Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Ultrasonographic measurement of femoral cartilage thickness in patients with spinal cord injury.

OBJECTIVE To assess femoral cartilage thickness in patients with spinal cord injury (SCI). SUBJECTS Forty-six patients with SCI (35 men, 11 women; mean age: 33.6 years (standard deviation 8.1) and 46 age-, sex- and body mass index (BMI)-matched healthy subjects were enrolled. METHODS Patients were evaluated with the American Spinal Injury Association (ASIA) Impairment Scale, Modified Ashworth Scale, Walking Index for Spinal Cord Injury, and Functional Independence Measurement. Mid-point ultrasonographic femoral cartilage thickness measurements were taken from the right lateral condyle, right intercondylar area, right medial condyle, left medial condyle, left intercondylar area and left lateral condyle. RESULTS Ultrasonographic measurements revealed significantly thicker values in the intercondylar areas (bilaterally) and the medial condyle (left knee) of patients with SCI compared with those of controls. When the subgroups were compared with their paired healthy controls, measurements pertaining to the motor complete group were found to be significantly thicker in the intercondylar areas (bilaterally) and the medial condyle (left knee). Cartilage thickness values correlated negatively with the duration of immobilization (for bilateral intercondylar areas), and with BMI and ASIA level (for bilateral lateral condyles). CONCLUSION Femoral cartilage thicknesses were found to change after SCI, and to have a negative correlation with disease duration and severity. Future studies including histological evaluations may elucidate whether such changes are favourable for the knee joints of patients with spinal cord injury.
Dopamine and Glutamate Control Area-Restricted Search Behavior in Caenorhabditis elegans

Area-restricted search (ARS) is a foraging strategy used by many animals to locate resources. The behavior is characterized by a time-dependent reduction in turning frequency after the last resource encounter. This maximizes the time spent in areas in which resources are abundant and extends the search to a larger area when resources become scarce. We demonstrate that dopaminergic and glutamatergic signaling contribute to the neural circuit controlling ARS in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. Ablation of dopaminergic neurons eliminated ARS behavior, as did application of the dopamine receptor antagonist raclopride. Furthermore, ARS was affected by mutations in the glutamate receptor subunits GLR-1 and GLR-2 and the EAT-4 glutamate vesicular transporter. Interestingly, preincubation on dopamine restored the behavior in worms with defective dopaminergic signaling, but not in glr-1, glr-2, or eat-4 mutants. This suggests that dopaminergic and glutamatergic signaling function in the same pathway to regulate turn frequency. Both GLR-1 and GLR-2 are expressed in the locomotory control circuit that modulates the direction of locomotion in response to sensory stimuli and the duration of forward movement during foraging. We propose a mechanism for ARS in C. elegans in which dopamine, released in response to food, modulates glutamatergic signaling in the locomotory control circuit, thus resulting in an increased turn frequency.
Hybrid NEMS-CMOS DC-DC Converter for Improved Area and Power Efficiency

Nano-electromechanical (NEM) relays are a promising class of emerging devices that exhibit zero leakage operation. Numerous end applications of NEM relay logic circuits have been proposed recently [1][2]. This work explores the usage of NEM relays in on-chip DC-DC converters. As a feasibility study of using NEMS in integrated power electronics, discontinuous conduction mode (DCM) buck regulator with specifications suitable for portable applications has been implemented in a NEMS-CMOS hybrid design and the results are compared against a standard commercial 0.35 μm CMOS implementation. Ron of the NEM relay switch is constant and is insensitive to the gate slew rate. This creates a paradigm shift in design of power switches. This coupled with infinite Roff offers significant area and power advantages over CMOS. Accurate Verilog-A models were developed based on published fabrication results of NEM relays [1] operating at 1V with a nominal air gap of 5-10nm. This work shows that NEMS-CMOS hybrid DC-DC converter has an area savings of 60V over CMOS and achieves 95% efficiency at max load condition (50mA).
Observer performance in assessing anemia on thoracic CT.

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was to evaluate the ability of expert reviewers to differentiate an anemic from a nonanemic state on the basis of visual assessment of the relative attenuation of blood in the left ventricle on noncontrast thoracic CT images and to compare reviewer performance with quantitative measurement of CT density in Hounsfield units. MATERIALS AND METHODS One hundred two noncontrast thoracic CT examinations were qualitatively reviewed by three independent reviewers. Hounsfield unit measurements of the blood in the left ventricle were recorded by a fourth individual. Anemia was defined as a hemoglobin level of less than 10 g/dL. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analyses of expert reviewers were compared with measured Hounsfield units. RESULTS Hounsfield unit measurements performed significantly better than subjective reviewer analyses for differentiation of an anemic from a nonanemic state (area under ROC curve = 0.85 vs 0.72, 0.70, and 0.69; 95% confidence interval, 0.78-0.92 vs 0.63-0.81, 0.61-0.79, and 0.60-0.78, respectively; p < 0.05). With use of a CT density threshold of 35 H, the sensitivity for anemia was 76% and specificity was 81%, whereas the sensitivity of three reviewers was 40-72% with a specificity of 60-83%. Interobserver agreement was found to be poor by kappa statistic (0.0906-0.2128). The correlation coefficient for the analysis of Hounsfield unit versus hemoglobin level was 0.72. Separating data by patient sex revealed a correlation coefficient of 0.81 for men versus 0.52 for women, although the actual regression lines were not statistically different (p > 0.05). CONCLUSION Despite expert reviewer analyses, subjective evaluations of blood attenuation characteristics are prone to inaccuracy and show poor interobserver agreement. Quantitative measurements of CT density in Hounsfield units should be performed to accurately differentiate an anemic from a nonanemic state when serum hemoglobin levels are not readily available.
Touch-less fingerprint recognition system

Touch-Less Fingerprint Recognition Is Considered As A Feasible Alternative To Touch-Based Fingerprint Recognition Technology. Touch-Less Fingerprint Technology Provides A Near Perfect Solution To The Problems In Terms Of Hygienic, Maintenance And Latent Fingerprints. This Paper Presents An Introduction To Touch-Less Fingerprint Recognition System Using A Digital Camera. This Paper Also Discusses Both The Disadvantages And The Advantages Of Touch-Less Fingerprint Systems Along With The Approaches To Capture Touch-Less Fingerprint.
The stability of climate on Venus

The climate of Venus is to a large degree controlled by the radiative properties of its massive atmosphere. However, volcanic outgassing and surface-atmosphere interactions may moderate the atmospheric abundances of CO2 and other radiatively important volatiles. Recently, work on the interpretation of the impact cratering record has placed limits on the magnitude of the volcanic flux. Additionally, recent laboratory data on the equilibria and kinetics of possible surface-atmosphere reactions under Venus-like conditions provide important insights into the role that they may play in moderating Venus' climate. The surface temperature and pressure on Venus coincide approximately with the P-T equilibrium of the calcite-wollastonite mineral reaction, and atmospheric sulfur species are probably involved in rapid heterogeneous reactions with the surface. Perturbations to the atmospheric inventory of radiatively active species may have a significant impact on the climate of Venus and upon the stability of the greenhouse effect. Through the use of a Venus climate model that couples atmospheric radiative-convective equilibrium with surface processes, we show that it is likely that Venus' climate is at or near a state of unstable equilibrium. Furthermore, we show that only moderate perturbations in the abundances of radiatively active volatiles may be sufficient to precipitate changes to new climate regimes.
The comparison of social support and religiosity in post traumatic stress disorder patients, their wives and control group

Background: many of Iran- Iraq war veterans, stricken to post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and therefore, they and their wives have several problems. The aim of this study was the comparison of social support and religiosity in PTSD patients, their wives and control group. Methods: This research was a causal-comparative study. For surveying the study variables, 25 PTSD patients, 25 PTSD patient’s wives and 25 normal subject were selected by convenience sampling method. The Duke’s social support questioner and the religiosity scale of Atkins and Havdon were used for data collection. Data were analyzed by the use of descriptive components and one way ANOVA method. Results: the results showed that the amount of social support in PTSD patients and their wives was lower than control group, but between PTSD patients and their wives didn’t seen any significant differences. The amount of religiosity in PTSD patients and their wives was higher than control group. Also in this case didn’t seen significant different between PTSD patients and their wives. Conclusion: In social support and religiosity components there is similarity between PTSD patients and their wives, but there is deference between these two groups with control group.
Improving automatic music classification performance by extracting features from different types of data

This paper discusses two sets of automatic musical genre classification experiments. Promising research directions are then proposed based on the results of these experiments. The first set of experiments was designed to examine the utility of combining features extracted from separate and independent audio, symbolic and cultural sources of musical information. The results from this set of experiments indicate that combining feature types can indeed substantively improve classification accuracy as well as reduce the seriousness of those misclassifications that do occur. The second set of experiments examined which high-level features were most important in successfully classifying symbolic data. It was found that features associated with instrumentation were particularly effective. The paper also presents the jMIR toolset, which was used to carry out these experiments and which is particularly well suited to combining information extracted from different types of data sources. jMIR is a free and open-source software suite designed for applications related to automatic music classification of various kinds.
Control of poly(A) polymerase level is essential to cytoplasmic polyadenylation and early development in Drosophila

Poly(A) polymerase (PAP) has a role in two processes, polyadenylation of mRNA precursors in the nucleus and translational control of certain mRNAs by cytoplasmic elongation of their poly(A) tails, particularly during early development. It was found recently that at least three different PAP genes exist in mammals, encoding several PAP isoforms. The in vivo specificity of function of each PAP isoform currently is unknown. Here, we analyse PAP function in Drosophila. We show that a single PAP isoform exists in Drosophila that is encoded by the hiiragi gene. This single Drosophila PAP is active in specific polyadenylation in vitro and is involved in both nuclear and cytoplasmic polyadenylation in vivo. Therefore, the same PAP can be responsible for both processes. In addition, in vivo overexpression of PAP does not affect poly(A) tail length during nuclear polyadenylation, but leads to a dramatic elongation of poly(A) tails and a loss of specificity during cytoplasmic polyadenylation, resulting in embryonic lethality. This demonstrates that regulation of the PAP level is essential for controlled cytoplasmic polyadenylation and early development.
Limitations of Acceptability Curves for Presenting Uncertainty in Cost-Effectiveness Analysis

Clinical journals increasingly illustrate uncertainty about the cost and effect of health care interventions using cost-effectiveness acceptability curves (CEACs). CEACs present the probability that each competing alternative is optimal for a range of values of the cost-effectiveness threshold. The objective of this article is to demonstrate the limitations of CEACs for presenting uncertainty in cost-effectiveness analyses. These limitations arise because the CEAC is unable to distinguish dramatically different joint distributions of incremental cost and effect. A CEAC is not sensitive to any change of the incremental joint distribution in the upper left and lower right quadrants of the cost-effectiveness plane; neither is it sensitive to radial shift of the incremental joint distribution in the upper right and lower left quadrants. As a result, CEACs are ambiguous to risk-averse policy makers, inhibit integration with risk attitude, hamper synthesis with other evidence or opinions, and are unhelpful to assess the need for more research. Moreover, CEACs may mislead policy makers and can incorrectly suggest medical importance. Both for guiding immediate decisions and for prioritizing future research, these considerable drawbacks of CEACs should make us rethink their use in communicating uncertainty. As opposed to CEACs, confidence and credible intervals do not conflate magnitude and precision of the net benefit of health care interventions. Therefore, they allow (in)formal synthesis of study results with risk attitude and other evidence or opinions. Presenting the value of information in addition to these intervals allows policy makers to evaluate the need for more empirical research.
Dirac physics in silicon via ‘photonic boron nitride’

We employ `photonic boron nitride', a silicon photonic crystal slab composed of a honeycomb lattice of holes to observe Dirac physics of guided optical modes. The lattice is composed of two component triangular lattices of different hole-size Δr, which breaks the Dirac cone and opens up an observable band gap. Graphene, a semimetallic two-dimensional material composed of a honeycomb lattice of carbon atoms, is known for its incredible strength and exceedingly high conductivity. The origin of graphene's unique behavior is the fact that at the (undoped) Fermi energy, electrons behave like massless relativistic particles. For graphene, the mass of those particles, m, is zero. Another two-dimensional material, boron nitride, is also a honeycomb lattice (composed of interpenetrating boron and nitrogen triangular lattices) and its electrons also obey the Dirac equation, but with m? 0. The breaking of inversion symmetry caused by the presence of two components (boron and nitrogen) rather than just one (carbon) implies non-zero mass, m. This in turn implies the presence of a band gap in the spectrum, making it a semiconductor. There has been a great deal of recent effort put into realizing artificial graphene, to take advantage of Dirac physics but in other systems, namely optics; microwaves; exciton-polariton condensates; among many others too numerous to name here. In optics in particular, Dirac physics offers a number of possible avenues to explore fundamental physics questions (e.g., the breakdown of Anderson localization; the formation of tachyon dispersions in non-Hermitian systems), as well as promising technological applications (engineering photonic topological insulators; epsilon-near-zero materials; and large-area single-mode lasing). Here, we present the first observation of a guided Dirac cone in a photonic crystal. Specifically, we use a silicon photonic crystal slab: the advantage of this geometry is that light can be manipulated in-plane without optical loss. The effect of the Dirac dispersion is observed in the TE-like polarization of the slab. We realize Dirac physics using a honeycomb array of holes; we break inversion symmetry by making the two honeycomb sublattices have different hole sizes. Perhaps the reason that Dirac physics has yet to be observed in this geometry is that guided waves don't leak out of plane (i.e., they lie below the light-line) - meaning it is impossible to directly observe Dirac cones as one would in reflectometry experiments or coupled resonators. There are a number of applications of Dirac physics in photonic crystal slabs, including fiat-band edge states (for potential use in Purcell enhancement and slow-light devices) and topological band gaps (provided a full gap is eventually opened), among others.
Contextual conditional models for smartphone-based human mobility prediction

Human behavior is often complex and context-dependent. This paper presents a general technique to exploit this "multidimensional" contextual variable for human mobility prediction. We use an ensemble method, in which we extract different mobility patterns with multiple models and then combine these models under a probabilistic framework. The key idea lies in the assumption that human mobility can be explained by several mobility patterns that depend on a sub-set of the contextual variables and these can be learned by a simple model. We showed how this idea can be applied to two specific online prediction tasks: what is the next place a user will visit? and how long will he stay in the current place? Using smartphone data collected from 153 users during 17 months, we show the potential of our method in predicting human mobility in real life.
Methacrylate Polymer Monoliths for Separation Applications

This review summarizes the development of methacrylate-based polymer monoliths for separation science applications. An introduction to monoliths is presented, followed by the preparation methods and characteristics specific to methacrylate monoliths. Both traditional chemical based syntheses and emerging additive manufacturing methods are presented along with an analysis of the different types of functional groups, which have been utilized with methacrylate monoliths. The role of methacrylate based porous materials in separation science in industrially important chemical and biological separations are discussed, with particular attention given to the most recent developments and challenges associated with these materials. While these monoliths have been shown to be useful for a wide variety of applications, there is still scope for exerting better control over the porous architectures and chemistries obtained from the different fabrication routes. Conclusions regarding this previous work are drawn and an outlook towards future challenges and potential developments in this vibrant research area are presented. Discussed in particular are the potential of additive manufacturing for the preparation of monolithic structures with pre-defined multi-scale porous morphologies and for the optimization of surface reactive chemistries.
Virtual Time and Global States of Distributed Systems

A distributed system can be characterized by the fact that the global state is distributed and that a common time base does not exist. However, the notion of time is an important concept in every day life of our decentralized \real world" and helps to solve problems like getting a consistent population census or determining the potential causality between events. We argue that a linearly ordered structure of time is not (always) adequate for distributed systems and propose a generalized non-standard model of time which consists of vectors of clocks. These clock-vectors are partially ordered and form a lattice. By using timestamps and a simple clock update mechanism the structure of causality is represented in an isomorphic way. The new model of time has a close analogy to Minkowski's relativistic spacetime and leads among others to an interesting characterization of the global state problem. Finally, we present a new algorithm to compute a consistent global snapshot of a distributed system where messages may be received out of order.
Novel Flat Data Center Network Architecture Based on Optical Switches With Fast Flow Control

We propose a novel flat and scalable data center network (DCN) architecture based on fast (nanosecond) distributed buffer-less optical switches and efficient optical flow control. The proposed DCN architecture scales as the square of the port count of the optical switches. In order to investigate the performance of the proposed architecture, the system operation of an electronic Top-of-the-Rack (ToR) and the optical switch is fully described, and all functional subsystems are modeled. The performance in terms of DCN scalability, average latency, packet loss, normalized throughput of the network, and electronic buffer size of the ToR is numerically assessed for a medium-size data center supporting 5760 servers and a large-size data center connecting 100 000 servers. Considering a traffic pattern with high inter-cluster (40%) traffic distribution and buffer size of 40 KB, the results report an end-to-end latency of less than 8.1 μs (including retransmission) and a packet loss <; 10-7 under a load of 0.4 for the large-size data center. Moreover, we provide a preliminary experimental validation of the DCN by using a 4 × 4 optical switch prototype showing dynamic switching at 40 Gb/s and error-free operation with less than 1.5 dB penalty for the longest path.
Analysis and Application of European Genetic Substructure Using 300 K SNP Information

European population genetic substructure was examined in a diverse set of >1,000 individuals of European descent, each genotyped with >300 K SNPs. Both STRUCTURE and principal component analyses (PCA) showed the largest division/principal component (PC) differentiated northern from southern European ancestry. A second PC further separated Italian, Spanish, and Greek individuals from those of Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry as well as distinguishing among northern European populations. In separate analyses of northern European participants other substructure relationships were discerned showing a west to east gradient. Application of this substructure information was critical in examining a real dataset in whole genome association (WGA) analyses for rheumatoid arthritis in European Americans to reduce false positive signals. In addition, two sets of European substructure ancestry informative markers (ESAIMs) were identified that provide substantial substructure information. The results provide further insight into European population genetic substructure and show that this information can be used for improving error rates in association testing of candidate genes and in replication studies of WGA scans.