Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Clinical Relevance of Force Platform Measures in Multiple Sclerosis: A Review

Balance impairment and falls are frequent in patients with multiple sclerosis (PwMS), and they may occur even at the earliest stage of the disease and in minimally impaired patients. The introduction of computer-based force platform measures (i.e., static and dynamic posturography) has provided an objective and sensitive tool to document both deficits and improvements in balance. By using more challenging test conditions, force platform measures can also reveal subtle balance disorders undetectable by common clinical scales. Furthermore, posturographic techniques may also allow to reliably identify PwMS who are at risk of accidental falls. Although force platform measures offer several theoretical advantages, only few studies extensively investigated their role in better managing PwMS. Standardised procedures, as well as clinical relevance of changes detected by static or dynamic posturography, are still lacking. In this review, we summarized studies which investigated balance deficit by means of force platform measures, focusing on their ability in detecting patients at high risk of falls and in estimating rehabilitation-induced changes, highlighting the pros and the cons with respect to clinical scales.
Novel UWB in-vehicle channel measurement approach based on chirp pulse sounding signal

The ultra-wide band (UWB) in-vehicle channel measurement through sounding the channel with the chirp pulse signal is proposed in the paper. An UWB channel impulse response (CIR) estimator using de-convolution technique is presented to compare the measurement error of the UWB CIR generated from the chirp sounding pulse signal and the Gaussian pulse sounding signal, respectively. The noise resistance performance of the proposed UWB channel measurement approach is analyzed to verify the correctness of the measured channel data generated from the experiments.
Is Small Beautiful and Worthy of Subsidy? Literature Review Introduction

This literature review was commissioned as part of an evaluation of IFC Project Development Facilities. In supporting Project Development Facilities to assist small and medium enterprises (SMES), IFC presumed that (i) development of SMES is important for achieving sustainable job creation and poverty reduction and (ii) subsidies are needed and justified to foster their development. As part of the evaluation effort, a literature review was needed to assess the weight of the empirical evidence underpinning these assumptions. The terms of reference for the review asked three important questions: What empirical evidence exists (if any) to support the belief that SMES make special contributions to employment, growth and poverty reduction? What are the rationales that have been used to justify subsidies to foster the development of SMES? And what empirical evidence exists (if any) to support or substantiate these rationales for intervention? The paper has three sections. Section 1 reviews the evidence for the assertion that SMES make special contributions to the economy. Section 2 examines the rationales often made for subsidies to support the development SMES and reviews the empirical evidence underpinning these rationales. The “bottom line” case for subsidies is then presented in section 3. We begin with a brief word about the definition of SME and the correlation of firm-size with behavioral characteristics of the firm. The definition of SME varies by country, or more specifically, by market size. Countries with large economies like the US and member states of the EU use cut-of points of fewer than 500 workers to describe SMES. In developing countries, where market size and average firm size are both much smaller, cut-of points of fewer than 100 workers or 250 workers are often used. Although these
Mechanisms of acupuncture

thousand years in China and Japan; the earliest literary reference is in The Yellow Emperor’s book of internal medicine, dating from the second or third century BC. Acupuncture reached Japan in the sixth century of the Christian era, and was introduced into Europe by ten Rhijne (1683), who had learnt about it in Japan. As a therapy, it spread very slowly in Europe. The first European and American publications on acupuncture treatment appeared in the early nineteenth century (Bache 1826, Berlioz 1816, Churchill 1821, Cloquet 1826). Although acupuncture was used to a considerable extent in conventional medical practice in Europe throughout the nineteenth century, attracting such mainstream giants as Osler, its use gradually died out. While some pioneers such as Felix Mann in the UK and a number of practitioners in France were using acupuncture extensively from the middle of the present century, it was really only in the 1970s that acupuncture captured the public interest and came to be widely practised. Films of acupuncture anaesthesia for operative surgery coming out of China following President Nixon’s visit in 1972 fired the public imagination. Acupuncture received full scholarly treatment in the West in the magisterial treatise of Lu & Needham (1980). In addition to classical acupuncture, a number of variations exist. Notable among these are Ryodoraku (Hyodo 1990, Nakatani & Yamashita 1977, Yoshio 1969) and auricular acupuncture, introduced in France by Nogier (1972). Auricular CHAPTER CONTENTS
Speech Shot Extraction from Broadcast News Videos

We propose a method for discriminating between a speech shot and a narrated shot to extract genuine speech shots from a broadcast news video. Speech shots in news videos contain a wealth of multimedia information of the speaker, and could thus be considered valuable as archived material. In order to extract speech shots from news videos, there is an approach that uses the position and size of a face region. However, it is difficult to extract them with only such an approach, since news videos contain non-speech shots where the speaker is not the subject that appears in the screen, namely, narrated shots. To solve this problem, we propose a method to discriminate between a speech shot and a narrated shot in two stages. The first stage of the proposed method directly evaluates the inconsistency between a subject and a speaker based on the co-occurrence between lip motion and voice. The second stage of the proposed method evaluates based on the intra- and inter-shot features that focus on the tendency of speech shots. With the combination of both stages, the proposed method accurately discriminates between a speech shot and a narrated shot. In the experiments, the overall accuracy of speech shots extraction by the proposed method was 0.871. Therefore, we confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed method.
A Reappraisal of Azhdarchid Pterosaur Functional Morphology and Paleoecology

Azhdarchid pterosaurs were among the most widespread and successful of pterosaur clades, but their paleoecology remains controversial. Morphological features common to all azhdarchids include a long, shallow rostrum; elongate, cylindrical cervical vertebrae that formed a long and unusually inflexible neck; and proportionally short wings with an abbreviated fourth phalanx. While azhdarchids have been imagined as vulture-like scavengers, sediment probers, swimmers, waders, aerial predators, or stork-like generalists, most recent authors have regarded them as skim-feeders, trawling their lower jaws through water during flight and seizing aquatic prey from the water's surface. Although apparently widely accepted, the skim-feeding model lacks critical support from anatomy and functional morphology. Azhdarchids lack the many cranial specialisations exhibited by extant skim-feeding birds, most notably the laterally compressed lower jaw and shock absorbing apparatus required for this feeding style. Well-preserved azhdarchid skulls are rare, but their rostra and lower jaws appear to have been sub-triangular in cross-section, and thus dissimilar to those of skim-feeders and sediment probers. Taphonomic data indicates that azhdarchids predominately inhabited inland settings, and azhdarchid morphology indicates that they were poorly suited for all proposed lifestyles bar wading and terrestrial foraging. However, azhdarchid footprints show that their feet were relatively small, padded and slender, and thus not well suited for wading. We argue that azhdarchids were stork- or ground hornbill-like generalists, foraging in diverse environments for small animals and carrion. Proficient terrestrial abilities and a relatively inflexible neck are in agreement with this interpretation.
Just What is a Robot Architecture Anyway? Turing Equivalency versus Organizing Principles

Over the years, there has been seemingly endless debate on how robot software architectures differ from each other and how they resemble each other. Often points are made that some architectures can do one thing while another cannot, or that in fact they are equivalent. The question is posed "Just what does it mean when we say that an architecture is different in some respect from another or that they are in some ways equivalent? " An effort is made in this paper to answer that question.
The self-trapping attractor neural network-part II: properties of a sparsely connected model storing multiple memories

In a previous paper, the self-trapping network (STN) was introduced as more biologically realistic than attractor neural networks (ANNs) based on the Ising model. This paper extends the previous analysis of a one-dimensional (1-D) STN storing a single memory to a model that stores multiple memories and that possesses generalized sparse connectivity. The energy, Lyapunov function, and partition function derived for the 1-D model are generalized to the case of an attractor network with only near-neighbor synapses, coupled to a system that computes memory overlaps. Simulations reveal that 1) the STN dramatically reduces intra-ANN connectivity without severly affecting the size of basins of attraction, with fast self-trapping able to sustain attractors even in the absence of intra-ANN synapses; 2) the basins of attraction can be controlled by a single free parameter, providing natural attention-like effects; 3) the same parameter determines the memory capacity of the network, and the latter is much less dependent than a standard ANN on the noise level of the system; 4) the STN serves as a useful memory for some correlated memory patterns for which the standard ANN totally fails; 5) the STN can store a large number of sparse patterns; and 6) a Monte Carlo procedure, a competitive neural network, and binary neurons with thresholds can be used to induce self-trapping.
The vasovagal response of the rat: its relation to the vestibulosympathetic reflex and to Mayer waves

Vasovagal responses (VVRs) are characterized by transient drops in blood pressure (BP) and heart rate (HR) and increased amplitude of low‐frequency oscillations in the Mayer wave frequency range. Typical VVRs were induced in anesthetized, male, Long‐Evans rats by sinusoidal galvanic vestibular stimulation (sGVS). VVRs were also produced by single sinusoids that transiently increased BP and HR, by 70‐90° nose‐up tilts, and by 60° tilts of the gravitoinertial acceleration vector using translation while rotating (TWR). The average power of the BP signal in the Mayer wave range increased substantially when tilts were >70° (0.91 g), i.e., when linear accelerations in the x–z plane were ≥0.9–1.0 g. The standard deviations of the wavelet‐filtered BP signals during tilt and TWR overlaid when they were normalized to 1 g. Thus, the amplitudes of the Mayer waves coded the magnitude of the linear acceleration ≥1 g acting on the head and body, and the average power in this frequency range was associated with the generation of VVRs. These data show that VVRs are a natural outcome of stimulation of the vestibulosympathetic reflex and are not a disease. The results also demonstrate the usefulness of the rat as a small animal model for studying human VVRs. —Cohen, B. , Martinelli, G. P., Raphan, T. , Schaffner, A. , Xiang, Y. , Holstein, G. R. , Yakushin, S. B. The vasovagal response of the rat: its relation to the vestibulosympathetic reflex and to Mayer waves. FASEB J. 27, 2564–2572 (2013). www.fasebj. org
Prevalence and frequency of microembolic signals in 105 patients with extracranial carotid artery occlusive disease

Besides the established factors “presence of symptoms” and “degree of stenosis”, plaque echolucency is considered to be associated with increased risk of stroke in patients with carotid artery disease. An evaluation was carried out as to whether the prevalence and number of microembolic signals (MES) detected by transcranial Doppler ultrasound were higher in patients with echolucent carotid plaques. One hundred and five patients with carotid artery stenosis from 20%-99% or occlusion underwent clinical investigations, duplex ultrasound of the carotid arteries, and a 1 hour recording from the middle cerebral artery downstream to the carotid artery pathology using the four gate technique. The presence of MES was more frequent and the number greater in symptomatic patients (21 out of 64 patients (33%); mean number of MES in all 64 patients 3.1) than in asymptomatic patients (four out of 41 patients (10%); mean number of MES in all 41 patients 0.3) (p=0.007, and p=0.006, respectively). Echogenicity of the lesions did not affect either number or presence of MES. Positivity for MES and the number of MES increased with increasing degree of stenosis (both p=0.002). Four out of 12 patients with carotid artery occlusion showed MES. No MES could be detected in carotid artery stenosis below 80%. There was a decline in positivity of MES and of the number of MES with the time after the ischaemic event. After 80 days or more after the index event, only one patient showed MES. In conclusion, increasing degree of stenosis and presence of symptoms similarly affect macroembolic and microembolic risk. Thus MES may be a surrogate parameter for risk of stroke. The presence of MES in a few asymptomatic patients suggests that clinically silent circulating microemboli may give additional information on the pending embolic potential of carotid artery stenoses. Echolucency of the plaque was not related to an increased number of MES.
Tracking In-Transit RFID-Tagged Goods Using Multi-Agent Technology

This paper proposes a novel approach integrating RFID and multi-agent technology to monitor in-transit goods status and its environmental information. RFID technology provides real-time access to the tagged goods in automatic fashion. Using multi-agent technology, collected raw data can be processed locally before they are sent out, which reduces the size and cost of data transfer. In addition, the filtered information is sent back to back-end enterprise application via short message system of mobile telecommunication platform, which is feasible even in outdoor communication environment. We finally implement a prototype system based on the proposed solution.
Computation of Inertial Motion: Neural Strategies to Resolve Ambiguous Otolith Information

According to Einstein’s equivalence principle, inertial accelerations during translational motion are physically indistinguishable from gravitational accelerations experienced during tilting movements. Nevertheless, despite ambiguous sensory representation of motion in primary otolith afferents, primate oculomotor responses are appropriately compensatory for the correct translational component of the head movement. The neural computational strategies used by the brain to discriminate the two and to reliably detect translational motion were investigated in the primate vestibulo-ocular system. The experimental protocols consisted of either lateral translations, roll tilts, or combined translation–tilt paradigms. Results using both steady-state sinusoidal and transient motion profiles in darkness or near target viewing demonstrated that semicircular canal signals are necessary sensory cues for the discrimination between different sources of linear acceleration. When the semicircular canals were inactivated, horizontal eye movements (appropriate for translational motion) could no longer be correlated with head translation. Instead, translational eye movements totally reflected the erroneous primary otolith afferent signals and were correlated with the resultant acceleration, regardless of whether it resulted from translation or tilt. Therefore, at least for frequencies in which the vestibulo-ocular reflex is important for gaze stabilization (>0.1 Hz), the oculomotor system discriminates between head translation and tilt primarily by sensory integration mechanisms rather than frequency segregation of otolith afferent information. Nonlinear neural computational schemes are proposed in which not only linear acceleration information from the otolith receptors but also angular velocity signals from the semicircular canals are simultaneously used by the brain to correctly estimate the source of linear acceleration and to elicit appropriate oculomotor responses.
“Kids like me, we go lightly on the head”: Experiences of children with a visual impairment on the physical self-concept

There has been limited research published investigating the experiences of the children with a visual impairment in physical activity and sports. The aim of the study was to explore the experiences of children with a visual impairment on their physical self-concept (PSC). A hermeneutic phenomenological approach was employed to investigate the experiences of children with a visual impairment. Qualitative interviews were conducted with six children between 10 and 12 years, followed by a thematic content analysis. Within the framework of the PSC, four themes emerged: (1) adaptations, (2) friends, (3) bullying, and (4) eyes and glasses. Findings suggest that children with a visual impairment despite the occurrence of bullying or lack of adaptations in sports of physical activity are satisfied with their physical self and global self-esteem.
Learning algorithms for adaptive processing and control

Linear and nonlinear adaptive filtering algorithms are described, along with applications to signal processing and control problems. Specific topics addressed include adaptive least mean square (LMS) filtering, adaptive filtering with discrete cosine transform LMS (DCT/LMS), adaptive noise cancelling, fetal electrocardiography, adaptive echo cancelling, inverse plant modeling, adaptive inverse control, adaptive equalization, adaptive linear prediction, and nonlinear filtering and prediction. <<ETX>>
Observations of UDP to TCP Ratio and Port Numbers

Widely used protocols (UDP and TCP) are observed for variations of the UDP to TCP ratio and of port number distribution, both over time and between different networks. The purpose of the study was to understand the impact of application trends, especially the growth in media streaming, on traffic characteristics. The results showed substantial variability but little sign of a systematic trend over time, and only wide spreads of port number usage.
On two kinds of “recipients” of professional actions undertaken by psychologists

In the article, the author introduces a distinction between two types of recipients: individuals (institutions) seeking the assistance of a practitioner psychologist, and practitioner psychologists, who use the results of the work of research psychologists in order to make their assistance ethical and effective. The article stresses the role of methodological awareness (as important as ethical awareness). The the central idea of the paper is R. Rosenthal’s thesis: “Bad science makes for bad ethics. ”
Security analysis of smart card based password authentication schemes

In the last few years, researchers have extensively studied the key exchange protocol. In 2007, Kwon et al. proposed a simple three-step key exchange protocol using smart card. In 2008, Chen and Lee proposed a secure and efficient user authentication scheme using smart card that is modified to enhance the security of the series of the Peyravian-Zunic scheme. The current paper demonstrates the vulnerability of Kwon et al.'s protocol regarding off-line password guessing attack and forgery attack. Also, we show that Chen and Lee's scheme is still vulnerable to the off-line password guessing attack and has the non-reparability. In this paper, in addition, after analyzing the two protocols, we propose each of countermeasure against our attacks.
Conservation-laws-preserving algorithms for spin dynamics simulations

We propose new algorithms for numerical integration of the equations of motion for classical spin systems with fixed spatial site positions. The algorithms are derived on the basis of a mid-point scheme in conjunction with the multiple time staging propagation. Contrary to existing predictor-corrector and decomposition approaches, the algorithms introduced preserve all the integrals of motion inherent in the basic equations. As is demonstrated for a lattice ferromagnet model, the present approach appears to be more efficient even over the recently developed decomposition method.
Exopolysaccharide Expression in Lactococcus lactis subsp. cremoris Ropy352: Evidence for Novel Gene Organization

ABSTRACT Lactococcus lactis subsp. cremoris Ropy352 produces two distinct heteropolysaccharides, phenotypically described as ropy and mucoid, when cultured in nonfat milk. One exopolysaccharide precipitated with 50% ethanol as a series of elongated threads and was composed of glucose and galactose in a molar ratio of 3:2. The second exopolysaccharide precipitated with 75% ethanol as a fine flocculant and consisted of galactose, glucose, and mannose with a molar ratio of 67:21:12. A mutant strain, L. lactis subsp. cremoris EK240, lacking the ropy phenotype did not produce the exopolysaccharide that precipitated with 50% ethanol; however, it produced the exopolysaccharide that precipitated with 75% ethanol, indicating that the former exopolysaccharide is essential for the ropy phenotype. Cultures of L. lactis subsp. cremoris Ropy352 in 10% nonfat milk reached a viscosity of 25 Pa-s after 24 h, while those of the nonropy L. lactis subsp. cremoris EK240 mutant did not change. A mutation abolishing ropy exopolysaccharide expression mapped to a region on a plasmid containing two open reading frames, epsM and epsN, encoding novel glycosyltransferases bordered by ISS1 elements oriented in the same direction. Sequencing of this plasmid revealed two other regions involved in exopolysaccharide expression, an operon located between partial IS981 and IS982 elements, and an independent gene, epsU. Two and possibly three of these regions are involved in L. lactis subsp. cremoris Ropy352 exopolysaccharide expression and are arranged in a novel fashion different from that of typical lactococcal exopolysaccharide loci, and this provides genetic evidence for exopolysaccharide gene reorganization and evolution in Lactococcus.