Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Computerized Progressive Attentional Training (CPAT) Program: Effective Direct Intervention for Children with ADHD

We tested the efficacy of a pioneering intervention program grounded in a contemporary theoretical framework of attention and designed to directly improve the various attentional functions of children with ADHD. The computerized progressive attentional training (CPAT) program is composed of four sets of structured tasks that uniquely activate sustained attention, selective attention, orienting of attention, and executive attention. Performance was driven by tight schedules of feedback and participants automatically advanced in ordered levels of difficulty contingent upon performance. Twenty 6- to 13-year-old children with ADHD were assigned to the experimental group and received the CPAT sessions twice a week over an 8-week period. Sixteen age-matched control children with ADHD were assigned to the control group and participated in sessions of the same frequency, length, and format except that instead of performing the training tasks they played various computer games during the session. The experimental participants showed a significant improvement in nontrained measures of reading comprehension, and passage copying as well as a significant reduction of parents' reports of inattentiveness. No significant improvements were observed in the control group. We thus concluded that the above academic and attentional improvements were primarily due to the CPAT.
Real-time shading

Real-time procedural shading was once seen as a distant dream. When the first version of this course was offered four years ago, real-time shading was possible, but only with one-of-a-kind hardware or by combining the effects of tens to hundreds of rendering passes. Today, almost every new computer comes with graphics hardware capable of interactively executing shaders of thousands to tens of thousands of instructions. This course has been redesigned to address today's real-time shading capabilities and to provide more practical information for practitioners. The morning sessions cover the more advanced technical aspects of creating a shading system. The afternoon sessions cover practical details of real-time shading use, including an overview of recently developed algorithms that run well on today's shading hardware and presentations on the latest hardware developments from several leading hardware vendors. The course concludes with the popular panel-style question and answer session, where participants can ask questions of any presenter or suggest topics of discussion.
Nodule detection from posterior and anterior chest radio graph using circular hough transform

Lung cancer is the foremost cause of death in many regions of the world. Early detection betters the chances of survival. PA chest radiography is the most commonly used diagnosis tool for detecting lung tumor, because it is cost effective and requires less radiation dose. Radiologists fail to detect nodule from PA chest radio graphs, at early stage because of complex anatomical structure present in radio graphs. Computer aided diagnosis systems are developed to assist radiologist in detecting tumor from radio graphs at early stage. Paper describes the algorithms to find potential nodule from Posterior and Anterior (PA) chest radio graphic images. In this paper two algorithms were proposed to detect tumor from PA chest radio graphs. In the first method tumor is separated from radio graphic image using different techniques like threshold, region growing and morphological operations and identified using geometrical features extracted from the segmented tumor. In second method tumor detected automatically with threshold and Circular Hough transform.
A Novel Web-based Approach for Balancing Usabili ty and Sec urity Requirements of Text Passwords

Many Internet applications, for example e-commerce or email services require that users create a username and password which serves as an authentication mechanism. Though text passwords have been around for a while, not much has been done in helping naive Internet users in creating stron g passwords. Generally users prefer easy-to-remember passwords, but service provides prefer that users use a strong, difficult-to-guess password policy to protect their own resources. In this work we have explored how appropriate feedback on password strength can be useful in choosing a strong password. We fi rst discuss the results of a security vs. usability study that we did, which shows the current trends in choosing passwords, and how a password cracking tools can easily guess a majority of weak passwords. Next, we propose a novel framework, which addresses our problem of enforcing password policies. Given a password policy, our framework is able to monitor password strength, and suggest passwords that are stronger. Moreover, since our passwords are pareto-efficient, and involve user participation in making a selection, we believe that our framework makes appropriate tradeoffs between password strength and difficulty in remembering. We also propose novel ways to compute the password reminder interval so that user-satisfaction remains within bounds. Experimental study shows that our approach is much bette r that current password creation models, and serves as a practical tool that can be integrated with Internet app lications.
Plant-mPLoc: A Top-Down Strategy to Augment the Power for Predicting Plant Protein Subcellular Localization

One of the fundamental goals in proteomics and cell biology is to identify the functions of proteins in various cellular organelles and pathways. Information of subcellular locations of proteins can provide useful insights for revealing their functions and understanding how they interact with each other in cellular network systems. Most of the existing methods in predicting plant protein subcellular localization can only cover three or four location sites, and none of them can be used to deal with multiplex plant proteins that can simultaneously exist at two, or move between, two or more different location sites. Actually, such multiplex proteins might have special biological functions worthy of particular notice. The present study was devoted to improve the existing plant protein subcellular location predictors from the aforementioned two aspects. A new predictor called “Plant-mPLoc” is developed by integrating the gene ontology information, functional domain information, and sequential evolutionary information through three different modes of pseudo amino acid composition. It can be used to identify plant proteins among the following 12 location sites: (1) cell membrane, (2) cell wall, (3) chloroplast, (4) cytoplasm, (5) endoplasmic reticulum, (6) extracellular, (7) Golgi apparatus, (8) mitochondrion, (9) nucleus, (10) peroxisome, (11) plastid, and (12) vacuole. Compared with the existing methods for predicting plant protein subcellular localization, the new predictor is much more powerful and flexible. Particularly, it also has the capacity to deal with multiple-location proteins, which is beyond the reach of any existing predictors specialized for identifying plant protein subcellular localization. As a user-friendly web-server, Plant-mPLoc is freely accessible at http://www.csbio. sjtu.edu. cn/bioinf/plant-multi/. Moreover, for the convenience of the vast majority of experimental scientists, a step-by-step guide is provided on how to use the web-server to get the desired results. It is anticipated that the Plant-mPLoc predictor as presented in this paper will become a very useful tool in plant science as well as all the relevant areas.
INFORMATIONAL HERDING AND OPTIMAL EXPERIMENTATION By Lones Smith and

We show that far from capturing a formally new phenomenon, informational herding is really a special case of single-person experimentation — and ‘bad herds’ the typical failure of complete learning. We then analyze the analogous team equilibrium, where individuals maximize the present discounted welfare of posterity. To do so, we generalize Gittins indices to our non-bandit learning problem, and thereby characterize when contrarian behaviour arises: (i) While herds are still constrained efficient, they arise for a strictly smaller belief set. (ii) A log-concave log-likelihood ratio density robustly ensures that individuals should lean more against their myopic preference for an action the more popular it becomes. We thank Patrick Bolton and three referees in guiding this radical revision, as well as Abhijit Banerjee, Katya Malinova, Meg Meyer, Christopher Wallace, and seminar participants at the MIT theory lunch, the Stockholm School of Economics, the Stony Brook Summer Festival on Game Theory (1996), Copenhagen University, the 1997 European Winter Meeting of the Econometric Society (Lisbon), Bristol University, and Erasmus University for comments on various versions. Smith gratefully acknowledges financial support for this work from NSF grants SBR-9422988 and SBR-9711885, and Sørensen equally thanks the Danish Social Sciences Research Council. e-mail address: lones@umich.edu e-mail address: peter.norman. sorensen@econ.ku. dk
Mixtures of multiple testing procedures for gatekeeping applications in clinical trials

This paper proposes a general framework for constructing gatekeeping procedures for clinical trials with hierarchical objectives. Such problems frequently exhibit complex structures including multiple families of hypotheses and logical restrictions. The proposed framework is based on combining multiple procedures across families. It enables the construction of powerful and flexible gatekeeping procedures that account for general logical restrictions among the hypotheses of interest. A clinical trial in patients with schizophrenia is used to illustrate the approach for parallel gatekeeping, whereas another clinical trial in patients with hypertension is used to illustrate the approach for gatekeeping with general logical restrictions. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Cystic Fibrosis Sputum Supports Growth and Cues Key Aspects of Pseudomonas aeruginosa Physiology

ABSTRACT The opportunistic human pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa causes persistent airway infections in patients with cystic fibrosis (CF). To establish these chronic infections, P. aeruginosa must grow and proliferate within the highly viscous sputum in the lungs of CF patients. In this study, we used Affymetrix GeneChip microarrays to investigate the physiology of P. aeruginosa grown using CF sputum as the sole source of carbon and energy. Our results indicate that CF sputum readily supports high-density P. aeruginosa growth. Furthermore, multiple signals, which reduce swimming motility and prematurely activate the Pseudomonas quinolone signal cell-to-cell signaling cascade in P. aeruginosa, are present in CF sputum. P. aeruginosa factors critical for lysis of the common CF lung inhabitant Staphylococcus aureus were also induced in CF sputum and increased the competitiveness of P. aeruginosa during polymicrobial growth in CF sputum.
Bosutinib versus imatinib in newly diagnosed chronic-phase chronic myeloid leukemia: results from the BELA trial.

PURPOSE Bosutinib is an oral Src/Abl tyrosine kinase inhibitor. The phase III Bosutinib Efficacy and Safety in Newly Diagnosed Chronic Myeloid Leukemia (BELA) trial compared bosutinib with imatinib in newly diagnosed, chronic-phase chronic myeloid leukemia (CML). PATIENTS AND METHODS A total of 502 patients were randomly assigned 1:1 to bosutinib 500 mg per day or imatinib 400 mg per day. RESULTS The complete cytogenetic response (CCyR) rate at 12 months was not different for bosutinib (70%; 95% CI, 64% to 76%) versus imatinib (68%; 95% CI, 62% to 74%; two-sided P = .601); therefore, the study did not achieve its primary end point. The major molecular response (MMR) rate at 12 months was higher with bosutinib (41%; 95% CI, 35% to 47%) compared with imatinib (27%; 95% CI, 22% to 33%; two-sided P < .001). Time to CCyR and MMR was faster with bosutinib compared with imatinib (two-sided P < .001 for both). On-treatment transformation to accelerated/blast phase occurred in four patients (2%) on bosutinib compared with 10 patients (4%) on imatinib. A total of three CML-related deaths occurred on the bosutinib arm compared with eight on the imatinib arm. The safety profiles of bosutinib and imatinib were distinct; GI and liver-related events were more frequent with bosutinib, whereas neutropenia, musculoskeletal disorders, and edema were more frequent with imatinib. CONCLUSION This ongoing trial did not meet its primary end point of CCyR at 12 months, despite the observed higher MMR rate at 12 months, faster times to CCyR and MMR, fewer on-treatment transformations to accelerated/blast phase, and fewer CML-related deaths with bosutinib compared with imatinib. Each drug had a distinct safety profile.
Characterizing and exploiting task load variability and correlation for energy management in multi core systems

We present a hybrid energy management technique that exploits the variability of and correlations among the computational loads of tasks in a real-time application with soft timing constraints. In our technique, task load variability and correlations are captured in stochastic models that incorporate certain salient features and essential characteristics of the application. We use the stochastic models in formulating and solving the energy management problem for applications with soft timing constraints running on multiprocessor systems with dynamic voltage scaling (DVS). We present a novel optimization formulation for minimizing average energy consumption while providing a probabilistic guarantee for satisfying timing constraints. We compare our stochastic models and energy management scheme with other models and schemes that do not capture/exploit either the variability of or the correlations among the computational loads of tasks.
Ventricular Response in Atrial Fibrillation: Role of Concealed Conduction in the AV Junction

The ventricular response in atrial fibrillation is determined by the long refractory period of the AV junction. Since an atrial impulse is always available for transmission to the ventricles, a regular ventricular rhythm would be expected, the rate of which would reflect the duration of a stable junctional refractory phase. The irregularity of the ventricular action associated with atrial fibrillation, therefore, indicates changes of refractoriness of the AV junctional tissues from cycle to cycle. This can best be attributed to varying degrees of penetration of “blocked” atrial impulses into parts of the AV junction, and to the effect of such concealed conduction on the propagation of subsequent impulses.The following facts are pointed out and illustrated as evidence of concealed AV and VA conduction during atrial fibrillation: (a) Occurrence of a “compensatory pause” following a ventricular premature systole. (b) Failure of an AV nodal escape to appear at the expected time due to concealed discharge of a subsidiary AV nodal pacemaker by a penetrating atrial impulse. (c) Acceleration of the ventricular rate when atrial fibrillation changes to flutter (elimination of concealed conduction with slowing of the atria). (d) A tendency for two or more long cycles to occur in succession (each containing one or more concealed responses). The reasons for the variations of the refractory period at different levels of the AV junction as a result of concealed conduction are analyzed. Their complex interplay may readily account for the over-all irregularity of the ventricular response associated with atrial fibrillation.
First remote sensing observations of trifluoromethane (HFC-23) in the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere

[1] This work reports the first remote sensing measurements of atmospheric HFC-23 (CHF3) using solar occultation measurements made by the Atmospheric Chemistry Experiment Fourier transform spectrometer (ACE-FTS) and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory Mark IV (MkIV) balloon interferometer. A total of 8809 ACE occultations measured between 2004 and 2010 have been processed, along with 24 MkIV occultations measured between 1989 and 2007. ACE data (yearly averages over the 10–25 km altitude range) in the tropics/subtropics (40°S–40°N) reveal a trend of 4.0 ± 1.6% per year in the growth of HFC-23 for 2004–2009 (or 3.9 ± 1.2% per year for 2004–2010), slightly smaller than surface measurements from Cape Grim air archive samples over the same time period (4.7 ± 0.3% per year). The northern midlatitude and high-latitude MkIV data (averaged over the 10–25 km altitude range) indicate a growth rate of 5.8 ± 0.3% per year over the period 1989–2007 (5.3 ± 0.4% per year for just the midlatitude data), similar to the Cape Grim surface trend of 5.7 ± 0.1% per year over the same period. The absolute HFC-23 volume mixing ratios measured by ACE and MkIV in the upper troposphere/lower stratosphere are in good agreement (<5% bias) with each other but are ∼30% larger than ground-based measurements. The source of this bias has not been definitively ascertained; however, spectroscopic errors are the most likely cause.
Gesundheit! Modeling Contagion through Facebook News Feed

Whether they are modeling bookmarking behavior in Flickr or cascades of failure in large networks, models of diffusion often start with the assumption that a few nodes start long chain reactions, resulting in large-scale cascades. While reasonable under some conditions, this assumption may not hold for social media networks, where user engagement is high and information may enter a system from multiple disconnected sources. Using a dataset of 262,985 Facebook Pages and their associated fans, this paper provides an empirical investigation of diffusion through a large social media network. Although Facebook diffusion chains are often extremely long (chains of up to 82 levels have been observed), they are not usually the result of a single chain-reaction event. Rather, these diffusion chains are typically started by a substantial number of users. Large clusters emerge when hundreds or even thousands of short diffusion chains merge together. This paper presents an analysis of these diffusion chains using zero-inflated negative binomial regressions. We show that after controlling for distribution effects, there is no meaningful evidence that a start node’s maximum diffusion chain length can be predicted with the user's demographics or Facebook usage characteristics (including the user's number of Facebook friends). This may provide insight into future research on public opinion formation.
Basic emotions and adaptation. A computational and evolutionary model

The core principles of the evolutionary theories of emotions declare that affective states represent crucial drives for action selection in the environment and regulated the behavior and adaptation of natural agents in ancestrally recurrent situations. While many different studies used autonomous artificial agents to simulate emotional responses and the way these patterns can affect decision-making, few are the approaches that tried to analyze the evolutionary emergence of affective behaviors directly from the specific adaptive problems posed by the ancestral environment. A model of the evolution of affective behaviors is presented using simulated artificial agents equipped with neural networks and physically inspired on the architecture of the iCub humanoid robot. We use genetic algorithms to train populations of virtual robots across generations, and investigate the spontaneous emergence of basic emotional behaviors in different experimental conditions. In particular, we focus on studying the emotion of fear, therefore the environment explored by the artificial agents can contain stimuli that are safe or dangerous to pick. The simulated task is based on classical conditioning and the agents are asked to learn a strategy to recognize whether the environment is safe or represents a threat to their lives and select the correct action to perform in absence of any visual cues. The simulated agents have special input units in their neural structure whose activation keep track of their actual “sensations” based on the outcome of past behavior. We train five different neural network architectures and then test the best ranked individuals comparing their performances and analyzing the unit activations in each individual’s life cycle. We show that the agents, regardless of the presence of recurrent connections, spontaneously evolved the ability to cope with potentially dangerous environment by collecting information about the environment and then switching their behavior to a genetically selected pattern in order to maximize the possible reward. We also prove the determinant presence of an internal time perception unit for the robots to achieve the highest performance and survivability across all conditions.
CURIE-TEMPERATURE "SLATER-PAULING CURVE"

The systematic variation of the Curie-temperature "Slater-Pauling curve" has been explained for the first time on the basis of the finite-temperature theory of the local environment effect. The peculiarity of the Curie temperatures in Fe-V, Fe-Ni, and Ni-Mn alloys is elucidated by using the effective exchange couplings.
A Low Temperature Limit for Life on Earth

There is no generally accepted value for the lower temperature limit for life on Earth. We present empirical evidence that free-living microbial cells cooling in the presence of external ice will undergo freeze-induced desiccation and a glass transition (vitrification) at a temperature between −10°C and −26°C. In contrast to intracellular freezing, vitrification does not result in death and cells may survive very low temperatures once vitrified. The high internal viscosity following vitrification means that diffusion of oxygen and metabolites is slowed to such an extent that cellular metabolism ceases. The temperature range for intracellular vitrification makes this a process of fundamental ecological significance for free-living microbes. It is only where extracellular ice is not present that cells can continue to metabolise below these temperatures, and water droplets in clouds provide an important example of such a habitat. In multicellular organisms the cells are isolated from ice in the environment, and the major factor dictating how they respond to low temperature is the physical state of the extracellular fluid. Where this fluid freezes, then the cells will dehydrate and vitrify in a manner analogous to free-living microbes. Where the extracellular fluid undercools then cells can continue to metabolise, albeit slowly, to temperatures below the vitrification temperature of free-living microbes. Evidence suggests that these cells do also eventually vitrify, but at lower temperatures that may be below −50°C. Since cells must return to a fluid state to resume metabolism and complete their life cycle, and ice is almost universally present in environments at sub-zero temperatures, we propose that the vitrification temperature represents a general lower thermal limit to life on Earth, though its precise value differs between unicellular (typically above −20°C) and multicellular organisms (typically below −20°C). Few multicellular organisms can, however, complete their life cycle at temperatures below ∼−2°C.
Good things come in threes: Single-parent multigenerational family structure and adolescent adjustment

Using data from the National Educational Longitudinal Study (NELS), we found that teenagers who live in nonmarried families are less likely to graduate from high school or to attend college, more likely to smoke or drink, and more likely to initiate sexual activity. Not all nonmarried families are alike, however. In particular, teenagers living with their single mothers and with at least one grandparent in multigenerational households have developmental outcomes that are at least as good and often better than the outcomes of teenagers in married families. These findings obtain when a wide array of economic resources, parenting behavior, and home and school characteristics are controlled for.