Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
II HIGH BANDWIDTH SYNAPTIC TRANSMISSION IN HUMAN NEOCORTEX

Human mental abilities far exceed those of other organisms. The reason for this remains enigmatic. We hypothesized that at a fundamental level, the dynamics of information encoding and transmission between neocortical principal cells in the brain may be better optimized for high processing capacity. Here, we find in unitary synaptic connections between human neocortical pyramidal neurons that the synaptic machinery rapidly recovers during repeated activation. This enables fast and sustainable information transfer between neurons at gamma band frequencies. Furthermore, we find that human principal cells can collectively track fine temporal features conveyed in their inputs at a much wider bandwidth than reported for rodents. This enables reliable information encoding into spike trains. Thereby, information processing and transfer can occur at high rates in human neocortical circuits.
Combining MFCC and Pitch to Enhance the Performance of the Gender Recognition

This paper describes a novel approach which combines the acoustic analysis using MFCC and the speaker's mean pitch to improve the performance of the gender recognition. In acoustic analysis, two sets of Gaussian mixture model (GMM), male and female, are trained from the speech, and the most likely sequence of models with corresponding likelihood scores are produced. In pitch estimation approach, a threshold is specified to differentiate the two sets. The information provided by the acoustic analysis using MFCC and pitch estimation are combined by using a linear normalization fusion method. The system was tested on the SRMC databases giving at most 3.3% recognition error rate
Release of a membrane-bound death domain by γ-secretase processing of the p75NTR homolog NRADD

Neurotrophin receptor alike death domain protein (NRADD) is a death-receptor-like protein with a unique ectodomain and an intracellular domain homologous to p75NTR. Expression of NRADD results in apoptosis, but only in certain cell types. This paper characterizes the expression and proteolytic processing of the mature 55 kDa glycoprotein. N-terminally truncated NRADD is processed by a γ-secretase activity that requires presenilins and has the same susceptibility to γ-secretase inhibitors as the secretion of amyloid β (Aβ). The ectodomain of endogenous NRADD is shed by activation of metalloproteinases. Inhibitor studies provide evidence that NRADD is cleaved in two steps typical of regulated intramembrane proteolysis (RIP). Inhibition of γ-secretase abrogates both the production of the soluble intracellular domain of NRADD and the appearance of NRADD in subnuclear structures. Thus, solubilized death domains with close homology to p75NTR might have a nuclear function. Furthermore, presenilin deficiency leads to abnormally glycosylated NRADD and overexpression of presenilin 2 inhibits NRADD maturation, which is dependent on the putative active site residue D366 but not on γ-secretase activity. Our results demonstrate that NRADD is an additional γ-secretase substrate and suggest that drugs against Alzheimer's disease will need to target γ-secretase in a substrate-specific manner.
Practice parameters for the role of actigraphy in the study of sleep and circadian rhythms: an update for 2002.

Actigraphy is a method used to study sleep-wake patterns and circadian rhythms by assessing movement, most commonly of the wrist. These evidence-based practice parameters are an update to the Practice Parameters for the Use of Actigraphy in the Clinical Assessment of Sleep Disorders, published in 1995. These practice parameters were developed by the Standards of Practice Committee and reviewed and approved by the Board of Directors of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. Recommendations are based on the accompanying comprehensive review of the medical literature regarding the role of actigraphy, which was developed by a task force commissioned by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. The following recommendations serve as a guide to the appropriate use of actigraphy. Actigraphy is reliable and valid for detecting sleep in normal, healthy populations, but less reliable for detecting disturbed sleep. Although actigraphy is not indicated for the routine diagnosis, assessment, or management of any of the sleep disorders, it may serve as a useful adjunct to routine clinical evaluation of insomnia, circadian-rhythm disorders, and excessive sleepiness, and may be helpful in the assessment of specific aspects of some disorders, such as insomnia and restless legs syndrome/periodic limb movement disorder. The assessment of daytime sleepiness, the demonstration of multiday human-rest activity patterns, and the estimation of sleep-wake patterns are potential uses of actigraphy in clinical situations where other techniques cannot provide similar information (e.g., psychiatric ward patients). Superiority of actigraphy placement on different parts of the body is not currently established. Actigraphy may be useful in characterizing and monitoring circadian rhythm patterns or disturbances in certain special populations (e.g., children, demented individuals), and appears useful as an outcome measure in certain applications and populations. Although actigraphy may be a useful adjunct to portable sleep apnea testing, the use of actigraphy alone in the detection of sleep apnea is not currently established. Specific technical recommendations are discussed, such as using concomitant completion of a sleep log for artifact rejection and timing of lights out and on; conducting actigraphy studies for a minimum of three consecutive 24-hour periods; requiring raw data inspection; permitting some preprocessing of movement counts; stating that epoch lengths up to 1 minute are usually sufficient, except for circadian rhythm assessment; requiring interpretation to be performed manually by visual inspection; and allowing automatic scoring in addition to manual scoring methods.
The Whitney Reduction Network: A Method for Computing Autoassociative Graphs

This article introduces a new architecture and associated algorithms ideal for implementing the dimensionality reduction of an m-dimensionalmanifold initially residing in an n-dimensional Euclidean space where n m. Motivated by Whitney's embedding theorem, the network is capable of training the identity mapping employing the idea of the graph of a function. In theory, a reduction to a dimension d that retains the differential structure of the original data may be achieved for some d 2m + 1. To implement this network, we propose the idea of a good-projection, which enhances the generalization capabilities of the network, and an adaptive secant basis algorithm to achieve it. The effect of noise on this procedure is also considered. The approach is illustrated with several examples.
Family life cycle and cohort effects: a study of travel patterns of German residents.

This paper discusses various aspects of travel patterns with respect to the family life cycle (FLC). A modernized FLC is proposed which reduces the number of non-classifiable cases. Based on longitudinal data, the paper explores not only the dependence of destination choice, seasonality, choice of accommodation, and transportation on the FLC, but also differences between three cohorts. It is concluded that that the FLC affects travel pattern considerably, however, other influences such as the cohort effect should be given more consideration. It is argued that longitudinal approaches can be valuable additions to the commonly used cross0sectioanl inquires in market research and positioning.
Real-time analysis for nonlinear model predictive control of autonomous vehicles

This paper presents an online Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) framework for trajectory tracking of autonomous vehicles. The operating environment is assumed to be unknown with various different types of obstacles. A bicycle model is used for the prediction of the future states in the NMPC framework, and a fully nonlinear CarSim vehicle model is used for the simulations. Real-time analysis is presented for a particular situation and the effect of warm initialization of optimization process on the computation time is elaborated. Simulation results show that the NMPC controller provides satisfactory online tracking performance while satisfying the real-time constraints, and warm initialization reduces the optimizer computational load significantly.
Research on mutual interference evaluation method of global navigation satellite system

With the increase in the international satellite navigation system, satellite navigation frequency resources are already in short supply, and due to commercial, disaster relief and other reasons, the design of the navigation signals and use are more sophisticated, complex. In the same basic bandwidth, there may be multi-navigation signals, by analyzing the intrasystem interference, the designed reasonableness of navigation signals institutional structure can be evaluated, and the overall system performance can be optimized. The band duplication of the satellite navigation system is analyzed, and various methods of the satellite navigation system mutual interference assessment test are comprehensively analyzed, and finally, according to the characteristics of C/A code signal acquisition, carrier tracking and data demodulation in GPS system, the equivalent carrier to noise ratio model based on spectrum isolated coefficient is proposed, and the spectrum isolated coefficient with C/A code interference factor is derived. Through the analysis of simulation results, the validity of the model is verified, which provides support for the subsequent optimal design of a new generation of navigation signals.
Preservice Teacher Performance Assessment during Student Teaching: Consequences and Pitfalls.

This paper describes student teacher evaluation at Evergreen State College, Washington, examining its 2-year, graduate-level initial certification program. The school began by reviewing its full-time student teaching program, testing a modified version of Danielson's (1996) "Enhancing Professional Practice: A Framework for Teaching. " All cooperating teachers, supervising college faculty, and teacher candidates involved in the graduate program were surveyed to determine the effectiveness of the school's new performance-based assessment of teacher candidates involved in full-time student teaching. Results demonstrating a positive impact on student learning around state learning goals were the focus of extensive deliberations among program faculty and an external advisory board. The school revised its internal assessment procedure and was granted continuing accreditation by the State Board of Education under its new performance-based criteria. This paper describes lessons learned, focusing on consequences and pitfalls. Overall, having primarily full-time faculty supervise student teachers was critical in implementing performance-based assessment during student teaching. Continuous mentoring was critical in helping teacher candidates meet performance requirements. Cooperating teachers and college faculty needed collaborative professional development to increase their mentoring skills under the performance-based system. Teacher candidates needed early exposure to the performance requirements for student teaching. (SM) ******************************************************************************** Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. ********************************************************************************
Carefree? Participation and Pay Differentials for Informal Carers in Britain

A substantial proportion of working age individuals in Britain are looking after sick, disabled, and elderly people and combine work and caring responsibilities. Using the British Household Panel Study (BHPS) for the years 1991 to 2002 this paper studies the determinants of labour market participation as well as earnings differentials for informal carers and non-carers over time. In particular, the paper decomposes participation and wage differentials for non-carers and carers and shows that carers are systematically disadvantaged. Furthermore, opportunity costs from forgone wages and wage discrimination are estimated and found to be substantial.
Steady-State Motion Visual Evoked Potential (SSMVEP) Based on Equal Luminance Colored Enhancement

Steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP) is one of the typical stimulation paradigms of brain-computer interface (BCI). It has become a research approach to improve the performance of human-computer interaction, because of its advantages including multiple objectives, less recording electrodes for electroencephalogram (EEG) signals, and strong anti-interference capacity. Traditional SSVEP using light flicker stimulation may cause visual fatigue with a consequent reduction of recognition accuracy. To avoid the negative impacts on the brain response caused by prolonged strong visual stimulation for SSVEP, steady-state motion visual evoked potential (SSMVEP) stimulation method was used in this study by an equal-luminance colored ring-shaped checkerboard paradigm. The movement patterns of the checkerboard included contraction and expansion, which produced less discomfort to subjects. Feature recognition algorithms based on power spectrum density (PSD) peak was used to identify the peak frequency on PSD in response to visual stimuli. Results demonstrated that the equal-luminance red-green stimulating paradigm within the low frequency spectrum (lower than 15 Hz) produced higher power of SSMVEP and recognition accuracy than black-white stimulating paradigm. PSD-based SSMVEP recognition accuracy was 88.15±6.56%. There was no statistical difference between canonical correlation analysis (CCA) (86.57±5.37%) and PSD on recognition accuracy. This study demonstrated that equal-luminance colored ring-shaped checkerboard visual stimulation evoked SSMVEP with better SNR on low frequency spectrum of power density and improved the interactive performance of BCI.
ESTIMATION PROCESSORS FOR HIGH DEFINITION VIDEO CODING

This paper presents a reconfigurable motion estimation processor suitable for high definition video coding. A toolset for the design of a video coding system is presented as well. The presented tools can be used in the design and configuration of the reconfigurable processor itself. They can also be used to design user-defined block-matching motion estimation algorithms. Using the tools, the processor’s design space may be explored in order to find configurations suitable for high definition video. The experiments presented show the effect of modifying the processor configuration on the performance obtained when coding high definition video sequences, and the results indicate that for high definition video, supporting sub-partitioning offers no gain for the increase in complexity.
Portal‐Masked Environment Map Sampling

We present a technique to efficiently importance sample distant, all‐frequency illumination in indoor scenes. Standard environment sampling is inefficient in such cases since the distant lighting is typically only visible through small openings (e.g. windows). This visibility is often addressed by manually placing a portal around each window to direct samples towards the openings; however, uniformly sampling the portal (its area or solid angle) disregards the possibly high frequency environment map. We propose a new portal importance sampling technique which takes into account both the environment map and its visibility through the portal, drawing samples proportional to the product of the two. To make this practical, we propose a novel, portal‐rectified reparametrization of the environment map with the key property that the visible region induced by a rectangular portal projects to an axis‐aligned rectangle. This allows us to sample according to the desired product distribution at an arbitrary shading location using a single (precomputed) summed‐area table per portal. Our technique is unbiased, relevant to many renderers, and can also be applied to rectangular light sources with directional emission profiles, enabling efficient rendering of non‐diffuse light sources with soft shadows.
EPSTI1 Is Involved in IL-28A-Mediated Inhibition of HCV Infection

It has been reported that IFN-λs inhibit HCV replication in vitro. But the mechanisms of how IL-28A conducts antiviral activity and the functions of IL-28A-induced ISGs (IFN-stimulated genes) are not fully understood. In this study, we found that IL-28A has the antiviral effect on HCV life cycle including viral replication, assembly, and release. IL-28A and IFN-α synergistically inhibit virus replication. EPSTI1 (epithelial-stromal interaction 1), one of IL-28A-induced ISGs, plays a vital role in IL-28A-mediated antiviral activity. Furthermore, forced expression of EPSTI1 effectively inhibits HCV replication in the absence of interferon treatment, and knockdown of EPSTI1 contributes to viral enhancement. EPSTI1 can activate PKR promoter and induce several PKR-dependent genes, including IFN-β, IFIT1, OAS1, and RNase L, which is responsible for EPSTI1-mediated antiviral activity.
UNU-IAS Working Paper No. 128 Education and the Creation of Sustainable Rural Communities in Uganda and Japan: Some Lessons for the DESD*

This paper is based on two research experiences from Uganda and Japan. The major goal of the research was to critically examine educational activities aimed at addressing the challenges of sustainable development in rural areas of the two countries in order to draw some lessons to inform the implementation of the decade of education for sustainable development. The paper is premised on the view that education is not neutral and reiterates the importance of approaching education practice from a more critical and open-minded perspective. It highlights the philosophies of education, environment and development as the major currents informing EfSD, thus making it a multidimensional endeavour both at the practical and theoretical levels. It reiterates the need to critique the philosophical positions of educators as the first step in reorienting education into EfSD. The results demonstrate the need not to only contextualise EfSD programmes but also broaden the scope to address other socio-cultural and economic issues that often lay out side the concern of educators. A contrast between Japanese and Ugandan experiences demonstrates the magnitude of the problems poverty; inadequate socio-economic infrastructure and the differing economic orientations pose to the implementing EfSD programmes. The paper highlights the complexities involved in attempting to balance ecological, economic, social and other development needs in different contexts. The Ugandan case illustrates inconsistencies in the epistemological assumptions and didactic approaches common in the implementation EfSD programmes and their potential dangers to EfSd success. The study shows that the intended emancipatory education processes are more often supplanted by technicist methodologies. Thus, it exposes the underlying historical, ideological and epistemological tensions and contradictions within the field of education, particularly in relation to the orientations (neo-classical, liberal and socially critical/emancipatory). It also demonstrates that with the choice of appropriate methods and approaches (more participatory, empowering and active) guided by clear conceptual frameworks EfSD can be successfully implemented.
BER performance of OFDM-BPSK and-QPSK over Nakagami-m fading channels

In this paper, the performance of OFDM-BPSK and-QPSK system in Nakagami-m channel has been reported. Here our approach is based on decomposition of Nakagami random variable into orthogonal random variables with Gaussian distribution envelopes. Results have been presented to obtain optimum value of m based on BER and SNR.
An efficient buffer-based architecture for on-line computation of 1-D discrete wavelet transform

In this paper, we propose a flexible architecture that performs the computation of the discrete wavelet transform, requiring a small memory space and is capable of operating at high sampling rate. The architecture employs two filtering blocks to compute the transform and one buffer to store the intermediate results. Each filtering block has two processing units that operate independently in parallel using a two-phase scheduling. An efficient scheme for the synchronization of the data flow among the three blocks is provided in order to minimize the buffer size and increase the speed of operation. Verilog and HSPICE simulation results are presented to show that the proposed architecture is more efficient for the computation of a fully decomposed discrete wavelet transform with high-tap filters than some other existing architectures in terms of their areas and speed of operations.
Isolating the effects of surface vasculature in infant neuroimaging using short-distance optical channels: a combination of local and global effects

Abstract. Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) records hemodynamic changes in the cortex arising from neurovascular coupling. However, (noninvasive) fNIRS recordings also record surface vascular signals arising from noncortical sources (e.g., in the skull, skin, dura, and other tissues located between the sensors and the brain). A current and important focus in the fNIRS community is determining how to remove these noncortical vascular signals to reduce noise and to prevent researchers from erroneously attributing responses to cortical sources. The current study is the first to test a popular method for removing signals from the surface vasculature (removing short, 1 cm, channel recordings from long, 3 cm, channel recordings) in human infants, a population frequently studied using fNIRS. We find evidence that this method does remove surface vasculature signals and indicates the presence of both local and global surface vasculature signals. However, we do not find that the removal of this information changes the statistical inferences drawn from the data. This latter result not only questions the importance of removing surface vasculature responses for empiricists employing this method, but also calls for future research using other tasks (e.g., ones with a weaker initial result) with this population and possibly additional methods for removing signals arising from the surface vasculature in infants.
LOM: A Lexicon-based Ontology Mapping Tool

Abstract : Ontology mapping is important to knowledge sharing and semantic integration but hard to completely automate. LOM is a semi-automatic lexicon-based ontology-mapping tool that supports a human mapping engineer with a first-cut comparison of ontological terms between the ontologies to be mapped, based on their lexical similarity. This paper will explain the algorithms used, the tests performed, and the applications developed using the results of this approach. It will also discuss the limitations of this approach as well as the future research and development issues in this field.