Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Cognitive Development in Adulthood

The term, “cognitive aging,” is typically used to refer to the area of developmental psychology focusing on the study of cognitive changes from young adulthood to very late life. Among the developmental processes of interest are those that reflect cognitive functioning, such as intelligence, memory, and reasoning. An underlying assumption is that cognition is used in different ways to accomplish different goals throughout adulthood, but that it is always a central component of one's concept of self—past, present, and future—and one's adjustment to challenges of everyday life. This area of lifespan developmental research is a particularly active one, in that it is at the crossroads of both classic theoretical questions and important issues of individual and social application. In this chapter, we summarize selected leading issues in the field of cognitive aging. These include: (1) intelligence and patterns of intellectual aging, (2) differential profiles associated with the “aging” of various systems of memory, (3) new topics in such memory-related domains as metamemory and social-interactive memory, and (4) emerging research in such novel domains as wisdom, creativity, compensation, and plasticity. We conclude that, because cognitive aging involves developmental processes that range from the neurological through the individual to the social levels of analyses, it will continue for the foreseeable future to fascinate scholars and anyone else who is curious about how and why cognitive changes occur throughout adulthood. Keywords: adulthood; cognitive development; creativity; crystallized intelligence; fluid intelligence; intellectual aging; memory; plasticity; wisdom
Radiation-induced brain injury: retrospective analysis of twelve pathologically proven cases

Purpose This study was designed to determine the influencing factors and clinical course of pathologically proven cases of radiation-induced brain injury (RIBI). Materials and Methods The pathologic records of twelve patients were reviewed; these patients underwent surgery following radiotherapy due to disease progression found by follow-up imaging. However, they were finally diagnosed with RIBI. All patients had been treated with 3-dimensional conventional fractionated radiotherapy and/or radiosurgery for primary or metastatic brain tumors with or without chemotherapy. The histological distribution was as follows: two falx meningioma, six glioblastoma multiform (GBM), two anaplastic oligodendroglioma, one low grade oligodendroglioma, and one small cell lung cancer with brain metastasis. Results Radiation necrosis was noted in eight patients and the remaining four were diagnosed with radiation change. Gender (p = 0.061) and biologically equivalent dose (BED)3 (p = 0.084) were the only marginally influencing factors of radiation necrosis. Median time to RIBI was 7.3 months (range, 0.5 to 61 months). Three prolonged survivors with GBM were observed. In the subgroup analysis of high grade gliomas, RIBI that developed <6 months after radiotherapy was associated with inferior overall survival rates compared to cases of RIBI that occurred ≥6 months (p = 0.085). Conclusion Our study demonstrated that RIBI could occur in early periods after conventional fractionated brain radiotherapy within normal tolerable dose ranges. Studies with a larger number of patients are required to identify the strong influencing factors for RIBI development.
Performance Analysis of a Preemptive and Priority Reservation Handoff Scheme for Integrated Service-Based Wireless Mobile Networks

We propose an analytical model for integrated real-time and non-real-time services in a wireless mobile network with priority reservation and preemptive priority handoff schemes. We categorize the service calls into four different types, namely, real-time and non-real-time service originating calls, and real-time and non real-time handoff service request calls. Accordingly, the channels in each cell are divided into three parts: one is for real-time service calls only, the second is for non-real-time service calls only, and the last one is for overflow of handoff requests that cannot be served in the first two parts. In the third group, several channels are reserved exclusively for real-time service handoffs so that higher priority can be given to them. In addition, a realtime service handoff request has the right to preempt non-real-time service in the preemptive priority handoff scheme if no free channels are available, while the interrupted non-real-time service call returns to its handoff request queue. The system is modeled using a multidimensional Markov chain and a numerical analysis is presented to estimate blocking probabilities of originating calls, forced termination probability, and average transmission delay. This scheme is also simulated under different call holding time and cell dwell time distributions. It is observed that the simulation results closely match the analytical model. Our scheme significantly reduces the forced termination probability of real-time service calls. The probability of packet loss of non-real-time transmission is shown to be negligibly small, as a non-real-time service handoff request in waiting can be transferred from the queue of the current base station to another one.
Variational Reference Priors

Posterior distributions are useful for a broad range of tasks in machine learning ranging from model selection to reinforcement learning. Given that modern machine learning models can have millions of parameters, selecting an informative prior is typically infeasible, resulting in widespread use of priors that avoid strong assumptions. For example, recent work on deep generative models (Kingma & Welling, 2014; Rezende et al., 2014) commonly uses the standard Normal distribution for the prior on the latent space. However, just because a prior is relatively flat does not mean it is uninformative. The Jeffreys prior for the Bernoulli model serves as a well-known counter example: Jeffreys (1946) showed that the arcsine distribution, despite its peaks near 0 and 1, is the truly objective prior (with respect to Fisher information) and not the uniform distribution. This suggests that objective priors such as the Jeffreys or the related Reference prior (Bernardo, 2005) are worthy of investigation for high-dimensional, web-scale probabilistic models. However, the challenge is that these priors are difficult to derive for all but the simplest models.
Baseline method for the decoding of optical markers known as ‘snowflakes’

This report presents the first quantitative results for the recognition of a new type of microscopic, optical marker called “snowflakes”. Snowflakes have an approximately circular shape with “teeth” on the outside that form a binary code. The application of snowflakes lies in the automatic tagging and tracking of items over time, distances, or processes by assigning a binary key. We describe a method to determine the position and model-parameters of snowflakes, and ultimately read the binary code from microscopic pictures of laser-machined snowflake prototypes. Our method is evaluated experimentally. We quantify the recognition rate and identify the classes of error relevant for future research.
A Proposal for Graph Theoretic Analysis of Protein-Protein Interaction ( PPI ) Networks

Protein-Protein Interaction (PPI) networks are commonly represented as undirected graphs with nodes corresponding to proteins and unit-weight edges representing the interactions between two proteins. In an on-going research, we intend to improve the knowledge-base of PPI networks by conducting the following graph theoretic analysis studies: (i) We propose to take an intersection of the PPI network graphs for specific commonly-studied organisms extracted from a set of well-known databases and evaluate properties such as degree distribution, diameter and clustering coefficient of the intersection graph, which will retain only interactions reported in all the databases. (ii) We propose to analyze the correlation between the properties observed for the intersection graph and the functionality of the proteins constituting the different PPI components. (iii) We will develop heuristics to search for different graphlets (connected subnetworks with a smaller number of nodes) in the PPI networks and conduct a frequency distribution analysis of these graphlets to capture the structural similarities in the different PPI networks.
Population Empirical Bayes

Bayesian predictive inference analyzes a dataset to make predictions about new observations. When a model does not match the data, predictive accuracy suffers. We develop population empirical Bayes (POP-EB), a hierarchical framework that explicitly models the empirical population distribution as part of Bayesian analysis. We introduce a new concept, the latent dataset, as a hierarchical variable and set the empirical population as its prior. This leads to a new predictive density that mitigates model mismatch. We efficiently apply this method to complex models by proposing a stochastic variational inference algorithm, called bumping variational inference (BUMP-VI). We demonstrate improved predictive accuracy over classical Bayesian inference in three models: a linear regression model of health data, a Bayesian mixture model of natural images, and a latent Dirichlet allocation topic model of scientific documents.
Poly(da:dt) Tracts: Major Determinants of Nucleosome Organization This Review Comes from a Themed Issue on Protein-nucleic Acid Interactions Edited

Homopolymeric stretches of deoxyadenosine nucleotides (A's) on one strand of double-stranded DNA, referred to as poly(dA:dT) tracts or A-tracts, are overabundant in eukaryotic genomes. They have unusual structural, dynamic, and mechanical properties, and may resist sharp bending. Such unusual material properties, together with their overabundance in eukaryotes, raised the possibility that poly(dA:dT) tracts might function in eukaryotes to influence the organization of nucleosomes at many genomic regions. Recent genome-wide studies strongly confirm these ideas and suggest that these tracts play major roles in chromatin organization and genome function. Here we review what is known about poly(dA:dT) tracts and how they work. Functional importance of poly(dA:dT) tracts in vivo Poly(dA:dT) tracts — homopolymeric stretches of deox-yadenosine nucleotides (A's), often having lengths of 10– 20 bp or even greater — are highly enriched in eukaryotic genomes but, intriguingly, not in prokaryotic genomes [1], suggesting that they may have a functional role unique to eukaryotic genomes. Indeed, studies of many individual genes showed that poly(dA:dT) tracts are important for transcriptional regulation [2 ,3 ,4–6], recombination [7], and blocking the spread of histone post-translational modifications that are linked to tran-scriptional repression [8]. An early suggestion, inspired in part by in vitro studies described below, was that poly(-dA:dT) tracts might function in vivo to facilitate gene activation by excluding nucleosomes [2 ]. A recent gen-ome-wide analysis showed further that poly(dA:dT) tracts are associated with and may cause nucleosome depletion at promoters, origins of DNA replication, and 3 0-ends of genes; that genes whose promoters contain poly(dA:dT) tracts tend to exhibit less transcriptional noise; and that origins of replication that have poly(dA:dT) tracts in their vicinity tend to have a greater likelihood of utilization per round of DNA replication [9 ]. The X-ray crystallographic structure of the nucleosome shows nucleosomal DNA to be highly distorted and sterically occluded, thereby hindering interaction of the nucleosomal DNA with other DNA binding proteins [10]. Thus, nucleosomal organization of DNA may have a generally repressive effect on DNA activity [11]. If nucleosomes were excluded from poly(dA:dT) tracts in vivo (and from their vicinity; see below), this nucleosome exclusion would facilitate access of other proteins to the DNA, helping to explain these functional roles of poly(-dA:dT) tracts. Poly(dA:dT) tracts and their flanking DNA are relatively depleted of nucleosomes in vivo The possibility that poly(dA:dT) tracts might function in vivo to facilitate gene activation by excluding nucleo-somes [2 ] focused attention on …
Dynamic Test Generation to Find Bugs in Web Application

Current tools for webpage validation cannot handle the dynamically generated pages that are ubiquitous on today’s Internet. There are no approaches which can detect the failures in dynamically generated web applications without executing them for several times. The Developer of the dynamic web applications has to check for failures only after executing the application in web server. If there are many failures occur, he has to correct them and again executes the application several times We present a dynamic test generation technique for the domain of dynamic Web applications. The technique utilizes both combined concrete and symbolic execution. This paper extends dynamic test generation to the domain of web applications that dynamically create web (HTML) pages during execution, which are typically presented to the user in a browser. We are proposing such approach which can detect the execution and HTML failures in dynamic web applications before they are going to be executed. Keywords-Software testing, Web applications,
Constructing Social Networks Based on Near-Duplicate Detection in YouTube Videos

With the video-sharing websites springing up, more and more people would like to upload and share either their own videos or remix others'. Meanwhile, they could view and comment the videos that they are interested in. Therefore, social networks among videos and users exist implicitly. In this work, we construct two types of social networks, video networks (VN) and topic participant networks (TPN), by utilizing videos, related metadata and near-duplicate detection. In the networks, the nodes denote the videos or users while the weights of the directed edges represent the correlation between the nodes. Then, several indices are defined to quantitatively evaluate the importance of the nodes in the networks. Experiments are conducted by using YouTube videos and corresponding metadata related with a specific event. Experimental results show that the analysis of social networks and indices fits the evolution of the event and the roll topic participants plays in spreading Internet videos very well. Finally, we extensionally investigate to utilize the network for recognizing important videos and participants, summarizing video datasets, and tracking an event with few videos.
Sidestepping the combinatorial explosion: Towards a processing model based on discriminative learning

Arnon and Snider (2010) documented frequency eects for compositional 4-grams independently of the frequencies of lower-order n-grams. They argue that comprehenders apparently store frequency information about multi-word units. We show that n-gram frequency eects can emerge in a parameter-free computational model driven by naive discriminative learning, trained on a sample of 300,000 4-word phrases from the British National Corpus. The discriminative learning model is a full decomposition model, associating orthographic input features straightforwardly with meanings. The model does not make use of separate representations for derived or inected words, nor for compounds, nor for phrases. Nevertheless, frequency eects are correctly predicted for all these linguistic units. Naive discriminative learning provides the simplest and most economical explanation for frequency eects in language processing, obviating the need to posit counters in the head for, and the existence of, hundreds of millions of n-gram representations. Keywords: naive discriminative learning; Rescorla-Wagner equations; n-gram frequency eects; computational modeling
Pathway-Based Factor Analysis of Gene Expression Data Produces Highly Heritable Phenotypes That Associate with Age

Statistical factor analysis methods have previously been used to remove noise components from high-dimensional data prior to genetic association mapping and, in a guided fashion, to summarize biologically relevant sources of variation. Here, we show how the derived factors summarizing pathway expression can be used to analyze the relationships between expression, heritability, and aging. We used skin gene expression data from 647 twins from the MuTHER Consortium and applied factor analysis to concisely summarize patterns of gene expression to remove broad confounding influences and to produce concise pathway-level phenotypes. We derived 930 “pathway phenotypes” that summarized patterns of variation across 186 KEGG pathways (five phenotypes per pathway). We identified 69 significant associations of age with phenotype from 57 distinct KEGG pathways at a stringent Bonferroni threshold (P<5.38×10−5). These phenotypes are more heritable (h2=0.32) than gene expression levels. On average, expression levels of 16% of genes within these pathways are associated with age. Several significant pathways relate to metabolizing sugars and fatty acids; others relate to insulin signaling. We have demonstrated that factor analysis methods combined with biological knowledge can produce more reliable phenotypes with less stochastic noise than the individual gene expression levels, which increases our power to discover biologically relevant associations. These phenotypes could also be applied to discover associations with other environmental factors.
Inactivation of the Mismatch Repair System in Pseudomonas aeruginosa Attenuates Virulence but Favors Persistence of Oropharyngeal Colonization in Cystic Fibrosis Mice

ABSTRACT The inactivation of the mismatch repair (MMR) system of Pseudomonas aeruginosa modestly reduced in vitro fitness, attenuated virulence in murine models of acute systemic and respiratory infections, and decreased the initial oropharyngeal colonization potential. In contrast, the inactivation of the MMR system favored long-term persistence of oropharyngeal colonization in cystic fibrosis mice. These results may help in understanding the reasons for the low and high prevalences, respectively, of hypermutable P. aeruginosa strains in acute and chronic infections.
Trends in Teenage Talk: Corpus compilation, analysis and findings

Teenage talk is fascinating, though so far teenage language has not been given the attention in linguistic research that it merits. The dearth of investigations into teenage language is due in part to under representation in language corpora. With the Bergen Corpus of London Teenage Language (COLT) a large corpus of teenage language has become available for research. The first part of Trends in Teenage Talk gives a description how the COLT corpus was collected and processed; the speakers are presented with special emphasis on the recruits and their various backgrounds; ending with a description what the COLT teenagers talk about and how they do it. The second part of the book is devoted to the most prominent features of the teenagers’ talk: ‘slanguage’; how reported speech is manifested; a survey of non-standard grammatical features; the use of intensifiers; tags; and interactional behaviour in terms of conflict talk.
Little String Theory at a TeV

We propose a framework where the string scale as well as all compact dimensions are at the electroweak scale $\\sim$ TeV$^{-1}$. The weakness of gravity is attributed to the small value of the string coupling $g_s \\sim 10^{-16}$, presumably a remnant of the dilaton\'s runaway behavior, suggesting the possibility of a common solution to the hierarchy and dilaton-runaway problems. In spite of the small $g_s$, in type II string theories with gauge interactions localized in the vicinity of NS5-branes, the standard model gauge couplings are of order one and are associated with the sizes of compact dimensions. At a TeV these theories exhibit higher dimensional and stringy behavior. The models are holographically dual to a higher dimensional non-critical string theory and this can be used to compute the experimentally accessible spectrum and self-couplings of the little strings. In spite of the stringy behavior, gravity remains weak and can be ignored at collider energies. The Damour-Polyakov mechanism is an automatic consequence of our scenario and suggests the presence of a massless conformally-coupled scalar, leading to potentially observable deviations from Einstein\'s theory, including violations of the equivalence principle.
Collaborative testing across shared software components (doctoral symposium)

Components of numerous component-based software systems are often developed and tested by multiple stakeholders, and there often exists significant overlap and synergy in the processes of testing systems with shared components. This work demonstrates that testers of shared software components can save effort by avoiding redundant work, and improve the test quality of each component as well as overall software systems by using information obtained when testing across multiple components. My research contains three parts. First, I investigate current testing practices for component-based software systems to find the overlap and synergy we conjecture exists. Second, I design and implement infrastructure and related tools to facilitate communication and data sharing between testers. Third, I design various testing processes to implement different collaborative testing algorithms and apply them to large actively developed software systems.
Collaborative recall and collective memory: What happens when we remember together?

Studies of collective memory have traditionally been the domain of philosophers and sociologists, while cognitive psychologists have largely investigated memory at the level of the individual. However, within cognitive psychology there is a variety of psychological theories and experimental paradigms that have been used to study the process and outcomes of remembering in groups. In this paper we review the research on group remembering and draw together findings from different traditions. In doing so, we aim to answer a series of questions about the outcomes and consequences of recalling in groups, and the particular features of groups and of memories that may be conducive to the formation of a collective memory. In clarifying what we know and what is yet to be studied about group memory, we point the way forward for a cognitive psychological study of collective memory.
ColorPhylo: A Color Code to Accurately Display Taxonomic Classifications

Color may be very useful to visualise complex data. As far as taxonomy is concerned, color may help observing various species’ characteristics in correlation with classification. However, choosing the number of subclasses to display is often a complex task: on the one hand, assigning a limited number of colors to taxa of interest hides the structure imbedded in the subtrees of the taxonomy; on the other hand, differentiating a high number of taxa by giving them specific colors, without considering the underlying taxonomy, may lead to unreadable results since relationships between displayed taxa would not be supported by the color code. In the present paper, an automatic color coding scheme is proposed to visualise the levels of taxonomic relationships displayed as overlay on any kind of data plot. To achieve this goal, a dimensionality reduction method allows displaying taxonomic “distances” onto a Euclidean two-dimensional space. The resulting map is projected onto a 2D color space (the Hue, Saturation, Brightness colorimetric space with brightness set to 1). Proximity in the taxonomic classification corresponds to proximity on the map and is therefore materialised by color proximity. As a result, each species is related to a color code showing its position in the taxonomic tree. The so called ColorPhylo displays taxonomic relationships intuitively and can be combined with any biological result. A Matlab version of ColorPhylo is available at http://sy.lespi. free.fr/ColorPhylo-homepage.html. Meanwhile, an ad-hoc distance in case of taxonomy with unknown edge lengths is proposed.