Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
MODULATION OF LOCUS COERULEAR NEURONAL ACTIVITY BY THE CENTRAL NUCLEUS OF THE AMYGDALA

The limbic and central noradrenergic systems are sensitive to stress and demonstrate pathophysiology in individuals with mood and anxiety disorders. Neurons from the central nucleus of the amygdala (CeA) form synapses onto the dendrites of noradrenergic neurons of the locus coeruleus (LC) in the rostrolateral peri-coerulear area. The CeA-LC pathway is thought to contain GABA and corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH), both of which have opposing effects on LC activity. The current study further characterized the CeA-LC pathway in vivo by examining extracellular electrophysiological LC activity during electrical and pharmacological manipulation of the CeA in halothane-anesthetized rats.The majority of LC neurons exhibited an excitatory response to electrical CeA stimulation, with a small group of neurons responding with pure inhibition or antidromic activation. Pharmacological activation of the CeA confirmed excitatory responses to electrical stimulation, whereas pharmacological inactivation of the CeA had no effect on LC activity. Excitatory responses to electrical CeA stimulation were partially attenuated following ventricular infusions of the CRH antagonist, D-Phe-CRH, but were completely attenuated following infusions of the excitatory amino acid antagonist, kynurenic acid. Ventricular administration of kynurenic acid during electrical CeA stimulation also revealed an inhibitory period that simultaneously occurs with excitatory responses.This study confirms previous findings suggesting that the CeA partially mediates excitatory responses via CRH. These findings further suggest that there is a glutamatergic component to excitatory responses following activation of the CeA. In addition, these data suggest that upon activation, the CeA provides a simultaneous inhibitory drive to LC neurons.Collectively, these data provide additional support for an excitatory limbic input to neurons of the LC. The present data also suggest that the CeA may selectively modulate LC activity across its projection sites via the simultaneous inhibitory drive from the CeA. Activation of the CeA-LC pathway, particularly during stress responses, may be critical for noradrenergic modulation of cortical and limbic areas involved in attention, emotional learning, and responses to stressful stimuli.
Perceptions of the Characteristics of Good, Bad and Ordinary Workers on the Job: The Influence of Work Experience and Culture

As noted in Kim & Sikula (2003; 2004), there are three types of people in the workplace: people of Necessity, Common people, and Parasites. A person of Necessity is irreplaceable, crucial to the functioning of an organization. The Common person is a worker of average ability and talent who makes no significant difference to the success of an organization. Parasites are detrimental freeloaders, harmful to the functioning of an organization. In the 2004 paper we analyzed the survey responses of 25 students in an MBA Organizational Behavior class, and of 13 working managers, all in the United States. In this paper we replicate our 2004 study in a different cultural setting an MBA Organizational Behavior class in Bangalore, India--and then compare the results. The leading traits and behaviors that characterize the Necessity and Parasite categories, in both data sets, are very similar. Significant differences exist, however, between the data sets when it comes to identifying the leading traits and behaviors that define a Common worker. We conclude by exploring potential explanations for the similarities and differences, based on the respondents’ work experience and cultural background. Introduction Human beings, by nature, are relational creatures. At any given time all people, regardless of their individual differences (e.g., age, gender, ethnic background), assume multiple roles in society, such as spouse, parent, employee, friend, club member, citizen of a city, town, or country, and member of a religious organization. Within each of these roles there is always more than one person involved, from a very small number of members in an institution such as a marriage, to the very large number of members comprising the citizenship of a nation. No matter what type of role a person plays for a group at any given time, however, that person falls into one of three categories: the person of Necessity, the Common person, and the Parasite. The most desirable category is that of Necessity. Without colleagues (or partners) who are Necessities, the group as a whole cannot conduct normal activities. The person of Necessity focuses his/her efforts on achieving the group’s goals, and thus consistently makes valuable contributions to the success of the group. From the group’s perspective, such a person is an enormous asset. The loss felt within the group by the departure of such an individual, consequently, is considerable. Comments made in the workplace, about a person of Necessity, include, “It would be hard to fill his shoes, or she is an excellent person, it’s a shame to lose
Draft Genome Sequence of Geobacillus thermopakistaniensis Strain MAS1

ABSTRACT Geobacillus thermopakistaniensis strain MAS1 was isolated from a hot spring located in the Northern Areas of Pakistan. The draft genome sequence was 3.5 Mb and identified a number of genes of potential industrial importance, including genes encoding glycoside hydrolases, pullulanase, amylopullulanase, glycosidase, and alcohol dehydrogenases.
The Association of Childhood Fitness to Proactive and Reactive Action Monitoring

Several studies have claimed that the positive association between childhood fitness and cognitive control is attributable to differences in the child’s cognitive control strategy, which can involve either proactive or reactive control. The present study tested this hypothesis by manipulating the probability of trial types during a modified flanker task. Preadolescent children performed mostly congruent and mostly incongruent conditions of the flanker task, with post-error task performance and error negativity/error-related negativity (Ne/ERN) being assessed. Results indicated that greater aerobic fitness was related to greater post-error accuracy and larger Ne/ERN amplitudes in the mostly congruent condition. These findings suggest that higher-fit children might be able to transiently upregulate cognitive control by recruiting reactive control in the mostly congruent condition. Further, greater fitness was related to greater modulation of Ne/ERN amplitude between conditions, suggesting that higher-fit children engaged in more proactive control in the mostly incongruent condition. This study supports the hypothesis that greater childhood fitness is associated with a more flexible shift between reactive and proactive modes of cognitive control to adapt to varying task demands.
Uncovering Droop Control Laws Embedded Within the Nonlinear Dynamics of Van der Pol Oscillators

This paper examines the dynamics of power-electronic inverters in islanded microgrids that are controlled to emulate the dynamics of Van der Pol oscillators. The general strategy of controlling inverters to emulate the behavior of nonlinear oscillators presents a compelling time-domain alternative to ubiquitous droop control methods which presume the existence of a quasistationary sinusoidal steady state and operate on phasor quantities. We present two main results in this paper. First, by leveraging the method of periodic averaging, we demonstrate that droop laws are intrinsically embedded within a slower time scale in the nonlinear dynamics of Van der Pol oscillators. Second, we establish the global convergence of amplitude and phase dynamics in a resistive network interconnecting inverters controlled as Van der Pol oscillators. Furthermore, under a set of nonrestrictive decoupling approximations, we derive sufficient conditions for local exponential stability of desirable equilibria of the linearized amplitude and phase dynamics.
Nitrogen dynamics in grain crop and legume pasture systems under elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration: A meta‐analysis

Understanding nitrogen (N) removal and replenishment is crucial to crop sustainability under rising atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration ([CO2]). While a significant portion of N is removed in grains, the soil N taken from agroecosystems can be replenished by fertilizer application and N2 fixation by legumes. The effects of elevated [CO2] on N dynamics in grain crop and legume pasture systems were evaluated using meta‐analytic techniques (366 observations from 127 studies). The information analysed for non‐legume crops included grain N removal, residue C : N ratio, fertilizer N recovery and nitrous oxide (N2O) emission. In addition to these parameters, nodule number and mass, nitrogenase activity, the percentage and amount of N fixed from the atmosphere were also assessed in legumes. Elevated [CO2] increased grain N removal of C3 non‐legumes (11%), legumes (36%) and C4 crops (14%). The C : N ratio of residues from C3 non‐legumes and legumes increased under elevated [CO2] by 16% and 8%, respectively, but the increase for C4 crops (9%) was not statistically significant. Under elevated [CO2], there was a 38% increase in the amount of N fixed from the atmosphere by legumes, which was accompanied by greater whole plant nodule number (33%), nodule mass (39%), nitrogenase activity (37%) and %N derived from the atmosphere (10%; non‐significant). Elevated [CO2] increased the plant uptake of fertilizer N by 17%, and N2O emission by 27%. These results suggest that N demand and removal in grain cropping systems will increase under future CO2‐enriched environments, and that current N management practices (fertilizer application and legume incorporation) will need to be revised.
Confidence Metrics Improve Human-Autonomy Integration

Controls frameworks for human-autonomy integration (HAI) often treat human sources of information as highly reliable [1]. However, data from human sensing are quite variable, both because of human nature and limitations on sensor technologies. This paper focuses on estimating the degree of uncertainty in human sensed data, i.e., developing confidence metrics, and implementing those metrics in a HAI for target recognition. Here we demonstrate that applying such confidence estimates to sensed human data can mitigate effects of variability in human sensing and improve HAI performance.
To Spin or Not to Spin? Natural and Laboratory Experiments from 'the Price is Right'

"The Wheel" is a sequential game of perfect information played twice during each taping of the television game show "The Price is Right". This game has simple rules and the stakes are high. We derive the unique subgame perfect Nash equilibrium (USPNE) for "The Wheel" and test its predictive ability using data from both the television show and laboratory plays of this game. We find that contestants frequently deviate from the USPNE when the decisions are difficult. The pattern of these deviations is (a) largely independent of the stakes of the game, and (b) consistent with a psychological bias of the omission-commission type. Copyright Royal Economic Society 2002
Th17 cells, HIV and the gut mucosal barrier

Purpose of reviewWe will present recent studies on a subset of CD4+ T helper cells, Th17 cells, that appears to be critical for regulating gut mucosal immune responses against extracellular microbial pathogens and may serve as a link between innate and adaptive immune responses. Implications of the loss of Th17 CD4+ T cells in HIV infection will be discussed in relation to the chronic immune activation and HIV pathogenesis. Recent findingsSevere depletion of CD4+ T cells occurs in the gut mucosa during primary HIV and simian immunodeficiency virus infections. A pronounced loss of mucosal Th17 CD4+ T cells in the simian immunodeficiency virus-infected rhesus macaque model of AIDS is linked to impaired immune responses in the gut mucosa to an enteric pathogen, Salmonella typhimurium, leading to the lack of local control of the pathogen and its translocation. Recovery of the gut mucosal immune system during highly active antiretroviral therapy is slow and incomplete compared with the peripheral blood compartment. Recent studies suggest that the replenishment of Th17 CD4+ T cells in the gut mucosa during highly active antiretroviral therapy, or during nonpathogenic simian immunodeficiency virus infections in the nonhuman primate models, correlates with better restoration and function of the gut mucosal immune system. SummaryA better understanding of the role of Th17 CD4+ cells in the generation of mucosal immune responses to enteric pathogens and maintenance of the intestinal epithelial integrity in HIV-infected patients will help in the development of novel strategies to modulate and enhance mucosal immune system and its function.
A two-pass strategy for handling OOVs in a large vocabulary recognition task

This paper addresses the issue of large-vocabulary recognition in a specific word class. We propose a two-pass strategy in which only major cities are explicitly represented in the first stage lexicon. An unknown word model encoded as a phone loop is used to detect OOV city names (referred to as rare city names). After which SpeM, a tool that can extract words and word-initial cohorts from phone graphs on the basis of a large fallback lexicon, provides an N-best list of promising city names on the basis of the phone sequences generated in the first stage. This N-best list is then inserted into the second stage lexicon for a subsequent recognition pass. Experiments were conducted on a set of spontaneous telephone-quality utterances each containing one rare city name. We tested the size of the N-best list and three types of language models (LMs). The experiments showed that SpeM was able to include nearly 85% of the correct city names into an N-best list of 3000 city names when a unigram LM, which also boosted the unigram scores of a city name in a given state, was used.
Fibroblast differentiation of bone marrow‐derived cells during wound repair

To examine the ontogeny of the wound fibroblast, bone marrow transplantation was performed to wild‐type recipients from transgenic donors that express both the luciferase and β‐galactosidase reporter genes under transcriptional control of the promoter/enhancer for the α2 chain of type I collagen. Polyvinyl alcohol sponges were implanted to elicit a naïve granulation tissue response, removed at defined time points, and processed for nucleic acids and histochemistry. Quantitative PCR for the luciferase transgene demonstrated that donor‐derived cells were present during inflammation, declined, and rebounded during later stages of tissue remodeling. Furthermore, quantitative RT‐PCR revealed that bone marrow‐derived collagen transcripts contributed significantly to the total collagen I α2 promoter activation during later stages of repair. β‐galactosidase staining revealed that indeed those cells which expressed the transgene exhibited a fibroblastic phenotype, co‐localized with sites of active collagen deposition, and expressed fibroblast specific protein‐1. These data strongly support the concept that the adult bone marrow compartment houses progenitors with the potential to migrate to sites of tissue damage, and participate in repair beyond inflammation as fibroblasts. Moreover, that bone marrow‐derived fibroblasts make a substantial contribution to the formation of new connective tissue, including type I collagen, during wound repair.
Feature Selection in Source Camera Identification

Source camera identification is the process of discerning which camera has been used to capture a particular image. In our previous work, we tackled the problem with a vector of thirty-six features to train and test the classifier. The features include the lens aberration parameters and statistical measurements from pixel intensities. In this paper, we focus on reducing the feature set by stepwise discriminant analysis. Simulation is carried out to evaluate the classifier's performance by using the full feature set, reduced feature sets and randomly selected feature sets. The results show that the reduced feature sets can decrease the processing time while also maintain or even improve the classification accuracy under some circumstances.
Towards an automated client-side framework for evaluating HTTP/TCP performance

Many different existing technologies and techniques have been developed to accelerate Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) with the aim of improving the end-user's web browsing experience. However, there is no standard methodology for evaluating HTTP performance or for the evaluation of a given HTTP acceleration technology in a multi-user scenario. In this paper we present a framework HTTP-AE (HTTP Automated Evaluation) for measuring the end-user's web browsing quality of experience. We describe how HTTP-AE can be used to automate the evaluation of HTTP performance and for the evaluation of HTTP acceleration technologies in multi-user environments. We present three case studies in which we evaluate three different HTTP acceleration technologies for satellite systems using HTTP-AE. In our first two case studies we show that typical browser HTTP acceleration techniques operate sub-optimally on satellite systems. In our third case study we show that in multi-user scenarios, HTTP acceleration technologies, which break the end-to-end semantics of HTTP, can distribute network resources unfairly to the end-users.
Who Plays Which Tourist Roles?—

Abstract This study investigates whether Yiannakis and Gibson's (1992) fifteen leisure tourist roles are applicable in an Australian context. The study also investigates the ability of demographics and personality, as measured by the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), to explain the roles undertaken. The results verify the applicability of the tourist roles for the Australian sample. Demographics, rather than personality, provide the better explanation for most tourist roles, but the use of a combination of demographics and personality generally leads to a significant improvement in level of explanation.
The Development of numerical competence : animal and human models

Contents: Part I: Empirical Approaches to Counting (or Numerical Competence) in Animals. M. Rilling, Invisible Counting Animals: A History of Contributions from Comparative Psychology, Ethology, and Learning Theory. S.T. Boysen, Counting in Chimpanzees: Nonhuman Principles and Emergent Properties of Number. W.K. Honig, Numerosity as a Dimension of Stimulus Control. D.M. Rumbaugh, D.A. Washburn, Counting by Chimpanzees and Ordinality Judgments by Macaques in Video-Formatted Tasks. Part II:Counting: Criteria and Relations to Basic Processes. H. Davis, Numerical Competence in Animals: Life Beyond Clever Hans. R.K. Thomas, R.B. Lorden, Numerical Competence in Animals: A Conservative View. D.J. Miller, Do Animals Subitize? H.A. Broadbent, R.M. Church, W.H. Meck, B.C. Rakitin, Quantitative Relationships Between Timing and Counting. Part III:Counting in Humans and Animals: Theoretical Perspectives. E.J. Capaldi, Animal Number Abilities: Implications for a Hierarchical Approach to Instrumental Learning. C.R. Gallistel, A Conceptual Framework for the Study of Numerical Estimation and Arithmetic Reasoning in Animals. E. von Glasersfeld, Reflections on Number and Counting. W.A. Wickelgren, Chunking, Familiarity, and Serial Order in Counting.
A scalable interest management scheme for distributed virtual environments

With the expansion of the internet and its bandwidth, distributed virtual environment (DVE) applications have become more prevalent. In DVE applications, users frequently crowd in a specific place, and a key aspect to consider is how to provide interactive performance for users. However, existing approaches using multicast require users to receive uninteresting messages. Even though recent works have addressed fine‐grained filtering, they still incur other drawbacks in terms of assigning lots of multicast addresses or handling overhead of multicast groups. This makes the system less scalable as the number of users increases. In this paper, we propose a new scalable filtering scheme that reduces not only the number of messages during interaction in a region and among neighboring regions, but also the number of multicast addresses without significant computational overhead. Interest management in a region dynamically creates groups of users with the same interests. While members communicate with each other with high fidelity, a representative sends information to non‐members with low frequency. For interaction among neighboring regions, we propose a sub‐region concept to select only a subset of users from the neighboring regions based on proximity, the distribution of the users' locations, and the viewing direction of a user. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Cultivating Methodology Through Somaesthetics

A gardener wouldn’t dream of cultivating her plot with just a trowel, nor would a chef cook with just a knife, so why do many academics rely on prose as their only means of representing their work? I will explore how educational theory and practice might be cultivated through praxis in the context of the fundamental basis of all place-based learning – the body through which we all experience the world. I will use three interrelated representations to explore the linkage between contemplative practice and the development of teaching and learning as a process: poetry, art and prose. The roots of my investigation are threefold: my recent experience of a three year Iyengar yoga teacher training program which represents the contemplative component, an exploration of mixed media metissage, and my ongoing work as a high school teacher in an inner city setting using experiential learning to stimulate interaction in my classes. These educational perspectives are further nested among personal interests in wilderness expeditions, gardening and artwork that delve into my ecological connectedness with the world and my responses to it.
The Cognitive Experience as a Psychological Basis of Intellectual Giftedness

This paper argues that cognitive experience is a psychological basis of intellectual giftedness and a type of representation (i.e., how an individual sees, understands, and interprets what is going on in the surrounding reality) is a proto-phenomenon of intellectual life of a person. The essay critiques existing approaches in psychology of giftedness, introduces our own approach, and presents an exploratory experimental psychological study comparing “gifted” high school students with “average” high school students in physics and mathematics.