Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Within-person variability in men’s facial width-to-height ratio

Background. In recent years, researchers have investigated the relationship between facial width-to-height ratio (FWHR) and a variety of threat and dominance behaviours. The majority of methods involved measuring FWHR from 2D photographs of faces. However, individuals can vary dramatically in their appearance across images, which poses an obvious problem for reliable FWHR measurement. Methods. I compared the effect sizes due to the differences between images taken with unconstrained camera parameters (Studies 1 and 2) or varied facial expressions (Study 3) to the effect size due to identity, i.e., the differences between people. In Study 1, images of Hollywood actors were collected from film screenshots, providing the least amount of experimental control. In Study 2, controlled photographs, which only varied in focal length and distance to camera, were analysed. In Study 3, images of different facial expressions, taken in controlled conditions, were measured. Results. Analyses revealed that simply varying the focal length and distance between the camera and face had a relatively small effect on FWHR, and therefore may prove less of a problem if uncontrolled in study designs. In contrast, when all camera parameters (including the camera itself) are allowed to vary, the effect size due to identity was greater than the effect of image selection, but the ranking of the identities was significantly altered by the particular image used. Finally, I found significant changes to FWHR when people posed with four of seven emotional expressions in comparison with neutral, and the effect size due to expression was larger than differences due to identity. Discussion. The results of these three studies demonstrate that even when head pose is limited to forward facing, changes to the camera parameters and a person’s facial expression have sizable effects on FWHR measurement. Therefore, analysing images that fail to constrain some of these variables can lead to noisy and unreliable results, but also relationships caused by previously unconsidered confounds.
Mechanism of autophosphorylation of Escherichia coli nitrogen regulator II (NRII or NtrB): trans-phosphorylation between subunits

Nitrogen regulator II (NRII or NtrB) is a homodimeric signal-transducing protein kinase/phosphatase responsible for the transcriptional regulation of the Ntr regulon in Escherichia coli. NRII is a member of a large family of proteins that are part of the related two-component signal transduction systems. We studied the mechanism of NRII autophosphorylation by using purified components. Alteration of the site of NRII autophosphorylation to asparagine (H-139-->N [H139N]) or deletion of the C-terminal 59 amino acids of NRII (ter291) resulted in proteins that were not autophosphorylated upon incubation with ATP. Alteration of glycine 313 to alanine resulted in a protein (G313A) that was phosphorylated to a lesser extent than the wild-type protein. Unlike wild-type NRII and H139N, G313A could not be efficiently cross-linked to [alpha-32P]ATP, suggesting that the G313A mutation affects nucleotide binding. Fusion of maltose-binding protein (MBP) to the N-terminal end of NRII resulted in a protein (MBP-NRII) that autophosphorylated normally. We developed a procedure for forming mixed dimers in vitro from these proteins. In mixed dimers consisting of MBP-NRII and H139N, only the MBP-NRII subunit is phosphorylated. In contrast, in mixed dimers consisting of MBP-NRII and G313A, phosphorylation is predominantly on the G313A subunit. We also demonstrated that the G313A and H139N proteins could complement for the autophosphorylation reaction when they were treated so as to permit the formation of mixed dimers and that the wild-type and H139N proteins could phosphorylate the ter291 protein. These results indicate that the autophosphorylation reaction occurs within the dimer by a trans, intersubunit mechanism in which one subunit binds ATP and phosphorylates the other subunit.
A COMPUTATIONAL MODEL FOR SIMULATION OF EMPATHY AND MORAL BEHAVIOR

Emotions and feelings are now considered as decisive in the human intelligent decision process. In particular, social emotions would help us to enhance the group and cooperate. It is still a matter of debate the what that motivates biological creatures to cooperate or not with their group. Would all kinds of cooperation hide a selfish interest, or would it exist truly altruism? If we pore over those questions from a human perspective, we end up passing through moral behavior and three kinds of individuals: the moral, immoral and amoral. If we move from biological subjects onto artificial agents, it is a complex matter to go without ad hoc mechanisms to bring up cooperation in utility-based computational approaches. We decided to take inspiration from moral behavior as a way of moving toward cooperation in Multiagent Systems. Our leading hypothesis relies on the idea that cooperation can emerge from the assistance of emotions and moral behavior during the process of decision making even when selfish behavior is rewarded by high reinforcements. The analogy with moral behavior is promoted through simulating the feeling of empathy. The importance of the empathy feeling is its function on regulating the agents priorities, enabling the selection of actions that may not be the best selfish selection, since non selfish decision making may be crucial to equalize the interactions among agents and bring up cooperation. We depict herein our bioinspired computational multiagent architecture (so-called MultiA) composed by artificial emotions, feelings and by an Empathy Module responsible for providing an action selection mechanism that rudimentarilly mimic both moral and immoral behaviors. Sensorial information is triggered by the environment, then, the computational architecture transforms it into basic and social artificial emotions and feelings. Thereat its own emotions are employed to estimate the current state of other agents through an Empathy module. Finally, its artificial feelings provide a measure (termed well-being) of its performance in response to the environment. Through that measure and reinforcement learning techniques, the architecture learns a mapping from emotions to actions. While facing high rewards to selfish behavior, the MultiA agents that adopt the cooperative strategy do so from the result of an empathy feeling (high empathy levels) regulating the agents priorities, acting as a moral agent. The MultiA agents that do not adopt the cooperative strategy select selfish actions, and do so as a result of low empathy levels, acting as an immoral agent. The MultiA mechanism of
Injection-Locked Clock Recovery Using a Multiplexed Oscillator for Half-Rate Data-Recovered Applications

An injection-locked clock recovery circuit (CRC) with quadrature outputs based on multiplexed oscillator is presented. The CRC can operate at a half-rate speed to provide an adequate locking range with reasonable jitter and power consumption because both clock edges sample the data waveforms. Implemented by 0.18-μm CMOS technique, experimental results demonstrate that it can achieve the phase noise of the recovered clock about -121.55 dBc/Hz at 100-kHz offset and -129.58 dBc/Hz at 1-MMz offset with ±25 MHz lock range, while operating at the input data rate of 1.55 Gb/s.
A Legwork Mechanism to Assist a Suggesting Module in Finding Worthy Webpages in Search Results

A legwork mechanism for improving the retrieval effectiveness of a search engine is proposed. The feedback of relevant/non-relevant information has been shown to be useful to effectively find most of the relevant web pages in the ranked search results. A suggesting module, a type of relevance feedback engine, can do this job fairly well, but does not perform as well when the feedback information is only about non-relevant webpages. In such an unfavorable circumstance the legwork mechanism assists the suggesting module by handing over the relevant information after finding one or more webpages, containing at least one clue keyword. With a slight increase in time required to select the clue(s) in a presented candidate list, a user is able to find relevant webpages more effectively. The effect of the legwork mechanism was evaluated using various search results on the Japanese search engine goo.
EEG Based Motor Imagery Classification Using SVM and MLP

This paper focuses on the classification of motor imagery of the left-right hand movements from a healthy subject. Elliptic Bandpass filters are used to discard the unwanted signals. Our study was on C3 and C4 electrodes particularly for the left-right limb movements. We deployed various feature extraction techniques on the EEG data. Statistical-based, wavelet-based energy-entropy & RMS, PSD based average power and bad power were performed to form the desired feature vectors. Variants of Support Vector Machines (SVM) were employed for classification and the results were also compared with Multi-layered Perceptron (MLP). Empirical results show that both SVM and MLP were suitable for such motor imagery classifications with the accuracy of 85% and 85.71% respectively. Among all employed feature extraction techniques wavelet-based methods specifically the energy-entropy feature set, gave promising results for both the classifiers.
Volume-sensitive anion channels mediate swelling-activated inositol and taurine efflux.

C6 glioma cells accumulate the organic osmolyte inositol in response to chronic hypertonic stress. Upon return to isotonic conditions, cell swelling activates a Na(+)-independent passive low-affinity inositol efflux mechanism that is inhibited 80-100% by a number of anion transport blockers, certain lipoxygenase blockers, and various polyunsaturated fatty acids. Taurine efflux is also enhanced by cell swelling. The taurine efflux pathway has characteristics that are identical to those of the inositol efflux mechanism, including kinetics of activation and inactivation, osmotic sensitivity, pharmacological sensitivity, and inhibition by certain Na+ and Cl- substitutes. These results suggest strongly that volume-sensitive inositol and taurine efflux are mediated by a common transport mechanism. The inhibition of the transport pathway by anion transport blockers and unsaturated fatty acids suggests indirectly that efflux of these solutes may be mediated by an anion channel. Whole cell patch clamp measurements in CsCl solutions were used to test this hypothesis. Under hypertonic conditions, C6 cells had an extremely low membrane conductance (approximately 0.02 nS/pF). After cell swelling, however, whole cell anion conductance was activated rapidly to values up to 1.5-2 nS/pF. This conductance was outwardly rectified and selective for anions and was inhibited 80-100% by blockers of swelling-activated inositol and taurine efflux. The relative taurine permeability (i.e., Ptaurine/PCl) of the conductance was 0.20. Isosmotic replacement of raffinose in the external medium with inositol or sorbitol induced a transient inward current, suggesting that Cl- and these polyols compete for common binding sites on the channel. We conclude that a volume-sensitive anion channel mediates the efflux of structurally diverse organic osmolytes such as taurine and inositol from the cell.
Fast Exact Matching and Correspondence with Hypergraphs on Spatio-temporal Data

Graphs and hyper-graphs are frequently used to recognize complex and often non-rigid patterns in computer vision, either through graph matching or point-set matching with graphs. Most formulations resort to the minimization of a difficult energy function containing geometric or structural terms, frequently coupled with data attached terms involving appearance information. Traditional methods solve the minimization problem approximately, for instance with spectral techniques. In this paper we deal with data embedded in a 3D ”space-time”, for instance in action recognition applications. We show that, in this context, we can take advantage of special properties of the time domain, in particular causality and the linear order of time. We show that the complexity of the exact matching problem is far inferior to the complexity of the general problem and we derive an algorithm calculating the exact solution. As a second contribution, we propose a new graphical structure which is elongated in time. We argue that, instead of approximately solving the original problem, a better solution can be obtained by exactly solving an approximated problem. An exact minimization algorithm is derived for this structure and successfully applied to action recognition in videos.
Orthostatic hypotension in the elderly.

ORTHOSTATIC hypotension is often observed in elderly people and may result in substantial morbidity and mortality from associated falls and syncope. Studies of elderly people living in the community have found a prevalence of orthostatic hypotension as high as 20 percent among medical outpatients over 65 years of age1 , 2 and 30 percent among those over 75.1 However, recent epidemiologic studies of healthy, normotensive elderly subjects without known risk factors for orthostatic hypotension have found a prevalence of less than 7 percent.3 , 4 Data on blood pressure measured in the supine and sitting positions in over 8000 participants in the National Health .
Massive hemoperitoneum due to a ruptured corpus luteum cyst in a patient with congenital hypofibrinogenemia

Congenital afibrinogenemia/hypofibrinogenemia is a rare inherited hematologic disorder in which a patient lacks or has insufficient level of fibrinogen, the blood coagulation factor I. The incidence of this uncommon disease is 1 to 2 per 1 million individuals. Hence, massive hemoperitoneum caused by ovulation in a woman with congenital afibrogenemia is also a very rare clinical condition. Massive hemoperitoneum usually presents as acute abdominal pain with potential findings of peritonitis including abdominal distention, hypotension and tachycardia with critical consequences. We performed emergent endoscopic surgery for hemoperitoneum caused by a ruptured corpus luteum cyst in a patient with congenital hypofibrinogenemia. To the best of our knowledge, this was the first case report of such treatment in Korea.
Effective motion control of vector control based PMSM drive system using PWM current controller

Today almost 90% loads are dynamic in nature, where each load is required to operate at different speed to achieve different purposes. So it is mandate to provide an effective motion control platform by which effective speed control can be possible. In this paper the PMSM as variable speed drive has been focused taking the advantage of its wide range of speed operation. Here the speed from 0 to rated speed has been achieved in constant torque region and speed above base speed has been achieved in field weakening region. An IGBT based VSI inverter has been simulated to generate proper AC voltage. The effective speed and torque control in each region has been achieved by using PWM current controller. In addition to it for reducing the steady state error close loop operation has been adopted with proper tuning of PI controller. The entire operation has been done by simulating mathematical models in both the regions with the help of MATLAB/SIMULINK.
Anti‐HLA Donor‐Specific Antibodies Detected in Positive B‐Cell Crossmatches by Luminex® Predict Late Graft Loss

The significance of B‐cell crossmatching in kidney transplantation is controversial. Recipients (n = 471) transplanted in a single centre from 1987 to 2005 with complete T‐ and B‐cell crossmatch records were studied. Sera from 83 patients transplanted across a positive B‐cell crossmatch, with concomitant negative T‐cell crossmatch (T–B+) on either current and/or peak sera were studied using Luminex® to determine presence of donor‐specific antibodies (DSA). Clinical outcomes of T–B+ patients were compared with 386 T–B− patients. T–B+ predicted vascular (p = 0.01), but not cellular (p = 0.82) or glomerular (p = 0.14) rejection. IgG HLA DSA were found in 33% (n = 27) of the T–B+ patients and were associated with higher risk of any (p = 0.047), vascular (p = 0.01) or glomerular (p < 0.001) rejection at 6 months. Of 27 patients with DSA, 18/21 (86%) were the complement‐fixing IgG1 and/or IgG3 subclass antibodies. DSA imposed a statistically significant higher risk of graft loss 5 years posttransplant (1.8 [1.0–3.3], p = 0.045). This study showed that only one‐third of positive B‐cell crossmatch (BXM) was caused by DSA and was associated with late graft loss. Thus, using BXM to preclude kidney transplantation may potentially disadvantage >60% of patients in whom BXM is not indicative of the presence of DSA.
Automatically Categorizing Procedurally Generated Content for Collecting Games

A potentially promising application for procedural content generation (PCG) is collecting games , i.e. games in which the player strives to collect as many classes of possible artifacts as possible from a diverse set. However, the challenge for PCG in collecting games is that procedurally generated content on its own does not fall into a predeﬁned set of classes, leaving no concrete quantiﬁable measure of progress for players to follow. The main idea in this paper is to remedy this shortcoming by feeding a sample of such content into a self-organizing map (SOM) that then in eﬀect generates as many categories as there are nodes in the SOM. Once thereby organized, any new content discovered by a player can be categorized simply by identifying the node most activate after its presentation. This approach is tested in this paper in the Petalz video game, where 80 categories for user-bred ﬂowers are generated by a SOM, allowing players to track their progress in discovering all the ”species”that are now explicitly identiﬁed. The hope is that this idea will inspire more researchers in PCG to investigate applications to collecting games in the future.
A Proposal for the Revision of Molecular Boundary Typology

Abstract Molecular shape is essential in understanding molecular function, and understanding molecular shape requires definition of molecular boundaries. In this paper, we review the conceptual evolution of three molecular boundary types: the van der Waals surface, the Connolly surface, and the Lee-Richards (accessible) surface. Then, we point out the confusion among the names of these surfaces existing in the literature. Since it is desirable to have a well- defined terminology in a discipline, we propose the standard names of the three molecular boundary types and their corresponding volumes in order to maximize consistency among researchers, respect the first individual who defined or computed a surface type, and promote collaboration between biologists and geometers.
Stochastic Computing Can Improve Upon Digital Spiking Neural Networks

With the surge in popularity of machine learning algorithms, research has turned towards exploring novel computing architectures in order to increase performance while limiting power consumption. Inspired by their biological counterparts, digital spiking neural networks have emerged as energy efficient alternatives to conventional hardware implementations, yet remain largely incompatible with cutting edge learning methods. Representing information with single-bit binary pulse trains, the behaviour of spiking neural networks exhibit many interesting analogues to the existing field of stochastic computing. In this paper, we not only illustrate the parallels between digital spiking neural networks and stochastic computing, but we also demonstrate that many computing elements in modern spiking hardware are, in fact, implementations of stochastic circuits. In addition, we show that stochastic computing design techniques can be leveraged in order to address shortcomings in current spiking neural network architectures.
A 2-nt RNA enhancer on exon 11 promotes exon 11 inclusion of the Ron proto-oncogene

Ron is a human receptor for the macrophage-stimulating protein (MSP). Exon 11 skipping of Ron pre-mRNA produces the RonΔ165 protein that has a deletion of a 49 amino acid region in the β-chain extracellular domain. RonΔ165 is constitutively active even in the absence of its ligand. Through stepwise deletion analysis, we identified a 2-nt RNA enhancer, which is located 74 nt upstream from the 5′ splice site of exon 11, for exon 11 inclusion. Through double-base and single-base substitution analysis of the 2-nt RNA, we demonstrated that the GA, CC, UG and AC dinucleotides on exon 11, in addition to the wild-type AG sequence, function as enhancers for exon 11 inclusion of the Ron pre-mRNA.
Die Learning Economy aus Netzwerkperspektive: Mechanismen und Probleme

Im Mittelpunkt der gegenwartigen okonomischen Entwicklung steht verstarkt Wissen als fundamentale Ressource und Triebkraft wirtschaftlichen Wachstums sowie Lernen als der bedeutendste Prozess. Diese Sichtweise wird durch das theoretische Konstrukt der Learning Economy beschrieben. Die Organisationsform des Netzwerkes gilt dabei als geeignetes Arrangement, um die Teilnahme an Lernprozessen sowie den Zugangs zu einer breiten und diversifizierten Wissensbasis zu gewahrleisten. In der vorliegenden Arbeit werden im Rahmen der konzeptionellen Charakteristika der Learning Economy die moglichen Auspragungen einer aktiven Netzwerktatigkeit, die erfolgsdeterminierenden Mechanismen eines Netzwerkes als auch die mit einem Netzwerkarrangement verbundenen Probleme dargelegt. Es zeigt sich einerseits, dass Netzwerke grundsatzlich einen geeigneten Mechanismus darstellen, um den Notwendigkeiten einer Learning Economy zu begegnen. Andererseits wird ersichtlich, dass die Funktionsfahigkeit von Netzwerken und das Ausschopfen der vorhandenen Moglichkeiten keinesfalls ohne konstante Anstrengungen der Partner und ein detailliertes Verstandnis der zentralen Wirkungszusammenhange erreicht werden kann. Daher ist die zum Teil euphorisch praktizierte Netzwerkdiskussion in mancher Hinsicht differenziert zu betrachten. Besonders der Abfluss okonomisch sensiblen Wissens, der nicht-wechselseitige Wissensaustausch sowie die Abschottung bestimmter regionaler Netzwerkstrukturen konnen schwerwiegende Folgen nach sich ziehen.
Distributed Computing Column 63: A Note on Fault-tolerant Consensus in Directed Networks

This column consists of an article by Lewis Tseng and Nitin Vaidya on fault-tolerant consensus in directed networks. The fault-tolerant consensus problem was initially studied for undirected complete graphs, and then for undirected arbitrary graphs. However, there was very little work on directed graphs, especially arbitrary ones, until recently. This article provides an overview of the authors’ work on identifying exactly what conditions on the topology of directed graphs are necessary and sufficient for solving consensus (exact/approximate) in various models (crash/Byzantine failures, synchronous/asynchronous) with either iterative or general algorithms. The authors point out interesting connections to papers in the control theory literature and leave us with a couple of intriguing open questions Many thanks to Lewis and Nitin for their contributions!