Integration of Direction Cues Is Invariant to the Temporal Gap between Them

Many decisions involve integration of evidence conferred by discrete cues over time. However, the neural mechanism of this integration is poorly understood. Several decision-making models suggest that integration of evidence is implemented by a dynamic system whose state evolves toward a stable point representing the decision outcome. The internal dynamics of such point attractor models render them sensitive to the temporal gaps between cues because their internal forces push the state forward once it is dislodged from the initial stable point. We asked whether human subjects are as sensitive to such temporal gaps. Subjects reported the net direction of stochastic random dot motion, which was presented in one or two brief observation windows (pulses). Pulse strength and interpulse interval varied randomly from trial to trial. We found that subjects' performance was largely invariant to the interpulse intervals up to at least 1 s. The findings question the implementation of the integration process via mechanisms that rely on autonomous changes of network state. The mechanism should be capable of freezing the state of the network at a variety of firing rate levels during temporal gaps between the cues, compatible with a line of stable attractor states

Energy analysis of wall materials using building information modeling (BIM) of public buildings in the tropical climate countries

During the previous two decades, the energy saving potential using systematic building management is considered to be important which should be considered through the building lifecycle. Among the wide range types of different buildings, Public buildings are considered as one of the biggest energy-consuming sector in the world and major part of this amount is used by the air conditioning system especially in tropical climates. The most effective decisions related to sustainable design of a building facility are made in the feasibility and early design stages. Building Information Modeling (BIM) can expedite this process and provide the opportunity of testing and assessing different design alternatives and materials selection that may impact on energy performance of buildings. This paper aims at evaluating the efficiency of various types of wall materials with regard to theirs properties on energy saving. The case study in this paper is modeled by means of BIM application and then simulated by software, which is appropriate for energy analysis. The current energy consumption patterns of this case identified and shifted to the optimized level of energy usages by changing the walls materials to find most optimized of walls materials. Modification most optimized wall materials and energy analysis indicated 9347 Wh in Per meter square of electrical energy saving

BREATH-HOLDING SPELLS: AN ANALYSIS OF 43 CASES

Objective:Breath holding spells, very often misinterpreted as epileptic seizures, are most common in children aged 6 months to 6 years of age. In this investigation, we sought to prospectively document the natural history of breath holding spells (BHS) among children with cyanotic, pallid and mixed type BHS referred for neurological consultation.Materials & Methods:This was a cross-sectional study in which a total of 43 children (23 boys, 20 girls) with BHS, admitted to the out patient clinic of the Children's Hospital Medical Center, between Sept 1998 and June 1999, were enrolled. A structured interview was under taken at the time of initial consultation to confirm BHS and its type, associated phenomenon, family history, sex and age at initiation of spells. Laboratory, electroencephalographic and electrocardiographic tests were done.Results:Patients were between 1.7 and 42.8 months (mean age 18.4 months). In 76.8% of cases, BHS began during the first 12 months of age. Anger and pain were the most common triggering factors (65.1 %). A positive family history of BHS was identified in 51% and parental consanguinity was found in 30% of cases. The spells were cyanotic in 79.1% (34 children). 78% of cases were iron deficient and 53% of cases had iron deficiency anemia.Conclusion:The results of this study emphasize the role of genetic factors in BHS; measurement of hemoglobin and serum ferritin is recommended all such cases.Key words: Breath-holding spells, Iron deficiency, Anemia, Serum ferriti

Speed and Accuracy of Static Image Discrimination by Rats

When discriminating dynamic noisy sensory signals, human and primate subjects achieve higher accuracy when they take more time to decide, an effect attributed to accumulation of evidence over time to overcome neural noise. We measured the speed and accuracy of twelve freely behaving rats discriminating static, high contrast photographs of real-world objects for water reward in a self-paced task. Response latency was longer in correct trials compared to error trials. Discrimination accuracy increased with response latency over the range of 500-1200ms. We used morphs between previously learned images to vary the image similarity parametrically, and thereby modulate task difficulty from ceiling to chance. Over this range we find that rats take more time before responding in trials with more similar stimuli. We conclude that rats' perceptual decisions improve with time even in the absence of temporal information in the stimulus, and that rats modulate speed in response to discrimination difficulty to balance speed and accuracy

Structural characterization and physical properties of P2O5-CaO-Na2O-TiO2 glasses by Fourier transform infrared, Raman and solid-state magic angle spinning nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopies.

Phosphate-based glasses have been investigated for tissue engineering applications. This study details the properties and structural characterization of titanium ultra-phosphate glasses in the 55(P(2)O(5))-30(CaO)-(25-x)(Na(2)O)-x(TiO(2)) (0≤x≤5) system, which have been prepared via melt-quenching techniques. Structural characterization was achieved by a combination of X-ray diffraction (XRD), and solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance, Raman and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopies. Physical properties were also investigated using density, degradation and ion release studies; additionally, differential thermal analysis was used for thermal analysis of these glasses. The results show that with the addition of TiO(2) the density and glass transition temperature increased whereas the degradation and ion release properties are decreased. From XRD data, TiP(2)O(7) and CaP(2)O(6) were detected in 3 and 5 mol.% TiO(2)-containing glasses. Magic angle spinning nuclear magnetic resonance results confirmed that as TiO(2) is incorporated into the glass; the amount of Q(3) increases as the amount of Q(2) consequently decreases, indicating increasing polymerization of the phosphate network. Spectroscopy results also showed that the local structure of glasses changes with increasing TiO(2) content. As TiO(2) is incorporated into the glass, the phosphate connectivity increases, indicating that the addition of TiO(2) content correlates unequivocally with an increase in glass stability

Evolving Neural Networks through a Reverse Encoding Tree

NeuroEvolution is one of the most competitive evolutionary learning frameworks for designing novel neural networks for use in specific tasks, such as logic circuit design and digital gaming. However, the application of benchmark methods such as the NeuroEvolution of Augmenting Topologies (NEAT) remains a challenge, in terms of their computational cost and search time inefficiency. This paper advances a method which incorporates a type of topological edge coding, named Reverse Encoding Tree (RET), for evolving scalable neural networks efficiently. Using RET, two types of approaches -- NEAT with Binary search encoding (Bi-NEAT) and NEAT with Golden-Section search encoding (GS-NEAT) -- have been designed to solve problems in benchmark continuous learning environments such as logic gates, Cartpole, and Lunar Lander, and tested against classical NEAT and FS-NEAT as baselines. Additionally, we conduct a robustness test to evaluate the resilience of the proposed NEAT algorithms. The results show that the two proposed strategies deliver improved performance, characterized by (1) a higher accumulated reward within a finite number of time steps; (2) using fewer episodes to solve problems in targeted environments, and (3) maintaining adaptive robustness under noisy perturbations, which outperform the baselines in all tested cases. Our analysis also demonstrates that RET expends potential future research directions in dynamic environments. Code is available from https://github.com/HaolingZHANG/ReverseEncodingTree.Comment: Accepted to IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (IEEE CEC) 2020. Lecture Presentatio

Prevalence and genotyping identification of Cryptosporidium in adult ruminants in central Iran

Background Apicomplexan parasites of the genus Cryptosporidium infect a wide range of animal species as well as humans. Cryptosporidium spp. can cause life threatening diarrhea especially in young animals, children, immunocompromised patients and malnourished individuals. Asymptomatic cryptosporidial infections in animals can also occur, making these animals potential reservoirs of infection. Methods In the present study, a molecular survey of Cryptosporidium spp. in ruminants that were slaughtered for human consumption in Yazd Province, located in central Iran was conducted. Faeces were collected per-rectum from 484 animals including 192 cattle, 192 sheep and 100 goats. DNA was extracted from all samples and screened for Cryptosporidium by PCR amplification of the 18S rRNA gene. Positives were Sanger sequenced and further subtyped by sequence analysis of the 60 kDa glycoprotein (gp60) locus. Results In total, Cryptosporidium spp. were detected in 22 animals: C. andersoni and C. bovis in seven and two cattle faecal samples, respectively, C. ubiquitum in five sheep, and C. xiaoi in six sheep and two goat samples, respectively. To our knowledge, this study provides for the first time, molecular information concerning Cryptosporidium species infecting goats in Iran, and is also the first report of C. ubiquitum and C. xiaoi from ruminants in Iran. Conclusion The presence of potentially zoonotic species of Cryptosporidium in ruminants in this region may suggest that livestock could potentially contribute to human cryptosporidiosis, in particular among farmers and slaughterhouse workers, in the area. Further molecular studies on local human populations are required to more accurately understand the epidemiology and transmission dynamics of Cryptosporidium spp. in this region

A Parameter-Efficient Learning Approach to Arabic Dialect Identification with Pre-Trained General-Purpose Speech Model

In this work, we explore Parameter-Efficient-Learning (PEL) techniques to repurpose a General-Purpose-Speech (GSM) model for Arabic dialect identification (ADI). Specifically, we investigate different setups to incorporate trainable features into a multi-layer encoder-decoder GSM formulation under frozen pre-trained settings. Our architecture includes residual adapter and model reprogramming (input-prompting). We design a token-level label mapping to condition the GSM for Arabic Dialect Identification (ADI). This is challenging due to the high variation in vocabulary and pronunciation among the numerous regional dialects. We achieve new state-of-the-art accuracy on the ADI-17 dataset by vanilla fine-tuning. We further reduce the training budgets with the PEL method, which performs within 1.86% accuracy to fine-tuning using only 2.5% of (extra) network trainable parameters. Our study demonstrates how to identify Arabic dialects using a small dataset and limited computation with open source code and pre-trained models.Comment: Accepted to Interspeech. Code is available at: https://github.com/Srijith-rkr/KAUST-Whisper-Adapter under MIT licens

GENETIC ANALYSIS FOR GRAIN YIELD AND VARIOUS MORPHOLOGICAL TRAITS IN MAIZE (ZEA MAYS L.) UNDER NORMAL AND WATER STRESS ENVIRONMENTS

ABSTRACT A genetic analysis study was carried out for various morphological traits in a complete 8 × 8 diallel cross of maize inbred lines under normal irrigation and drought conditions. Estimation of genetic components of variation and graphical presentation deduced that most of the traits like days to pollen shed, anthesis-silking interval, ear height, kernel rows per ear, 100-kernel weight, shelling percentage, grain yield per plant showed over-dominance type of inheritance under both normal and drought conditions unlike leaf rolling which showed partial dominance under normal but over-dominance type of inheritance under drought conditions. It can be inferred that because of over-dominance nature of inheritance of most of the yield related traits, heterosis breeding can be pursued to exploit high yielding hybrids with considerable drought tolerance

Quiescience as a mechanism for cyclical hypoxia and acidosis

Tumour tissue characteristically experiences fluctuations in substrate supply. This unstable microenvironment drives constitutive metabolic changes within cellular populations and, ultimately, leads to a more aggressive phenotype. Previously, variations in substrate levels were assumed to occur through oscillations in the hæmodynamics of nearby and distant blood vessels. In this paper we examine an alternative hypothesis, that cycles of metabolite concentrations are also driven by cycles of cellular quiescence and proliferation. Using a mathematical modelling approach, we show that the interdependence between cell cycle and the microenvironment will induce typical cycles with the period of order hours in tumour acidity and oxygenation. As a corollary, this means that the standard assumption of metabolites entering diffusive equilibrium around the tumour is not valid; instead temporal dynamics must be considered