Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Functional Impact of Dendritic Branch-Point Morphology

Cortical pyramidal cells store multiple features of complex synaptic input in individual dendritic branches and independently regulate the coupling between dendritic and somatic spikes. Branch points in apical trees exhibit wide ranges of sizes and shapes, and the large diameter ratio between trunk and oblique dendrites exacerbates impedance mismatch. The morphological diversity of dendritic bifurcations could thus locally tune neuronal excitability and signal integration. However, these aspects have never been investigated. Here, we first quantified the morphological variability of branch points from two-photon images of rat CA1 pyramidal neurons. We then investigated the geometrical features affecting spike initiation, propagation, and timing with a computational model validated by glutamate uncaging experiments. The results suggest that even subtle membrane readjustments at branch points could drastically alter the ability of synaptic input to generate, propagate, and time action potentials.
Effects of Subchronic Clozapine and Haloperidol on Striatal Glutamatergic Synapses

Abstract: Subchronic treatment with haloperidol increases the number of asymmetric glutamate synapses associated with a perforated postsynaptic density in the striatum. To characterize these synaptic changes further, the effects of subchronic (28 days) administration of an atypical antipsychotic, clozapine (30 mg/kg, s.c.), or a typical antipsychotic, haloperidol (0.5 mg/kg, s.c.), on the binding of [3H]MK‐801 to the NMDA receptor‐linked ion channel complex and on the in situ hybridization of riboprobes for NMDAR2A and 2B subunits and splice variants of the NMDAR1 subunit were examined in striatal preparations from rats. The density of striatal glutamate immunogold labeling associated with nerve terminals of all asymmetric synapses and the immunoreactivity of those asymmetric synapses associated with a perforated postsynaptic density were also examined by electron microscopy. Subchronic neuroleptic administration had no effect on [3H]MK‐801 binding to striatal membrane preparations. Both drugs increased glutamate immunogold labeling in nerve terminals of all asymmetric synapses, but only haloperidol increased the density of glutamate immunoreactivity within nerve terminals of asymmetric synapses containing a perforated postsynaptic density. Whereas subchronic administration of clozapine, but not haloperidol, resulted in a significant increase in the hybridization of a riboprobe that labels all splice variants of the NMDAR1 subunit, both drugs significantly decreased the abundance of NMDAR1 subunit mRNA containing a 63‐base insert. Neither drug altered mRNA for the 2A subunit, but clozapine significantly increased hybridization of a probe for the 2B subunit. The data suggest that some neuroleptic effects may be mediated by glutamatergic systems and that typical and atypical antipsychotics can have varying effects on the density of glutamate in presynaptic terminals and on the expression of specific NMDA receptor splice variant mRNAs. Alternatively, NMDAR1 subunit splice variants may differentially respond to interactions with glutamate.
The ORFanage: an ORFan database

As each newly sequenced genome contains a significant number of protein-coding ORFs that are species-, family- or lineage-specific, many interesting questions arise about the evolution and role of these ORFs and of the genomes they are part of. We refer to these poorly conserved ORFs as singleton or paralogous ORFans if they are unique to one genome, or as orthologous ORFans if they appear only in a family of closely related organisms and have no homolog in other genomes. In order to study and classify ORFans we have constructed the ORFanage, an ORFan database. This database consists of the predicted ORFs in fully sequenced microbial genomes, and enables searching for the three types of ORFans in any subset of the genomes chosen by the user. The ORFanage could help in choosing interesting targets for further genomic and evolutionary studies. The ORFanage is accessible via http://www.bioinformatics. buffalo. edu/ORFanage.
CRAWLING THE ALGORITHMIC FOUNDATIONS OF RECOMMENDATION TECHNOLOGIES

The WorldWide Web has emerged during the last decade as one of the most prominent research fields. However, its size, heterogeneity and complexity to a large extent overcome our ability to efficiently manipulate data using traditional techniques. In order to cope with these characteristics several Web applications require intelligent tools that may help to extract the proper information relevant to the user's requests. In this thesis we report on the algorithmic aspects of recommendation technologies, which refer to algorithms and systems that have been developed to help users find items that may be of their interest from a variety of available items. Collaborative Filtering (CF), the prevalent method for providing recommendations, has been successfully adopted by research and industrial applications. However, its applicability is limited due to the sparsity and the scalability problems. Sparsity refers to a situation that transactional data are lacking or are insufficient, while scalability refers to the expensive computations required by CF. For addressing the scalability problem we propose a method of Incremental CF (ICF) that is based on incremental updates of user-to-user similarities. Our ICF algorithm (i) is not based on any approximation method, thus it gives the potential for high-quality recommendations formulation, and (ii) provides recommendations orders of magnitude faster than classic CF and thus, is suitable for online application. To provide high-quality recommendations even when data are sparse, we propose a method for alleviating sparsity using trust inferences. Trust inferences are transitive associations between users in the context of an underlying social network and are valuable sources of additional information that help dealing with the sparsity and the cold-start problems. Our experimental evaluation indicates that our method of trust inferences significantly improves the quality performance of the classic CF method. Finally, we provide a roadmap for future research directions that extend recommendation technologies to more complex types of applications and identify various research opportunities for developing them. To my parents Eleni and Ioannis, and my brother Sakis for their carry and support in all aspects of my life
Robot-directed speech detection using Multimodal Semantic Confidence based on speech, image, and motion

In this paper, we propose a novel method to detect robot-directed (RD) speech that adopts the Multimodal Semantic Confidence (MSC) measure. The MSC measure is used to decide whether the speech can be interpreted as a feasible action under the current physical situation in an object manipulation task. This measure is calculated by integrating speech, image, and motion confidence measures with weightings that are optimized by logistic regression. Experimental results show that, compared with a baseline method that uses speech confidence only, MSC achieved an absolute increase of 5% for clean speech and 12% for noisy speech in terms of average maximum F-measure.
Learning and adapting for organisational change: researching union education in Australia

The last quarter century saw a restructuring of employment, production and trade and a dramatic decline in union membership and density levels. There are many explanations for this, including the hostile industrial relations framework imposed by many governments, but there have been other factors such as the growth of new non-unionised industries that often rely on casualised labour; new attitudes to unions by younger workers; a political/cultural decline in the workers' movement under neo-liberalism; and an inability by many unions to adapt to these changes. Now dramatic economic changes arising from the global financial crisis that will see increased unemployment and further industry restructuring, along with the restructuring and re-skilling implications of climate change, pose new challenges for trade unions. Drawing on research with senior Australian union officials about the movement's education and training activities this paper considers the relevance of the adaptive systems literature for understanding the operational environments facing unions as they become larger more complex organisations. It considers the existing suite of education activities with reference to Illeris' tension field and the literature of union renewal that emphasises the need to develop new solidarities and therefore a broader conception of education, learning and development.
The Significance of Religion in Advancing a Culturally Sensitive Approach towards Child Maltreatment

Religion is a dimension that can have a significant effect on child-rearing beliefs and parenting behaviors, and consequently on parents' approach toward child maltreatment. This potential effect can be explained by Kohn's (1963) hypothesis about the relationship between values, a significant component of religion, and child-rearing practices. This subject has been examined in a study that was the first of its kind on ultra-orthodox Jewish families in Israel. The findings provide preliminary knowledge on the major influence that the religious dimension and its related collectivist norms have in this area. A semi-structured questionnaire, which included fourteen vignettes of abuse and neglect situations, was utilized to interview fifty families. The findings indicate that the rationale given by parents for their expectations from children and their perceptions of which child-rearing practices are acceptable and which are not were based mainly on religious values and norms. Religion also has an effect on whom the families are willing to involve and to what extent. These results emphasize the necessity for cultural sensitivity when working with families in their own social context when child maltreatment has occurred.
Workspace Consistency : A Programming Model for Shared Memory Parallelism

Recent interest in deterministic parallelism has yielded new deterministic programming languages, which offer promising features but require rewriting existing code, and deterministic schedulers, which emulate existing thread APIs but do not eliminate races from the basic programming model. Workspace consistency (WC) is a new synchronization and memory consistency model that offers a “naturally deterministic,” race-free programming model that can be adopted in both new or existing languages. WC’s basic semantics are inspired by—and intended to be as easily understood as— the “parallel assignment” construct in sequential languages such as Perl and JavaScript, where concurrent threads always read their inputs before writing shared outputs. Prototype implementations of a restricted form of WC already exist, supporting only strictly hierarchical fork/join-style synchronization, but this paper develops and explores the model in more detail and extends it to support non-hierarchical synchronization patterns such as producer/consumer pipelines and futures.
Resilience and Professional Quality of Life in Staff Working with People with Intellectual Disabilities and Offending Behavior in Community Based and Institutional Settings

Staff in forensic services for people with intellectual disabilities (ID) are expected to deal with a wide range of emotional challenges when providing care. The potential impact of this demanding work has not been systematically explored previously. This article explores the professional quality of life (QoL) and the resilience (hardiness) of the staff in this setting. The Professional QoL questionnaire and the Disposional Resilience Scale were completed by staff (n=85, 80% response rate) in the Norwegian forensic service for ID offenders. Responses from staff working in institutional settings were compared to those from staff in local community services. Staff in the local community services had higher resilience scores compared to the staff in the institutional setting, (t=2.19; P<0.05). However in the other QoL and resilience domains there were no differences between the staff in the two settings. The greater sense of resilient control among community staff may be a function of both the number of service users they work with and the institutional demands they face. Even though these participants worked with relatively high risk clients, they did not report significantly impaired quality of life compared to other occupations.
The Linguistic Shaping of Thought: A Study in the Impact of Language on Thinking in China and the West. By Alfred Bloom. [Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1981. 104 pp. £9·95.]

Sources for the facts and figures are Chinese journals, mainland and Hong Kong, such as Beijing Review, China Reconstructs, Ming Bao, etc.; western journals, The Economist, Business America, Wall Street Journal; and official publications, mostly American, from State Department and Congress committees, together with such official decrees and regulations to be found in the monitoring of Chinese broadcasts; thus, five pages of Provisional Methods of Implementing the PRC Academic Degrees Regulations (June 1981) or 30 pages of economic data " compiled from fragmentary data published in the Chinese Press. " All this is divided up into 15 sections plus one more of material that cannot be fitted in elsewhere " Special Topics "; where Prohibition of Airguns in Areas of Peking jostles " Five Stresses and Four Points of Beauty. " In short, a compilation of somewhat dubious value, even allowing for the well-known fact that the truth about China is hard to get at, even for its rulers in some cases. Certainly neither the value of the material printed nor its truth nor its usefulness to any user of this book seems to have been considered. The reader must find his own way about without benefit of an index, though the index of the four earlier volumes is offered. RICHARD HARRIS
Relations Among Preschool Children's Understanding of Visual Perspective Taking, False Belief, and Lying

This study investigated the relations among preschool children's ability to understand that other people see things differently than they do, that other people can believe things differently than the children know to be true, and that they can manipulate others' beliefs through intentional lying. Children between the ages of 3 and 5 were given tasks that tested their knowledge of Level 2 visual perspective taking, understanding of false belief, and the discriminative use of deceptive ploys. The Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT-III) was administered as a measure of language proficiency. The children's scores on the three types of tasks were correlated with each other and with children's age, but not with scores on the PPVT-III. Most children either passed all the tasks or failed all the tasks. Regression analyses indicated that scores on visual perspective taking and false belief independently predicted each other, and scores on false belief and the discriminative use of deception independently predicted each other. The results provide evidence that advances in visual perspective taking, false belief understanding, and the discriminative use of deceptive ploys are developmentally related and occur in close synchrony.
Increasing resistance to vancomycin and other glycopeptides in Staphylococcus aureus.

Strains of Staphylococcus aureus with reduced susceptibility to glycopeptides have been reported from Japan, the United States, Europe, and the Far East. Although isolates with homogeneous resistance to vancomycin (MICs = 8 microg/mL) continue to be rare, there are increasing reports of strains showing heteroresistance, often with vancomycin MICs in the 1-4 microg/mL range. Most isolates with reduced susceptibility to vancomycin appear to have developed from preexisting methicillin-resistant S. aureus infections. Many of the isolates with reduced susceptibility to glycopeptides have been associated with therapeutic failures with vancomycin. Although nosocomial spread of the vancomycin-intermediate S. aureus (VISA) strains has not been observed in U.S. hospitals, spread of VISA strains has apparently occurred in Japan. Broth microdilution tests held a full 24 hours are optimal for detecting resistance in the laboratory; however, methods for detecting heteroresistant strains are still in flux. Disk-diffusion tests, including the Stokes method, do not detect VISA strains. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other groups have issued recommendations regarding appropriate infection control procedures for patients infected with these strains.
23 Personality and Mental Health

The importance of personality to mental health entails accurate definition of both personality and mental health. According to World Health Organization (WHO) health is defined as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity (WHO, 2001b, p.1). Mental health and mental well-being are included in the foregoing definition of health which emphasizes on considering mental health as a construct interconnecting with other variables in a unified context. In addition of, this definition, psychologists deal with mental health in some terms. looking at the realm of mental health, we meet terms such as mental health (WHO, 2001), “psychological health” (Rosenthal & Hooley, 2010), well-being (Josefsson et al., 2011), “subjective well-being” or “happiness” (Lucas & Diener, 2008; Ryan and Deci, 2001), “Psychological well-being” or “eudaimonia” (Cloninger & Zohar 2011; Wood, Joseph, & Maltby, 2011) “mental hygiene” (Barenbaum & Winter, 2008) and “psychological wealth” (Diener & Biswas-Diener, 2008) that need to be explained in order to illustrate a correct definition and understanding of mental health. Thus, it is clear that, mental Health cannot be considered separately, and in order to have a better understanding of mental health, its major components such as physical, mental, and spiritual well-being should be considered together (Cloninger & Zohar, 2011).
Novel approaches to antifungal prophylaxis

Antifungal prophylaxis represents a significant advance in the management of patients at risk from fungal infections in a variety of settings. Identification of patients at the highest risk and the utilisation of safe and effective drugs maximises the benefits of prophylaxis. Situations in which antifungal prophylaxis has been shown to be useful are bone marrow transplantation, liver and lung transplantation, surgical and neonatal intensive care units, secondary prophylaxis of fungal infections associated with HIV and neutropenia associated haematological malignancies and their treatment. New antifungal agents, such as the echinocandins and the new azoles, are available and have a potential role in antifungal prophylaxis. Future studies should evaluate which strategy is more useful; prophylaxis or pre-emptive therapy.
Beyond Parity Constraints: Fourier Analysis of Hash Functions for Inference

Random projections have played an important role in scaling up machine learning and data mining algorithms. Recently they have also been applied to probabilistic inference to estimate properties of high-dimensional distributions; however, they all rely on the same class of projections based on universal hashing. We provide a general framework to analyze random projections which relates their statistical properties to their Fourier spectrum, which is a well-studied area of theoretical computer science. Using this framework we introduce two new classes of hash functions for probabilistic inference and model counting that show promising performance on synthetic and real-world benchmarks.
Differential expression of adhesion molecules and chemokines between nasal and small intestinal mucosae: implications for T‐ and sIgA+ B‐lymphocyte recruitment

Nasal and small intestinal mucosae are the first sites of contact with infectious agents and the sites of T‐cell‐mediated and secreted immunoglobulin A (IgA)‐mediated defences against pathogens. We investigated the factors controlling the infiltration of CD3+ T lymphocytes and surface IgA+ (sIgA+) B lymphocytes into swine epithelium and lamina propria (LP) within and between these two mucosal effector sites. Vascular addressins, vascular cell adhesion molecule 1 and mucosal addressin cell adhesion molecule‐1 were reciprocally expressed in both mucosae. Strong expression of α4β1 relative to α4β7 was characteristic of CD3+ T cells in nasal mucosa LP and epithelium and of sIgA+ cells in nasal mucosa epithelium. The same profile was observed on corresponding blood cells. Conversely, higher levels of integrins β7 and α4β7 than α4β1 were characteristic of CD3+ T cells and sIgA+ cells in the small intestine. However, about 40% of the LP‐activated sIgA+ cells displayed sIgAhigh, integrin α4 and integrin α4 expression. Whereas CCL19, CXCL12, CCL21 and CCL28 messenger RNAs were similarly expressed in both mucosae, CCL25 messenger RNA was only expressed in the small intestine. Thus, the nasal and small intestine mucosae represent separate compartments for infiltration by CD3+ T cells and sIgA+ effector cells, with the exception of a population of small intestine activated sIgA+ cells, which may gain access to both mucosae.
A Comparison of Variant Calling Pipelines Using Genome in a Bottle as a Reference

High-throughput sequencing, especially of exomes, is a popular diagnostic tool, but it is difficult to determine which tools are the best at analyzing this data. In this study, we use the NIST Genome in a Bottle results as a novel resource for validation of our exome analysis pipeline. We use six different aligners and five different variant callers to determine which pipeline, of the 30 total, performs the best on a human exome that was used to help generate the list of variants detected by the Genome in a Bottle Consortium. Of these 30 pipelines, we found that Novoalign in conjunction with GATK UnifiedGenotyper exhibited the highest sensitivity while maintaining a low number of false positives for SNVs. However, it is apparent that indels are still difficult for any pipeline to handle with none of the tools achieving an average sensitivity higher than 33% or a Positive Predictive Value (PPV) higher than 53%. Lastly, as expected, it was found that aligners can play as vital a role in variant detection as variant callers themselves.
Flying Dutchmen? Return Reasoning Among Dutch Lifestyle Migrants in Rural Sweden

Abstract This article aims to examine return reasoning among Dutch lifestyle migrant families in Hällefors, rural Sweden. It addresses two questions: after migrating to Hällefors, what influences return reasoning among Dutch families? What does this imply for return migration and transnationalism within lifestyle migration research? The questions are addressed through analysis of Dutch migrant families’ narratives, collected in 2011 and subsequent years. The findings are related to issues of transnationalism and return migration within lifestyle migration research. As many of these intra-EU urban–rural migrants are seriously considering returning, this study draws attention to temporary lifestyle migration over longer periods.