Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The aging mind: neuroplasticity in response to cognitive training

Is it possible to enhance neural and cognitive function with cognitive training techniques? Can we delay age-related decline in cognitive function with interventions and stave off Alzheimer's disease? Does an aged brain really have the capacity to change in response to stimulation? In the present paper, we consider the neuroplasticity of the aging brain, that is, the brain's ability to increase capacity in response to sustained experience. We argue that, although there is some neural deterioration that occurs with age, the brain has the capacity to increase neural activity and develop neural scaffolding to regulate cognitive function. We suggest that increase in neural volume in response to cognitive training or experience is a clear indicator of change, but that changes in activation in response to cognitive training may be evidence of strategy change rather than indicative of neural plasticity. We note that the effect of cognitive training is surprisingly durable over time, but that the evidence that training effects transfer to other cognitive domains is relatively limited. We review evidence which suggests that engagement in an environment that requires sustained cognitive effort may facilitate cognitive function.
From rhetoric to reality? Putting HIV and AIDS rights talk into practice in a South African rural community

Whilst international rhetoric on HIV and AIDS frequently invokes discourses of human rights to inspire and guide action, translating universal rights talk into practice in specific settings remains a challenge. Community mobilisation is often strategy of choice. We present a case study of the Entabeni Project in South Africa – in which a foreign-funded NGO sought to work with female health volunteers in a deep rural community to increase their access to two HIV-relevant rights: women's rights (especially gender equality) and rights to health (especially access to HIV- and AIDS-related services). Whilst the project had short-term health-related successes, it was less successful in implementing a gender empowerment agenda. The concept of women's rights had no purchase with women who had little interest in directly challenging male power, foregrounding the fight against poverty as their main preoccupation. The area's traditional chief and gatekeeper insisted the project should remain ‘apolitical’. Project funders prioritised ‘numbers reached’ over a gender empowerment orientation. In the absence of (1) a marginalised group who are willing to assert their rights; and (2) a context where powerful people are willing to support these claims, ‘rights’ may be a blunt tool for HIV-related work with women in deeply oppressive and remote rural communities beyond the reach of international treaties and urban-based activist movements.
“Let Me Hear Your Handwriting!” Evaluating the Movement Fluency from Its Sonification

The quality of handwriting is evaluated from the visual inspection of its legibility and not from the movement that generates the trace. Although handwriting is achieved in silence, adding sounds to handwriting movement might help towards its perception, provided that these sounds are meaningful. This study evaluated the ability to judge handwriting quality from the auditory perception of the underlying sonified movement, without seeing the written trace. In a first experiment, samples of a word written by children with dysgraphia, proficient children writers, and proficient adult writers were collected with a graphic tablet. Then, the pen velocity, the fluency, and the axial pen pressure were sonified in order to create forty-five audio files. In a second experiment, these files were presented to 48 adult listeners who had to mark the underlying unseen handwriting. In order to evaluate the relevance of the sonification strategy, two experimental conditions were compared. In a first ‘implicit’ condition, the listeners made their judgment without any knowledge of the mapping between the sounds and the handwriting variables. In a second ‘explicit’ condition, they knew what the sonified variables corresponded to and the evaluation criteria. Results showed that, under the implicit condition, two thirds of the listeners marked the three groups of writers differently. In the explicit condition, all listeners marked the dysgraphic handwriting lower than that of the two other groups. In a third experiment, the scores given from the auditory evaluation were compared to the scores given by 16 other adults from the visual evaluation of the trace. Results revealed that auditory evaluation was more relevant than the visual evaluation for evaluating a dysgraphic handwriting. Handwriting sonification might therefore be a relevant tool allowing a therapist to complete the visual assessment of the written trace by an auditory control of the handwriting movement quality.
Learning Compressible Models

In this paper, we study the combination of compression and l1-norm regularization in a machine learning context: learning compressible models. By including a compression operation into the l1 regularization, the assumption on model sparsity is relaxed to compressibility: model coefficients are compressed before being penalized, and sparsity is achieved in a compressed domain rather than the original space. We focus on the design of different compression operations, by which we can encode various compressibility assumptions and inductive biases, e.g., piecewise local smoothness, compacted energy in the frequency domain, and semantic correlation. We show that use of a compression operation provides an opportunity to leverage auxiliary information from various sources, e.g., domain knowledge, coding theories, unlabeled data. We conduct extensive experiments on brain-computer interfacing, handwritten character recognition and text classification. Empirical results show clear improvements in prediction performance by including compression in l1 regularization. We also analyze the learned model coefficients under appropriate compressibility assumptions, which further demonstrate the advantages of learning compressible models instead of sparse models.
Substrate-Integrated Waveguide Bandpass Filters With Planar Resonators for System-on-Package

This paper proposes some novel substrate-integrated waveguide (SIW) bandpass filters combined with planar resonators. According to specific topologies, microstrip lines with different electrical lengths are introduced into their designs. Their corresponding phase-shift characteristics are used to obtain the desired couplings between SIW cavities and the microstrip resonator. Two third-order filter samples are realized. One has a single transmission zero below the passband and the other possesses a quasi-elliptic response. Further, a fourth-order filter is developed by effectively superpositing two individual third-order topologies. It shows better frequency selectivity and flat in-band group delay, with good agreement between the measured and the simulated S-parameters. Their compactness and high rejection in the stopbands make them very suitable for system-on-package.
The 70-Gene Prognostic Signature for Korean Breast Cancer Patients

Purpose A 70-gene prognostic signature has prognostic value in patients with node-negative breast cancer in Europe. This diagnostic test known as "MammaPrint™ (70-gene prognostic signature)" was recently validated and implementation was feasible. Therefore, we assessed the 70-gene prognostic signature in Korean patients with breast cancer. We compared the risk predicted by the 70-gene prognostic signature with commonly used clinicopathological guidelines among Korean patients with breast cancer. We also analyzed the 70-gene prognostic signature and clinicopathological feature of the patients in comparison with a previous validation study. Methods Forty-eight eligible patients with breast cancer (clinical T1-2N0M0) were selected from four hospitals in Korea. Fresh tumor samples were analyzed with a customized microarray for the 70-gene prognostic signature. Concordance between the risk predicted by the 70-gene prognostic signature and risk predicted by commonly used clinicopathological guidelines (St. Gallen guidelines, National Institutes of Health [NIH] guideline, and Adjuvant! Online) was evaluated. Results Prognosis signatures were assessed in 36 patients. No significant differences were observed in the clinicopathological features of patients compared with previous studies. The 70-gene prognosis signature identified five (13.9%) patients with a low-risk prognosis signature and 31 (86.1%) patients with a high-risk prognosis signature. Clinical risk was concordant with the prognosis signature for 29 patients (80.6%) according to the St. Gallen guidelines; 30 patients (83.4%) according to the NIH guidelines; and 23 patients (63.8%) according to the Adjuvant! Online. Our results were different from previous validation studies in Europe with about a 40% low-risk prognosis and about a 60% high-risk prognosis. The high incidence in the high-risk group was consistent with data in Japan. Conclusion The results of 70-gene prognostic signature of Korean patients with breast cancer were somewhat different from those identified in Europe. This difference should be studied as whether there is a gene disparity between Asians and Europeans. Further large-scale studies with a follow-up evaluation are required to assess whether the use of the 70-gene prognostic signature can predict the prognosis of Korean patients with breast cancer.
EFFECTS OF ACUTE UPPER‐BODY VIBRATION ON STRENGTH AND POWER VARIABLES IN CLIMBERS

Whole-body vibration training has recently received a lot of attention with reported enhancements of strength and power qualities in athletes. This study investigated whether upper-body vibration would be able to augment muscular attributes for climbing performance. Twelve healthy active climbers volunteered for the study. All participants underwent 3 treatments—arm cranking (AC), upper-body vibration (UBV), and non-UBV (NUBV)—in a balanced random order, conducted on separate days. Upper-body vibration was generated via a commercialized electric-powered dumbbell with a rotating axis that delivered oscillatory movements to the shoulders and arms. The UBV treatment consisted of performing 5 upper-body exercises for a total duration of 5 minutes. The UBV frequency was set at 26 Hz, amplitude 3 mm. For the NUBV treatment, the participants performed the exact exercises and time constraints as UBV; however, the vibration dumbbell was set at 0 Hz and 0 mm amplitude. The third treatment consisted of AC, which was performed at 75 k·min-1 for 5 minutes. Pre-and postmuscular performance measures of medicine ball throw, hand grip strength, and a specific climbing maneuver were performed after each treatment. There were no significant treatment differences on medicine ball throw, hand grip strength, and the specific climbing maneuver. Acute UBV exposure did not demonstrate the expected potential neuromuscular enhancements on the climbing performance tests selected for this study.
Heterogeneous Chip Multiprocessor Design for Virtual Machines

Multicore architectures provide an alternative to increasing clock frequencies to improve performance of modern processors. The best design for these chip multiprocessors, including structure sizes or whether to use homogeneous or heterogeneous cores, remains open for exploration. One potential design path involves using heterogeneous cores that are specialized for a given task. This paper examines the design of a core specifically for the execution of virtual machines. While virtual machines create opportunities for runtime code modification for tasks such as optimization, instrumentation, and security, they lead to overhead at run time. Using cycle-accurate simulation, we characterize a virtual machine in terms of functional unit usage, cache usage, and branch behavior. We also discuss additional structures and instructions necessary for supporting a virtual machine. By moving the execution of the virtual machine to a separate core and parallelizing its execution with that of the application, we hope to mitigate some of the overhead of execution; a smaller, specialized core can also provide savings in power consumption and die size and complexity.
A Smoothed Dual Approach for Variational Wasserstein Problems

Variational problems that involve Wasserstein distances have been recently proposed to summarize and learn from probability measures. Despite being conceptually simple, such problems are computationally challenging because they involve minimizing over quantities (Wasserstein distances) that are themselves hard to compute. We show that the dual formulation of Wasserstein variational problems introduced recently by G. Carlier, A. Oberman, and E. Oudet [ESAIM Math. Model. Numer. Anal. , 6 (2015), pp. 1621--1642] can be regularized using an entropic smoothing, which leads to smooth, differentiable, convex optimization problems that are simpler to implement and numerically more stable. We illustrate the versatility of this approach by applying it to the computation of Wasserstein barycenters and gradient flows of spacial regularization functionals. (A correction is attached.)
The histone demethylase Kdm3a is required for normal epithelial proliferation, ductal elongation and tumor growth in the mouse mammary gland

Histone modification alters chromatin architecture to regulate gene transcription. KDM3A is a histone demethylase in the JmjC domain-containing protein family. It removes di- and mono- methyl residues from di- or mono-methylated lysine 9 of histone H3 (H3K9me2/me1). Recent studies have shown that Kdm3a plays an important role in self-renewal of embryonic stem cells, spermatogenesis, metabolism, sex determination and tumor angiogenesis. However, its role in mammary gland development and breast carcinogenesis remains unclear. In this study, we found that Kdm3a is expressed in the mouse mammary gland epithelial cells. Knockout of Kdm3a significantly increased H3K9me2/me1 levels in these epithelial cells, which correlated with markedly decreased mammary gland ductal elongation and branching in the intact knockout virgin mice. Furthermore, estrogen replacement in the ovariectomized Kdm3a knockout mice couldn’t rescue the retarded ductal growth. Moreover, transplantation of KO mammary gland pieces to wild type recipient mice showed slower ductal growth compared with that of WT gland pieces. Consistently, knockout of Kdm3a also reduced the proliferation rates and cyclin D1 expression in the mammary gland epithelial cells. In addition, Kdm3a knockout did not significantly change the latency of the polyoma middle T oncogene-induced mammary gland tumorigenesis. Tumor growth, however, was slowed which might be due to the decrease in cyclin D1 expression and tumor cell proliferation. We also found that Kdm3a binds and activates the cyclin D1 promoter. These results demonstrate that Kdm3a plays an important intrinsic role in promoting mammary gland ductal growth and tumor growth probably through enhancing cyclin D1 expression and cell proliferation.
A study on the features of mentoring during elementary school teacher training, focusing on feedback based on the individual circumstances of student teachers

This case study aimed to clarify the contents of mentoring in physical education lessons during practical teacher training at elementary school level. First, the investigator observed the mentoring process involving Mentor X during physical education lessons, and completed field notes about conversations between Mentor X and student teachers at the physical education feedback meeting. These field notes were then classified by the KJ method to clarify the characteristics of the individual mentoring. We then selected and analyzed the characteristics that were typical of Mentor X's approach. The following results were obtained: 1. The mentoring contents were classified from seven viewpoints: “facts in the lesson”, “activities of the student teacher”, “facts about children”, “understanding of teaching materials”, “ideas as a teacher”, “ideas of student teachers” and “ideas of the mentor”. 2. The mentor's seven viewpoints were classified into two broad categories, i.e. “lessons” and “ideas”, as well as three small categories, i.e. “student teachers”, “children” and “teaching materials”. 3. The mentor talked about “children” in order to change the student teachers' interest from their teaching to pupil learning during the lesson. 4. The mentor talked about “ideas” in order to change the student teachers' interest from pupil learning to lesson objectives and the intended teaching activities during the lesson. 5. The mentor talked about “teaching materials” in order to deepen the student teachers' understanding of teaching materials when able to share the lesson objectives with them.
Heart Rate Variability Among Children With Acquired Brain Injury

Objective To find evidence of autonomic imbalance and present the heart rate variability (HRV) parameters that reflect the severity of paroxysmal sympathetic hyperactivity (PSH) in children with acquired brain injury (ABI). Methods Thirteen children with ABI were enrolled and age- and sex-matched children with cerebral palsy were selected as the control group (n=13). The following HRV parameters were calculated: time-domain indices including the mean heart rate, standard deviation of all average R-R intervals (SDNN), root mean square of the successive differences (RMSSD), physical stress index (PSI), approximate entropy (ApEn); successive R-R interval difference (SRD), and frequency domain indices including total power (TP), high frequency (HF), low frequency (LF), normalized HF, normalized LF, and LF/HF ratio. Results There were significant differences between the ABI and control groups in the mean heart rate, RMSSD, PSI and all indices of the frequency domain analysis. The mean heart rate, PSI, normalized LF, and LF/HF ratio increased in the ABI group. The presence of PSH symptoms in the ABI group demonstrated a statistically significant decline of the SDNN, TP, ln TP. Conclusion The differences in the HRV parameters and presence of PSH symptoms are noted among ABI children compared to an age- and sex-matched control group with cerebral palsy. Within the ABI group, the presence of PSH symptoms influenced the parameters of HRV such as SDNN, TP and ln TP.
Effects of Direct Social Experience on Trust Decisions and Neural Reward Circuitry

The human striatum is integral for reward-processing and supports learning by linking experienced outcomes with prior expectations. Recent endeavors implicate the striatum in processing outcomes of social interactions, such as social approval/rejection, as well as in learning reputations of others. Interestingly, social impressions often influence our behavior with others during interactions. Information about an interaction partner’s moral character acquired from biographical information hinders updating of expectations after interactions via top down modulation of reward circuitry. An outstanding question is whether initial impressions formed through experience similarly modulate the ability to update social impressions at the behavioral and neural level. We investigated the role of experienced social information on trust behavior and reward-related BOLD activity. Participants played a computerized ball-tossing game with three fictional partners manipulated to be perceived as good, bad, or neutral. Participants then played an iterated trust game as investors with these same partners while undergoing fMRI. Unbeknownst to participants, partner behavior in the trust game was random and unrelated to their ball-tossing behavior. Participants’ trust decisions were influenced by their prior experience in the ball-tossing game, investing less often with the bad partner compared to the good and neutral. Reinforcement learning models revealed that participants were more sensitive to updating their beliefs about good and bad partners when experiencing outcomes consistent with initial experience. Increased striatal and anterior cingulate BOLD activity for positive versus negative trust game outcomes emerged, which further correlated with model-derived prediction error learning signals. These results suggest that initial impressions formed from direct social experience can be continually shaped by consistent information through reward learning mechanisms.
Humor Facilitates Text Comprehension: Evidence from Eye Movements

One crucial property of verbal jokes is that the punchline usually contains an incongruency that has to be resolved by updating the situation model representation. In the standard pragmatic model, these processes are considered to require cognitive effort. However, only few studies compared jokes to texts requiring a situation model revision without being funny. In the present study participants' eye movements were recorded while they read short texts falling into four categories: jokes, texts that made a revision of the situation model necessary without being funny (revision texts), and two types of control texts. Jokes were read faster and elicited fewer regressive eye movements than the other text categories. Women were more sensitive to revision and inference demands of nonhumorous texts than men, and this was particularly the case when the instructions required a meta-linguistic evaluation. In contrast to the predictions of the two-stage model of pragmatics, humor appreciation facilitated text comprehension, and this effect was more pronounced for men than for women.
PREVENTING THE FORGOTTEN URETERIC STENT: RESULTS FROM THE IMPLEMENTATION OF AN ELECTRONIC STENT REGISTER

The use of ureteric stents in urological practice is now routine, but is associated with shortand long-term complications. Early stent-related problems include pain, bothersome urinary symptoms, haematuria, UTI, and migration [1–4]. However, the sequelae from stents left in situ for long periods are more serious. In a series of 22 ‘forgotten’ stents left in situ for >6 months, Monga et al. [5] found that 68% were calcified, 45% fragmented, and 14% fragmented and calcified. In that series, 52% subsequently required ureteroscopy, 26% percutaneous nephroscopy, 32% ESWL, 3% open cystolitholapaxy, and 3% nephrectomy. Further reports also highlight the complicated management of patients with forgotten encrusted stents. A small series of encrusted retained stents was described by Borboroglu and Kane [6]; on average, patients needed between two and six endourological procedures to render them stoneand stent-free.
Individual Tree-Crown Delineation and Treetop Detection in High-Spatial-Resolution Aerial Imagery

The cost of forest sampling can be reduced substantially by the ability to estimate forest and tree parameters directly from aerial photographs. However, in order to do so it is necessary to be able to accurately identify individual treetops and then to define the region in the vicinity of the treetop that encompasses the crown extent. These two steps commonly have been treated independently. In this paper, we derive individual tree-crown boundaries and treetop locations under a unified framework. We applied a two-stage approach with edge detection followed by markercontrolled watershed segmentation. A Laplacian of Gaussian edge detection method at the smallest effective scale was employed to mask out the background. An eight-connectivity scheme was used to label the remaining tree objects in the edge map. Subsequently, treetops are modeled based on both radiometry and geometry. More specifically, treetops are assumed to be represented by local radiation maxima and also to be located near the center of the tree-crown. As a result, a marker image was created from the derived treetop to guide a watershed segmentation to further differentiate touching and clumping trees and to produce a segmented image comprised of individual tree crowns. Our methods were developed on a 256- by 256-pixel CASI image of a commercially thinned trial forest. A promising agreement between our automatic methods and manual delineation results was achieved in counting the number of trees as well as in delineating tree crowns.