Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Developmental Trajectory of Brain-Scalp Distance from Birth through Childhood: Implications for Functional Neuroimaging

Measurements of human brain function in children are of increasing interest in cognitive neuroscience. Many techniques for brain mapping used in children, including functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), electroencephalography (EEG), magnetoencephalography (MEG) and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), use probes placed on or near the scalp. The distance between the scalp and the brain is a key variable for these techniques because optical, electrical and magnetic signals are attenuated by distance. However, little is known about how scalp-brain distance differs between different cortical regions in children or how it changes with development. We investigated scalp-brain distance in 71 children, from newborn to age 12 years, using structural T1-weighted MRI scans of the whole head. Three-dimensional reconstructions were created from the scalp surface to allow for accurate calculation of brain-scalp distance. Nine brain landmarks in different cortical regions were manually selected in each subject based on the published fNIRS literature. Significant effects were found for age, cortical region and hemisphere. Brain-scalp distances were lowest in young children, and increased with age to up to double the newborn distance. There were also dramatic differences between brain regions, with up to 50% differences between landmarks. In frontal and temporal regions, scalp-brain distances were significantly greater in the right hemisphere than in the left hemisphere. The largest contributors to developmental changes in brain-scalp distance were increases in the corticospinal fluid (CSF) and inner table of the cranium. These results have important implications for functional imaging studies of children: age and brain-region related differences in fNIRS signals could be due to the confounding factor of brain-scalp distance and not true differences in brain activity.
A GIMMICK FOR MIMIC: THE ELT STUDENT-TEACHERS’ ATTITUDES TOWARDS DRAMA COURSE

As a part of interaction-based meaningful activities, the use of drama techniques in education has gained popularity so far. The purpose of this study is to tackle the question whether the drama course together with the in-class applications contribute to the attitudes of prospective English language teachers. In that, the study is composed of the quantitative analysis of the attitudes of the prospective teachers from third graders at English Language Teaching (hereafter ELT) department. The data is gathered through the use of a 25-question-attitude scale (Topoglu & Erden, 2012) which has been administered to all participants, in sum composed of 37 sophomore students. The results have indicated positive attitudes towards drama course held in ELT department within the scope of desire to increase in course duration, continuity of the course for future benefits, the development of personal, interactional and social skills, and the improvement of the creativity skill.
Role of Perceived Value and Emotions in the Satisfaction and Future Intentions of Spectators in Sporting Events

The quality of service offered by sports entities has become a good predictor of user satisfaction and also future intentions. To know the future intentions of customers of any service is a key objective to develop service improvement and retention strategies. This need has also become apparent to professional sports clubs. In this study, the relationship between quality, perceived value, emotions, satisfaction and future intentions of spectators are analyzed for a sporting event. Using a sample of 563 spectators and modeling with structural equations, results indicate that perceived value is the best predictor of the satisfaction and future intentions of spectators, while quality and emotions have limited relevance as predictors of spectator satisfaction. DOI: http://dx.doi. org/10.5755/j01.ee. 27.2. 12288
Voice Activity Detection Using Spectral Entropy in Bark-Scale Wavelet Domain

In this paper, a novel entropy-based voice activity detection (VAD) algorithm is presented in variable-level noise environment. Since the frequency energy of different types of noise focuses on different frequency subband, the effect of corrupted noise on each frequency subband is different. It is found that the seriously obscured frequency subbands have little word signal information left, and are harmful for detecting voice activity segment (VAS). First, we use bark-scale wavelet decomposition (BSWD) to split the input speech into 24 critical subbands. In order to discard the seriously corrupted frequency subband, a method of adaptive frequency subband extraction (AFSE) is then applied to only use the frequency subband. Next, we propose a measure of entropy defined on the spectrum domain of selected frequency subband to form a robust voice feature parameter. In addition, unvoiced is usually eliminated. An unvoiced detection is also integrated into the system to improve the intelligibility of voice. Experimental results show that the performance of this algorithm is superior to the G.729B and other entropy-based VAD especially for variable-level background noise.
Young Children Pause on Phrase Boundaries in Self-Paced Music Listening: The Role of Harmonic Cues

Proper segmentation of auditory streams is essential for understanding music. Many cues, including meter, melodic contour, and harmony, influence adults’ perception of musical phrase boundaries. To date, no studies have examined young children’s musical grouping in a production task. We used a musical self-pacing method to investigate (1) whether dwell times index young children’s musical phrase grouping and, if so, (2) whether children dwell longer on phrase boundaries defined by harmonic cues specifically. In Experiment 1, we asked 3-year-old children to self-pace through chord progressions from Bach chorales (sequences in which metrical, harmonic, and melodic contour grouping cues aligned) by pressing a computer key to present each chord in the sequence. Participants dwelled longer on chords in the 8th position, which corresponded to phrase endings. In Experiment 2, we tested 3-, 4-, and 7-year-old children’s sensitivity to harmonic cues to phrase grouping when metrical regularity cues and melodic contour cues were misaligned with the harmonic phrase boundaries. In this case, 7 and 4 year olds but not 3 year olds dwelled longer on harmonic phrase boundaries, suggesting that the influence of harmonic cues on phrase boundary perception develops substantially between 3 and 4 years of age in Western children. Overall, we show that the musical dwell time method is child-friendly and can be used to investigate various aspects of young children’s musical understanding, including phrase grouping and harmonic knowledge.
On the Critical Period in Second Language Acquisition

This article reviews the studies on the critical period in second language acquisition.At present,there are three views: single critical period,multiple critical periods and no critical period.Although there is no certain conclusion,many studies show that age plays an important part in the acquisition of phonetics and syntax in second language acquisition.Finally,the implications of the studies on critical period are explored.
Effect of race and socioeconomic status on cardiovascular risk factor burden: the Cooper Center Longitudinal Study.

OBJECTIVES This study examines the prevalence of cardiovascular risk factors and chronic disease burden among African Americans compared to Caucasians in a population of higher socioeconomic status. DESIGN The current study is a cross-sectional, secondary data analysis of the Cooper Center Longitudinal Study. SETTING Patients with a medical examination from 1970-2010 at the Cooper Clinic. PARTICIPANTS 762 African Americans and 40,051 Caucasians who met the criteria. OUTCOME MEASURES Racial differences in cardiovascular risk factors/burden of disease between African Americans and Caucasians. RESULTS African Americans had higher prevalence of evaluated cardiovascular risk factors than did Caucasians after controlling for obesity, tobacco use, and physical fitness. Caucasians had greater likelihood of no risk factors while African Americans were more likely to have all three risk factors. Race was typically predictive of cardiovascular risk factors in African Americans compared to Caucasians. CONCLUSIONS Findings suggest that health differences persist despite greater socioeconomic status, and further investigations of biopsychosocial causes are warranted.
Activity-based context awareness interaction design

Context awareness is an important part of mobile and ubiquitous computing research field. Most existing studies concentrate on the technical implementation of context awareness system. Due to the lack of understanding on human being's awareness mechanism in a special context, there is a considerable gap between systems context awareness actions and human expectations to context awareness systems. Activity-based Context-Aware Mode(lACAM)is built on the basis of activity theory and human situational awareness theories. ACAM describes human context-aware process enclosed with a specific activity,which can get more accurate understanding on human context awareness mechanism and lead the development of context-aware technology. The case study is conducted under the background of supermarket. The context awareness process of shopping activity and activity-based context awareness shopping assistant verifies the ACAM preliminary.
Trying to Conceive After an Early Pregnancy Loss: An Assessment on How Long Couples Should Wait

OBJECTIVE: To compare time to pregnancy and live birth among couples with varying intervals of pregnancy loss date to subsequent trying to conceive date. METHODS: In this secondary analysis of the Effects of Aspirin in Gestation and Reproduction trial, 1,083 women aged 18–40 years with one to two prior early losses and whose last pregnancy outcome was a nonectopic or nonmolar loss were included. Participants were actively followed for up to six menstrual cycles and, for women achieving pregnancy, until pregnancy outcome. We calculated intervals as start of trying to conceive date minus pregnancy loss date. Time to pregnancy was defined as start of trying to conceive until subsequent conception. Discrete Cox models, accounting for left truncation and right censoring, estimated fecundability odds ratios (ORs) adjusting for age, race, body mass index, education, and subfertility. Although intervals were assessed prior to randomization and thus reasoned to have no relation with treatment assignment, additional adjustment for treatment was evaluated given that low-dose aspirin was previously shown to be predictive of time to pregnancy. RESULTS: Couples with a 0–3-month interval (n=765 [76.7%]) compared with a greater than 3-month (n=233 [23.4%]) interval were more likely to achieve live birth (53.2% compared with 36.1%) with a significantly shorter time to pregnancy leading to live birth (median [interquartile range] five cycles [three, eight], adjusted fecundability OR 1.71 [95% confidence interval 1.30–2.25]). Additionally adjusting for low-dose aspirin treatment did not appreciably alter estimates. CONCLUSION: Our study supports the hypothesis that there is no physiologic evidence for delaying pregnancy attempt after an early loss.
Adaptive joint block-weighted collaborative representation for facial expression recognition

Facial expression recognition (FER) plays a significant role in human-computer interactions. Recently, regularized linear representation-based classification has achieved satisfying results in FER. Considering that different blocks in a sample should contribute differently to the representation and classification, we propose an adaptive joint block-weighted collaborative representation-based classification (JBW_CRC) method to effectively exploit the similarity and distinctiveness of different blocks. In JBW_CRC, samples are divided into different blocks and each block of the query sample is represented as a feature vector. Each feature vector is coded on its related block dictionary, which considers the similarity among the feature vectors. Additionally, the distinctiveness of different feature vectors is obtained by weighting its distance to other features, which addresses the distinctiveness in the different feature vectors. The proposed method is verified from the aspect of training samples, time complexity, and Gaussian noise variances on benchmark databases and the extensive experiments show that the proposed method is very competitive with some similar pattern classification methods.
Phylogenetic and Morphological Investigation of a Dunaliella Strain Isolated from Yuncheng Salt Lake, China

A Dunaliella strain was isolated from Yuncheng Salt Lake, Shanxi, China (111.05°E, 35.03°N). Morphological characteristics and molecular data were used to evaluate the relationship of this algal strain to other Dunaliella strains. Morphology of the isolated strain observed was close to Dunaliella salina . Phylogenetic trees were constructed from rbcL , psaB , ITS (ITS-1+5.8S rDNA+ITS-2) and 18S rDNA sequence data. Phylogenetic analysis of the four gene sequences revealed that the isolated Dunaliella strain is closely related to D. salina (Dunal) Teodoresco, D. peircei Nicolai et Baas-Becking, D. tertiolecta Butcher and more likely closer to D. salina . Combined morphological characteristics and phylogenetic analysis, the isolated Duanliella —designated here as D. sp YC01—should be a Dunalialla salina strain.
CPP-ELM: Cryptographically Privacy-Preserving Extreme Learning Machine for Cloud Systems

The training techniques of the distributed machine learning approach replace the traditional methods with a cloud computing infrastructure and provide flexible computing services to clients. Moreover, machine learning-based classification methods are used in many diverse applications such as medical predictions, speech/face recognition, and financial applications. Most of the application areas require security and confidentiality for both the data and the classifier model. In order to prevent the risk of confidential data disclosure while outsourcing the data analysis, we propose a privacy-preserving protocol approach for the extreme learning machine algorithm and give private classification protocols. The proposed protocols compute the hidden layer output matrix H in an encrypted form by using a distributed multi-party computation (or cloud computing model) approach. This paper shows how to build a privacy-preserving classification model from encrypted data.
Amygdala-Specific Reduction of α1-GABAA Receptors Disrupts the Anticonvulsant, Locomotor, and Sedative, But Not Anxiolytic, Effects of Benzodiazepines in Mice

The heterogeneity and distribution of GABAA receptor subunits mediates differential roles in behavior. It is thought that particular behavioral responses to benzodiazepine (BZ) ligands might be associated with an action at a regionally defined receptor subtype. However, the role of specific GABAA receptor subtypes in particular brain regions is less clear. Such detailed knowledge of regional α1-GABAA receptor function will advance our understanding of the neural circuitry underlying the role of GABAA receptors and the effects of GABAA-modulating drugs on behavior. By combining inducible, site-specific α1 subunit deletion, using a lentivirus expressing Cre-recombinase in mice with the α1 subunit gene flanked by loxP sites, we examine baseline and pharmacological effects of deletion of amygdala α1-GABAA receptors. We find that amygdala-specific reduction of α1 receptor subunits does not affect mRNA or protein levels of amygdala α2 or α3 subunit receptors. Nor does this inducible reduction affect baseline locomotion or measures of anxiety. However, we also find that this inducible, site-specific deletion does disrupt the normal sedative-locomotor inhibition as well as the anticonvulsive effects, of two distinct BZ-site ligands, diazepam and zolpidem, which is relatively α1-subunit selective. These data, using inducible, region and subunit-specific deletion, combined with pharmacogenetic approaches, demonstrate that amygdala expression of the α1-GABAA receptor subunit is required for normal BZ effects on sedation, locomotion, and seizure inhibition, but not for anxiolysis.
Harnessing Stack Overflow for the IDE

Developers often consult online tutorials and message boards to find solutions to their programming issues. Among the many online resources, Question & Answer websites are gaining popularity. This is no wonder if we consider a case like Stack Overflow, where more than 92% questions on expert topics are answered in a median time of 11 minutes. This new resource has scarcely been acknowledged by any Integrated Development Environment (IDE): Even though developers spend a large part of their working time in IDEs, and the usage of Q&A services has dramatically increased, developers can only use such resources using external applications. We introduce Seahawk, an Eclipse plugin to integrate Stack Overflow crowd knowledge in the IDE. It allows developers to seamlessly access Stack Overflow data, thus obtaining answers without switching the context. We present our preliminary work on Seahawk: It allows users to (1) retrieve Q&A from Stack Overflow, (2) link relevant discussions to any source code in Eclipse, and (3) attach explanative comments to the links.
Developmental exposure to diethylstilbestrol alters uterine gene expression that may be associated with uterine neoplasia later in life

Previously, we described a mouse model where the well‐known reproductive carcinogen with estrogenic activity, diethylstilbestrol (DES), caused uterine adenocarcinoma following neonatal treatment. Tumor incidence was dose‐dependent reaching >90% by 18 mo following neonatal treatment with 1000 µg/kg/d of DES. These tumors followed the initiation/promotion model of hormonal carcinogenesis with developmental exposure as initiator, and exposure to ovarian hormones at puberty as the promoter. To identify molecular pathways involved in DES‐initiation events, uterine gene expression profiles were examined in prepubertal mice exposed to DES (1, 10, or 1000 µg/kg/d) on days 1–5 and compared to controls. Of more than 20 000 transcripts, approximately 3% were differentially expressed in at least one DES treatment group compared to controls; some transcripts demonstrated dose–responsiveness. Assessment of gene ontology annotation revealed alterations in genes associated with cell growth, differentiation, and adhesion. When expression profiles were compared to published studies of uteri from 5‐d‐old DES‐treated mice, or adult mice treated with 17β estradiol, similarities were seen suggesting persistent differential expression of estrogen responsive genes following developmental DES exposure. Moreover, several altered genes were identified in human uterine adenocarcinomas. Four altered genes [lactotransferrin (Ltf), transforming growth factor beta inducible (Tgfb1), cyclin D1 (Ccnd1), and secreted frizzled‐related protein 4 (Sfrp4)], selected for real‐time RT‐PCR analysis, correlated well with the directionality of the microarray data. These data suggested altered gene expression profiles observed 2 wk after treatment ceased, were established at the time of developmental exposure and maybe related to the initiation events resulting in carcinogenesis. © 2007 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Acute Volvulus of a Wandering Spleen on Pregnancy: A Case Report

Wandering or ectopic spleen is a rare congenital or acquired abnormality due to a defect in the anatomical fixity of the spleen with the surrounding organs. Pedicle twisting is its most common complication. It is an anatomo-clinical entity most often described in children, but rare in adults. It is a serious condition, especially when it occurs on a pregnancy putting at stake maternal and fetal prognosis. Authors report a case of acute volvulus of wandering spleen in a 26-year-old patient admitted for abdominal pain on an active pregnancy of 15 weeks of amenorrhea. Abdominal ultrasound scan helped to set the diagnosis. At laparotomy, the enlarged spleen was in an ectopic position, in the iliac fossa with a pedicle abnormally twisted in several spiral turns. Splenectomy was performed. The post-operative period was simple and the pregnancy progressed well to term.
Lactoferrin Expression in Human and Murine Ocular Tissue

ABSTRACT Purpose: Lactoferrin (LF) is a multifunctional protein known to provide innate defense due to its antimicrobial and anti-inflammatory properties. In the eye, LF has been identified in the tears and vitreous humor. Its presence in other ocular tissues has not been determined. Our aim is to assess the presence of LF in the cornea, iris, retina and retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) of humans and mice. Methods: To test for the endogenous production of LF, reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction was performed in cultured human cells from the cornea and RPE and in murine tissues. To confirm LF localization in specific ocular tissue, immunohistochemistry was performed on flat mounts of cornea, retina and RPE in human donor eyes. The presence of LF was assessed by western blotting in human and mouse ocular tissue and human culture cells (cornea and RPE). To verify antibody specificity, purified human LF and transferrin (TF) were used on 1D and 2D western blots. Results: LF gene expression was confirmed in the cornea and RPE cell cultures from humans, suggesting that LF is an endogenously produced protein. PCR results from mouse ocular tissue showed LF expression in cornea, iris, RPE, but not in retina. These results were also consistent with immunohistochemical localization of LF in human donor tissue. Antibody reaction for human LF was specific and western blotting showed its presence in the cornea, iris and RPE tissues. A faint reaction for the retina was observed but was likely due to contamination from other ocular tissues. Multiple commercially available antibodies for murine LF cross-reacted with TF, so no reliable results were obtained for murine western blot. Conclusion: LF is expressed in multiple eye tissues of humans and mice. This widespread expression and multifunctional activity of LF suggests that it may play an important role in protecting eye tissues from inflammation-associated diseases.