Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Morphology, distribution, and synaptic relations of somatostatin- and neuropeptide Y-immunoreactive neurons in rat and monkey neocortex

Neurons in the monkey and rat cerebral cortex immunoreactive for somatostatin tetradecapeptide (SRIF) and for neuropeptide Y (NPY) were examined in the light and electron microscope. Neurons immunoreactive for either peptide are found in all areas of monkey cortex examined as well as throughout the rat cerebral cortex and in the subcortical white matter of both species. In monkey and rat cortex, SRIF-positive neurons are morphologically very similar to NPY-positive neurons. Of the total population of SRIF-positive and NPY-positive neurons in sensory-motor and parietal cortex of monkeys, a minimum of 24% was immunoreactive for both peptides. Most cell bodies are small (8 to 10 micron in diameter) and are present through the depth of the cortex but are densest in layers II-III, in layer VI, and in the subjacent white matter. From the cell bodies several processes commonly emerge, branch two or three times, become beaded, and extend for long distances through the cortex. The fields formed by these processes vary from cell to cell; therefore, the usual morphological terms bipolar, multipolar, and so on do not adequately characterize the full population of neurons. Virtually every cell, however, has at least one long vertically oriented process, and most processes of white matter cells ascent into the cortex. No processes could be positively identified with the light microscope as axons. The processes of the peptide-positive neurons form dense plexuses in the cortex. In each area of monkey cortex, SRIF-positive and NPY-positive processes form a superficial plexus in layers I and II and a deep plexus in layer VI. These plexuses vary in density from area to area. All appear to arise from cortical or white matter cells rather than from extrinsic afferents. In some areas such as SI and areas 5 and 7, the superficial plexus extends deeply into layers III and IV; and in area 17, two very prominent middle plexuses occur in layers IIIB through IVB and in the upper one-third of layer V; these are separated by layer IVC, a major zone of thalamic terminations, which contains very few SRIF- or NPY-positive processes. The density of the plexuses is greater for NPY-positive processes than for SRIF-positive processes in all areas. In the rat, the plexuses do not display a strict laminar organization but generally are densest in the supragranular layers (I to III) and decline steadily in the deeper layers. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)
3 Measuring Presence in the Simulating Brain

A description of the brain as an organ for simulating its environment can inform and illuminate a discussion about brain measurements in connection with the sense of presence. Developing theories of how mental simulations and continuous predictions underlie brain function have implications for how presence can, or cannot, be associated with brain measurements. Here, the simulating brain is accepted as a working hypothesis. The resulting implications are discussed and briefly related to how brain measurements have been used to investigate presence in previous studies.
Attachment tendencies and sexual activities

The aim of this study was to test a specific model according to which representations of sexuality (sexual motivation, sexual satisfaction, sexual anxiety, and fear of sex) act as mediators between attachment tendencies and sexual activities (frequency of dyadic and solitary sexual activity and frequency of sexual desire). A community sample of men and women (N = 490; 25–45 years) engaged in an ongoing couple relationship completed questionnaires related to the study variables. After age, duration of relationship, and marital satisfaction were controlled for, the main results showed that (a) in women, higher attachment anxiety was predictive of a higher frequency of dyadic sex and desire for sex; avoidance was predictive of a lower sexual desire; (b) in men, attachment avoidance was predictive of a lower frequency of dyadic sex and desire for sex and of a higher frequency of solitary activity; and (c) most of these effects were indirect and mediated through representations; the paths linking avoidance to sexual activities went mainly through lower positive representations in both women and men (sexual motivation and satisfaction), whereas the paths for anxiety went through a higher negative representation in men (sexual anxiety) and through a higher positive representation in women (sexual motivation). These results were consistent with the deactivation and hyperactivation strategies described for avoidant and anxious tendencies, respectively. However, several suppressor effects were observed, highlighting complex mediational paths. Finally, structural invariance showed that the links between attachment and sexual activities were mediated by representations for both women and men.
Vascular Biomarkers and Surrogates in Cardiovascular Disease

Cardiovascular biomarker research efforts have resulted in the identification of new risk factors and novel drug targets, as well as the establishment of treatment guidelines. Government agencies, academic research institutions, diagnostic industries, and pharmaceutical companies all recognize the importance of biomarkers in advancing therapies to improve public health. In drug development, biomarkers are used to evaluate early signals of efficacy and safety, to select dose, and to identify the target population. The United States Food and Drug Administration has relied on biomarkers to support clinical applications in many therapeutic fields, including cardiovascular disease. The appropriate application of cardiovascular biomarkers requires an understanding of disease natural history, the mechanism of the intervention, and the characteristics and limitations of the biomarker. Channels of communication among researcher, developer, and regulator must remain open to maximize the success of future biomarker efforts. In 2003, 2004, and 2005, an international panel of cardiovascular biomarker experts convened at the “Cardiovascular Biomarker and Surrogate Endpoints Symposia” held in Bethesda, Md, to discuss the use of biomarkers in the development of improved cardiovascular diagnostics and therapeutics. The information presented in the present report summarizes the authors’ perspective distilled from these proceedings.
Geoparsing history: Locating commodities in ten million pages of nineteenth-century sources

ABSTRACT In the Trading Consequences project, historians, computational linguists, and computer scientists collaborated to develop a text mining system that extracts information from a vast amount of digitized published English-language sources from the “long nineteenth century” (1789 to 1914). The project focused on identifying relationships within the texts between commodities, geographical locations, and dates. The authors explain the methodology, uses, and the limitations of applying digital humanities techniques to historical research, and they argue that interdisciplinary approaches are critically important in addressing the technical challenges that arise. Collaborative teamwork of the kind described here has considerable potential to produce further advances in the large-scale analysis of historical documents.
Knowledge-centric and language independent framework for safety analysis tools

This paper presents a knowledge-centric and language independent framework and its application to develop safety analysis tools for avionics systems. A knowledge-centric approach is important to address domain-specific needs, with respect to the types of problems the tools detect and the strategies used to analyze and adapt the code. The knowledge is captured by formally specified patterns used to detect a variety of problems, ranging from simple syntactic issues to difficult semantic problems requiring global analysis. Patterns can also be used to describe transformations of the software, used to rectify problems detected through software inspection, and to support interactive inspection and adaptation when full automation is impractical. This paper describes the Knowledge Centric Software (KCS) framework. It focuses on two key aspects: an eXtensible Common Intermediate Language (XCIL) for language independent analysis, and an eXtensible Pattern Specification Language (XPSL) for representing domain-specific knowledge.
Health conversational system based on contextual matching of community-driven question-answer pairs

More and more people are turning to the World Wide Web for learning and sharing information about their health using search engines, forums and question answering systems. In this demonstration, we look at a new way of delivering health information to the end-users via coherent conversations. The proposed conversational system allows the end-users to vaguely express and gradually refine their information needs using only natural language questions or statements as input. We provide example scenarios in this demonstration to illustrate the inadequacies of current delivery mechanisms and highlight the innovative aspects of the proposed conversational system.
Inhibitors of TLR-9 Act on Multiple Cell Subsets in Mouse and Man In Vitro and Prevent Death In Vivo from Systemic Inflammation

In parallel with the discovery of the immunostimulatory activities of CpG-containing oligodeoxynucleotides, several groups have reported specific DNA sequences that could inhibit activation by CpG-containing oligodeoxynucleotides in mouse models. We show that these inhibitory sequences, termed IRS, inhibit TLR-9-mediated activation in human as well as mouse cells. This inhibitory activity includes proliferation and IL-6 production by B cells, and IFN-α and IL-12 production by plasmacytoid dendritic cells. Our studies of multiple cell types in both mice and humans show the optimal IRS to contain a GGGG motif within the sequence, and the activity to require a phosphorothioate backbone. Although the GGGG motif readily itself leads to formation of a tetrameric oligodeoxynucleotide structure, inhibitory activity resides exclusively in the single-stranded form. When coinjected with a CpG oligodeoxynucleotide in vivo, IRS were shown to inhibit inflammation through a reduction in serum cytokine responses. IRS do not need to be injected at the same site to inhibit, demonstrating that rapid, systemic inhibition of TLR-9 can be readily achieved. IRS can also inhibit a complex pathological response to ISS, as shown by protection from death after massive systemic inflammation induced by a CpG-containing oligodeoxynucleotides.
Structure of catalase-A from Saccharomyces cerevisiae.

The structure of the peroxisomal catalase A from the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, with 515 residues per subunit, has been determined and refined to 2.4 A resolution. The crystallographic agreement factors R and Rfree are 15.4% and 19.8%, respectively. A tetramer with accurate 222-molecular symmetry is located in the asymmetric unit of the crystal. The conformation of the central core of catalase A, about 300 residues, remains similar to the structure of catalases from distantly related organisms. In contrast, catalase A lacks a carboxy-terminal domain equivalent to that found in catalase from Penicillium vitalae, the only other fungal catalase structure available. Structural peculiarities related with the heme and NADP(H) binding pockets can be correlated with biochemical characteristics of the catalase A enzyme. The network of molecular cavities and channels, filled with solvent molecules, supports the existence of one major substrate entry and at least two possible alternative pathways to the heme active site. The structure of the variant protein Val111Ala, also determined by X-ray crystallography at 2.8 A resolution, shows a few, well-localized, differences with respect to the wild-type enzyme. These differences, that include the widening of the entry channel in its narrowest point, provide an explanation for both the increased peroxidatic activity and the reduced catalatic activity of this mutant.
Unrestricted pure call-by-value recursion

Call-by-value languages commonly restrict recursive definitions by only allowing functions and syntactically explicit values in the right-hand sides. As a consequence, some very appealing programming patterns that work well in lazy functional languages are hard to apply in a call-by-value setting, even though they might not be using laziness for any other purpose than to enable the desired form of recursion. In this paper we present an operational semantics as well as a straightforward implementation technique for unrestricted recursion under pure call-by-value. On that basis we are able to demonstrate that highly recursive programming idioms such as combinator-based parsing are indeed compatible with call-by-value evaluation.
Global Binary Patterns: A Novel Shape Descriptor

In this paper, we propose a novel shape descriptor, called Global Binary Patterns (GBP), based on interpreting intensity values along a direction in an image as binary numbers, converting these binary numbers to their decimal values and concatenating these decimal values as the elements of a vector that is the GBP representation of the shape. Comparing with some widelyused state-of-the-art methods in the literature, we show that GBP is very fast and its performance on several widely-used databases is comparable or better.
Ranking Websites: A Probabilistic View

In this paper we suggest evaluating the importance of a website with the mean frequency of visiting the website for the Markov chain on the Internet graph describing random surfing. We show that this mean frequency is equal to the sum of the PageRanks of all the webpages in that website (hence referred to as PageRankSum), and we propose a novel algorithm, AggregateRank, based on the theory of stochastic complement to calculate the rank of a website. The AggregateRank algorithm gives a good approximation of the PageRankSum accurately, while the corresponding computational complexity is much lower than PageRankSum. By constructing return-time Markov chains restricted to each website, we describe also the probabilistic relation between PageRank and AggregateRank. The complexity of the AggregateRank algorithm, the error bound of the estimation, and the experiments are discussed at the end of the paper.
A flow model for joint action recognition and identity maintenance

We propose a framework that performs action recognition and identity maintenance of multiple targets simultaneously. Instead of first establishing tracks using an appearance model and then performing action recognition, we construct a network flow-based model that links detected bounding boxes across video frames while inferring activities, thus integrating identity maintenance and action recognition. Inference in our model reduces to a constrained minimum cost flow problem, which we solve exactly and efficiently. By leveraging both appearance similarity and action transition likelihoods, our model improves on state-of-the-art results on action recognition for two datasets.
Combining in-domain and out-of-domain speech data for automatic recognition of disordered speech

Recently there has been increasing interest in ways of using outof-domain (OOD) data to improve automatic speech recognition performance in domains where only limited data is available. This paper focuses on one such domain, namely that of disordered speech for which only very small databases exist, but where normal speech can be considered OOD. Standard approaches for handling small data domains use adaptation from OOD models into the target domain, but here we investigate an alternative approach with its focus on the feature extraction stage: OOD data is used to train feature-generating deep belief neural networks. Using AMI meeting and TED talk datasets, we investigate various tandem-based speaker independent systems as well as maximum a posteriori adapted speaker dependent systems. Results on the UAspeech isolated word task of disordered speech are very promising with our overall best system (using a combination of AMI and TED data) giving a correctness of 62.5%; an increase of 15% on previously best published results based on conventional model adaptation. We show that the relative benefit of using OOD data varies considerably from speaker to speaker and is only loosely correlated with the severity of a speaker’s impairments. Index Terms: Speech recognition, Tandem features, Deep belief neural network, Disordered speech
Chemical Stimulation of Synaptosomes Modulates α-Ca2+/Calmodulin-Dependent Protein Kinase II mRNA Association to Polysomes

The presence of specific mRNAs in dendrites and at synapses is well established, but a direct and reliable demonstration that they are associated with polysomes is still missing. To address this point we analyzed the polysomal association of the mRNAs for the alpha-subunit of Ca(2+)/calmodulin-dependent protein kinase II (alpha-CaMKII), for type 1 inositol 1,4,5-trisphosphate receptor (InsP3R1) and for the activity-regulated cytoskeleton-associated protein (Arc) in a synaptosomal preparation devoid of contaminating material from neuronal and glial perikarya. We show that a fraction of alpha-CaMKII, InsP3R1, and Arc mRNAs present in synaptosomes is indeed associated with polysomes. Moreover, we show that polysomal association of alpha-CaMKII mRNA, but not InsP3R1 and Arc mRNAs, increases with depolarization of the synaptosomal membrane. Finally, we show that the synthesis of alpha-CaMKII protein increases with stimulation. Dendritic mRNA recruitment onto polysomes in response to synaptic stimulation might represent one of the mechanisms underlying the processes of learning and memory.
Oliguria, volume overload, and loop diuretics

Acute kidney injury (AKI) is commonly and increasingly encountered in patients with critical illness. In the past, epidemiologic studies have consistently found that oliguria further increases the risk of death from AKI. Compared with patients outside the intensive care unit (ICU), critically ill patients are more likely to have volume overload as a result of impaired solute and water excretion. Recently, broad changes have occurred in ICU practice, such as early goal-directed therapy in sepsis, which may further compound volume overload in the ICU patient with oliguric AKI. Evidence has also emerged to suggest that a positive fluid accumulation in ICU patients can unfavorably affect outcome. Thus, the ICU patient with oliguric AKI presents a dilemma with limited therapeutic options. These would include optimization of systemic hemodynamics, added fluid therapy, administration of loop diuretics, or finally, the initiation of renal replacement therapy. Interestingly, recent survey data and observational studies indicate that a majority of intensivists use loop diuretics, specifically furosemide, at some point during the course of illness in patients with AKI. Paradoxically, loop diuretics have been found in several clinical studies of patients with AKI to be potentially detrimental or, at the least, lack effectiveness for improving clinical outcomes. This contradiction between clinical practice and available evidence would suggest there is equipoise and need for higher-quality evidence to better characterize the role of loop diuretics in ICU patients with AKI.
Effects of confusion on resistance to persuasion

The disrupt-then-reframe (DTR) technique (Davis and Knowles 1999) uses a subtle disruption followed by an immediate reframing to increase compliance. Similarly, Ward and Brenner (2006) found that acknowledging a negative quality can result in less negative evaluations of the quality. In two experiments, we investigate possible extensions and boundary conditions related to this research. Experiment 1 extends the DTR effect into a new, non-monetary marketing related domain (technical jargon). Experiment 2 demonstrates the effectiveness of negative acknowledgement in reducing negative perceptions while increasing overall product evaluation, but only for individuals who are high in need for structure.
Exogenous phytic acid inhibits early growth of wheat seedlings (Triticum aestivum L.) by decreasing superoxide anion derived from NADPH oxidase.

Reactive oxygen species (ROS), especially H2O2 and O2-, are found to be a signal of regulating plant development in recent years. PA is a famous anti-nutrient factor and antioxidant. The aim of this study is to investigate the effect of exogenous phytic acid (PA, C6H18O24P6) on seed germination and early seedling growth in wheat, and to determine whether ROS are involved in it. Seeds of wheat were grown in PA and the production of H2O2 and O2- were detected in leaves and roots of six-day-seedling. Results show that exogenous PA depresses the early wheat seedling growth(leaves expansion and root tip-growth) in a dose dependent manner and reducesO2- production in leaves and roots whereas does not affect germination and H2O2 production. To verify whether the growth inhibition by PA results from the decrease in the production of O2-, exogenous O2- combined with PA was used to treat wheat seeds, and the production of H2O2 and O2-, the activities of NADPH oxidase, POD and SOD were investigated. Results show that exogenous O2- reverses markedly the inhibition of early seedling growth by PA and the production of O2-rather than H2O2 was increased by exogenous O2-. PA alone decreases the activities of POD and NADPH oxidase in leaves andO2- can recover them partially. Therefore, exogenous PA restrains early development of wheat seedlings by reduction of O2-derived from NADPH oxidase and it also indicates that O2- plays a vital role in leave expansion and root tip-growth of wheat seedlings.
Solar energy empowered 5G cognitive metro-cellular networks

Harvesting energy from natural (solar, wind, vibration, etc.) and synthesized (microwave power transfer) sources is envisioned as a key enabler for realizing green wireless networks. Energy efficient scheduling is one of the prime objectives in emerging cognitive radio platforms. To that end, in this article we present a comprehensive framework to characterize the performance of a cognitive metro-cellular network empowered by solar energy harvesting. The proposed model allows designers to capture both the spatial and temporal dynamics of the energy field and the mobile user traffic. A new definition for the “energy outage probability” metric, which characterizes the self-sustainable operation of the base stations under energy harvesting, is proposed, and the process for quantifying is described with the help of a case study for various UK cities. It is shown that the energy outage probability is strongly coupled with the path-loss exponent, required quality of service, and base station and user density. Moreover, the energy outage probability varies both on a daily and yearly basis depending on the solar geometry. It is observed that even in winter, BSs can run for three to six hours without any purchase of energy from the power grid by harvesting instantaneous energy.
Construction of Irregular LDPC Codes with Low Error Floors

This work describes a new systematic construction approach for irregular low-density parity-check codes based on the splitting-and-filling technique. The generated code using this proposed method not only has a given degree distribution pair but also has girth of at least six. More importantly, by carefully filling the elements of the variable (check) node sets during the generating process, we can optimize one of the special combinatorial characteristics, such as the stopping size or the girth, of an LDPC code. Simulation results show that the resulting code can achieve good near capacity performance as well as good error-floor performance when decoded using the iterative belief propagation (BP) decoding method.