Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Theory of Rt Distributions a Theory of Reaction Time Distributions

A Theory of RT Distributions 2 Short Abstract We present a theory of reaction time (RT) distributions deriving from the distribution of the quotient of two normal random variables: task difficulty (top-down information), and rate of external evidence income (bottom-up information). We show that a number of known properties of RT distributions are homogeneously accounted for by variations in the value of two easily inter-pretable parameters, the coefficients of variation of the two normal variables. The theory provides a quantitative and qualitative better account of several large datasets than other distributions families that bave been proposed to account for RTs. A Theory of RT Distributions 3 Long Abstract We develop a general theory of reaction time (RT) distributions in psychological experiments, deriving from the distribution of the quotient of two normal random variables, that of the task difficulty (top-down information), and that of the external evidence that becomes available to solve it (bottom-up information). The theory provides a unified account of known changes in the shape of the distributions depending on properties of the task and of the participants, and it predicts additional changes that should be observed. A number of known properties of RT distributions are homogeneously accounted for by variations in the value of two easily interpretable parameters: the coefficients of variation of the two normal variables. The predictions of the theory are compared with those of multiple families of distributions that have been proposed to account for RTs, indicating our theory provides a significantly better account of experimental data. For this purpose, we provide comparisons with four large datasets across tasks and modalitities. Finally, we show how the theory links to neurobiological models of response latencies.
Prostate cancer screening in the randomized Prostate, Lung, Colorectal, and Ovarian Cancer Screening Trial: mortality results after 13 years of follow-up.

BACKGROUND The prostate component of the Prostate, Lung, Colorectal, and Ovarian (PLCO) Cancer Screening Trial was undertaken to determine whether there is a reduction in prostate cancer mortality from screening using serum prostate-specific antigen (PSA) testing and digital rectal examination (DRE). Mortality after 7-10 years of follow-up has been reported previously. We report extended follow-up to 13 years after the trial. METHODS A total of 76 685 men, aged 55-74 years, were enrolled at 10 screening centers between November 1993 and July 2001 and randomly assigned to the intervention (organized screening of annual PSA testing for 6 years and annual DRE for 4 years; 38 340 men) and control (usual care, which sometimes included opportunistic screening; 38 345 men) arms. Screening was completed in October 2006. All incident prostate cancers and deaths from prostate cancer through 13 years of follow-up or through December 31, 2009, were ascertained. Relative risks (RRs) were estimated as the ratio of observed rates in the intervention and control arms, and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were calculated assuming a Poisson distribution for the number of events. Poisson regression modeling was used to examine the interactions with respect to prostate cancer mortality between trial arm and age, comorbidity status, and pretrial PSA testing. All statistical tests were two-sided. RESULTS Approximately 92% of the study participants were followed to 10 years and 57% to 13 years. At 13 years, 4250 participants had been diagnosed with prostate cancer in the intervention arm compared with 3815 in the control arm. Cumulative incidence rates for prostate cancer in the intervention and control arms were 108.4 and 97.1 per 10 000 person-years, respectively, resulting in a relative increase of 12% in the intervention arm (RR = 1.12, 95% CI = 1.07 to 1.17). After 13 years of follow-up, the cumulative mortality rates from prostate cancer in the intervention and control arms were 3.7 and 3.4 deaths per 10 000 person-years, respectively, resulting in a non-statistically significant difference between the two arms (RR = 1.09, 95% CI = 0.87 to 1.36). No statistically significant interactions with respect to prostate cancer mortality were observed between trial arm and age (P(interaction) = . 81), pretrial PSA testing (P(interaction) = . 52), and comorbidity (P(interaction) = . 68). CONCLUSIONS After 13 years of follow-up, there was no evidence of a mortality benefit for organized annual screening in the PLCO trial compared with opportunistic screening, which forms part of usual care, and there was no apparent interaction with age, baseline comorbidity, or pretrial PSA testing.
Ser276 Phosphorylation of NF-kB p65 by MSK1 Controls SCF Expression in Inflammation

Transcription of the mast cell growth factor SCF (stem cell factor) is upregulated in inflammatory conditions, and this is dependent upon NF-κB, as well as the MAP kinases p38 and ERK activation. We show here that the MAPK downstream nuclear kinase MSK1 induces NF-κB p65 Ser276 phosphorylation upon IL-1ß treatment, which was inhibited in cells transfected with a MSK1 kinase-dead (KD) mutant compared to the WT control. In addition, we show by ChIP experiments that MSK1 as well as MAPK inhibition abolishes binding of p65, of its coactivator CBP, and of MSK1 itself to the κB intronic enhancer site of the SCF gene. We show that interaction between NF-κB and CBP is prevented in cells transfected by a p65 S276C mutant. Finally, we demonstrate that both transfections of MSK1-KD and MSK1 siRNA - but not the WT MSK1 or control siRNA - downregulate the expression of SCF induced by IL-1ß. Our study provides therefore a direct link between MSK1-mediated phosphorylation of Ser276 p65 of NF-κB, allowing its binding to the SCF intronic enhancer, and pathophysiological SCF expression in inflammation.
Clustered Nyström Method for Large Scale Manifold Learning and Dimension Reduction

Kernel (or similarity) matrix plays a key role in many machine learning algorithms such as kernel methods, manifold learning, and dimension reduction. However, the cost of storing and manipulating the complete kernel matrix makes it infeasible for large problems. The Nyström method is a popular sampling-based low-rank approximation scheme for reducing the computational burdens in handling large kernel matrices. In this paper, we analyze how the approximating quality of the Nyström method depends on the choice of landmark points, and in particular the encoding powers of the landmark points in summarizing the data. Our (non-probabilistic) error analysis justifies a “clustered Nyström method” that uses the k-means clustering centers as landmark points. Our algorithm can be applied to scale up a wide variety of algorithms that depend on the eigenvalue decomposition of kernel matrix (or its variant), such as kernel principal component analysis, Laplacian eigenmap, spectral clustering, as well as those involving kernel matrix inverse such as least-squares support vector machine and Gaussian process regression. Extensive experiments demonstrate the competitive performance of our algorithm in both accuracy and efficiency.
A Probabilistic Approach to Skin Detection

In this paper, we present an approach to skin detection in images, which labels each pixel as skin or nonskin based on a simple probabilistic model acquired from a database of manually labeled images. We tested several variations of this approach (using different color spaces and pre-processing techniques) and the achieved accuracy seemed quite encouraging with, a detection rate of 77,79%.
Complications of Macular Peeling

Macular peeling refers to the surgical technique for the removal of preretinal tissue or the internal limiting membrane (ILM) in the macula for several retinal disorders, ranging from epiretinal membranes (primary or secondary to diabetic retinopathy, retinal detachment…) to full-thickness macular holes, macular edema, foveal retinoschisis, and others. The technique has evolved in the last two decades, and the different instrumentations and adjuncts have progressively advanced turning into a safer, easier, and more useful tool for the vitreoretinal surgeon. Here, we describe the main milestones of macular peeling, drawing attention to its associated complications.
Analyzing the Classifier using the Knowledge Hierarchy

In this paper, we analyze the classifier in machine learning using the knowledge hierarchy in information science. An instance provides the type of information answering questions begin with where and what. A classifier is the type of knowledge answering the question begins with how, and a classification model is the type of knowledge answering the question begins with why. A classifier utilizes information contained in training data set to obtain the knowledge represented by a classification model. We analyze types of information utilized by four typical classifiers, C4.5 algorithm, Naive Bayes classifier, support vector machine and k nearest neighbors. We also analyze typical improving methods of above four classifiers from the perspective of information utilized and divide information into global information and local information according to numbers of instances and attributes used.
Statistical Machine Translation with Local Language Models

Part-of-speech language modeling is commonly used as a component in statistical machine translation systems, but there is mixed evidence that its usage leads to significant improvements. We argue that its limited effectiveness is due to the lack of lexicalization. We introduce a new approach that builds a separate local language model for each word and part-of-speech pair. The resulting models lead to more context-sensitive probability distributions and we also exploit the fact that different local models are used to estimate the language model probability of each word during decoding. Our approach is evaluated for Arabic- and Chinese-to-English translation. We show that it leads to statistically significant improvements for multiple test sets and also across different genres, when compared against a competitive baseline and a system using a part-of-speech model.
An aggressive worn-out flash block management scheme to alleviate SSD performance degradation

Since NAND flash cannot be updated in place, SSDs must perform all writes in pre-erased pages. Consequently, pages containing superseded data must be invalidated and garbage collected. This garbage collection adds significant cost in terms of the extra writes necessary to relocate valid pages from erasure candidates to clean blocks, causing the well-known write amplification problem. SSDs reserve a certain amount of flash space which is invisible to users, called over-provisioning space, to alleviate the write amplification problem. However, NAND blocks can support only a limited number of program/erase cycles. As blocks are retired due to exceeding the limit, the reduced size of the over-provisioning pool leads to degraded SSD performance. In this work, we propose a novel system design that we call the Smart Retirement FTL (SR-FTL) to reuse the flash blocks which have been cycled to the maximum specified P/E endurance. We take advantage of the fact that the specified P/E limit guarantees data retention time of at least one year while most active data becomes stale in a period much shorter than one year, as observed in a variety of disk workloads. Our approach aggressively manages worn blocks to store data that requires only short retention time. In the meantime, the data reliability on worn blocks is carefully guaranteed. We evaluate the SR-FTL by both simulation on an SSD simulator and prototype implementation on an OpenSSD platform. Experimental results show that the SR-FTL successfully maintains consistent over-provisioning space levels as blocks wear and thus the degree of SSD performance degradation near end-of-life. In addition, we show that our scheme reduces block wear near end-of-life by as much as 84% in some scenarios.
Have Public Bailouts Made Banks’ Loan Books Safer?

In response to the financial crisis, the authorities in a number of countries used public funds to recapitalise their banks. Did a reduction of risk in banks' lending follow these rescue operations? To help answer this question, we analyse the balance sheets and syndicated loan signings of 87 large internationally active banks. As loan signing volumes started diminishing across the board in 2009, our evidence shows that rescued banks did not reduce the risk of their new lending significantly more than non-rescued banks. Our results are relevant for the ongoing assessment of public bank rescue programmes.
A real time AMBA based audio coprocessor for System-on-Chip

This paper proposed a design of an audio co-processor and interface. The design is based on AMBA bus system that is easily interfaced into System on Chip (SoC). The design had been integrated with Leon 3 SoC and implemented into Altera™ DE2-115. In order to obtain a real-time audio processing, several audio interface and co-processor modules have been designed and integrated into SoC system, by using DMA access. The designed audio interface consists of WM8731 audiocodec driver and buffer that works in 48 kHz data-rate. The audio co-processor consists of hanning window filter and 256 point FFT/IFFT. The FFT/IFFT co-processor is provided to enable the audio process in both time and frequency domain. The Hann window is used to maintain the continuity of block processing. In order to provide high speed data processing, those modules are interfaced to SoC using DMA acccess.
THE SCHRÖDINGER WAVE FUNCTIONAL AND CLOSED STRING ROLLING TACHYON

In this paper we apply a Schrodinger picture description of the minisuperspace approach to the closed string tachyon condensation. We will calculate the rate of produced closed string and we will show that the density of high massive closed string modes reaches the string density in time of order one in string units.
THE EFFECT OF THE ONLINE SOCIAL NETWORK STRUCTURE CHARACTERISTICS ON NETWORK INVOLVEMENT AND CONSUMER PURCHASING INTENTION : FOCUS ON KOREAN SOCIAL PROMOTION SITES

The study aims to understand how the characteristics of online social network structure (tie strength, network density, network centrality and homophily, etc.) can impact consumer purchase intention through network involvement. This study focuses on social promotion sites (social commerce sites) like TicketMonster which is the most popular deal-of-the-day website in South Korea etc. These sites have a social aspect. Each promotion is valid only if a certain minimum number of consumers purchase the deal, and the news of these deal-of-the-day websites spreads virally through Facebook updates and Twitter tweets or other social network sites on a daily basis as people encourage family, friends and others within their social networks to sign up for the offer, so that the deal becomes available to all. So we propose and analyze that a consumer’s decision for purchasing in the deal-of-the-day websites is affected by the characteristics of the online social network structure through consumers’ network involvement. The results of this study are: Strong ties with friends can increase their affective involvement to the network. And network density, network centrality and homophily can both increase SNS users’ affective involvement and cognitive involvement to the online social network, both of which can increase their purchase intention to the recommended deals by their friends in SNS.
Congestion Management in Power System by Optimal Location And Sizing of UPFC Dhanasekar

This paper presents a particle swarmoptimization (PSO) based algorithm to perform congestionmanagement by properplacement and sizing of one unified power flow controller (UPFC). The proposed approach makes use of the PSOalgorithm to allocate the near-optimal GenCos as well as the optimal location and size of UPFC whereas the Newton–Raphson solution minimizes the mismatch of the power flow equations. Simulation results (without/with the line flowconstraints, before and after compensation) are used to analyses the impact of UPFC on the congestion levels of the5-bus test system.
A survey of risks, threats and vulnerabilities in cloud computing

Cloud Computing (CC) is revolutionizing the methodology by which IT services are being utilized. CC is being introduced and marketed with many attractive promises that are enticing to many companies and managers around world, such as reduced capital costs, and relief from managing complex IT infrastructure, to name a few. However, along with desirable benefits come risks and security concerns that must be considered and addressed correctly. This paper highlights and categorizes many of security issues introduced by the "cloud"; surveys the risks, threats and vulnerabilities, and makes the necessary recommendations that can help promote the benefits and mitigate the risks associated with Cloud Computing.
Multi-robot system for artistic pattern formation

This paper describes work on multi-robot pattern formation. Arbitrary target patterns are represented with an optimal robot deployment, using a method that is independent of the number of robots. Furthermore, the trajectories are visually appealing in the sense of being smooth, oscillation free, and showing fast convergence. A distributed controller guarantees collision free trajectories while taking into account the kinematics of differentially driven robots. Experimental results are provided for a representative set of patterns, for a swarm of up to ten physical robots, and for fifty virtual robots in simulation.
2011 the International Conference on Advanced Power System Automation and Protection Multi-agent System Wide Area Protection Considering Distributed Generation Impact

˖ ˖ Using distributed generation (DG) is an interesting topic that has drawn attention of electrical engineers to itself in recent years. Presence of these generation units in distribution systems, although has many advantages and benefits, has to be applied after performing detailed studies and investigations due to their complexities in operation, control and protection of network. One of the most considerable problems that arise, when DG is used, is destructing efficiency and qualification of the existing protection system. The injected currents of DG to a distribution network lead to not having a radial network anymore, and consequently cause the network faces an inefficient protection system that was formerly designed according to the existing philosophy behind the distribution network. In this paper, firstly through analyzing the effects of distribution network with DG. Then basing on the multi-Agent system wide area protection scheme has been presented to provide the distribution networks including DG. With the introduction of the Multi-Agent System (MAS), it can make full use of computer intelligence and the inherent distribution of power system to build a protection system. In this protection scheme, longitudinal comparison protection as the achieve target, using the design principles of Agent to definition the respective functions of the Agent and design the communication mechanism between every Agent, as well as stipulate the action rules of Agent. This paper considers that the most important of Agent in the protection is to accelerate the protection action and isolation the fault section, which is capable of overcoming the problems caused by DG. And it suitable for distribution network protection scheme with DG.
Mesencephalic Astrocyte-derived Neurotrophic Factor Protects the Heart from Ischemic Damage and Is Selectively Secreted upon Sarco/endoplasmic Reticulum Calcium Depletion*

Background: Intra- and extracellular MANF are protective; however, the conditions governing MANF secretion are unknown. Results: Of the conditions examined, only SR/ER Ca2+ depletion increased MANF secretion. Conclusion: SR/ER Ca2+ depletion-mediated MANF secretion was due to decreased Ca2+-dependent binding of MANF to the SR/ER-resident chaperone, GRP78. Significance: This mechanism of regulating intra- and extracellular MANF levels may contribute to survival of Ca2+-stressed cells. The endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress protein mesencephalic astrocyte-derived neurotrophic factor (MANF) has been reported to protect cells from stress-induced cell death before and after its secretion; however, the conditions under which it is secreted are not known. Accordingly, we examined the mechanism of MANF release from cultured ventricular myocytes and HeLa cells, both of which secrete proteins via the constitutive pathway. Although the secretion of proteins via the constitutive pathway is not known to increase upon changes in intracellular calcium, MANF secretion was increased within 30 min of treating cells with compounds that deplete sarcoplasmic reticulum (SR)/ER calcium. In contrast, secretion of atrial natriuretic factor from ventricular myocytes was not increased by SR/ER calcium depletion, suggesting that not all secreted proteins exhibit the same characteristics as MANF. We postulated that SR/ER calcium depletion triggered MANF secretion by decreasing its retention. Consistent with this were co-immunoprecipitation and live cell, zero distance, photo affinity cross-linking, demonstrating that, in part, MANF was retained in the SR/ER via its calcium-dependent interaction with the SR/ER-resident protein, GRP78 (glucose-regulated protein 78 kDa). This unusual mechanism of regulating secretion from the constitutive secretory pathway provides a potentially missing link in the mechanism by which extracellular MANF protects cells from stresses that deplete SR/ER calcium. Consistent with this was our finding that administration of recombinant MANF to mice decreased tissue damage in an in vivo model of myocardial infarction, a condition during which ER calcium is known to be dysregulated, and MANF expression is induced.
The Dual Impact of Trade: Measuring its Impact on Imitation and Growth

Imports of goods that embody foreign technology raise a country's output directly as inputs into production and indirectly through reverse-engineering of these goods, which contributes to domestic imitation and innovation. This paper first quantifies spillovers from high-technology imports from developed countries to domestic imitation and innovation in both developed and developing countries. It then considers the contribution of foreign and domestic innovation to real per capita GDP growth. ; International patent data for forty countries from 1970 to 1985 are used to create proxies for imitation and innovation. High-technology imports, as well as quality-adjusted research and the size of the economy, positively affect both domestic imitation and innovation. Transportation and communication infrastructure positively affects imitation, but does not appear to play a role in innovation. Interestingly, foreign direct investment, often considered an important mechanism for technological diffusion to developing nations, does not significantly affect either domestic innovation or imitation. Finally, while both foreign and domestic innovation contribute positively to real per capita GDP growth, foreign technology from developed countries appears to play a far greater role in growth than domestic technology.