Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Chronic Schizophrenic Disorder

Reaction time, set index, critical flicker frequency, two-flash threshold, a sustained performance task and psychophysiological parameters from people with chronic schizophrenic disorder (n = 14) and a control group (n = 12) were analysed to assess the association between arousal, attentional dysfunction and social dysfunction in schizophrenia. Shorter reaction time, rated ability to mime and, in the schizophrenic group, scores on Venable's ward activity scale correlated with each other. In the schizophrenic group, prolonged reaction time latency correlated positively with skin conductance level in the right hand and negatively with skin conductance variability in the left hand, the latter being in the opposite direction to that for the control group. The results may provide support for the hypothesis that lateralised cerebral dysfunction is associated with performance deficits in people with chronic schizophrenic symptoms.
Signifying Acts: Structure and Meaning in Everyday Life

The theme of "Signifying Acts "is that social acts are created by human agents engaging in signifying gestures and eliciting determined responses from which flow a number of consequences. This theme is developed by a critical synthesis of various strands of early and contemporary thought in symbolism, meaning, language, and grammar. These strands have been classified as pragmatism and interactionism, structuralism and grammatical theoryPerinbanayagam brings together for the first time the writings of G. H. Mead and his followers, who label their efforts symbolic interactionism, and the recent developments in the philosophical and anthropological studies of mind and meaning. Through his wide-ranging analysis, he demonstrates the sociological relevance of Chomsky, Derrida, and Searle and particularizes their contributions to a more comprehensive theoretical framework. The interdisciplinary scope of his thesis recalls Ernest Becker s "Birth and Death of Meaning, "and his stylistic flair will stimulate readers at all levels of sophistication. "
The in vitro expression of SAP6 gene in Candida albicans morphogenesis mutants under human serum influence

Candida albicans morphogenesis enables colonization of various niches in host body. Various hyphae-dependent genes have been described. Among them secreted aspartyl proteinases (Saps) play a central role in pathogenesis. Candida albicans SAP4-6 genes encode secretory aspartyl proteinases Sap4-6, which are involved in hyphae formation and virulence. Transcriptional factors Cph1 (STE-like transcription factor) and Efg1 (positive regulator of filamentous growth) govern the expression of several C. albicans genes and contribute to morphogenesis. Given that SAP4-6 expression is regulated during hyphal formation, in this study we investigated the degree of SAP6 expression in strains with deletion of EFG1 and/or CPH1 regulating morphological transition in comparison to clinical isolate. The SAP6 gene expression level was measured with the application of quantitative real-time PCR, after 18 h incubation in human serum at body temperature. Moreover, scanning electron microscopy was applied to characterize morphologies of the tested strains. The estimated SAP6 expression was considerably high in the Δcph1/Δcph1 strain. Furthermore, introduction of the functional copy of CPH1 to this mutant resulted in upregulation of SAP6 expression. In the contrary, in the strains deleted for either EFG1 or both CPH1 and EFG1 factors, SAP6 expression was significantly altered. Reintroduction of one copy of EFG1 to Δcph1/Δcph1 Δefg1/Δefg1 restored hyphae formation, yet SAP6 expression remained altered in this strain. This might suggest that SAP6 is hyphae-independent and is not solely regulated by Efg1 but also by Cph1. Moreover, other transcriptional factors may regulate this gene expression under human serum influence.
Investigating brane resolution with perturbative dynamics

We investigate the transition between singular and non-singular geometries from the vantage point of perturbative field dynamics. In particular, we obtain the closed-form absorption probability for minimally-coupled massless scalars propagating in the background of a heterotic 5-brane on a Taub-NUT instanton. This is an exact calculation for arbitrary incident frequencies. For the singular geometry, the absorption probability vanishes when the frequency is below a certain threshold, and for the non-singular case it vanishes for all frequencies. We discuss the connection between this phenomenon and the behavior of geodesics in this background. We also obtain exact quasinormal modes.
Dissimilatory Reduction of Extracellular Electron Acceptors in Anaerobic Respiration

ABSTRACT An extension of the respiratory chain to the cell surface is necessary to reduce extracellular electron acceptors like ferric iron or manganese oxides. In the past few years, more and more compounds were revealed to be reduced at the surface of the outer membrane of Gram-negative bacteria, and the list does not seem to have an end so far. Shewanella as well as Geobacter strains are model organisms to discover the biochemistry that enables the dissimilatory reduction of extracellular electron acceptors. In both cases, c-type cytochromes are essential electron-transferring proteins. They make the journey of respiratory electrons from the cytoplasmic membrane through periplasm and over the outer membrane possible. Outer membrane cytochromes have the ability to catalyze the last step of the respiratory chains. Still, recent discoveries provided evidence that they are accompanied by further factors that allow or at least facilitate extracellular reduction. This review gives a condensed overview of our current knowledge of extracellular respiration, highlights recent discoveries, and discusses critically the influence of different strategies for terminal electron transfer reactions.
A Strawsonian look at desert

P.F. Strawson famously argued that reactive attitudes and ordinary moral practices justify moral assessments of blame, praise, and punishment. Here we consider whether Strawson's approach can illuminate the concept of desert. After reviewing standard attempts to analyze this concept and finding them lacking, we suggest that to deserve something is to justifiably receive a moral assessment in light of certain criteria – in particular, eligibility criteria (a subject's properties that make the subject principally eligible for moral assessments) and assignment criteria (particulars about the subject, act, and circumstances that justify assessments such as blame in a particular case). Strawson's analysis of the ordinary attitudes and practices of moral assessment hints at these criteria but does not unequivocally ground a notion of desert. Following Strawson's general naturalistic approach, we show that recent psychological research on folk concepts and practices regarding freedom, moral responsibility, and blame illuminates how people actually arrive at moral assessments, thus revealing the very eligibility criteria and assignment criteria we suggest ground a concept of desert. By pushing the Strawsonian line even further than Strawson did, by empirically investigating actual moral practice and folk understandings, we can illuminate desert and lend credence to Strawson's general anti-metaphysical position.
Cache optimization for real-time embedded systems

as IT Professional. His current research interests include modeling and simulation, cache memory optimization, multi-core architecture, and real-time embedded system. He has published several journal and conference papers in these areas. He has served as a session chair in various conferences including IMETI CCCT-2009 and IASTED PDCS-2008, iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The author sincerely acknowledges the encouragement and guidance from his dissertation advisor Dr. Imad Mahgoub throughout this work. The author expresses his gratitude to the members of the supervisory committee for their guidance and valuable suggestions. The author is grateful to the Department of Computer and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Office of Admissions for providing all kind of supports during this study and research work at Florida Atlantic University. The author thanks Motorola and Mirabilis Design for their supports to this work. The author expresses his thanks to his wife Manira Rani and friends for their supports throughout the writing of this manuscript. Finally, the author acknowledges the destructions from some individuals throughout this work. Cache memory is used, in most single-core and multi-core processors, to improve performance by bridging the speed gap between the main memory and CPU. Even though cache increases performance, it poses some serious challenges for embedded systems running real-time applications. Cache introduces execution time unpredictability due to its adaptive and dynamic nature and cache consumes vast amount of power to be operated. Energy requirement and execution time predictability are crucial for the success of real-time embedded systems. Various cache optimization schemes have been proposed to address the performance, power consumption, and predictability issues. However, currently available solutions are not adequate for real-time embedded systems as they do not address the performance, power consumption, and execution time predictability issues at the same time. Moreover, existing solutions are not suitable for dealing with multi-core architecture issues. vi In this dissertation, we develop a methodology through cache optimization for real-time embedded systems that can be used to analyze and improve execution time predictability and performance/power ratio at the same time. This methodology is effective for both single-core and multi-core systems. First, we develop a cache modeling and optimization technique for single-core systems to improve performance. Then, we develop a cache modeling and optimization technique for multi-core systems to improve performance/power ratio. We develop a cache locking scheme to improve execution time predictability for real-time systems. We introduce Miss Table (MT) based cache locking scheme with victim …
Psychological Pressure in Competitive Environments: New Evidence from Randomized Natural Experiments

Dynamic competitive settings may create psychological pressure when feedback about the performance of competitors is provided before the end of the competition. Such psychological pressure could produce a first-mover advantage, despite a priori equal winning probabilities. Using data from a randomized natural experiment-penalty shootouts in soccer-we reexamine evidence by Apesteguia and Palacios-Huerta [Apesteguia J, Palacios-Huerta I (2010) Psychological pressure in competitive environments: Evidence from a randomized natural experiment. Amer. Econom. Rev. 100(5):2548-2564]. They report a 21-percentage-point advantage for first movers over second movers in terms of winning probabilities. Extending their sample of 129 shootouts to 540, we fail to detect any significant first-mover advantage. Our results are fully consistent with recent evidence from other sports contests.
Effect of ancient population structure on the degree of polymorphism shared between modern human populations and ancient hominins

Recent comparisons between anatomically modern humans and ancient genomes of other hominins have raised the tantalizing, and hotly debated, possibility of hybridization. Although several tests of hybridization have been devised, they all rely on the degree to which different modern populations share genetic polymorphisms with the ancient genomes of other hominins. However, spatial population structure is expected to generate genetic patterns similar to those that might be attributed to hybridization. To investigate this problem, we take Neanderthals as a case study, and build a spatially explicit model of the shared history of anatomically modern humans and this hominin. We show that the excess polymorphism shared between Eurasians and Neanderthals is compatible with scenarios in which no hybridization occurred, and is strongly linked to the strength of population structure in ancient populations. Thus, we recommend caution in inferring admixture from geographic patterns of shared polymorphisms, and argue that future attempts to investigate ancient hybridization between humans and other hominins should explicitly account for population structure.
Efficient Optimization for Sparse Gaussian Process Regression

We propose an efficient optimization algorithm to select a subset of training data as the inducing set for sparse Gaussian process regression. Previous methods either use different objective functions for inducing set and hyperparameter selection, or else optimize the inducing set by gradient-based continuous optimization. The former approaches are harder to interpret and suboptimal, whereas the latter cannot be applied to discrete input domains or to kernel functions that are not differentiable with respect to the input. The algorithm proposed in this work estimates an inducing set and the hyperparameters using a single objective. It can be used to optimize either the marginal likelihood or a variational free energy. Space and time complexity are linear in training set size, and the algorithm can be applied to large regression problems on discrete or continuous domains. Empirical evaluation shows state-of-art performance in discrete cases, competitive prediction results as well as a favorable trade-off between training and test time in continuous cases.
Women's Economic Dependency: Nature, Causes, and Consequences

English translation © 2007 M.E. Sharpe, Inc., from the Russian text © 2006 the author. “Ekonomicheskaia zavisimost’ zhenshchin: sushchnost’, prichiny i posledstviia,” Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia, 2006, no. 4, pp. 47–57. A publication of the Russian Academy of Sciences; the Department of Philosophy, Sociology, Psychology, and Law, Russian Academy of Sciences; and the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs. Evgeniia Sergeevna Balabanova is a candidate of sociological sciences and a doctoral candidate in the faculty of social sciences at Nizhnii Novgorod N.I. Lobachevskii State University. The article was prepared based on the results of a survey that was carried out with the financial support of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Grant No. 03-77876-000-GSS. Translated by Kim Braithwaite. Sociological Research, vol. 46, no. 2, March–April 2007, pp. 5–21. © 2007 M.E. Sharpe, Inc. All rights reserved. ISSN 1061-0154/2007 $9.50 + 0.00. DOI 10.2753/SOR1061-0154460201
B-Mode Ultrasound Image Simulation in Deformable 3-D Medium

This paper presents an algorithm for fast image synthesis inside deformed volumes. Given the node displacements of a mesh and a reference 3-D image dataset of a predeformed volume, the method first maps the image pixels that need to be synthesized from the deformed configuration to the nominal predeformed configuration, where the pixel intensities are obtained easily through interpolation in the regular-grid structure of the reference voxel volume. This mapping requires the identification of the mesh element enclosing each pixel for every image frame. To accelerate this point location operation, a fast method of projecting the deformed mesh on image pixels is introduced in this paper. The method presented was implemented for ultrasound B-mode image simulation of a synthetic tissue phantom. The phantom deformation as a result of ultrasound probe motion was modeled using the finite element method. Experimental images of the phantom under deformation were then compared with the corresponding synthesized images using sum of squared differences and mutual information metrics. Both this quantitative comparison and a qualitative assessment show that realistic images can be synthesized using the proposed technique. An ultrasound examination system was also implemented to demonstrate that real-time image synthesis with the proposed technique can be successfully integrated into a haptic simulation.
Comment on van Kerkhove's "Wolf-Pack Theory"

van Kerkhove (2004/this issue) attempts to address an applied animal behavior problem. A cacophony of issues, however, points to the difficulty of understanding and integrating the scientific literature on principles of animal behavior and conditioning (learning theory). The author's primary focus seems to be on the inappropriateness of "wolf-pack theory" (not a theory at all) to guide treatment programs for the reduction of dog–dog (intraspecific) aggression. The author's commentary also includes other topics that deserve critical comment and may be conceptualized within several categories.
Twelve Species of the Nucleoid-associated Protein from Escherichia coli

The genome of Escherichia coli is composed of a single molecule of circular DNA with the length of about 47,000 kilobase pairs, which is associated with about 10 major DNA-binding proteins, altogether forming the nucleoid. We expressed and purified 12 species of the DNA-binding protein, i.e. CbpA (curved DNA-binding protein A), CbpB or Rob (curved DNA-binding protein B or right arm of the replication origin binding protein), DnaA (DNA-binding protein A), Dps (DNA-binding protein from starved cells), Fis (factor for inversion stimulation), Hfq (host factor for phage Qβ), H-NS (histone-like nucleoid structuring protein), HU (heat-unstable nucleoid protein), IciA (inhibitor of chromosome initiation A), IHF (integration host factor), Lrp (leucine-responsive regulatory protein), and StpA (suppressor oftd− phenotype A). The sequence specificity of DNA binding was determined for all the purified nucleoid proteins using gel-mobility shift assays. Five proteins (CbpB, DnaA, Fis, IHF, and Lrp) were found to bind to specific DNA sequences, while the remaining seven proteins (CbpA, Dps, Hfq, H-NS, HU, IciA, and StpA) showed apparently sequence-nonspecific DNA binding activities. Four proteins, CbpA, Hfq, H-NS, and IciA, showed the binding preference for the curved DNA. From the apparent dissociation constant (K d ) determined using the sequence-specific or nonspecific DNA probes, the order of DNA binding affinity were determined to be: HU > IHF > Lrp > CbpB(Rob) > Fis > H-NS > StpA > CbpA > IciA > Hfq/Dps, ranging from 25 nm (HU binding to the non-curved DNA) to 250 nm (Hfq binding to the non-curved DNA), under the assay conditions employed.
Internationalization, competitiveness and performance in athletics (1984–2006)

This study examines whether a process of internationalization has affected the level of athletic performance amongst high-level athletes competing on the world stage. Top 100 International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) rankings were compared at two time points: 1984 and 2006, by event and by gender. We identified internationalization as a determinant of the level of athletic performances. This level increased more in events that witnessed more important shifts in market shares (dynamic internationalization or competitiveness) and where dominance by a subset of countries (static internationalization) decreased. This internationalization clearly affects performances in men's athletics (as the performance has clearly gone up since 1984), but not in women's athletics. Here the general level of women's athletics has actually decreased.
Neuroprotective Strategy in Retinal Degeneration: Suppressing ER Stress-Induced Cell Death via Inhibition of the mTOR Signal

The retina is a specialized sensory organ, which is essential for light detection and visual formation in the human eye. Inherited retinal degenerations are a heterogeneous group of eye diseases that can eventually cause permanent vision loss. UPR (unfolded protein response) and ER (endoplasmic reticulum) stress plays an important role in the pathological mechanism of retinal degenerative diseases. mTOR (the mammalian target of rapamycin) kinase, as a signaling hub, controls many cellular processes, covering protein synthesis, RNA translation, ER stress, and apoptosis. Here, the hypothesis that inhibition of mTOR signaling suppresses ER stress-induced cell death in retinal degenerative disorders is discussed. This review surveys knowledge of the influence of mTOR signaling on ER stress arising from misfolded proteins and genetic mutations in retinal degenerative diseases and highlights potential neuroprotective strategies for treatment and therapeutic implications.
Discovery and validation of gene‐linked diagnostic SNP markers for assessing hybridization between Largemouth bass (Micropterus salmoides) and Florida bass (M. floridanus)

Efforts to improve recreational fisheries have included widespread stocking of Micropterus floridanus outside its native range of peninsular Florida. Hybridization of Florida bass (M. floridanus) with largemouth bass (Micropterus salmoides) has now dramatically expanded beyond a naturally occurring intergrade zone in the southeast U.S. In recent years, there has been growing interest in protecting the genetic integrity of native basses and assessing the impact and nature of M. salmoides/M. floridanus introgression from the standpoint of hatchery and sport‐fishery managers, fish biologists, ecologists and evolutionary biologists. Here, we conducted RNA‐seq‐based sequencing of the transcriptomes of M. salmoides, M. floridanus and their F1 hybrid and identified a set of 3674 SNP markers with fixed‐allelic differences from 2112 unique genes. We then developed a subset of 25 of these markers into a single diagnostic multiplex assay and validated its capacity for assessing integrity and hybridization in hatchery and wild populations of largemouth and Florida bass. The availability of this resource, high‐quality transcriptomes and a large set of gene‐linked SNPs, should greatly facilitate functional and population genomics studies in these key species and allow the identification of traits and processes under selection during introgressive hybridization.
Multimodality Imaging for Left Ventricular Hypertrophy Severity Grading: A Methodological Review

Left ventricular hypertrophy (LVH), defined by an increase in left ventricular mass (LVM), is a common cardiac finding generally caused by an increase in pressure or volume load. Assessing severity of LVH is of great clinical value in terms of prognosis and treatment choices, as LVH severity grades correlate with the risk for presenting cardiovascular events. The three main cardiac parameters for the assessment of LVH are wall thickness, LVM, and LV geometry. Echocardiography, with large availability and low cost, is the technique of choice for their assessment. Consequently, reference values for LVH severity in clinical guidelines are based on this technique. However, cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) and computed tomography (CT) are increasingly used in clinical practice, providing excellent image quality. Nevertheless, there is no extensive data to support reference values based on these techniques, while comparative studies between the three techniques show different results in wall thickness and LVM measurements. In this paper, we provide an overview of the different methodologies used to assess LVH severity with echocardiography, CMR and CT. We argue that establishing reference values per imaging modality, and possibly indexed to body surface area and classified per gender, ethnicity and age-group, might be essential for the correct classification of LVH severity.