Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Posturography in differential diagnosis of patients with enlargement of brain ventricles.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE This study aimed to quantitatively evaluate balance disturbances by means of static posturography in patients with enlargement of the ventricular system (Evans ratio > 0.3). MATERIAL AND METHODS Fifty-four patients were diagnosed and treated in our Department of Neurosurgery. Thirty-six of them were qualified as patients with brain atrophy and 18 others were identified as patients with normal pressure hydrocephalus (NPH). Average sway radius and developed area of the posturogram were evaluated with eyes open and closed. These parameters constituted a base to calculate vision indices related to radius and area as a result of division of the difference of a given parameter (radius or area) measured with eyes closed and open by its corresponding sum. RESULTS The sway range was significantly greater in patients with NPH in comparison to the control group. In NPH, there were no differences of sways observed with eyes open or closed - the vision indices were not statistically different from zero (vision index related to radius: -6.1 ± 18.9%, vision index related to area: -5.1 ± 34.7%). This may indicate no participation of sight in postural stability control. Values of the vision index related to radius (9.3 ± 19.4%) and to area (22.1 ± 28.2%) in the atrophy group significantly differed from zero, which indicated the participation of sight in postural stability control. CONCLUSIONS Introduction of a new measure called the 'vision index' seems to be a promising clinical practice method of differentiation of hydrocephalus and brain atrophy.
Quality improvement of ultrathin gate oxide by using thermal growth followed by SF ANO technique

Rapid thermal oxide followed by anodization in direct current superimposed with scanning frequency alternating current was demonstrated for the first time to have an improved quality in ultrathin gate oxides. Compared with the thermal oxide grown without the scanning-frequency anodization (SF ANO) treatment, the gate leakage current density (J/sub g/) of SF ANO sample is significantly reduced without increasing the thickness of gate oxide. In addition, it could be observed that the interface trap density (D/sub it/) is reduced with tighter distribution. It is suggested that the bulk traps and interface traps in thermally grown oxide can be repaired during the SF ANO process.
Solving the Border Control Problem: Evidence of Enhanced Face Matching in Individuals with Extraordinary Face Recognition Skills

Photographic identity documents (IDs) are commonly used despite clear evidence that unfamiliar face matching is a difficult and error-prone task. The current study set out to examine the performance of seven individuals with extraordinary face recognition memory, so called “super recognisers” (SRs), on two face matching tasks resembling border control identity checks. In Experiment 1, the SRs as a group outperformed control participants on the “Glasgow Face Matching Test”, and some case-by-case comparisons also reached significance. In Experiment 2, a perceptually difficult face matching task was used: the “Models Face Matching Test”. Once again, SRs outperformed controls both on group and mostly in case-by-case analyses. These findings suggest that SRs are considerably better at face matching than typical perceivers, and would make proficient personnel for border control agencies.
A 3-D Scan Matching using Improved 3-D Normal Distributions Transform for Mobile Robotic Mapping

A 3D scan matching is an important component for sensor based localization and mapping by a mobile robot in natural environment. In this paper, the present authors propose a way to extend 2D normal distributions transform (NDT) scan matching method to 3D scan matching, and its improvement for faster processing time. This scan matching method divides scan into voxels, and approximates scan points in each cell into normal distribution. That matching time is O(N) with N of the number of input scan points. The authors describe in this paper, NDT for 3D scan points, its acceleration using the dual resolutions of NDT, and experiments of map building in large scale environments
Analysis of the Mecanum wheel arrangement of an omnidirectional vehicle

Mecanum wheels are widely used in omnidirectional vehicles, but their arrangements are usually arbitrarily selected. We find that the arrangement of Mecanum wheels influences the performance of an omnidirectional vehicle. The two most used arrangement modes, Type-X and Type-O, are studied. The inverse velocity Jacobian matrix of the arrangement judges whether a vehicle can fulfill omnidirectional movement. The eigenvalues of the inverse velocity Jacobian matrix and global stiffness index are proposed to evaluate the stability and dexterity of different arrangement modes. The theoretical results show that the Type-X vehicle has a larger stiffness and global stiffness index than the Type-O vehicle, which ensures that the Type-X vehicle moves more precisely and stably than the Type-O vehicle. Four types of movements (straight, sideways, diagonal, and revolving) are tested for both arrangements. The experiments show that the actual running tracks of Type-X follow the ideal running tracks well, while the performance of Type-O is much worse. Moreover, an external force is subjected to both arrangements. The results illustrate that the behavior of the Type-X vehicle is more stable than that of Type-O.
Networked Control of Nonlinear Systems under Denial-of-Service

We investigate the analysis and design of a control strategy for nonlinear systems under Denial-of-Service attacks. Based on an ISS-Lyapunov function analysis, we provide a characterization of the maximal percentage of time that feedback information can be lost without resulting in instability of the system. Motivated by the presence of a digital channel we consider event-based controllers for which a minimal inter-sampling time is explicitly characterized.
Variational Surface Approximation and Model Selection

We consider the problem of approximating an arbitrary generic surface with a given set of simple surface primitives. In contrast to previous approaches based on variational surface approximation, which are primarily concerned with finding an optimal partitioning of the input geometry, we propose to integrate a model selection step into the algorithm in order to also optimize the type of primitive for each proxy. Our method is a joint global optimization of both the partitioning of the input surface as well as the types and number of used shape proxies. Thus, our method performs an automatic trade‐off between representation complexity and approximation error without relying on a user supplied predetermined number of shape proxies. This way concise surface representations are found that better exploit the full approximative power of the employed primitive types.
APUS: fast and scalable paxos on RDMA

State machine replication (SMR) uses Paxos to enforce the same inputs for a program (e.g., Redis) replicated on a number of hosts, tolerating various types of failures. Unfortunately, traditional Paxos protocols incur prohibitive performance overhead on server programs due to their high consensus latency on TCP/IP. Worse, the consensus latency of extant Paxos protocols increases drastically when more concurrent client connections or hosts are added. This paper presents APUS, the first RDMA-based Paxos protocol that aims to be fast and scalable to client connections and hosts. APUS intercepts inbound socket calls of an unmodified server program, assigns a total order for all input requests, and uses fast RDMA primitives to replicate these requests concurrently. We evaluated APUS on nine widely-used server programs (e.g., Redis and MySQL). APUS incurred a mean overhead of 4.3% in response time and 4.2% in throughput. We integrated APUS with an SMR system Calvin. Our Calvin-APUS integration was 8.2X faster than the extant Calvin-ZooKeeper integration. The consensus latency of APUS outperformed an RDMA-based consensus protocol by 4.9X. APUS source code and raw results are released on github.com/hku-systems/apus.
Heuristic and Exact Algorithms for QoS Routing with Multiple Constraints(Regular section)

The modern network service of finding the optimal path subject to multiple constraints on performance metrics such as delay, jitter, loss probability, etc. gives rise to the multiconstrained optimal-path (MCOP) QoS routing problem, which is NP-complete. In this paper, this problem is solved through both exact and heuristic algorithms. We propose an exact algorithm E MCOP, which first constructs an aggregate weight and then uses a K-shortest-path algorithm to find the optimal solution. By means of E MCOP, the performance of the heuristic algorithm H MCOP proposed by Korkmaz et al. in a recent work is evaluated. H MCOP only runs Dijkstra’s algorithm (with slight modifications) twice, but it can find feasible paths with a success ratio very close to that of the exact algorithm. However, we notice that in certain cases its feasible solution has an unsatisfactorily high average cost deviation from the corresponding optimal solution. For this reason, we propose some modified algorithms based on H MCOP that can significantly improve the performance by running Dijkstra’s algorithm a few more times. The performance of the exact algorithm and heuristics is investigated through computer simulations on networks of various sizes. key words: QoS routing, multi-constrained path, additive QoS constraints, K-shortest-path algorithm, high-speed networking
Plasma Exchange and Rituximab in the Management of Acute Occlusive Retinal Vasculopathy Secondary to Systemic Lupus Erythematosus.

Purpose: To report a case of acute occlusive retinal vasculopathy secondary to systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) successfully treated with plasma exchange and rituximab Methods: Case Report Results: A 25-year-old female presenting acutely with lupus retinal vasculitis was treated urgently with plasma exchange after failure to respond to intravenous methylprednisolone. Following this, fluorescein angiography demonstrated reperfusion of occluded arterioles. Visual acuity improved from 6/60 to 6/6 bilaterally. Remission was maintained following rituximab (Rituxan) in combination with mycophenolatemofetil and oral prednisolone. Conclusions: Early treatment with plasma exchange achieved reperfusion of the occluded microvascular circulation with correspondingly good visual recovery and should be considered when patients present with corticosteroid refractory retinal vasculitis associated with SLE.
Measuring conditional Web throughput

We focus on the analysis of the performance of HTTP transaction over TCP connections as derived from a measured data set collected at the ingress/egress point of Politecnico di Torino. We argue that looking at global average performance figures may hide some interesting trends that researchers and operators may want to detect. Thus, we partition the original measured set by looking at conditional densities and averages; considered conditional parameters include, among others, TCP connections RTTs, length of data set, adopted loss recovery algorithm. We show that particular care must be taken when analyzing data, since the measured set whose size is reduced by the partitioning scheme could be not large enough to ensure significance. A simple method to evaluate the significance of the presented measures is used. Ingenuity is required to understand behaviors not in line with the classical intuition driven by TCP knowledge.
DOA and steering vector estimation using a partially calibrated array

We consider the problem of estimating directions of arrival (DOAs) using an array of sensors, where some of the sensors are perfectly calibrated, while others are uncalibrated. We identify a cost function whose minimizer is a statistically consistent and efficient estimator of the unknown parameters-the DOAs and the gains and phases of the uncalibrated sensors. Next we present an iterative algorithm for finding the minimum of that cost function The proposed algorithm is guaranteed to converge. The performance of the estimation algorithm is compared with the Cramer Rao bound (CRB). The derivation of the bound is also included. It is shown that DOA accuracy can be improved by adding uncalibrated sensors to a precisely calibrated array. Moreover, the number of sources that can be resolved may be larger than the number that can be resolved by the calibrated portion of the array.
Operator-based and random mutant selection: Better together

Mutation testing is a powerful methodology for evaluating the quality of a test suite. However, the methodology is also very costly, as the test suite may have to be executed for each mutant. Selective mutation testing is a well-studied technique to reduce this cost by selecting a subset of all mutants, which would otherwise have to be considered in their entirety. Two common approaches are operator-based mutant selection, which only generates mutants using a subset of mutation operators, and random mutant selection, which selects a subset of mutants generated using all mutation operators. While each of the two approaches provides some reduction in the number of mutants to execute, applying either of the two to medium-sized, real-world programs can still generate a huge number of mutants, which makes their execution too expensive. This paper presents eight random sampling strategies defined on top of operator-based mutant selection, and empirically validates that operator-based selection and random selection can be applied in tandem to further reduce the cost of mutation testing. The experimental results show that even sampling only 5% of mutants generated by operator-based selection can still provide precise mutation testing results, while reducing the average mutation testing time to 6.54% (i.e., on average less than 5 minutes for this study).
Twin surrogates to test for complex synchronisation

We present an approach to generate (multivariate) twin surrogates (TS) based on recurrence properties. This technique generates surrogates which correspond to an independent copy of the underlying system, i.e. they induce a trajectory of the underlying system starting at different initial conditions. We show that these surrogates are well suited to test for complex synchronisation and exemplify this for the paradigmatic system of Rossler oscillators. The proposed test enables to assess the statistical relevance of a synchronisation analysis from passive experiments which are typical in natural systems.
Approach to a disciplined development process - the ISTAR integrated project support environment

This paper is an extended, written, version of a presentation to the Second Process Workshop. It presents a systematic, top down, approach to the design of integrated project and programming support environments (IPSEs) using the ISTAR project at Imperial Software Technology Ltd as an illustration. In the context of the Workshop the talk was intended to describe an approach to software development and evolution in general. If that be his concern the reader may so interpret the text. Alternatively it may be seen as an introduction to ISTAR and a contribution to IPSE development technology.
Effects of Kinesio Taping versus McConnell Taping for Patellofemoral Pain Syndrome: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Objectives. To conduct a systematic review comparing the effects of Kinesio taping with McConnell taping as a method of conservative management of patients with patellofemoral pain syndrome (PFPS). Methods. MEDLINE, PUBMED, EMBASE, AMED, and the Cochrane Central Register of Control Trials electronic databases were searched through July 2014. Controlled studies evaluating the effects of Kinesio or McConnell taping in PFPS patients were retrieved. Results. Ninety-one articles were selected from the articles that were retrieved from the databases, and 11 articles were included in the analysis. The methods, evaluations, and results of the articles were collected, and the outcomes of patellar tapings were analyzed. Kinesio taping can reduce pain and increase the muscular flexibility of PFPS patients, and McConnell taping also had effect in pain relief and patellar alignment. Meta-analysis showed small effect in pain reduction and motor function improvement and moderate effect in muscle activity change among PFPS patients using Kinesio taping. Conclusions. Kinesio taping technique used for muscles can relieve pain but cannot change patellar alignment, unlike McConnell taping. Both patellar tapings are used differently for PFPS patients and substantially improve muscle activity, motor function, and quality of life.
Geocontext extraction methods analysis for determining the new approach to automatic semantic places recognition

Goal of this paper is to determine actual trends in geocontext extraction methods and to understand which types of geocontext information are the most interesting for users. For this purposes comparison of recent researches about geocontext analysis was done. Researches were compared by the type of achieved result, used formalism, source data and limitations. As the main result of comparison new approach for automatic semantic places recognition was proposed. This approach is based on geotags markup with semantic user-defined tags. The solution allows extracting information (coordinates and a set of corresponding semantic tags on the natural language) about locations which are interesting for the location-based services users. The main advantage of the approach is its simplicity - the method does not rely on any syntax analysis algorithms during the semantic labeling stage. For illustrating the approach an example of the general purpose accidents monitoring service for the Geo2Tag platform was described.
A Novel PRAMC-Based Ultralow-Profile Transmitarray Antenna by Using Ray Tracing Principle

In this paper, a novel ultralow-profile transmitarray (TA) is proposed by using multifolded ray tracing principle. The proposed TA unit cell would reflect the incident wave of x-polarization as a ground and transmit the incident wave of y-polarization with arbitrary phase shift in the operating frequency band. A broadband polarization rotation reflection surface based on artificial magnetic conductor with small phase difference in wide range of incidence angle is applied to transform the polarization of incident wave. Two kinds of TA antennas at 28 GHz are studied, where the distances between the source and the TA are, respectively, reduced to 1/3 and 1/4 of the focal length (named as TA antennas I and II), which are much less than that of the conventional TA antennas. The simulated results show that the proposed TA antennas can achieve −1 dB gain drop bandwidth of 5% and cross-polarization level of less than −30 dB, and the maximum aperture efficiencies can achieve 46% and 40%, respectively. For demonstration, the TA antenna I is fabricated and measured. Good agreement can be observed between the measurement and simulation.
The impact of online health information on the doctor-patient relationship Findings from a qualitative study

Against the backdrop of the comprehensive presence and influence of new media, this study focuses on the impact of online health information on the relationship between doctor and patient. Considering the existing literature, three research questions are examined, looking at (1) the impact of online health information on the power relations between doctor and patient, (2) the significance of the information’s impact on the relationship, in the sense of opportunities and challenges, as well as (3) the variables determining this significance. To approach these questions, qualitative in-depth interviews with doctors and a patient organisation representative as well as focus group discussions with patients are conducted. Doctors working in medical practices as opposed to clinical doctors, and the situation as it manifests in the German Rhine-Main Area are focussed on in order to add to the established body of literature by considering previously neglected aspects. The study finds that online health information contributes to an empowerment of the patient, while the doctor stays important due to an advantage in medical expert knowledge. Online health information can signify both an opportunity and a challenge to the relationship, mainly depending on the information’s quality and the patient’s capabilities to evaluate the information. Imperfections of both the information’s quality and the patients’ evaluation capabilities support the necessity of a powerful doctor. However, patients unaware of their limited evaluation capabilities may nevertheless behave more powerful in the relationship, causing discrepancies with the doctor. These results confirm connections relevant to the conceptual framework and literature but also hint to aspects that are worth considering in closer detail. The findings suggest that the doctor-patient relationship is affected by the new media influence, but that new media will not turn upside down the core pillars of the doctorpatient relationship. MSc Dissertation of Susanne Christmann
Sensitivity Analysis of Continuous Time Bayesian Networks Using Perturbation Realization

The continuous time Bayesian network (CTBN) model can be thought of as a factored Markov process. Sensitivity analysis of a Markov process is done by calculating partial derivatives of a user-defined performance function with respect to changes in the transition intensities of the Markov process. On the other hand, sensitivity analysis has yet to be applied to the CTBN model. To address this, we show how to extend the perturbation realization method for Markov process sensitivity analysis to the CTBN, which works on a sample path of the process. However, in a CTBN, the number of states is exponential in the number of nodes, making it difficult to create a sample path of the entire model that visits every state. We show how to exploit the conditional independence structure of the CTBN to build sample paths and compute performance measure derivatives independently for different subnetworks.
Monetary Policy and Stock Markets Evidence from EU Countries

The analysis of monetary policy impact - via interest rate as instrument of intervention - on the evolution of stock market prices has gained more popularity during the current crisis due to the accumulation of financial imbalances. This article investigates the impact of monetary policy on equity indexes in European Union countries from January 2000 to February 2012, using cointegration and Granger causality tests. The results reveal the existence of long and short term relationship between stock prices and interest rates. We also find that on the long-run the comovement between interest rates and stock prices are stronger during crisis period, when compared with entire period.
Effect of Pt and FePt Layer Thickness on Microstructure and Magnetic Properties of L10 FePt Films With Perpendicular Anisotropy

The effect of the thicknesses of the Pt intermediate layer and FePt magnetic layer in CrV/Pt/FePt multilayers on the microstructure and magnetic properties for the perpendicular magnetic anisotropy was investigated. The Pt (0–4 nm) and FePt (7–28 nm) layers were deposited on a 90 nm-thick Cr94V6 underlayer at 350 °C, and the crystal structure and magnetic properties of the fabricated CrV/Pt/FePt multilayers were characterized. X-ray diffraction and vibrating sample magnetometer measurements revealed that the out-of-plane coercivity (Hc-out) and squareness increase when the Pt intermediate layer is deposited between CrV and FePt because it protects against diffusion of Cr and V atoms into the FePt magnetic layer during deposition. In addition, we confirmed that Hc-out and squareness decrease with increasing FePt layer thickness in the range of 7–28 nm. As a result, the maximum Hc-out, S, and squareness were obtained for a multilayer with a CrV thickness of 90 nm, Pt thickness of 2 nm, and FePt thickness of 7 nm. This paper shows that highly ordered FePt L10 (001) can be fabricated by sublayer thickness control.