Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Role of Resorbable Plate and Artificial Bone Substitute in Reconstruction of Large Orbital Floor Defect

It is essential to reduce and reconstruct bony defects adequately in large orbital floor fracture and defect. Among many reconstructive methods, alloplastic materials have attracted attention because of their safety and ease of use. We have used resorbable plates combined with artificial bone substitutes in large orbital floor defect reconstructions and have evaluated their long-term reliability compared with porous polyethylene plate. A total of 147 patients with traumatic orbital floor fracture were included in the study. Surgical results were evaluated by clinical evaluations, exophthalmometry, and computed tomography at least 12 months postoperatively. Both orbital floor height discrepancy and orbital volume change were calculated and compared with preoperative CT findings. The average volume discrepancy and vertical height discrepancies were not different between two groups. Also, exophthalmometric measurements were not significantly different between the two groups. No significant postoperative complication including permanent diplopia, proptosis, and enophthalmos was noted. Use of a resorbable plate with an artificial bone substitute to repair orbital floor defects larger than 2.5 cm2 in size yielded long-lasting, effective reconstruction without significant complications. We therefore propose our approach as an effective alternative method for large orbital floor reconstructions.
Connector algebras for C/E and P/T nets' interactions

A quite fourishing research thread in the recent literature on component based system is concerned with the algebraic properties of different classes of connectors. In a recent paper, an algebra of stateless connectors was presented that consists of five kinds of basic connectors, namely symmetry, synchronization, mutual exclusion, hiding and inaction, plus their duals and it was shown how they can be freely composed in series and in parallel to model sophisticated "glues". In this paper we explore the expressiveness of stateful connectors obtained by adding one-place buffers or unbounded buffers to the stateless connectors. The main results are: i) we show how different classes of connectors exactly correspond to suitable classes of Petri nets equipped with compositional interfaces, called nets with boundaries; ii) we show that the difference between strong and weak semantics in stateful connectors is reflected in the semantics of nets with boundaries by moving from the classic step semantics (strong case) to a novel banking semantics (weak case), where a step can be executed by taking some "debit" tokens to be given back during the same step; iii) we show that the corresponding bisimilarities are congruences (w.r.t. composition of connectors in series and in parallel); iv) we show that suitable monoidality laws, like those arising when representing stateful connectors in the tile model, can nicely capture concurrency aspects; and v) as a side result, we provide a basic algebra, with a finite set of symbols, out of which we can compose all P/T nets, fulfilling a long standing quest.
Linked ecologies and norm change in United Nations peacekeeping operations

How do norms guiding peacekeeping change, and who are the important actors in this process? Using sociology of professions and practice theory, this thesis seeks to advance constructivist theorizing of norm change in international organizations by a closer look at UN peacekeeping. The thesis argues that ambiguity is deep-seated in UN peacekeeping and that basic norms (grundnorms) and norms guiding peacekeeping operations are often in conflict. The thesis highlights the role of practices in two ways. First, special envoys and representatives of the Secretary-General (SRSGs) can act as norm arbitrators through actions in the field and have bottom–up influence on norm change in the organization. Second, various ‘ecologies’ such as think tanks and academia have, together with member states and UN officials, formed informal policy alliances to establish new norms, principles, and concepts such as ‘responsibility to protect’ and ‘integrated missions,’ effectively constituting and driving norm change in the international system. This thesis sees these processes as social practices that advance change in the organization. With this contribution, the study further expands the understanding of which actors have agency and what sources of authority they draw on in norm change processes in international organizations. The UN can be seen as a competitive arena where informal policy alliances, or ‘linked ecologies,’ put forward ideas on how to solve policy issues. In a broad sense, the UN is an arena where informal alliances are formed around issues of common concern; and, with the financial support of donor states and knowledge production of think tanks, academia and the working level of the UN, ownership among member states is built in consultative processes.
Enhancing sensitivity in tuning fork photoacoustic spectroscopy systems

A fast, high-sensitivity detector is required for studies of environmentally relevant gases. Photoacoustic spectroscopy (PAS), an absorption spectroscopy technique in which absorption is detected as sound, is explored as a possible solution. A tuning-fork based PAS sensor is modeled using COMSOL Multiphysics. The model combines the acoustic and piezoelectric modules and also includes viscous damping. The model is validated by comparison to experimental data. Acoustic resonator tubes have been found to enhance the signal in these systems. Here the model is applied to determine the dependence of the signal on resonator tube dimensions.
Group decision-making based case retrieval and its application

The distribution of the case feature attribute weights directly affects the case retrieval result. Aim at improving the retrieval precision, a retrieval method is proposed based on group decision-making for optimizing the case feature attributes weights. Firstly, multiple groups of initial weights are obtained by genetic algorithm. Then, the multiple sets of retrieval results produced by these weights are optimized through group decision-making method, and the weights can be dynamic adjusted through the deviations between individual decision results and group result. The simulation results indicate that the proposed approach can fully excavate the potential knowledge of attribute weights and thus result in higher retrieval accuracy in a case-based reasoning system. The PID adjusting comparison experiment of typical two order delay system verifies the effectiveness of the new method.
Multi-Functional Magnetic Photoluminescent Photocatalytic Polystyrene-Based Micro- and Nano-Fibers Obtained by Electrospinning

This work reports on the implementation of electrospinning (ES) as a facile route to encapsulate nano-engineered materials in a polystyrene (PS) matrix. We applied ES to co-encapsulate two kinds of nanoparticles, i.e., upconversion nanophosphors (UCNPs) and superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles (SPIONs), in polystyrene (PS)-based micro- and nano-fibers (PSFs). This approach made it possible to integrate near-infrared (NIR) light-sensitive 500-nm β-NaYF4:Yb, Er UCNPs with 10-nm γ-Fe2O3 SPIONs in PS fibers. During the ES process, PSFs were additionally loaded with a well-established singlet oxygen (1∆g) photosensitizer, rose bengal (RB). The thus obtained PSFs revealed the promising features of prospective multi-functional magnetic photoluminescent photocatalytic nano-constructs.
Forecast Design in Monetary Capital Stock Measurement

We design a procedure for measuring the United States capital stock of money implied by the Divisia monetary aggregate service flow, in a manner consistent with the present-value model of economic capital stock. We permit non-martingale expectations and time varying discount rates. Based on Barnett’s (1991) definition of the economic stock of money, we compute the U.S. economic stock of money by discounting to present value the flow of expected expenditure on the services of monetary assets, where expenditure on monetary services is evaluated at the user costs of the monetary components. As a theoretically consistent measure of money stock, our economic stock of money nests Rotemberg, Driscoll, and Poterba’s (1995) currency equivalent index as a special case, under the assumption of martingale expectations. To compute the economic stock of money without imposing martingale expectations, we define a procedure for producing the necessary forecasts based on an asymmetric vector autoregressive model and a Bayesian vector autoregressive model. In application of this proposed procedure, Barnett, Chae, and Keating (2005) find the resulting capital-stock growth-rate index to be surprisingly robust to the modeling of expectations. Similarly the primary conclusions of this supporting paper regard robustness. We believe that further experiments with other forecasting models would further confirm our robustness conclusion. Different forecasting models can produce substantial differences in forecasts into the distant future. But since the distant future is heavily discounted in our stock formula, and since alternative forecasting formulas rarely produce dramatic differences in short term forecasts, we believe that our robustness result obviates prior concerns about the dependency of theoretical monetary capital stock computations upon forecasts of future expected flows. Even the simple martingale forecast, which has no unknown parameters and is easily computed with current period data, produces a discounted stock measure that is adequate for most purposes. Determining an easily measured extended index that can remove the small bias that we identify under the martingale forecast remains a subject for our future research. At the time that Milton Friedman (1969) was at the University of Chicago, the “Chicago School” view on the monetary transmission mechanism was based upon the wealth effect, called the “real balance effect” or “Pigou (1943) effect,” of open market operations. Our research identifies very large errors in the wealth effects computed from the conventional simple sum monetary aggregates and makes substantial progress in the direction of accurate measurement of monetary-policy wealth effects.
KFC Server: interactive forecasting of protein interaction hot spots

The KFC Server is a web-based implementation of the KFC (Knowledge-based FADE and Contacts) model—a machine learning approach for the prediction of binding hot spots, or the subset of residues that account for most of a protein interface's; binding free energy. The server facilitates the automated analysis of a user submitted protein–protein or protein–DNA interface and the visualization of its hot spot predictions. For each residue in the interface, the KFC Server characterizes its local structural environment, compares that environment to the environments of experimentally determined hot spots and predicts if the interface residue is a hot spot. After the computational analysis, the user can visualize the results using an interactive job viewer able to quickly highlight predicted hot spots and surrounding structural features within the protein structure. The KFC Server is accessible at http://kfc.mitchell-lab.org.
Restorative Plasticity of Dopamine Neuronal Transplants Depends on the Degree of Hemispheric Dominance

The ability of dopaminergic (DA) transplants to restore complex sensorimotor behaviors in experimental Parkinson's disease is dependent on graft survival and reinnervation and is likely to be further modified by complex functional graft–host interactions. Here, we examined the impact of hemispheric dominance and extensive testing regimes on the functional capabilities of DA transplants to restore skilled forelimb movements in rats with unilateral 6-hydroxydopamine lesions. Interestingly, a near complete recovery was observed in DA-grafted animals that did not exhibit a strong hemispheric lateralization for paw use before lesion and implantation surgery, whereas animals with a clear lateralization of paw use and grafted into the contralateral hemisphere exhibited only moderate recovery. Finally, animals grafted ipsilateral to the preferred paw were most resistant to functional improvements in skilled forelimb use. However, the influence of hemispheric dominance on the degree of functional DA graft-induced restoration was specific for skilled forelimb use, whereas no such differences were observed in other tests for motor and sensory functions related to the DA system. Furthermore, functional recovery of DA-grafted animals in skilled forelimb use was significantly promoted by extensive behavioral testing regimes indicative of a “learning how to use” the transplant effect. These findings indicate the importance of the underlying functional architecture of complex sensorimotor behaviors, such as skilled forelimb use, and the DA neurotransmitter system for the plasticity of DA transplants to promoting a more complete behavioral recovery in experimental, and potentially, also in clinical forms of Parkinson's disease.
Enhancing Audience Engagement in Performing Arts Through an Adaptive Virtual Environment with a Brain-Computer Interface

Audience engagement is an important indicator of the quality of the performing arts but hard to measure. Psychophysiological measurements are promising research methods for perceiving and understanding audience's responses in real-time. Currently, such research are conducted by collecting biometric data from audience when they are watching a performance. In this paper, we draw on techniques from brain-computer interfaces (BCI) and knowledge from quality of performing arts to develop a system that monitor audience engagement in real time using electroencephalography (EEG) measurement and seek to improve it by triggering the adaptive performing cues when the engagement level decreased. We simulated the immersive theatre performances to provide audience a high-fidelity visual-audio experience. An experimental evaluation is conducted with 48 participants during two different performance studies. The results showed that our system could successfully detect the decreases in audience engagement and the performing cues had positive effects on regain audience engagement. Our research offers the guidelines for designing theatre performances from the audience's perception.
Culture and R2

Consistent with predictions from the psychology literature, we find that stock prices co-move more (less) in culturally tight (loose) and collectivistic (individualistic) countries. Culture influences stock price synchronicity by affecting correlations in investors’ trading activities and a country’s information environment. Both market-wide and firm-specific variations are lower in tighter cultures. Individualism is mostly associated with higher firm-specific variations. Trade and financial openness weakens the effect of domestic culture on stock price comovements. These results hold for various robustness checks. Our study suggests that culture is an important omitted variable in the literature that investigates cross-country differences in stock price comovements.
Performance improvement algorithms for colour image compression using DWT and multilevel block truncation coding

This paper introduces two algorithms for colour image compression. The first one is intensity based adaptive quantization coding (IBAQC), while the second is a combination of discrete wavelet transforms (DWT) and the IBAQC algorithm. The AQC produced a good peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) with high bit per pixels (bpp). The aim of this paper is to present algorithms with low bit rate whilst preserving the PSNR and image quality to an acceptable range. The experiments were performed using different kinds of standard color images, multi level quantizers, different thresholds, different block sizes, and different wavelet filters. Both algorithms considered the intensity variation of each colour plane. The results obtained showed a good reduction in bpp compared with the AQC algorithm, with a little loss in PSNR due to the dropping of some blocks that claimed to be low intensity variation according to a comparison with predefined thresholds for each colour plane.
A Panel Data Approach for Program Evaluation — Measuring the Benefits of Political and Economic Integration of Hong Kong with Mainland China

We propose a simple to implement panel data method to evaluate the impacts of social policy. The basic idea is to exploit the dependence among cross-sectional units to construct the counterfactuals. The cross-sectional correlations are attributed to the presence of some (unobserved) common factors. However, instead of trying to estimate the unobserved factors, we propose to use observed data. We use a panel of 24 countries to evaluate the impact of political and economic integration of Hong Kong (HK) with Mainland China. We find that the political integration hardly had any impact on the growth of the Hong Kong economy. However, the economic integration has raised HKâ€™s annual real GDP by about 4%.
Resolving the Large-Scale Spectral Variability of the Luminous Seyfert 1 Galaxy 1H 0419–577: Evidence for a New Emission Component and Absorption by Cold Dense Matter

An XMM-Newton observation of the luminous Seyfert 1 galaxy 1H 0419-577 in 2002 September, when the source was in an extreme low-flux state, found a very hard X-ray spectrum at 1-10 keV with a strong soft excess below ~1 keV. Comparison with an earlier XMM-Newton observation when 1H 0419-577 was "X-ray bright" indicated that the dominant spectral variability was due to a steep power law or cool Comptonized thermal emission. Four further XMM-Newton observations, with 1H 0419-577 in intermediate-flux states, now support that conclusion, while we also find the variable emission component in intermediate-state difference spectra to be strongly modified by absorption in low-ionization matter. The variable "soft excess" then appears to be an artifact of absorption of the underlying continuum, while the "core" soft emission can be attributed to recombination in an extended region of more highly ionized gas. We note the wider implications of finding substantial cold dense matter overlying (or embedded in) the X-ray continuum source in a luminous Seyfert 1 galaxy.
Responses of Anterior Superior Temporal Polysensory (STPa) Neurons to Biological Motion Stimuli

Cells have been found in the superior temporal polysensory area (STPa) of the macaque temporal cortex that are selectively responsive to the sight of particular whole body movements (e.g., walking) under normal lighting. These cells typically discriminate the direction of walking and the view of the body (e.g., left profile walking left). We investigated the extent to which these cells are responsive under biological motion conditions where the form of the body is defined only by the movement of light patches attached to the points of limb articulation. One-third of the cells (25/72) selective for the form and motion of walking bodies showed sensitivity to the moving light displays. Seven of these cells showed only partial sensitivity to form from motion, in so far as the cells responded more to moving light displays than to moving controls but failed to discriminate body view. These seven cells exhibited directional selectivity. Eighteen cells showed statistical discrimination for both direction of movement and body view under biological motion conditions. Most of these cells showed reduced responses to the impoverished moving light stimuli compared to full light conditions. The 18 cells were thus sensitive to detailed form information (body view) from the pattern of articulating motion. Cellular processing of the global pattern of articulation was indicated by the observations that none of these cells were found sensitive to movement of individual limbs and that jumbling the pattern of moving limbs reduced response magnitude. A further 10 cells were tested for sensitivity to moving light displays of whole body actions other than walking. Of these cells 5/10 showed selectivity for form displayed by biological motion stimuli that paralleled the selectivity under normal lighting conditions. The cell responses thus provide direct evidence for neural mechanisms computing form from nonrigid motion. The selectivity of the cells was for body view, specific direction, and specific type of body motion presented by moving light displays and is not predicted by many current computational approaches to the extraction of form from motion.
Invited Commentary Invited Commentary: Dietary Pattern Analysis

The analytic approaches used in nutritional epidemiology for dietary pattern analyses share common characteristics with those of genetic epidemiology. In this issue of the Journal, Gorst-Rasmussen et al. (Am J Epidemiol. 2011;173(10):1097–1104) discuss one such approach. Application of methods used in genetic pattern analyses to nutritional epidemiology could prove valuable but raises important issues that need to be considered because dietary and genetic studies often address different types of questions in analyzing interrelated variables. These different aims require statistical methods that assume different characteristics of the underlying patterns. The authors briefly describe such differences to facilitate interpretation and applications of previous and future pattern studies.
Estimating the Natural Rate of Interest: A SVAR Approach

For the successful conduct of monetary policy the central bank needs reliable indicators of the monetary policy stance. A recently often advocated one is the gap between the real, market and the natural rate of interest. In this article we estimate the historical time series of the natural rate of interest using a structural vector autoregressive model. This method returns plausible results and thus seems to be well designed for the estimation of the natural rate of interest. We show that the natural rate exhibits quite substantial variability over time, of comparable magnitude to the variability of the real interest rate. We also find that it is a procyclical variable. We conclude that the gap between the natural and real market interest rates can be considered a useful, although not perfect, indicator of the stance of monetary policy.