Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Modulation of Neural Activity during Guided Viewing of Visual Art

Mobile Brain-Body Imaging (MoBI) technology was deployed to record multi-modal data from 209 participants to examine the brain’s response to artistic stimuli at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (MARCO) in Monterrey, México. EEG signals were recorded as the subjects walked through the exhibit in guided groups of 6–8 people. Moreover, guided groups were either provided with an explanation of each art piece (Guided-E), or given no explanation (Guided-NE). The study was performed using portable Muse (InteraXon, Inc, Toronto, ON, Canada) headbands with four dry electrodes located at AF7, AF8, TP9, and TP10. Each participant performed a baseline (BL) control condition devoid of artistic stimuli and selected his/her favorite piece of art (FP) during the guided tour. In this study, we report data related to participants’ demographic information and aesthetic preference as well as effects of art viewing on neural activity (EEG) in a select subgroup of 18–30 year-old subjects (Nc = 25) that generated high-quality EEG signals, on both BL and FP conditions. Dependencies on gender, sensor placement, and presence or absence of art explanation were also analyzed. After denoising, clustering of spectral EEG models was used to identify neural patterns associated with BL and FP conditions. Results indicate statistically significant suppression of beta band frequencies (15–25 Hz) in the prefrontal electrodes (AF7 and AF8) during appreciation of subjects’ favorite painting, compared to the BL condition, which was significantly different from EEG responses to non-favorite paintings (NFP). No significant differences in brain activity in relation to the presence or absence of explanation during exhibit tours were found. Moreover, a frontal to posterior asymmetry in neural activity was observed, for both BL and FP conditions. These findings provide new information about frequency-related effects of preferred art viewing in brain activity, and support the view that art appreciation is independent of the artists’ intent or original interpretation and related to the individual message that viewers themselves provide to each piece.
Reciprocal Skills Training in the Treatment of Externalising Behaviour Disorders in Childhood: A Preliminary Investigation

Abstract This study reported on the efficacy of Reciprocal Skills Training (RST), a family-based treatment modality for childhood externalising disorders. Children (N = 57) ranging from 7 to 12 years old who fulfilled diagnostic criteria for oppositional defiant disorder were randomly allocated to RST (in either a hospital or clinical setting) or a waiting-list control group. At posttreatment, no significant differences were observed across the two treatment settings. Results indicated that 95.5% of children in the hospital setting and 72.2% of children in the clinical setting no longer met criteria for oppositional defiant disorder, compared to 30% of children on the waiting list. Children in the treatment groups also obtained significantly lower scores on the Externalising scale of the Child Behaviour Checklist, compared to the waiting-list group. In addition, mothers' levels of stress and depression were significantly reduced at posttreatment, compared to mothers of children on the waiting list. These findings suggest that RST is an effective treatment modality for children displaying externalising behaviours, as well as for their mothers. The results are discussed in terms of limitations of the current study and future directions for research and clinical practice.
Communication at Times of Transitions: How to Help Patients Cope with Loss and Re‐Define Hope

Patients undergo multiple transitions during the course of their cancer care. Oncologists are uniquely positioned to help patients through these transitions. When patients' situations change, they must cope with loss and associated negative emotions. They then are able to redefine hope. During transitions, patients want their oncologists to provide biomedical information, show that they care about and understand them as individuals, and balance hope and realism. Eliciting concerns and expressing empathy shows patients that their oncologist cares about and understands them and also helps patients to cope with the loss and negative emotions that transitions create. Oncologists can maintain hope by being sensitive to what patients are ready to hear when, and by helping them discover and identify realistic hopes. This is accomplished with the Ask-Tell-Ask and Hope for the Best, Prepare for the Worst techniques, and most importantly by being curious about patients' hopes and fears.
Evaluation of a Substitution Device for Emotional Labor by using Task-Processing Time and Cognitive Load

Nowadays, physical and intellectual labor can be substituted by robotics and information technology. However, emotional labor, which causes mental stress to the workers, has not been substituted yet. Therefore, we propose a method called emotional cyborg that substitutes human-emotional representation with the use of attachable devices. In this study, we used AgencyGlass, a device that substitutes the function of human eyes. We conducted a preliminary study to measure the task-processing time and the subject's cognitive load during the use of AgencyGlass. The result suggests that the AgencyGlass can perform joint attention similar to humans; however, its attentional shift is weaker than in humans.
Spatial heterogeneity and function of voltage– and ligand–gated ion channels in retinal amacrine neurons

The spatial distribution of ion channels within amacrine cells of the tiger salamander retina was studied using patch recording in the retinal slice preparation. By focally puffing kainate, GABA and glycine at amacrine cell processes in the inner plexiform layer, it was determined that the cell's glutamate receptors were located in a confined region of the processes near the soma, while glycine and GABA receptors were located throughout the processes. Likewise, similar techniques in conjunction with voltage steps demonstrated that voltage–gated sodium channels were located throughout the cell and were shown to generate sodium–dependent spikes, while only the processes contained voltage–gated calcium channels. These results suggest that this form of transient amacrine cell collects its excitatory synaptic inputs in a region confined to a central annular region near the soma, that the signal is actively propagated throughout its processes by voltage–gated sodium channels and that calcium–dependent neurotransmitter release of glycine from this neuron can occur throughout its processes. Thus, excitatory signals are collected in the processes near the soma, inhibitory signals throughout the processes and excitation is probably propagated thoughout the processes of the amacrine cell.
Word Association and MI-Trigger-based Language Modeling

There exists strong word association in natural language. Based on mutual information, this paper proposes a new MI-Trigger-based modeling approach to capture the preferred relationships between words over a short or long distance. Both the distance-independent(DI) and distance-dependent(DD) MI-Trigger-based models are constructed within a window. It is found that proper MI-Trigger modeling is superior to word bigram model and the DD MI-Trigger models have better performance than the DI MI-Trigger models for the same window size. It is also found that the number of the trigger pairs in an MI-Trigger model can be kept to a reasonable size without losing too much of its modeling power. Finally, it is concluded that the preferred relationships between words are useful to language disambiguation and can be modeled efficiently by the MI-Trigger-based modeling approach.
Invasive Paget Disease of the Breast: Clinicopathologic Study of an Underrecognized Entity in the Breast

Mammary Paget disease (MPD) is considered an intraepidermal manifestation of an underlying mammary carcinoma. In contrast to extramammary Paget disease, invasion of mammary Paget cells into the dermis (invMPD) has not been reported, except for 2 cases described in Rosen’s textbook. Our study was designed to identify the presence of dermal invasion of mammary Paget cells and characterize the associated clinicopathologic features. Slides from 146 MPD patients were retrieved. Six cases of invMPD were identified. One case of invMPD was not associated with an underlying breast cancer, 1 was associated with invasive ductal carcinoma (IDC), 1 with ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) with microinvasion, and 3 with DCIS only. The underlying breast carcinomas was separate from the area of invMPD. The depth of invasion, measured from the dermal-epidermal junction to the focus of deepest invasion, ranged from 0.02 to 0.9 mm. The horizontal extent ranged from 0.01 to 4.0 mm. Lymph node with isolated tumor clusters was present in case 1, which had no underlying carcinoma but had the greatest extent of invasion, and in case 3, which had DCIS with microinvasion. One patient (case 1) died of unrelated causes 2 years later, and the remaining patients were alive without disease at last follow-up. In summary, we describe 6 cases of MPD with invasion of Paget cells into the dermis and provide histopathologic criteria for the diagnosis of this rare and underrecognized entity. Further studies are required to determine whether invasion in MPD has clinical significance.
Indications for surgery in necrotizing pancreatitis--a millennial review.

Almost from the time of the initial clinical description of acute pancreatitis by Fitz in 1889 [1], the role of surgery in this condition has been controversial. Fitz, an anatomist and pathologist from Boston, concluded from his post-mortem studies that survival from acute pancreatitis was intrinsically determined by the extent of the necrotizing process, and that surgical intervention could only complicate matters. Senn, a Chicago surgeon, took exception to Fitz's position, and advocated drainage and removal of dead tissues [2]. Interestingly, despite Senn's proposal, there is little evidence that he successfully performed such a procedure. Today, more than five generations later, we continue to debate the indications for surgery in necrotizing pancreatitis.
Epigenetic Regulation by Heritable RNA

Genomic concepts are based on the assumption that phenotypes arise from the expression of genetic variants. However, the presence of non-Mendelian inheritance patterns provides a direct challenge to this view and suggests an important role for alternative mechanisms of gene regulation and inheritance. Over the past few years, a highly complex and diverse network of noncoding RNAs has been discovered. Research in animal models has shown that RNAs can be inherited and that RNA methyltransferases can be important for the transmission and expression of modified phenotypes in the next generation. We discuss possible mechanisms of RNA-mediated inheritance and the role of these mechanisms for human health and disease.
Learning cascaded latent variable models for biomedical text classification

In this paper, we develop a weakly supervised version of logistic regression to help to improve biomedical text classi-ﬁcation performance when there is limited annotated data. We learn cascaded latent variable models for the classiﬁcation tasks. First, with a large number of unlabelled but limited amount of labelled biomedical text, we will bootstrap and semi-automate the annotation task with partially and weakly annotated data. Second, both coarse-grained (document) and ﬁne-grained (sentence) levels of each individual biomedical report will be taken into consideration. Our experimental work shows this achieves higher classiﬁcation results.
Vertical Height Errors in Digital Terrain Models Derived from Airborne Laser Scanner Data in a Boreal-Alpine Ecotone in Norway

It has been suggested that airborne laser scanning (ALS) could be used for operational monitoring of vegetation changes in the alpine tree line caused by climate change. Because the vegetation is low in such tree-less areas close to the alpine zone, the accuracy of the digital terrain model (DTM) becomes crucial for early detection of, e.g., pioneer trees representing an ongoing tree migration given that the height of the vegetation may be on the same order of magnitude as the DTM uncertainty. The goal of this study was to assess and exemplify the vertical height errors of DTMs derived from ALS data under varying flying altitudes and pulse repetition frequencies (PRF). Important effects in the analysis were local terrain form, terrain surface, ground vegetation height, and terrain slope, because they may be correlated with recruitment patterns of pioneer trees. Based on 426 ground control points collected in a boreal-alpine ecotone, a standard deviation of 0.07–0.08 m was found for the lowest flying altitudes and lowest PRFs. For the highest PRF the standard deviation was 0.13 m. There were statistically significant mean errors for the different terrain forms and ground vegetation heights (−0.11 to 0.13 m).
Multi-element antenna with close spacing for highly mobile OFDM systems

In this paper, we consider employing a multi-element antenna (MEA) with close spacing to tackle the challenging channel estimation (CE) in highly mobile OFDM systems. Instead of large spacing for diversity, we propose to place the adjacent elements with one symbol distance in the moving direction to observe the quasi-duplicated channels in temporal difference of one symbol period. In exploiting the quasi-duplicated channels, we developed a novel CE-symbol detection (SD) iteration that cooperates with the standardized comb-type pilots to track fast varying channels. From simulation results, we show the proposed system outperforms the conventional receiver of two antennas with spatial diversity in highly mobile channels as long as the mutual coupling effects with the close-spaced elements are restricted.
Protein kinase C and intracellular calcium are involved in follicle‐stimulating hormone‐mediated meiotic resumption of cumulus cell–enclosed porcine oocytes in hypoxanthine‐supplemented medium

The present experiments were conducted to examine the hypothesis that follicle‐stimulating hormone (FSH) can stimulate the hydrolysis of phosphoinositide, generating the intracellular second messengers to activate protein kinase C and mobilizing intracellular calcium, thus inducing oocyte meiotic resumption. Pig cumulus cell–enclosed oocytes (CEO) were cultured for 24 hr in 4 mM hypoxanthine (HX)–supplemented medium and treated with different agents in the following designs: (1) CEO were treated with neomycin (an inhibitor of phosphoinositide hydrolysis) in the presence of FSH or only treated with 7,12‐dimethylbenzin(a) anthracene (DMBA, a tumor promoter which can cause phosphorylation of phospholipase C (PLC), formation of inositol triphophate, and mobilization of intracellular calcium) to mimic the direct activation of PLC; (2) CEO were challenged by FSH, together with sphingosine or staurosporine (two kinds of PKC inhibitors); or treated with phorbol myristate acetate (PMA, an activator of PKC) separately; (3) CEO were primed with BAPTA/AM (an intracellular calcium chelator) or BAPTA/AM +FSH for 60 min, and then transferred into a new culture medium supplemented with FSH but without BAPTA/AM; total culture time was 24 hr. At the end of the culture, the incidence of germinal vesicle breakdown (GVBD) was calculated. The results showed that: (1) FSH (100 U/liter) could stimulate pig CEO to override the arrest of HX and resume meiosis; DMBA (10−8–10−5 M) itself also had such a kind of effect; whereas neomycin, at the level of 10–20 mM, could dramatically inhibit the stimulatory effect of FSH. (2) Staurosporine (10−9–10−6 M) or sphingosine (10−8–10−5 M) could also inhibit the effect of FSH in a dose‐dependent manner on stimulating CEO to resume meiosis. However, PMA (10−8–10−5 M) alone had a dual effect on the meiotic resumption of pig CEO. PMA, at the level of 10−8–10−6 M, could stimulate CEO to resume meiosis, and at high concentration of 10−5 M , it could even enhance the inhibitory effect of HX. (3) Priming CEO with BAPTA/AM only or BAPTA/AM +FSH for 60 min could significantly inhibit the effect of FSH in a dose‐dependent manner. These results indicate that in the process of ligand‐mediated meiotic resumption of pig CEO, FSH can stimulate the hydrolysis of phosphoinositide leading to the activation of PKC and mobilization of intracellular calcium; and suggest that multiple signaling pathways and signal interaction are involved in this process. Mol. Reprod. Dev. 53:51–58, 1999. © 1999 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Biosurfactant/s from Lactobacilli species: Properties, challenges and potential biomedical applications

Lactic acid bacteria are generally believed to have positive roles in maintaining good health and immune system in humans. A number of Lactobacilli spp. are known to produce important metabolites, among which biosurfactants in particular have shown antimicrobial activity against several pathogens in the intestinal tract and female urogenital tract partly through interfering with biofilm formation and adhesion to the epithelial cells surfaces. Around 46 reports are documented on biosurfactant production from Lactobacillus spp. of which six can be broadly classified as cell free biosurfactant and 40 as cell associated biosurfactants and only approximately 50% of those have reported on the structural composition which, in order of occurrence were mainly proteinaceous, glycolipidic, glycoproteins, or glycolipopeptides in nature. Due to the proteinaceous nature, most biosurfactant produced by strains of Lactobacillus are generally believed to be surlactin type with high potential toward impeding pathogens adherence. Researchers have recently focused on the anti‐adhesive and antibiofilm properties of Lactobacilli‐derived biosurfactants. This review briefly discusses the significance of Lactobacilli‐derived biosurfactants and their potential applications in various fields. In addition, we highlight the exceptional prospects and challenges in fermentation economics of Lactobacillus spp. ‐derived biosurfactants’ production processes.
A Cultural Critique of the DSM-IV Dissociative Disorders Section

The Dissociative Disorders subcommittee of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)-sponsored Committee on Culture and Diagnosis proposed 36 specific textual recommendations for inclusion in DSM-IV, covering five themes: (i) most forms of dissociation around the world are normal, and must be distinguished from cross-cultural forms of pathological dissociation with the help of specific criteria; (ii) cultural factors influence the attribution of pathology to particular dissociative experiences; (iii) several dissociative illness syndromes were left out of DSM-III-R due to their cultural patterning (e.g. 'possession trance syndromes', ataques de nervios) and should be included; (iv) the inclusion of these syndromes should not be at the expense of subsuming parallel cultural nosologies under psychiatric nosology; and (v) the phenomenology of pathological dissociation across cultures displays considerable diversity. A review of the final text of DSM-IV reveals that 42% of these 36 items were included, 50% were rejected and 8% were incorporated in a simplified form. In general, data in favor of cross-cultural phenomenology were well received, but critique of the universality of DSM-IV diagnoses was not tolerated. Textual proposals presenting psychiatric anthropological issues were not included, whether on the need for cultural experts, the cultural roots of illness forms, or the social function of symptoms. While the inclusion of some cultural items signals a step forward in the cross-cultural validity of the DSM, work still has to be done to ensure the global applicability of the current dissociative disorder diagnoses as well as their social and clinical usefulness.
Reliability and validity of the Belief in Human Benevolence scale

The construction and development of a Belief in Human Benevolence scale (BHB), held to be useful for research into delinquent behaviour, was described. It was demonstrated to be reliable (α = 0.77) both with undergraduates and prisoners. Its validity is supported by correlations with theoretically related aspects of social cognition (interpreting relationships as cooperative and prison staff as treating prisoners fairly) and personality (oral pessimism and psychoticism). Its correlation with McGurk's measure of undercontrol suggests that it may distinguish between more and less delinquent offender personality types.
A 5-GHz combined oscillator/mixer

In this paper, an IQ oscillator/mixer circuit is presented in which the mixers are an integral part of the oscillator. The oscillator alone has accurate quadrature outputs, even in the presence of component mismatch. This precise quadrature is preserved when mixers are incorporated in the oscillator. An oscillator/mixer core for a carrier frequency of 5 GHz, suitable for a low-IF front-end, was designed and tested. The power consumption is 30 mW from a 2.5 V supply, and a phase error of 1deg was measured
Lower Bound for High-Dimensional Statistical Learning Problem via Direct-Sum Theorem

We explore the connection between dimensionality and communication cost in distributed learning problems. Specifically we study the problem of estimating the mean ~ θ of an unknown d dimensional normal distribution in the distributed setting. In this problem, the samples from the unknown distribution are distributed among m different machines. The goal is to estimate the mean ~ θ at the optimal minimax rate while communicating as few bits as possible. We show that in this simple setting, the communication cost scales linearly in the number of dimensions i.e. one needs to deal with different dimensions individually.
Grid connection of multi-Megawatt clean Wave energy power plant under weak grid condition

The WaveDragon is a 7 megawatt wave energy converter, that is currently developed for clean offshore energy production. The system will be floating several kilometres off the Pembrokeshire coast, Wales, UK, and transfers energy using a submarine power cable. Key interest is the control of the power take-off system at disturbed voltages and under weak-grid condition due to long submarine cable and remote, rural location. A multi-reference frame controller is implemented for harmonics compensation. A parameter estimator is implemented to estimate the grid impedance. Simulation and measurements results from a laboratory test setup that illustrate properties of developed method are shown.
Ionizing Radiation and Leukemia Mortality among Japanese Atomic Bomb Survivors, 1950–2000

Abstract This paper provides the first comprehensive report on mortality by type of leukemia among the Japanese atomic bomb survivors in the Life Span Study (LSS). Analyses include 310 deaths due to leukemia during the period 1950–2000 among 86,611 people in the LSS. Poisson regression methods were used to evaluate associations between estimated bone marrow dose and leukemia mortality. Attention was given to variation in the radiation dose–leukemia mortality association by time since exposure, age at exposure, city and sex. The excess relative rate per gray of acute myeloid leukemia was best described by a quadratic dose–response function that peaked approximately 10 years after exposure. Acute lymphatic leukemia and chronic myeloid leukemia mortality were best described by a linear dose–response function that did not vary with time since exposure. Adult T-cell leukemia was not associated with estimated bone marrow dose. Overall, 103 of the 310 observed leukemia deaths were estimated to be excess deaths due to radiation exposure. In the most recent decade of observation (1991–2000), the estimated attributable fraction of leukemia deaths among those survivors exposed to >0.005 Gy was 0.34, suggesting that the effect of the atomic bombings on leukemia mortality has persisted in this cohort for more than five decades.