Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Muscarinic Long-Term Enhancement of NMDA and AMPA Receptor-Mediated Transmission at Schaffer Collateral Synapses Develop through Different Intracellular Mechanisms

We had described a muscarinic-mediated long-term synaptic enhancement at Schaffer collateral synapses caused by the insertion of AMPARs in spines of rat hippocampal CA1 pyramidal neurons that requires Ca2+ release from IP3-sensitive stores (Fernández de Sevilla et al., 2008). We now show that this AMPA-mediated LTPIP3 is precisely matched by an amplification of NMDAR-mediated transmission. The enhanced AMPAR transmission involves SNARE protein activity and CaMKII activation. The amplification of NMDA transmission requires combined CaMKII, PKC, and SRC kinase activity without detectable surface incorporation of NMDARs, suggesting that changes in receptor properties mediate this process. The enhanced AMPAR- and NMDAR-mediated transmission markedly reduce the induction threshold of “Hebbian” LTP. We conclude that both modes of glutamatergic synaptic potentiation may play a critical functional role in the regulation of the learning machinery of the brain by adding flexibility to the demands of the hippocampal network.
Let′s ′play′ with molecular pharmacology

Background: Understanding concepts of molecular mechanisms of drug action involves sequential visualization of physiological processes and drug effects, a task that can be difficult at an undergraduate level. Role-play is a teaching-learning methodology whereby active participation of students as well as clear visualization of the phenomenon is used to convey complex physiological concepts. However, its use in teaching drug action, a process that demands understanding of a second level of complexity over the physiological process, has not been investigated. We hypothesized that role-play can be an effective and well accepted method for teaching molecular pharmacology. Methods: In an observational study, students were guided to perform a role-play on a selected topic involving drug activity. Students′ gain in knowledge was assessed comparing validated pre- and post-test questionnaires as well as class average normalized gain. The acceptance of role-play among undergraduate medical students was evaluated by Likert scale analysis and thematic analysis of their open-ended written responses. Results: Significant improvement in knowledge (P < 0.001) was noted in the pre- to post-test knowledge scores, while a high gain in class average normalized score was evident. In Likert scale analysis, most students (93%) expressed that role-play was an acceptable way of teaching. In a thematic analysis, themes of both strengths and weaknesses of the session emerged. Discussion: Role-play can be effectively utilized while teaching selected topics of molecular pharmacology in undergraduate medical curricula.
A qualitative comparison of power law generators

Several topology generator algorithms have been proposed to match the heavy-tailed behavior of the real Internet AS-level topology. Although evaluation studies have been presented for each topology generator, each of these studies assumes a different framework. Therefore, it is difficult to compare the differences between the topology generator algorithms. The objective of this paper is to fill this gap by comparing representative families of topology generators.
Invariancy Methods for Points, Curves and Surfaces in Computational Vision

Many issues in computational vision can be understood from the interplay between camera geometry and the structure of images and objects. Typically, the image structure is available and the goal is to reconstruct object structure and camera geometry. This is often difficult due to the complex interdependence between these three entities. The theme of this thesis is to use invariants to solve these and other problems of computational vision. Two types of invariancies are discussed; view-point invariance and object invariance. A view-point invariant does not depend on the camera geometry. The classical cross ratio of four collinear points is a typical example. A number of invariants for planar curves are developed and discussed. View-point invariants are useful for many purposes, for example to solve recognition problems. This idea is applied to navigation of laser guided vehicles and to the recognition of planar curves. An object invariant does not depend on the object structure. The epipolar constraint is a typical example. The epipolar constraint is generalised in several directions. Multilinear constraints are derived for both continuous and discrete time motion. Similar constraints are used to solve navigation problems. Generalised epipolar constraints are derived for curves and surfaces. The invariants are based on pure geometrical properties. To apply these ideas to real images it is necessary to consider practical issues such as noise. Stochastic properties of low-level vision are investigated to give guidelines for design of practical algorithms. A theory for interpolation and scale-space smoothing is developed. The resulting low-level algorithms, for example edge-detection and correlation, are invariant with respect to the position of the discretisation grid. The ideas are useful in order to understand existing algorithms and to design new ones. (Less)
Evaluating re-identification risks with respect to the HIPAA privacy rule

OBJECTIVE Many healthcare organizations follow data protection policies that specify which patient identifiers must be suppressed to share "de-identified" records. Such policies, however, are often applied without knowledge of the risk of "re-identification". The goals of this work are: (1) to estimate re-identification risk for data sharing policies of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) Privacy Rule; and (2) to evaluate the risk of a specific re-identification attack using voter registration lists. MEASUREMENTS We define several risk metrics: (1) expected number of re-identifications; (2) estimated proportion of a population in a group of size g or less, and (3) monetary cost per re-identification. For each US state, we estimate the risk posed to hypothetical datasets, protected by the HIPAA Safe Harbor and Limited Dataset policies by an attacker with full knowledge of patient identifiers and with limited knowledge in the form of voter registries. RESULTS The percentage of a state's population estimated to be vulnerable to unique re-identification (ie, g=1) when protected via Safe Harbor and Limited Datasets ranges from 0.01% to 0.25% and 10% to 60%, respectively. In the voter attack, this number drops for many states, and for some states is 0%, due to the variable availability of voter registries in the real world. We also find that re-identification cost ranges from $0 to $17,000, further confirming risk variability. CONCLUSIONS This work illustrates that blanket protection policies, such as Safe Harbor, leave different organizations vulnerable to re-identification at different rates. It provides justification for locally performed re-identification risk estimates prior to sharing data.
The Challenges of Multi-dimensional Sentiment Analysis Across Languages

This paper outlines a pilot study on multi-dimensional and multilingual sentiment analysis of social media content. We use parallel corpora of movie subtitles as a proxy for colloquial language in social media channels and a multilingual emotion lexicon for fine-grained sentiment analyses. Parallel data sets make it possible to study the preservation of sentiments and emotions in translation and our assessment reveals that the lexical approach shows great inter-language agreement. However, our manual evaluation also suggests that the use of purely lexical methods is limited and further studies are necessary to pinpoint the cross-lingual differences and to develop better sentiment classifiers.
Scaling and Sustaining an Intervention: The Case of Reading Recovery

ABSTRACT In every school district across the country, every year, initiatives are adopted with the goal of improving the literacy performance of young students, and, just as frequently, these initiatives fail or quickly become passing fads. In this article, Rodgers reviews literature related to scaling educational innovations and describes challenges and barriers to implementing and maintaining evidence-based reform. Using Reading Recovery as a case example, she describes features of the intervention that are thought to be linked to its longevity in terms of scalability and sustainability. She also shares lessons learned from the most recent period of its expansion with the 5-year grant to scale up Reading Recovery across the county. Implications from this article include the importance of adopting an initiative that has a well-articulated design, collecting data on the progress of the students served, and having a person in the district who acts as a redirecting agent, maintaining the design of the initiative and guarding it against tendencies to pare down the design.
“Heritage” as alternative place and space: old-time music and roots- and routes-based tourism in Southern Appalachia

ABSTRACT After a decades-long exodus of industry and capital from Southern Appalachia, heritage tourism attempts to generate revenue by representing cultural authenticity in an area historically occupying the place of cultural backwater in American popular imaginations. This paper analyzes the representational terrain that such a tourism project traverses to present viable narratives of cultural authenticity. I suggest that valuations of authenticity in these representations, while exhibiting ambivalences about the values of the past and present, foreground iconic and indexical relationships among music, musicians, and Appalachian history and landscape, in turn drawing on the appeal of a different orientation to space and place. This appeal of and for a cultural and affective alternate route – an alternative to a high-speed, rootless, globalized landscape of mass consumption – is both opposed to and dependent on that landscape for its value and viability.
The I Theory of Money

A theory of money needs a proper place for financial intermediaries. Intermediaries diversify risks and create inside money. In downturns, micro-prudent intermediaries shrink their lending activity, fire-sell assets and supply less inside money, exactly when money demand rises. The resulting Fisher disinflation hurts intermediaries and other borrowers. Shocks are amplified, volatility spikes and risk premia rise. Monetary policy is redistributive. Accommodative monetary policy that boosts assets held by balance sheet-impaired sectors, recapitalizes them and mitigates the adverse liquidity and disinflationary spirals. Since monetary policy cannot provide insurance and control risk-taking separately, adding macroprudential policy that limits leverage attains higher welfare.
Propagation of Neuronal Activity along the Neocortical–Perirhinal–Entorhinal Pathway in the Guinea Pig

The study of synaptic interactions within the parahippocampal region is crucial to understand the integrative functions performed by this region during memory information processing. Despite the extensive anatomical studies, the intrinsic physiology of the parahippocampal area has been poorly investigated. We describe here the organization pattern of the synaptic network formed by the temporal neocortex, areas 36 and 35 of the perirhinal cortex (PRC) and the entorhinal cortex (EC), in the in vitro isolated guinea-pig brain. Current source density analysis of laminar field potential profiles was performed with multichannel silicon probes positioned in different parahippocampal subfields. Stimulation of the temporal neocortex induced monosynaptic and polysynaptic potentials in areas 35 and 36, respectively. Area 36 stimulation evoked monosynaptic responses within areas 36 and 35. Stimuli in area 35 induced responses that propagated longitudinally along area 35 itself. No local field responses were observed in the EC after stimulation of both neocortex and areas 35/36. Despite the absence of a local extracellular response, intracellular recordings demonstrated that subpopulations of superficial layer neurons in medial and lateral EC showed polysynaptic EPSPs after stimulation of area 35 and area 36. The results demonstrate that the propagation of neuronal activity across the rhinal sulcus in the direction from the PRC to the EC is finely and diffusely distributed. In agreement with previous reports, these findings suggest that the PRC–EC pathway is highly regulated by inhibitory network interactions.
Methodology to Develop and Evaluate a Semantic Representation for NLP

Natural language processing applications that extract information from text rely on semantic representations. The objective of this paper is to describe a methodology for creating a semantic representation for information that will be automatically extracted from textual clinical records. We illustrate two of the four steps of the methodology in this paper using the case study of encoding information from dictated dental exams: (1) develop an initial representation from a set of training documents and (2) iteratively evaluate and evolve the representation while developing annotation guidelines. Our approach for developing and evaluating a semantic representation is based on standard principles and approaches that are not dependent on any particular domain or type of semantic representation.
Attachment style and perceived stress in college students

The purpose of this study was to examine the impact that attachment (as measured by an adult attachment measure) has on a college student’s perceived stress levels. A sample of seven hundred and twenty-seven college students ranging from 18 to 30 years (N=727; 73.2% female, 26.8% male; 46.8% Hispanic/Latino, 18.2% Asian/Pacific Islander, 13.3% Caucasian, 7.4% other/mixed, 5.0% Middle Eastern, 4.5% African American/Black, 4.5% Armenian, and 0.3% Native American) completed two self-report questionnaires assessing attachment styles (ECR-S) and perceived stress levels (PSS). Analyses revealed a statistically significant relationship between an adult’s level of secure attachment and level of perceived stress. The overall results showed that secure attachment levels were significantly and negatively related to perceived stress levels. These results provide further evidence of the impact that earlier relationships have on a person’s functioning in adulthood, specifically with regards to one’s ability to cope with a physically and emotionally demanding environment. Implications for providing attachment related interventions and directions for future research are explored.
Sexual Behavior During the Emerging Adult Years: Attachment and Social Support Perspectives

The purpose of this study was to better understand sexual development during the transition to adulthood. Previous research was extended by testing models that examined direct effects of romantic attachment and social support on emerging adults’ sexual outcomes, as well as models that examined the mediating role of sexual motivations in those associations. Undergraduate students (n = 290, 66% female) completed questionnaires that assessed romantic attachment, social support, sexual motives, risky sexual behaviors, and health-promoting sexual beliefs. Results indicated romantic attachment strongly predicted sexual functioning, such that higher levels of attachment insecurity were associated with fewer health-promoting sexual beliefs and more risky sexual behaviors. Attachment anxiety was most closely associated with sexual outcomes for females, while attachment avoidance was a stronger predictor of sexual outcomes for males. Furthermore, coping but not intimacy motivations were found to partially mediate the link between attachment anxiety and health-promoting sexual beliefs for females. Although overall relationships between social support and sexual outcomes were not significant as hypothesized, links between specific support sources and sexual outcomes emerged during further analysis. Conclusions underscore the usefulness of attachment theory as a framework for understanding sexual behavior and provide further support for the importance of considering gender differences when examining the interplay between the attachment and sexual systems. Practical implications for sexual health prevention and intervention efforts are discussed.
Mining and modelling the dynamic patterns of service providers in cellular data network based on big data analysis

Understanding the dynamic traffic and usage characteristics of data services in cellular networks is important for optimising network resources and improving user experience. Recent studies have illustrated traffic characteristics from specific perspectives, such as user behaviour, device type, and applications. In this paper, we present the results of our study from a different perspective, namely service providers, to reveal the traffic characteristics of cellular data networks. Our study is based on traffic data collected over a five-day period from a leading mobile operator's core network in China. We propose a Zipf-like model to characterise the distributions of the traffic volume, subscribers, and requests among service providers. Nine distinct diurnal traffic patterns of service providers are identified by formulating and solving a time series clustering problem. Our work differs from previous related works in that we perform measurements on a large quantity of data covering 2.2 billion traffic records, and we first explore the traffic patterns of thousands of service providers. Results of our study present mobile Internet participants with a better understanding of the traffic and usage characteristics of service providers, which play a critical role in the mobile Internet era.
Agilent Mimo Channel Modeling and Emulation Test Challenges

Application Note This application note begins with a review of MIMO technologies and the basic properties of wireless channels and goes on to introduce the concepts of spatial correlation and its effects on MIMO performance. It also includes a demonstration of modeling the spatial characteristics of MIMO channels and describes how these complex channels can be emulated using commercially available instrumentation such as the Agilent N5106A PXB baseband generator and signal emulator. Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) technology holds the promise of higher data rates with increased spectral efficiency. Due to the potential improvement in system performance and advances in digital signal processing, many wireless systems, including the IEEE 802.11n wireless LAN, IEEE 802.16e-based Mobile WiMAX™ Wave 2 and the Long-Term Evolution (LTE) mobile wireless system, have recently adopted the use of MIMO and multiple antenna technologies. All of these commercial wireless systems operate in high multipath environments and it is the benefit of multipath that provides the performance improvement when using multiple antenna configurations. While MIMO offers the potential for increased signal robustness and capacity improvement when operating in rich multipath environments, developing and testing MIMO components and systems requires advanced channel emulation tools that are easily configured and provide an accurate representation of realistic wireless channels and conditions. This application note begins with a review of MIMO technologies and the basic properties of wireless channels and goes on to introduce the concepts of spatial correlation and its effects on MIMO performance. It also includes a demonstration of modeling the spatial characteristics of MIMO channels and describes how these complex channels can be emulated using commercially available instrumentation such as the Agilent N5106A PXB baseband generator and signal emulator which will be referred to throughout the remainder of this document as the PXB.
Keep calm and react with foresight: strategies for low-latency and energy-efficient elastic data stream processing

This paper addresses the problem of designing scaling strategies for elastic data stream processing. Elasticity allows applications to rapidly change their configuration on-the-fly (e.g., the amount of used resources) in response to dynamic workload fluctuations. In this work we face this problem by adopting the Model Predictive Control technique, a control-theoretic method aimed at finding the optimal application configuration along a limited prediction horizon in the future by solving an online optimization problem. Our control strategies are designed to address latency constraints, using Queueing Theory models, and energy consumption by changing the number of used cores and the CPU frequency through the Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) support available in the modern multicore CPUs. The proactive capabilities, in addition to the latency- and energy-awareness, represent the novel features of our approach. To validate our methodology, we develop a thorough set of experiments on a high-frequency trading application. The results demonstrate the high-degree of flexibility and configurability of our approach, and show the effectiveness of our elastic scaling strategies compared with existing state-of-the-art techniques used in similar scenarios.
Regulation of Rat Schwann Cell Po Expression and DNA Synthesis by Insulin‐like Growth Factors In Vitro

Myelination by Schwann cells is likely to be regulated in Vitro by positive and negative epigenetic factors. In Vitro, the positive regulation of myelin differentiation, in particular expression of the major myelin protein Po, can be mimicked by cAMP elevating agents, while serum, transforming growth factor (TGF)βs, and fibroblast growth factor (FGF)2 have been shown to exert a negative effect on this differentiation. Growth factors which promote Po induction have not, however, been identified previously. Using a forskolin concentration (0.4 μM) which alone produces little Po mRNA or protein induction, we show that insulin‐like growth factor (IGF)‐I, IGF‐II and high concentrations of insulin promote high levels of Po induction, although in the absence of forskolin they have no effect. Another event related to Schwann cell differentiation, induction of galactocerebroside expression in response to cAMP analogues, is also potentiated by IGFs. In a different context, IGFs regulate Schwann cell DMA synthesis. We find that in defined medium forskolin plus FGF2, TGFβ or platelet‐derived growth factor (PDGF) BB causes minimal DNA synthesis in the absence of IGFs and that IGFs act as potent mitogens under these conditions. IGFs also potentiate DNA synthesis induced by β isoforms of neu‐differentiation factors (NDFs), although in this case considerable DNA synthesis occurs even in the absence of IGF. These results show that IGFs can act as powerful stimulators of both proliferation and differentiation in Schwann cells, and that the total growth factor input determines which of these pathways IGFs will promote.