Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Spontaneous Fluctuations in the Flexible Control of Covert Attention

Spontaneous fluctuations in cognitive flexibility are characterized by moment-to-moment changes in the efficacy of control over attentional shifts. We used fMRI to investigate the neural correlates in humans of spontaneous fluctuations in readiness to covertly shift attention between two peripheral rapid serial visual presentation streams. Target detection response time (RT) after a shift or hold of covert spatial attention served as a behavioral index of fluctuations in attentional flexibility. In particular, the cost associated with shifting attention compared with holding attention varied as a function of pretrial brain activity in key regions of the default mode network (DMN), but not the dorsal attention network. High pretrial activity within the DMN was associated with a greater increase in shift trial RT relative to hold trial RT, revealing that these areas are associated with a state of attentional stability. Conversely, high pretrial activity within bilateral anterior insula and the presupplementary motor area/supplementary motor area was associated with a greater decrease in shift trial RT relative to hold trial RT, reflecting increased flexibility. Our results importantly clarify the roles of the precuneus, medial prefrontal cortex, and lateral parietal cortex, indicating that reduced activity may not simply indicate greater task engagement, but also, specifically, a readiness to update the focus of attention. Investigation of the neural correlates of spontaneous changes in attentional flexibility may contribute to our understanding of disorders of cognitive control as well as healthy variability in the control of spatial attention. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Individuals regularly experience fluctuations in preparatory cognitive control that affect performance in everyday life. For example, individuals are able to more quickly initiate a spatial shift of attention at some moments than at others. The current study revealed that pretrial brain activity in specific cortical regions predicted trial-by-trial changes in participants' abilities to flexibly shift the focus of attention. Intrinsically generated fluctuations in brain activity within several key default mode network regions, as well as within the anterior insula and presupplementary/supplementary motor areas, carried behavioral consequences for preparatory attentional control beyond lapses of attentional engagement. Our results are the first to link intrinsic variation in pretrial brain activity to moment-by-moment changes in preparatory attentional control over spatial selection.
The B subunit of Escherichia coli heat-labile enterotoxin inhibits Th1 but not Th17 cell responses in established experimental autoimmune uveoretinitis.

PURPOSE To investigate the efficacy of the B subunit of Escherichia coli heat-labile enterotoxin (EtxB) in the treatment of ocular autoimmune disease. Murine experimental autoimmune uveoretinitis (EAU) is an animal model of autoimmune posterior uveitis initiated by retinal antigen-specific Th1 and Th17 CD4(+) T cells, which activate myeloid cells, inducing retinal damage. EtxB is a potent immune modulator that ameliorates other Th1-mediated autoimmune diseases, enhancing regulatory T-cell activity. METHODS EAU was induced in B10.RIII mice by immunization with peptide hIRBP(161-180). Disease severity was measured by clinical and histologic assessment, and functional responses of macrophages (Mphis) and T cells were assessed, both in vivo and in cocultures in vitro. EtxB was administered intranasally daily for 4 days, starting either 3 days before or 3 days after EAU induction. RESULTS Preimmunization treatment with EtxB protected mice from EAU, limiting both the number and the activation status of retinal infiltrating immune cells. Treatment after EAU induction did not alter the disease course, despite suppression of IFN-gamma. Although EtxB treatment of in vitro cocultures of T cells and Mphis increased IL-10 production, EtxB treatment in vivo increased the proportion and number of IL-17-producing CD4(+) cells infiltrating the eye. CONCLUSIONS EtxB preimmunization protects mice from EAU induction by inhibiting Th1 responses, but the resultant reduction in IFN-gamma responses by EtxB does not effect infiltration or structural damage in established EAU, where Th17 responses predominate. These data highlight the critical importance of the dynamics of T-cell phenotype and infiltration during EAU when considering immunomodulatory therapy.
Wenxin Keli suppresses atrial substrate remodelling after epicardial ganglionic plexi ablation.

BACKGROUND The chronic effects of ganglionic plexi (GP) ablation on atrial fibrillation (AF) inducibility have not been elucidated. OBJECTIVE To investigate the effect of Wenxin Keli (WK) on the inducibility of AF and atrial substrate remodelling after epicardial GP ablation. METHODS Twenty dogs were randomly divided into a sham-operated group, a GP ablation group and a WK-treated group. All animals underwent a left thoracotomy at the fourth intercostal space. AF inducibility was assessed by burst rapid pacing at the right atrium. Both the GP ablation group and the WK-treated group received four major GP ablations. In the WK-treated group, dogs were treated with oral WK once per day, and all animals were allowed to recover for eight weeks, after which AF inducibility and AF duration were measured again. RESULTS After eight weeks of WK treatment, AF inducibility was lower than in the GP ablation group, and was similar to that of the sham-operated group. Compared with the sham-operated group, the levels of atrial natriuretic peptide (ANP), tumour necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-α) and interleukin (IL)-6 in right atrial tissues were increased in GP ablation group (143.6±33.7 pg/mg versus 206.2±41.4 pg/mg, P=0.02; 75.3±12.1 pg/mg versus 141.3±64 pg/mg, P=0.03; and 175.1±42.5 pg/mg versus 351.7±101 pg/mg, P<0.01, respectively). There were no significant differences in levels of ANP, TNF-α and IL-6 in atrial tissues between the sham-operated group and WK treated group. Expression of connexin 43 in atrial tissues was increased after eight weeks of GP ablation, while WK administration inhibited connexin 43 remodelling. CONCLUSIONS Epicardial GP ablation can induce atrial substrate remodelling, including Cx43 upregulation and increased levels of ANP, TNF-α and IL-6. These changes may be suppressed by long-term oral WK administration.
Visual and textual sentiment analysis using deep fusion convolutional neural networks

Sentiment analysis is attracting more and more attentions and has become a very hot research topic due to its potential applications in personalized recommendation, opinion mining, etc. Most of the existing methods are based on either textual or visual data and can not achieve satisfactory results, as it is very hard to extract sufficient information from only one single modality data. Inspired by the observation that there exists strong semantic correlation between visual and textual data in social medias, we propose an end-to-end deep fusion convolutional neural network to jointly learn textual and visual sentiment representations from training examples. The two modality information are fused together in a pooling layer and fed into fully-connected layers to predict the sentiment polarity. We evaluate the proposed approach on two widely used data sets. Results show that our method achieves promising result compared with the state-of-the-art methods which clearly demonstrate its competency.
Applying and extending a semantic foundation for role-related concepts in enterprise modelling

In this paper, we provide a semantic foundation for role-related concepts in enterprise modelling. We use a conceptual modelling framework to provide a well-founded underpinning for these concepts. We review a number of enterprise modelling approaches in light of the concepts described (namely, ARIS, ArchiMate, DoDAF, RM-ODP and BPMN). This allows us to understand the various approaches, to contrast them and to identify problems in their definition and/or usage. We start with a core set of concepts and then extend this set to address the social aspects of actors and roles in an organisation. In particular, this enables us to investigate the actor–role relations in further detail.
Distinct Ectomycorrhizospheres Share Similar Bacterial Communities as Revealed by Pyrosequencing-Based Analysis of 16S rRNA Genes

ABSTRACT Analysis of the 16S rRNA gene sequences generated from Xerocomus pruinatus and Scleroderma citrinum ectomycorrhizospheres revealed that similar bacterial communities inhabited the two ectomycorrhizospheres in terms of phyla and genera, with an enrichment of the Burkholderia genus. Compared to the bulk soil habitat, ectomycorrhizospheres hosted significantly more Alpha-, Beta-, and Gammaproteobacteria.
An Enhanced Approach to Adaptive Video Streaming over P2P Networks

Peer-to-peer (P2P) networks became the new paradigm in video streaming. P2P are more scalable in many scenarios where peers can easily share resources and feed each other. However, churn of peers can depict the nature of P2P and lead to packet loss, end-to-end delay as well as continuity indexing in terms of streaming. However, due to the nature of multimedia (Live or video on demand) quality is intolerable and such issues can be very serious challenge. This paper introduces an enhanced combination of two well-known techniques known as “locality awareness” and “Flexible Macroblock Ordering” (FMO). Locality-awareness plays a vital role in reducing the transmission cost among the peers whilst FMO is superior techniques in case of packet loss. However these two approaches have not been studied in conjunction. A comparative simulation-based study has been carried out for the proposed approach against a benchmark system. The results have shown better performance of the proposed approach in terms of End-to-End delay and video quality.
Random competition: a simple, but efficient method for parallelizing inference systems

We present a very simple parallel execution model suitable for inference systems with nondeterministic choices (OR-branching points). All the parallel processors solve the same task without any communication. Their programs only di er in the initialization of the random number generator used for branch selection in depth rst backtracking search. This model, called random competition, permits us to calculate analytically the parallel performance for arbitrary numbers of processors. This can be done exactly and without any experiments on a parallel machine. Finally, due to their simplicity, competition architectures are easy (and therefore low-priced) to build. As an application of this systematic approach we compute speedup expressions for speci c problem classes de ned by their run-time distributions. The results vary from a speedup of 1 for linearly degenerate search trees up to clearly "superlinear" speedup for strongly imbalanced search trees. Moreover, we are able to give estimates for the potential degree of OR-parallelism inherent in the di erent problem classes. Such an estimate is very important for the design of particular parallel inference machines, since spedups strongly depend upon the application domain.
POLYMORPHISM OF BACTERIAL RESTRICTION‐MODIFICATION SYSTEMS: THE ADVANTAGE OF DIVERSITY

Bacterial restriction‐modification systems provide defense against foreign DNA by using a self versus nonself recognition mechanism. A great diversity of recognition motifs is maintained in natural populations. Circumstantial evidence suggests that defense against bacteriophage viruses favors this diversity. (1) Bacterial restriction enzymes can destroy invading phage DNA. (2) Phage DNA can mimic the host's self‐recognition mechanism. The ability of the virus to pose as a mimic favors diversification of the host's recognition motif. Other observations suggest that restriction modification (RM) does not provide any significant defensive advantages in mature communities.
Cross-Evaluation of Entity Linking and Disambiguation Systems for Clinical Text Annotation

In this paper we study whether state-of-the-art techniques for multi-domain and multilingual entity linking can be ported to the clinical domain. To do so, we compare two known entity linking systems, BabelFly and TagMe, that leverage on Wikipedia and DBpedia, with the standard clinical semantic annotation and disambiguation system, MetaMap, over the SemRep clinical word sense disambiguation gold standard. We show that BabelFly and especially TagMe, while achieving decent precision on clinical annotation, outmatch MetaMap's F1-score.
Modeling and characterization of different channels based on human body communication

Human body communication (HBC), which uses the human body as a transmission medium for electrical signals, provides a prospective communication solution for body sensor networks (BSNs). In this paper, an inhomogeneous model which includes the tissue layers of skin, fat, and muscle is proposed to study the propagation characteristics of different HBC channels. Specifically, the HBC channels, namely, the on-body to on-body (OB-OB)channel, on-body to in-body (OB-IB) channel, in-body to on-body (IB-OB) channel, and in-body to in-body (IB-IB)channel, are studied over different frequencies (from 1MHz to 100MHz) through numerical simulations with finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method. The results show that the gain of OB-IB channel and IB-OB channel is almost the same. The gain of IB-IB channel is greater than other channels in the frequency range 1MHz to 70MHz. In addition, the gain of all channels is associated with the channel length and communication frequency. The simulations are verified by experimental measurements in a porcine tissue sample. The results show that the simulations are in agreement with the measurements.
Diagram Understanding Using Integration of Layout Information and Textual Information

Pattern information and natural language information used together can complement and reinforce each other to enable more effective communication than can either medium alone (Feiner 91) (Nakamura 93). One of the good examples is a pictorial book of flora (PBF) . In the PBF, readable explanations which combine texts, pictures, and diagrams are achieved, as shown in Figure 1 and 2. Taking advantage of this, we propose here a new method for analyzing the PBF diagrams by using natural language information. In the PBF, many kinds of information about plants are generally stored in the following media:
Temperature Gradient Measurements by Using Thermoelectric Effect in CNTs-Silicone Adhesive Composite

This work presents the fabrication and investigation of thermoelectric cells based on composite of carbon nanotubes (CNT) and silicone adhesive. The composite contains CNT and silicon adhesive 1∶1 by weight. The current-voltage characteristics and dependences of voltage, current and Seebeck coefficient on the temperature gradient of cell were studied. It was observed that with increase in temperature gradient the open circuit voltage, short circuit current and the Seebeck coefficient of the cells increase. Approximately 7 times increase in temperature gradient increases the open circuit voltage and short circuit current up to 40 and 5 times, respectively. The simulation of experimental results is also carried out; the simulated results are well matched with experimental results.
Dimensions and principles of declassification

Computing systems often deliberately release (or declassify) sensitive information. A principal security concern for systems permitting information release is whether this release is safe: is it possible that the attacker compromises the information release mechanism and extracts more secret information than intended? While the security community has recognised the importance of the problem, the state-of-the-art in information release is, unfortunately, a number of approaches with somewhat unconnected semantic goals. We provide a road map of the main directions of current research, by classifying the basic goals according to what information is released, who releases information, where in the system information is released, and when information can be released. With a general declassification framework as a long-term goal, we identify some prudent principles of declassification. These principles shed light on existing definitions and may also serve as useful "sanity checks" for emerging models.
From Waste to Electronics: Printed Circuit Boards Using Renewable Resources of Oil Palm Empty Fruit Bunch

Printed circuit boards (PCB) are widely used in electronic devices, at low and high frequency applications. Unfortunately, conventional PCBs are basically made from toxic petroleum products. Once they are unusable, they are bound to be thrown away since they are not recyclable or easily decomposed. In solving this problem, a new PCB substrate, which is based on reinforcing natural fiber with thermoplastics, is proposed. Oil palm empty fruit bunch has been chosen as raw material while polypropylene (PP) was added as filler. In modeling the prototype, five different loadings of natural fiber reinforced with different percentages of weight of PP were studied. The reflection method (one-port reflection coefficient method) is employed in measuring the permittivity. The measurement covers permittivity and dielectric loss.
Bbof1 is required to maintain cilia orientation

Multiciliate cells (MCCs) are highly specialized epithelial cells that employ hundreds of motile cilia to produce a vigorous directed flow in a variety of organ systems. The production of this flow requires the establishment of planar cell polarity (PCP) whereby MCCs align hundreds of beating cilia along a common planar axis. The planar axis of cilia in MCCs is known to be established via the PCP pathway and hydrodynamic cues, but the downstream steps required for cilia orientation remain poorly defined. Here, we describe a new component of cilia orientation, based on the phenotypic analysis of an uncharacterized coiled-coil protein, called bbof1. We show that the expression of bbof1 is induced during the early phases of MCC differentiation by the master regulator foxj1. MCC differentiation and ciliogenesis occurs normally in embryos where bbof1 activity is reduced, but cilia orientation is severely disrupted. We show that cilia in bbof1 mutants can still respond to patterning and hydrodynamic cues, but lack the ability to maintain their precise orientation. Misexpression of bbof1 promotes cilia alignment, even in the absence of flow or in embryos where microtubules and actin filaments are disrupted. Bbof1 appears to mediate cilia alignment by localizing to a polar structure adjacent to the basal body. Together, these results suggest that bbof1 is a basal body component required in MCCs to align and maintain cilia orientation in response to flow.
A comparison of model and GRACE estimates of the large‐scale seasonal cycle in ocean bottom pressure

Seasonal variability in ocean bottom pressure pb is analyzed using GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) data products and an optimized model solution obtained by fitting most available ocean data in a least‐squares sense. The annual cycle in the spatial mean is a substantial part of the observed seasonal pb variability; net freshwater input and atmospheric pressure effects are both important. For the residual spatially‐varying patterns, GRACE and model results agree well over the Southern Ocean where strongest variability at both annual and semiannual periods is present. Phase patterns tend to match well, although model amplitudes are generally weaker. Considerable uncertainty remains in both GRACE and model pb fields, judging from the spread among available estimates. Improving the pb estimates requires removal of data noise from aliasing and leakage of land hydrology signals, and further optimization of the ocean model, including possible use of GRACE data to constrain the solution.
Arterial Hypertension and Health-Related Quality of Life

Purpose To investigate the effect of awareness of arterial hypertension on quality of life in hypertensive patients in Greece. Materials and methods This was a prospective observational study that included 189 aware hypertensive patients on treatment with antihypertensive therapy. Patients were ambulatory men or women ≥18 years old, with diagnosed essential hypertension. The administration and fulfillment of the questionnaires was given at the outpatient hypertensive clinic starting with the SF-36 and continuing with the BDI-I test. Results The mean BDI score was 9.9 ± 6.9, and 58, 25, 8.9, and 7.3% were identified as without, with minimal, moderate, and 0.8% with severe depression, respectively. The mean score for physical component summary (PCS-36) was 48.9 ± 7.6, and the mean score for mental component summary (MCS-36) was 46.0 ± 10.6. The stage of hypertension was not an independent predictor for any of the SF-36 dimensions. Dippers had not different levels of health-related quality of life (HRQOL) as compared with non-dippers. LV hypertrophy was associated with lower scores on bodily pain (p < 0.05) and kidney failure was associated with lower scores on general health perception (p < 0.05). Female gender, increased age, and the presence of COPD were independently associated with lower physical and mental health scores (p < 0.05). Score on BDI independently correlated with all dimensions of SF-36, indicating that greater depression levels are associated with lower levels of HRQOL. Conclusion The stage as well as awareness of arterial hypertension does not affect physical and mental health. The fact that arterial hypertension per se is not a symptomatic disease may explain these results at least in patients with uncomplicated hypertension.
Correlations of Length Distributions between Non-coding and Coding Sequences of Arabidopsis thaliana

Gene length and organization are important attributes of genomics. With a large amount of sequence data becoming available, statistical analyses can be applied to this data and will offer beneficial output to research communities. Previous work in this field has focused on protein length and its coding region, while we are investigating the non-coding and coding regions, as well as trying to uncover any potential correlation that may exist between these regions. Analysis on the Arabidopsis thaliana found there was a strong correlation between the coding sequence length and non-coding regions, conditional on the 5psila UTR data. These results seemed consistent over all chromosomes and data that either contained or lacked introns. Classification of proteins into functional classes presented several interesting results. It was found that the number of protein types in a specific functional category decreased as the value of the 5psila UTR ratio, separated into eight subsets, increased. This work has revealed some possible correlations between different gene regions.
From the OntoBayes Model to a Service Oriented Decision Support System

The aim of this paper is to propose a service oriented decision support system based on an ontology-driven uncertainty model (OntoBayes). OntoBayes consists of knowledge and decision model parts. The former is the integration of ontologies and Bayesian networks while the latter can describe different decision models. OntoBayes gives a solution to deal with uncertainty and structure complexity and provides decision models by decision making. In order to construct a decision support system, a service oriented framework and architecture was introduced finally.