Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Right hippocampal pathology inhibits the Flynn effect in temporal lobe epilepsy

If brain pathology impedes the mechanisms that drive the Flynn effect, the gap between the mean IQ of patient groups and the general population will increase over successive generations. We examined the IQs of a large series of patients aged between 18 and 35 years, with homogenous underlying brain pathology tested over two decades, for evidence of a Flynn effect; 381 patients with temporal lobe epilepsy and unilateral hippocampal sclerosis (n = 221 left hippocampal sclerosis, LHS; n = 160 right hippocampal sclerosis, RHS) completed the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scales. Patients assessed between 1990 and 2000 were assessed on the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale–Revised (WAIS–R; n = 234). Patients assessed between 2001 and 2011 were assessed on the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale–Third Edition (WAIS–III; n = 147). The IQ scores were adjusted for the progressive obsolescence of norms using the following equation: adjusted IQ = recorded IQ – (estimated magnitude of Flynn effect in the normal population x years since test was normed, at the time of assessment). In the RHS group there was a significant negative correlation between the year of assessment and the adjusted Verbal IQ (r = −.18, p < .05) and adjusted Performance IQ (r = −.20, p < .01). There were no significant correlations between the adjusted IQ scores and the year of assessment in the LHS group. Our data suggest that the gap between the mean IQ in the general population and that in patients with right hippocampal pathology is widening in successive generations. The findings are discussed in relation to the current theories regarding the mechanisms that drive the Flynn effect.
Activation of a LTR-retrotransposon by telomere erosion

Retrotransposons can facilitate repair of broken chromosomes, and therefore an important question is whether the host can activate retrotransposons in response to chromosomal lesions. Here we show that Ty1 elements, which are LTR-retrotransposons in Saccharomyces cerevisiae, are mobilized when DNA lesions are created by the loss of telomere function. Inactivation of telomerase in yeast results in progressive shortening of telomeric DNA, eventually triggering a DNA-damage checkpoint that arrests cells in G2/M. A fraction of cells, termed survivors, recover from arrest by forming alternative telomere structures. When telomerase is inactivated, Ty1 retrotransposition increases substantially in parallel with telomere erosion and then partially declines when survivors emerge. Retrotransposition is stimulated at the level of Ty1 cDNA synthesis, causing cDNA levels to increase 20-fold or more before survivors form. This response is elicited through a signaling pathway that includes Rad24, Rad17, and Rad9, three components of the DNA-damage checkpoint. Our findings indicate that Ty1 retrotransposons are activated as part of the cellular response to telomere dysfunction.
Query-Adaptive Image Search Re-ranking Using Deep Convolutional Neural Network Feature

Image search re-ranking, as an effective tool to improve the text-based image search result, has been adopted by many commercial search engines nowadays. Given a query keyword, images are first retrieved based on the textual information. Then visual features are extracted from images to reorder them by mining their visual patterns. However, the popular visual features applied in re-ranking are not informative enough. Besides, the parameters for the re-ranking models are set equally for all queries, which fails to cope with the variability of different queries. In this paper, we propose a novel re-ranking method which adopts informative visual features for image representation and adaptively re-rank the images. Specifically, we adopt a proven successful DCNN feature (deep convolutional neural network), which shows the excellent performance in many computer vision fields, to calculate the visual similarities between images. For each query, the parameters for the image search re-ranking model is adaptively determined using the QDE (query difficulty estimation) method. Experiments are conducted on the INRIA web353 dataset. The experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves significant improvement over state-of-the-art methods.
Best Practices for School-Based Moral Education

How can schools help students build moral character? One way is to use prepackaged moral education programs, but as we report here, their effectiveness tends to be limited. What, then, can schools do? We took two steps to answer this question. First, we consulted more than 50 of the world’s leading social scientists. These scholars have spent decades studying morality, character, or behavior change but until now few had used their expertise to inform moral education practices. Second, we searched recent studies for promising behavior change techniques that apply to school-based moral education. These two lines of investigation congealed into two recommendations: Schools should place more emphasis on hidden or “stealthy” moral education practices and on a small set of “master” virtues. Throughout the article, we describe practices flowing from these recommendations that could improve both the effectiveness and efficiency of school-based moral education.
A Disaggregated Analysis of the Impact of Output Gap on Inflation and Implications for Monetary Policy

This study investigates the sensitivity of Consumer Price Index (CPI) sub-items to output gap for an emerging market economy, Turkey. To this aim, we estimate standard Phillips Curve equations for each of the 152 sub-indices of the CPI and determine the goods and services that respond to output gap in a statistically and economically significant manner. Thereby, we propose an alternative view to assess core inflation as a complementary tool to better monitor underlying inflation with respect to its main drivers. Empirical findings show that about one-third of the consumer basket is affected by the output gap. Remaining items that are found to be insensitive to business cycle extensively co-move with import prices and exchange rate. The results imply that controlling inflation through counter-cyclical policies may be a more challenging issue, especially when external factors work in the opposite direction. Policy efforts to reduce exchange rate volatility and import content of aggregate production are as important as cyclical policies geared toward steering the economy with respect to its potential.
Investiční rozhodování firem v korupčním prostředí ve střední a východní Evropě

Corporate innovations are a central part of a country’s economic activity. They foster and improve competitiveness, which ultimately leads to economic growth and progress. In this study, we focus on the post-communist European region, where corporations operate under uncertain conditions. Utilizing a sample with almost 100,000 firm level observations over the period from 2001 to 2013, we analyse effects of uncertainty steaming from corruption environment on innovation decisions of the Central European private firms. We find that domestic firms and firms with dispersed ownership innovate less when business and municipal uncertainty conditions increase. When firms are unsure whether they will be blocked by local bureaucrats from capitalizing on their innovation, they scale down their efforts. However, this result disappears for firms with foreign majority ownership. We hypothesize that foreign controlled firms have cleared all uncertainties before they entered the foreign market.
A comparison of risperidone and haloperidol for the prevention of relapse in patients with schizophrenia.

BACKGROUND Prevention of relapse is a major goal of maintenance treatment in patients with psychotic disorders. We performed a long-term comparison of a newer, atypical antipsychotic drug, risperidone, and an older, conventional neuroleptic drug, haloperidol, in terms of the rate of relapse in patients with schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder. METHODS In a double-blind, prospective study at 40 sites, we randomly assigned adult outpatients in stable condition with chronic schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder to receive treatment with flexible doses of either risperidone or haloperidol for a minimum of one year. RESULTS Of the 397 patients who underwent randomization, data from 2 were excluded because they did not receive study medication; data from all 30 patients from one site were excluded by the sponsor, the Janssen Research Foundation, because of concern about the integrity of the data. The median duration of treatment was 364 days in the risperidone group and 238 days in the haloperidol group (P=0.02). Of the 177 patients assigned to risperidone and the 188 assigned to haloperidol who remained in the analysis, 44.1 percent and 52.7 percent, respectively, discontinued treatment for reasons other than relapse. The Kaplan-Meier estimate of the risk of relapse at the end of the study was 34 percent for the risperidone group and 60 percent for the haloperidol group (P<0.001); the risk ratio for relapse with haloperidol, from the Cox model, was 1.93 (95 percent confidence interval, 1.33 to 2.80; P<0.001). Early discontinuation of treatment for any reason was more frequent among haloperidol-treated patients (risk ratio, 1.52; 95 percent confidence interval, 1.18 to 1.96). Patients in the risperidone group had greater reductions in the mean severity of both psychotic symptoms and extrapyramidal side effects than those in the haloperidol group. CONCLUSIONS Adult outpatients with clinically stable schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder have a lower risk of relapse if they are treated with risperidone than if they are treated with haloperidol.
Standard detectors aren't (currently) fooled by physical adversarial stop signs

An adversarial example is an example that has been adjusted to produce the wrong label when presented to a system at test time. If adversarial examples existed that could fool a detector, they could be used to (for example) wreak havoc on roads populated with smart vehicles. Recently, we described our difficulties creating physical adversarial stop signs that fool a detector. More recently, Evtimov et al. produced a physical adversarial stop sign that fools a proxy model of a detector. In this paper, we show that these physical adversarial stop signs do not fool two standard detectors (YOLO and Faster RCNN) in standard configuration. Evtimov et al.'s construction relies on a crop of the image to the stop sign; this crop is then resized and presented to a classifier. We argue that the cropping and resizing procedure largely eliminates the effects of rescaling and of view angle. Whether an adversarial attack is robust under rescaling and change of view direction remains moot. We argue that attacking a classifier is very different from attacking a detector, and that the structure of detectors - which must search for their own bounding box, and which cannot estimate that box very accurately - likely makes it difficult to make adversarial patterns. Finally, an adversarial pattern on a physical object that could fool a detector would have to be adversarial in the face of a wide family of parametric distortions (scale; view angle; box shift inside the detector; illumination; and so on). Such a pattern would be of great theoretical and practical interest. There is currently no evidence that such patterns exist.
A Potent Synthetic LXR Agonist Is More Effective than Cholesterol Loading at Inducing ABCA1 mRNA and Stimulating Cholesterol Efflux*

The LXR nuclear receptors are intracellular sensors of cholesterol excess and are activated by various oxysterols. LXRs have been shown to regulate multiple genes of lipid metabolism, including ABCA1 (formerly known asABC1). ABCA1 is a lipid pump that effluxes cholesterol and phospholipid out of cells. ABCA1 deficiency causes extremely low high density lipoprotein (HDL) levels, demonstrating the importance of ABCA1 in the formation of HDL. The present work shows that the acetyl-podocarpic dimer (APD) is a potent, selective agonist for both LXRα (NR1H3) and LXRβ (NR1H2). In transient transactivation assays, APD was ∼1000-fold more potent, and yielded ∼6-fold greater maximal stimulation, than the widely used LXR agonist 22-(R)-hydroxycholesterol. APD induced ABCA1mRNA levels, and increased efflux of both cholesterol and phospholipid, from multiple cell types. Gas chromatography-mass spectrometry measurements demonstrated that APD stimulated efflux of endogenous cholesterol, eliminating any possible artifacts of cholesterol labeling. For both mRNA induction and stimulation of cholesterol efflux, APD was found to be more effective than was cholesterol loading. Taken together, these data show that APD is a more effective LXR agonist than endogenous oxysterols. LXR agonists may therefore be useful for the prevention and treatment of atherosclerosis, especially in the context of low HDL levels.
MemexQA: Visual Memex Question Answering

This paper proposes a new task, MemexQA: given a collection of photos or videos from a user, the goal is to automatically answer questions that help users recover their memory about events captured in the collection. Towards solving the task, we 1) present the MemexQA dataset, a large, realistic multimodal dataset consisting of real personal photos and crowd-sourced questions/answers, 2) propose MemexNet, a unified, end-to-end trainable network architecture for image, text and video question answering. Experimental results on the MemexQA dataset demonstrate that MemexNet outperforms strong baselines and yields the state-of-the-art on this novel and challenging task. The promising results on TextQA and VideoQA suggest MemexNet's efficacy and scalability across various QA tasks.
Modulation of ATP-sensitive and large-conductance Ca++-activated K+ channels by Zeneca ZD6169 in guinea pig bladder smooth muscle cells.

ZD6169, the S-enantiomer of the racemic N-(4-benzoylphenyl)-3,3,3-trifluoro-2-hydroxy-2-methylpropionamide , was reported to possess a mechanoinhibitory effect on bladder detrusor smooth muscle through its ability to activate the KATP-sensitive K+ channel (KATP). In this study, the effects of ZD6169 and its racemic mixture on the whole-cell KATP and large-conductance CA+2-activated K+ (BKCa) currents in isolated smooth muscle cells from guinea pig bladder detrusor were examined by the patch-clamp technique. ZD6169 produced a multiple stimulatory and inhibitory effect on the KATP current. With a threshold effective concentration of 0.5 microM, it produced a glyburide-sensitive activation that reached a maximum between 5 and 10 microM. ZD6169 at concentrations greater than 20 microM markedly inhibited KATP channel, which resulted in a bell-shaped concentration-response relationship. Over a similar concentration range, ZD6169 caused a sizable stimulation of the BKCa current. All effects were readily reversible. Consistent with the data in whole-cell recordings, ZD6169 activated single BKCa channel in inside-out patches by increasing its open-state probability. Several lines of evidence showed that the opening of BKCa channel was Ca+2 independent. The activity profile of the racemic ZD6169 on KATP and BKCa channels had remarkable resemblance to that of ZD6169. Our results indicate that ZD6169 exerts diverse effects on multiple types of K+ channels. A combination of the absence of KATP channel activation and the presence of BKCa channel stimulation by ZD6169 at higher concentrations may be responsible, in part, for its reported weaker cardiovascular side effects than cromakalim.
Cuadros de mando y sistemas de indicadores para la gestión de los destinos turísticos: Una reflexión desde la sociología

The aim of this paper is to analyze the use of strategic management tools, such as scorecards and other indicators systems, to the management of tourism destinations. The paper starts by analyzing the rise of the concepts of scorecards and balanced scorecards within the broader field of strategic management as an autonomous academic field and a profession, in the second half of the XXth century. An analysis of how these concepts have been applied to the management of tourism firms and destinations follows. The paper concludes by showing the limitation of such an approach to manage so complex social institutions as tourism destinations, due to their organicist approach. Therefore, more useful methodologies, such as those stemming from the so called “Saint Gallen consensus” are suggested in order to improve the governance of tourism destinations.
Randomized Quasi-Random Testing

Random testing is a fundamental testing technique that can be used to generate test cases for both hardware and software systems. Quasi-random testing was proposed as an enhancement to the cost-effectiveness of random testing: In addition to having similar computation overheads to random testing, it makes use of quasi-random sequences to generate low-discrepancy and low-dispersion test cases that help deliver high failure-detection effectiveness. Currently, few algorithms exist to generate quasi-random sequences, and these are mostly deterministic, rather than random. A previous study of quasi-random testing has examined two methods for randomizing quasi-random sequences to improve their applicability in testing. However, these randomization methods still have shortcomings-one method does not introduce much randomness to the test cases, while the other does not support incremental test case generation. In this paper, we present an innovative approach to incrementally randomizing quasi-random sequences. The test cases generated by this new approach show a high degree of randomness and evenness in distribution. We also conduct simulations and empirical studies to demonstrate the applicability and effectiveness of our approach in software testing.
Magnetically driven microrobotic system for cancer cell manipulation

Lab-on-a-chip applications, such as single cell manipulation and targeted delivery of chemicals, could greatly benefit from mobile untethered microdevices able to move in fluidic environments by using magnetic fields. In this paper a magnetically driven microrobotic system enabling the controlled locomotion of objects placed at the air/liquid interface is proposed and exploited for cell manipulation. In particular authors report the design, fabrication and testing of a polymeric thin film-based magnetic microrobot (called “FilmBot”) used as a support for navigating cancer cells. By finely controlling magnetic film locomotion, it is possible to navigate the cells by exploiting their adhesion to the film without affecting their integrity. Preliminary in vitro tests demonstrated that the magnetic thin film is able to act as substrate for T24 bladder cancer cells without affecting their viability and that film locomotion can be magnetically controlled (with a magnetic field and a gradient of 6 mT and 0.6 T/m, respectively) along specific directions, with a mean speed of about 3 mm/s.
Effects of Hemodialysis on Profound Memory Deficits in Renal Insufficiency Due to Multiple Myeloma: A Case Study

Multiple myeloma, a rare cancer for individuals less than 65 years of age, and its pathophysiological effects have a profound impact on neurocognitive function. Specific transient deficits in patients with renal failure secondary to multiple myeloma have been noted to improve with hemodialysis. We present a complex case of an individual with multiple myeloma, renal insufficiency, treated seizure disorder, and schizophrenia, paranoid type, who experienced functional improvements in memory and visuospatial function with short- and long-term administration of hemodialysis. Within weeks of treatment, memory impairments resolved. With continued hemodialysis, some areas of neurocognitive function were in the superior range, indicating an overall improvement of more than three standard deviations. Implications and recommendations for clinicians treating individuals with similar challenges are offered.
Primary explant culture: An in vitro model of the human prostate

Human prostate tissue gave rise to essentially pure cultures of basal cells in vitro. Careful analysis by phase‐contrast microscopy and photography suggested that these cells attempt to differentiate into secretory acinar cells. This was confirmed by immunocytochemical analysis for prekeratin which is present only in basal cells in situ and for prostatic acid phosphatase, prostate‐specific antigen, and prostate fluid antigen, which are present only in secretory acinar cells in situ.
Social Participation and Mortality Among Older Adults in Singapore: Does Ethnicity Explain Gender Differences?

Objectives Social participation has been consistently associated with lower risk of all-cause mortality, but studies have been ambivalent about how this association differs between men and women. The present study investigates if ethnicity accounts for gender differences in (a) the types of social activities older adults participate in and (b) the association between social participation and 4-year mortality. Methods Data from 4,482 Singaporean older adults who participated in a nationally representative longitudinal survey were analyzed. Stepwise logistic regressions and Cox proportional hazard models with inverse probability of treatment weights were used. Results Men were more likely to engage in social activities compared with women, but this gender difference varied by ethnicity for three activities. Whereas going out to eat was associated with a lower risk of mortality for men only, playing sports was found to be protective for women only, but these associations did not vary by ethnicity. Discussion Findings suggest that although ethnicity may account for gender differences in the content of social activity participation, it does not explain gender differences in the association between social participation and mortality. More consideration should be given to whether each activity provides an appropriate milieu for the social interaction of each gender.
Coal consumption and economic growth: The causality puzzle. Review of international literature

The purpose of this paper is to review the existing literature on the relationship between coal consumption and economic growth, highlighting both the theoretical framework and the empirical evidence. The direction of causality between coal consumption and economic growth has been found to vary from one country to the next, depending on the data set and the methodology employed by the researcher. However, there is overwhelming support for a bidirectional relationship between coal consumption and economic growth. This paper is different from other reviews, in that it critically evaluates the impact of coal consumption on economic growth, as well as the causal relationship between these two variables. The paper concludes that the causal relationship between coal consumption and economic growth is ambiguous.