Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Decreased Activation Along the Dorsal Visual Pathway After a 3-Month Treatment With Galantamine in Mild Alzheimer Disease: A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study

Visual perception has been shown to be altered in Alzheimer disease (AD) patients, and it is associated with decreased cognitive function. Galantamine is an active cholinergic agent, which has been shown to lead to improved cognition in mild to moderate AD patients. This study examined brain activation in a group of mild AD patients after a 3-month open-label treatment with galantamine. The objective was to examine the changes in brain activation due to treatment. There were 2 tasks to visual perception. The first task was a face-matching task to test the activation along the ventral visual pathway, and the second task was a location-matching task to test neuronal function along the dorsal pathway. Brain activation was measured using functional magnetic resonance imaging. There were 5 mild AD patients in the study. There were no differences in the task performance and in the cognitive scores of the Consortium to Establish a Registry for Alzheimer's Disease battery before and after treatment. In the location-matching task, we found a statistically significant decrease in activation along the dorsal visual pathway after galantamine treatment. A previous study found that AD patients had higher activation in the location-matching task compared with healthy controls. There were no differences in activation for the face-matching task after treatment. Our data indicate that treatment with galantamine leads to more efficient visual processing of stimuli or changes the compensatory mechanism in the AD patients. A visual perception task recruiting the dorsal visual system may be useful as a biomarker of treatment effects.
Using skeletons for nonholonomic path planning among obstacles

The authors describe a practical path planner for nonholonomic robots in environments with obstacles. The planner is based on building a one-dimensional, maximal clearance skeleton through the configuration space of the robot. Rather than using the Euclidean metric to determine clearance, a special metric which captures information about the nonholonomy of the robot is used. The robot navigates from start to goal states by loosely following the skeleton. The resulting paths taken by the robot are of low complexity. Much of the computation can be done offline for a given robot, making for an efficient planner. The focus is on path planning for mobile robots, particularly the planar two-axle car, but the underlying ideas may be applied to planners for other nonholonomic robots. <<ETX>>
OORS: An object-oriented rewrite system

Retargeting a compiler’s back end to a new architecture is a time-consuming process. This becomes an evident problem in the area of programmable graphics hardware (graphics processing units, GPUs) or embedded processors, where architectural changes are faster than elsewhere. We propose the object-oriented rewrite system OORS to overcome this problem. Using the OORS language, a compiler developer can express the code generation and optimization phase in terms of cost-annotated rewrite rules supporting complex non-linearmatching and replacing patterns. Retargetability is achieved by organizing rules into profiles, one for each supported target architecture. Featuring a rule and profile inheritance mechanism, OORS makes the reuse of existing specifications possible. This is an improvement regarding traditional approaches. Altogether OORS increases the maintainability of the compiler’s back end and thus both decreases the complexity and reduces the effort of the retargeting process. To show the potential of this approach, we have implemented a code generation and a code optimization pattern matcher supporting different target architectures using the OORS language and introduced them in a compiler of a programming language for CPUs and GPUs.
Modified greedy pursuits for improving sparse recovery

Compressive Sensing (CS) theory combines the signal sampling and compression for sparse signals resulting in reduction in sampling rate. In recent years, many recovery algorithms have been proposed to reconstruct the signal efficiently. Subspace Pursuit and Compressive Sampling Matching Pursuit are some of the popular greedy methods. Also, Fusion of Algorithms for Compressed Sensing is a recently proposed method where several CS reconstruction algorithms participate and the final estimate of the underlying sparse signal is determined by fusing the estimates obtained from the participating algorithms. All these methods involve solving a least squares problem which may be ill-conditioned, especially in the low dimension measurement regime. In this paper, we propose a step prior to least squares to ensure the well-conditioning of the least squares problem. Using Monte Carlo simulations, we show that in low dimension measurement scenario, this modification improves the reconstruction capability of the algorithm in clean as well as noisy measurement cases.
Inhibition of GlcNAc-Processing Glycosidases by C-6-Azido-NAG-Thiazoline and Its Derivatives

NAG-thiazoline is a strong competitive inhibitor of GH20 β-N-acetyl- hexosaminidases and GH84 β-N-acetylglucosaminidases. Here, we focused on the design, synthesis and inhibition potency of a series of new derivatives of NAG-thiazoline modified at the C-6 position. Dimerization of NAG-thiazoline via C-6 attached triazole linkers prepared by click chemistry was employed to make use of multivalency in the inhibition. Novel compounds were tested as potential inhibitors of β-N-acetylhexosaminidases from Talaromyces flavus, Streptomyces plicatus (both GH20) and β-N-acetylglucosaminidases from Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron and humans (both GH84). From the set of newly prepared NAG-thiazoline derivatives, only C-6-azido-NAG-thiazoline displayed inhibition activity towards these enzymes; C-6 triazole-substituted NAG-thiazolines lacked inhibition activity against the enzymes used. Docking of C-6-azido-NAG-thiazoline into the active site of the tested enzymes was performed. Moreover, a stability study with GlcNAc-thiazoline confirmed its decomposition at pH < 6 yielding 2-acetamido-2-deoxy-1-thio-α/β-D-glucopyranoses, which presumably dimerize oxidatively into S-S linked dimers; decomposition products of NAG-thiazoline are void of inhibitory activity.
Analysis of optic nerve stroke by retinal Bex expression.

PURPOSE Few proteins are known to be selectively expressed in retinal ganglion cells (RGCs), the neurons directly affected by optic nerve stroke and glaucoma. In addition, subsets of RGCs are reported to project to various CNS areas via the retinohypothalamic pathway in rodents and primates. Many of these areas exhibit immunoreactivity for the brain-expressed X-linked (Bex) proteins Bex1 and Bex2. This prompted us to evaluate expression of these proteins in retina. METHODS We utilized rats and transgenic mice, coupled with a new rodent model of isolated optic nerve stroke (rodent anterior ischemic optic neuropathy, rAION). An anti-Bex1 antibody was reacted to retinal tissue extracts. To evaluate short term effects of rAION on RGC Bex expression, a double transgenic mouse strain was employed expressing cyan fluorescent protein (CFP) under control of the Thy-1 protein promotor, and beta-galactosidase (lacZ) under control of the immediate early stress c-fos gene promotor. Positive identification of rat RGCs was performed by retrograde fluorogold labeling via stereotactic CNS injection. Retinas were analyzed using both diaminobenzidine (DAB)-linked immunochemistry and confocal microscopy. RESULTS Bex immunoreactivity is present at high levels in the retina. Bex1 and Bex2 are selectively expressed in RGCs and differentially expressed in a subset of large RGC neurons. Bex signal levels are lower in small RGC neurons, which preferentially express high levels of the transcription factor Brn3b. Post-stroke, Bex accumulates in the RGC cytoplasm, consistent with the optic nerve edema produced by clinical AION. CONCLUSIONS Bex immunoreactivity can be used to evaluate, ex vivo, the distribution of RGC cell bodies and their axons in the retina and rAION effects on RGC axonal loss. Thus, Bex can be utilized to evaluate both long- and short-term effects of optic nerve stroke and may play a significant role in regulating RGC functions in both the axonal and cell body components of RGC neurons.
National estimates of racial segregation in rural and small-town America

The objective of this paper is to provide, for the first time, comparative estimates of racial residential segregation of blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans in nonmetropolitan and metropolitan places in 1990 and 2000. Analyses are based on block data from the 1990 and 2000 U.S. decennial censuses. The results reveal a singularly important and perhaps surprising central conclusion: levels and trends in recent patterns of racial segregation in America’s small towns are remarkably similar to patterns observed in larger metropolitan cities. Like their big-city counterparts, nonmetropolitan blacks are America’s most highly segregated racial minority—roughly 30% to 40% higher than the indices observed for Hispanics and Native Americans. Finally, baseline ecological models of spatial patterns of rural segregation reveal estimates that largely support the conclusions reached in previous metropolitan studies. Racial residential segregation in rural places increases with growing minority percentage shares and is typically lower in “new” places (as measured by growth in the housing stock), while racially selective annexation and the implied “racial threat” at the periphery exacerbate racial segregation in rural places. Our study reinforces the need to broaden the spatial scale of segregation beyond its traditional focus on metropolitan cities or suburban places, especially as America’s population shifts down the urban hierarchy into exurban places and small towns.
Temporal and relational data representation by graph morphing

This article presents a tool namely VisuGraph, designed to support temporal data visualization by means of graph representation that offers users a synthetic view of knowledge, difficult to extract from a data corpus. The temporal dimension adds the possibility to situate past, but also present or future events and strategies. In this context, we propose a graph-morphing algorithm in order to highlight major tendencies and significant data changes during different periods of time. The goal is to present an animation based on a graph of temporal data, with every period pooled, followed up by each period graph successively. Our approach is based on a space-time analogy like for a clock. For each period, we propose to design a temporal mark, represented in a chronological order in the extremities of the visualization frame, like the hours on a clock. Each element of data is placed near the temporal marks according to its presence during each period. Thus, visualization of the successive periods makes it possible to detect persisting or temporary data and to detect a chronology in the changes in relations.
Aliases, Creeping, and Wall Cleaning: Understanding Privacy in the Age of Facebook

This paper explores how 20-something Facebook users understand and navigate privacy concerns. Based on a year long ethnographic study in Toronto, Canada, this paper looks at how - contrary to many mainstream accounts - younger users do indeed care about protecting and controlling their personal information. However, their concerns revolve around what I call social privacy, rather than the more conventional institutional privacy. This paper also examines the somewhat subversive practices which users engaged in to enhance their own social privacy, and in some cases, violate that of others. Finally, this paper examines some of the reasons that users may continue using the site, despite privacy concerns.
On the conflict matrix of clause-sets

We study the asymmetric respectively symmetric conflict matrix of a multi-clause-set F , where the entry at position (i, j) is the number of literals, which appear positively in clause Ci of F and negatively in clause Cj (at the same time), respectively the number of clashes (at all) between Ci and Cj . A central problem is the determination of the symmetric/asymmetric conflict number of a (symmetric) conflict matrix A, which is the minimal number of variables in a multi-clause-set F with symmetric/asymmetric conflict matrix A. The problem of determining the symmetric conflict number of a (symmetric) conflict matrix has been introduced as the addressing problem by Graham and Pollak, which, given an undirected graph G, asks for a labelling of the nodes with code words over {0, 1, ∗} such that the distance of two nodes in G equals the distance of their code words (the Hamming distance after deletion of all positions with a ∗), and where the goal is to minimise the number of positions of the code. Using the distance matrix A of G we see, that the minimal number of positions of such a labelling of G is the symmetric conflict number of A. If G is directed, than the problem is to determine the asymmetric conflict number of the distance matrix A of G as a directed graph (considering directed paths). In both cases, multi-clause-sets F with (symmetric) conflict matrix A correspond to so called addressings of G. The symmetric/asymmetric conflict number appears in the literature also in another formulation, which allows to consider conflict matrices which not necessarily are distance matrices (of some graph). A multigraph G is considered together with a partition of the edge set of G into edgesets of (simple) bipartite subgraphs of G, and the goal is to minimise the number of bipartite subgraphs used. The minimal such number is
The siphon controversy counterpoint: the brain need not be “baffling”

application to circulation of the giraffe head. Am J Physiol Regul Integr Comp Physiol 256: R567–R571, 1989. 11. Hicks JW and Badeer HS. Gravity and the circulation: “open” vs. “closed” systems. Am J Physiol Regul Integr Comp Physiol 262: R725– R732, 1992. 12. Hill L and Bernard H. The influence of the force of gravity on the circulation. Part II. J Physiol (Lond) 21: 328–352, 1897. 13. Lillywhite HB. Snakes, blood circulation and gravity. Sci Am December: 66–72, 1988. 14. Seymour RS, Hargens AR, and Pedley TJ. The heart works against gravity. Am J Physiol Regul Integr Comp Physiol 265: R715–R720, 1993. 15. Seymour RS and Johansen K. Blood flow uphill and downhill: does a siphon facilitate circulation above the heart? Comp Biochem Physiol A 88: 167–170, 1987. 16. Valdueza JM, von Munster T, Hoffman O, Schreiber S, and Einhaupl KM. Postural dependency of the cerebral venous outflow. Lancet 355: 200–201, 2000.
Identification of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus carriage in less than 1 hour during a hospital surveillance program.

BACKGROUND Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) has spread worldwide and is responsible for significant morbidity, mortality, and health care costs. Control strategies to limit the emergence and spread of this organism rely on rapid and sensitive tests for detection of MRSA carriage. However, the standard surveillance culture method for detecting MRSA is labor intensive and time-consuming (2-3 days per procedure). There is thus a need for a rapid and accurate method to screen for MRSA carriage. METHODS We recently developed an easy-to-use real-time polymerase chain reaction (PCR) assay suitable for specific detection of MRSA in nasal specimens in <1 h. We studied the efficacy of our new PCR assay in routine screening for nasal MRSA carriage during a hospital surveillance program. A total of 331 nasal specimens obtained from 162 patients at risk for colonization were tested by both the standard mannitol agar culture method and our PCR assay. RESULTS The PCR assay detected MRSA in all 81 samples that were culture positive for MRSA. The PCR assay detected 4 additional MRSA-positive specimens, for a specificity of 98.4%, a positive predictive value of 95.3%, and a sensitivity and negative predictive value of 100%. CONCLUSIONS This novel PCR assay allows reliable identification of MRSA carriers in <1 h. This test should facilitate the efficacy of MRSA surveillance programs.
A cubic calcium oxynitrido-silicate, Ca2.89Si2N1.76O4.24

The title compound, tricalcium oxynitride silicate, with composition Ca3-xSi2N2-2xO4+2x (x ≃ 0.12), is a perovskite-related calcium oxynitrido silicate containing isolated oxynitrido silicate 12-rings. The N atoms are statistically disordered with O atoms (occupancy ratio N:O = 0.88:0.12) and occupy the bridging positions in the 12 ring oxynitrido silicate anion, while the remaining O atoms are located at the terminal positions of the Si(O,N)4 tetrahedra. The majority of the Ca2+ cations fill the channels along [100] in the packing of the 12-ring anions. The rest of these cations are located at several positions, with partial occupancy, in channels along the body diagonals.
Professional Psychology: Where are We Headed?

There is much debate at present around changing the professional structure of psychology to better meet the needs of South African society. In this paper this debate is assessed in terms of the requirements of the employment sector. Employment advertisements, for psychology and social and human science graduates appearing in three national weekly newspapers over 21 years, from 1976 to 1996, were analyzed. From the data it appears that the role of psychology in the ‘New South Africa’ is changing, with new opportunities opening up for graduates with broad as opposed to narrow professional qualifications. The implications of this for the professional structure of the discipline of psychology are considered.
A track-before-detect approach for extended target tracking in multi-lidar systems using a low-level centralized fusion framework

This paper presents a new method of multiple object tracking in a multisensor lidar context. One of the difficulties of scanning laser range finders (LRF) lies in the measurements of the objects since they are spatially distributed. We propose a tracking method (MF-IP-SMC), which uses the LRF data from a clustering stage (IP method) which avoids the usual detection step. This step is indeed source of detection problems or false alarm. The MF-IP-SMC approach is then validated on multilidar sequences of vehicles on road. A comparison with reference methods in vehicle tracking is then presented in order to quantify the contribution of the proposed solution.
Analysis and small-signal modeling of a nonisolated high voltage step-up dc-dc boost converter

This paper presents the modeling and control of a high voltage gain DC-DC converter based on the three-state switching cell (3SSC). Initially, the equivalent circuit must be obtained so that a mathematical modeling tool can be applied, which in this case is the PWM (Pulse Width Modulation) switch. From the small-signal analysis of the converter, it is possible to obtain the most relevant transfer functions that allow the closed-loop operation of the system. In order to validate the theoretical analysis, an experimental prototype rated at 1000 W using average current mode control is implemented and evaluated, thus showing that the converter remains stable under a wide load range.
Three dimensional view registration by a frequency domain technique

This work presents the algorithmic variations of a 3-D motion estimation method which make it suitable to 3-D view registration. Important characteristics are that the method is suitable for unsupervised 3-D registration and that texture information can be incorporated with beneficial effects on the overall 3-D registration performance. A peculiarity of the method is that it operates in the frequency domain.
Analysis of Carrier Utilization in Full-Duplex Cellular Networks by Dividing the Co-Channel Interference Region

We focus on the intra-cell co-channel interference between users in a full-duplex (FD) cellular network where FD enabled base stations are deployed with traditional half-duplex (HD) mobile stations. In order to suppress the co-channel interference, a cell partitioning method is proposed to divide the whole interference region into several partitions and allocate the frequency resources to them properly. The carrier utilization of such orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA)-based cellular networks is also analyzed theoretically to verify the proposed partitioning scheme. Our results show that the achievable gain in spectral efficiency over traditional HD systems increases with the number of users and decreases with the number of the partitions.
Politicization and publicization: the fragile effects of deliberation in working-class districts

A deep understanding of the use of deliberative processes requires a political ethnography able to detect their consequences for the participants and for the public sphere. This article analyses a participatory process organised in France by an activist-professional facilitator with a small group of bureaucrats and marginalized individuals, designed to promote mutual understanding and raise public issues. This ethnography shows that deliberation in small groups, rather than merely producing consensus and reproducing inequalities in accessing forms of public expression as is sometimes alleged, may generate at least preliminary politicization and the publicization of social issues in working-class districts. These rather fragile effects raise the question of the continuity of collective action and institutional transformations generated by deliberative processes.
How Product-Plot Integration and Cognitive Load Affect Brand Attitude: A Replication

Marketers are progressively using product placements to counteract technology that enables consumers to skip advertisements. However, consumers are increasingly multitasking while they watch videos, which might affect placement effectiveness. In France we conceptually replicate research on product–plot integration and multitasking that was originally conducted in the United States to analyze how different levels of cognitive charge influence this phenomenon. Results show that participants under moderate cognitive load liked intrusive placements. However, participants under high cognitive load were significantly less positive toward intrusive placements. The results show a potential U-shaped relationship between placement integration and levels of cognitive load.
Video Authentication Based on Statistical Local Information

With the outgrowth of video editing tools, video information trustworthiness becomes a hypersensitive field. Today many devices have the capability of capturing digital videos such as CCTV, digital cameras and mobile phones and these videos may transmitted over the Internet or any other non secure channel. As digital video can be used to as supporting evidence, it has to be protected against manipulation or tampering. As most video authentication techniques are based on watermarking and digital signatures, these techniques are effectively used in copyright purposes but difficult to implement in other cases such as video surveillance or in videos captured by consumer's cameras. In this paper we propose an intelligent technique for video authentication which uses the video local information which makes it useful for real world applications. The proposed algorithm relies on the video's statistical local information which was applied on a dataset of videos captured by a range of consumer video cameras. The results show that the proposed algorithm has potential to be a reliable intelligent technique in digital video authentication without the need to use for SVM classifier which makes it faster and less computationally expensive in comparing with other intelligent techniques.