Maternal antibodies from mothers of children with autism alter brain growth and social behavior development in the rhesus monkey.

Antibodies directed against fetal brain proteins of 37 and 73 kDa molecular weight are found in approximately 12% of mothers who have children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), but not in mothers of typically developing children. This finding has raised the possibility that these immunoglobulin G (IgG) class antibodies cross the placenta during pregnancy and impact brain development, leading to one form of ASD. We evaluated the pathogenic potential of these antibodies by using a nonhuman primate model. IgG was isolated from mothers of children with ASD (IgG-ASD) and of typically developing children (IgG-CON). The purified IgG was administered to two groups of female rhesus monkeys (IgG-ASD; n=8 and IgG-CON; n=8) during the first and second trimesters of pregnancy. Another control group of pregnant monkeys (n=8) was untreated. Brain and behavioral development of the offspring were assessed for 2 years. Behavioral differences were first detected when the macaque mothers responded to their IgG-ASD offspring with heightened protectiveness during early development. As they matured, IgG-ASD offspring consistently deviated from species-typical social norms by more frequently approaching familiar peers. The increased approach was not reciprocated and did not lead to sustained social interactions. Even more striking, IgG-ASD offspring displayed inappropriate approach behavior to unfamiliar peers, clearly deviating from normal macaque social behavior. Longitudinal magnetic resonance imaging analyses revealed that male IgG-ASD offspring had enlarged brain volume compared with controls. White matter volume increases appeared to be driving the brain differences in the IgG-ASD offspring and these differences were most pronounced in the frontal lobes

The Valuable Bases of Business Ethics in Multicultural Environment

A causa de la creciente importancia de las normas éticas en la comunicación y las actividades el presente estudio identifica la base de valores subyacentes a la conducta empresarial en el entorno de la comunicación de negocios y sus estructuras globales. El estudio pretendió obtener datos empíricos acerca de los valores que condicionan el comportamiento de los empresarios de los países Alemania, Francia, EEUU, España, Rusia, etc. cuya interacción determina la situación en el mercado europeo y mundial. Se comprobó la hipótesis de que, junto al reducido número de valores culturales comunes, las bases de valores éticos de negocios difieren impidiendo la comunicación y la actividad empresarial multicultural efectiva y ponen en duda la transición masiva del Occidente al postmaterialismo, al menos para el importante grupo social, como lo es el empresario.Because of the increasing importance of ethical standards in business communication and activities the present research approach differs from methods traditionally applied in other studies in the same area, as it addresses profound ethical values underlying business conduct within the global interaction of business structures. The main study objective was gathering information on the true values which determine the entrepreneur’s behavior of the countries (Germany, France, USA, Spain, Russia, etc.) whose activities influence the general situation on the European and world market. The following hypothesis was to prove: European culture countries undoubtedly share a certain common values, but their market players show very different business ethics grounds, that is a serious obstacle for effective intercultural communication and makes doubtful the general Western shift to the postmaterialism at least regarding the business community

Decision Procedure for Entailment of Symbolic Heaps with Arrays

This paper gives a decision procedure for the validity of en- tailment of symbolic heaps in separation logic with Presburger arithmetic and arrays. The correctness of the decision procedure is proved under the condition that sizes of arrays in the succedent are not existentially bound. This condition is independent of the condition proposed by the CADE-2017 paper by Brotherston et al, namely, one of them does not imply the other. For improving efficiency of the decision procedure, some techniques are also presented. The main idea of the decision procedure is a novel translation of an entailment of symbolic heaps into a formula in Presburger arithmetic, and to combine it with an external SMT solver. This paper also gives experimental results by an implementation, which shows that the decision procedure works efficiently enough to use

Extreme plasma states in laser-governed vacuum breakdown

Triggering vacuum breakdown at the upcoming laser facilities can provide rapid electron-positron pair production for studies in laboratory astrophysics and fundamental physics. However, the density of the emerging plasma should seemingly stop rising at the relativistic critical density, when the plasma becomes opaque. Here we identify the opportunity of breaking this limit using optimal beam configuration of petawatt-class lasers. Tightly focused laser fields allow plasma generation in a small focal volume much less than ${\lambda}^3$, and creating extreme plasma states in terms of density and produced currents. These states can be regarded as a new object of nonlinear plasma physics. Using 3D QED-PIC simulations we demonstrate the possibility of reaching densities of more than $10^{25}$ cm$^{-3}$, which is an order of magnitude higher than previously expected. Controlling the process via the initial target parameters gives the opportunity to reach the discovered plasma states at the upcoming laser facilities

Raising awareness in the industry on secure code review practices

As products and services become increasingly digital and software increasingly complex, all aspects of an industrial software development lifecycle must contribute to quality. Code review serves as a means to address software quality and fosters knowledge exchange across teams. Nonetheless, code review practices require resources and often require more resources than planned, while the benefit of a code review to code quality is less tangible. In our work, we address the effectiveness and efficiency of code review practices and develop an understanding of what is a good and valuable code review practice as part of a software development lifecycle. Our focus is code reviews meant to identify and address security weaknesses in an industrial context. This work presents a design study on how to design a workshop on code review. We conducted and evaluated three workshops with 37 industrial software developers. The findings of our work reveal that presenting constructive code review practices can contribute to raising awareness of secure coding and software lifecycle practices among software development professionals. This contributes to the quality and, in particular, security of software.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Reflections on training next-gen industry workforce on secure software development

The increasing number of security incidents highlights the growing importance of cybersecurity, particularly in industrial environments. Education and awareness of secure coding practices are fundamental to secure products and services. In this paper, we explore the potential of CyberSecurity Challenges (CSCs), a serious game that is designed to raise awareness of industrial software developers about secure coding, to train the next generation of professionals in undergraduate programs. Our work details how to tailor the game to the training environment and assesses its effectiveness through an experiment undertaken with 16 trainees. The findings of our work reveal that the CSC game can contribute to raising awareness of secure coding practices among next-generation trainees, and highlights the potential that the game has when used in an academic setting.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Mechanisms for High-frequency QPOs in Neutron Star and Black Hole Binaries

We explain the millisecond variability detected by Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) in the X-ray emission from a number of low mass X-ray binary systems (Sco X-1, 4U1728-34, 4U1608-522, 4U1636-536, 4U0614+091, 4U1735-44, 4U1820-30, GX5-1 and etc) in terms of dynamics of the centrifugal barrier, a hot boundary region surrounding a neutron star. We demonstrate that this region may experience the relaxation oscillations, and that the displacements of a gas element both in radial and vertical directions occur at the same main frequency, of order of the local Keplerian frequency. We show the importance of the effect of a splitting of the main frequency produced by the Coriolis force in a rotating disk for the interpretation of a spacing between the QPO peaks. We estimate a magnitude of the splitting effect and present a simple formula for the whole spectrum of the split frequencies. It is interesting that the first three lowest-order overtones fall in the range of 200-1200 Hz and match the kHz-QPO frequencies observed by RXTE. Similar phenomena should also occur in Black Hole (BH) systems, but, since the QPO frequency is inversely proportional to the mass of a compact object, the frequency of the centrifugal-barrier oscillations in the BH systems should be a factor of 5-10 lower than that for the NS systems. The X-ray spectrum formed in this region is a result of upscattering of a soft radiation (from a disk and a NS surface) off relatively hot electrons in the boundary layer. We also briefly discuss some alternative QPO models, including a possibility of acoustic oscillations in the boundary layer, the proper stellar rotation, and g-mode disk oscillations.Comment: The paper is coming out in the Astrophysical Journal in the 1st of May issue of 199

On The Inflaton Potential From Antibranes in Warped Throats

We compute the force between a stack of smeared antibranes at the bottom of a warped throat and a stack of smeared branes at some distance up the throat, both for anti-D3 branes and for anti-M2 branes. We perform this calculation in two ways: first, by treating the antibranes as probes in the background sourced by the branes and second, by treating the branes as probes in the candidate background sourced by the antibranes. These two very different calculations yield exactly the same expression for the force, for all values of the brane-antibrane separation. This indicates that the force between a brane and an antibrane is not screened in backgrounds where there is positive charge dissolved in flux, and gives a way to precisely compute the inflaton potential in certain string cosmology scenarios.Comment: 9 page

Data-Driven Audio Feature Space Clustering for Automatic Sound Recognition in Radio Broadcast News

This is an Open Access article published by World Scientific Publishing Company. It is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY) License. Further distribution of this work is permitted, provided the original work is properly cited. T. Theodorou, I. Mpoas, A. Lazaridis, N. Fakotakis, 'Data-Driven Audio Feature Space Clustering for Automatic Sound Recognition in Radio Broadcast News', International Journal on Artificial Intelligence Tools, Vol. 26 (2), April 2017, 1750005 (13 pages), DOI: 10.1142/S021821301750005. © The Author(s).In this paper we describe an automatic sound recognition scheme for radio broadcast news based on principal component clustering with respect to the discrimination ability of the principal components. Specifically, streams of broadcast news transmissions, labeled based on the audio event, are decomposed using a large set of audio descriptors and project into the principal component space. A data-driven algorithm clusters the relevance of the components. The component subspaces are used by sound type classifier. This methodology showed that the k-nearest neighbor and the artificial intelligent network provide good results. Also, this methodology showed that discarding unnecessary dimension works in favor on the outcome, as it hardly deteriorates the effectiveness of the algorithms.Peer reviewe

Variability Abstraction and Refinement for Game-Based Lifted Model Checking of Full CTL

One of the most promising approaches to fighting the configuration space explosion problem in lifted model checking are variability abstractions. In this work, we define a novel game-based approach for variability-specific abstraction and refinement for lifted model checking of the full CTL, interpreted over 3-valued semantics. We propose a direct algorithm for solving a 3-valued (abstract) lifted model checking game. In case the result of model checking an abstract variability model is indefinite, we suggest a new notion of refinement, which eliminates indefinite results. This provides an iterative incremental variability-specific abstraction and refinement framework, where refinement is applied only where indefinite results exist and definite results from previous iterations are reused. The practicality of this approach is demonstrated on several variability models