Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Uncertainty and predictiveness determine attention to cues during human associative learning

Prior research has suggested that attention is determined by exploiting what is known about the most valid predictors of outcomes and exploring those stimuli that are associated with the greatest degree of uncertainty about subsequent events. Previous studies of human contingency learning have revealed evidence for one or other of these processes, but differences in the designs and procedures of these studies make it difficult to pinpoint the crucial determinant of whether attentional exploitation or exploration will dominate. Here we present two studies in which we systematically manipulated both the predictiveness of cues and uncertainty regarding the outcomes with which they were associated. This allowed us to demonstrate, for the first time, evidence of both attentional exploration and exploitation within the same experiment. Moreover, while the effect of predictiveness persisted to influence the rate of novel learning about the same cues in a second stage, the effect of uncertainty did not. This suggests that attentional exploration is more sensitive to a change of context than is exploitation. The pattern of data is simulated with a hybrid attentional model.
Entrepreneurial orientation and performance: investigating local requirements for entrepreneurial decision-making

Abstract Entrepreneurial orientation (EO) plays an important role in explaining firm performance. In this study, we investigate the relation between EO and performance at the strategic business unit (SBU) level and examine the influence of decision-making mode and social capital of the focal business unit manager. Adopting the attention-based view (ABV) as our main theoretical perspective, we examine the impact of decision-making mode (i.e., participative vs. autocratic) on the EO–performance relation. In addition, we investigate the extent to which strong network ties with actors at lower, similar, and higher hierarchical positions, respectively, enable SBU managers to effectively engage in participative decision-making processes when leveraging EO. Our findings based on 119 SBUs of one large international company provide nuanced insights into how local conditions interact to shape EO’s influence on performance.
Acoustic indexing for multimedia retrieval and browsing

This paper reviews the Video Mail Retrieval (VMR) project at Cambridge University and ORL. The VMR project began in September 1993 with the aim of developing methods for retrieving video documents by scanning the audio soundtrack for keywords. The project has shown, both experimentally and through the construction of a working prototype, that speech recognition can be combined with information retrieval methods to locate multimedia documents by content. The final version of the VMR system uses pre-computed phone lattices to allow extremely rapid word spotting and audio indexing, and statistical information retrieval (IR) methods to mitigate the effects of spotting errors. The net result is a retrieval system that is open-vocabulary and speaker-independent, and which can search audio orders of magnitude faster than real time.
Conservative Elementary Object Systems

This contribution presents decidability results for the formalism of Elementary Object Systems EOS. Object nets are Petri nets which have Petri nets as tokens --an approach known as the nets-within-nets paradigm. In this paper we study the relationship of the reachability and the liveness problem. We prove that both problems are undecidable for EOS even for the subclass of conservative EOS while it is well known that both are decidable for classical p/t nets. Despite these undecidability results, boundedness can be decided for conservative EOS using a monotonicity argument similar to that for p/t nets.
A Volterra Series Nonlinear Model of the Sampling Distortion in Flash ADCs Due to Substrate Noise Coupling

This brief presents a Volterra series model to evaluate the impact of substrate noise on Flash analog-to-digital converters. The proposed approach first relates substrate noise to the induced timing uncertainty of the comparator by means of an analytical linear model. The analysis then expresses the resulting sampling distortion power by also considering the comparator's nonlinearities and thus models the signal-to-noise-and-distortion ratio (SNDR) of the converter. In particular, it is shown that substrate noise causes an FM modulation of the clock, and the resulting timing error is a joint effect of AM-FM modulation of the input signal and the coupled noise. The derivation of the analytical expression is also valid for any multitone ground perturbation and is validated on a high-resolution Flash converter. The developed nonlinear model for the SNDR is found to almost double the noise amplitude range compared with the linear model, thus predicting the impact of realistically large noise signals.
Robust stability of perturbed variable eigenvalues control systems

This paper gives out the sufficient robust stable conditions for variable eigenvalues control systems in presence of parametrical or structural perturbations in accordance with the robust stable analysis of perturbed systems without eigenvalues variations. And the sufficient robust stable conditional functions for variable eigenvalues control systems with parametrical or structural perturbations on the basis of the step analysis of variable eigenvalues control systems are presented in this paper too.
Monoclonal Antibodies and Polyvalent Antiserum to Chicken Choline Acetyltransferase

Abstract: Monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) to chick cho‐line acetyltransferase (ChAT) were obtained from mouse‐hybridoma cultures after immunization with partially purified enzyme isolated from optic lobes. Antibodies that bound active enzyme were detected in 11 hybridoma cultures. The mAbs showed cross‐reactivity to ChAT from quail and beef but not to ChAT from several other species. An affinity column prepared with one of the mAbs was used to purify ChAT to apparent homogeneity. Polyclonal antiserum to mAb affinity‐purified ChAT was produced in a rabbit. This antiserum inhibited chick ChAT activity and quantitatively precipitated ChAT activity from solution. On immunoblots, the antiserum stained ChAT and two other proteins. After preadsorption of the antiserum with effluent from the mAb affinity column, the antiserum became monospecific for ChAT. This an‐tiserum was useful for immunocytochemical localization of ChAT. it selectively stained neuronal cell bodies in chick spinal cord and rat brain at locations known to contain cholinergic neurons.
Fast RNS implementation of elliptic curve point multiplication in GF(p) with selected base pairs

Implementing elliptic curve point multiplication (ECPM) based on residue number system (RNS) can efficiently use FPGA resources. In this paper, we propose a modular reduction method, where a kind of RNS pair is selected to achieve fast reduction. Our reduction method mainly needs several parallel additions while the reduction unit of previous designs require two multiplications which are computed serially. We also present a novel multiplier-and-accumulator (MAC) with modular reduction unit (MAAU), whose reduction unit employs our fast reduction method, and MAC is based on Karatsuba-Ofman method. Compared with the previous classic designs based on Cox-Rower architecture, our reduction method allows our MAAU to take much larger radix r = 66 without increasing the number of the pipeline stages of MAAU while clock frequency keeps relatively high and no more resources are consumed. Taking larger radix leads to reducing the number of modulo, thus reducing the number of the required cycles and accelerating ECPM. Experimental results obtained on FPGA Stratix II show that the point multiplication for any curves of the size 256, 384 and 521 can be accomplished in 0.42, 0.87 and 1.53 ms respectively, which outperform the previous designs.
Postischemic Spontaneous Hyperthermia and Its Effects in Middle Cerebral Artery Occlusion in the Rat

This study examined the time course and effects of postischemic spontaneous hyperthermia after transient and permanent focal ischemia. Rats underwent a 90-min, 120-min, or permanent middle cerebral artery occlusion (MCAO). Body temperatures started rising 15-20 min after MCAO and reached 39-40.5 degrees C during the first hour. Sustained hyperthermia was observed during the rest of the first 24 h. In another experiment, rats were subjected to the same interventions, but a normothermic body temperature was maintained. Spontaneous hyperthermia significantly increased the infarct volumes measured 48 h after MCAO in all groups. Reperfusion 2 h after the onset of ischemia was not beneficial in the hyperthermic animals in contrast to the normothermic group. We also examined the effect of spontaneous hyperthermia on the temporal progression of infarcted and penumbral areas 4, 12, or 48 h after MCAO. During spontaneous hyperthermia, penumbral areas became infarcted areas more rapidly, which was most expressed at 4 h. These findings demonstrate that severe spontaneous hyperthermia can occur in rats after MCAO and that it not only increases the infarct volumes in both transient and permanent ischemia, but also accelerates the incorporation of penumbral areas into necrotic areas, which significantly decreases the window of opportunity for therapeutic interventions.
Gold-mining multinationals and community interaction in Tanzania : towards localised social accountability

The main objective of this thesis is to study the accountability of gold-mining companies to the communities within which they operate in Tanzania. The thesis develops a localised social accountability framework from accountability and stakeholder literature. This framework is discussed in four thematic chapters: land grievances, environmental pollution, violent conflict and company social spending.
Twenty years of Milan criteria: the wicked flee though no one pursues.

After the initial very disappointing results observed in the management of hepatocellular cancer (HCC) using liver transplantation (LT) (1), a revolution has started with the introduction of the Milan criteria (MC) (2). The very seminal paper from Mazzaferro has represented a real breakpoint respect to the past, consenting to obtain substantially similar survivals among tumoral and non-tumoral patients. However, despite the MC are connected with excellent patient survivals and low recurrence rates, only a very small percentage of HCC patients meet these so stringent criteria, with a small but not negligible percentage of MC-IN patients eventually experiencing a post-LT recurrence. As a consequence, several expanded criteria have been proposed with the intent to enlarge the population of potentially transplantable patients and to further reduce the risk for HCC recurrence: however, only the San Francisco criteria proposed by Yao (3) and the Up-to-seven Criteria proposed by Mazzaferro (4) have obtained a worldwide clinical validation. Thus, despite twenty years have passed away from their introduction, the MC still remain the cornerstone of HCC selection for LT. The reason for the enduring success of the MC is connected with the fact that (I) they are easy to use, and that (II) they perfectly fall into a sort of “grey area” in which patient survivals are excellent also when radiology underestimates the cancer. As shown by Decaens (5), MC still excellently work also when the explanted liver is taken into account, but if we step-up to the (slightly) enlarged San Francisco Criteria, survivals fall and recurrences increase. However, we know that morphology alone do not tell us the entire story. Recent publications aimed at identify new selection tools able to detect “high-risk-for-recurrence” HCC patients have focused their attention on alpha-fetoprotein modification, radiological response after loco-regional treatments and inflammatory markers (6-10). We know MC still continue doing a great job in selecting patients with high risk for recurrence. However, some of these “wicked” tumors still continue fleeing. New criteria integrating HCC morphology and biology are strongly needed with the intent to “capture” all of them.
Methods of Data Analysis Learning probability distributions Week 5 1 Motivation

One of the key problems in non-parametric data analysis is to infer good models of probability distributions, assuming we are given as data a finite sample from that distribution. This problem is ill-posed for continuous distributions, even when they are low-dimensional: with finite data, there is no way to distinguish between (or exclude) distributions that are not regularized a priori, for example, by assuming that they are smooth in some sense. The question then becomes about how to formulate the problem of choosing the “best” distribution among the distributions that are “sufficiently smooth” mathematically; intuitively, more data should allow us to consider less smooth distributions. One way of constructing such continuous distribution estimates is by kernel density estimation (KDE), which literally involves smoothing (or convolving) the data with a particular kernel function. Assuming a metric on the state space, the kernel specifies how far away from individual data points the corresponding contributions to estimated distribution extend. Another possibility is to describe the data with a parametric family of distributions that is sufficiently rich so that, in the large sample limit, it can describe an arbitrary smooth distribution. A well-known example from this class are Mixtures of Gaussians. Both of these approaches are reasonably simple to implement, both can be seen as instances of probabilistic (maximum likelihood or Bayesian) inference for their parameters, and both belong to a standard set of unsupervised learning tools for data exploration / modeling. Yet another versatile framework for modeling both continuous and discrete distributions of potentially high dimensionality given a finite sample is the maximum entropy (ME) approach. Here, we are looking for the most random distribution (= maximum entropy) that exactly reproduces a chosen set of statistics which can reliably be estimated from data. The assumption of maximum entropy is a formal version of Occam’s razor: one chooses distributions of a particular form that contain a minimal amount of structure that is nevertheless sufficient to explain selected aspects of observations (constraints). Seen another way, the maximum entropy assumption is just another form of regularization, the intuition being that the most regular smooth distributions are uniform distributions which maximize the entropy by definition. What makes maximum entropy models special are certain uniqueness theorems and links to information-theoretic quantities. Going beyond these standard tools, one can consider unsupervised deep learning models, restricted Boltzmann machines, field-theoretic methods for learning probability distributions and Gaussian Processes (in a supervised setting) that we will consider in the next lecture.
The Renal Tubular Acidoses

The past decade has seen much progress in our understanding of the cellular mechanisms responsible for renal tubular acidosis (RTA), although the mechanism of the common complication of nephrocalcinosis remains unclear. In this brief overview, we discuss RTA from the standpoint of applied or ‘clinical’ renal tubular physiology, since this represents a synthesis of over 50 years of clinical description and classification, more than 30 years of segmental renal tubular physiology, and almost 10 years of applied molecular genetics. We begin by defining RTA and its current clinical classification, and we review this in the context of normal urinary acidification and how it might go wrong.
Patterns of gene expression in the developing adult sea urchin central nervous system reveal multiple domains and deep‐seated neural pentamery

SUMMARY The adult sea urchin central nervous system (CNS) is composed of five radial nerve cords connected to a circular nerve ring. Although much is known about the molecular mechanisms underlying the development and function of the nervous systems of many invertebrate and vertebrate species, virtually nothing is known about these processes in echinoderms. We have isolated a set of clones from a size‐selected cDNA library prepared from the nervous system of the sea urchin Heliocidaris erythrogramma for use as probes. A total of 117 expressed sequence clones were used to search the GenBank database. Identified messages include genes that encode signaling proteins, cytoskeletal elements, cell surface proteins and receptors, cell proliferation and differentiation factors, transport and channel proteins, and a RNA DEAD box helicase. Expression was analyzed by RNA gel blot hybridization to document expression through development. Many of the genes have apparently neural limited expression and function, but some have been co‐opted into new roles, notably associated with exocytotic events at fertilization. Localization of gene expression by whole‐mount in situ hybridization shows that the morphologically simple sea urchin radial CNS exhibits complex organization into localized transcriptional domains. The transcription patterns reflect the morphological pentamery of the echinoderm CNS and provide no indication of an underlying functional bilateral symmetry in the CNS.
Relation of glenohumeral and acromioclavicular joint destruction in rheumatoid shoulder. A 15 year follow up study

OBJECTIVES To evaluate the relation of glenohumeral (GH) and acromioclavicular (AC) joint involvement in a cohort of 74 patients with seropositive and erosive rheumatoid arthritis (RA) followed up prospectively. METHODS At the 15 year follow up radiographs of 148 shoulders were evaluated, and the grade of destruction of GH and AC joints were assessed by the Larsen method. One GH joint arthroplasty had been performed after 13 years of the disease onset and the preoperative radiograph was evaluated. RESULTS Erosive involvement (Larsen grade ⩾ 2) was observed in 96 of 148 (65%) of the shoulders. Both GH and AC joints were affected in 62 of 148 (42%) shoulders. GH joint alone was involved in nine (6%) shoulders and only AC joint was affected in 25 (17%) shoulders. AC joint destruction correlated with the GH joint destruction,r=0.74 (95% confidence intervals (CI) 0.65 to 0.80 ). CONCLUSION In RA AC joint is affected more often than the GH joint, but in half of the patients both joints are involved. This should be remembered when treating painful rheumatoid shoulder.
MEMORY AND SPEED OF PROCESSING IN GENERAL GIFTED AND EXCELLING IN MATHEMATICS STUDENTS

The present study examined the memory and speed of processing abilities associated with general giftedness (G) and excellence in mathematics (E). The research involved four groups of 16-18 years old participants varying in levels of G and E. 160 participants were tested on a battery of three memory tests and five speed of processing tests. Working-memory was found to be related to both G and E factors. The results reveal that G factor is related to high short term memory and that E factor is associated with high visual-spatial memory. Gifted students who excel in mathematics (G-E group) outperformed in all speed of processing tasks compared to the other three participants groups. The results can contribute to the theoretical knowledge about similarities and differences in memory and speed of processing abilities in G and E groups.
Family-centred music therapy to promote social engagement in young children with severe autism spectrum disorder: a randomized controlled study.

BACKGROUND Limited capacity for social engagement is a core feature of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), often evident early in the child's development. While these skills are difficult to train, there is some evidence that active involvement in music-making provides unique opportunities for social interaction between participants. Family-centred music therapy (FCMT) endeavours to support social engagement between child and parent within active music-making, yet the extent of benefits provided is unknown. AIM This study investigated the impacts of FCMT on social engagement abilities. METHODS Twenty-three children (36-60 months) with severe ASD received either 16 weeks of FCMT in addition to their early intervention programmes (n = 12), or their early intervention programme only (n = 11). Change in social engagement was measured with standardized parent-report assessments, parent interviews and clinician observation. RESULTS Intention-to-treat analysis for the Vineland Social Emotional Early Childhood Scale indicated a significant effect in favour of FCMT. Thematic qualitative analysis of the parent interviews showed that the parent-child relationship grew stronger. CONCLUSION FCMT improves social interactions in the home and community and the parent-child relationship, but not language skills or general social responsiveness. This study provides preliminary support for the use of FCMT to promote social engagement in children with severe ASD.
The Chlamydomonas reinhardtii Nar1 Gene Encodes a Chloroplast Membrane Protein Involved in Nitrite Transport

A key step for nitrate assimilation in photosynthetic eukaryotes occurs within chloroplasts, where nitrite is reduced to ammonium, which is incorporated into carbon skeletons. The Nar1 gene from Chlamydomonas reinhardtii is clustered with five other genes for nitrate assimilation, all of them regulated by nitrate. Sequence analysis of genomic DNA and cDNA of Nar1 and comparative studies of strains having or lacking Nar1 have been performed. The deduced amino acid sequence indicates that Nar1 encodes a chloroplast membrane protein with substantial identity to putative formate and nitrite transporters in bacteria. Use of antibodies against NAR1 has corroborated its location in the plastidic membrane. Characterization of strains having or lacking this gene suggests that NAR1 is involved in nitrite transport in plastids, which is critical for cell survival under limiting nitrate conditions, and controls the amount of nitrate incorporated by the cells under limiting CO2 conditions.
Comparative Study of Various Latch-Type Sense Amplifiers

When the input voltage difference of a sense amplifier (SA) exceeds the offset voltage (VOS), the SA correctly detects it and outputs a large signal. However, when the input voltage is in a certain region, the SA can fail to sense the input voltage difference even if it is sufficiently large. This input voltage region is defined as the sensing dead zone of the SA. Because sensing dead zones differ depending on SAs and the input voltages to the SA differ depending on the memory devices, analyzing the sensing dead zone is very important. In this brief, we analyze the sensing dead zones of the most popular latch-type SAs: voltage- and current-latched SAs. Furthermore, a suitable latch-type SA scheme is suggested for various SA input voltages in terms of sensing delay, power consumption, and PDP, using a 65-nm predictive technology model at a VDD of 1.1 V.