Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The effect of neck manipulation on excitability of the motor cortex

XI CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION 1 1.1 Manual Therapy 1 1.1.1 Background 1 1.1.2 Manual Therapy Techniques 2 1.1.2.1 Cavitation 3 1.1.3 Mechanisms Underlying the Effect of Manual Therapy 4 1.2 Neurophysiological Mechanisms 6 1.2.1 Spinal Cord Modulation 6 1.2.2 Supraspinal Modulation 7 1.2.2.1 Cortical Pathways 7 1.2.2.2 The Corticospinal Tract 8 1.2.2.3 Transcortical Long-Loop Reflex 9 1.2.2.4 Brainstem and Accessary Pathways 9 1.3 Manual Therapy Effects on the Motor System 11 1.3.1 Effect of Manipulation on Peripheral Afferents 11 1.3.1.1 Joint Afferents (group II, III and IV) 11 1.3.1.2 Muscle Afferents (group I, II) 12 1.3.1.3 Cutaneous Afferents 12 1.3.1.4 Nociceptor Afferents 12 1.3.2 Assessing Motor Effects 13 1.3.3 Effect of Manipulation on the Motor System 14 1.3.3.1 Pain-Spasm-Pain Cycle 14 1.3.3.2 Effect of Pain on Motor Output 15 1.3.3.3 Effect of Manipulation on Motor Output 16 1.3.3.4 Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation 17 1.4 Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation 20 1.4. 1 Methodology 20 1.4. 1.1 Cortical Excitability in an Active Motor System 21 1.4. 2 Reliability with TMS 22 1.4. 2.1 Firing Thresholds 22 1.4. 2.2 Within-Subject Variability 22 1.4. 2.3 Variation between Individuals 23 1.4. 3 Methods Used to Reduce Variability 24 1.4. 3.1 Optimal Site 25 1.4. 3.2 Averaging 25 1.4. 3.3 Percentage Change Calculation 25 1.4. 3.4 Coil Type 26
Synthesis and anticancer activity of new flavonoid analogs and inconsistencies in assays related to proliferation and viability measurements

Flavonoids have been studied intensely for their ability to act as anti-carcinogenic, anti-inflammatory, anti-viral and anti-aging agents and are often marketed as supplements related to their anti-inflammatory activity. Previous studies have primarily focused on the effects of polar natural flavonoids. We examined the activity of novel hydrophobic and lipophilic flavonols against human DU-145 and PC-3 prostate cancer cell lines. All flavonol analogs were more active than the naturally occurring flavonols quercetin, kaempferol, kaempferide and galangin. The most potent analogs were 6.5-fold more active against DU-145 and PC-3 cells than quercetin and fell within the biologically relevant concentration range (low micromolar). We also evaluated the potential toxic effects of flavonol analogs on normal cells, an assessment that has frequently been ignored when studying the anticancer effects of flavonoids. During these analyses, we discovered that various metabolic and DNA staining assays were unreliable methods for assessing cell viability of flavonoids. Flavonoids reduce colorimetric dyes such as MTT and Alamar Blue in the absence of cells. We showed that flavonol-treated prostate cancer cells were stained less intensely with crystal violet than untreated cells at non-toxic concentrations. The trypan blue exclusion assay was selected as a reliable alternative for measuring cell viability.
An Analytical Capacitance Model of Temperature-Sensitive, Large-Displacement Multimorph Cantilevers: Numerical and Experimental Validation

This paper presents a new experimentally validated analytical capacitance macromodel for microelectromechanical systems large-displacement cantilever beams. The presented model successfully captures 1) the deformed cantilever shape under large-displacement conditions and when the beam is subjected to simultaneous thermal and residual stresses; 2) the electric field and capacitance between the curled beam and an electrode underneath it from room temperature to over 200 °C. All analytical models are verified through finite-element analysis and, for the first time, experimentally validated for deflections over 120 μm and temperatures above 200 °C. We start by extending a multimorph model originally proposed to analyze piezoelectric actuators, to also consider thermal and residual (postfabrication) strains under large-displacement conditions. The model is experimentally validated through measurements conducted on SiO2/Ti/Au cantilevers fabricated on silicon wafers. The average error between the measured and simulated displacements is less than 4% and 3% at the beam midpoints and tips, respectively, for the entire range of 20-250 °C . Capacitance measurements conducted to over 200 °C show an average deviation from the macromodel of 6.4% over the range of 20-213 °C. The standard deviation for capacitance error is 5.4%, and the maximum error is 15.3%.
Detection of Prosthetic Hip Infection at Revision Arthroplasty by Immunofluorescence Microscopy and PCR Amplification of the Bacterial 16S rRNA Gene

ABSTRACT In this study the detection rates of bacterial infection of hip prostheses by culture and nonculture methods were compared for 120 patients with total hip revision surgery. By use of strict anaerobic bacteriological practice during the processing of samples and without enrichment, the incidence of infection by culture of material dislodged from retrieved prostheses after ultrasonication (sonicate) was 22%. Bacteria were observed by immunofluorescence microscopy in 63% of sonicate samples with a monoclonal antibody specific forPropionibacterium acnes and polyclonal antiserum specific for Staphylococcus spp. The bacteria were present either as single cells or in aggregates of up to 300 bacterial cells. These aggregates were not observed without sonication to dislodge the biofilm. Bacteria were observed in all of the culture-positive samples, and in some cases in which only one type of bacterium was identified by culture, both coccoid and coryneform bacteria were observed by immunofluorescence microscopy. Bacteria from skin-flake contamination were readily distinguishable from infecting bacteria by immunofluorescence microscopy. Examination of skin scrapings did not reveal large aggregates of bacteria but did reveal skin cells. These were not observed in the sonicates. Bacterial DNA was detected in 72% of sonicate samples by PCR amplification of a region of the bacterial 16S rRNA gene with universal primers. All of the culture-positive samples were also positive for bacterial DNA. Evidence of high-level infiltration either of neutrophils or of lymphocytes or macrophages into associated tissue was observed in 73% of patients. Our results indicate that the incidence of prosthetic joint infection is grossly underestimated by current culture detection methods. It is therefore imperative that current clinical practice with regard to the detection and subsequent treatment of prosthetic joint infection be reassessed in the light of these results.
The weight of experience : an investigation of probability weighting under decisions from experience

In decisions from experience tasks objective information regarding payoffs and probabilities must be inferred from samples of possible outcomes. A series of recent experiments has revealed that people show deviating choice behaviour in such tasks, indicating underweighting of small probabilities instead of overweighting of small probabilities as in decisions from description. In a range of experiments, the research presented in this thesis provides a new direction by showing that such reversals from overweighting to underweighting in decisions from experience are very robust and can be replicated even if all the existing explanations - sampling error, recency weighting and judgement error - are experimentally controlled for. Furthermore, reversals were replicated within common decision making biases like the common ratio effect. An important, but unexpected, new finding has been the observation of a reversed reflection effect under decisions from experience. This suggests that the difference between choice behaviour may not be restricted to underlying transformations of probabilities, as suggested in the literature. Drawing from an extensive range of model tests and parameter estimations, it is also demonstrated that the differences are reflected in the best fitting parameter values for prospect theory under decisions from experience. However, it is also shown that simple reinforcement models, which provide a more intuitive rationale for experiential choice behaviour, can account for the data just as well, without any assumptions regarding the weighting of probabilities.
Quality Assessment of the Breast Meat from WoorimatdagTM and Broilers

The objective of this study was to compare the characteristics that define the quality of WoorimatdagTM (WM, a certified meat-type commercial Korea indigenous chicken breed) and a commercial broiler breed (Ross, CB). Two hundred WM and 200 CB chickens that were 1-d-old and mixed sex were obtained from a commercial hatchery and randomly assigned to floor pens (20 chickens per pen, 3.0×2.0 m) and raised under the same environmental conditions. WM breast meat contained significantly higher crude protein and ash as well as lower crude fat than CB breast meat (p<0.05). WM breast meat had slightly higher alanine, histidine, isoleucine, and glycine as well as lower phenylalanine content than CB breast meat (p<0.05), and the WM breast meat had a low ratio of unsaturated to saturated fatty acid composition (p<0.05). However, arachidonic acid composition was higher in the WM than the CB breast meat. In addition, the inosin-5’-monophosphate content was also higher in the WM compared with the CB breast (p<0.05). The WM breast meat had higher total collagen content compared with CB breast meat. WM soup taste received higher scores with regard to sensory evaluation compared with CB soup (p<0.05). From these results, we conclude that higher amount of protein and flavor precursors and lower amount of fat in the breast meat of WM could be attractive by consumer when compared with CB.
SiO2/ZnO Composite Hollow Sub-Micron Fibers: Fabrication from Facile Single Capillary Electrospinning and Their Photoluminescence Properties

In this work, SiO2/ZnO composite hollow sub-micron fibers were fabricated by a facile single capillary electrospinning technique followed by calcination, using tetraethyl orthosilicate (TEOS), polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP) and ZnO nanoparticles as raw materials. The characterization results of the scanning electron microscopy (SEM), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), X-ray diffraction (XRD) and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR) spectra indicated that the as-prepared composite hollow fibers consisted of amorphous SiO2 and hexagonal wurtzite ZnO. The products revealed uniform tubular structure with outer diameters of 400–500 nm and wall thickness of 50–60 nm. The gases generated and the directional escaped mechanism was proposed to illustrate the formation of SiO2/ZnO composite hollow sub-micron fibers. Furthermore, a broad blue emission band was observed in the photoluminescence (PL) of SiO2/ZnO composite hollow sub-micron fibers, exhibiting great potential applications as blue light-emitting candidate materials.
Functional outcome at 2.5, 5, 9, and 24 months after injury in the Netherlands.

BACKGROUND The collection of empirical data on the frequency, severity, and duration of functioning is a prerequisite to identify patient groups with long term or permanent disability. METHODS We fielded postal questionnaires in a stratified sample of 8,564 injury patients aged 15 years and older, who had visited an emergency department in the Netherlands. Measurements were at 2.5, 5, 9, and 24 months after the injury and included a generic health status classification (EQ-5D), socio-demographic, and medical information. We analyzed determinants of long-term functional outcome by multivariate regression analysis. RESULTS Five months after the injury health status of nonhospitalized injury patients was comparable to the general population's health (EQ-5D summary measure 0.87). Health status of patients admitted for 3 days or less improved until 9 months (0.82). For those admitted more than 3 days health status improved until 24 months (0.48 toward 0.67), but remained below population norms. Hospitalization, age and sex (females), type of injury (spinal cord injury, hip fracture, and lower extremity injury), and comorbidity were significant predictors of poor functioning in the long term. CONCLUSIONS Recovery patterns vary widely between nonhospitalized, shortly, and long hospitalized injury patients. Nonhospitalized injury patients recover within 5 months from an injury whereas a considerable group of hospitalized injury patients suffer from persistent health problems. Our study indicates the importance of health monitoring with an adapted longitudinal design for injury patients. The time intervals used should match the various stages of the recovery process, which depends on the severity of the injury studied.
Aircraft Trajectory Prediction Made Easy with Predictive Analytics

At the heart of Air Traffic Management (ATM) lies the Decision Support Systems (DST) that rely upon accurate trajectory prediction to determine how the airspace will look like in the future to make better decisions and advisories. Dealing with airspace that is prone to congestion due to environmental factors still remains the challenge especially when a deterministic approach is used in the trajectory prediction process. In this paper, we describe a novel stochastic trajectory prediction approach for ATM that can be used for more efficient and realistic flight planning and to assist airspace flow management, potentially resulting in higher safety, capacity, and efficiency commensurate with fuel savings thereby reducing emissions for a better environment. Our approach considers airspace as a 3D grid network, where each grid point is a location of a weather observation. We hypothetically build cubes around these grid points, so the entire airspace can be considered as a set of cubes. Each cube is defined by its centroid, the original grid point, and associated weather parameters that remain homogeneous within the cube during a period of time. Then, we align raw trajectories to a set of cube centroids which are basically fixed 3D positions independent of trajectory data. This creates a new form of trajectories which are 4D joint cubes, where each cube is a segment that is associated with not only spatio-temporal attributes but also with weather parameters. Next, we exploit machine learning techniques to train inference models from historical data and apply a stochastic model, a Hidden Markov Model (HMM), to predict trajectories taking environmental uncertainties into account. During the process, we apply time series clustering to generate input observations from an excessive set of weather parameters to feed into the Viterbi algorithm. Our experiments use a real trajectory dataset with pertaining weather observations and demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach to the trajectory prediction process for ATM.
Optimization of Surface Orientation for High-Performance, Low-Power and Robust FinFET SRAM

We analyze the impact of surface orientation on stability, performance and power of 6-T and 8-T FinFET SRAMs. We show that, in comparison to 32nm 6-T FinFET SRAM cell with devices of (110) orientation, multi-oriented devices with optimized orientation can improve the static noise margin (SNM) by 23-35% and access time (~22-33%), while consuming the same leakage power. For 8-T FinFET SRAM, multi-oriented devices can improve write stability substantially (~17%) with negligible area overhead
TCP Congestion Control and Heavy Tails

Abstract Long-range dependence has been observed in many recent Internet traffic measurements. Previous studies have shown that there is a close relationship between heavy-tailed distribution of various traffic parameters and the long-range dependent property. In this paper, we use a simple Markov chain model to argue that when the loss rate is relatively high, TCP''s adaptive congestion control mechanism indeed generates traffic with heavy-tailed OFF, or idle, periods, and therefore introduces long-range dependence into the overall traffic. Moreover, the degree of such long-range dependence, measured by the Hurst parameter, increases as the loss rate increases, agreeing with many previous measurement-based studies. In addition, we observe that more variable initial retransmission timeout values for different packets introduces more variable packet inter-arrival times, which increases the burstiness of the overall traffic. Finally, we show that high loss conditions can lead to a heavy-tailed distribution of transmission times even for constant-sized files. This means that file size variability need not be the only cause of heavy-tailed variability in transmission durations.
Fluid-driven origami-inspired artificial muscles

Significance Artificial muscles are flexible actuators with capabilities similar to, or even beyond, natural muscles. They have been widely used in many applications as alternatives to more traditional rigid electromagnetic motors. Numerous studies focus on rapid design and low-cost fabrication of artificial muscles with customized performances. Here, we present an architecture for fluidic artificial muscles with unprecedented performance-to-cost ratio. These artificial muscles can be programed to produce not only a single contraction but also complex multiaxial actuation, and even controllable motion with multiple degrees of freedom. Moreover, a wide variety of materials and fabrication processes can be used to build the artificial muscles with other functions beyond basic actuation. Artificial muscles hold promise for safe and powerful actuation for myriad common machines and robots. However, the design, fabrication, and implementation of artificial muscles are often limited by their material costs, operating principle, scalability, and single-degree-of-freedom contractile actuation motions. Here we propose an architecture for fluid-driven origami-inspired artificial muscles. This concept requires only a compressible skeleton, a flexible skin, and a fluid medium. A mechanical model is developed to explain the interaction of the three components. A fabrication method is introduced to rapidly manufacture low-cost artificial muscles using various materials and at multiple scales. The artificial muscles can be programed to achieve multiaxial motions including contraction, bending, and torsion. These motions can be aggregated into systems with multiple degrees of freedom, which are able to produce controllable motions at different rates. Our artificial muscles can be driven by fluids at negative pressures (relative to ambient). This feature makes actuation safer than most other fluidic artificial muscles that operate with positive pressures. Experiments reveal that these muscles can contract over 90% of their initial lengths, generate stresses of ∼600 kPa, and produce peak power densities over 2 kW/kg—all equal to, or in excess of, natural muscle. This architecture for artificial muscles opens the door to rapid design and low-cost fabrication of actuation systems for numerous applications at multiple scales, ranging from miniature medical devices to wearable robotic exoskeletons to large deployable structures for space exploration.
Exploring the inner speech process in verbal working memory

Verbal working memory (VWM) is the ability to dynamically preserve and manipulate verbal information for brief periods of time. VWM is maintained through a silent "inner speech" process (Baddeley, 1986; Baddeley & Hitch, 1974). It is well established in the behavioral and neuroimaging literature that VWM can be disrupted by the simultaneous (concurrent) performance of simple speech tasks (e.g. overt concurrent articulation of a word or digit) (Caplan et al., 2000; Larsen & Baddeley, 2003). Our primary goal in these experiments is to test whether VWM and overt concurrent articulation will have one or more overlapping regions of activation in areas commonly associated with speech processing, and to determine whether such regions are active during simple tapping tasks. Due to concerns about overt movement artifacts, we also explore covert version of speech and tapping tasks. Experiment 1 was a behavioral study that examined the effects of overt and covert concurrent articulation and finger tapping on VWM. We found that overtly and covertly concurrently articulating "the" were the most detrimental to subjects' recall ability. These effects could be attributed to dual-task interference effects at the level of inner speech in VWM, thus, indicating a shared set of neural regions for all speech and VWM. At the same time, the effect sizes were different for the overt and covert versions of our tasks, raising questions about the common assumption of shared substrates. Experiment 2 was an imaging study designed to examine whether there were shared neural regions between simple speech tasks and VWM and to further explore differences between overt and covert tasks. The results from this experiment provided only weak evidence implicating two candidate regions as the shared locus of activation: the left cerebellum and left superior temporal gyrus. We also found interesting evidence in support of distinct sets of regions for overt versus covert versions of the tasks.
When Knowing You Are Doing Well Hinders Performance

Summary The effect of two types of verbal consequences, rule-following feedback and task performance feedback, on rule-induced insensitivity to programmed schedules of reinforcement were examined. Rule-following feedback could be either accurate or non-contingently positive. The task involved moving a sign through a grid using telegraph keys operating on a multiple DRL 6/FR 18 schedule of reinforcement in the presence of an initially accurate rule. After acquisition, the multiple schedule was changed without notice to a FR 1/FI Yoked schedule. Accurate rule-following feedback plus feedback on task performance produced striking insensitivity to the DRL 6 to FR 1 schedule change, the opposite of what might be expected by a common sense analysis of task performance feedback, even after controlling for contact with the changed contingency. It is argued that findings such as these can only be understood by considering the mutual verbal relations evoked by the combinations of rules and feedback, rather than treating feedback as a simple consequential event or as a verbal consequence whose effects do not depend on the relations sustained with other events.
The Savanna Principle

Why do microeconomic theories (such as decision theory and game theory) often fail to predict human behavior despite their mathematical elegance and deductive rigor? I suggest that such empirical failures stem from the theory's misconception of how the human brain functions. Drawing on evolutionary psychology, I propose the Savanna Principle, which posits that a hypothesis about human behavior fails to the extent that its scope conditions and assumptions are inconsistent with the ancestral environment, and its experimental corollary, that the Savanna Principle holds (and the hypothesis fails) to the extent that the conditions of the experiment resemble the ancestral environment. I suggest that the Savanna Principle and its corollary might together explain the relative empirical failure of noncooperative game theory and public choice theory, and the relative success of network exchange theory and competitive price theory tested in double auction markets in experimental economics. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.