Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Dynamic quantised feedback stabilisation of discrete-time linear system with white noise input

In this paper, we mainly focus on the problem of quantised feedback stabilisation of a stochastic discrete-time linear system with white noise input. The dynamic quantiser is used here. The stability of the system under state quantisation and input quantisation is analysed in detail, respectively. Both the convergence of the state's mean and the boundedness of the state's covariance matrix norm should be considered when analysing its stability. It is shown that for the two situations of the state quantisation and the input quantisation, if the system without noise input can be stabilised by a linear feedback law, it must be stabilised by the dynamic quantised feedback control policy. The sufficient conditions that the dynamic quantiser should satisfy are given. Using the results obtained in this paper, one can test whether the stochastic system is stabilisable or not. Numerical examples are given to show the effectiveness of the results.
Quantitative evaluation of liver function with T1 relaxation time index on Gd‐EOB‐DTPA‐enhanced MRI: Comparison with signal intensity‐based indices

To evaluate whether the reduction rate of T1 relaxation time of the liver (T1 relaxation time index) before and 20 minutes after gadolinium‐ethoxybenzyl‐diethylenetriaminepentaacetic acid (Gd‐EOB‐DTPA) injection has the potential to serve as an magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)‐based liver function test in comparison with signal intensity‐based indices.
Reliability of a New Instrument for Measuring Maximum Rising Strength

Blain H, Carrière I, Péninou G, Micallef J-P, Colvez A: Reliability of a new instrument for measuring maximum rising strength. Am J Phys Med Rehabil 2006;85:502–508. Objective:To assess the intrarater test-retest reliability of a newly developed instrument for measuring maximum rising strength (MRS) in comparison with that of maximum knee extension strength (KES). Design:Three replications of isometric MRS and KES were measured on three test occasions separated by 1 wk in 97 healthy men and women aged 23–90. MRS was measured in seated subjects using a dynamometer fixed on the ground and connected by an adjustable nonelastic cord to a padded belt. Results:The intraclass coefficients (ICCs) of MRS were 0.92 and 0.93 at 60 and 70° of knee flexion, respectively, and 0.98 when the mean of three highest peak values of MRS at 60° and the three highest peak values at 70° knee flexion on each session were considered vs. 0.95 for KES. A significant increase in MRS and KES strength was found between the first and the third sessions (+7 to 8%)(P < 0.001). No side effects of strength measurements were noticed. Conclusion:Despite a significant learning effect, MRS measurement is reliable in men and women of a wide range of ages. Whether this instrument will be useful for targeting individuals with early sit-to-stand difficulties requires further investigation.
Short-term effects of upper extremity circuit resistance training on muscle strength and functional independence in patients with paraplegia.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES A number of exercises to strengthen the upper extremities are recommended to increase functional independence and quality of life (QoL) in patients with paraplegia. Circuit resistance training (CRT) is a type of progressive resistive exercise performed repeatedly at fixed mechanical exercise stations. The aim of this study was to investigate the potential benefits of CRT for upper extremity muscle strength, functional independence, and QoL in patients with paraplegia. MATERIALS AND METHODS Twenty-six patients with paraplegia who were participating in a conventional rehabilitation program at a tertiary education and research hospital were enrolled in this study. The participants were randomly assigned to two groups. The exercise group participated in the CRT program, which consisted of repetitive exercises for the upper extremities performed at fixed mechanical stations 5 sessions per week for 6 weeks, in addition to conventional rehabilitation. Participants in the control group received only conventional rehabilitation over the same period. We compared the groups with respect to QoL, as well as isokinetic muscle test outcomes in the upper extremities, using the Functional Independence Measure (FIM) and Borg's scale. RESULTS We observed significant increases in scores on the physical component of the FIM, Borg's scale, and QoL in both the exercise and control groups. Furthermore, the large majority of isokinetic values were significantly more improved in the exercise group compared to the control group. When post-treatment outcomes were compared between the groups, improvements in scores on the physical component of the FIM and in most isokinetic values were significantly greater in the exercise group. CONCLUSIONS This study showed that CRT has positive effects on muscle strength in the upper extremities and the physical disability components of the FIM when added to conventional rehabilitation programs for paraplegic patients. However, we observed no significant improvement in QoL scores after adding CRT to a conventional treatment regime. LEVEL OF EVIDENCE Randomized trial (Level II).
Emotional experience and estimates of D2 receptor occupancy in psychotic patients treated with haloperidol, risperidone, or olanzapine: an experience sampling study.

OBJECTIVE Blockade of dopamine D(2) receptors is thought to mediate the therapeutic effects of antipsychotic medication but may also induce social indifference. As antipsychotic drugs differ in D(2) receptor binding, "tight" and "loose" binding drugs may be hypothesized to differentially affect emotional experience. The present study investigates the differential effects of relatively tight versus looser binding drugs on the experience of emotions in the realm of daily life. METHOD We assessed positive and negative affect in the daily life of 109 patients with a DSM-IV diagnosis of psychotic disorder who were currently taking antipsychotic medication by using the experience sampling method (a structured diary technique). Antipsychotic medication was classified as loose (olanzapine; n = 35) or tight (haloperidol, risperidone; n = 74) binding, based on the drug's dissociation constants at the D(2) receptor. The study was conducted from 2007 to 2008. RESULTS Multilevel analyses showed a significant interaction between binding group (loose vs tight) and D(2) receptor occupancy estimates with regard to the experience of positive (P = .008) and negative (P = .019) affect. For tight-binding-agent users, a significant association was found between D(2) receptor binding estimates and both positive affect (P = .040) and negative affect (P = .0001) in the flow of daily life, with increasing levels of estimated D(2) receptor occupancy being associated with decreased feelings of positive affect and increased feelings of negative affect. For loose-binding-agent users, no such association was apparent. These associations were only partly mediated by clinical symptoms. CONCLUSIONS These findings add ecological validity to previous laboratory findings showing an association between D(2) receptor occupancy and emotional experience.
Predicted deposition variability due to fluctuations in release height and drop size distribution

An extensive field study has been undertaken to quantify the aerial release of spray material through the changes in meteorology as the day progresses. An important subset of these collected data is one-second interval data of the aircraft behavior and the mechanical release systems. These unique data provide an excellent source of information on bounding the variability in the expected deposition patterns, and how this variability might impact any error bounds established around the time-averaged predictions generated by the AGDISP model. This paper quantifies the variability in aerial application parameters and makes suggestions with regard to possible implications of this variability on the variability of deposition predictions in the flight line direction.
Criminal Justice and Wealth Inequality: How Much Freedom Can Money Buy in Russia?

In many countries, the public would like to know whether their criminal judicial system is more lenient towards the wealthier citizens and if so, by how much. The calculation of the relevant statistics requires knowledge of defendants' wealth, which is not observed in most circumstances. To address this issue, this paper proposes to base the analysis on criminal traffic accidents and use the information on the car of the defendant as the proxy to wealth, in addition to other available proxies based on educational and employment information. Utilizing the multiple proxy approach based on the data from Russia, the analysis finds that the Russian judicial system is more lenient to the defendants with higher wealth. The inequality partially comes from the design of the legal system which provides for certain legal channels that naturally create those disparities. Nevertheless, the inequality persists, even after accounting for those legal channels.
Prognostic Factors in Hodgkin's Disease

Hodgkin's disease (HD) is a curable tumoral disease. However, there are groups of patients who suffer relapse and the identification of prognostic factors and the adaptation of treatments to individual risk is one the lines of investigation in this disease. A study was performed on 526 patients diagnosed of HD in our hospital between January 1967 and September 2001. An analysis was made of the most important variables in terms of both disease-free and overall survival. Overall survival in this series of patients was 94% at 2 years, 86% at 5 years, 76% at 10 years and 72% at 15 years. Median survival was 249 months. Factors influencing poor prognosis in the overall survival were: male gender (P < 0.0001), lymphocyte depletion (P < 0.0001), stages III and IV (P < 0.0001), B symptoms (P < 0.0001), spleen involvement at diagnosis (P = 0.003), no complete remission after first line treatment (P < 0.0001), and more than 30 years-of-age (P < 0.0001). Disease free survival was 83% at 2 years and 68% at 5 years although without reaching the mean follow-up. The disease free survival study revealed the following risk factors: male gender (P = 0.02), lymphocyte depletion (P < 0.0001), stages III and IV (P < 0.001), B symptoms (P < 0.001), extranodal or splenic involvement (P < 0.05), and no complete remission after first line treatment (P < 0.0001). The result of treatment optimization is that some factors that were considered to indicate a poor prognosis have disappeared, and that others which are useful have appeared and allow us to establish groups with differing risks of relapse and who could be candidates for differentiated treatments.
Development of a fatigue-tracking system for monitoring human body movement

Monitoring fatigue and furthermore predicting fatigue is quite important in fundamental research and practical applications. In this paper, we developed a wireless wearable system for quantifying and tracking fatigue. The system is based on the scientific electromyography kinesiology study, which shows the mean frequency of the surface electromyogram (sEMG) signal decreases with the increase of fatigue intensity. According to this clue, from the engineering viewpoint, we assume the decrease relation mentioned is a linear relation and use statistical analysis (including 10 male subjects and 7 female subjects) to prove this assumption. Besides, in order to accurately assess fatigue, fatigue level is defined. Based on the simplified linear model mentioned, the fatigue level can be calculated efficiently. Furthermore, by considering the fatigue process as a dynamic process, we track the fatigue level by “forgetting” the sEMG measurement history taken at a relatively long time ago. Finally, the performance of the developed fatigue tracking system is tested and verified by the experiment of holding self weight.
P-glycoprotein Retains Drug-stimulated ATPase Activity upon Covalent Linkage of the Two Nucleotide Binding Domains at Their C-terminal Ends*

P-glycoprotein (Pgp), a member of the ABC transporter family, functions as an ATP hydrolysis-driven efflux pump to rid the cell of toxic organic compounds, including a variety of drugs used in anti-cancer chemotherapy. We have recently obtained EM projection images of lipid-bound Pgp without nucleotide and transport substrate that showed the two halves of the transporter separated by a central cavity (Lee, J. Y., Urbatsch, I. L., Senior, A. E., and Wilkens, S. (2002) J. Biol. Chem. 277, 40125–40131). Addition of nucleotide and/or substrate lead to a close association of the two halves of the transporter, thereby closing the central cavity (Lee, J. Y., Urbatsch, I. L., Senior, A. E., and Wilkens, S. (2008) J. Biol. Chem. 283, 5769–5779). Here, we used cysteine-mediated disulfide cross-linking to further delineate the structural rearrangements of the two nucleotide binding domains (NBD1 and NBD2) that take place during catalysis. Cysteines introduced at or near the C-terminal ends of NBD1 and NBD2 allowed for spontaneous disulfide cross-linking under nonreducing conditions. For mutant A627C/S1276C, disulfide formation was with high efficiency and cross-linked Pgp retained 30–68% drug-stimulated ATPase activity compared with reduced or cysteine-less Pgp. Two other cysteine pairs (K615C/S1276C and A627C/K1260C) also formed a disulfide but to a lesser extent, and the cross-linked form of these two mutants had lower drug-stimulated ATPase activity. The data suggest that the C-terminal ends of the two NBDs of Pgp are not required to undergo significant motion with respect to one another during the catalytic cycle.
A combined feature representation of deep feature and hand-crafted features for person re-identification

Person re-identification is one of the hot topics in computer vision. How to design a robust feature representation to identify pedestrians is a key problem for person re-identification. In this paper, a feature representation based on Multi-Statistics Cascade on Pyramid (MSCP) is proposed for person re-identification. The MSCP feature is composed of deep PCA network feature and hand-crafted features of Local Maximal Occurrence (LOMO) feature and color correlogram. MSCP can characterize the pedestrian images precisely from both global and local views. The Cross-view Quadratic Discriminant Analysis (XQDA) is employed to learn the distance metric of MSCP features. And then a novel re-identification method based on MSCP and XQDA is achieved. Experimental results on VIPeR Dataset demonstrate that our proposed method can achieve superior identification performance compared with six state-of-art methods.
Acute increase in blood flow to the rat bladder subsequent to partial bladder outlet obstruction

Partial obstruction of the rat bladder outlet initiates a multi‐step process during which the bladder progressively loses its functional ability. The first step in this progression is bladder hypertrophy; the organ dramatically increases in size and weight to compensate for the effects of obstruction. Unoperated female rats, age‐matched, sham‐obstructed rats, and rats that received a partial bladder outlet obstruction were studied. During the first 24 hours after partial bladder outlet obstruction, relative bladder blood flow was measured using a fluorescent microsphere infusion technique and laser Doppler imaging. Nitric oxide synthase (NOS) activities of control and obstructed rat bladder tissues were determined using an enzymatic assay that measures the conversion of 3H‐L‐arginine to 3H‐L‐citrulline. Using the microsphere infusion technique, a significant increase in blood flow to the obstructed rat bladder was observed during the first 24 hours after partial bladder outlet obstruction. Relative bladder blood flow increased approximately sixfold at 4 and 6 hours post‐obstruction and remained elevated through 24 hours of obstruction. Sham operations (evaluated after 6 hours after surgery) resulted in a minor increase in blood flow that did not reach statistical significance. Relative blood flow to the spleen, measured in the same rats, was not significantly changed. Laser Doppler measurements also identified a significant increase in rat bladder blood flow after outlet obstruction and showed that increased blood flow could be detected as early as 1 hour post‐obstruction. Interestingly, despite the significant differences in bladder blood flow between control and early post‐obstructed rat bladders, NOS activities of control and obstructed rat bladders were comparable. The increase in bladder blood flow precedes the urothelial, fibroblast and smooth muscle cell hyperplasia, and the smooth muscle hypertrophy that occurs after obstruction. We propose that, in response to surgical induction of partial outlet obstruction, acute up‐regulation of bladder blood flow may be an initiating factor for subsequent bladder cell proliferation and smooth muscle hypertrophy. Neurourol. Urodynam. 19:195–208, 2000. © 2000 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Classification ensemble to improve medical Named Entity Recognition

An accurate Named Entity Recognition (NER) is important for knowledge discovery in text mining. This paper proposes an ensemble machine learning approach to recognise Named Entities (NEs) from unstructured and informal medical text. Specifically, Conditional Random Field (CRF) and Maximum Entropy (ME) classifiers are applied individually to the test data set from the i2b2 2010 medication challenge. Each classifier is trained using a different set of features. The first set focuses on the contextual features of the data, while the second concentrates on the linguistic features of each word. The results of the two classifiers are then combined. The proposed approach achieves an f-score of 81.8%, showing a considerable improvement over the results from CRF and ME classifiers individually which achieve f-scores of 76% and 66.3% for the same data set, respectively.
Recognition and transition frame detection of Arabic news captions for video retrieval

The authors have conducted studies on recognizing Arabic news captions to develop a system for video retrieval to index and edit Arabic broadcast programs daily received and stored in big database. This paper describes a dedicated OCR for recognizing low resolution news captions in video images. News caption recognition system consisting of text line extraction, word segmentation and segmentation-recognition of words is developed and the performance was experimentally evaluated using datasets of frame images extracted from AlJazeera broadcasting programs. Character recognition of moving news caption is difficult due to combing noise yielded by the interlacing of scan lines. A technique to detect and eliminate the combing noise to correctly recognize the moving news caption is proposed. This paper also proposes a technique based on inter-frame text difference to detect transition frame of still news captions. The technique to detect transition frames is necessary for efficient video retrieve and play. The proposed technique is experimentally tested and shown to be robust to quick motion of the background and is able to detect the transition frame correctly with the F-measure higher than 90%. When compared with the ABBY FineReader 11 ® commercial OCR the dedicated OCR improves the recall of the Arabic characters in AlJazeera broadcasting news from 70.74% to 95.85% for non-interlaced moving news captions and from 23.82% to 96.29% for interlaced moving news captions.
The politics of fiscal rules within the European Union: a dynamic analysis of fiscal rules stringency

ABSTRACT Over the last 25 years, fiscal rules (FRs) have been proliferating in Europe bringing in-depth change to the architecture of fiscal institutions. This paper investigates different theories explaining the changes in national fiscal rules stringency (FRS) using a panel of 28 European countries from 1990 to 2013. The authors found evidence that fiscal stress prevents fiscal reform in the short term, and leads to stronger fiscal rules in the long term. This pattern corresponds to the ‘war of attrition’ argument formulated by Alesina and Drazen [(1989) ‘Why are stabilizations delayed? ’, The American Economic Review 81(5): 1170–88]. The authors found evidence that countries eager to join the EU showed their commitment to Maastricht targets by incorporating FRs into national laws. Countries facing financial difficulties after the 2009 sovereign debt crisis were coerced into adopting more stringent FRs to obtain fiscal support from the EU. Both cases support the idea that coercive diplomacy might explain the strength of national fiscal rules in the EU.
Rifampin Resistance Missed in Automated Liquid Culture System for Mycobacterium tuberculosis Isolates with Specific rpoB Mutations

ABSTRACT WHO-endorsed phenotypic drug susceptibility testing (DST) methods for Mycobacterium tuberculosis are assumed to be the gold standard for identifying rifampin (RMP) resistance. However, previous results indicated that low-level, yet probably clinically relevant, RMP resistance linked to specific rpoB mutations is easily missed by some growth-based methods. We aimed to compare the level of resistance detected on Löwenstein-Jensen (LJ) medium with resistance detected by the Bactec MGIT 960 automated DST (MGIT-DST) system for various rpoB mutants. Full agreement between LJ and MGIT-DST was observed for mutations located at codons 513 (Lys or Pro) and 531 (Leu, Trp), which were always resistant by both methods. For mutations 511Pro, 516Tyr, 533Pro, 572Phe, and several 526 mutations, LJ and MGIT results were highly discordant, with MGIT-DST failing to give a result or declaring the strains susceptible. Our data show that phenotypic RMP resistance testing of M. tuberculosis is not a binary phenomenon for some rpoB mutations and that the widely used automated MGIT 960 system is prone to miss some RMP resistance-conferring mutations, while careful DST on LJ missed hardly any. Given the association of these mutations with poor clinical outcome, our findings suggest that the gold standard for rifampin resistance should be reconsidered, in order to address the present confusion caused by discrepancies between phenotypic and genotypic results. The impacts of these mutations will depend on the frequency of their occurrence, which may vary from one setting to another.
Cricket Paralysis Virus, a Potential Control Agent for the Olive Fruit Fly, Dacus oleae Gmel

Representatives of several families of insect viruses were tested for growth and pathogenicity in the olive fruit fly, Dacus oleae Gmel. The viruses included nuclear polyhedrosis viruses, an iridovirus, two picornaviruses, and Trichoplusia ni small RNA virus (a member of the Nudaurelia β family), in addition to two naturally occurring viruses of the olive fruit fly. Two viruses, one of the two picornaviruses (cricket paralysis virus [CrPV] and the iridovirus (type 21 from Heliothis armigera), were found to replicate in adult flies. Flies which were fed on a solution containing CrPV for 1 day demonstrated a high mortality with 50% dying within 5 days and nearly 80% dying within 12 days of being fed. The virus was transmissible from infected to noninfected flies by fecal contamination. The CrPV which replicated in the infected flies was demonstrated to be the same as input virus by infection of Drosophila melanogaster cells and examination of the expressed viral proteins, immunoprecipitation of the virus purified from flies, and electrophoretic analysis of the structural proteins.