Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Feel the Time. Time Perception as a Function of Interoceptive Processing

The nature of time is rooted in our body. Constellations of impulses arising from the flesh constantly create our interoceptive perception and, in turn, the unfolding of these perceptions defines human awareness of time. This study explored the connection between time perception and interoception and proposes the Interoceptive Buffer saturation (IBs) index. IBs evaluates subjects’ ability to process salient stimuli from the body by measuring subjective distortions of interoceptive time perception, i.e., the estimated duration of tactile interoceptive stimulations. Thirty female healthy subjects were recruited through consecutive sampling and assessed for common variables related to interoceptive alterations: depressive symptoms (Beck Depression Inventory, BDI-II), eating disorders (EDI-3) risk, and anxiety levels (State Trait Anxiety Inventory, STAI). Interoceptive cardiac accuracy (IAc) was assessed as well. Subjects performed verbal time estimation of interoceptive stimuli (IBs) delivered using a specifically designed interoceptive tactile stimulator, as well as verbal time estimation of visual and auditory stimuli. Results showed that IBs index positively correlated with IAc, and negatively with EDI-3 Drive for Thinness (DT) risk subscale. Moreover, IBs index was positively predicted by IAc, and negatively predicted by DT and somatic factors of depression. Our results suggest that underestimations in interoceptive time perception are connected to different psychological conditions characterized by a diminished processing of high salience stimuli from the body. Conversely, overestimations of the duration of interoceptive stimuli appear to be function of subjects’ ability to correctly perceive their own bodily information. Evidence supported IBs index, fostering the concept of interoceptive treatments for clinical purposes.
Monte Carlo model of brain emulation development Future of

Obviously this is a hugely ambitious project far outside current capabilities, possibly not even feasible in theory. However, should such a technology ever become feasible there are good reasons to expect the consequences to be dramatic: it would enable software intelligence, copyable human capital, new ethical problems, and (depending on philosophical outlook) immortality and a posthuman species. Even if one does not ascribe a high probability to WBE being ever feasible it makes sense to watch for trends indicating that it may be emerging, since adapting to its emergence may require significant early and global effort taking decades.
BREEDING BIOLOGY OF PASSERINES IN A SUBTROPICAL MONTANE FOREST IN NORTHWESTERN ARGENTINA

Abstract The breeding ecology of south temperate bird species is less widely known than that of north temperate species, yet because they comprise a large portion of the world's avian diversity, knowledge of their breeding ecology can contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of the geographic diversity of avian reproductive traits and life history strategies. We provide the first detailed examination of the reproductive strategies of 18 forest passerines of subtropical, northwestern Argentina. Mean clutch sizes were smaller and egg mass was greater than for north temperate birds, but differed among species and nest types, with cavity-nesters having larger clutches than species with open-cup and enclosed nests. Across all species, the average breeding season duration was 50 days; thus, the common perception that southern species have smaller clutch sizes because of longer breeding seasons is not supported in this community. Daily nest predation rates were influenced by nest type, cavity nests suffering the least from predation, as found in north temperate systems. Only females incubated eggs in all but one species, whereas both parents fed and cared for nestlings in all species. Mean nest attentiveness was low compared to north temperate passerines. Mean hourly nestling feeding rates differed among species and were negatively related to nest predation risk. In short, coexisting species in this subtropical forest varied in their life history strategies, in part correlated with variation in nest predation risk, but also differing from north temperate species.
Signaling and Employer Learning with Instruments

Do matching frictions affect youth employment in developing countries? We organise job fairs in Addis Ababa, to match firms with a representative sample of young, educated job-seekers. We create very few jobs: one for approximately 10 firms that attended. We explore reasons for this, and find significant evidence for mismatched expectations: about wages, about firms requirements and about the average quality of job-seekers. We find evidence of learning and updating of beliefs in the aftermath of the fair. This changes behaviour: both workers and firms invest more in formal job search after the fairs
Risk Factors for the Development of Pneumonia in Older Adults With Burn Injury

Older adults with burns are at risk for worse outcomes because of factors related to age, comorbidities, and response to treatment. Although the impact of pneumonia has been previously described in burn patients, less is known in the older adult population. In this study, we used the National Burn Repository to characterize patient and injury factors associated with pneumonia development in older adults with burns. We examined the records of all patients in the National Burn Repository aged 55 years and older from 1995 to 2007. To better characterize the effects of age on outcomes, patients were stratified into three categories: 55 to 64 years, 65 to 74 years, and 75 years and older. Pneumonia was identified by listed complications and ICD-9 codes. Comorbidities were classified by Charlson Comorbidity Index Score. Unadjusted and multivariate regression analyses were performed to distinguish the impact of age, comorbidities, and injury factors on pneumonia development and mortality. A total of 23,794 patient records met inclusion criteria during the study period, and 2,052 (8.6%) had pneumonia. Patients who developed pneumonia were more likely to be men (65 vs 56%, P < .001), have higher TBSA (21 vs 13%, P < .001), have sustained inhalation injury (21 vs 7%, P < .001), and have comorbid condition (34 vs 13%, P < .001). On multivariate analysis, factors significantly associated with pneumonia development were male sex, percent TBSA, inhalation injury, and presence of comorbidity. Specifically, chronic lung and heart disease had adjusted odds ratio (OR) of 2.70 and 3.48, respectively, for development of pneumonia (P < .001). By logistic regression, adjusted OR for pneumonia were 0.89 (95% CI 0.74–1.06, P = .18) in the 65 to 74 years age group and 1.26 (95% CI 1.07–1.48, P = .005) in the oldest group compared with the 55 to 64 years age group. Pneumonia during hospitalization was associated with an adjusted OR of 1.91 for death (95% CI 1.61–2.27, P < .001) after controlling for the factors of age, sex, comorbidity, TBSA, and inhalation injury. Injury factors and the presence of comorbidities consistently predicted the development of pneumonia in this large national patient sample. Higher age category also predicted higher pneumonia risk, although this association was only significant in the highest age group. This study, thus, highlights the importance of comorbidities over chronological age in pneumonia development in older adults with burn injuries.
Making a New Dog?

We are in the middle of a period of rapid and substantial environmental change. One impact of this upheaval is increasing contact between humans and other animals, including wildlife that take advantage of anthropogenic foods. As a result of increased interaction, the evolution and function of many species may be altered through time via processes including domestication and hybridization, potentially leading to speciation events. We discuss the ecological and management importance of such possibilities, using gray wolves and other large carnivores as case studies. We identify five main ways that carnivores might be affected: changes to social structures, behavior and movement patterns, changes in survivorship across wildto human-dominated environments, evolutionary divergence, and potential speciation. As the human population continues to grow and urban areas expand while some large carnivore species reoccupy parts of their former distributions, there will be important implications for human welfare and conservation policy.
EDA for cyber-physical systems

Over the years, electronic design automation (EDA) has been moving up the design abstraction ladder. Starting from automating tasks like placement, floor-planning and routing in integrated circuits design, EDA now encompasses many system-level design tasks. However, the next challenge facing the EDA community is to develop methods and also tools for cyber-physical systems (CPS) design. For these systems, physical processes, control algorithms that control these processes, and the computation and communication platforms on which these control algorithms are implemented — are all modeled and designed in a tightly integrated fashion. Currently available EDA methods and tools are not equipped to handle such integrated modeling and design. In particular, there is a big disconnect between modeling tools — like Matlab/Simulink — that are used for modeling plant dynamics and designing their controllers, and the tools that are used to design and configure the hardware/software platforms on which these controllers are eventually implemented. In this extended abstract we discuss the consequences of this disconnect and possible ways of addressing this situation.
Q#: Enabling Scalable Quantum Computing and Development with a High-level DSL

Quantum computing exploits quantum phenomena such as superposition and entanglement to realize a form of parallelism that is not available to traditional computing. It offers the potential of significant computational speed-ups in quantum chemistry, materials science, cryptography, and machine learning. The dominant approach to programming quantum computers is to provide an existing high-level language with libraries that allow for the expression of quantum programs. This approach can permit computations that are meaningless in a quantum context; prohibits succint expression of interaction between classical and quantum logic; and does not provide important constructs that are required for quantum programming. We present Q#, a quantum-focused domain-specific language explicitly designed to correctly, clearly and completely express quantum algorithms. Q# provides a type system; a tightly constrained environment to safely interleave classical and quantum computations; specialized syntax; symbolic code manipulation to automatically generate correct transformations of quantum operations; and powerful functional constructs which aid composition.
Analyzing the benefits of the combined interaction of head and eye tracking in 3D visualization information

This work presents an evaluation of the joint interaction of eye tracking and head tracking in a 3D information visualization environment. In this context, it was conducted a task-based evaluation of the interactions, in a prototype using 3D scatter plots, such as navigation, selection, filters, and other typical interactions of an information visualization tool. The tasks mentioned were performed through interactions using head tracking for navigation and eye tracking for selection, and they were evaluated according to quantitative metrics (time and response of a questionnaire) and qualitative (extracted using the Think-Aloud Protocol). The results show that the "click by blinking" configuration was unstable, but the head tracking as a form of navigation showed a greater accuracy in the interaction.
An M-ary code shifted differential chaos shift keying scheme

In this paper, by applying M-ary constellation modulation to code shifted differential chaos shift keying (CS-DCSK), a new M-ary DCSK which is called CS-MDCSK, is proposed. In the proposed scheme, the reference chaos signal is the same with the CS-DCSK, and the two orthogonal components of information bearing signal are obtained by two Walsh codes. Furthermore, the proposed CS-MDCSK is extended to general scheme (GCS-MDCSK), which transmits more than one M-ary constellation information bearing signals with one reference. Since high order constellations are used, the proposed scheme enhances the spectrum efficiency compared to CS-DCSK and GCS-DCSK. By computer simulations, the bit error rate (BER) performance of two proposed systems are compared to that of CS-DCSK and GCS-DCSK, respectively. Simulation results show that the proposed systems outperform the CS-DCSK and GCS-DCSK when 4-ary constellation is applied.
Behavioral mechanisms of context fear generalization in mice

There is growing interest in generalization of learned contextual fear, driven in part by the hypothesis that mood and anxiety disorders stem from impaired hippocampal mechanisms of fear generalization and discrimination. However, there has been relatively little investigation of the behavioral and procedural mechanisms that might control generalization of contextual fear. We assessed the relative contribution of different contextual features to context fear generalization and characterized how two common conditioning protocols—foreground (uncued) and background (cued) contextual fear conditioning—affected context fear generalization. In one experiment, mice were fear conditioned in context A, and then tested for contextual fear both in A and in an alternate context created by changing a subset of A's elements. The results suggest that floor configuration and odor are more salient features than chamber shape. A second experiment compared context fear generalization in background and foreground context conditioning. Although foreground conditioning produced more context fear than background conditioning, the two procedures produced equal amounts of generalized fear. Finally, results indicated that the order of context tests (original first versus alternate first) significantly modulates context fear generalization, perhaps because the original and alternate contexts are differentially sensitive to extinction. Overall, results demonstrate that context fear generalization is sensitive to procedural variations and likely reflects the operation of multiple interacting psychological and neural mechanisms.
Embracing imperfection in learning analytics

Learning Analytics (LA) sits at the confluence of many contributing disciplines, which brings the risk of hidden assumptions inherited from those fields. Here, we consider a hidden assumption derived from computer science, namely, that improving computational accuracy in classification is always a worthy goal. We demonstrate that this assumption is unlikely to hold in some important educational contexts, and argue that embracing computational "imperfection" can improve outcomes for those scenarios. Specifically, we show that learner-facing approaches aimed at "learning how to learn" require more holistic validation strategies. We consider what information must be provided in order to reasonably evaluate algorithmic tools in LA, to facilitate transparency and realistic performance comparisons.
A survey on various routing protocols in cognitive radio networks

In the modern eras there is a swift progress in the evolution of various wireless devices and the applications in it . so, there is a need for better utilization of the available resources and Spectrum. In order to overcome this condition where one need to use the spectrum unused called as spectrum holes. The Cognitive radio networks have evolved and have enabled the effective usage of wireless spectrum . if the spectrum approach and selection is opportunistic in the selection of the band in spectrum it become useful in case of unlicensed or primary users. The best available spectrum hole is to be detected and is to be utilized by the secondary user. It can be done without interference to the primary users and also taking into consideration about already occupied spectrum holes. Many routing algorithms have been developed in this regard which mainly aims at providing end-to-end communication between the secondary users and also avoiding interference with the primary users. The main challenges that are faced by a routing protocol is that, the module used for routing must be responsive of the physical environment. so that precise decision is made in path selection and stability of the selected path is to be maintained. In case of sudden presence of the primary user, it may lead to link failure and in turn requires re-routing. To overcome these challenges an effective routing algorithm for a multi-hop cognitive radio network is proposed, where spectrum awareness and route maintenance is taken care. The obtained results are presented in an analytical framework and a quantifiable approach is followed in representing the throughput and delay.
Effects of gender on the health and development of medically at-risk infants.

OBJECTIVES To examine gender-differentiated health and cognitive/motor/language developmental outcomes among medically at-risk infants. DESIGN Longitudinal descriptive and comparative secondary analysis. SETTING Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, intermediate care unit, and infectious disease clinic of tertiary medical centers in the southeast and east United States. PARTICIPANTS One hundred eight (108) premature infants, 67 medically fragile infants, and 83 infants seropositive for HIV. METHODS Neonatal and later health variables were obtained from the medical record to determine the technology dependence scores and frequency of common health problems. Data for physical growth and cognitive/motor/language development were obtained through the physical measurement, including the Bayley Scales of Infant Development-Second Edition, the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scale, the Toll Control Developmental Checklist, and the Preschool Language Scale-3 during home visits between 6 and 27 months corrected ages. RESULTS Fewer effects on health and developmental outcomes related to gender were observed with medically fragile infants than the other two groups of infants. The cognitive/motor/language scores were decreased with increasing age of the infants in all groups. CONCLUSION Male gender can be considered a significant biological risk factor for infants' cognitive and motor development, especially for premature infants. Because of their increased risk, it is recommended that male infants who are born prematurely or seropositive for HIV have early and advanced developmental screening tests by trained personnel through periodic pediatric clinic.
Fronto-Parietal Brain Responses to Visuotactile Congruence in an Anatomical Reference Frame

Spatially and temporally congruent visuotactile stimulation of a fake hand together with one’s real hand may result in an illusory self-attribution of the fake hand. Although this illusion relies on a representation of the two touched body parts in external space, there is tentative evidence that, for the illusion to occur, the seen and felt touches also need to be congruent in an anatomical reference frame. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging and a somatotopical, virtual reality-based setup to isolate the neuronal basis of such a comparison. Participants’ index or little finger was synchronously touched with the index or little finger of a virtual hand, under congruent or incongruent orientations of the real and virtual hands. The left ventral premotor cortex responded significantly more strongly to visuotactile co-stimulation of the same versus different fingers of the virtual and real hand. Conversely, the left anterior intraparietal sulcus responded significantly more strongly to co-stimulation of different versus same fingers. Both responses were independent of hand orientation congruence and of spatial congruence of the visuotactile stimuli. Our results suggest that fronto-parietal areas previously associated with multisensory processing within peripersonal space and with tactile remapping evaluate the congruence of visuotactile stimulation on the body according to an anatomical reference frame.
Sharing the load: Mex67–Mtr2 cofunctions with Los1 in primary tRNA nuclear export

Here, Chatterjee et al. describe a novel tRNA nuclear export pathway that functions in parallel to the tRNA nuclear exporter Los1. They provide molecular, genetic, cytological, and biochemical evidence that the Mex67–Mtr2 (TAP–p15) heterodimer, best characterized for its essential role in mRNA nuclear export, cofunctions with Los1 in tRNA nuclear export.
Psychological Health and Function After Burn Injury: Setting Research Priorities

There are many sources of threat to the psychological health of an individual who has sustained an acute burn injury, including the immediate experience of intense, excruciating pain that continues at least until wound closure and, as is now becoming clear, becomes chronic in a substantial portion of survivors. This pain is most severe during the frequent and unavoidable dressing changes and rehabilitation procedures but is often quite intense even at rest. The injury and pain are accompanied by many other challenges to psychological equilibrium, such as the many secondary complications that may arise. The traumatic event itself often includes additional threat from perceived loss of control, horror, or hopelessness and may lead to intense symptoms of distress. The burn wound results in immediate changes and may lead to scarring and long-term alterations in one’s preinjury appearance and level of physical functioning. Separation from loved ones and others in the social support system is another source of stress (either through dislocation or death), as is disruption of one’s roles and daily routines. This article describes some of the research challenges and opportunities related to the psychological issues that can follow a burn injury. Psychological responses to burn injury may take the form of psychopathology (eg, depression, posttraumatic stress disorder [PTSD]), posttraumatic growth (eg, finding new meaning, enhanced hope, and confidence), or a combination of behavioral, cognitive, and emotional responses that comprise an adaptive process of psychosocial rehabilitation (eg, resilience, active coping). Many survivors, whether experiencing psychopathology, posttraumatic growth, or adaptive psychosocial rehabilitation, are in need of assistance. For example, substantial evidence indicates that, after major burn injury, severe psychological distress is among the most prevalent, enduring, and impairing of secondary complications and may manifest as sleep disturbance, depression, body image dissatisfaction, or posttraumatic distress. Severe distress is present in 33% of adults and PTSD in more than 25% of adults and children. There is good evidence that psychological health concerns in the acute care setting have long-term consequences. The prevalence, severity, and enduring nature of psychological distress after burn injury makes it a priority in rehabilitation efforts.