Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Weaving Lighthouses and Stitching Stories: Blind and Visually Impaired People Designing E-textiles

We describe our experience of working with blind and visually impaired people to create interactive art objects that are personal to them, through a participatory making process using electronic textiles (e-textiles) and hands-on crafting techniques. The research addresses both the practical considerations about how to structure hands-on making workshops in a way which is accessible to participants of varying experience and abilities, and how effective the approach was in enabling participants to tell their own stories and feel in control of the design and making process. The results of our analysis is the offering of insights in how to run e-textile making sessions in such a way for them to be more accessible and inclusive to a wider community of participants.
Resistive circuit topologies that admit several solutions

Necessary and sufficient conditions are given that a resistive circuit may have several but finitely many solutions. Whether it actually has several solutions depends on the values of the sources and linear resistors as well as on the characteristics of the non-linear resistors. Such circuits are required for static memory applications of all kinds, including associative memories realized by neural networks. These criteria are given both in terms of linear circuits and circuit topology. In the same way the minimal memory circuits are characterized. They constitute the building blocks for more complicated memory circuits.
Limb-Salvage Surgery of Soft Tissue Sarcoma with Sciatic Nerve Involvement

Background The surgical resection of soft tissue sarcomas (STS) with sciatic nerve involvement presents a significant surgical and oncological challenge. Current treatment strategies pursue a multimodal approach with the aim of limb preservation. We aim to evaluate the outcomes of limb-sparing surgery of STS in a patient cohort and to propose a classification for STS with sciatic nerve involvement. Methods Patients receiving limb-preserving resections for STS with sciatic nerve involvement between 01/2010 and 01/2017 were included. Clinical and oncological data were prospectively collected in a computerized database and retrospectively analyzed. Sciatic nerve involvement in STS was classified preoperatively as follows: type A for nerve encasement; type B for nerve contact; and type C for no nerve involvement. Results A total of 364 patients with STS were treated, of which 27 patients had STS with sciatic nerve involvement. Eight patients with type A tumors (29.6%) underwent sciatic nerve resection, and 19 patients with type B tumors (70.4%) received epineural dissections. Disease progression was observed in 8 patients (29.6%) with a local recurrence of 11.1% and distant metastasis in 29.6%. The type of nerve resection significantly influenced leg function but had no impact on disease recurrence or overall survival. Conclusion In a cohort of carefully selected patients with STS and sciatic nerve involvement, the extent of sciatic nerve resection had no significant impact on disease recurrence or survival. Precise classification of neural involvement may therefore be useful in selecting the appropriate degree of nerve resection, without compromising oncological outcome or unnecessarily sacrificing leg function.
Angel-Echo: A Personalized Health Care Application

Technology is constantly pioneering new paths in health care by creating new outlets for medical professionals to care for their patients. With the development of wearable sensors and enhanced forms of wireless communication like Bluetooth low energy (BLE) communication, health data can now be collected wirelessly without compromising the independence of patients. Interactive voice interfaces such as the Amazon Echo provide an easy way for individuals to access a variety of data by using voice commands, making interacting with technology easier for those of limited technological experience. Wearable sensors, such as the Angel Sensor, combined with voice interactive devices, such as the Amazon Echo, have allowed for the development of applications that provide easy user interaction. Here, we propose a smart application that monitors health status by combining the data collection capabilities of the Angel sensor and the voice interfacing capabilities of the Amazon Echo. We also present test results of the Amazon Echo speech recognition on different populations.
Forage production in mixed grazing systems of elephant grass with arrowleaf clover or forage peanut

Os sistemas de produção leiteira, em sua maioria, utilizam as pastagens como base da alimentação dos animais, geralmente, constituídas apenas por gramíneas. Essa prática simplifica o manejo dos pastos, contudo, implica em custos elevados de produção, notadamente pelo uso de adubos nitrogenados. Uma alternativa para tornar os sistemas forrageiros mais sustentáveis é a introdução de leguminosas, possibilitando melhor distribuição de forragem no decorrer do tempo, além de reduzir custos com adubação. Assim, o objetivo desta pesquisa foi avaliar , ao longo do ano, três sistemas forrageiros (SF) com capim elefante (CE), azevém (AZ), espécies de crescimento espontâneo (ECE), como SF1(testemunha); CE + AZ + ECE + trevo vesiculoso, como SF2; e CE + AZ + ECE + amendoim forrageiro, como SF3. O capim elefante foi estabelecido em linhas afastadas a cada 4 m. No período hibernal realizou-se a semeadura do azevém entre as linhas de CE; e considerando os respectivos tratamentos o trevo vesiculoso foi semeado e o amendoim forrageiro foi preservado. Para avaliação foram usadas vacas da raça Holandesa. O delineamento experimental utilizado foi o inteiramente casualizado, com três tratamentos (SF), três repetições (piquetes) com medidas repetidas (pastejos). Os valores de massa de forragem foram de 3,46; 3,80 e 3,91 t ha , respectivamente para os tratamentos SF1, SF2 e SF3. Melhores resultados foram obtidos nos sistemas forrageiros consorciados com leguminosas.
Adherence to complementary feeding recommendations for infants and implications for public health

Abstract Objective The current study investigates (i) the extent to which breast-feeding and non-breast-feeding mothers follow the Canadian Nutrition for Healthy Term Infants (NHTI) recommendations; (ii) the first complementary foods given and the differences by breast-feeding status; (iii) whether any breast-feeding is associated with earlier introduction to complementary foods relative to non-breast-feeding, after controlling for potentially confounding factors; and (iv) the need for improvements in timing and resources of interventions by examining breast-feeding rates over time and information sources used by mothers. Design Longitudinal data from the Kingston, Frontenac, and Lennox & Addington (KFL&A) Infant Feeding Survey were used. Mothers completed a survey at the end of their hospital stay and were interviewed by telephone at 2, 4, 6 and 12 months thereafter. Setting The study took place in the KFL&A region of Ontario, Canada. Subjects The sample consisted of 325 mothers who gave birth to a live infant of at least 36 weeks’ gestation and a birth weight of at least 1500 g at Kingston General Hospital between January and July of 2008. Results Four in five mothers introduced complementary foods prior to 6 months. Mothers not breast-feeding at 6 months introduced water, juice, infant cereals, fruit and vegetables, and foods not recommended by Canada’s Food Guide sooner than breast-feeding mothers. Breast-feeding mothers were more likely to introduce milks appropriately, but had low adherence to giving their infants vitamin D supplements. Conclusions To support adherence to NHTI recommendations, interventions should be conducted during early infancy and deliver consistent, evidence-based recommendations.
Pathogenesis of epileptic seizures and epilepsy after stroke

Abstract Stroke is an important cause of seizures and epilepsy in adults, particularly among the elderly. The incidence of stroke increases yearly as life expectancy increases and the number of patients with post-stroke seizures and epilepsy is also rising. Post-stroke epilepsy accounts for nearly 50% of newly diagnosed epilepsy among patients over 60 years of age. With increasing stroke awareness and advanced treatments, increased attention is paid to post-stroke seizures and epilepsy including its diagnosis and treatment. There has been a plethora of research on the pathogenesis of seizures and epilepsy after stroke. And thus, the research advances in the pathogenesis and related therapeutic targets of post-stroke seizures and epilepsy will be reviewed in this article.
T Cells Specifically Targeted to Amyloid Plaques Enhance Plaque Clearance in a Mouse Model of Alzheimer's Disease

Patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) exhibit substantial accumulation of amyloid-β (Aβ) plaques in the brain. Here, we examine whether Aβ vaccination can facilitate the migration of T lymphocytes to specifically target Aβ plaques and consequently enhance their removal. Using a new mouse model of AD, we show that immunization with Aβ, but not with the encephalitogenic proteolipid protein (PLP), results in the accumulation of T cells at Aβ plaques in the brain. Although both Aβ-reactive and PLP-reactive T cells have a similar phenotype of Th1 cells secreting primarily IFN-γ, the encephalitogenic T cells penetrated the spinal cord and caused experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (EAE), whereas Aβ T cells accumulated primarily at Aβ plaques in the brain but not the spinal cord and induced almost complete clearance of Aβ. Furthermore, while a single vaccination with Aβ resulted in upregulation of the phagocytic markers triggering receptors expressed on myeloid cells-2 (TREM2) and signal regulatory protein-β1 (SIRPβ1) in the brain, it caused downregulation of the proinflammatory cytokines TNF-α and IL-6. We thus suggest that Aβ deposits in the hippocampus area prioritize the targeting of Aβ-reactive but not PLP-reactive T cells upon vaccination. The stimulation of Aβ-reactive T cells at sites of Aβ plaques resulted in IFN-γ-induced chemotaxis of leukocytes and therapeutic clearance of Aβ.
Red wine activates plasma membrane redox system in human erythrocytes

Abstract In the present study, we report that polyphenols present in red wine obtained by a controlled microvinification process are able to protect human erythrocytes from oxidative stress and to activate Plasma Membrane Redox System (PMRS). Human plasma obtained from healthy subjects was incubated in the presence of whole red wine at a concentration corresponding to 9.13–73 μg/ml gallic acid equivalents to verify the capacity to protect against hypochlorous acid (HOCl)-induced plasma oxidation and to minimize chloramine formation. Red wine reduced hemolysis and chloramine formation induced by HOCl of 40 and 35%, respectively. PMRS present on human erythrocytes transfers electrons from intracellular molecules to extracellular electron acceptors. We demonstrated that whole red wine activated PMRS activity in human erythrocytes isolated from donors in a dose-dependent manner with a maximum at about 70–100 μg/ml gallic acid equivalents. We also showed that red wine increased glutathione (GSH) levels and erythrocytic antioxidant capacity, measured by 2,2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) quenching assay. Furthermore, we reported that GSH played a crucial role in regulating PMRS activity in erythrocytes. In fact, the effect of iodoacetamide, an alkylating agent that induces depletion of intracellular GSH, was completely counteracted by red wine. Bioactive compounds present in red wine, such as gallic acid, resveratrol, catechin, and quercetin were unable to activate PMRS when tested at the concentrations normally present in aged red wines. On the contrary, the increase of PMRS activity was associated with the anthocyanin fraction, suggesting the capacity of this class of compounds to positively modulate PMRS enzymatic activity.
Vorticity alignment results for the three-dimensional Euler and Navier - Stokes equations

We address the problem in Navier - Stokes isotropic turbulence of why the vorticity accumulates on thin sets such as quasi-one-dimensional tubes and quasi-two-dimensional sheets. Taking our motivation from the work of Ashurst, Kerstein, Kerr and Gibbon, who observed that the vorticity vector aligns with the intermediate eigenvector of the strain-matrix S, we study this problem in the context of both the three-dimensional Euler and Navier - Stokes equations using the variables and where . This introduces the dynamic angle , which lies between and . For the Euler equations a closed set of differential equations for and is derived in terms of the Hessian matrix of the pressure . For the Navier - Stokes equations, the Burgers vortex and shear-layer solutions turn out to be the Lagrangian fixed-point solutions of the equivalent equations with a corresponding angle . Under certain assumptions for more general flows it is shown that there is an attracting fixed point of the equations which corresponds to positive vortex stretching and for which the cosine of the corresponding angle is close to unity. This indicates that near alignment is an attracting state of the system and is consistent with the formation of Burgers-like structures. PACS Numbers: 4727J, 4732C, 4715K
Hypertension as predictor of sunitinib treatment outcome in metastatic renal cell carcinoma

Abstract Hypertension and hypothyreoidism are frequent side effects of VEGFR-inhibitors. We investigated whether hypertension or hypothyreoidism diagnosed during sunitinib treatment is associated with treatment efficacy. Material and methods. Sixty-four consecutive patients with metastatic renal cell cancer (RCC) were treated with sunitinib in a single center. Hypertension was defined as persistent blood pressure >150/100 mmHg or blood pressure requiring intensification of pre-existing anti-hypertensive medication. Hypothyreoidism was defined as elevation of TSH levels and clinical symptoms requiring hormone replacement therapy (≥Gr. II hypothyreoidim). Results. Twenty-four (38%) patients developed hypertension and 12 (19%) hypothyreoidism. The dose of sunitinib administered was not significantly associated with hypertension or hypothyreoidism. There was no correlation between hypertension and hypothyreoidism. Hypertension was associated with frequent tumor response to sunitinib, a long time to disease progression and long overall survival (p= 0.001, 0.0003 and 0.001, respectively). In a multivariate analysis, hypertension was an independent predictor of progression-free survival (hazard ratio, 0.21; 95% CI 0.076 to 0.59, p=0.0030). There were no statistically significant differences in the frequency of ≥ grade 3 adverse events between patients with or without hypertension. Conclusion. Sunitinib-associated hypertension may be a strong predictive marker for treatment efficacy in metastatic RCC.
Metric-based iterative closest point scan matching for sensor displacement estimation

This paper addresses the scan matching problem for mobile robot displacement estimation. The contribution is a new metric distance and all the tools necessary to be used within the iterative closest point framework. The metric distance is defined in the configuration space of the sensor, and takes into account both translation and rotation error of the sensor. The new scan matching technique ameliorates previous methods in terms of robustness, precision, convergence, and computational load. Furthermore, it has been extensively tested to validate and compare this technique with existing methods
A comparison of decision tree based techniques for indoor positioning system

Currently, an indoor positioning system based on a fingerprint technique for wireless networks under IEEE 802.11 standard uses a method to collect a received signal strengths (RSS) to create a radio map in an offline phase. Then, it detects the RSS in an online phase to compare and find the position. However, while detecting and gathering the RSS, there are some variations of the RSS that affect the accuracy of position estimation. Therefore, there are several methods used to estimate the position in order to improve the accuracy, but the one focused in this paper is a decision tree based classification. The decision tree based classification method is found that it can provide better improvement in accuracy than the others, e.g., K-Nearest Neighbor (K-NN), Bayesian, and Neural networks. However, the techniques used to construct the decision tree are varied depending on the algorithm used to implement. Therefore, this paper is a comparison of decision tree based techniques using typical decision tree (DT) and Gradient boosted tree algorithms for estimating the position indoor. In the study, the RSSs collected from access points in the experimental area are used as the training and testing data. The decision tree models are created by using typical DT and Gradient boosted algorithms based on the training data obtained. There are two factors to consider in the comparative study, i.e., the number of training data and the number of reference radio signals. The testing results from the experiment showed that the decision tree based on Gradient boosted algorithm yielded more accurate results than typical DT, where the amount of 19 reference radio signals and 50 samples of training data gave the best result.
AN OVERVIEW OF FRICTION STIR WELDING OF MAGNESIUM ALLOYS

Magnesium is a chemical active element, which can form intermetallic compounds with other alloying elements such as aluminum, calcium, copper etc. and due to its low density and light weight it has wide range of applications in the field of automobiles, aerospace, electronics, medicines, sports etc. Friction stir welding (FSW) is a promising weld ing technique used for joining Magnesium alloys. The present paper gives an overview of friction stir weld ing of magnesium alloys explored through various research studies and experiments in a systematic and chronological order. It also gives the impact of different weld ing parameters on the microstructure and mechanical properties of the FSW jo ints of magnesium alloys.
Online Social Network Analysis: A Survey of Research Applications in Computer Science

The emergence and popularization of online social networks suddenly made available a large amount of data from social organization, interaction and human behavior. All this information opens new perspectives and challenges to the study of social systems, being of interest to many fields. Although most online social networks are recent (less than fifteen years old), a vast amount of scientific papers was already published on this topic, dealing with a broad range of analytical methods and applications. This work describes how computational researches have approached this subject and the methods used to analyze such systems. Founded on a wide though non-exaustive review of the literature, a taxonomy is proposed to classify and describe different categories of research. Each research category is described and the main works, discoveries and perspectives are highlighted.
MAP: Medial axis based geometric routing in sensor networks

One of the challenging tasks in the deployment of dense wireless networks (like sensor networks) is in devising a routing scheme for node to node communication. Important consideration includes scalability, routing complexity, quality of communication paths and the load sharing of the routes. In this paper, we show that a compact and expressive abstraction of network connectivity by the medial axis enables efficient and localized routing. We propose MAP, a Medial Axis based naming and routing Protocol that does not require geographical locations, makes routing decisions locally, and achieves good load balancing. In its preprocessing phase, MAP constructs the medial axis of the sensor field, defined as the set of nodes with at least two closest boundary nodes. The medial axis of the network captures both the complex geometry and non-trivial topology of the sensor field. It can be represented succinctly by a graph whose size is in the order of the complexity of the geometric features (e.g., the number of holes). Each node is then given a name related to its position with respect to the medial axis. The routing scheme is derived through local decisions based on the names of the source and destination nodes and guarantees delivery with reasonable and natural routes. We show by both theoretical analysis and simulations that our medial axis based geometric routing scheme is scalable, produces short routes, achieves excellent load balancing, and is very robust to variations in the network model.
The cardiac sodium-calcium exchanger NCX1 is a key player in the initiation and maintenance of a stable heart rhythm.

AIMS The complex molecular mechanisms underlying spontaneous cardiac pacemaking are not fully understood. Recent findings point to a co-ordinated interplay between intracellular Ca(2+) cycling and plasma membrane-localized cation transport determining the origin and periodicity of pacemaker potentials. The sodium-calcium exchanger (NCX1) is a key sarcolemmal protein for the maintenance of calcium homeostasis in the heart. Here, we investigated the contribution of NCX1 to cardiac pacemaking. METHODS AND RESULTS We used an inducible and sinoatrial node-specific Cre transgene to create micelacking NCX1 selectively in cells of the cardiac pacemaking and conduction system (cpNCX1KO). RT-PCR and immunolabeling experiments confirmed the precise tissue-specific and temporally controlled deletion. Ablation of NCX1 resulted in a progressive slowing of heart rate accompanied by severe arrhythmias. Isolated sinoatrial tissue strips displayed a significantly decreased and irregular contraction rate underpinning a disturbed intrinsic pacemaker activity. Mutant animals displayed a gradual increase in the heart-to-body weight ratio and developed ventricular dilatation; however, their ventricular contractile performance was not significantly affected. Pacemaker cells from cpNCX1KO showed no NCX1 activity in response to caffeine-induced Ca(2+) release, determined by Ca(2+) imaging. Regular spontaneous Ca(2+) discharges were frequently seen in control, but only sporadically in knockout (KO) cells. The majority of NCX1KO cells displayed an irregular and a significantly reduced frequency of spontaneous Ca(2+) signals. Furthermore, Ca(2+) transients measured during electrical field stimulation were of smaller magnitude and decelerated kinetics in KO cells. CONCLUSIONS Our results establish NCX1 as a critical target for the proper function of cardiac pacemaking.
Can Achievement Peer Effect Estimates Inform Policy? A View from Inside the Black Box

Abstract Empirical studies of peer effects rely on the assumption that peer spillovers can be measured through observables. However, in the education context, many theories of peer spillovers center around unobservables, such as ability, effort, or motivation. I show that when peer effects arise from unobservables, the typical empirical specifications will not measure these effects accurately, which may help explain differences in the magnitude and even sign of peer effect estimates across studies. I also show that under reasonable assumptions, these estimates cannot be applied to determine the effects of regrouping students, a central motivation of the literature.