Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Reduction of Spinal Loads Through Adjustable Interventions at the Origin and Destination of Palletizing Tasks

Objective: This article evaluates the effectiveness of two interventions: a self-leveling pallet carousel designed to position the loads vertically and horizontally at origin, and an adjustable cart designed to raise loads vertically at destination to reduce spine loads. Background: Low back disorders among workers in manual material handling industries are very prevalent and have been linked to manual palletizing operations. Evidence into the effectiveness of ergonomic interventions is limited, with no research that investigates interventions with adjustable load location. Method: Thirteen males experienced in manual material handling participated in simulated order selecting tasks where spine loads were quantified for each intervention condition: carousel to traditional cart, pallet to traditional cart, pallet to adjustable cart, and carousel to adjustable cart. Results: The results showed that combining both devices results in reduction in spine compression (61%), anterior-posterior shear (72%), and lateral shear (63%) compared to traditional palletizing conditions. Individually, the carousel was responsible for the greatest reductions, but the lowest values were typically achieved by combining the adjustable cart and carousel. Conclusion: The combination of the interventions (self-leveling carousel and adjustable cart) was most effective in reducing the spine loads when compared to the traditional pallet-cart condition. The individual interventions also reduced the loads compared to the traditional condition. Application: With de-palletizing/palletizing tasks being a major source of low back injuries, the combination of self-leveling carousel and adjustable cart has been found to be effective in reducing the peak spine loading as compared to traditional pallet on floor and nonadjustable flat cart conditions.
Associative hierarchical CRFs for object class image segmentation

Most methods for object class segmentation are formulated as a labelling problem over a single choice of quantisation of an image space - pixels, segments or group of segments. It is well known that each quantisation has its fair share of pros and cons; and the existence of a common optimal quantisation level suitable for all object categories is highly unlikely. Motivated by this observation, we propose a hierarchical random field model, that allows integration of features computed at different levels of the quantisation hierarchy. MAP inference in this model can be performed efficiently using powerful graph cut based move making algorithms. Our framework generalises much of the previous work based on pixels or segments. We evaluate its efficiency on some of the most challenging data-sets for object class segmentation, and show it obtains state-of-the-art results.
ERCC1 polymorphism, expression and clinical outcome of oxaliplatin-based adjuvant chemotherapy in gastric cancer.

AIM To determine the influence of excision repair cross complementing group 1 (ERCC1) codon 118 polymorphism and mRNA level on the clinical outcome of gastric cancer patients treated with oxaliplatin-based adjuvant chemotherapy. METHODS Eighty-nine gastric cancer patients treated with oxalipatin-based adjuvant chemotherapy were included in this study. ERCC1 codon 118 C/T polymorphism was tested by polymerase chain reaction-ligation detection reaction (PCR-LDR) method in peripheral blood lymphocytes of those patients; and the intratumoral ERCC1 mRNA expression was measured using reverse transcription PCR in 62 patients whose tumor tissue specimens were available. RESULTS No significant relationship was found between ERCC1 codon 118 polymorphism and ERCC1 mRNA level. The median relapse-free and overall survival period was 20.1 mo and 28.4 mo, respectively. The relapse-free and overall survivals in patients with low levels of ERCC1 mRNA were significantly longer than those in patients with high levels (P<0.05), while there was no significant association found between ERCC1 118 genotypes and the disease prognosis. Multivariate analysis also showed that ERCC1 mRNA level was a potential predictor for relapse and survival in gastric cancer patients treated with oxaliplatin-based adjuvant chemotherapy (P<0.05). CONCLUSION ERCC1 codon 118 polymorphism has no significant impact on ERCC1 mRNA expression, and the intratumoral ERCC1 mRNA level but not codon 118 polymorphism may be a useful predictive parameter for the relapse and survival of gastric cancer patients receiving oxaliplatin-based adjuvant chemotherapy.
Process chain for fabrication of anisotropic optical functional surfaces on polymer components

This paper aims to introduce a process chain for fabrication of anisotropic optical functional surfaces on polymer products. The surface features under investigation are composed of micro serrated ridges. The scope was to maximize the visible contrast between horizontally orthogonal textured surfaces from a certain viewing angle. The process chain comprised three steps: tooling, replication and quality assurance. Tooling was achieved by precision micro milling. Replication processes such as injection moulding, hot embossing, blow moulding, etc. were employed according to the specific type of product. In order to implement the traceability of the manufacturing process, the geometry and dimension of the micro structure on the tool and the replica were assessed via metrological methods. The functionality of the anisotropic surfaces on the polymer replicas were evaluated by a gonioreflectometer and image processing. Eventually, according to the function evaluation of polymer products, the process chain steps will be optimized by tuning the tooling and moulding processes.
PCR detection, identification to species level, and fingerprinting of Campylobacter jejuni and Campylobacter coli direct from diarrheic samples

Three sets of primers were designed for PCR detection and differentiation of Campylobacter jejuni and Campylobacter coli. The first PCR assay was designed to coidentify C. jejuni and C. coli based on their 16S rRNA gene sequences. The second PCR assay, based on the hippuricase gene sequence, identified all tested reference strains of C. jejuni and also strains of that species which lack detectable hippuricase activity. The third PCR assay, based on the sequence of a cloned (putative) aspartokinase gene and the downstream open reading frame, identified all tested reference strains of C. coli. The assays will find immediate application in the rapid identification to species level of isolates. The assays combine with a protocol for purification of total DNA from fecal samples to allow reproducible PCR identification of campylobacters directly from stools. Of 20 clinical samples from which campylobacters had been cultured, we detected C. jejuni in 17, C. coli in 2, and coinfection of C. jejuni and Campylobacter hyointestinalis in 1. These results were concordant with culture and phenotypic identification to species level. Strain typing by PCR-restriction fragment length polymorphism of the flagellin (flaA) gene detected identical flaA types in fecal DNA and the corresponding campylobacter isolate. Twenty-five Campylobacter-negative stool samples gave no reaction with the PCR assays. These PCR assays can rapidly define the occurrence, species incidence, and flaA genotypes of enteropathogenic campylobacters.
Arterial pulsatility as an index of cerebral microangiopathy in diabetes.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE This study was designed to evaluate cerebral hemodynamic changes related to diabetes mellitus (DM) with transcranial Doppler ultrasonography (TCD). METHODS We measured the flow velocities and the Gosling pulsatility index (PI) of the middle cerebral artery (MCA), extracranial internal carotid artery (ICA), and basilar artery (BA) in 56 stroke-free, normotensive patients with type 2 DM and 70 age- and gender-matched healthy volunteers. Patients were divided into 2 groups according to the presence of microvascular complications such as retinopathy, nephropathy, and neuropathy. RESULTS Patients showed slightly lower hematocrit and higher serum fibrinogen levels than control subjects, but other clinical profiles, including stroke risk factors except for diabetes, were comparable between patients and controls. The flow velocity of the ICA but not the MCA and BA in patients regardless of the complication was significantly higher than that in controls. The PIs of the MCA and ICA were significantly higher in patients with complication than those without complication, as well as in controls. The PI of the BA was also significantly higher, even in patients without complication, than in controls. The PIs of the MCA and ICA but not the BA were closely correlated with the duration of DM (r(2)=0.46 and 0.34, respectively). CONCLUSIONS This study defines TCD findings of diabetes-related cerebral hemodynamic changes and suggests that the PI reflects microangiopathic changes of cerebral vessels.
Inventories and the automobile market

This article studies the within-model-year pricing, production, and inventory management of new automobiles. Using new monthly data on U.S. transaction prices, we document that, for the typical vehicle, prices fall over the model year at a 9.0% annual rate. Concurrently, both sales and inventories are hump shaped. To explain these time series, we formulate an industry model for new automobiles in which inventory and pricing decisions are made simultaneously. The model predicts that automakers' build-to-stock inventory management policy substantially influences the time series of prices and sales, accounting for four tenths of the price decline observed over the model year.
UvA Rescue Team 2008 Team Description Paper Virtual Robot competition Rescue Simulation League RoboCup 2008

With the progress made in active exploration, the robots of the UvA Rescue Team are capable of making deliberative decisions about the frontiers to be explored. The robots select the frontiers with maximum information gain. The robots incorporate the positions of their team mates in their decisions, to optimize the gain for the team as a whole. The active exploration is based on the shared occupancy map, which is online generated. During the exploration the robots are constantly looking for victims, which for the UvA Rescue Team is performed by looking for typical color histograms in the images of the omnidirectional camera.
Spinal reflex plasticity in response to alpine skiing in the elderly

The present study was designed to assess the influence of 12 weeks (28.5±2.6 skiing days) of alpine skiing on spinal reflex plasticity, strength and postural control in senior citizens. Therefore, soleus H‐reflexes and postural stability were measured during bipedal quiet and unstable stance in 22 (12 male and 10 female) elderly subjects aged 66.6±1 years. Furthermore, the maximal isometric force was determined in a leg press. The results showed an increased H‐reflex excitability after the training (+39%; P<0.05) while no changes occurred in the background EMG. The postural sway decreased after training (−6.6 cm; P≤0.05) and the maximal force increased (+16.1%; P<0.05). No adaptations in any parameter could be observed in the control group. The present study demonstrated that skiing training was effective to alter the spinal reflex activity in elderly individuals. The increased H‐reflexes correspond to adaptations known from strength training in young subjects. It may be assumed that alpine skiing induced a functional adaptation in that subjects have learned to integrate Ia afferent feedback more efficiently to ensure adequate motoneuron output.
Post-translational modification and conformational state of Heat Shock Protein 90 differentially affect binding of chemically diverse small molecule inhibitors

Heat shock protein 90 (Hsp90) is an essential molecular chaperone in eukaryotes that facilitates the conformational maturation and function of a diverse protein clientele, including aberrant and/or over-expressed proteins that are involved in cancer growth and survival. A role for Hsp90 in supporting the protein homeostasis of cancer cells has buoyed interest in the utility of Hsp90 inhibitors as anti-cancer drugs. Despite the fact that all clinically evaluated Hsp90 inhibitors target an identical nucleotide-binding pocket in the N domain of the chaperone, the precise determinants that affect drug binding in the cellular environment remain unclear, and it is possible that chemically distinct inhibitors may not share similar binding preferences. Here we demonstrate that two chemically unrelated Hsp90 inhibitors, the benzoquinone ansamycin geldanamycin and the purine analog PU-H71, select for overlapping but not identical subpopulations of total cellular Hsp90, even though both inhibitors bind to an amino terminal nucleotide pocket and prevent N domain dimerization. Our data also suggest that PU-H71 is able to access a broader range of N domain undimerized Hsp90 conformations than is geldanamycin and is less affected by Hsp90 phosphorylation, consistent with its broader and more potent anti-tumor activity. A more complete understanding of the impact of the cellular milieu on small molecule inhibitor binding to Hsp90 should facilitate their more effective use in the clinic.
Automatic empirical techniques for developing efficient mpi collective communication routines

Due to the wide use of collective operations in Message Passing Interface (MPI) applications, developing efficient collective communication routines is essential. Despite numerous research efforts for optimizing MPI collective operations, it is still not clear how to obtain MPI collective routines that can achieve high performance across platforms and applications. In particular, while it may not be extremely difficult to develop an efficient communication algorithm for a given platform and a given application, including such an algorithm in an MPI library poses a significant challenge: the communication library is general-purpose and must provide efficient routines for different platforms and applications. In this research, a new library implementation paradigm called delayed finalization of MPI collective communication routines (DF) is proposed for realizing efficient MPI collective routines across platforms and applications. The idea is to postpone the decision of which algorithm to be used for a collective operation until the platform and/or application are known. Using the DF approach, the MPI library can maintain, for each communication operation, an extensive set of algorithms, and use an automatic algorithm selection mechanism to decide the appropriate algorithm for a given platform and a given application. Hence, a DF based library can adapt to platforms and applications. To verify that the DF approach is effective and practical, Ethernet switched clusters are selected as the experimental platform and two DF based MPI libraries, STAGE-MPI and STAR-MPI, are developed and evaluated. In the development of the DF based libraries, topology-specific algorithms for all-to-all, all-gather, and broadcast operations are designed for Ethernet switched clusters. The experimental results indicate that both STAGE-MPI and STAR-MPI significantly out-perform traditional MPI libraries including LAM/MPI and MPICH in many cases, which demonstrates that the performance of MPI collective library xii routines can be significantly improved by (1) incorporating platform/application specific communication algorithms in the MPI library, and (2) making the library adaptable to platforms and applications.
A Minimum of Rivalry: Evidence from Transition Economies on the Importance of Competition for Innovation and Growth

Abstract This paper examines the importance of competition in innovation and the growth of firms. We make use of the large-scale natural experiment of the shift from an economic system without competition to a market economy to shed light on the factors that influence innovation by firms and their subsequent growth, thereby alleviating problems due to non-random clustering of innovation opportunities in mature market economies. We find evidence that monopolies innovate less and have weaker growth than firms facing a minimum of rivalry. The presence of competitors has both a direct effect on performance, and an indirect effect, through improving the efficiency with which the rents from market power in product markets are utilised to undertake innovation. There is also some less clear-cut evidence of an 'inverted-U', namely that the presence of a few rivals is more conducive to performance than the presence of many competitors.
Is reduction of symptoms in eating disorder patients after 1 year of treatment related to attachment security and mentalization?

ABSTRACT In a sample of 38 eating disorder (ED) patients who received psychotherapeutic treatment, changes in attachment security, and mentalization in relation to symptoms reduction were investigated. Attachment security improved in 1 year but was unrelated to improvement of ED or comorbid symptoms. Mentalization did not change significantly in 1 year. Pretreatment mentalization was negatively related to the severity of ED symptoms, trait anxiety, psycho-neuroticism, and self-injurious behavior after 1 year of treatment. We conclude that for ED patients, improving mentalization might increase the effect of treatment on core and comorbid symptoms.
Identification of structurally diverse alkaloids in Corydalis species by liquid chromatography/electrospray ionization tandem mass spectrometry.

RATIONALE Alkaloids with significant therapeutic effects are the main active constituents of Corydalis (C.) species. There are several kinds of alkaloids in C. species associated with diverse alkaloid metabolism in plants, but they are rarely identified. This study aimed to identify diverse alkaloids in C. species by liquid chromatography/electrospray ionization tandem mass spectrometry (LC/ESI-MS/MS). METHODS Several types of alkaloids were extracted from C. species using ultrasonication with 70% CH(3)OH, and the extract was partitioned at pH 2 and 12. Separation of alkaloids was achieved by C18 high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), and MS/MS analysis was conducted by electrospray ionization triple-quadrupole mass spectrometry. For further confirmation, LC/Fourier transform ion cyclotron resonance (FTICR)-MS was used to obtain accurate mass data and gas chromatography (GC)/MS combined with trimethylsilyl derivatization was applied for identification of the minor alkaloids. RESULTS Thirty-three alkaloids among three different C. species were successfully separated and identified by LC/ESI-MS/MS and LC/FTICR-MS. Structural assignment of individual alkaloids was performed according to MS/MS spectral patterns. For further confirmation, accurate mass data of alkaloids by LC/FTICR-MS were obtained within 5 ppm and the GC/MS data for the trimethylsilyl alkaloids were also obtained. Among 33 alkaloids identified from this study, 13 alkaloids were reported for the first time in the investigated C. species. CONCLUSIONS The LC/ESI-MS/MS technique was effective in obtaining structural information and yielded diagnostic ions for diverse alkaloids. Based on the identified 33 alkaloids, marker compounds were suggested for the three C. species with different geographic origins. This study may also be useful for elucidating unknown alkaloids in herbal medicines.
2005 7 th International Conference on Information Fusion ( FUSION ) Mobility Tracking in Cellular Networks with Sequential Monte Carlo Filters

This paper considers mobility tracking in wireless communication networks based on received signal strength indicator measurements. Mobility tracking involves on-line estimation ofthe position and speed ofa mobile unit. Mobility tracking isformulated as an estimation problem ofa hybrid system consisting of a base state vector and a modal state vector. The command is modelled as a first-order Markov process which can take values from a finite set ofacceleration levels. In order to cover the wide range ofacceleration changes, a set ofacceleration values is predetermined. Sequential Monte Carlo algorithms -a particle filter (PF) and a Rao-Blackwellised particlefilter (RBPF) are proposed and their performance evaluated over a synthetic data example.
Using GPUs to compute large out-of-card FFTs

The optimization of Fast Fourier Transfer (FFT) problems that can fit into GPU memory has been studied extensively. Such on-card FFT libraries like CUFFT can generally achieve much better performance than their counterparts on a CPU, as the data transfer between CPU and GPU is usually not counted in their performance. This high performance, however, is limited by the GPU memory size. When the FFT problem size increases, the data transfer between system and GPU memory can comprise a substantial part of the overall execution time. Therefore, optimizations for FFT problems that outgrow the GPU memory can not bypass the tuning of data transfer between CPU and GPU. However, no prior study has attacked this problem. This paper is the first effort of using GPUs to efficiently compute large FFTs in the CPU memory of a single compute node. In this paper, the performance of the PCI bus during the transfer of a batch of FFT subarrays is studied and a blocked buffer algorithm is proposed to improve the effective bandwidth. More importantly, several FFT decomposition algorithms are proposed so as to increase the data locality, further improve the PCI bus efficiency and balance computation between kernels. By integrating the above two methods, we demonstrate an out-of-card FFT optimization strategy and develop an FFT library that efficiently computes large 1D, 2D and 3D FFTs that can not fit into the GPU's memory. On three of the latest GPUs, our large FFT library achieves much better double precision performance than two of the most efficient CPU based libraries, FFTW and Intel MKL. On average, our large FFTs on a single GeForce GTX480 are 46% faster than FFTW and 57% faster than MKL with multiple threads running on a four-core Intel i7 CPU. The speedup on a Tesla C2070 is 1.93x and 2.11x over FFTW and MKL. A peak performance of 21GFLOPS is achieved for a 2D FFT of size 2048x65536 on C2070 with double precision.
Censoring for Improved Sensing Performance in Infrastructure-Less Cognitive Radio Networks

Censoring has been proposed to be utilized in wireless distributed detection networks with a fusion center to enhance network performance in terms of error probability in addition to the well- established energy saving gains. In this paper, we further examine the employment of censoring in infrastructure-less cognitive radio networks, where nodes employ binary consensus algorithms to take global decisions regarding a binary hypothesis test without a fusion center to coordinate such a process. We show analytically - and verify by simulations - that censoring enhances the performance of such networks in terms of error probability and convergence times. Our protocol shows performance gains up to 46.6\% in terms of average error probability over its conventional counterpart, in addition to performance gains of about 48.7% in terms of average energy expenditure and savings up to 50% in incurred transmission overhead.