Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Investigating Genotypic Definitions of Tau Trajectory Subtypes in Alzheimer’s Disease using Tree-Based Models

As life expectancies increase, dementia and neurodegenerative diseases affect increasing portions of the population. Alzheimer’s disease (AD) in particular has shown increasing variation in disease progression which suggests subtyping as an avenue for improving understanding and treatment of the condition. Recent research in neuroimaging has revealed distinct phenotypes of AD but a genetic explanation of these subtypes has yet to be uncovered. To that end we attempt to classify these subtypes from SNPs. Multiple tree-based models demonstrate that we found no correlation between tau trajectories and clinically SNPs in a small sample of ADNI patients. Beyond the possible confounds of small sample size, our results are also consistent with the lack of previous studies that implicate SNPs in tau pathology. Based on our discoveries, we include multiple suggestions for future studies into tau-disposition of AD as well as suggestions for linking SNP data to other kinds of phenotypic subtypes of AD.
Factors Affecting Data-Privacy Protection and Promotion of Safe Digital Usage

India is facing the problem of the digital divide. Being developing countries and with low literacy rates, digital knowledge among the public is weak. Those who know a bit about digital operations on smartphones and computers are not having complete knowledge of data security and its peculiarities. Therefore, this study aimed to find determinants of data-privacy anxiety among Indians and to understand their stress and anxiety during the use of digital applications in their daily routines, especially amid the COVID-19 scenario. The current study adopted an inductive qualitative exploratory approach to delve into the above issues. This study employed a reflexive thematic analysis method to analyse interview data of 10 participants across young-adult to middle-adult age groups of male and female gender. Participants belonged to middle socio-economic status having urban background. The study found 6 themes and 26 subordinate themes as determinants of data-privacy anxiety. Emerging themes from the data indicated at the systemic determinants of data-security anxiety, the paradox of learned helplessness and convenience preference among participants. This paper employed the Foucauldian lens of bio-power to discuss the circumscribing function of ill-structured knowledge dissemination approaches. This paper argues in favor of a critical pedagogy approach in educating people about digital security, dealing with data-privacy anxiety, and promoting safe digital usage among all generations of Indians. It also suggests measures of modifications in policies and documentation processes of major online platforms and apps to curb uncertainty and sense of insecurity among users. © 2022 Copyright for this paper by its authors.
3,4-Dihydroxyphenylethanol (DPE or Hydroxytyrosol) Counteracts ERK1/2 and mTOR Activation, Pro-Inflammatory Cytokine Release, Autophagy and Mitophagy Reduction Mediated by Benzo[a]pyrene in Primary Human Colonic Epithelial Cells

Understanding the effects induced by carcinogens on primary colonic epithelial cells and how to counteract them might help to prevent colon cancer, which is one of the most frequent and aggressive cancers. In this study, we exposed primary human colonic epithelial cells (HCoEpC) to Benzo[a]pyrene (B[a]P) and found that it led to an increased production of pro-inflammatory cytokines and activated ERK1/2 and mTOR. These pathways are known to be involved in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), which represents a colon cancer risk factor. Moreover, B[a]P reduced autophagy and mitophagy, processes whose dysregulation has been clearly demonstrated to predispose to cancer either by in vitro or in vivo studies. Interestingly, all the effects induced by B[a]P could be counteracted by 3,4-Dihydroxyphenylethanol (DPE or Hydroxytyrosol, H), the most powerful anti-inflammatory and antioxidant compound contained in olive oil. This study sheds light on the mechanisms that could be involved in colon carcinogenesis induced by a chemical carcinogen and identifies a safe natural product that may help to prevent them.
Individual characteristics of teacher education students. Re-examining the negative selection hypothesis

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Working Paper 66

I propose analysing the dynamics of income positions using dynamic panel ordered probit models. I disentangle, simultaneously, the roles of state dependence and heterogeneity (observed and non-observed) in explaining income position persistence, such as poverty persistence and affluence persistence. I apply my approach to Chile exploiting longitudinal data from the P-CASEN 2006–2009. First, I find that income position mobility at the bottom and the top of the income distribution is much higher than the expected, showing signs of high economic insecurity. Second, the observable individual characteristics have a much stronger impact than true state dependence to explain individuals’ current income position in the income distribution extremes.
Replicating and Improving Hourglass Networks for Human Pose Estimation

Much of the technology that is driving innovation across a variety of fields relies on the stable solution to one of the most difficult problems in computer vision and machine learning: being able to discern what activities people are performing from an image. Being able to understand a person’s actions serves a range of purposes, especially in fields involving human-computer interactions and for the safety of autonomous driving vehicles, for example. One of the most crucial steps in understanding what people are doing is the estimation of a person’s pose, i.e. their orientation, the articulation of their limbs, posture, and the relationships of joints adjacent to one another.
A cross-national comparison of corporate web-site communications: an examination of the services sector

Despite the trend toward increased marketing in the electronic medium, there is still a lack of comprehensive research. Especially noteworthy is the lack of research on equivalence of electronic information across both industries and national boundaries. The literature is replete with findings from studies surrounding consumer and B2B goods advertising promoted through print and TV mediums; however, this study suggests that previous findings and methods may not be directly transferable to service advertisers in an electronic medium. The specific design characteristics inherent with the web medium combined with the inherent limitations surrounding cultural indices suggest that new methods and measures are required. This study proposes that a newly developed one-dimensional construct that incorporates socioeconomic, media, and technology variables can be applied to better evaluate differences in web-based information content. It is suggested that this new indicator can support a clearer and more systematic procedure for use in cross-national communication studies than previously used methods.
Prototyping scales of knitwear design for sustainability

This paper explores how the physical presence of prototypes substantiates research at various scales of design. Working with sustainable change challenges us to stand in the open and act towards a future that we do not know the full picture of. Here I propose to turn our attention to the traditional design method of prototyping to unfold how to influence various scales of design. The paper begins outlining the scope of the experimental and practice-based research within knitwear design, and discuss prototyping as a means to investigate the role of the designer in an industry in search of sustainable development. The presented design experiments show, how applying the knitted prototypes contributed to a research program which both holds the details, and at the same time makes it possible to assess the broader perspective of design practice when making changes of the existing fashion system.
Posterior Collapse and Latent Variable Non-identifiability A Examples of posterior collapse continued

We consider classical probabilistic principal component analysis (PPCA) and show that its local latent variables can suffer from posterior collapse at maximum likelihood parameter values (i.e. global maxima of log marginal likelihood). This example refines the perspective of Lucas et al. [7], which demonstrated that posterior collapse can occur in PPCA absent any variational approximation but due to local maxima in the log marginal likelihood. Here we show that posterior collapse can occur even with global maxima, absent optimization issues due to local maxima.
Representing Hyperbolic Space Accurately using Multi-Component Floats

Hyperbolic space is particularly useful for embedding data with hierarchical structure; however, representing hyperbolic space with ordinary ﬂoating-point numbers greatly affects the performance due to its ineluctable numerical errors. Simply increasing the precision of ﬂoats fails to solve the problem and incurs a high computation cost for simulating greater-than-double-precision ﬂoats on hardware such as GPUs, which does not support them. In this paper, we propose a simple, feasible-on-GPUs, and easy-to-understand solution for numerically accurate learning on hyperbolic space. We do this with a new approach to represent hyperbolic space using multi-component ﬂoating-point (MCF) in the Poincaré upper-half space model. Theoretically and experimentally we show our model has small numerical error, and on embedding tasks across various datasets, models represented by multi-component ﬂoating-points gain more capacity and run signiﬁcantly faster on GPUs than prior work.
Heterogeneous-Graph Reasoning and Fine-Grained Aggregation for Fact Checking

Fact checking is a challenging task that requires corresponding evidences to verify the property of a claim based on reasoning. Previous studies generally i) construct the graph by treating each evidence-claim pair as node which is a simple way that ignores to exploit their implicit interaction, or building a fully-connected graph among claim and evidences where the entailment relationship between claim and evidence would be considered equal to the semantic relationship among evidences; ii) aggregate evidences equally without considering their different stances towards the verification of fact. Towards the above issues, we propose a novel heterogeneous-graph reasoning and fine-grained aggregation model, with two following modules: 1) a heterogeneous graph attention network module to distinguish different types of relationships within the constructed graph; 2) fine-grained aggregation module which learns the implicit stance of evidences towards the prediction result in details. Extensive experiments on the benchmark dataset demonstrate that our proposed model achieves much better performance than state-of-the-art methods.
Interactive comment on “Characterization of total ecosystem scale biogenic VOC exchange at a Mediterranean oak-hornbeam forest” by S. Schallhart et al

Schallhart et al. present interesting measurements of VOC concentrations and fluxes from a mixed forest dominated by oak and hornbeam trees in the Po Valley. The number of direct measurements of VOCs above biogenic sources using PTR-ToF is very small so the results of BVOC emission and in particular less known BVOC/VOC deposition could be extremely valuable. Another interesting aspect of the study is that it is located in a region strongly emitting biogenic VOC close to anthropogenic influences (often high NOx) so should enable investigations of the atmospheric chemical interactions between BVOCs during polluted vs unpolluted/less polluted times. The context of pollution is brought up only to say that the conversion of MVK+MAC is unexpected. It would be very interesting to see also the anthropogenic ions such as aromatics which
Studi Pengenalan Ekspresi Wajah Berbasis Convolutional Neural Network

ABSTRAK Pengenalan ekspresi wajah adalah topik penelitian yang aktif dilakukan dalam beberapa dekade terakhir. Aplikasinya dapat ditemukan dalam biometric security, robotika, kesehatan, neuromarketing sampai animasi avatar. Mengenal ekspresi pada wajah bukanlah merupakan masalah yang mudah dalam pembelajaran mesin, karena setiap orang dapat memiliki cara yang berbeda untuk memperlihatkan ekspresinya. Bahkan citra pada orang yang sama dalam satu ekspresi, dapat menghasilkan fitur yangbervariasi, tergantung pencahayaan, posisi maupun latarbelakangcitra. Karena itu pengenalan ekspresi wajah masih merupakan masalah yang menantang dalam bidang computer vision. Pendekatan tradisional untuk pengenalan ekspresi wajah sangat bergantung pada hand-crafted features seperti SIFT, HOG maupun LBP, yang kemudian dilanjutkan dengan training data pada citra. Dalam beberapa tahun terakhir, metode deep learning mulai dipergunakan dalam pengenalan ekspresi wajah dengan hasil yang secara umum lebih baik. Penelitian ini menggunakan salah satu metode deep learning yang umum dipakai pada citra, yaitu Convolutional Neural Network untuk pengenalan ekspressi wajah, dengan sejumlah variasi parameter menggunakan dataset JAFFE. Hasil terbaik yang diperoleh adalah nilai akurasi sebesar 87,5% untuk arsitektur hanya dengan 3 lapisan training pada jaringan.
Capacitive Micromachined Ultrasonic Transducers for Non-destructive Testing Applications

Ultrasound is a popular technique for industrial non-destructive testing (NDT) applications. By sending ultrasonic waves into an object and observing the amplitude and the delay of the reflected or transmitted waves, one can characterize the material, measure the thickness of the object, and detect discontinuities (flaws) as well as the size, location, and orientation of the defects in the object. Traditionally, ultrasonic transducers for NDT are made with piezoelectric crystals. Meanwhile, another class of ultrasonic transducers known as capacitive micromachined ultrasonic transducers (CMUTs) have become popular in medical ultrasound research because of their large bandwidths and other attributes that allow them to be integrated into the tip of a catheter. However, CMUTs have not been widely adopted in ultrasonic NDT applications. In this thesis, three important CMUTs characteristics that could potentially make them attractive for NDT applications are introduced and demonstrated. First, CMUTs can be beneficial to NDT because the fabrication techniques of CMUTs can easily be used to implement high-frequency, high-density phased arrays, which are essential for high resolution scanning. Surface scanning using a 2-D row-column addressed CMUT array was demonstrated. Secondly, CMUTs can be integrated with supporting microelectronic circuits, thus one can implement a highly integrated transducer system, which can be useful in structural health monitoring NDT applications. Front-end microelectronic circuits that include a transmit pulser and a receive amplifier were designed, tested, and characterized. Thirdly, CMUTs are suitable for air-coupled applications because of their low acoustic impedance at resonance. Air-coupled CMUTs fabricated in a standard RF-MEMS process were characterized and tested. This thesis concludes with an analysis of the potential usefulness of CMUTs for ultrasonic NDT. While many ultrasonic NDT applications are better off being performed using conventional piezoelectric transducers, CMUTs can and should be used in certain NDT applications that can take advantage of the beneficial characteristics of this exciting transducer technology.
Using neural network technologies to reduce information asymmetry

The article discusses an approach to the analysis of static information based on the use of neural network technologies. Kohonen maps were constructed on the basis of data on the yields of the main agricultural crops in four adjacent areas of the Volga region over 30 years. As a result, based on the analysis of the maps obtained, three clusters were identified: a cluster with high, medium and low yields for the main crops. Also, on the basis of a comparative analysis, regions were identified for which similar results were observed for different crops. The results obtained have a significant impact on the process of making managerial decisions regarding the use of the agricultural insurance tool.
The Impact of Different type of Coupons on Consumer Purchase at Bricks and Mortars*

Manufacturers distribute many items across the retailer members, and consumers see these items on the shelf space in the grocery stores. The interactions between manufacturers and retailers result in various different marketing strategies targeted towards consumers in the bricks and mortars. In general, manufacturers and retailers choose between various available marketing strategies such as advertising, rebate, coupons and so on under this circumstance. Among these marketing strategies, coupons have been an important and widely utilized marketing tool for a long time. There are still debates about the advantages and effectiveness of different marketing strategies in the literature, the consumer packaged goods(CPG) industry has increased the spending of coupons to consumers. Although some have argued(Jedidi et al. 1999) that coupons have a negative effect on brand equity and the profitability of the brand in the long term, most agree that coupons tend to boost sales(Ailawadi et al. 2006; Jones 1990; Salter 2001; Venkatesan and Farris 2012) and also may speed up the purchase rotation in the short term. For example, in 1995 about $6 billion worth of coupons were redeemed for a total saving of
Absorption and Metabolization of Cytoprotective Epicatechin Thio-Conjugates in Rats

The epicatechin thio-derivatives 4 β -( S -cysteinyl)-epicatechin (Cys-EC) and 4 β -( S -cysteaminyl)-epicatechin (Cya-EC) are compounds that may provide protection from oxidation via mechanisms involving either the flavonoid moiety or the non-phenolic cysteine or cysteamine part of the molecule. Because the metabolically modified molecules may be the actual active species, we estimated the absorption/metabolization of the thio-derivatives through the small intestine in vitro and studied the body distribution of the compounds and their metabolites in rats. The analysis of the samples generated was done by high-performance liquid chromatography coupled to a UV detector and a tandem mass spectrometer. We show that Cya-EC follows the same phase II metabolization pattern as EC, while Cys-EC is transported with the intact catechol moiety through the small intestine and effectively metabolized systemically. We also find that Cya-EC generates Cys-EC in vivo, which provides evidence for a Cya-EC-mediated cytoprotective effect through cysteamine/cystine exchange with subsequent cysteine transport, ubiquitously throughout the organism.
Decision Support Framework Development and Application

The Concept Design Center (CDC) at The Aerospace Corporation does an excellent job of assessing the performance of single discipline space systems; however, the relevant decision environment involves the evaluation of combinations of space and non-space solutions against a variety of metrics. The goal of developing an enhanced Decision Support Framework (DSF) is to provide National Security Space (NSS) decision makers at all levels with more comprehensive and relevant information upon which to base their decisions. As one component of the DSF development at The Aerospace Corporation, the capabilities of the CDC will be enhanced to analyze the performance of multiple systems and combination of systems. Incorporation of military utility analysis tools in the CDC environment will permit exploratory analyses over a range of values to map measures of performance to measures of effectiveness. Addition of economic analysis tools capable of cross portfolio analysis will enable affordability and cost effectiveness trades to be performed. New tools capable of performing value centric analysis will permit The Aerospace Corporation to explore conceptual design trade space for NSS missions using a broader set of metrics.
A cryo-ET study of microtubules in axons

The microtubule cytoskeleton in axons plays key roles in intracellular transport and in defining cell shape. Despite many years of study of microtubules, many questions regarding their native architecture remain unanswered. Here, we performed cryo-electron tomography of mouse dorsal root ganglion (DRG) and Drosophila melanogaster (Dm) neurons and examined their microtubule ultrastructure in situ. We found that the microtubule minus and plus ends in DRG axons are structurally similar and frequently contact nearby components. The microtubules in DRG axons maintained a 13 protofilament (pf) architecture, even close to lattice break sites. In contrast, microtubules in Dm neurons had 12 or 13 pfs and we detected sites of pf number transition. The microtubule lumen in DRG axons is filled with globular microtubule inner proteins (MIPs). Our data suggest these have a defined structure, which is surprising given they are thought to contain the disordered protein MAP6. In summary, we reveal novel morphological and structural features of microtubules in their native environment.