Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Improvement of Insight with Non-Invasive Brain Stimulation in Patients with Schizophrenia: A Systematic Review

Patients with schizophrenia are often unaware of their condition and the consequences of their illness. This lack of insight results in impaired functioning, treatment non-adherence and poor prognosis. Here, we aimed to investigate the effects of non-invasive brain stimulation (NIBS) on two forms of insight, clinical and cognitive, in patients with schizophrenia. We conducted a systematic review of the literature registered in the PROSPERO database (CRD42020220323) according to PRISMA guidelines. The literature search was conducted in Medline and Web of Science databases based on studies published up until October 2020 that included pre-NIBS and post-NIBS measurements of clinical and/or cognitive insight in adults with schizophrenia. A total of 14 studies were finally included, and their methodological quality was assessed by using the QualSyst tool. Despite the lack of well-conducted large randomized-controlled studies using insight as the primary outcome, the available findings provide preliminary evidence that NIBS can improve clinical insight in patients with schizophrenia, with a majority of studies using transcranial direct current stimulation with a left frontotemporal montage. Further studies should investigate the effect of NIBS on insight as a primary outcome and how these effects on insight could translate into clinical and functional benefits in patients with schizophrenia.
Effect of family income and physical activity on children’s quality of life

ABSTRACT It is unclear whether gender differences exist in the relationship between maternal physical activity (PA) and children’s quality of life (QoL). We also know relatively little about the potential role of PA in mitigating the adverse impact of family financial hardship. This study examined the interaction effect of PA with social and demographic factors on QoL among 272 primary school children and their mothers in Hong Kong. Children self-reported their QoL, whereas mothers reported their own and children’s PA levels. Mothers also reported their family demographics including monthly household income. Moderated multiple regression models were calculated to examine 1) the relationship between maternal PA and child QoL based on child gender and 2) the relationship between family income status and child QoL based on maternal-child PA level status. The relationship between maternal PA and child QoL varied by child gender (β = .21, p = .049), with boys of active mothers showing higher QoL. Compared to active families, when both mothers and boys were inactive, there were bigger income differences in child QoL scores (β = .37, p = .041). No significant differences were observed in girls. The findings have implications for family-based PA interventions and highlights the benefits of PA toward the QoL of male children in disadvantaged families.
Incorporating rainy season and reproductive phenology into the survival and transition rates of the invasive species Sambucus nigra: an approximation with multistate models

Abstract Although it has been demonstrated that environmental changes within a year can affect the reproduction, survival, and growth of invasive species, these factors have rarely been incorporated into demographic analyses. Therefore, we applied multistate demographic models (based on capture–recapture animal methods accounting for imperfect detectability of individuals in natural conditions) to evaluate the effects of reproductive phenology and rainy season on the survival and transition/retrogression rates among stage categories of black elderberry (Sambucus nigra L.)—an invasive tree species widely distributed in temperate forests of Europe and America. In the Abies religiosa temperate forest, Mexico City, a multistate demographic model of S. nigra was built using bimonthly censuses during a year. We selected the best-fitting model according to Akaike's information criterion adjusted for small sample sizes (AICc). We determined the response of reproductive phenology of S. nigra to the rainy season for 2 yr through repeatability and phenotypic plasticity indexes. Our results showed that the reproductive phenology of S. nigra has a low repeatability index and a high phenotypic plasticity index. We demonstrated that additive and interactive effects of reproductive phenology and rainy season promote changes in survival and transition/retrogression rates among stage categories. During the rainy season, the survival probability of seedlings and transition probability toward the adult category increased. Therefore, our study represents a significant contribution to the knowledge of the demographic dynamics of invasive species on an intra-annual scale.
Predicting and Manipulating Cone Responses to Naturalistic Inputs

Primates explore their visual environment by making frequent saccades, discrete and ballistic eye movements that direct the fovea to specific regions of interest. Saccades produce large and rapid changes in input. The magnitude of these changes and the limited signaling range of visual neurons mean that effective encoding requires rapid adaptation. Here, we explore how macaque cone photoreceptors maintain sensitivity under these conditions. Adaptation makes cone responses to naturalistic stimuli highly nonlinear and dependent on stimulus history. Such responses cannot be explained by linear or linear-nonlinear models but are well explained by a biophysical model of phototransduction based on well-established biochemical interactions. The resulting model can predict cone responses to a broad range of stimuli and enables the design of stimuli that elicit specific (e.g., linear) cone photocurrents. These advances will provide a foundation for investigating the contributions of cone phototransduction and post-transduction processing to visual function. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT We know a great deal about adaptational mechanisms that adjust sensitivity to slow changes in visual inputs such as the rising or setting sun. We know much less about the rapid adaptational mechanisms that are essential for maintaining sensitivity as gaze shifts around a single visual scene. We characterize how phototransduction in cone photoreceptors adapts to rapid changes in input similar to those encountered during natural vision. We incorporate these measurements into a quantitative model that can predict cone responses across a broad range of stimuli. This model not only shows how cone phototransduction aids the encoding of natural inputs but also provides a tool to identify the role of the cone responses in shaping those of downstream visual neurons.
Relationship between parameters of public parks and their surroundings and the richness, diversity and species composition of vascular herbaceous plants on the example of Krakow in Central Europe

Greenery is a natural value in urban space. To maintain the richness and diversity of greenery, it is necessary to understand the factors and mechanisms that influence vegetation. The purpose of this paper was to determine the impact of selected features of public parks and factors on the richness and diversity of herbaceous plants. In Krakow public parks, this richness and diversity is greater in parks with a larger area and habitat heterogeneity, the presence of migration corridors, and natural elements. Full stand coverage negatively affects diversity. Biologically inactive surface affects richness and diversity as well as a number of different groups of plant species. The presence of rare and non-synanthropic species is related to the park’s surface, natural elements, and its heterogeneity.
Isolation and Characterization of Polysaccharides from the Ascidian Styela clava

Styela clava is an edible sea squirt farmed in Korea that has gradually invaded other seas, negatively impacting the ecology and economy of coastal areas. Extracts from S. clava have shown wide bioactivities, and ascidians have the unique capability among animals of biosynthesizing cellulose. Thus, S. clava is a relevant candidate for valorization. Herein, we aimed at surveying and characterizing polysaccharides in both tunic and flesh of this ascidian. To this end, we enzymatically hydrolyzed both tissues, recovering crystalline cellulose from the tunic with high aspect ratios, based on results from microscopy, X-ray diffraction, and infrared spectroscopy analyses. Alkaline hydroalcoholic precipitation was applied to isolate the polysaccharide fraction that was characterized by gel permeation chromatography (with light scattering detection) and NMR. These techniques allowed the identification of glycogen in the flesh with an estimated Mw of 7 MDa. Tunic polysaccharides consisted of two fractions of different Mw. Application of Diffusion-Ordered NMR allowed spectroscopically separating the low-molecular-weight fraction to analyze the major component of an estimated Mw of 40–66 kDa. We identified six different sugar residues, although its complexity prevented the determination of the complete structure and connectivities of the residues. The two more abundant residues were N-acetylated and possibly components of the glycosaminoglycan-like (GAG-like) family, showing the remaining similarities to sulfated galactans. Therefore, Styela clava appears as a source of nanocrystalline cellulose and GAG-like polysaccharides.
Deep Clustering Analysis via Dual Variational Autoencoder With Spherical Latent Embeddings

In recent years, clustering methods based on deep generative models have received great attention in various unsupervised applications, due to their capabilities for learning promising latent embeddings from original data. This article proposes a novel clustering method based on variational autoencoder (VAE) with spherical latent embeddings. The merits of our clustering method can be summarized as follows. First, instead of considering the Gaussian mixture model (GMM) as the prior over latent space as in a variety of existing VAE-based deep clustering methods, the von Mises–Fisher mixture model prior is deployed in our method, leading to spherical latent embeddings that can explicitly control the balance between the capacity of decoder and the utilization of latent embedding in a principled way. Second, a dual VAE structure is leveraged to impose the reconstruction constraint for the latent embedding and its corresponding noise counterpart, which embeds the input data into a hyperspherical latent space for clustering. Third, an augmented loss function is proposed to enhance the robustness of our model, which results in a self-supervised manner through the mutual guidance between the original data and the augmented ones. The effectiveness of the proposed deep generative clustering method is validated through comparisons with state-of-the-art deep clustering methods on benchmark datasets. The source code of the proposed model is available at https://github.com/fwt-team/DSVAE.
A Comparative Study on Ground Motion Attenuation in the 2012 Varzaghan-Ahar Doublet Event, Northwest of Iran

Predictive capabilities of the four updated NGA ground-motion models (NGA-WEST2) are evaluated in this study for acceleration response spectra using observed ground motions for August 11, 2012 Varzaghan-Ahar events in Iran. The predicted results were compared with those of regional attenuation equations and NGA08 models as well. The results of analyses revealed that the models of NGA-WEST2 improve prediction performance of NGA08 models for the two studied moderate events. All of models underestimate the recorded spectra of the second event for regionally significant period of 0.2 s at source distances below 50 km. For this distance range, almost all of the models underestimate the recorded spectra for periods larger than 1 s.
A Critical Review of the Pharmacokinetics and Pharmacodynamics of Opioid Medications Used in Avian Patients

Opioid drugs are used to manage moderate to severe pain in mammals and avian species. In dosing opioids for a particular species, it is optimal to use dosing regimens based on pharmacokinetics or pharmacodynamics studies conducted in the same species as variability in the physiology among different species may result in differences in drug pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics. Unfortunately, dosing regimens are typically extrapolated from closely related avian species or even mammals, which is unideal. Therefore, this critical review aims to collate and evaluate the dosing regimens of selected opioids: tramadol, hydromorphone, buprenorphine, butorphanol, and fentanyl, in avian species and its related safety, efficacy and pharmacokinetic data. Our review found specific dosing regimens not described in the Exotic Animal Formulary for tramadol used in Indian Peafowl (Pavo cristatus), Muscovy Duck (Cairina moschata) and Hispaniolan Parrot (Amazona ventralis); hydromorphone used in Orange-winged Parrot (Amazona amazonica); buprenorphine used in Cockatiel (Nymphicus hollandicus), American Kestrel (Falco sparverius) and Grey Parrot (Psittacus erithacus); and butorphanol used in Hispaniolan Parrot (Amazona ventralis), Broiler Chicken and Indian Peafowl (Pavo cristatus). Cockatiel appeared to not experience analgesic effects for hydromorphone and buprenorphine, and American Kestrel exhibited sex-dependent responses to opioids. The selected opioids were observed to be generally safe, with adverse effects being dose-dependent.
The Cramer-Rao bound for position and amplitude estimation of multiple pulses in Gaussian noise

Estimating the position or amplitude of a pulse is a common problem in radar and seismic signal processing. In this paper an approximation to the Cramer-Rao bound for estimation of positions and amplitudes of multiple pulses is derived. It is shown that a vector can be associated with each parameter and the effect of a parameter on the estimation of another parameter is expressed as the normalized cross correlation of the vectors associated with these two parameters. We give examples to show that this approximation is good. These results provide a simple, geometric explanation for the effect of one pulse on the estimation of another.
Differential antigenic requirements by diverse MR1‐restricted T cells

MHC‐related protein 1 (MR1) presents microbial riboflavin metabolites to mucosal‐associated invariant T (MAIT) cells for surveillance of microbial presence. MAIT cells express a semi‐invariant T‐cell receptor (TCR), which recognizes MR1–antigen complexes in a pattern‐recognition‐like manner. Recently, diverse populations of MR1‐restricted T cells have been described that exhibit broad recognition of tumor cells and appear to recognize MR1 in association with tumor‐derived self‐antigens, though the identity of these antigens remains unclear. Here, we have used TCR gene transfer and engineered MR1‐expressing antigen‐presenting cells to probe the MR1 restriction and antigen reactivity of a range of MR1‐restricted TCRs, including model tumor‐reactive TCRs. We confirm MR1 reactivity by these TCRs, show differential dependence on lysine at position 43 of MR1 (K43) and demonstrate competitive inhibition by the MR1 ligand 6‐formylpterin. TCR‐expressing reporter lines, however, failed to recapitulate the robust tumor specificity previously reported, suggesting an importance of accessory molecules for MR1‐dependent tumor reactivity. Finally, MR1‐mutant cell lines showed that distinct residues on the α1/α2 helices were required for TCR binding by different MR1‐restricted T cells and suggested central but distinct docking modes by the broad family of MR1‐restricted αβ TCRs. Collectively, these data are consistent with recognition of distinct antigens by diverse MR1‐restricted T cells.
Discovering Lexical Similarity Using Articulatory Feature-Based Phonetic Edit Distance

Lexical Similarity (LS) between two languages uncovers many interesting linguistic insights such as phylogenetic relationship, mutual intelligibility, common etymology, and loan words. There are various methods through which LS is evaluated. This paper presents a method of Phonetic Edit Distance (PED) that uses a soft comparison of letters using the articulatory features associated with their International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) transcription. In particular, the comparison between the articulatory features of two letters taken from words belonging to different languages is used to compute the cost of replacement in the inner loop of edit distance computation. As an example, PED gives edit distance of 0.82 between German word ‘vater’ ([fa:tər]) and Persian word ‘ <fig position="float" orientation="portrait"><p> <graphic position="float" orientation="portrait" xlink:href="khan6-3137905.eps"/></p> </fig>’ ([pedær]), meaning ‘father,’ and, similarly, PED of 0.93 between Hebrew word ‘ <fig position="float" orientation="portrait"><p> <graphic position="float" orientation="portrait" xlink:href="khan7-3137905.eps"/></p> </fig>’ ([ʃəɭam]) and Arabic word ‘ <fig position="float" orientation="portrait"><p> <graphic position="float" orientation="portrait" xlink:href="khan8-3137905.eps"/></p> </fig>’ ([səɭa:m], meaning ‘peace,’ whereas classical edit distances would be 4 and 2, respectively. We report the results of systematic experiments conducted on six languages: Arabic, Hindi, Marathi, Persian, Sanskrit, and Urdu. Universal Dependencies (UD) corpora were used to restrict the comparison to lists of words belonging to the same part of speech. The LS based on the average PED between pair of words was then computed for each pair of languages, unveiling similarities otherwise masked by the adoption of different alphabets, grammars, and pronunciations rules.
The Effectiveness and Safety of Calcium Carbonate Use in Chronic Kidney Disease Patients with Normophosphatemia

Patients with early and moderate stages of chronic kidney disease (CKD) have normal serum phosphate levels. Increased fibroblast growth factor-23 (FGF23) levels in these patients are responsible for maintaining normophosphatemia status by increasing the excretion of phosphate through urine. However, an increased serum FGF23 level is related to cardiomegaly, vascular calcification, CKD progression, and mortality. This study aimed to examine the effectiveness and safety of calcium carbonate use in stage 3 or 4 CKD patients with normophosphatemia. This double-blind randomized controlled trial (ClinicalTrials.gov identifier NCT03550534) included stage 3 or 4 CKD patients with normophosphatemia who visited the nephrology or endocrinology clinic at Dr. Cipto Mangunkusumo Hospital. Forty-six subjects were randomized to receive either calcium carbonate or placebo over a 12-weeks period. Urine phosphate, serum phosphate, serum calcium, and serum intact FGF23 levels were measured before and after the intervention. The baseline characteristics of the two groups were similar, except for the higher prevalence of dyslipidemia in the placebo group. The CaCO3 group had shown reduced levels of FGF23 compared to the placebo group, -8.03 vs. 0.15 pg/ml respectively (p = 0.019). The median level of FGF23 showed a significant decrease only in the CaCO3 group. An increase in eGFR and a slightly decrease in urine phosphate were observed in the CaCO3 group; however, the data was found to be statistically not significant. No significant changes were noted in the serum calcium levels in both groups. The administration of calcium carbonate has been shown to be effective and safe for moderate CKD patients with normophosphatemia due to its effect in lowering FGF23 levels without escalating the serum calcium level.
AC 2007-1277: GEEKS ARE CHIC: CULTURAL IDENTITY AND ENGINEERING STUDENTS' PATHWAYS TO THE PROFESSION

Brittany A. Claar is an undergraduate student at Regis University, studying sociology; she has recently transferred from Colorado School of Mines, where she was a Chemical Engineering student and worked as a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) student for the Center for the Advancement of Engineering Education (CAEE). She has worked for CAEE for two years and has had direct involvement with preparing transcripts to be coded, developing a codebook for analysis of ethnographic interview data, and coding in ATLAS.ti, a software package used in analysis of qualitative data.
Assessing the Effect of Drivers’ Gender on Their Intention to Use Fully Automated Vehicles

Although fully automated vehicles (SAE level 5) are expected to acquire a major relevance for transportation dynamics by the next few years, the number of studies addressing their perceived benefits from the perspective of human factors remains substantially limited. This study aimed, firstly, to assess the relationships among drivers’ demographic factors, their assessment of five key features of automated vehicles (i.e., increased connectivity, reduced driving demands, fuel and trip-related efficiency, and safety improvements), and their intention to use them, and secondly, to test the predictive role of the feature’ valuations over usage intention, focusing on gender as a key differentiating factor. For this cross-sectional research, the data gathered from a sample of 856 licensed drivers (49.4% females, 50.6% males; M = 40.05 years), responding to an electronic survey, was analyzed. Demographic, driving-related data, and attitudinal factors were comparatively analyzed through robust tests and a bias-corrected Multi-Group Structural Equation Modeling (MGSEM) approach. Findings from this work suggest that drivers’ assessment of these AV features keep a significant set of multivariate relationships to their usage intention in the future. Additionally, and even though there are some few structural similarities, drivers’ intention to use an AV can be differentially explained according to their gender. So far, this research constitutes a first approximation to the intention of using AVs from a MGSEM gender-based approach, being these results of potential interest for researchers and practitioners from different fields, including automotive design, transport planning and road safety.
Magmatic origin and petrogenesis characterization of syenite rock from Pakkanadu alkaline complex, Southern Granulite Terrain, India: Implication on emplacement and petrogenetic history

The present study mainly focused on understanding the magmatic origin and petrogenesis characterization based on the Petrography, major, trace and Rare Earth Element (REE) signatures in the alkaline syenite from Pakkanadu alkaline carbonatite complex. The alkaline plutons from South Indian granulite terrain are intruded along with Archaean epidote-hornblende gneisses. The study area was carbonatite complexes of Tamil Nadu and is characterized by a group of rock associations Carbonatite-Syenite-Pyroxenite - Dunite. From Harker various patterns Pakkanadu alkaline complex syenite showed increasing trends of SiO2, Al2O3, Na2O + K2O opposite to decreasing order of CaO, Fe2O3, MgO, TiO2, P2O5 and MnO trend, suggest fractionation of clinopyroxene, hornblende, sphene, apatite and oxide minerals and feldspar that ruled the fractionation. The concentration of trace elements enriched in Large Ion lithophile elements (LILE) (Ba, Sr, and Rb) elements and High Field Strength Elements (HFSEs) indicated that the dyke intrusion by differentiation of magma from a mantle source. Rare earth element (REE) distribution of Light rare earth element (LREE) enriched and High rare earth element (HREE) depleted pattern show strongly fractionated pattern with moderate Eu anomalies. Plots of tectonic discrimination diagrams of Pakkanadu samples fall in the field of syn-COLG field to the VAG syn- COLG field. For the first time, this type of study was carried out in the study region in a detailed manner. The present study significantly exposed the petrography, petrogenesis and magmatic origin process in the Pakkanadu alkaline carbonatite complex.