Voxel-Wise Analysis of Structural and Functional MRI for Lateralization of Handedness in College Students

The brain structural and functional basis of lateralization in handedness is largely unclear. This study aimed to explore this issue by using voxel-mirrored homotopic connectivity (VMHC) measured by resting-state functional MRI (R-fMRI) and gray matter asymmetry index (AI) by high-resolution anatomical images. A total of 50 healthy subjects were included, among them were 13 left-handers, 24 right-handers, and 13 mixed-handers. Structural and R-fMRI data of all subjects were collected. There were significant differences in VMHC among the three groups in lateral temporal-occipital, orbitofrontal, and primary hand motor regions. Meanwhile, there were significant differences in AI that existed in medial prefrontal, superior frontal, and superior temporal regions. Besides, the correlation analysis showed that the closer the handedness score to the extreme of the left-handedness (LH), the stronger the interhemispheric functional connectivity, as well as more leftward gray matter. In general, left/mixed-handedness (MH) showed stronger functional homotopy in the transmodal association regions that depend on the integrity of the corpus callosum, but more variable in primary sensorimotor cortices. Furthermore, the group differences in VMHC largely align with that in AI. We located the specific regions for LH/MH from the perspective of structural specification and functional integration, suggesting the plasticity of hand movement and different patterns of emotional processing.

A Review of Wood as Structural Member

Due to growing urbanization the building material such as concrete, steel and steel composite structures are used predominantly in many countries across the world. while considering the environment hazard due to carbon emission the introduction of wood as building material is used for structural specification even in case entire building structure is also build with the help of wood as its structural components. In this study the wood as a building material is to be considered in previous works that how the material behaves what are the factors to be considered for design is to be studied and finally conclude that if the wood is suitable for the building material for a structure.

Robust Cortical Criticality and Diverse Neural Network Dynamics Resulting from Functional Specification

Despite recognized layered structure and increasing evidence for criticality in the cortex, how the specification of input, output and computational layers affects the self-organized criticality has been surprisingly neglected. By constructing heterogeneous structures with a well-accepted model of leaky neurons, we found that the specification can lead to robust criticality almost insensitive to the strength of external stimuli. This naturally unifies the adaptation to strong inputs without extra synaptic plasticity mechanisms. Presence of output neurons constitutes an alternative explanation to subcriticality other than the high frequency inputs. Degree of recurrence is proposed as a network metric to account for the signal termination due to output neurons. Unlike fully recurrent networks where external stimuli always render subcriticality, the dynamics of networks with sufficient feed-forward connections can be driven to criticality and supercriticality. These findings indicate that functional and structural specification and their interplay with external stimuli are of crucial importance for the network dynamics. The robust criticality puts forward networks of the leaky neurons as a promising platform for realizing artificial neural networks that work in the vicinity of critical points.

Enterprise Applications

The authors provide a method to systematically develop enterprise application architectures from problem descriptions. From these descriptions, they derive two kinds of specifications: a behavioral specification describes how the automated business process is carried out. It can be expressed using activity or sequence diagrams. A structural specification describes the classes to be implemented and the operations they provide. The structural specification is created in three steps. All the diagrams are expressed in UML.