Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Freezing in Parkinson's disease: A spatiotemporal motor disorder beyond gait

Freezing of gait (FOG) is an incapacitating problem in Parkinson's disease that is difficult to manage therapeutically. We tested the hypothesis that impaired rhythm and amplitude control is a common mechanism of freezing which is also present during other rhythmic tasks. Therefore, we compared the occurrence and spatiotemporal profiles of freezing episodes during upper limb motion, lower limb motion, and FOG. Eleven freezers, 12 non‐freezers, and 11 controls performed a rhythmic bilateral finger movement task. The triggering effect of movement speed, amplitude, and coordination pattern was evaluated. Regression slopes and spectral analysis addressed the spatial and temporal kinematic changes inherent to freezing episodes. The FOG Questionnaire score significantly predicted severity of upper limb freezing, present in 9 freezers, and of foot freezing, present in 8 freezers. Similar to gait, small‐amplitude movements tended to trigger upper limb freezing, which was preceded by hastened movement and a strong amplitude breakdown. Upper limb freezing power spectra were broadband, including increased energy in the “freeze band” (3–8 Hz). Contrary to FOG, unilateral upper limb freezing was common and occurred mainly on the disease‐dominant side. The findings emphasize that a core motor problem underlies freezing which can affect various movement effectors. This deficit may originate on the disease‐dominant body side and interfere with amplitude and timing regulation during repetitive limb movements. These results may shift current thinking on the origins of freezing as being not exclusively a gait failure. © 2011 Movement Disorder Society
What we talk about when we talk about cloud network performance

Infrastructure-as-a-Service ("Cloud") data-centers intrinsically depend on high-performance networks to connect servers within the data-center and to the rest of the world. Cloud providers typically offer different service levels, and associated prices, for different sizes of virtual machine, memory, and disk storage. However, while all cloud providers provide network connectivity to tenant VMs, they seldom make any promises about network performance, and so cloud tenants suffer from highly-variable, unpredictable network performance. Many cloud customers do want to be able to rely on network performance guarantees, and many cloud providers would like to offer (and charge for) these guarantees. But nobody really agrees on how to define these guarantees, and it turns out to be challenging to define "network performance" in a way that is useful to both customers and providers. We attempt to bring some clarity to this question.
An encrypted payload protocol and target-side scripting engine

Modern exploit payloads in commercial and open-source penetration testing frameworks have grown much more advanced than the traditional shellcode they replaced. These payloads permit interactive access without launching a shell, network proxying, and many other rich features. Available payload frameworks have several limitations, however. They make little use of encryption to secure delivery and communications, especially in earlier stage payloads. In addition, their richer features require a constant network connection to the penetration tester, making them unsuitable against mobile clients, such as laptops, PDAs, and smart phones. This work introduces a first-stage exploit payload that is able to securely establish an encrypted channel using ElGamal key agreement and the RC4 stream cipher. The key agreement implementation requires only modular exponentiation and RC4 also lends itself to an implementation requiring a very small amount of executable code. This secure channel is used to send further executable code and deliver a fully-featured interpreter to execute mission logic written in the high-level Lua scripting language. This scripting environment permits secure code delivery as well as disconnected operation and execution of penetration testing mission logic.
White matter microstructure, cognition, and molecular markers in fragile X premutation females

Objective: To examine the interrelationships between fragile X mental retardation 1 (FMR1) mRNA and the FMR1 exon 1/intron 1 boundary methylation, white matter microstructure, and executive function, in women with a FMR1 premutation expansion (PM; 55–199 CGG repeats) and controls (CGG < 44). Methods: Twenty women with PM without fragile X-associated tremor/ataxia syndrome (FXTAS) and 20 control women between 22 and 54 years of age completed this study. FMR1 mRNA and methylation levels for 9 CpG sites within the FMR1 exon 1/intron 1 boundary from peripheral blood samples were analyzed. To measure white matter microstructure, diffusion-weighted imaging was used, from which fractional anisotropy (FA) and mean diffusivity (MD) values from anatomic regions within the corpus callosum and cerebellar peduncles were extracted. Executive function was assessed across a range of tasks. Results: No differences were revealed in white matter microstructure between women with PM and controls. However, we reveal that for women with PM (but not controls), higher FMR1 mRNA correlated with lower MD values within the middle cerebellar peduncle and Paced Auditory Serial Addition Test scores, higher methylation of the FMR1 exon 1/intron 1 boundary correlated with lower MD within the inferior and middle cerebellar peduncles and longer prosaccade latencies, and higher FA values within the corpus callosum and cerebellar peduncle regions corresponded to superior executive function. Conclusions: We provide evidence linking white matter microstructure to executive dysfunction and elevated FMR1 mRNA and FMR1 exon 1/intron 1 boundary methylation in women with PM without FXTAS. This suggests that the FXTAS phenotype may not be distinct but may form part of a spectrum of PM involvement.
Lively voice: a new model for speaking synthetic characters

Speech is one component of most synthetic characters. It is often assumed that the most important objective for such characters is that they should be ‘life-like’, ‘natural’ and ‘believable’. This paper suggests that this is inappropriate and that a better quality is one which we call ‘liveliness’. This concept and many of the ideas behind it derive from the theatre. One of the objectives of this work is to establish the same kind of relationship between the synthetic character and the user as exists between an actor and an audience, the audience is not fooled that the actor ’is’ the character, no more should the synthetic character be expected to be a real person. It is proposed to test these ideas in a performance bringing together an actor, an audience and a computer, all interacting and producing laughter in the audience.
A new method of test data generation for branch coverage in software testing based on EPDG and Genetic Algorithm

A new method called EPDG-GA which utilizes the Edge Partitions Dominator Graph (EPDG) and Genetic Algorithm (GA) for branch coverage testing is presented in this paper. First, a set of Critical Branches (CBs) are obtained by analyzing the EPDG of the tested program, while covering all the CBs implies covering all the branches of the Control Flow Graph (CFG). Then, the fitness functions are instrumented in the right position by analyzing the Pre-Dominator Tree (PreDT), and two metrics are developed to prioritize the CBs. Coverage-Table is established to record the CBs information and keeps track of whether a branch is executed or not. GA is used to generate test data to cover CBs so as to cover all the branches. The comparison results show that this approach is more efficient than random testing approach.
Music Structure Segmentation Algorithm Evaluation: Expanding on MIREX 2010 Analyses and Datasets

Music audio structure segmentation has been a task in the Music Information Retrieval Evaluation eXchange (MIREX) since 2009. In 2010, five algorithms were evaluated against two datasets (297 and 100 songs) with an almost exclusive focus on western popular music. A new annotated dataset significantly larger in size and with a more diverse range of musical styles became available in 2011. This new dataset comprises over 1,300 songs spanning pop, jazz, classical, and world music styles. The algorithms from the 2010 iteration of MIREX are re-evaluated against this new dataset. This paper presents a detailed analysis of these evaluation results in order to gain a better understanding of the current state-of-the-art in automatic structure segmentation. These expanded analyses focus on the interaction of algorithm performance and rankings with datasets, musical styles, and annotation level. Because the new dataset contains multiple annotations for each song, we also introduce a baseline for expected human performance for this task.
Color Image Segmentation using CIELab Color Space using Ant Colony Optimization

segmentation plays vital role to understand an image. Only proper understanding of an image tells that what it represents and the various objects present in the image. In this paper we have proposed a new approach by using CIELab color space and Ant based clustering for the segmentation of color images. Image segmentation process divides an image into distinct regions with property that each region is characterized by unique feature such as intensity, color etc. This paper elaborates the ant based clustering for image segmentation. CMC distance is used to calculate the distance between pixels as this color metric gives good results with CIELab color space. Results shows the segmentation performed using ant based clustering and also shows that number of clusters for the image with particular CMC distance also varies. In order to evaluate the performance of proposed technique, MSE (Mean Square Error) is used. MSE is the global quality measure based on pixel difference. To verify our work, we have compared the results with results of color image quantization using LAB color model based on Bacteria Foraging Optimization (13).
Compressed-Sensed-Domain L1-PCA Video Surveillance

We consider the problem of foreground and background extraction from compressed-sensed (CS) surveillance videos that are captured by a static CS camera. We propose, for the first time in the literature, a principal component analysis (PCA) approach that computes directly in the CS domain the low-rank subspace of the background scene. Rather than computing the conventional L2-norm-based principal components, which are simply the dominant left singular vectors of the CS-domain data matrix, we compute the principal components under an L1-norm maximization criterion. The background scene is then obtained by projecting the CS measurement vector onto the L1 principal components followed by total-variation (TV) minimization image recovery. The proposed L1-norm procedure directly carries out low-rank background representation without reconstructing the video sequence and, at the same time, exhibits significant robustness against outliers in CS measurements compared to L2-norm PCA. An adaptive CS- L1-PCA method is also developed for low-latency video surveillance. Extensive experimental studies described in this paper illustrate and support the theoretical developments.
Calcium and vitamin D in the prevention of osteoporotic fractures.

Osteoporosis has been defined as a skeletal disorder characterized by compromised bone strength, predisposing a person to increased risk of fracture.1 The three major osteoporotic fractures are those of the forearm, vertebra and hip, but fractures of the humerus, pelvis and ribs are also common. The incidence of these fracture rises steeply with age, such that most occur in people aged >65 years, where they are associated with excess mortality, substantial morbidity, and significant health and social services expenditure.2 This paper outlines the physiological roles of calcium and vitamin D, and assesses the current criteria for adequate calcium intake and optimal vitamin D status in adults. It highlights the prevalence of vitamin D insufficiency and low calcium intake in the UK, and reviews studies of vitamin D supplementation, with and without calcium, in the prevention of falls and fractures. Relevant clinical trials were identified using the search strategies described in recent meta-analyses.3,,4 Calcium is required for a number of functions in the body, including neuromuscular activity, membrane function, hormone secretion, enzyme activity, coagulation of the blood and skeletal mineralization.5 Over 99% of the body's calcium is stored in bone, where it provides mechanical strength to the skeleton, and serves as a mineral reservoir that can be drawn upon to maintain a normal plasma calcium. An adequate dietary calcium is therefore required to offset the obligatory losses of calcium in the urine and digestive juices, and prevent unnecessary loss of calcium from the skeletal reservoir.5 The recommended dietary calcium intake varies widely from country to country.6 In the US an intake of between 1000 and 1500 mg/day is recommended for adults, depending on age, gender and menstrual status.7 In contrast, the UK Committee on the Medical Aspects of Food and Nutrition Policy (COMA) … Address correspondence to Professor R.M. Francis, Musculoskeletal Unit, Freeman Hospital, Newcastle upon Tyne NE7 7DN. email: rmfrancis{at}compuserve.com
A System for Smart Home Control of Appliances based on Timer and Speech Interaction

The main objective of this work is to design and construct a microcomputer based system: to control electric appliances such as light, fan, heater, washing machine, motor, TV, etc. The paper discusses two major approaches to control home appliances. The first involves controlling home appliances using timer option. The second approach is to control home appliances using voice command. Moreover, it is also possible to control appliances using Graphical User Interface. The parallel port is used to transfer data from computer to the particular device to be controlled. An interface box is designed to connect the high power loads to the parallel port. This system will play an important role for the elderly and physically disable people to control their home appliances in intuitive and flexible way. We have developed a system, which is able to control eight electric appliances properly in these three modes.
Review of Randomized Controlled Trials on Psychological Interventions in Child Sexual Abuse: Current Status and Emerging Needs in the Indian Context

Child sexual abuse (CSA) is a critical, psychologically traumatic and sometimes life-threatening incident often associated with sequel of adverse physical, behavioral, and mental health consequences. Factors such as developmental age of the child, severity of abuse, closeness to the perpetrator, availability of medico-legal-social support network and family care, gender stereotypes in the community complicate the psychological trauma. Although the research on the effects of CSA as well as psychological intervention to reduce the victimization and promote the mental health of the child is in its infancy stage in India, the global research in the past three decades has progressed much ahead. A search was performed using MEDLINE, PubMed, PsycINFO, and Google Scholar from 1984 to 2015 and only 17 randomized controlled trials (RCTs) out of 96 potentially relevant studies were included. While nonspecific therapies covering a wide variety of outcome variables were prominent till 1999s, the trend changed to specific and focused forms of trauma-focused therapies in next one-and-half decades. Novel approaches to psychological interventions have also been witnessed. One intervention (non-RCT) study on effects on general counseling has been reported from India.
Object Space Silhouette Algorithims

In computer graphics, silhouette extraction and rendering has a critical role in a growing number of applications. This paper examines five object space silhouette extraction algorithms for polygonal models. The algorithms are applied to a variety of models and compared in terms of code complexity and run time performance. The purpose of this paper is to inform programmers who must choose from among these five algorithms. Note: The computer code generated for this project is available online at: http://cs.utah. edu/ ̃hartner
Syntactic Processing of Hebrew Sentences in Normal and Dyslexic Readers: Electrophysiological Evidence

Abstract The authors examined differences in brain activity as measured by amplitudes and latencies of event-related potential (ERP) components in Hebrew-speaking adult dyslexic and normal readers. The participants were measured while processing words' syntactic functions during reading of sentences with subject-verb-object syntactic order. The results suggested that among dyslexic and normal readers, N100 and P300 ERP components were sensitive to certain constituents of syntactic analysis for target words in accordance with their grammatical roles. The findings further demonstrated significant differences in ERP measures between dyslexic and normal readers. Compared with normal readers, dyslexic readers exhibited consistently higher amplitudes and longer latencies in both ERP components for the subject of the sentence. Significant, though less consistent, ERP variations were observed for other sentence elements. In addition, dyslexic readers differed from normal readers in their processing strategies. For normal readers, the verb-oriented, morphologically based strategy was found to be the most efficient for sentence processing in Hebrew, whereas the dyslexic readers demonstrated a more primitive mode of identification of words' grammatical roles, namely, the word-order strategy. The results support the hypothesis that there is a syntactic processing “weakness” in dyslexics.
Inpatient rehabilitation specifically designed for geriatric patients: systematic review and meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials

Objective To assess the effects of inpatient rehabilitation specifically designed for geriatric patients compared with usual care on functional status, admissions to nursing homes, and mortality. Design Systematic review and meta-analysis. Data sources Medline, Embase, Cochrane database, and reference lists from published literature. Review methods Only randomised controlled trials were included. Trials had to report on inpatient rehabilitation and report at least one of functional improvement, admission to nursing homes, or mortality. Trials of consultation or outpatient services, trials including patients aged <55, trials of non-multidisciplinary rehabilitation, and trials without a control group receiving usual care were excluded. Data were double extracted. Odds ratios and relative risks with 95% confidence intervals were calculated. Results 17 trials with 4780 people comparing the effects of general or orthopaedic geriatric rehabilitation programmes with usual care were included. Meta-analyses of effects indicated an overall benefit in outcomes at discharge (odds ratio 1.75 (95% confidence interval 1.31 to 2.35) for function, relative risk 0.64 (0.51 to 0.81) for nursing home admission, relative risk 0.72 (0.55 to 0.95) for mortality) and at end of follow-up (1.36 (1.07 to 1.71), 0.84 (0.72 to 0.99), 0.87 (0.77 to 0.97), respectively). Limited data were available on impact on health care or cost. Compared with those in control groups, weighted mean length of hospital stay after randomisation was longer in patients allocated to general geriatric rehabilitation (24.5 v 15.1 days) and shorter in patients allocated to orthopaedic rehabilitation (24.6 v 28.9 days). Conclusion Inpatient rehabilitation specifically designed for geriatric patients has the potential to improve outcomes related to function, admission to nursing homes, and mortality. Insufficient data are available for defining characteristics and cost effectiveness of successful programmes.
Linking Speech Perception and Neurophysiology: Speech Decoding Guided by Cascaded Oscillators Locked to the Input Rhythm

The premise of this study is that current models of speech perception, which are driven by acoustic features alone, are incomplete, and that the role of decoding time during memory access must be incorporated to account for the patterns of observed recognition phenomena. It is postulated that decoding time is governed by a cascade of neuronal oscillators, which guide template-matching operations at a hierarchy of temporal scales. Cascaded cortical oscillations in the theta, beta, and gamma frequency bands are argued to be crucial for speech intelligibility. Intelligibility is high so long as these oscillations remain phase locked to the auditory input rhythm. A model (Tempo) is presented which is capable of emulating recent psychophysical data on the intelligibility of speech sentences as a function of “packaging” rate (Ghitza and Greenberg, 2009). The data show that intelligibility of speech that is time-compressed by a factor of 3 (i.e., a high syllabic rate) is poor (above 50% word error rate), but is substantially restored when the information stream is re-packaged by the insertion of silent gaps in between successive compressed-signal intervals – a counterintuitive finding, difficult to explain using classical models of speech perception, but emerging naturally from the Tempo architecture.
A User Modeling Using Implicit Feedback for Effective Recommender System

An amount of information on the Web has been increased explosively with the growth of information technology. In the area of electronic commerce, the recommender systems that provide personalized content are crucial research issue. The analysis of efficient user preference is important for improving the recommendation accuracy. Existing recommendation system has used implicit feedback for analyzing user preference. But, when the collected user information is lack, it is not fit. This paper proposes a personalized recommendation system which is based on information built by analyzing implicit feedback. The proposed system monitors the various user behaviors comprehensively to analyze user intention more precisely. The system also deduces the most important attribute for the user among various attribute of a product based on ID3 algorithm, and applies the result to analyzing user preference. Therefore, proposed system is able to recommend items in the situation that user behavior information is lack. Empirical results show that the effectiveness of the system is confirmed.
A new representation for linear lists

We present a new data structure for maintaining a set of records in a linear list according to their key values. This data structure has the property that we can keep a number of fingers at points of interest in the key space (e.g., the beginning or the end of the list), so that access and modification in the neighborhood of a finger is very efficient. In the Section 2 we discuss the general structure of our B-tree. Since we propose to search the tree from a leaf upwards, additional links need to be introduced. In Section 3 we show how to obtain our result for the case of one finger. A key idea is the construction of a number representation behaving as described above, which we can use to model the propagation of modifications in the B-tree along the finger path. In Section 4 we generalize the structure so that several fingers in the key space can be maintained, with the advantage that access is cheap in the neighborhood of each finger. Finally in Section 5 we present some implementation notes and applications, mostly to sorting.