Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Beneficial Effect of Cholinesterase Inhibitor Medications on Recognition Memory Performance in Mild to Moderate Alzheimer’s Disease: Preliminary Findings

Cholinesterase inhibitor (ChEI) medications (ie, donepezil, rivastigmine, and galantamine) have been useful in slowing the progression of the mild to moderate stages of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Findings supporting this have largely relied on a global error score from the Alzheimer’s Disease Assessment Scale and have not described the nature of the memory problems. We examined this issue by comparing learning, recall, and recognition scores among 2 groups of mild to moderately demented AD patients. Participants were patients from a memory clinic who either were on ChEI treatment (AD+ChEI, n = 14) or had never taken a ChEI (AD-ChEI, n = 14). Participants underwent a comprehensive neuropsychological evaluation, including administration of the CERAD Word List Memory test. Results indicated no significant group difference for learning and delayed free recall, but the AD+ChEI group had significantly fewer errors than the AD-ChEI group on the CERAD Recognition test. Our findings provide preliminary evidence that the aspect of memory that is most affected by ChEIs appears to be facilitation of retention of new information in memory. The implications of this on clinical care and functional abilities as well as future directions are discussed.
A V2X-based approach for reduction of delay propagation in vehicular Ad-Hoc networks

In this paper we investigate the time delay propagation rates in a Vehicular Ad-Hoc Network, where vehicular connectivity is supported by both Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) protocols. In our vision, seamless connectivity issues in a VANET with nearby network infrastructure, can be fixed by an opportunistic choice of a vehicular protocol between V2V and V2I. Such a decision is taken by each vehicle whenever it needs to transmit messages. Our technique — called as Vehicle-to-X — represents a handoff procedure between V2V and V2I, and vice versa, in order to keep vehicles connected independent of mobility issues and traffic scenarios. We investigate the time delay as a performance metric for protocol switching, and present the time propagation rates which occur when vehicles are transmitting warning messages, via V2V or V2I. Simulation results show how the simultaneous usage of pre-existing network infrastructure, together with inter-vehicular communications, provides low delays; while traditional opportunistic vehicular communications increases the transmission time delays and does not guarantee seamless connectivity to vehicles.
Learning image Vicept description via mixed-norm regularization for large scale semantic image search

The paradox of visual polysemia and concept polymorphism has been a great challenge in the large scale semantic image search. To address this problem, our paper proposes a new method to generate image Vicept representation. Vicept characterizes the membership distribution between elementary visual appearances and semantic concepts, and forms a hierarchical representation of image semantic from local to global. To obtain discriminative Vicept descriptions with structural sparsity, we adopt mixed-norm regularization in the optimization problem for learning the concept membership distribution of visual word. Furthermore, considering the structure of BOV in images, visual descriptor is encoded as a weighted sum of dictionary elements using group sparse coding, which could obtain sparse representation at the image level. The wide applications of Vicept are validated in our experiments, including large scale semantic image search, image annotation, and semantic image re-ranking.
Life-Cycle Consumption Plans and Portfolio Policies in a Heath-Jarrow-Morton Economy

This paper applies the methods of Detemple, Garcia, and Rindisbacher (2003, 2005) to derive optimal lifetime consumption-portfolio plans in an economy characterized by a N- factor Heath-Jarrow-Morton (1992) bond sector that is Markovian with respect to 3N state variables. The Detemple-Garcia-Rindisbacher methodology is reviewed and its . exibility is further demonstrated.
The Junctional Adhesion Molecule 3 (JAM-3) on Human Platelets is a Counterreceptor for the Leukocyte Integrin Mac-1

The recently described junctional adhesion molecules (JAMs) in man and mice are involved in homotypic and heterotypic intercellular interactions. Here, a third member of this family, human JAM-3, was identified and described as a novel counterreceptor on platelets for the leukocyte β2-integrin Mac-1 (αMβ2, CD11b/CD18). With the help of two monoclonal antibodies, Gi11 and Gi13, against a 43-kD surface glycoprotein on human platelets, a full-length cDNA encoding JAM-3 was identified. JAM-3 is a type I transmembrane glycoprotein containing two Ig-like domains. Although JAM-3 did not undergo homophilic interactions, myelo-monocytic cells adhered to immobilized JAM-3 or to JAM-3–transfected cells. This heterophilic interaction was specifically attributed to a direct interaction of JAM-3 with the β2-integrin Mac-1 and to a lower extent with p150.95 (αXβ2, CD11c/CD18) but not with LFA-1 (αLβ2, CD11a/CD18) or with β1-integrins. These results were corroborated by analysis of K562 erythroleukemic cells transfected with different heterodimeric β2-integrins and by using purified proteins. Moreover, purified JAM-3 or antibodies against JAM-3 blocked the platelet-neutrophil interaction, indicating that platelet JAM-3 serves as a counterreceptor for Mac-1 mediating leukocyte–platelet interactions. JAM-3 thereby provides a novel molecular target for antagonizing interactions between vascular cells that promote inflammatory vascular pathologies such as in atherothrombosis.
Stated Preferences of Doctors for Choosing a Job in Rural Areas of Peru: A Discrete Choice Experiment

Background Doctors’ scarcity in rural areas remains a serious problem in Latin America and Peru. Few studies have explored job preferences of doctors working in underserved areas. We aimed to investigate doctors’ stated preferences for rural jobs. Methods and Findings A labelled discrete choice experiment (DCE) was performed in Ayacucho, an underserved department of Peru. Preferences were assessed for three locations: rural community, Ayacucho city (Ayacucho’s capital) and other provincial capital city. Policy simulations were run to assess the effect of job attributes on uptake of a rural post. Multiple conditional logistic regressions were used to assess the relative importance of job attributes and of individual characteristics. A total of 102 doctors participated. They were five times more likely to choose a job post in Ayacucho city over a rural community (OR 4.97, 95%CI 1.2; 20.54). Salary increases and bonus points for specialization acted as incentives to choose a rural area, while increase in the number of years needed to get a permanent post acted as a disincentive. Being male and working in a hospital reduced considerably chances of choosing a rural job, while not living with a partner increased them. Policy simulations showed that a package of 75% salary increase, getting a permanent contract after two years in rural settings, and getting bonus points for further specialisation increased rural job uptake from 21% to 77%. A package of 50% salary increase plus bonus points for further specialisation would also increase the rural uptake from 21% to 52%. Conclusions Doctors are five times more likely to favour a job in urban areas over rural settings. This strong preference needs to be overcome by future policies aimed at improving the scarcity of rural doctors. Some incentives, alone or combined, seem feasible and sustainable, whilst others may pose a high fiscal burden.
Increased exposure to sodium during pregnancy and lactation changes basal and induced behavioral and neuroendocrine responses in adult male offspring

Excessive sodium (Na+) intake in modern society has been associated with several chronic disorders such as hypertension. Several studies suggest that early life events can program physiological systems and lead to functional changes in adulthood. Therefore, we investigated behavioral and neuroendocrine responses under basal conditions and after 48 h of water deprivation in adult (60‐day‐old Wistar rats) male, Wistar rats originating from dams were offered only water or 0.15 mol/L NaCl during pregnancy and lactation. Early life salt exposure induced kidney damage, as shown by a higher number of ED‐1 positive cells (macrophages/monocytes), increased daily urinary volume and Na+ excretion, blunted basal water intake and plasma oxytocin levels, and increased plasma corticosterone secretion. When challenged with water deprivation, animals exposed to 0.15 mol/L NaCl during early life showed impaired water intake, reduced salt preference ratio, and vasopressin (AVP) secretion. In summary, our data demonstrate that the perinatal exposure to excessive Na+ intake can induce kidney injury in adult offspring and significantly affect the key mechanisms regulating water balance, fluid intake, and AVP release in response to water deprivation. Collectively, these novel results highlight the impact of perinatal programming on the homeostatic mechanisms regulating fluid and electrolyte balance during exposure to an environmental stress (i.e. dehydration) in later life.
USE OF SOCL\L ECOLOGY MODEL TO ADDRESS ALCOHOL USE AMONG COLLEGE ATHLETES

Compared to non-athletes, college athletes consume more alcohol and report higher rates of alcohol-relat ed consequences such as DUI, unsafe sexual practices, and criminal behavior. This poses major problems for the integrity of college athletics, athletic department personnel, and health educators who work to reduce destructive alcohol behaviors on campus. To understand why current alcohol education is ineffective, it is necessary to examine the ecology of this behavior. This article examines alcohol use among college athletes using the Social Ecology Model to determine what most injluences this behavior. A proposed ecological model specific to alcohol use among college athletes is discussed.
Direct Innervation and Modulation of Orexin Neurons by Lateral Hypothalamic LepRb Neurons

Leptin, the adipose-derived hormonal signal of body energy stores, acts via the leptin receptor (LepRb) on neurons in multiple brain regions. We previously identified LepRb neurons in the lateral hypothalamic area (LHA), which are distinct from neighboring leptin-regulated melanin-concentrating hormone (MCH)- or orexin (OX)-expressing cells. Neither the direct synaptic targets of LHA LepRb neurons nor their potential role in the regulation of other LHA neurons has been determined, however. We thus generated several adenoviral and transgenic systems in which cre recombinase promotes the expression of the tracer, WGA (wheat germ agglutinin), and used these in combination with LepRbcre mice to determine the neuronal targets of LHA LepRb neurons. This analysis revealed that, although some LHA LepRb neurons project to dopamine neurons in the ventral tegmental area, LHA LepRb neurons also densely innervate the LHA where they directly synapse with OX, but not MCH, neurons. Indeed, few other LepRb neurons in the brain project to the OX-containing region of the mouse LHA, and direct leptin action via LHA LepRb neurons regulates gene expression in OX neurons. These findings thus reveal a major role for LHA leptin action in the modulation of OX neurons, suggesting the importance of LHA LepRb neurons in the regulation of OX signaling that is crucial to leptin action and metabolic control.
Large-Scale QSO-Galaxy Correlations for Radio-Loud and Optically Selected QSO Samples

We have studied the distribution of BJ < 20.5 galaxies from the Royal Observatory Edinburgh/Naval Research Laboratory COSMOS/UKST catalog around two samples of z > 0.3 QSOs with similar redshift distributions. The first sample is formed by 144 radio-loud QSOs from the Parkes catalog (PKS), and the other contains 167 optically selected QSOs extracted from the Large Bright Quasar Survey (LBQS). It is found that there is a ≈ 99.0% significance level excess of COSMOS/UKST galaxies around the PKS QSOs, whereas there is a marginal defect of galaxies around the LBQS QSOs. When the distribution of galaxies around both samples is compared, we find that there is an overdensity of galaxies around the PKS sample with respect to the LBQS sample anticorrelated with the distance from the QSOs at a 99.7% significance level. Although this result apparently agrees with the predictions of the multiple magnification bias, it is difficult to explain by gravitational lensing effects alone; dust in the foreground galaxies and selection effects in the detection of LBQS QSOs should be taken into account. It has been established that the lines of sight to PKS flat-spectrum QSOs go through significantly higher foreground galaxy densities than the directions to LBQS quasars, what may be partially related to the reported reddening of PKS QSOs.
Ionospheric calibration of low frequency radio interferometric observations using the peeling scheme I. Method description and first results

Calibration of radio interferometric observations becomes increasingly difficult towards lower frequencies. Below ∼300 MHz, spatially variant refractions and propagation delays of radio waves traveling through the ionosphere cause phase rotations that can vary significantly with time, viewing direction and antenna location. In this article we present a description and first results of SPAM (Source Peeling and Atmospheric Modeling), a new calibration method that attempts to iteratively solve and correct for ionospheric phase errors. To model the ionosphere, we construct a time-variant, 2-dimensional phase screen at fixed height above the Earth’s surface. Spatial variations are described by a truncated set of discrete Karhunen-Loeve base functions, optimized for an assumed power-law spectral density of free electrons density fluctuations, and a given configuration of calibrator sources and antenna locations. The model is constrained using antenna-based gain phases from individual self-calibrations on the available bright sources in the field-of-view. Application of SPAM on three test cases, a simulated visibility data set and two selected 74 MHz VLA data sets, yields significant improvements in image background noise (5–75 percent reduction) and source peak fluxes (up to 25 percent increase) as compared to the existing self-calibration and field-based calibration methods, which indicates a significant improvement in ionospheric phase calibration accuracy.
Sketch Recognition in Software Design

tion may be voiced during a software design meeting. We can capture the spoken and visual software design meeting information by videotaping the meeting and any white-boards used. By indexing these videos, we make it easy to retrieve the videotaped information without watching the entire video from start to nish. Motivation: We want to allow software design meetings to continue as they are, with software designers discussing the design and drawing free-hand sketches of these designs on a white-board. Using our system, designers can sketch naturally, as we place few requirements on the sketcher. We recognize and interpret these diagrams using sketch recognition. Because the diagrams are interpreted, we provide natural editing capabilities to the designers, allowing the users to edit their original strokes in an intuitive way. For instance, the designer can drag their drawn class from the center and move all of the strokes used to draw the class as well as stretch and skew the strokes used to create an attached arrow. The interpreted diagrams are used to automatically generate stub code using a software engineering tool. Software design meetings are videotaped to capture visual and spoken design information unobtrusively. When drawn items are interpreted, we use these understood sketch events to index the videotape of the software design meeting. We decided to design our application as a Metaglue agent since the Metaglue agent architecture provides support for multi-modal interactions through speech, gesture, and graphical user interfaces[2]. The Metaglue agent architecture also provides mechanisms for resource discovery and management which allows us to use available video agents or screen capture agents in a Metaglue supported room. We have selected UML-type diagrams because they are a de facto standard for depicting software applications. Within UML [1] we focused on class diagrams, rst because of their central role in describing program structure, and second because many of the symbols used in class diagrams are quite similar, and hence, offer an interesting challenge for sketch recognition. We added several symbols for agent-design since many of the applications created in the Intelligent Room [6] of the MIT AI Lab are
Gestures and Lip Shape Integration for Cued Speech Recognition

In this article, automatic recognition of Cued Speech in French based on hidden Markov models (HMMs) is presented. Cued Speech is a visual mode, which uses hand shapes in different positions and in combination with lip-patterns of speech makes all the sounds of spoken language clearly understandable to deaf and hearing-impaired people. The aim of Cued Speech is to overcome the problems of lipreading and thus enable deaf children and adults to understand full spoken language. In this study, lip shape component is fused with hand component using also multistream HMM decision fusion to realize Cued Speech recognition, and continuous phoneme recognition experiments using data from a normal-hearing and a deaf cuer were conducted. In the case of the normal-hearing cuer, the obtained phoneme accuracy was 83.5%, and in the case of the deaf cuer 82.1%.
Run-toRun MPC Tuning via Gradient Descent Gene

A gradient-descent method for the run-to-run tuning of MPC c ontrollers is proposed. It is shown that, with an assumption on process repeatability, th e MPC tuning parameters may be brought to a locally optimal set. SISO and MIMO examples il lu trate the characteristics of the proposed approach.
Ancient Origin and Recent Innovations of RNA Polymerase IV and V

Small RNA-mediated chromatin modification is a conserved feature of eukaryotes. In flowering plants, the short interfering (si)RNAs that direct transcriptional silencing are abundant and subfunctionalization has led to specialized machinery responsible for synthesis and action of these small RNAs. In particular, plants possess polymerase (Pol) IV and Pol V, multi-subunit homologs of the canonical DNA-dependent RNA Pol II, as well as specialized members of the RNA-dependent RNA Polymerase (RDR), Dicer-like (DCL), and Argonaute (AGO) families. Together these enzymes are required for production and activity of Pol IV-dependent (p4-)siRNAs, which trigger RNA-directed DNA methylation (RdDM) at homologous sequences. p4-siRNAs accumulate highly in developing endosperm, a specialized tissue found only in flowering plants, and are rare in nonflowering plants, suggesting that the evolution of flowers might coincide with the emergence of specialized RdDM machinery. Through comprehensive identification of RdDM genes from species representing the breadth of the land plant phylogeny, we describe the ancient origin of Pol IV and Pol V, suggesting that a nearly complete and functional RdDM pathway could have existed in the earliest land plants. We also uncover innovations in these enzymes that are coincident with the emergence of seed plants and flowering plants, and recent duplications that might indicate additional subfunctionalization. Phylogenetic analysis reveals rapid evolution of Pol IV and Pol V subunits relative to their Pol II counterparts and suggests that duplicates were retained and subfunctionalized through Escape from Adaptive Conflict. Evolution within the carboxy-terminal domain of the Pol V largest subunit is particularly striking, where illegitimate recombination facilitated extreme sequence divergence.
An Evolutionary Approach for Scalable Load Balancing in Cluster Computing

The proliferation of the World Wide Web and the pervasiveness of the related technologies have increased the demand of high performance clusters and distributed resources. Load balancing of the systems in which heterogeneous servers and resources are distributed becomes a key factor in achieving a rapid response time, efficient resource utilization and consequently higher throughput. In a large scale distributed environment, Load balancing using mobile agents holds appeal in comparison with pure message passing protocol scheme. In this paper, the integration of a Genetic Algorithm with the Sender Initiated Approach for server selection serves as a promising possibility for efficient load balancing and effective resource utilization in distributed systems.
Why Have Auctions Been Losing Market Shares to Bookbuilding in IPO Markets?

We analyze Taiwan's IPO auctions to shed light on the diminishing role of auctions in IPO markets. In contrast to Ljungqvist and Wilhelm's (2002) results for bookbuilding IPOs, we find that underpricing increases with institutional allocation in auctions. This implies that issuing firms in auctions with higher institutional allocations leave more money on the table. Retail investors earn zero abnormal returns, suggesting that auctions do not benefit them. Institutional investors earn positive abnormal returns, but receive much lower allocations than in countries with bookbuilding. The results suggest that under bookbuilding underwriters could compensate institutional investors with higher allocations and lower underpricing, simultaneously reducing money left on the table and increasing institutional investors' expected dollar profits. This would benefit issuing firms and institutional investors, while not harming retail investors. Our welfare analysis implies that auctions are an inferior IPO method.
Evaluating multi-paradigm BCI interaction

The multimodal, multi-paradigm brain-computer interfacing (BCI) game Bacteria Hunt was used to evaluate two aspects of BCI interaction in a gaming context. One goal was to examine the effect of feedback on the ability of the user to manipulate his mental state of relaxation. This was done by having one condition in which the subject played the game with real feedback, and another with sham feed- back. The feedback did not seem to affect the game experi- ence (such as sense of control and tension) or the objective indicators of relaxation, alpha activity and heart rate. The results are discussed with regard to clinical neurofeedback studies. The second goal was to look into possible inter- actions between the two BCI paradigms used in the game: steady-state visually-evoked potentials (SSVEP) as an indi- cator of concentration, and alpha activity as a measure of
A general framework for mining relations for the semantic web

Automatic ontology learning is inevitable for the expansion of the Semantic Web. This paper lists basic problems of ontology learning at first. Then it proposes a general framework for mining relations from various sources to build ontologies for the semantic web. The framework aims at solving the problems of ontology learning by concentrating on the generic relation "is related to" between objects on the web. It is based on the fact that every data source on the web has a certain clearly defined structure which can be used to automatically extract semantic relations. To define the strength of the semantic relation frequent item set mining is proposed.