Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Physical, Neural, and Mental Timing

The conclusions drawn by Benjamin Libet from his work with colleagues on the timing of somatosensorial conscious experiences has met with a lot of praise and criticism. In this issue we find three examples of the latter. Here I attempt to place the divide between the two opponent camps in a broader perspective by analyzing the question of the relation between physical timing, neural timing, and experiential (mental) timing. The nervous system does a sophisticated job of recombining and recoding messages from the sensorial surfaces and if these processes are slighted in a theory, it might become necessary to postulate weird operations, including subjective back-referral. Neuroscientifically inspired theories are of necessity still based on guesses, extrapolations, and philosophically dubious manners of speech. They often assume some neural correlate of consciousness (NCC) as a part of the nervous system that transforms neural activity in reportable experiences. The majority of neuroscientists appear to assume that the NCC can compare and bind activity patterns only if they arrive simultaneously at the NCC. This leads to a search for synchrony or to theories in terms of the compensation of differences in neural delays (latencies). This is the main dimension of the Libet discussion. Examples from vision research, such as "temporal-binding-by-synchrony" and the "flash-lag" effect, are then used to illustrate these reasoning patterns in more detail. Alternatively one could assume symbolic representations of time and space (symbolic "tags") that are not coded in their own dimension (not time in time and space in space). Unless such tags are multiplexed with the quality message (tickle, color, or motion), one gets a binding problem for tags. One of the hidden aspects of the discussion between Libet and opponents appears to be the following. Is the NCC smarter than the rest of the nervous system, so that it can solve the problems of local sign (e.g., "where is the event"? ) and timing (e.g., "when did it occur? " and "how long did it last? ") on its own, or are these pieces of information coded symbolically early on in the system? A supersmart NCC appears to be the assumption of Libet's camp (which includes Descartes, but also mystics). The wish to distribute the smartness evenly across all stages of processing in the nervous system (smart recodings) appears to motivate the opponents. I argue that there are reasons to side with the latter group.
Role of propofol and its solvent, intralipid, in nitric oxide-induced peripheral vasodilatation in dogs.

BACKGROUND The commercial propofol preparation in an intralipid solution causes marked vasodilatation. Both propofol and its solvent seem to stimulate the nitric oxide (NO) pathway. The role of intralipid in cardiac and regional haemodynamic changes induced by propofol and their respective interactions with the NO pathway was assessed. METHODS Dogs were instrumented to record arterial pressure, heart rate, cardiac output, dP/dt (the first derivative of left ventricular pressure) and vertebral, carotid, coronary, mesenteric, hepatic, portal and renal blood flows. Experimental groups were as follows. Group 1 (control; n = 11): N-methyl-L-arginine (L-NMA) 20 mg kg-1 i.v. ; Group 2 (n = 8): propofol (10 mg ml-1) 4 mg kg-1 i.v. bolus followed by 0.6 mg kg-1 min-1; Group 3 (n = 6): intralipid 0.25 ml kg-1 bolus followed by 0.06 ml kg-1 min-1. After 60 min, L-NMA was injected in Groups 2 and 3. RESULTS Propofol induced increases in heart rate, coronary and carotid blood flows, and decreases in systemic vascular resistance and dP/dt. Intralipid increased renal blood flow, carotid vascular resistance and mesenteric vascular resistance. In the presence of intralipid, L-NMA-induced pressor response and systemic, carotid and renal vasoconstriction were more pronounced than in control dogs. CONCLUSIONS Except for the coronary and carotid circulations, intralipid modulates the NO pathway in cardiac and regional blood flow.
Using the Reenement Calculus for Dataaow Processes Using the Reenement Calculus for Dataaow Processes

The reenement calculus, based on predicate transformer semantics, is proving useful in the construction of sequential programs. It is argued that the reenement calculus provides a suitable development formalism for (possibly real-time) dataaow-like processes. Conventional precondition and postcondition speciications of sequential programs are generalised to assumption and eeect speciications of processes. Such speciications may be given predicate transformer semantics and then formally reened to implementations in much the same way as precondition and postcondition speciications of sequential programs. A minimal collection of dataaow-process operators and associated reenement laws is considered. Small examples of dataaow-process development are presented to demonstrate the utility of the approach. The compositionality of the approach is considered in detail.
Pathway Profiling and Rational Trial Design for Studies in Advanced Stage Cervical Carcinoma: A Review and a Perspective

Multiple genetic abnormalities will have occurred in advanced cervical cancer and multiple targeting is likely to be needed to control tumor growth. To date, dominant therapeutic targets under scrutiny for cervical cancer treatment have been EGFR pathway and angiogenesis inhibition as well as anti-HPV vaccines. The potentially most effective targets to be blocked may be downstream from the membrane receptor or at the level of the nucleus. Alterations of the pathways involved in DNA repair and in checkpoint activations, as well as the specific site of HPV genome integration, appear worth assessing. For genetic mutational analysis, complete exon sequencing may become the norm in the future but at this stage frequent mutations (that matter) can be verified by PCR analysis. A precise documentation of relevant alterations of a large spectrum of protein biomarkers can be carried out by reverse phase protein array (RPPA) or by multiplex analysis. Clinical decision-making on the drug(s) of choice as a function of the biological alteration will need input from bio-informatics platforms as well as novel statistical designs. Endpoints are yet to be defined such as the loss (or reappearance) of a predictive biomarker. Single or dual targeting needs to be explored first in relevant preclinical animal and in xenograft models prior to clinical deployment.
PUBLIC SCHOOL QUALITY AND PRIVATE SCHOOL ENROLLMENTS

Proposition have a significant, 13 long-run will undoubtedly effect on have a ignificant, long-run eff ct o California's public schools. A literal reading of that proposition suggests a fairly drastic cutback in public school spending.1 Of course, the state's bailout of local governments will moderate that cutback; but, even with that assistance, public school spending is likely to be reduced considerably. A reduction in public school spending will prompt some parents to switch their children from public schools to private schools. The initial impact of that switch will be beneficial for public schools. The limited revenue available for public schools would then be spread across a smaller number of students. In that way, public schools could partially offset the decline in quality resulting from the initial reduction in total expenditures. The decline in public school enrollments will tend to erode political support for those schools, however, since families without children in public schools are less likely to support them. This could imply further cutbacks in spending and thus an even greater decline in public school enrollments. If the initial cutback is large enough, it could trigger a progressive decline in public school quality accompanied by an accelerating exodus from the public schools an unravelling of the public school system. In technical terms, the quality of public schools in a community is likely to have at least two equilibrium levels.2 In one equilibrium, public schools are of high quality and most children attend them. In the other, public schools are of low quality and most children attend private schools. Both equilibria are locally stable; if the level of public school quality is slightly perturbed from its present equilibrium, it will tend to return to that
Perceptual long-term harmonic plus noise modeling for speech data compression

The harmonic plus noise model (HNM) is widely used for the modeling of audio signals. In this paper, we introduce perceptual frequency masking to the 2-band HNM, developed by Stylianou et al., applied to speech signals. An auditory model is used to recognize inaudible sinusoids, which will be removed from the set of model's parameters in order to reduce the data size for speech coding. The proposed perceptual HNM was applied to a large speech database from TIMIT and HINT and has proved to achieve an important (up to 50% in short term frames) parameters-rate compression, yielding a significant data-rates reduction for the long-term (LT) HNM model. The latter is based on LT trajectory modeling of the Short-Term (ST) HNM parameters. Objective and subjective quality evaluation shows that the perceptual HNM introduces no additional distortion compared to the generic 2-band HNM.
Assistant Principal Professional Growth and Development: A Matter that Cannot Be Left to Chance.

With the advent of recent standards for educational leadership and the increasing complexity of a principal’s job, there is a dire need for assistant principals to participate in clearly defined and consistent professional development growth activities. This study examines professional development needs of assistant principals, including their perspectives toward such endeavors. This paper is intended to assist those planning and providing such programs in satisfying the needs of individuals as well as the larger educational enterprise. Using ISLLC and state standards as a guiding framework for professional development may provide useful input concerning the “what” of professional development for assistant principals. This in turn will hopefully increase assistant principals’ instructional leadership skills as well as instill in them the desire to become principals. Assistant principals are vital resources available to support principals in a host of ways. This support becomes more necessary as principals continue to be inundated with additional duties and responsibilities
Influence of Environmental and Managerial Factors on Efficiency of Improved Pulse Production in Bangladesh

Agricultural production depends largely on environmental circumstances which are often overlooked in studies analysing productivity and efficiency leading to biased outcome. On . the other hand, managerial factors also persuade production performance. The paper fits parametric stochastic approach to farm level cross-sectional data for 360 improved pulse growers in order to determine the influence of selected environmental and managerial factors on the productivity and efficiency of Bangladesh pulse producers. Results reveal that environmental production conditions significantly affect technical efficiency and correlates of inefficiency. Average efficiency level was recorded 0.798 and 0.647 with and without environmental variables, respectively. Thus an improvement of 15 points is observed when environmental production conditions were controlled. Farmers' education and training were found to have significant effect on yield and technical efficiency.
Subclinical Thyroid Dysfunction and Cognitive Decline in Old Age

Background Subclinical thyroid dysfunction has been implicated as a risk factor for cognitive decline in old age, but results are inconsistent. We investigated the association between subclinical thyroid dysfunction and cognitive decline in the PROspective Study of Pravastatin in the Elderly at Risk (PROSPER). Methods Prospective longitudinal study of men and women aged 70–82 years with pre-existing vascular disease or more than one risk factor to develop this condition (N = 5,154). Participants taking antithyroid medications, thyroid hormone supplementation and/or amiodarone were excluded. Thyroid function was measured at baseline: subclinical hyper- and hypothyroidism were defined as thyroid stimulating hormones (TSH) <0.45 mU/L or >4.50 mU/L respectively, with normal levels of free thyroxine (FT4). Cognitive performance was tested at baseline and at four subsequent time points during a mean follow-up of 3 years, using five neuropsychological performance tests. Results Subclinical hyperthyroidism and hypothyroidism were found in 65 and 161 participants, respectively. We found no consistent association of subclinical hyper- or hypothyroidism with altered cognitive performance compared to euthyroid participants on the individual cognitive tests. Similarly, there was no association with rate of cognitive decline during follow-up. Conclusion We found no consistent evidence that subclinical hyper- or hypothyroidism contribute to cognitive impairment or decline in old age. Although our data are not in support of treatment of subclinical thyroid dysfunction to prevent cognitive dysfunction in later life, only large randomized controlled trials can provide definitive evidence.
Polyvariant flow analysis with higher-ranked polymorphic types and higher-order effect operators

We present a type and effect system for flow analysis that makes essential use of higher-ranked polymorphism. We show that, for higher-order functions, the expressiveness of higher-ranked types enables us to improve on the precision of conventional let-polymorphic analyses. Modularity and decidability of the analysis are guaranteed by making the analysis of each program parametric in the analyses of its inputs; in particular, we have that higher-order functions give rise to higher-order operations on effects. As flow typing is archetypical to a whole class of type and effect systems, our approach can be used to boost the precision of a wide range of type-based program analyses for higher-order languages.
Energy and national security.

On May 19 and 20, 2003, thirty-some members of Sandia staff and management met to discuss the long-term connections between energy and national security. Three broad security topics were explored: I. Global and U.S. economic dependence on oil (and gas); II. Potential security implications of global climate change; and III. Vulnerabilities of the U.S. domestic energy infrastructure. This report, rather than being a transcript of the workshop, represents a synthesis of background information used in the workshop, ideas that emerged in the discussions, and ex post facto analysis of the discussions. Each of the three subjects discussed at this workshop has significant U.S. national security implications. Each has substantial technology components. Each appears a legitimate area of concern for a national security laboratory with relevant technology capabilities. For the laboratory to play a meaningful role in contributing to solutions to national problems such as these, it needs to understand the political, economic, and social environments in which it expects its work to be accepted and used. In addition, it should be noted that the problems of oil dependency and climate change are not amenable to solution by the policies of any one nation--even the one that is currently the largestmore » single energy consumer. Therefore, views, concerns, policies, and plans of other countries will do much to determine which solutions might work and which might not. « less
Effects of Topical Capsaicin on Cutaneous Innervation: Implications for Pain Management

Changes in cutaneous innervation are a hallmark of neuropathic pain syndromes. Although in few cases the density of cutaneous innervation increases in painful areas, for the most part the density of nociceptive sensory nerve endings decreases and the degree of deinnervation seems to correlate with the severity of pain. In combination with tests for nociceptor function, immunostaining for protein gene product 9.5 (PGP 9.5) is commonly used as diagnostic tool to indicate these pathophysiological changes in cutaneous innervation. However, sole reliance on PGP 9.5 may underestimate the presence of regenerating sensory nerve terminals or fail to capture changes in the expression of proteins such as ion channels or receptors. Topical capsaicin consistently reduces intra-epidermal nerve fiber density assayed via PGP 9.5, and also increases thresholds for activation of some thermoreceptors. The mechanism of action involves a highly localized insult to cutaneous nociceptors mediated by activation of TRPV1 and calcium overload, and perhaps even a direct toxicity to mitochondria. It is possible that topical capsaicin and lidocaine share an ability to reduce cutaneous innervation by inducing localized toxicity in mitochondria-rich nociceptive terminals. Overall, the high local concentrations of drugs and even excipients delivered by topical analgesics into the skin may be able to activate secondary pharmacodynamic processes. Optimizing topical formulations of capsaicin or other analgesics to maximize pain relief with the fewest adverse effects is not a simple matter of varying drug concentration, and it is highly questionable whether 'bioequivalence' could ever be based simply upon equivalent cutaneous drug delivery.
Axi-symmetric models of ultraviolet radiative transfer with applications to circumstellar disk chemistry

A new two-dimensional axi-symmetric ultraviolet radiative transfer code is presented, which is used to calculate photodissociation and ionization rates for use in chemistry models of flaring circumstellar disks. Scattering and absorption of photons from the central star and from the interstellar radiation field are taken into account. The molecules are effectively photodissociated in the surface layer of the disk, but can exist in the intermediate, moderately warm layers. A comparison has been made with an approximate 2D ray-tracing method and it was found that the latter underestimates the ultraviolet field and thus the molecular photodissociation rates below the disk surface. The full 2D results show significantly higher abundances of radicals such as CN and C 2 H than previous work, partly due to the fact that CO is dissociated to greater depths. Results for different stellar radiation fields are also presented. The CN/HCN ratio shows a strong dependence on the stellar spectrum, whereas other ratios such as HCO + /CO show only little variation.
Essays on Nonlinear Macroeconomic Dynamics

This dissertation consists of four essays that study topics in macroeconomics, finance and their interplay using nonlinear quantitative equilibrium models and state of the art econometric techniques. Chapter 1 proposes a general equilibrium model with financial intermediation and sovereign default risk to study the macroeconomic consequences of news regarding a future sovereign default. The model, estimated on Italian data, is used to measure the output losses of the 2010-2012 sovereign debt crisis, and to evaluate the effects of credit policies implemented by European authorities. Chapter 2 proposes a new class of time series model that can be used to measure nonlinearities in the data and to evaluate the fit of Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) models solved with high order perturbation. We first characterize this class, the Quadratic Autoregressive (QAR) model. We then show how the QAR model can be used as a diagnostic tool to assess whether a DSGE model is able to replicate the nonlinear behavior of a set of U.S. aggregate time series. Chapter 3 studies the determinants of medium term movements in the market value of U.S. corporations. We find that secular movements in the mean and volatility of TFP growth are strongly associated with these medium term fluctuations in asset prices. These empirical findings are then interpreted within a production based asset pricing model where the mean and volatility of aggregate productivity growth varies over time. We show that the model can rationalize a sizable elasticity of asset prices to the drivers of aggregate productivity. Chapter 4 proposes a method to identify Harrod-neutral technology shocks in the data in presence of input heterogeneity in the aggregate production function. We prove that, in a wide class of models, Harrod-neutral technology shocks are the only one consistent with a certain form of balanced growth. We then use this property to identify Harrod-neutral shocks using a state-space model. Monte Carlo simulations show that the proposed method performs very well in small samples. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Economics First Advisor Frank Schorfheide Subject Categories Economics This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn. edu/edissertations/1212 ESSAYS ON NONLINEAR MACROECONOMIC DYNAMICS Luigi Bocola A DISSERTATION in Economics Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Linguistic Resources for Genre-Independent Language Technologies : User-Generated Content in BOLT

We describe an ongoing effort to collect and annotate very large corpora of user-contributed content in multiple languages for the DARPA BOLT program, which has among its goals the development of genre-independent machine translation and information retrieval systems. Initial work includes collection of several hundred million words of online discussion forum threads in English, Chinese and Egyptian Arabic, with multi-layered linguistic annotation for a portion of the collected data. Future phases will target still more challenging genres like Twitter and text messaging. We provide details of the collection strategy and review some of the particular technical and annotation challenges stemming from these genres, and conclude with a discussion of strategies for tackling these issues.
Data Centric Discovery with a Data-Oriented Architecture

Increasingly, scientific discovery is driven by the analysis, manipulation, organization, annotation, sharing, and reuse of high-value scientific data. While great attention has been given to the specifics of analyzing and mining data, we find that there are almost no tools nor systematic infrastructure to facilitate the process of discovery from data. We argue that a more systematic perspective is required, and in particular, propose a data-centric approach in which discovery stands on a foundation of data and data collections, rather than on fleeting transformations and operations. To address the challenges of data-centric discovery, we introduce a Data-Oriented Architecture and contrast it with the prevalent Service-Oriented Architecture. We describe an instance of the Data-Oriented Architecture and describe how it has been used in a variety of use cases.
An Infrastructure for Application Level Multicast in Publish/Subscribe System

The Application level multicast is an important technique for indirect communication model. However, there are few works to integrate them together. An Infrastructure for Application Level Multicast Routing in Publish/Subscribe system (IALMRS) is proposed in this paper. We realize a multicast routing protocol for such Publish/Subscribe systems based on IALMRS. From the tests for this multicast routing protocol in publish/subscribe system, IALMPS has a good performance in time delay.