Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Initial patient testing of iPAM - a robotic system for Stroke rehabilitation

iPAM is a dual robotic system currently being developed in the UK under a NHS New and Emerging Applications of Technologies (NEAT) grant. The aim of the system is to provide assistive upper-limb therapeutic excercise for post-stroke rehabilitation. iPAM features two co-ordinated, pneumatically-actuated robotic arms which attach to the patient's forearm and upper-arm to provide assistance, mimicking the intervention of a physiotherapist. The system design and manufacture has been completed and the robot installed at a local hospital (St Mary's, Leeds PCT, UK) inside a community rehabilitation unit. The controller is currently developed and 'tuned' to provide gravity compensation for robots, removing any potentially damaging loads on the patient arm. The control scheme has been tested in simulation and using a mechanical arm model to ensure safe operation. Two small scale trials have been conducted to assess two facets of the robot design; firstly the mechanical design of the system to unimpede normal arm movement and secondly, its ability to provide varying levels of lift to the patient's arm to increase range of movement. The former of these trials compares free arm movement in healthy volunteers and Stroke patients with that when attached to iPAM. The robot was configured to compensate for its own weight, so the human upper-limb was unloaded. It was found that the robot had no significant affect on movement patterns. The second group of patient trials evaluated the operation of various levels of assistance against gravity. Patients were asked to point to a target with varying degrees of 'lift' applied to their upper and lower arm. In those patients with significant upper-limb impairment it was found that higher values of 'lift' improved the extent of reach but altered the movement pattern. Results from the trials demonstrated the suitability of certain modes of operation depending on the severity of patient disability.
Structural Basis of Transcriptional Gene Silencing Mediated by Arabidopsis MOM1

Shifts between epigenetic states of transcriptional activity are typically correlated with changes in epigenetic marks. However, exceptions to this rule suggest the existence of additional, as yet uncharacterized, layers of epigenetic regulation. MOM1, a protein of 2,001 amino acids that acts as a transcriptional silencer, represents such an exception. Here we define the 82 amino acid domain called CMM2 (Conserved MOM1 Motif 2) as a minimal MOM1 fragment capable of transcriptional regulation. As determined by X-ray crystallography, this motif folds into an unusual hendecad-based coiled-coil. Structure-based mutagenesis followed by transgenic complementation tests in plants demonstrate that CMM2 and its dimerization are effective for transcriptional suppression at chromosomal loci co-regulated by MOM1 and the siRNA pathway but not at loci controlled by MOM1 in an siRNA–independent fashion. These results reveal a surprising separation of epigenetic activities that enable the single, large MOM1 protein to coordinate cooperating mechanisms of epigenetic regulation.
Lessons from Behavioral Responses to International Taxation

This paper considers the impact of international taxation on patterns of foreign direct investment and on the extent of international tax avoidance activity. Recent evidence indicates that taxation significantly influences the location of foreign direct investment, corporate borrowing, transfer pricing, dividend and royalty payments, and R&D performance. Reactions to worldwide tax rate differences, as well as to changes in international tax rules, provide important information concerning the extent to which taxpayers respond to incentives. The generally high degree of responsiveness in turn carries implications for the design of domestic as well as international tax policy.
Genome-wide analysis of auxin response factor gene family members in medicinal model plant Salvia miltiorrhiza

ABSTRACT Auxin response factors (ARFs) can function as transcriptional activators or repressors to regulate the expression of auxin response genes by specifically binding to auxin response elements (AuxREs) during plant development. Based on a genome-wide strategy using the medicinal model plant Salvia miltiorrhiza, 25 S. miltiorrhiza ARF (SmARF) gene family members in four classes (class Ia, IIa, IIb and III) were comprehensively analyzed to identify characteristics including gene structures, conserved domains, phylogenetic relationships and expression patterns. In a hybrid analysis of the phylogenetic tree, microRNA targets, and expression patterns of SmARFs in different organs, root tissues, and methyl jasmonate or indole-3-acetic acid treatment conditions, we screened for candidate SmARFs involved in various developmental processes of S. miltiorrhiza. Based on this analysis, we predicted that SmARF25, SmARF7, SmARF16 and SmARF20 are involved in flower, leaf, stem and root development, respectively. With the further insight into the targets of miR160 and miR167, specific SmARF genes in S. miltiorrhiza might encode products that participate in biological processes as described for ARF genes in Arabidopsis. Our results provide a foundation for understanding the molecular basis and regulatory mechanisms of SmARFs in S. miltiorrhiza. Summary: Genome-wide analysis identified 25 ARF gene members (seven transcriptional activators and 18 repressors) in S. miltiorrhiza. The gene structures, functional domains, miRNA targets and expression patterns were analyzed in detail.
Adaptive handover method with application-awareness for multimedia streaming service in wireless LAN

In this paper, we present an adaptive handover method with application-awareness for multimedia streaming service in wireless local area networks. Traditionally, the handover method in wireless local area network did not take into account the characteristics of the application service. Thus, the severe service disruption may occur during the movement of mobile node. In order to prevent the degradation of the applications service, the scanning period and the number of channels per scanning for handover are dynamically adapted to the type of applications and wireless networking environment. The performance of the proposed adaptive handover mechanism has been evaluated by simulation. The simulation results show that the proposed mechanism the proposed mechanism can prevent service quality degradation and provide session connectivity.
Frame-Based Editing: Combining the Best of Blocks and Text Programming

Editing program code as text has several major weaknesses: syntax errors (such as mismatched braces) interrupt programmer flow and make automated tool support harder, boilerplate code templates have to be typed out, and programmers are responsible for layout. These issues have been known about for decades, but early attempts to address these issues, in the form of structured editors, produced unwieldy, hard-to-use tools which failed to catch on. Recently, however, block-based editors in education like Scratch and Snap! have demonstrated that modern graphical structured editors can provide great benefits for programming novices, including very young age groups. These editors become cumbersome for more advanced users, due to their unbending focus on mouse input for block creation and manipulation, and poor scaling of navigation and manipulation facilities to larger programs. Thus, after a few years, learners tend to move from Scratch to text-based editing. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a novel way to edit programs: frame-based editing. Frame-based editing improves text-based editing by incorporating techniques from block-based editing, and thus provides a suitable follow-on from tools like Scratch. Frame-based editing retains the easy navigation and clearer display of textual code to support manipulation of complex programs, but fuses this with some of the structured editing capabilities that block programming has shown to be viable. The resulting system combines the advantages of text and structured blocks. Preliminary experiments suggest that frame-based editing enables faster program entry than blocks or text, while resulting in fewer syntax errors. We believe it provides an interesting future direction for program editing for learners at all levels of proficiency.
A distributed kernel for virtual time driven applications

The advent of distributed memory parallel machines turns the design and implementation of dedicated environments feasible for distributed applications. This paper addresses such a realization by presenting a distributed kernel, called FLORIA, whose aim is to provide a virtual time environment for application programs (distributed discrete event simulation is the most known of the applications based on such a virtual time-the so called simulation time-and consequently constitutes the paradigm of this class). This paper presents basic features of the virtual time concept and then describes the time-related aspects of the implementation of a distributed kernel dedicated to virtual time driven applications. <<ETX>>
A shared time-slot router architecture for TDM wavelength optical WDM networks

Recent advances of WDM technology provide multiple magnitude of raw bandwidth in a fiber. One of the effective ways of utilizing the gigabits bandwidth in a fiber is to partition each wavelength into fixed length time-slots for optical data transmission. In this paper, the shared time-slot wavelength router (STSWR) architecture that is capable to allow the bandwidth of a time-slot in a wavelength to be shared by low speed Ethernet data traffic with unexpired connection duration and travel along the same route from the same source STSWR to the destination STSWR is being considered. The shared time-slot of a route is not released until the connection duration of all the connections that are sharing this time-slot has expired. The STSWR has optical time-slot interchangers built-in. This architecture does not use any wavelength converter. The data in the time-slot are optically transmitted at each intermediate hop of a route. The effectiveness of this network architecture in blocking probability and throughput is demonstrated by simulation.
Specialized Search in Linguistics and Languages

Seven Tones ([13]) is a search engine specialized in linguistics and languages. Its current database, which is stored on a single machine, contains approximately 240,000 indexed web pages about linguistics and languages. Nevertheless, the search engine is designed for a much larger capacity. It has been used in several other systems and is feasible to be transplanted into a distributed computing environment. The performance of Seven Tones in terms of relevance and web page quality is better than Google in the area of linguistics and languages.
Sympathetic Responses to Noxious Stimulation of Muscle and Skin

Acute pain triggers adaptive physiological responses that serve as protective mechanisms that prevent continuing damage to tissues and cause the individual to react to remove or escape the painful stimulus. However, an extension of the pain response beyond signaling tissue damage and healing, such as in chronic pain states, serves no particular biological function; it is maladaptive. The increasing number of chronic pain sufferers is concerning, and the associated disease burden is putting healthcare systems around the world under significant pressure. The incapacitating effects of long-lasting pain are not just psychological – reflexes driven by nociceptors during the establishment of chronic pain may cause serious physiological consequences on regulation of other body systems. The sympathetic nervous system is inherently involved in a host of physiological responses evoked by noxious stimulation. Experimental animal and human models demonstrate a diverse array of heterogeneous reactions to nociception. The purpose of this review is to understand how pain affects the sympathetic nervous system by investigating the reflex cardiovascular and neural responses to acute pain and the long-lasting physiological responses to prolonged (tonic) pain. By observing the sympathetic responses to long-lasting pain, we can begin to understand the physiological consequences of long-term pain on cardiovascular regulation.
Possible effect of decreased insulin resistance on ferritin levels after Nordic Walking training

Dear editor We read with interest the article by Kortas et al1 entitled “Effect of Nordic Walking training on iron metabolism in elderly women. ” In their study, the authors investigated the effect of Nordic Walking (NW) training on serum ferritin, C-reactive protein (CRP), hepcidin, hemojuvelin, and vitamin D, which have been stated as components of the inflammatory system. In this study, while NW training significantly reduced iron stores and increased hemojuvelin and tended to reduce CRP levels, it did not affect hepcidin levels. The authors also observed a significant weight loss after training. The authors concluded NW training has pro-healthy effects manifested by decreased inflammation and a drop in iron stores. It is well known that obesity is associated with insulin resistance and physical exercise and weight loss reduce insulin resistance. Several studies indicate a positive correlation between iron levels and insulin resistance.2,3 There is also a relationship between insulin resistance and CRP levels.4 The possibility of decreased insulin resistance with weight loss after training can also contribute to the decline in CRP and ferritin levels in this study. The authors mentioned that they did not observe the anticipated increase in hepcidin levels after exercise. As the authors stated, hepcidin levels increase in response to both inflammation and exercise. Because the mean body mass index of the study population is in the overweight range, these subjects might have insulin resistance and associated inflammation. Thus, the anticipated increase in hepcidin levels with exercise might have been attenuated via decreased inflammation in this study. This two-way interaction may account for the unchanged hepcidin levels. The authors did not report insulin levels in this study and did not discuss the probable effect of insulin resistance on the relationship between ferritin and exercise. We suggest that consideration of these factors may facilitate interpretation of the findings of this study. We also suggest that insulin resistance would better be assessed in future studies in this field.
Social Security: History and Politics from the New Deal to the Privatization Debate

Everyone agrees that Social Security's future is in jeopardy - or is it? Long viewed as the "third rail" of American politics, Social Security is now the focus of national attention as President George W. Bush pushes for privatization. But too few of us, young and elderly alike, really understand the origins and workings of this popular program. Daniel Beland answers the call for objective information with a short history that provides context and clarity for the current debates. Covering six decades through the beginning of the current century, Beland chronicles how Social Security and the controversy surrounding its solvency have evolved, offering along the way new insights into its past, present, and future. His balanced perspective will help readers understand and evaluate partisan arguments on both sides of the issue. Beland reconstructs the political history of Social Security, describes the impact of subsequent amendments to the original act, and offers comparative insights from other countries that can improve our understanding of the debate. He focuses particularly on the relationship between ideas and institutions in policymaking to examine the impact of gender and race on Social Security politics; and he shows that gender has had a more direct impact on Social Security development - especially regarding spousal benefits - and is more important in understanding the politics of reform than has often been understood. In assessing how "Social Security" has been sold to the public, Beland reveals how the 1935 act resulted in part from its link with the traditional American belief in the values associated with hard work and self-reliance, while surreptitiously providing some economic security for the impoverished. Today's privatizers argue for changing from a guaranteed benefit to a defined contribution program, seeking to reclaim from liberals the rhetoric about American values in order to alter the very nature of Social Security - effectually turning discourse centered on personal and collective gain against the institutional legacy of the New Deal. Succinct and illuminating, Beland's work provides concerned citizens with a thoughtful exploration of how the politics of Social Security evolved, while offering scholars new theoretical insights about the welfare state and the role of ideas and institutions in policymaking.
‘Software and Scholarship’ — Editorial

The thematic focus of this issue is to examine what happens where software and scholarship meet, with particular reference to digital work in the humanities. Despite the some seven decades of its existence, Digital Humanities continues to struggle with the implications, in the academic ecosystem, of its position between engineering and art. The parallel drawn here between software and engineering on the one hand will be less controversial than the one between scholarship and art on the other — to what extent should these really be cast as parallel? Mathematicians are scholars, and physicists; so too are philosophers, theologians, biologists, and historians. Each of these fields tends to evoke a very different perception of the balance between logic and intuition, however; some are perceived as pursuing a form of unambiguous truth within the systems they inhabit, others as pursuing a more pluralistic understanding. Although the lines between disciplines are so often more arbitrary than real, and it is difficult to draw a firm distinction that will satisfy both the mathematicians and the philosophers, the label of ‘scholar’ seems to be something that scientists are keen to avoid.1
NUMERICAL AND EXPERIMENTAL INVESTIGATION OF LASER BEAM WELDING OF AISI 304 STAINLESS STEEL SHEET

Laser welding offers the advantage of very low heat input to the weld, resulting in low distortion and the ability to weld heat sensitive components. To obtain good weld bead geometry the selection of input parameters is very important. Laser beam welding trials are carried-out for 1.6 mm thick austenitic stainless steel for different beam power, welding speed and beam angle. The experimental trials for butt-joint configuration are conducted based on three level Box-Behnken design with replication resulting in 15 trials. The transient temperature profiles and weld pool dimensions, depth of penetration (DP) and bead width (BW) of the weld have been calculated using finite element code SYSWELD. A three dimensional Conical Gaussian heat source and the temperature dependent thermo-physical properties of AISI 304 stainless steel sheet are employed for performing a non-linear transient thermal analysis. It is found that the optimized parameters for deep penetration welding are laser power of 1250 Watts, welding speed of 750 mm/min and beam angle of 90o. Finally, the results of the simulation models and the experimental results are compared.
Classification of Dengue Outbreak Using Data Mining Models

This paper presents the Malaysian dengue outbreak detection model using three classification methods. Dengue outbreak detection and prediction has been a major interest of researchers in surveillance and public health. In this paper, a selection of different dengue data attributes are used for classification modelling and the performances are compared with the previous related work. The experimental results show that the proposed classifiers improve the performance of other methods. The significant selection of attributes in dengue dataset contributes to the good results.
Spatio-Spectral Filters for Robust Classification of Single Trial EEG

Data recorded in EEG based Brain-Computer Interfacing experiments is generally very noisy, nonstationary and contaminated with artifacts, that can deteriorate discrimination/classification methods. In this work we extend the Common Spatial Pattern (CSP) algorithm with the aim to alleviate these adverse effects. In particular we suggest an extension of CSP to the state space, which utilizes the method of delay embedding. As we will show, this allows for individually tuned frequency filters at each electrode position and thus yields an improved and more robust machine learning procedure. The advantages of the proposed method over the currently state-of-the-art method (CSP) are verified in terms of an improved information transfer rate (bits per trial) on a set of EEG-recordings from experiments of imagined limb movements.
International Adoption: Thoughts on the Human Rights Issues

This article discusses the human rights debate at the core of current controversy over international adoption. Many powerful children's human rights organizations, including UNICEF, take the position that such adoption should be restricted if not eliminated, based on ideas about heritage rights and the related significance of keeping children within their country of origin. They have had a major impact on policy in recent years, resulting in the closing down of international adoption from many countries. This article takes the position that children's most important human rights include the right to grow up in a nurturing family, and that international adoption is able to offer significant numbers of children the permanent homes they need and will not find in their countries of origin. It discusses the history and current trends in such adoption, recent legal developments, the politics and policy pros and cons, and reform directions for the future.
Contention-Based Reservation Protocol for WDM Local Light wave Networks with Nonuniform Traffic Pattern

SUMMARY This paper proposes a medium access control (MAC) protocol for single-hop WDM star-coupler networks, in which the number of stations is larger than the number of channels and the stations have arbitrary distances to the star coupler. The proposed protocol has one control channel for reserving the slots of data channels and several data channels which are used to transmit traffic. This paper also suggests a scheme that accomplishes load balancing among data channels for arbitrary traffic patterns between stations. Since this load balancing scheme diminishes an influence that traffic patterns have on the performance of the proposed MAC protocol, the proposed system is appropriate for systems which have asymmetric traffic intensity between stations. Throughput and mean message delay of the MAC protocol are analyzed using a discrete time Markov process and a D/G/1 queue with batch arrivals. The numerical results show that the performance is improved as the message length increases, the maximum round-trip propagation delay decreases, and the number of data channels increases.