Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Dopamine Regulates Two Classes of Primate Prefrontal Neurons That Represent Sensory Signals

The lateral prefrontal cortex (PFC), a hub of higher-level cognitive processing, is strongly modulated by midbrain dopamine (DA) neurons. The cellular mechanisms have been comprehensively studied in the context of short-term memory, but little is known about how DA regulates sensory inputs to PFC that precede and give rise to such memory activity. By preparing recipient cortical circuits for incoming signals, DA could be a powerful determinant of downstream cognitive processing. Here, we tested the hypothesis that prefrontal DA regulates the representation of sensory signals that are required for perceptual decisions. In rhesus monkeys trained to report the presence or absence of visual stimuli at varying levels of contrast, we simultaneously recorded extracellular single-unit activity and applied DA to the immediate vicinity of the neurons by micro-iontophoresis. We found that DA modulation of prefrontal neurons is not uniform but tailored to specialized neuronal classes. In one population of neurons, DA suppressed activity with high temporal precision but preserved signal/noise ratio. Neurons in this group had short visual response latencies and comprised all recorded narrow-spiking, putative interneurons. In a distinct population, DA increased excitability and enhanced signal/noise ratio by reducing response variability. These neurons had longer visual response latencies and were composed exclusively of broad-spiking, putative pyramidal neurons. By gating sensory inputs to PFC and subsequently strengthening the representation of sensory signals, DA might play an important role in shaping how the PFC initiates appropriate behavior in response to changes in the sensory environment.
Effect of plane of arm elevation on glenohumeral kinematics: a normative biplane fluoroscopy study.

BACKGROUND Understanding glenohumeral motion in normal and pathologic states requires the precise measurement of shoulder kinematics. The effect of the plane of arm elevation on glenohumeral translations and rotations remains largely unknown. The purpose of this study was to measure the three-dimensional glenohumeral translations and rotations during arm elevation in healthy subjects. METHODS Eight male subjects performed scaption and forward flexion, and five subjects (three men and two women) performed abduction, inside a dynamic biplane fluoroscopy system. Bone geometries were extracted from computed tomography images and used to determine the three-dimensional position and orientation of the humerus and scapula in individual frames. Descriptive statistics were determined for glenohumeral joint rotations and translations, and linear regressions were performed to calculate the scapulohumeral rhythm ratio. RESULTS The scapulohumeral rhythm ratio was 2.0 ± 0.4:1 for abduction, 1.6 ± 0.5:1 for scaption, and 1.1 ± 0.3:1 for forward flexion, with the ratio for forward flexion being significantly lower than that for abduction (p = 0.002). Humeral head excursion was largest in abduction (5.1 ± 1.1 mm) and smallest in scaption (2.4 ± 0.6 mm) (p < 0.001). The direction of translation, as determined by the linear regression slope, was more inferior during abduction (-2.1 ± 1.8 mm/90°) compared with forward flexion (0.1 ± 10.9 mm/90°) (p = 0.024). CONCLUSIONS Scapulohumeral rhythm significantly decreased as the plane of arm elevation moved in an anterior arc from abduction to forward flexion. The amount of physiologic glenohumeral excursion varied significantly with the plane of elevation, was smallest for scaption, and showed inconsistent patterns across subjects with the exception of consistent inferior translation during abduction.
Batch processing of Top-k Spatial-textual Queries

Top-k spatial-textual queries have received significant attention in the research community. Several techniques to efficiently process this class of queries are now widely used in a variety of applications. However, the problem of how best to process multiple queries efficiently is not well understood. Applications relying on processing continuous streams of queries, and offline pre-processing of other queries could benefit from solutions to this problem. In this work, we study practical solutions to efficiently process a set of top-k spatial-textual queries. We propose an efficient best-first algorithm for the batch processing of top-k spatial-textual queries that promotes shared processing and reduced I/O in each query batch. By grouping similar queries and processing them simultaneously, we are able to demonstrate significant performance gains using publicly available datasets.
Exploring Service System Resources: The Role of Technology

This paper traces a firm's transition from goods-dominant to service-dominant logic using a remote monitoring system. By adopting a service system perspective and tracing its main resources involved in value creation, we have examined the value propositions that are brought forth, and the roles the different resources play. We have shown how the introduction of a new technology in the form of an RMS has a potentially strong impact on the other three resources in the service system, organization, by grounding service processes in data collection and analysis, people, through changing trust relationships, and shared information, by becoming the system's language, laws and measures. Thus, by paying specific attention to technology, we may also see and work with its potential.
Skeletal muscle phosphocreatine recovery after submaximal exercise in children and young and middle-aged adults.

CONTEXT Elderly subjects have reduced mitochondrial function. However, it remains unclear whether the decline in mitochondrial function begins earlier in the life span. OBJECTIVE The objective of the study was to determine skeletal muscle mitochondrial oxidative phosphorylation by (31)phosphorous-magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) across a variety of age groups. DESIGN This was a cross-sectional study of 121 healthy normal-weight and overweight individuals from age 8 to 55 yr. SETTING The study was conducted at a single university medical center in Boston, MA. PARTICIPANTS Participants included 68 children and 53 adults from the Boston community. INTERVENTIONS AND MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Phosphocreatine (PCr) recovery was evaluated by (31)phosphorous-MRS after submaximal exercise. Subjects were also evaluated with anthropometric measurements, metabolic profiles, and measures of physical activity. RESULTS PCr recovery determined by (31)phosphorous-MRS is positively associated with age in univariate analysis in a cohort of individuals aged 8-55 yr (r = +0.55, P < 0.0001). Stratification of subjects into four age groups (prepubertal and early pubertal children, pubertal and postpubertal children < 18 yr, young adults aged 18-39 yr, and middle aged adults aged 40-55 yr) demonstrates prolongation of PCr recovery with increasing age across the four groups (P < 0.0001 by ANOVA). The relationship between PCr recovery and age remains strong when controlling for gender; race; ethnicity; body mass index; measures of physical activity and inactivity; and anthropometric, nutritional, and metabolic parameters (P < 0.004). CONCLUSIONS Skeletal muscle PCr recovery measured by (31)phosphorous-MRS is prolonged with age, even in children and young adults.
Love, Loss and Magic: Connecting Author and Story1

The themes of love, loss and magic have been enduring themes in fairytales, myths, legends and fantasy within the genre of children's literature. These stories frequently depict young protagonists who have been ‘orphaned’ in some way—for example, through death, betrayal, absence, rejection or unexplained disappearance. In many of these narratives an important feature is the power of the story to grip and hold its readers through the intervention of magic in its most sinister and beneficent form as well as the love and loyalty of friends and creatures drawn from the world of fantasy. What is seldom examined is the way in which the author's own biography of loss and love both informs and provides a major impetus to the stories they have written. This article explores the way in which the themes of love, loss and magic interconnect with two phenomenally successful contemporary children's writers. Using selected extracts from the work of Philip Pullman and Michael Morpurgo, the article suggests a dynamic synergy with the authors and their stories.
AN IMPROVED CONTRAST ENHANCEMENT APPROACH FOR PANORAMIC DENTAL X-RAY IMAGES

The Panoramic Dental X-ray image is an important tool for a thorough dental examination. These X-ray images suffer from poor contrast because of the luminance non-linearity introduced by medical imaging techniques. Hence an automatic method of image enhancement of panoramic X-ray image is essential. A novel method of improving the quality of these images is determined based on gamma correction using GLCM (Gray level co-occurrence matrix) by minimizing the homogeneity feature and by computing a global gamma value based on cumulative histogram without any knowledge of the imaging device. The performance of both the methods is compared in terms of metrics like MSE, PSNR & AMBE and it is illustrated that gamma correction based on GLCM by minimizing the homogeneity yields better results in terms of low MSE, high PSNR and low AMBE.
Singularity Analysis Via the Iterated Kernel Method

In the quarter plane, five lattice path models with unit steps have resisted the otherwise general approach featured in recent works by Fayolle, Kurkova and Raschel. Here we consider these five models, called the singular models, and prove that the univariate generating functions marking the number of walks of a given length are not D-finite. Furthermore, we provide exact and asymptotic enumerative formulas for the number of such walks, and describe an efficient algorithm for exact enumeration.
Personal Exposure to Dust and Endotoxin in Robusta and Arabica Coffee Processing Factories in Tanzania

Introduction: Endotoxin exposure associated with organic dust exposure has been studied in several industries. Coffee cherries that are dried directly after harvest may differ in dust and endotoxin emissions to those that are peeled and washed before drying. The aim of this study was to measure personal total dust and endotoxin levels and to evaluate their determinants of exposure in coffee processing factories. Methods: Using Sidekick Casella pumps at a flow rate of 2l/min, total dust levels were measured in the workers’ breathing zone throughout the shift. Endotoxin was analyzed using the kinetic chromogenic Limulus amebocyte lysate assay. Separate linear mixed-effects models were used to evaluate exposure determinants for dust and endotoxin. Results: Total dust and endotoxin exposure were significantly higher in Robusta than in Arabica coffee factories (geometric mean 3.41mg/m3 and 10 800 EU/m3 versus 2.10mg/m3 and 1400 EU/m3, respectively). Dry pre-processed coffee and differences in work tasks explained 30% of the total variance for total dust and 71% of the variance for endotoxin exposure. High exposure in Robusta processing is associated with the dry pre-processing method used after harvest. Conclusions: Dust and endotoxin exposure is high, in particular when processing dry pre-processed coffee. Minimization of dust emissions and use of efficient dust exhaust systems are important to prevent the development of respiratory system impairment in workers.
Use of Focus Group Methodology to Develop an Asthma Self-Management Program Useful for Community-Based Medical Practices

Health education programs developed in academic medical centers are not optimally disseminated to community clinical settings. Strategies are needed to translate the findings of research on health education programs into programs useful in a wide range of health care settings. Focus group techniques were used to provide data for revising a successful university-based asthma self-management program to make it more practical for use by community physicians. Physicians representing a variety of specialties attended the sessions and provided feedback on the utility of various components of the original program. The discussions revealed that many physicians felt they did not have the time or resources to conduct the original program and identified elements viewed as impractical. This
Satisfaction-Oriented Fuzzy Reasoning

This paper examines the traditional architecture of fuzzy expert reasoning and suggests a reorientation, which is simpler, more intuitive, and more implementable. This new approach centers on first determining the degree of satisfaction that a rule applies to the current situation, and then using this degree of satisfaction to qualify the rule’s conclusion. This provides a theoretical basis for the effective work being done in practical fuzzy expert systems. But beyond this, satisfaction-oriented fuzzy reasoning establishes a framework for a large new space of fuzzy reasoning, both theoretical and practical.
Victim-offender mediation and social work: Focus groups with mediators in Flanders

The role of social work in the restorative justice field remains largely unexplored. This article reports on the findings of focus groups conducted with mediators of juvenile and adult mediation practices in Flanders (Belgium) to gain more insight into how mediators perceive their professional role and to what extent they refer to individual and structural dimensions of social work practice. Implications for future social work involvement and research are made.
Book review: “Into the people effectiveness arena: Navigating between chaos and order”

Veldsman, T.H. (2002) "Into the people effectiveness arena: Navigating between chaos and order", Randburg, South Africa: Knowledge Resources, 364 pages. In a noteworthy new South African management text, Theo Veldsman, consultant in the strategic human resource management (SHRM) field, brings together the fruit of many years of experience and thought on people management issues in an exciting new way.
OSD1 Promotes Meiotic Progression via APC/C Inhibition and Forms a Regulatory Network with TDM and CYCA1;2/TAM

Cell cycle control is modified at meiosis compared to mitosis, because two divisions follow a single DNA replication event. Cyclin-dependent kinases (CDKs) promote progression through both meiosis and mitosis, and a central regulator of their activity is the APC/C (Anaphase Promoting Complex/Cyclosome) that is especially required for exit from mitosis. We have shown previously that OSD1 is involved in entry into both meiosis I and meiosis II in Arabidopsis thaliana; however, the molecular mechanism by which OSD1 controls these transitions has remained unclear. Here we show that OSD1 promotes meiotic progression through APC/C inhibition. Next, we explored the functional relationships between OSD1 and the genes known to control meiotic cell cycle transitions in Arabidopsis. Like osd1, cyca1;2/tam mutation leads to a premature exit from meiosis after the first division, while tdm mutants perform an aberrant third meiotic division after normal meiosis I and II. Remarkably, while tdm is epistatic to tam, osd1 is epistatic to tdm. We further show that the expression of a non-destructible CYCA1;2/TAM provokes, like tdm, the entry into a third meiotic division. Finally, we show that CYCA1;2/TAM forms an active complex with CDKA;1 that can phosphorylate OSD1 in vitro. We thus propose that a functional network composed of OSD1, CYCA1;2/TAM, and TDM controls three key steps of meiotic progression, in which OSD1 is a meiotic APC/C inhibitor.
Underdetermined source separation of finite alphabet signals via l1 minimization

This paper addresses the underdetermined source separation problem of finite alphabet signals. We present a new framework for recovering finite alphabet signals. We formulate this problem as a recovery of sparse signals from highly incomplete measurements. It is known that sparse solutions can be obtained by ℓ1 minimization, through convex optimization. This relaxation procedure in our problem fails in recovering sparse solutions. However, this does not impact the reconstruction of the finite alphabet signals. Simulation results are presented to show that this approach provides good recovery properties and good images separation performance.
Calibration of an autocorrelation‐based method for determining amplitude histogram reliability and quantal size

1 We describe a method, based on autocorrelation and Monte Carlo simulation, for determining the likelihood that peaks in synaptic amplitude frequency histograms could have been a result of finite sampling from parent distributions that were unimodal. 2 The first step was to calculate an ‘autocorrelation score’ for the histogram to be tested. A unimodal distribution was fitted to the test histogram and subtracted from it. The resulting difference function was smoothed and its autocorrelation function calculated. The amplitude of the first (non‐zero lag) peak in this autocorrelation function was taken as the autocorrelation score for that histogram. The score depends on the sharpness of the histogram peaks, the equality of their spacing and the number of trials. 3 The second stage was to generate large numbers of random samples, each of the same number of trials as the histogram, from a unimodal generator distribution of similar shape. The autocorrelation score was calculated for each sample and the proportion of samples with scores greater than the histogram gave the likelihood that the histogram peaks could have arisen by sampling artifact. 4 The method was calibrated using simulated non‐quantal and quantal histograms with different signal‐to‐noise ratios and numbers of trials. For a quantal distribution with four peaks and a signal‐to‐noise ratio of 3, a sample size of about 500 trials was needed for 95% of samples to be distinguished from a non‐quantal distribution. 5 The ability of the autocorrelation method to distinguish quantal from non‐quantal distributions was compared against two conventional statistical tests, the X2 and the Kolmogorov–Smirnov goodness of fit tests. The autocorrelation method was more specific in extracting quantized responses. The Kolmogorov–Smirnov test in particular could not distinguish quantal distributions with multiple peaks even if the peaks were very sharp. 6 The improved discrimination of the autocorrelation method proved important when applied to experimental data recorded from hippocampal synapses. Of thirty‐three histograms that were significantly different from smooth distributions by the autocorrelation method (P≤ 0.05), only seventeen were significantly different using the X2 test and only two when using the Kolmogorov–Smirnov test. 7 The autocorrelation method also gave an estimate of histogram peak spacing or quantal size. Using simulated quantal distributions, we showed that this estimate was likely to be correct within a few per cent for distributions that gave P≤ 0.01 by autocorrelation scoring.
Log-Linear Mixtures for Object Class Recognition

We present log-linear mixture models as a fully discriminative approach to object category recognition which can, analogously to kernelised models, represent non-linear decision boundaries. We show that this model is the discriminative counterpart to Gaussian mixtures and that either one can be transformed into the respective other. However, the proposed model is easier to extend toward fusing multiple cues and numerically more stable to train and to evaluate. Experiments on the PASCAL VOC 2006 data show that the performance of our model compares favourably well to the state-of-the-art despite the model consisting of an order of magnitude fewer parameters, which suggests excellent generalisation capabilities.
Enhancement of microwave plasma characteristics for biomedical applications using pulse modulation method

Pulse modulation technique was applied for microwave excited atmospheric pressure air and Ar plasmas with fixed average power. Breakdown and sustain powers were measured and UV-Vis emission spectra were observed. As the duty ratio decreased, pulse modulated plasmas showed enhanced results as compared to continuous signal excited plasmas. Breakdown powers of both of air and Ar plasmas were reduced as duty ratio decreased. Reactive species including hydroxyl radicals, atomic oxygen and nitric oxide were increased with the decrease of duty ratio. The change of breakdown power and increase of reactive species give advantages for biomedical applications. Gas temperature was reduced also in both of air and Ar plasmas with the decrease of duty ratio. The results related to the high energy electrons which were generated during on-time of the microwave signal. Blood coagulation experiment of the air plasma was conducted and it showed ~7 times faster coagulation than natural coagulation.
REIT Capital Budgeting and Equity Marginal Q

Equity marginal "q" is the change in the market value of a company's equity in response to a one-unit unexpected change in its asset base. Hence, it is a profitability index that evaluates a firm's capital budgeting decisions at the margin. We estimate the equity marginal "q" for real estate-managing public corporations, namely, real estate investment trusts (REITs), in an attempt to understand how the various costs and benefits of being a public corporation play a role in managing this important asset class. Using the universe of equity REITs for the period from 1993 to 2005, we find that REITs with greater idiosyncratic volatility, higher stock turnover and smaller bid-ask spread have a higher equity marginal "q". In addition, both the holdings of institutional investors and their investment horizons are respectively positively related to equity marginal "q. " With these firm characteristics taken into account, firm size is found to be negatively related to equity marginal "q". Our findings are economically important as well, because the equity marginal "q" ratio alone accounts for approximately one-third of the total REIT shareholder wealth change during the study period. Copyright (c) 2009 American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association.
Prevalence and associated factors of edentulousness in a group of community – dwelling Thai elderly

The purpose of this research was to investigate the prevalence and correlates of edentulousness among the Thai elderly living at home. This study was a baseline part of a longitudinal epidemiologic investigation of geriatric oral health. Subjects comprised of 522 older adults aged 51 years and over living at home in an urban community in Bangkok. Data were collected from a clinical oral examination and an interview. All 32 teeth were assessed for tooth loss status. Results show that, of the 522 older adults, 9.6% were completely edentulous and 9.2% were edentulous in only one arch. The oldest individuals and those with the least education and income were the most likely to be edentulous (p< 0.05). Multiple logistic regression showed a significant and independent association between edentulousness and age (OR = 5.93). Edentulousness on at least one dental arch was associated with age and income. In conclusion, socioeconomic factors were found to be associated with edentulousness in the cohort of urban older adults. Policy action needs to extend beyond health-related factors in order to reduce oral health inequalities among Thai elderly.