Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Functional disruption of the brain mechanism for reading: effects of comorbidity and task difficulty among children with developmental learning problems.

OBJECTIVE The study investigated the relative degree and timing of cortical activation associated with phonological decoding in poor readers. METHOD Regional brain activity was assessed during performance of a pseudoword reading task and a less demanding, letter-sound naming task by three groups of students: children who experienced reading difficulties without attention problems (N = 50, RD) and nonreading impaired (NI) readers either with (N = 20) or without attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD; N = 50). Recordings were obtained with a whole-head neuromagnetometer, and activation profiles were computed through a minimum norm algorithm. RESULTS Children with RD showed decreased amplitude of neurophysiological activity in the superior temporal gyrus, bilaterally, and in the left supramarginal and angular gyri during late stages of decoding, compared to typical readers. These effects were restricted to the more demanding pseudoword reading task. No differences were found in degree of activity between NI and ADHD students. Regression analyses provided further support for the crucial role of left hemisphere temporoparietal cortices and the fusiform gyrus for basic reading skills. CONCLUSIONS Results were in agreement with fMRI findings and replicate previous MEG findings with a larger sample, a higher density neuromagnetometer, an overt pseudoword reading task, and a distributed current source-modeling method.
Arachidonic Acid Derivatives and Their Role in Peripheral Nerve Degeneration and Regeneration

After peripheral nerve injury, a process of axonal degradation, debris clearance, and subsequent regeneration is initiated by complex local signaling, called Wallerian degeneration (WD). This process is in part mediated by neuroglia as well as infiltrating inflammatory cells and regulated by inflammatory mediators such as cytokines, chemokines, and the activation of transcription factors also related to the inflammatory response. Part of this neuroimmune signaling is mediated by the innate immune system, including arachidonic acid (AA) derivatives such as prostaglandins and leukotrienes. The enzymes responsible for their production, cyclooxygenases and lipooxygenases, also participate in nerve degeneration and regeneration. The interactions between signals for nerve regeneration and neuroinflammation go all the way down to the molecular level. In this paper, we discuss the role that AA derivatives might play during WD and nerve regeneration, and the therapeutic possibilities that arise.
Mechanisms of Body Weight Fluctuations in Parkinson’s Disease

Typical body weight changes are known to occur in Parkinson’s disease (PD). Weight loss has been reported in early stages as well as in advanced disease and malnutrition may worsen the clinical state of the patient. On the other hand, an increasing number of patients show weight gain under dopamine replacement therapy or after surgery. These weight changes are multifactorial and involve changes in energy expenditure, perturbation of homeostatic control, and eating behavior modulated by dopaminergic treatment. Comprehension of the different mechanisms contributing to body weight is a prerequisite for the management of body weight and nutritional state of an individual PD patient. This review summarizes the present knowledge and highlights the necessity of evaluation of body weight and related factors, as eating behavior, energy intake, and expenditure in PD.
The asymptotic complexity of matrix reduction over finite fields

Consider an invertible n \times n matrix over some field. The Gauss-Jordan elimination reduces this matrix to the identity matrix using at most n^2 row operations and in general that many operations might be needed. In [1] the authors considered matrices in GL(n;q), the set of n \times n invertible matrices in the finite field of q elements, and provided an algorithm using only row operations which performs asymptotically better than the Gauss-Jordan elimination. More specifically their `striped elimination algorithm' has asymptotic complexity \frac{n^2}{\log_q{n}}. Furthermore they proved that up to a constant factor this algorithm is best possible as almost all matrices in GL(n;g) need asymptotically at least \frac{n^2}{2\log_q{n}} operations. In this short note we show that the `striped elimination algorithm' is asymptotically optimal by proving that almost all matrices in GL(n;q) need asymptotically at least frac{n^2}{\log_q{n}} operations.
Adaptive Algorithm and Platform Selection for Visual Detection and Tracking

Computer vision algorithms are known to be extremely sensitive to the environmental conditions in which the data is captured, e.g., lighting conditions and target density. Tuning of parameters or choosing a completely new algorithm is often needed to achieve a certain performance level, especially when there is a limitation of the computation source. In this paper, we focus on this problem and propose a framework to adaptively select the "best" algorithm-parameter combination and the computation platform under performance and cost constraints at design time, and adapt the algorithms at runtime based on real-time inputs. This necessitates developing a mechanism to switch between different algorithms as the nature of the input video changes. Our proposed algorithm calculates a similarity function between a test video scenario and each training scenario, where the similarity calculation is based on learning a manifold of image features that is shared by both the training and test datasets. Similarity between training and test dataset indicates the same algorithm can be applied to both of them and achieve similar performance. We design a cost function with this similarity measure to find the most similar training scenario to the test data. The "best" algorithm under a given platform is obtained by selecting the algorithm with a specific parameter combination that performs the best on the corresponding training data. The proposed framework can be used first offline to choose the platform based on performance and cost constraints, and then online whereby the "best" algorithm is selected for each new incoming video segment for a given platform. In the experiments, we apply our algorithm to the problems of pedestrian detection and tracking. We show how to adaptively select platforms and algorithm-parameter combinations. Our results provide optimal performance on 3 publicly available datasets.
Assessing Gear Modifications Needed to Optimize Yields in a Heavily Exploited, Multi-Species, Seagrass and Coral Reef Fishery

Effective management is necessary if small-scale fisheries, such as those found in mixed habitats including seagrass and coral reefs, are to continue providing food for many of the poorest communities of the world. Gear-based management, although under represented and under studied, has the potential to be adaptive, address multiple objectives, and be crafted to the socio-economic setting. Management effectiveness in seagrass and coral reef fisheries has generally been evaluated at the scale of the fish community. However, community level indicators can mask species-specific declines that provide significant portions of the fisheries yields and income. Using a unique dataset, containing ten years of species level length frequency catch data from a multi-gear, multi-species seagrass and coral reef fishery in Kenya, we evaluate species specific fishery statuses, compare gear use to gear regulations and estimate the potential needs for further gear restrictions. Despite the high diversity of the fishery, fifteen species represented over 90% of the catch, and only three species represented 60% of the catch. The three most abundant species in the catch, Lethrinus lentjan (Lacepède), Siganus sutor (Valenciennes) and Leptoscarus vaigiensis (Quoy & Gaimard) all showed evidence of growth overfishing. Lethrinus lentjan, with an exploitation rate of 0.82, also shows evidence of recruitment overfishing. Current legal but weakly enforced gear restrictions are capable of protecting a significant portion of the catch up to maturity but optimization of yield will require that the current mesh size be increased from 6.3 to 8.8 and 9.2 cm to increase yields of L. lentjan and S. sutor, respectively. Given the difficulties of enforcing mesh size, we recommend that the economic benefits of these larger mesh sizes be communicated and enforced through co-management. This abstract is also available in Kiswahili (Abstract S1).
Impact of positive bias temperature instability (PBTI) on 3T1D-DRAM cells

Memory circuits are playing a key role in complex multicore systems with both data and instructions storage and mailbox communication functions. There is a general concern that conventional SRAM cell based on the 6T structure could exhibit serious limitations in future CMOS technologies due to the instability caused by transistor mismatching as well as for leakage consumption reasons. For L1 data caches the new cell 3T1D DRAM is considered a potential candidate to substitute 6T SRAMs. We first evaluate the impact of the positive bias temperature instability, PBTI, on the access and retention time of the 3T1D memory cell implemented with 45 nm technology. Then, we consider all sources of variations and the effect of the degradation caused by the aging of the device on the yield at system level.
A cross-situational strategy for damping homonymy in The Naming Game

Recently there has been a growing interest in the properties and formal analysis of multi-agent systems bootstrapping a communication system (see e.g. .(Baronchelli et al., 2005) and the contribution of (De Vylder and Tuyls, 2005), this workshop. ) Although very interesting and promising results were obtained in these studies, major simplifications were made. For example, although much larger populations are considered than was the case in most earlier work, both the cited works (1) assume the possibility of meaning transfer, i.e. the hearer always exactly knows the speaker’s intended meaning independent of whether he understands the speaker’s utterance and (2) only consider single-word utterances. In this draft we first consider what happens when relaxing the meaning-transfer assumption, and propose a cross-situational learning scheme that allows a population of agents to still bootstrap a common lexicon under this condition. We empirically show the validity of the scheme and thereby improve on the results reported in (Smith, 2003) and (Vogt and Coumans, 2003) in which no satisfactory solution was found. We then continue to identify some problems that arise when abandoning the single-word utterance simplification. However, no solid solutions are proposed for the identified problems. It is not our aim to reduce the importance of previous work, instead we are excited by recent results and hope to stimulate further research by pointing towards some new challenges. Draft prepared for the Workshop on Semiotic Dynamics of Language Games, Bagnovignoni (Siena Italy) 8-11
Mice and Elephants

Next generation networks with large bandwidth and long delay, also known as Long Fat Network (LFN) pose a major challenge to Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) performance. Specifically, sustaining the link utilisation of these networks at a high level is quite challenging, especially when large (elephant) flows are intermixed with small (mice) flows. A small amount of packet loss can cause a huge performance loss (1 out of 22,000 lost packets causes 80x reduction in data transfer, when the Round Trip Time (RTT) is more than about 10 ms). Under supervision of Ronald van der Pol and Marijke Kaat from SURFnet, this research investigates the several configuration parameters of the TCP network stack of the Linux kernel. Moreover, it will be investigated how these configuration choices in correlation with tc(8) traffic shaping in Linux Operating System (OS) can provide better overall throughput of the link.
Controlling the dynamics of a bidimensional gel above and below its percolation transition.

The morphology and the microscopic internal dynamics of a bidimensional gel formed by spontaneous aggregation of gold nanoparticles confined at the water surface are investigated by a suite of techniques, including grazing-incidence x-ray photon correlation spectroscopy (GI-XPCS). The range of concentrations studied spans across the percolation transition for the formation of the gel. The dynamical features observed by GI-XPCS are interpreted in view of the results of microscopic imaging; an intrinsic link between the mechanical modulus and internal dynamics is demonstrated for all the concentrations. Our work presents an example of a transition from a stretched to a compressed correlation function actively controlled by quasistatically varying the relevant thermodynamic variable. Moreover, by applying a model proposed some time ago by Duri and Cipelletti [Europhys. Lett. 76, 972 (2006)] we are able to build a master curve for the shape parameter, whose scaling factor allows us to quantify a "long-time displacement length. " This characteristic length is shown to converge, as the concentration is increased, to the "short-time localization length" determined by pseudo-Debye-Waller analysis of the initial contrast. Finally, the intrinsic dynamics of the system is then compared with that induced by means of a delicate mechanical perturbation applied to the interface.
Therapeutic Approaches for Inhibition of Protein Aggregation in Huntington's Disease

Huntington's disease (HD) is a late-onset and progressive neurodegenerative disorder that is caused by aggregation of mutant huntingtin protein which contains expanded-polyglutamine. The molecular chaperones modulate the aggregation in early stage and known for the most potent protector of neurodegeneration in animal models of HD. Over the past decades, a number of studies have demonstrated molecular chaperones alleviate the pathogenic symptoms by polyQ-mediated toxicity. Moreover, chaperone-inducible drugs and anti-aggregation drugs have beneficial effects on symptoms of disease. Here, we focus on the function of molecular chaperone in animal models of HD, and review the recent therapeutic approaches to modulate expression and turn-over of molecular chaperone and to develop anti-aggregation drugs.
Deconstructing the Tail at Scale Effect Across Network Protocols

Network latencies have become increasingly important for the performance of web servers and cloud computing platforms. Identifying network-related tail latencies and reasoning about their potential causes is especially important to gauge application run-time in online data-intensive applications, where the 99th percentile latency of individual operations can significantly affect the the overall latency of requests. This paper deconstructs the "tail at scale" effect across TCP-IP, UDP-IP, and RDMA network protocols. Prior scholarly works have analyzed tail latencies caused by extrinsic network parameters like network congestion and flow fairness. Contrary to existing literature, we identify surprising rare tails in TCP-IP round-trip measurements that are as enormous as 110x higher than the median latency. Our experimental design eliminates network congestion as a tail-inducing factor. Moreover, we observe similar extreme tails in UDP-IP packet exchanges, ruling out additional TCP-IP protocol operations as the root cause of tail latency. However, we are unable to reproduce similar tail latencies in RDMA packet exchanges, which leads us to conclude that the TCP/UDP protocol stack within the operating system kernel is likely the primary source of extreme latency tails.
Security modeling and quanti(cid:2)cation of intrusion tolerant systems (cid:0)

In the past, the security of a software or an information system has been treated as a qualitative attribute. Recently however, several researchers [1, 2, 3] have suggested that security be treated as a quantifiable QoS attribute. The question that naturally arises is how to formally define security? Security analysis of a software or an information system is a 5-fold framework of (1) Availability, (2) Integrity, (3) Confidentiality, (4) Authenticity, and (5) Non-repudiation as depicted in Figure 1:
USDA AND PRIVATE ANALYSTS' FORECASTS OF ENDING STOCKS: HOW GOOD ARE THEY?

Forecasts of U.S. ending stocks for corn, soybean, and wheat issued by the USDA and private analysts are evaluated. The null hypothesis that USDA forecasts are unbiased cannot be rejected. The null hypothesis that private analysts' forecasts are unbiased forecasts of USDA forecasts cannot be rejected either. However, there is strong evidence that the forecasts issued by the USDA and private analysts are inefficient. Overall, the precision of the USDA forecasts and the private analysts' forecasts is highest for wheat and lowest for soybean.
Endowing Human Pancreatic Ribonuclease with Toxicity for Cancer Cells*

Onconase® is an amphibian protein that is now in Phase III clinical trials as a cancer chemotherapeutic. Human pancreatic ribonuclease (RNase 1) is homologous to Onconase® but is not cytotoxic. Here, ERDD RNase 1, which is the L86E/N88R/G89D/R91D variant of RNase 1, is shown to have conformational stability and ribonucleolytic activity similar to that of the wild-type enzyme but >103-fold less affinity for the endogenous cytosolic ribonuclease inhibitor protein. Most significantly, ERDD RNase 1 is toxic to human leukemia cells. The addition of a non-native disulfide bond to ERDD RNase 1 not only increases the conformational stability of the enzyme but also increases its cytotoxicity such that its IC50 value is only 8-fold greater than that of Onconase®. Thus, only a few amino acid substitutions are necessary to make a human protein toxic to human cancer cells. This finding has significant implications for human cancer chemotherapy.
Truthful mechanisms for the location of different facilities

In this paper we formalize and initiate the study of \emph{heterogeneous $k$-facility location without money}, a problem akin to the classical $k$-facility location problem but encompassing a richer model and featuring multi-parameter agents. In particular, we consider \emph{truthful mechanisms without money} for the problem in which \emph{heterogeneous} (i.e. serving different purposes) facilities have to be located and agents are only interested in some of them. We study the approximation factor that can be achieved by truthful mechanisms in this setting and present some bounds which make a surprising parallel with our knowledge of truthfulness for the classical single-dimensional facility location problem.
Dietary assessment methods in epidemiologic studies

Diet is a major lifestyle-related risk factor of various chronic diseases. Dietary intake can be assessed by subjective report and objective observation. Subjective assessment is possible using open-ended surveys such as dietary recalls or records, or using closed-ended surveys including food frequency questionnaires. Each method has inherent strengths and limitations. Continued efforts to improve the accuracy of dietary intake assessment and enhance its feasibility in epidemiological studies have been made. This article reviews common dietary assessment methods and their feasibility in epidemiological studies.
Margin lending and stock market volatility

Margin loans have long been associated in the popular mind with instability in security markets, and the potential for margin lending to exacerbate the amplitude of cycles in stock prices has received considerable attention in the years since the Crash of 1929. Despite the many empirical studies of the association between margin loans or margin requirements and the volatility of stock returns, there has been no definitive answer, and the consensus among financial economists is that margin lending plays little, if any, role in shaping the probability distribution of returns on common stocks. Perhaps as a result of this, the Federal Reserve System's margin requirements have not been changed since 1974. ; This study addresses the role of margin requirements from the vantage points of economic theory and the historical record. The author reviews many of the key empirical studies of the link between margin requirements and stock prices. Economic theory suggests many reasons that the link might be weak, and this is supported by many of the empirical studies. ; The author estimates a model of the returns on common stocks in the period 1975-2001. The model includes information on the amount of margin debt outstanding. He concludes that margin loans are a statistically significant factor in the determination of stock returns, and that the effect is stronger and more reliable for the NASDAQ Composite index than for the S&P 500 index. However, the economic significance of margin debt is so low that this study is not able to support a return to the active margin policy that existed prior to 1974.
Hyperfractionated Radiotherapy with Concurrent Cisplatin/5-Fluorouracil for Locoregional Advanced Head and Neck Cancer: Analysis of 105 Consecutive Patients

Objective. We reviewed a cohort of patients with previously untreated locoregional advanced head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) who received a uniform chemoradiotherapy regimen. Methods. Retrospective review was performed of 105 patients with stage III or IV HNSCC treated at Greater Baltimore Medical Center from 2000 to 2007. Radiation included 125 cGy twice daily for a total 70 Gy to the primary site. Chemotherapy consisted of cisplatin (12 mg/m2/h) daily for five days and 5-fluorouracil (600 mg/m2/20 h) daily for five days, given with weeks one and six of radiation. All but seven patients with N2 or greater disease received planned neck dissection after chemoradiotherapy. Primary outcomes were overall survival (OS), locoregional control (LRC), and disease-free survival (DFS). Results. Median followup of surviving patients was 57.6 months. Five-year OS was 60%, LRC was 68%, and DFS was 56%. Predictors of increased mortality included age ≥55, female gender, hypopharyngeal primary, and T3/T4 stage. Twelve patients developed locoregional recurrences, and 16 patients developed distant metastases. Eighteen second primary malignancies were diagnosed in 17 patients. Conclusions. The CRT regimen resulted in favorable outcomes. However, locoregional and distant recurrences cause significant mortality and highlight the need for more effective therapies to prevent and manage these events.
A Empirical Framework for Facial Expression Analysis

For facial expression analysis different-different approaches have been implemented. First thing preprocessing step is done and after that face detection algorithm applied for face detection. After face detection facial feature tracking or feature is extracted on the behalf of obtained feature value. Different-different classifier likes ANN, HMM, SVM is used to train the feature value obtained and then after testing is done to classify the classes to whom this feature value belongs. If high dimension feature value is obtained than PCA does work to reduce the dimension. Our approach is that apply Gabor filter on face to extract the feature. After feature extraction SVM is used to training and testing the feature value and finally similarity measure is evaluated to classify the classes to whom it belongs means it be from happy, sad, disgust, surprise, angry class. As many algorithm has been used for showing the Facial Expression of a Human. They have used different-different feature extraction method. Consideration of some similarity function has taken. Sometimes PCA, LDA was considered for dimensions reduction and for better accuracy.