nils-herrmann/clean_scirepeval huggingface dataset:
Is Closed Loop, Time Locked Primary Motor Cortex Stimulation an Ideal Target for Improving Movements in Neurological Disorders?
Venue: Movement disorders official journal of the Movement Disorder Society

The basal ganglia play a critical role in motor control as evidenced by movement impairments in neurological disorders, including bradykinesia in Parkinson's disease (PD) Using a two virus labeling system in genetically modified mice, approximately 60% to 70% of monosynaptic glutamatergic input onto direct and indirect pathway medium spiny neurons (dMSN, iMSN) in dorsal striatum was found to originate from cortical areas, with dense primary motor cortex (M1) projections to iMSN. A recent study examined experience dependent plasticity associated with goaldirected, rewarded reaching movements in mice combined with closed loop, time locked optical stimulation of dorsal striatal iMSN or dMSN. Stimulation occurred within 15 ms after movement initiation and lasted for 450 ms using 10 ms pulses at 16.7 Hz during the slowest or fastest third of movements. Overall, dMSN stimulation increased, whereas iMSN stimulation decreased movement velocity during the fastest movements. In contrast, during the slowest movements, iMSN stimulation increased whereas dMSN stimulation decreased movement velocity. Administration of D1 and D2 receptor antagonists abolished the effects of iMSN or dMSN stimulation on movement velocity. Importantly, stimulation of both fast and slow movements on every trial or random stimulation had no effects. This elegant study used optogenetic techniques to selectively stimulate the direct or the indirect pathway in the context of specific types of movements and has important implications for motor control. A prominent model of the basal ganglia is that the direct pathway promotes intended movements whereas the indirect pathway inhibits competing actions. However, the current results suggest that this model is too simplistic because both indirect and direct pathways can undergo activity dependent plasticity and, more important, both pathways can bidirectionally modulate movement kinematics. Furthermore, these results suggest that closed loop, timelocked stimulation of iMSN may improve bradykinesia with prominent slow movements. Stimulations should occur in the presence of dopaminergic medications attributed to the dopamine dependency and target only slower movements and iMSN. Electrical stimulation of dorsal striatum where iMSN and dMSN are intermingled would not be ideal, and optogenetic stimulation in humans will not be feasible in the foreseeable future. However, the STN in the indirect pathway or targeting M1 corticostriatal pathways upstream may be viable options. Selective M1 stimulation during slow movements should activate iMSN, leading to activity dependent plasticity and higher movement velocity. This type of closedloop M1 stimulation, time locked to onset of slow movement, may be able to overcome previous negative results of openloop, continuous epidural M1 stimulation in PD.
3D object tracking in driving environment: A short review and a benchmark dataset
Venue: 2016 IEEE 19th International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC)

Research in autonomous driving has matured significantly with major automotive companies making important efforts to have their autonomous or highly automated cars available in the near future. As driverless cars move from laboratories to complex real world environments, the perception capabilities of these systems to acquire, model and interpret the 3D spatial information must become more robust. Object tracking is one of the challenging problems of autonomous driving in 3D dynamic environments. Although different approaches are proposed for object tracking with demonstrated success in driving environments, it is very difficult to evaluate and compare them because they are defined with various constraints and boundary conditions. The appearance modeling for object tracking in the driving environments, using a multimodal perception system of autonomous cars and advanced driver assistance systems (ADASs) and the evaluation of such object trackers are the research focus of this paper. A benchmark dataset, called 3D Object Tracking in Driving Environment (3D OTD) is also proposed to facilitate the evaluation of object appearance modeling in object tracking methods.
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder Among Health Care Providers Following the Israeli Attacks Against Gaza Strip in 2014: A Call for Immediate Policy Actions
Venue: Archives of Psychiatric Nursing

This study aimed to assess the level of posttraumatic stress disorder and to examine the relationship between exposure to war stress and posttraumatic symptoms among health care providers following Israeli offensives against Gaza Strip in 2014.  A cross sectional design was used for this study. We targeted all nurses and doctors working in three governmental hospitals in the Gaza Strip and worked with victims of the last war, more specifically, those who were working in emergency departments, intensive care units, operating rooms, surgical departments, and burn units. A demographic sheet and Impact Event Scale Revised were used in this study. The Impact Event Scale Revised has three sub scales; intrusion, avoidance, and hyper arousal.  The results showed that 291 (89.8% of 324 participants had scores more than 35 (threshold cut off point) on the Impact Event Scale Revised. Scores ranged from zero to 80 with a mean of 52.13. Females had higher levels of stress (55.79) than males (51.63) and nurses (54.85) had more stress than physicians (47.38) The most frequent symptoms of trauma subscales was "avoidance" (mean=20.04) followed by "intrusion" (mean=17.83) and then "hyper arousal" (mean=14.27) Levels of trauma symptoms were not affected by place of living, hospital of work, while level of education had impacted level of trauma.  The findings showed that health care providers suffered from severe posttraumatic symptoms after exposure to prolonged war stress. This level of trauma among health care providers warrants intervention programs to reduce stress and trauma among Gaza health care providers after the war.
The Relationship between War Trauma, PTSD, Depression, and Anxiety among Palestinian Children in the Gaza Strip

The aim of the study was to examine the relationship between war trauma, PTSD, depression, and anxiety among Palestinian children in the Gaza Strip.  A sample consisted of 251 children aged 6 16 were selected from 3 summer camps in the Gaza Strip. Children were interviewed using the following scales: sociodemographic scale, Gaza Traumatic Events Checklist, Impact of Events Scale, Children Revised Manifest Anxiety Scale, and Children Depression Inventory.  The results showed that the most common traumatic events due to war on 2009 reported by children were hearing shelling of the area by artillery, hearing the sonic sounds of jetfighters, watching mutilated bodies on TV, and hearing shootings and bombardment. Mean Impact of Events Scale was 18.37, intrusion subscale mean was 8.98, avoidance subscale mean was 9.49, 148 children were in the clinical range for post traumatic stress disorder symptoms (59% Study showed that 21.9% of children had anxiety and 50.6% had depression. Total traumatic events were significantly correlated PTSD, avoidance, arousal symptoms, anxiety, and depression.  The findings showed that political violence due to war trauma is related to the development of PTSD and depression in Palestinian children in Gaza Strip. Different levels of programs and interventions had to be described; such interventions under extremely adverse circumstances can be put in place after children's basic needs have been met. This is because existing emergency aid agencies have already responded to the local infrastructure in specialized and culturally appropriate ways and so can serve as a channel for the provision of additional services.
SQLiGoT: Detecting SQL injection attacks using graph of tokens and SVM
Venue: Comput. Secur.

SQL injection attacks have been predominant on web databases since the last 15 years. Exploiting input validation flaws, attackers inject SQL code through the front end of websites and steal data from the back end databases. Detection of SQL injection attacks has been a challenging problem due to extreme heterogeneity of the attack vectors. In this paper, we present a novel approach to detect injection attacks by modeling SQL queries as graph of tokens and using the centrality measure of nodes to train a Support Vector Machine (SVM) We explore different methods of creating token graphs and propose alternative designs of the system comprising of single and multiple SVMs. The system is designed to work at the database firewall layer and can protect multiple web applications in a shared hosting scenario. Though we focus primarily on web applications developed with PHP and MySQL, the approach can be easily ported to other platforms. The experimental results demonstrate that this technique can effectively identify malicious SQL queries with negligible performance overhead.
Supply chain forecasting: Theory, practice, their gap and the future
Venue: Eur. J. Oper. Res.

Supply Chain Forecasting (SCF) goes beyond the operational task of extrapolating demand requirements at one echelon. It involves complex issues such as supply chain coordination and sharing of information between multiple stakeholders. Academic research in SCF has tended to neglect some issues that are important in practice. In areas of practical relevance, sound theoretical developments have rarely been translated into operational solutions or integrated in state of the art decision support systems. Furthermore, many experience driven heuristics are increasingly used in everyday business practices. These heuristics are not supported by substantive scientific evidence; however, they are sometimes very hard to outperform. This can be attributed to the robustness of these simple and practical solutions such as aggregation approaches for example (across time, customers and products) This paper provides a comprehensive review of the literature and aims at bridging the gap between theory and practice in the existing knowledge base in SCF. We highlight the most promising approaches and suggest their integration in forecasting support systems. We discuss the current challenges both from a research and practitioner perspective and provide a research and application agenda for further work in this area. Finally, we make a contribution in the methodology underlying the preparation of review articles by means of involving the forecasting community in the process of deciding both the content and structure of this paper.
Coping with Negative Consumption Experiences: How Attribution Influences Disappointment, Regret, Word of Mouth and Complaining Behaviours

Consumers generally feel bad if products or services they purchased do not deliver what was expected. For example, if a holiday destination has not met expectations consumers will be disappointed and may feel regret about their choice of holiday destination. Their level of disappointment and regret may in turn influence their responsiveness to future product and service offers and to future product and service failures. Whereas there is a large literature on post consumption processes, relatively little is yet known about how these disappointment and regret influence behaviour. The present research experimentally investigates how disappointment and regret result from attributional processes, in particular whether the cause of the failure is deemed internal or external, and how these emotions relate to coping strategies, in particular vindictive negative word of mouth and vindictive complaining. Our findings show that when consumers attribute the failure externally, they experience higher disappointment and outcome regret, however, when they attribute the failure internally, they experience lower disappointment and higher process regret. The higher disappointment and outcome regret also foster a tendency to voice dissatisfaction, either through spreading negative word of mouth or lodging direct complaints. Furthermore, we also demonstrate that the feeling of disappointment and regret sequentially experienced by consumers act as a mechanism to unveil their coping strategies.
The effects of proximal withdrawal states on job attitudes, job searching, intent to leave, and employee turnover.
Venue: The Journal of applied psychology

We present the first major test of proximal withdrawal states theory (PWST; Hom, Mitchell, Lee, Griffeth, 2012) In addition, we develop and test new ideas to demonstrate how PWST improves our understanding and prediction of employee turnover. Across 2 studies, we corroborate that reluctant stayers (those who want to leave but have to stay) are similar to enthusiastic leavers (those who want to leave and can leave) in affective commitment, job satisfaction, and job embeddedness, and that reluctant leavers (those who want to stay but have to leave) are similar to enthusiastic stayers (those who want to stay and can stay) on these dimensions. We find that job satisfaction and job embeddedness more strongly influence the intent to leave and job search behavior for enthusiastic stayers and leavers than for reluctant stayers and leavers. More important, we show that for those experiencing low control over their preference for leaving or staying (i.e. reluctant stayers and leavers) traditional variables such as job satisfaction, job embeddedness, and intent to leave are poor predictors of their turnover behavior. We further demonstrate that focusing on enthusiastic stayers and leavers can significantly enhance the accuracy of job satisfaction, job embeddedness, and intent to leave for predicting actual employee turnover.
Parallel Model Based Diagnosis on Multi Core Computers
Venue: J. Artif. Intell. Res.

Model Based Diagnosis (MBD) is a principled and domain independent way of analyzing why a system under examination is not behaving as expected. Given an abstract description (model) of the system's components and their behavior when functioning normally, MBD techniques rely on observations about the actual system behavior to reason about possible causes when there are discrepancies between the expected and observed behavior. Due to its generality, MBD has been successfully applied in a variety of application domains over the last decades. In many application domains of MBD, testing different hypotheses about the reasons for a failure can be computationally costly, e.g. because complex simulations of the system behavior have to be performed. In this work, we therefore propose different schemes of parallelizing the diagnostic reasoning process in order to better exploit the capabilities of modern multi core computers. We propose and systematically evaluate parallelization schemes for Reiter's hitting set algorithm for finding all or a few leading minimal diagnoses using two different con flict detection techniques. Furthermore, we perform initial experiments for a basic depth first search strategy to assess the potential of parallelization when searching for one single diagnosis. Finally, we test the effects of parallelizing "direct encodings" of the diagnosis problem in a constraint solver.
Evaluating the predictive power of sun induced chlorophyll fluorescence to estimate net photosynthesis of vegetation canopies: A SCOPE modeling study

Progress in imaging spectroscopy technology and data processing can enable derivation of the complete sun induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF) emission spectrum. This opens up opportunities to fully exploit the use of the SIF spectrum as an indicator of photosynthetic activity. Simulations performed with the coupled fluorescence photosynthesis model SCOPE were used to determine how strongly canopy leaving SIF can be related to net photosynthesis of the canopy (NPC) for various canopy configurations. Regression analysis between SIF retrievals and NPC values produced the following general findings: (1) individual SIF bands that were most sensitive to NPC were located around the first emission peak (SIFred) for heterogeneous canopy configurations (i.e. varying biochemistry, leaf, canopy variables) (2) using two SIF retrieval bands, e.g. O2 B at 687 nm and O2 A at 760 nm, or the red and NIR emission peaks at 685 nm and 740 nm, led to stronger correlations than using only one band; (3) using the O2 B and the O2 A SIF retrieval bands was at least as effective as using the two emission peaks; (4) superior correlations were achieved by using the four main SIF retrieval bands (Ha, O2 B, water vapor, O2 A) and (5) further improvements may be obtained by exploiting the full SIF profile and by using an adaptive, nonlinear regression algorithm such as Gaussian processes regression (GPR) Relationships can be due to variation in photosynthetic capacity (Vcmo) but also from variation in leaf optical and canopy structural variables such as chlorophyll content and leaf area index. Overall, modeling results suggest that sampling the SIF profile in at least both O2 B and O2 A bands enables quantification photosynthetic activity of vegetation with high accuracy.
A meta analysis of leaf nitrogen distribution within plant canopies.
Venue: Annals of botany

Leaf nitrogen distribution in the plant canopy is an important determinant for canopy photosynthesis. Although the gradient of leaf nitrogen is formed along light gradients in the canopy, its quantitative variations among species and environmental responses remain unknown. Here, we conducted a global meta analysis of leaf nitrogen distribution in plant canopies.  We collected data on the nitrogen distribution and environmental variables from 393 plant canopies (100, 241 and 52 canopies for wheat, other herbaceous and woody species, respectively) KEY  The trends were clearly different between wheat and other species; the photosynthetic nitrogen distribution coefficient (Kb) was mainly determined by leaf area index (LAI) in wheat, whereas it was correlated with the light extinction coefficient (KL) and LAI in other species. Some other variables were also found to influence Kb We present the best equations for Kb as a function of environmental variables and canopy characteristics. As a more simple function, Kb 0*5KL can be used for canopies of species other than wheat. Sensitivity analyses using a terrestrial carbon flux model showed that gross primary production tended to be more sensitive to the Kb value especially when nitrogen content of the uppermost leaf was fixed.  Our results reveal that nitrogen distribution is mainly driven by the vertical light gradient but other factors such as LAI also have significant effects. Our equations contribute to an improvement in the projection of plant productivity and cycling of carbon and nitrogen in terrestrial ecosystems.
Reappraising Stress Arousal Improves Performance and Reduces Evaluation Anxiety in Classroom Exam Situations

For students to thrive in the U.S. educational system, they must successfully cope with omnipresent demands of exams. Nearly all students experience testing situations as stressful, and signs of stress (e.g. racing heart) are typically perceived negatively. This research tested the efficacy of a psychosituational intervention targeting cognitive appraisals of stress to improve classroom exam performance. Ninety three students (across five semesters) enrolled in a community college developmental mathematics course were randomly assigned to stress reappraisal or placebo control conditions. Reappraisal instructions educated students about the adaptive benefits of stress arousal, whereas placebo materials instructed students to ignore stress. Reappraisal students reported less math evaluation anxiety and exhibited improved math exam performance relative to controls. Mediation analysis indicated reappraisal improved performance by increasing students' perceptions of their ability to cope with the stressful testing situation (resource appraisals) Implications for theory development and policy are discussed.
Cross Sectional Study on Exam Anxiety among Medical Students of a Tertiary Care Teaching Hospital of Western India

" Students with test anxiety feel tense, fearful and worried in evaluative situations. This study was carried out with the objective to find out the levels of exam anxiety and factors contributing to it.  It was a cross sectional study conducted among 150 randomly selected medical students with the help of a tool used for measuring exam anxiety, Test Anxiety Inventory (TAI)  The mean score of TAI worry was 16.95 3.39) TAI emotionality was 17.04 2.901) and that of TAI total was 41.99 +5.336) The TAI emotionality subscale and TAI total scores was higher in female medical students. Those students who were living in hostel had higher mean TAI emotionality scores. No significant difference between TAI worry, TAI emotionality and TAI total with respect to regular/repeater batch, parental pressure, extent of course of study and duration of exams. No association was found TAI total with year of study in MBBS and medium of study in higher secondary education.  The total anxiety scores were significantly higher among female medical students. The emotional effect of exam anxiety was significantly higher among the female medical students than the males and among the students living at hostel than those living with their families.
Transcriptional regulation of PRPF31 gene expression by MSR1 repeat elements causes incomplete penetrance in retinitis pigmentosa
Venue: Scientific reports

PRPF31 associated retinitis pigmentosa presents a fascinating enigma: some mutation carriers are blind, while others are asymptomatic. We identify the major molecular cause of this incomplete penetrance through three cardinal features: (1) there is population variation in the number (3 or 4) of a minisatellite repeat element (MSR1) adjacent to the PRPF31 core promoter; (2) in vitro, 3 copies of the MSR1 element can repress gene transcription by 50 to 115 fold; (3) the higher expressing 4 copy allele is not observed among symptomatic PRPF31 mutation carriers and correlates with the rate of asymptomatic carriers in different populations. Thus, a linked transcriptional modifier decreases PRPF31 gene expression that leads to haploinsufficiency. This result, taken with other identified risk alleles, allows precise genetic counseling for the first time. We also demonstrate that across the human genome, the presence of MSR1 repeats in the promoters or first introns of genes is associated with greater population variability in gene expression indicating that copy number variation of MSR1s is a generic controller of gene expression and promises to provide new insights into our understanding of gene expression regulation.
Appetite controlled by a cholecystokinin nucleus of the solitary tract to hypothalamus neurocircuit
Venue: eLife

The nucleus of the solitary tract (NTS) is a key gateway for meal related signals entering the brain from the periphery. However, the chemical mediators crucial to this process have not been fully elucidated. We reveal that a subset of NTS neurons containing cholecystokinin (CCKNTS) is responsive to nutritional state and that their activation reduces appetite and body weight in mice. Cell specific anterograde tracing revealed that CCKNTS neurons provide a distinctive innervation of the paraventricular nucleus of the hypothalamus (PVH) with fibers and varicosities in close apposition to a subset of melanocortin 4 receptor (MC4RPVH) cells, which are also responsive to CCK. Optogenetic activation of CCKNTS axon terminals within the PVH reveal the satiating function of CCKNTS neurons to be mediated by a CCKNTS PVH pathway that also encodes positive valence. These data identify the functional significance of CCKNTS neurons and reveal a sufficient and discrete NTS to hypothalamus circuit controlling appetite.