Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Sequential Analysis of the Numerical Stroop Effect Reveals Response Suppression

Automatic processing of irrelevant stimulus dimensions has been demonstrated in a variety of tasks. Previous studies have shown that conflict between relevant and irrelevant dimensions can be reduced when a feature of the irrelevant dimension is repeated. The specific level at which the automatic process is suppressed (e.g., perceptual repetition, response repetition), however, is less understood. In the current experiment we used the numerical Stroop paradigm, in which the processing of irrelevant numerical values of 2 digits interferes with the processing of their physical size, to pinpoint the precise level of the suppression. Using a sequential analysis, we dissociated perceptual repetition from response repetition of the relevant and irrelevant dimension. Our analyses of reaction times, error rates, and diffusion modeling revealed that the congruity effect is significantly reduced or even absent when the response sequence of the irrelevant dimension, rather than the numerical value or the physical size, is repeated. These results suggest that automatic activation of the irrelevant dimension is suppressed at the response level. The current results shed light on the level of interaction between numerical magnitude and physical size as well as the effect of variability of responses and stimuli on automatic processing.
Demonstration of NLFM Waveforms With Experiments and Doppler Shift Compensation for SAR Application

Range sidelobe suppression in synthetic aperture radars (SARs) is conventionally realized using amplitude weighting with windowing functions in either time or frequency domains, which would result in a reduced signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the output. To counterbalance the loss, a system with more complexity and cost is needed, especially for spaceborne SAR. Fortunately, nonlinear frequency modulation (NLFM) chirp waveforms, which can shape the signal's power spectral density and offer radar matched filter output with lower sidelobes at no cost of reduced SNR, is a promising candidate. In this letter, the proof-of-principle experiment is presented to construct NLFM transmitting pulses using a real SAR system platform on the ground and analyze the characteristics of the pulses. Two approaches are developed to perform system-specific predistortion and the advantage of NLFM waveforms with better SNR is demonstrated using the theoretical derivation and experimental results. For spaceborne NLFM SAR, the effect of Doppler shift on NLFM SAR imaging cannot be neglected. Therefore, for further promoting the application of NLFM in SAR, one effective compensation approach is developed. All the experimental results and analysis validate the promising potential of NLFM for SAR application.
An Evaluation of Arabidopsis thaliana Hybrid Traits and Their Genetic Control

Heterosis is an important phenomenon in agriculture. However, heterosis often greatly varies among hybrids and among traits. To investigate heterosis across a large number of traits and numerous genotypes, we evaluated 12 life history traits on parents and hybrids derived from five Arabidopsis thaliana ecotypes (Col, Ler-0, Cvi, Ws, and C24) by using a complete diallel analysis containing 20 hybrids. Parental contributions to heterosis were hybrid and trait specific with a few reciprocal differences. Most notably, C24 generated hybrids with flowering time, biomass, and reproductive traits that often exceeded high-parent values. However, reproductive traits of C24 and Col hybrids and flowering time traits of C24 and Ler hybrids had no heterosis. We investigated whether allelic variation at flowering time genes FRIGIDA (FRI) and FLOWERING LOCUS C (FLC) could explain the genotype- and trait-specific contribution of C24 to hybrid traits. We evaluated both Col and Ler lines introgressed with various FRI and FLC alleles and hybrids between these lines and C24. Hybrids with functional FLC differed from hybrids with nonfunctional FLC for 21 of the 24 hybrid-trait combinations. In most crosses, heterosis was fully or partially explained by FRI and FLC. Our results describe the genetic diversity for heterosis within a sample of A. thaliana ecotypes and show that FRI and FLC are major factors that contribute to heterosis in a genotype and trait specific fashion.
A previously undescribed scene-selective site is the key to encoding ego-motion in naturalistic environments

Current models of scene processing in the human brain include three scene-selective areas: the parahippocampal place area (or the temporal place areas), the restrosplenial cortex (or the medial place area), and the transverse occipital sulcus (or the occipital place area). Here, we challenged this model by showing that at least one other scene-selective site can also be detected within the human posterior intraparietal gyrus. Despite the smaller size of this site compared to the other scene-selective areas, the posterior intraparietal gyrus scene-selective (PIGS) site was detected consistently in a large pool of subjects (n = 59; 33 females). The reproducibility of this finding was tested based on multiple criteria, including comparing the results across sessions, utilizing different scanners (3T and 7T) and stimulus sets. Furthermore, we found that this site (but not the other three scene-selective areas) is significantly sensitive to ego-motion in scenes, thus distinguishing the role of PIGS in scene perception relative to other scene-selective areas. These results highlight the importance of including finer scale scene-selective sites in models of scene processing – a crucial step toward a more comprehensive understanding of how scenes are encoded under dynamic conditions.
Hybrid interconnect design for heterogeneous hardware accelerators

The communication infrastructure is one of the important components of a multicore system along with the computing cores and memories. A good interconnect design plays a key role in improving the performance of such systems. In this paper, we introduce a hybrid communication infrastructure using both the standard bus and our area-efficient and delay-optimized network on chip for heterogeneous multicore systems, especially hardware accelerator systems. An adaptive data communication-based mapping for reconfigurable hardware accelerators is proposed to obtain a low overhead and latency interconnect. Experimental results show that the proposed communication infrastructure and the adaptive data communication-based mapping achieves a speed-up of 2.4× with respect to a similar system using only a bus as interconnect. Moreover, our proposed system achieves a reduction of energy consumption of 56% compared to the original system.
Variational Problems and Partial Di erentialEquations on Implicit Surfaces : The Framework andExamples in Image Processing and Pattern

A novel framework for solving variational problems and partial diier-ential equations deened on surfaces is introduced in this paper. The key idea is to implicitly represent the surface as the level set of a higher dimensional function, and solve the problem in a xed Cartesian coordinate system using this new embedding function. When this is combined with the general theory of harmonic maps, we can address such problems as intrinsic regularization of data deened on the surface and pattern generation using the intrinsic surface geometry. We describe the basic technique and present examples in image processing and computer graphics. More precisely , we address the problems of isotropic and anisotropic regularization of images and direction maps deened on the surface and the problem of intrinsic texture synthesis.
Automatic Association of Chats and Video Tracks for Activity Learning and Recognition in Aerial Video Surveillance

We describe two advanced video analysis techniques, including video-indexed by voice annotations (VIVA) and multi-media indexing and explorer (MINER). VIVA utilizes analyst call-outs (ACOs) in the form of chat messages (voice-to-text) to associate labels with video target tracks, to designate spatial-temporal activity boundaries and to augment video tracking in challenging scenarios. Challenging scenarios include low-resolution sensors, moving targets and target trajectories obscured by natural and man-made clutter. MINER includes: (1) a fusion of graphical track and text data using probabilistic methods; (2) an activity pattern learning framework to support querying an index of activities of interest (AOIs) and targets of interest (TOIs) by movement type and geolocation; and (3) a user interface to support streaming multi-intelligence data processing. We also present an activity pattern learning framework that uses the multi-source associated data as training to index a large archive of full-motion videos (FMV). VIVA and MINER examples are demonstrated for wide aerial/overhead imagery over common data sets affording an improvement in tracking from video data alone, leading to 84% detection with modest misdetection/false alarm results due to the complexity of the scenario. The novel use of ACOs and chat messages in video tracking paves the way for user interaction, correction and preparation of situation awareness reports.
The Consequence of Immune Suppressive Cells in the Use of Therapeutic Cancer Vaccines and Their Importance in Immune Monitoring

Evaluating the number, phenotypic characteristics, and function of immunosuppressive cells in the tumor microenvironment and peripheral blood could elucidate the antitumor immune response and provide information to evaluate the efficacy of cancer vaccines. Further studies are needed to evaluate the correlation between changes in immunosuppressive cells and clinical outcomes of patients in cancer vaccine clinical trials. This paper focuses on the role of T-regulatory cells, myeloid-derived suppressor cells, and tumor-associated macrophages in cancer and cancer immunotherapy and their role in immune monitoring.
Differentiation of Human CD8+ T Cells from a Memory to Memory/Effector Phenotype1

Previous studies of perforin expression and cytokine production in subsets of peripheral human CD45RA−CD8+ T cells with different CD28/CD27 phenotypes showed that CD28+CD45RA−CD8+ and CD27+CD45RA−CD8+ T cells have characteristics of memory T cells, whereas CD28−CD45RA−CD8+ and CD27−CD45RA−CD8+ T cells have characteristics of both memory and effector T cells. However, the differentiation pathway from memory CD8+ T cells into memory/effector CD8+ T cells has not been completely clarified. We investigated this differentiation pathway using EBV- and human CMV (HCMV)-specific CD8+ T cells. Three subsets of CD45RA−CD8+ T cells were observed in both total CD8+ T cells and EBV- or HCMV-specific CD8+ T cells: CD27+CD28+, CD27+CD28−, and CD27−CD28−. A significant number of the CD27−CD28+ subset was observed in total CD8 T cells. However, this subset was barely detectable in EBV- or HCMV-specific CD8+ T cells. Analysis of perforin expression and cytotoxic activity in the first three subsets suggested the following differentiation pathway: CD27+CD28+CD45RA−→CD27+CD28−CD45RA−→CD27−CD28−CD45RA−. This was supported by the observation that the frequency of CCR5+ cells and CCR7+ cells decreased during this sequence. Analysis of CCR5 and CCR7 expression in the CD27+CD28+ memory cell subset demonstrated the presence of three CCR5/CCR7 populations: CCR5−CCR7+, CCR5+CCR7+, and CCR5+CCR7−. These findings suggested the following differentiation pathway: CD27+CD28+CD45RA− (CCR5−CCR7+→CCR5+CCR7+→CCR5+CCR7−)→CD27+CD28−CD45RA−→CD27−CD28−CD45RA−. The presence of a CD27−CD28+ subset with a CCR5+CCR7− phenotype implies a specialized role for this subset in the differentiation of CD8+ T cells.
Risks of Large Portfolios

The risk of a large portfolio is often estimated by substituting a good estimator of the volatility matrix. However, the accuracy of such a risk estimator is largely unknown. We study factor-based risk estimators under a large amount of assets, and introduce a high-confidence level upper bound (H-CLUB) to assess the estimation. The H-CLUB is constructed using the confidence interval of risk estimators with either known or unknown factors. We derive the limiting distribution of the estimated risks in high dimensionality. We find that when the dimension is large, the factor-based risk estimators have the same asymptotic variance no matter whether the factors are known or not, which is slightly smaller than that of the sample covariance-based estimator. Numerically, H-CLUB outperforms the traditional crude bounds, and provides an insightful risk assessment. In addition, our simulated results quantify the relative error in the risk estimation, which is usually negligible using 3-month daily data.
Coupling Enterprise Systems with Wireless Sensor Nodes : Analysis , Implementation , Experiences and Guidelines

This paper presents an approach for closely coupling enterprise systems and tiny wireless sensor nodes that are embedded into physical items. Coupling is done by implementing services from the enterprise system on the wireless sensor node system and by letting part of the business logic run on the nodes. The paper analyses concrete application scenarios and discusses implications of this approach. The discussion is underpinned by implementation and testing of demonstration applications. The collected experiences lead to four guidelines a designer of such a system should follow.
Sentential influences on acoustic-phonetic processing: a Granger causality analysis of multimodal imaging data

ABSTRACT Sentential context influences the way that listeners identify phonetically ambiguous or perceptual degraded speech sounds. Unfortunately, inherent inferential limitations on the interpretation of behavioural or BOLD imaging results make it unclear whether context influences perceptual processing directly, or acts at a post-perceptual decision stage. In this paper, we use Kalman-filter enabled Granger causation analysis of MRI-constrained MEG/EEG data to distinguish between these possibilities. Using a retrospective probe verification task, we found that sentential context strongly affected the interpretation of words with ambiguous initial voicing (e.g. DUSK-TUSK). This behavioural context effect coincided with increased influence by brain regions associated with lexical representation on regions associated with acoustic-phonetic processing. These results support an interactive view of sentence context effects on speech perception.
Stress incontinence and pelvic floor neurophysiology 15 years after the first delivery

Headline This is a longitudinal study of a cohort of primigravidae recruited between 1985 and 1987 and followed up 7 and 15 years later. Pelvic floor neurophysiology was performed and questionnaires were administered to determine the natural history of stress incontinence and to establish whether pelvic floor denervation after the first delivery is associated with symptoms of stress urinary incontinence in the future.
Historical Perspective and Risk of Multiple Neglected Tropical Diseases in Coastal Tanzania: Compositional and Contextual Determinants of Disease Risk

Background In the past decade, research on neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) has intensified in response to the need to enhance community participation in health delivery, establish monitoring and surveillance systems, and integrate existing disease-specific treatment programs to control overlapping NTD burdens and detrimental effects. In this paper, we evaluated the geographical distribution of NTDs in coastal Tanzania. Methods and Findings We also assessed the collective (compositional and contextual) factors that currently determine risks to multiple NTDs using a cross sectional survey of 1253 individuals in coastal Tanzania. The results show that the effect size in decreasing order of magnitude for non-binary predictors of NTD risks is as follows: NTD comorbidities > poverty > educational attainment > self-reported household quality of life > ethnicity. The multivariate analysis explained 95% of the variance in the relationship between NTD risks and the theoretically-relevant covariates. Compositional (biosocial and sociocultural) factors explained more variance at the neighbourhood level than at the regional level, whereas contextual factors, such as access to health services and household quality, in districts explained a large proportion of variance at the regional level but individually had modest statistical significance, demonstrating the complex interactions between compositional and contextual factors in generating NTD risks. Conclusions NTD risks were inequitably distributed over geographic space, which has several important policy implications. First, it suggests that localities of high burden of NTDs are likely to diminish within statistical averages at higher (regional or national) levels. Second, it indicates that curative or preventive interventions will become more efficient provided they can be focused on the localities, particularly as populations in these localities are likely to be burdened by several NTDs simultaneously, further increasing the imperative of multi-disease interventions.
Development of an Instrument to Assess Individual IT Culture

Reconsidering IT usage as part of a cultural phenomenon drives us to envisage the development of a new instrument to assess the construct of Individual IT Culture (IITC). IT-culture is a concept which has started only recently to appear in IS literature. Grounding our research in psycho sociology and the theories of needs and motivation, which have considerably evolved in the last two decades, we propose the development of a new scale to assess this new concept and, through two-step clustering, we apply this new instrument in order to start verifying a users’ typology based on the users’ IITC.
The Internet at home

reorganizing to provide electronic services to households through computer-based telecommunications. Hardware and software companies and service providers are redesigning their offerings to appeal to the home market. Finally, federal policy is encouraging and seeding a national information infrastructure designed to make these services widely available. Despite these changes, we have too little understanding of how people at home— in their roles as family members, students, participants in the labor force, members of groups and communities, or just as citizens—use the new services and what they want from them. Similarly, we have little understanding about how these services, once used, affect people’s lives. The thesis of this special section is that good empirical research is crucial to both designing what might be termed the new home computing and understanding its impact. Most of our current insight about this subject comes from drawing analogies from the histories of older technologies or from carefully examining the behavior of the early adopters of emerging technologies. Both provide valuable insight, but both have limitations.
UvA-DARE ( Digital Academic Repository ) Simple forecasting heuristics that make us smart : evidence from different market experiments

We study a model in which individual agents use simple linear first order price forecasting rules, adapting them to the complex evolving market environment with a smart Genetic Algorithm optimization procedure. The novelties are: (1) a parsimonious experimental foundation of individual forecasting behaviour; (2) an explanation of individual and aggregate behavior in four different experimental settings, (3) improved one-period and 50-period ahead forecasting of lab experiments, and (4) a characterization of the mean, median and empirical distribution of forecasting heuristics. The median of the distribution of GA forecasting heuristics can be used in designing or validating simple Heuristic Switching Model. JEL codes: C53, C63, C91, D03, D83, D84.
Package 'diffhic' Title Differential Analyis of Hi-c Data

annotatePairs . 2 boxPairs . 4 clusterPairs . 5 compartmentalize . 7 connectCounts . 9 consolidatePairs . 12 correctedContact . 13 cutGenome . 16 diClusters . 17 diffHicUsersGuide . 19 DNaseHiC . 20
Does evidence-based practice improve patient outcomes? An analysis of a natural experiment in a Spanish hospital.

RATIONALE, AIMS AND OBJECTIVES Evidence-based practice (EBP) is widely promoted, but does EBP produce better patient outcomes? We report a natural experiment when part of the internal medicine service in a hospital was reorganized in 2003 to form an EBP unit, the rest of the service remaining unchanged. The units attended similar patients until 2012 permitting comparisons of outcomes and activity. METHODS We used routinely collected statistics (2004-11) to compare the two different methods of practice and test whether patients being seen by the EBP unit differed from standard practice (SP) patients. Data were available by doctor and year. To check for differences between the EBP and SP doctors prior to reorganization, we used statistics from 2000 to 2003. We looked for changes in patient outcomes or activity following reorganization and whether the EBP unit was achieving significantly different results from SP. Data across the periods were combined and tested using Mann-Whitney test. RESULTS No statistically significant differences in outcomes were detected between the EBP and the SP doctors prior to reorganization. Following the unit's establishment, the mortality of patients being treated by EBP doctors compared with their previous performance dropped from 7.4% to 6.3% (P < 0.02) and length of stay from 9.15 to 6.01 days (P = 0.002). No statistically significant improvements were seen in SP physicians' performance. No differences in the proportion of patients admitted or their complexity between the services were detected. Despite this, EBP patients had a clinically significantly lower risk of death 6.27% versus 7.75% (P < 0.001) and a shorter length of stay 6.01 versus 8.46 days (P < 0.001) than SP patients. Readmission rates were similar: 14.4% (EBP); 14.5% (SP). EBP doctors attended twice as many patients/doctor as SP doctors. CONCLUSION The EBP unit was associated with better patient outcomes and more efficient performance than achieved by the same physicians previously or by SP concurrently.
Human papillomavirus (HPV) and cervical cancer.

 HPV is the most common sexually transmitted virus in the US and causes virtually all cases of cervical cancer and genital warts.  HPV infects approximately 20 million people in the United States, and there are 6.3 million new cases each year. Cervical cancer is the second leading cancer killer of women in the US. Nearly 10,000 women are diagnosed with cervical cancer each year and 3,700 of these women die.
Unsupervised feature selection by nonnegative sparsity adaptive subspace learning

Given the high-dimensionality of the original data, dimensionality reduction becomes a necessary step in data processing. In this study, a novel unsupervised feature selection model is proposed, which regards the unsupervised feature selection process as nonnegative subspace learning. Considering the efficiency of the learned subspace which can better indicate the selected features, a nonnegative sparsity adaptive subspace learning framework is proposed. It adapts the sparsity by weighted ℓ2, 1 model. Specifically, the weights are defined by multi-stage support detection. Then we provide an approach to solve this weighted ℓ2, 1 constraint non-convex problem leading to the Non-negative Sparsity Adaptive Subspace Learning (NSASL) algorithm. By the experiments which are conducted on real-word datasets, the superiority of proposed method over seven state-of-the-art unsupervised feature selection algorithms is verified.
Clinicopathological conference Dyspnea in a patient with systemic lupus erythematosus

A 33-year-old woman with a previous history of systemic lupus erythematosus complained of exerptional dyspnea and pleuritic chest pain accompanied by polyarthritis. Chest-x-rays revealed an elevation of the right hemidiaphragm. We discuss the diagnostic and therapeutic approach. © 2008 Elsevier España, S.L. All rights reserved. Disnea en una paciente con lupus eritematoso sistémico