Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The neuropsychological functioning of older adults pre- and post-cognitive training with a brain plasticity-based computerized training program

The present study evaluates the effectiveness of Posit Science Cortex™ with Insight Drive Sharp™ as a tool for improving neuropsychological functioning in a normal aging sample. The purpose of the DriveSharp™ training program is to help an individual improve his or her visual attention and useful field of view. Each exercise continually adapts to the individual's performance so that the training is always at an appropriate level for that specific person. Thirty-two healthy older adult participants were randomly assigned to either the active intervention group (DriveSharp™) or a waitlist control group. Participants in the intervention group were required to engage in vi training at its recommended dosing (60 min/day, 5 days/week, 2 weeks). All participants were given identical neuropsychological assessments to measure change in various realms of cognitive functioning. The Trail Making Test (Reitan, 1986) and the Useful Field of View test (UFOV; Edwards, Vance, et al., 2005) were used to assess the areas of cognition that DriveSharp™ was designed to train (visual attention and information processing), and the Raven's Progressive Matrices test (Raven, 1962) was used to measure area of cognition that is not directly trained by the program: fluid intelligence. It was hypothesized that participants undergoing the intervention would experience improvement in both the trained and untrained neuropsychological measures, and that the performance gain on the measure of fluid intelligence would be the result of the variance shared between fluid intelligence and the more fundamental, directly-trained cognitive abilities. Results revealed a statistically significant improvement on Trail Making Test A/C and the UFOV Selective Attention subtest for the total sample that received training. There was also evidence of a training effect on the UFOV Divided Attention subtest, though this improvement was not statistically significant. These results indicate that the DriveSharp™ program may improve specific aspects of visual attention related to selective attention and inhibition of irrelevant information. No significant change in performance was seen on the UFOV Processing Speed subtest (a measure of a cognitive area claimed to be directly trained by the DriveSharp™ program). Additionally, there was no significant improvement in performance on the Raven's Progressive Matrices, indicating no improvement due to training in more complex abilities, such as fluid intelligence.
Face Recognition From Video using Active Appearance Model Segmentation

Face recognition from video can be improved if good face segmentation of the subject under test is achieved. Many video based face recognition rely on simple background modeling and coarse alignment strategies for segmentation. This work presents a face recognition from video framework based on using active appearance models (AAM) to achieve accurate face segmentation and consistent shape free representation across a video sequence. The segmentation provided by the AAM can be effectively normalized (morphed) to a mean shape. The resulting sub-image can then be delivered to conventional face recognition from video algorithms for robust classification. We present preliminary results on a dataset of 17 individuals and outline the problems encountered in this approach
Cryptagram: photo privacy for online social media

While Online Social Networks (OSNs) enable users to share photos easily, they also expose users to several privacy threats from both the OSNs and external entities. The current privacy controls on OSNs are far from adequate, resulting in inappropriate flows of information when users fail to understand their privacy settings or OSNs fail to implement policies correctly. OSNs may further complicate privacy expectations when they reserve the right to analyze uploaded photos using automated face identification techniques. In this paper, we propose the design, implementation and evaluation of Cryptagram, a system designed to enhance online photo privacy. Cryptagram enables users to convert photos into encrypted images, which the users upload to OSNs. Users directly manage access control to those photos via shared keys that are independent of OSNs or other third parties. OSNs apply standard image transformations (JPEG compression) to all uploaded images so Cryptagram provides an image encoding and encryption mechanism that is tolerant to these transformations. Cryptagram guarantees that the recipient with the right credentials can completely retrieve the original image from the transformed version of the uploaded encrypted image while the OSN cannot infer the original image. Cryptagram's browser extension integrates seamlessly with preexisting OSNs, including Facebook and Google+, and currently has over 400 active users.
The role of botulinum toxin in the neurorehabilitation of young patients with brachial plexus birth palsy

Purpose: To favour the active movements of the shoulder abductor/external rotator, elbow extensor and supinator muscles, through the partial inhibition of the uninvolved antagonistic muscles, in the Brachial Plexus birth Palsy (BPP). Methods: The type A Botulinum Neuro Toxin (BNT-Dysport®, Ipsen) was injected in 50 outpatients (mean age: 4.7 ± 3.4 years) with BPP according to the criteria: early and current neuro-rehabilitation (Reflex Locomotion-RL), age <14 years, no cognitive impairment. Repeat injections (1.9 ± 0.8) were performed in 30 patients. Results: The range of active movements increased at the maximal benefit phase, compared to the baseline values (p < 0.05-0.01). The gain of shoulder's abduction was directly related to the youngest age (r = 0.6). An expanded compliance of the injected muscles and a faster response to the RL, in respect to that experienced in the pre-BNT sessions, was detected. The Global Clinical Rating Scale disclosed the temporal pro® le of the clinical outcome, with step-like increases of the function in 70% of the patients, and a `plateau' trait in the remaining ones (+29.8 ± 10.5%). The video-taped recordings showed an improvement in the global movements. Conclusions: The employment of BNT in the management of young patients with BPP has beneficial effects in the integration of the bodily scheme.
Diet and multiple sclerosis

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is believed to be an inflammatory disease with autoimmune mechanisms, and much of the epidemiologic data point to an important, possibly predominant, role of environmental factors in its etiology.1,2 In this regard, diet is an important subject of etiologic research. Frequent contact with numerous microbial, and potentially toxic, agents and their presentation to the gut-associated lymphoid tissue,3 provide an important biological rationale. Similar to MS incidence, diet shows striking geographic and ethnic variability, and may be preserved or changed after migration to another sociocultural environment. This is in accord with the divergent results of recent migrant studies in MS.4,5 Furthermore, the fact that the risk of MS is correlated in both ecologic6-8 and individual9-11 terms with some gastrointestinal disorders argues in favor of a role for nutrition in the etiology of MS. Considering the likely high frequency of subclinical disease in MS,12 epidemiologic research is unable to clearly differentiate between "risk factors" and "triggers"; the latter lead, by definition, to a transitory accentuation of the inflammatory process. Since triggers can act to increase the incidence of the disease, they may also be classified as risk factors in epidemiologic terms. Furthermore, variables that affect prognosis may also provide clues to causal factors that act before clinical manifestations, and for this reason it may also be useful to take into account the result of trials on lifestyle variables such as diet when studying the etiology of MS. This is a review of available epidemiologic data on the possible role of diet in the etiology of MS, with particular emphasis on methodologic issues. Ecologic studies. In light of a comparatively low intra-population variability13 in diet, ecologic investigations are particularly valuable in the study of nutritional factors and MS. This is in contrast to …
The Inevitability of Failure: The Flawed Assumption of Security in Modern Computing Environments

Although public awareness of the need for secu­ rity in computing systems is growing rapidly, current efforts to provide security are unlikely to succeed. Current security efforts suffer from the flawed assumption that adequate security can be provided in applications with the existing security mechanisms of mainstream operating systems. In reality, the need for secure operating systems is growing in today’s com­ puting environment due to substantial increases in connectivity and data sharing. The goal of this paper is to motivate a renewed interest in secure operating systems so that future security efforts may build on a solid foundation. This paper identifies several secure operating system features which are lacking in mainstream operating systems, argues that these features are necessary to adequately protect general applica­ tion-space security mechanisms, and provides con­ crete examples of how current security solutions are critically dependent on these features.
Using template-grammars for shake & bake paraphrasing

In this paper we propose an approach to corpus-based generation in a machine translation framework that is similar to shake & bake (Whitelock, 1992). A bag of words is mapped against an automatically induced TL template grammar and a sentence is generated by recursively applying rules that are extracted from the template grammar. A test version of the template grammar is enriched with further lexical and grammatical variation patterns. We show how we induce a template grammar and how it is enriched with additional paraphrasing knowledge. We suggest a framework for weighing and training the template grammars and show that the enriched template grammars produce better paraphrases.
Effects of altering flow and odor information on plume tracking behavior in walking cockroaches, Periplaneta americana (L.)

SUMMARY Animals using odor plumes to locate resources are activated to track these plumes by the presence of an attractive odor, and typically steer toward the source using directional cues from the flowing air or water bearing the odor. We challenged freely walking virgin male cockroaches, Periplaneta americana, to track plumes of airborne female pheromone and then video-recorded and analyzed their responses as the odor plume and wind were independently manipulated. Plume tracking males that experienced the total loss of directional air flow halfway to the odor source showed little change in their performance, and 100% were able to quickly locate the pheromone source. By contrast, males experiencing a sudden loss of odor while tracking a plume rapidly changed their behavior; often turning downwind and retracing their steps to the release point, or walking in loops, but rarely moving upwind to the previous location of the source. In a subsequent experiment, in order to determine whether a memory of the previously experienced wind direction could provide the directional information necessary to locate an odor source, we challenged males to track plumes in zero wind after pre-exposing them to: (1) wind and pheromone, (2) wind only, and (3) neither wind nor pheromone. These were compared to males tracking a wind-borne pheromone plume, in which case, all males were able to locate the pheromone source. Our results show that males require the detection of wind and pheromone simultaneously during plume tracking in order to quickly and efficiently locate the odor source. These results are consistent with those reported from flying moths tracking wind-borne pheromone plumes, and suggest that the control system underlying this behavior requires ongoing simultaneous experience with wind and odor information during the performance of the behavior to operate efficiently.
Evaluation of Data Storage in HathiTrust Research Center Using Cassandra

As digital data sources grow in number and size, they pose an opportunity for computational investigation by means of text mining, NLP, and other text analysis techniques. The HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) was recently established to provision for automated analytical techniques on the over 11 million digitized volumes (books) of the HathiTrust digital repository. The HTRC data store that hosts and provisions access to HathiTrust volumes needs to be efficient, fault-tolerant and large-scale. In this paper, we propose three schema designs of Cassandra NoSQL store to represent HathiTrust corpus and perform extensive performance evaluation using simulated workloads. The experimental results demonstrate that encapsulating the whole volume within a single row with regular columns delivers the best overall performance.
Building the Perfect Parasite: Cell Division in Apicomplexa

Apicomplexans are pathogens responsible for malaria, toxoplasmosis, and crytposporidiosis in humans, and a wide range of livestock diseases. These unicellular eukaryotes are stealthy invaders, sheltering from the immune response in the cells of their hosts, while at the same time tapping into these cells as source of nutrients. The complexity and beauty of the structures formed during their intracellular development have made apicomplexans the darling of electron microscopists. Dramatic technological progress over the last decade has transformed apicomplexans into respectable genetic model organisms. Extensive genomic resources are now available for many apicomplexan species. At the same time, parasite transfection has enabled researchers to test the function of specific genes through reverse and forward genetic approaches with increasing sophistication. Transfection also introduced the use of fluorescent reporters, opening the field to dynamic real time microscopic observation. Parasite cell biologists have used these tools to take a fresh look at a classic problem: how do apicomplexans build the perfect invasion machine, the zoite, and how is this process fine-tuned to fit the specific niche of each pathogen in this ancient and very diverse group? This work has unearthed a treasure trove of novel structures and mechanisms that are the focus of this review.
Planning under Uncertainty for Robotic Tasks with Mixed Observability

Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) provide a principled, general framework for robot motion planning in uncertain and dynamic environments. They have been applied to various robotic tasks. However, solving POMDPs exactly is computationally intractable. A major challenge is to scale up POMDP algorithms for complex robotic tasks. Robotic systems often have mixed observability : even when a robot’s state is not fully observable, some components of the state may still be so. We use a factored model to represent separately the fully and partially observable components of a robot’s state and derive a compact lower-dimensional representation of its belief space. This factored representation can be combined with any point-based algorithm to compute approximate POMDP solutions. Experimental results show that on standard test problems, our approach improves the performance of a leading point-based POMDP algorithm by many times.
Photonic Spin Hall Effect at Metasurfaces

Photonic Spin Hall Effect When charged carriers move in a magnetic field, they are deflected—an effect known as the Hall effect. Electrons possess charge and spin, a property related to magnetism. The symmetry of electromagnetism then allows for a spin Hall effect whereby the spin is deflected by an electric field. In optics, photons, too, have electric and magnetic components and should thus also exhibit a corresponding photonic spin Hall effect. Using designer metamaterial surfaces, Yin et al. (p. 1405) show that the spin-orbit coupling for photons can be amplified, giving rise to an observable photonic spin Hall effect. The polarization-dependent deflection of photons can be controlled with a designed metamaterial surface. The spin Hall effect (SHE) of light is very weak because of the extremely small photon momentum and spin-orbit interaction. Here, we report a strong photonic SHE resulting in a measured large splitting of polarized light at metasurfaces. The rapidly varying phase discontinuities along a metasurface, breaking the axial symmetry of the system, enable the direct observation of large transverse motion of circularly polarized light, even at normal incidence. The strong spin-orbit interaction deviates the polarized light from the trajectory prescribed by the ordinary Fermat principle. Such a strong and broadband photonic SHE may provide a route for exploiting the spin and orbit angular momentum of light for information processing and communication.
A Non-Auxinic Growth-Promoting Factor Present in Crown Gall Tumor Tissue

Summary A biologically active factor is present in crown gall tumor tissue extracts which when used in association with an auxin is capable of encouraging the very active proliferation of normal tobacco pith tissue. Neither the factor present in the tumor extract nor the auxin is by itself effective in stimulating the active division of the pith cells.
Resolving the angular profile of 60 GHz wireless channels by delay-Doppler measurements

Previous channel measurement campaigns in millimetre wave bands were mostly focussing on time invariant channels of static environments. Highly directive antennas were swept in azimuth and elevation angle to extract the angular profile of the double-directional radio channel. This angular profile is also visual in the Doppler domain. Therefore, contrary to common Doppler modelling, close scattering objects have to be taken into account. In this paper, a methodology for repeatable estimation of the angular profile through delay-Doppler measurements is proposed. Repeat-able measurements of the static scenario allow for 1) optimization of the probing signals to reduce the geometrical effects and 2) disambiguation of the angular estimates through different measurement positions.
A phonetically aware system for speech activity detection

Speech activity detection (SAD) is an essential component of most speech processing tasks and greatly influences the performance of the systems. Noise and channel distortions remain a challenge for SAD systems. In this paper, we focus on a dataset of highly degraded signals, developed under the DARPA Robust Automatic Transcription of Speech (RATS) program. On this challenging data, the best-performing systems are those based on deep neural networks (DNN) trained to predict speech/non-speech posteriors for each frame. We propose a novel two-stage approach to SAD that attempts to model phonetic information in the signal more explicitly than in current systems. In the first stage, a bottleneck DNN is trained to predict posteriors for senones. The activations at the bottleneck layer are then used as input to a second DNN, trained to predict the speech/non-speech posteriors. We test performance on two datasets, with matched and mismatched channels compared to those in the training data. On the matched channels, the proposed approach leads to gains of approximately 35% relative to our best single-stage DNN SAD system. On mismatched channels, the proposed system obtains comparable performance to our baseline, indicating more work needs to be done to improve robustness to mismatched data.
Regulation of sigL Expression by the Catabolite Control Protein CcpA Involves a Roadblock Mechanism in Bacillus subtilis: Potential Connection between Carbon and Nitrogen Metabolism

ABSTRACT A catabolite-responsive element (CRE), a binding site for the CcpA transcription factor, was identified within the sigL structural gene encoding σL in Bacillus subtilis. We show that CcpA binds to this CRE to regulate sigL expression by a “roadblock” mechanism and that this mechanism in part accounts for catabolite repression of σL-directed levD operon expression.
Vitality of chondrocytes in the mandibular condyle as revealed by collagen formation. An autoradiographic study with 3 H-Proline.

Histological and autoradiographic studies using 3H-proline indicate that cartilaginous tissue in the mandibular condyle maintains morphologic and metabolic characteristics of an embryonic type of tissue. Cartilage cells in the condyle lack the specific arrangement and cellular homogeneity characteristic of more differentiated endochondral growth sites. Through dedifferentiation many chondrocytes in the mandibular condyle appear to outlive the hypoxic conditions that are reported to prevail within the mineralizing zone. Chondrocytes in this zone reveal only a minimal amount of 3H-proline uptake in comparison with the cells in the chondroblastic and premineralizing zones. The dedifferentiated chondrocytes appear to redifferentiate into more specialized cells, possibly osteoprogenitor cells, as they reveal a significant increase in 3H-proline incorporation in the vicinity of the ossifying front. These observations on proline metabolism support the concept that calcification in the condylar cartilage is not necessarily accompanied by degeneration and death of the chondrocytes.
Performance of Polymerase Chain Reaction Techniques Detecting Perforin in the Diagnosis of Acute Renal Rejection: A Meta-Analysis

Background Studies in the past have shown that perforin expression is up-regulated during acute renal rejection, which provided hopes for a non-invasive and reliable diagnostic method to identify acute rejection. However, a systematic assessment of the value of perforin as a diagnostic marker of acute renal rejection has not been performed. We conducted this meta-analysis to document the diagnostic performance of perforin mRNA detection and to identify potential variables that may affect the performance. Methodology/Principal Findings Relevant materials that reported the diagnostic performance of perforin mRNA detection in acute renal rejection patients were extracted from electronic databases. After careful evaluation of the studies included in this analysis, the numbers of true positive, true negative, false positive and false negative cases of acute renal rejection identified by perforin mRNA detection were gathered from each data set. The publication year, sample origin, mRNA quantification method and housekeeping gene were also extracted as potential confounding variables. Fourteen studies with a total of 501 renal transplant subjects were included in this meta-analysis. The overall performance of perforin mRNA detection was: pooled sensitivity, 0.83 (95% confidence interval: 0.78 to 0.88); pooled specificity, 0.86 (95% confidence interval: 0.82 to 0.90); diagnostic odds ratio, 28.79 (95% confidence interval: 16.26 to 50.97); and area under the summary receiver operating characteristic curves value, 0.9107±0.0174. The univariate analysis of potential variables showed some changes in the diagnostic performance, but none of the differences reached statistical significance. Conclusions/Significance Despite inter-study variability, the test performance of perforin mRNA detected by polymerase chain reaction was consistent under circumstances of methodological changes and demonstrated both sensitivity and specificity in detecting acute renal rejection. These results suggest a great diagnostic potential for perforin mRNA detection as a reliable marker of acute rejection in renal allograft recipients.