Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Noninvasive Measurements of the Membrane Potential and GABAergic Action in Hippocampal Interneurons

Neurotransmitters affect the membrane potential (Vm) of target cells by modulating the activity of receptor-linked ion channels. The direction and amplitude of the resulting transmembrane current depend on the resting level of Vm and the gradient across the membrane of permeant ion species. Vm, in addition, governs the activation state of voltage-gated channels. Knowledge of the exact level of Vm is therefore crucial to evaluate the nature of the neurotransmitter effect. However, the traditional methods to measureVm, with microelectrodes or the whole-cell current-clamp technique, have the drawback that the recording pipette is in contact with the cytoplasm, and dialysis with the pipette solution alters the ionic composition of the interior of the cell. Here we describe a novel technique to determine theVm of an intact cell from the reversal potential of K+ currents through a cell-attached patch. Applying the method to interneurons in hippocampal brain slices yielded more negative values for Vm than subsequent whole-cell current-clamp measurements from the same cell, presumably reflecting the development of a Donnan potential between cytoplasm and pipette solution in the whole-cell mode. Cell-attachedVm measurements were used to study GABAergic actions in intact CA1 interneurons. In 1- to 3-week-old rats, bath-applied GABA inhibited these cells by stabilizingVm at a level depending on contributions from both GABAA and GABAB components. In contrast, in 1- to 4-d-old animals, only GABAA receptors were activated resulting in a depolarizing GABA response.
Dynamically balanced and plausible trajectory planning for human-like characters

We present an interactive motion planning algorithm to compute plausible trajectories for high-DOF human-like characters. Given a discrete sequence of contact configurations, we use a three-phase optimization approach to ensure that the resulting trajectory is collision-free, smooth, and satisfies dynamic balancing constraints. Our approach can directly compute dynamically balanced and natural-looking motions at interactive frame rates and is considerably faster than prior methods. We highlight its performance on complex human motion benchmarks corresponding to walking, climbing, crawling, and crouching, where the discrete configurations are generated from a kinematic planner or extracted from motion capture datasets.
Python for Unified Research in Econometrics and Statistics

Python is a powerful high-level open source programming language that is available for multiple platforms. It supports object-oriented programming and has recently become a serious alternative to low-level compiled languages such as C + +. It is easy to learn and use, and is recognized for very fast development times, which makes it suitable for rapid software prototyping as well as teaching purposes. We motivate the use of Python and its free extension modules for high performance stand-alone applications in econometrics and statistics, and as a tool for gluing different applications together. (It is in this sense that Python forms a “unified” environment for statistical research.) We give details on the core language features, which will enable a user to immediately begin work, and then provide practical examples of advanced uses of Python. Finally, we compare the run-time performance of extended Python against a number of commonly-used statistical packages and programming environments. Supplemental materials are available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of Econometric Reviews to view the free supplemental file.
Queries mixing positive and negative associations and their weakening

This paper deals with queries involving two components: one describing desired associations, another specifying forbidden associations. In addition, those preferences are cited in the context of a hierarchy expressing some strength about what is wanted and rejected. So doing an ordinal ordering over the answers is made available in order to distinguish among the elements of the answer. The situation where no answer is returned is also tackled and it is proposed to soften the initial query in order to get a non-empty answer. It is shown that this can be achieved still using an ordinal framework which is an extension of the initial one.
An anti-piracy mechanism based on class separation and dynamic loading for Android applications

With expanding use of smartphones, smartphone app piracy has grown more widespread. However, existing licensing services have limits on protecting copyright of apps because they can be cracked. We present a new approach to block execution of pirated apps and protect apps against piracy. The proposed approach uses Java class separation and dynamic loading. When an app is being developed, it is divided into two parts, an Incomplete Main Application (IMA) and Separate Essential Class (SEC). Then, they are uploaded to market server. If a user buys and installs an app, only its IMA is downloaded to the user's smartphone. When the user first execute the app's IMA, the market server authenticates the user, encrypts the app's SEC, and sends the encrypted SEC to the user's smartphone. The downloaded SEC is decrypted and stored in secure space on the smartphone. The SEC, then, is loaded dynamically into the app's address space and the app is successfully executed. Only designated processes are allowed to access the SEC stored in the secure space. Other accesses are considered illegal and are prohibited. Although the app's IMA can be pirated, without the SEC the app cannot be successfully executed. We verify effectiveness of the approach using experiments and show the approach incurs an acceptable overhead.
CRITICAL CONDITIONS FOR RILL INITIATION

Quantifying critical conditions of rill formation can be useful for a better understanding of soil erosion processes. Current studies lack a consensus and related rationale on how to describe these conditions. This study was based on the concepts that (1) the shear stress available for erosion at any given point is a function of the runoff rate, the slope steepness, and hydraulic characteristics of the surface; (2) rill incision begins when overland flow shear stress exceeds soil critical shear stress; and (3) the distance from the top of the slope to the point where rills form can be measured and analyzed as length to rill initiation and decreases with increase in slope and rainfall intensity. These concepts were tested with a representative silty-clay soil from the Loess Plateau in northwestern China on a large sloping indoor plot (8 × 3 m), with five different slopes using simulated rainfall at three rainfall intensities. Values of several hydraulic parameters at rill initiation were determined from the experimental data. The results showed relationships among slope steepness, rainfall intensity, and location of rill initiation. It was found that slope was relatively more important than rainfall intensity in determining the location of rill initiation. Soil critical shear stress determined in this study ranged from 1.33 to 2.63 Pa, with an average of 1.94 Pa. Soil critical shear stress was inversely related to slope and was not influenced by rainfall intensity. The results of this study were comparable with those of previous investigators.
XenPump: A New Method to Mitigate Timing Channel in Cloud Computing

Cloud computing security has become the focus in information security, where much attention has been drawn to the user privacy leakage. Although isolation and some other security policies have been provided to protect the security of cloud computing, confidential information can be still stolen by timing channels without being detected. In this paper, a new method named XenPump is presented aiming to mitigate the threat of the timing channels by adding latency. XenPump is designed as a module located in hypervisor, monitoring the hypercalls used by the timing channels and adding latencies to lower the threat into an acceptable level. The prototype of XenPump has been implemented in Xen virtualization platform, and the performance is evaluated by the shared memory based timing channel. The experiment results show that XenPump can mitigate the threat of the timing channel by interrupting both the capacity and transmission accuracy. It is believed that after small extension, XenPump can mitigate the incoming timing channels.
Evaluation of Immunomagnetic Separation for the Detection of Salmonella in Surface Waters by Polymerase Chain Reaction

Salmonella spp. is associated with fecal pollution and capable of surviving for long periods in aquatic environments. Instead of the traditional, time-consuming biochemical detection, polymerase chain reaction (PCR) allows rapid identification of Salmonella directly concentrated from water samples. However, prevalence of Salmonella may be underestimated because of the vulnerability of PCR to various environmental chemicals like humic acid, compounded by the fact that various DNA polymerases have different susceptibility to humic acid. Because immunomagnetic separation (IMS) theoretically could isolate Salmonella from other microbes and facilitate removal of aquatic PCR inhibitors of different sizes, this study aims to compare the efficiency of conventional PCR combined with immunomagnetic separation (IMS) for Salmonella detection within a moderately polluted watershed. In our study, the positive rate was increased from 17.6% to 47% with nearly ten-fold improvement in the detection limit. These results suggest the sensitivity of Salmonella detection could be enhanced by IMS, particularly in low quality surface waters. Due to its effects on clearance of aquatic pollutants, IMS may be suitable for most DNA polymerases for Salmonella detection.
Towards Petascale Cosmological Simulations with ChaNGa

Cosmological simulators are currently an important component in the study of the formation of galaxies and large scale structures, and can help answer many important questions about the universe. Despite their utility, existing parallel simulators do not scale effectively on modern machines containing thousands of processors. In this paper we present ChaNGa, a recently released production simulator based on the Charm++ infrastructure. To achieve scalable performance, ChaNGa employs various optimizations that maximize the overlap between computation and communication. Other optimizations described in the paper include a particle caching mechanism and a recently added multi-timestepping scheme. The paper shows experimental results demonstrating scalable performance for simulations on machines with thousands of processors, including IBM-BlueGene/L and Cray-XT3. We conclude by pointing to our current work, which focuses on developing new load balancing strategies to further improve ChaNGa’s parallel efficiency. To our knowledge, ChaNGa is presently the most scalable cosmological simulator available.
An approach for automatically structuring Vietnamese legal text

Recognizing the structures of legal texts is significant to understand texts in this domain. In this paper, we describe a task of automatically structuring Vietnamese legal documents based on our study of this domain in several aspects: their linguistic features and patterns of recognition with trigger sets. The task focuses on the recognition of the logical structures of the documents stored in law database of Vietnam Ministry of Justice. A rule-based approach in association with some patterns is applied and is verified on a manually built corpus. Experimental result got 64.37% on assumption annotation, 64.15% on provision annotation and 75.76% on sanction annotation in the Fβ=1 score on the corpus of Vietnamese Enterprise Law articles.
Longitudinal Effects of Violent Media Usage on Aggressive Behavior—The Significance of Empathy

The aim of this study was to thoroughly investigate the link between violent media consumption and aggressive behavior. Using a large longitudinal student sample, the role of empathy as a possible mediator of this relationship was of special interest. Data were drawn from wave three to five of the Berlin Longitudinal Study Media, a four-year longitudinal control group study with 1207 school children. Participants completed measures of media usage (violent content of TV and computer games), aggressive behavior perpetration, and empathy. The average age of participants was 10.4 years at Time 1 and 12.4 years at Time 3. Half of the study sample was male (50%). Trivariate structural equation modeling using three measurement times were conducted for assessing the role of empathy as a mediator of the longitudinal relationship between the usage of violent media content and aggressive behavior. For male students empathic skills were shown to unfold a key mediating role between problematic media usage and aggressive behavior.
De Novo Generation of Escape Variant-Specific CD8+ T-Cell Responses following Cytotoxic T-Lymphocyte Escape in Chronic Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1 Infection

ABSTRACT Human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) evades CD8+ T-cell responses through mutations within targeted epitopes, but little is known regarding its ability to generate de novo CD8+ T-cell responses to such mutants. Here we examined gamma interferon-positive, HIV-1-specific CD8+ T-cell responses and autologous viral sequences in an HIV-1-infected individual for more than 6 years following acute infection. Fourteen optimal HIV-1 T-cell epitopes were targeted by CD8+ T cells, four of which underwent mutation associated with dramatic loss of the original CD8+ response. However, following the G357S escape in the HLA-A11-restricted Gag349-359 epitope and the decline of wild-type-specific CD8+ T-cell responses, a novel CD8+ T-cell response equal in magnitude to the original response was generated against the variant epitope. CD8+ T cells targeting the variant epitope did not exhibit cross-reactivity against the wild-type epitope but rather utilized a distinct T-cell receptor Vβ repertoire. Additional studies of chronically HIV-1-infected individuals expressing HLA-A11 demonstrated that the majority of the subjects targeted the G357S escape variant of the Gag349-359 epitope, while the wild-type consensus sequence was significantly less frequently recognized. These data demonstrate that de novo responses against escape variants of CD8+ T-cell epitopes can be generated in chronic HIV-1 infection and provide the rationale for developing vaccines to induce CD8+ T-cell responses directed against both the wild-type and variant forms of CD8 epitopes to prevent the emergence of cytotoxic T-lymphocyte escape variants.
The Ethical contexts for business conflicts

This is the first in a series of studies which is aimed at clarifying one of the most vexing and ubiquitous problems of contemporary livingoethics and moral education. It deals with the area endemic to moral decision makingoconflict. This conflict is examined as it appears in corporate living. This collection of articles covers a broad array of topics to give the reader a flavor for the kinds of issues which exist in this cognate domain. Within these pages readers will explore everything from the problem of decision making and authority to models of the market which may impact on ethical and corporate decisions such as declaring bankruptcy. Other authors reflect more systemic concerns such as examining organizational structures for issues involving justice or, in another case, exploring just how and if values impact on concrete living at all. Co-published with Oxford Philosophy Trust.
Social Influence in the Housing Market

We utilize the decennial U.S. Census to study social effects in housing consumption across 4 million households from 126 ethnic groups and 2,071 geographic locations in the United States. We find that the homeownership decisions within ethnic groups are locally correlated, after controlling for the homeownership rates within the group and the region. Social influence is stronger for younger, less educated, and lower-income individuals; immigrants; and Americans with ancestors from more unequal, uncertainty-avoiding, and collectivistic cultures. Our results suggest that both status and information considerations play an important role in the social comparison process in capital markets.
Effect of mismatched SNR on the performance of iterative linear detection in MIMO-OFDM systems

In this paper, the effect of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) mismatch on the bit error rate (BER) performance of iterative linear detection in MIMO-OFDM systems based on high-order modulation is investigated. The effect of SNR mismatch on every iteration and different combinations of detecting and decoding schemes is studied in detail. Simulation shows that the performance of iterative linear detection is very sensitive to SNR mismatch regardless of SNR overestimation or underestimation. Furthermore, a simplified iterative linear detection is proposed, which is more insensitive to SNR mismatch nearly without loss of performance.
Towards Achieving Molecular Circuit Robustness Using a Multi-Valued Programmable Logic Model

An approach is presented to create molecular electronics systems by introducing a multi-valued programmable logic (MVPL) block to model the characteristics recently observed experimentally in certain molecular structures to achieve circuit robustness on a molecular substrate. We show that— given the experimentally observed characteristics of certain types of molecular electronics substrates—we can adopt a multi-valued logic system for the logic blocks, thereby partially avoiding the need to incorporate specialized fault detection or fault tolerant circuitry at the molecular level that would be required in binary logic circuits.
Cu speciation and cyanobacterial distribution in harbors subject to anthropogenic Cu inputs

Cu speciation was studied in four harbors on the south coast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, that are exposed to varying degrees of Cu contamination from anthropogenic sources. Copper in waters outside the harbors was complexed by ∼10 nM of very strong chelators, twofold higher than ambient Cu concentrations. In Eel Pond (Woods Hole) and Falmouth Inner Harbor, total dissolved Cu concentrations were 7–10‐fold higher. However, because the strong chelators were saturated in these two harbors, the free Cu increased by 1,000‐fold, from ∼10−13 M to ∼10−10 M. There was no evidence for any enhanced biological production of chelators in response to the elevated Cu concentrations. However, cell densities of cyanobacteria, which have been proposed as a source of strong Cu chelators in seawater, decline drastically in the high Cu harbors. These trends are consistent with culture studies showing that Synechococcus sp. , the predominant cyanophyte in these waters, shows a dramatic decrease in growth rates above a free Cu2+ level of 10−11 M. In Great Pond and Waquoit Bay, which showed no significant Cu contamination or saturation of strong ligands, cyanobacterial cell densities showed little or no decrease. Results suggest that significant anthropogenic inputs of Cu may overwhelm processes occurring in seawater that lead Cu and strong chelator concentrations to approach comparable levels.
Comparing Information Retrieval Effectiveness of Different Metadata Generation Methods

This study describes an information retrieval experiment comparing the retrieval effectiveness (recall and precision) for queries run against professionally and automatically generated metadata records. The metadata records represented web pages from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. The results of 10 queries were analyzed in terms of recall and precision for this small-scale study. The results of the study suggest that professionally generated metadata records are not significantly better in terms of information retrieval effectiveness than automatically generated metadata records.
Ketamine exerts antidepressant effects and reduces IL-1β and IL-6 levels in rat prefrontal cortex and hippocampus

Ketamine has fast-acting and robust antidepressant effects in animal models and depressed patients. It has been hypothesized that its underlying mechanism of action is associated with the inflammatory response in the central nervous system. Therefore, the present study was designed to investigate the antidepressant effects of ketamine and the expression of interleukin (IL)-1β and IL-6 in the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus of a rat model. Twenty Wistar rats were randomly divided into 2 groups (each group, n=10); the saline group and the ketamine group. On the 1st day, rats undertook a forced swimming test (FST) for 15 min (pre-test session). On the 2nd day, saline or ketamine was administered intraperitoneally 30 min before the test session. Following this, rats performed another FST for 5 min (test session) and the immobility time was recorded. The rats were then sacrificed, and the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus were harvested for determination of IL-1β and IL-6 levels. Compared with the saline group, ketamine administration significantly decreased the immobility time of rats during the FST (P<0.05). In addition, the ketamine group demonstrated a statistically significant decrease in the expression of IL-1β and IL-6 in rat prefrontal cortex and hippocampus compared with the saline group (P<0.05). Ketamine-induced antidepressant effects are associated with decreased levels of IL-1β and IL-6 in rat prefrontal cortex and hippocampus.
Comparative Genome Sequence Analysis of Multidrug-Resistant Acinetobacter baumannii

ABSTRACT The recent emergence of multidrug resistance (MDR) in Acinetobacter baumannii has raised concern in health care settings worldwide. In order to understand the repertoire of resistance determinants and their organization and origins, we compared the genome sequences of three MDR and three drug-susceptible A. baumannii isolates. The entire MDR phenotype can be explained by the acquisition of discrete resistance determinants distributed throughout the genome. A comparison of closely related MDR and drug-susceptible isolates suggests that drug efflux may be a less significant contributor to resistance to certain classes of antibiotics than inactivation enzymes are. A resistance island with a variable composition of resistance determinants interspersed with transposons, integrons, and other mobile genetic elements is a significant but not universal contributor to the MDR phenotype. Four hundred seventy-five genes are shared among all six clinical isolates but absent from the related environmental species Acinetobacter baylyi ADP1. These genes are enriched for transcription factors and transporters and suggest physiological features of A. baumannii that are related to adaptation for growth in association with humans.
Viewpoint based mobile robotic exploration aiding object search in indoor environment

We present a probabilistic method of finding the next best viewpoint that maximizes the chances of finding an object in a known environment for an indoor mobile robot. We make use of the information that is available to a robot in the form of potential locations to search for an object. Extraction of these potential locations and their representation for exploration is explained. This work primarily focuses on placing the robot at its best location in the environment to detect, recognize an object and hence do object search. With experiments done on the exploration, object recognition individually we show the robustness of this approach for object search task. We analyse and compare our method with two other strategies for localizing the object empirically and show unequivocally that the strategy based on the probabilistic formalism in general performs better than the other two.