Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Pilot Study of Intensive Locomotor-Related Skill Training and Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation in Chronic Spinal Cord Injury

Background and Purpose: Improved walking function is a priority among persons with motor-incomplete spinal cord injury (PwMISCI). Accessibility and cost limit long-term participation in locomotor training offered in specialized centers. Intensive motor training that facilitates neuroplastic mechanisms that support skill learning and can be implemented in the home/community may be advantageous for promoting long-term restoration of walking function. Additionally, increasing corticospinal drive via transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) may enhance training effects. In this pilot study, we investigated whether a moderate-intensity motor skill training (MST) circuit improved walking function in PwMISCI and whether augmenting training with tDCS influenced outcomes. Methods: Twenty-five adults (chronic, motor-incomplete spinal cord injury) were randomized to a 3-day intervention of a locomotor-related MST circuit and concurrent application of sham tDCS (MST+tDCSsham) or active tDCS (MST+tDCS). The primary outcome was overground walking speed. Secondary outcomes included walking distance, cadence, stride length, and step symmetry index (SI). Results: Analyses revealed significant effects of the MST circuit on walking speed, walking distance, cadence, and bilateral stride length but no effect on interlimb SI. No significant between-groups differences were observed. Post hoc analyses revealed within-groups change in walking speed (ΔM = 0.13 m/s, SD = 0.13) that app-roached the minimally clinically important difference of 0.15 m/s. Discussion and Conclusions: Brief, intensive MST involving locomotor-related activities significantly increased walking speed, walking distance, and spatiotemporal measures in PwMISCI. Significant additive effects of tDCS were not observed; however, participation in only 3 days of MST was associated with changes in walking speed that were comparable to longer locomotor training studies. Video Abstract available for more insights from the authors (see the Video, Supplemental Digital Content 1, available at: http://links.lww.com/JNPT/A386).
PISA data clusters reveal student and school inequality that affects results

The data from the PISA survey show that student performance correlates with socio-economic background, that private schools have higher results and more privileged students, and that this varies between countries. We explore this further and analyze the PISA data using methods from network theory and find clusters of countries whose students have similar performance and socio-economic background. Interestingly, we find a cluster of countries, including China, Spain and Portugal, characterized by less privileged students performing well. When considering private schools only, some countries, such as Portugal and Brazil, are in a cluster with mostly wealthy countries characterized by privileged students. Swedish grades are compared to PISA results, and we see that the higher grades in private schools are in line with the PISA results, suggesting that there is no grade inflation in this case, but differences in socio-economic background suggest that this is due to school segregation.
Inverse load calculation procedure for offshore wind turbines and application to a 5-MW wind turbine support structure

A significant number of wind turbines installed today have reached their designed service life of 20 years, and the number will rise continuously. Most of these turbines promise a more economical performance if they operate for more than 20 years. To assess a continued operation, we have to analyze the load-bearing capacity of the support structure with respect to site-specific conditions. Such an analysis requires the comparison of the loads used for the design of the support structure with the actual loads experienced. This publication presents the application of a so-called inverse load calculation to a 5-MW wind turbine support structure. The inverse load calculation determines external loads derived from a mechanical description of the support structure and from measured structural responses. Using numerical simulations with the software fast, we investigated the influence of wind-turbine-specific effects such as the wind turbine control or the dynamic interaction between the loads and the support structure to the presented inverse load calculation procedure. fast is used to study the inverse calculation of simultaneously acting wind and wave loads, which has not been carried out until now. Furthermore, the application of the inverse load calculation procedure to a real 5-MW wind turbine support structure is demonstrated. In terms of this practical application, setting up the mechanical system for the support structure using measurement data is discussed. The paper presents results for defined load cases and assesses the accuracy of the inversely derived dynamic loads for both the simulations and the practical application. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Anticipatory governance and anticipatory life cycle assessment of single wall carbon nanotube anode lithium ion batteries

Anticipatory governance (AG) provides a forward-looking framework through which social, ethical, and legal aspects of such emerging technologies as nanotechnology may be assessed. Advanced versions of AG integrate a suite of qualitative methods, including sustainability constellation mapping, as well as quantitative methods focused on real-time trend analysis of bibliometric and patent activity. Together, these methods present a broad view of energy-related nanotechnology research, and explicitly call attention to root causes, actors, and outcomes of nanotechnology innovations. While the AG framework includes socio-technical integration, thereby making the laboratory an active venue for governance, it lacks laboratory-generated quantitative analysis that can help connect broader governance strategies back to laboratory researchers working with nanotechnology. Anticipatory life cycle assessment (LCA) builds upon developments in LCA, and seeks to adapt life cycle frameworks to developing nanotechnologies through a combination of laboratory-scale inventory data collection, thermodynamic modeling of nano-manufacturing processes, and nanotechnology experience curve modeling. Anticipatory LCA may call attention to environmentally problematic processes in the life cycle of novel nanotechnologies before significant social, political, and economic investments in research and infrastructure contribute to technology lock in. One such technology is single wall carbon nanotube (SWCNT) anodes for advanced lithium ion batteries, which may increase the energy density of portable, rechargeable batteries. Through a case study of SWCNT anodes, we demonstrate that incorporation of anticipatory LCA within AG directly addresses the lack of laboratory-generated quantitative methods, promotes communication between laboratory researchers, social scientists, and a broad set of stakeholders, and may reorient laboratory research agenda.  School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment, Arizona State University. Center for Nanotechnology and Society, Arizona State University. Corresponding Author: bwender@asu.edu  Center for Nanotechnology and Society, Arizona State University. School of Sustainability, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85281  Center for Nanotechnology and Society, Arizona State University  School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment, Arizona State University  Center for Nanotechnology and Society, Arizona State University. School of Sustainability, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85281 Wender, Foley, Guston, Seager, and Wiek, Anticipatory Governance and Anticipatory Life Cycle Assessment of Single Wall Carbon Nanotube Anode Lithium Ion Batteries, 9 Nanotechnology Law & Business nnn (Fall 2012)
Broadband phase shifters using comprehensive compensation method

In this letter, broadband phase shifters using comprehensive compensation method have been presented. The phase shift is dependent on the differences of substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) width, SIW length, microstrip‐line length, and permittivity. The overall phase shift can be compensated mutually due to different physical parameters of constitutive transmission lines, as explained in details in this letter. The fillers with different dielectric permittivity are filled in the SIW's interior with a metalized PCB closely covered on the surfaces. Measurement results show that the fractional bandwidths for 45.1° ± 3° and 90° ± 5.1° versions can be up to 70.4% and 69%, respectively. For the operating frequency band, the return losses are all better than 13.5 dB, and the insertion losses are all less than 1.7 dB. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 59:766–770, 2017
Sustaining soil for advancing peace: World is one family

V asudhaiva Kutumbakam from the ancient Hindu text the Maha Upanishad means “world is one family” (Sanskrit, from vasudha, the earth; iva, is, and kutumbakam, family). This phrase is more relevant now than ever before because humanity is at both political and environmental crossroads. The Sanskrit phrase also implies that peace must be universal rather than only in some parts of the globally “joint family. ” Global issues with several adverse impacts on human wellbeing and planetary processes include climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic, and conflicts leading to political unrest and refugees. Violent conflicts affecting a large number of people have global economic ramifications, and the gross domestic product and family income can be drastically reduced for even up to four years after the end of a conflict (De Groot et al. 2021). Because of numerous global conflicts, there were 79.5 million refugees worldwide by the end of 2019 (Augustinus and Tempra 2021) and 82.4 million refugees worldwide who were internally displaced (UNHCR 2021). The crisis in eastern Europe has created another 5.26 million refugees as of April 25, 2022, along with an estimated 7.7 million internally displaced persons. With eviction from land linked to violent conflicts, protecting people and their land rights, and addressing historical justices and political exclusion through judicious land governance, are critical to accomplishing peace and harmony (Augustinus and Tempra 2021). In the present era of degrading soils and warming climate, it is important to consider how can peace be climate-resilient and advanced simultaneously along with environmental sustainability (Brauch et al. 2019; Barnett 2019; Nicoson 2021), in which restoration and conservation of global soil resources can play a critical role. Therefore, the objective of this article is to discuss how can peace be made resilient to climate change, soil degradation, drought and water scarcity, loss of biodiversity, low agronomic productivity, and poor nutritional quality. Simply put, the goal is to deliberate how peace can be achieved through sustainable management of soil and other natural resources while also restoring the environment and mitigating climate change. Soil and environmental degradation, leading to social conflicts and war, are related to the concept of economic growth (Lal 2015). An attempt is also made to assess the impact of military activity on soil quality, and necessity to heal both the land and people adversely impacted by war.
Assessment of Blood Viscosity from Photoplethysmogram

Continuous Blood Viscosity (BV) monitoring is vital in early diagnosis of Cardiovascular Diseases (CVD). Currently, BV is monitored using both invasive methods which comprises complex, costly, non-clinical access equipments and invasive methods that are not accurate and measures only average viscosity measurements techniques. Assessment of BV from Photoplethysmography (PPG) signal using Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is a prominent method that eliminates the existing limitations. In this paper, a new method is proposed to estimate BV from PPG signal filtered by Butterworth type FIR filter, using CNN. BV was measured using filtered PPG signal obtained from MIMIC II database in Physionet Repository. This trained model extracts blood viscosity from the PPG test signal with the high prediction accuracy of 99.87% and loss function of 0.0025.
Embedding Antenna Booster in Smart-metering Platforms

The growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) requires that a large number of devices need wireless connectivity. For this reason, a simple and fast method capable of designing multiband antenna systems, utilizing a very simple antenna element is proposed. In this method the antenna is seen as an impedance box where a multiband matching network with lumped components is the one that fixes the number of frequency bands. The multiband matching network was designed in Optenni Lab based on the measured antenna input impedance and the EM-simulated radiation efficiency. To validate the procedure, a multiband antenna system operating at 824MHz-960MMHz and 1710-2690MHz is implemented. The matching network has been obtained through a fully automated process without human intervention and without any type of adjustments. This enables the design of multiband antenna systems in a quick, easy, and systematic way.
A 28 GHz Beam Steerable Elliptic Microstrip Array Antenna for 5G Applications

This paper discusses the design, fabrication, and measurement of a two-layer, $2 \times 10$ elliptic, microstrip series fed antenna array operating at 28 GHz for 5G and mm-wave user equipment. A branch line coupler was used as a feeding network that can generate three beams. The peak gain value of each beam was 13 dBi at 28 GHz. The gain value was above 10 dBi within a beam coverage of −45° to 45°, and the peak gain value for the 26.5 GHz to 29.5 GHz band was above 10 dBi. The impedance bandwidth of the proposed design was below −10 dB in the 26.5 GHz to 29.5 GHz band. The dimensions of the $2\times 10$ antenna array with coupler were $80\times 40\times 0.203$ mm3 on Rogers RO4003 substrate. This design is suitable for 5G mobile user applications due to its low cost and compactness.
Dual-Band, Dual-Linearly Polarized Transmitarrays for SATCOM Applications at Ka-Band

We propose here a $40\times 40$-element shared-aperture dual-band dual linearly-polarized transmitarray with 1-bit phase resolution and fixed beam at Ka-band. The design is based on a stacked approach where the unit-cell size is compact and is equal to only $0.48\times\lambda_{0}$ and $0.32\times\lambda_{0}$ at 29 GHz and 19 GHz, respectively. The beam-scanning performances of this array are compared to those of an array with the same number of elements and same illumination but comprising unit-cells based on the interleaving approach (lattice size of $0.72\times\lambda_{0}$ and $0.47\times\lambda_{0}$, respectively). The shared-aperture unit-cells include four printed U-slotted patch antennas and a connecting metallized via; the desired $180^{\circ}$ phase shift is obtained by rotating one of the patches around its corresponding via. Our simulation results demonstrate that the transmitarray based on the stacked approach exhibits excellent beam scanning performance up to $\pm 70^{\circ}$ on the two bands. A prototype pointing at broadside has been optimized and fabricated to validate the numerical simulations.
Compact Wideband Loop Antenna for Earbuds

This paper presents the compact wideband loop antenna with a small size of 7.05mm’s radius covering ultra-wideband above 6 GHz, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth bands for earbuds. The wide bandwidth of the proposed compact loop antenna is obtained with the antenna structure consisting of the loop antenna and the capacitive loading pin inserted in the middle of the loop antenna. The loop antenna with the capacitive loading pin supports multi-resonant modes. A wider bandwidth can be obtained by adjusting the position of the capacitive loading pin. The half-wavelength resonant frequency of the basic loop can easily be tuned through the physical capacitance between the capacitive loading pin and loop antenna. Additionally, the impedance loop is considered for the impedance matching of the compact wideband loop antenna. The simulated and measured results are included to evaluate the performance of the proposed compact wideband loop antenna. Consequently, we obtained that the simulation and measurements results are consistent.
Ultra Low Power Wireless Epidermal Sensor for Battery-less pH monitoring in the sub-6 GHz 5G band

RFID epidermal electronics recently gave us the possibility to connect our body to the external world and gather information about our health and state directly from the skin. To increase the acceptance of the monitoring platforms and overcome the limitations of current technology, i.e. the need of a dedicated reader and a limited bandwidth, new architectures of battery-less backscattering-based communications have been considered. Among them, 5G appears particularly promising thanks to the large bandwidth, the interoperability among devices and the pervasive coverage. In this perspective, this paper proposes the first epidermal chemical sensor for the sampling of the human sweat and the monitoring of the pH. The device communicates with the external reader through a frequency modulation of the backscattered wave, whose parameters depend on the measured analyte. Early simulations and tests corroborate the feasibility of the approach.
Radar Cross Section Enhancement using Metasurfaces for Road Safety Applications

The protection and safety of vulnerable road users such as pedestrians and cyclists is essential specially in urban areas. Project CYCLOPE aims to provide technical solutions to integrate cyclists and ensure safety for pedestrians in urban areas. Automobile radar technologies are integrated in automobiles for detection of vulnerable road users to decrease accidents. However, targets such as pedestrians and cyclists can have a low radar cross section and hard to detect. Retrodirective metasurfaces can be a key solution when integrated along side targets to enhance their RCS detection. In this paper, we design a dual polarized retrodirective metasurface at a given angle of incidence. Furthermore, we demonstrate a human model and measure its RCS at 24 GHz using an automobile radar system with and without the retrodirective metasurface. The results show a gain of 15 dBm in terms of RCS detection when implementing the metasurface design.
Higher-Symmetries for Broadband Reflecting Luneburg Lenses at Ka-band

This paper reports the application of higher symmetries to the design of a Reflecting Luneburg Lens (RLL) with broadband response. RLLs consist of two circular parallel plate waveguides (PPWs) vertically stacked. The bottom PPW is filled with an azimuthally symmetric graded index (GRIN) medium. Owing to this GRIN medium, the wave launched by a primary feed in the bottom PPW is collimated in the top one, so that a plane wave with a different propagation direction is generated for any azimuthal position of the source. In this work, the GRIN medium in the bottom PPW is implemented by higher symmetry unit-cells consisting of metallic inclusions. This type of unit-cell achieves the required effective refractive index profile with reduced frequency dispersion, thus increasing the operational bandwidth of the lens. The proposed architecture constitutes a low-profile beam-forming solution that also provides complete azimuthal scanning in a wide frequency range. Moreover, it remains completely metallic, thus benefitting from structural robustness and reduced losses.
Parallel-Plate Lens Beamformer in Multilayer PCB Technology for Wide-Angle Scanning

In this paper, the design of a continuous parallel-plate lens in multilayer PCB technology is presented. The beamformer consists of a continuously shaped lens doublet made from a stack of substrate layers and an integrated SIW feed system. Asymptotic techniques are used to optimize the lens and feed geometries. The proposed concept is validated by full-wave simulations of a lens design operating in the K-band (17.3-20.2 GHz). The final structure is matched to free-space using a linear flare and provides a total of nine beams over a $\pm 60^{\circ}$ sector with low scan losses in the order of 2 dB.
A computational tool for engineer dropout prediction

Dropout rates for students in high education are remarkably high, and the phenomenon has been investigated in several studies. Student dropout represents a loss of human capital and a waste of resources. This paper presents an analytic learning framework we have been developing at university to identify potential dropout situations in engineering bachelor students. We discuss the underlying model and show how it has been deployed in an analytics pipeline that alerts schools by predicting possible dropout situations. Our tool is also prescriptive in that it provides insight that might suggest strategies to reduce the dropout rates.
Estimation of Characteristics for the Reflective Rectangular Slot Element Using MoM with One Basis Function

Estimation of the reflected field phase, admittance and unknown basis functions coefficients are presented for the case of the single-layer rectangular slot element in unit cell. The analysis is based on a solution of an integral-equation system with the Method of Moments in spectral domain. Only one basis function is used for the analysis. It is shown that this approach provides satisfactory accuracy for the development of the slot reflectarray antennas. Characteristics of the unit cell and reflectarray antennas obtained by proposed approach and full-wave simulations are presented.
Resolution-Oriented Weighted Stacking Algorithm

In this article, we proposed a weighted stacking algorithm for obtaining high-resolution data and constructed an optimization objective function using the similarity of the stacked amplitude spectrum and constant (amplitude spectrum of impulse function). The optimization problem is solved to obtain the stacking weights involved in the common midpoint (CMP) gathers by using the alternating iterative method of gradient descent and subgradient descent. Then, the weighted stacking is performed to obtain resolution-enhanced data. A traditional poststack deconvolution algorithm decomposes the data and performs frequency-weighted recombination, which alters the original frequency composition. Furthermore, most existing methods require wavelet estimation, which may be inaccurate. The amplitude-spectrum shape of CMP gather controls the resolution-enhanced data using the proposed method, which is a stacking scheme that does not require wavelet estimation. On the other hand, our proposed stacking algorithm can handle data containing white noise, and we introduce a penalty term to avoid the mutual offset between the effective signals caused by negative weight, which improves the stacked signal-to-noise ratio. Applications to synthetic and field seismic datasets demonstrate that data stacked using the proposed method have higher resolution and can be more easily interpretated compared to the traditional equal-weight stacking.
Liquid Metal Enabled SIW Vias and RF Blocking Walls for Reconfigurable Antennas

This paper presents a method for designing reconfigurable microwave devices based on substrate integrated waveguides (SIW) technology. The method involves forming walls from drill holes that can be filled with liquid metal to form vias. Furthermore, the proposed method is validated by designing and testing several reconfigurable radio frequency (RF) switches. The switches are intended to be used for reconfigurable antenna applications. The measured results for the proposed devices are in good agreement with the simulated results and they show wideband operating bandwidth with highly efficient performance. The proposed method will find application within a wide range of different reconfigurable microwave devices and circuits.