Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Care and Neurorehabilitation in the Disorder of Consciousness: A Model in Progress

The operational model and strategies developed at the Institute S. Anna-RAN to be applied in the care and neurorehabilitation of subjects with disorders of consciousness (DOC) are described. The institute units are sequentially organized to guarantee appropriate care and provide rehabilitation programs adapted to the patients' clinical condition and individual's needs at each phase of evolution during treatment in a fast turnover rate. Patients eligible of home care are monitored remotely. Transferring advanced technology to a stage of regular operation is the main mission. Responsiveness and the time windows characterized by better residual responsiveness are identified and the spontaneous/induced changes in the autonomic system functional state and biological parameters are monitored both in dedicated sessions and by means of an ambient intelligence platform acquiring large databases from traditional and innovative sensors and interfaced with knowledge management and knowledge discovery systems. Diagnosis of vegetative state/unresponsive wakefulness syndrome or minimal conscious state and early prognosis are in accordance with the current criteria. Over one thousand patients with DOC have been admitted and treated in the years 1998–2013. The model application has progressively shortened the time of hospitalization and reduced costs at unchanged quality of services.
The Influence of Art Expertise and Training on Emotion and Preference Ratings for Representational and Abstract Artworks

Across cultures and throughout recorded history, humans have produced visual art. This raises the question of why people report such an emotional response to artworks and find some works more beautiful or compelling than others. In the current study we investigated the interplay between art expertise, and emotional and preference judgments. Sixty participants (40 novices, 20 art experts) rated a set of 150 abstract artworks and portraits during two occasions: in a laboratory setting and in a museum. Before commencing their second session, half of the art novices received a brief training on stylistic and art historical aspects of abstract art and portraiture. Results showed that art experts rated the artworks higher than novices on aesthetic facets (beauty and wanting), but no group differences were observed on affective evaluations (valence and arousal). The training session made a small effect on ratings of preference compared to the non-trained group of novices. Overall, these findings are consistent with the idea that affective components of art appreciation are less driven by expertise and largely consistent across observers, while more cognitive aspects of aesthetic viewing depend on viewer characteristics such as art expertise.
Assessing the attitudes, knowledge and perspectives of medical students to chiropractic.

OBJECTIVE To assess second-year medical students' views on chiropractic. METHODS A three-step triangulation approach was designed, comprising a 53-item survey, nine key informant interviews and one focus group of 8 subjects. ANOVA was used to assess attitude-response survey totals over grouping variables. Constant comparison method and NVivo was used for thematic analysis. RESULTS 112 medical students completed the survey (50% response rate). Subjects reporting no previous chiropractic experience/exposure or interest in learning about chiropractic were significantly more attitude-negative towards chiropractic. Thematically, medical students viewed chiropractic as an increasingly evidence-based complementary therapy for low back/chronic pain, but based views on indirect sources. Within formal curriculum, they wanted to learn about clinical conditions and benefits/risks related to treatment, as greater understanding was needed for future patient referrals. CONCLUSION The results highlight the importance of exposure to chiropractic within the formal medical curriculum to help foster future collaboration between these two professions.
Marlin: Mitigating Code Reuse Attacks Using Code Randomization

Code-reuse attacks, such as return-oriented programming (ROP), are a class of buffer overflow attacks that repurpose existing executable code towards malicious purposes. These attacks bypass defenses against code injection attacks by chaining together sequence of instructions, commonly known as gadgets, to execute the desired attack logic. A common feature of these attacks is the reliance on the knowledge of memory layout of the executable code. We propose a fine grained randomization based approach that breaks these assumptions by modifying the layout of the executable code and hinders code-reuse attack. Our solution, Marlin, randomizes the internal structure of the executable code by randomly shuffling the function blocks in the target binary. This denies the attacker the necessary a priori knowledge of instruction addresses for constructing the desired exploit payload. Our approach can be applied to any ELF binary and every execution of this binary uses a different randomization. We have integrated Marlin into the bash shell that randomizes the target executable before launching it. Our work shows that such an approach incurs low overhead and significantly increases the level of security against code-reuse based attacks.
Diminishing Return in Transfer: A PRIM Model of the Frensch (1991) Arithmetic Experiment

It is generally believed that transfer decreases with expertise. Several existing models explain this by different forms of chunking, but each is specific to a particular task. The new PRIM theory of cognitive skill transfer allows a more generalized approach to study this phenomenon. To demonstrate this, I present a model of the Frensch (1991) experiment of transfer that explains why a short training period does not differentiate between three types of training in terms of the amount of transfer, but a longer training period does.
Crystallization of Nitrogenase MoFe Protein (NifB Av1) from a nifB Mutated Strain UW45 of Azotobacter vinelandii

Six hundred and 28 mg of NifB Av1 was obtained by a chromatography twice on DE 52 columns and Sephacryl S-300 column from the crude extract (37 677 mg) of a nifB mutated strain UW45 of Azotobacter vinelandii Lipmann. The protein was almost homogeneous as determined by Coomassie staining of SDS gels. The analysis by SDS-PAGE showed that NifB Av1 was similar to Av1 from wild-type strain of A. vinelandii (OP) in the kinds of subunits (α and β subunit). When complemented with Av2, NifB-Av1 had hardly any H-reducing activity, but could be significantly activated by FeMoco extracted from Av1. Under a suitable condition for crystallization, short dark-brown rhombohedral crystals could be obtained from NifB-Av1. Both of the longest sides of the biggest crystal were 0.1 mm. The time of the formation of crystals and number, size, quality and shape of crystals obviously depended not only on the kinds and concentrations of the components in the precipitant solution, but also on the methods for crystallization and technical bias, etc. The preliminary results showed that the crystal seemed to be formed from NifB-Av1.
ToolConnect: A Functional Connectivity Toolbox for In vitro Networks

Nowadays, the use of in vitro reduced models of neuronal networks to investigate the interplay between structural-functional connectivity and the emerging collective dynamics is a widely accepted approach. In this respect, a relevant advance for this kind of studies has been given by the recent introduction of high-density large-scale Micro-Electrode Arrays (MEAs) which have favored the mapping of functional connections and the recordings of the neuronal electrical activity. Although, several toolboxes have been implemented to characterize network dynamics and derive functional links, no specifically dedicated software for the management of huge amount of data and direct estimation of functional connectivity maps has been developed. toolconnect offers the implementation of up to date algorithms and a user-friendly Graphical User Interface (GUI) to analyze recorded data from large scale networks. It has been specifically conceived as a computationally efficient open-source software tailored to infer functional connectivity by analyzing the spike trains acquired from in vitro networks coupled to MEAs. In the current version, toolconnect implements correlation- (cross-correlation, partial-correlation) and information theory (joint entropy, transfer entropy) based core algorithms, as well as useful and practical add-ons to visualize functional connectivity graphs and extract some topological features. In this work, we present the software, its main features and capabilities together with some demonstrative applications on hippocampal recordings.
The Great Forestry Survey of 1669-1671

A program of forestry surveys and reform conducted in France during the 17th century has been accused of rationalizing the landscape and suppressing peasant culture; tools of cartography were said to have made rural lands both more legible to the state and alien to locals. On closer inspection, it seems that the surveys did not produce abstract rationalizations of the forests that made them ‘readable’ at a distance or more orderly on the ground; mainly the reformers developed databases or archives of misuses of the forests by nobles who were supposed to be managing them for the crown. This paper follows one reformer, Louis de Froidour, as he moved through the Midi-Pyrenees, using a set of letters he wrote while doing forest surveys for the reform. He described and explained noble opposition to his entering ‘their forests’, and how he nonetheless conducted the required surveys and acquired the necessary documents. Froidour not only did not target peasant villages, but also sometimes even protected forests that he said locals needed more than the crown. He had no romantic affection for mountain inhabitants (quite the opposite). He protected their interests because villagers rather than nobles paid taxes, and so disrupting their economies would not benefit the state. This case study, while only focusing on a small area of France, provides valuable insight into the logic of the reform, and its political consequences.
The Use of Supported Acidic Ionic Liquids in Organic Synthesis

Catalysts obtained by the immobilisation of acidic ionic liquids (ILs) on solid supports offer several advantages compared to the use of catalytically active ILs themselves. Immobilisation may result in an increase in the number of accessible active sites of the catalyst and a reduction of the amount of the IL required. The ionic liquid films on the carrier surfaces provide a homogeneous environment for catalytic reactions but the catalyst appears macroscopically as a dry solid, so it can simply be separated from the reaction mixture. As another advantage, it can easily be applied in a continuous fixed bed reactor. In the present review the main synthetic strategies towards the preparation of supported Lewis acidic and Brønsted acidic ILs are summarised. The most important characterisation methods and structural features of the supported ionic liquids are presented. Their efficiency in catalytic reactions is discussed with special emphasis on their recyclability.
Evaluating the culture of safety

More public discussion is needed on the role and content of the case record In their paper in this issue of QSHC in which they redesign current case (or medical) record review methods for the purpose of detecting adverse events and teasing out opportunities for preventing recurrence of this patient harm, Woloshynowych et al 1 state that “in our view the full potential of retrospective record review has yet to be explored”. Their view on the so far unrealised potential of the medical record is true, despite current efforts in some countries. The medical record has a time honoured place as a chronological account of the clinical state and care of a particular patient. This place has been reinforced by the routine use of the medical record as part of any legal or insurance inquiry about care, as well as in clinical or peer review processes that are designed to improve the delivery of health care. But, unlike an incident report or computer alert, the medical record has a passive nature that requires and rewards systematic examination after an alerting process identifies the records that need review. That alert may be an adverse clinical outcome—for …
Randomized Motion Planning: a Tutorial

Sampling demonstrated to be the algorithmic key to efficiently solve many high dimensional motion planning problems. Information on the configuration space is acquired by generating samples and edges between them, which are stored in a suitable data structure. Following this paradigm, many different algorithmic techniques have been proposed, and some of them are now widely accepted as part of the standard literature in the field. The paper reviews some of the most influential proposals and ideas, providing indications on their practical and theoretical implications.
Edition synchrone de plusieurs objets: services et interaction

Graphical interactions that modify many objects at once have not been studied systematically. Based on contextual inquiries of designers, and on previous systems and work, we have identified the services required for an efficient interaction with multiple objects: set management, action management, and support for exploratory design. We present a number of interactions that provide a subset of the identified services, by relying on an improved property sheet. This work may enable designers to design more consistent and more powerful interactions.
Comparison of Three Different Immunoassays and PCR for the Detection of Hepatitis C Virus Infection in Pregnant Women in Taiwan

To compare different hepatitis C virus (HCV) immunoassays and HCV‐RNA in pregnant women, we investigated two independent groups: 1,687 cases without screening for serum alanine aminotransferase (ALT) (group A) and 333 cases with elevated ALT (>45 IU/1) (group B), after screening 21,459 pregnant women. In group A, 11 (0.65%) and 21 (1.24%) were anti‐HCV‐positive by first‐ and second‐generation tests, respectively, while in group B 8 (2.40%) and 19 (5.71%) were positive, respectively. The results revealed by second‐generation assays based on either recombinant protein or synthetic peptides were identical, as were the anti‐HCV titers in group B. Among 40 second‐generation anti‐HCV‐positive cases, 18 (86%) of 21 in group A and 17 (89%) of the 19 in group B contained serum HCV‐RNA by RT‐PCR. Thus the prevalence of anti‐HCV in Taiwanese pregnant women is 1.24% versus 5.71% in those with elevated ALT level.
Continuous mode transition

Some aspects of transition induced by freestream turbulence can be understood in terms of the continuous spectrum of the Orr-Sommerfeld and Squire equations. Instead of discrete mode (Tollmien-Schlichting wave) precursors, transition can be studied, starting from continuous mode precursors. An examination of mode shapes leads to a theory of how freestream disturbances penetrate the boundary layer and, ultimately, provoke transition. Basically, low-frequency modes penetrate the boundary layer, while high frequencies are expelled — a result referred to as shear sheltering. Low frequency penetration can be characterized by a ‘coupling coefficient’. This only describes the initial route into the boundary layer. Transition subsequently involves an interaction between low and high frequency modes, to produce breakdown near the top of the boundary layer. Continuous mode transition is illustrated by numerical simulations of mode interaction. Either one or two modes are prescribed at the inlet to the computational domain. One low frequency mode will generate perturbation jets in the boundary layer. Transition does not occur. One low and one high frequency mode suffice to induce transition. These studies of mode interactions provide a fundamental perspective on the transition mechanism seen in full simulations with turbulent inflow. DNS of transition induced by grid turbulence and by swept wakes are also reviewed.
Marxism, Positivism, and Scientific Sociology: Social Gravity and Historicity

Marxism and positivism are often thought to be incompatible perspectives in sociology. Yet, Marxism has a long history of commitment to scientific inquiry. Here, we juxtapose these two scientific paradigms—Marxism and positivism—in ways that can enhance both, while highlighting in particular the power of the former. We argue that many of the key theoretical claims of Marxism can be explored in terms of analytic concepts congruent with and easily accessible to the contemporary positivist tradition. Marxist criticisms of the cruder versions of the positivist program are not antiscience but are rather rational critiques based on scientific principles.
Caveolin-1 Knockdown by Small Interfering RNA Suppresses Responses to the Chemokine Monocyte Chemoattractant Protein-1 by Human Astrocytes*

Astrocytes regulate the integrity of the blood-brain barrier and influence inflammatory processes in the central nervous system. The pro-inflammatory chemokine monocyte chemoattractant protein-1 (MCP-1), which is both released by and stimulates astrocytes, is thought to play a crucial role in both these activities. Because astrocytes have been shown to possess caveolae, vesicular structures that participate in intracellular transport and signal transduction events, we reasoned that expression of the major structural protein of these organelles, caveolin-1, might feature critically in the cellular responses to MCP-1. To test this hypothesis, caveolin-1 level was “knocked down” in human astrocyte cultures by using a small interfering RNA approach. This method resulted in efficient (>90% loss) and specific knockdown of caveolin-1 expression while sparring glial fibrillary acidic protein as well as several other proteins involved in endocytosis. Astrocytes suffering caveolin-1 loss showed diminished ability to down-modulate and internalize the MCP-1 receptor (CCR2) in response to exposure to this chemokine and also demonstrated significantly reduced capacity to undergo chemotaxis and calcium flux when MCP-1-stimulated. The results highlight a potentially prominent role for caveolae and/or caveolin-1 in mediating astrocyte responses to MCP-1, a feature that might significantly dictate the progression of inflammatory events at the blood-brain barrier.
What is spasticity? The discussion continues

Spasticity is a term that has been used by clinicians and researcher for decades, yet there is little agreement about what it actually means. Numerous definitions for spasticity have been proposed and as knowledge of the phenomenon builds, definitions that were accepted in the past may no longer be valid. This paper does not attempt to define spasticity but instead explores how the definitions for spasticity have evolved over time and illustrates the need for authors to be cautious when using the term.
Human Factors in Entrepreneurship Effectiveness

Early experiments in entrepreneurship development through training in terventions were heavily influenced by the assumption that personality factors such as achievement motivation played a crucial role in creative business endeavours. Although the assumption has not lost much of its vigour, it has of late come under increasing attack by those who believe that managerial skills are a more important factor in entrepreneurial success. Stressing that it is human factors that make the difference between success and failure, the author reviews the performance of a segment of industrial units in an Indian state to underscore his point.
Simultaneous Information and Power Transfer for Broadband Wireless Systems

Far-field microwave power transfer (MPT) will free wireless sensors and other mobile devices from the constraints imposed by finite battery capacities. Integrating MPT with wireless communications to support simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) allows the same spectrum to be used for dual purposes without compromising the quality of service. A novel approach is presented in this paper for realizing SWIPT in a broadband system where orthogonal frequency division multiplexing and transmit beamforming are deployed to create a set of parallel sub-channels for SWIPT, which simplifies resource allocation. Based on a proposed reconfigurable mobile architecture, different system configurations are considered by combining single-user/multi-user systems, downlink/uplink information transfer, and variable/fixed coding rates. Optimizing the power control for these configurations results in a new class of multi-user power-control problems featuring the circuit-power constraints, specifying that the transferred power must be sufficiently large to support the operation of the receiver circuitry. Solving these problems gives a set of power-control algorithms that exploit channel diversity in frequency for simultaneously enhancing the throughput and the MPT efficiency. For the system configurations with variable coding rates, the algorithms are variants of water-filling that account for the circuit-power constraints. The optimal algorithms for those configurations with fixed coding rates are shown to sequentially allocate mobiles their required power for decoding in ascending order until the entire budgeted power is spent. The required power for a mobile is derived as simple functions of the minimum signal-to-noise ratio for correct decoding, the circuit power and sub-channel gains.
Exploring the Relationship Between Mood Disorders and Gifted Individuals

Researchers of the gifted have traditionally advanced the theory, though they are often without data to support it, that an association between intellectual and/or creative giftedness and mood disorders exists. This assumed association is often referred to as the mad genius theory. This article explores the origins and development of the theory and describes the difficulties that arise when evaluating it due to problems associated with defining and measuring the relevant terms. Finally, the article examines the current scientific knowledge concerning the association between mood disorders and intellectual and/or creative giftedness. Broadly speaking, the data support the association as it relates to the construct of creativity and mood disorders and as it relates to the relationship between high IQ and bipolar disorder but not high IQ and depression.
Productivity in Old Age

It is commonly assumed that older adults are “unproductive” as soon as they retire and begin receiving a pension from the social security system, as occurs in most European countries. This article deals with the concept of unpaid work and social productivity, on the basis of data collected in the base line of the Estudio Longitudinal sobre Envejecimiento Activo (ELEA; Longitudinal Study of Active Aging), exploring the extent to which Spanish older adults (aged 55 to 75) report being involved in productive activities. First, the data are examined by age, gender, and working status; and second, under moderate-cost assumptions, the unpaid contribution to society of older people is calculated, in terms of Euros. The results are discussed in the context of other general studies about unpaid productive activities in old age; it is concluded that our sample is characterized by a focus on productive activity related to care for other adults and children and their estimated contribution in unpaid activities expresses the importance of older persons as social capital.