Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Performance of Fine Motor and Spatial Tasks During the Menstrual Cycle

Performance of Fine Motor and Spatial Tasks During the Menstrual Cycle Various studies have shown fluctuations in task performance during the menstrual cycle. The aim of this study was to see the effects of the menstrual cycle on performing fine motor and spatial tasks of different level of complexity in twenty students aged 18 to 21 years, with regular menstrual cycle (28 to 30 days). The students performed O'Connor Finger Dexterity Test and mental rotation test during the menstrual, late follicular, and midluteal phase. Before the tests were performed, we administered Spielberger's State-Trait Anxiety Inventory for each phase. After the tasks were completed, the subjects ranked their difficulty on Borg's scale. The results showed the best performance in both tests in the midluteal phase (with sex hormones at their peak). The anxiety level and task difficulty ranking were the highest in the menstrual phase, when the hormone levels were the lowest. Učinkovitost u zadacima fine motorike i prostornih odnosa tijekom menstrualnog ciklusa Različita su istraživanja pokazala promjene učinkovitosti tijekom menstrualnog ciklusa. U zadacima u kojima su uspješnije žene, najveća učinkovitost događa se tijekom kasne folikularne ili srednje lutealne faze. U zadacima u kojima su pak uspješniji muškarci najveća je učinkovitost nađena u menstrualnoj fazi. Na osnovi uporabe zadataka fine motorike i prostornih zadataka različitih razina kompleksnosti, cilj ovog istraživanja bio je ispitati utjecaj menstrualnog ciklusa na kognitivne funkcije. U istraživanju je sudjelovalo dvadeset ispitanica, dobi od 18 do 21 godinu, s redovitim menstrualnim ciklusima (28 do 30 dana). Ispitanice su izvodile O'Connorov deksterimetar i zadatke mentalne rotacije tijekom menstrualne, kasne folikularne i srednje lutealne faze. Prije izvođenja zadataka, u svakoj fazi ciklusa primijenjen je Spielbergerov upitnik stanja anksioznosti. Nakon izvođenja zadataka, ispitanice su procjenjivale njihovu težinu na Borgovoj skali. Rezultati su pokazali najbolju učinkovitost u oba zadatka u fazi visokih razina spolnih hormona (srednja lutealna faza). Stanje anksioznosti i procijenjene težine zadataka bili su najviši u menstrualnoj fazi, kada su razine spolnih hormona najniže.
Endovascular Repair of Peripheral and Visceral Aneurysms With the Cardiatis Multilayer Flow Modulator: One-Year Results From the Italian Multicenter Registry

Purpose To assess the efficacy of the Cardiatis Multilayer Flow Modulator (CMFM), a bare cobalt alloy self-expanding stent, in the treatment of peripheral and visceral artery aneurysms. Methods In this multicenter (n=22), prospective, voluntary registry, 54 patients (47 men; mean age 68 years, range 19–87) who underwent CMFM deployment for peripheral (n=35) or visceral aneurysms (n=19) in a variety of target arteries were enrolled between June 2009 and June 2010. Among the 54 lesions, 44 had a total of 53 side branches. The main effectiveness endpoint was stent and side branch patency with no aneurysm rupture or reperfusion at 1, 6, and 12 months after stent implantation. Outcome measures were complete aneurysm thrombosis and sac shrinkage. The safety endpoint was freedom of complications (death, aneurysm rupture, endoleak, need for reintervention, stent foreshortening, stent occlusion, and access-site sequelae). Aneurysms were categorized as saccular (type I) or fusiform (type II) without a side branch or with branch(es) in the sac (subtype A), neck (subtype X), or both (subtype AX). Kaplan-Meier estimates were calculated for primary and secondary endpoints. Sac shrinkage was correlated to aneurysm morphology subtypes and presence/absence of mural thrombus. Results Technical success was achieved in all patients. Mortality at 1 year was 5.5% (n=3), including 1 perioperative death. Six patients were lost to follow-up. There was no aneurysm rupture. Six (11.1%) stents occluded over the 1-year period; 3 asymptomatic patients were not treated, 2 symptomatic patients had successful stent dilation to restore patency, and 1 symptomatic patient required bypass (the only side branch lost). Cumulative primary and secondary patency estimates were 86.9% and 90.7% at 1 year. The cumulative side branch patency was 96.1% and the freedom from all complications was 83.0% at 1 year. Complete aneurysm thrombosis was recorded in 42 (93.3%) of 45 patients at 1 year. Percent diameter reduction was 15.5%, 3.8%, and 11.0% at 1, 6, and 12 months (p<0.05), respectively. Presence of mural thrombus did not influence the time course of shrinkage (p>0.05), while complex lesion anatomy (presence of side branches) delayed shrinkage (p<0.05). Conclusion Results at 1 year show that CMFM can be safely used in the treatment of PAA and VAA, with good results in terms of freedom from rupture, patency of the stents and side branches, complete aneurysm thrombosis, shrinkage, and acceptable freedom from morbidity and mortality.
Normalized Synergy Predicts That CD8 Co-Receptor Contribution to T Cell Receptor (TCR) and pMHC Binding Decreases As TCR Affinity Increases in Human Viral-Specific T Cells

The discovery of naturally occurring T cell receptors (TCRs) that confer specific, high-affinity recognition of pathogen and cancer-associated antigens remains a major goal in cellular immunotherapies. The contribution of the CD8 co-receptor to the interaction between the TCR and peptide-bound major histocompatibility complex (pMHC) has previously been correlated with the activation and responsiveness of CD8+ T cells. However, these studies have been limited to model systems of genetically engineered hybridoma TCRs or transgenic mouse TCRs against either a single epitope or an array of altered peptide ligands. CD8 contribution in a native human antigen-specific T cell response remains elusive. Here, using Hepatitis C Virus-specific precursor CTLs spanning a large range of TCR affinities, we discovered that the functional responsiveness of any given TCR correlated with the contribution of CD8 to TCR/pMHC binding. Furthermore, we found that CD8 contribution to TCR/pMHC binding in the two-dimensional (2D) system was more accurately reflected by normalized synergy (CD8 cooperation normalized by total TCR/pMHC bonds) rather than synergy (total CD8 cooperation) alone. While synergy showed an increasing trend with TCR affinity, normalized synergy was demonstrated to decrease with the increase of TCR affinity. Critically, normalized synergy was shown to correlate with CTL functionality and peptide sensitivity, corroborating three-dimensional (3D) analysis of CD8 contribution with respect to TCR affinity. In addition, we identified TCRs that were independent of CD8 for TCR/pMHC binding. Our results resolve the current discrepancy between 2D and 3D analysis on CD8 contribution to TCR/pMHC binding, and demonstrate that naturally occurring high-affinity TCRs are more capable of CD8-independent interactions that yield greater functional responsiveness even with CD8 blocking. Taken together, our data suggest that addition of the normalized synergy parameter to our previously established TCR discovery platform using 2D TCR affinity and sequence test would allow for selection of TCRs specific to any given antigen with the desirable attributes of high TCR affinity, CD8 co-receptor independence and functional superiority. Utilizing TCRs with less CD8 contribution could be beneficial for adoptive cell transfer immunotherapies using naturally occurring or genetically engineered T cells against viral or cancer-associated antigens.
A distributed opportunistic scheduling scheme for wireless network coding

Network coding (NC) is an emerging technology area promising to increase the utilization of both wired and wireless networks. It can be seen as an extension to routing by allowing relay nodes to combine the information received from multiple links in the subsequent transmissions. NC was initially proposed in the context of multicast in wired networks where it was proven to achieve the maximum multicast capacity. However, the operation of NC in wireless networks with multiple unicast transmissions and its impact on the different layers has not been fully understood. In this paper we give a thorough insight into the interaction of NC and scheduling in wireless networks and we propose a novel distributed proportional fair (PF) scheduling algorithm that exploits multiuser diversity and coding opportunities to maximize the network throughput while guarantees “proportional fairness”.
Orbital tumors treated using transcranial approaches: surgical technique and neuroophthalmogical results in 41 patients.

OBJECT Orbital tumors can be divided schematically into primary lesions, originating from the orbit itself, and secondary lesions, extending to the orbit from neighboring structures. These tumors are variable in their biological nature and in their location. The authors evaluate 41 cases of benign and malignant tumors involving the orbit and discuss the surgical challenge, which involves tumor removal, preserving visual function and cosmetic reconstruction. METHODS The authors performed a retrospective analysis of a series of all cases involving patients who underwent surgery for treatment of orbital tumors in their hospital between December 2003 and December 2006. Data were collected from the patients' files in the hospital's outpatient clinic, operative notes, and pre- and postoperative imaging studies. RESULTS The authors identified 41 patients who met the inclusion criteria (age range 14-82 years, mean 42.2 years, standard deviation 22.4 years). The most common presenting symptoms were proptosis and/or partial ptosis (11 cases [27%]) and headache (7 cases [17%]). In 5 (12%) cases, the tumors were primary intraorbital lesions, and in 34 cases (83%) they were secondary. Two patients had metastases to the orbit. The most common lesion types were meningioma (10 cases [24%]) and osteoma (7 cases [17%]). In 24 cases a midline approach through a frontal craniotomy or a subcranial approach was used; in 13 a lateral approach was used; and in 4 a biopsy procedure was performed. Maxillectomy through a Weber-Ferguson approach or a facial degloving approach was added in 5 cases to complete tumor removal. Duration of follow-up was 1-38 months (mean 20 months). None of the patients died as a result of the procedure, and there were relatively few complications. Excluding the patients who underwent orbital exenteration, none of the patients had visual deterioration following surgery, and most had no change in their visual condition. Two patients had temporary diplopia, 1 had a cerebrospinal fluid leak, and 1 had enophthalmos following removal of an orbital osteosarcoma. CONCLUSIONS Orbital tumors can be treated safely using transcranial approaches in many cases. Preoperative imaging can accurately define the compartments involved and the surgical approach needed for tumor removal. A multidisciplinary team of surgeons facilitates optimal tumor removal and skull base sealing as well as good cosmetic results.
A Cheap Linear Attention Mechanism with Fast Lookups and Fixed-Size Representations

The softmax content-based attention mechanism has proven to be very beneficial in many applications of recurrent neural networks. Nevertheless it suffers from two major computational limitations. First, its computations for an attention lookup scale linearly in the size of the attended sequence. Second, it does not encode the sequence into a fixed-size representation but instead requires to memorize all the hidden states. These two limitations restrict the use of the softmax attention mechanism to relatively small-scale applications with short sequences and few lookups per sequence. In this work we introduce a family of linear attention mechanisms designed to overcome the two limitations listed above. We show that removing the softmax non-linearity from the traditional attention formulation yields constant-time attention lookups and fixed-size representations of the attended sequences. These properties make these linear attention mechanisms particularly suitable for large-scale applications with extreme query loads, real-time requirements and memory constraints. Early experiments on a question answering task show that these linear mechanisms yield significantly better accuracy results than no attention, but obviously worse than their softmax alternative.
Exploiting Stochasticity in Systematic Search: Results on a Highly Structured Domain

Abstract : We introduce a new benchmark domain for hard computational problems that bridges the gap between purely random instances and highly structured problems. We show how to obtain interesting search problems by introducing random perturbations into a structured domain, and how such problems can be used to study the robustness of search control mechanisms. Our experiments demonstrate that the performance of search strategies designed to mimic direct constructive methods degrade surprisingly quickly in the presence of even minor perturbations. On the other hand, our experiments show that by adding a random element to a complete search procedure we can dramatically improve the performance of deterministic methods. These results apply both for the case of finding consistent models as well as for the case of proving inconsistency, complementing the well known success of using randomness in incomplete model find procedures. We pushed the idea of exploiting stochasticity one step further by combining algorithms that exhibit competing behavior into portfolios. Our results show that a portfolio approach can have a dramatic impact in terms of the overall performance, in comparison to the performance of each of its component algorithms. An interesting special case is when the best strategy consists of combining copies of the same algorithm. This portfolio is analogous to the practice of 'restarts' for stochastic procedures, where the same algorithm is run repeatedly with different seeds, a common practice in the theorem proving community. Combining copies of the same algorithm into a portfolio might be a good strategy, especially in the cases that one algorithm dominates for a given class of problems.
We are visible: technology-mediated social participation in a Twitter network for the homeless

This paper examines patterns of follow relationships in the @wearevisible ego-network on Twitter -- a project encouraging homeless individuals to "sign up, speak out, [and] be seen" online. A content analysis of the public profiles in this network identified eleven social roles: homeless individual, homeless advocate, celebrity, do-gooder, service provider, non-profit generalist, social media enthusiast, support organization, social worker, librarian, and researcher. A cluster analysis and visualization of the connections between individuals enacting these roles showed that self-identified homeless individuals were well-connected to each other and showed potential for developing stronger ties with a broad range of different user types. The results from this case study suggest opportunities for rethinking health and human services in a technologically-mediated social context, as well as inspiring future research to study this population online.
Exploring and Designing for Memory Impairments in Depression

Depression is an affective disorder with distinctive autobiographical memory impairments, including negative bias, overgeneralization and reduced positivity. Several clinical therapies address these impairments, and there is an opportunity to develop new supports for treatment by considering depression-associated memory impairments within design. We report on interviews with ten experts in treating depression, with expertise in both neuropsychology and cognitive behavioral therapies. The interviews explore approaches for addressing each of these memory impairments. We found consistent use of positive memories for treating all memory impairments, the challenge of direct retrieval, and the need to support the experience of positive memories. We aim to sensitize HCI researchers to the limitations of memory technologies, broaden their awareness of memory impairments beyond episodic memory recall, and inspire them to engage with this less explored design space. Our findings open up new design opportunities for memory technologies for depression, including positive memory banks for active encoding and selective retrieval, novel cues for supporting generative retrieval, and novel interfaces to strengthen the reliving of positive memories.
A statistical approach to rule learning

We present a new, statistical approach to rule learning. Doing so, we address two of the problems inherent in traditional rule learning: The computational hardness of finding rule sets with low training error and the need for capacity control to avoid over-fitting. The chosen representation involves weights attached to rules. Instead of optimizing the error rate directly, we optimize for rule sets that have large margin and low variance. This can be formulated as a convex optimization problem allowing for efficient computation. Given the representation and the optimization procedure, we effectively yield weighted clauses in a CNF-like representation. To avoid overfitting, we propose a model selection strategy that utilizes a novel concentration inequality. Empirical tests show that the system is competitive with existing rule learning algorithms and that its flexible learning bias can be adjusted to improve predictive accuracy considerably.
A Qualitative, Multi-scale Grammar For Image Description and Analysis

A qualitative image description grammar with automatic image fitting and object modelling algorithms is presented. The grammar is based on assigning a square sub-region of an image one of a finite number of qualitative labels, based on the occurrence of object boundaries within this region and how these intersect the region boundary. In the general case there is an infinite number of such labels, however the use of a multi-scale approach allows a finite (small) number of labels at each scale. This makes the problem tractable within a constraint satisfaction type framework. Constraints are put onneighboringlabels based on the premisethat all object boundariesare continuous, having no ending within an image. A minimum description length (MDL) approach is suggested for description hypothesis selection (based on colour histograms) and methods for (constraint based) hypothesis generation/adaption and (Hidden Markov Model based) a-priori shape modelling are presented.
Optical coherence tomography (OCT): a review

This paper reviews the state of the art of optical coherence tomography (OCT), an interferometric imaging technique that provides cross-sectional views of the subsurface microstructure of biological tissue. Following a discussion of the basic theory of OCT, an overview of the issues involved in the design of the main components of OCT systems is presented. The review concludes by introducing new imaging modes being developed to extract additional diagnostic information.
The design of random-testable sequential circuits

A method is described for selecting a minimal set of directly accessible flip-flops. Since this problem turns out to be NP-complete, suboptimal solutions can be derived using some heuristics. An algorithm is presented to compute the corresponding weights of the patterns, which are time-dependent in some cases. The entire approach is validated with the help of examples. Only 10-40% of the flip-flops have to be integrated into a partial scan path or into a built-in self-test register to obtain nearly complete fault coverage by weighted random patterns. <<ETX>>
Cortical Folding Patterns and Predicting Cytoarchitecture

The human cerebral cortex is made up of a mosaic of structural areas, frequently referred to as Brodmann areas (BAs). Despite the widespread use of cortical folding patterns to perform ad hoc estimations of the locations of the BAs, little is understood regarding 1) how variable the position of a given BA is with respect to the folds, 2) whether the location of some BAs is more variable than others, and 3) whether the variability is related to the level of a BA in a putative cortical hierarchy. We use whole-brain histology of 10 postmortem human brains and surface-based analysis to test how well the folds predict the locations of the BAs. We show that higher order cortical areas exhibit more variability than primary and secondary areas and that the folds are much better predictors of the BAs than had been previously thought. These results further highlight the significance of cortical folding patterns and suggest a common mechanism for the development of the folds and the cytoarchitectonic fields.
Topic Classification Method for Analyzing Effect of eWOM on Consumer Game Sales

Electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) has become an important resource for the analysis of marketing research. In this study, in order to analyze user needs for consumer game software, we focus on tweet data. And we proposed topic extraction method using entropy-based feature selection based feature expansion. We also applied it to the classification of the data extracted from tweet data by using SVM. As a result, we achieved a 0.63 F-measure.
On Optimal Data Compression in Multiterminal Statistical Inference

The multiterminal theory of statistical inference deals with the problem of estimating or testing the correlation of letters generated from two (or many) correlated information sources under the restriction of a certain transmission rate for each source. A typical example is two binary sources with joint probability <i>p</i>(<i>x</i>, <i>y</i>) where the correlation of <i>x</i> and <i>y</i> is to be tested or estimated. Given <i>n</i> iid observations <i>x</i><sup>n</sup> = <i>x</i><sub>1</sub> . <i>x</i><sub>n</sub> and <i>y</i><sup>n</sup>=<i>y</i><sub>1</sub> . <i>y</i><sup>n</sup>, only <i>k</i> = <i>rn</i> (0 <; <i>r</i> <; 1) bits each can be transmitted to a common destination. What is the optimal data compression for statistical inference? A simple idea is to send the first <i>k</i> letters of <i>x</i><sup>n</sup> and <i>y</i><sup>n</sup>. A simpler problem is the helper case where the optimal data compression of <i>x</i><sup>n</sup> is searched for under the condition that all of <i>y</i><sup>n</sup> are transmitted. It is a long standing problem to determine if there is a better data compression scheme than this simple scheme of sending first <i>k</i> letters. The present paper searches for the optimal data compression under the framework of linear-threshold encoding and shows that there is a better data compression scheme depending on the value of correlation. To this end, we evaluate the Fisher information in the class of linear-threshold compression schemes. It is also proved that the simple scheme is optimal when <i>x</i> and <i>y</i> are independent or their correlation is not too large.
Evolution of bone microanatomy of the tetrapod tibia and its use in palaeobiological inference

Bone microanatomy appears to track changes in various physiological or ecological properties of the individual or the taxon. Analyses of sections of the tibia of 99 taxa show a highly significant (P ≤ 0.005) relationship between long‐bone microanatomy and habitat. Randomization tests reveal a highly significant (P ≤ 0.005) phylogenetic signal on several compactness profile parameters and lifestyle. Discriminant analyses yield an inference model which has a success rate of 63% when lifestyle is coded into three states (aquatic, amphibious and terrestrial) or 83% for a binary model (aquatic vs. amphibious to terrestrial). Lifestyle is inferred to have been terrestrial for the stem‐tetrapod Discosauriscus (Early Permian), the basal synapsid Dimetrodon (Early Permian), the dicynodont therapsid Dicynodon (Late Permian), an unindentified gorgonopsian (Late Permian); the parareptile Pareiasaurus (Middle or Late Permian) is modelled as being aquatic, but was more likely amphibious.