Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The New Logic

The purpose of this paper is to communicate some developments in what we call the new logic. In a nutshell the new logic is a model of the behaviour of a logical agent. By these lights, logical theory has two principal tasks. The first is an account of what a logical agent is. The second is a description of how this behaviour is to be modelled. Before getting on with these tasks we offer a disclaimer and a warning. The disclaimer is that although the new logic is significantly different from it, we have no inclination to see the new logic as a rival of mathematical logic. We do not advocate the displacement of, e.g. model theory, but rather its supplementation or adaptation. The warning is that, whereas mathematical logic must eschew psychologism, the new logic cannot do without it. The fuller story of the new logic is part of our book, The Reach of Abduction, scheduled to appear in 2001 or early 2002. 1 The Sort of Thing a Logical Agent Is 1.1 Psychologism and the New Logic Is there a logic of discovery? Some say not. Others are not so sure. We ourselves are in a third camp: In work underway we are actually trying to codify such a logic. Critics of the logic of discovery, those who think it a misbegotten enterprise as such, are frequently drawn to the idea that accounts of how people entertain and select hypotheses, form and deploy conjectures, and more generally how they think things up, are a matter for psychology. Underlying this view is something like the following argument. Let K be a class of cognitive actions. Then if K possesses an etiology (i.e. is subject to causal forces), this precludes the question of the performing or disperforming the K-action for good or bad reasons. If there were a logic of K-action it would be an enquiry into when K-actions are performed rationally, that is, for the right reasons. Hence there can be no logic of K. Against this, Donald Davidson is widely taken as having shown that far from reasons for actions precluding their having causes, reasons are causes, or more strictly, having a reason for an action is construable as a cause of it. (Davidson [14]. See also Piestroski [54].) We ourselves are inclined to emphasize a substantial body of work in reliabilist and other forms of causal epistemology. In its most basic sense, a subject performs a cognitive task rationally when his performance of it is induced by causal mechanisms that are functioning reliably, that are functioning as they should. If a logic can be seen as a theory of rational cognitive performance, the present argument fails to demonstrate the impossibility of a logic of discovery. Even so, the idea of logic as a 141 L. J. of the IGPL, Vol. 9 No. 2, pp. 141–174 2001 c ©Oxford University Press
Enhanced Antitumor Efficacy of an Oncolytic Herpes Simplex Virus Expressing an Endostatin–Angiostatin Fusion Gene in Human Glioblastoma Stem Cell Xenografts

Viruses have demonstrated strong potential for the therapeutic targeting of glioblastoma stem cells (GSCs). In this study, the use of a herpes simplex virus carrying endostatin–angiostatin (VAE) as a novel therapeutic targeting strategy for glioblastoma-derived cancer stem cells was investigated. We isolated six stable GSC-enriched cultures from 36 human glioblastoma specimens and selected one of the stable GSCs lines for establishing GSC-carrying orthotopic nude mouse models. The following results were obtained: (a) VAE rapidly proliferated in GSCs and expressed endo–angio in vitro and in vivo 48 h and 10 d after infection, respectively; (b) compared with the control gliomas treated with rHSV or Endostar, the subcutaneous gliomas derived from the GSCs showed a significant reduction in microvessel density after VAE treatment; (c) compared with the control, a significant improvement was observed in the length of the survival of mice with intracranial and subcutaneous gliomas treated with VAE; (d) MRI analysis showed that the tumor volumes of the intracranial gliomas generated by GSCs remarkably decreased after 10 d of VAE treatment compared with the controls. In conclusion, VAE demonstrated oncolytic therapeutic efficacy in animal models of human GSCs and expressed an endostatin–angiostatin fusion gene, which enhanced antitumor efficacy most likely by restricting tumor microvasculature development.
Joint estimation of subject motion and tracer kinetic parameters of dynamic PET data in an EM framework

Dynamic Positron Emission Tomography is a powerful tool for quantitative imaging of in vivo biological processes. The long scan durations necessitate motion correction, to maintain the validity of the dynamic measurements, which can be particularly challenging due to the low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and spatial resolution, as well as the complex tracer behaviour in the dynamic PET data. In this paper we develop a novel automated expectation-maximisation image registration framework that incorporates temporal tracer kinetic information to correct for inter-frame subject motion during dynamic PET scans. We employ the Zubal human brain phantom to simulate dynamic PET data using SORTEO (a Monte Carlo-based simulator), in order to validate the proposed method for its ability to recover imposed rigid motion. We have conducted a range of simulations using different noise levels, and corrupted the data with a range of rigid motion artefacts. The performance of our motion correction method is compared with pairwise registration using normalised mutual information as a voxel similarity measure (an approach conventionally used to correct for dynamic PET inter-frame motion based solely on intensity information). To quantify registration accuracy, we calculate the target registration error across the images. The results show that our new dynamic image registration method based on tracer kinetics yields better realignment of the simulated datasets, halving the target registration error when compared to the conventional method at small motion levels, as well as yielding smaller residuals in translation and rotation parameters. We also show that our new method is less affected by the low signal in the first few frames, which the conventional method based on normalised mutual information fails to realign.
A KH-Domain RNA-Binding Protein Interacts with FIERY2/CTD Phosphatase-Like 1 and Splicing Factors and Is Important for Pre-mRNA Splicing in Arabidopsis

Eukaryotic genomes encode hundreds of RNA-binding proteins, yet the functions of most of these proteins are unknown. In a genetic study of stress signal transduction in Arabidopsis, we identified a K homology (KH)-domain RNA-binding protein, HOS5 (High Osmotic Stress Gene Expression 5), as required for stress gene regulation and stress tolerance. HOS5 was found to interact with FIERY2/RNA polymerase II (RNAP II) carboxyl terminal domain (CTD) phosphatase-like 1 (FRY2/CPL1) both in vitro and in vivo. This interaction is mediated by the first double-stranded RNA-binding domain of FRY2/CPL1 and the KH domains of HOS5. Interestingly, both HOS5 and FRY2/CPL1 also interact with two novel serine-arginine (SR)-rich splicing factors, RS40 and RS41, in nuclear speckles. Importantly, FRY2/CPL1 is required for the recruitment of HOS5. In fry2 mutants, HOS5 failed to be localized in nuclear speckles but was found mainly in the nucleoplasm. hos5 mutants were impaired in mRNA export and accumulated a significant amount of mRNA in the nuclei, particularly under salt stress conditions. Arabidopsis mutants of all these genes exhibit similar stress-sensitive phenotypes. RNA-seq analyses of these mutants detected significant intron retention in many stress-related genes under salt stress but not under normal conditions. Our study not only identified several novel regulators of pre-mRNA processing as important for plant stress response but also suggested that, in addition to RNAP II CTD that is a well-recognized platform for the recruitment of mRNA processing factors, FRY2/CPL1 may also recruit specific factors to regulate the co-transcriptional processing of certain transcripts to deal with environmental challenges.
How is eHealth literacy measured and what do the measurements tell us? A systematic review

The increasing use of digital services and technologies in health care calls for effective tools to evaluate the users’ eHealth literacy in order to better understand the users’ interaction with health technologies. We here present a systematic review of existing tools to measure eHealth literacy and for what these tools have been used to investigate. We identified eight tools, of which three of them are bases upon a conceptual model of eHealth literacy and the remaining five are dual tools, i.a. comprised of individual measures for health literacy and digital literacy. Of these eight tools, only one tool (The eHealth literacy Scale - eHEALS) was used in other studies than the one it was originally published in. eHEALS has primarily been used to establish eHealth literacy levels in different populations. Five of the studies have been conducted by examining eHealth literacy’s impact on health outcomes, and one study has established an association between high eHealth literacy levels and increased likelihood of attending colorectal cancer screenings in a Japanese population. The two other concept-based tools, eHLS and PRE-HIT, reflect an elaborated understanding of eHealth literacy. The five dual tools were primarily used to screen for adequate and inadequate health literacy and digital literacy. In conclusion, there is very little knowledge about individuals’ eHealth literacy and how it relates to health outcomes or the clinical course of specific diseases. New tools developed for the new age of social media and new technologies should be used as eHEALS may have some limitations. https://doi.org/10.34105/j.kmel. 2015.07. 038
Impact of a Grief-Crisis Intervention Immediately after a Sudden Violent Death on the Survivor's Ability to Cope

A challenging concern of grief-crisis intervention is providing appropriate emotional and educational support immediately after a sudden violent death. Research suggests that coping after this type of loss is laborious for the entire family, including children, adolescents, and adults. The survivor's grief response is intense with a prolonged trauma. The consensus of the research indicates that grief-crisis intervention helps the survivors to want to go on living in the face of disaster and positively affects their ability to cope.
QR-factorization method for computing the greatest common divisor of polynomials with inexact coefficients

This paper presents a novel means of computing the greatest common divisor (GCD) of two polynomials with real-valued coefficients that have been perturbed by noise. The method involves the QR-factorization of a near-to-Toeplitz matrix derived from the Sylvester matrix of the two polynomials. It turns out that the GCD to within a constant factor is contained in the last nonzero row of the upper triangular matrix R in the QR-factorization of the near-to-Toeplitz matrix. The QR-factorization is efficiently performed by an algorithm due to Chun et al. (1987). A condition number estimator due to Bischof (1990) and an algorithm for rank estimation due to Zarowski (1998) are employed to account for the effects of noise.
Overlapping Sound Event Recognition using Local Spectrogram Features with the Generalised Hough Transform

We present a novel approach for recognition of overlapping sound events based on the Generalised Hough Transform (GHT) – a technique commonly used for object recognition in the domain of image processing. Unlike our previous work on image-based sound event classiﬁcation, where we focussed on global image features, here we extract local features from detected interest-points in the spectrogram. These form a robust representation of the local region, and when the information from all interest-points in the spectrogram are combined using the GHT, we can form hypotheses for the location of one or more overlapping sound events in the image. Our experiments show promising results, and demonstrate the ability of our approach to recognise overlapping sounds.
Betaine Homocysteine Methyltransferase Is Active in the Mouse Blastocyst and Promotes Inner Cell Mass Development*

Background: Blastocyst stage embryos require a large pool of methyl groups, but the source is unknown. Results: Betaine-homocysteine methyltransferase (BHMT), which takes methyl groups from betaine, is highly active in mouse blastocysts and promotes development of cells that become the fetus. Conclusion: BHMT contributes to the methyl pool in the blastocyst. Significance: Betaine and BHMT promote embryo development. Methyltransferases are an important group of enzymes with diverse roles that include epigenetic gene regulation. The universal donor of methyl groups for methyltransferases is S-adenosylmethionine (AdoMet), which in most cells is synthesized using methyl groups carried by a derivative of folic acid. Another mechanism for AdoMet synthesis uses betaine as the methyl donor via the enzyme betaine-homocysteine methyltransferase (BHMT, EC 2.1.1.5), but it has been considered to be significant only in liver. Here, we show that mouse preimplantation embryos contain endogenous betaine; Bhmt mRNA is first expressed at the morula stage; BHMT is abundant at the blastocyst stage but not other preimplantation stages, and BHMT activity is similarly detectable in blastocyst homogenates but not those of two-cell or morula stage embryos. Knockdown of BHMT protein levels and reduction of enzyme activity using Bhmt-specific antisense morpholinos or a selective BHMT inhibitor resulted in decreased development of embryos to the blastocyst stage in vitro and a reduction in inner cell mass cell number in blastocysts. The detrimental effects of BHMT knockdown were fully rescued by the immediate methyl-carrying product of BHMT, methionine. A physiological role for betaine and BHMT in blastocyst viability was further indicated by increased fetal resorption following embryo transfer of BHMT knockdown blastocysts versus control. Thus, mouse blastocysts are unusual in being able to generate AdoMet not only by the ubiquitous folate-dependent mechanism but also from betaine metabolized by BHMT, likely a significant pool of methyl groups in blastocysts.
Cognitive Aging in Zebrafish

Background Age-related impairments in cognitive functions represent a growing clinical and social issue. Genetic and behavioral characterization of animal models can provide critical information on the intrinsic and environmental factors that determine the deterioration or preservation of cognitive abilities throughout life. Methodology/Principal Findings Behavior of wild-type, mutant and gamma-irradiated zebrafish (Danio rerio) was documented using image-analysis technique. Conditioned responses to spatial, visual and temporal cues were investigated in young, middle-aged and old animals. The results demonstrate that zebrafish aging is associated with changes in cognitive responses to emotionally positive and negative experiences, reduced generalization of adaptive associations, increased stereotypic and reduced exploratory behavior and altered temporal entrainment. Genetic upregulation of cholinergic transmission attenuates cognitive decline in middle-aged achesb55/+ mutants, compared to wild-type siblings. In contrast, the genotoxic stress of gamma-irradiation accelerates the onset of cognitive impairment in young zebrafish. Conclusions/Significance These findings would allow the use of powerful molecular biological resources accumulated in the zebrafish field to address the mechanisms of cognitive senescence, and promote the search for therapeutic strategies which may attenuate age-related cognitive decline.
Perceptually-evaluated loss-delay controlled adaptive transmission of MPEG video over IP

This paper presents the adaptive video over IP (AViP) approach to transmit video sequences. A rate-selection algorithm based on both delay and loss indication is presented and its performance measured using actual MPEG-2 video sequences, network simulations and objective measures of perceptual quality. The results show that the AViP approach leads to efficient use of available network resources, reactiveness to congestions and TCP-friendliness. Moreover, AViP delivers significantly higher perceptual levels of quality than traditional constant-bit-rate systems operating at the same average level.
Associations of Birth Order with Early Adolescent Growth, Pubertal Onset, Blood Pressure and Size: Evidence from Hong Kong’s “Children of 1997” Birth Cohort

Background Birth order has been proposed as a cardiovascular risk factor, because the lower birth weight and greater infant weight gain typical of firstborns could programme metabolism detrimentally. Methods We examined the associations of birth order (firstborn or laterborn) with birth weight-for-gestational age, length/height and body mass index (BMI) z-scores during infancy, childhood, and puberty using generalized estimating equations, with age at pubertal onset using interval-censored regression and with age-, sex- and height-standardized blood pressure, height and BMI z-scores at 13 years using linear regression in a population-representative Chinese birth cohort: “Children of 1997” (n = 8,327). Results Compared with laterborns, firstborns had lower birth weight-for-gestational age (mean difference = -0.18 z-score, 95% confidence interval (CI) -0.23, -0.14), lower infant BMI (-0.09 z-score, 95% CI -0.14, -0.04), greater childhood height (0.10 z-score, 95% CI 0.05, 0.14) and BMI (0.08 z-score, 95% CI 0.03, 0.14), but not greater pubertal BMI (0.05 z-score, 95% CI -0.02, 0.11), adjusted for sex, parental age, birthplace, education and income. Firstborns had earlier onset of pubic hair (time ratio = 0.988, 95% CI 0.980, 0.996), but not breast or genitalia, development. Firstborns had greater BMI (0.07 z-score, 95% CI 0.002, 0.15), but not height (0.05 z-score, 95% CI -0.01, 0.11), at 13 years, but similar blood pressure. Conclusions Differences by birth order continue into early adolescence with firstborns being heavier with earlier pubic hair development, which could indicate long-term cardiovascular risk.
Natural and Electroporation-Mediated Transformation of Methanococcus voltae Protoplasts

The lack of high-efficiency transformation systems has severely impeded genetic research on methanogenic members of the kingdom Archaeobacteria. By using protoplasts of Methanococcus voltae and an integration vector, Mip1, previously shown to impart puromycin resistance, we obtained natural transformation frequencies that were about 80-fold higher (705 transformants per μg of transforming DNA) than that reported with whole cells. Electroporation-mediated transformation of M. voltae protoplasts with covalently closed circular Mip1 DNA was possible, but at lower frequencies of ca. 177 transformants per μg of vector DNA. However, a 380-fold improvement (3,417 transformants per μg of DNA) over the frequency of natural transformation with whole cells was achieved by electroporation of protoplasts with linearized DNA. This general approach, of using protoplasts, should allow the transformation of other methanogens, especially those that may be gently converted to protoplasts as a result of their tendency to lyse in hypotonic solutions.
Investigation of biomechanical strategies increasing walking speed in young children aged 1 to 7 years

For young children, biomechanical joint maturation is achieved at 4 years old for the ankle, at about 6–7 years for the knee, at 6 for the hip. These differences may involve different propulsion strategies with respect to age and particularly to increase walking speed. One hundred and six children are included in the study. Mechanical work during the stance phase was computed and an involvement ratio for each joint was deduced (work of one joint divided by the sum of the works of the three joints). Whatever the age, the biomechanical strategy to increase speed is similar for the positive work: increase of the ankle involvement and decrease of the hip involvement. The negative work is mainly produced by the knee whatever age.
A Socio-Technical Approach to Sustainability in Organizations: an Exploratory Study

Research has shown that sustainability is a critical issue for organizations. There are many dimensions to this concept, notably economic, social and environmental sustainability. When considering development of Information Systems, it is necessary to take these factors into account. However, although developers wish to deliver a package of sustainable benefits, the values that these benefits represent to different stakeholder groups will vary. Approaches will be needed that can provide support to resolve divergent and conflicting requirements within a transformation process, and help to surface contextual understandings of sustainable performance. Poorly-designed systems lead to work activity that is less than optimal, and thus fails to achieve a level of excellence in performance that is a significant prerequisite for competitiveness and economic sustainability. This paper introduces an investigation into understanding of a socio-technical systems framework that could function as a trigger for sustainability development where a suitable agenda already exists within an organization. Preliminary results, and their limitations, are discussed and a tentative agenda for further research is presented.
An ERP Investigation of Semantic Richness Dynamics: Multidimensionality vs. Task Demands

Semantic richness is a multidimensional and dynamic construct that can be defined as the amount of semantic information a word possesses. In this thesis, the semantic richness dimensions of number of associates, number of semantic neighbours, and body-object interaction were investigated. Forty-eight young adults were randomly assigned to perform either lexical decision (LDT) or semantic categorization tasks (SCT). The goal of this thesis was to investigate behavioural and electrophysiological differences (using the Event-Related Potential technique) between semantically rich words and semantically impoverished words. Results revealed that the amplitude of the N400 ERP component was smaller for words with high number of associates and high number of semantic neighbours compared to words with low number of associates or low number of semantic neighbours, respectively, but only during LDT. Behavioural results, however, only showed an accuracy and reaction time advantage (during item analyses) for words with many associates. In contrast, N400 amplitudes did not differ for words with high bodyobject interaction rating when compared to words with low body-object interaction rating in any of the tasks, although a behavioural reaction time advantage was observed in item analyses of the LDT. These results suggest that words with many associates or semantic neighbours may be processed more efficiently and be easier to integrate within the neural semantic network than words with few associates or semantic neighbours. In addition, the N400 effect was seen in the LDT but not in the SCT, suggesting that semantic richness information may be used in a topdown manner in order to fulfill the task requirements using available neural resources in a more efficient manner.