Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Recognition and Analysis of the Contours Drawn during the Poppelreuter's Test

This study aims to digitalize the Poppelreuter's overlapping figures test. The Poppelreuter's test used in psychology and neurology to assess visual perceptual function. Its recent modification performed with pencil and paper. Replacing the pencil and paper by the tablet computer equipped with the stylus, allows recording and analyzing fine motor motions observed during the test. On the one hand, this provides an opportunity to compute the measures describing condition of the participant. On the other hand, this possess two major problems to be tackled. The first one is to recognize the contours of the overlapping objects drawn by the participant. In the case of severe neurologic disorder, dissimilarity between the etalon shape and drawn contour may be very high. The second problem is to identify errors made during the drawing. The both problems are addressed within this study. Traditional machine learning techniques K-means, k-nearest neighbors and random forest used in this study to identify drawn contours and drawing mistakes. Finally, to demonstrate applicability of the proposed approach, kinematic parameters analyzed for the pilot groups of Parkinson Disease patients and healthy individuals.
Bone marrow-derived multidrug resistance protein ABCB 4 protects against atherosclerotic lesion development in LDL receptor knockout mice ☆

Objective: Several members of the ATP binding cassette (ABC)-transporter super family expressed in macrophages protect against atherosclerosis by promoting macrophage cholesterol and phospholipid efflux. Systemic disruption of ABCB4 in mice results in a virtual absence of phospholipids in bile and a strongly impaired biliary cholesterol secretion, indicating that ABCB4 plays an essential role in cellular lipid efflux. The aim of the current study was to determine the role of bone marrow-derived ABCB4 in atherosclerotic lesion development. Methods: Chimeras were created that specifically lack ABCB4 in bone marrow-derived cells, including macrophages, by performing a bone marrow transplantation on LDL receptor knockout (LDLr−/−) mice. Atherosclerotic lesion development was induced by feeding a highcholesterol diet (15% fat and 0.25% cholesterol). Results: Serum cholesterol levels were significantly lower inmice reconstitutedwith ABCB4 knockout bonemarrow as a result of reducedVLDL and LDL cholesterol levels. Despite the lower serum cholesterol levels, ABCB4 deficiency in bone marrow-derived cells resulted in a 1.8-fold (p=0.005) increase in lesion size. In vitro foam cell formation, inducedwith acetylated LDL (AcLDL) in peritonealmacrophages, was increased in the absence of ABCB4, possibly due to a 2-fold (pb0.05) increased association of AcLDL, while the efflux of cholesterol was unaffected. Conclusion: Bone marrow-derived ABCB4 has an important anti-atherosclerotic function, probably by limiting macrophage foam cell formation. © 2007 European Society of Cardiology. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. eb rary 0, 2013
Minimizing network contention for mapping tasks onto massively parallel computers

This paper presents a new framework aimed at compile-time determination of satisfactory sub-optimal solutions to the mapping problem onto modern massively parallel computing systems. The approach incorporates realistic assumptions on the models both for parallel programs and target architectures. It is refined for the K-ary n-cube family of processor networks that use a deterministic routing algorithm and the wormhole flow control strategy. The proposed mapping heuristic is guided by an evaluation function that approximates the total completion time of a given assignment by taking into account communication delays caused by network contention which are the major contributors to message latencies when network traffic is heavy or unevenly distributed. Results achieved on several program-derived graphs with up to 784 tasks prove the effectiveness of this approach. <<ETX>>
Functional Organization of the Brain and Psychic Activity: A View Beyond Luria (With Luria)

This paper reviews, elaborates, and rebuilds Luria’s model of the three functional units of the brain. As a result, five functional brain units have been delineated: preferential (unit for life-support and arousal regulation), limbic (unit for valuation/motivation and for context memory), cortical and thalamic-cortical (“the conscious agent”), basal ganglia (”the reinforcer”), and cerebellar (”the supervisor”). The new model is more realistic; it includes elements missing from Luria’s model and avoids a corticocentric approach. It will allow a better analysis of the effects of brain pathology on cognition, neuropsychiatry, and behavior. Within the framework, the concept of complex functional system is maintained and expanded. Keywords: brain, functional model, complex systems, cortex, Luria
Testability driven statistical path selection

In the face of large-scale process variations, statistical timing methodology has advanced significantly over the last few years, and statistical path selection takes advantage of it in at-speed testing. In deterministic path selection, the separation of path selection and test generation is known to require time consuming iteration between the two processes. This paper shows that in statistical path selection, this is not only the case, but also the quality of results can be severely degraded even after the iteration. To deal with this issue, we consider testability in the first place by integrating a SAT solver, and this necessitates a new statistical path selection method. Our proposed method is based on a generalized path criticality metric which properties allow efficient pruning. Our experimental results show that the proposed method achieves 47% better quality of results on average, and up to 361x speedup compared to statistical path selection followed by test generation.
Homology TQFT's and the Alexander–Reidemeister Invariant of 3-Manifolds via Hopf Algebras and Skein Theory

Abstract We develop an explicit skein-theoretical algorithm to compute the Alexander polynomial of a 3-manifold from a surgery presentation employing the methods used in the construction of quantum invariants of 3-manifolds. As a prerequisite we establish and prove a rather unexpected equivalence between the topological quantum field theory constructed by Frohman and Nicas using the homology of $U\left( 1 \right)$ -representation varieties on the one side and the combinatorially constructed Hennings TQFT based on the quasitriangular Hopf algebra $\mathcal{N=}\mathbb{Z}\text{/2}\ltimes {{\wedge }^{*}}{{\mathbb{R}}^{2}}$ on the other side. We find that both TQFT's are $\text{SL}\left( 2,\,\mathbb{R} \right)$ -equivariant functors and, as such, are isomorphic. The $\text{SL}\left( 2,\,\mathbb{R} \right)$ -action in the Hennings construction comes from the natural action on $\mathcal{N}$ and in the case of the Frohman–Nicas theory from the Hard–Lefschetz decomposition of the $U\left( 1 \right)$ -moduli spaces given that they are naturally Kähler. The irreducible components of this TQFT, corresponding to simple representations of $\text{SL}\left( 2,\,\mathbb{Z} \right)\,\text{and}\,\text{Sp}\left( 2g,\,\mathbb{Z} \right)$ , thus yield a large family of homological TQFT's by taking sums and products. We give several examples of TQFT's and invariants that appear to fit into this family, such as Milnor and Reidemeister Torsion, Seiberg–Witten theories, Casson type theories for homology circles à la Donaldson, higher rank gauge theories following Frohman and Nicas, and the $\mathbb{Z}/p\mathbb{Z}$ reductions of Reshetikhin–Turaev theories over the cyclotomic integers $\mathbb{Z}[{{\zeta }_{p}}]$ . We also conjecture that the Hennings TQFT for quantum- $\mathfrak{s}{{\mathfrak{l}}_{2}}$ is the product of the Reshetikhin–Turaev TQFT and such a homological TQFT.
Produced by Alternative Splicing A Novel Form of Prostate-specific Antigen Transcript

Molecular characterization of prostate-specific antigen (PSA) has not been well elucidated, despite a great deal of clinical study. We examined the heterogeneity of PSA using reverse transcription-PCR and direct sequencing. A novel, alternatively spliced variant of thePSA transcript was found in prostate cancer (PC), as well as in benign prostatic tissue. This alternative splicing leads to the deletion of 44 amino acid residues (amino acids 45–88) from mature PSA, resulting in the loss of asparagine 45, which is a binding site for a carbohydrate chain. By these nested reverse transcription-PCR systems, this novel, alternatively splicedPSA gene was recognized in 13 of 18 (72.2%) cases with noncancerous prostate tissue, 4 of 5 (80.0%) PC cases, and 3 of 12 (25.0%) blood samples from PC patients (noncancerous prostate tissue groupversus blood sample group, P 5 0.011). At present, the biological significance of this alternative splicing remains to be established.
Street-Level Bureaucrats and the Welfare State

In the era of “activation,” which is characterized by the decentralization and individualization of social services, welfare caseworkers play an increasingly important role in shaping the policy outcomes of the welfare state. In this article, it is argued that to theoretically accommodate the complex institutional and systemic environments in which today’s caseworkers operate, the street-level bureaucracy approach introduced by Lipsky should be married with institutionalist theory, thereby laying the groundwork for a micro-institutionalist theory of policy implementation.
Improving Chinese to English SMT with Multiple CWS Results

In Chinese to English statistical machine translation (SMT), Chinese texts always need a pre-processing high segments sentences into words and this standard approach is Chinese word segmentation (CWS). However, CWS is not developed for SMT, its results are not necessarily optimal for SMT. In recent years, many investigations have been performed concerning making CWS suitable for SMT, but we explore it from another direction. In this paper, our basic idea is to use multiple CWS results as additional language knowledge sources and we present a simple and effective approach to use multiple CWS results for SMT. We also give experiment results over range of strategy settings, and obtain substantial improvements in performance for translation from Chinese to English. The best result shows we gain 1.89 BLEU percentage points over a state of the art HPBT baseline system without using multiple CWS results.
Graphical Models and Point Pattern Matching

This paper describes a novel solution to the rigid point pattern matching problem in Euclidean spaces of any dimension. Although we assume rigid motion, jitter is allowed. We present a noniterative, polynomial time algorithm that is guaranteed to find an optimal solution for the noiseless case. First, we model point pattern matching as a weighted graph matching problem, where weights correspond to Euclidean distances between nodes. We then formulate graph matching as a problem of finding a maximum probability configuration in a graphical model. By using graph rigidity arguments, we prove that a sparse graphical model yields equivalent results to the fully connected model in the noiseless case. This allows us to obtain an algorithm that runs in polynomial time and is provably optimal for exact matching between noiseless point sets. For inexact matching, we can still apply the same algorithm to find approximately optimal solutions. Experimental results obtained by our approach show improvements in accuracy over current methods, particularly when matching patterns of different sizes
Metacognition and insight in health, psychosis and dementia: relationship with mood and neurocognition

Lack of awareness of illness (insight) is a well recognised problem in clinical syndromes such as first episode psychosis and dementia. In healthy persons, ability to accurately rate our thoughts and behaviours is also often referred to as metacognition and there is also some debate as to whether the accuracy of our self-awareness diminishes during healthy ageing. Low mood is often noted to be associated with better insight in clinical groups, however it is not clear whether this also mediates awareness is healthy adults. Some aspects of insight are also mediated by cognitive abilities; more work is required in this area in healthy adults. Awareness and metacognition are often used interchangeably in the clinical literature, despite the methods differing drastically between healthy and clinical awareness studies. The aims of this thesis were: - to investigate the similarities and differences between insight and experimental measures of metacognitive efficiency across the adult life span and in patients experiencing their first episode of psychosis (FEP), early-stage dementia (ED) and depression. - to quantify the insight and metacognitive functional abilities and deficits in these groups. - to investigate the effect of mood and cognitive abilities on insight and metacognitive efficiency. - to run a pilot neuroimaging study aimed at investigating the structural neural correlates of both cognitive insight and metacognitive efficiency in ED patients. Both clinical measures of insight and experimentally derived metacognitive tasks were used. Results indicate age, memory and mood mediate metacognitive efficiency in healthy adults, with small associations between metacognitive efficiency and some measures of insight when controlling for age. In patients, results suggest that mood is associated with cognitive insight in FEP, but not metacognitive efficiency in either early dementia or psychosis. Further, there was an association between cognition and metacognitive efficiency in FEP, but not ED. There was no association between insight and metacognitive efficiency in either patient group. Comparing groups, FEP patients have worse metacognitive efficiency that healthy younger adults but not insight, whereas there was no difference between ED and healthy older adults. FEP patients appear to have better self-reflection on clinical scales than ED patients, whereas there was no difference between the two groups in metacognitive efficiency. The imaging study indicated that measures of cognitive insight and metacognitive efficiency have overlapping structural correlates in the cortical midline structures. Implications for these findings in both healthy adults and patients are discussed.
MOOCs in teacher education: institutional and pedagogical change?

ABSTRACT We study the implementation of a MOOC initiative which involved two distinct teacher education institutions at HEIs, and where the implementation was led by a governmental body. Our aim was to see in what ways this initiative changed the teacher education involved, in terms of institutional organisation and pedagogics. Based on interviews with stakeholders from the government and from the two HEIs, we found that the process of implementing and piloting the MOOC faced various sorts of resistance. Our study might serve as a contribution to researchers and practitioners involved in development and running MOOCs as cross institutional initiatives, in that it addresses the diversity of challenges new study models are facing within HEIs. It may also be of interest to teacher education departments responsible for continuing education programs, since it demonstrates the opportunities that comes with a MOOC to provide larger groups of in-service teachers with new educational possibilities.
Combining Process-Based Cache Partitioning and Pollute Region Isolation to Improve Shared Last Level Cache Utilization on Multicore Systems

Shared last level cache has been widely used in modern multicore processors. However, uncontrolled cache sharing on multicore leads to more serious cache pollution than that on single-core processor. A process with weak locality can evict strong locality data sets that belong to other concurrent ones. Processes in multiprocessing environment always affect each other on multicore systems with shared last level cache. Prior approaches either partition shared cache in process level to reduce inter-process cache contention, or isolate the non-temporal memory accesses in order to accelerate single application execution. Process-based cache partitioning may make intra-process cache pollution more serious and have great impact on single process performance. In this work, we take an alternative view to explore physical page layout optimization by combining process-based cache partitioning and pollute region isolation for improving the shared last level cache utilization on multicore systems. Our proposed approach includes three steps. The first step determines the cache sizes of co-scheduled applications and the second step recognizes weak-locality regions of each application on different cache size configurations. Lastly, the third step customizes the physical page layout to partition cache space among concurrent processes and set up global pollute buffer for mapping pollute regions into a small slice of shared last level cache. Our approach is directly used in commercial multicore systems without any additional hardware requirement. Our experimental results show that in comparison with default Linux memory management scheme, our approach improves performance by 26.73% on average. Even compared to the process-based cache partitioning RapidMRC, our approach further eliminates the harmful effect of non-reusable data, and system performance is also improved by 5.63% on average.
Effect of muscle torques ratios and age category on judo fight

Background and Study Aim. The review of the studies that have examined fitness preparation of judokas shows that both dynamic and static strength testing protocols have been in use in judo. Therefore, it can be assumed that strength is an important component of athletes’ motor preparation. The principal aim of the present study was to find proportions between relative muscle torques at each stage of athletes’ development. Material and Methods. The examinations involved e.g. biometric measurements (BH – body height,BM – body mass) and evaluation of body composition (LBM – lean body mass, FM – fat mass, PF – percentage fat content [12]. Body height was measured with Martin type anthropometer. Results. The authors found that the ratios of relative muscle torques that define the position of the elbow, arm and trunk joints correlated with age of the judokas. We also observed a specificity of the judo fight and demonstrated the differences in the level of the indices of activity and effectiveness of attack depending on the age category. Ratios of the muscle torques measured under static conditions correlated with the indices of the course of the fight to different extent and they were in correlation with the age category. The level of achievement in judo tournaments in junior and cadet categories correlated mainly with the ratio of muscle torques in knee extensors to flexors. Lean body mass was calculated by deducting fat mass. Conclusions. The obtained information might help coaches modify strength training regimes in cadet judokas in order to match model levels of ratios of relative muscle torques observed in seniors under static conditions. Biomechanical characteristics of professional athletes might be of importance to both coaches and scientists in the field of robotics.
Multimodal feature generation framework for semantic image classification

The automatic attribution of semantic labels to unlabeled or weakly labeled images has received considerable attention but, given the complexity of the problem, remains a hard research topic. Here we propose a unified classification framework which mixes textual and visual information in a seamless manner. Unlike most recent previous works, computer vision techniques are used as inspiration to process textual information. To do so, we consider two types of complementary tag similarities, respectively computed from a conceptual hierarchy and from data collected from a photo sharing platform. Visual content is processed using recent techniques for bag-of visual-words feature generation. A central contribution of our work is to infer the coding step of the general bag-of-word framework with such similarities and to aggregate these tag-codes by max-pooling to obtain a single representative vector (signature). Final image annotations are obtained via late fusion, where the three modalities (two text-based and one visual-based) are merged during the classification step. Experimental results on the Pascal VOC 2007 and MIR Flickr datasets show an improvement over the state-of-the-art methods, while significantly decreasing the computational complexity of the learning system.
Electrostatic droplet-formation in water/oil flow in a microchannel system

Electrostatic atomization has been studied to inject charged water droplets into oil in a microchannel reactor system. With a negative DC voltage, Taylor cone was formed and the droplets were injected into oil within 1/30 sec. The injection took place periodically with interval of a few seconds when the DC voltage was maintained. Using water, droplets of 10.7 /spl mu/m average diameter with standard deviation of 3.8 /spl mu/m were injected into rapeseed oil. When 50% glycerol was used, droplets of 6.7 /spl mu/m diameter with SD of 2 /spl mu/m were generated. The electrostatic atomization was proved to be effective in a microchannel system to produce charged fine droplets into oil. This will provide a pump-free system as the droplets can be manipulated using electrical force. The results require further improvement to produce more monodisperse droplets.
Pax6−/− Mice have a Cell Non‐Autonomous Defect in Non‐Radial Interneuron Migration

The mammalian neocortex is comprised of neuronal subtypes that can be classified as interneurons and projection neurons. These neuronal populations are derived from distinct progenitor zones: excitatory neurons from the cortical ventricular zone and interneurons from the ganglionic eminence (GE). These separate origins necessitate distinct pathways of migration. Using mouse genetics combined with embryonic forebrain slice culture assays, we sought to identify substrates and/or guidance molecules for non‐radial cell migration (NRCM). Mice carrying a mutation in Pax6 (Small eye, Sey−/ −), a paired domain transcription factor, are reported to have increased numbers of cortical inhibitory interneurons, suggesting Pax6 play a repressive role in guiding NRCM and/or specifying interneurons. Unexpectedly, we found a cell non‐autonomous reduction in the distance Sey−/ − neurons migrated. In contrast, no difference in the number of non‐radially migrating GE cells was observed in Sey−/ − mice. Our data indicate the increased numbers of interneurons observed in Sey−/ − do not result from an increased rate or number of non‐radially migrating cells; instead, loss of Pax6 results in the ectopic specification of interneurons in the cortical ventricular zone.
Hardware implementation of deep brain stimulator on a biophysical neural population model

In this paper we propose a hardware implementation of a new deep brain stimulator that is able to desynchronize an abnormally synchronized neural population model. The proposed stimulator is based on a delay feedback technique and is applied on a population of neurons described with Izhikevich model. The whole structure of the stimulator and the neural population model are first simulated in software and then implemented on hardware FPGA platform. The results of software/hardware simulation/implementation show that the proposed stimulator has a good performance and is able to desynchronize a hyper-synchronized neuronal population model.