Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Experimental Analysis of Accuracy in the Identification of Motor Unit Spike Trains From High-Density Surface EMG

The aim of this study was to compare the decomposition results obtained from high-density surface electromyography (EMG) and concurrently recorded intramuscular EMG. Surface EMG signals were recorded with electrode grids from the tibialis anterior, biceps brachii, and abductor digiti minimi muscles of twelve healthy men during isometric contractions ranging between 5% and 20% of the maximal force. Bipolar intramuscular EMG signals were recorded with pairs of wire electrodes. Surface and intramuscular EMG were independently decomposed into motor unit spike trains. When averaged over all the contractions of the same contraction force, the percentage of discharge times of motor units identified by both decompositions varied in the ranges 84%-87% (tibialis anterior), 84%-86% (biceps brachii), and 87%-92% (abductor digiti minimi) across the force levels analyzed. This index of agreement between the two decompositions was linearly correlated with a self-consistency measure of motor unit discharge pattern that was based on coefficient of variation for the interspike interval (R2 = 0.68 for tibialis anterior, R2 = 0.56 for biceps brachii, and R2 = 0.38 for abductor digiti minimi). These results constitute an important contribution to the validation of the noninvasive approach for the investigation of motor unit behavior in isometric low-force tasks.
Cycles in Symbol Production: The Case of Popular Music

This study questions the common assertion that culture forms go through cycles. Data on the structure of the music industry and the sorts of music produced over 26 years are examined. Periods of market concentration are found to correspond to periods of homogeneity, periods of competition to periods of diversity. A relatively long period of gradually increasing concentration is followed by a short burst of competition and diversity, with changes in market structure preceding changes in music. Assertions that consumers necessarily "get what they want" or "want what they get" are not supported. The degree of vertical integration at three key points (creative factors, merchandising and distribution), as well as diverse mechanisms in the industry's task environment, are found to be important in explaining these associations. Their nature suggests the fruitfulness of comparative studies of the production of symbol systems in the arts, science, and religion.
Posttransplant lymphoproliferative disorders in kidney transplant recipients: a retrospective cohort analysis over two decades in Hong Kong

Objective To characterize the posttransplant lymphoproliferative disorders (PTLD) including the Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) status, histological subgroups, site of occurrence and the clinical outcome in the Chinese kidney transplant recipients. Methods A retrospective cohort study of 1, 227 adult kidney transplant recipients who were followed up in two transplant centers in Hong Kong over two decades. Results 23 (1.9%) patients developed PTLD. Median duration from transplant to PTLD was 104 (5-252) months. Six patients (26.1%) had early PTLD and 17 (73.9%) had late PTLD. Ten (43%) developed PTLD >10 years after transplant. All patients in early PTLD group were EBV-positive. In the late PTLD group, 60% were EBV-negative and 40% EBV-positive. More than 90% of cases were monomorphic PTLD with majority being diffuse large B cell lymphoma. Bone marrow was the most common extranodal site. The overall treatment response rate was 52.2 %. None of the patients developed rejection or relapse after PTLD. At a median follow-up of 9 (1-79) months after PTLD, 18 patients died. Patient survival was 48% at 1 year and 30% at 3 years and death-censored allograft survival was 82% at 1year and 73% at 3 years. Conclusion Late PTLD is common. Careful adjustment of immunosuppression, close monitoring of patients, increased awareness and early detection of the disease are essential.
Anisotropy of the magnetoviscous effect in a ferrofluid with weakly interacting magnetite nanoparticles

The anisotropy of the magnetoviscous effect of a ferrofluid has been studied in a specially designed slit die viscometer, which allows three distinct orientations of the magnetic field with respect to the fluid flow. The corresponding Miesowicz viscosity coefficients were determined in dependence of the shear rate and the magnetic field intensity to gain a comprehensive magnetorheological characterization of the fluid. The particles in the fluid have a mean diameter of 13 nm corresponding to an interaction parameter of λ ≈ 1.3 for magnetite. Thus, the fluid can be expected to show a transition from non-interacting individual particles to microstructures with chain-like associated particles when the magnetic field intensity is increased and the shear rate is decreased. The observed field and shear dependent anisotropy of the magnetoviscous effect is explained coherently in terms of these microstructural changes in the fluid.
Predictors of Cognitive Dysfunction after Major Noncardiac Surgery

Background:The authors designed a prospective longitudinal study to investigate the hypothesis that advancing age is a risk factor for postoperative cognitive dysfunction (POCD) after major noncardiac surgery and the impact of POCD on mortality in the first year after surgery. Methods:One thousand sixty-four patients aged 18 yr or older completed neuropsychological tests before surgery, at hospital discharge, and 3 months after surgery. Patients were categorized as young (18–39 yr), middle-aged (40–59 yr), or elderly (60 yr or older). At 1 yr after surgery, patients were contacted to determine their survival status. Results:At hospital discharge, POCD was present in 117 (36.6%) young, 112 (30.4%) middle-aged, and 138 (41.4%) elderly patients. There was a significant difference between all age groups and the age-matched control subjects (P < 0.001). At 3 months after surgery, POCD was present in 16 (5.7%) young, 19 (5.6%) middle-aged, and 39 (12.7%) elderly patients. At this time point, the prevalence of cognitive dysfunction was similar between age-matched controls and young and middle-aged patients but significantly higher in elderly patients compared to elderly control subjects (P < 0.001). The independent risk factors for POCD at 3 months after surgery were increasing age, lower educational level, a history of previous cerebral vascular accident with no residual impairment, and POCD at hospital discharge. Patients with POCD at hospital discharge were more likely to die in the first 3 months after surgery (P = 0.02). Likewise, patients who had POCD at both hospital discharge and 3 months after surgery were more likely to die in the first year after surgery (P = 0.02). Conclusions:Cognitive dysfunction is common in adult patients of all ages at hospital discharge after major noncardiac surgery, but only the elderly (aged 60 yr or older) are at significant risk for long-term cognitive problems. Patients with POCD are at an increased risk of death in the first year after surgery.
Restoration of Contralateral Representation in the Mouse Somatosensory Cortex after Crossing Nerve Transfer

Avulsion of spinal nerve roots in the brachial plexus (BP) can be repaired by crossing nerve transfer via a nerve graft to connect injured nerve ends to the BP contralateral to the lesioned side. Sensory recovery in these patients suggests that the contralateral primary somatosensory cortex (S1) is activated by afferent inputs that bypassed to the contralateral BP. To confirm this hypothesis, the present study visualized cortical activity after crossing nerve transfer in mice through the use of transcranial flavoprotein fluorescence imaging. In naïve mice, vibratory stimuli applied to the forepaw elicited localized fluorescence responses in the S1 contralateral to the stimulated side, with almost no activity in the ipsilateral S1. Four weeks after crossing nerve transfer, forepaw stimulation in the injured and repaired side resulted in cortical responses only in the S1 ipsilateral to the stimulated side. At eight weeks after crossing nerve transfer, forepaw stimulation resulted in S1 cortical responses of both hemispheres. These cortical responses were abolished by cutting the nerve graft used for repair. Exposure of the ipsilateral S1 to blue laser light suppressed cortical responses in the ipsilateral S1, as well as in the contralateral S1, suggesting that ipsilateral responses propagated to the contralateral S1 via cortico-cortical pathways. Direct high-frequency stimulation of the ipsilateral S1 in combination with forepaw stimulation acutely induced S1 bilateral cortical representation of the forepaw area in naïve mice. Cortical responses in the contralateral S1 after crossing nerve transfer were reduced in cortex-restricted heterotypic GluN1 (NMDAR1) knockout mice. Functional bilateral cortical representation was not clearly observed in genetically manipulated mice with impaired cortico-cortical pathways between S1 of both hemispheres. Taken together, these findings strongly suggest that activity-dependent potentiation of cortico-cortical pathways has a critical role for sensory recovery in patients after crossing nerve transfer.
The force feedback instrument based on stepper motor drive and its application in underwater teleoperation

A force feedback instrument of stepper motor driver in teleoperation system is proposed for the poor sence of force telepresence in underwater robot teleoperation, and the reproduction of standard force signal is achieved on the instrument by force-displacement hybrid control. The single-degree-of-freedom teleoperation system is constructed according to the force feedback instrument, and the force and displacement tracking experiments are verified by the master-slave PID control with state observer. The results show that the force feedback instrument is simple and easy to control by the precise position control of the stepper motor. The single-degree-of-freedom teleoperation system satisfies the characteristics of force signal teleprence and the phenomenon of sizing and holding on in teleoperation. The sample with different stiffness capture and the arbitrary teleoperation under the allowable space is achieved in the teleoperation system. The overall system has a good transparency, stability.
Persistent execution state of a Java virtual machine

Current work on persistency in Java does not consider. the execution environment of the threads and this is one of the reasons why persistence has not been addressed by the Java high-performance community. Equipping high-performance computing systems with checkpointing and recovery mechanisms allows to minimise work loss in presence of failure. This paper discusses concepts for checkpointing and recovery of running Java virtual machines (JVM). Checkpointing a JVM is to capture the execution state of the JVM and to make this s tate persistent. In order to recover the checkpointed execution state, it is necessary to reproduce the execution state and to resume the JVM. In other words checkpointing and recovery allows the reconstruction of a JVM at any arbitrary execution state. The checkpointing and recovery concepts have been prototypically implemented. The prototype provides generic mechanisms for extracting an execution state from a running JVM and for initialising a JVM with a persi tent execution state. These mechanisms can be used for a wide range of applications. Our prototype also uses these mechanisms for JVM migra t ion (relocation of a running JVM from one computer to another computer). General Terms Persistence, Java, JVM, execution state, checkpointing, recovery
Modelling Opinion Formation with Physics Tools: Call for Closer Link with Reality

The growing field of studies of opinion formation using physical formalisms and computer simulation based tools suffers from relative lack of connection to the 'real world' societal behaviour. Such sociophysics research should aim at explaining observations or at proposing new ones. Unfortunately, this is not always the case, as many works concentrate more on the models themselves than on the social phenomena. Moreover, the simplifications proposed in simulations often sacrifice realism on the altar of computability. There are several ways to improve the value of the research, the most important by promoting truly multidisciplinary cooperation between physicists aiming to describe social phenomena and sociologists studying the phenomena in the field. In the specific case of modelling of opinion formation there are a few technical ideas which might bring the computer models much closer to reality, and therefore to improve the predictive value of the sociophysics approach.
Pivotal Advance: Th‐1 cytokines inhibit, and Th‐2 cytokines promote fibrocyte differentiation

CD14+ peripheral blood monocytes can differentiate into fibroblast‐like cells called fibrocytes, which are associated with and are at least partially responsible for wound healing and fibrosis in multiple organ systems. Signals regulating fibrocyte differentiation are poorly understood. In this study, we find that when added to human PBMCs cultured in serum‐free medium, the profibrotic cytokines IL‐4 and IL‐13 promote fibrocyte differentiation without inducing fibrocyte or fibrocyte precursor proliferation. We also find that the potent, antifibrotic cytokines IFN‐γ and IL‐12 inhibit fibrocyte differentiation. In our culture system, IL‐1β, IL‐3, IL‐6, IL‐7, IL‐16, GM‐CSF, M‐CSF, fetal liver tyrosine kinase 3, insulin growth factor 1, vascular endothelial growth factor, and TNF‐α had no significant effect on fibrocyte differentiation. IL‐4, IL‐13, and IFN‐γ act directly on monocytes to regulate fibrocyte differentiation, and IL‐12 acts indirectly, possibly through CD16‐positive NK cells. We previously identified the plasma protein serum amyloid P (SAP) as a potent inhibitor of fibrocyte differentiation. When added together, the fibrocyte‐inhibitory activity of SAP dominates the profibrocyte activities of IL‐4 and IL‐13. The profibrocyte activities of IL‐4 and IL‐13 and the fibrocyte‐inhibitory activities of IFN‐γ and IL‐12 counteract each other in a concentration‐dependent manner. These results indicate that the complex mix of cytokines and plasma proteins present in inflammatory lesions, wounds, and fibrosis will influence fibrocyte differentiation.
1. Introduction and Overview

Distributed generation (DG) is a broad term that encompasses myriad technologies that generate, store, and distribute electricity close to the end user. DG technology is rapidly developing and being deployed around the world. Subsequent chapters of this book describe the legal and economic issues as well as implications of the everincreasing prevalence of DG. In this chapter, the authors introduce, in nontechnical terms, the basic concepts and technologies most frequently used in DG installations in the United States. Any discussion of rapidly developing DG technology comes with the inherent risk that it will be outdated soon after it is written. Therefore, this introductory chapter serves to provide the reader with a foundation for further inquiry and a general introduction of the chapters that follow, rather than a comprehensive technical exposition of DG.
Plagiarism detection in arabic scripts using fuzzy information retreival

The nature of Arabic language structure exposes the need for fuzzy or vague concept to reveal dishonest practices in Arabic documents. In this paper, we present a statement-based plagiarism detection approach in Arabic scripts using fuzzy-set IR model. The degree of similarity is calculated and compared to a threshold value to judge whether two statements are the same or different. Our corpus collection has been built in which all stopwords were removed and non-stop words were stemmed for typical Arabic IR. The corpora have 100 documents with 4367 statements in total. Five query documents with about 250 plagiarized statements were constructed and tested. Experimental results show that fuzzyset IR successfully detected not only exact but also similar statements that have different structure. However, our Arabic fuzzy-set model approach does not handle the case of rewording with different synonyms/antonyms, a deficiency that will lead to future work of modeling the system using Arabic thesaurus. Keywordsfuzzy-set information retrieval; Arabic; plagiarism detection;
Trans men's sexual narrative-practices: Introducing STS to trans and sexuality studies

Clinical expectations that trans people will be so filled with self-loathing that sexual interactions will be limited if possible at all fail to take into account the heterogeneous ways trans people experience their own bodies and sexualities. In this essay, I extend recent work in science and technology studies (STS) that attends to material practices by examining the work of narrative and argue for a new paradigm in situating trans sexualities. I analyse trans men's autobiographical stories to show some of the many ways that trans men make sense of themselves (and enact maleness) as sexual subjects. By focusing on how sex-gender is enacted and hangs together in narrative-practices, we can more fully understand and appreciate the realities of trans lives and the inadequacies of clinical diagnosis.
Low-leakage robust SRAM cell design for sub-100nm technologies

A novel low-leakage robust SRAM design for sub-100nm technologies, Hybrid SRAM (HSRAM) cell, is presented in this paper. Leakage power, especially subthreshold leakage and gate leakage, and soft error are challenging the design of SRAM. While these important issues have been separately addressed in previous SRAM designs, there exists no design that simultaneously cuts down leakage power and enhances the resistance to soft error. In this work, we have built the first such SRAM cell, by hybrid of high-/spl kappa/ gate dielectric and dynamic threshold voltage which is realized in the form of jointly biased gate and substrate transistor. The HSRAM not only makes the gate leakage negligible, but lessens the severe increase of subthreshold leakage caused by Fringing/Field Induced Barrier Lowering (FIBL) effect accompanied with the introduction of high-/spl kappa/ gate dielectric, and in the same time reduces the susceptibility to soft error by increasing the node capacitance. Experiments were performed in both transistor level and circuit level for this novel HSRAM using ISE8.0 and HSPICE. They indicate that up to 93% reduction in total leakage is possible by using HSRAM cell, with an up to 23% increase in reliability degree and an up to 73% reduction in bitline delay, compared to standard 6T SRAM.
Cohomology and support varieties for Lie superalgebras II

In [2] (Preprint, 2006, arXiv:math.RT/0609363) the authors initiated a study of the representation theory of classical Lie superalgebras via a cohomological approach. Detecting subalgebras were constructed and a theory of support varieties was developed. The dimension of a detecting subalgebra coincides with the defect of the Lie superalgebra, and the dimension of the support variety for a simple supermodule was conjectured to equal the atypicality of the supermodule. In this paper the authors compute the support varieties of Kac supermodules for Type‐I Lie superalgebras and of the simple supermodules for gl (m|n). The latter result verifies our earlier conjecture for gl (m|n). In our investigation we also delineate several of the major differences between Type‐I versus Type‐II classical Lie superalgebras. Finally, the connection between atypicality, defect and superdimension is made more precise by using the theory of support varieties and representations of Clifford superalgebras.
MCSLAM: a Multiple Constrained SLAM

In this paper, we propose a new algorithm, named MCSLAM (Multiple Constrained SLAM ), designed to dynamically adapt each optimization to the variable number of parameters families (sensor pose, roughly known objects poses and dimensions, delay between sensors, .) and heterogeneous constraints (reprojection error, distance from points or edges to object surface, acceleration.). The proposed algorithm is based on three contributions: 1) a new Levenberg-Marquardt C++ library named LMA and freely available 1 2) an architecture allowing a high level of flexibility and performances 3) a real-time usage of a temporal spline curve as the parametric trajectory model that provides an efficient way to add heterogeneous constraints within the optimization. The main idea of LMA is to provide a simple interface with a nonintrusive mechanism of adaptation to a problem while maintaining good performances. LMA works as a meta-program using C++ template to analyse at compile-time (CT) the problem to optimize from a list of C++ functors. The parameters are deduced from the functors arguments and the degree of freedom (dof ) of each parameter is defined by the user. Then LMA generates a data structure to store the functors and the parameters in tuple according to the number of parameters families and constraints. The resolution of the normal equations is written efficiently using a sparse representation constructed with a set of small matrices of static sizes. The LMA library solves the normal equations using dense Cholesky or a sparse PCG specially designed to manage little matrices of static size. It also implements the classical optimization tricks to be effective on little, medium, and big size problems. LMA also implements common features as automatic differentiation and robust cost functions. The continuous-time representation of the trajectory is used to deal with constraints on the motion. This allows to mix data from many unsynchronised sensors and evolution model. To apply constraints on the 3D structure of the environment, 3D models of coarsely knowns shapes are used. To represent the motion, we use the uniform cumulative b-spline described by Lovegrove et al. [2] but we separate position and orientation in two different splines and we use the Rodriguez formula to compute the exponential and the logarithm of SO3 group. Moreover, we adapt the keyframe based SLAM to deal with the spline: key-frames are constrained to be on the spline. We also use every inter-key-frame poses computed by the localization process to apply a weak constraint on the spline. A temporal sliding window of 3 seconds is used to select, from the SLAM and the IMU, the more recent data used to constrain the spline. The MCSLAM algorithm is based on a graph composed by constraints, parameters and dependencies. First, the problem configuration is analysed at compile-time to generate a specified LMA solver, whose cost function to minimize is the sum of the constraints C dynamically
Oxidative-stress-mediated arterial dysfunction in patients with peripheral arterial disease.

AIMS To investigate the existence of a relationship among flow-mediated dilation (FMD), nitric oxide (NO), and oxidative stress in patients with peripheral arterial disease (PAD), and to assess if the administration of an antioxidant was able to improve arterial dilatation. METHODS AND RESULTS We performed a cross-sectional study comparing FMD, 8-Hydroxy-2-deoxy-2-deoxyguanosine (8-OHdG), a marker of oxidative stress, and nitrite/nitrate (NOx) serum levels in a population of 25 PAD patients and 40 controls. In the second part of the study, 21 PAD patients were randomly allocated to a treatment sequence of 7 days of i.v. infusion of placebo or 6 g/day propionyl-L-carnitine (PLC) in a cross-over design. Compared with controls, patients with PAD had enhanced 8-OHdG serum levels (2.4 +/- 1.2 vs. 4.24 +/- 3.11 ng/mL; P < 0.001), reduced NOx (17.02 +/- 6.11 vs. 11.28 +/- 6.02 microM; P < 0.001), and lowered FMD (10.34 +/- 2.14 vs. 6.69 +/- 2.95; P < 0.001). PLC infusion was associated with an increase of FMD [from 6.6 +/- 0.6 to 11.1 +/- 1.2% (mean +/- SE), P = 0.004] and NOx (from 14.5 +/- 1.4 to 17.1 +/- 1.2 microM; +18%, P = 0.012) and a decrease of 8-OHdG (from 3.62 +/- 0.37 to 2.64 +/- 0.32 ng/mL; -27%, P < 0.001). No changes were observed after placebo treatment. CONCLUSION This study shows that in PAD patients, oxidative stress is implicated in determining reduced FMD.