Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Neuroanatomical and Microglial Alterations in the Striatum of Levodopa-Treated, Dyskinetic Hemi-Parkinsonian Rats

Dyskinesia associated with chronic levodopa treatment in Parkinson’s disease is associated with maladaptive striatal plasticity. The objective of this study was to examine whether macroscale structural changes, as captured by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) accompany this plasticity and to identify plausible cellular contributors in a rodent model of levodopa-induced dyskinesia. Adult male Sprague-Dawley rats were rendered hemi-parkinsonian by stereotaxic injection of 6-hydroxydopamine into the left medial forebrain bundle prior to chronic treatment with saline (control) or levodopa to induce abnormal involuntary movements (AIMs), reflective of dyskinesia. Perfusion-fixed brains underwent ex vivo structural MRI before sectioning and staining for cellular markers. Chronic treatment with levodopa induced significant AIMs (p < 0.0001 versus saline). The absolute volume of the ipsilateral, lesioned striatum was increased in levodopa-treated rats resulting in a significant difference in percentage volume change when compared to saline-treated rats (p < 0.01). Moreover, a significant positive correlation was found between this volume change and AIMs scores for individual levodopa-treated rats (r = 0.96; p < 0.01). The density of Iba1+ cells was increased within the lesioned versus intact striatum (p < 0.01) with no difference between treatment groups. Conversely, Iba1+ microglia soma size was significantly increased (p < 0.01) in the lesioned striatum of levodopa-treated but not saline-treated rats. Soma size was not, however, significantly correlated with either AIMs or MRI volume change. Although GFAP+ astrocytes were elevated in the lesioned versus intact striatum (p < 0.001), there was no difference between treatment groups. No statistically significant effects of either lesion or treatment on RECA1, a marker for blood vessels, were observed. Collectively, these data suggest chronic levodopa treatment in 6-hydroxydopamine lesioned rats is associated with increased striatal volume that correlates with the development of AIMs. The accompanying increase in number and size of microglia, however, cannot alone explain this volume expansion. Further multi-modal studies are warranted to establish the brain-wide effects of chronic levodopa treatment.
The Economic Actors of the Post-Soviet Society * Introduction : The echelons of capitalist development

Introduction: The echelons of capitalist development The models of market economy for the countries of Eastern Europe and Russia, undoubtedly, were shaped under the influence of the global community recommendations. IMF and IMRD have formulated the basic principles of the "Washington consensus" which became the basis of the "Gaidar economy". In fact, a huge gap between the noble plans and their weak implementation was a consequence of the modest economic experience of the future reformers: unfortunately, the level of theoretical expertise of the "Gaidar & Team" left a lot to be desired. As a result of transformational recession, the rates of growth in Russia in the 1990s were consistently negative. Considering the current USD purchasing power, the GDP in Russia is comparable to those of Jordan, Morocco, Swaziland and remains substantially lower then the average world GDP. There are several institutional concepts which enable us to grasp the logic and prospects of economic development of Russia. Although the most well known one is the concept of postindustrial society, it allows seeing only a long-term tendency of evolution. In order to understand the regularities of the medium-term development, it is worth using the notion of the "echelons of capitalism development" of Gershenkron. Let us consider in details the way these "echelons" come into being and the role of Russia in this process.
DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT OF SERIES FED TWO DIPOLE ANTENNA FOR WLAN BASE STATION APPLICATIONS

Antenna design is the crucial process in the development of any devices in wireless communication Era. In this paper, Series-Fed Two Dipole Antenna is designed for the WLAN applications. The proposed antenna operates at 2.4GHz frequency band which is IEEE 802.11b, industrial, scientific and medical (ISM) band with reduced size and improved gain for providing effective access to wireless internet to the end users. A modified balun feeding is used for improving impedance matching. This antenna is designed over the FR4 substrate with dielectric permittivity of 4.4 and height of the substrate is 1.6mm to achieve lower return loss. The dimension of the proposed antenna is 105mm length 80mm width. This antenna is simulated in an integral based solver simulation software called CST Microwave studio v2017 and achieved best results such as VSWR 1.25, Return loss -19 dB and Bandwidth of 200MHz, Directivity of 6.71dBi, gain of 6.19dB. This antenna finds its applications in WLAN Base Stations and wireless access points.
Arbitraging Arbitrageurs

This paper develops a theory of strategic trading in markets with large influential arbitrageurs. If arbitrageurs are not very well-capitalized, margin requirements or capital constraints make their trades predictable. Other market participants can exploit this by trading against them. Competitors may even find it optimal to lend to arbitrageurs that are financially fragile; additional capital makes the arbitrageurs more viable, and lenders can reap profits from trading against them for a longer time. The strategic behavior of these market participants has implications for the functioning of financial markets. Strategic trading may produce significant price distortions, increase price manipulation activities, and trigger forced liquidations of large traders.
Optimization of scheduling for EV charging and power flow based on model predictive control considering waiting que

Abstract In this paper, we deal with an optimal power flow problem and charging scheduling problem of Electric Vehicle(EV) in the electric distribution system. Recently the smartgrid is getting attention from the environmental viewpoint, but it is difficult to predict the amount of generation of alternative energy. Especially in recent year, the spread of EV is progressed, but EV charging needs much electric and charging time. Hence we deal with a charging scheduling problem and an optimal power dispatching problem at the same time. In proposed method, waiting que is considered existing uncertainty of EV number arriving service station. Finally, we confirm the effectiveness of our method through numerical simulation.
On a possibility of gradual model-learning

In this paper, the term of gradual learning describes the process, in which an n -dimensional model is constructed in n steps; each step increases the dimensionality of the constructed model by one. The approach is explained using the apparatus of compositional models since its algebraic properties seem to serve the purpose best. The paper shows also the equivalence of compositional models and Bayesian networks, and thus the paper gives a hint that the approach applies to the graphical model as well.
Self-Supervised Learning for Facial Action Unit Recognition through Temporal Consistency

Facial expressions have inherent temporal dependencies that can be leveraged in automatic facial expression analysis from videos. In this paper, we propose a self-supervised representation learning method for facial Action Unit (AU) recognition through learning temporal consistencies in videos. To this end, we use a triplet-based ranking approach that learns to rank the frames based on their temporal distance from an anchor frame. Instead of manually labeling informative triplets, we randomly select an anchor frame along with two additional frames with predeﬁned distances from the anchor as positive and negative. To develop an effective metric learning approach, we introduce an aggregate ranking loss by taking the sum of multiple triplet losses to allow pairwise comparisons between adjacent frames. A Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is used as encoder to learn representations by minimizing the objective loss. We demonstrate that our encoder learns meaningful representations for AU recognition with no labels. The encoder is evaluated for AU detection on various detasets including BP4D, EmotioNet and DISFA. Our results are comparable or superior to the state-of-the-art AU recognition through self-supervised learning.
Equine Assisted Activities Have Positive Effects on Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder and Family Functioning

Equine-assisted activities (EAA) have emerged as a new method of treatment for children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in recent years. This study aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of EAA in the areas of social functioning, autistic behaviours, family functioning, and clinical severity for children diagnosed with ASD. The participants were 24 children (4-12 years old) diagnosed with ASD and their mothers. Subjects were randomized into two groups, and the programme consisted of eight sessions of EAA. A social communication questionnaire and clinical global impression scale were used to evaluate the severity of autistic behaviours, and family assessment device was used for family functioning, while the Beck Depression Inventory was used to evaluate the severity of maternal depression. The results suggested that the severity of ASD decreases and improvements in maternal mental health and family functioning were observed in the experimental group, while no significant results were observed in the control group. This study provided preliminary evidence that an eight-week EAA can provide significant improvements in terms of both family and child functioning for children diagnosed with ASD. Further studies in larger samples are needed to investigate these effects.
The Relation between Atmospheric Teleconnection Patterns and Precipitation Extremes over Europe

Atmospheric correlations have profound importance for the perception of short-term and long-term variability in climate. The most important correlations are recognized as atmospheric teleconnection patterns which are instant correlations in the variations of large-scale atmospheric parameters at certain points on the Earth. These patterns may significantly lead to the variability in the climate and influence the extreme precipitation. Possible droughts and floods could originate as a consequence of excessive decrease or increase in precipitation amount and frequency. The main aim of this paper is to obtain a better understanding of the relation precipitation extremes in the whole European domain that are relevant to the several representative atmospheric teleconnection pattern indices by applying various statistical approaches valid for consecutive 38 winter seasons. Relations were checked by means of Pearson and Spearman correlation methods for selected winter seasons. What is more, Multiple Linear Regression method was applied to determine the inter-connection between these atmospheric teleconnection patterns and the extreme precipitation frequencies exceeding thresholds settled. Then, according to the exceeding frequencies the determined critical values, most of the regions over Europe have a high negative and positive coefficients of these atmospheric teleconnection pattern indices with the precipitation totals and their frequencies valid for winter seasons (statistically significant at the 90%, 1 mm/day, 10 mm/day threshold levels).
Rising China, anxious Asia? An empirical assessment in Bayesian-DSGE model with vertical and processing trade

This paper is thus motivated to investigate the ties that bind China to East and Southeast Asia, and to probe into the mechanism through which China’s economic expansion has influenced its Asian neighbors. By using a Bayesian estimated tworegion dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model that incorporates the simultaneous presence of vertical and processing trade, we show that vertical trade in intermediate inputs substantially arises alongside processing trade between China and East Asia in the aftermath of China’s WTO accession. Nonetheless, vertical trade between China and the developing Southeast Asia is trivial over the same time span. More interestingly, when processing trade per se prevails macroeconomic fluctuations are mainly driven by own shocks. To the contrary, the emergence of vertical trade alongside processing trade will give rise to cross-border influence of TFP and IST shocks to countries specializing at midstream production and leading the vertical trade. The impulse response analysis indicates that China’s integration into regional production network as a dominant player in processing trade has been benign to the advanced East Asian economies through vertical trade, but malign to the developing Southeast Asian economies that have to compete in processing trade.
SUSTAINABLE SOFTWARE ENGINEERING EDUCATION CURRICULA DEVELOPMENT

: Climate change risk and environmental degradation are the most critical issues of our society. Our technology influenced daily life style involves many software and apps which are used by large society and their use is increasing than ever before. Sustainability is a significant topic for future professionals and more so for Information Technology (IT) professionals and software engineers due to its impact on the society. It is significant to motivate and raise concern among students and faculty members regarding sustainability by including it into Software Engineering curriculum.
ANALYSES OF HEAVY PRECIPITATION EVENTS OVER LIGURIAN REGION

Some of the most intense flood events in the Mediterranean coastal areas are due to quasistationary convection that may insist on the same place for many hours, producing impressive amounts of accumulated precipitation. During last autumn season, three heavy precipitation events, characterized by the development of intense and organized convective systems, affected the Liguria Region (Northern Italy), leading to severe floods. The present study aims at identifying the main characteristics of the convective events and the physical/dynamical mechanisms responsible for the heavy precipitations, through a combination of in-situ measurements, satellite data and numerical model simulations. Passive microwave observations, elaborated through the 183-WSL fast rain rate retrieval algorithm, are used to recognize the area affected by heavy rainfall and to identify some characteristics of the convective systems. Moreover, a number of numerical simulations have been performed implementing a modelling chain based on the hydrostatic model BOLAM and the non-hydrostatic model MOLOCH, nested in BOLAM. The present analysis allows to identify common features among the three events, at different scales: a very similar large scale pattern, the presence of a convergence line triggering convection, low-level intense moist flow over the sea feeding convection and strong vertical shear. Moreover, a detailed mesoscale analysis is provided.
The burden of rodent-borne diseases in Africa South of the Sahara

There are many vector-borne diseases in Africa wbicb cause a heavy toll in buman morbidity, mortality, economie Joss and suffering. Plagne remains endemie in severa! countries in Africa; 1,269 cases ofplague were reported in Africain 1994 and tbese represent 43.2% of the 2,935 human cases of plague from ail the world and 50% of the mortality. The 6 countries which have reported human cases of the disease as recently as 1994 are Madagascar, Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania, Zaire and Zimbabwe. Na tura! foci of the infection re main in others. However, in addition to plague, other infections and human diseases with rodent reservoirs account for a great deal ofmorbiciity and mortality in Africa though little actual data are available on the munber of cases. The rodent-bome infections include the virus diseases Lassa fever, Crimean-Congo haemoiThagic fever, and, possibly, Rift Valley feve r. Bacterial infections include bruceUosis, leptospirosis, plague, rat-bite fever, tick-borne relapsing fever and tularemia. Rickettsial infections are common and include murine typhus, tick typhus, Q-fever. There are also severa! hel.minthic infections which may be passed from rodents to man and the most impo1iant of these is schistosomiasis. One must take into account the fact that serious rodent depredations on man's foodstu:f:fs can also lead to malnutrition.
Interviewers’ and Respondents’ Joint Production of Response Quality in Openended Questions. A Multilevel Negativebinomial Regression Approach

Open-ended questions are an important methodological tool for social science researchers, but they suffer from large variations in response quality. In this contribution, we discuss the state of research and develop a systematic approach to the mechanisms of quality generation in open-ended questions, examining the effects from respondents and interviewers as well as those arising from their interactions. Using data from an open-ended question on associations with foreigners living in Germany from the ALLBUS 2016, we first apply a two-level negative binomial regression to model influences on response quality on the interviewer and respondent level and their interaction. In a second regression analysis, we assess how qualitative variation (information entropy) in responses on the interviewer level is related to interviewer characteristics and data quality. We find that respondents’ education, age, gender, motivation and topic interest influence response quality. The interviewer-related variance in response length is 36%. Whereas interviewer characteristics (age, gender, education, experience) do not have a direct effect, they impact on response quality due to interactions between interviewer and respondent characteristics. Notably, an interviewer’s experience has a positive effect on response quality only in interaction with highly educated respondents.
Conceptual Study of International Migration and Diaspora

Discussions on the phenomenon of international migration seem to be the base for the diaspora researches. However, should these intertwined social processes, in terms of theoretical researches, be fed from a much broader conceptual framework? Can a phenomenon of diaspora, arising as a result of international migration, be studied without the concept of related terms such as globalization, migration, ghettoization, minorities, identity, nationalism and transnational social spaces? This study focuses to answer these questions and points out the necessity of including the other concepts in a broader context for a better understanding of the relationship between international migration and diaspora. These concepts and conceptual discussions that become more and more important in the literature, makes to interpret the relationship between international migration and diaspora in the light of current developments.
An Observational Analysis of an Especially Long-Lived Supercell in Montana

During the late morning of 16 June 2007, a supercell thunderstorm developed across far north central Montana. Over the next 10 hours this storm traveled approximately 483 km (300 miles), producing flash flooding, hail up to 7.62 cm (2.75 inches) in diameter, and wind gusts up to 143 km/hr (89 miles/hr) before terminating near the Montana-North Dakota border. Approximately 10,000 acres of crops were completely destroyed, and combined monetary damages to crops and property approached 35 million USD. Although supercell storms are not particularly common in Montana, the sheer duration and severity of this event distinguish it from other organized severe convective episodes. This paper documents the pre-storm environment and evolution of this supercell within an atmosphere characterized by very limited instability, yet pronounced shear.
Forecasting EU Allowance Price Using Transactions of Central Entities

European Union Emission Trading System (EU ETS) can be analyzed as a transaction network. Under the rules of ETS, firms must hold enough allowances to cover for their annual emissions. Excess allowances may be traded or banked for future use. The allowance price is considered as an indication of how well the policy meets its objectives. We aim for a better understanding of the structure of the network and of the way the market dynamics affect the EUA price. Our findings indicate that there exists a small subset of nodes which emerges as core transactors and accounts to roughly 1.8% of the entire network participants. We call it All Time Almost Dominating Set, (ATADOM). Aiming to quantify its power, we provide a Vector AutoRegressive (VAR) model to forecast the EUA price. By using trading quantities restricted to ATADOM, along with significant price determinants from the literature, we find that it is possible to explain and to forecast EUA price by just tracking the behavior of the ATADOM set within EU ETS. Our work can be the basis of a compact evaluation tool to one of the most prominent environmental policies, the EU ETS.
Real-time screen reading: reducing domain shift for one-shot learning

Many digital meters such as those used for home health (e.g. blood pressure meters) or meters monitoring industrial equipment do not contain wireless connectivity. Hence, connecting these devices to phone tracking apps or control centres either requires cumbersome manual transcription or is not plausible due to costs. Our motivation is to cheaply retro-ﬁt these types of meters with ‘smart’ data transfer capabilities using a mobile phone app and limited training data. We demonstrate how one can use single training images of meter screens to build efﬁcient custom meter readers targeted to chosen devices. To this end, we build a CNN based system which runs in real-time on mobile device with very high read accuracy (close to 100%). Our contributions include (i) introduction of an exciting new application domain, (ii) a method of training from purely synthetic data by reducing domain shift using a surprisingly simple approach which unlike adversarial training based methods does not even require unlabelled data; (iii) a highly accurate system for parsing digital meter screens and (iv) release of a new screen reading dataset. The system, although trained solely on synthetic data, transfers very well to the real-world. Our method of screen detection and text recognition also improves over the state of the art on our dataset.
Antalya’s tourist security: A gap analysis of expectations vs perceptions

The tourism industry strongly contributes to the gross domestic product of many countries. An important aspect of the tourism industry is the security of tourists and its connection to the overall tourism security of a country or tourist location. It is essential to identify vulnerable areas and require security improvements within the tourism industry. This study aims to identify security gaps in the Mediterranean city of Antalya from a tourist perspective. Tourists have been classified in this study as leisure tourists, business tourists, and special event tourists. The research identified expectations and perceptions gaps in the transportation sector, accommodation sector, airports, and public places of Antalya. Data was collected from a sample size of 551 tourists residing in 34 different countries in Europe, Central Asia, and the Middle East. Findings show gaps exist specifically in the levels of security of buses, hotels, airports, shopping malls, restaurants, tourist sites, and beaches of Antalya. The research also assessed the influence of tourists’ purpose of travel and country of residence on their expectations and perceptions of security in Antalya. The study ultimately identified gaps concerning the security of tourists visiting Antalya, and future studies can explore the issues related to these tourism industry’s components in which gaps exist.