Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Reward and relief dimensions of temptation to drink: construct validity and role in predicting differential benefit from acamprosate and naltrexone

Researchers have sought to distinguish between individuals whose alcohol use disorder (AUD) is maintained by drinking to relieve negative affect (‘relief drinkers’) and those whose AUD is maintained by the rewarding effects of alcohol (‘reward drinkers’). As an opioid receptor antagonist, naltrexone may be particularly effective for reward drinkers. Acamprosate, which has been shown to down‐regulate the glutamatergic system, may be particularly effective for relief drinkers. This study sought to replicate and extend prior work (PREDICT study; Glöckner‐Rist et al. ) by examining dimensions of reward and relief temptation to drink and subtypes of individuals with distinct patterns of reward/relief temptation. We utilized data from two randomized clinical trials for AUD (Project MATCH, n = 1726 and COMBINE study, n = 1383). We also tested whether classes of reward/relief temptation would predict differential response to naltrexone and acamprosate in COMBINE. Results replicated prior work by identifying reward and relief temptation factors, which had excellent reliability and construct validity. Using factor mixture modeling, we identified five distinct classes of reward/relief temptation that replicated across studies. In COMBINE, we found a significant class‐by‐acamprosate interaction effect. Among those most likely classified in the high relief/moderate reward temptation class, individuals had better drinking outcomes if assigned to acamprosate versus placebo. We did not find a significant class‐by‐naltrexone interaction effect. Our study questions the orthogonal classification of drinkers into only two types (reward or relief drinkers) and adds to the body of research on moderators of acamprosate, which may inform clinical decision making in the treatment of AUD.
Piriform cortical glutamatergic and GABAergic neurons express coordinated plasticity for whisker-induced odor recall

Neural plasticity occurs in learning and memory. Coordinated plasticity at glutamatergic and GABAergic neurons during memory formation remains elusive, which we investigate in a mouse model of associative learning by cellular imaging and electrophysiology. Paired odor and whisker stimulations lead to whisker-induced olfaction response. In mice that express this cross-modal memory, the neurons in the piriform cortex are recruited to encode newly acquired whisker signal alongside innate odor signal, and their response patterns to these associated signals are different. There are emerged synaptic innervations from barrel cortical neurons to piriform cortical neurons from these mice. These results indicate the recruitment of associative memory cells in the piriform cortex after associative memory. In terms of the structural and functional plasticity at these associative memory cells in the piriform cortex, glutamatergic neurons and synapses are upregulated, GABAergic neurons and synapses are downregulated as well as their mutual innervations are refined in the coordinated manner. Therefore, the associated activations of sensory cortices triggered by their input signals induce the formation of their mutual synapse innervations, the recruitment of associative memory cells and the coordinated plasticity between the GABAergic and glutamatergic neurons, which work for associative memory cells to encode cross-modal associated signals in their integration, associative storage and distinguishable retrieval.
Very high cycle fatigue testing of concrete using ultrasonic cycling

Abstract The ultrasonic fatigue testing method has been further developed to perform cyclic compression tests with concrete. Cylindrical specimens vibrate in resonance at a frequency of approximately 20 kHz with superimposed compressive static loads. The high testing frequency allows time-saving investigations in the very high cycle fatigue regime. Fatigue tests were carried out on “Concrete 1” (compressive strength fc = 80 MPa) and “Concrete 2” (fc = 107 MPa) under purely compressive loading conditions. Experiments at maximum compressive stresses of 0.44 fc (Concrete 1) and 0.38 fc (Concrete 2) delivered specimen failures above 109 cycles, indicating that no fatigue limit exists for concrete below one billion load cycles. Resonance frequency, power required to resonate the specimen and second order harmonics of the vibration are used to monitor fatigue damage in situ. Specimens were scanned by X-ray computed tomography prior to and after testing. Fatigue cracks were produced by ultrasonic cycling in the very high cycle fatigue regime at interfaces of grains as well as in cement. The possibilities as well as limitations of ultrasonic fatigue testing of concrete are discussed.
Navigating the Cultural Landscape towards Self-Determination: Results of an Exploratory Study in American Samoa

The American Samoa University Center for Excellence in Developmental Disabilities, Education, Research, and Service (AS-UCEDD) with the University of Hawaii Center on Disability Studies, conducted an exploratory study to better understand how state agencies deliver services, and how disability is perceived by agency staff and consumers in American Samoa. While it initially was envisioned as a needs-sensing study that used surveys and targeted database reviews to systematically capture client needs, the study transformed to a largely qualitative preliminary investigation that was dependent on personal interviews. Findings revealed how contextual, linguistic, and cultural factors play a hugely important role when researching western-based ideals and concepts within indigenous communities.
The structural code of cyanobacterial genomes

A periodic bias in nucleotide frequency with a period of about 11 bp is characteristic for bacterial genomes. This signal is commonly interpreted to relate to the helical pitch of negatively supercoiled DNA. Functions in supercoiling-dependent RNA transcription or as a ‘structural code’ for DNA packaging have been suggested. Cyanobacterial genomes showed especially strong periodic signals and, on the other hand, DNA supercoiling and supercoiling-dependent transcription are highly dynamic and underlie circadian rhythms of these phototrophic bacteria. Focusing on this phylum and dinucleotides, we find that a minimal motif of AT-tracts (AT2) yields the strongest signal. Strong genome-wide periodicity is ancestral to a clade of unicellular and polyploid species but lost upon morphological transitions into two baeocyte-forming and a symbiotic species. The signal is intermediate in heterocystous species and weak in monoploid picocyanobacteria. A pronounced ‘structural code’ may support efficient nucleoid condensation and segregation in polyploid cells. The major source of the AT2 signal are protein-coding regions, where it is encoded preferentially in the first and third codon positions. The signal shows only few relations to supercoiling-dependent and diurnal RNA transcription in Synechocystis sp. PCC 6803. Strong and specific signals in two distinct transposons suggest roles in transposase transcription and transpososome formation.
A Verifiable System for Automated Face Identification

In this paper, we consider a use case where an airport passenger travels and uses an automated gate to cross a border.We detail three phases: a pre-check before the arrival at the airport, the travel of the passenger from his check-in to the automated border gates and finally, the crossing of the gate. To accelerate the throughput at the border gates, we want to identify his face among a flight passenger list during the second phase. This identification is split between the passenger who takes a picture of his face with his smartphone and the immigration authorities. We rely on cryptographic verifiable computation techniques to ensure the security of the process. Experimental results show that our protocol is practical.
Control-Informed Geometric Optimization of Wave Energy Converters: The Impact of Device Motion and Force Constraints

The energy cost for producing electricity via wave energy converters (WECs) is still not competitive with other renewable energy sources, especially wind energy. It is well known that energy maximising control plays an important role to improve the performance of WECs, allowing the energy conversion to be performed as economically as possible. The control strategies are usually subsequently employed on a device that was designed and optimized in the absence of control for the prevailing sea conditions in a particular location. If an optimal unconstrained control strategy, such as pseudo-spectral optimal control (PSOC), is adopted, an overall optimized system can be obtained no matter whether the control design is incorporated at the geometry optimization stage or not. Nonetheless, strategies, such as latching control (LC), must be incorporated at the optimization design stage of the WEC geometry if an overall optimized system is to be realised. In this paper, the impact of device motion and force constraints in the design of control-informed optimized WEC geometries is addressed. The aim is to verify to what extent the constraints modify the connection between the control and the optimal device design. Intuitively, one might expect that if the constraints are very tight, the optimal device shape is the same regardless of incorporating or not the constrained control at the geometry optimization stage. However, this paper tests the hypothesis that the imposition of constraints will limit the control influence on the optimal device shape. PSOC, LC and passive control (PC) are considered in this study. In addition, constrained versions of LC and PC are presented.
Numerical study on groove formation of rails for various materials

Recovered rails exhibit groove formation along the outer edge of the armature/rail contact surface in many experiments. Different causes are hypothesized, such as local melting resulting from the concentration of current density, material yielding due to high contact pressure, and material softening at elevated temperatures. Numerical simulations using the hybrid finite-element/boundary-element code EMAP3D were conducted to identify the cause of this damage. Various rail materials such as chrome copper, 7055 aluminum alloy, beryllium copper, and dispersion-strengthened copper are investigated. The results are presented And they show that groove formation is due to the effect of both material softening at high local temperature and material yielding.
Characterizing the capacity gain of stream control scheduling in MIMO wireless mesh networks

Stream control has recently attracted attentions in the research of MIMO wireless networks as a potential way to improve network capacity. However, inappropriate use of stream control may significantly degrade network capacity as well. In this paper, we provide the first formal study on stream control scheduling in MIMO wireless mesh networks. We derive the theoretical upper bound on network capacity gain of stream control scheduling. We also provide an efficient scheduling algorithm and show that its achieved network capacity gain is close to its theoretical upper bound. Moreover, we point out the poor performance of a previous stream control scheduling algorithm SCMA under the general settings of wireless mesh networks. This formal characterization provides a deeper understanding of steam control scheduling in MIMO wireless mesh networks.
Flat Refractive Geometry

While the study of geometry has mainly concentrated on single viewpoint (SVP) cameras, there is growing attention to more general non-SVP systems. Here, we study an important class of systems that inherently have a non-SVP: a perspective camera imaging through an interface into a medium. Such systems are ubiquitous: They are common when looking into water-based environments. The paper analyzes the common flat-interface class of systems. It characterizes the locus of the viewpoints (caustic) of this class and proves that the SVP model is invalid in it. This may explain geometrical errors encountered in prior studies. Our physics-based model is parameterized by the distance of the lens from the medium interface, besides the focal length. The physical parameters are calibrated by a simple approach that can be based on a single frame. This directly determines the system geometry. The calibration is then used to compensate for modeled system distortion. Based on this model, geometrical measurements of objects are significantly more accurate than if based on an SVP model. This is demonstrated in real-world experiments. In addition, we examine by simulation the errors expected by using the SVP model. We show that when working at a constant range, the SVP model can be a good approximation.
Analytical Modeling of the Printed Dipole Antenna Loaded with CRLH Structures

In this paper, an analytical method to characterize the frequency behaviour of Composite Right/Left Handed (CRLH) loaded printed dipole antenna is presented. One needs to determine the parameters of ungrounded reactive components realizing CRLH structures. E-cient resonant RLC circuit models based on Partial Elements Theory are presented to calculate inductance of meander line inductor and inter digital capacitor, while their capacitance is determined by Conformal Mapping Method. By using these circuit models and dispersion relation of balanced CRLH TL, negative resonance modes of antenna can be obtained. In addition, to validate the accuracy of the proposed analytical method, a prototype of the CRLH loaded printed dipole antenna is simulated, fabricated and measured.
[Highly-accurate nephelometric titrimetry].

AIM To indicate the titration end-point of precipitation reaction by measuring the relative intensity of the scattered light in the titrate for use in pharmaceutical analysis. METHODS A visible light-emitting diode (LED) was used as a light source and a photodiode was used as the optical detector. Light on the detector creates an electric current through the diode. With the addition of the titrant, the titrate became turbid and the intensity of the scattered light in the solution increased gradually. If the precipitation reaction proceeded the completion and the solubility of the precipitate was small enough, the intensity of the scattered light will reach maximum at the stoichiometric point; thus, the titration end-point can be indicated. The accuracy of nephelometric titrimetry was discussed theoretically and the titration of NaCl with AgNO3 was used as a model. To demonstrate the applicability of the new titrimetry in pharmaceutical analysis, phenytoin sodium and procaine hydrochloride were titrated with AgNO3 and NaOH solutions, respectively. RESULTS With our new titrator and nephelometric sensor, the accuracy and precision of our new titrimetry can be better than 0.2% under suitable conditions. CONCLUSION This new titrimetry can be used for pharmaceutical analysis.
Towards a Better Understanding of Discourse: Integrating Multiple Discourse Annotation Perspectives Using UIMA

There exist various different discourse annotation schemes that vary both in the perspectives of discourse structure considered and the granularity of textual units that are annotated. Comparison and integration of multiple schemes have the potential to provide enhanced information. However, the differing formats of corpora and tools that contain or produce such schemes can be a barrier to their integration. U-Compare is a graphical, UIMA-based workflow construction platform for combining interoperable natural language processing (NLP) resources, without the need for programming skills. In this paper, we present an extension of U-Compare that allows the easy comparison, integration and visualisation of resources that contain or output annotations based on multiple discourse annotation schemes. The extension works by allowing the construction of parallel subworkflows for each scheme within a single U-Compare workflow. The different types of discourse annotations produced by each sub-workflow can be either merged or visualised side-by-side for comparison. We demonstrate this new functionality by using it to compare annotations belonging to two different approaches to discourse analysis, namely discourse relations and functional discourse annotations. Integrating these different annotation types within an interoperable environment allows us to study the correlations between different types of discourse and report on the new insights that this allows us to discover.
On-Line Case-Based Plan Adaptation for Real-Time Strategy Games

Traditional artificial intelligence techniques do not perform well in applications such as real-time strategy games because of the extensive search spaces which need to be explored. In addition, this exploration must be carried out on-line during performance time; it cannot be precomputed. We have developed on-line case-based planning techniques that are effective in such domains. In this paper, we extend our earlier work using ideas from traditional planning to inform the real-time adaptation of plans. In our framework, when a plan is retrieved, a plan dependency graph is inferred to capture the relations between actions in the plan. The plan is then adapted in real-time using its plan dependency graph. This allows the system to create and adapt plans in an efficient and effective manner while performing the task. The approach is evaluated using WARGUS, a well-known real-time strategy game.
Type Refinements

Despite many concentrated research efforts in various areas such as software engineering, programming languages, and logic, software today is not fundamentally more reliable than it was a decade ago. Software is becoming increasingly complex and inter-reliant and the techniques and tools provided by the academic community are used only sparsely. In part, this can be attributed to the many barriers to technology transfer. However, one can also recognize that in a number of ways the methods provided by the research community fail to be applicable to the problems faced by developers or maintainers of large-scale, long-lived systems. One important aspect of software development and maintenance is to understand properties of a complete system, its individual components, and how they interact. There is a wide range of properties of interest, some concerned only with the input/output behavior of functions, others concerned with concurrency or real-time requirements of processes. Upon examining the techniques for formally specifying, understanding, and verifying program behavior available today, one notices that they are almost bi-polar. On the one extreme we find work on proving the correctness of programs, on the other we find type systems for programming languages. Both of these have clear shortcomings: program proving is very expensive, time-consuming, and often infeasible, while present type systems support only minimal consistency properties of programs. The proposed research is intended to help bridge this gap by designing and implementing more refined type systems that allow rich classes of program properties to be expressed, yet still be automatically verified. Through careful, logically motivated design we hope to combine the best ideas from abstract interpretation, automated program analysis, type theory, and verification. In the remainder of this section we explain and justify our approach in somewhat more detail, before giving a research plan in the next section.
Dissipation of Potassium and Proton Gradients Inhibits Mitochondrial Hyperpolarization and Cytochrome c Release during Neural Apoptosis

Exposure of rat hippocampal neurons or human D283 medulloblastoma cells to the apoptosis-inducing kinase inhibitor staurosporine induced rapid cytochrome c release from mitochondria and activation of the executioner caspase-3. Measurements of cellular tetramethylrhodamine ethyl ester fluorescence and subsequent simulation of fluorescence changes based on Nernst calculations of fluorescence in the extracellular, cytoplasmic, and mitochondrial compartments revealed that the release of cytochrome c was preceded by mitochondrial hyperpolarization. Overexpression of the anti-apoptotic protein Bcl-xL, but not pharmacological blockade of outward potassium currents, inhibited staurosporine-induced hyperpolarization and apoptosis. Dissipation of mitochondrial potassium and proton gradients by valinomycin or carbonyl cyanidep-trifluoromethoxy-phenylhydrazone also potently inhibited staurosporine-induced hyperpolarization, cytochrome c release, and caspase activation. This effect was not attributable to changes in cellular ATP levels. Prolonged exposure to valinomycin induced significant matrix swelling, and per se also caused release of cytochrome c from mitochondria. In contrast to staurosporine, however, valinomycin-induced cytochrome c release and cell death were not associated with caspase-3 activation and insensitive to Bcl-xL overexpression. Our data suggest two distinct mechanisms for mitochondrial cytochrome c release: (1) active cytochrome c release associated with early mitochondrial hyperpolarization, leading to neuronal apoptosis, and (2) passive cytochrome c release secondary to mitochondrial depolarization and matrix swelling.
Asphalt binder adsorption by aggregates: a microscopic study

Asphalt adsorption by aggregates is an important parameter in hot mix asphalt mix design. In the present study, a comparison is made between asphalt binder adsorption obtained from volumetric calculations with that of from microscopic observations. Four different types of aggregates (of sieve size 50–80 mm) are used in the study. Volumetric measurements are carried out on individual aggregates to calculate the percentage of adsorbed asphalt binder. On the other hand, the depth of asphalt binder penetration (obtained from microscopic observation) is used to quantify the amount of adsorbed asphalt binder. From the results, it appears that microscopic studies consistently over-estimate the percentage of asphalt binder adsorbed. Scanning electron microscope with energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy is used to further investigate some possible reasons for such a discrepancy.
Detection probability analysis for AF assisted cooperative spectrum sensing in cognitive radio networks

In this paper, we investigate the cooperative spectrum sensing when primary user data is forwarded to fusion center with the help of amplify-forward (AF) based cognitive relay in cognitive radio networks. We proceed by obtaining the probability density function (PDF) statistics of the received signal via AF relay link at the fusion center. Then we obtain the PDF of combined signal from relay link and direct link at the output of maximum ratio combiner (MRC). Finally, to avoid cumbersome integrations, we use an alternative representation of generalized marcum Q-function to obtain an upper bound for the detection probability when the network is operating over independent and identically distributed (IID) rayleigh fading channels. We also obtain an exact expression for detection probability when no cooperation is taking place among cognitive users. In the end, we present simulation results and compare them with the analytical expressions for the validity of our mathematical derivations.
Promoting robustness for speaker modeling in the community: the PRISM evaluation set

—We introduce a new database for evaluation of speaker recognition systems. This database involves types of variability already seen in NIST speaker recognition evaluations (SREs) like language, channel, speech style and vocal effort, and new types not yet available on any standard database like severe noise, and reverberation. The database is created using data from NIST SREs from 2004 to 2010. We present results of a state-of-the-art system on the different subset of this database. The database will be publicly available, and this work aims at encouraging other sites to adopt it and improve it.