Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Selective attention modulates feature accumulation speed during perception and memory retrieval

Mounting evidence has elucidated the sequential information processing trajectory, progressing from low-level perceptual to higher-level conceptual features during visual object recognition and reversing during memory retrieval. However, the extent to which the processing stream can be modulated by selective attention, as dictated by task requirements, remains unclear. The present study combined convolutional neural network (AlexNet), drift-diffusion model and multivariate decoding analysis to address this question. By using single-trial-based multivariate decoding analysis, we tracked the onset and peak time of feature representations across various visual perceptual and mnemonic categorization tasks, encompassing color, animacy, and size feature categorization. The findings of this study revealed several key outcomes: (1) A significant increase in reaction time was observed for the visual perception of color, animacy, and size features. (2) The findings from AlexNet and the drift-diffusion model revealed that, despite a parallel processing nature in these three features, those with larger decision boundaries necessitate subjects to spend more reaction time in making decisions about them. (3) In perceptual tasks, selective attention induced a reversal in the onset time of perceptual and conceptual features in the occipital and parietal lobe, resulting in the earlier detection of conceptual features compared to perceptual features. Conversely, in mnemonic tasks, selective attention led to the precedence of the peak time of perceptual features over conceptual features in the frontal lobe, signifying the reactivation of perceptual features with the highest fidelity prior to conceptual features. (4) Phase coupling analysis indicated a reversed information flow in the beta band during the task preparation stage in visual perception and memory retrieval tasks. Additionally, interactions between the occipital and temporal lobes in the theta band during the task preparation stage were found to promote an earlier onset time of target features in the visual perception stage. Collectively, these results underscore the parallel processing nature of features and demonstrate that the speed of feature information accumulation can be modulated by task requirements, with a more pronounced effect observed during perceptual compared to mnemonic stages.
A Vector System Encoding Histone H3 Mutants Facilitates Manipulations of the Neuronal Epigenome

The differentiation of developmental cell lineages is associated with genome-wide modifications in histone H3 methylation. However, the causal role of histone H3 methylation in transcriptional regulation and cell differentiation has been difficult to test in mammals. The experimental overexpression of histone H3 mutants carrying lysine-to-methionine (K-to-M) substitutions has emerged as an alternative tool for inhibiting the endogenous levels of histone H3 methylation at specific lysine residues. Here, we leverage the use of histone K-to-M mutants by creating Enhanced Episomal Vectors that enable the simultaneous depletion of multiple levels of histone H3 lysine 4 (H3K4) or lysine 9 (H3K9) methylation in projection neurons of the mouse cerebral cortex. Our approach also facilitates the simultaneous depletion of H3K9 and H3K27 trimethylation (H3K9me3 and H3K27me3, respectively) in cortical neurons. In addition, we report a tamoxifen-inducible Cre-FLEX system that allows the activation of mutant histones at specific developmental time points or in the adult cortex, leading to the depletion of specific histone marks. The tools presented here can be implemented in other experimental systems, such as human in vitro models, to test the combinatorial role of histone methylations in developmental fate decisions and the maintenance of cell identity.
An integrated lot-sizing model with supplier and carrier selection and quantity discounts considering multiple products

Because of growing competition in the global markets and the vital role of suppliers in business success, the subject of supplier selection has attracted many researchers and practitioners during the recent years. In addition to the supplier selection, the order quantity discount provided by the suppliers, is considered through a new mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model involving a manufacturer with multiple products and multiple purchasing items over multiple periods. According to the proposed model, the manufacturer purchases different amount of raw materials from selected suppliers in order to produce different products. Customers’ demands are fulfilled by minimizing the total purchase, inventory, production, and transportation costs over a multi-period planning horizon. Since the problem is NP-hard, an efficient genetic algorithm (GA) is used to solve the large-scale real-world instances. The results are compared with results from the exact approach wherever possible in order to investigate the efficiency of the algorithm.
A Review of the Application of Otolith Microchemistry Toward the Study of Latin American Fishes

ABSTRACT In developed countries, otolith microchemistry has been used for more than three decades for studies of life history, migration, and environmental ecology of fish stock of commercial importance. Although Latin America produces 16% of the annual fish capture, most of their fishery resources have not been well studied and handled. Modern methodologies related to microchemistry have not been applied to the underdeveloped countries of Latin America due to its high cost. In the last decade, there have been several studies on Latin American resources, carried out mainly by first world countries. Currently, some regional economies are strong and stable enough to ensure the training of specialized human resources and to generate opportunities for the exchange of projects and acquisition of state-of-the-art technology. In this work, all available literature associated to Latin American resources in relation to the use of otolith microchemistry has been reviewed. The use of different methodologies in the region in relation to global trends has been discussed. In addition to that, the extent of collaboration between underdeveloped and developed countries has been evaluated. This review shows a promising future in the application of otolith microchemistry to study biology of fishes, which will impact on the medium and long term to ensure the sustainability of certain resources and, therefore, the strengthening of regional economies.
Intersection Classes in TFNP and Proof Complexity

A recent breakthrough in the theory of total NP search problems (TFNP) by Fearnley, Goldberg, Hollender, and Savani has shown that CLS = PLS ∩ PPAD , or, in other words, the class of problems reducible to gradient descent are exactly those problems in the intersection of the complexity classes PLS and PPAD . Since this result, two more intersection theorems have been discovered in this theory: EOPL = PLS ∩ PPAD and SOPL = PLS ∩ PPADS . It is natural to wonder if this exhausts the list of intersection classes in TFNP, or, if other intersections exist. In this work, we completely classify all intersection classes involved among the classical TFNP classes PLS , PPAD , and PPA , giving new complete problems for the newly-introduced intersections. Following the close links between the theory of TFNP and propositional proof complexity, we develop new proof systems – each of which is a generalization of the classical Resolution proof system – that characterize all of the classes, in the sense that a query total search problem is in the intersection class if and only if a tautology associated with the search problem has a short proof in the proof system. We complement these new characterizations with black-box separations between all of the newly introduced classes and prior classes, thus giving strong evidence that no further collapse occurs. Finally, we characterize arbitrary intersections and joins of the PPA q classes for q ≥ 2 in terms of the Nullstellensatz proof systems.
An embedded feature selection method for imbalanced data classification

Imbalanced data is one type of datasets that are frequently found in real-world applications, e.g., fraud detection and cancer diagnosis. For this type of datasets, improving the accuracy to identify their minority class is a critically important issue. Feature selection is one method to address this issue. An effective feature selection method can choose a subset of features that favor in the accurate determination of the minority class. A decision tree is a classifier that can be built up by using different splitting criteria. Its advantage is the ease of detecting which feature is used as a splitting node. Thus, it is possible to use a decision tree splitting criterion as a feature selection method. In this paper, an embedded feature selection method using our proposed weighted Gini index ( WGI ) is proposed. Its comparison results with Chi2, F-statistic and Gini index feature selection methods show that F-statistic and Chi2 reach the best performance when only a few features are selected. As the number of selected features increases, our proposed method has the highest probability of achieving the best performance. The area under a receiver operating characteristic curve ( ROC AUC ) and F-measure are used as evaluation criteria. Experimental results with two datasets show that ROC AUC performance can be high, even if only a few features are selected and used, and only changes slightly as more and more features are selected. However, the performance of Fmeasure achieves excellent performance only if 20 % or more of features are chosen. The results are helpful for practitioners to select a proper feature selection method when facing a practical problem.
Scalable Distributed Agreement from LWE: Byzantine Agreement, Broadcast, and Leader Election

Distributed agreement is a general name for the task of ensuring consensus among non-faulty nodes in the presence of faulty or malicious behavior. Well-known instances of agreement tasks are Byzantine Agreement, Broadcast, and Committee or Leader Election. Since agreement tasks lie at the heart of many modern distributed applications, there has been an increased interest in designing scalable protocols for these tasks. Specifically, we want protocols where the per-party communication complexity scales sublinearly with the number of parties. With unconditional security, the state of the art protocols have ˜ O ( √ n ) per-party communication and ˜ O (1) rounds, where n stands for the number of parties, tolerating 1 / 3 − ϵ fraction of corruptions for any ϵ > 0. There are matching lower bounds showing that these protocols are essentially optimal among a large class of protocols. Recently, Boyle-Cohen-Goel (PODC 2021) relaxed the attacker to be computationally bounded and using strong cryptographic assumptions showed a protocol with ˜ O (1) per-party communication and rounds (similarly, tolerating 1 / 3 − ϵ fraction of corruptions). The security of their protocol relies on SNARKs for NP with linear-time extraction, a somewhat strong and non-standard assumption. Their protocols further relies on a public-key infrastructure (PKI) and a common-reference-string (CRS). In this work, we present a new protocol with ˜ O (1) per-party communication and rounds but relying only on the standard Learning With Errors (LWE) assumption. Our protocol also relies on a PKI and a CRS, and tolerates 1 / 3 − ϵ fraction of corruptions, similarly to Boyle et al. Technically, we leverage (multi-hop) BARGs for NP directly and in a generic manner which significantly deviate from the framework of Boyle et al.
VARIATION IN PERCEPTION AND PRODUCTION OF /s/-/ S / IN ENGLISH

In this exploratory study, we examine the relationship between perception and production in /s/ and /ʃ/ in North American English. To this end, peak ERB N trajectories fitted with functional PCA characterize the fricative space on an individual level for 121 participants. Mahalanobis distances quantify the degree of category overlap and distance. Participants also completed a categorization task on /s/-/ʃ/ continua with four minimal pairs, the data of which were fit to a mixed-effects logistic regression. Individual logistic slopes are compared with the by-individual Mahalanobis distance, suggesting a subtle link between production and perception. An additional analysis suggests that the strength of the perception-production link is moderated by participants’ multi-/monolingual status
An Analysis of User Behaviors for Objectively Evaluating Spoken Dialogue Systems

Establishing evaluation schemes for spoken dialogue systems is important, but it can also be challenging. While subjective evaluations are commonly used in user experiments, objective evaluations are necessary for research comparison and reproducibility. To address this issue, we propose a framework for indirectly but objectively evaluating systems based on users' behaviors. In this paper, to this end, we investigate the relationship between user behaviors and subjective evaluation scores in social dialogue tasks: attentive listening, job interview, and first-meeting conversation. The results reveal that in dialogue tasks where user utterances are primary, such as attentive listening and job interview, indicators like the number of utterances and words play a significant role in evaluation. Observing disfluency also can indicate the effectiveness of formal tasks, such as job interview. On the other hand, in dialogue tasks with high interactivity, such as first-meeting conversation, behaviors related to turn-taking, like average switch pause length, become more important. These findings suggest that selecting appropriate user behaviors can provide valuable insights for objective evaluation in each social dialogue task.
Hydrology: Principles and Processes

The book comprises nine chapters, with seven core chapters dealing in detail with the basic principles and processes of the main hydrological components of the water cycle: precipitation, interception, evaporation, soil water, groundwater, streamflow and water quality. It takes a broadly non-mathematical approach, although some numeracy is assumed particularly in the treatment of evaporation and soil water. The introductory and concluding chapters show the relations and interactions between these components, and also put the importance of water into a wider human context – its significant role in human history, its key role today, and potential role in future in the light of climate change and increasing global population pressures. The book is thoroughly up-to-date, contains over 100 diagrams and photographs to explain and amplify the concepts described, and contains over 750 references for further study.
World Heart Federation Roadmap for Secondary Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease: 2023 Update

Background: Secondary prevention lifestyle and pharmacological treatment of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD) reduce a high proportion of recurrent events and mortality. However, significant gaps exist between guideline recommendations and usual clinical practice. Objectives: Describe the state of the art, the roadblocks, and successful strategies to overcome them in ASCVD secondary prevention management. Methods: A writing group reviewed guidelines and research papers and received inputs from an international committee composed of cardiovascular prevention and health systems experts about the article’s structure, content, and draft. Finally, an external expert group reviewed the paper. Results: Smoking cessation, physical activity, diet and weight management, antiplatelets, statins, beta-blockers, renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system inhibitors, and cardiac rehabilitation reduce events and mortality. Potential roadblocks may occur at the individual, healthcare provider, and health system levels and include lack of access to healthcare and medicines, clinical inertia, lack of primary care infrastructure or built environments that support preventive cardiovascular health behaviours. Possible solutions include improving health literacy, self-management strategies, national policies to improve lifestyle and access to secondary prevention medication (including fix-dose combination therapy), implementing rehabilitation programs, and incorporating digital health interventions. Digital tools are being examined in a range of settings from enhancing self-management, risk factor control, and cardiac rehab. Conclusions: Effective strategies for secondary prevention management exist, but there are barriers to their implementation. WHF roadmaps can facilitate the development of a strategic plan to identify and implement local and national level approaches for improving secondary prevention.
HIGH GENE FLOW IN EASTERN RED-BACKED SALAMANDERS ( PLETHODON CINEREUS ) FROM FORESTS IN SOUTH-CENTRAL INDIANA

: Anthropogenic changes are expected to shape the genetic structure of many herpetofaunal populations. Genetic analyses can determine the loss of genetic diversity in isolated populations, identify barriers to dispersal and gene flow, and inform ways in which populations should be managed. Plethodontid salamanders are ideal for understanding fine-scale and landscape-level genetic structure in continuous landscapes given their high abundance and their sensitivity to ecosystem changes. Our study aimed to assess the landscape-level population structure in Eastern Red-Backed Salamanders ( Plethodon cinereus ) within intact habitat. We investigated genetic variation in 479 individuals from three sites across roughly 26 km of intact hardwood forest. We tested for genetic structure among and within three sites using several metrics, including hierarchical Bayesian analysis, F ST analysis, AMOVA
BOUNDARY-DRIVEN ACCOUNT FOR DOWNSTEP IN JAPANESE

This study verifies the boundary-driven account for downstep in Japanese: downstep is triggered by phonological boundaries. The assumption widely adopted in the literature is that downstep is triggered only by accents. However, it remains unknown which account is more accurate. We propose that downstep is one example of the phonetic realization of boundary-driven downstep. We define boundary-driven downstep as a phonological mechanism that lowers the pitch of subsequent PPhrases when a PPhrase or a PClause directly dominates two or more PPhrases. Nine native speakers of Tokyo Japanese participated in a production experiment, which paradigmatically compared the F0 heights of a sequence of a final-accented word preceding an unaccented word to a sequence of unaccented words. The results showed that the condition with final accents without particles did not show a large F0 downtrend. Our finding indicates that accents do not directly trigger downstep.
How do children mark gender phonetically? An analysis of voice quality

Children assigned female at birth (AFAB) have identical vocal tracts and larynxes to children assigned male at birth (AMAB) before puberty. Nonetheless, previous studies have found that adult listeners perceive the speech of AFAB children as more girl-like than that of AMAB children, suggesting that some gendered speech characteristics are learned before the development of vocal tract sex dimorphism. AFAB and AMAB children differ in many segmental acoustic measures. This study examined differences in voice quality between the two groups of children, given the well documented voice quality differences between adult men and women. We examined various acoustic indices of voice quality of 110 English-speaking children at three and at five years-of-age. We found only minimal differences in the voice quality between the groups at both time-points. We found that these measures can predict gender ratings of children’s speech, suggesting that people apply stereotypes about adult speech when rating children.
SPEAKERS COMPENSATE FOR TEMPORAL PERTURBATIONS IN AUDITORY FEEDBACK REGARDLESS OF SYLLABLE STRUCTURE

It is known that speakers monitor sensory feedback during speech to maintain accurate production. However, it is unclear the extent to which speakers use feedback for timing speech gestures, and how that may interact with phonological structure. We present an altered auditory feedback study that accelerates and decelerates the formant transition in /aɪ/, testing the hypothesis that speakers use feedforward control to time gestures within a syllable, and auditory feedback to initiate the next syllable. Results suggest that speakers used directionally specific temporal information from auditory feedback: they shortened the perturbed vowel when transitions were accelerated, and slowed down when transitions were decelerated. Shortening was restricted to perturbed segments, while slowing occurred on both perturbed segments and following vocoids, suggesting that some of the slowing may be a non-specific response to feedback delay. Similar results between and within syllables suggest that temporal monitoring in speech has a flat lookahead structure.
IN-DEPTH REVIEW Artificial Intelligence in Dermatology: A Review of Literature and Application to Pediatric Dermatology

Research into medical application of artificial intelligence (AI) has risen rapidly over the past several years. Its potential for use in dermatology has been increasingly explored, with research evaluating efficacy of various diagnostic algorithms. With a shortage of pediatric dermatologists and wait times of several months for appointments 1,2 , such technological advancements may be seen as a way to increase access to care. Understanding AI technology is
Species diversity and major host/substrate associations of the genus Akanthomyces (Hypocreales, Cordycipitaceae)

﻿Abstract Akanthomyces, a group of fungi with rich morphological and ecological diversity in Cordycipitaceae (Ascomycota, Hypocreales), has a wide distribution amongst diverse habitats. By surveying arthropod-pathogenic fungi in China and Southeast Asia over the last six years, nine Akanthomyces spp. were found and identified. Five of these were shown to represent four known species and an undetermined species of Akanthomyces. Four of these were new species and they were named A.kunmingensis and A.subaraneicola from China, A.laosensis from Laos and A.pseudonoctuidarum from Thailand. The new species were described and illustrated according to the morphological characteristics and molecular data. Akanthomycesaraneogenus, which was isolated from spiders from different regions in China, Thailand and Vietnam, was described as a newly-recorded species from Thailand and Vietnam. The phylogenetic positions of the nine species were evaluated, based on phylogenetic inferences according to five loci, namely, ITS, nrLSU, TEF, RPB1 and RPB2. In this study, we reviewed the research progress achieved for Akanthomyces regarding its taxonomy, species diversity, geographic distribution and major host/substrate associations. The morphological characteristics of 35 species in Akanthomyces, including four novel species and 31 known taxa, were also compared.