Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Control of functional electrical stimulation for restoration of motor function

An injury or disease of the central nervous system (CNS) results in significant limitations in the communication with the environment (e.g., mobility, reaching and grasping). Functional electrical stimulation (FES) externally activates the muscles; thus, can restore several motor functions and reduce other health related problems. This review discusses the major bottleneck in current FES which prevents the wider use and better outcome of the treatment. We present a control method that we continually enhance during more than 30 years in the research and development of assistive systems. The presented control has a multi-level structure where upper levels use finite state control and the lower level implements model based control. We also discuss possible communication channels between the user and the controller of the FES. The artificial controller can be seen as the replica of the biological control. The principle of replication is used to minimize the problems which come from the interplay of biological and artificial control in FES. The biological control relies on an extensive network of neurons sending the output signals to the muscles. The network is being trained though many the trial and error processes in the early childhood, but staying open to changes throughout the life to satisfy the particular needs. The network considers the nonlinear and time variable properties of the motor system and provides adaptation in time and space. The presented artificial control method implements the same strategy but relies on machine classification, heuristics, and simulation of model-based control. The motivation for writing this review comes from the fact that many control algorithms have been presented in the literature by the authors who do not have much experience in rehabilitation engineering and had never tested the operations with patients. Almost all of the FES devices available implement only open-loop, sensory triggered preprogrammed sequences of stimulation. The suggestion is that the improvements in the FES devices need better controllers which consider the overall status of the potential user, various effects that stimulation has on afferent and efferent systems, reflexive responses to the FES and direct responses to the FES by non-stimulated sensory-motor systems, and the greater integration of the biological control.
The implementation of verbal instructions: An fMRI study

In everyday life, our actions are often guided by verbal instructions. Usually, we can implement such instructions immediately without trial and error learning. This raises the fundamental question how verbal instructions are transformed into efficient motor behavior. The aim of this study was to gain deeper insights into the implementation of verbal instructions both on a neural and a cognitive level. To this end, we devised an fMRI experiment in which participants were required to permanently implement new stimulus–response (S–R) mappings and object–color (O–C) mappings. This enabled us to test whether there are brain areas that are specific to the implementation of newly instructed S–R mappings or whether newly instructed rules are represented independently from the specific content. Furthermore, we could test which brain areas are involved in the processing of S–R mappings when compared with O–C mappings. Our results suggest that only one brain area, the left inferior frontal junction (IFJ), was sensitive to the novelty of instructions regardless of whether these instructions conveyed S–R or O–C mappings. Furthermore, our results show that instructions conveying S–R mapping involve a network of brain areas, including pre‐PMd, M1, and IPS that was not sensitive to the novelty of the instructions. Therefore, we conclude that the implementation of verbal instructions results from an interplay of a brain areas that represent novel rulelike information in domain general terms and brain areas that are specific to S–R rules. Hum Brain Mapp, 2011. © 2010 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
On Cyber Attacks and Signature Based Intrusion Detection for MODBUS Based Industrial Control Systems

Industrial control system communication networks are vulnerable to reconnaissance, response injection, command injection, and denial of service attacks. Such attacks can lead to an inability to monitor and control industrial control systems and can ultimately lead to system failure. This can result in financial loss for control system operators and economic and safety issues for the citizens who use these services. This paper describes a set of 28 cyber attacks against industrial control systems which use the MODBUS application layer network protocol. The paper also describes a set of standalone and state based intrusion detection system rules which can be used to detect cyber attacks and to store evidence of attacks for post incident analysis. All attacks described in this paper were validated in a laboratory environment. The detection rate of the intrusion detection system rules presented by attack class is also presented.
The Use of Management Tools in Municipal Government: A National Survey

Students and practitioners of urban management have long been interested in the management capabilities of local government, stemming from the reform era and its concern with instituting businesslike administrative practices in municipal government. In more recent times, beginning roughly a decade ago, this concern reemerged in the form of a perceived imperative to implement more sophisticated management technology in city halls in order to enable them more effectively to utilize their own resources and the vast infusion of federal grant funds to combat the web of urban problems that had come to be recognized as a national responsibility. The lack of adequate management capacity was seen as a chief inhibiting factor which characterized most U.S. cities in the 1960s. The overall tone of a report by the OMB Study Committee on Policy Management Assistance published in 1975 sounded the call for greater management capability at all levels in the intergovernmental system and for the federal government to assist local units in capacity building. ' A year later a comprehensive ACIR report on improving urban America noted that even if the states and federal government implemented numerous recommendations concerning local governmental structure, legal restrictions, grant programs and so forth, "there would still be a problem in getting adequate public services because of the inadequate management and functional capability that unfortunately is the hallmark of most existing local governments today. "2 A report issued by the American Society for Public Administration in 1979 further documented both the need to improve management capacity at the state and local level and the importance of federal involvement;3 and more recently it has been asserted that even though the federal involvement might be debatable, "few would quarrel with the need to strengthen state and local management. "4 The continued movement toward capacity building has a somewhat different impetus now than a decade ago given the changing context of urban management.
VOLATILITY SPILLOVER BETWEEN USA AND EGYPTIAN CAPITAL MARKETS

This paper investigates volatility spillover among the capital markets of USA and Egypt by applying the Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedasticity (GARCH) model and multivariate regression analysis. During the period from 01/01/2004 to 30/06/2010, daily closing prices of the two market indices (EGX 30 and S&P 500) are examined. The study turns out that evidence of bidirectional volatility spillover between US capital market and Egyptian capital market is observed. These findings suggest that the developed equity markets and the emerging markets are gradually integrated in the sense that the volatility of each market is transmitted to the other markets.
The Kinetics of Plasma Free Fatty Acid and Triglyceride Transport in Patients with Idiopathic Hypertriglyceridaemia and Their Relation to Carbohydrate Metabolism

Abstract. Plasma free fatty acid and triglyceride transport kinetics were assessed in 20 patients with idiopathic hypertriglyceridaemia. None of these patients had abnormal glucose tolerance. They included 10 patients in whom the serum triglyceride elevation was due to an increase in the circulating VLDL (Fredrickson Type IV) and 10 in whom the increase in plasma VLDL was associated with hyperchylomicronaemia (Fredrickson Type V). These were compared with a control group of 27 normal subjects. –Increased plasma triglyceride turnover with normal clearance was observed in the Type IV patients suggesting that the hypertriglyceridaemia in these patients was predominantly due to enhancement of plasma triglyceride production. The plasma triglyceride concentration correlated closely with the changes in triglyceride turnover rate. –Studies performed in the Type V patients showed an increase in the plasma triglyceride turnover rate in only 3 subjects, while in the remaining patients the turnover values were similar to those of the control subjects. The increase in serum triglyceride concentration found in some of the patients was due to an increase in plasma triglyceride production. However, in the majority of patients in this group impairment of plasma triglyceride clearance was the predominant abnormality. –In both hypertriglyceridaemic groups the plasma FFA flux was markedly increased and correlated significantly with the degree of hypertriglyceridaemia. The increase in triglyceride turnover observed in Type IV patients and some of the Type V patients correlated closely with the enhancement of plasma FFA flux suggesting that the increase in triglyceride production in these patients was secondary to enhanced lipolysis. –The plasma insulin response to an oral glucose load was markedly increased in both groups of hypertriglyceridaemic patients and correlated significantly with the elevation in serum triglyceride concentration. The plasma insulin response also correlated with the plasma free fatty acid turnover. –The results suggest that the initial lesion in these patients was related to insulin unresponsiveness in adipose tissue resulting in enhanced lipolysis with secondary changes in insulin secretion and plasma triglyceride transport kinetics.
Purification and Properties of Dextransucrase from Streptococcus mutans

The dextransucrase (EC 2.4.1.5) activity from cell-free culture supernatants of Streptococcus mutans strain 6715 has been purified approximately 1,500-fold by ammonium sulfate precipitation, hydroxylapatite chromatography, and isoelectric focusing. The enzyme was eluted as a single peak of activity from hydroxylapatite, and isoelectric focusing of the resulting preparation gave a single band of dextransucrase activity which focused at a pH of 4.0. The final enzyme preparation contained two distinct, enzymatically active proteins as judged by assay in situ after polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis. One of the proteins represented 90% of the total dextransucrase activity and 53% of the total protein. The molecular weight of the enzyme was estimated by gel filtration to be 94,000. The temperature optimum of the enzyme was broad (34 to 42 C) and its pH range was rather narrow, with optimal activity at pH 5.5. The Km for sucrose was 3 mM, and fructose competitively inhibited the enzyme reaction with a Ki of 27 mM.
Requirement of Cysteine-rich Repeats of the Fas Receptor for Binding by the Fas Ligand*

The Fas receptor is a member of a family of cell death receptors, including tumor necrosis factor receptor I (TNFR I), death receptor 3 and 4 (DR3 and DR4), and cytopathic avian receptor 1 (CAR1). The Fas receptor is composed of several discrete domains, including three cysteine-rich domains (CRDs), a transmembrane domain, and an intracellular domain responsible for transmitting an apoptotic signal. While the mechanism of Fas-mediated cell death has become elucidated, the requirements for Fas ligand binding to the receptor have not been fully defined. Using a series of chimeric Fc-receptor fusion proteins between the human Fas receptor and TNFR I, each cysteine-rich domain of Fas was found to be required for interaction with the Fas ligand. Interestingly, TNFR I CRD1 could partially substitute for the Fas CRD1. The importance of this domain was underscored by the analysis of a Fas extracellular mutation (C66R), which resulted in a complete loss of ligand binding. This mutation was cloned from a human patient suffering from Canale-Smith syndrome, which is characterized by autoimmunity resembling that observed in the lpr andlpr cg mice. The localization of essential ligand binding domains in the Fas receptor correlated exactly with the ability of the Fas receptor fusion proteins to prevent cell death mediated by the Fas ligand.
Konvergencia és növekedési ütem [Convergence and growth rate]

A szerzők tanulmanyukban empirikusan vizsgaljak a kozep-kelet-europai orszagok felteteles konvergenciajanak folyamatat a human tőkevel kibővitett Solow-modell kereteben. Tobbfele minta es modellvariacio alapjan megbecsulik a tőkefelhalmo zasbol eredő konvergencia sebesseget 1997-2006 kozott kilenc kozep-kelet-europai orszagra vonatkozoan. A posztszocialista orszagok gazdasagi felzarkozasa a stacionariustol tavoli jovedelemszintről indult, ami szamos problemat felvet a szakiroda lom főaramaban hagyomanyosan alkalmazott modszertannal szemben. A tanulmany első feleben ezert elmeleti szempontbol is vizsgaljak a konvergencia sebessegenek temakoret, kulonos tekintettel annak valos dinamikajara. Journal of Economic Literature (JEL) kod: O47, O30, E13.
Recombinant adeno-associated virus-mediated high-efficiency, transient expression of the murine cationic amino acid transporter (ecotropic retroviral receptor) permits stable transduction of human HeLa cells by ecotropic retroviral vectors

Adeno-associated virus has a broad host range, is nonpathogenic, and integrates into a preferred location on chromosome 19, features that have fostered development of recombinant adeno-associated viruses (rAAV) as gene transfer vectors for therapeutic applications. We have used an rAAV to transfer and express the murine cationic amino acid transporter which functions as the ecotropic retroviral receptor, thereby rendering human cells conditionally susceptible to infection by an ecotropic retroviral vector. The proportion of human HeLa cells expressing the receptor at 60 h varied as a function of the multiplicity of infection (MOI) with the rAAV. Cells expressing the ecotropic receptor were efficiently transduced with an ecotropic retroviral vector encoding a nucleus-localized form of beta-galactosidase. Cells coexpressing the ecotropic receptor and nucleus-localized beta-galactosidase were isolated by fluorescence-activated cell sorting, and cell lines were recovered by cloning at limiting dilution. After growth in culture, all clones contained the retroviral vector genome, but fewer than 10% (3 of 47) contained the rAAV genome and continued to express the ecotropic receptor. The ecotropic receptor coding sequences in the rAAV genome were under the control of a tetracycline-modulated promoter. In the presence of tetracycline, receptor expression was low and the proportion of cells transduced by the ecotropic retroviral vector was decreased. Modulation of receptor expression was achieved with both an episomal and an integrated form of the rAAV genome. These data establish that functional gene expression from an rAAV genome can occur transiently without genome integration.
Prominent feature extraction for review analysis: an empirical study

Sentiment analysis (SA) research has increased tremendously in recent times. SA aims to determine the sentiment orientation of a given text into positive or negative polarity. Motivation for SA research is the need for the industry to know the opinion of the users about their product from online portals, blogs, discussion boards and reviews and so on. Efficient features need to be extracted for machine-learning algorithm for better sentiment classification. In this paper, initially various features are extracted such as unigrams, bi-grams and dependency features from the text. In addition, new bi-tagged features are also extracted that conform to predefined part-of-speech patterns. Furthermore, various composite features are created using these features. Information gain (IG) and minimum redundancy maximum relevancy (mRMR) feature selection methods are used to eliminate the noisy and irrelevant features from the feature vector. Finally, machine-learning algorithms are used for classifying the review document into positive or negative class. Effects of different categories of features are investigated on four standard data-sets, namely, movie review and product (book, DVD and electronics) review data-sets. Experimental results show that composite features created from prominent features of unigram and bi-tagged features perform better than other features for sentiment classification. mRMR is a better feature selection method as compared with IG for sentiment classification. Boolean Multinomial Naïve Bayes) algorithm performs better than support vector machine classifier for SA in terms of accuracy and execution time.
Baccalaureate Education and the Employment Decision: Self-Employment and the Class of 1993

This paper delves into the relation of collegiate education to the employment decision. We are able to identify specific characteristics of the individuals who are self-employed versus those who opt to work for a for-profit business, a not-for-profit entity, or the government (including the military). Specifically, this research utilizes the U.S. Department of Education's Baccalaureate & Beyond (B&B) data series, which tracks college and university graduates in the class of 1993. Unlike others who pursue wage-and-salary occupations in the not-for-profit or government sectors, students in the class of 1993 who were self-employed in 2003 were less likely to have earned or be currently enrolled in graduate education. Graduates with social science and "other" majors were more likely to be self-employed. In addition, those individuals who chose self-employment had shorter job tenures than others, such as those who now work for government or the military.
Essays on empirical time series modeling with causality and structural change

Essays on Empirical Time Series Modeling with Causality and Structural Change. (August 2006) Jin Woong Kim, B.S., Hankuk University of Foreign Studies; M.S., Sogang University Co-Chairs of Advisory Committee: Dr. David J. Leatham Dr. David A. Bessler In this dissertation, three related issues of building empirical time series models for financial markets are investigated with respect to contemporaneous causality, dynamics, and structural change. In the first essay, nation-wide industry information transmission among stock returns of ten sectors in the U.S. economy is examined through the Directed Acyclical Graph (DAG) for contemporaneous causality and Bernanke decomposition for dynamics. The evidence shows that the information technology sector is the most root cause sector. Test results show that DAG from ex ante forecast innovations is consistent with the DAG fro m ex post fit innovations. This supports innovation accounting based on DAGs using ex post innovations. In the second essay, the contemporaneous/dynamic behaviors of real estate and stock returns are investigated. Selected macroeconomic variables are included in the model to explain recent movements of both returns. During 1971-2004, there was a single structural break in October 1980. A distinct difference in contemporaneous causal structure before and after the break is found. DAG results show that REITs take the role
Emissions Pathways to Avoid Dangerous Climate Change — A Trans-Atlantic View

Greenhouse-gas emissions have increased steadily on a global basis since at least the beginning of the industrial revolution. Other things being equal, growth in emissions would have been expected to continue for hundreds of years. But Earth’s climate is now being changed in ways that are scientifically distinguishable from natural variations and in some cases even discernible by the average person. This realization has led to attempts by the global community over the past 20 years to change the expected course of future emissions in order to avert dangerous levels of climate change. The objective of this paper is to examine the feasibility of emissions pathways that would eventually stabilize atmospheric concentrations so as to avoid dangerous interference with the climate system. This stabilization goal is defined by the UN framework convention on climate change (UNFCCC), a piece of international law that has been ratified by most nations, including the US and the nations making up the EU. We discuss the specific options open to the US and the EU in working towards global emissions pathways to avoid dangerous climate change. On the basis of global assumptions about long term global concentration and temperature goals, therefore, we take a bilateral perspective: What are reasonable objectives for the US and the EU in view of this global problem? What factors enhance or limit the ability of each to reduce emissions? How may critical obstacles be surmounted? We do not discuss other global players— Japan, China, Brazil, etc.—because we want to focus on our own regions of origin. Hopefully, this will stimulate similar reflection in other parts of the world. We assume as a guideline that a long term global goal of limiting warming to about 2°C (see Edmonds and Smith 2005, Hare et al. 2004, O’Neill and Oppenheimer 2002) will eventually be viewed as a plausible guideline for coordinating national policies, either informally or formally (e.g., through implementation of Article 2 of the UNFCCC). Note that various studies use two degrees above 1990, current or pre-industrial levels as a proposed long term target, objectives which differ by as much as 0.6°C. The implications for long-term emissions, however, are basically the same:
Cre recombinase‐dependent expression of a constitutively active mutant allele of the catalytic subunit of protein kinase A

Using the cre‐loxP recombination system, we generated a line of mice expressing a constitutively active catalytic subunit of Protein Kinase A (PKA) in a temporally and spatially regulated fashion. In the absence of cre recombinase the modified catalytic subunit allele is functionally silent, but after recombination the mutant allele is expressed, resulting in enhanced PKA effects at basal cAMP levels. Mice expressing the modified protein in hepatocytes using albumin‐cre transgenics show defects in glucose homeostasis, glycogen storage, fructose 2,6‐bisphosphate levels, and induction of glucokinase mRNA during feeding. Similar to animals lacking glucokinase in the liver (Postic et al.: J Biol Chem 274:305–315, 1999), these mice also have defects in glucose‐stimulated insulin secretion, a hallmark of Type II diabetes. The widespread expression of PKA and the involvement of this kinase in a myriad of signaling pathways suggest that these animals will provide critical tools for the study of PKA function in vivo. genesis 43:109–119, 2005. © 2005 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.