Landscape Assessment via Regression Analysis

This paper presents a methodology for assessing the visual quality of agricultural landscapes through direct and indirect techniques of landscape valuation. The first technique enables us to rank agricultural landscapes on the basis of a survey of public preferences. The latter weighs the contribution of the elements and attributes contained in the picture to its overall scenic beauty via regression analysis. The photos used in the survey included man-made elements, positive and negative, agricultural fields, mainly of cereals and olive trees, and a natural park. The results show that perceived visual quality increases, in decreasing order of importance, with the degree of wilderness of the landscape, the presence of well-preserved man-made elements, the percentage of plant cover, the amount of water, the presence of mountains and the colour contrast.landscape assessment, visual quality, landscape elements, landscape value, Land Economics/Use, H41, Q21, Q26,

Representational organization of novel task sets during proactive encoding

Recent multivariate analyses of brain data have boosted our understanding of the organizational principles that shape neural coding. However, most of this progress has focused on perceptual visual regions (Connolly et al., 2012), whereas far less is known about the organization of more abstract, action-oriented representations. In this study, we focused on humans{\textquoteright} remarkable ability to turn novel instructions into actions. While previous research shows that instruction encoding is tightly linked to proactive activations in fronto-parietal brain regions, little is known about the structure that orchestrates such anticipatory representation. We collected fMRI data while participants (both males and females) followed novel complex verbal rules that varied across control-related variables (integrating within/across stimuli dimensions, response complexity, target category) and reward expectations. Using Representational Similarity Analysis (Kriegeskorte et al., 2008) we explored where in the brain these variables explained the organization of novel task encoding, and whether motivation modulated these representational spaces. Instruction representations in the lateral prefrontal cortex were structured by the three control-related variables, while intraparietal sulcus encoded response complexity and the fusiform gyrus and precuneus organized its activity according to the relevant stimulus category. Reward exerted a general effect, increasing the representational similarity among different instructions, which was robustly correlated with behavioral improvements. Overall, our results highlight the flexibility of proactive task encoding, governed by distinct representational organizations in specific brain regions. They also stress the variability of motivation-control interactions, which appear to be highly dependent on task attributes such as complexity or novelty.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENTIn comparison with other primates, humans display a remarkable success in novel task contexts thanks to our ability to transform instructions into effective actions. This skill is associated with proactive task-set reconfigurations in fronto-parietal cortices. It remains yet unknown, however, how the brain encodes in anticipation the flexible, rich repertoire of novel tasks that we can achieve. Here we explored cognitive control and motivation-related variables that might orchestrate the representational space for novel instructions. Our results showed that different dimensions become relevant for task prospective encoding depending on the brain region, and that the lateral prefrontal cortex simultaneously organized task representations following different control-related variables. Motivation exerted a general modulation upon this process, diminishing rather than increasing distances among instruction representations

SinEx DB: a database for single exon coding sequences in mammalian genomes

Indexación: Web of Science.Eukaryotic genes are typically interrupted by intragenic, noncoding sequences termed introns. However, some genes lack introns in their coding sequence (CDS) and are generally known as 'single exon genes' (SEGs). In this work, a SEG is defined as a nuclear, protein-coding gene that lacks introns in its CDS. Whereas, many public databases of Eukaryotic multi-exon genes are available, there are only two specialized databases for SEGs. The present work addresses the need for a more extensive and diverse database by creating SinEx DB, a publicly available, searchable database of predicted SEGs from 10 completely sequenced mammalian genomes including human. SinEx DB houses the DNA and protein sequence information of these SEGs and includes their functional predictions (KOG) and the relative distribution of these functions within species. The information is stored in a relational database built with My SQL Server 5.1.33 and the complete dataset of SEG sequences and their functional predictions are available for downloading. SinEx DB can be interrogated by: (i) a browsable phylogenetic schema, (ii) carrying out BLAST searches to the in-house SinEx DB of SEGs and (iii) via an advanced search mode in which the database can be searched by key words and any combination of searches by species and predicted functions. SinEx DB provides a rich source of information for advancing our understanding of the evolution and function of SEGs.https://academic.oup.com/database/article-lookup/doi/10.1093/database/baw09

Flavored Non-Minimal Left-Right Symmetric Model Fermion Masses and Mixings

A complete study on the fermion masses and flavor mixing is presented in a non-minimal left-right symmetric model (NMLRMS) where the ${\bf S}_{3}\otimes {\bf Z}_{2}\otimes {\bf Z}^{e}_{2}$ flavor symmetry drives the Yukawa couplings. In the quark sector, the mass matrices possess a kind of the generalized Fritzsch textures that allow us to fit the CKM mixing matrix in good agreement to the last experimental data. In the lepton sector, on the other hand, a soft breaking of the $\mu\leftrightarrow \tau$ symmetry provides a non zero and non maximal reactor and atmospheric angles, respectively. The inverted and degenerate hierarchy are favored in the model where a set of free parameters is found to be consistent with the current neutrino data.Comment: 23 pages, 9 figures. references added, typos corrected, JCGI added his current institution;conclusions rewrote and unchanged results. Version published in European Physical Journal