Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Spectral Analysis of Motor Unit Action Potentials

The statistical processing of electromyographic signal examination performed in the time domain ensures mostly correct classification of pathology; however, because of an ambiguity of most temporal parameter definitions, a diagnosis can include a significant error that strongly depends on the neurologist's experience. Then, selected temporal parameters are determined for each run, and their mean values are calculated. In the final stage, these mean values are compared with a standard and, including additional clinical information, a diagnosis is given. An inconvenience of this procedure is high time consumption that arises from the necessity of determination of many parameters. Additionally, an ambiguity in determination of basic temporal parameters can cause doubts when parameters found by the physician are compared with standard parameters determined in other research centers. In this paper, we present a definition for spectral discriminant that directly enables a unique diagnosis to be made. An essential advantage of the suggested discriminant is a precise and algorithmically realized definition that enables an objective comparison of examination results obtained by physicians with different experiences or working in different research centers. A suggestion of the standard for selected muscle based on a population of 70 healthy cases is presented in the Results section.
Local Knowledge of Pond Fish-Farming Ecosystem Services: Management Implications of Stakeholders’ Perceptions in Three Different Contexts (Brazil, France and Indonesia)

This article addresses ecosystem service perceptions in the case of pond fish-farming systems in Brazil, France and Indonesia. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment vision suggests a more integrated reflection on environmental policies with greater adaptability to local knowledge and the development of social learning processes, which tend to promote more sustainable changes in behavior and practice than do sanctions. This study considers a part of the identification of ecosystem services. It shows that perceptions differ with the context, and found few differences depending on the type of stakeholders (fish farmers and other stakeholders). From a methodological viewpoint, this paper opens up new prospects for valuing ecosystem services through a perception study.
Oncolytic adenoviruses for treatment of brain tumours

Standard therapies are not capable of curing patients with malignant glioma; more than 90% of patients die within 2 years after diagnosis. Gene therapy appeared as a promising new approach for this disease. However, results of clinical trials with replication deficient viral vectors were disappointing. The main reasons being poor transduction efficiency of adenovirus towards glioma cells and limited spread and distribution of the vector in the tumour. With the increasing knowledge of viral genetics and its functions, an attractive alternative tool to kill malignant glioma cells has been developed: Replicating adenovirus as an oncolytic agent. This type of therapy, also referred to as virotherapy, has the potential to overcome some of the limitations connected with replication deficient adenoviral vectors. In this review the authors describe the latest developments in strategies that are being used to create a tumour- or glioma- selective replicating adenovirus. Special attention is given to the methods of viral delivery to an infiltrating tumour in the brain, regarding optimal dose and toxicity. Furthermore, the role of conventional antitumour treatments, such as irradiation and chemotherapy, in enhancing the effect of virotherapy is being emphasised.
Effect of Engaging Trainees by Assessing Peer Performance: A Randomised Controlled Trial Using Simulated Patient Scenarios

Introduction. The aim of this study was to explore the learning effect of engaging trainees by assessing peer performance during simulation-based training. Methods. Eighty-four final year medical students participated in the study. The intervention involved trainees assessing peer performance during training. Outcome measures were in-training performance and performance, both of which were measured two weeks after the course. Trainees' performances were videotaped and assessed by two expert raters using a checklist that included a global rating. Trainees' satisfaction with the training was also evaluated. Results. The intervention group obtained a significantly higher overall in-training performance score than the control group: mean checklist score 20.87 (SD 2.51) versus 19.14 (SD 2.65) P = 0.003 and mean global rating 3.25 SD (0.99) versus 2.95 (SD 1.09) P = 0.014. Postcourse performance did not show any significant difference between the two groups. Trainees who assessed peer performance were more satisfied with the training than those who did not: mean 6.36 (SD 1.00) versus 5.74 (SD 1.33) P = 0.025. Conclusion. Engaging trainees in the assessment of peer performance had an immediate effect on in-training performance, but not on the learning outcome measured two weeks later. Trainees had a positive attitude towards the training format.
Improvement the Properties of Cement Mortar by Using Styrene Butadiene Rubber Polymer

The use of polymers in mortar and concrete as admixture can improve the physical and mechanical properties like higher strength and lower permeability than the conventional concrete. Rheomix 141 is styrene-butadiene co–polymer latex (SBR), specifically designed for use with cement composites. It is used in mortar and concrete as an admixture to increase resistance to water penetration, improve abrasion resistance and durability. The objective of the present investigation is to examine the ability of improve cement mortar by using SBR (Rheomix 141). Polymer-modified cement mortars were prepared by varying polymer/cement ratio (P/C). The effects of styrene–Butadiene rubber (SBR) emulsion on the physical properties like bulk density and setting time, and mechanical properties like compressive strength and flexural strength of cement mortars is studied. The results explained the improvement in compressive in flexural strengths in cement mortar with added 8% polymer content. The rates of increase in compressive strength at 3,7, and 28 days were in the range of 13.5%, 8.35% and 9.12% respectively compared with conventional mortar (0% polymer), while the maximum increase in flexural strength (at 8% polymer content) was 11%. Also that, as the polymer content increase up to 8%, setting time of modified mortars decrease. ربر نيدياتويب نيرياتسلا مادختساب تنمسلاا ةنوم صاوخ نيسحت
Acetaldehyde and parkinsonism: role of CYP450 2E1

The present review update the relationship between acetaldehyde (ACE) and parkinsonism with a specific focus on the role of P450 system and CYP 2E1 isozyme particularly. We have indicated that ACE is able to enhance the parkinsonism induced in mice by 1-methyl-4-phenyl-1,2,3,6-tetrahydropyridine, a neurotoxin able to damage the nigrostriatal dopaminergic pathway. Similarly diethyldithiocarbamate, the main metabolite of disulfiram, a drug widely used to control alcoholism, diallylsulfide (DAS) and phenylisothiocyanate also markedly enhance the toxin-related parkinsonism. All these compounds are substrate/inhibitors of CYP450 2E1 isozyme. The presence of CYP 2E1 has been detected in the dopamine (DA) neurons of rodent Substantia Nigra (SN), but a precise function of the enzyme has not been elucidated yet. By treating CYP 2E1 knockout (KO) mice with the neurotoxin 1-methyl-4-phenyl-1,2,3,6-tetrahydropyridine, the SN induced lesion was significantly reduced when compared with the lesion observed in wild-type animals. Several in vivo and in vitro studies led to the conclusion that CYP 2E1 may enhance the 1-methyl-4-phenyl-1,2,3,6-tetrahydropyridine toxicity in mice by increasing free radical production inside the dopaminergic neurons. ACE is a good substrate for CYP 2E1 enzyme as the other substrate-inhibitors and by this way may facilitate the susceptibility of dopaminergic neurons to toxic events. The literature suggests that ethanol and/or disulfiram may be responsible for toxic parkinsonism in human and it indicates that basal ganglia are the major targets of disulfiram toxicity. A very recent study reports that there are a decreased methylation of the CYP 2E1 gene and increased expression of CYP 2E1 mRNA in Parkinson's disease (PD) patient brains. This study suggests that epigenetic variants of this cytochrome contribute to the susceptibility, thus confirming multiples lines of evidence which indicate a link between environmental toxins and PD.
Efficient complex service deployment in cloud infrastructure

The purpose of the work in this thesis is to provide the Service Provider a solution which is capable of deploying complex services in a cloud automatically and cost-effectively. The first contribution allows the Service Provider to construct complex services requested by the clients from basic services at his disposal. The construction must be efficient in terms of execution time and operation cost while respecting the client's constraints. We present an analytic model for this problem and propose a heuristic solution which performance is 20-30% better than other approaches. The second contribution solves the problem of deploying the services while considering end-users' demands. To ensure the quality of services provided to end-users, not only one instance but a set of service replicas is deployed in the network. How the service is duplicated and distributed depends on the demands of its end-users that change constantly in quantity as well as distribution, which complicates the problem. Thus the provisioning mechanism has to be capable of adapt to the change in the network, including the change in end-users' demands. Our third contribution is a system using OpenStack which allows Service Provider to deploy complex services in a cloud that spans over different locations (multi-site cloud). Given a client's request, the system automatically calculates the optimal provisioning plan and deploys it while respecting the client's constraints.
Pronunciation modeling by sharing gaussian densities across phonetic models

Conversational speech exhibits considerable pronunciation variability, which has been shown to have a detrimental effect on the accuracy of automatic speech recognition. There have been many attempts to model pronunciation variation, including the use of decision trees to generate alternate word pronunciations from phonemic baseforms. Use of pronunciation models during recognition is known to improve accuracy. This paper describes the incorporation of pronunciation models into acoustic model training in addition to recognition. Subtle difficulties in the straightforward use of alternatives to canonical pronunciations are first illustrated: it is shown that simply improving the accuracy of the phonetic transcription used for acoustic model training is of little benefit. Acoustic models trained on the most accurate phonetic transcriptions result in worse recognition than acoustic models trained on canonical baseforms. Analysis of this counterintuitive result leads to a new method of accommodating nonstandard pronunciations: rather than allowing a phoneme in the canonical pronunciation to be realized as one of a few distinct alternate phones, the hidden Markov model (HMM) states of the phoneme? s model are instead allowed to share Gaussian mixture components with the HMM states of the model(s) of the alternate realization(s). Qualitatively, this amounts to making a soft decision about which surface form is realized. Quantitatively, experiments show that this method is particularly well suited for acoustic model training for spontaneous speech: a 1.7 %(absolute) improvement in recognition accuracy on the Switchboard corpus is presented.
Symptoms of stress in four societies.

Summary A questionnaire of 33 items concerning reactions to stressful situations was administered to samples of French, American, Filipino, and Haitian college students. Differences in reported frequency were found for sex, level of industrialization, language, and nationality. Factor analyses of the total sample and of male and female national samples revealed cultural differences in patterns of reaction with French speakers showing different combinations of physical and cognitive disruptions.
An evaluation of aspect-oriented programming for Java-based real-time systems development

Some concerns, such as debugging or logging functionality, cannot be captured cleanly, and are often tangled and scattered throughout the code base. These concerns are called crosscutting concerns. Aspect-oriented programming (AOP) is a paradigm that enables developers to capture crosscutting concerns in separate aspect modules. The use of aspects has been shown to improve understandability and maintainability of systems. It has been shown that real-time concerns, such as memory management and thread scheduling, are crosscutting concerns [A. Corsaro et al., (2002), M.Deters et al., (2001), A. Gal et al., (2002)]. However it is unclear whether encapsulating these concerns provides benefits. We were interested in determining whether using AOP to encapsulate real-time crosscutting concerns afforded benefits in system properties such as understandability and maintainability. This paper presents research comparing the system properties of two systems: a real-time sentient traffic simulator and its aspect-oriented equivalent. An evaluation of AOP is presented indicating both benefits and drawbacks with this approach
Optimal control dependence computation and the Roman chariots problem

The control dependence relation plays a fundamental role in program restructuring and optimization. The usual representation of this relation is the control dependence graph (CDG), but the size of the CDG can grow quadratically with the input programs, even for structured programs. In this article, we introduce the augmented postdominator tree <italic>(APT)</italic>, a data structure which can be constructed in space and time proportional to the size of the program and which supports enumeration of a number of useful control dependence sets in time proportional to their size. Therefore, <italic>APT</italic> provides an optimal representation of control dependence. Specifically, the <italic>APT</italic> data structure supports enumeration of the set cd(e), which is the set of statements control dependent on control-flow edge e, of the set <bold>conds</bold>(w), which is the set of edges on which statement <italic>w</italic> is dependent, and of the set <bold>cdequiv</bold>(<italic>w</italic>), which is the set of statements having the same control dependences as <italic>w</italic>. Technically, <italic>APT</italic> can be viewed as a factored representation of the CDG where queries are processed using an approach known as filtering search.
Tomosyn associates with secretory vesicles in neurons through its N- and C-terminal domains

The secretory pathway in neurons requires efficient targeting of cargos and regulatory proteins to their release sites. Tomosyn contributes to synapse function by regulating synaptic vesicle (SV) and dense-core vesicle (DCV) secretion. While there is large support for the presynaptic accumulation of tomosyn in fixed preparations, alternative subcellular locations have been suggested. Here we studied the dynamic distribution of tomosyn-1 (Stxbp5) and tomosyn-2 (Stxbp5l) in mouse hippocampal neurons and observed a mixed diffuse and punctate localization pattern of both isoforms. Tomosyn-1 accumulations were present in axons and dendrites. As expected, tomosyn-1 was expressed in about 75% of the presynaptic terminals. Interestingly, also bidirectional moving tomosyn-1 and -2 puncta were observed. Despite the lack of a membrane anchor these puncta co-migrated with synapsin and neuropeptide Y, markers for respectively SVs and DCVs. Genetic blockade of two known tomosyn interactions with synaptotagmin-1 and its cognate SNAREs did not abolish its vesicular co-migration, suggesting an interplay of protein interactions mediated by the WD40 and SNARE domains. We hypothesize that the vesicle-binding properties of tomosyns may control the delivery, pan-synaptic sharing and secretion of neuronal signaling molecules, exceeding its canonical role at the plasma membrane.
No Relationship Between Vitamin D Status and Insulin Resistance in a Group of High School Students

Objective: To investigate the effects of vitamin D deficiency on both insulin resistance and risk of metabolic syndrome in children. Methods: The study group consisted of 301 children and adolescents with a mean age of 14.2±1.8 years. Serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D [25(OH)D] levels and insulin resistance indices were evaluated. According to serum 25(OH)D levels, the subjects were classified in 3 groups. Those with levels ≤10 ng/mL were labeled as the vitamin D deficient group (group A), those with levels of 10-20 ng/mL as the vitamin D insufficient group (group B) and those with ≥20 ng/mL as having normal vitamin D levels (group C). Metabolic syndrome was defined according to the International Diabetes Federation consensus. The participants with and without metabolic syndrome were compared in terms of 25(OH)D levels. Results: Mean 25(OH)D level of the total group was 18.2±9.3 (2.8-72.0) ng/mL. Distribution of individuals according to their vitamin D levels showed that 11.6% were in group A, 53.5% in group B, and 34.9% in group C. The proportions of boys and girls in these categories were 22.9% and 77.1% in group A, 36.6% and 63.4% in group B, 54.3% and 45.7% in group C, respectively. There were no significant differences in 25(OH)D levels in the individuals with and without impaired fasting glucose or impaired glucose tolerance. No relationship was observed between insulin resistance/sensitivity indices and vitamin D status (p>0.05). Metabolic syndrome was diagnosed in 12.3% (n=37) of the children. There was also no difference in mean 25(OH)D levels between individuals who had and those who did not have the metabolic syndrome. Conclusion: In our study, no correlations were found between insulin measurements during oral glucose tolerance test and vitamin D deficiency. Nonetheless, more extended studies including vitamin D supplementation and evaluating insulin sensitivity via clamp technique are needed to further elucidate this relationship. Conflict of interest:None declared.
Contrasting Effects of Lithium Chloride and CB1 Receptor Blockade on Enduring Changes in the Valuation of Reward

When an organism responds for a reward, its learned behavior can be characterized as goal-directed or habitual based on whether or not it is susceptible to reward devaluation. Here, we evaluated whether instrumental responding for brain stimulation reward (BSR) can be devalued using a paradigm traditionally used for natural rewards. Rats were trained to lever press for BSR; afterward, BSR was paired with either lithium chloride (LiCl, 5 mg/kg, i.p.), a pro-emetic, or AM251, a CB1 receptor antagonist (3 mg/kg, i.p.) or the vehicle of these compounds. Pairings of BSR with these compounds and their vehicles were performed in a novel environment so that only unconditional effects of BSR would be affected by the pharmacological manipulations. Subsequently, in a probe test, all rats were returned in the drug-free state to the boxes where they had received training and instrumental responding was reassessed in the absence of BSR delivery. When compared to control, LiCl produced a significant decrease in the number of responses during the test session, whereas AM251 did not. These results show that instrumental responding for BSR is susceptible to devaluation, in accord with the proposal that this behavior is supported at least in part by associations between the response and the rewarding outcome. Further, they suggest that reward modulation observed in studies involving the use of CB1 receptor antagonists arises from changes in the organism’s motivation rather than drug-induced changes in the intrinsic value of reward.
Perfectionism, Levels of Positive andNegative Affect and Test PerformanceFollowing a Midterm Test inDevelopment Psychology

The main aim of the study was to examine the associations among trait dimensions of perfectionism, test performance, and levels of positive and negative affect after taking a midterm test in developmental psychology. A sample of 97 university students, aged 19- 20, enrolled in 1st year at Faculty of Educational Science, Goce Delcev University of Stip, R. Macedonia, completed the Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale (MPS; Hewitt & Flett, 2004), one week prior to an actual class test. Measures of positive affect and negative affect were obtained immediately following the midterm classroom test (PANAS; Watson et al., 1988). The test completed by each student was a regular midterm test that comprised 20% of their final grade in developmental psychology. As we expected, it was found that socially prescribed perfectionism is significantly associated with lower positive affect, greater negative affect, and poorer test performance. In contrast, self-oriented perfectionism is significantly associated with higher levels of positive affect but not with test performance or with the levels of negative affect. Other-oriented perfectionism is significantly associated with both positive affect and enhanced test performance. The results are discussed in terms of the need to examine trait dimensions of perfectionism within the context of ongoing and actual performance of perfectionist students.
Boosting on a Feature Budget

In this paper we explore the problem of predicting using a limited number of features per training example. We suggest that a modication of AdaBoost (or other boosting algorithms), where hypotheses are sampled from the nal weighted predictor, is well-suited for this task. We derive bounds for the number of samples needed and also verify the eectiveness of this method in experiments.
Diophantine Approximation and Algebraic Curves

The first topic of the workshop, Diophantine approximation, has at its core the study of rational numbers which closely approximate a given real number. This topic has an ancient history, going back at least to the first rational approximations for π. The adjective Diophantine comes from the third century Hellenistic mathematician Diophantus, who wrote an influential text solving various equations in integers and rational numbers (and whose name is now also attached to such “Diophantine equations”). The subject rose to prominence in the last century beginning with the seminal work of Thue, and it has been the source of a large number of deep and influential results, including far-reaching work of Siegel, Roth, Baker, Schmidt, and Faltings, among others. It remains a highly active area at the forefront of number theory and mathematics. The second topic of the workshop, algebraic curves, has long been implicit and in the background of Diophantine problems. In this direction, the fundamental role of algebraic curves was cemented in the influential 1922 conjecture of Mordell that an algebraic curve of genus at least two possesses only finitely many rational points. The interplay between geometry and arithmetic has increased rapidly since that time, and the use of increasingly advanced tools from algebraic and arithmetic geometry has led to the solution of many outstanding and previously inaccessible problems, including the resolution of Mordell’s conjecture (by Faltings). The workshop centered on the interplay between Diophantine approximation and algebraic curves, with interconnections to a diverse array of topics in algebra, geometry, analysis, and logic, among others.