Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Coordinated alpha and gamma control of muscles and spindles in movement and posture

Mounting evidence suggests that both α and γ motoneurons are active during movement and posture, but how does the central motor system coordinate the α-γ controls in these tasks remains sketchy due to lack of in vivo data. Here a computational model of α-γ control of muscles and spindles was used to investigate α-γ integration and coordination for movement and posture. The model comprised physiologically realistic spinal circuitry, muscles, proprioceptors, and skeletal biomechanics. In the model, we divided the cortical descending commands into static and dynamic sets, where static commands (αs and γs) were for posture maintenance and dynamic commands (αd and γd) were responsible for movement. We matched our model to human reaching movement data by straightforward adjustments of descending commands derived from either minimal-jerk trajectories or human EMGs. The matched movement showed smooth reach-to-hold trajectories qualitatively close to human behaviors, and the reproduced EMGs showed the classic tri-phasic patterns. In particular, the function of γd was to gate the αd command at the propriospinal neurons (PN) such that antagonistic muscles can accelerate or decelerate the limb with proper timing. Independent control of joint position and stiffness could be achieved by adjusting static commands. Deefferentation in the model indicated that accurate static commands of αs and γs are essential to achieve stable terminal posture precisely, and that the γd command is as important as the αd command in controlling antagonistic muscles for desired movements. Deafferentation in the model showed that losing proprioceptive afferents mainly affected the terminal position of movement, similar to the abnormal behaviors observed in human and animals. Our results illustrated that tuning the simple forms of α-γ commands can reproduce a range of human reach-to-hold movements, and it is necessary to coordinate the set of α-γ descending commands for accurate and stable control of movement and posture.
A behavioral model of sensory alignment in the superficial and deep layers of the superior colliculus

The ability to combine sensory information is an important attribute of the brain. Multisensory integration in natural systems suggests that a similar approach in artificial systems may be important. Multisensory integration is exemplified in mammals by the superior colliculus (SC), which combines visual, auditory and somatosensory stimuli to shift gaze. However, although we have a good understanding of the overall architecture of the SC, as yet we do not fully understand the process of integration. While a number of computational models of the SC have been developed, there has not been a larger scale implementation that can help determine how the senses are aligned and integrated across the superficial and deep layers of the SC. In this paper we describe a prototype implementation of the mammalian SC consisting of self-organizing maps linked by Hebbian connections, modeling visual and auditory processing in the superficial and deep layers. The model is trained on artificial auditory and visual stimuli, with testing demonstrating the formation of appropriate spatial representations, which compare well with biological data. Subsequently, we train the model on multisensory stimuli, testing to see if the unisensory maps can be combined. The results show the successful alignment of sensory maps to form a multisensory representation. We conclude that, while simple, the model lends itself to further exploration of integration, which may give insight into whether such modeling is of benefit computationally.
Myositis ossificans circumscripta of the triceps due to overuse in a female swimmer

Myositis ossificans is a rare condition characterized by non-neoplastic heterotopic bone formation in soft tissue and skeletal muscle. It is a benign and often self-limiting disease with no need for surgery. Here, we describe a young female swimmer with myositis ossificans circumscripta of the triceps due to overuse. Because of the benign character of the lesion, conservative treatment was initiated with rest and anti-inflammatory drugs. She obtained complete resolution after 6 months and was able to return to normal sporting activities. Myositis ossificans circumscripta is a rare benign lesion with an excellent prognosis. Most lesions in athletes occur due to contusions or strains; however, overuse is now described as well. Spontaneous resolution is seen in almost all cases. Cases in which, despite conservative treatment, a painful mass persists, surgical excision can be considered.
Structure of Cysteine- and Glycine-rich Protein CRP2

Members of the cysteine- and glycine-rich protein family (CRP1, CRP2, and CRP3) contain two zinc-binding LIM domains, LIM1 (amino-terminal) and LIM2 (carboxyl-terminal), and are implicated in diverse cellular processes linked to differentiation, growth control, and pathogenesis. Here we report the solution structure of full-length recombinant quail CRP2 as determined by multi-dimensional triple-resonance NMR spectroscopy. The structural analysis revealed that the global fold of the two LIM domains in the context of the full-length protein is identical to the recently determined solution structures of the isolated individual LIM domains of quail CRP2. There is no preference in relative spatial orientation of the two domains. This supports the view that the two LIM domains are independent structural and presumably functional modules of CRP proteins. This is also reflected by the dynamic properties of CRP2 probed by15N relaxation values (T 1,T 2, and nuclear Overhauser effect). A model-free analysis revealed local variations in mobility along the backbone of the two LIM domains in the native protein, similar to those observed for the isolated domains. Interestingly, fast and slow motions observed in the 58-amino acid linker region between the two LIM domains endow extensive motional freedom to CRP2. The dynamic analysis indicates independent backbone mobility of the two LIM domains and rules out correlated LIM domain motion in full-length CRP2. The finding that the LIM domains in a protein encompassing multiple LIM motifs are structurally and dynamically independent from each other supports the notion that these proteins may function as adaptor molecules arranging two or more protein constituents into a macromolecular complex.
MOTION OF ECCENTRICALLY AND DYNAMICALLY LOADED HYDROSTATIC THRUST BEARINGS IN MIXED LUBRICATION

The mixed lubrication characteristics of hydrostatic thrust pad bearings under eccentrically and dynamically loaded conditions are studied theoretically. On the basis of the operation of hydraulic pumps and motors, the eccentricity of loads, time-lag of changes in between the supply pressure and loads, surface roughness, recess volume and the bulk modulus of liquids are examined. The basic equations applying the perturbation method are developed; the three dimensional motion of the bearing is simulated; and the solutions including the pressure distributions, friction, flow rate, power loss and the stiffness are obtained. The calculations indicate that: The eccentric load causes local contacts. The preceding change in loads poses the larger motion of the pad. As the recess volume increases or the bulk modulus decreases, the bearing stiffness decreases.
Analyzing Real-Time Systems: Theory and Tools

The main topic of this dissertation is the development and use of methods for formal reasoning about the correctness of real-time systems, in particular methods and tools to handle new classes of problems. In real-time systems the correctness of the system does not only depend on the order in which actions take place, but also the timing of the actions. The formal reasoning presented here is based on (extensions of) the model of timed automata and tools supporting this model, mainly Uppaal. Real-time systems are often part of safety critical systems e.g. control systems for planes, trains, or factories, though also everyday electronics as audio/video equipment and (mobile) phones are considered real-time systems. Often these systems are concurrent systems with a number of components interacting, and reasoning about such systems is notoriously difficult. However, since most of the systems are either safety critical or errors in the systems are costly, ensuring correctness is very important, and hence formal reasoning can play a role in increasing the reliability of real-time systems. We present two classes of cost extended timed automata, where a cost is associated to an execution of the automaton. We show that calculating the minimum cost of reaching a location in the automaton, the minimum-cost reachability problem, is decidable for both classes. Since a number of optimization problems, e.g. scheduling problems in a natural way, can be modeled using cost extended timed automata, we can now solve these problems using extensions of timed model checkers. The state-space of the simpler class, uniformly priced timed automata (UPTA), which is a subclass of linearly priced timed automata (LPTA), can effectively be represented using a slightly modified version of the well known difference bounded matrix (DBM) data-structure for representing zones, used in most timed model checkers. Using an extension of the region construction, the minimum-cost reachability problem can also be solved for LPTAs. However, the standard way of using zones for representing the state-space cannot be used for LPTAs, since there is no way of capturing the cost of states. Based on the notion of facets, zones can be split into smaller zones which can be represented by extended DBMs in an effective way. Minimum-cost reachability for both UPTAs and LPTAs have been implemented in extensions of Uppaal, and successfully tested on a number of case studies. In particular, part of the Sidmar steel production plant, which is a case study of the Esprit VHS project, has been studied. Schedulability, without considering cost and optimality, has also been addressed using standard timed automata and Uppaal. In order to solve the schedulability problem in Uppaal it proved crucial to add a number
Study on Application of Retinex in Infrared Color Aerial Photographs

Infrared color remote sensing is always possessed of the consequence. The level of the virescence is a quite important synthetic index for appraising a city, so infrared color remote sensing is brought into play to it's the important function in the application of detecting urban virescence. But in the city, ground- object complexity, high-building gather, a mass of shadows being, and numbers of color ground-object being. All of them are main disturbing source to extracting vegetation information. That is a topic of the day how resists their disturbance. This paper just about aim at the problems, to discuss Retinex helpfully to attaint goal that resisting disturbance of the hereinbefore disturbing sources in extracting vegetation information from infrared color remote sensing images.
Quasi-three-level solid-state lasers in the near and mid infrared

Quasi-three-level lasers based on trivalent rare-earth ions are the most important types of solid-state lasers covering the near to mid infrared from 0.9 µm in the Nd3+ ion up to beyond 7 µm in the Pr3+ ion [1] and they are the most important sources especially in the eye-safe range > 1.4 µm. Although for a long time being regarded as less efficient and not so well suited for high-power operation due to the presence of reabsorption on the laser emission by its own active medium, these lasers made an enormous progress in the last years. This progress has been enabled on one side by the availability of high-power pump sources like laser diodes with now high spectral and spatial brightness, allowing operating the laser at high pump intensity far above its threshold. Often, resonant direct-diode pumping is the key to high efficiency and high output power. On the other side, however, the population dynamics and the spectroscopic properties of these lasers need to be very well understood in order to obtain efficient lasing and to fully exploit their possibilities. The unique properties of these lasers will be addressed based on two examples: Recent advances in the description of the spectroscopic properties of these lasers on the example of Er3+ allow us now to incorporate the laser medium's temperature as a real-time variable into laser modeling and simulation [2,3]. These new theories, together with a novel description which takes into account the influence of the laser medium's own fluorescence on the laser performance [4], e.g. opened the way to design and realize one of the most powerful solid-state lasers in the eye-safe spectral range: The Er3+:YAG solid-state heat-capacity laser (SSHCL). Fig. 1 shows the most recent results with an output power of 4.65 kW at an emission wavelength of 1.64 µm and an incident pump slope efficiency of 51.4 % (58.4 % with respect to the absorbed pump power). Over 435 J of pulse energy at a moderate temperature rise of only 56.7 K/s are achieved, currently limited by the influence of increasing thermal inhomogeneities destabilizing the laser cavity.
Data center TCP (DCTCP)

Cloud data centers host diverse applications, mixing workloads that require small predictable latency with others requiring large sustained throughput. In this environment, today's state-of-the-art TCP protocol falls short. We present measurements of a 6000 server production cluster and reveal impairments that lead to high application latencies, rooted in TCP's demands on the limited buffer space available in data center switches. For example, bandwidth hungry "background" flows build up queues at the switches, and thus impact the performance of latency sensitive "foreground" traffic. To address these problems, we propose DCTCP, a TCP-like protocol for data center networks. DCTCP leverages Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) in the network to provide multi-bit feedback to the end hosts. We evaluate DCTCP at 1 and 10Gbps speeds using commodity, shallow buffered switches. We find DCTCP delivers the same or better throughput than TCP, while using 90% less buffer space. Unlike TCP, DCTCP also provides high burst tolerance and low latency for short flows. In handling workloads derived from operational measurements, we found DCTCP enables the applications to handle 10X the current background traffic, without impacting foreground traffic. Further, a 10X increase in foreground traffic does not cause any timeouts, thus largely eliminating incast problems.
A phonetic feature based lattice rescoring approach to LVCSR

Large Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognition (LVCSR) systems decode the input speech using diverse information sources, such as acoustic, lexical, and linguistic. Although most of the unreliable hypotheses are pruned during the recognition process, current state-of-the-art systems often make errors that are “unreasonable” for human listeners. Several studies have shown that a proper integration of acoustic-phonetic information can be beneficial to reducing such errors. We have previously shown that high-accuracy phone recognition can be achieved if a bank of speech attribute detectors is used to compute a confidence score describing attribute activation levels that the current frame exhibits. In those experiments, the phone recognition system did not rely on the language model to follow their word sequence constraints, and the vocabulary was small. In this work, we extend our approach to LVCSR by introducing a second recognition step during which additional information not directly used during conventional log-likelihood based decoding is introduced. Experimental results show promising performance.
Towards semantic service selection for B2B integration

There are various B2B integration scenarios where a requester can choose among several services of the same or different service providers offering similar service capabilities satisfying the request. The choice of the service to be invoked often depends on the parameters of the actual request and preferences of the requester. In this paper we introduce a solution for a dynamic (at run-time) web service selection based on semantic interpretation of offered service capabilities and the parameters specifying the actual request. The proposed solution takes into account special conditions on service usage either contractually agreed offline between requester and provider or specified by the requester without the knowledge of the provider. In general, those conditions restrict the interpretation of the original service capabilities as offered by a service provider and influence the choice of a service.
The Odontoblast Process: Form and Function

The odontoblast is a unique cell. Its body sits at the edge of a calcified tissue and sends a process a considerable distance into it and away from its nutritional and controlling center. In other vital, calcified tissues, the cell body remains close to the process and within the tissue. Dentin is unusual by virtue of its anatomy, which allows nutrients to arrive only from one surface, the other being sealed off, in the healthy state, by the inert and unfeeling enamel. The odontoblast process extends into an increasingly inhospitable locality. It is this polarity and special environment that make the odontoblast process of particular interest. The formation and maintenance of dentin are well-established functions of the odontoblast. Its function as a sensory receptor is, however, largely speculative. In all functions, the process acts (or would act) as the main pathway of activity. In describing what we know about the process, we are largely limited to information obtained by histological techniques and are thus looking mainly at structural data drawn from small sections of chemically treated tissues. Biochemical analyses and the use of radioactive tracers add to this considerably, but the need for techniques that permit examination of the dynamic activities of the cell should be expressed at an early stage. The odontoblast process has been examined in a number of species, including man, monkey, cat, mouse, and ferret. As far as 1 am aware, there are no clearly reported species differences, so I will discuss most of the reports without reference to species. It may be that some differences between reports are explicable on this basis, but this is not clear at the present time. A more plausible explanation for variations lies in the difficulty of processing dentin for microscopic observation. The odontoblast process is a fragile cellular organ, surrounded by a matrix of resilient and resistant material protecting and obscuring it from close examination. We should be aware of the limitations of our techniques and direct considerably more effort toward overcoming them.
Techniques for dealing with reverse causality between institutions and economic performance

This article provides a succinct review of the arguments stressing the mutual relationship between institutions and economic performance, and a scholarly account of some of the most popular econometric strategies used to minimize reversed causality problems in impact estimation. Among the techniques revisited we find the instrumental variables (IV) approach, distributed lags and vector autoregressions (VAR), quasi-experiments, and identification by heteroskedasticity (IH). Ultimately, the review is conceived as a methodological aide to researchers seeking to explore causal relationships through the use of the Institutional Profiles Database (IPD) produced by the Agence Francaise de Developpement (AFD).
The Use of Ultrasound (20kHz) as a Novel Method for Preparing Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cell Electrodes

A novel Sonoelectrochemical method for preparing catalyst layers for Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cell (PEMFC) is described. Platinum loaded on Nafion-bonded carbon anodes in PEMFC membrane electrode assemblies (MEAs) were prepared in K2PtCl4 aqueous solutions by galvanostatic pulse electrodeposition [optimum current duty of 10ms (tON)/100ms (tOFF)] in the absence [1,2] and presence of low-frequency high-power ultrasound (20 kHz, up to 29 W.cm) and at (313 ± 1) K [3]. In order to optimize the system, initial studies focussed on platinum potentiostatic electrodeposition on glassy carbon (GC) disc electrodes in the absence (Fig.1) and presence of ultrasound (Fig.2). It was found that ultrasound affects significantly the electrodeposition process of Pt on carbon electrodes, i.e. limiting currents were observed compared to those obtained under silent conditions (no agitation) (Fig. 1). Since the Pt electrodeposition in aqueous solutions only occurred on carbon, which is usually mixed with a nonconductive proton exchange polymer, Nafion®, it was possible to increase the utilization efficiency of the catalyst and hence the performance of the MEA. The amount of Pt electrodeposit (Pt loading) on the Nafionbonded carbon substrate was determined by inductively coupled plasma-atomic emission spectroscopy (ICP-AES) and the electrochemical surface areas (ESA) of the Pt electrodeposits were determined by cyclic voltammetry in N2 purged 1M H2SO4. It was found that electrodes prepared sonoelectrochemically showed better performance compared to those prepared by (i) galvanostatic pulse method only (i.e. in the absence of ultrasound) and (ii) conventional method (electrodes prepared with 20 wt.% Pt/C from E-TEK; 0.3 mg Pt cm on both anode and cathode) (Fig.3). For example, a power density value of 98.5mW.cm was found for anodes prepared sonoelectrochemically compared with 91.5mW.cm (by galvanostatic pulse method alone) and 86mW.cm (by conventional method), in other words, an increase of ca. 12mW.cm was found using the sonogalvanostatic pulse method (Fig.3). In this paper, it is reported for the first time the use of ultrasound for the fabrication of PEMFC electrodes at room temperature, atmospheric pressure and at 20 kHz. Further investigations are currently being carried out to optimise the ultrasonic effect on the performance of MEAs.
Interleukin 6 Influences Germinal Center Development and Antibody Production via a Contribution of C3 Complement Component

Mice rendered deficient for interleukin (IL) 6 by gene targeting were evaluated for their response to T cell–dependent antigens. Antigen-specific immunoglobulin (Ig)M levels were unaffected whereas all IgG isotypes showed varying degrees of alteration. Germinal center reactions occurred but remained physically smaller in comparison to those in the wild-type mice. This concurred with the observations that molecules involved in initial signaling events leading to germinal center formation were not altered (e.g., B7.2, CD40 and tumor necrosis factor R1). T cell priming was not impaired nor was a gross imbalance of T helper cell (Th) 1 versus Th2 cytokines observed. However, B7.1 molecules, absent from wild-type counterparts, were detected on germinal center B cells isolated from the deficient mice suggesting a modification of costimulatory signaling. A second alteration involved impaired de novo synthesis of C3 both in serum and germinal center cells from IL-6–deficient mice. Indeed, C3 provided an essential stimulatory signal for wild-type germinal center cells as both monoclonal antibodies that interrupted C3-CD21 interactions and sheep anti–mouse C3 antibodies caused a significant decrease in antigen-specific antibody production. In addition, germinal center cells isolated from C3–deficient mice produced a similar defect in isotype production. Low density cells with dendritic morphology were the local source of IL-6 and not the germinal center lymphocytes. Adding IL-6 in vitro to IL-6–deficient germinal center cells stimulated cell cycle progression and increased levels of antibody production. These findings reveal that the germinal center produces and uses molecules of the innate immune system, evolutionarily pirating them in order to optimally generate high affinity antibody responses.