pinecone/core-2020-05-10-deduplication huggingface dataset:
Bach Speaks: A Cortical “Language-Network” Serves the Processing of Music

AbstractThe aim of the present study was the investigation of neural correlates of music processing with fMRI. Chord sequences were presented to the participants, infrequently containing unexpected musical events. These events activated the areas of Broca and Wernicke, the superior temporal sulcus, Heschl's gyrus, both planum polare and planum temporale, as well as the anterior superior insular cortices. Some of these brain structures have previously been shown to be involved in music processing, but the cortical network comprising all these structures has up to now been thought to be domain-specific for language processing. To what extent this network might also be activated by the processing of non-linguistic information has remained unknown. The present fMRI-data reveal that the human brain employs this neuronal network also for the processing of musical information, suggesting that the cortical network known to support language processing is less domain-specific than previously believed
Judgment Biases in a Simulated Classroom—A Cognitive-Environmental Approach

AbstractBiases in judgments and decision making that are commonly explained in terms of the judge's prior expectancies can originate in unbiased environmental learning. Applying a recently developed sampling approach to decision making to the assessment of student achievement in a simulated classroom, we investigate systematic biases in teacher's judgment of student achievement. What might appear to reflect teacher expectancies based on students' overall ability level, gender stereotypes, or naı̈ve behavioral theories can be explained by ordinary learning rules underlying decision making, such as increasing accuracy with increasing sample size of observations in a probabilistic environment. Ability (% correct answers) and motivation levels (% raising hands) of 16 students in eight subject matters were manipulated. In Experiment 1 the judged difference between smart and poor students increased with sample size, due to participation rate or unequal teacher attention. In Experiment 2, verification biases in hypothesis testing about the relative assets of boys and girls in language and science were shown to be independent of gender stereotypes, but mediated instead by differential size of stimulus samples. Experiment 3 showed that judges' sensitivity to environmental base rates can mimic expectancy biases resulting from scripted knowledge
Transformation of the Methylotrophic Actinomycete Amycolatopis methanolica with Plasmid DNA: Stimulatory Effect of a pMEA300-Encoded Gene

Amycolatopsis methanolica contains a 13.29-kb plasmid (pMEA300) present both in the free state and integrated at a unique genomic location. A pMEA300-free derivative (strain WV1) was selected, allowing further analysis of pMEA300-encoded functions. Whole cells of strain WV1 could be transformed at high frequencies (approximately 10^6 transformants per microgram of plasmid DNA) with both circular and linear plasmid DNA, provided that the pMEA300-encoded stf (stimulation of transformation frequency) gene was present. stf would encode a putative protein of 373 amino acids with Mr 40,201, resembling putative regulatory proteins involved in sporulation of Streptomyces griseus and Streptomyces coelicolor.
Organizing cardiovascular preventive care in general practice: Determinants of a successful intervention

Background. Although outreach visitor interventions have proven to be effective, more detailed studies are needed to understand what elements of interventions work and why. In this study we investigate the determinants of success of an intervention for optimizing cardiovascular preventive care in general practice. Methods. After baseline measurements and randomization, 62 general practices received a comprehensive intervention program, by means of outreach visitors, lasting 21 months. Data on practice management and preventive activities were gathered at baseline and at postintervention measurements. Key characteristics of the intervention considered possible determinants of success were gathered by questionnaire. The difference between ideal and actual practice in each aspect of organizing cardiovascular preventive care was calculated as a deficiency score. The difference between deficiency scores before and after the intervention were the main outcome measures. Results. The key characteristic, duration of exposure to an aspect (in months), was positively related to the change in availability of separate clinics and in the amount of teamwork. The improvement in instruments and materials was positively related to the general practitioner's opinion about the given feedback. No relations were found between the key characteristics and changes in record-keeping or follow-up routines. Conclusion. Although implementation of a comprehensive prevention program is effective, we could not fully disentangle the "black box" of the intervention. The duration of exposure to an aspect of organizing cardiovascular care was the key determinant to success
Molecular characterization and in silico expression analysis of a chalcone synthase gene family in Sorghum bicolor

Recent use of Sorghum bicolor as a target for grass genomics has presented new resources for gene discovery in novel metabolic pathways in Poaceae. Sorghum synthesizes a unique class of flavonoid phytoalexins, the 3-deoxyanthocyanidins, in response to fungal infection. The biosynthetic pathways for 3-deoxyflavonoids are largely uncharacterized but are known to involve transcriptional activation of chalcone synthase (CHS). CHS, or naringenin CHS, catalyses the formation of naringenin, the precursor for different flavonoids. We have isolated seven sorghum CHS genes, CHS1-7, from a genomic library on high-density filters. CHS1-7 are highly conserved and closely related to the maize C2 and Whp genes. Several of them are also linked in the genome. These findings suggest that they are the result of recent gene duplication events. Expression of the individual CHS genes was studied in silico by examination of expressed sequence tag (EST) data available in the public domain. Our analyses suggested that CHS1-7 were not differentially expressed in the various growth and developmental conditions represented by the cDNA libraries used to generate the EST data. However, we identified a CHS-like gene, CHS8, with significantly higher EST abundance in the pathogen-induced library. CHS8 shows only 81-82% identity to CHS1-7 and forms a distinct subgroup in our phylogenetic analysis. In addition, the active site region contains substitutions that distinguish CHS8 from naringenin CHS. We propose that CHS8 has evolved new enzymatic functions that are involved in the synthesis of defence-related flavonoids, such as the 3-deoxyanthocyanidins, during fungal infection. © 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.postprin
Composition and Flux of Holocene Sediments on the Eastern Laptev Sea Shelf, Arctic Siberia

A 467-cm-long core from the inner shelf of the eastern Laptev Sea provides a depositional history since 9400 cal yr. B.P. The history involves temporal changes in the fluvial runoff as well as postglacial sea-level rise and southward retreat of the coastline. Although the core contains marine fossils back to 8900 cal yr B.P., abundant pf ant debris in a sandy facies low in the core shows that a river influenced the study site until similar to 8100 cal yr B.P. As sea level rose and the distance to the coast increased, this riverine influence diminished gradually and the sediment type changed, by 7400 cal yr B.P., from sandy silt to clayey silt, Although total sediment input decreased in a step-like fashion from 7600 to 4000 cal yr B.P., this interval had the highest average sedimentation rates and the greatest fluxes in most sedimentary components, While this maximum probably resulted from middle Holocene climate warming, the low input of sand to the site after 7400 cal yr B.P. probably resulted from further southward retreat of the coastline and river mouth. Since about 4000 cat yr B.P., total sediment flux has remained rather constant in this part of the Laptev Sea shelf due to a gradual stabilization of the depositional regime after completion of the Holocene sea-level rise
Paleoclimatic reconstruction using Mutual Climatic Range on terrestrial mollusks.

International audienceTerrestrial mollusks, easily identified in Quaternary sediments, represent a reliable tool for quantitative estimates of environmental parameters. Our study, comparing the species distribution with meteorological parameters in Europe, shows that mean temperature of the coldest month and annual thermal magnitude are the most important forcing parameters. This survey allows us to adapt the Mutual Climatic Range (MCR) method to terrestrial mollusk assemblages following two main steps. A set of assemblages from different European regions (northern Norway to southern France) is used to apply the method on present day mollusks. The reconstructed values describe the latitudinal temperature gradient prevailing over Europe. However, the comparison between the reconstructed and the measured values indicates a shift, similar to that observed, with the same method applied on beetle assemblages. Thus, estimates must be calculated after tuning the reconstruction with the observations. The results from the modern mollusk assemblages indicate that the MCR method can be safely applied to reconstruct temperatures from terrestrial mollusk assemblages in any worldwide Quaternary sequence. A trial application is made on Late Pleistocene assemblages from Achenheim (Alsace, France)
On the Political Economy of Latin American Land Reforms

Private ownership of land has been stressed in the development literature as key to increasing productivity in the agricultural sector. The beneficiaries of the redistributive land reforms undertaken in many Latin American countries, however, did not receive the individual property right of the land. This paper suggests that this type of reform was a measure intended to favor not the peasantry, but the landed elite of those countries. It is shown that if land is the abundant factor land rent is decreasing with the total amount of privately owned land. Thus, the landed elite favored giving the peasants land under a restricted ownership regime.Publicad
Implementation, Elimination of Weakly Dominated Strategies and Evolutionary Dynamics

This paper studies convergence and stability properties of T. Sjöström's (1994, Games Econom. Behav.6, 502–511) mechanism, under the assumption that boundedly rational players find their way to equilibrium using monotonic evolutionary dynamics and best-reply dynamics. This mechanism implements most social choice functions in economic environments using as a solution concept one round of deletion of weakly dominated strategies and one round of deletion of strictly dominated strategies. However, there are other sets of Nash equilibria, whose payoffs may be very different from those desired by the social choice function. With monotonic dynamics, all these sets of equilibria contain limit points of the evolutionary dynamics. Furthermore, even if the dynamics converge to the “right” set of equilibria (i.e., the one which contains the solution of the mechanism), it may converge to an equilibrium which is worse in welfare terms. In contrast with this result, any interior solution of the best-reply dynamics converges to the equilibrium whose outcome the planner desires.Publicad
Why do women wait? : matching, wage inequality and the incentives for fertility delay

This paper explores the interaction between wage inequality and the marriage and fertility decisions of young women. We develop an equilibrium search model of marriage, divorce, and investment in children that allows for differential timing of fertility. We show how patterns of fertility timing in U.S. data can be explained by the incentives for fertility delay implied by marriage and labor markets. We find that these incentives help explain both the cross-sectional relationship between women's wages and fertility timing and the changes over the past 40 years in married women's fertility timing and labor supply.Publicad
Capacitance of a Double-Heterojunction GaAs/AlGaAs Structure Subjected
  to In-Plane Magnetic Fields: Results of Self-Consistent Calculations

The capacitance of a double-heterojunction structure with a wide GaAs undoped
layer embedded between two selectively doped AlGaAs barriers is calculated
self-consistently as a function of intensity of the in-plane magnetic field.
With increasing field intensity the capacitance initially increases and after
reaching a maximum decreases toward a high field limit which is less than its
zero field value. This behaviour is attributed to 'breathing', or charge
redistribution, of the 2D electron gas at individual heterojunctions due to a
combination of the confining potential and the magnetic field.Comment: LaTeX, 9 pages, 7 figs. available on request from smrcka@fzu.cs in 1
  PS file (compressed and uuencoded
Coulomb effects in artificial molecules

We study the capacitance spectra of artificial molecules consisting of two
and three coupled quantum dots from an extended Hubbard Hamiltonian model that
takes into account quantum confinement, intra- and inter-dot Coulomb
interaction and tunneling coupling between all single particle states in
nearest neighbor dots. We find that, for weak coupling, the interdot Coulomb
interaction dominates the formation of a collective molecular state. We also
calculate the effects of correlations on the tunneling probability through the
evaluation of the spectral weights, and corroborate the importance of selection
rules for understanding experimental conductance spectra.Comment: dvi file and 4 postscript figures, all included in uu file. To appear
  in Superlatt. and Microstr. Also available at
  http://www.phy.ohiou.edu/~ulloa/ulloa.htm
Quantum ballistic transport in in-plane-gate transistors showing onset
  of a novel ferromagnetic phase transition

We study one-dimensional transport in focused-ion-beam written in-plane-gate
transistors on III-V heterostructures at moderately low temperatures at zero
bias without any external magnetic field applied. In accordance with a recent
proposal of A. Gold and L. Calmels, Valley- and spin-occupancy instability in
the quasi-one-dimensional electron gas, Phil. Mag. Lett. 74, 33-42 (1996) and
earlier experimental data, we observe plateaux in the source-drain conductivity
considered as a function of the gate voltage, not only at multliples of 2e^2/h
but also clearly at e^2/h, just before the channel closes to zero conductivity.
This may be interpreted as a many electron effect, namely as a novel ballistic
ferromagnetic ground state evading standard descriptions and theorems.Comment: 19 pages, 9 figures, 22 reference
Quantum Information is Physical

We discuss a few current developments in the use of quantum mechanically
coherent systems for information processing. In each of these developments,
Rolf Landauer has played a crucial role in nudging us and other workers in the
field into asking the right questions, some of which we have been lucky enough
to answer. A general overview of the key ideas of quantum error correction is
given. We discuss how quantum entanglement is the key to protecting quantum
states from decoherence in a manner which, in a theoretical sense, is as
effective as the protection of digital data from bit noise. We also discuss
five general criteria which must be satisfied to implement a quantum computer
in the laboratory, and we illustrate the application of these criteria by
discussing our ideas for creating a quantum computer out of the spin states of
coupled quantum dots.Comment: 28 pages, Latex, 2 eps figures, Paper to be published in
  Superlattices and Microstructures, Special Issue on the Occasion of Rolf
  Landauer's 70th Birthday. V2: 11 pages, small corrections to Sect. IV and to
  figure
Thermopower of Single-Channel Disordered and Chaotic Conductors

We show (analytically and by numerical simulation) that the zero-temperature
limit of the distribution of the thermopower S of a one-dimensional disordered
wire in the localized regime is a Lorentzian, with a disorder-independent width
of 4 pi^3 k_B^2 T/3e\Delta (where T is the temperature and \Delta the mean
level spacing). Upon raising the temperature the distribution crosses over to
an exponential form exp(-2|S|eT/\Delta). We also consider the case of a chaotic
quantum dot with two single-channel ballistic point contacts. The distribution
of S then has a cusp at S=0 and a tail |S|^{-1-\beta} log|S| for large S (with
\beta=1,2 depending on the presence or absence of time-reversal symmetry).Comment: To be published in Superlattices and Microstructures, special issue
  on the occasion of Rolf Landauer's 70th birthda
Front Propagation in Evanescent Media

We investigate the time evolution of waves in evanescent media generated by a
source within this medium and observed at some distance away from the location
of the source. The aim is to find a velocity which describes a causal process
and is thus, for a medium with relativistic dispersion, limited by the velocity
of light. The wave function consists of a broad frequency forerunner generated
by the onset of the source, and of a monochromatic front which carries the
oscillation frequency of the source. For a medium with Schr\"{o}dinger-like
dispersion the monochromatic front propagates with a velocity which is in
agreement with the traversal time, and in the relativistic case the velocity of
the fronts is limited by the velocity of light. For sources with a sharp onset,
the forerunners are not attenuated and in magnitude far exceed the
monochromatic front. In contrast, for sources which are frequency-band limited,
the forerunners are also attenuated and become comparable to the monochromatic
front: like in the propagating case, there exists a time at which a broad
frequency forerunner is augmented by a monochromatic wave
Photon side-bands in mesoscopics

This paper reviews several applications of photonic side-bands, used by
Buttiker and Landauer in their theory of traversal time in tunneling [Phys.
Rev. Lett. 49, 1739 (1982)], in transport and optics of mesoscopic systems.
Topics include generalizations of the transmission theory of transport to
time-dependent situations, optics and transport of mesoscopic systems in THz
electromagnetic fields, and phase-measurements of photon-assisted tunneling
through a quantum dot.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figures, submitted to Superlattices and Microscructures,
  special issue to commemorate Rolf Landauer's 70th birthda
Giant phase-conjugate reflection with a normal mirror in front of an
  optical phase-conjugator

We theoretically study reflection of light by a phase-conjugating mirror
preceded by a partially reflecting normal mirror. The presence of a suitably
chosen normal mirror in front of the phase conjugator is found to greatly
enhance the total phase-conjugate reflected power, even up to an order of
magnitude. Required conditions are that the phase-conjugating mirror itself
amplifies upon reflection and that constructive interference of light in the
region between the mirrors takes place. We show that the phase-conjugate
reflected power then exhibits a maximum as a function of the transmittance of
the normal mirror.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures, RevTe
Nonlinear conductance of nanowires - A signature of Luttinger liquid
  effects?

We analyze recent measurements of the room temperature current-voltage
characteristics of gold nanowires, whose zero current conductance is quantized
in units of $2e^2/h$. A faster than linear increase of current with voltage was
observed at low voltages beginning from $V_c=0.1$V. We analyze the nonlinear
behavior in terms of a dynamic Coulomb blockade of conducting modes and show
that it may be explained as a Luttinger-liquid effect.Comment: 13 pages, latex with supplied stylefile, 3 figures in eps format,
  submitted to Superlattices and Microstructure
Collective modes and the far-infrared absorption of the two-dimensional
  electron gas in a periodic quantizing magnetic field

We investigate the far-infrared (FIR) absorption of a two-dimensional
electron gas in a periodically modulated quantizing magnetic field. The
magnetic field varies along only one spatial direction and the external
time-dependent electric field is linearly polarized along that axis. The mutual
Coulomb interaction of the electrons is treated self-consistently in the ground
state and in the absorption calculation within the Hartree approximation. The
effects of the magnetic material on top of the heterostructure as a grating
coupler is included in the time-dependent incident FIR electric field. We show
that similar to an electric modulation, the absorption can be directly
correlated to the underlying electronic energy bands. In addition, the magnetic
modulation leads to absorption spectra with a richer structure due to the quite
different static response of the electron density to the modulation.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures, to appear in Superlattices and Microstructure
Monte-Carlo simulation of the coherent backscattering of electrons in a
  ballistic system

We study weak localization effects in the ballistic regime as induced by
man-made scatterers. Specular reflection of the electrons off these scatterers
results into backscattered trajectories which interfere with their
time-reversed path resulting in weak localization corrections to the
resistance. Using a semi-classical theory, we calculate the change in
resistance due to these backscattered trajectories. We found that the inclusion
of the exact shape of the scatterers is very important in order to explain the
experimental results of Katine et al. [Superlattices and Microstructures 20,
337 (1996)].Comment: 3 pages, 7 ps figures, accepted for publication in Superlattices and
  Microstructure
The importance of self-consistency in determining interface properties
  of S-I-N and D-I-N structures

We develop a method to solve the Bogoliubov de Gennes equation for
superconductors self-consistently, using the recursion method. The method
allows the pairing interaction to be either local or non-local corresponding to
$s$ and $d$--wave superconductivity, respectively. Using this method we examine
the properties of various $S-I-N$ and $D-I-N$ interfaces. In particular we
self-consistently calculate the spatially varying density of states and the
superconducting order parameter. We see that changing the strength of the
insulating barrier, at the interface, does not, in the case of an $s$--wave
superconductor, dramatically, change the low energy local density of states, in
the superconducting region near the interface. This is in stark contrast to
what we see in the case of a $D-I-N$ interface where the local particle density
of states is changed dramatically. Hence we deduce that in calculating such
properties as the conductance of $S-I-N$ and $D-I-N$ structures it is far more
important to carry out a self-consistent calculations in the $d$--wave case.Comment: 14 pages, 8 figures, submitted to special issue of "Superlattices and
  Microstructures
Quasiclassical Green's function approach to mesoscopic superconductivity

Recent experiments on mesoscopic normal-metal--superconductor
heterostructures resolve properties on length scales and at low temperatures
such that the temperature is below the Thouless energy $k_B T \le E_{Th}$. We
describe the properties of these systems within the framework of quasiclassical
many-body techniques. Diffusive and ballistic systems are covered, both in
equilibrium and nonequilibrium situations. Thereby we demonstrate the common
physical basis of various subtopics.Comment: 38 pages, LaTeX, sup.sty-style file included, to appear in
  Superlattices and Microstructures; several minor changes and corrections of
  typographical errors, two updated figure