Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
When Self-Affirmations Reduce Defensiveness: Timing Is Key

Research on self-affirmation has shown that simple reminders of self-integrity reduce people’s tendency to respond defensively to threat. Recent research has suggested it is irrelevant whether the self-affirmation exercise takes place before or after the threat or the individual’s defensive response to it, supposedly because the meaning of threats is continuously reprocessed. However, four experiments revealed that affirmations may be effective only when introduced prior to the initiation of a defensive response. Affirmations introduced before threatening feedback reduced defensive responding; affirming after a threat was effective in reducing defensiveness only if the defensive conclusion had yet to be reached. Even though threats may activate a defensive motivation, the authors’ results suggest that defensive responses may not be spontaneous and may be prompted only when suggested by the dependent measures themselves. This explains why some affirmations positioned after threats are effective in reducing defensiveness. Implications for self-affirmation theory are discussed.
Virtually zooming-in with sensory substitution for blind users

When perceiving a scene visually we constantly move our eyes and focus on particular details, which we integrate into a coherent percept. Can blind individuals integrate visual information this way? Can they even conceptualize zooming-in on sub-parts of visual images? We explore this question virtually using the EyeMusic Sensory Substitution Device (SSD). SSDs transfer information usually received by one sense via another, here `seeing' with sound. This question is especially important for SSD users since SSDs typically down-sample the visual stimuli into low-resolution images in which zooming-in to sub-parts could significantly improve users' perception. Five blind participants used the EyeMusic with a zoom-mechanism in a virtual environment to identify cartoon figures. Using a touchscreen they could zoom into different parts of the image, identify individual facial features and integrate them into a full facial representation. These findings show that indeed such integration of visual information is possible even for users who are blind from birth and demonstrates the approach's potential for practical visual rehabilitation.
Epidermal Growth Factor Receptor Mutation Detection Using High-Resolution Melting Analysis Predicts Outcomes in Patients with Advanced Non–Small Cell Lung Cancer Treated with Gefitinib

Purpose: Epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) mutations, especially deletional mutations in exon 19 (DEL) and L858R, predict gefitinib sensitivity in patients with non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). In this study, we validated EGFR mutation detection using high-resolution melting analysis (HRMA) and evaluated the associations between EGFR mutations and clinical outcomes in advanced NSCLC patients treated with gefitinib on a larger scale. Experimental Design: The presence of DEL or L858R was evaluated using HRMA and paraffin-embedded tissues and/or cytologic slides from 212 patients. In 66 patients, the results were compared with direct sequencing data. Results: HRMA using formalin-fixed tissues had a 92% sensitivity and a 100% specificity. The analysis was successfully completed in 207 patients, and DEL or L858R mutations were detected in 85 (41%) patients. The response rate (78% versus 8%), time-to-progression (median, 9.2 versus 1.6 months), and overall survival (median, 21.7 versus 8.7 months) were significantly better in patients with EGFR mutations (P < 0.001). Even among the 34 patients with stable diseases, the time-to-progression was significantly longer in patients with EGFR mutations. Patients with DEL (n = 49) tended to have better outcomes than those with L858R (n = 36); the response rates were 86% and 67%, respectively (P = 0.037), and the median time-to-progression was 10.5 and 7.4 months, respectively (P = 0.11). Conclusions: HRMA is a precise method for detecting DEL and L858R mutations and is useful for predicting clinical outcomes in patients with advanced NSCLC treated with gefitinib.
Doxycycline inhibits proinflammatory cytokines but not acute cerebral cytogenesis after hypoxia-ischemia in neonatal rats.

BACKGROUND Neonatal hypoxia-ischemia (HI) is a major cause of perinatal brain injury and is associated with a spectrum of neuropsychiatric disorders. Although very few treatment options are currently available, doxycycline (DOXY) has been reported to be neuroprotective in neontatal HI. Our objective was to investigate the effects of DOXY on neonatal brain development in normal and HI rat pups. We hypothesized that DOXY would inhibit microglial activation but that developmentally important processes, including cytogenesis and trophic responses, would not be impaired. METHODS To investigate the putative neurodevelopmental consequences of DOXY administration in a clinically relevant animal model of HI, we performed a time-course analysis such that postnatal rat pups received DOXY (10mg/kg) or vehicle immediately before HI (n >or= 6). We then assessed cytogenesis, proinflammatory cytokines, brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) and matrix metalloproteinases regionally and longitudinally. RESULTS We found that DOXY significantly inhibits neuroinflammation in the frontal cortex, striatum and hippocampus; decreases interleukin-1Beta (IL-1Beta) and tumour necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-alpha); and augments BDNF following HI. In addition, DOXY-treated pups have significantly fewer 2-bromo-5-deoxyuridine (BrdU)-positive cells in the subventricular zone 6 hours post-HI. However, DOXY does not persistently affect cytogenesis in the subventricular zone or dentate gyrus up to 7 days post-HI. The BrdU-positive cells not expressing markers for mature neurons colabel with nestin, an intermediate filament protein typical of neuronal precursors. LIMITATIONS Our study investigates "acute" neurodevelopment over the first 7 days of life after HI injury. Further long-term investigations into adulthood are underway. CONCLUSION Taken together, our results suggest the putative clinical potential of DOXY in the management of neonatal cerebral HI injury.
Self-Adaptive OmpSs Tasks in Heterogeneous Environments

As new heterogeneous systems and hardware accelerators appear, high performance computers can reach a higher level of computational power. Nevertheless, this does not come for free: the more heterogeneity the system presents, the more complex becomes the programming task in terms of resource management. OmpSs is a task-based programming model and framework focused on the runtime exploitation of parallelism from annotated sequential applications. This paper presents a set of extensions to this framework: we show how the application programmer can expose different specialized versions of tasks (i.e. pieces of specific code targeted and optimized for a particular architecture) and how the system can choose between these versions at runtime to obtain the best performance achievable for the given application. From the results obtained in a multi-GPU system, we prove that our proposal gives flexibility to application's source code and can potentially increase application's performance.
A Dynamic Ocean–Atmosphere Model of the Tropical Atlantic Decadal Variability

A linear model that couples an ocean mixed layer with a simple dynamic atmosphere is used to study the mechanism for decadal variability over the tropical Atlantic. An unstable mode with a dipole sea surface temperature (SST) pattern similar to observed decadal variability in the tropical Atlantic emerges in the time integration of the model. A wind‐evaporation‐SST feedback is responsible for the growth and oscillation of the unstable mode whereas the mean state of the Atlantic climate is essential for maintaining the spatially quasistanding dipole structure. The oscillation period ranges from several to a few tens of years and is sensitive to coupling strength. The oscillation is not self-sustainable as the realistic damping rate exceeds the growth rate. In response to white noise forcing, the model produces a red SST spectrum without a peak at finite frequencies. Therefore it is suggested that the tropical dipole’s preferred timescales, if any, arise from the forcing by or interaction with the extratropics. In a model run where the forcing is confined to the extratropics, a dipole SST pattern still dominates the forcing-free Tropics, in support of the proposed linkage between the Tropics and extratropics.
Heteroscedasticity in perception of viewers of television advertisements: A comparative study on different age groups

Purpose: To analyze the portrayal of women in the advertisements and how respondents of different age react differently towards positive portrayal vs. Nudity in television advertisements. Design/Methodology/Approach: The sample size of 1210 was taken for the study. The factors affecting attitudes of respondents below the age of 40 and above the age of 40 were found with the help of factor analysis and respondents were classified and distinguished with the help of cluster analysis and discriminant analysis. Findings: Women in advertisements have been represented in illicit portrayal. She has not been shown in roles which represent her status and power. Men in commercials have been shown in roles superior to women. This leads to the lack of confidence among women. Major factors affecting attitude of people towards positive portrayal of women vs. nudity in advertisements were found out and listed as “Models over Products”, “Feeling of Inferiority”, “opposite attracts” etc. The respondents were classified as “Indifferent” and “Leveraged”. These respondents were also differentiated using discriminant analysis. The study reveals the attitudes of the respondents on the basis of age towards the positive portrayal vs. Nudity in television advertisements and how women have been suffered due to the sensuous portrayal in the advertisements.
(PS)2: protein structure prediction server version 3.0

Protein complexes are involved in many biological processes. Examining coupling between subunits of a complex would be useful to understand the molecular basis of protein function. Here, our updated (PS)2 web server predicts the three-dimensional structures of protein complexes based on comparative modeling; furthermore, this server examines the coupling between subunits of the predicted complex by combining structural and evolutionary considerations. The predicted complex structure could be indicated and visualized by Java-based 3D graphics viewers and the structural and evolutionary profiles are shown and compared chain-by-chain. For each subunit, considerations with or without the packing contribution of other subunits cause the differences in similarities between structural and evolutionary profiles, and these differences imply which form, complex or monomeric, is preferred in the biological condition for the subunit. We believe that the (PS)2 server would be a useful tool for biologists who are interested not only in the structures of protein complexes but also in the coupling between subunits of the complexes. The (PS)2 is freely available at http://ps2v3.life. nctu.edu. tw/.
Role of Software Metrics in Software Engineering and Requirements Analysis

The current software engineering practices observed in the local software industry generally lacks the software metrics planning part. The specific planning required to improve the software practices, to gauge the productivity of the individuals, and productivity at different phases of software development life cycle (SDLC), is generally missing. These organizations do not have any planning to gauge and control the business development issues and improve their productivities. During development phase, most of these software houses do collect data about different aspects of the project like project planning, requirement specification, testing, and bugs found. However, these organizations, generally, do not understand the importance of such data elements, how to maintain the data, how to built measurements plan, and most importantly how to use this data to improve their processes and productivity. In fact most of the time, the available data gets destroyed and hence never used. The current talk will discuss the need and importance of software metrics, the role of metrics in different phases of SDLC, and particularly the requirement phase. The requirement elicitation is considered as the most important aspect of software development, and if not handled properly, may cause severe productivity and quality issues. The talk will elaborate different metrics that may be used in requirement elicitation process and hence may help improve the requirement document resulting in improved productivity in the overall software development.
Dust formation and inhomogeneous mass-loss from asymptotic giant branch stars

ABSTRA C T We examine the flow from asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars when along a small solid angle the optical depth resulting from dust is very large. We consider two types of flows. In the first, small cool spots are formed on the surface of slowly rotating AGB stars. Large quantities of dust are expected to be formed above the surface of these cool spots. We propose that if the dust formation occurs during the last AGB phase when the mass-loss rate is high, the dust shields the region above it from the stellar radiation. This leads to both further dust formation in the shaded region and, owing to lower temperature and pressure, the convergence of the stream toward the shaded region, and the formation of a flow having a higher density than its surroundings. This density contrast can be as high as ,4. A concentration of magnetic cool spots toward the equator will lead to a density contrast of up to a few between the equatorial and polar directions. This process can explain the positive correlation between high mass-loss rate and a larger departure from sphericity in progenitors of elliptical planetary nebulae. In the second type of flow, the high density in the equatorial plane is formed by a binary interaction, where the secondary star is close to, but outside the AGB envelope. The shielding of the radiation by dust results in a very slow and dense flow in the equatorial plane. We suggest this flow as an alternative explanation for the equatorial dense matter found at several hundred astronomical units around several post-AGB binary
A Geometric Invariant Digital Image Watermarking Scheme Based on Robust Feature Detector and Local Zernike Moments

A robust and geometric invariant digital image watermarking scheme based on robust feature points detector and local Zernike transform is proposed in this paper. The robust feature points detector is proposed based on SIFT algorithm to extract circular patches. A local Zernike moments-based watermarking scheme is raised. Each extracted circular patch is decomposed into a collection of binary patches and Zernike transform is applied to the appointed binary patches. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme is very robust against geometric distortions and common signal processing.
Hybrid rigid and non-rigid image-based modeling of articulated figures

A magnetic shim for an N.M. R. apparatus comprises a deformable body (particularly a flexible sheet) of electrically insulating material (e.g. P.V.C.) within which magnetic material (e.g. gamma -ferric oxide or barium ferrite) is dispersed. The shim may easily be attached (e.g. by an adhesive backing layer) to an inside wall of the apparatus and may suitably be cut to size until suitable magnetic compensation is achieved by trial and error. The nature of the compensation effected by the shim may be altered by employing different magnetic materials dispersed within the non-conducting material and/or by varying their concentration.
Application-Specific Memory Subsystems

OF THE DISSERTATION Application-Specific Memory Subsystems by Joseph G. Wingbermuehle Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science Washington University in St. Louis, 2015 Professor Roger D. Chamberlain, Chair The disparity in performance between processors and main memories has led computer architects to incorporate large cache hierarchies in modern computers. These cache hierarchies are designed to be general-purpose in that they strive to provide the best possible performance across a wide range of applications. However, such a memory subsystem does not necessarily provide the best possible performance for a particular application. Although general-purpose memory subsystems are desirable when the work-load is unknown and the memory subsystem must remain fixed, when this is not the case a custom memory subsystem may be beneficial. For example, in an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) or a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) designed to run a particular application, a custom memory subsystem optimized for that application would be desirable. In addition, when there are tunable parameters in the memory subsystem, it may make sense to change these parameters depending on the application being run. Such a situation arises today with FPGAs and, to a lesser extent, GPUs, and it is plausible that general-purpose computers will begin to support greater flexibility in the memory subsystem in the future. In this dissertation, we first show that it is possible to create application-specific memory subsystems that provide much better performance than a general-purpose memory subsystem. In addition, we show a way to discover such memory subsystems automatically using a superoptimization technique on memory address traces gathered from applications. This allows one to generate a custom memory subsystem with little effort. xi We next show that our memory subsystem superoptimization technique can be used to optimize for objectives other than performance. As an example, we show that it is possible to reduce the number of writes to the main memory, which can be useful for main memories with limited write durability, such as flash or Phase-Change Memory (PCM). Finally, we show how to superoptimize memory subsystems for streaming applications, which are a class of parallel applications. In particular, we show that, through the use of ScalaPipe, we can author and deploy streaming applications targeting FPGAs with superoptimized memory subsystems. ScalaPipe is a domain-specific language (DSL) embedded in the Scala programming language for generating streaming applications that can be implemented on CPUs and FPGAs. Using the ScalaPipe implementation, we are able to demonstrate actual performance improvements using the superoptimized memory subsystem with applications implemented in hardware.
3D Stacked Package Technology and Its Application Prospects

In recent years, the increasing demands for the high performance integrated circuit devices have led to the development of multi-die stacked technology in a single package form. The 3D (three dimension) stacked package technology is developing trend of the integrated circuit advanced high-density packaging, which can easily meet the developing of smaller footprint, lower profile, multi-function, lower power consumption and lower cost for the cell phones and consumer products like digital cameras, MP4, PDA and other wireless devices. Some correlative concepts of the 3D stacked package have been proposed in this paper. Firstly, the development trends and the general classifications of 3D stacked package have been introduced. Furthermore, in order to compare with the traditional 2D package (MCM), the advantages of the 3D stacked package technology have been discussed, and it also briefly states the technical challenges that 3D stacked package technology must be faced. In addition, the potential applications that may take advantage of 3D stacked package technology are discussed in the end.
Gear-shift decoding

This paper considers a class of iterative message-passing decoders for low-density parity-check codes in which the decoder can choose its decoding rule from a set of decoding algorithms at each iteration. Each available decoding algorithm may have a different per-iteration computation time and performance. With an appropriate choice of algorithm at each iteration, overall decoding latency can be reduced significantly, compared with standard decoding methods. Such a decoder is called a gear-shift decoder because it changes its decoding rule (shifts gears) in order to guarantee both convergence and maximum decoding speed (minimum decoding latency). Using extrinsic information transfer charts, the problem of finding the optimum (minimum decoding latency) gear-shift decoder is formulated as a computationally tractable dynamic program. The optimum gear-shift decoder is proved to have a decoding threshold equal to or better than the best decoding threshold among those of the available algorithms. In addition to speeding up software decoder implementations, gear-shift decoding can be applied to optimize a pipelined hardware decoder, minimizing hardware cost for a given decoder throughput
Proliferation is a central independent prognostic factor and target for personalized and risk-adapted treatment in multiple myeloma

Background Proliferation of malignant plasma cells is a strong adverse prognostic factor in multiple myeloma and simultaneously targetable by available (e.g. tubulin polymerase inhibitors) and upcoming (e.g. aurora kinase inhibitors) compounds. Design and Methods We assessed proliferation using gene expression-based indices in 757 samples including independent cohorts of 298 and 345 samples of CD138-purified myeloma cells from previously untreated patients undergoing high-dose chemotherapy, together with clinical prognostic factors, chromosomal aberrations, and gene expression-based high-risk scores. Results In the two cohorts, 43.3% and 39.4% of the myeloma cell samples showed a proliferation index above the median plus three standard deviations of normal bone marrow plasma cells. Malignant plasma cells of patients in advanced stages or those harboring disease progression-associated gain of 1q21 or deletion of 13q14.3 showed significantly higher proliferation indices; patients with gain of chromosome 9, 15 or 19 (hyperdiploid samples) had significantly lower proliferation indices. Proliferation correlated with the presence of chromosomal aberrations in metaphase cytogenetics. It was significantly predictive for event-free and overall survival in both cohorts, allowed highly predictive risk stratification (e.g. event-free survival 12.7 versus 26.2 versus 40.6 months, P<0.001) of patients, and was largely independent of clinical prognostic factors, e.g. serum β2-microglobulin, International Staging System stage, associated high-risk chromosomal aberrations, e.g. translocation t(4;14), and gene expression-based high-risk scores. Conclusions Proliferation assessed by gene expression profiling, being independent of serum-β2-microglobulin, International Staging System stage, t(4;14), and gene expression-based risk scores, is a central prognostic factor in multiple myeloma. Surrogating a biological targetable variable, gene expression-based assessment of proliferation allows selection of patients for risk-adapted anti-proliferative treatment on the background of conventional and gene expression-based risk factors.
The dark in the birth: Psychodynamic interpretation of pregnant depression

Sintomi depressivi durante la gravidanza possono avere conseguenze devastanti , non solo per le donne, ma anche per il bambino ed il nucleo familiare. La depressione prenatale puo influenzare la salute del bambino e pone anche la donna a rischio significativo di sviluppare depressione postpartum. La depressione prenatale e stata relativamente trascurata; per questo motivo e necessario identificare i sintomi depressivi durante tutto il periodo della gravidanza. L'interpretazione psicodinamica della depressione prenatale aiuta ad inquadrare la patolgia permettendo di sviluppare trattamenti piu completi e personalizzati.