Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Spatiotemporal forward solution of the EEG and MEG using network modeling

Dynamic systems have proven to be well suited to describe a broad spectrum of human coordination behavior such as synchronization with auditory stimuli. Simultaneous measurements of the spatiotemporal dynamics of electroencephalographic (EEG) and magnetoencephalographic (MEG) data reveals that the dynamics of the brain signals is highly ordered and also accessible by dynamic systems theory. However, models of EEG and MEG dynamics have typically been formulated only in terms of phenomenological modeling such as fixed-current dipoles or spatial EEG and MEG patterns. In this paper, it is our goal to connect three levels of organization, that is the level of coordination behavior, the level of patterns observed in the EEG and MEG and the level of neuronal network dynamics. To do so, we develop a methodological framework, which defines the spatiotemporal dynamics of neural ensembles, the neural field, on a sphere in three dimensions. Using magnetic resonance imaging we map the neural field dynamics from the sphere onto the folded cortical surface of a hemisphere. The neural field represents the current flow perpendicular to the cortex and, thus, allows for the calculation of the electric potentials on the surface of the skull and the magnetic fields outside the skull to be measured by EEG and MEG, respectively. For demonstration of the dynamics, we present the propagation of activation at a single cortical site resulting from a transient input. Finally, a mapping between finger movement profile and EEG/MEG patterns is obtained using Volterra integrals.
Yield Stability and Agronomic Performance of Rain Fed Upland Rice Genotypes by Using GGE Bi-Plot and AMMI in North West Ethiopia

The study was conducted at Fogera, Pawe, Assosa, Gondar and Mai-tsebri in Ethiopia during 2016-2017 with the objective of identifying high yielding, major disease resistance and stable rice varieties for rain fed upland ecosystem. A total of seventeen rain fed upland genotypes including one check were used for the study. The trial was laid out in randomized complete block design with three replication with a plot sized of 7.5 m2 with six rows in each location. Data were analyzed using combined analysis of variance, GGE bi-plot and AMMI. The combined analysis of variance for grain yield, days to maturity, days to heading, panicle length and filled grain per panicle showed significant difference (P≤0.01). G7 and G4 showed significant difference than the standard check on grain yield and better resistance to blast disease and gave grain yield advantage of 11 % and 10 %, respectively. The three way interaction of genotypes x environment x years were revealed significant variation (P≤0.01) for yield and other agronomic characters. The GGE bi-plot analysis showed that PCA 1 and PCA 2 described for 51.63 % and 27.31% of GGE sum of squares, respectively for grain yield, explaining a total of 78.95 % variation. In AMMI bi-plot, environments E2, E3 and E4 exerted strong interaction forces while the rest (E1 and E5) did less. Based on GGE bi-plot analysis result, Genotype (G4) and genotype (G7) were recommended for national variety releasing committee to release for future production by considering their high yielding and stability.
Exploring the multifaced influencing factors of corporate social responsibility in Chinese-listed manufacturing enterprises

Although scholars have conducted research on the corporate social responsibility (CSR) of Chinese firms from different perspectives, there has been no unified conclusion so far. Therefore, identifying the factors that influence CSR in Chinese enterprises is an important topic for further investigation. Does the debt leverage ratio, ownership type, degree of internationalization (DOI), and auditing by the Big Four accounting firms have an impact on CSR? Based on a series of questions, our study aims to explore the influencing factors and relationships of CSR from multiple angles. Using data from 252 Chinese A-share listed enterprises from 2014 to 2019 and the CSR scores from the Hexun.com rating index, we constructed a panel dataset comprising 1,414 firm-year observations. After comparing models, the fixed effects method of panel data is ultimately used for empirical regression. The research results indicate a significant negative correlation between the leverage ratio and CSR. State-owned enterprises (SOEs) outperform non-state-owned enterprises (non-SOEs) in terms of CSR. There is a significant positive correlation between DOI and CSR. However, the contribution of audits by the Big Four accounting firms to CSR in Chinese enterprises is limited. While our study examines many aspects of the elements that affect corporate social responsibility (CSR) in Chinese companies, each firm must consider its circumstances and apply suitable strategies to improve its CSR practices.
Thinking More or Feeling Less? Explaining the Foreign-Language Effect on Moral Judgment

Would you kill one person to save five? People are more willing to accept such utilitarian action when using a foreign language than when using their native language. In six experiments, we investigated why foreign-language use affects moral choice in this way. On the one hand, the difficulty of using a foreign language might slow people down and increase deliberation, amplifying utilitarian considerations of maximizing welfare. On the other hand, use of a foreign language might stunt emotional processing, attenuating considerations of deontological rules, such as the prohibition against killing. Using a process-dissociation technique, we found that foreign-language use decreases deontological responding but does not increase utilitarian responding. This suggests that using a foreign language affects moral choice not through increased deliberation but by blunting emotional reactions associated with the violation of deontological rules.
Age-invariant face recognition using a feature progressing model

Face recognition is to identify a person from the person's face image. Age invariant face recognition is to achieve face recognition while the person's face image may be taken at any age. To tackle this problem, two kinds of methods are often adopted, namely, usage of a facial aging model or elimination of age effects. In this paper, we propose a feature progressing model and use it for age invariant face recognition. The proposed method is evaluated on 2 databases of face images with age variance, namely, FG-NET[1], MORPH[2], and compared with some state-of-art methods. The results demonstrated the advantages of the new model.
Residential Water Demand Management: Lessons from Aurora, Colorado 1

Abstract: Residential water demand is a function of several factors, some of which are within the control of water utilities (e.g., price, water restrictions, rebate programs) and some of which are not (e.g., climate and weather, demographic characteristics). In this study of Aurora, Colorado, factors influencing residential water demand are reviewed during a turbulent drought period (2000‐2005). Findings expand the understanding of residential demand in at least three salient ways: first, by documenting that pricing and outdoor water restriction policies interact with each other ensuring that total water savings are not additive of each program operating independently; second, by showing that the effectiveness of pricing and restrictions policies varies among different classes of customers (i.e., low, middle, and high volume water users) and between predrought and drought periods; and third, in demonstrating that real‐time information about consumptive use (via the Water Smart Reader) helps customers reach water‐use targets.
Adaptive Weighted K-Means Algorithm for Color Image Segmentation

Huang et al. (2005) proposed a weighted k-means algorithm that could automatically calculate variable weights. In this paper we consider an adaptive weighted k-means (AWKM) algorithm with spatial correction. The proposed algorithm is applied in color image segmentation. Some numerical and image experiments are performed to assess the performance of AWKM in comparison with previous methods. Experimental results show that the proposed AWKM has better performance. KeywordsCluster analysis; K-means; Feature weight; Weighted k-means; Adaptive weighted k-means; Color image segmentation
Shifts in Coding Properties and Maintenance of Information Transmission during Adaptation in Barrel Cortex

Neuronal responses to ongoing stimulation in many systems change over time, or “adapt. ” Despite the ubiquity of adaptation, its effects on the stimulus information carried by neurons are often unknown. Here we examine how adaptation affects sensory coding in barrel cortex. We used spike-triggered covariance analysis of single-neuron responses to continuous, rapidly varying vibrissa motion stimuli, recorded in anesthetized rats. Changes in stimulus statistics induced spike rate adaptation over hundreds of milliseconds. Vibrissa motion encoding changed with adaptation as follows. In every neuron that showed rate adaptation, the input–output tuning function scaled with the changes in stimulus distribution, allowing the neurons to maintain the quantity of information conveyed about stimulus features. A single neuron that did not show rate adaptation also lacked input–output rescaling and did not maintain information across changes in stimulus statistics. Therefore, in barrel cortex, rate adaptation occurs on a slow timescale relative to the features driving spikes and is associated with gain rescaling matched to the stimulus distribution. Our results suggest that adaptation enhances tactile representations in primary somatosensory cortex, where they could directly influence perceptual decisions.
Toward a Software Infrastructure for the Cyclops-64 Cellular Architecture

This paper presents the initial design of the Cyclops-64 (C64) system software infrastructure and tools under development as a joint effort between IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, ETI Inc. and the University of Delaware. The C64 system is the latest version of the Cyclops cellular architecture that consists of a large number of compute nodes each employs a multiprocessor-on-a-chip architecture with 160 hardware thread units. The first version of the C64 system software has been developed and is now under evaluation. The current version of the C64 software infrastructure includes a C64 toolchain (compiler, linker, functionally accurate simulator, runtime thread library, etc.) and other tools for system control (system initialization, diagnostics and recovery, job scheduler, program launching, etc.) This paper focuses on the following aspects of the C64 system software: (1) the C64 software toolchain; (2) the C64 Thread Virtual Machine (C64 TVM) with emphasis on TiNy ThreadsTM, the implementation of the C64 TVM; (3) the system software for host control. In addition, we illustrate, through two case studies, what an application developer can expect from the C64 architecture as well as some advantages of this architecture, in particular, how it provides a cost-effective solution. A C64 chip’s performance varies across different applications from 5 to 35 times faster than common off-the-self microprocessors.
Flt3 Does Not Play a Critical Role in Murine Myeloid Leukemias Induced by MLL Fusion Genes

Leukemias harboring MLL translocations are frequent in children and adults, and respond poorly to therapies. The receptor tyrosine kinase FLT3 is highly expressed in these leukemias. In vitro studies have shown that pediatric MLL-rearranged ALL cells are sensitive to FLT3 inhibitors and clinical trials are ongoing to measure their therapeutic efficacy. We sought to determine the contribution of Flt3 in the pathogenesis of MLL-rearranged leukemias using a myeloid leukemia mouse model. Bone marrow from Flt3 null mice transduced with MLL-ENL or MLL-CBP was transplanted into host mice and Flt3 −/− leukemias were compared to their Flt3 wild type counterparts. Flt3 deficiency did not delay disease onset and had minimal impact on leukemia characteristics. To determine the anti-leukemic effect of FLT3 inhibition we studied the sensitivity of MLL-ENL leukemia cells to the FLT3 inhibitor PKC412 ex vivo. As previously reported for human MLL-rearranged leukemias, murine MLL-ENL leukemia cells with higher Flt3 levels were more sensitive to the cytotoxicity of PKC412. Interestingly, Flt3 deficient leukemia samples also displayed some sensitivity to PKC412. Our findings demonstrate that myeloid leukemias induced by MLL-rearranged genes are not dependent upon Flt3 signaling. They also highlight the discrepancy between the sensitivity of cells to Flt3 inhibition in vitro and the lack of contribution of Flt3 to the pathogenesis of MLL-rearranged leukemias in vivo.
Atmospheric Boundary Layer Height Monitoring Using a Kalman Filter and Backscatter Lidar Returns

A solution based on a Kalman filter to trace the evolution of the atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) sensed by a ground-based elastic-backscatter tropospheric lidar is presented. An erf-like profile is used to model the mixing-layer top and the entrainment-zone thickness. The extended Kalman filter (EKF) enables to retrieve and track the ABL parameters based on simplified statistics of the ABL dynamics and of the observation noise present in the lidar signal. This adaptive feature permits to analyze atmospheric scenes with low signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) without the need to resort to long-time averages or range-smoothing techniques, as well as to pave the way for future automated detection solutions. First, EKF results based on oversimplified synthetic and experimental lidar profiles are presented and compared with classic ABL estimation quantifiers for a case study with different SNR scenarios.
Probabilistic semantic similarity measurements for noisy short texts using Wikipedia entities

This paper describes a novel probabilistic method of measuring semantic similarity for real-world noisy short texts like microblog posts. Our method adds related Wikipedia entities to a short text as its semantic representation and uses the vector of entities for computing semantic similarity. Adding related entities to texts is generally a compound problem that involves the extraction of key terms, finding related entities for each key term, and the aggregation of related entities. Explicit Semantic Analysis (ESA), a popular Wikipedia-based method, solves these problems by summing the weighted vectors of related entities. However, this heuristic weighting highly depends on the rule of majority decision and is not suited to short texts that contain few key terms but many noisy terms. The proposed probabilistic method synthesizes these procedures by extending naive Bayes and achieves robust estimates of related Wikipedia entities for short texts. Experimental results on short text clustering using Twitter data indicated that our method outperformed ESA for short texts containing noisy terms.
A 3D REAL TIME RENDERING ENGINE FOR BINAURAL SOUND REPRODUCTION

A method of computationally efficient 3D sound reproduction via headphones is presented using a virtual Ambisonic approach. Previous studies have shown that incorporating head tracking as well as room simulation is important to improve sound source localization capabilities. The simulation of virtual acoustic space requires to filter the stimuli with head related transfer functions (HRTFs). In time-varying systems this yields the problem of high quality interpolation between different HRTFs. The proposed model states that encoding signals into Ambisonic domain results in time-invariant HRTF filters. The proposed system is implemented on a usual notebook using Pure Data (PD), a graphically based open source real time computer music software.
Vertical Variations in Bacterial Community Composition and Environmental Factors in the Culture Pond Sediment of Sea Cucumber Apostichopus Japonicus

ABSTRACT Lv, X. ; Yu, P.; Mao, W. , and Li, Y. , 2018. Vertical variations in bacterial community composition and environmental factors in the culture pond sediment of sea cucumber Apostichopus japonicus. In: Wang, D. and Guido-Aldana, P.A. (eds.), Select Proceedings from the 3rd International Conference on Water Resource and Environment (WRE2017). Journal of Coastal Research, Special Issue No. 84, pp. 69–76. Coconut Creek (Florida), ISSN 0749-0208. The bacterial communities in culture pond sediments play important roles in the decomposition of organic matter, the release of nutrients and conservation of water quality. To explore the vertical variations in the microbial communities and environmental factors in the sediment accumulation of the sea cucumber (Apostichopus japonicus Selenka) culture pond, microbial community compositions were determined by high-throughput sequencing and environmental factors were measured using samples collected at different sediment depths. A total of 113,161 high-quality reads and 17,317 operational taxonomic units (OUTs) were obtained from different sediment samples. The results showed that the sediment of culture ponds has the characteristics of high organic matter, nitrogen, and sulfur contents and low phosphate contents. The bacterial richness was higher in the surface layer of the sediment. In total, 31 phyla were identified, among which the Proteobacteria, Acidobacteria, Bacteroidetes, Chloroflexi, Planctomycetes, Gemmatimonadetes and Nitrospirae were the dominant phyla in the sediment. Principle component analysis (PCA) showed that total-phosphate, salinity, NH4+, pH and PO43− were the main factors that influenced the microbial communities. This study will deepen our understanding of aquaculture environmental regulation and provide theoretical guidance for the exploitation of probiotics.
Viral control of vTR expression is critical for efficient formation and dissemination of lymphoma induced by Marek’s disease virus (MDV)

Marek’s disease virus (MDV) is an alphaherpesvirus that causes lethal T-cell lymphomas in chickens. MDV is unique in that it harbors two copies of a viral telomerase RNA subunit (vTR) in its genome exhibiting 88% sequence identity to the chicken orthologue, chTR. The minimal telomerase ribonucleoprotein complex consists of a protein subunit with reverse transcriptase activity (TERT) and TR. Physiologically, the complex compensates for the progressive telomere shortening that occurs during mitosis and is involved in the process of cellular immortalization. Previous studies showed that MDV vTR performes an auxiliary function during oncogenesis. Comparative in vitro analysis of the viral and chicken TR promoters revealed that the vTR promoter (PvTR) was up to 3-fold more efficient than the chTR promoter (PchTR) in avian cells and that the stronger transcriptional activity of PvTR resulted largely from an E-box located two nucleotides downstream of the transcriptional start site of the vTR gene. To test the hypothesis that PvTR is required for vTR expression and, hence, efficient tumor formation, we generated a recombinant virus, vPchTR+/+, in which the vTR promoter was replaced by that of chTR. In vivo, growth of vPchTR+/+ was indistinguishable from that of parental virus; however, tumor induction was reduced by > 50% and lymphomas were smaller and less disseminated when compared to those induced by parental virus. We concluded that PvTR is not required for lytic replication in vivo but is essential for efficient transcription of vTR and thereby critical for efficient MDV lymphoma formation.
ORGANIC NUTRIENTS REQUIRED FOR GROWTH AND SPORULATION OF BACILLUS CEREUS

E spores. This concentration is obtained by simple mixing of equal parts of absolute ethanol and the enrichment culture prepared as follows. When the presence of type E toxin was demonstrated in the suspect fish by titrations with mice, portions of the sample were cultured in duplicate tubes of cooked meat medium (CMM) prepared from fresh liver and Trypticase-peptoneglucose (TPG) broth (Schmidt, Nank, and Lechowich, J. Food Sci. 27:77, 1962), and were incubated for 3 days at 30 C. After incubation, 2-ml samples of the enrichment culture were placed in sterile test tubes and were mixed with an equal volume of absolute ethanol. This mixture was allowed to stand at 25 C for 1 hr with occasional mixing. The culture-alcohol mixture was streaked on liver veal agar plates containing 4% sterile egg yolk and was subcultured into TPG broth. Plates were incubated in Case Anaero jars under a nitrogen atmosphere for 48 hr at 35 C. After incubation, the plates were examined for characteristic colonies of C. botulinum type E. The opalescence zones (McClung and Toabe, J. Bacteriol. 53:139, 1947) produced by type E colonies aided colony recognition, especially if other sporeforming organisms were present. When typical colonies predominated, the corresponding TPG broth subcultures were assayed for type E toxin. The assaying of TPG broth subculture, rather than reculturing of the individual colonies from the plates, eliminated the possibility of selecting a nontoxic variant frequently encountered in toxic subcultures. Pure culture isolates were rapidly obtained by this procedure from 40 of 41 individual packages of smoked whitefish chubs containing type E toxin, including those associated with victims of the outbreak in the Tennessee-Alabama-Kentucky area in September-October 1963. In addition, pure cultures were obtained from canned tuna fish (Johnston, Feldman, and Sullivan, Public Health Rept. U.S. 78:561, 1963) and the smoked whole whitefish associated with the outbreak of type E botulism in Kalamazoo, Mich. , in September 1963. When the enrichment cultures were streaked on plates without alcohol treatment, the overgrowth of facultative microorganisms prevented the recovery of C. botulinum type E. Direct plating of the macerated fish without treatment was not successful for isolating the species, whereas alcohol treatment of the fish often permitted isolation by direct plating. In a few cases, difficulty was encountered when clostridia or other sporeformers were also present. It is felt, however, that the ability of C. botulinum type E to sporulate more readily than many other sporeformers in TPG enrichment broth will aid in its selection by means of the alcohol treatment. Studies are under way on the applicability of this method for the direct recovery of small numbers of C. botulinum type E spores from foodstuffs, water, mud, soil, and other possible sources, in environmental surveys.
Efficient Stochastic Local Search for MPE Solving

Finding most probable explanations (MPEs) in graphical models, such as Bayesian belief networks, is a fundamental problem in reasoning under uncertainty, and much effort has been spent on developing effective algorithms for this NP-hard problem. Stochastic local search (SLS) approaches to MPE solving have previously been explored, but were found to be not competitive with state-of-the-art branch & bound methods. In this work, we identify the shortcomings of earlier SLS algorithms for the MPE problem and demonstrate how these can be overcome, leading to an SLS algorithm that substantially improves the state-of-the-art in solving hard networks with many variables, large domain sizes, high degree, and, most importantly, networks with high induced width.