Dynamics of Balancing Space and Time in Memory: Tau and Kappa Effects Revisited.

In 3 experiments, the authors studied the organization of spatiotemporal information in memory. Stimuli consisted of configurations of dots, presented sequentially. The stimuli were either proportional, with interdot distances corresponding to interdot durations, or not proportional, with interdol distances not corresponding to interdot durations. After a learning phase, participants reproduced the spatial (Experiment 1), temporal (Experiment 2), or spatial and temporal (Experiment 3) characteristics of the target 60 times in succession. In the nonproportional conditions, effects of variable interdot durations or distances on the reproduction of, respectively, constant distances (tau effect) or durations (kappa effect) were observed, whereas no such effects were observed when variable distances or durations were to be produced. Tau and kappa effects influenced the accuracy but not the variability of responses. The results are discussed in light of the distinction between properties of the stabilized mental image and the process of stabilization. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Platelet-activating factor and the vascular effects of zymosan in rats

Platelet-activating factor (PAF; 2.5 micrograms/kg) injected in the tail vein of anaesthetized rats increased the vascular permeability of the duodenum, paws, skin and muscles, as measured by the extravasation of 125I-labelled albumin. It did not affect the permeability of the lungs or the presence of labelled albumin in the liver and spleen. The effects of PAF were dose dependently inhibited by WEB 2086 (ID50: 1.39 to 2.09 mg/kg) and SM-12502 (ID50: 7.17 to 8.36 mg/kg). Zymosan, an activator of the alternative complement pathway (10 or 16 mg/kg), induced protein extravasation in the lungs, duodenum, paws and skin, and the accumulation of labelled albumin in the liver. The effects of zymosan on the duodenum and liver were dose dependently inhibited by WEB-2086 and SM-12502. Both PAF antagonists increased the effects of zymosan in the paws but they did not affect protein extravasation in the lungs. The hypotensive effect of PAF (0.5 micrograms/kg) was inhibited by WEB 2086 (ID50: 1.21 mg/kg) and SM-12502 (ID50: 13.4 mg/kg). Both PAF antagonists reduced the hypotensive effects of zymosan (4 or 16 mg/kg) with a similar relative inhibitory potency. PAF is the major mediator involved in the hypotensive effect of zymosan but plays only a minor role in the permeability-enhancing effect of zymosan, mostly in the splanchnic area.     

Analysis of a conjugated infinite element method for acoustic scattering

This work is devoted to a study of a conjugated infinite element method for Helmholtz problems in exterior domains. A formulation of this method with Lagrange multipliers defined on (semi-)infinite space is presented and analyzed in a domain decomposition context. The implementation aspects of this method in a parallel industrial acoustic software (SYSNOISE) are described in details. Numerical results show the computational efficiency of this method on acoustic scattering problems.     

Post-Translational Modifications of Retroviral HIV-1 Gag Precursors: An Overview of Their Biological Role

Protein post-translational modifications (PTMs) play key roles in eukaryotes since they finely regulate numerous mechanisms used to diversify the protein functions and to modulate their signaling networks. Besides, these chemical modifications also take part in the viral hijacking of the host, and also contribute to the cellular response to viral infections. All domains of the human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) Gag precursor of 55-kDa (Pr55^Gag), which is the central actor for viral RNA specific recruitment and genome packaging, are post-translationally modified. In this review, we summarize the current knowledge about HIV-1 Pr55^Gag PTMs such as myristoylation, phosphorylation, ubiquitination, sumoylation, methylation, and ISGylation in order to figure out how these modifications affect the precursor functions and viral replication. Indeed, in HIV-1, PTMs regulate the precursor trafficking between cell compartments and its anchoring at the plasma membrane, where viral assembly occurs. Interestingly, PTMs also allow Pr55^Gag to hijack the cell machinery to achieve viral budding as they drive recognition between viral proteins or cellular components such as the ESCRT machinery. Finally, we will describe and compare PTMs of several other retroviral Gag proteins to give a global overview of their role in the retroviral life cycle.     

Deep learning for graphics recognition: document understanding and beyond

International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition (IJDAR) -     

LARS: A learning algorithm for rewriting systems

Whereas there is a number of methods and algorithms to learn regular languages, moving up the Chomsky hierarchy is proving to be a challenging task. Indeed, several theoretical barriers make the class of context-free languages hard to learn. To tackle these barriers, we choose to change the way we represent these languages. Among the formalisms that allow the definition of classes of languages, the one of string-rewriting systems (SRS) has outstanding properties. We introduce a new type of SRS’s, called Delimited SRS (DSRS), that are expressive enough to define, in a uniform way, a noteworthy and non trivial class of languages that contains all the regular languages, , , the parenthesis languages of Dyck, the language of Lukasiewicz, and many others. Moreover, DSRS’s constitute an efficient (often linear) parsing device for strings, and are thus promising candidates in forthcoming applications of grammatical inference. In this paper, we pioneer the problem of their learnability. We propose a novel and sound algorithm (called LARS) which identifies a large subclass of them in polynomial time (but not data). We illustrate the execution of our algorithm through several examples, discuss the position of the class in the Chomsky hierarchy and finally raise some open questions and research directions. This work was supported in part by the IST Program of the European Community, under the PASCAL Network of Excellence, IST-2002-506778. This publication only reflects the authors’ views. Editor: Georgios Paliouras and Yasubumi Sakakibara