Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Exploring the Loss of Semantic Memory in Semantic Dementia: Evidence from a Primed Monitoring Study

An on-line primed monitoring study was used in an exploration of the nature of semantic memory loss in a patient (P.P.) with semantic dementia who showed a profound semantic impairment on a range of off-line tasks. Priming for pairs of words taken from a common category (e.g., cat-dog, spade-rake, ruby-emerald) was contrasted with that for word pairs from different categories that were related functionally (e.g., shampoo-hair, broom-floor, theater-play). Control participants showed robust priming for both types of semantic relation. P.P., in contrast, showed a normal priming effect for the functionally related conditions but no priming for category coordinates. This result suggests that P.P.'s semantic memory loss cannot be explained solely as a loss of stored representations or as a problem with deliberate controlled access to that information. Rather, elements of both explanations apply for different kinds of semantic information. a form of progressive fluent aphasia characterized by a selective impairment of semantic aspects of language with relative sparing of other linguistic abilities, including phonology and syntax. Autobiographical, episodic, and short-term memory and visuoperceptual and nonverbal problem-solving abilities are also strikingly preserved, in contrast to the loss of semantic memory. Of the 5 patients of this type described by Hodges, Patterson, Oxbury, and Funnell (1992), P.P. had the most severe semantic memory impairment. Her performance on a battery of tests designed to assess semantic knowledge, via different input and output modalities, was already almost at floor level when she presented in 1990. For example, she was unable to generate a single exemplar to any of six semantic categories or to name any of the pictures presented to her, and her word-to-picture matching was no better than chance. Moreover, even the very limited amount of semantic knowledge exhibited during the earlier phases of testing (such as the ability to sort pictures at the level of living versus man-made and to engage in some meaningful conversation) deteriorated over the following 2</ 2 years (Hodges et al., 1993). As a result of their extensive investigations of P.P.'s performance on a range of tasks, Hodges et al. (1993) characterized her impairment as a selective loss of semantic memory. In its strongest form, this can be interpreted as the claim that the structures representing semantic knowledge—the meanings of words, the nature of objects, and factual information—have been destroyed as a result of the progressive brain damage underlying semantic dementia. P.P.'s almost total inability to use this …
A pitch-aided lane tracking algorithm for driver assistance system with insufficient observations

The driver assistance system (DAS) is important to assist drivers with driving safety and efficiency. The lane departure warning system (LDWS), being an essential portion within the DAS, aims at providing warning messages under irregular driving behaviors due to distraction, drowsiness, or driver negligence. As the developments of mobile devices are boosted vigorously, it becomes more feasible to integrate sensing, photographing and displaying components within the LDWS. In this paper, the pitch-aided lane tracking (PALT) algorithm is proposed to detect and track the lanes on the roadways base on the particle filter. A pitch model is proposed to track the lane attributes associated with the pitch angle of a mobile device in order to conquer the effects from bumpy road and loosely-equipped of a mobile device. Moreover, the proposed PALT scheme can compensate the influences of insufficient observations from the display. Numerical results show that proposed PALT scheme can provide better lane-tracking performance compared to both original observations and the model without considering pitch angle.
Closed-loop control of ankle plantarflexors and dorsiflexors using an inverted pendulum apparatus: A pilot study

Considerable demand exists for a device to facilitate hands-free, stable stance in individuals with neurological disorders such as spinal cord injury (SCI) and stroke. In this regard, applying functional electrical stimulation (FES) to muscles of the lower limbs in closed loop has shown promise. In particular, it has been suggested that a PID control strategy could offer functional benefits to stability by mimicking the neurological control strategy employed in able-bodied stance. In this proof of concept study, we tested this assertion by examining the potential of a PID control strategy with gravity compensation to effectively maintain balance during quiet stance by regulating FES-induced contractions of the ankle plantarflexors and dorsiflexors in able-bodied individuals. A novel Inverted Pendulum Standing Apparatus (IPSA) was employed to simulate quiet stance whilst minimizing the voluntary control of able-bodied subjects. Quiet and perturbed standing trials were performed in 3 able-bodied subjects. Performance metrics including those pertaining to stability during quiet stance (root mean square difference), perturbation rejection capabilities (settling time, peak deviation), and ability to transition from an offset initial position (settling time), were examined. For all 3 subjects and for all of the metrics examined, our results showed that the proposed closed-loop controlled FES system improved performance in comparison to voluntary control. These results indicate that the PID plus gravity control strategy used in this study offers meaningful benefits over voluntary control in terms of standing stability. Thus, the controller could potentially be applied to the problem of improving or restoring standing ability in some neurologic patient populations.
Gender, Work, and Health for Trans Health Providers: A Focus on Transmen

Well-documented health research points to trans people's vulnerability to health inequities that are linked to deeply embedded structural and social determinants of health. Gender and work, as social determinants of health for trans people, both shape and are shaped by multiple factors such as support networks, social environments, income and social status, shelter, and personal health practices. There is a gap in the nursing literature in regards to research on work and health for diverse trans people and a virtual silence on the particular issues of trans-identified health providers. This qualitative study used comparative life history methodology and purposeful sampling to examine links among work, career, and health for transmen who are health providers. Semistructured interviews were completed with four Canadian transmen involved in health care professional and/or practice contexts with diverse professions, age, work, and transitioning experiences. Critical gender analysis showed that unique and gender-related critical events and influences shape continuities and discontinuities in their careerlives. This strength-based approach foregrounds how resilience and growth emerged through participants' articulation with everyday gender dynamics. These findings have implications for nursing research, education, and practice that include an understanding of how trans providers “do transgender work” and supporting them in that process.
Mutation Operators for the Evolution of Finite Automata

Evolutionary programming has originally been proposed for the breeding of nite state automata. The mutation operator is working directly on the graph structure of the automata. In this paper we introduce variation operators based on the automatons input/output behavior rather than its structure. The operators are designed to make use of additional information based on a ranking of states as well as a problem-speciic metric which enhances the search process.
Overview of TAC-KBP2015 Tri-lingual Entity Discovery and Linking

In this paper we give an overview of the Tri-lingual Entity Discovery and Linking task at the Knowledge Base Population (KBP) track at TAC2015. In this year we introduced a new end-to-end Tri-lingual entity discovery and linking task which requires a system to take raw texts from three languages (English, Chinese and Spanish) as input, automatically extract entity mentions, link them to an English knowledge base, and cluster NIL mentions across languages. More entity types and mention types were also added into some languages. In this paper we provide an overview of the task deﬁnition, annotation issues, successful methods and research challenges associated with this new task. This new task has attracted a lot of participants and has intrigued many interesting research problems and potential approaches. We believe it’s a promising task to be combined with Tri-lingual slot ﬁlling to form a new Tri-lingual cool-start KBP track in TAC2016.
Formations of Robotic Swarm: An Artificial Force Based Approach

Cooperative control of multiple mobile robots is an attractive and challenging problem which has drawn considerable attention in the recent past. This paper introduces a scalable decentralized control algorithm to navigate a group of mobile robots (swarm) into a predefined shape in 2D space. The proposed architecture uses artificial forces to control mobile agents into the shape and spread them inside the shape while avoiding inter-member collisions. The theoretical analysis of the swarm behavior describes the motion of the complete swarm and individual members in relevant situations. We use computer simulated case studies to verify the theoretical assertions and to demonstrate the robustness of the swarm under external disturbances such as death of agents, change of shape etc. Also the performance of the proposed distributed swarm control architecture was investigated in the presence of realistic implementation issues such as localization errors, communication range limitations, boundedness of forces etc.
Quinones and Aromatic Chemical Compounds in Particulate Matter Induce Mitochondrial Dysfunction: Implications for Ultrafine Particle Toxicity

Particulate pollutants cause adverse health effects through the generation of oxidative stress. A key question is whether these effects are mediated by the particles or their chemical compounds. In this article we show that aliphatic, aromatic, and polar organic compounds, fractionated from diesel exhaust particles (DEPs), exert differential toxic effects in RAW 264.7 cells. Cellular analyses showed that the quinone-enriched polar fraction was more potent than the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH)–enriched aromatic fraction in O2•− generation, decrease of membrane potential (ΔΨm), loss of mitochondrial membrane mass, and induction of apoptosis. A major effect of the polar fraction was to promote cyclosporin A (CsA)–sensitive permeability transition pore (PTP) opening in isolated liver mitochondria. This opening effect is dependent on a direct effect on the PTP at low doses as well as on an effect on ΔΨm at high doses in calcium (Ca2+)-loaded mitochondria. The direct PTP effect was mimicked by redox-cycling DEP quinones. Although the aliphatic fraction failed to perturb mitochondrial function, the aromatic fraction increased the Ca2+ retention capacity at low doses and induced mitochondrial swelling and a decrease in ΔΨm at high doses. This swelling effect was mostly CsA insensitive and could be reproduced by a mixture of PAHs present in DEPs. These chemical effects on isolated mitochondria could be reproduced by intact DEPs as well as ambient ultrafine particles (UFPs). In contrast, commercial polystyrene nanoparticles failed to exert mitochondrial effects. These results suggest that DEP and UFP effects on the PTP and ΔΨm are mediated by adsorbed chemicals rather than the particles themselves.
E-textile based automatic activity diary for medical annotation and analysis

Health monitoring applications often require that the patient maintain a diary of activities so that the physiological data can be correlated to what the user was doing. However, patients are notoriously bad at self-reporting. Consequently, it would be beneficial to automatically generate an activity diary. This paper presents a proof-of-concept prototype electronic textile system for recording both physiological data and context information. It also presents some of the issues that arise in the design and use of a health monitoring and activity annotation system
Microcystin-Degrading Activity of an Indigenous Bacterial Strain Stenotrophomonas acidaminiphila MC-LTH2 Isolated from Lake Taihu

Microcystin-LR (MC-LR) and microcystin-RR (MC-RR) produced by harmful cyanobacterial blooms (HCBs) pose substantial threats to the ecosystem and public health due to their potential hepatotoxicity. Degradation of microcystins (MCs) by indigenous bacteria represents a promising method for removing MCs from fresh water without harming the aquatic environment, but only a few microcystin (MC)-degrading bacteria have been isolated and had their mechanisms reported. This study aimed to isolate indigenous bacteria from Lake Taihu, and investigate the capability and mechanism of MC degradation by these bacteria. During a Microcystis bloom, an indigenous MC-degrading bacterium designated MC-LTH2 was successfully isolated from Lake Taihu, and identified as Stenotrophomonas acidaminiphila based on phylogenetic analysis. In the presence of MC-LR together with MC-RR, the strain MC-LTH2 was capable of totally degrading both simultaneously in 8 days, at rates of 3.0 mg/(L⋅d) and 5.6 mg/(L⋅d), respectively. The degradation rates of MCs were dependent on temperature, pH, and initial MC concentration. Adda (3-amino-9-methoxy-2, 6, 8-trimethyl-10-phenyldeca-4, 6-dienoic acid) was detected as an intermediate degradation product of MCs using high performance liquid chromatography coupled with time-of-flight mass spectrometry (HPLC-TOF-MS). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report of Stenotrophomonas acidaminiphila capable of degrading two MC analogues and other compounds containing Adda residue completely under various conditions, although the mlrA gene in the strain was not detected. These results indicate the Stenotrophomonas acidaminiphila strain MC-LTH2 possesses a significant potential to be used in bioremediation of water bodies contaminated by MC-LR and MC-RR, and is potentially involved in the degradation of MCs during the disappearance of the HCBs in Lake Taihu.
Inspiring Innovative Design Integration by Collaborative Exploration of Boolean Operations

Computer-Aided Design (CAD) applications provide industrial design communities with various computer-based tools to perform design activities. Innovation is an important requirement in most design tasks. This paper presents a novel approach to inspiring innovative design integration in a horizontal collaboration process. The approach allows individual designers' works to be integrated and multiple design choices to be explored. The technique is currently applied to design work involving Boolean operations-widely available in most CAD operations, where a major technical challenge is to integrate a group of concurrent Boolean operations for design exploration. The approach is particularly helpful to inspire innovation in the integration phases of industrial design tasks such as accessory design, art design, and digital media design.
Signal and Image Processing with Sinlets

This paper presents a new family of localized orthonormal bases - sinlets - which are well suited for both signal and image processing and analysis. One-dimensional sinlets are related to specific solutions of the time-dependent harmonic oscillator equation. By construction, each sinlet is infinitely differentiable and has a well-defined and smooth instantaneous frequency known in analytical form. For square-integrable transient signals with infinite support, one-dimensional sinlet basis provides an advantageous alternative to the Fourier transform by rendering accurate signal representation via a countable set of real-valued coefficients. The properties of sinlets make them suitable for analyzing many real-world signals whose frequency content changes with time including radar and sonar waveforms, music, speech, biological echolocation sounds, biomedical signals, seismic acoustic waves, and signals employed in wireless communication systems. One-dimensional sinlet bases can be used to construct two- and higher-dimensional bases with variety of potential applications including image analysis and representation.
Fabrics coated with lubricated nanostructures display robust omniphobicity

The development of a stain-resistant and pressure-stable textile is desirable for consumer and industrial applications alike, yet it remains a challenge that current technologies have been unable to fully address. Traditional superhydrophobic surfaces, inspired by the lotus plant, are characterized by two main components: hydrophobic chemical functionalization and surface roughness. While this approach produces water-resistant surfaces, these materials have critical weaknesses that hinder their practical utility, in particular as robust stain-free fabrics. For example, traditional superhydrophobic surfaces fail (i.e., become stained) when exposed to low-surface-tension liquids, under pressure when impacted by a high-velocity stream of water (e.g., rain), and when exposed to physical forces such as abrasion and twisting. We have recently introduced slippery lubricant-infused porous surfaces (SLIPS), a self-healing, pressure-tolerant and omniphobic surface, to address these issues. Herein we present the rational design and optimization of nanostructured lubricant-infused fabrics and demonstrate markedly improved performance over traditional superhydrophobic textile treatments: SLIPS-functionalized cotton and polyester fabrics exhibit decreased contact angle hysteresis and sliding angles, omni-repellent properties against various fluids including polar and nonpolar liquids, pressure tolerance and mechanical robustness, all of which are not readily achievable with the state-of-the-art superhydrophobic coatings.
The Relationship between Youth Ministry Participation and Faith Maturity of Adolescents: Testing for Faith-Nurturing Characteristics in Youth Ministry as a Mediator Using Multiple Regression

Relationships among level (i.e., frequency) of youth ministry (YM) participation, faith-nurturing characteristics of YM, and faith maturity were examined in 742 second-generation Korean American adolescents (SGKAAs) in 7th through 12th grade from 13 Korean American churches in California. Using Baron and Kenny's (1986) framework, this study tested the hypothesis that faith-nurturing characteristics of YM mediated the relationship between the level (i.e., frequency) of YM participation and faith maturity of adolescents. The significant relationship between the level of YM participation and faith maturity was significantly reduced in magnitude when faith-nurturing characteristics of YM were included in the model, providing evidence in this sample that faith-nurturing characteristics of YM were a partial mediator. The implications for YM are discussed. The present investigation demonstrates how multiple regression analyses can be used as one possible method for testing mediation effects involving YM and adolescent faith maturity.
Positive Selection Drives Rapid Evolution of the meq Oncogene of Marek’s Disease Virus

Marek’s disease (MD), caused by Marek’s disease virus (MDV), a poultry-borne alphaherpesvirus, is a devastating disease of poultry causing an estimated annual loss of one billion dollars to poultry producers, worldwide. Despite decades of control through vaccination, MDV field strains continue to emerge having increased virulence. The evolutionary mechanism driving the emergence of this continuum of strains to increased MDV virulence, however, remains largely enigmatic. Increase in MDV virulence has been associated with specific amino acid changes within the C-terminus domain of Mareks’s EcoRI-Q (meq)-encoded oncoprotein. In this study, we sought to determine whether the meq gene has evolved adaptively and whether past vaccination efforts have had any significant effect on the reduction or increase of MDV diversity over time. Our analysis suggests that meq is estimated to be evolving at a much faster rate than most dsDNA viruses, and is comparable with the evolutionary rate of RNA viruses. Interestingly, most of the polymorphisms in meq gene appear to have evolved under positive selection and the time of divergence at the meq locus coincides with the period during which the poultry industry had undergone transitions in management practices including the introduction and widespread use of live attenuated vaccines. Our study has revealed that the decades-long use of vaccines did not reduce MDV diversity, but rather had a stimulating effect on the emergence of field strains with increased genetic diversity until the early 2000s. During the years 2004–2005, there was an abrupt decline in the genetic diversity of field isolates followed by a recovery from this bottleneck in the year 2010. Collectively, these data suggest that vaccination seems to not have had any effect on MDV eradication, but rather had a stimulating effect on MDV emergence through adaptation.
Peripheral Reproductive Organ Health and Melatonin: Ready for Prime Time

Melatonin has a wide variety of beneficial actions at the level of the gonads and their adnexa. Some actions are mediated via its classic membrane melatonin receptors while others seem to be receptor-independent. This review summarizes many of the published reports which confirm that melatonin, which is produced in the ovary, aids in advancing follicular maturation and preserving the integrity of the ovum prior to and at the time of ovulation. Likewise, when ova are collected for in vitro fertilization-embryo transfer, treating them with melatonin improves implantation and pregnancy rates. Melatonin synthesis as well as its receptors have also been identified in the placenta. In this organ, melatonin seems to be of particular importance for the maintenance of the optimal turnover of cells in the villous trophoblast via its ability to regulate apoptosis. For male gametes, melatonin has also proven useful in protecting them from oxidative damage and preserving their viability. Incubation of ejaculated animal sperm improves their motility and prolongs their viability. For human sperm as well, melatonin is also a valuable agent for protecting them from free radical damage. In general, the direct actions of melatonin on the gonads and adnexa of mammals indicate it is an important agent for maintaining optimal reproductive physiology.