Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Gait analysis of elderly women after total knee arthroplasty

[Purpose] The purpose of this study was to investigate ability and muscle activities of elderly women after total knee arthroplasty (TKA) and compare them with those of healthy ones. [Subjects and Methods] Fifteen female patients with TKA due to advanced degenerative arthritis of the measured on knee joint and 19 healthy elderly females participated. Tibiofemoral angles of TKA patients were using a gait analysis system anterioposterior X-rays of the weight-bearing knee. The knee flexion angle and gait parameters were measured. Muscle activities and prolongation time were EMG system. The gait of the treated limb of each participant was evaluated in three consecutive trials at fast speed and comfortable speed. [Results] The knee flexion angle %stance phase, stride length, step length, speed, cadence, and gait cycle significantly decreased at both the fast speed and comfortable speeds, and the onset and duration time of rectus femoris activity was significantly increased at the comfortable speed in the TKA group. [Conclusion] In conclusion, elderly women who received TKA showed decreased gait ability and muscle activity compared to the healthy elderly women.
Stochastic simplification of aggregate detail

Many renderers perform poorly on scenes that contain a lot of detailed geometry. The load on the renderer can be alleviated by simplification techniques, which create less expensive representations of geometry that is small on the screen. Current simplification techniques for high-quality surface-based rendering tend to work best with element detail (i.e., detail due to the complexity of individual elements) but not as well with aggregate detail (i.e., detail due to the large number of elements). To address this latter type of detail, we introduce a stochastic technique related to some approaches used for point-based renderers. Scenes are rendered by randomly selecting a subset of the geometric elements and altering those elements statistically to preserve the overall appearance of the scene. The amount of simplification can depend on a number of factors, including screen size, motion blur, and depth of field.
Managerial Incentives, Risk Aversion, and Debt

Abstract We investigate the risk choices of risk-averse CEOs. Following recent theoretical work, we expect CEO risk aversion to be more pronounced in firms with high leverage or high default probability. We find that the CEOs of these firms reduce firm risk, even in the presence of strong risk-taking incentives. Our results are robust to controls for the sensitivity of CEO wealth to stock price changes, firm risk determinants, the endogenous feedback effects of firm risk on CEO incentives, unobserved firm and market effects, and debt governance. The impact of CEO risk aversion is economically significant.
Case Study Analysis of Corporate Decision-Making for Cell Phone Deployment

The wireless cell phone market has experienced phenomenal growth over the last decade. This paper studies the factors that five companies considered important in deciding to deploy wireless cell phone devices, the extent of current use of wireless cell phones, the extent of existing utilization and/or planning for web-enabled cell phone use, the constraining factors in their deployment decisions, how such decisions are made, and how regulation of the wireless industry has affected their decision-making process. The conceptual model combines the TAM and innovation diffusion models, adding the factors of security/privacy and web connectivity. Case study methodology is utilized for five manufacturing and technology firms. A key finding is that the most important decision factors are security/privacy, provision of quality service to customers, web connectivity, and, for one firm, productivity. Many other findings are presented, and the conceptual model is supported by the findings. The study’s practical implications are examined. BACKGROUND AND LITERATURE REVIEW This study focuses on identifying factors that corporations consider important in their decision to deploy devices designed for mobile telephony and mobile data services. We also consider the approval steps in decision-making, the extent and importance of web-enabled cell phones, and the functional areas of use of cell phones. There has been little research regarding corporate adoption of wireless (mobile) devices, but there is a solid foundation of theories and previous studies on technology adoption for this case study. The decision to adopt a wireless device, especially if the alternative is a wireline device, is in essence a technology adoption issue (Kleijnen and de Ruyter 2003, Van Akkeren and Harker 2003). A number of theories have been developed to help explain the concept of technology adoption (Mennecke and Strader 2003; Kleijnen and de Ruyter 2003). One widely accepted model is the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) (Davis 1989, Davis 1993). Davis (1989) emphasized the theoretical constructs of perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use as a means of predicting user acceptance of information technology. Adams et al. (1992) replicated Davis’ research for fixed voice and e-mail. They refined the measurement scales and utilized structured equation modeling to explain interactions. In later research using the TAM model, Davis’ results in 1993 indicated that while ease of use is clearly important, usefulness is even
Fractal dust model of the Universe based on Mandelbrot's Conditional Cosmological Principle and General Theory of Relativity

We present a fractal dust model of the Universe based on Mandelbrot's proposal to replace the standard Cosmological Principle by his Conditional Cosmological Principle within the framework of General Theory of Relativity. This model turns out to be free from the de-Vaucouleurs paradox and is consistent with the SNe1a observations. The expected galaxy count as a function of red-shift is obtained for this model. An interesting variation is a steady state version, which can account for an accelerating scale factor without any cosmological constant in the model.
The Hidden Value of Lying: Evasion of Guilt in Expert Advice

I develop a model of strategic communication between an uninformed receiver and a partially informed sender who is averse to lying. The sender's cost of lying is endogenous, depending on the receiver's beliefs induced by the sender's message, rather than on its exogenous formulation. One of my main findings is that this leads to the endogenous emergence of evasive communication, i.e., pretending to be uninformed, even when communication is completely unrestricted. Furthermore, the belief-dependent cost of lying gives rise to specific predictions regarding the welfare implications of several conventional policies. In particular, prohibition of lying (i.e., of explicit falsification) may lead to a decrease in the receiver's welfare. In addition, dealing with an ex-ante less informed sender can be beneficial to the receiver. The results are attributed exclusively to belief-dependent preferences and cannot be explained by an outcome-based model.
Albendazole for treatment and prophylaxis of microsporidiosis due to Encephalitozoon intestinalis in patients with AIDS: a randomized double-blind controlled trial.

A double-blind placebo-controlled trial was conducted to assess the efficacy and safety of albendazole (400 mg twice daily for 3 weeks) for the treatment of Encephalitozoon intestinalis infection in patients with AIDS. Clearance of microsporidia from the intestinal tract was obtained in 4 of 4 patients in the albendazole group versus 0 of 4 in the control group (P = .01, one-sided Fisher's exact test) and was associated with significant clinical benefit. All 4 controls subsequently cleared microsporidia following open-labeled albendazole treatment. To investigate the effect of albendazole in preventing relapse, these 8 patients were then randomly assigned to receive either albendazole (400 mg twice daily) or no treatment for the next 12 months. Albendazole significantly delayed the occurrence of relapse (P = .04, one-sided log-rank test). In human immunodeficiency virus-infected patients with E. intestinalis infection, albendazole has parasitologic and clinical efficacy and reduces the risk of relapse.
UML-based behavior specification of interactive multimedia applications

Availability of precise, yet usable modeling languages is essential to the construction of multimedia systems based on software engineering principles and methods. Although several languages have been proposed for the specification of isolated multimedia system aspects, there not yet exists an integrated modeling language that adequately supports multimedia software development in practice. We propose an extension of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) for the integrated specification of multimedia systems based on an object-oriented development method. Since integration of co-existing timed procedural and interactive behavior is at the heart of multimedia systems, we focus on UML-based specification of behavior in this paper. In addition, we outline how these behavioral aspects are to be integrated with media, presentation, and software architecture modeling to achieve a coherent and consistent model.
Macro Factors in Bond Risk Premia

Empirical evidence suggests that excess bond returns are forecastable by financial indicators such as forward spreads and yield spreads, a violation of the expectations hypothesis based on constant risk premia. But existing evidence does not tie the forecastable variation in excess bond returns to underlying macroeconomic fundamentals, as would be expected if the forecastability were attributable to time variation in risk premia. We use the methodology of dynamic factor analysis for large datasets to investigate possible empirical linkages between forecastable variation in excess bond returns and macroeconomic fundamentals. We find that several common factors estimated from a large dataset on U.S. economic activity have important forecasting power for future excess returns on U.S. government bonds. Following Cochrane and Piazzesi (2005), we also construct single predictor state variables by forming linear combinations of either five or six estimated common factors. The single state variables forecast excess bond returns at maturities from two to five years, and do so virtually as well as an unrestricted regression model that includes each common factor as a separate predictor variable. The linear combinations we form are driven by both "real" and "inflation" macro factors, in addition to financial factors, and contain important information about one year ahead excess bond returns that is not captured by forward spreads, yield spreads, or the principal components of the yield covariance matrix.
Intestinal T-cell Responses in Celiac Disease – Impact of Celiac Disease Associated Bacteria

A hallmark of active celiac disease (CD), an inflammatory small-bowel enteropathy caused by permanent intolerance to gluten, is cytokine production by intestinal T lymphocytes. Prerequisites for contracting CD are that the individual carries the MHC class II alleles HLA-DQ2 and/or HLA-DQ8 and is exposed to gluten in the diet. Dysbiosis in the resident microbiota has been suggested to be another risk factor for CD. In fact, rod shaped bacteria adhering to the small intestinal mucosa were frequently seen in patients with CD during the “Swedish CD epidemic” and bacterial candidates could later be isolated from patients born during the epidemic suggesting long-lasting changes in the gut microbiota. Interleukin-17A (IL-17A) plays a role in both inflammation and anti-bacterial responses. In active CD IL-17A was produced by both CD8+ T cells (Tc17) and CD4+ T cells (Th17), with intraepithelial Tc17 cells being the dominant producers. Gluten peptides as well as CD associated bacteria induced IL-17A responses in ex vivo challenged biopsies from patients with inactive CD. The IL-17A response was suppressed in patients born during the epidemic when a mixture of CD associated bacteria was added to gluten, while the reverse was the case in patients born after the epidemic. Under these conditions Th17 cells were the dominant producers. Thus Tc17 and Th17 responses to gluten and bacteria seem to pave the way for the chronic disease with interferon-γ-production by intraepithelial Tc1 cells and lamina propria Th1 cells. The CD associated bacteria and the dysbiosis they might cause in the resident microbiota may be a risk factor for CD either by directly influencing the immune responses in the mucosa or by enhancing inflammatory responses to gluten.
Advancing Our Understanding of Team Motivation

Although research on team motivation has been one of the fastest growing research domains in organizational science, progress in this domain has been hampered by a lack of integrative reviews. Thus, we develop a theoretical framework in this article to summarize and discuss different conceptual approaches to team motivation for the following six content areas: team design, team needs, team goals, team self-regulation, team efficacy, and team affect. Our framework organizes previous research according to two dimensions. First, we assess the degree of interdependence between team members’ motivational states, differentiating between models that conceptualize team motivation as functionally equivalent to individual level motivation and models that conceptualize team motivation as a truly collective phenomenon. Second, we assess the extent to which research conceptualizes team motivation as a dynamic phenomenon that evolves over time, with static models of team motivation and dynamic models of team motivation demarcating the opposite ends of this continuum. With this framework, we show that previous research on team motivation has overemphasized conceptual similarities between motivation constructs at the individual and team levels of analysis. We address this shortcoming by developing a theory of interdependent regulatory dynamics. This theory emphasizes the interdependent and dynamic nature of team motivation. It depicts the processes in which team members decide how to allocate their efforts and resources between individual goals and team goals, and it identifies the multiple pathways through which teams coordinate and regulate their collective efforts over time.
Nonlinear Modeling of Dynamic Metal Transfer in Laser-Enhanced GMAW

Laser-enhanced gas metal arc welding (GMAW) is an innovative process recently proposed and developed at the University of Kentucky (Refs. 1–3), shown in Fig. 1. It adds a relatively low-power laser to conventional GMAW, and the objective is to provide an auxiliary force to help detach the droplet at a desired diameter with a desired welding current. In laserenhanced GMAW, the droplet size is a critical parameter that determines the process stability and produces a desired appearance and quality of welds. Relatively large droplet sizes will lead to ripples in the welds and decrease the directionality of the welds. In laser-enhanced GMAW, laser recoil pressure force is the additional detaching force compared to conventional GMAW. However, it is hard to directly calculating this force value precisely as many physical coefficients are unknown. For the recoil pressure acting on a substrate during intense laser evaporation, Ref. 4 gave the following:1/2
A DISCRETE-TIME STATE-SPACE MODEL WITH WAKE INTERFERENCE FOR STABILITY ANALYSIS OF FLEXIBLE AIRCRAFT

Keywords. exible aircraft, linear stability, state-space, ight dynamics Abstract. This paper investigates the coupled aeroelastic and ight dynamics stabil- ity of exible lightweight aircraft. The aerodynamics are modelled by the discrete-time unsteady vortex lattice method, which can capture the large deformations of the lifting surfaces, and includes 3-D eects and in-plane motions. A geometrically-exact compos- ite beam formulation is used to model the nonlinear exible-body dynamics, including rigid-body motions, and the equations are accommodated to discrete-time formulation. The governing equations are linearised around an equilibrium conguration, which can be highly deformed, performing a small perturbation analysis and assuming a frozen aero- dynamic geometry. The resulting framework is a monolithic discrete-time state-space formulation, which provides a powerful tool for the stability boundary prediction of a exible vehicle through a direct generalized eigenvalue analysis. It oers increased delity as compared to traditional tools, and at very low computational cost. As a suitable test case to illustrate the capabilities of this approach, the utter of a T-tail is examined. In addition, previous open-loop results are extended in order to asses wake interference eects on exible aircraft dynamics.
Game-theoretic modelling of oligopolistic competition under uncertainty

This thesis reconsiders some of the most widely debated controversies in game theoretic modelling of oligopolistic competition, and proposes modifications of existing models and concepts demonstrating how these controversies can be addressed in the presence of uncertainty.The first part of the discussion is concerned with competition by product design in heterogeneous goods' markets, as captured by the Hotelling framework. The most prominent difficulty here is the model's lack of robustness to changes in the transportation cost specification, and the fact that the only universally tractable quadratic formulation induces an implausible and socially undesirable 'maximum differentiation' outcome. The problem is addressed in Chapter Two, by considering a model with uncertain consumer demand and general linear-quadratic costs. It turns out that, for uncertainty big enough, the presence of a linear component in the cost function no longer rules out an analytical solution to the game. In particular, I characterize a subgame-perfect equilibrium in which the firms' locations converge to the socially efficient ones in the limit as uncertainty increases, regardless of the curvature of the cost function. Thus, the presence of substantial demand uncertainty makes the market more competitive, by reducing the excessive equilibrium product differentiation and the resulting prices.In fact, Chapter Three demonstrates that this also holds when the firms do not know the exact distribution of consumer demand fluctuations, but resolve the resulting ambiguity using the Arrow and Hurwicz alpha-maxmin criterion. This is because firms that are sufficiently pessimistic, in the sense of assigning a large weight to the lowest profit scenario, locate closer together in equilibrium under uncertainty, where it is argued that operating on such a pessimistic premise could become prevalent via strategic commitment, elimination of underperforming firms or as a result of taxation.This discussion is complemented by the second part of the thesis, which is concerned with competition in homogeneous goods' markets. In particular, Chapter Four reconsiders the so far unresolved discrepancy between the Cournot model of quantity competition and the alternative Bertrand price setting specification. To this end, I propose a model evaluation criterion, based on a recent generalization of the von Neumann-Morgenstern stable set concept. In particular, a restriction of the players' strategy sets is said to constitute a stable convention when no one has an incentive to unilaterally violate it, while faced with strategic uncertainty about the counterparts' exact choices within their restricted strategy sets. Applying the criterion to a simultaneous move quantity-price game reveals that Cournot competition is a stable convention when production costs are high relative to the number of firms and difficult to recover for unsold output. In contrast, Bertrand competition is never stable.
Chinese ‘low-tar’ cigarettes do not deliver lower levels of nicotine and carcinogens

Background Low-tar cigarette smoking is gaining popularity in China. The China National Tobacco Corporation (CNTC) promotes low-tar cigarettes as safer than regular cigarettes. Methods A total of 543 male smokers smoking cigarettes with different tar yields (15 mg, regular cigarettes, 10–13 mg low-tar cigarettes and <10 mg low-tar cigarettes) were recruited in Shanghai, China, who then completed a questionnaire on smoking behaviour and provided a urine sample for analysis of the nicotine metabolites cotinine and trans-3′-hydroxycotinine. A total of 177 urine samples were selected at random for the analysis of the carcinogens polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon metabolites (PAHs) (1-hydroxypyrene, naphthols, hydroxyfluorenes and hydroxyphenanthrenes) and the tobacco specific nitrosamine 4-(methylnitrosamino)-1-(3-pyridyl)-butanone (NNK) metabolites, 4-(methylnitrosamino)-1-(3-pyridyl)-butanol (NNAL) and NNAL-glucuronide. Values were normalised by creatinine to correct for possible distortions introduced by dilution or concentration of the urine. Results Smokers of low-tar cigarettes smoked fewer cigarettes per day (p=0.001) compared to smokers of regular cigarettes. Despite this lower reported consumption, levels of cotinine, trans-3′-hydroxycotinine and PAHs in urine of people smoking low-tar cigarettes were not correlated with nominal tar delivery of the cigarettes they smoked. Urine concentrations of NNAL were higher in smokers of lower tar than higher tar cigarettes. Conclusions Chinese low-tar cigarettes do not deliver lower doses of nicotine and carcinogens than regular cigarettes, therefore it is unlikely that there would be any reduction in harm. CNTC's promotion of low-tar cigarettes as ‘less harmful’ is a violation of the World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, which China ratified in 2005.
The bovine papillomavirus type 1 E2 transactivator and repressor proteins use different nuclear localization signals

The E2 gene of bovine papillomavirus type 1 encodes at least three nuclear phosphoproteins that regulate viral transcription and DNA replication. All three proteins have a common C-terminal domain that has DNA-binding and dimerization activities. A basic region in this domain forms an alpha helix which makes direct contact with the DNA target. In this study, it is shown that in addition to its role in DNA binding, this basic region functions as a nuclear localization signal both in the E2 DNA-binding domain and in a heterologous protein. Deletion of this signal sequence resulted in increased accumulation of the E2 transactivator and repressor proteins in the cytoplasm, but nuclear localization was not eliminated. In the full-length transactivator protein, another signal, present in the N-terminal transactivation domain, is used for transport to the nucleus, and the C-terminal nuclear localization signal(s) are masked. The use of different nuclear localization signals could potentially allow differential regulation of the subcellular localization of the E2 transactivator and repressor proteins at some stage in the viral life cycle.
Parameterized linear matrix inequality techniques in fuzzy control system design

This paper proposes different parameterized linear matrix inequality (PLMI) characterizations for fuzzy control systems. These PLMI characterizations are, in turn, relaxed into pure LMI programs, which provides tractable and effective techniques for the design of suboptimal fuzzy control systems. The advantages of the proposed methods over earlier ones are then discussed and illustrated through numerical examples and simulations.