Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Caregiving Networks in Later Life: Does Cognitive Status Make a Difference?*

ABSTRACT This study examines the caregiving networks of older adults, with particular emphasis on differences according to cognitive status (n = 303). Individuals with cognitive impairment were significantly more likely than those who were cognitively intact to receive assistance with personal care, linking with the outside world, and mobility. The types of network were generally similar for care receivers with cognitive impairment and those who were cognitively intact, although the percentage of networks comprised solely of the identified caregiver varied depending on the tasks. Coresidence of the caregiver and care receiver was more important than the care receiver's cognitive status for exclusive care by the identified caregiver. Having more ADL/IADL limitations was associated with a reliance on a network of the identified caregiver, in conjunction with other caregivers in several task areas. The findings highlight the complexity of sources of help in later life and the need for future research to consider the caregiving network as a whole. RÉSUMÉ L'étude examine les réseaux de soins des personnes âgées, surtout en relation du statut cognitif (n = 303). Les personnes souffrant de diminution cognitive avaient une meilleure chance de recevoir de l'aide avec les soins personnels, les liens au monde extérieur et la mobilité que celles qui ont un statut cognitif intact. En général, les genres de réseaux sont les mêmes et pour les receveurs de soins ayant une diminution cognitive et pour ceux ayant un statut cognitif intact. Toutefois, le pourcentage des réseaux contenant seulement le soignant identifié peut varier compte tenu des tâches. Quant aux soins exclusifs du soignant identifié, la co-résidence du soignant et du receveur d'aide semble avoir une signification plus importante que le statut cognitif du receveur. Le fait d'avoir davantage de restrictions sur les activités de la vie quotidienne (AVQ) et des activités instrumentales de la vie quotidienne (AIVQ). était associé à une dépendance sur le réseau du soignant identifié concurremment avec d'autres soignants à périmètres de tâches multiples. Les résultats démontrent la complexité des sources d'aide disponibles au cours de la vie avancée et du besoin de recherches avancées afin d'étudier en entier le réseau des soins.
Use a Spoon as a Spade?: Changes in the Upper and Lower Alpha Bands in Evaluating Alternate Object Use

Previous electrophysiological research on human creative cognition has related creative ideation to increased activity in the alpha band, an effect which mainly reflects increased general attentional demands. Research on alpha unrelated to creativity has revealed different functional roles of the upper (semantic processes) and lower (attentional processes) alpha sub-bands. At the same time, the need to dissect creative thinking into specific cognitive operations, such as, semantic processing, re-representation, or conceptual expansion has become evident. The main aim of the reported study was to test whether increased semantic processing demands linked to creating conceptual re-representations of objects required for evaluating alternate uses modulate activity in the upper and/or lower alpha sub-bands. For this purpose, we performed an alternate use evaluation task (AUeT), in which participants saw word pairs representing common uses, alternate uses, and unrelated word pairs, and evaluated whether a given use was common or uncommon (question 1), and how usable it was (question 2). Such an approach allowed us to examine the time-course of semantic processing involved in evaluating alternate uses. Additionally, the results could be contrasted with event-related potential (ERP) studies on creative language and semantic processing. We assumed that demands related to access and integration of semantic information needed to create a re-representation of objects (alternate uses) would be larger than in the case of common uses, which do not require creating a re-representation. This should be reflected in more activity in the alpha band in response to alternate than common uses, which was observed in the analysis of the upper alpha band over parieto-occipital sites. In the lower alpha band, more activity over the left than right anterior sites was observed for alternate uses, which might reflect increased attentional demands. Additionally, in the ERP analysis, alternate uses evoked larger N400 (400–500 ms) amplitudes than common uses, a pattern that extended to later time windows (500–1,000 ms). Overall, the results indicate increased semantic processing demands in alternate use evaluation, possibly linked to the creation of conceptual re-representations.
Does rapport‐building boost the eyewitness eyeclosure effect in closed questioning?

Purpose Several studies have documented that people's ability to correctly report details of witnessed events is enhanced when they merely close their eyes. Yet closing one's eyes in front of a stranger could sometimes create social discomfort, which other studies suggest can impair memory reports. This paper reports two experiments exploring the extent to which the memory benefits of eyeclosure are enhanced when efforts are taken to build interviewer/witness rapport, thus potentially reducing discomfort. Methods In both studies participants observed filmed events and, afterwards, half underwent a basic rapport‐building exercise with an interviewer. All participants then answered closed questions about specific details of the event, and half were instructed to close their eyes throughout this questioning. We recorded the proportion of questions answered correctly, incorrectly, or with ‘don't know’ responses. Results Both eyeclosure and rapport‐building separately enhanced correct responding. The data offer no evidence, though, that rapport‐building moderated this eyeclosure benefit. This is despite the fact that rapport‐building did appear to moderate the effect of eyeclosure on participants' self‐reported comfort during the interviews. Conclusions These studies give us initial cause for doubt over a hypothesized – but heretofore untested – social psychological constraint on the benefits of eyeclosure.
Why promoting biological ideology increases prejudice against people labelled “schizophrenic”

Although the public understands that many factors influence who ends up crazy, terrified or miserable, studies consistently find that they place much more emphasis on adverse life events than on chemical imbalances or genetics. Biological psychiatry, enthusiastically supported by the pharmaceutical industry, insists on trying to educate the public that they are wrong. This “mental illness is an illness like any other” approach to destigmatisation ignores the large body of research evidence that biogenetic explanations actually fuel fear and prejudice. If future destigmatisation programs are to be evidence-based and therefore effective, they will need to avoid illness-type explanations and labels and focus instead on increasing contact with the people against whom the prejudice is targeted and on highlighting the social causes of their difficulties. This might create funding challenges for programs dependent on drug company money.
Short-time Fourier Transform analysis of EEG signal generated during imagined writing

Short-time Fourier Transform (STFT) analysis is one of the techniques to reveal the frequency contents of the EEG signals at each time point. This information can be used to provide control and perform several tasks using Brain Computer Interface system (BCI). This paper describes the STFT analysis of EEG signals obtained during writing and imagined writing. The EEG signal was filtered using a bandpass filter with a frequency range of 8-30 Hz before the STFT was computed. The width of the Hamming window used in the STFT computation was varied to obtain the optimum width. The results of the STFT analysis showed that the frequency components of the EEG signals obtained from writing are the same as that obtained during imagined writing.
Role of transformational leadership in effective organizational knowledge creation practices: Mediating effects of employees' work engagement

Engagement as an area of increasing interest has been discussed in terms of a wide array of organizational policies, practices, and outcomes. This study focuses on a specific aspect of work engagement and its relationship with leadership practices and the outcome of knowledge creation. The mediating effect of employees' work engagement level was assessed to explain the relationship between transformational leadership and organizational knowledge creation practices in the Korean business context. A total of 432 cases were collected from Korean for-profit organizations. Hierarchical multiple regression analysis and structural equation modeling were used along with basic descriptive analysis and interconstruct correlation analysis to examine the structural relationships and the mediating effect among the constructs. Results found transformational leadership to be a statistically significant construct that has an impact on employees' work engagement and organizational knowledge creation practices. Additionally, employees' work engagement was found to be a statistically significant mediator that explains the relationship between transformational leadership and organizational knowledge creation practices.
Towards a taxonomy of adaptive agent-based collaboration patterns for autonomic service ensembles

Services are increasingly becoming the building block of today's distributed systems. However, to support the development of robust complex applications made up of ensembles of cooperating service components and to promote autonomic features, adaptive collaboration patterns among components have to be enforced. In this paper, we introduce a taxonomy of adaptive agent-based collaboration patterns, for their analysis and exploitation in the area of autonomic service ensembles. The preliminary proposed taxonomy has two main advantages: (i) it enables the reuse of existing experience from the agents' world in the area of autonomic service systems, and (ii) it can provide useful suggestions to designer for the choice of the most suitable patterns.
Multi-Level and Multi-Scale Feature Aggregation Using Pretrained Convolutional Neural Networks for Music Auto-Tagging

Music auto-tagging is often handled in a similar manner to image classification by regarding the two-dimensional audio spectrogram as image data. However, music auto-tagging is distinguished from image classification in that the tags are highly diverse and have different levels of abstraction. Considering this issue, we propose a convolutional neural networks (CNN)-based architecture that embraces multi-level and multi-scaled features. The architecture is trained in three steps. First, we conduct supervised feature learning to capture local audio features using a set of CNNs with different input sizes. Second, we extract audio features from each layer of the pretrained convolutional networks separately and aggregate them altogether giving a long audio clip. Finally, we put them into fully connected networks and make final predictions of the tags. Our experiments show that using the combination of multi-level and multi-scale features is highly effective in music auto-tagging and the proposed method outperforms the previous state-of-the-art methods on the MagnaTagATune dataset and the Million Song Dataset. We further show that the proposed architecture is useful in transfer learning.
Voters’ Left–Right Perception of Parties in Contemporary Japan: Removing the Noise of Misunderstanding

Abstract The prevailing theory states that either Japanese voters have stopped ideologically distinguishing parties or that the main political parties in Japan have become more centrist in recent years. These arguments are based on survey questions asking citizens to locate parties on an ideological scale. However, these questions may suffer from noise caused by respondents who misinterpret the question wording or answer the questions inappropriately to mask their misunderstanding of the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’. To address this problem by extracting only the views of those who know the meaning of left–right terms, this article develops a mixture model. Applying the model to an opinion poll conducted after the 2012 Japanese general election, I confirm that those who comprehend the left–right terminology – slightly over half of all voters – largely perceived parties’ ideologies in the same way as experts. Additionally, I find that even these voters face difficulties in placing ambiguous or new parties on the political spectrum. This study has implications not only for understanding trends in Japanese political ideology, but also for survey design and analysis of heterogeneous survey responses.
The IκB Function of NF-κB2 p100 Controls Stimulated Osteoclastogenesis

The prototranscription factor p100 represents an intersection of the NF-κB and IκB families, potentially serving as both the precursor for the active NF-κB subunit p52 and as an IκB capable of retaining NF-κB in the cytoplasm. NF-κB–inducing kinase (NIK) controls processing of p100 to generate p52, and thus NIK-deficient mice can be used to examine the biological effects of a failure in such processing. We demonstrate that treatment of wild-type osteoclast precursors with the osteoclastogenic cytokine receptor activator of NF-κB ligand (RANKL) increases both expression of p100 and its conversion to p52, resulting in unchanged net levels of p100. In the absence of NIK, p100 expression is increased by RANKL, but its conversion to p52 is blocked, leading to cytosolic accumulation of p100, which, acting as an IκB protein, binds NF-κB complexes and prevents their nuclear translocation. High levels of unprocessed p100 in osteoclast precursors from NIK−/− mice or a nonprocessable form of the protein in wild-type cells impair RANKL-mediated osteoclastogenesis. Conversely, p100-deficient osteoclast precursors show enhanced sensitivity to RANKL. These data demonstrate a novel, biologically relevant means of regulating NF-κB signaling, with upstream control and kinetics distinct from the classical IκBα pathway.
DTMsim - DTM channel simulation in ns

Dynamic Transfer Mode (DTM) is a ring based MAN technology that provides a channel abstraction with a dynamically adjustable capacity. TCP is a reliable end to end transport protocol capable of adjusting its rate. The primary goal of this work is investigate the coupling of dynamically allocating bandwidth to TCP flows with the affect this has on the congestion control mechanism of TCP. In particular we wanted to find scenerios where this scheme does not work, where either all the link capacity is allocated to TCP or congestion collapse occurs and no capacity is allocated to TCP. We have created a simulation environment using ns-2 to investigate TCP over networks which have a variable capacity link. We begin with a single TCP Tahoe flow over a fixed bandwidth link and progressively add more complexity to understand the behaviour of dynamically adjusting link capacity to TCP and vice versa.
Evolving Notch polyQ tracts reveal possible solenoid interference elements

Polyglutamine (polyQ) tracts in regulatory proteins are extremely polymorphic. As functional elements under selection for length, triplet repeats are prone to DNA replication slippage and indel mutations. Many polyQ tracts are also embedded within intrinsically disordered domains, which are less constrained, fast evolving, and difficult to characterize. To identify structural principles underlying polyQ tracts in disordered regulatory domains, here I analyze deep evolution of metazoan Notch polyQ tracts, which can generate alleles causing developmental and neurogenic defects. I show that Notch features polyQ tract turnover that is restricted to a discrete number of conserved “polyQ insertion slots”. Notch polyQ insertion slots are: (i) identifiable by an amphipathic “slot leader” motif; (ii) conserved as an intact C-terminal array in a 1-to-1 relationship with the N-terminal solenoid-forming ankyrin repeats (ARs); and (iii) enriched in carboxamide residues (Q/N), whose sidechains feature dual hydrogen bond donor and acceptor atoms. Correspondingly, the terminal loop and β-strand of each AR feature conserved carboxamide residues, which would be susceptible to folding interference by hydrogen bonding with residues outside the ARs. I thus suggest that Notch polyQ insertion slots constitute an array of AR interference elements (ARIEs). Notch ARIEs would dynamically compete with the delicate serial folding induced by adjacent ARs. Huntingtin, which harbors solenoid-forming HEAT repeats, also possesses a similar number of polyQ insertion slots. These results strongly suggest that intrinsically disordered interference arrays featuring carboxamide and polyQ enrichment are coupled proteodynamic modulators of solenoids. SIGNIFICANCE Neurodegenerative disorders are often caused by expanded polyglutamine (polyQ) tracts embedded in the disordered regions of regulatory proteins, which are difficult to characterize structurally. To identify functional principles underlying polyQ tracts in disordered regulatory domains, I analyze evolution of the Notch protein, which can generate polyQ-related alleles causing neurodevelopmental defects. I show that Notch evolves polyQ tracts that come and go in a few conserved “polyQ insertion slots”. Several features suggest these slots are ankyrin repeat (AR) interference elements, which dynamically compete with the delicate solenoid formed by Notch. Huntingtin, whose polyQ expansions causes Huntington’s Disease in humans, also has solenoid-forming modules and polyQ insertion slots, suggesting a common architectural principle underlies solenoid-forming polyQ-rich proteins.
Exercise training and vascular cell phenotype in a swine model of familial hypercholesterolaemia: conduit arteries and veins

What is the central question of this study? Does endurance exercise training cause anti‐atherogenic effects on the endothelium in a swine model of familial hypercholesterolaemia (FH), and how are these effects distributed across veins, arteries and multiple vascular territories within each system? What is the main finding and its importance? Coronary artery endothelium‐dependent vasomotor function was depressed in sedentary FH pigs compared with sedentary control animals, and exercise training did not change vasomotor function within FH. In systemic conduit arteries and veins, few effects of FH on endothelial cell protein expression were noted, including both pro‐ and anti‐atherogenic changes. These findings suggest that exercise training does not produce a consistently improved endothelial cell phenotype in either coronary or systemic conduit vessels in this swine model of FH.
Improving management of distributed services using correlations and predictions in SLA-driven cloud computing systems

Recent advancements in cloud computing have enabled the proliferation of distributed applications, which require management and control of multiple services. However, without an efficient mechanism for scaling services in response to changing environmental conditions and number of users, application performance might suffer, leading to Service Level Agreement (SLA) violations and inefficient use of hardware resources. We introduce a system for controlling the complexity of scaling applications composed of multiple services using mechanisms based on fulfillment of SLAs. We present how service monitoring information can be used in conjunction with service level objectives, predictions, and correlations between performance indicators for optimizing the allocation of services belonging to distributed applications. We validate our models using experiments and simulations involving a distributed enterprise information system. We show how discovering correlations between application performance indicators can be used as a basis for creating refined service level objectives, which can then be used for scaling the application and improving the overall application's performance under similar conditions.
In-plane and cross-plane thermal conductivities of molybdenum disulfide

We investigate the in-plane and cross-plane thermal conductivities of molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) using non-equilibrium molecular dynamics simulations. We find that the in-plane thermal conductivity of monolayer MoS2 is about 19.76 W mK−1. Interestingly, the in-plane thermal conductivity of multilayer MoS2 is insensitive to the number of layers, which is in strong contrast to the in-plane thermal conductivity of graphene where the interlayer interaction strongly affects the in-plane thermal conductivity. This layer number insensitivity is attributable to the finite energy gap in the phonon spectrum of MoS2, which makes the phonon–phonon scattering channel almost unchanged with increasing layer number. For the cross-plane thermal transport, we find that the cross-plane thermal conductivity of multilayer MoS2 can be effectively tuned by applying cross-plane strain. More specifically, a 10% cross-plane compressive strain can enhance the thermal conductivity by a factor of 10, while a 5% cross-plane tensile strain can reduce the thermal conductivity by 90%. Our findings are important for thermal management in MoS2 based nanodevices and for thermoelectric applications of MoS2.
AN AUTOMATED MALWARE DETECTION SYSTEM FOR ANDROID USING BEHAVIOR-BASED ANALYSIS AMDA

— The Android platform is the fastest growing market in smartphone operating systems to date. As such, it has become the most viable target of security threats. The reliance of the Android Market Security Model on its reactive anti-malware system presents an opportunity for malware to be present in the Official Android Market and does not encompass applications outside the official market. This allows applications to masquerade as harmless applications which lead to the loss of credentials if precautions are not taken. Most anti-malware applications in the Market use static analysis for detection because it is fast and relatively simple. However, static analysis requires regular updates of threat databases and it may be circumvented by obfuscation techniques. As a solution to these problems, the study utilizes behavior analysis of applications as basis for malware. As a first step, features of known-benign and known-malicious applications are extracted for machine learning to provide baseline behavior datasets. Test applications are then passed through the behavior based module for identification of its being malware or benign. A classification scheme is provided for applications identified as malware by the system.
Detection and Classification of Pests in Greenhouse Using Image Processing

The techniques of machine vision and digital image Processing are extensively applied to agricultural science and it have great perspective especially in the plant protection field, which ultimately leads to crops management. The paper proposes a software prototype system for early pest detection on the infected crops in greenhouse. Images of the infected leaf are captured by a camera with pan tilt and zoom and processed using image processing techniques to detect presence of pests. SVM classifier is used for classification. SVM classifier helps to detect the pests and in the classification of pest based on their features. Results show more precision in identifying the presence of pest at early stage.