Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Effect of Personality Traits on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Outcomes in Student Pharmacists with Rat Phobia: A Randomized Clinical Trial

Background: Little is known about which personality traits determine the effectiveness of various types of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) on animal phobia. The objective of the present study was to investigate a possible association between personality traits and the outcome of single- and multi-session CBT. Methods: The present randomized clinical trial was conducted from November 2018 to May 2019 in Shiraz, Iran. Forty female students with rat phobia, who met the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V) criteria, were systematically allocated into a single- and a multi-session therapy group (odd numbers one-session treatment, even numbers multi-session treatment). In both groups, the students were gradually exposed to rats as part of the treatment. Psychological measures (state-anxiety, rat phobia, and disgust questionnaires) were used to compare pre- and post-intervention outcomes. Multivariate analysis of covariance was used to assess which personality traits influenced the intervention outcome. The statistical analysis was performed using SPSS (version 20.0) and P values<0.05 were considered statistically significant. Results: Rat phobia was positively and significantly affected by conscientiousness (P=0.001) and agreeableness (P=0.003). Of these personality traits, only a higher degree of conscientiousness resulted in a further reduction of state anxiety after the intervention (P=0.005). There were no significant differences between the pre- and post-intervention outcomes. Conclusion: The outcome of single- and multi-session rat phobia therapies was associated with specific personality traits of the participants, namely conscientiousness and agreeableness. Both intervention methods had an equal effect on reducing rat phobia.
Trust and Trustworthiness in Procurement Contracts with Retainage

In complex procurement projects, it is difficult to write enforceable contracts that condition price upon quality. Supplier nonperformance becomes an acute risk, particularly when there is intense competition for the contract. An established incentive mechanism used to mitigate the problem of supplier nonperformance is retainage, in which the buyer sets aside a portion of the purchase price. After project completion, the buyer determines the amount of retainage that is released to the seller, considering any defects that arise. Although generally a feasible contract form to implement, the practical difficulties in assessing completion introduce a moral hazard for the buyer. We develop a structurally new game and experimental design to offer managerial insights on how retainage principles mediate trust and trustworthiness in competitive procurement settings with moral hazard. The experimental results suggest that if trust in the procurement relationship is strong enough, then retainage can mitigate the seller-side moral hazard problem and substitute for reputation in a fragmented supply chain at the cost of inflated tender prices. In high retainage structures, there is a tradeoff between trade efficiency and supplier participation in request for bids. We further develop a model of fair payment norms and offer managerial insights on how to design the retainage mechanism, conditional on prevailing levels of trust and beliefs about fairness. This paper was accepted by Vishal Gaur, operations management.
MANY FACES OF NON-EQUILIBRIUM: ANOMALOUS TRANSPORT PHENOMENA IN DRIVEN PERIODIC SYSTEMS

We consider a generic system operating under non-equilibrium conditions. Explicitly, we consider an inertial classical Brownian particle dwelling a periodic structure with a spatially broken reflection symmetry. The particle is coupled to a bath at the temperature T and is driven by an unbiased time-periodic force. In the asymptotic long-time regime, the particle operates as a Brownian motor exhibiting finite directed transport although no net biasing force acts on the system. Here, we review and interpret in further detail our own recent research on the peculiar transport behaviour for this set-up. The main focus is put on those different emerging Brownian diffusion anomalies. Particularly, within the transient, time-dependent domain, the particle is able to exhibit anomalous diffusive motion which eventually crosses over into normal diffusion only in the asymptotic long-time limit. In the latter limit, this normal diffusion coefficient may even show a non-monotonic temperature dependence, meaning that it is not monotonically increasing with increasing temperature, but may exhibit instead an extended, intermediate minimum before growing again with increasing temperature.
HISTORICAL SENTIENT – BUILDING INFORMATION MODEL: A DIGITAL TWIN FOR THE MANAGEMENT OF MUSEUM COLLECTIONS IN HISTORICAL ARCHITECTURES

Abstract. This paper investigates the application of the Digital Twin approach to get a Sentient building able to acquire the ability to perceive external inputs and develop strategies to support its management and/or conservation. The experimentation foresees the integration of an H-BIM model with a Decision Support System based on Artificial Intelligence (in this case Machine Learning techniques) for the management of museum collections in historical architectures. The innovative aspect of this methodology resides in the change of paradigm regarding the relations between the historical building under consideration and the professional figures who deal with the management, conservation and architectural restoration. This work tries to contextualize the novel HS-BIM methodology within the theoretical discussion of the disciplines mentioned above and to participate in Digital Twin’s debate. HS-BIM can be seen as a possible path that leads to creating digital twins for cultural heritage. The reflection inspired by this experience aims to revise the concept of Digital Twin as a parallel/external digital model in favour of an artificial evolution of the real system augmented by a “cognitive” apparatus. In this vision, thanks to AI application, future buildings will be able to sense “comfort and pain” and learning from their own life-cycle experience but also from that one of elder sentient-buildings thanks to transfer learning already applied in AI’s fields.
Reusing Ambient Light to Recognize Hand Gestures

In this paper, we explore the feasibility of reusing ambient light to recognize human gestures. We present GestureLite, a system that provides hand gesture detection and classiﬁcation using the pre-existing light in a room. We observe that in an environment with a reasonably consistent lighting scheme, a given gesture will block some light rays and leave others unobstructed, resulting in the user casting a unique shadow pattern for that movement. GestureLite captures these unique shadow patterns using a small array of light sensors. Using standard machine learning techniques, GestureLite can learn these patterns and recognize new instances of speciﬁc gestures when the user performs them. We tested GestureLite using a 10-gesture dictionary in several real-world environments and found it achieves, on average, a gesture recognition accuracy of 98%.
Engineering Nanoscale Exosomes for Lysosomal Delivery of Bioactive Enzymes

There are at least 50 lysosomal storage diseases that are caused by accumulation of a substrate due to a defective enzyme. Although some treatment options are available, low efficacy, high cost, and immunogenicity are main challenges of current treatments. To overcome those limitations, we use cell-derived nanoparticles to deliver biologically active cargos into lysosomes. Naturally produced exosomes can deliver proteins without triggering an immune response. Additionally, exosome have an intrinsic ability to cross blood brain barrier benefiting patients at a late disease stage that affects the brain. After fusing either Gaussia luciferase (gLuc) or puromycin resistant protein (puro) onto a vesicular stomatitis virus glycoprotein (VSVG) with GFP/RFP reporters, we show that exosomes can be loaded with the recombinant protein without changing basic characteristics of exosomes. Moreover, we show that the biological activity of the proteins is retained in both the producer and recipient cells at a statistically significant level. As expected, the modified exosomes co-localize with both lysosomal and endosomal compartments indicating that they still undergo an endosomal pathway after an uptake assay. This work demonstrates that we can engineer nanoscale exosomes for delivery of therapeutic enzymes into lysosomes. The engineered vesicles have a great potential of becoming a method for enzyme delivery into patients with a lysosomal storage disease.
Cycle structure of generalized and closed loop invariants

This article gives a rigorous mathematical treatment of generalized and closed loop invariants (CLI) which extend the standard notion of (nonlinear) invariants used in the cryptanalysis of block ciphers. Employing the cycle structure of bijective S-box components, we precisely characterize the cardinality of both generalized and CLIs. We demonstrate that for many S-boxes used in practice quadratic invariants (especially useful for mounting practical attacks in cases when the linear layer is an orthogonal matrix) might not exist, whereas there are many quadratic invariants of generalized type (alternatively quadratic CLIs). In particular, it is shown that the inverse mapping S ( x ) = x − 1 over GF (2 4 ) admits quadratic CLIs that additionally possess linear structures. The use of cycle structure is further reﬁned through a novel concept of active cycle set , which turns out to be useful for deﬁning invariants of the whole substitution layer. We present an algorithm for ﬁnding such invariants provided the knowledge about the cycle structure of the constituent S-boxes used.
Corporate Governance: The long term impact of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act on Capital structure and Investment of firms

Corporate governance can have influence on the overall performance of a firm. That influence can be positive or negative, dependent on the effectiveness of corporate governance. The existence of agency issues can make corporate governance even more complicated. In the wake of numerous infamous corporate scandals, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act was set out in the US in 2002 in order to improve corporate governance and auditing practice of publicly listed companies. Although there have been studies on the impact of the adoption of the Act on corporate governance, findings are still controversial. Employing a deductive approach and drawing on a sample dataset of 12,822 firms during a period of 31 years, this paper helps to shed more light on the long term impact of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act on corporate governance. We take capital structure and investment as the two measures of corporate governance. Our findings show that the adoption of the Act helps to reduce over-leverage and over-investment in the financing and investment decision making of firms. Our findings also reveal that firms tend to follow a target leverage level, which is consistent with the trade-off theory. We also examine the possibility of under-leverage and under-investment of firms.
Comprehensive analysis of TPX2-related ceRNA network as prognostic biomarkers in lung adenocarcinoma

Background and aim: Competing endogenous RNA (ceRNA) is believed to play vital roles in tumorigenesis. The goal of this study was to screen prognostic biomarkers in lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD). Methods: Common differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were collected from Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) databases and The Cancer Genome Atlas databases (TCGA) using GEO2R and “limma” package in R, respectively. Overlapping DEGs were conducted using enrichment of functions and protein-protein interaction (PPI) network to discover significant candidate genes. By using a comprehensive analysis, we constructed an mRNA mediated ceRNA network. Survival rates were used Kaplan-Meier analysis. Statistical analysis was used to further identify the prognosis of studied genes. Results: Integrated analysis of GSE32863 and TCGA databases, a total of 886 overlapping DEGs, including 279 up-regulated and 607 down-regulated genes were identified. Considering the highest term of candidate genes in PPI, we identified TPX2, which was enriched in cell division signaling pathway. Besides, 35 differentially expressed miRNAs (DEmiRNAs) were predicted to target TPX2 and only 7 DEmiRNAs were identified to be prognostic biomarkers in LUAD. Then, 30 differentially expressed lncRNAs (DElncRNAs) were predicted to bind these 7 DEmiRNAs. Finally, we found that 7 DElncRNAs were correlated with the overall survival (all p <0.05). Furthermore, we identified elevated TPX2 was strongly correlated with the worse survival rate among 458 samples. Univariate and multivariate cox analysis showed TPX2 may act as an independent factor for prognosis in LUAD (p <0.05). Then pathway enrichment results suggested that TPX2 may facilitate tumorigenesis by participating in several cancer-related signaling pathways in LUAD, especially in Notch signal pathway. Conclusions: TPX2-related lncRNAs and miRNAs are related to the survival of LUAD. 7 lncRNAs, 7 miRNAs and TPX2 may serve as prognostic biomarkers in LUAD.
School indoor air quality and health risk on the junior high schools students in Depok, Indonesia

Introduction: School environment represents an important microenvironment for students who spend 6-8 hours in classrooms. Indoor air quality is linked to several respiratory diseases in the school age group. This research aims to study indoor air quality of schools at different environmental characteristic and assess its health risks to students. Methods: This research measured air quality (PM 2.5 , PM 10 , CO 2 , and HCHO) in three junior high schools and followed by health risk assessment. Results: This research found that the mean or median level of indoor PM 2.5 and PM 10 in all three schools exceeded the standard value with health risks (HQ> 1) for PM 2.5 in all three schools and PM 10 in two schools. Whereas carbon dioxide and formaldehyde concentrations were still safe and did not inflict health risks (HQ < 1). The scenario for managing the health risk of PM 2.5 and PM 10 exposure was to control the exposure at a safe threshold of PM 2.5 0.035 mg/m; 0.043 mg/m and PM 10 0.144 mg/m for most of the population at normal school time. Conclusion: It was concluded that the level of indoor particulate matters indicates poor indoor air quality in all three schools at different environmental characteristic and inflicts health risk on students so that the health risk management is required.
Physiological Adaptations to Prolonged Fasting and Apnea-Induced Ischemia/Reperfusion in Northern Elephant Seals: Role of Oxidative Stress

Author(s): Vazquez-Medina, Jose Pablo | Advisor(s): Ortiz, Rudy M | Abstract: While diving, seals are repeatedly exposed to hypoxemia and ischemia/reperfusion. While on land, seals experience sleep apnea and prolonged periods of absolute food and water deprivation. Prolonged fasting, sleep apnea, hypoxemia and ischemia/reperfusion increase oxidant production and oxidative stress in terrestrial mammals. The objectives of this project were to investigate if prolonged fasting and sleep apnea increase oxidative stress in elephant seals and to explore the adaptations seals evolved to cope with increased oxidant production. In the first chapter, we demonstrated that despite activating the renin-angiotensin system and increasing NADPH oxidase expression and activity, prolonged fasting does not increase local or systemic oxidative damage or inflammation. In the second chapter we showed that prolonged fasting increases systemic and local endogenous antioxidant defenses (glutathione and antioxidant enzymes), which likely contribute to the prevention of oxidative damage. The third chapter explored the physiological mechanisms leading to the up-regulation of the antioxidant system during prolonged fasting and demonstrated that systemic increases in the renin-angiotensin system can activate the redox-senstive transcription factor Nrf2 through stimulating the Smad pathway and increasing the expression of NADPH oxidase 4. The fourth chapter shows that rather than inducing local or systemic oxidative damage, repetitive sleep apnea bouts activate protective responses against hypoxia and oxidative stress in elephant seals by increasing the levels of Nrf2 and hypoxia inducible factor 1α (HIF-1α). This is the first work demonstrating the oxidant-mediated activation of hormetic responses against hypoxia and oxidative stress in a large, wild vertebrate. Our findings contribute to expanding our knowledge of the evolution of antioxidant defenses and adaptive responses to oxidative stress. Understanding the mechanisms that allow adapted mammals to avoid oxidative damage has the potential to advance our knowledge of oxidative stress-induced pathologies and to enhance the translative value of biomedical therapies in the long term
Identifying Misinformation from Website Screenshots

Can the look and the feel of a website give information about the trustworthiness of an article? In this paper, we propose to use a promising, yet neglected aspect in detecting the misinformativeness: the overall look of the domain web page. To capture this overall look, we take screenshots of news articles served by either misinformative or trustworthy web domains and leverage a tensor decomposition based semi-supervised classification technique. The proposed approach i.e., VizFake is insensitive to a number of image transformations such as converting the image to grayscale, vectorizing the image and losing some parts of the screenshots. VizFake leverages a very small amount of known labels, mirroring realistic and practical scenarios, where labels (especially for known misinformative articles), are scarce and quickly become dated. The F1 score of VizFake on a dataset of 50k screenshots of news articles spanning more than 500 domains is roughly 85% using only 5% of ground truth labels. Furthermore, tensor representations of VizFake, obtained in an unsupervised manner, allow for exploratory analysis of the data that provides valuable insights into the problem. Finally, we compare VizFake with deep transfer learning, since it is a very popular black-box approach for image classification and also well-known text based methods. VizFake achieves competitive accuracy with deep transfer learning models while being two orders of magnitude faster and not requiring laborious hyper-parameter tuning.
Eye of the Beholder: Memory Recall Perspective Impacts Nostalgia’s Influence on Positive Affect

Recalling memories for which one is nostalgic provides a host of psychological benefits, including promoting positive affect. The present research (N = 409) examined how memory recall perspective impacts this affective consequence of waxing nostalgic. Memory recall perspective research indicates that people show stronger affective engagement with memories recalled from a first person perspective (seeing the event through one’s own eyes, as one experienced it) rather than a third person perspective (seeing the event as an outside observer may have). Results indicated that when participants recalled memories from a first person perspective, those who recalled an event for which they felt nostalgic reported higher positive affect compared to their counterparts who recalled an ordinary past event. However, when participants recalled memories from a third person perspective, those who recalled an event for which they felt nostalgic reported levels of positive affect that did not differ from participants who recalled an ordinary past event. This finding suggests that, when comparing nostalgic reverie to recalling an ordinary past event, the extent to which nostalgia serves as a well-spring of positive affect is partially impacted by memory recall perspective.
Mapping the Interactive Effects of ApoE Gene Polymorphism on Caudate Functional Connectivity in Mild Cognitive Impairment Associated With Parkinson’s Disease

Introduction Cognitive impairment (CI) is a frequent non-motor symptom of Parkinson’s disease (PD). Caudate and Apolipoprotein E (ApoE) are biomarkers linked to CI in PD. There is little known about whether ApoE affects caudate in mild CI of PD (PD-MCI). We investigated the possible interactive effect of ApoE genotypes on caudate functional connectivity (FC) in PD-MCI. Methods A total of 95 PD-MCI patients and 99 matched healthy controls underwent extensive neuropsychological assessment and magnetic resonance imaging. The two groups were separated into three subgroups according to their genotyping. Functional data were analyzed with FC analysis. Results Decreased FC between the caudate and the bilateral inferior orbit frontal gyrus and bilateral middle occipital gyrus (MOG) was found between groups, along with poor performance in general, executive, episodic memory, language, and visual–spatial function. Decreased FC between the caudate and right MOG, right middle temporal gyrus, and right superior occipital gyrus was found as an interaction effect. The FC values of ε4 carriers with PD-MCI were much lower than the other carriers, and FC was positively correlated with the impairment of global and language function. Conclusion These results support the idea that altered FC between the bilateral caudate and posterior cortical regions was interactively influenced by ApoE genotype and PD-MCI status, and the ε4 subtype associated with underlying pathology of global cognitive decline and semantic fluency impairment in an interactive manner. Gene-based imaging approaches might strengthen the credibility in imaging genetic associations, which might provide new powerful insights into the neural mechanisms underlying PD-MCI.
CXCL4 Links Inflammation and Fibrosis by Reprogramming Monocyte-Derived Dendritic Cells in vitro

Fibrosis is a condition shared by numerous inflammatory diseases. Our incomplete understanding of the molecular mechanisms underlying fibrosis has severely hampered effective drug development. CXCL4 is associated with the onset and extent of fibrosis development in multiple inflammatory and fibrotic diseases. Here, we used monocyte-derived cells as a model system to study the effects of CXCL4 exposure on dendritic cell development by integrating 65 longitudinal and paired whole genome transcriptional and methylation profiles. Using data-driven gene regulatory network analyses, we demonstrate that CXCL4 dramatically alters the trajectory of monocyte differentiation, inducing a novel pro-inflammatory and pro-fibrotic phenotype mediated via key transcriptional regulators including CIITA. Importantly, these pro-inflammatory cells directly trigger a fibrotic cascade by producing extracellular matrix molecules and inducing myofibroblast differentiation. Inhibition of CIITA mimicked CXCL4 in inducing a pro-inflammatory and pro-fibrotic phenotype, validating the relevance of the gene regulatory network. Our study unveils that CXCL4 acts as a key secreted factor driving innate immune training and forming the long-sought link between inflammation and fibrosis.