Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Bilingual Autobiographical Memory: Experimental Studies and Clinical Cases

This paper argues that the consecutive bilingual’s dual cultural-linguistic self-representations act as filters for memory retrieval of events from the personal past. Examination of work in experimental psychology on bilingual autobiographical memory and clinical case reports from psychoanalytic therapy with bilinguals suggests that memory retrievals for events from childhood and youth (in the country of origin) are more numerous, more detailed and more emotionally marked when remembering is done in the first language (‘mother tongue’) rather than in the second language. The mechanism accounting for this phenomenon has been identified as encoding specificity and state-dependent learning, where the bilingual’s languages are considered the operative ‘states’ at encoding and retrieval. The paper suggests that this notion of ‘states’ be refined to include cultural-linguistic self-representations attending language socialization in first and second cultures. Such language-specific self-representations act as linguistically mediated ‘states’ that may or may not match similar states at encoding and thus account for qualitative and quantitative differences in retrieval.
Identification of primary retinal cells and ex vivo detection of proinflammatory molecules using flow cytometry

Purpose Advances in the understanding of the pathogenesis of retinal disorders can be facilitated by a methodology to measure expression of proinflammatory molecules in various subsets of retinal cells. Methods We examined whether a multiparameter flow cytometric assay can be used to identify various subsets of retinal cells and examine expression of molecules involved in inflammatory responses in the retina. Single-cell suspensions freshly obtained after enzymatic digestion of normal mouse retinas were stained with antibodies against cluster of differentiation 11b (CD11b), cluster of differentiation 31 (CD31), Glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP), rhodopsin, Thy-1, and vimentin. These markers were previously shown by immunohistochemistry to label retinal microglia/macrophages, endothelial cells, astrocytes, photoreceptors, ganglion neurons, and Müller cells respectively in normal mouse retinas. Results Costaining with antibodies against intercellular adhesion molecule-1 (ICAM-1) and CD40 revealed that ICAM-1 is normally expressed at various levels on all subsets of retinal cells examined. In contrast, CD40 was detected only on CD11b+, CD31+, Thy-1+, and vimentin+ cells. Ischemia-reperfusion of the retina resulted in upregulation of ICAM-1 on CD105+ and vimentin+ cells and upregulation of nitric oxide synthase 2 in CD11b+ cells. Discussion These results indicate that flow cytometry can be used to readily quantitate expression of surface and intracellular molecules of relevance to retinopathies in freshly isolated retinal cells.
Crowdsourcing reproducible seizure forecasting in human and canine epilepsy

See Mormann and Andrzejak (doi:10.1093/brain/aww091) for a scientific commentary on this article. Seizures are thought to arise from an identifiable pre-ictal state. Brinkmann et al. report the results of an online, open-access seizure forecasting competition using intracranial EEG recordings from canines with naturally occurring epilepsy and human patients undergoing presurgical monitoring. The winning algorithms forecast seizures at rates significantly greater than chance.
Structure and characterization of AgfB from Salmonella enteritidis thin aggregative fimbriae.

The agfBAC operon of Salmonella enteritidis encodes thin aggregative fimbriae, fibrous, polymeric structures primarily composed of AgfA fimbrins. Although uncharacterized, AgfB shows a 51 % overall amino acid sequence similarity to AgfA. Using AgfB epitope-specific antiserum, AgfB was detected as a minor component of whole, purified fimbriae. Like AgfA, AgfB was released from purified fimbriae by >70 % formic acid, whereupon both AgfA-AgfA and AgfA-AgfB dimers as well as monomers were detected. This suggested that AgfB may form specific, highly stable, structural associations with AgfA in native fimbrial filaments, associations that were weakened in structurally unstable fibers derived from AgfA chimeric fimbrial mutants. Detailed sequence comparisons between AgfA and AgfB showed that AgfB harbored a similar fivefold repeated sequence pattern (x(6)QxGx(2)NxAx(3)Q), and contained structural motifs similar to the parallel beta helix model proposed for AgfA. Molecular modeling of AgfB revealed a 3D structure remarkably similar to that of AgfA, the structures differing principally in the surface disposition of non-conserved, basic, acidic and non-polar residues. Thus AgfB is a fimbrin-like structural homologue of AgfA and an integral, minor component of native thin aggregative fimbrial fibers. AgfB from an agfA deletion strain was detected as a non-fimbrial, SDS-insoluble form in the supernatant and was purified. AgfA from an agfB deletion strain was found in both SDS-soluble and insoluble, non-fimbrial forms. No AgfA-AgfA dimers were detected in the absence of AgfB. Fimbriae formation by intercellular complementation between agfB and agfA deletion strains could not be shown under a variety of conditions, indicating that AgfA and AgfB are not freely diffusible in S. enteritidis. This has important implications on the current assembly hypothesis for thin aggregative fimbriae.
Bootstrapping Apprenticeship Learning

We consider the problem of apprenticeship learning where the examples, demonstrated by an expert, cover only a small part of a large state space. Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) provides an efficient tool for generalizing the demonstration, based on the assumption that the expert is maximizing a utility function that is a linear combination of state-action features. Most IRL algorithms use a simple Monte Carlo estimation to approximate the expected feature counts under the expert's policy. In this paper, we show that the quality of the learned policies is highly sensitive to the error in estimating the feature counts. To reduce this error, we introduce a novel approach for bootstrapping the demonstration by assuming that: (i), the expert is (near-)optimal, and (ii), the dynamics of the system is known. Empirical results on gridworlds and car racing problems show that our approach is able to learn good policies from a small number of demonstrations.
Commentary: What Were They Thinking? The Role of Family Firm Mental Models on Threat Recognition

In this commentary, we extend Sirmon, Arregle, Hitt, and Webb's work in this issue by introducing shared mental models as antecedents of threat of imitability recognition and as moderators of the relationship between threat recognition and strategic action. Specifically, while Sirmon, Arregle, Hitt, and Webb focus on responses to threat recognition, we develop propositions on how shared mental models related to business issues affect the threat recognition process and on how shared mental models related to family issues influence strategic responses to recognized threats. Implications and areas for future research are discussed.
School Superintendents' Antilabor Bias in Screening Researchers' Access to Classrooms.

A field-experimental probe was designed to examine the differential acceptability to school superintendents of prounion, antiunion, and neutral researchers' requests to survey high school students in their classrooms. Two contrasting hypotheses were tested: (1) administrators are opposed to advocates, whether pro or con, in the labor relations domain or (2) administrators are opposed to prounion advocates. The survey instrument was sent, along with one of three cover letters (prounion, neutral, or antiunion), to each of 60 superintendents in a suburban county, soliciting their permission to conduct a survey. The research organization was identified as being part of the nearby state university. Analyses of the rates of rejection of this request found that letters that stated the desire to reverse the declining strength of organized labor elicited greater rejection rates than did those that took a neutral or strongly antilabor stance. The results indicate the limitations of a purely psychological model of the behavior of administrators and the importance of structural conflicts between administrators and teachers.
Verbal Components of Emotional Empathy

Various theoretical approaches have been used to define the concept of empathy: psychoanalytical and egopsychological theories, object relations theories and cognitive psychological as well as humanistic views. Attempts have been made to synthesize these approaches. The physiological and kinaesthetic components of empathy have often been neglected, whereas the psychological and social components have been emphasized. Most consider emotional sensitivity and capacity for identification (of the affective components) and role-taking and perspective-taking capacity (of the cognitive aspects) as central components of empathy. 338 adults responded to the 1972 Mehrabian and Epstein scale of emotional empathy. Factor analysis yielded factors of emotional receptiveness, readiness for identification, and sympathy under labile control. Women proved more empathetic on all factors than men. Mehrabian and Epstein's scale appears useful in studying the central components of empathy.
Elastic minutiae matching by means of thin-plate spline models

This paper presents a novel minutiae matching method that deals with elastic distortions by normalizing the shape of the test fingerprint with respect to the template. The method first determines possible matching minutiae pairs by means of comparing local neighborhoods of the minutiae. Next a thin-plate spline model is used to describe the non-linear distortions between the two sets of possible pairs. One of the fingerprints is deformed and registered according to the estimated model, and then the number of matching minutiae is counted. This method is able to deal with all possible non-linear distortions while using very tight bounding boxes. For deformed fingerprints, the algorithm gives considerably higher matching scores compared to rigid matching algorithms, while only taking 100 ms on a 1 GHz P-III machine.
Arbitrarily oriented text detection using geodesic distances between corners and skeletons

This paper proposes a corner and skeleton based method for arbitrarily oriented text detection. By calculating the minimum moment of inertia of each candidate text region, we firstly obtain the orientation and minimum bounding box of each connected component. Secondly, based on the fact that corners are frequent and essential patterns in text regions, we propose a geodesic distance between corner and the skeleton of text regions to measure the effective distance between corner and text. Finally, a geodesic distances weighted corner saturation parameter is given to determine which candidate regions are the true text regions. Experimental results in ICDAR 2003 database show that the proposed method can handle the natural scene text of both horizontal and nonhorizontal orientation.
Estimating Sparse Events using Probabilistic Logic: Application to Word n-Grams

In several tasks from diierent elds, we are encountering sparse events. In order to provide with probabilities for such events, researchers commonly perform a maximum likelihood (ML) estimation. However, it is well-known that the ML estimator is sensitive to extreme values. In other words, conngurations with low or high frequencies are respectively underestimated or overestimated and therefore nonreliable. In order to solve this problem and to better evaluate these probability values, we propose a novel approach based on the probabilistic logic (PL) paradigm. For a sake of illustration, we focuss on this paper on events such as word trigrams (w 3 ; w 1 ; w 2) or word/pos-tag trigrams ((w 3 ; t 3); (w 1 ; t 1); (w 2 ; t 2)). These latter entities are the basic objects used in speech or handwriting recognition. In order to distinguish between for example: \replace the fun" and \replace the oor" an accurate estimation of these two trigrams is needed. The ML estimation is equivalent to a frequency computation of the connguration in a training corpus. Depending on the nature of the corpus, one of the two phrases is more frequent than the other. Even more, the nature of the language is such that one of them or many other conngurations may not occur in the training corpus. Our method estimates probabilities for such unseen conngurations using partial informations of these conngurations. For example, if the number of occurrences of the trigram \replace the fun" is very low, then the new estimation is computed from occurrences of the unigrams \replace", \the", \fun", the bigrams \the fun", \replace the" and the trigram \replace the fun".
The Use of Single-Case Experimental Research to Examine Physical Activity, Exercise, and Physical Fitness Interventions: A Review

This review identified studies that have utilized single-case experimental methods to evaluate physical activity, exercise, and physical fitness interventions. A total of 10 studies met the inclusion criteria. Single-case experimental design studies were inclusive to clinical populations and able to demonstrate an intervention effect. Future researchers should use validated and reliable assessments of physical activity or physical activity capacity, establish stable baseline assessments of their target behavior prior to the introduction of any intervention, use statistical tests to establish clinical and statistical significance, and move away from simple A-B designs that do not rule out the effects of extraneous variables.
Performance Boosting and Workload Isolation in Storage Area Networks with SANCache

Consolidation of server and storage resources in data centers results in interference of workloads with different characteristics and different performance requirements. It is difficult to isolate workloads and make performance guarantees on demand. SANCache automates hot data selection and migration for selected logical units (volumes) on storage. It automatically allocates a SAN-wide cache resource across workloads in order to meet their performance goals. Our goal is to eliminate some of the tedious tasks handled by Storage Area Network (SAN) administrators for performance tuning. SANCache can handle hot data management at a finer granularity, faster response and higher accuracy than what could be achieved manually. This paper presents SANCache design features, demonstrates benefits of online adaptation, and presents performance results using industry standard SPC and TPC-C benchmarks over two commercial disk arrays. We also contribute a new data placement technique called Most Recently Frequently Used (MRFU) to the literature.
Inactivation of MAPK in mature oocytes triggers progression into mitosis via a Ca2+-dependent pathway but without completion of S phase

Unfertilized sea urchin eggs that are arrested at G1 phase after completion of meiosis contain a highly phosphorylated mitogen-activated protein (MAP) kinase (MAPK), the ERK-like protein (ERK-LP). Several data including our previous results show that ERK-LP is inactivated after fertilization, which agrees with results obtained in other species including Xenopus, starfish and mammals. The question is to elucidate the function of a high MAPK activity in sea urchin eggs. We report here that dephosphorylation of ERK-LP with very low concentrations of two MEK inhibitors, PD98059 or U0126, triggers entry into mitosis. Under these conditions, recurrent oscillations of the phosphorylation of ERK-LP and of a tyrosine residue in Cdc2 occur, and the intracellular Ca2+ level (Ca2+i) progressively and slowly increases. Nuclear envelope breakdown and all mitotic events initiated after dephosphorylation of ERK-LP are inhibited when changes in Ca2+i are prevented; however, they are independent of the intracellular pH. These results suggest that inactivation of a MEK-ERK pathway, normally induced after fertilization of sea urchin eggs, triggers entry into mitosis by altering Ca2+i but cannot trigger full DNA replication. We discuss the hypothesis that neither inactivation nor activation of a MEK-ERK pathway is required for S phase completion in sea urchin egg.
Global Regulation of Gene Expression by the MafR Protein of Enterococcus faecalis

Enterococcus faecalis is a natural inhabitant of the human gastrointestinal tract. However, as an opportunistic pathogen, it is able to colonize other host niches and cause life-threatening infections. Its adaptation to new environments involves global changes in gene expression. The EF3013 gene (here named mafR) of E. faecalis strain V583 encodes a protein (MafR, 482 residues) that has sequence similarity to global response regulators of the Mga/AtxA family. The enterococcal OG1RF genome also encodes the MafR protein (gene OG1RF_12293). In this work, we have identified the promoter of the mafR gene using several in vivo approaches. Moreover, we show that MafR influences positively the transcription of many genes on a genome-wide scale. The most significant target genes encode components of PTS-type membrane transporters, components of ABC-type membrane transporters, and proteins involved in the metabolism of carbon sources. Some of these genes were previously reported to be up-regulated during the growth of E. faecalis in blood and/or in human urine. Furthermore, we show that a mafR deletion mutant strain induces a significant lower degree of inflammation in the peritoneal cavity of mice, suggesting that enterococcal cells deficient in MafR are less virulent. Our work indicates that MafR is a global transcriptional regulator. It might facilitate the adaptation of E. faecalis to particular host niches and, therefore, contribute to its potential virulence.
A Distance-Dependent Free-Space Optical Cooperative Communication System

A distance-dependent cooperative scheme is proposed for free-space optical communications with a single-relay-assisted scenario. The new scheme exploits a fact that the diversity order of a free-space optical channel is related to the link distance. It is shown that, both analytically and numerically, the frame error rate of the new scheme can provide higher diversity order than a benchmark adaptive decode-and-forward scheme.
Practical poetry: Thich Nhat Hanh and the cultivation of a problem‐oriented officer

This essay argues for a more formal relationship between policing and mindful practice as taught by the Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh. The paper explores the value of Nhat Hanh’s teachings for improving the daily implementation of police services by individual officers, and the transformation of the suffering witnessed and experienced by those officers. Practical tools for the cultivation of mindfulness for officers are provided.
Photoplethysmography derivatives and pulse transit time in overnight blood pressure monitoring

Overnight continuous blood pressure measurement provides simultaneous monitoring of blood pressure and sleep architecture. By this means, we are able to investigate whether different sleep events are associated to blood pressure fluctuations. In this paper, we used the Pulse Transit Time (PTT) to develop and evaluate functions for measurement of blood pressure. We focused on the first and second derivatives of fingertip Photoplethysmography (PPG) recordings to detect PPG critical points. By applying R wave of ECG and PPG critical points, we created two PTT-based models for estimation of systolic and diastolic blood pressure (SBP and DBP). Seven subjects polysomnography datasets that contained PPG, ECG and blood pressure recordings were utilised to validate and compare developed PTT-BP functions. Results found that if the peak of the first derivative of PPG (VPG) was considered as the pulse pressure arrival point, the resulted PTT (PTTV) would more accurately predict both SBP and DBP. The average R-squared coefficient for SBP and DBP were correspondingly 0.593 and 0.416. The obtained mean error for PTTV based functions in SBP was ±3.96 mmHg with standard deviation of 1.41 mmHg and in DBP was ±6.88 mmHg with standard deviation of 3.03 mmHg. We concluded PTT detected from VPG is a reliable and suitable maker for overnight continuous blood pressure monitoring.
Direct Torque Control of Brushless DC Motor Drives With Improved Reliability

Currently, road vehicles are more equipped with permanent magnet synchronous motors. Particularly interesting are brushless dc (BLDC) motors, which, due to their inherently sensorless operation, are considered as viable candidates in large-scale production industries such as the automotive one. Within this trend, this paper deals with the synthesis and implementation of a novel direct torque control (DTC) strategy dedicated to the control of BLDC motor drives. Compared with the most recent and highly performed DTC strategy, the proposed one offers improved reliability due to the achievement of balanced switching frequencies of the inverter upper and lower insulated-gate bipolar transistors, on one hand, and the reduction in the average value of the motor common mode voltage, on the other hand. Furthermore, the torque ripple is significantly damped during sector-to-sector commutations using a three-level hysteresis torque controller. An experientially based comparative study of the most recent and highly performed DTC strategy from one side and the introduced one from the other side clearly highlights the potentialities exhibited by the latest one.
On modeling nonhomogeneous Poisson process for stochastic simulation input analysis

A validated simulation model primarily requires performing an appropriate input analysis mainly by determining the behavior of real-world processes using probability distributions. In many practical cases, probability distributions of the random inputs vary over time in such a way that the functional forms of the distributions and/or their parameters depend on time. This paper answers the question whether a sequence of observations from a process follows the same statistical distribution, and if not, where the exact change points are. We propose a Likelihood Ratio Test (LRT) based method to detect multiple change points when observations follow non-stationary Poisson process with diverse occurrence rates over time. Results from a comprehensive Monte Carlo study indicate satisfactory performance for the proposed method.
Dynamically Evolving, Large-scale Information Systems

We present ESTER, a modular and highly eﬃcient system for combined full-text and ontology search. ESTER builds on a query engine that supports two basic operations: preﬁx search and join. Both of these can be implemented very eﬃciently with a compact index, yet in combination provide powerful querying capabilities. We show how ESTER can answer basic SPARQL graph-pattern queries on the ontology by reducing them to a small number of these two basic operations. ESTER further supports a natural blend of such semantic queries with ordinary full-text queries. Moreover, the preﬁx search operation allows for a fully interactive and proactive user interface, which after every keystroke suggests to the user possible semantic interpretations of his or her query, and speculatively executes the most likely of these interpretations. As a proof of concept, we applied ESTER to the English Wikipedia, which contains about 3 million documents, combined with the recent YAGO ontology, which contains about 2.5 million facts. For a variety of complex queries, ESTER achieves worst-case query processing times of a fraction of a second, on a single machine, with an index size of about 4 GB.