Emotion-related musical variables affect person perception: Differential effects for men and women in a synchronization task

This study investigated person perception in respect of variables associated with affect in music (tempo and mode) following motor synchronization to music. Participants (n=128, 50% female) were tested in a task involving stepping with a researcher to the beat of slow or fast music in major or minor mode, following which measures concerning the synchronised partner were collected (incidental memory, likeability of, similarity to and prosocial attitude towards). Significant effects were found only for the 'likeability’ measure, modulated by gender, suggesting that variables associated with affect perception in music, such as mode and tempo appear relevant for person perception in a synchronization task in ways that differ for men and women. The results of this 'proof of concept' study indicate the need for further research on the effect of motor synchronization based on ecologically valid musical interaction tasks

Pruning training sets for learning of object categories

Training datasets for learning of object categories are often contaminated or imperfect. We explore an approach to automatically identify examples that are noisy or troublesome for learning and exclude them from the training set. The problem is relevant to learning in semi-supervised or unsupervised setting, as well as to learning when the training data is contaminated with wrongly labeled examples or when correctly labeled, but hard to learn examples, are present. We propose a fully automatic mechanism for noise cleaning, called ’data pruning’, and demonstrate its success on learning of human faces. It is not assumed that the data or the noise can be modeled or that additional training examples are available. Our experiments show that data pruning can improve on generalization performance for algorithms with various robustness to noise. It outperforms methods with regularization properties and is superior to commonly applied aggregation methods, such as bagging

A neighborhood-based approach for clustering of linked document collections

This technical report addresses the problem of automatically structuring linked document collections by using clustering. In contrast to traditional clustering, we study the clustering problem in the light of available link structure information for the data set (e.g., hyperlinks among web documents or co-authorship among bibliographic data entries). Our approach is based on iterative relaxation of cluster assignments, and can be built on top of any clustering algorithm (e.g., k-means or DBSCAN). These techniques result in higher cluster purity, better overall accuracy, and make self-organization more robust. Our comprehensive experiments on three different real-world corpora demonstrate the benefits of our approach

Effect of an electric field on a floating lipid bilayer: a neutron reflectivity study

We present here a neutron reflectivity study of the influence of an alternative electric field on a supported phospholipid double bilayer. We report for the first time a reproducible increase of the fluctuation amplitude leading to the complete unbinding of the floating bilayer. Results are in good agreement with a semi-quantitative interpretation in terms of negative electrostatic surface tension.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figures, 1 table accepted for publication in European Physical Journal E Replaced with with correct bibliograph

Lipid peroxidation is essential for α-synuclein-induced cell death.

Parkinson's disease is the second most common neurodegenerative disease and its pathogenesis is closely associated with oxidative stress. Deposition of aggregated α-synuclein (α-Syn) occurs in familial and sporadic forms of Parkinson's disease. Here, we studied the effect of oligomeric α-Syn on one of the major markers of oxidative stress, lipid peroxidation, in primary co-cultures of neurons and astrocytes. We found that oligomeric but not monomeric α-Syn significantly increases the rate of production of reactive oxygen species, subsequently inducing lipid peroxidation in both neurons and astrocytes. Pre-incubation of cells with isotope-reinforced polyunsaturated fatty acids (D-PUFAs) completely prevented the effect of oligomeric α-Syn on lipid peroxidation. Inhibition of lipid peroxidation with D-PUFAs further protected cells from cell death induced by oligomeric α-Syn. Thus, lipid peroxidation induced by misfolding of α-Syn may play an important role in the cellular mechanism of neuronal cell loss in Parkinson's disease. We have found that aggregated α-synuclein-induced production of reactive oxygen species (ROS) that subsequently stimulates lipid peroxidation and cell death in neurons and astrocytes. Specific inhibition of lipid peroxidation by incubation with reinforced polyunsaturated fatty acids (D-PUFAs) completely prevented the effect of α-synuclein on lipid peroxidation and cell death

Simple Applications of q-Bosons

A deformation of the harmonic oscillator algebra associated with the Morse potential and the SU(2) algebra is derived using the quantum analogue of the anharmonic oscillator. We use the quantum oscillator algebra or $q$-boson algebra which is a generalisation of the Heisenberg-Weyl algebra obtained by introducing a deformation parameter $q$. Further, we present a new algebraic realization of the $q$-bosons, for the case of $q$ being a root of unity, which corresponds to a periodic structure described by a finite-dimensional representation. We show that this structure represents the symmetry of a linear lattice with periodic boundary conditions.Comment: LATEX2e, 10 pages, v2: few misprints corrected, added Journal-re

Viper toxins affect membrane characteristics of human erythrocytes

Elucidating electrokinetic stability by which surface charges regulate toxins interaction with erythrocytes is crucial for understanding the cell functionality. Electrokinetic properties of human erythrocytes upon treatment of Vipoxin, phospholipase A2 (PLA2) and Vipoxin acidic component (VAC), isolated from Vipera ammodytes meridionalis venom were studied using particle microelectrophoresis. PLA2 and Vipoxin treatments alter the osmotic fragility of erythrocyte membranes. The increased stability of cells upon viper toxins is presented by the increased zeta potential of erythrocytes before sedimentation of cells during electric field applied preventing the aggregation of cells. Lipid peroxidation of low dose toxin-treated erythrocytes shows reduced LP products compared to untreated cells. The apparent proton efflux and conductivity assays are performed and the effectiveness PLA2 > Vipoxin>VAC is discussed. The reported results open perspectives to a further investigation of the electrokinetic properties of the membrane after viper toxins treatment to shed light on the molecular mechanisms driving the mechanisms of inflammation and neurodegenerative diseases