Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Alcohol’s effects on emotionally motivated attention, defensive reactivity and subjective anxiety during uncertain threats

Abstract Developing a better understanding of how and under what circumstances alcohol affects the emotions, cognitions and neural functions that precede and contribute to dangerous behaviors during intoxication may help to reduce their occurrence. Alcohol intoxication has recently been shown to reduce defensive reactivity and anxiety more during uncertain vs certain threat. However, alcohol’s effects on emotionally motivated attention to these threats are unknown. Alcohol may disrupt both affective response to and attentional processing of uncertain threats making intoxicated individuals less able to avoid dangerous and costly behaviors. To test this possibility, we examined the effects of a broad range of blood alcohol concentrations on 96 participants’ sub-cortically mediated defensive reactivity (startle potentiation), retrospective subjective anxiety (self-report) and cortically assessed emotionally motivated attention (probe P3 event related potential) while they experienced visually cued uncertain and certain location electric shock threat. As predicted, alcohol decreased defensive reactivity and subjective anxiety more during uncertain vs certain threat. In a novel finding, alcohol dampened emotionally motivated attention during uncertain but not certain threat. This effect appeared independent of alcohol’s effects on defensive reactivity and subjective anxiety. These results suggest that alcohol intoxication dampens processing of uncertain threats while leaving processing of certain threats intact.
Cooperative communication in wireless networks

Transmit diversity generally requires more than one antenna at the transmitter. However, many wireless devices are limited by size or hardware complexity to one antenna. Recently, a new class of methods called cooperative communication has been proposed that enables single-antenna mobiles in a multi-user environment to share their antennas and generate a virtual multiple-antenna transmitter that allows them to achieve transmit diversity. This article presents an overview of the developments in this burgeoning field.
TF2Network: predicting transcription factor regulators and gene regulatory networks in Arabidopsis using publicly available binding site information

A gene regulatory network (GRN) is a collection of regulatory interactions between transcription factors (TFs) and their target genes. GRNs control different biological processes and have been instrumental to understand the organization and complexity of gene regulation. Although various experimental methods have been used to map GRNs in Arabidopsis thaliana, their limited throughput combined with the large number of TFs makes that for many genes our knowledge about regulating TFs is incomplete. We introduce TF2Network, a tool that exploits the vast amount of TF binding site information and enables the delineation of GRNs by detecting potential regulators for a set of co-expressed or functionally related genes. Validation using two experimental benchmarks reveals that TF2Network predicts the correct regulator in 75-92% of the test sets. Furthermore, our tool is robust to noise in the input gene sets, has a low false discovery rate, and shows a better performance to recover correct regulators compared to other plant tools. TF2Network is accessible through a web interface where GRNs are interactively visualized and annotated with various types of experimental functional information. TF2Network was used to perform systematic functional and regulatory gene annotations, identifying new TFs involved in circadian rhythm and stress response.
Awareness of Racial Disparities in Kidney Transplantation among Health Care Providers in Dialysis Facilities.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Despite the important role that health care providers at dialysis facilities have in reducing racial disparities in access to kidney transplantation in the United States, little is known about provider awareness of these disparities. We aimed to evaluate health care providers' awareness of racial disparities in kidney transplant waitlisting and identify factors associated with awareness. DESIGN, SETTING, PARTICIPANTS, & MEASUREMENTS We conducted a cross-sectional analysis of a survey of providers from low-waitlisting dialysis facilities (n=655) across all 18 ESRD networks administered in 2016 in the United States merged with 2014 US Renal Data System and 2014 US Census data. Awareness of national racial disparity in waitlisting was defined as responding "yes" to the question: "Nationally, do you think that African Americans currently have lower waitlisting rates than white patients on average? " The secondary outcome was providers' perceptions of racial difference in waitlisting at their own facilities. RESULTS Among 655 providers surveyed, 19% were aware of the national racial disparity in waitlisting: 50% (57 of 113) of medical directors, 11% (35 of 327) of nurse managers, and 16% (35 of 215) of other providers. In analyses adjusted for provider and facility characteristics, nurse managers (versus medical directors; odds ratio, 7.33; 95% confidence interval, 3.35 to 16.0) and white providers (versus black providers; odds ratio, 2.64; 95% confidence interval, 1.39 to 5.02) were more likely to be unaware of a national racial disparity in waitlisting. Facilities in the South (versus the Northeast; odds ratio, 3.05; 95% confidence interval, 1.04 to 8.94) and facilities with a low percentage of blacks (versus a high percentage of blacks; odds ratio, 1.86; 95% confidence interval, 1.02 to 3.39) were more likely to be unaware. One quarter of facilities had >5% racial difference in waitlisting within their own facilities, but only 5% were aware of the disparity. CONCLUSIONS Among a limited sample of dialysis facilities with low waitlisting, provider awareness of racial disparities in kidney transplant waitlisting was low, particularly among staff who may have more routine contact with patients.
Improved expansion ratio and heat resistance of microcellular poly(L-lactide) foam via in-situ formation of stereocomplex crystallites

It is critical to broaden the applications of poly(L-lactic acid) foams by improving heat resistance properties. The stereocomplex crystallites that are formed by melt blending of poly(L-lactic acid)/polylactide possess high melting point of about 220℃ and thus exhibit high heat resistance; therefore, the introduction of stereocomplex crystallites tends to improve the thermal stability of poly(lactic acid) foam. Unfortunately, using the solid-state foaming method, it was found that the expansion ratio of the obtained poly(lactic acid) foams was compromised with the value of 1.7 times once the stereocomplex crystallites were formed during the sample saturation stage. In this study, by applying a high compression molding temperature of 230℃, the as-prepared poly(L-lactic acid) and poly(L-lactic acid)/polylactide blends were amorphous. After being CO2 saturated at a mild condition, the specimens were foamed at 90–160℃. The wide-angle X-ray diffraction profiles presented that the stereocomplex crystallites and PLA homocrystals were in-situ generated during the foaming process. It is observed that the in-situ formed stereocomplex crystallites could act as the physical cross-linking agent to stabilize the nucleated bubbles and suppress cell coalescence, resulting in the increased expansion ratio (with value of about 23.6–25.6 times) and cell density, especially at high foaming temperatures and extended foaming time. Furthermore, the in-situ formed stereocomplex crystallites during the foaming increased the heat resistance performance of poly(L-lactic acid) foams. This novel crystallization control method helps us to find a balance point in preparing poly(L-lactic acid) foam with high expansion ratio, well-defined cell structure and high heat resistance performance.
Mechanisms underpinning sympathetic nervous activity and its modulation using transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation

What is the topic of this review? This review briefly considers what modulates sympathetic nerve activity and how it may change as we age or in pathological conditions. It then focuses on transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation, a method of neuromodulation in autonomic cardiovascular control. What advances does it highlight? The review considers the pathways involved in eliciting the changes in autonomic balance seen with transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation in relationship to other neuromodulatory techniques.
How to Break CaptchaStar

Most of web sites adopt a Captcha system to distinguish malicious software from humans. This paper proposes an attack on a recent interactive image-based Captcha scheme, called CaptchaStar. The CaptchaStar was designed to be more secure and user friendly than existing solutions, however, as we show in this paper, it fails to meet these goals Nevertheless, the presented attack is very efficient, with a success rate for the attacker of 96% on the on-line version proposed by the authors. Moreover, the modification of CaptchaStar parameters (as noise addition) does not prevent our attack.
Workarounds to Intended Use of Health Information Technology: A Narrative Review of the Human Factors Engineering Literature

Objective To integrate and synthesize insights from recent studies of workarounds to the intended use of health information technology (HIT) by health care professionals. Background Systems are safest when the documentation of how work is done in policies and procedures closely matches what people actually do when they are working. Proactively identifying and managing workarounds to the intended use of technology, including deviations from expected workflows, can improve system safety. Method A narrative review of studies of workarounds with HIT was conducted to identify themes in the literature. Results Three themes were identified: (1) Users circumvented new additional steps in the workflow when using HIT, (2) interdisciplinary team members communicated via HIT in text fields that were intended for other purposes, and (3) locally developed paper-based and manual whiteboard systems were used instead of HIT to support situation awareness of individuals and groups; an example of a locally developed system was handwritten notes about a patient on a piece of paper folded up and carried in a nurse’s pocket. Conclusion Workarounds were employed to avoid changes to workflow, enable interdisciplinary communication, coordinate activities, and have real-time portable access to summarized and synthesized information. Application Implications for practice include providing summary overview displays, explicitly supporting role-based communication and coordination through HIT, and reducing the risk to reputation due to electronic monitoring of individual performance.
Reduced Functional Connectivity in Adults with Persistent Post-Concussion Symptoms: A Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy Study

Abstract Concussion, or mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI), accounts for ∼80% of all TBIs across North America. The majority of mTBI patients recover within days to weeks; however, 14–36% of the time, acute mTBI symptoms persist for months or even years and develop into persistent post-concussion symptoms (PPCS). There is a need to find biomarkers in patients with PPCS, to improve prognostic ability and to provide insight into the pathophysiology underlying chronic symptoms. Recent research has pointed toward impaired network integrity and cortical communication as a biomarker. In this study we investigated functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) as a technique to assess cortical communication deficits in adults with PPCS. Specifically, we aimed to identify cortical communication patterns in prefrontal and motor areas during rest and task, in adult patients with persistent symptoms. We found that (1) the PPCS group showed reduced connectivity compared with healthy controls, (2) increased symptom severity correlated with reduced coherence, and (3) connectivity differences were best distinguishable during task and in particular during the working memory task (n-back task) in the right and left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). These data show that reduced brain communication may be associated with the pathophysiology of mTBI and that fNIRS, with a relatively simple acquisition paradigm, may provide a useful biomarker of this injury.
A Novel Detection Method for Acoustic Emission Using a Scanning Probe Microscope

The fracture of the atomic-scale contact should be investigated for understanding the mechanism of the mechanical processing. Using a combination of the scanning probe microscope (SPM) with possible high space resolution and the acoustic emission (AE) with high sensitivity for fracture is one of the possible way of investigating the fracture mechanism. When using the SPM, the AE signal might be detected with receiving the AE wave by the piezoelectric tube scanner of the SPM receiving the AE wave, where by the piezoelectric effect the electric signal due to the AE wave is superimposed on the scan signal. Based on that, in this study, a novel method to detect AE signal from the scan signal is proposed. With this method, without changing the SPM body, the AE could be detected, and a two-dimensional AE source location could be possible by using four divided electrodes of the piezoelectric tube scanner. By a simple experiment using the AE wave simulator, the AE signal seems to be detected by the piezoelectric scanner of the SPM. Also, one of the typical data from the experiment suggests the AE source location might be possible. In the experiment of the indentation using atomic force microscope (AFM), which is one of the SPM, the AE signal is observed reproducibly.
Pictures in Your Mind: Using Interactive Gesture-Controlled Reliefs to Explore Art

Pictures in Your Mind: Using Interactive Gesture-Controlled Reliefs to Explore Art Journal Item How to cite: Reichinger, Andreas; Garcia Carrizosa, Helena; Wood, Joanna; Schröder, Svenja; Löw, Christian; Luidolt, Laura Rosalia; Schimkowitsch, Maria; Fuhrmann, Anton; Maierhofer, Stefan and Purgathofer, Werner (2018). Pictures in Your Mind: Using Interactive Gesture-Controlled Reliefs to Explore Art. ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing, 11(1), article no. 2.
Planar Luneburg Lens Based on the High Impedance Surface for Effective Ku-Band Wave Focusing

In this paper, a planar Ku-band Luneburg lens is designed, fabricated, and measured. Based on the high impedance surface, metamaterial units are designed and arranged in an array with gradient equivalent refractive index to achieve good wave focusing effects in the Ku band. The proposed 2-D lens is superior at its compact size and more feasible fabrication process when compared with the conventional 3-D lens. Both theoretical analysis and measurement results have been provided for a systematic study on this lens’ performance, and good agreement between them has been achieved. Benefiting from flexible beam steering, the proposed lens has helpful applications in estimating the direction of arrival in the passive direction finding system, improving the directive radiation for an antenna, and simulating increased target’s radar cross-section characteristic by adding a reflector.
Summary cache: a scalable wide-area web cache sharing protocol

The sharing of caches among Web proxies is an important technique to reduce Web traffic and alleviate network bottlenecks. Nevertheless it is not widely deployed due to the overhead of existing protocols. In this paper we demonstrate the benefits of cache sharing, measure the overhead of the existing protocols, and propose a new protocol called "summary cache". In this new protocol, each proxy keeps a summary of the cache directory of each participating proxy, and checks these summaries for potential hits before sending any queries. Two factors contribute to our protocol's low overhead: the summaries are updated only periodically, and the directory representations are very economical, as low as 8 bits per entry. Using trace-driven simulations and a prototype implementation, we show that, compared to existing protocols such as the Internet cache protocol (ICP), summary cache reduces the number of intercache protocol messages by a factor of 25 to 60, reduces the bandwidth consumption by over 50%, eliminates 30% to 95% of the protocol CPU overhead, all while maintaining almost the same cache hit ratios as ICP. Hence summary cache scales to a large number of proxies. (This paper is a revision of Fan et al. 1998; we add more data and analysis in this version.).
Off the beaten path: A case of mediastinal ectopic thyroid tissue

A 58-year-old woman was referred for investigation of an enlarged left mediastinal node detected on a chest computerized tomography (CT) scan. Six months prior to the current presentation, she had been treated with neoadjuvant chemotherapy, debulking surgery, and adjuvant intra-peritoneal chemotherapy for a stage IIIc ovarian serous carcinoma. Pancorporal CT scan was obtained in order to start maintenance therapy as part of a research protocol. The patient was otherwise in good health and asymptomatic. Her blood work was unremarkable. The CT scan reported a left 1.2 cm hyperdense high paratracheal lymph node (Figure 1). SubsequentF-Fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG) positron-emission tomography (PET) was performed and showed a non-avid lymph node; in addition it excluded any other thoracic or extra-pulmonary active disease. Minimally invasive biopsy with endobronchial ultrasound transbronchial aspiration (EBUS-TBNA) was performed (Figure 2). The localization of the lesion as well as its solid and homogenous aspect challenged the hypothesis of a lymph node. The densities of the nodule and of the thyroid gland above it were compared and were both found to exhibit a similar ultrasound appearance, raising the possibility of ectopic thyroid tissue. Five EBUS-TBNA (Olympus UC160F-OL8) passes were made into the nodule using a 22-G needle. The tissue obtained was rinsed into ThinPrep Cytolyt Solution (Hologic Inc., Marlborough, MA) and then sent to the McGill University Health Center cytopathology laboratory for preparation and microscopic analysis. After centrifugation, smears and a cell block were prepared, stained with the Papapnicolaou stain and hematoxylin & eosin stain, respectively. Cytologic examination of the smears revealed a few fragments of glandular epithelium in a honeycomb and macrofollicular arrangement and exhibiting neither nuclear atypia nor cilia. The macrofollicular
Tensor-Based Multi-view Feature Selection with Applications to Brain Diseases

In the era of big data, we can easily access information from multiple views which may be obtained from different sources or feature subsets. Generally, different views provide complementary information for learning tasks. Thus, multi-view learning can facilitate the learning process and is prevalent in a wide range of application domains. For example, in medical science, measurements from a series of medical examinations are documented for each subject, including clinical, imaging, immunologic, serologic and cognitive measures which are obtained from multiple sources. Specifically, for brain diagnosis, we can have different quantitative analysis which can be seen as different feature subsets of a subject. It is desirable to combine all these features in an effective way for disease diagnosis. However, some measurements from less relevant medical examinations can introduce irrelevant information which can even be exaggerated after view combinations. Feature selection should therefore be incorporated in the process of multi-view learning. In this paper, we explore tensor product to bring different views together in a joint space, and present a dual method of tensor-based multi-view feature selection DUAL-TMFS based on the idea of support vector machine recursive feature elimination. Experiments conducted on datasets derived from neurological disorder demonstrate the features selected by our proposed method yield better classification performance and are relevant to disease diagnosis.
Community violence exposure correlates with smaller gray matter volume and lower IQ in urban adolescents

Adolescents’ exposure to community violence is a significant public health issue in urban settings and has been associated with poorer cognitive performance and increased risk for psychiatric illnesses, including PTSD. However, no study to date has investigated the neural correlates of community violence exposure in adolescents. Sixty‐five healthy adolescents (age = 14–18 years; 36 females, 29 males) from moderate‐ to high‐crime neighborhoods in Los Angeles reported their violence exposure, parents’ education level, and free/reduced school lunch status (socio‐economic status, SES), and underwent structural neuroimaging and intelligence testing. Violence exposure negatively correlated with measures of SES, IQ, and gray matter volume. Above and beyond the effect of SES, violence exposure negatively correlated with IQ and with gray matter volume in the left inferior frontal gyrus and anterior cingulate cortex, regions involved in high‐level cognitive functions and autonomic modulation, and previously shown to be reduced in PTSD and combat‐exposed military populations. The current results provide first evidence that frontal brain regions involved in cognition and affect appear to be selectively affected by exposure to community violence, even in healthy nondelinquent adolescents who are not the direct victims or perpetrators of violence.
Virtual Extension of Meta-models with Facet Tools

In the software industry, Model Driven Engineering (MDE) techniques have proven useful not only for developing new software applications but for re-engineering legacy systems. However the stakeholders face costly maintenance operations due to frequent new standards and upgraded releases. Therefore, solutions ensuring a better adaptability and flexibility of modelling tools are needed. We propose an improved technique of virtual extension of meta-models with Facets that enables one to modify meta-models already in use without rebuilding completely the software product. This technique has been implemented and experimented for model alignment and evolution.
A mobile-based image analysis system for cervical cancer detection

Cervical cancer is the third major killer disease in developed and developing countries. Whereas screening and other preventive measures reduce the mortality in developed countries, mortality rate still remains very high in developing countries. This project focuses on the analysis of digital image of the cervix, captured with a low-level camera and under a contrast agent (the visual inspection with acetic acid (VIA)). Gaussian and mean filter techniques were used to remove the speckles. A segmentation algorithm was used to isolate the Region of Interest (ROI) from the image. Additionally a Canny edge detection algorithm was used to find edges. Furthermore, quantification and classification of the images were done. An android application was used to integrated all the above. This allows usage in rural settings. The results obtained were quite satisfactory (Specificity 79% and Sensitivity of 83%).