Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Dynamic Range Adaptation to Spectral Stimulus Statistics in Human Auditory Cortex

Classically, neural adaptation refers to a reduction in response magnitude by sustained stimulation. In human electroencephalography (EEG), neural adaptation has been measured, for example, as frequency-specific response decrease by previous stimulation. Only recently and mainly based on animal studies, it has been suggested that statistical properties in the stimulation lead to adjustments of neural sensitivity and affect neural response adaptation. However, it is thus far unresolved which statistical parameters in the acoustic stimulation spectrum affect frequency-specific neural adaptation, and on which time scales the effects take place. The present human EEG study investigated the potential influence of the overall spectral range as well as the spectral spacing of the acoustic stimulation spectrum on frequency-specific neural adaptation. Tones randomly varying in frequency were presented passively and computational modeling of frequency-specific neural adaptation was used. Frequency-specific adaptation was observed for all presentation conditions. Critically, however, the spread of adaptation (i.e., degree of coadaptation) in tonotopically organized regions of auditory cortex changed with the spectral range of the acoustic stimulation. In contrast, spectral spacing did not affect the spread of frequency-specific adaptation. Therefore, changes in neural sensitivity in auditory cortex are directly coupled to the overall spectral range of the acoustic stimulation, which suggests that neural adjustments to spectral stimulus statistics occur over a time scale of multiple seconds.
Regulation of nap Gene Expression and Periplasmic Nitrate Reductase Activity in the Phototrophic Bacterium Rhodobacter sphaeroides DSM158

ABSTRACT Bacterial periplasmic nitrate reductases (Nap) can play different physiological roles and are expressed under different conditions depending on the organism. Rhodobacter sphaeroides DSM158 has a Nap system, encoded by the napKEFDABC gene cluster, but nitrite formed is not further reduced because this strain lacks nitrite reductase. Nap activity increases in the presence of nitrate and oxygen but is unaffected by ammonium. Reverse transcription-PCR and Northern blots demonstrated that the napKEFDABC genes constitute an operon transcribed as a single 5.5-kb product. Northern blots and nap-lacZ fusions revealed that nap expression is threefold higher under aerobic conditions but is regulated by neither nitrate nor ammonium, although it is weakly induced by nitrite. On the other hand, nitrate but not nitrite causes a rapid enzyme activation, explaining the higher Nap activity found in nitrate-grown cells. Translational nap′-′lacZ fusions reveal that the napK and napD genes are not efficiently translated, probably due to mRNA secondary structures occluding the translation initiation sites of these genes. Neither butyrate nor caproate increases nap expression, although cells growing phototrophically on these reduced substrates show a very high Nap activity in vivo (nitrite accumulation is sevenfold higher than in medium with malate). Phototrophic growth on butyrate or caproate medium is severely reduced in the NapA− mutants. Taken together, these results indicate that nitrate reduction in R. sphaeroides is mainly regulated at the level of enzyme activity by both nitrate and electron supply and confirm that the Nap system is involved in redox balancing using nitrate as an ancillary oxidant to dissipate excess reductant.
Components of Metabolic Syndrome as Risk Factors for Hearing Threshold Shifts

Background Hearing loss was a common, chronically disabling condition in the general population and had been associated with several inflammatory diseases. Metabolic syndrome, which was associated with insulin resistance and visceral obesity, was considered a chronic inflammatory disease. To date, few attempts had been made to establish a direct relationship between hearing loss and metabolic syndrome. The aim of the present study was to investigate the relationship between metabolic syndrome and hearing loss by analyzing the data in the reports of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey 1999–2004. Methods This study included 2100 participants aged ≤ 65 years who enrolled in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (1999–2004). We examined the relationship between the presence of different features of metabolic syndrome in the participants and their pure-tone air-conduction hearing thresholds, including low-frequency and high-frequency thresholds. Results After adjusting for potential confounders, such as age, medical conditions, and smoking status, the participants with more components of metabolic syndrome were found to have higher hearing thresholds than those with fewer components of metabolic syndrome (p < 0.05 for a trend). The low-frequency hearing threshold was associated with individual components of metabolic syndrome, such as abdominal obesity, high blood pressure, elevated triglycerides, and a low level of high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C) (p < 0.05 for all parameters). Conclusions The results indicated that the presence of a greater number of components of metabolic syndrome was significantly associated with the hearing threshold in the US adult population. Among the components of metabolic syndrome, the most apparent association was observed between low HDL and hearing loss.
Touched by the Storyteller: The Influence of Remote Touch in the Context of Storytelling

In this study we investigate the role of remote touch as an additional communication channel in the context of storytelling. We focus on studying the effect of remote touch and the timing of touch on perceived social presence and story recall. In our experiment people listened to an emotional story. Listeners were either remotely touched by the storyteller at emotional story moments, remotely touched at random moments during the story, or not touched at all. Our results indicate that remote touch does not enhance the perceived social presence of the storyteller. However, even when the link between remote touch and the story is not explicitly clear, touch at emotional story moments can contribute to the perception of the story. Furthermore, while touches at emotional story moments can distract from the story content, touch in general can implicitly enhance the attention paid to the story content.
The Chemistry of the Local Group

Abstract Simulations of the chemical enrichment histories of ten Local Group (LG) dwarf galaxies are presented, employing empirically-derived star formation histories (SFHs), a rich network of isotopic and elemental nucleosynthetic yields, and a range of prescriptions for supernova (SN)-driven outflows. Our main conclusions are that (i) neutron-capture element patterns (particularly that of Ba/Y) suggest a strong contribution from low- and intermediate-mass stars (LIMS), (ii) neutron star mergers may play a relatively larger role in the nucleosynthesis of dwarfs, (iii) SN feedback alone can explain the observed gas fraction in dwarf irregulars (dIrrs), but dwarf spheroidals (dSphs) require almost all their gas to be removed via ram pressure and/or tidal stripping, (iv) the predicted heavy Mg isotope enhancements in the interstellar medium (ISM) of dwarfs may provide an alternate solution to claims of a varying fine structure (v) the gas lost from dwarfs have O,Si/C abundances in broad agreement with intergalactic medium abundances at redshifts 2<z<4, and (vi) the chemical properties of dSphs are well-matched by preventing galactic winds from re-accreting, whilst those of dIrrs are better-matched by incorporating metallicity-dependent cooling and re-accretion of hot winds. Finally, doubts are cast upon a claimed association between LG dSph UMaII and HVC Complex A.
rscala : Integration of R and Scala

This paper introduces the rscala package for the statistical software R. This package provides a two-way bridge between R and Scala enabling a user to exploit each language’s respective strengths in a single project. The rscala package transparently brings Scala and Java methods into R as if they were native R functions. Specifically, Scala classes can be instantiated and methods of Scala classes can be called directly. Furthermore, arbitrary Scala code can be executed on the fly from within R, inline Scala functions can be defined, and callbacks to the original R interpreter are supported. Finally, rscala also enables arbitrary R code to be embedded within a Scala application. The rscala package is available on CRAN and requires no special installations or configurations of R or Scala.
Seabed Characterization by Inversion of Acoustic Data from a Towed Array

The goal of geoacoustic inversion is to estimate environmental parameters from measured acoustic fields from e.g. a towed array. Though the inversion results have some uncertainty, inversion is an efficient technique to estimate environment parameters. Based on the a posteriori probability density of environmental parameters obtained from inversion, we perform statistical estimation of transmission loss (TL) and generate a 90% credibility level envelope or uncertainty band for the TL. This uncertainty band accounts for the inherent variability of the environment not usually contained in sonar performance prediction model inputs, and presents a useful probabilistic description of the environment s variability. Towed arrays are advantageous to fixed systems as they are easy to deploy and the moving ship enables estimation of spatially variable seabed properties. The approach is demonstrated with data obtained from the MAPEX2000 experiment conducted by NATO Undersea Research Centre (NURC) in the Mediterranean Sea in November 2000. Index Terms geoacoustic inversion, seabed characterization, towed array, transmission loss estimation.
Multigrid Method for Ill-Conditioned Symmetric Toeplitz Systems

In this paper, we consider solutions of Toeplitz systems Anu = b where the Toeplitz matrices An are generated by nonnegative functions with zeros. Since the matrices An are ill conditioned, the convergence factor of classical iterative methods, such as the damped Jacobi method, will approach one as the size n of the matrices becomes large. Here we propose to solve the systems by the multigrid method. The cost per iteration for the method is of O(n log n) operations. For a class of Toeplitz matrices which includes weakly diagonally dominant Toeplitz matrices, we show that the convergence factor of the two-grid method is uniformly bounded below one independent of n, and the full multigrid method has convergence factor depending only on the number of levels. Numerical results are given to illustrate the rate of convergence.
The Changing Housing Cycle and the Implications for Monetary Policy

This chapter examines how innovations in housing finance systems in advanced economies over the past two decades have altered the role of the housing sector in the business cycle and in the monetary policy transmission mechanism. It concludes that these changes have broadened the spillovers from the housing sector to the rest of the economy and have amplified their impact by strengthening the role of housing as collateral. This analysis suggests that in economies with more developed mortgage markets, monetary policymak-ers may need to respond more aggressively to developments in the housing sector, within a risk-management approach that treats house price dynamics as one of the key factors to be considered in assessing the balance of risks to output and inflation. T he recent booms in house prices and residential investment in many advanced economies, and the sharp correction that has followed in a few of them, have reignited the debate over the link between housing and the business cycle and over how monetary policymakers should respond to developments in the housing sector. Despite general agreement that developments in the housing sector have important implications for the level of economic activity, there is no consensus on why this is the case. In particular , there is disagreement on the dynamics of residential investment, its consequences for the business cycle, and the impact of house price fluctuations on consumer spending. Note: The main authors of this chapter are Roberto Cardarelli (team leader), Deniz Igan, and Alessan-dro Rebucci, with support from Gavin Asdorian and Stephanie Denis and under the supervision of Tim Lane. Tommaso Monacelli and Luca Sala provided consultancy support. Dramatic changes in the systems of housing finance over the past two decades have only increased the uncertainty about the link between housing and economic activity. What is clear is that more widely available and lower-cost housing financing has contributed to the rapid growth of mortgage debt in a number of countries—including among households with impaired or insufficient credit histories, typically referred to as subprime borrowers. What is less clear is whether these changes have weakened the link between housing and the business cycle. Some authors advanced the hypothesis that these changes have weakened the link between housing and the business cycle—for example, easier access to credit allows households to better smooth temporary downturns in income (Dynan, Elmendorf, and Sichel, 2006). Indeed, the economies that better weathered the cyclical downturn in …
Die Bemessung von Stahlverbundstuetzen nach nationalen und EU-Regeln

Die neuen nationalen und europaeischen Regelwerke fuer Verbundkonstruktionen aus Stahl und Beton enthalten fuer Verbundstuetzen neue Nachweisverfahren, die eine wirtschaftlichere Bemessung der Stuetzen und der Lasteinleitungsbereiche ermoeglichen. Der Beitrag gibt einen Ueberblick ueber die neuen Regelwerke und erlaeutert bauaufsichtliche Genehmigungsverfahren fuer Verbundstuetzen mit Querschnittsausbildungen, fuer die in den neuen Regelwerken keine Bemessungsverfahren enthalten sind. (A)
Stagnation recovery behaviours for collective robotics

Accomplishing useful tasks with a collection of decentralized mobile robots will require control methods that deal effectively with a number of unique problems that impede the system's progress. Reactive control architectures can easily cause the problems of stagnation and cyclic behaviour, both characterized by a lack of progress in achieving a task. In this paper the authors present one possible solution to stagnation recovery, motivated from the study of group transport in ants and demonstrate its use in a box-pushing task. By using stagnation recovery behaviours, which are triggered by a lack of progress in the task-achieving activity of the system, the collective system can monitor its own advancement in a decentralized manner. A set of such behaviours are progressively ordered using timeouts, with each set designed for a specific recovery strategy. The stagnation recovery behaviours have been tested in simulation with the results to be mapped onto a set of ten autonomous robots presently under construction. <<ETX>>
Transform-based indexing of audio data for multimedia databases

Since the relative proportion of multimedia (video, image and audio) data within databases is expected to increase substantially in the future, keyword-based indexing would be inadequate and efficient content-based query and retrieval are required. The problem of devising content based query, indexing, and retrieval for these newer data types remains an open and challenging problem. While considerable attention has recently been given to image (and, to some extent, video) indexing, much less has been devoted to the problem of indexing its unidimensional counterpart-audio data. The paper proposes content-based indexing schemes for audio data in multimedia databases. The methods are based on transform techniques used in signal processing which transform data from time (or spatial) domain to frequency domain. This offers many advantages such as easy removal of noise, efficient compression and different types of processing. Two algorithms for indexing are presented along with experimental results.
Gender equality, the state and civil society: A comparative case study of Rwanda and South Africa

This paper examines the evolution of gender equality as manifested and protected by the state in both Rwanda and South Africa since 1994. As a liberal democracy, South Africa should, in theory, allow for the influence of citizens in policy making and be held accountable for its shortcomings regarding its commitment to gender equality and ending violence against women. Evidence reveals that the South African state falls far short of these ideals, particularly in its relationships with women's organizations in civil society. Conversely, the Rwandan state, under authoritarian leadership, demonstrates significantly greater commitment to gender equality, and civil society groups report positive relationships with the state. Four factors explain this disparity: the context of each country's political transition, the origins and ideology of the ruling party, the extent and type of state corruption and neopatrimonialism, and the role of civil society in a semi-authoritarian state versus a liberal democratic state.
Improved environmental adaption method and its application in test case generation

An Environmental Adaption Method (EAM) has been recently proposed in which, each solution updates its structure on the basis of current environmental fitness and its own fitness. EAM uses a new operator known as adaption operator. In this paper, an improved EAM, henceforth called as IEAM has been proposed and proper tuning of parameters of algorithm has been done to find the optimal solution in minimum time. IEAM has been tested on a set of benchmark functions. Results show the superiority of IEAM over PSO-TVAC, SADE and other optimization algorithms. Even for complex functions, the performance of IEAM is very good. In addition to this, IEAM has also been applied to software testing to generate test cases for white box testing.
Predicting membrane protein contacts from non-membrane proteins by deep transfer learning

Computational prediction of membrane protein (MP) structures is very challenging partially due to lack of sufficient solved structures for homology modeling. Recently direct evolutionary coupling analysis (DCA) sheds some light on protein contact prediction and accordingly, contact-assisted folding, but DCA is effective only on some very large-sized families since it uses information only in a single protein family. This paper presents a deep transfer learning method that can significantly improve MP contact prediction by learning contact patterns and complex sequence-contact relationship from thousands of non-membrane proteins (non-MPs). Tested on 510 non-redundant MPs, our deep model (learned from only non-MPs) has top L/10 long-range contact prediction accuracy 0.69, better than our deep model trained by only MPs (0.63) and much better than a representative DCA method CCMpred (0.47) and the CASP11 winner MetaPSICOV (0.55). The accuracy of our deep model can be further improved to 0.72 when trained by a mix of non-MPs and MPs. When only contacts in transmembrane regions are evaluated, our method has top L/10 long-range accuracy 0.62, 0.57, and 0.53 when trained by a mix of non-MPs and MPs, by non-MPs only, and by MPs only, respectively, still much better than MetaPSICOV (0.45) and CCMpred (0.40). All these results suggest that sequence-structure relationship learned by our deep model from non-MPs generalizes well to MP contact prediction. Improved contact prediction also leads to better contact-assisted folding. Using only top predicted contacts as restraints, our deep learning method can fold 160 and 200 of 510 MPs with TMscore>0.6 when trained by non-MPs only and by a mix of non-MPs and MPs, respectively, while CCMpred and MetaPSICOV can do so for only 56 and 77 MPs, respectively. Our contact-assisted folding also greatly outperforms homology modeling.
An event-driven SIR model for topic diffusion in web forums

Social media is being increasingly used as a communication channel. Among social media, web forums, where people in online communities disseminate and receive information by interaction, provide a good environment to examine information diffusion. In this research, we aim to understand the mechanisms and properties of the information diffusion in the web forum. For that, we model topic-level information diffusion in web forums using the baseline epidemic model, the SIR(Susceptible, Infective, and Recovered) model, frequently used in previous research to analyze disease outbreaks and knowledge diffusion. In addition, we propose an event-driven SIR model that reflects the event effect on information diffusion in the web forum. The proposed model incorporates the effect of news postings on the web forum. We evaluate two models using a large longitudinal dataset from the web forum of a major company. The event-SIR model outperforms the SIR model in fitting on major spikey topics that have peaks of author participation.
Self-rated health. Comparisons between three different measures. Results from a population study.

BACKGROUND Self-rating of health is among the most frequently assessed health perceptions in epidemiological research. The aim of this study was to compare different measures of global self-rated health (SRH) with respect to differences in age and sex groups and relations to hypothesized determinants. METHOD Three single-question measures of SRH were included in a health questionnaire administered to 8200 randomly chosen men and women. Two SRH measures were non-comparative, one with seven (SRH-7) and one with five response options (SRH-5), while the third measure included a comparison with others of the same age (SRH-age). SRH-7 had specified response options only at the ends of the scale, while the other two measures gave specified statements for each option. Comparisons between the SRH assessments were studied with respect to response frequencies, frequency distributions, age and gender differences and differences in associations with hypothesized determinants. RESULTS The differences between the SRH measures were in most cases marginal. Some diversities may, however, be worth considering: a high drop-out rate for the SRH-7 measure in the oldest age group; a trend that SRH-7 correlated most strongly with the independent variables; SRH-age showed improved health ratings with increasing age but a less skewed frequency distribution compared to the non-comparative measures. CONCLUSIONS The results imply that non-comparative measures are more appropriate in longitudinal studies and that measures without specified response options might be less suitable for an older study group. The overall impression is, however, that the different measures represents parallel assessments of subjective health.