Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Selective Modification of Short-Term Hippocampal Synaptic Plasticity and Impaired Memory Extinction in Mice with a Congenitally Reduced Hippocampal Commissure

The hippocampus is critical for forming new long-term memories, but the contributions of the hippocampal commissure (HC) to memory function and hippocampal synaptic plasticity are unclear. To shed light on this issue, we characterized behavioral memory and hippocampal synaptic plasticity in two inbred mouse strains. BALB/cWah1 mice display a range of corpus callosal defects and an intact HC, whereas 9XCA/Wah mice exhibit a complete absence of corpus callosum and a greatly reduced HC. No differences between strains were found in long-term potentiation (LTP) within two synaptic pathways in hippocampal slices. However, paired-pulse facilitation was deficient in area CA1 of slices from 9XCA/Wah, and it was rescued by decreasing extracellular [Ca2+], suggesting that presynaptic calcium dynamics may be altered in this strain. In addition, contextual fear extinction was impaired in 9XCA/Wah mice, but performance on cued fear extinction and on 24 hr memory tests for cued and contextual fear conditioning were not significantly different between strains. Thus, an intact HC is critical for normal extinction of contextual fear. Intact interhemispheric connectivity is not required for acquisition or expression of cued and contextual fear conditioning. LTP was normal in slices from mice that lacked an intact HC, and this was correlated with normal performance on fear conditioning tests. In contrast, impaired short-term synaptic plasticity was correlated with defective contextual memory extinction in mice lacking an intact HC. Thus, the HC in mice is vital for particular aspects of memory function and for short-term synaptic modification in specific hippocampal circuits.
Prolonged signal-averaged P wave duration as a prognostic marker for morbidity and mortality in patients with congestive heart failure

Objective --To evaluate the prognostic roles of prolonged signal-averaged P wave duration (SAPWD), raised levels of natriuretic peptides, and clinical characteristics in patients with stable congestive heart failure (CHF). Design --The SAPWD was assessed from a signal-averaged electrocardiogram (SAECG), and the plasma levels of N-terminal pro-atrial natriuretic peptide (Nt-proANP) and N-terminal pro-brain natriuretic peptide (Nt-proBNP) were measured in 43 consecutive patients with stable CHF without prior supraventricular arrhythmia. Echocardiographic and clinical data were also recorded. Time to death, hospitalization due to deteriorated CHF, or ECG-documented atrial fibrillation (AF) was recorded over a 438-day median follow-up. Results --During follow-up, 17 patients met an endpoint defined as death, AF, or hospitalization due to deteriorated CHF. Proportional hazard regression including the variables high age, prolonged SAPWD, raised levels of Nt-proANP and Nt-proBNP, and low ejection fraction (EF) showed that only prolonged SAPWD S 149 r ms was associated with an increased risk of meeting an early endpoint; the hazard ratio 3.94 with 95% confidence interval 1.50-10.42; p r = r 0.006. Conclusion --Prolonged SAPWD appears to predict early death, AF development, or hospitalization due to deterioration of CHF in patients with stable CHF.
Catalytic Promiscuity of the Radical S-adenosyl-L-methionine Enzyme NosL

Catalytic promiscuity plays a key role in enzyme evolution and the acquisition of novel biological functions. Because of the high reactivity of radical species, in our view enzymes involving radical-mediated mechanisms could intrinsically be more prone to catalytic promiscuity. This mini-review summarizes the recent advances in the study of NosL, a radical S-adenosyl-L-methionine (SAM)-dependent L-tryptophan (L-Trp) lyase. We demonstrate here the interesting chemistry and remarkable catalytic promiscuity of NosL, and attempt to highlight the high evolvability of radical SAM enzymes and the potential to engineer these enzymes for novel and improved activities.
Japanese cultural and ethical Ba (locus) as the place of new sources for technological and social innovation as well as for ethical discussions on robots and life in the information era

In the first part of this paper, the author tries to analyze the crisis that Japanese people of today face, citing various statistical data provided by the Japanese government and the research groups interested in this problem including the author's research data themselves. This crisis means that Japan of today has to deal with a lot of serious situations such as the economic stagnation measured by the GDP growth, loss of export capacity of high-tech industries, the high suicide rate, the decline of the local economy and so on. The important thing regarding this Japan's decline is the fact that these serious situations have started to appear in that time of so-called 'informatization. ' In the second part of this paper, the author attempts to find out the factors related to these serious situations in Japan of today. In the author's view, one of the most important factors affecting Japan's culture, society and industries might be a loss of 'depth' of Japanese culture and society, or (loss of) awareness of the place (Ba) from which people can extract various meanings of life coming from Japanese cultural traditions, senses of 'oneness' or the experiences in the past history. The phenomenon of loss of cultural depth or loss of awareness of Ba-related meanings is one of the most serious problems in Japan today and this leads to serious problems such as high suicide rate in Japan since 1998. But on the other hand, at least at a latent level, it was found through the author's own previous researches [11, 12, 13, 14, 15] that Japanese people still tend to show strong sympathy for the meanings related to Seken, i.e. the traditional aspect of Japanese culture and society or Ba with traditional cultural, ethical, existential meanings. And finally, the author wants to focus on 'another depth' which seems to be related to traditional ways of understanding of oneness(Ichinyo) in Japan, i.e. the world view putting emphasis on the situations of undifferentiation of things, persons, events, nature. In addition to this kind of traditional oneness, we have to carefully see some sort of 'artificial oneness' including emergence of autonomous robots or phenomena related to 'rubber hand illusion,' 'mirror box therapy' and so on: 'artificial oneness' happening in the artificial environments in the information era. In this sense, the attempt the author tries in this paper might be regarded as the first one with the aim to (re) discover the 'depth' in Japan in the information era and at the same time the pioneer work to try to (re) gain the 'depth' in the fields of studies on information society and on the relation(s) between information technologies and the meanings of life with 'depth' and with 'width' beyond the differentiation of things and persons at the surface level too.
Torture in Counterterrorism: Agency Incentives and Slippery Slopes

We develop a counterterrorism model to analyze the effects of allowing a government agency to torture suspects when evidence of terrorist involvement is strong. We find that legalizing torture in strong-evidence cases has offsetting effects on agency incentives to counter terrorism by means other than torture. It lowers these incentives because the agency may come to rely on torture to avert attacks. However, it also increases these incentives because other efforts may increase the probability of having strong enough evidence to warrant the use of torture. Legalizing torture in strong-evidence cases is more likely to reduce non-torture efforts if these efforts are more effective at stopping attacks and less effective at turning up strong evidence when the suspect is guilty. If it reduces non-torture efforts, it can reduce security and is more likely to do so if the attack threat is higher. Moreover, if torture is used in strong-evidence cases even if torture is banned, legalizing torture in strong-evidence cases necessarily reduces security if it reduces non-torture efforts. Lastly, it can increase incentives to torture even in weak-evidence cases—a slippery slope.
Uplink Multicell Processing with Limited Backhaul via Per-Base-Station Successive Interference Cancellation

This paper studies an uplink multicell joint processing model in which the base-stations are connected to a centralized processing server via rate-limited digital backhaul links. We propose a simple scheme that performs Wyner-Ziv compress-and-forward relaying on a per-base-station basis followed by successive interference cancellation (SIC) at the central processor. The proposed scheme has a significantly reduced complexity as compared to joint decoding, resulting in an easily computable achievable rate region. Although suboptimal in general, this paper shows that the proposed per-base-station SIC scheme can achieve the sum capacity of a class of Wyner cellular model to within a constant gap. This paper also establishes that in order to achieve to within a constant gap to the maximum SIC rate with infinite backhaul, the limited-backhaul system must have backhaul capacities that scale logarithmically with the signal-to-interference-and-noise ratios (SINRs) at the base-stations. Further, this paper studies the optimal backhaul rate allocation problem for the per-base-station SIC model with a total backhaul capacity constraint, and shows that the sum-rate maximizing allocation should also have individual backhaul rates that scale logarithmically with the SINR at each base-station. Finally, the proposed per-base-station SIC scheme is evaluated in a practical multicell network to quantify the performance gain brought by multicell processing.
IPsec-Based Anonymous Networking: A Working Implementation

Protecting users' privacy is becoming one of the rising issues for the success of future communications. The Internet in particular, with its open architecture, presents several threats to the right of protecting personal and sensitive data. One fundamental building block of privacy-respectful communications is protecting the communication parties identities, or, as it is commonly called within the research community anonymous networks (ANs). An AN prevents external observers as well as the network to have access to communicating partners identities and addresses. In this paper we propose a novel architecture to realize ANs, as an extension to IPsec. After explaining the rationale and discussing possible alternatives, we present a working prototype implementation and its experimental performance comparison with application level solutions.
What is an RKHS?

We start by reviewing some elementary Banach and Hilbert space theory. Two key results here will prove useful in studying the properties of reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces: (a) that a linear operator on a Banach space is continuous if and only if it is bounded, and (b) that all continuous linear functionals on a Banach space arise from the inner product. The latter is often termed Riesz representation theorem.
Enhanced robot audition by dynamic acoustic sensing in moving humanoids

Auditory systems of humanoid robots usually acquire the surrounding sound field by means of microphone arrays. These arrays can undergo motion related to the robot's activity. The conventional approach to dealing with this motion is to stop the robot during sound acquisition. This approach avoids changing the positions of the microphones during the acquisition and reduces the robot's ego-noise. However, stopping the robot can interfere with the naturalness of its behaviour. Moreover, the potential performance improvement due to motion of the sound acquiring system can not be attained. This potential is analysed in the current paper. The analysis considers two different types of motion: (i) rotation of the robot's head and (ii) limb gestures. The study presented here combines both theoretical and numerical simulation approaches. The results show that rotation of the head improves the high-frequency performance of the microphone array positioned on the head of the robot. This is complemented by the limb gestures, which improve the low-frequency performance of the array positioned on the torso and limbs of the robot.
MVDC microgrids enabled by 15kV SiC IGBT based flexible three phase dual active bridge isolated DC-DC converter

The Dual Active Bridge (DABC) dc-dc converter is an integral part of the recently popular Medium-Voltage (MV) dc micro-grid application due to its high-power density. The advent of 15kV SiC IGBT and 10kV SiC MOSFET, has enabled a non-cascaded MV and Medium-Frequency (MF) DABC converter which is expected to have higher MTBF than the cascaded H-bridge topology due to relatively small number of switches. A composite DABC three-level three-phase topology earlier proposed for MV-MF application, has dual secondary side bridges to meet the rated load conditions. The duty-ratio control of the primary and the independent operation of dual secondary bridges as a single active bridge, can be utilized to solve the light load ZVS problem. This paper presents flexible operating modes of this MV DABC for ZVS and higher efficiency. The MV DABC simulations are presented to bring out the advantages of this topology in wide range load and voltage-ratio conditions. This paper reports 8kV experimental validation of this DABC while using 15kV/40A SiC IGBTs on the MV side.
Geometry by deflaring

Stray light reflected by lens surfaces creates flare which affects the image. A pronounced form of this flare is aperture ghosting, where bright spots that resemble the shape of the lens aperture are overlayed on the image. This might disrupt image analysis. It occurs when a bright narrow source (usually the Sun) is in the vicinity of the field of view, though often the source may be outside the actual viewed field. This paper analyzes the geometry of this phenomenon. It theoretically proves empirical observations, particularly the condensation of this flare around a straight line. Based on the image-formation model, we devise a very simple method for mitigating this effect, using as few as two frames taken when the camera moves. This significantly improves the images. Furthermore, aperture ghosting is shown to encode useful geometric information, specifically the location of the (often unseen) illumination source, and the optical center of the camera. Hence, our approach decodes this information as a by-product of deflaring. This is demonstrated experimentally outdoors.
Phrase and word level strategies for detecting appositions in speech

Appositions are grammatical constructs in which two noun phrases are placed side-by-side, one modifying the other. Detecting them in speech can help extract semantic information useful, for instance, for co-reference resolution and question answering. We compare and combine three approaches: wordlevel and phrase-level classifiers, and a syntactic parser trained to generate appositions. On reference parses, the phrase-level classifier outperforms the other approaches while on automatic parses and ASR output, the combination of the appositiongenerating parser and the word-level classifier works best. An analysis of the system errors reveals that parsing accuracy and world knowledge are very important for this task. Index Terms: Speech understanding, Punctuation, Apposition detection.
Who Should Be Blamed For Information System Failure? Integrating Systems Thinking Into IS Education

IS failure has been observed and documented in various literature. Many researchers have tried to understand the phenomenon by studying success or failure factors with a hope that IS professionals can learn from these lessons. It seems that these contingency factors are not sufficient to understand the whole picture of IS failure and its causes. We may need a further investigation of the problem from the root: IS education. In this paper, we argue that the problem with many IS failures is due to the design of the IS curriculum that lacks the idea of systems thinking. We suggest to incorporate systems thinking component into IS education as a long term strategy to deal with IS failure problem.
Scalable system level synthesis for virtually localizable systems

In previous work, we developed the system level approach to controller synthesis, and showed that under suitable assumptions, this framework allowed for the synthesis of localized controllers. We further showed that such localized controllers enjoy O(1) synthesis and implementation complexity relative to the dimension of the global system, making them particularly well suited for the control of large-scale cyber-physical systems. However, the assumptions under which a system is localizable are stringent: roughly, a system is localizable if the controller has the necessary actuation, sensing and communication resources to “get out ahead” of the propagation of a disturbance and neutralize it, thus containing its effect to a localized spatiotemporal region. In this paper, we relax the assumption of exact localizability, and develop a controller synthesis methodology that is applicable to arbitrary systems that are in an appropriate sense “easy to control. ” We focus on the state-feedback setting and develop a simple necessary and sufficient condition for robust stability using the system level approach. We then leverage this condition, along with the introduction of virtual actuation, communication and system responses into the synthesis process, to design stabilizing controllers that have (i) O(1) synthesis and implementation complexity and (ii) guaranteed performance bounds. We end with a power-inspired example demonstrating the usefulness of these techniques, wherein we synthesize a near globally optimal controller for a system that is neither localizable nor quadratically invariant.
Risk management in cloud computing

Despite the use of efficient methods of tasks organization that has made optimal planning more possible, the risk of resources unavailability in cloud computing is still present. Taking into consideration the cloud computing bank with a somehow commercial nature, the non availability of resources, such as liquidity risk, remains. This is why we propose, through this paper, the discussion of the possibilities of predicting such a risk by the means so far applied in economy. This work suggests a method used in stock management to predict liquidity risk and proposes a model inspired from fluid mechanic to reduce such a risk. The model is an application of Bernoulli and Torricelli theorems. The resources bank can be considered as a reservoir of liquid; therefore the availability of resources depends necessarily on the liquid flow velocity and the replacement. Torricelli's theorem enables to calculate the velocity of emptying of reservoir.
Recent advances in asthma biomarker research

Asthma is characterized by recurrent and reversible airflow obstruction, which is routinely monitored by history and physical examination, spirometry and home peak flow diaries. As airway inflammation is central to asthma pathogenesis, its monitoring should be part of patient management plans. Fractional exhaled nitric oxide level (FeNO) is the most extensively studied biomarker of airway inflammation, and FeNO references were higher in Chinese (Asians) than Whites. Published evidence was inconclusive as to whether FeNO is a useful management strategy for asthma. Other biomarkers include direct (histamine, methacholine) and indirect (adenosine, hypertonic saline) challenges of bronchial hyperresponsiveness (BHR), induced sputum and exhaled breath condensate (EBC). A management strategy that normalized sputum eosinophils among adult patients resulted in reductions of BHR and asthma exacerbations. However, subsequent adult and pediatric studies failed to replicate these benefits. Asthma phenotypes as defined by inflammatory cell populations in sputum were also not stable over a 12-month period. A recent meta-analysis concluded that induced sputum is not accurate enough to be applied in routine monitoring of childhood asthma. There is poor correlation between biomarkers that reflect different asthma dimensions: spirometry (airway caliber), BHR (airway reactivity) and FeNO or induced sputum (airway inflammation). Lastly, EBC is easily obtained noninvasively by cooling expired air. Many biomarkers ranging from acidity (pH), leukotrienes, aldehydes, cytokines to growth factors have been described. However, significant overlap between groups and technical difficulty in measuring low levels of inflammatory molecules are the major obstacles for EBC research. Metabolomics is an emerging analytical method for EBC biomarkers. In conclusion, both FeNO and induced sputum are useful asthma biomarkers. However, they will only form part of the clinical picture. Longitudinal studies with focused hypotheses and well-designed protocols are needed to establish the roles of these biomarkers in asthma management. The measurement of biomarkers in EBC remains a research tool.
Hits and misses: leveraging tDCS to advance cognitive research

The popularity of non-invasive brain stimulation techniques in basic, commercial, and applied settings grew tremendously over the last decade. Here, we focus on one popular neurostimulation method: transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS). Many assumptions regarding the outcomes of tDCS are based on the results of stimulating motor cortex. For instance, the primary motor cortex is predictably suppressed by cathodal tDCS or made more excitable by anodal tDCS. However, wide-ranging studies testing cognition provide more complex and sometimes paradoxical results that challenge this heuristic. Here, we first summarize successful efforts in applying tDCS to cognitive questions, with a focus on working memory (WM). These recent findings indicate that tDCS can result in cognitive task improvement or impairment regardless of stimulation site or direction of current flow. We then report WM and response inhibition studies that failed to replicate and/or extend previously reported effects. From these opposing outcomes, we present a series of factors to consider that are intended to facilitate future use of tDCS when applied to cognitive questions. In short, common pitfalls include testing too few participants, using insufficiently challenging tasks, using heterogeneous participant populations, and including poorly motivated participants. Furthermore, the poorly understood underlying mechanism for long-lasting tDCS effects make it likely that other important factors predict responses. In conclusion, we argue that although tDCS can be used experimentally to understand brain function its greatest potential may be in applied or translational research.