Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE Comments on ''Balance and the Slow Quasimanifold: Some Explicit Results''

The concept of slow vortical dynamics and its role in theoretical understanding is central to geophysical fluid dynamics. It leads, for example, to ‘‘potential vorticity thinking’’ (Hoskins et al. 1985). Mathematically, one imagines an invariant manifold within the phase space of solutions, called the slow manifold (Leith 1980; Lorenz 1980), to which the dynamics are constrained. Whether this slow manifold truly exists has been a major subject of inquiry over the past 20 years. It has become clear that an exact slow manifold is an exceptional case, restricted to steady or perhaps temporally periodic flows (Warn 1997). Thus the concept of a ‘‘fuzzy slow manifold’’ (Warn and Ménard 1986) has been suggested. The idea is that nearly slow dynamics will occur in a stochastic layer about the putative slow manifold. The natural question then is, how thick is this layer? In a recent paper, Ford et al. (2000) argue that Lighthill emission—the spontaneous emission of freely propagating acoustic waves by unsteady vortical flows—is applicable to the problem of balance, with the Mach number Ma replaced by the Froude number F, and that it is a fundamental mechanism for this fuzziness. They consider the rotating shallow-water equations and find emission of inertia–gravity waves at O(F 2). This is rather surprising at first sight, because several studies of balanced dynamics with the rotating shallow-water equations have gone beyond second order in F, and found only an exponentially small unbalanced component (Warn and Ménard 1986; Lorenz and Krishnamurthy 1987; Bokhove and Shepherd 1996; Wirosoetisno and Shepherd 2000). We have no technical objection to the analysis of Ford et al. (2000), but wish to point out that it depends crucially on R * 1, where R is the Rossby number. This condition requires the ratio
Commenting : A New Political Information Space

Though still a small subsection of the internet, weblogs are becoming an increasingly prominent space for finding and discussing information in particular political information. But because of their newness, the question remains as to what are the possible implications of political blogs on people’s current information reality. As a way to better understand political blogs as a space for gaining political information and also discussing that information, a pilot study was developed whose main focus was to understand the nature of the comments posted to political blogs. There has been much speculation in the popular and scholarly press about the possible democratic implications of people writing blogs, with claims that the medium opens up a new space for deliberation and participation. However, little work has focused on blog commenters the people who are reading blogs and responding based on what they have read. And yet, to understand the blogosphere as a new deliberative or political information space, it is critical to analyze those who are engaging in the discussion. Therefore, this study focuses not on the principal authors of popular blog sites but the readers who are inspired to post their responses.
Failure of cerebellar patients to time finger opening precisely causes ball high-low inaccuracy in overarm throws.

We investigated the idea that the cerebellum is required for precise timing of fast skilled arm movements by studying one situation where timing precision is required, namely finger opening in overarm throwing. Specifically, we tested the hypothesis that in overarm throws made by cerebellar patients, ball high-low inaccuracy is due to disordered timing of finger opening. Six cerebellar patients and six matched control subjects were instructed to throw tennis balls at three different speeds from a seated position while angular positions in three dimensions of five arm segments were recorded at 1,000 Hz with the search-coil technique. Cerebellar patients threw more slowly than controls, were markedly less accurate, had more variable hand trajectories, and showed increased variability in the timing, amplitude, and velocity of finger opening. Ball high-low inaccuracy was not related to variability in the height or direction of the hand trajectory or to variability in finger amplitude or velocity. Instead, the cause was variable timing of finger opening and thereby ball release occurring on a flattened arc hand trajectory. The ranges of finger opening times and ball release times (timing windows) for 95% of the throws were on average four to five times longer for cerebellar patients; e.g., across subjects mean ball release timing windows for throws made under the medium-speed instruction were 11 ms for controls and 55 ms for cerebellar patients. This increased timing variability could not be explained by disorder in control of force at the fingers. Because finger opening in throwing is likely controlled by a central command, the results implicate the cerebellum in timing the central command that initiates finger opening in this fast skilled multijoint arm movement.
MEDIUM FOR DIFFERENTIATING THE GRAM-NEGATIVE, NONFERMENTING BACILLI OF MEDICAL INTEREST

Sellers, Walter (U.S. Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine, Brooks Air Force Base, Tex.). Medium for differentiating the gram-negative, nonfermenting bacilli of medical interest. J. Bacteriol. 87:46–48. 1964. —An agar-slant medium is described for differentiating gram-negative, nonfermenting bacilli of medical interest. Differences in the ability of bacilli to grow anaerobically in the presence of nitrate, to produce pH changes, to produce N2 from nitrite and nitrate (singly and in combination), to fluoresce, and to oxidize a drop of glucose solution to acid in the presence of high peptone concentrations were used in the development of the medium. Organisms differentiated by the medium include Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Bacterium anitratum, Mima polymorpha, and Vibrio alcaligenes or Alcaligenes faecalis.
A comparative evaluation of the effectiveness of an anorganic bone matrix/cell binding peptide with an open flap debridement in human infrabony defects: a clinical and radiographic study.

AIM The development of biologic modalities designed to enhance bone regeneration and wound healing of specific periodontal sites continues to unfold. This is accomplished through the cell binding activity of Type-I collagen provided by a synthetic cell binding peptide (P-15) which is incorporated in a scaffold of anorganic bovine matrix (ABM). This combination is designed to facilitate the attachment, migration, and differentiation of cells. The objective of this study is to clinically and radiographically evaluate the effectiveness of the combination of ABM and P-15 (ABM/P-15) 'putty' during regenerative periodontal procedures. METHODS AND MATERIALS A total of 20 interproximal intraosseous defects in 16 patients, (8 males, 8 females), age 22-48 years (mean 34.45) were recruited and divided equally into two experimental groups. Following open flap debridement (OFD), the defect sites in a test group were grafted with a bovine-derived xenograft enriched with a cell binding peptide. The defect sites in a control group were treated with only OFD. Appropriate periodontal maintenance schedules were followed; at six months, clinical and radiographic assessments for soft tissue and hard tissue were performed for documentation and finalization of results. RESULTS Statistical analysis using student paired 't' test analyses of the patient mean value from the 16 patients revealed the ABM/P-15 'putty' graft group demonstrated significantly better mean defect fill of 3.4 + 0.7 mm (70.5%) versus mean defect fill of 0.9 mm (17.33%) for defects treated with only OFD. Soft tissue findings showed significant differences among treatment with ABM/P-15 compared to OFD. CONCLUSIONS These results indicate the use of P-15 synthetic cell binding peptide combined with ABM yields better clinical results in conjunction with OFD than with OFD alone.
The potential of the aviation sector to reduce greenhouse gas emissions using biojet fuels

iii LAY SUMMARY . iv PREFACE . v TABLE OF CONTENTS.vi LIST OF TABLES . ix LIST OF FIGURES . xi LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS . xii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS . xiii DEDICATION . xiv CHAPTER 1: Introduction and Background . 1 1.
Ritodrine in the treatment of preterm labour: a study of 213 patients

Summary. In a study of 213 patients with diagnosed, uncomplicated preterm labour up to 33 weeks gestation, intravenous followed by oral ritodrine (Yutopar) was found to be an effective treatment. Success rate was related to Bishop score at commencement of therapy, the mean time to delivery being 36.9 days. It was ≥56 days in 26.5% of patients and ≥2 days in 91%. Relapse rate was low if infusion was followed by an adequate oral dosage. Concurrent signs and symptoms were seen in a third of patients but drug withdrawal was only necessary in seven. There was no significant difference in the incidence of respiratory distress syndrome between the infants of patients treated with ritodrine alone and those of patients treated with ritodrine plus steroids.
An adaptive FEC code control algorithm for mobile wireless sensor networks

For better performance over a noisy channel, mobile wireless networks transmit packets with forward error correction (FEC) code to recover corrupt bits without retransmission. The static determination of the FEC code size, however, degrades their performance since the evaluation of the underlying channel state is hardly accurate and even widely varied. Our measurements over a wireless sensor network, for example, show that the average bit error rate (BER) per second or per minute continuously changes from 0 up to 10−3. Under this environment, wireless networks waste their bandwidth since they can't deterministically select the appropriate size of FEC code matching to the fluctuating channel BER. This paper proposes an adaptive FEC technique called adaptive FEC code control (AFECCC), which dynamically tunes the amount of FEC code per packet based on the arrival of acknowledgement packets without any specific information such as signal to noise ratio (SNR) or BER from receivers. Our simulation experiments indicate that AFECCC performs better than any static FEC algorithm and some conventional dynamic hybrid FEC/ARQ algorithms when wireless channels are modeled with two-state Markov chain, chaotic map, and traces collected from real sensor networks. Finally, AFECCC implemented in sensor motes achieves better performance than any static FEC algorithm.
Center and surgeon volume influence the revision rate following unicondylar knee replacement: an analysis of 23,400 medial cemented unicondylar knee replacements.

BACKGROUND Revision rates following unicondylar knee replacement vary among reporting institutions. Revision rates from institutions involved in the design of these implants and independent single-center series are comparable with those following total knee replacement, suggesting that higher operative volumes and surgical enthusiasm improve revision outcomes. METHODS This registry-based cohort study involved the analysis of 23,400 medial cemented Oxford unicondylar knee replacements for the treatment of osteoarthritis. Total center and surgeon operative volumes were calculated over an eight-year time span since the inception of the registry (April 2003 to December 2010). The revision rate was calculated according to center volume and surgeon volume, each of which was grouped into five categories. The groups were compared with use of life tables, Kaplan-Meier plots, and Cox regression models that adjusted for variations in age, sex, and American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) grade among the groups. RESULTS A total of 919 surgeons and a total of 366 centers performed at least one replacement, with the majority performing a small number of procedures. The revision rate for the centers with the lowest volume (fifty or fewer procedures over the eight-year study period) was 1.62 (95% confidence interval [CI], 1.42 to 1.82) revisions per 100 component years; this was significantly higher than the rate for the centers with the highest volume (more than 400 procedures), which was 1.16 (95% CI, 0.97 to 1.36) revisions per 100 component years. The five-year implant survival rate of 92.3% (95% CI, 91.2% to 93.3%) for the lowest-volume centers was significantly lower than the rate of 94.1% (95% CI, 93.0% to 95.2%) for the highest-volume centers. Similarly, the revision rate for the surgeons with the lowest volume (twenty-five or fewer procedures), 2.16 (95% CI, 1.91 to 2.41) revisions per 100 component years, was significantly higher than that for the surgeons with the highest volume (more than 200 procedures), 0.80 (95% CI, 0.62 to 0.98) revisions per 100 component years. The five-year survival rate of 90.1% (95% CI, 88.8% to 91.3%) for the lowest-volume surgeons was also significantly lower than the rate of 96.0% (95% CI, 95.0% to 97.0%) for the highest-volume surgeons. When center and surgeon volume were considered simultaneously, the hazard of revision was greater for lower-volume surgeons at lower-volume centers compared with higher-volume surgeons at higher-volume centers (hazard ratio = 1.87 [95% CI, 1.58 to 2.22], p < 0.001). CONCLUSIONS High-volume centers and surgeons specializing in such procedures had superior results following unicondylar knee replacement compared with their low-volume counterparts. These results suggest that centers and surgeons should undertake a minimum of thirteen such procedures per year to achieve results comparable with the high-volume operators.
Content-based image retrieval using hierarchical temporal memory

Several querying interfaces for content-based image retrieval (CBIR) are reviewed and a new CBIR system is introduced that uses Hierarchical Temporal Memory for the automatic indexing of architectural images and provides a sketch-based and iconic index querying interface. Experimentation shows the system is robust for recognizing query images under varying amounts of noise, distortion, occlusion, blurring, and affine transformation.
[A cost-effectiveness study on a case-finding program of tuberculosis through screening those suspects with chronic cough symptoms in the rich rural areas].

OBJECTIVE To study the feasibility and cost-effectiveness of a case-finding program on tuberculosis (TB) in richer rural areas. METHODS Screening was implemented every three months for a total period of 9 months, in rural areas with high case notification rates. Three villages, each with ten thousand population, were selected to carry out a household screening program. A suspect was defined as who coughed for more than 3 weeks. The suspect was then referred to further diagnosis in county TB dispensary to undergo chest X-ray and sputum test. RESULTS Of the 86,168 community population screened, 26 TB patients were identified with 7 of them were smear positive. The ratio of effectiveness vs. cost decreased on the second but slightly increased on the third screening program. The direct costs for the 3 screening programs were 6,312,397 and 1637 RMB respectively. Of total direct cost, 5.9% was paid by TB patients, whereas 35.9% was through financing of the county itself. CONCLUSION The community household screening program could achieve higher case detection rate than passive case-finding approach which could be used in richer areas with low case detection rate in China.
The Application of Visual Saliency Models in Objective Image Quality Assessment: A Statistical Evaluation

Advances in image quality assessment have shown the potential added value of including visual attention aspects in its objective assessment. Numerous models of visual saliency are implemented and integrated in different image quality metrics (IQMs), but the gain in reliability of the resulting IQMs varies to a large extent. The causes and the trends of this variation would be highly beneficial for further improvement of IQMs, but are not fully understood. In this paper, an exhaustive statistical evaluation is conducted to justify the added value of computational saliency in objective image quality assessment, using 20 state-of-the-art saliency models and 12 best-known IQMs. Quantitative results show that the difference in predicting human fixations between saliency models is sufficient to yield a significant difference in performance gain when adding these saliency models to IQMs. However, surprisingly, the extent to which an IQM can profit from adding a saliency model does not appear to have direct relevance to how well this saliency model can predict human fixations. Our statistical analysis provides useful guidance for applying saliency models in IQMs, in terms of the effect of saliency model dependence, IQM dependence, and image distortion dependence. The testbed and software are made publicly available to the research community.
THE WILLIAM DAVIDSON INSTITUTE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN BUSINESS SCHOOL Worker Flows , Job Flows and Firm Wage Policies : An Analysis of Slovenia

Like many transition economies, Slovenia is undergoing profound changes in the workings of the labor market with potentially greater flexibility in terms of both wage and employment adjustment. We investigate the impact of the changing labor market for Slovenia using unique longitudinal matched employer-employee data that permits measurement of employment transitions and wages for workers and links of the workers to the firms with whom they are employed. We can thus measure worker flows and job flows in a comprehensive and integrated manner. We find a high pace of job flows in Slovenia especially for young, small, private and foreign owned firms and for young, less educated workers. While job flows have approached the rates observed in developed market economies, the excess of worker flows above job flows is lower than that observed in market economies. A key factor in the patterns of the worker and job flows is the determination of wages in Slovenia. A base wage schedule provides strict guidelines for minimum wages for different skill categories. However, firms are permitted to offer higher wages to an individual based upon the success of the worker and/or the firm. Our analysis shows that firms deviate from the base wage schedule significantly and that the idiosyncratic wage policies of firms are closely related to the observed pattern of worker and job flows at the firm. Firms with more flexible wages (measured as less compression of wages within the firm) have less employment instability and also are able to improve the match quality of its workers. JEL Classification Codes: J23, J31, J41, J61, P23, P31
Exploiting Offload Enabled Network Interfaces

Network interface cards are one of the key components to achieve efficient parallel performance. In the past, they have gained new functionalities such as lossless transmissionand remote direct memory access that are now ubiquitous in high-performance systems. Prototypes of next generation network cards now offer new features that facilitate device programming. In this work, various possible uses of network offload features are explored. We use the Portals 4 interface specification as an example to demonstrate various techniques such as fully asynchronous, multi-schedule asynchronous, and solo collective communications. MPI collectives are used as a proof of concept for how to leverage our proposed semantics. In a solo collective, one or more processes can participate in a collective communication without being aware of it. This semantic enables fully asynchronous algorithms. We discuss how the application of the solo collectives can improve the performance of iterative methods, such as multigrid solvers. The results obtained show how this work may be used to accelerate existing MPI applications, but they also display how these techniques could ease the programming of algorithms outside of the Bulk Synchronous Parallel (BSP) model.
Arbitrarily Varying Wiretap Channels with Type Constrained States

The arbitrarily varying wiretap channel (AVWTC) is an open problem largely because of two main challenges. Not only does it capture the difficulty of the compound wiretap channel (another open problem) as a special case, it also requires that secrecy is ensured with respect to exponentially many possible channel state sequences. This work overcomes the second aforementioned difficulty. To that end, we consider an AVWTC with a type constraint on the allowed state sequences, and derive a single- letter characterization of its correlated-random (CR) assisted semantic-security (SS) capacity. The allowed state sequences are the ones in a typical set around a single constraining type. SS is established by showing that the mutual information between the message and the eavesdropper's observations is negligible even when maximized over all message distributions, choices of state sequences and realizations of the CR-code. Both the achievability and the converse proofs of the type constrained coding theorem rely on stronger claims than actually required. The direct part establishes a novel single-letter lower bound on the CR-assisted SS-capacity of an AVWTC with state sequences constrained by any convex and closed set of state probability mass functions. This bound achieves the best known single-letter secrecy rates for a corresponding compound wiretap channel over the same constraint set. In contrast to other single-letter results in the AVWTC literature, the derivation does not assume the existence of a best channel to the eavesdropper. Optimality is a consequence of a max-inf upper bound on the CR-assisted SS-capacity of an AVWTC with state sequences constrained to any collection of type-classes. When adjusted to the aforementioned compound WTC, the upper bound simplifies to a max-min structure, thus strengthening the previously best known single- letter upper bound by Liang et al. that has a min- max form.
Lignin biosynthesis.

The lignin biosynthetic pathway has been studied for more than a century but has undergone major revisions over the past decade. Significant progress has been made in cloning new genes by genetic and combined bioinformatics and biochemistry approaches. In vitro enzymatic assays and detailed analyses of mutants and transgenic plants altered in the expression of lignin biosynthesis genes have provided a solid basis for redrawing the monolignol biosynthetic pathway, and structural analyses have shown that plant cell walls can tolerate large variations in lignin content and structure. In some cases, the potential value for agriculture of transgenic plants with modified lignin structure has been demonstrated. This review presents a current picture of monolignol biosynthesis, polymerization, and lignin structure.