Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Mental workload and driving

The aim of this review is to identify the most representative measures of subjective and objective mental workload in driving, and to understand how the subjective and objective levels of mental workload influence the performance as a function of situation complexity and driving experience, i.e., to verify whether the increase of situation complexity and the lack of experience increase the subjective and physiological levels of mental workload and lead to driving performance impairments. This review will be useful to both researchers designing an experimental study of mental workload and to designers of drivers’ training content. In the first part, we will broach the theoretical approach with two factors of mental workload and performance, i.e., situation complexity and driving experience. Indeed, a low complex situation (e.g., highways), or conversely a high complex situation (e.g., town) can provoke an overload. Additionally, performing the driving tasks implies producing a high effort for novice drivers who have not totally automated the driving activity. In the second part, we will focus on subjective measures of mental workload. A comparison of questionnaires usually used in driving will allow identifying the most appropriate ones as a function of different criteria. Moreover, we will review the empirical studies to verify if the subjective level of mental workload is high in simple and very complex situations, especially for novice drivers compared to the experienced ones. In the third part, we will focus on physiological measures. A comparison of physiological indicators will be realized in order to identify the most correlated to mental workload. An empirical review will also take the effect of situation complexity and experience on these physiological indicators into consideration. Finally, a more nuanced comparison between subjective and physiological measures will be established from the impact on situation complexity and experience.
Intermediate conductance calcium-activated potassium channels modulate summation of parallel fiber input in cerebellar Purkinje cells

Encoding sensory input requires the expression of postsynaptic ion channels to transform key features of afferent input to an appropriate pattern of spike output. Although Ca2+-activated K+ channels are known to control spike frequency in central neurons, Ca2+-activated K+ channels of intermediate conductance (KCa3.1) are believed to be restricted to peripheral neurons. We now report that cerebellar Purkinje cells express KCa3.1 channels, as evidenced through single-cell RT-PCR, immunocytochemistry, pharmacology, and single-channel recordings. Furthermore, KCa3.1 channels coimmunoprecipitate and interact with low voltage-activated Cav3.2 Ca2+ channels at the nanodomain level to support a previously undescribed transient voltage- and Ca2+-dependent current. As a result, subthreshold parallel fiber excitatory postsynaptic potentials (EPSPs) activate Cav3 Ca2+ influx to trigger a KCa3.1-mediated regulation of the EPSP and subsequent after-hyperpolarization. The Cav3-KCa3.1 complex provides powerful control over temporal summation of EPSPs, effectively suppressing low frequencies of parallel fiber input. KCa3.1 channels thus contribute to a high-pass filter that allows Purkinje cells to respond preferentially to high-frequency parallel fiber bursts characteristic of sensory input.
Prévalence des attitudes et comportements inadaptés face à l’alimentation chez des adolescentes de la région de Montréal

La presente etude fait partie d'un projet de recherche portant sur les habitudes alimentaires des adolescentes et les facteurs de vulnerabilite aux troubles alimentaires. Nous presentons ici les resultats ayant trait a la pre valence des preoccupations et des troubles lies a T alimentation dans un groupe, nonre presentatif, de 1162 adolescentes de la region de Montreal. Les items de deux echelles souvent employees dans le domaine revelent que le tiers des filles sont insatisfaites de leur corps et que 14% d'entre elles adoptent des attitudes et comportements inadaptes face a l'alimentation. A l'aide de differents criteres, on estime la prevalence de l'anorexie nerveuse a environ 0,6% et celle de la boulimie nerveuse entre 0,5 et 2,5 %. Ces resultats se comparent a ceux rappor tes dans d'autres centres urbains occidentaux et font ressortir l'urgence de sensibiliser la population et les milieux de la sante quebecois aux troubles alimentaires.
The British Asian Option

Abstract Following the economic rationale of Peskir and Samee (2008a,b), we present a new class of Asian options where the holder enjoys the early exercise feature of American options whereupon his payoff (deliverable immediately) is the ‘best prediction’ of the European payoff under the hypothesis that the true drift of the stock price equals a contract drift. Inherent in this is a protection feature that is key to the British Asian option. Should the option holder believe the true drift of the stock price to be unfavorable (based upon the observed price movements), he can substitute the true drift with the contract drift and minimize his losses. The practical implications of this protection feature are most remarkable, as not only is the option holder afforded a unique protection against unfavorable stock price movements (covering the ability to sell in a liquid option market completely endogenously), but also when the stock price movements are favorable he will generally receive high returns. We derive a closed form expression for the arbitrage-free price in terms of the rational exercise boundary and show that the rational exercise boundary itself can be characterized as the unique solution to a nonlinear integral equation. Using these results we perform a financial analysis of the British Asian option that leads to the conclusions above and shows that with the contract drift properly selected the British Asian option becomes a very attractive alternative to the classic (European) Asian option.
The Dynamics of Multifaceted Gentrification: A Comparative Analysis of the Trajectories of Six Neighbourhoods in the Île-de-France Region

In this article, we propose to examine the diversity of gentrification trajectories taken by six neighbourhoods in the Ile-de-France Region. To apprehend the dynamics of the different gentrification processes, we investigate the manner in which changes in the urban environment render it accessible to certain residential aspirations and lifestyles and inaccessible to others. Our findings, based on a combination of a quantitative survey and socio-historical analyses of six inner-city and suburban neighbourhoods, suggest that ongoing gentrification largely depends on ways in which newcomers are able to maintain their lifestyle, and consequently on the elements likely to disrupt this. Thwarted gentrification, observed for example in the Goutte d'Or, can only be understood if we consider the not inconsiderable difficulties of daily life in such neighbourhoods and the relatively low level of social tolerance of newcomers. Static analyses attentive only to the structure of the property market do not account for the nuisances that, over time, make an environment intolerable and drive residents away. The dynamics of multifaceted gentrification relate, therefore, not only to the diverse structural characteristics of the various neighbourhoods but also to the differentiated functional, social and sensitive everyday experiences, perceptions and evaluations of the built environment.
Fluoresceination of FepA during colicin B killing: effects of temperature, toxin and TonB

We studied the reactivity of 35 genetically engineered Cys sulphydryl groups at different locations in Escherichia coli FepA. Modification of surface loop residues by fluorescein maleimide (FM) was strongly temperature‐dependent in vivo, whereas reactivity at other sites was much less affected. Control reactions with bovine serum albumin showed that the temperature dependence of loop residue reactivity was unusually high, indicating that conformational changes in multiple loops (L2, L3, L4, L5, L7, L8, L10) transform the receptor to a more accessible form at 37°C. At 0°C colicin B binding impaired or blocked labelling at 8 of 10 surface loop sites, presumably by steric hindrance. Overall, colicin B adsorption decreased the reactivity of more than half of the 35 sites, in both the N‐ and C‐ domains of FepA. However, colicin B penetration into the cell at 37°C did not augment the chemical modification of any residues in FepA. The FM modification patterns were similarly unaffected by the tonB locus. FepA was expressed at lower levels in a tonB host strain, but when we accounted for this decrease its FM labelling was comparable whether TonB was present or absent. Thus we did not detect TonB‐dependent structural changes in FepA, either alone or when it interacted with colicin B at 37°C. The only changes in chemical modification were reductions from steric hindrance when the bacteriocin bound to the receptor protein. The absence of increases in the reactivity of N‐domain residues argues against the idea that the colicin B polypeptide traverses the FepA channel.
ClC-3 Chloride Channels Facilitate Endosomal Acidification and Chloride Accumulation*

We investigated the involvement of ClC-3 chloride channels in endosomal acidification by measurement of endosomal pH and chloride concentration [Cl–] in control versus ClC-3-deficient hepatocytes and in control versus ClC-3-transfected Chinese hamster ovary cells. Endosomes were labeled with pH or [Cl–]-sensing fluorescent transferrin (Tf), which targets to early/recycling endosomes, or α2-macroglobulin (α2M), which targets to late endosomes. In pulse label-chase experiments, [Cl–] was 19 mm just after internalization in α2M-labeled endosomes in primary cultures of hepatocytes from wild-type mice, increasing to 58 mm over 45 min, whereas pH decreased from 7.1 to 5.4. Endosomal acidification and [Cl–] accumulation were significantly impaired in hepatocytes from ClC-3 knock-out mice, with [Cl–] increasing from 16 to 43 mm and pH decreasing from 7.1 to 6.0. Acidification and Cl– accumulation were blocked by bafilomycin. In Tf-labeled endosomes, [Cl–] was 46 mm in wild-type versus 35 mm in ClC-3-deficient hepatocytes at 15 min after internalization, with corresponding pH of 6.1 versus 6.5. Approximately 4-fold increased Cl– conductance was found in α2M-labeled endosomes isolated from hepatocytes of wild-type versus ClC-3 null mice. In contrast, Golgi acidification was not impaired in ClC-3-deficient hepatocytes. In transfected Chinese hamster ovary cells expressing ClC-3A, endosomal acidification and [Cl–] accumulation were enhanced. [Cl–] in α2M-labeled endosomes was 42 mm (control) versus 53 mm (ClC-3A) at 45 min, with corresponding pH 5.8 versus 5.2; [Cl–] in Tf-labeled endosomes at 15 min was 37 mm (control) versus 49 mm (ClC-3A) with pH 6.3 versus 5.9. Our results provide direct evidence for involvement of ClC-3 in endosomal acidification by Cl– shunting of the interior-positive membrane potential created by the vacuolar H+ pump.
Prosopagnosia: A case study involving problems in processing configural information

An ongoing issue in face recognition research is whether holistic face processing relies on the segregation of local discrete facial parts. Evidence in favor of the holistic-plus-parts view stems from a recent study reported by Arguin and Saumier (1999), who show that the priming effects of individual facial parts (i.e., eyes, nose, mouth, orcontour) depends on the presence of configural information and that the magnitude of priming augments as the number of facial parts serving as primes increase. The present study demonstrates that these global processing effects are absent in a prosopagnosic patient (A.R.), who shows no priming from single face parts and a linear increase in the magnitude of priming as a function of the number of parts presented. These findings indicate that A.R. is incapable of integrating individual facial parts into a global facial configuration ant that this is likely at the root of her prosopagnosia.
Motivated Consumer Innovativeness: Concept and Measurement

Existing consumer innovativeness scales ignore the multitude of motivation sources of buying innovations. The objective of this paper is to incorporate recent motivation research into a multi-dimensional innovativeness scale to better account for the consumer-product relation. An exploratory and confirmatory study (with 780 respondents in total) indicates that four types of motivations underlie consumer innovativeness: functional, hedonic, social and cognitive. The proposed 28-item Motivated Consumer Innovativeness scale proves to be reliable, valid and goes beyond existing innovativeness scales.
Probabilistic Models for Disambiguation of an HPSG-Based Chart Generator

We describe probabilistic models for a chart generator based on HPSG. Within the research field of parsing with lexicalized grammars such as HPSG, recent developments have achieved efficient estimation of probabilistic models and high-speed parsing guided by probabilistic models. The focus of this paper is to show that two essential techniques -- model estimation on packed parse forests and beam search during parsing -- are successfully exported to the task of natural language generation. Additionally, we report empirical evaluation of the performance of several disambiguation models and how the performance changes according to the feature set used in the models and the size of training data.
Conducting Empirical Research in 3D Virtual Worlds: Experiences from two projects in Second Life

At The Open University in the UK, we have conducted empirical qualitative research in Second Life, a 3D virtual world. The first project is in the education domain in which we are investigating the designs of learning spaces in Second Life, while the second project is related to shopping and consumer behaviour of users in Second Life. In this paper, we discuss our experiences of conducting empirical research in 3D virtual worlds with a specific focus on the following aspects: ethical norms, real-world and virtual identities, privacy of the participants, communication modalities (voice, text and use of gestures), logistics of conducting user-based studies, and skills and training needs of researchers. Although our experiences are based on conducting empirical research in Second Life, we hope that our experiences and discussions in this paper will also be useful for researchers who aim to conduct research in avatar-based 3D virtual worlds other than Second Life.
Monotone circuits for connectivity require super-logarithmic depth

We prove that every monotone circuit which tests <italic>st</italic>-connectivity of an undirected graph on <italic>n</italic> nodes has depth &OHgr;(log<supscrpt>2</supscrpt><italic>n</italic>). This implies a superpolynomial (<italic>n</italic><supscrpt>&OHgr;(log n)</supscrpt>) lower bound on the size of any monotone formula for <italic>st</italic>-connectivity. The proof draws intuition from a new characterization of circuit depth in terms of communication complexity. It uses counting arguments and Extremal Set Theory. Within the same framework, we also give a very simple and intuitive proof of a depth analogue of a theorem of Krapchenko concerning formula size lower bounds.
VraSR Two-Component Regulatory System and Its Role in Induction of pbp2 and vraSR Expression by Cell Wall Antimicrobials in Staphylococcus aureus

ABSTRACT The VraS/VraR two-component system (VraSR) regulates transcriptional induction of penicillin-binding protein 2 (encoded by pbp2) by vancomycin in Staphylococcus aureus. We have now defined the vraSR operon and determined that its induction by β-lactams as well as by vancomycin is autoregulated. Induction of the pbp2 and vraSR operons by β-lactams and related compounds within 1 hour after exposure to the antimicrobials was dependent on vraS. However, when a disk diffusion assay that can detect induction of genes over an extended time period was used, induction of the pbp2 operon was mediated by some β-lactams, including oxacillin; this induction was independent of vraS.
Self‐Esteem and Justice Orientation as Moderators for the Effects of Individual‐Targeted and Group‐Targeted Justice

Drawing on the self-interest and moral virtues perspectives of justice, we examine how self-esteem and justice orientation as individual difference factors moderate the effects of individual-targeted and group-targeted justice on helping behaviors and intention to leave. A scenario-based study was conducted using a total sample of 624 Japanese undergraduate students. The results highlighted the difference between the moderating roles of self-esteem and justice orientation. Self-esteem moderated the effect of individual-targeted procedural justice on intention to leave such that the effect was stronger when self-esteem was high. In contrast, justice orientation mainly moderated the effects of group-targeted procedural and distributive justice on helping behaviors such that the effects were weaker when justice orientation was high. Implications of our findings and future research directions are discussed.
The Fanconi anemia ID2 complex: Dueling saxes at the crossroads

Fanconi anemia (FA) is a rare recessive genetic disease characterized by congenital abnormalities, bone marrow failure and heightened cancer susceptibility in early adulthood. FA is caused by biallelic germ-line mutation of any one of 16 genes. While several functions for the FA proteins have been ascribed, the prevailing hypothesis is that the FA proteins function cooperatively in the FA-BRCA pathway to repair damaged DNA. A pivotal step in the activation of the FA-BRCA pathway is the monoubiquitination of the FANCD2 and FANCI proteins. Despite their importance for DNA repair, the domain structure, regulation, and function of FANCD2 and FANCI remain poorly understood. In this review, we provide an overview of our current understanding of FANCD2 and FANCI, with an emphasis on their posttranslational modification and common and unique functions.
A behavioural analysis of "choking" in self-paced skills

This thesis is about "choking" in self-paced skills. Choking refers to ''the occurrence of inferior perfonnance despite striving and incentives for superior perfonnance" (Baumeister and Steinhilber, 1986, p. 361). Self-paced skills are skills in which perfonnance is initiated by the athlete. This research set out to investigate the cause of choking in self-paced skills within the theoretical framework of behaviour analysis. The main focus of the research relates to the distinction between behaviour under the control of verbal antecedents (rule-governed behaviour) and behaviour that is shaped by its consequences (contingency-shaped b.ehaviour). It was originally hypothesised that the insensitivity of rule-governed behaviour to changes in the contingencies of reinforcement could he beneficial in situations where these changes led to greater perfonnance pressure. Specifically, it was predicted that perfonnance under the control of verbal antecedents would be less susceptible to choking. In the first experiment, no support was found for the hypothesis and, furthennore, rule-governed perfonnance appeared to be inferior to contingency-shaped perfonnance in the early stages of acquisition. In light of these results, and after a detailed examination of the behaviour analysis distinction between these two fonns of behaviour, evidence was presented which suggested that verbal control of the topography, or form, of behaviour would be likely to disrupt perfonnance in self-paced skills. In subsequent experiments, it was found that using simple verbal cues was an effective means of preventing choking under pressure. It was hypothesised that the function of these cues was in preventing reinvestment of too many technical instructions in the moments before perfonnance initiation. The assumptions upon which the reinvestment theory of choking is based were also examined with results providing general support for the theory but also suggesting that it needs to be refined to account for verbal antecedents that do not disrupt perfonnance.
A Framework for Detecting External Plagiarism from Monolingual Documents: Use of Shallow NLP and N-gram Frequency Comparison

The internet has increased the copy-paste scenarios amongst students as well as amongst researchers leading to different levels of plagiarized documents. For this reason, much of research is focused on for detecting plagiarism automatically. In this paper, an initiative is discussed where Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, as well as supervised machine learning algorithms have been combined to detect plagiarized texts. Here, the major emphasis is on to construct a framework which detects external plagiarism from monolingual texts successfully. For successfully detecting the plagiarism, n-gram frequency comparison approach has been implemented to construct the model framework. The framework is based on 120 characteristics which have been extracted during pre-processing the documents using NLP approach. Afterwards, filter metrics has been applied to select most relevant characteristics and then supervised classification learning algorithm has been used to classify the documents in four levels of plagiarism. Confusion matrix was built to estimate the false positives and false negatives. Our plagiarism framework achieved a very high accuracy score of 89% with low false positive and false negative rate.
An investigation of the storage and biosynthesis of phenylpropenes in sweet basil.

Plants that contain high concentrations of the defense compounds of the phenylpropene class (eugenol, chavicol, and their derivatives) have been recognized since antiquity as important spices for human consumption (e.g. cloves) and have high economic value. Our understanding of the biosynthetic pathway that produces these compounds in the plant, however, has remained incomplete. Several lines of basil (Ocimum basilicum) produce volatile oils that contain essentially only one or two specific phenylpropene compounds. Like other members of the Lamiaceae, basil leaves possess on their surface two types of glandular trichomes, termed peltate and capitate glands. We demonstrate here that the volatile oil constituents eugenol and methylchavicol accumulate, respectively, in the peltate glands of basil lines SW (which produces essentially only eugenol) and EMX-1 (which produces essentially only methylchavicol). Assays for putative enzymes in the biosynthetic pathway leading to these phenylpropenes localized many of the corresponding enzyme activities almost exclusively to the peltate glands in leaves actively producing volatile oil. An analysis of an expressed sequence tag database from leaf peltate glands revealed that known genes for the phenylpropanoid pathway are expressed at very high levels in these structures, accounting for 13% of the total expressed sequence tags. An additional 14% of cDNAs encoded enzymes for the biosynthesis of S-adenosyl-methionine, an important substrate in the synthesis of many phenylpropenes. Thus, the peltate glands of basil appear to be highly specialized structures for the synthesis and storage of phenylpropenes, and serve as an excellent model system to study phenylpropene biosynthesis.