ERP to chess stimuli reveal expert-novice differences in the amplitudes of N2 and P3 components

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below. Copyright @ 2013 Society for Psychophysiological Research.ERP experiments were conducted to analyze the underlying neural events when chess players make simple judgments of a board position. Fourteen expert players and 14 age-matched novices viewed, for each of four tasks, 128 unique positions on a mini (4 × 4) chess board each presented for 0.5 s. The tasks were to respond: (a) if white king was in check, (b) if black knight was present, (c) if white king was not in check, and (d) if no black knight was present. Experts showed an enhanced N2 with check targets and a larger P3 with knight targets, relative to novices. Expert-novice differences in posterior N2 began as early as 240 ms on check-related searches. Results were consistent with the view that prolonged N2 components reflect matching of current perceptual input to memory, and thus are sensitive to experts' superior pattern recognition and memory retrieval of chunks

The V5A13.1 envelope glycoprotein deletion mutant of mouse hepatitis virus type-4 is neuroattenuated by its reduced rate of spread in the central nervous system.

Following intracerebral inoculation of adult Balb/c Byj mice, the MHV-4 strain of mouse hepatitis virus (MHV) had an LD50 of less than 0.1 PFU, whereas its monoclonal antibody resistant variant V5A13.1 had an LD50 of 10(4.2) PFU. To determine the basis for this difference in neurovirulence we have studied the acute central nervous system (CNS) infection of these two viruses by in situ hybridization. Both viruses infected the same, specific neuroanatomical areas, predominantly neurons, and spread via the cerebrospinal fluid, along neuronal pathways and between adjacent cells. The neuronal nuclei infected and the spread of virus within the brain are described. The main difference between the parental and variant viruses was the rate at which the infection spread. MHV-4 spread rapidly, destroying large numbers of neurons and the animals died within 4 days of infection. The variant virus spread to the same areas of the brain but at a slower rate. This difference in the rate of virus spread was also apparent from the brain virus titers. The slower rate of spread of the variant virus appears to allow intervention by the immune response. Consistent with this, the variant virus spread slowly in athymic nu/nu mice, but in the absence of an intact immune response, infection and destruction of neurons eventually reached the same extent as that of the parental virus and the mice died within 6 days of infection. We conclude that the V5A13.1 variant of MHV-4 is neuroattenuated by its slower rate of spread in the CNS

Fast inactivation in Shaker K+ channels. Properties of ionic and gating currents.

Fast inactivating Shaker H4 potassium channels and nonconducting pore mutant Shaker H4 W434F channels have been used to correlate the installation and recovery of the fast inactivation of ionic current with changes in the kinetics of gating current known as "charge immobilization" (Armstrong, C.M., and F. Bezanilla. 1977. J. Gen. Physiol. 70:567-590.). Shaker H4 W434F gating currents are very similar to those of the conducting clone recorded in potassium-free solutions. This mutant channel allows the recording of the total gating charge return, even when returning from potentials that would largely inactivate conducting channels. As the depolarizing potential increased, the OFF gating currents decay phase at -90 mV return potential changed from a single fast component to at least two components, the slower requiring approximately 200 ms for a full charge return. The charge immobilization onset and the ionic current decay have an identical time course. The recoveries of gating current (Shaker H4 W434F) and ionic current (Shaker H4) in 2 mM external potassium have at least two components. Both recoveries are similar at -120 and -90 mV. In contrast, at higher potentials (-70 and -50 mV), the gating charge recovers significantly more slowly than the ionic current. A model with a single inactivated state cannot account for all our data, which strongly support the existence of "parallel" inactivated states. In this model, a fraction of the charge can be recovered upon repolarization while the channel pore is occupied by the NH2-terminus region

Multi-point monitoring of nitrous oxide emissions and aeration efficiency in a full-scale conventional activated sludge tank

In this work the biological tank of a WRRF in Italy was monitored placing five floating hoods on a plug-flow-like biological aerated tank surface in order to capture emission dynamics in both time and space domains. The five hoods report which location is more responsible for N2O production at a certain moment of the day. Moreover, with this experimental investigation, a spatial shift in N2O production towards the end of the biological tank could be detected. This provides important insights in the changes in biological dynamics especially with varying incoming load

Seed selection for information cascade in multilayer networks

Information spreading is an interesting field in the domain of online social media. In this work, we are investigating how well different seed selection strategies affect the spreading processes simulated using independent cascade model on eighteen multilayer social networks. Fifteen networks are built based on the user interaction data extracted from Facebook public pages and tree of them are multilayer networks downloaded from public repository (two of them being Twitter networks). The results indicate that various state of the art seed selection strategies for single-layer networks like K-Shell or VoteRank do not perform so well on multilayer networks and are outperformed by Degree Centrality

On the Optimal Space Complexity of Consensus for Anonymous Processes

The optimal space complexity of consensus in shared memory is a decades-old open problem. For a system of $n$ processes, no algorithm is known that uses a sublinear number of registers. However, the best known lower bound due to Fich, Herlihy, and Shavit requires $\Omega(\sqrt{n})$ registers. The special symmetric case of the problem where processes are anonymous (run the same algorithm) has also attracted attention. Even in this case, the best lower and upper bounds are still $\Omega(\sqrt{n})$ and $O(n)$. Moreover, Fich, Herlihy, and Shavit first proved their lower bound for anonymous processes, and then extended it to the general case. As such, resolving the anonymous case might be a significant step towards understanding and solving the general problem. In this work, we show that in a system of anonymous processes, any consensus algorithm satisfying nondeterministic solo termination has to use $\Omega(n)$ read-write registers in some execution. This implies an $\Omega(n)$ lower bound on the space complexity of deterministic obstruction-free and randomized wait-free consensus, matching the upper bound and closing the symmetric case of the open problem

Strain amplitude response and the microstructure of PA/clay nanocomposites

Polyamide 6/clay nanocomposites (PAn, where n is the mass fraction of clay) with various clay loading were prepared by melt compounding in a twin screw extruder. Exfoliation of clay in a PA matrix was confirmed by X-ray diffraction. Strain amplitude response of PAn in both melt and solution states has been investigated. In the melt state, critical strain amplitude of PAn is sensitive to strain amplitude response and decrease logarithmically with increasing clay loading. The elastic moduli (G′) of PAn are reversible under frequency loop sweeps. Comparisons of strain amplitude response in both melt and solution states have been conducted. Two different responses have been observed: strain thinning in the melt state and weak strain overshoot in the solution state. FTIR studies show that amide II band of PAn shifts toward high wavenumbers, but amide I band and N–H stretching vibration are independent of clay loading. We suggest that two types of strain amplitude response of PAn can be explained: strain thinning which is dominant in PAn caused by physical adsorption and entanglement of PA chains on nanoclays and weak strain overshoot caused by weak bonds between PA chains and nanoclays

Can food vouchers improve nutrition and reduce health inequalities in low-income mothers and young children: A multi-method evaluation of the experiences of beneficiaries and practitioners of the Healthy Start programme in England

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.Background: Good nutrition is important during pregnancy, breastfeeding and early life to optimise the health of women and children. It is difficult for low-income families to prioritise spending on healthy food. Healthy Start is a targeted United Kingdom (UK) food subsidy programme that gives vouchers for fruit, vegetables, milk, and vitamins to low-income families. This paper reports an evaluation of Healthy Start from the perspectives of women and health practitioners. Methods. The multi-method study conducted in England in 2011/2012 included focus group discussions with 49 health practitioners, an online consultation with 620 health and social care practitioners, service managers, commissioners, and user and advocacy groups, and qualitative participatory workshops with 85 low-income women. Additional focus group discussions and telephone interviews included the views of 25 women who did not speak English and three women from Traveller communities. Results: Women reported that Healthy Start vouchers increased the quantity and range of fruit and vegetables they used and improved the quality of family diets, and established good habits for the future. Barriers to registration included complex eligibility criteria, inappropriate targeting of information about the programme by health practitioners and a general low level of awareness among families. Access to the programme was particularly challenging for women who did not speak English, had low literacy levels, were in low paid work or had fluctuating incomes. The potential impact was undermined by the rising price of food relative to voucher value. Access to registered retailers was problematic in rural areas, and there was low registration among smaller shops and market stalls, especially those serving culturally diverse communities. Conclusions: Our evaluation of the Healthy Start programme in England suggests that a food subsidy programme can provide an important nutritional safety net and potentially improve nutrition for pregnant women and young children living on low incomes. Factors that could compromise this impact include erosion of voucher value relative to the rising cost of food, lack of access to registered retailers and barriers to registering for the programme. Addressing these issues could inform the design and implementation of food subsidy programmes in high income countries. © 2014 McFadden et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.The Policy Research Programme in the Department of Health, UK

Smart Content Recognition from Images Using a Mixture of Convolutional Neural Networks

With rapid development of the Internet, web contents become huge. Most of the websites are publicly available, and anyone can access the contents from anywhere such as workplace, home and even schools. Nevertheless, not all the web contents are appropriate for all users, especially children. An example of these contents is pornography images which should be restricted to certain age group. Besides, these images are not safe for work (NSFW) in which employees should not be seen accessing such contents during work. Recently, convolutional neural networks have been successfully applied to many computer vision problems. Inspired by these successes, we propose a mixture of convolutional neural networks for adult content recognition. Unlike other works, our method is formulated on a weighted sum of multiple deep neural network models. The weights of each CNN models are expressed as a linear regression problem learned using Ordinary Least Squares (OLS). Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms both single CNN model and the average sum of CNN models in adult content recognition.Comment: To be published in LNEE, Code: github.com/mundher/NSF