder was utilized to model speech waveforms from acoustic feature instead of melcepstrum vocoder. The evaluation results show the effectiveness of the submitted system.
A New Paradigm for Continental U.S. Summer Rainfall Variability: Asia–North America Teleconnection

AbstractThe present study reveals a close relationship between the leading mode of continental U.S. (CONUS) summer rainfall and the East Asian subtropical monsoon rainfall (viz., mei-yu in China, baiu in Japan, and changma in the Korean peninsula). The East Asian subtropical monsoon rainfall and the CONUS dipole rainfall patterns are connected by an upper-level Asia–North America (ANA) teleconnection. The Rossby wave energy propagates along the path of the westerly jet stream (WJS) from East Asia to North America, affecting the CONUS summer rainfall. Mechanisms through which East Asian summer monsoon heating influence North American rainfall are illustrated by idealized anomaly atmospheric general circulation model experiments. In boreal winter, because of the southward shift of the WJS, the Pacific–North American (PNA) pattern can be excited by the tropical central/eastern Pacific heating associated with El Nino, affecting the rainfall over CONUS. In boreal summer, because the WJS is weaker and locates f.
An evaluation of citizen science-based indices for monitoring the distribution and abundance of bobcats (Lynx rufus)

Carnivores substantially impact humans, but are elusive and difficult to monitor. Although less precise than intensive methods (e.g., capture-recapture), indices of relative abundance are widely used to monitor carnivore numbers. This study assessed public sightings and hunter surveys as approaches to monitoring the distribution and relative abundance of bobcats (Lynx rufus) in New Hampshire. To validate indices, I used a telemetry-based model of habitat suitability and information from camera surveys conducted by volunteers in three study areas. Bobcats were found widely distributed in New Hampshire with lower abundance in northern and mountainous regions. Public sightings and hunter surveys (both effort-corrected) were strongly correlated to each other and the suitability model when summarized by Wildlife Management Unit. Detection rates from camera surveys were correlated to other indices and the model within the three study areas. I suggest future research validate indices using absolute abundance, and assess influences of confounding variables.
Research Showcase @ CMU

Persistence means objects live potentially forever. Undoability means that any change to a program's store can po tentially be undone. In our design and implementation of support for single-threaded nested transactions in Standard ML of New Jersey (SML/NJ), we provide persistence and undoability as orthogonal features and combine them in a simple and elegant manner. We provide support for persistence through an SML interface that lets users manipulate a set of persistent roots and provides a save function that causes all data reachable from the persistent roots to be moved into the persistent heap. We implement the interface through simple extensions to SML's generational garbage collector and maintain the persistent heap using CMU's Recoverable Virtual Memory system. We provide support for undoability through an SML interface that exports two functions: checkpoint, which check points the current store, and restore, which undoes all changes made to the previously checkpointed store. The implementation takes advantage of the simple runtime representation of data in SML and, as for persistence, extends the existing garbage collector scheme. SML's "mostly" functional nature allows us to implement this abstraction without undue performance penalty. Finally, we combine these capabilities to support single-threaded nested transactions by defining a higher-order function transact that guarantees the permanence of effects of committed transactions. We succinctly define transact completely in terms of the interfaces for persistence and undoability. Unlike other transaction-based programming languages like Argus or Avalon/C++, we need not add new control structures; moreover, we handle aborts of nested or top-level transactions using SML's exception mechanism.
DeepFaceEditing: Deep Face Generation and Editing with Disentangled Geometry and Appearance Control

achieve fine control of facial details such as wrinkles. To address this is- sue, we propose DeepFaceEditing, a structured disentanglement framework specifically designed for face images to support face generation and edit- ing with disentangled control of geometry and appearance. We adopt a local-to-global approach to incorporate the face domain knowledge: local component images are decomposed into geometry and appearance representations, which are fused consistently using a global fusion module to improve generation quality. We exploit sketches to assist in extracting a better geometry representation, which also supports intuitive geometry editing via sketching. The resulting method can either extract the geometry and appearance representations from face images, or directly extract the ge- ometry representation from face sketches. Such representations allow users to easily edit and synthesize face images, with decoupled control of their geometry and appearance. Both qualitative and quantitative evaluations show the superior detail and appearance control abilities of our method compared to state-of-the-art methods.
A Characteristic Set Method for Equation Solving in Finite Fields 1

In this paper, we present a characteristic set method to solve polynomial equation systems in ﬁnite ﬁelds. Due to the special property of ﬁnite ﬁelds, the given characteristic set methods are much more eﬃcient and have better properties than the general characteristic set method.
Non-pollen palynomorphs and thecamoebians as proxies of environmental and anthropogenic change: a case study from Lake Simcoe, Ontario, Canada

The distribution of aquatic microfossils and pollen in the long core from Lake Simcoe (LS07PC5) shows synchronous response since deglaciation, highlighting the potential of little-known non-pollen palynomorphs (NPP) as paleolimnological indicators. Upcore variations in NPP, thecamoebians and pollen reflect hydrological and climatic variations: onset of the Main Lake Algonquin, the draining of Lake Algonquin, the early Holocene drought, the midto late Holocene climate shifts including mid-Holocene drought and the Little Ice Age, and human settlement. The distribution of microfossils in the short cores (CB1 and SB1) shows the level of eutrophication decreasing gradually from Cook’s Bay to the Atherley Narrows outflow due to differences in the extent of anthropogenic impact and cumulative retention of phosphorous within sediments. Changes in assemblages and concentration of NPP within the cores reflect the history of settlement within Lake Simcoe basin, recording temporal differences in
AIS Electronic Library (AISeL)

Business agility has been considered as one of the key organizational capabilities in the modern business environment. The current research indicates that information technologies (IT) can help firms develop agility and in turn agility can improve firm performance, but how IT leads to agility and superior performance and under what circumstances is an ongoing consideration. In particular, while current research has examined higher-order latent capacities of IT resources and capabilities, they haven’t clearly specified what IT factors can enable organizational agility and how. In this study, we investigate the distinct values of two key capabilities of agility, i
Sensitivity of simulated mesospheric transport of nitrogen oxides to parameterized gravity waves

Gravity waves strongly influence the circulation and transport processes in the middle atmosphere. We analyze the sensitivity of the simulated mesospheric transport of nitrogen oxides (NOx) to differences in a parameterization of nonorographic gravity waves. After particularly strong sudden stratospheric warming (SSW) events as in January 2009, satellite instruments measured a strong mesospheric descent of NOx. However, this downward transport is in general underestimated in models covering this altitude range. We use simulations of the atmospheric general circulation and chemistry model HAMMONIA (Hamburg Model of Neutral and Ionized Atmosphere) to discuss both differences in a homogeneous background gravity wave source and a source related to frontal activity. The results show that the transport of NOx is highly sensitive to such differences. With a stronger gravity wave source, less NOx is transported after the SSW to the mesosphere and the elevated stratopause descends more rapidly to its climatological altitude. We observe the opposite by weakening the gravity wave sources yielding a better agreement with the observations. The amount of the transported NOx is controlled by the altitude at which momentum is deposited in the atmosphere. The higher the altitude where the momentum is deposited in the upper mesosphere, the stronger is the descent of NOx. A small wave amplitude favors the transition to turbulence at a higher altitude due to the exponential increase of the amplitude with height.