Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Cognitive Style and Frame Susceptibility in Decision-Making

The susceptibility of decision-makers’ choices to variations in option framing has been attributed to individual differences in cognitive style. According to this view, individuals who are prone to a more deliberate, or less intuitive, thinking style are less susceptible to framing manipulations. Research findings on the topic, however, have tended to yield small effects, with several studies also being limited in inferential value by methodological drawbacks. We report two experiments that examined the value of several cognitive-style variables, including measures of cognitive reflection, subjective numeracy, actively open-minded thinking, need for cognition, and hemispheric dominance, in predicting participants’ frame-consistent choices. Our experiments used an isomorph of the Asian Disease Problem and we manipulated frames between participants. We controlled for participants’ sex and age, and we manipulated the order in which choice options were presented to participants. In Experiment 1 (N = 190) using an undergraduate sample and in Experiment 2 (N = 316) using a sample of Amazon Mechanical Turk workers, we found no significant effect of any of the cognitive-style measures taken on predicting frame-consistent choice, regardless of whether we analyzed participants’ binary choices or their choices weighted by the extent to which participants preferred their chosen option over the non-chosen option. The sole factor that significantly predicted frame-consistent choice was framing: in both experiments, participants were more likely to make frame-consistent choices when the frame was positive than when it was negative, consistent with the tendency toward risk aversion in the task. The present findings do not support the view that individual differences in people’s susceptibility to framing manipulations can be substantially accounted for by individual differences in cognitive style.
Limited benefit of slow rewarming after cerebral hypothermia for global cerebral ischemia in near-term fetal sheep

The optimal rate of rewarming after therapeutic hypothermia for neonatal hypoxic–ischemic encephalopathy is unknown, although it is widely suggested that slow rewarming is beneficial. Some preclinical studies suggest better outcomes with slower rewarming, but did not control for the duration of hypothermia. In this study, near-term fetal sheep (0.85 gestation) received 30 min cerebral ischemia followed by normothermia, 48 h hypothermia with rapid rewarming over 1 h, 48-h hypothermia with slow rewarming over 24 h, or 72-h hypothermia with rapid rewarming. Slow rewarming after 48 h of hypothermia improved recovery of EEG power compared with rapid rewarming (p < 0.05), but was not different from rapid rewarming after 72 h of hypothermia. At seven days recovery, neuronal survival was partially improved by both fast and slow rewarming after 48-h hypothermia, but less than 72-h hypothermia in the cortex and CA4 (p < 0.05). In conclusion, although electrographic recovery was partially improved by slow rewarming over 24 h following cerebral hypothermia for 48 h, optimal neuroprotection was seen with hypothermia for 72 h with rapid rewarming, suggesting that the overall duration of cooling was the critical determinant of outcomes after therapeutic hypothermia.
Region-Specific Reductions in Morphometric Properties and Synaptic Colocalization of Astrocytes Following Cocaine Self-Administration and Extinction

While much is known about the effects of cocaine use on the cellular structure and function of neurons and synapses within the brain’s reward circuitry, relatively little is known about the effects of cocaine on astrocytes. Given the significant role that astrocytes play in modulating neuronal and synaptic function, this lack of knowledge regarding the role of astroglial adaptations in the neuropathology of drug abuse represents an important investigative need. We recently showed that astrocytes within the nucleus accumbens (NAc) core exhibit decreased volume, surface area, and synaptic colocalization following cocaine self-administration and extinction, compared to NAc astrocytes from saline-administering animals (Scofield et al., 2016b). However, it is unknown whether these cocaine-dependent changes in astrocytes are ubiquitous throughout the brain’s reward circuitry, or represent specific adaptations within the NAc. It is also not known whether the extinction period is necessary for the retracted phenotype, or whether self-administration alone is sufficient to drive these changes. In the current study, we have extended our assessment of the effects of cocaine self-administration on morphometric properties and synaptic colocalization of astrocyte peripheral processes in the prelimbic region of the medial prefrontal cortex (PL) and basolateral nucleus of the amygdala (BLA), both known to also contribute significantly to motivated behaviors. In addition, in order to pinpoint the temporal dimension of previously observed effects, we also examined astrocytes within the NAc following the last self-administration session. While a reduction of astrocyte size and synaptic colocalization was observed in the NAc core of cocaine-extinguished rats as previously shown, no differences in PL or BLA astrocytes were observed between saline- and cocaine-extinguished rats. Moreover, decreased synaptic colocalization of peripheral processes in the NAc was observed with a post-synaptic marker, instead of a presynaptic marker as used previously. In contrast, no significant changes were found in NAc astrocytes after self-administration alone. These results provide insights into the influence of cocaine use on astrocytes within the brain reward circuitry, and inform both regional heterogeneity as well as temporal dynamics of astrocyte responsiveness to cocaine self-administration.
Extracellular ATP is a danger signal activating P2X7 receptor in a LPS mediated inflammation (ARDS/ALI)

Acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) is a life-threating lung condition resulting from a direct and indirect injury to the lungs [1, 2]. Pathophysiologically it is characterized by an acute alveolar damage, an increased permeability of the microvascular-barrier, leading to protein-rich pulmonary edema and subsequent impairment of arterial oxygenation and respiratory failure [1]. This study examined the role of extracellular ATP in recruiting inflammatory cells to the lung after induction of acute lung injury with lipopolysaccharide (LPS). However, the precise mechanism is poorly understood. Our objective was to investigate the functional role of the P2X7 receptor in the pathogenesis of acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS/ acute lung injury (ALI)) in vitro and in vivo. We show that intratracheally applied LPS causes an acute accumulation of ATP in the BALF (bronchoalveolar lavage) and lungs of mice. Prophylactic and therapeutic inhibition of P2X7R signalling by a specific antagonist and knock-out experiments was able to ameliorate the inflammatory response demonstrated by reduced ATP-levels, number of neutrophils and concentration of pro-inflammatory cytokine levels in the BALF. Experiments with chimeric mice showed that P2X7R expression on immune cells was responsible for the observed effect. Consistently, the inflammatory response is diminished only by a cell-type specific knockdown of P2X7 receptor on non-stationary immune cells. Since the results of BALF from patients with acute ARDS or pneumonia simulated the in vivo data after LPS exposure, the P2X7 receptor may be a new therapeutic target for treatment in acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS/ALI).
Reflections on an Experiment, Evaluating the Impact of Spatialisation on Exploration

This paper reports on an experiment designed to evaluate whether visualising a digital library (using a spatialisation technique) can inﬂuence exploratory search behaviour. In the experiment we asked participants to complete a set of novel tasks using one of two interfaces - a visualisation interface, ExploViz, and its search-based equivalent, LibSearch. A set of measures were used to capture sensemaking and exploratory behaviour and to analyse cognitive load. As results were non-signiﬁcant, we reﬂect upon the design of the experiment, consider possible issues and suggest how these could be addressed in future iterations.
Components of Water Use Efficiency Have Unique Genetic Signatures in the Model C4 Grass Setaria1[OPEN]

Both water-dependent and water-independent processes controlled by unique genetic components regulate plant growth in the model C4 grass Setaria. Plant growth and water use are interrelated processes influenced by genetically controlled morphological and biochemical characteristics. Improving plant water use efficiency (WUE) to sustain growth in different environments is an important breeding objective that can improve crop yields and enhance agricultural sustainability. However, genetic improvement of WUE using traditional methods has proven difficult due to the low throughput and environmental heterogeneity of field settings. To overcome these limitations, this study utilizes a high-throughput phenotyping platform to quantify plant size and water use of an interspecific Setaria italica × Setaria viridis recombinant inbred line population at daily intervals in both well-watered and water-limited conditions. Our findings indicate that measurements of plant size and water use are correlated strongly in this system; therefore, a linear modeling approach was used to partition this relationship into predicted values of plant size given water use and deviations from this relationship at the genotype level. The resulting traits describing plant size, water use, and WUE all were heritable and responsive to soil water availability, allowing for a genetic dissection of the components of plant WUE under different watering treatments. Linkage mapping identified major loci underlying two different pleiotropic components of WUE. This study indicates that alleles controlling WUE derived from both wild and domesticated accessions can be utilized to predictably modulate trait values given a specified precipitation regime in the model C4 genus Setaria.
SMALL AUXIN UP RNA62/75 Are Required for the Translation of Transcripts Essential for Pollen Tube Growth1[OPEN]

SAUR62 and SAUR75 regulate pollen tube growth through physical interaction with ribosome subunits to affect translation of cell wall and actin cytoskeleton remodeling-related transcripts. Successful pollen tube elongation is critical for double fertilization, but the biological functions of pollen tube genes and the regulatory machinery underlying this crucial process are largely unknown. A previous translatomic study revealed two Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana) SAUR (SMALL AUXIN UP RNA) genes, SAUR62 and SAUR75, whose expression is up-regulated by pollination. Here, we found that both SAUR62 and SAUR75 localized mainly to pollen tube nuclei. The siliques of homozygous saur62 (saur62/−), saur75 (saur75/−), and the SAUR62/75 RNA interference (RNAi) knockdown line had many aborted seeds. These lines had normal pollen viability but defective in vitro and in vivo pollen tube growth, with branching phenotypes. Immunoprecipitation with transgenic SAUR62/75-GFP flowers revealed ribosomal protein RPL12 family members as potential interacting partners, and their individual interactions were confirmed further by yeast two-hybrid and bimolecular fluorescence complementation assays. Polysome profiling showed reduced 80S ribosome abundance in homozygous saur62, saur75, ribosomal large subunit12c, and SAUR62/75 RNAi flowers, suggesting that SAUR62/75 play roles in ribosome assembly. To clarify their roles in translation, we analyzed total proteins from RNAi versus wild-type flowers by isobaric tags for relative and absolute quantitation, revealing significantly reduced expression of factors participating in pollen tube wall biogenesis and F-actin dynamics, which are critical for the elastic properties of tube elongation. Indeed, RNAi pollen tubes showed mislocalization of deesterified and esterified pectins and F-actin organization. Thus, the biological roles of SAUR62/75 and their RPL12 partners are critical in ribosomal pre-60S subunit assembly for efficient pollen tube elongation and subsequent fertilization.
Domino Reaction Sequence for the Synthesis of [2.2.2]Diazabicycloalkenes and Base-Promoted Cycloreversion to 2-Pyridone Alkaloids.

A new domino reaction sequence for the construction of 2-pyridone structures is reported. The reaction sequence begins with diacetyldiketopiperazine and proceeds via aldol condensation, alkene isomerization, and intramolecular Diels-Alder cycloaddition. The intermediate [2.2. 2]diazabicycloalkene cycloadducts can be isolated or can engage in a base-accelerated extrusion of one lactam bridge to provide the 2-pyridone cycloreversion products. The operation leading to pyridone products can occur in one reaction vessel and proceeds at convenient temperatures.
“The Only Thing We Can Do is Treat Them Well Here”: Public Health With Latinos in a New Immigrant Destination

ABSTRACT Human service agencies in new immigrant destinations often lack the experience and bilingual staff required to provide inguistically and culturally appropriate services to Latino immigrant families. This qualitative study examined the ways one new destination public health agency responded to this demographic shift. The agency leveraged a culture of collaboration and a team approach so that serving immigrants became the responsibility of all workers, not only a few bilingual staff. Implications for practice including the potential benefits and pitfalls of including monolingual workers in immigrant clients’ care are discussed.
Influence of BJT Transit Frequency Limit Relation to MOSFET Parameters on the Switching Speed of BiCMOS Digital Circuits

The use is made of the BJT transit frequency limit (fTL) dependence on the MOSFET parameters (L, Vth) to design BiCMOS digital circuits. The fTL relation is used in conjunction with the established BiCMOS gate delay models. It is shown that the minimum delay BiCMOS circuits driving the large capacitive load, can be designed at the transit frequency limit with the reduced BJT AREA factor. The time delay calculations are presented for a typical BiCMOS circuit and comparison is made with the results simulated using SPICE.
“I’m not going to walk, just for the sake of walking…”: a qualitative, phenomenological study on physical activity during hospital stay

Abstract Purpose: To understand beliefs, thoughts, attitudes, and experiences related to physical activity during hospital stay in patients and health care providers. Methods: A qualitative, interpretive, phenomenological study examined the common meaning and lived experiences of patients and health care providers related to inpatient physical activity. Data from semi-structured interviews were analysed using qualitative content analysis. Results: A total of 42 participants (18 patients and 24 health care providers) were interviewed. Patients and health care providers described physical activity as a purposeful activity to achieve a goal. In contrast, they talked about physical and mental rest to balance inpatient physical activity. Furthermore, the hospital environment was felt to discourage patients to be physically active with care centred around the hospital beds, frequent disturbances of rest on hospital rooms, and dependency of patients on health care providers as important sources. The ability of patients to perform physical activity was associated with feelings, such as freedom and autonomy. Conclusions: Physical activity during hospital stay is a purposeful activity to achieve a goal, and should be well-balanced with both physical and mental rest according to patients and health care providers. In addition, the hospital environment seems to be a source of low inpatient physical activity. Implications for rehabilitation Health care providers should offer meaningful activities to engage patients’ interest in being physically active during hospital stay. Tailored interventions aiming to increase inpatient physical activity should be balanced with phases of both physical and mental rest. A change of the hospital environment in both culture and the build environment is needed to elicit physical activity in patients during hospital stay.
A Case Study on the Impact of Similarity Measure on Information Retrieval based Software Engineering Tasks

Information Retrieval (IR) plays a pivotal role in diverse Software Engineering (SE) tasks, e.g., bug localization and triaging, code retrieval, requirements analysis, etc. The choice of similarity measure is the core component of an IR technique. The performance of any IR method critically depends on selecting an appropriate similarity measure for the given application domain. Since different SE tasks operate on different document types like bug reports, software descriptions, source code, etc. that often contain non-standard domain-specific vocabulary, it is essential to understand which similarity measures work best for different SE documents. This paper presents two case studies on the effect of different similarity measure on various SE documents w.r. t. two tasks: (i) project recommendation: finding similar GitHub projects and (ii) bug localization: retrieving buggy source file(s) correspond to a bug report. These tasks contain a diverse combination of textual (i.e. description, readme) and code (i.e. source code, API, import package) artifacts. We observe that the performance of IR models varies when applied to different artifact types. We find that, in general, the context-aware models achieve better performance on textual artifacts. In contrast, simple keyword-based bag-of-words models perform better on code artifacts. On the other hand, the probabilistic ranking model BM25 performs better on a mixture of text and code artifacts. We further investigate how such an informed choice of similarity measure impacts the performance of SE tools. In particular, we analyze two previously proposed tools for project recommendation and bug localization tasks, which leverage diverse software artifacts, and observe that an informed choice of similarity measure indeed leads to improved performance of the existing SE tools.
Training De-Confusion: An Interactive, Network-Supported Visual Analysis System for Resolving Errors in Image Classification Training Data

Convolutional neural networks gain more and more popularity in image classification tasks since they are often even able to outperform human classifiers. While much research has been targeted towards network architecture optimization, the optimization of the labeled training data has not been explicitly targeted yet. Since labeling of training data is time-consuming, it is often performed by less experienced domain experts or even outsourced to online services. Unfortunately, this results in labeling errors, which directly impact the classification performance of the trained network. To overcome this problem, we propose an interactive visual analysis system that helps to spot and correct errors in the training dataset. For this purpose, we have identified instance interpretation errors, class interpretation errors and similarity errors as frequently occurring errors, which shall be resolved to improve classification performance. After we detect these errors, users are guided towards them through a two-step visual analysis process, in which they can directly reassign labels to resolve the detected errors. Thus, with the proposed visual analysis system, the user has to inspect far fewer items to resolve labeling errors in the training dataset, and thus arrives at satisfying training results more quickly.
Mind Your Keys? A Security Evaluation of Java Keystores

Cryptography is complex and variegate and requires to combine different algorithms and mechanisms in nontrivial ways. This complexity is often source of vulnerabilities. Secure key management is one of the most critical aspects, since leaking a cryptographic key vanishes any advantage of using cryptography. In this paper we analyze Java keystores, the standard way to manage and securely store keys in Java applications. We consider seven keystore implementations from Oracle JDK and Bouncy Castle, a widespread cryptographic library. We describe, in detail, how the various keystores enforce confidentiality and integrity of the stored keys through passwordbased cryptography and we show that many of the implementations do not adhere to state-of-the-art cryptographic standards. We investigate the resistance to offline attacks and we show that, for non-compliant keystores, brute-forcing can be up to three orders of magnitude faster with respect to the most compliant keystore. Additionally, when an attacker can tamper with the keystore file, some implementations are vulnerable to denial of service attacks or, in the worst case, arbitrary code execution. Finally we discuss the fixes implemented by Oracle and Bouncy Castle developers following our responsible disclosure.
Dementia, Alzheimer's Disease, and Mortality after Hemodialysis Initiation.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Older patients with ESKD experience rapid declines in executive function after initiating hemodialysis; these impairments might lead to high rates of dementia and Alzheimer's disease in this population. We estimated incidence, risk factors, and sequelae of diagnosis with dementia and Alzheimer's disease among older patients with ESKD initiating hemodialysis. DESIGN, SETTING, PARTICIPANTS, & MEASUREMENTS We studied 356,668 older (age ≥66 years old) patients on hemodialysis (January 1, 2001 to December 31, 2013) from national registry data (US Renal Data System) linked to Medicare. We estimated the risk (cumulative incidence) of diagnosis of dementia and Alzheimer's disease and studied factors associated with these disorders using competing risks models to account for death, change in dialysis modality, and kidney transplant. We estimated the risk of subsequent mortality using Cox proportional hazards models. RESULTS The 1- and 5-year risks of diagnosed dementia accounting for competing risks were 4.6% and 16% for women, respectively, and 3.7% and 13% for men, respectively. The corresponding Alzheimer's disease diagnosis risks were 0.6% and 2.6% for women, respectively, and 0.4% and 2.0% for men, respectively. The strongest independent risk factors for diagnosis of dementia and Alzheimer's disease were age ≥86 years old (dementia: hazard ratio, 2.11; 95% confidence interval, 2.04 to 2.18; Alzheimer's disease: hazard ratio, 2.11; 95% confidence interval, 1.97 to 2.25), black race (dementia: hazard ratio, 1.70; 95% confidence interval, 1.67 to 1.73; Alzheimer's disease: hazard ratio, 1.78; 95% confidence interval, 1.71 to 1.85), women (dementia: hazard ratio, 1.10; 95% confidence interval, 1.08 to 1.12; Alzheimer's disease: hazard ratio, 1.12; 95% confidence interval, 1.08 to 1.16), and institutionalization (dementia: hazard ratio, 1.36; 95% confidence interval, 1.33 to 1.39; Alzheimer's disease: hazard ratio, 1.10; 95% confidence interval, 1.05 to 1.15). Older patients on hemodialysis with a diagnosis of dementia were at 2.14-fold (95% confidence interval, 2.07 to 2.22) higher risk of subsequent mortality; those with a diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease were at 2.01-fold (95% confidence interval, 1.89 to 2.15) higher mortality risk. CONCLUSIONS Older patients on hemodialysis are at substantial risk of diagnosis with dementia and Alzheimer's disease, and carrying these diagnoses is associated with a twofold higher mortality.