Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Reproducibility of activation maps for longitudinal studies of visual function by functional magnetic resonance imaging.

PURPOSE To test the intra- and intersubject reproducibility of brain activation patterns that underlie visually guided saccades and word recognition in normally sighted subjects and patients with macular degeneration using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). METHODS Ten normally sighted subjects and five patients with macular degeneration were asked to perform two visually guided saccade tasks and two word-recognition tasks during fMRI with behavioral monitoring. The fMRI measurements were repeated three times at intervals of at least 4 weeks between sessions. The intrasubject reproducibility of the brain activation patterns was examined in a model-independent manner by comparing the distributions of activation across the frontal, parietal, temporal, and occipital brain lobes using Intraclass Correlation Coefficients (ICCs). Intersubject reproducibility was examined by repeated-measure ANOVA. Results. Control subjects showed overall higher intrasubject reproducibility of brain activation patterns (75% ICCs > 0.5) than that of patients with macular degeneration (56% ICCs > 0.5). The intrasubject reproducibility for the patients improved when the target location was fixed, as in the word-recognition tasks (75% ICCs > 0.5), compared with the visually saccade tasks (37% ICCs > 0.5). Intersubject variability of brain activation patterns was strikingly high for both the control and patient groups. CONCLUSIONS The fMRI method can serve as a reliable within-subjects measure of brain activation that has potential for measuring longitudinal changes in brain networks associated with rehabilitation training. Striking intersubject variability reflected at the level of lobes of the brain among control subjects with similar behavioral performance, suggests individual analysis is necessary when implementing longitudinal brain activation studies.
A Study of Consumers' Intention to Purchase Ethnic Food When Eating at Restaurants

The popularity of ethnic cuisine is increasing in the United States. Since food choice is a complex phenomenon with various factors affecting it, a detailed theoretical and practical examination is used in this study to understand consumers' ethnic eating behavior. The purposes of this study were to: (a) examine the applicability of the modified Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA) model within the restaurant segment and (b) explore psychological and sociological influences related to consumers' intention to purchase ethnic food in restaurants. This study found that the relationship between cognitive evaluation and attitude (β = 0.98) and the relationship between attitude and intention (β = 0.71) were significantly supported (p < 0.01). By understanding consumer behaviors with regard to ethnic foods, restaurant operators and foodservice providers can better meet the needs and desires of consumers while at the same time improve the effectiveness of local food systems.
Interconnect capacitance extraction for system LCD circuits

This paper discusses interconnect capacitance extraction for system LCD circuits, where coupling capacitance is much significant since a ground plane locates far away unlike LSI interconnects. We focus on a pattern matching method with interpolation to implement an accurate and efficient capacitance extraction system, and present good implementations that are suitable for system LCD circuits. To reduce computational cost, interconnect structures are spatially divided into several sub-regions considering capacitance coupling range, and analyzed in each sub-region using a capacitance database pre-characterized by a 3-D field solver. This paper evaluates tradeoff curves between characterization cost and extraction accuracy for four division methods in lattice structures that are basic and common structures in LCD driver circuits. Experimental results reveal efficient division methods for accurate capacitance extraction.
Innovation Policy for Development: An Overview

This presentation on innovation policy development broadens the notion of innovation to include all sorts of "process innovations" and organizational changes. Then it describes innovation and growth in a historical perspective to conclude that innovation policies for development should include much more than just supporting formal R&D projects, more than just in "high tech" sectors. Other topics covered in the presentations include: the economic rationale for government support of innovation and R&D, how to expand spillovers in development economies, key issues in outward vs. locally oriented innovations, general purpose technologies (GPTs), promises and limitations of innovation policies: the case of Israel, how to draw guiding principles for innovation policies, and main levers: skills, incentives, information, finance. This document was presented at the 2005 LAEBA Annual Conference, in Buenos Aires, Argentina
Ubiquitination of tumor suppressor PML regulates prometastatic and immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment

The tumor microenvironment plays an important role in tumor growth and metastasis. However, the mechanism by which tumor cells regulate the cell and non-cell constituents of surrounding stroma remains incompletely understood. Promyelocytic leukemia (PML) is a pleiotropic tumor suppressor, but its role in tumor microenvironment regulation is poorly characterized. PML is frequently downregulated in many cancer types, including lung cancer. Here, we identify a PML ubiquitination pathway that is mediated by WD repeat 4–containing cullin-RING ubiquitin ligase 4 (CRL4WDR4). Clinically, this PML degradation pathway is hyperactivated in lung cancer and correlates with poor prognosis. The WDR4/PML axis induces a set of cell-surface or secreted factors, including CD73, urokinase-type plasminogen activator receptor (uPAR), and serum amyloid A2 (SAA2), which elicit paracrine effects to stimulate migration, invasion, and metastasis in multiple lung cancer models. In xenograft and genetically engineered mouse models, the WDR4/PML axis elevates intratumoral Tregs and M2-like macrophages and reduces CD8+ T cells to promote lung tumor growth. These immunosuppressive effects were all reversed by CD73 blockade. Our study identifies WDR4 as an oncoprotein that negatively regulates PML via ubiquitination to promote lung cancer progression by fostering an immunosuppressive and prometastatic tumor microenvironment, suggesting the potential of immune-modulatory approaches for treating lung cancer with aberrant PML degradation.
Emphasis on Distributive, Procedural, and Interactional Justice: Differential Perceptions of Men and Women

Differences in perceptions of justice may result from differential emphasis on distributive, procedural, and interactional justice. Correlations were significant between sex of participants and the likelihood of using distributive and interactional justice in the context of decisions about pay raises; men were more likely than women to consider distributive justice, whereas women were more likely than men to consider interactional justice.
Performances of unsupervised hmm in acoustic-to-articulatory inversion

In the context of the acoustic-to-articulatory inversion, various unsupervised HMM based feature-mapping methods are assessed and compared. In a previous study we introduced an unsupervised HMM as an alternative model to the phone-HMM. We propose here to evaluate this approach using different inversion methods, in order to assess the behavior of our model and its compatibility with the most efficient inversion algorithms available. The best configuration leads to similar root mean square error (up to 1.44 mm) than phoneme-based HMM.
International pluralism and the rule of law

Does international law have a place in a world being reshaped by globalization? Sceptics argue that international law belongs to a world order, based on relations among sovereign states, that is rapidly receding into history. But such a claim itself invites scepticism. Globalization is a journalist's term—a rough tool for making sense of what appears to be a trend toward a more integrated international economy and its attendant cultural homogenization.It is common to identify globalization with cultural uniformity and to contrast it with difference. See, for example, Benjamin R. Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism are Reshaping the World (New York: Ballantine Books, 1996), and Thomas L. Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization, expanded paperback edn. (New York: Anchor Books, 2000). Academics who use the term link it to the proliferation of intergovernmental organizations and transnational interest groups concerned with human rights, the environment, or economic issues, and to the emergence of a new normative framework, distinct from classical (‘Westphalian’) international law, for ‘global civil society’ and ‘cosmopolitan democracy’. See, for example, Michael Walzer (ed.), Toward a Global Civil Society (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1995) and Daniele Archibugi, David Held, and Martin Köhler (eds.), Re-imagining Political Community: Studies in Cosmopolitan Democracy (Oxford: Polity Press, 1998). Whether these trends will continue and how they might affect familiar political arrangements is not yet clear. It is possible that international law will disappear along with the pluralist system of sovereign states that the new global order is said to be replacing. It is more likely, however, that the old system will continue in a new form, and that there will be a place for international law in the new order. In this article, I discuss the character of law in the international system, on the assumption that globalization will not destroy that system. But even if international law does vanish, perhaps to be replaced by a different system of world law, the issues I consider here will remain relevant because they are inherent in the idea of law itself.
A crucial role for macrophages in the pathology of K/B × N serum‐induced arthritis

Autoantibodies in the form of immune complexes are known to be crucial mediators in initiating inflammation in a variety of autoimmune diseases. This has been well documented in the anti‐collagen II antibody‐induced arthritis animal model for a long time now. Recently, in the K/B × N mouse model (the F1 of the TCR‐transgenic KRN and the diabetic NOD mice), anti‐glucose‐6‐phosphate isomerase (GPI) autoantibodies have been shown to induce arthritis. Experimental work in the K/B × N model demonstrated key roles of autoantigenic immune complexes activating the alternative pathway of complement, the subsequent association with C5aR and FcγRIII‐mediated cell activation and production of the inflammatory cytokines IL‐1 and TNF‐α, finally leading to joint destruction. The presence of high amounts of inflammatory cytokines and matrix‐degrading proteases at sites of inflammation obviously put the cytokine‐producing macrophages as the next target for investigation in this model. Here, we show that mice depleted of macrophages by clodronate liposome treatment are completely resistant to K/B × N serum‐induced arthritis. Reconstituting clodronate liposome‐treated mice with macrophages from naive animals could reverse this resistance. Also, we found that deficiencies in the Wiskott‐Aldrich syndrome protein and CD40, which are both implicated in macrophage activation, chemotaxis and phagocytosis, are not essential in serum‐induced arthritis. Mast cell degranulation was seen in arthritogenic serum‐treated mice even in the absence of macrophages, possibly suggesting that mast cell degranulation/activation acts hierarchically before macrophages in the inflammatory cascade of anti‐GPI antibody‐induced arthritis.
Spouse, Parent, Worker: Role Commitments and Role-Related Experiences in the Construction of Adults' Well-Being

This study examined relations between adults' role strain, anxiety, and depression and 5 aspects of role-related experience: commitment; demands, satisfactions, and evaluations; and social support for role-related activities. Participants were 102 men and 194 women, all employed, in dual-earner marriages, and parenting a preschool child. High commitment to roles was not uniformly associated with greater well-being (e.g., a component of work commitment reflecting absorption in work was linked with higher role strain in men). Diverse sources of support were linked with women's psychological states, but men's well-being was responsive chiefly to wives' support. Age, in this 30-something sample, and role-tenure had relatively little impact on the relations between role-related experiences and well-being. The changing nature of families and the activities in which adult family members engage and the changing gender composition of the work force and the work it performs virtually ensure continuing interest in the relations between family life and work life and between experiences in these settings and adults' psychological well-being. Gaining a better understanding of experiences that are consequential for men's and women's wellbeing is an important goal in its own right. Insofar as adults' well-being may impinge on their functioning as parents and thus have implications for the quality of children's lives (Dodge, 1990; Hock & DeMeis, 1990), this objective becomes doubly important. Early research on the impacts of work and family experiences on men's and women's well-being took a role-count approach, with debate centering on whether occupancy of multiple roles (e.g., parent, spouse, and worker) drained individuals' time and energy resources and reduced their well-being or, in addition to creating demands on resources, provided additional avenues of gratification and social rewards that led to improvements in well-being (see Baruch & Barnett, 1986,1987, for a fuller discussion of the scarcity and enhancement hypotheses). Considerable attention was directed toward the possibility that women
A visibilidade ambiental em perspectiva sociológica: estudo comparado Brasil-Portugal

This article deals with the analysis of the social production of public image of environmental issues in Brazil and Portugal in recent contexts. For this purpose the paper takes the perspective of the media coverage, highlighting the role of television. The aim is to examine how the socio-analytic arrangements were constructed by the media entities, from setting the agenda and the subject of environment , based on the following questions: (a) what are the environmental issues highlighted by the media in both countries? (b) how do the media studies focused on the environmental agenda relate to the analytical perspective of the social sciences? (c) what social actors are favored in these studies? (d) how are the discursive arrangements of these actors exhibited by the media? The study was based on literature review, document analysis and systematic review of academic studies on environmental mediatization and history of ecological ideas, focusing on the convergence of sociology of communication and environmental sociology. The conclusions reveal the ambiguous nature of media coverage, as part of the logic of interpretive templates that guide public opinion.
Physical Activity Measurement Device Agreement: Pedometer Steps/Minute and Physical Activity Time

The purpose of this study was to examine agreement between the Walk4Life DUO pedometer (W4L; Walk4Life, Plainfield, Illinois, USA) and two criterion instruments in the measurement of physical activity. Participants (N = 189, M = 16.74 years, SD = .99) in high school physical education concurrently wore the DUO (i.e., comparison instrument) and Yamax SW651 pedometers (Yamax Corp., Japan; i.e., criterion instrument), and were video recorded for off-site systematic behavioral observation (i.e., criterion instrument). Physical activity measures were steps/minute (i.e., DUO and SW651) and physical activity time (minutes; i.e., DUO and behavioral observation). Relative agreement between physical activity measures was strong (r ≥ .97, p ≤ .05). However, overall absolute agreement suggests that the DUO pedometer underestimates steps/minute (mean difference score [Mdiff ] = 3.13, SD = 4.73, t = 9.07, p = .0001), overestimates physical activity time (Mdiff = −10.76, SD = 6.46, t = −17.22, p = .0001), and does not produce clinically acceptable steps/minute (mean absolute percent error [MAPE ] = 10.82%, SD = 9.82) and physical activity time (MAPE = 76.13%, SD = 37.04) outcomes. In conclusion, it is recommended that researchers and practitioners cautiously interpret DUO steps/minutes and not employ the DUO physical activity time function during physical activity programs, such as high school physical education, to estimate physical activity time.
The Relationship of Undergraduate Major and Housing with Depression in Undergraduate Students

Introduction: Past literature has shown that college undergraduates are particularly vulnerable to depression. The objective of this study is to find if certain majors and housing arrangements are associated with major depression as assessed by the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9), after adjustment for age, gender, and family history of depression. Methods: Participants were undergraduates at a large public university that used the university health center from April 1 - November 4, 2013. Participants completed a survey which included the PHQ-2, a validated screening test for depression. Those who scored positive were asked to take the longer PHQ-9 survey to assess for major depression. Logistic regression was used to test the significance of associations between several prescribed variables (namely, college major, housing arrangement, age, gender, and family history of depression) and outcome (major depression as assessed by the PHQ-9). Results: Of 541 students, 71 (13.1%) scored positive on the PHQ-9 for depression. Family history was significantly associated (OR 4.20, 95% CI, 2.42, 7.29) with major depressive disorder, as was a major in the College of Arts and Humanities (OR 3.84, 95% CI, 1.18, 12.46) compared to the baseline of an undecided/interdisciplinary major. Conclusions: A major in the College of Arts and Humanities was significantly associated with major depression. This may be significant for future efforts to target mental health interventions on college campuses.
An introduction to structural health monitoring

The process of implementing a damage identification strategy for aerospace, civil and mechanical engineering infrastructure is referred to as structural health monitoring (SHM). Here, damage is defined as changes to the material and/or geometric properties of these systems, including changes to the boundary conditions and system connectivity, which adversely affect the system's performance. A wide variety of highly effective local non-destructive evaluation tools are available for such monitoring. However, the majority of SHM research conducted over the last 30 years has attempted to identify damage in structures on a more global basis. The past 10 years have seen a rapid increase in the amount of research related to SHM as quantified by the significant escalation in papers published on this subject. The increased interest in SHM and its associated potential for significant life-safety and economic benefits has motivated the need for this theme issue. This introduction begins with a brief history of SHM technology development. Recent research has begun to recognize that the SHM problem is fundamentally one of the statistical pattern recognition (SPR) and a paradigm to address such a problem is described in detail herein as it forms the basis for organization of this theme issue. In the process of providing the historical overview and summarizing the SPR paradigm, the subsequent articles in this theme issue are cited in an effort to show how they fit into this overview of SHM. In conclusion, technical challenges that must be addressed if SHM is to gain wider application are discussed in a general manner.
Investigation of speaker embeddings for cross-show speaker diarization

This paper proposes to investigate speaker embeddings, a representation extracted from hidden layers of deep neural networks trained on a speaker identification task, on cross-show diarization. The new representation brings an improvement over i-vectors, and we show that while shallow hidden layers give best results on the single-show condition, deeper layers yield better performance on cross-show diarization. This confirms that deep representations model higher level features which help generalizing to different acoustic conditions. Experiments, conducted on the French corpus of REPERE, show that the deep speaker embeddings technique decreases DER by 0.82 points.
Exploratory querying of SPARQL endpoints in space and time

The linked data Web provides a simple and flexible way of accessing information resources in a self-descriptive format. This offers a realistic chance of perforating existing data silos. However, in order to do so, space, time and other semantic concepts need to function as dimensions for effectively exploring, querying and filtering contents. While triple stores, SPARQL endpoints, and RDF were designed for machine access, large burdens are still placed on a user to simultaneously explore and query the contents of a given endpoint according to these dimensions. First, one has to know the semantic concepts and the type of knowledge contained in an endpoint a-priori in order to query content effectively. Second, one has to be able to write and understand SPARQL and RDF. And third, one has to understand complex data type literals for space and time. In this article, we propose a way to deal with these challenges by interactive visual query construction, i.e., by letting query results feedback into both (space-time) exploration and filtering, and thus enabling exploratory querying. We propose design principles for SPEX (Spatio-temporal content explorer), a tool which helps people unfamiliar with the content of SPARQL endpoints or their syntax to explore the latter in space and time. In a preliminary user study on a repository of historical maps, we found that our feedback principles were effective, however, that successful question answering still requires improvements regarding space-time filtering, vocabulary explanation and the linking of space-time windows with other displays.