Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
What does “it” mean, anyway? Examining the time course of semantic activation in reference resolution

ABSTRACT Pronouns serve a critical referential function, yet the cognitive processes engaged during pronoun comprehension remain incompletely understood. One view is that encountering a pronoun leads the comprehender to reactivate the semantic features of its antecedent. We examined this by manipulating the concreteness of a noun antecedent and assessing whether an Event Related Potential (ERP) concreteness effect was elicited at a downstream pronoun. We observed a robust concreteness effect at the noun, but no similar effect at the pronoun. We also examined whether N400 semantic priming from the antecedent would increase on content words shortly following the pronoun, relative to those preceding it. Again, although we observed semantic priming following the noun, it did not increase following the pronoun. Our data suggest that pronouns do not induce the activation of (much) new semantic information in long-term memory, perhaps instead triggering an attentional shift towards their antecedents’ extant representations within working memory.
Computer Science Education in French Secondary Schools: Historical and Didactical Perspectives

Computer science as a school subject in France is characterized by a succession of promising starts that have not yet been transformed into perennial solutions. The main goal of this article is to analyze this complex situation from a historical perspective, and describe the current rebirth of an optional Computer Science course in the last year of secondary education, together with other initiatives that might contribute to introducing Computer Science as a school subject. We also aim at discussing some perspectives for the future to support a better informatics education for all students. The sources we have used are mainly historical and administrative, however we have also drawn on empirical research and surveys conducted since the seventies. This article therefore takes both retrospective and perspective viewpoints.
Differential expression of glutamate receptors in avian neural pathways for learned vocalization

Learned vocalization, the substrate for human language, is a rare trait. It is found in three distantly related groups of birds—parrots, hummingbirds, and songbirds. These three groups contain cerebral vocal nuclei for learned vocalization not found in their more closely related vocal nonlearning relatives. Here, we cloned 21 receptor subunits/subtypes of all four glutamate receptor families (AMPA, kainate, NMDA, and metabotropic) and examined their expression in vocal nuclei of songbirds. We also examined expression of a subset of these receptors in vocal nuclei of hummingbirds and parrots, as well as in the brains of dove species as examples of close vocal nonlearning relatives. Among the 21 subunits/subtypes, 19 showed higher and/or lower prominent differential expression in songbird vocal nuclei relative to the surrounding brain subdivisions in which the vocal nuclei are located. This included relatively lower levels of all four AMPA subunits in lMAN, strikingly higher levels of the kainite subunit GluR5 in the robust nucleus of the arcopallium (RA), higher and lower levels respectively of the NMDA subunits NR2A and NR2B in most vocal nuclei and lower levels of the metabotropic group I subtypes (mGluR1 and ‐5) in most vocal nuclei and the group II subtype (mGluR2), showing a unique expression pattern of very low levels in RA and very high levels in HVC. The splice variants of AMPA subunits showed further differential expression in vocal nuclei. Some of the receptor subunits/subtypes also showed differential expression in hummingbird and parrot vocal nuclei. The magnitude of differential expression in vocal nuclei of all three vocal learners was unique compared with the smaller magnitude of differences found for nonvocal areas of vocal learners and vocal nonlearners. Our results suggest that evolution of vocal learning was accompanied by differential expression of a conserved gene family for synaptic transmission and plasticity in vocal nuclei. They also suggest that neural activity and signal transduction in vocal nuclei of vocal learners will be different relative to the surrounding brain areas. J. Comp. Neurol. 476:44–64, 2004. © 2004 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Non-asymptotic and second-order achievability bounds for source coding with side-information

We present a novel achievability bound for the Wyner-Ahlswede-Körner (WAK) problem of lossless source coding with rate-limited side-information. This bound is proved using ideas from channel simulation and channel resolvability. The bound improves on all previous non-asymptotic bounds on the error probability of the WAK problem. We also present achievable second-order coding rates by applying the multidimensional Berry-Essèen theorem to our new non-asymptotic bound.
Dust Size Growth and Settling in a Protoplanetary Disk

We have studied dust evolution in a quiescent or turbulent protoplanetary disk by numerically solving a coagulation equation for settling dust particles, using the minimum mass solar nebula model. As a result, if we assume an ideally quiescent disk, the dust particles settle toward the disk midplane to form a gravitationally unstable layer within 2 × 103 to 4 × 104 yr at 1-30 AU, which is in good agreement with an analytic calculation by Nakagawa et al., although they did not take the particle size distribution into account explicitly. In an opposite extreme case of a globally turbulent disk, on the other hand, the dust particles fluctuate owing to turbulent motion of the gas and most particles become large enough to move inward very rapidly within 70 to 3 × 104 yr at 1-30 AU, depending on the strength of the turbulence. Our result suggests that global turbulent motion should cease for planetesimal formation to be possible in protoplanetary disks.
Separability for lattice systems at high temperature

Equilibrium states of infinite extended lattice systems at high temperature are studied with respect to their entanglement. Two notions of separability are offered. They coincide for finite systems but differ for infinitely extended ones. It is shown that for lattice systems with localized interaction for high enough temperature there exists no entanglement localized in a finite region of given size. Even more quasifree states at high temperature are also not distillably entangled for all local regions of arbitrary size. For continuous systems entanglement survives at all temperatures. In mean-field theories it is possible that local regions are not entangled but we have still entanglement hidden in the non local fluctuation algebra.
Chronic Neurotrophin-3 Strengthens Synaptic Connections to Motoneurons in the Neonatal Rat

We report that neurotrophin-3 (NT-3), delivered chronically via fibroblasts implanted intrathecally into neonatal rats, can facilitate synaptic transmission in the spinal cord. A small collagen plug containing NT-3-secreting fibroblasts was placed on the exposed dorsal surface of the spinal cord (L1) of 2-d-old rats; controls received β-galactosidase-secreting fibroblasts. After 6 hr to 12 d of survival, synaptic potentials (EPSP) elicited by two synaptic inputs, L5 dorsal root and ventrolateral funiculus (VLF), were recorded intracellularly in L5 motoneurons in vitro. Preparations treated with NT-3 implants exhibited enhanced monosynaptic synaptic transmission from both inputs, which persisted over the entire testing period. Unlike acute enhancement of transmission by NT-3 (Arvanian and Mendell, 2001a), the chronic effect could occur at connections not normally eliciting an NMDA receptor-mediated response at the time of NT-3 exposure. Using susceptibility to blockade of the NMDA receptor by Mg2+ and APV, we confirmed that chronic treatment with NT-3 did not enhance NMDA receptor activity at these connections. Cords treated with chronic NT-3 also transiently displayed polysynaptic components activated by VLF that were blocked by the NMDA receptor antagonist APV. These novel NMDA receptor-mediated potentials may reflect changes in interneurons near the site of fibroblast implantation. We conclude that chronic NT-3 enhances the potency of segmental and descending projections via mechanisms different from those underlying acute changes.
The universal template is a subtemplate of the double-scroll template

The double-scroll attractor that can be produced by a wide class of nonlinear electronic circuits is known to contain periodic orbits of all types under certain operating conditions. We identify the branched manifold that describes the double-scroll attractor under these operating conditions. We then show that Ghrist’s universal template is embedded as a subtemplate in the double-scroll template.
laUD-MS: An Extensible System for Unstructured Data Management

The challenge of managing intensive unstructured data provides a good opportunity for both academy and industry in data management area. In this paper, we analyze the five basic requirements in constructing a data management system for unstructured data. We then introduce our tentative implementation of an unstructured data management system developed according to the requirements. A dedicated performance test framework is proposed in conjunction, and preliminary experiments demonstrate the key traits of our system. We discuss about our position adopted in our implementation. We claim that simple user and programming interface, data centric approach, customizable data consistency, extensible architecture, real-time and batch processing integration are very important properties of unstructured data management systems that satisfy the five basic requirements.
An Improved Similarity Algorithm for Personalized Recommendation

Recommendation systems represent personalized services that aim at predicting users’ interest on information items available in the application domain. The computation of the neighbor set of users or resources is the most important step of the personalized recommendation system, and the key to this step is the calculation of similarity. This paper analyzes three main similarity algorithms and finds deficiencies in these algorithms, which affect the quality of the recommendation system. Then the paper proposes a new similarity algorithm Simi-Huang, which effectively overcomes the above-mentioned drawbacks. Experiments show that Simi-Huang algorithm is better than the three main similarity algorithms in the computation of accuracy, especially when the data is sparse. Under different training models, Simi-Huang is best in accuracy of all the algorithms; the smaller the training model is, the more accurate the algorithm is.
F-Calculus: A Universal Programming Language of Self-Stabilizing Computational Fields

This paper proposes a new programming language F-calculus (digamma-calculus). F-calculus is an effective tool to construct self-stabilizing computational fields. A computational field is a data structure representing a network composed of asynchronously running devices that have low computational ability and independent states. The research on computational fields has been getting more advanced recently due to the rise of distributed computing and the internet of things. Self-stabilizing computational fields are important especially for practice. Our main contribution is to clarify the class of self-stabilizing computational fields, about which little has been known since the research field was established. In this paper, we introduce our new calculus and prove that it has the same expressive power to the self-stabilizing fragment of the field calculus on condition that termination is guaranteed. Furthermore, we discuss formal verification of self-stabilization using a type-theoretic approach.
Twenty Questions with Noise: Bayes Optimal Policies for Entropy Loss

We consider the problem of twenty questions with noisy answers, in which we seek to find a target by repeatedly choosing a set, asking an oracle whether the target lies in this set, and obtaining an answer corrupted by noise. Starting with a prior distribution on the target's location, we seek to minimize the expected entropy of the posterior distribution. We formulate this problem as a dynamic program and show that any policy optimizing the one-step expected reduction in entropy is also optimal over the full horizon. Two such Bayes optimal policies are presented: one generalizes the probabilistic bisection policy due to Horstein and the other asks a deterministic set of questions. We study the structural properties of the latter, and illustrate its use in a computer vision application.
Enhanced detection of electrode placement/connection errors

Lead connection and electrode positional errors are a common problem in ECG recording. This study set out to review the sensitivity and specificity of existing criteria in the Glasgow program using an older (1997) version of the software and to produce enhancements where required for incorporation into the current version of the program still in development. 50 volunteers were recruited to the study. Arm and leg lead connection errors were introduced as were V1/V2 and V2/V3 connection reversals. It was shown that detection of arm lead connection errors could be enhanced from 64% to 88% at 100% specificity. Chest lead misconnections were detected with improved sensitivity. V1 and V2 reversal was much more easily detected than V2 and V3 reversal while maintaining high specificity.
Biomechanical Effect of Margin Convergence Techniques: Quantitative Assessment of Supraspinatus Muscle Stiffness

Although the margin convergence (MC) technique has been recognized as an option for rotator cuff repair, little is known about the biomechanical effect on repaired rotator cuff muscle, especially after supplemented footprint repair. The purpose of this study was to assess the passive stiffness changes of the supraspinatus (SSP) muscle after MC techniques using shear wave elastography (SWE). A 30 × 40-mm U-shaped rotator cuff tear was created in 8 cadaveric shoulders. Each specimen was repaired with 6 types of MC technique (1-, 2-, 3-suture MC with/without footprint repair, in a random order) at 30° glenohumeral abduction. Passive stiffness of four anatomical regions in the SSP muscle was measured based on an established SWE method. Data were obtained from the SSP muscle at 0° abduction under 8 different conditions: intact (before making a tear), torn, and postoperative conditions with 6 techniques. MC techniques using 1-, or 2-suture combined with footprint repair showed significantly higher stiffness values than the intact condition. Passive stiffness of the SSP muscle was highest after a 1-suture MC with footprint repair for all regions when compared among all repair procedures. There was no significant difference between the intact condition and a 3-suture MC with footprint repair. MC techniques with single stitch and subsequent footprint repair may have adverse effects on muscle properties and tensile loading on repair, increasing the risk of retear of repairs. Adding more MC stitches could reverse these adverse effects.
ANFIS as a method for determinating MPPT in the photovoltaic system simulated in MATLAB/Simulink

Photovoltaic systems as part of larger distribution systems for the production of electricity have non-linear current-voltage characteristics. These characteristics depend on the temperature of the solar cells and insolation of panels. The method for the search of the maximum power or MPPT is widely known, and there are many offered algorithm solutions. The aim of this paper is to present ANFIS (Adaptive Neural Fuzzy System Inference) as a method of computer intelligence in the search function of maximum power or maximum utilization of the PV system, without prior knowledge of the system. MPPT ANFIS will be located between the PV panels and devices for voltage regulation. Inputs used to go inside the fuzzy regulators and outputs of the fuzzy regulators are going into power changing device. The advantage of this method is the low cost of implementation because it uses embedded computer systems and does not require additional sensors for measuring temperature and insolation. It is very easy to upgrade in the case of increasing the knowledge base used in FIS membership function. Everything is simulated by MATLAB/Simulink software on the one-phase IBC system.
Extensive surgical and comprehensive postoperative medical management for cystic fibrosis chronic rhinosinusitis

Background Chronic rhinosinusitis has a major impact on the quality of life of patients with cystic fibrosis (CF) and may contribute to progression of chronic lung disease. Despite multiple sinus surgeries, maxillary sinus involvement is a recurrent problem. The modified endoscopic medial maxillectomy (MEMM) permits debridement in the clinic, improves mucus clearance with nasal irrigations, and increases access for topical delivery of therapeutics. However, clinical outcomes of aggressive sinus surgery with regimented postoperative medical treatment have not been systematically evaluated. Methods CF patients completed the 22-Item Sinonasal Outcome Test questionnaires before sinus surgery (and bilateral MEMM) and at sequential postoperative visits. Objective measures included Lund-Kennedy endoscopic score and pulmonary function tests (forced expiratory volume at 1 second percent [FEV1%] predicted). Culture-directed antibiotic therapy, prednisone, and topical irrigations were initiated postoperatively. Results Twenty-two patients (mean age, 26.5 years; 4.9 prior sinus operations) underwent MEMM and sinus surgery. Symptom scores were significantly reduced at 60 days (primary outcome, 64.7 ± 18.4 presurgery versus 27.5 ± 15.3 postsurgery; p < 0.0001) and up to a year postoperatively (27.6 ± 12.6; p < 0.0001). Endoscopic scores were also reduced after surgery (10.4 ± 1.1 presurgery versus 5.7 ± 2.4 [30 days], 5.7 ± 1.4 [60 days], 5.8 ± 1.3 [120 days], and 6.0 ± 1.1 [1 year]; p < 0.0001)]. There were no differences in FEV1% predicted up to 1 year postoperatively, but hospital admissions secondary to pulmonary exacerbations significantly decreased (2.0 ± 1.4 versus 3.2 ± 2.4, respectively; p < 0.05). Conclusion Prospective evaluation indicates sinus surgery with MEMM is associated with marked improvement in sinus disease outcomes. Additional studies are necessary to confirm whether this treatment paradigm is associated with improved CF pulmonary disease.
Microbe biogeography tracks water masses in a dynamic oceanic frontal system

Dispersal limitation, not just environmental selection, plays an important role in microbial biogeography. The distance–decay relationship is thought to be weak in habitats where dispersal is high, such as in the pelagic environment, where ocean currents facilitate microbial dispersal. Most studies of microbial community composition to date have observed little geographical heterogeneity on a regional scale (100 km). We present a study of microbial communities across a dynamic frontal zone in the southwest Indian Ocean and investigate the spatial structure of the microbes with respect to the different water masses separated by these fronts. We collected 153 samples of free-living microorganisms from five seamounts located along a gradient from subtropical to subantarctic waters and across three depth layers: (i) the sub-surface chlorophyll maximum (approx. 40 m), (ii) the bottom of the euphotic zone (approx. 200 m), and (iii) the benthic boundary layer (300–2000 m). Diversity and abundance of microbial operational taxonomic units (OTUs) were assessed by amplification and sequencing of the 16S rRNA gene on an Illumina MiSeq platform. Multivariate analyses showed that microbial communities were structured more strongly by depth than by latitude, with similar phyla occurring within each depth stratum across seamounts. The deep layer was homogeneous across the entire survey area, corresponding to the spread of Antarctic intermediate water. However, within both the sub-surface layer and the intermediate depth stratum there was evidence for OTU turnover across fronts. The microbiome of these layers appears to be divided into three distinct biological regimes corresponding to the subantarctic surface water, the convergence zone and subtropical. We show that microbial biogeography across depth and latitudinal gradients is linked to the water masses the microbes persist in, resulting in regional patterns of microbial biogeography that correspond to the regional scale physical oceanography.
Supernumerary Robotic Limbs for aircraft fuselage assembly: Body stabilization and guidance by bracing

A new type of wearable robot that assists the wearer with extra arms secured around the hips is presented. Supernumerary Robotic Limbs (SRL) can hold objects, clamp them to a fixture, guide and support human hands, and assist the wearer in performing a task as a close co-worker. This paper focuses on a class of tasks where SRL physically interacts with the environment through contact. SRL makes contact with a wall and thereby braces the human body against the environment. SRL also guides the human hands by placing a drill jig over the drilling location. Bracing the human body and guiding the hands, SRL can enhance the drilling task stability and accuracy. The SRL technology is applied to aircraft assembly, where conventional industrial robots failed to perform effectively. First, the basic design concept of SRL is summarized, and task strategies using SRL and their functional requirements are described. Kinematic and static properties resulting from the structural closed loops formed around the SRL, the human, and the environment are analyzed, and effective strategies for physical disturbance rejection and fine positioning are discussed. A prototype robotic arm grasps the aircraft fuselage structure. Another robotic arm places a drill jig precisely on the fuselage structure, and guides and stabilizes a hand drill held by the human user. An optimization method is developed in order to identify the SRL kinematic configuration and joint torques that stabilize the drill and at the same time minimize the human workload.