Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Validation of a new coil array tailored for dog functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies

Comparative neuroimaging allows for the identification of similarities and differences between species. It provides an important and promising avenue, to answer questions about the evolutionary origins of the brain’s organization, in terms of both structure and function. Dog fMRI has recently become one particularly promising and increasingly used approach to study brain function and coevolution. In dog neuroimaging, image acquisition has so far been mostly performed with coils originally developed for use in human MRI. Since such coils have been tailored to human anatomy, their sensitivity and data quality is likely not optimal for dog MRI. Therefore, we developed a multi-channel receive coil (K9 coil) tailored for high-resolution functional imaging in canines, optimized for dog cranial anatomy. In this paper we report structural (n = 9) as well as functional imaging data (resting-state, n = 6; simple visual paradigm, n = 9) collected with the K9 coil in comparison to reference data collected with a human knee coil. Our results show that the K9 coil significantly outperforms the human knee coil, improving the signal-to-noise ratio across the imaging modalities. We noted increases of roughly 45% signal-to-noise in the structural and functional domain. In terms of translation to functional fMRI data collected in a visual flickering checkerboard paradigm, group-level analyses show that the K9 coil performs better than the knee coil as well. These findings demonstrate how hardware improvements may be instrumental in driving data quality, and thus, quality of imaging results, for dog-human comparative neuroimaging. Significance Statement Comparative neuroimaging is a powerful avenue to discover evolutionary mechanisms at the brain level. However, data quality is a major constraint in non-human functional magnetic resonance imaging. We describe a novel canine head coil for magnetic resonance imaging, designed specifically for dog cranial anatomy. Data quality performance and improvements over previously used human knee coils are described quantitatively. In brief, the canine coil improved signal quality substantially across both structural and functional imaging domains, with strongest improvements noted on the cortical surface.
Living up to high standards and psychological distress

We argue and demonstrate that setting high standards, an essential aspect of perfectionism, is not associated with maladaptive responses in and of itself. Rather, our findings suggest that people's responses to their perceptions that they consistently fail to meet their own standards are maladaptive. More importantly, in the present survey study (n = 293), we extend previous research by showing that low personal standards and the perception that others are imposing high standards on the self operate in concert to strengthen the link between perceived discrepancy and psychological distress. Furthermore, in support of our moderation-mediation model, regression analyses provided evidence for the mediating role of generalised self-efficacy beliefs. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Domestic Policies and Sovereign Default*

A model with two essential elements, sovereign default and distortionary fiscal and monetary policies, explains the interaction between sovereign debt, default risk and inflation in emerging countries. We derive conditions under which monetary policy is actively used to support fiscal policy and characterize the intertemporal tradeoffs that determine the choice of debt. We show that in response to adverse shocks to the terms of trade or productivity, governments reduce debt and deficits, and increase inflation and currency depreciation rates, matching the patterns observed in the data for emerging economies. JEL Classification: E52, E62, F34, F41, G15.
The Two Koreas and the Great Powers

1. Introduction: the two Koreas and the great powers in a changing world 2. China and the two Koreas 3. Russia and the two Koreas 4. Japan and the two Koreas 5. The United States and the two Koreas 6. The future of the two Koreas.
A Geochemical Investigation of Oxygen Fugacity in the Marianas Subduction Factory

Oxygen fugacity is a fundamental thermodynamic property that describes reduction-oxidation (redox) equilibria in the solid Earth. It controls material transfer from the interior to the exterior of the planet by dictating the speciation of multi-valent elements (e.g., Fe, V, S). Oceanic crust ages and oxidizes as it moves from spreading centers to subduction zones, where it returns to the mantle in modified form. Subducting slabs release H2O-rich fluids and SiO2-rich melts to the mantle wedge in subduction zones, contributing significantly to the isotopic and major, trace, and volatile element composition of arc and back-arc magmas, however the effect that the oxidized nature of subducting slabs on arc basalts remains unclear. Arc basalts have a higher proportion of oxidized (Fe) relative to reduced (Fe) iron, expressed as the Fe/ΣFe ratio, than do mid-ocean ridge basalts (MORB) but there is disagreement as to whether this arises due to shallow level differentiation processes (e.g., crystal fractionation, crustal assimilation, degassing) in the arc crust or to differences in the fO2 of the mantle source. This thesis addresses this problem by examining the oxidation state of Fe and other transition element proxies for fO2 in (1) altered oceanic crust prior to subduction, (2) modern eruptive products from the active Mariana arc and back-arc, and (3) eruptive products representative of subduction initiation and margin evolution in the Marianas. Melt inclusions and submarine glasses record variable magmatic compositions that have the potential to record changes in magma chemistry during crystal fractionation and volcanic degassing. Recent innovations in synchrotron technologies have made studies of Fe redox possible in situ, on small scales (>10 microns), allowing direct observation of changes in Fe redox during shallow level differentiation processes in arc and back-arc magmas. This study reports observations of Fe redox variation from several Mariana arc volcanic centers as well as from the Mariana trough, demonstrating that shallow level differentiation processes are not responsible for generating the oxidized nature of arc basalts. Constraints for mantle source fO2 show that the mantle wedge is more oxidized than MORB source mantle and link this oxidation to influence from recycling slab fluids. Additionally, we explore other transition row element proxies for fO2 and show that these proxies need not preclude oxidized mantle wedge conditions in the Marianas. We examine changes in Fe redox in samples that record subduction initiation and margin evolution, demonstrating that in zones of melt generation within the mantle wedge, oxidation occurs immediately upon subduction initiation and that the mantle wedge remains oxidized for the majority of a subduction zone’s lifetime. We further constrain the fluxes of Fe in to and out of the Mariana convergent margin, demonstrating that the Pacific plate is very oxidized prior to subduction and that 50-70% of this oxidized signature survives the recycling process to be subducted into the deep upper mantle.
Visual Place Recognition Using an Unsupervised CNN Approach

Visual place recognition (VPR) plays a key role in many applications, such as mobile robot navigation and localization, location intelligence in smart warehouse etc. Convolutional neural network (CNN) based deep learning (DL) solutions have been demonstrated to outperform traditional bag-of-words (BoWs) solutions for VPR. However, CNN-based DL solutions often require a large amount of high-quality annotated data, where manual annotation is time-consuming and even difficult in some scenarios. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised CNN approach for VPR. First, we use Oriented FAST and Rotated BRIEF (ORB) feature detector, bag-of-words (BoWs) and Hough space verification methods to automatically generate image clusters. Each image cluster is assigned with a numbered keyframe representing one place. Images relating to its keyframes will be stored as a visual experience with relevant available information, such as pose of current keyframe, in the corresponding cluster. Next, the image clusters are used as training datasets to train various CNN models for VPR. Experiments have been conducted on a public dataset and competitive results have been achieved using the proposed unsupervised CNN method.
Organic nutrient sources on growth and yield of rice.

Field experiments were conducted at Tamil Nadu Agricultural University, Coimbatore during rabi 2007 and 2008 to study the effect of organic sources of nutrients (enriched FYM compost, vermicompost, FYM + neem cake, enriched FYM compost + vermicompost + FYM, composted poultry manure and enriched poultry manure compost) and recommended NPK fertilizers on growth and yield of rice. The results revealed that the application of enriched poultry manure compost on equal N basis (2.3 t ha-1) recorded higher growth parameters, yield attributes and grain yield of 4675 kg ha-1 in 2007 and 4953 kg ha-1 in 2008, which was however comparable with composted poultry manure.
Large-Scale Screening of COVID-19 from Community Acquired Pneumonia using Infection Size-Aware Classification

The worldwide spread of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has become a threatening risk for global public health. It is of great importance to rapidly and accurately screen patients with COVID-19 from community acquired pneumonia (CAP). In this study, a total of 1658 patients with COVID-19 and 1027 patients of CAP underwent thin-section CT. All images were preprocessed to obtain the segmentations of both infections and lung fields, which were used to extract location-specific features. An infection Size Aware Random Forest method (iSARF) was proposed, in which subjects were automated categorized into groups with different ranges of infected lesion sizes, followed by random forests in each group for classification. Experimental results show that the proposed method yielded sensitivity of 0.907, specificity of 0.833, and accuracy of 0.879 under five-fold cross-validation. Large performance margins against comparison methods were achieved especially for the cases with infection size in the medium range, from 0.01% to 10%. The further inclusion of Radiomics features show slightly improvement. It is anticipated that our proposed framework could assist clinical decision making.
Embedded Port Infrastructure Inspection using Artificial Intelligence

This paper is related to the H2020 RAPID project, focusing on the AI automated monitoring of critical port infrastructure such as concrete structure. An important objective in RAPID was to translate a technical expertise of labelling cracks into a UAV real-time embedded solution based on deep neural networks. The efficiency of a deep learning algorithm is highly dependent on the data used for training, and this paper illustrates the fact that the use of open-source data is not sufficient. An intensive collaboration between neural network and industry experts made it possible to obtain a relevant data set of sufficient size to carry out quality training. This collaborative work also allowed the definition of ground truths, necessary for the validation of the detection system. In this paper, we provide a definition of the useful metrics and objectives for the algorithms in accordance with the complexity of the cracks and their environment, used to identify the best neural network in terms of efficiency, and performance to embed it on a UAV. Our research then focused on the hardware platform that could be used as an onboard computer for the drone, considering Size, Weight and Power (SWaP) constraints. We applied optimization methods to reduce the latency of our models while maintaining high accuracy. These techniques allowed us achieve a state-of-the-art detection rate while complying with the real-time requirements of the overall system, and the need to increase productivity of mission inspections in a port environment through high-speed inferences.
Comparative Analysis of NLP Models for Detecting Depression on Twitter

Depression is a serious mental health issue affecting a significant portion of the world’s population. With the widespread use of social media platforms, researchers have explored the possibility of utilizing natural language processing (NLP) techniques to detect signs of depression in users’ posts. In this paper, we present a comparative analysis of six different NLP models, namely BERT, RoBERTa, DistilBERT, ALBERT, Electra, and XLNet, for depression detection on Twitter data. The experiments compare the performance of different models, and the results reveal that the highest-performing models include XLNet, DistilBERT, and RoBERTa with the accuracies over 99%.
A new approach for predicting solar radiation in tropical environment using satellite images - Case study of Malaysia

Satellite images have been indentified as an alternative and accurate method for predicting average annual daily solar radiation of a specific location. These images can be use to predict the performance and sizing of various solar energy systems such as solar thermal and photovoltaic applications. The data from satellite images are used and compared with the actual readings from solar instruments. The results are then used to estimate solar intensity for other places where solar instrument is not available. Malaysia lies entirely in the equatorial region. The tropical environment has been characterized by heavy rainfall, constantly high temperature and relative humidity. The annual average daily solar irradiations for Malaysia were from 4.21 kWh/m 2 to 5.56 kWh/m 2 . The highest solar radiation was estimated at 6.8 kWh/m 2 in August and November while the lowest was 0.61 kWh/m 2 in December. The Northern region and a few places in East Malaysia have
The Agricultural Productivity Gap in Developing Countries

——————————————————————————————————— According to national accounts data for developing countries, value added per worker is on average four times higher in the non-agriculture sector than in agriculture. Taken at face value this “agricultural productivity gap” suggests that labor is greatly misallocated across sectors in the developing world. In this paper we draw on new micro evidence to ask to what extent the gap is still present when better measures of sector labor inputs and value added are taken into consideration. We find that even after considering sector differences in hours worked and human capital per worker, and alternative measures of sector income constructed from household survey data, a puzzlingly large gap remains. —————————————————————————————————————————— Email: douglas.gollin@williams.edu, lagakos@asu.edu, mwaugh@stern.nyu. edu. We thank Lisa Starkman and Michael Jaskie for excellent research assistance. For helpful comments we thank Francesco Caselli, Matthias Doepke, Berthold Herrendorf, Larry Huffman, Per Krusell, Kiminori Matsuyama, Maggie McMillan, Ed Prescott, Victor Rios Rull, Richard Rogerson, Mark Rosenzweig, Todd Schoellman, Francis Teal, Aleh Tsyvinski, and Dietz Vollrath, as well as seminar participants at Arizona State, Northwestern, and Yale, and conference participants at the NBER Summer Institute (Economic Growth Group), the SED (Ghent), the Conference on Economic Growth and Cultural Change (Munich), and the World Bank’s Annual Bank Conference on Development Economics. This paper was written while Gollin was on leave at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. Financial support from the International Growth Centre is gratefully appreciated. All potential errors are our own.
The Relationship Between Lateral Trunk Control During Landing and Lower Extremity Muscle Strength in Young Athletes After ACL Reconstruction

Background: An anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) tear is a devastating injury that is typically treated with ACL reconstruction (ACLR). Previous work shows that young athletes continue to demonstrate asymmetrical lower extremity biomechanics during landing tasks even after rehabilitation and return-to-sport (RTS), and these asymmetries are related to muscle strength deficits and increase the risk of re-injury. However, less is known about lateral trunk control during single-leg landing (SLL). Hypothesis: The purpose of this study was to test the hypothesis that lateral trunk instability during SLL would be greater in those with ACLR compared to healthy controls and would be associated with quadriceps femoris (QF) and hip abduction (HA) muscle strength deficits. Methods: 131 individuals (72% female, mean age: 17.2 y) cleared for RTS following unilateral, primary ACLR and 56 healthy controls (73% female, mean age: 17.2 y) participated. Biomechanical data were collected using 3D motion analysis during a SLL task to calculate frontal plane trunk excursion (FPTE; measure of lateral trunk control). FPTE limb symmetry indices were calculated for the ACLR and Control groups [(involved/uninvolved) x100%]. QF and HA strength were measured using an isokinetic dynamometer, and LSI were then calculated. FPTE and FPTE LSI were compared between the ACLR and Control groups using independent t-tests. Within the ACLR group, linear regression was used to examine the relationship of both FPTE and FPTE LSI to QF (involved peak torque; QI) and HA strength (involved peak torque; LSI). Finally, QI was used to divide the ACLR participants into high-quadriceps (HQ) (QI>90%; n = 68) and low-quadriceps (LQ) (QI
Frequency of MTHFR GENE C677T Polymorphism for Non-Syndromic Autism Spectrum Disorder Patients

Background: The folate metabolism is a pathway that may involve in the non-syndromic Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase enzyme has a key role in folate metabolism. The C677T polymorphism of MTHFR gene could reduce the effectiveness of the enzyme. Objectives: To evaluate the frequency of MTHFR geneC677T polymorphism for non-syndromic ASD patients. Method: Thirty-four DNA samples were taken from each group. PCR mixture was consisted of 1µL DNA, 2. 5µL PCR buffer, 0. 5µL dNTP, 1. 5µL MgCL2, 0. 125µLTaqenzyme, 0. 5µLofforwardandreverseprimerandaquabidesttoreach a volume of 25 µL. The PCR profiles were initiation 95oC for 5 min, denaturation 94oC for 1min, annealing 55oCfor 45 seconds, and elongation 72oC for30 seconds. The cycles were done in 35 times an dfinal elongation was at 72oC for 5min. The PCR product was 198bp, and then digested by the Hinfl enzyme for 16hours at 37°C, and visualized using2%agarosegeland then electrophoresed for 30 minutes at 100 volts. Result: Non-syndromic ASD samples showed none had homozygote mutant type (677TT), 3 (8.8%) samples had heterozygote (677CT)and 31 (91.2%) samples had wild type (677CC). Meanwhile, normal control showed only 1 (2.9%)sample had homozygote mutant type(677TT), 9 (26.5%) samples had heterozygote (677CT)and 24 (70.6%) samples had wild type (677CC). Conclusion: The frequency of MTHFR geneC677T polymorphism in patients with non-syndromic ASD and controls are not significantly different.
JERAMI (Indonesian Journal of Crop Science)

The use of TSS as a seed has many advantages over grasses, including healthier plants and higher productivity. This study aimed to find out the response of three varieties of onion (Bima, Bauji and Sumenep) to the provision of BAP to enhance TSS production. The research was conducted at Leuw Bishop Experiment Station (240 m above sea level) and the Department of Agriculture and Horticulture Science Department of Seed Science and Technology, Bogor Agricultural Institute from March to December 2015. The experiment was conducted in a two-factor randomized design (RAK). The first factor is the BAP concentration consisting of five standards; 0, 50, 100, 150 and 200 ppm. The second factor is the varieties consisting of Bima, Bauji and Sumenep. The two-factor combination of the 15 treatment combinations was repeated three times so that there were 45 units of trials. Each experiment consisted of 30 plants and 10 plants were observed as samples. The results show that the 50 ppm BAP Application can increase the flowering percentage by 38.3%. Salad varieties produce the highest number of capsules per bag (53.8 capsules) compared to Bima (39.1 capsules). The highest TSS weight per straw and per plot was also produced by the Salad varieties (0.456 g and 6.179 g, respectively). The Ranger varieties have a weight of 1000 grains weighing 3.652 g than the Gross 3.557 g. BAP application up to 200 ppm is unable to stimulate the flowering of the Sumenep varieties of onions that are difficult to flower.
KIER DISCUSSION PAPER SERIES

Using a two-country New Open Economy Macroeconomics model, we analyze how monetary policy should respond to a “global liquidity trap,” where the two countries may fall into a liquidity trap simultaneously. We first characterize optimal monetary policy, and show that the optimal rate of inflation in one country is affected by whether or not the other country is in a liquidity trap. We next examine how well the optimal monetary policy is approximated by relatively simple monetary policy rules. We find that the interest-rate rule targeting the producer price index performs very well in this respect. JEL Class: E52; E58; F41
KIER DISCUSSION PAPER SERIES

This paper provides a meta-analysis of studies on the effect of ownership on the performance of Russian firms over 20 years of rapid institutional and economic changes. We review 29 studies extracted from the EconLit and Web of Science databases with a total of 877 relevant estimates. We find that the government negatively affects company management regardless of its administrative level. In contrast, private ownership is positively associated with firm performance. The effect size and statistical significance are notably varied among different types of private ownership. While the effect of insider (employee and management) ownership is comparable to that of foreign investors, the effect of domestic outsider investors is considerably smaller. Our assessment of publication selection bias reveals that the existing literature does not contain genuine evidence for a series of ownership types and, therefore, some of the findings have certain limitations. JEL classification numbers: D22, G32, H32, P26, P31.
KIER DISCUSSION PAPER SERIES

One-sector neoclassical growth models reveal that consumption externalities lead to inefficient allocation in a steady state and indeterminate equilibrium toward the steady state only if there is a labor-leisure tradeoff. This paper shows that in a two-sector neoclassical growth model, even without a labor-leisure tradeoff, consumption spillovers easily lead to inefficient allocation in a steady state and indeterminate equilibrium toward the steady state. Consumption spillovers that yield over-accumulation of capital in an otherwise identical one-sector model may lead to under-accumulation of capital in two-sector models depending on relative capital intensities and relative degrees of externalities. Moreover, a two-sector model economy with consumption externalities is less stabilized than an otherwise identical one-sector model economy with consumption externalities.