Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Enhanced Place Specificity of the Parallel Auditory Brainstem Response: An Electrophysiology Study

Purpose This study investigates the effect of parallel stimulus presentation on the place specificity of the auditory brainstem response (ABR) in human listeners. Frequency-specific stimuli do not guarantee a response place on the cochlea corresponding only to that characteristic frequency – especially for brief and high-level stimuli. Masking techniques can ensure place specific responses, and prior modeling has suggested parallel presentation of frequency-specific stimuli improves place specificity. We tested this hypothesis experimentally here, comparing the place specificity of responses to serial and parallel stimuli at two stimulus frequencies and three stimulus rates. Methods Stimuli were presented alongside high-pass filtered noise with a varied cutoff frequency. Latencies of the ABRs were examined to assess place specificity of responses. Response bands were derived by subtracting responses from different high pass noise conditions. The response amplitude from each derived response band was then used to determine how much individual frequency regions of the auditory system were contributing to the overall response. Results We find that parallel presentation improves place specificity of ABRs for the lower stimulus frequency and at higher stimulus rates. At a higher stimulus frequency, serial and parallel presentation were equally place specific. Conclusion Parallel presentation can provide more place specific responses than serial for lower stimulus frequencies. The improvement increases with higher stimulus rates and is in addition to the parallel ABR’s primary benefit of faster test times.
Downregulation of NR4A3 During Inactivity Alters Glucose Metabolism and Impairs Translation in Human Skeletal Muscle

Background Physical activity promotes health, whereas inactivity is associated with metabolic impairment. The transcription factor nuclear receptor subfamily 4 group A member 3 (NR4A3) is a pleiotropic regulator of skeletal muscle exercise adaptation and metabolism. However, the consequence of lower NR4A3 expression remains largely unexplored. We investigated the impact of NR4A3 downregulation on human skeletal muscle metabolism. Methods Published transcriptomic datasets from human bed rest and limb immobilisation studies were curated to meta-analyse the effect of physical inactivity on skeletal muscle NR4A3 levels. In primary human skeletal muscle myotubes, siRNA and lentivirus were used to silence and overexpress NR4A3, respectively. Basal and stimulated (insulin ± leucine) signal transduction was determined by immunoblot analysis. Effects on glucose, fatty acid, and protein metabolism were measured using radiolabelled substrate assays. Lactate production was assessed in culture supernatant by colourimetry. Cell morphology was analysed by immunocytochemistry and gene expression was quantified by RT-qPCR. Results Physical inactivity decreased skeletal muscle NR4A3 (−27%), concomitant with pathways related to mitochondrial function, cytoskeleton organization, chromatin regulation, protein synthesis and degradation. Silencing of nuclear-localised NR4A3 protein (−38%) decreased glucose oxidation (−18%) and increased lactate production (+23%) in vitro. This coincided with greater signalling downstream of AMPK and elevated rates of basal (+26%) and FCCP-stimulated (+55%) fatty acid oxidation. NR4A3 downregulation lowered protein synthesis (−25%), and impaired mTORC1 signalling. Alternatively, overexpression of the canonical NR4A3 protein isoform (+290%) augmented translation (+152%) and total cellular protein content, while partial restoration of NR4A3 levels rescued glucose oxidation in NR4A3-silenced cells. NR4A3 depletion reduced myotube area (−48%) and further altered protein and gene expression of key contractile elements in skeletal muscle. Conclusions Our study connects reduced NR4A3 expression with physical inactivity and indicates that NR4A3 downregulation in human skeletal muscle has adverse effects on glucose metabolism and protein synthesis. Thus, decrements in NR4A3 abundance could be causal in the deleterious health consequences resulting from sedentary lifestyles and targeting NR4A3 may offer new avenues for combating conditions such as disuse muscle atrophy.
Independent expansion, selection and hypervariability of the TBC1D3 gene family in humans

TBC1D3 is a primate-specific gene family that has expanded in the human lineage and has been implicated in neuronal progenitor proliferation and expansion of the frontal cortex. The gene family and its expression have been challenging to investigate because it is embedded in high-identity and highly variable segmental duplications. We sequenced and assembled the gene family using long-read sequencing data from 34 humans and 11 nonhuman primate species. Our analysis shows that this particular gene family has independently duplicated in at least five primate lineages, and the duplicated loci are enriched at sites of large-scale chromosomal rearrangements on chromosome 17. We find that most humans vary along two TBC1D3 clusters where human haplotypes are highly variable in copy number, differing by as many as 20 copies, and structure (structural heterozygosity 90%). We also show evidence of positive selection, as well as a significant change in the predicted human TBC1D3 protein sequence. Lastly, we find that, despite multiple duplications, human TBC1D3 expression is limited to a subset of copies and, most notably, from a single paralog group: TBC1D3-CDKL. These observations may help explain why a gene potentially important in cortical development can be so variable in the human population.
Hemozoin induces Malaria via activation of DNA damage, p38 MAPK and Neurodegenerative Pathways in Human iPSC-derived Neuronal Model of Cerebral Malaria

Malaria caused by Plasmodium falciparum infection results in severe complications including cerebral malaria (CM), in which approximately 30% of patients end up with neurological sequelae. Sparse in vitro cell culture-based experimental models which recapitulate the molecular basis of CM in humans has impeded progress in our understanding of its etiology. This study employed healthy human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) derived neuronal cultures stimulated with hemozoin (HMZ)-the malarial toxin as a model for CM. Secretome, qRT-PCR, Metascape, and KEGG pathway analyses were conducted to assess elevated proteins, genes, and pathways. Neuronal cultures treated with HMZ showed enhanced secretion of interferon-gamma (IFN-γ), interleukin (IL)1-beta (IL-1β), IL-8 and IL-16. Enrichment analysis revealed malaria, positive regulation of cytokine production and positive regulation of mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) cascade which confirm inflammatory response to HMZ exposure. KEGG assessment revealed up-regulation of malaria, MAPK and neurodegenerative diseases-associated pathways which corroborates findings from previous studies. Additionally, HMZ induced DNA damage in neurons. This study has unveiled that exposure of neuronal cultures to HMZ, activates molecules and pathways similar to that observed in CM and neurodegenerative diseases. Furthermore, our model is an alternative to rodent experimental models of CM.
How Archiving by Freezing Affects the Genome-Scale Diversity of Escherichia coli Populations

In the experimental evolution of microbes such as Escherichia coli, many replicate populations are evolved from a common ancestor. Freezing a population sample supplemented with the cryoprotectant glycerol permits later analysis or restarting of an evolution experiment. Typically, each evolving population, and thus each sample archived in this way, consists of many unique genotypes and phenotypes. The effect of archiving on such a heterogeneous population is unknown. Here, we identified optimal archiving conditions for E. coli. We also used genome sequencing of archived samples to study the effects that archiving has on genomic population diversity. We observed no allele substitutions and mostly small changes in allele frequency. Nevertheless, principal component analysis of genome-scale allelic diversity shows that archiving affects diversity across many loci. We showed that this change in diversity is due to selection rather than drift. In addition, ∼1% of rare alleles that occurred at low frequencies were lost after treatment. Our observations imply that archived populations may be used to conduct fitness or other phenotypic assays of populations, in which the loss of a rare allele may have negligible effects. However, caution is appropriate when sequencing populations restarted from glycerol stocks, as well as when using glycerol stocks to restart or replay evolution. This is because the loss of rare alleles can alter the future evolutionary trajectory of a population if the lost alleles were strongly beneficial.
Chicken Production and Marketing Systems in Enkulal Watershed, Dera District, Amhara Region, Ethiopia

A survay was conducted at Enkulal watershed, which is found in Dera District, Amhara Region, Ethiopia. The watershed was one of the sites of Tana Beles watershed development project. The main objective of the study was to characterize the existing chicken production and marketing system of the watershed. A total 52 randomly selected chicken owners were used for the study. According to the results, there were three chicken production systems in the study areas, scavenging only (3.8%), scavenging with seasonal feed supplementation (65.4%) and scavenging with regular feed supplementation (30.8%). The dominant (95.8%) chicken breeds were local ecotypes. The average chicken flock size per household was 5.8. The first, second and third purposes of chicken were; selling for cash income (48.1%), egg hatching (26.9%), home consumption (69.2%), respectively. Similarly; the first, second and third purposes of eggs were; hatching (48.1%), selling for cash income (55.8%), home consumption (71.2%), respectively. The result indicated that only 11.5% of respondents prepared separate chicken houses for birds and the rest (88.5%) kept birds in various night sheltering places like; inside their house (82.7%), under basket (3.8%) and under local sitting place (1.9%). The average age of cockerels at first mating and pullets at first egg were 26.3 weeks and 28.5 weeks, respectively. The survey revealed that 96.2% of chicken owners experienced disease problems in their area, mainly Newcastle disease (100%). The average number of eggs laid/clutch was 14.3 and the number of total clutch periods/hen/year was 3.73. Accordingly; the annual egg productivity of hens, under the existing management condition was 53.4 eggs/hen. The average hatchability performance of hens was 82.5%. However, survivability was low (61.5%). Seasonal diseases outbreak was the major (86.9%) cause for mortality in the watershed. Seasonality of prices was the major (85.6%) chicken and egg marketing constraint in the areas.
Mixing and Matching: Combining Independently Trained Translation Model Components

This paper investigates how to combine encoders and decoders of different independently trained NMT models. Combining encoders/decoders is not directly possible since the intermediate representations of any two independent NMT models are different and cannot be combined without modification. To address this, firstly, a dimension adapter is added if the encoder and decoder have different embedding dimensionalities, and secondly, representation adapter layers are added to align the encoder’s representations for the decoder to process. As a proof of concept, this paper looks at many-to-Estonian translation and combines a massively multilingual encoder (NLLB) and a high-quality language-specific decoder. The paper successfully demonstrates that the sentence representations of two independent NMT models can be made compatible without changing the pre-trained components while keeping translation quality from deteriorating. Results show improvements in both translation quality and speed for many-to-one translation over the baseline multilingual model.
Residual Melt Extraction and Out-of-sequence Differentiation in the Bushveld Complex, South Africa

There is strong evidence (e.g. presence of adcumulates) that the Rustenburg Layered Suite of the 2 06 Ga Bushveld Complex lost significant quantities of residual melt. However, the mechanisms of residual melt extraction during the solidification of its crystal mushes are unclear. Here, we present a petrological study of the Marikana dykes, a suite of ESE–WNW-trending dioritic pegmatites that crosscut gabbronorites of the Main Zone in the western Bushveld. The dykes comprise an evolved (and hydrous) mineral assemblage of zoned plagioclase laths (An60–25) and poikilitic Fe-rich hornblende (Mg# 40–18), mantled by biotite (Mg# 49), with magnetite and quartz inclusions. Primocryst margins are intergrown with a granitic (K-feldspar and quartz) groundmass that exhibits graphic textures. The Marikana dykes are cogenetic with the Rustenburg Layered Suite, because (1) the dykes lack chilled margins, (2) host Main Zone rocks are not thermally metamorphosed, (3) meterscale rounded blocks of gabbronorite in the dykes indicate entrainment of hot Main Zone cumulate material in the dykes, (4) U–Pb zircon ages (between 2040 and 2060 Ma) overlap with previously published Bushveld ages, corroborating the field relationships and indicating that the dykes and layered sequence are coeval, and (v) dyke zircon EHf values (–7 6 6 0 9 at 2 06 Ga) demonstrate that the melt Hf isotopic signature is identical to that of the melts that fed the layered sequence. Primocrysts from the host Main Zone were locally entrained into the dykes [e.g. relict clinopyroxene (Mg# 57) in poikilitic hornblende and relict plagioclase cores (c. An70)]. High-An plagioclase xenocrystic cores in the dykes, and plagioclase laths in the host Main Zone, share a similar Sr/Sr isotopic composition (0 7075–0 7076 at 2 06 Ga) consistent with recycling of local Main Zone primocrysts into the dykes. In contrast, low-An margins of plagioclase in the dykes record greater Sr/Sr isotopic compositional variability (0 7073–0 7078 at 2 06 Ga) consistent with crystallization from an evolved and isotopically heterogeneous melt. Based on the occurrence of similar pegmatite veins, bulk REE compositions, and plagioclase Sr/Sr isotope compositions, the evolved melts that are recorded in the Marikana dykes are residual liquids extracted from the underlying Upper Critical Zone. We further postulate, because the Main Zone was rigid enough to allow dyking, that parts of the Upper Critical Zone were either (1) emplaced and crystallized after consolidation of the Main Zone or (2) remained above its solidus (i.e. allowing retention of residual pore melt) for timescales longer than the emplacement and consolidation of the Main Zone. The Marikana dykes represent fossilized conduits that facilitated, during the solidification of crystal mushes in the Bushveld Complex, the extraction of differentiated residual melts. Our model is consistent with an out-of-sequence differentiation history in the Rustenburg Layered Suite.
Anthropogenic CO2 Emission Records in Scots Pine Growing in the Most Industrialized Region of Poland from 1975 to 2014

Abstract Stable carbon isotope ratios and radiocarbon (14C) concentrations in samples of pine wood (AD 1975–2012) from 3 sites, as well as needles (AD 2012–2014) collected from 15 sites, in a heavily urbanized area in proximity to heavy industrial factories in Poland were analyzed as bio-indicators of CO2 emissions. The sampling sites were located at different distances from point sources. The stable isotopic composition was determined using an isotope ratio mass spectrometer, and the 14C concentration was determined using a liquid scintillation counter and an accelerator mass spectrometer. Spatial and temporal variability of δ13C and Δ14C in tree ring cellulose and needles was noted in all regions. A negative correlation between δ13C tree ring cellulose and anthropogenic CO2 emissions has been observed. The ratio of δ13C in tree ring cellulose to δ13C in needles created in the same year is equal to 1.2 at the investigated sites.
LBS Research Online

We consider the single-period joint assortment and inventory planning problem with stochastic demand and dynamic substitution across products, motivated by applications in highly di ﬀ erentiated markets, such as online retailing and airlines. This class of problems is known to be notoriously hard to deal with from a computational standpoint. In fact, prior to the present paper, only a handful of modeling approaches were shown to admit provably-good algorithms, at the cost of strong restrictions on customers’ choice outcomes. Our main contribution is to provide the ﬁrst e ﬃ cient algorithms with provable performance guarantees for a broad class of dynamic assortment optimization models. Under general rank-based choice models, our approximation algorithm is best-possible with respect to the price parameters, up to lower-order terms. In particular, we obtain a constant-factor approximation under horizontal di ﬀ erentiation, where product prices are uniform. In more structured settings, where the customers’ ranking behavior is motivated by price and quality cues, we derive improved guarantees through tailor-made algorithms. In extensive computational experiments, our approach dominates existing heuristics in terms of revenue performance, as well as in terms of speed, given the myopic nature of our methods. From a technical perspective, we introduce a number of novel algorithmic ideas of independent interest, and unravel hidden relations to submodular maximization.
Classifying Precipitation Types in Tropical Cyclones Using the NRL 37 GHz Color Product

The tropical cyclone (TC) webpage developed by the U.S. Naval Research Lab (NRL) has been widely used by the community for real‐time TC monitoring and forecasting. Using 14 years of Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission Microwave Imager and Precipitation Radar data in TCs, precipitation/convection types are quantitatively classified based on vertical radar profiles corresponding to seven different color regions in the NRL's 37 GHz color composite product. The bright cyan and all pink (including pure pink, bright cyan/pink, and weak cyan/pink, and green/pink) regions are identified as nearly 100% precipitative regions. The bright cyan and pure pink regions are shallow and deep convective precipitation, respectively, while the green/pink, weak cyan/pink, and bright cyan/pink regions are mainly stratiform rain. Eighty‐four percent of pixels in the weak cyan region are precipitating, including either shallow convective, stratiform, or anvil precipitation. Seventy‐six percent of pixels in the green region are nonprecipitating pixels, and 24% of them are very lightly precipitating pixels, which could be contaminated from clouds with high liquid water content. The ability to perform TC precipitation‐type analysis of this detail (convective versus stratiform and deep versus shallow) was previously only possible using radar‐based classification algorithms. Using the 37 GHz precipitation‐type analysis, a significant increase of coverage of stratiform precipitation and shallow convection in the inner core is found between 3 and 21 hr before the onset of TC rapid intensification.
AEROELASTICS FLIGHT DYNAMICS COUPLING EFFECTS OF THE SEMI AEROELASTIC HINGE DEVICE – IFASD 2019

A recent consideration in aircraft design is the use of folding wing-tips with the aim of enabling higher aspect ratio aircraft with less induced drag, but also meeting airport gate limitations. This study investigates the impact of floating folding wing-tips on the aircraft flight dynamics. It is found that a floating wing-tips aircraft has similar handling qualities with respect to an aircraft with no wing extension.
Design of Human-Aware Robotic Decision Support Systems

—Advances in robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) have enabled the possibility of human-robot teaming. One potential avenue for collaborative robots is to provide decision-support for human partners in complex decision-making tasks. However, such agents are imperfect in real-world scenarios and may provide incorrect or suboptimal recommendations. Thus, it is imperative for human collaborators to understand when to trust the robot’s suggestions for maximizing task performance. Explainable AI (xAI) attempts to improve user understanding by providing explanations or rationales for agent recommendations. However, constantly providing explanations is unnecessary and can induce cognitive overload among users. In this work, we propose a POMDP framework that allows the robot to infer the users’ latent trust and preferences to provide appropriate and timely explanations for maximizing human-robot team performance in a sequential decision-making game.
Click-words: learning to predict document keywords from a user perspective

Motivation: Recognizing words that are key to a document is important for ranking relevant scientific documents. Traditionally, important words in a document are either nominated subjectively by authors and indexers or selected objectively by some statistical measures. As an alternative, we propose to use documents' words popularity in user queries to identify click-words, a set of prominent words from the users' perspective. Although they often overlap, click-words differ significantly from other document keywords. Results: We developed a machine learning approach to learn the unique characteristics of click-words. Each word was represented by a set of features that included different types of information, such as semantic type, part of speech tag, term frequency–inverse document frequency (TF–IDF) weight and location in the abstract. We identified the most important features and evaluated our model using 6 months of PubMed click-through logs. Our results suggest that, in addition to carrying high TF–IDF weight, click-words tend to be biomedical entities, to exist in article titles, and to occur repeatedly in article abstracts. Given the abstract and title of a document, we are able to accurately predict the words likely to appear in user queries that lead to document clicks. Contact: luzh@ncbi.nlm. nih.gov Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Political Uncertainty and Household Stock Market Participation

† Agarwal, Aslan, Huang, and Ren are from J. Mack Robinson College of Business, Georgia State University, vagarwal@gsu.edu (Vikas), haslan@gsu.edu (Hadiye), lxhuang@gsu.edu (Lixin), and hren1@gsu.edu (Honglin). We appreciate helpful comments from Sreedhar Bharath, Amit Bubna, Chuck Buker, Sudheer Chava, Philippe d’Astous, Grant Farnsworth, Rohan Ganduri, John Graham, Huseyin Gulen, Rawley Heimer, Mihai Ion, Brandon Julio, Stephen A. Karolyi, Eric Kelley, Christian Lundblad, Renuka Sane, Stephan Siegel, Ajay Subramanian, Yulia VeldMerkoulova, Baozhong Yang, Vincent Yao, Haibei Zhao, seminar and conference participants at the 2019 AFA Annual Meetings, the 9th Emerging Markets Finance Conference, the 2018 CEAR-RSI Household Finance Workshop, the 2018 Conference on Financial Economics and Accounting, the 2018 FMA Annual Meetings, the 2018 FSU SunTrust Beach Conference, the 2018 Boulder Summer Conference on Consumer Financial Decision Making, the 2019 Academic Research Colloquium for Financial Planning and Related Disciplines, Clemson University, Georgia State University, Ivey Business School, Lehigh University, Texas Christian University, and help from Julia Beckhusen, Shelley K. Irving, Karen Kosanovich, Peter Mateyka, and Kyle Vezina of the U.S. Census Bureau. We thank Brad M. Barber and Terrance Odean for sharing their brokerage data with us. Xuxi Guo and Yen-Lin Huang provided excellent research assistance. Vikas acknowledges the support from the Centre for Financial Research in Cologne. We thank the organizers of the 2019 Academic Research Colloquium for Financial Planning and Related Disciplines for the best paper prize in household finance.