Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Requirement of an Allosteric Kinetics of NMDA Receptors for Spike Timing-Dependent Plasticity

Spike timing-dependent synaptic plasticity (STDP) plays an important role in neural development and information processing in the brain; however, the mechanism by which spike timing information is encoded into STDP remains unclear. Here, we show that a novel allosteric kinetics of NMDA receptors (NMDARs) is required for STDP. We developed a detailed biophysical model of STDP and found that the model required spike timing-dependent distinct suppression of NMDARs by Ca2+-calmodulin. This led us to predict an allosteric kinetics of NMDARs: a slow and rapid suppression of NMDARs by Ca2+-calmodulin with prespiking → postspiking and postspiking → prespiking, respectively. We found that the allosteric kinetics, but not the conventional kinetics, is consistent with specific features of amplitudes and peak time of NMDAR-mediated EPSPs in experiments. We found that the allosteric kinetics of NMDARs was also valid for synaptic plasticity induced by more complex spike trains in layer II/III of visual cortex. We extracted an essential synaptic learning rule by reduction of the allosteric STDP model and found that spike timing-dependent bidirectional role of postspiking in synaptic modification, which depends on the allosteric kinetics, is the essential principle in STDP. Thus, we propose a simple hypothesis of the allosteric kinetics of NMDARs that can coherently explain critical features of spike timing-dependent NMDAR-mediated EPSPs and synaptic plasticity.
Pigment specific growth and grazing rates of phytoplankton in the central equatorial Pacific

Dilution experiments were performed during two transects across the central equatorial Pacific (3°N–3°S, 140°W) to estimate growth and mortality rates of select phytoplankton groups distinguished by their characteristic pigments. The first transect was conducted in February–March 1992 during a moderate El Niño event; the second transect took place in August–September 1992, under normal upwelling conditions. Experiments with and without added nutrients (N, P, Fe, and Mn) indicated that growth rates were nutrient limited during El Niño conditions. Nevertheless, the enhanced growth rates with added nutrients during El Niño were less than rates without added nutrients during the normal upwelling period; therefore, nutrients alone did not account for all of the differences between cruises. Growth rates were different for the various algal groups. In August–September, diatoms grew at 1.7 d−1, and prochlorophytes and prymnesiophytes at −0.5 d−1. Grazing by microzooplankton balanced growth for algal groups exhibiting the lowest growth rates (i.e. prymnesiophytes and prochlorophytes). Although microzooplankton grazing on diatoms and pelagophytes was also significant, a substantial fraction of their growth escaped consumption, accounting for most of the net chlorophyll production of the phytoplankton community.
Emerging robotics devices for therapeutic rehabilitation of the lower extremity

Application of robotics in rehabilitation provides various opportunities to improve the quality of daily life of disabled people. Therapy rehabilitation is categorized as cardiopulmonary, neurological and musculoskeletal. This paper focus on rehabilitation robots used for musculoskeletal therapy which assists in strengthening and restoring functionality and improving coordination in the musculoskeletal system. The development of therapy rehabilitation robots in the form of passive and active is reviewed in this paper with regards to the 21st century. Therapy rehabilitation robots are mainly discussed based on different actuation systems, degree of intelligence and virtual reality based rehabilitation robots. The main focus of this paper is to address the impact of the developments in the field of rehabilitation, limitations and challenges faced by current researchers.
/spl beta/-order MMSE spectral amplitude estimation for speech enhancement

This paper proposes /spl beta/-order minimum mean-square error (MMSE) speech enhancement approach for estimating the short time spectral amplitude (STSA) of a speech signal. We analyze the characteristics of the /spl beta/-order STSA MMSE estimator and the relation between the value of /spl beta/ and the spectral amplitude gain function of the MMSE method. We further investigate the effectiveness of a range of fixed-/spl beta/ values in estimating STSA based on the MMSE criterion, and discuss how the /spl beta/ value could be adapted using the frame signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The performance of the proposed speech enhancement approach is then evaluated through spectrogram inspection, objective speech distortion measures and subjective listening tests using several types of noise sources from the NOISEX-92 database. Evaluation results show that our approach can achieve a more significant noise reduction and a better spectral estimation of weak speech spectral components from a noisy signal as compared to many existing speech enhancement algorithms.
On the 1/N corrections to the Green functions of random matrices with independent entries

We propose a general approach to the construction of 1/N corrections to the Green function GN(z) of the ensembles of random real-symmetric and Hermitian N*N matrices with independent entries Hk,l. By this approach we study the correlation function CN(z1,z2) of the normalized trace N-1TrGN assuming that the average of mod Hk,l5 is bounded. We found that to leading order CN(z1,z2)=N-2F(z1,z2), where F(z1,2) only depends on the second and the fourth moments of Hk,l. For the correlation function of the density of energy levels we obtain an expression which, in the scaling limit only depends on the second moment of Hk,l. This can be viewed as supporting the universality conjecture of random matrix theory.
Reducing Side Effects of Hiding Sensitive Itemsets in Privacy Preserving Data Mining

Data mining is traditionally adopted to retrieve and analyze knowledge from large amounts of data. Private or confidential data may be sanitized or suppressed before it is shared or published in public. Privacy preserving data mining (PPDM) has thus become an important issue in recent years. The most general way of PPDM is to sanitize the database to hide the sensitive information. In this paper, a novel hiding-missing-artificial utility (HMAU) algorithm is proposed to hide sensitive itemsets through transaction deletion. The transaction with the maximal ratio of sensitive to nonsensitive one is thus selected to be entirely deleted. Three side effects of hiding failures, missing itemsets, and artificial itemsets are considered to evaluate whether the transactions are required to be deleted for hiding sensitive itemsets. Three weights are also assigned as the importance to three factors, which can be set according to the requirement of users. Experiments are then conducted to show the performance of the proposed algorithm in execution time, number of deleted transactions, and number of side effects.
Fundamental Theorems of Asset Pricing for Good Deal Bounds

We prove fundamental theorems of asset pricing for good deal bounds in incomplete markets. These theorems relate arbitrage‐freedom and uniqueness of prices for over‐the‐counter derivatives to existence and uniqueness of a pricing kernel that is consistent with market prices and the acceptance set of good deals. They are proved using duality of convex optimization in locally convex linear topological spaces. The concepts investigated are closely related to convex and coherent risk measures, exact functionals, and coherent lower previsions in the theory of imprecise probabilities.
Does celebrity “case material” worsen attitudes surrounding mental illness?

Case study in college courses that bear on psychopathology boasts numerous merits. However, one approach to case study— “diagnose a celebrity” —may worsen attitudes surrounding mental illness. Celebrity “case material” may incline students to think that psychological problems are trivial or amusing, to believe that mental health professionals are not sober practitioners in serious fields of study, or to desire greater social distance from individuals with psychological problems. In this study, I evaluated the effect of consumption of celebrity “case material” on attitudes surrounding mental illness. Two-hundred sixty participants were randomly assigned to one of three groups in an online experiment: (1) the control group, which did not read any case material, (2) the celebrity group, which read an article from an internet gossip website about the psychological struggles of a young actress, or (3) the standard case group, which read a bogus psychological evaluation that mirrored the celebrity gossip article but that stripped all entertainment-related elements. Self-report scales capturing attitudes surrounding mental illness were administered. Results did not support the prediction that celebrity “case material” would worsen attitudes surrounding mental illness. Unexpectedly, the standard case material led to significantly greater desired social distance from people with psychological problems. Insofar as the standard case material compelled participants to see the young woman depicted in the case through a psychiatric lens, these findings could be attributable to the pervasive tendency to devalue individuals who possess psychiatric labels. These results suggest that stigma-related concerns should be featured more prominently in psychopathology coursework.
Consumer and co-producer roles in e-service: analysing efficiency and effectiveness of e-service designs

Many electronic services are distinguished by the active and significant participation of customers in real-time service design and delivery, a phenomenon referred to as service co-production. Because e-service often involves higher levels of service co-production than in traditional person-to-person services, it has become important to incorporate customers' needs both as a service consumer and as a service co-producer into the design of e-service systems. In this paper, we propose a two-stage approach to evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of e-services. We focus on meeting customers' needs as both consumers and co-producers. The approach is demonstrated in an exploratory empirical study of the e-service operations of a sample of internet food retailers.
Poster: Detecting if a Smartphone is Indoors or Outdoors with Ultrasounds

Context information is fundamental for mobile application. A system able to detect if a smartphone is indoors or outdoors can give useful information to upper-level applications, permitting to improve their performance or reduce the computational load and consequently the lifetime of the smartphone battery. For example, GPS provides an accurate location reference in the outdoor environment while it performs poorly inside buildings. The proposed Indoor/Outdoor (IO) detector can provide a useful essential information to a localization application that can check whether the user is outdoors before turning on the GPS interface and decide not to turn it on and use other localization methods if the user is detected indoors. In mobile data services, mobile phones normally observe more WiFi access points (APs) with strong signals inside buildings, whereas it is unlikely to have good WiFi connections in outdoor environments. Therefore, knowing whether the smartphone is indoors or outdoors can help to make smarter decisions regarding whether to perform or not AP scans. Although it is clear that various applications may benefit from accurate and prompt indoor/outdoor information, the research work on indoor/outdoor detection of mobile devices is still lacking. There are mainly two techniques to perform such detection. One is to use GPS and its signal quality as a cue to infer if the user is indoor. This technique is proven to be highly power consuming. Another technique is to leverage the sensors which the smartphone is equipped with. IO detection can be done by exploiting lightweight sensors such as the light sensor, the radio interface and the magnetism sensor [1]. The proposed IO detector is an active system. The phone periodically emits an ultrasonic ping using its in-built speakers and continuously listens for the echoes through its microphone. It is impossible to identify the direction of the echoes being the microphone (as well as the phone speakers) non-directional. The idea is that indoors the number and the intensity of the echoes should be higher than outdoors due to the higher number of obstacles. Translating such an idea into a practical Indoor/Outdoor detector means finding those features that model such behaviour. The proposed
Calcium and neurodegeneration

When properly controlled, Ca2+ fluxes across the plasma membrane and between intracellular compartments play critical roles in fundamental functions of neurons, including the regulation of neurite outgrowth and synaptogenesis, synaptic transmission and plasticity, and cell survival. During aging, and particularly in neurodegenerative disorders, cellular Ca2+‐regulating systems are compromised resulting in synaptic dysfunction, impaired plasticity and neuronal degeneration. Oxidative stress, perturbed energy metabolism and aggregation of disease‐related proteins (amyloid β‐peptide, α‐synuclein, huntingtin, etc.) adversely affect Ca2+ homeostasis by mechanisms that have been elucidated recently. Alterations of Ca2+‐regulating proteins in the plasma membrane (ligand‐ and voltage‐gated Ca2+ channels, ion‐motive ATPases, and glucose and glutamate transporters), endoplasmic reticulum (presenilin‐1, Herp, and ryanodine and inositol triphosphate receptors), and mitochondria (electron transport chain proteins, Bcl‐2 family members, and uncoupling proteins) are implicated in age‐related neuronal dysfunction and disease. The adverse effects of aging on neuronal Ca2+ regulation are subject to modification by genetic (mutations in presenilins, α‐synuclein, huntingtin, or Cu/Zn‐superoxide dismutase; apolipoprotein E isotype, etc.) and environmental (dietary energy intake, exercise, exposure to toxins, etc.) factors that may cause or affect the risk of neurodegenerative disease. A better understanding of the cellular and molecular mechanisms that promote or prevent disturbances in cellular Ca2+ homeostasis during aging may lead to novel approaches for therapeutic intervention in neurological disorders such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases and stroke.
Improving computational efficiency of lattice Boltzmann methods on complex geometries

The lattice Boltzmann method has evolved over the past decade to a common technique in the field of computational fluid dynamics. The basic principle of cellular-automata allows an easy simulation of discrete surfaces and implementation of different boundary conditions. To meet the numerical requirements of continuous surfaces the enhanced Bouzidi bounce-back with interpolation was implemented. As the LBM requires a fine grained grid base, thus high memory usage, a particular emphasis was put on performance issues and performance optimization. To meet the increased obstacle to fluid ratio of unsteady surfaces, an unstructered list format was introduced, which turned out to be insensitive to the obstacle fluid ratio in terms of performance. The unstructured list algorithm with enhanced spatial data locality, finally performed nearly equal to the full matrix implementation. To exploit the growing parallelism in state-of-the-art compute nodes, a shared memory parallelization approach was implemented.
Children's Hope, Resilience and Autonomy

ABSTRACT Hope has been neglected as a topic by philosophers interested in families, children, and children's autonomy. Hope may be confused with adjacent phenomena, such as optimism and wishful thinking. However, hope, when understood to involve goals, exploration of pathways to achieving those goals, and motivation to explore the pathways, is necessary for autonomy. It is also importantly related to children's resilience in response to challenges and stressors. In the course of explaining what I take autonomy to involve, why I think children can have areas of local autonomy, and connections between hope, autonomy and resilience, I examine evidence that supports my claims about these connections. I then conclude with a brief discussion of implications of these connections for social policy, especially in the educational context, and for personal interactions with children.
A Novel Injectable Calcium Phosphate Cement-Bioactive Glass Composite for Bone Regeneration

Background Calcium phosphate cement (CPC) can be molded or injected to form a scaffold in situ, which intimately conforms to complex bone defects. Bioactive glass (BG) is known for its unique ability to bond to living bone and promote bone growth. However, it was not until recently that literature was available regarding CPC-BG applied as an injectable graft. In this paper, we reported a novel injectable CPC-BG composite with improved properties caused by the incorporation of BG into CPC. Materials and Methods The novel injectable bioactive cement was evaluated to determine its composition, microstructure, setting time, injectability, compressive strength and behavior in a simulated body fluid (SBF). The in vitro cellular responses of osteoblasts and in vivo tissue responses after the implantation of CPC-BG in femoral condyle defects of rabbits were also investigated. Results CPC-BG possessed a retarded setting time and markedly better injectability and mechanical properties than CPC. Moreover, a new Ca-deficient apatite layer was deposited on the composite surface after immersing immersion in SBF for 7 days. CPC-BG samples showed significantly improved degradability and bioactivity compared to CPC in simulated body fluid (SBF). In addition, the degrees of cell attachment, proliferation and differentiation on CPC-BG were higher than those on CPC. Macroscopic evaluation, histological evaluation, and micro-computed tomography (micro-CT) analysis showed that CPC-BG enhanced the efficiency of new bone formation in comparison with CPC. Conclusions A novel CPC-BG composite has been synthesized with improved properties exhibiting promising prospects for bone regeneration.
UA-ZBSA: A Headline Emotion Classification through Web Information

This paper presents a headline emotion classification approach based on frequency and co-occurrence information collected from the World Wide Web. The content words of a headline (nouns, verbs, adverbs and adjectives) are extracted in order to form different bag of word pairs with the joy, disgust, fear, anger, sadness and surprise emotions. For each pair, we compute the Mutual Information Score which is obtained from the web occurrences of an emotion and the content words. Our approach is based on the hypothesis that group of words which co-occur together across many documents with a given emotion are highly probable to express the same emotion.
Market Potential, Increasing Returns, and Geographic Concentration

In this paper, I examine the relationship between increasing returns to scale and the geographic concentration of economic activity. Using data on U.S. counties, I estimate the structural parameters of the Krugman (1991) model of economic geography. The specification I use, which is derived from the equilibrium conditions of the model, resembles a spatial labor demand function as it is proximity to consumer markets tha determines nominal wages and employment in a given location. Parameter estimates show support for small but significant scale economies; the estimated price-marginal cost ratio is 1.1 in 1980 and 1.2 in 1990. The parameter estimatines also suggest that geographic concentration is a stable feature of the spatial distribution of economic activity. As a prelude to the analysis, I estimate a reduced form of the Krugman model which approximates Harris' (1954) market-potential function. The estimation results show how far demand linkages extend across space and how shocks to income in one location affect wages and employment in other locations. Demand linkages between regions are strong and growing over time, but limited in geographic scope. Simulations based on parameter estimates suggest that a 10% fall in personal income for a region the size of Illinois reduces employment by 6.0-6.4% in counties that are 100 km in distance, with effects declining to zero for counties more than 800 km in distance. The results are consistent with a high volume of trade within cities and between proximate cities.
Tradeoff and Sensitivity Analysis of a Hybrid Model for Ranking Commercial Off-the-Shelf Products

Despite its popularity, The COTS-based development still faces some challenges, in particular the evaluation and selection process in which uncertainty plays a major role. A hybrid model, composed of the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and Bayesian Belief Network (BBN), is proposed to evaluate and rank various COTS candidates while explicitly considering uncertainty. Several input parameters such as weights assigned to evaluation criteria, relative scores for various COTS candidates, and prior belief about the satisfaction of various attributes associated with the evaluation criteria need to be estimated. The estimation process of these input parameters is subject to uncertainty that limits the applicability of the model’s results. In this paper, we apply sensitivity analysis to check the validity and robustness of the model. Further, we apply tradeoff analysis to explore the impact of relaxing one criterion in order to achieve an increase in another criterion that is considered as more desirable in a particular project context. A digital library system is used as a case study to illustrate how the proposed tradeoff and sensitivity analysis was performed.
Control strategy for islanded microgrid integrating renewable energy with storage and diesel generator

This paper presents control schemes for efficient operation of renewable energy based islanded microgrid integrated with Energy Storage System (ESS) and diesel generator as a backup source. In the proposed control algorithm, ESS and diesel generator are operated in various control modes based on the state of charge (SOC) level of the battery ESS. The ESS system is categorized into three states as normal, warning and critical based on the SOC level. During the normal state, ESS system is operated as the main source while in the warning state it will operate along with diesel generator in peer to peer mode and in the critical state diesel generator operates as the main source to regulate the islanded microgrid. The detailed model of the islanded microgrid system is developed in MATLAB/Simulink™, and the simulation results of the operation of the system in various modes and transition between them are presented in the paper.