Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Interconnected cortical networks between primary somatosensory cortex septal columns and posterior parietal cortex in rat

Visual and somesthetic cues are used for spatial processing in the posterior parietal cortex (PPC) of the mammalian brain. In rats, somatic information collected by the mystacial whiskers is critically involved in constructing a neural representation of the external space. Here, we delineated the topography of the cortical pathway from the primary somatosensory cortex (SI) that may deliver vibrissal cues to PPC for spatial processing. For anterograde tracing, we made small injections of biotinylated dextran amine (BDA) into SI barrel cortex. The injections in the regions directly above the septal compartments produced dense terminals in PPC, whereas injections above the center of the barrels resulted in sparse terminals. For retrograde tracing, we made large injections of cholera toxin subunit B (CtB) in PPC. Retrogradely labeled neurons within SI barrel cortex formed multiple, parallel strips. In layer IV, these strips of labeled neurons were confined within the septal rows, extending from barrel arc position 0 to 5. In the extragranular layers, labeled neurons were clustered primarily within the vertical extensions of the septal rows and extended to the edges of neighboring barrel columns. Based on these findings, in which SI projections to PPC arise mainly from the septal columns, we hypothesize that septal columns may form interconnected cortical networks that engage in spatial information processing contingent on somestheic cues. J. Comp. Neurol. 519:405–419, 2011. © 2010 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Two Different Protocols for Knee Joint Motion Analyses in the Stance Phase of Gait: Correlation of the Rigid Marker Set and the Point Cluster Technique

Objective. There are no reports comparing the protocols provided by rigid marker set (RMS) and point cluster technique (PCT), which are similar in terms of estimating anatomical landmarks based on markers attached to a segment. The purpose of this study was to clarify the correlation of the two different protocols, which are protocols for knee motion in gait, and identify whether measurement errors arose at particular periods during the stance phase. Methods. The study subjects were 10 healthy adults. All estimated anatomical landmarks were which their positions, calculated by each protocol of the PCT and RMS, were compared using Pearson's product correlation coefficients. To examine the reliability of the angle changes of the knee joint measured by RMS and the PCT, the coefficient of multiple correlations (CMCs) was used. Results. Although the estimates of the anatomical landmarks showed high correlations of >0.90 (P < 0.01) for the Y- and Z-coordinates, the correlations were low for the X-coordinates at all anatomical landmarks. The CMC was 0.94 for flexion/extension, 0.74 for abduction/adduction, and 0.71 for external/internal rotation. Conclusion. Flexion/extension and abduction/adduction of the knee by two different protocols had comparatively little error and good reliability after 30% of the stance phase.
Intralocus Sexual Conflict Can Drive the Evolution of Genomic Imprinting

Genomic imprinting is a phenomenon whereby the expression of an allele differs depending upon its parent of origin. There is an increasing number of examples of this form of epigenetic inheritance across a wide range of taxa, and imprinting errors have also been implicated in several human diseases. Various hypotheses have been put forward to explain the evolution of genomic imprinting, but there is not yet a widely accepted general hypothesis for the variety of imprinting patterns observed. Here a new evolutionary hypothesis, based on intralocus sexual conflict, is proposed. This hypothesis provides a potential explanation for much of the currently available empirical data, and it also makes new predictions about patterns of genomic imprinting that are expected to evolve but that have not, as of yet, been looked for in nature. This theory also provides a potential mechanism for the resolution of intralocus sexual conflict in sexually selected traits and a novel pathway for the evolution of sexual dimorphism.
Rotator cuff function during a golf swing

A study of bilateral shoulder muscle activity during the golf swing was undertaken using electromyography and high-speed photography. Understanding of the muscle firing patterns could lead to injury prevention and development of appropriate training and condition ing regimens. The swings of seven adult male right- handed professional golfers without shoulder problems were examined. Indwelling electrodes were inserted into the supraspinatus, subscapularis, infraspinatus, latissimus dorsi, pectoralis major, anterior deltoid, mid dle deltoid, and posterior deltoid on the right side. Each subject was allowed to warm up until he felt comfort able. Films of each subject were taken at 450 frames per second. The swing was broken into four segments to which electromyographic signals were synchronized electronically. The EMG tracings were subjected to analog-to-digital conversion and a relative measure of quantity obtained. All tests were repeated on the left side for each subject. Results indicate that all portions of the deltoid were inactive on the right side throughout the swing. The deltoid was likewise inactive on the left except for a brief spurt from the anterior portion during the millisec onds immediately preceding ball contact. Of the rotator cuff muscles, on the left the supraspinatus fired at a low level throughout the swing, as did the infraspinatus. The latter had a slightly larger burst of activity immedi ately after ball contact. The subscapularis was more active than any other muscle throughout the swing. The cuff muscles on the right side showed as much activity overall as those on the left. In addition, the latissimus dorsi and pectoralis major seemed to provide power bilaterally, with marked activity during the accel eration phase. Contrary to the information presented in a number of golf instruction manuals, the left shoulder of a right- handed golfer does not provide more "drive" than does the right. To achieve greater distance it would seem that a golfer should concentrate on exercising the ro tator cuff bilaterally as well as the latissimus dorsi and pectoralis major.
On the irreducible representations of a finite semigroup

Work of Clifford, Munn and Ponizovskii parameterized the irreducible representations of a finite semigroup in terms of the irreducible representations of its maximal subgroups. Explicit constructions of the irreducible representations were later obtained independently by Rhodes and Zalcstein and by Lallement and Petrich. All of these approaches make use of Rees's theorem characterizing 0-simple semigroups up to isomorphism. Here we provide a short modern proof of the Clifford-Munn-Ponizovskii result based on a lemma of J. A. Green, which allows us to circumvent the theory of 0-simple semigroups. A novelty of this approach is that it works over any base ring.
An Empirical Comparison of Collaborative Filtering Approaches on Netflix Data

Recommender systems are widely used in E-Commerce for making automatic suggestions of new items that could meet the interest of a given user. Collaborative Filtering approaches compute recommendations by assuming that users, who have shown similar behavior in the past, will share a common behavior in the future. According to this assumption, the most eective collaborative ltering techniques try to discover groups of similar users in order to infer the preferences of the group members. The purpose of this work is to show an empirical comparison of the main collaborative ltering approaches, namely Baseline, Nearest Neighbors, Latent Factor and Probabilistic models, focusing on their strengths and weaknesses. Data used for the analysis are a sample of the well-known Netix Prize database.
Study of the thermal treatment of SiO2 aggregate

Crystalline quality and the silanoles defects (Si-OH) present within the structure of natural SiO2 play an important role in its reactivity. In this work, the relationship between the loss of silanoles and the crystallinity improvement upon heating between 450 °C and 650 °C was shown using X-Ray Diffraction (XRD) and Fourier Transform mid Infrared Spectroscopy in Attenuated Total Reflection (ATR). A shift of the principal band Si-O-Si from 1078 cm−1 to 1082 cm−1 and the decrease of the intensity of the Si-OH bands at 555cm−1and at 950cm−1 upon heating between 450 °C and 650 °C were shown. The reduction of the band is correlated to the loss of silanoles. In agreement with FT-IR results, the decrease of the FWHM of the XRD peaks shows that the crystalline quality is improved upon heating. This result leads to a decrease of the reactivity of SiO2 aggregate under chemical attacks.
Contextualizing Depression and Physical Functioning in Battered Women

This investigation examined the relationships between physical, psychological, and sexual abuse along with vulnerability appraisals, positive and negative social relations, and socioeconomic resources on battered women’s depression symptomatology and physical functioning. Women were recruited following an incident of partner violence that resulted in a police-report or the filing of a protection order. Participants were surveyed using a standardized questionnaire. Bivariate correlations and multiple regressions were used to examine the relationships between predictors as well as the cumulative and unique contributions of each variable set in explaining depression and physical functioning. Findings indicate that vulnerability appraisals, social relations, and socioeconomic resources significantly explain women’s depression and physical functioning over and above the unique effect of specific types of partner violence. Given that women’s physical and mental health are important aspects of assisting women with safety planning and violence cessation strategies, implications for assessment and interventions for battered women are discussed.
The impact of process parameters on gold elimination from soldered connector assemblies

Gold coatings are used on connector structures to maintain suitable solderability of the underlying Ni coating layer as well as to prevent surface corrosion during service. However, the likelihood of Au embrittlement in connector solder joints must be minimized by eliminating much of the Au plating from the surfaces using a hot solder dipping or “wicking” procedure prior to final assembly. It was observed that Au removal was most effective by using a double wicking process. Also, a higher soldering temperature improved the efficiency of the Au removal process. A longer soldering time during the wicking process did not appear to offer an appreciable improvement in Au removal. Because the wicking procedure was a manual process, it was found to be operator dependent.
Exploring the Efficacy of Pooled Stools in Fecal Microbiota Transplantation for Microbiota-Associated Chronic Diseases

Fecal microbiota transplantation is being assessed as a treatment for chronic microbiota-related diseases such as ulcerative colitis. Results from an initial randomized trial suggest that remission rates depend on unobservable features of the fecal donors and observable features of the patients. We use mathematical modeling to assess the efficacy of pooling stools from different donors during multiple rounds of treatment. In the model, there are two types of patients and two types of donors, where the patient type is observable and the donor type (effective or not effective) is not observable. In the model, clinical outcomes from earlier rounds of treatment are used to estimate the current likelihood that each donor is effective, and then each patient in each round is treated by a pool of donors that are currently deemed to be the most effective. Relative to the no-pooling case, pools of size two or three significantly increase the proportion of patients in remission during the first several rounds of treatment. Although based on data from a single randomized trial, our modeling suggests that pooling of stools – via daily cycling of encapsulated stool from several different donors – may be beneficial in fecal microbiota transplantation for chronic microbiota-related diseases.
Alignment of Noisy Unstructured Text Data

This paper describes a textual aligner named MEDITE whose specificity is the detection of moves. It was developed to solve a problem from textual genetic criticism, a humanities discipline that compares different versions of authors’ texts in order to highlight invariants and differences between them. Our aligner handles this task and it is general enough to handle others. The algorithm, based on the edit distance with moves, aligns duplicated character blocks with an A∗ heuristic algorithm. We present an experimental evaluation of our algorithm by comparing it with similar ones in four experiments. The first one deals with the alignment of texts with a large amount of repetitions; we show it is a very difficult problem. Two other experiments are duplicate linkage and text reuse detection. Finally, the algorithm is tested with synthetic data.
State of health aware charge management in hybrid electrical energy storage systems

This paper is the first to present an efficient charge management algorithm focusing on extending the cycle life of battery elements in hybrid electrical energy storage (HEES) systems while simultaneously improving the overall cycle efficiency. In particular, it proposes to apply a crossover filter to the power source and load profiles. The goal of this filtering technique is to allow the battery banks to stably (i.e., with low variation) receive energy from the power source and/or provide energy to the load device, while leaving the spiky (i.e., with high variation) power supply or demand to be dealt with by the supercapacitor banks. To maximize the HEES system cycle efficiency, a mathematical problem is formulated and solved to determine the optimal charging/discharging current profiles and charge transfer interconnect voltage, taking into account the power loss of the EES elements and power converters. To minimize the state of health (SoH) degradation of the battery array in the HEES system, we make use of two facts: the SoH of battery is better maintained if (i) the SoC swing is smaller, and (ii) the same SoC swing occurs at lower average SoC. Now then using the supercapacitor bank to deal with the high-frequency component of the power supply or demand, we can reduce the SoC swing for the battery array and lower the SoC of the array. A secondary helpful effect is that, for fixed and given amount of energy delivered to the load device, an improvement in the overall charge cycle efficiency of the HEES system translates into a further reduction in both the average SoC and the SoC swing of the battery array. The proposed charge management algorithm for a Li-ion battery - supercapacitor bank HEES system is simulated and compared to a homogeneous EES system comprised of Li-ion batteries only. Experimental results show significant performance enhancements for the HEES system, an increase of up to 21.9% and 4.82x in terms of the cycle efficiency and cycle life, respectively.
Efficient Heuristic N e arsin

Most artificial natural language processing (NLP) systems make use of some simple algorithm for parsing. These algorithms overlook the inextricable link between parsing natural language and understanding it. Humans parse language in a linear fashion. Our goal is to develop an NLP system that parses in a linear and psychologically valid fashion. When this goal is achieved, our NLP system will be efficient , and it will generate the correct interpretation in ambiguous situations. In this paper, we describe two NLP systems, whose parsing is driven by several heuristics. The first is a bottom-up system which is based on the work of (Ford, Bresnan & Kaplan 1982). The second system is a more expansive attempt, incorporating the initial heuristics and several more. This system runs on a much larger domain and incorporates several new syntactic forms. It has its weaknesses, but it shows good progress toward the goal of linearity.
On the statistical properties of the capacity of sparse multipath fading channels

Most existing works in wireless communications assume rich scattering. However, there is growing experimental evidence that physical wireless channels can exhibit a sparse structure. By assuming an asymmetric Doppler power spectral density (PSD), we can model and simulate sparse channels by using a finite sum of weighted complex harmonic functions, also called sum of cisoids (SOC). In this paper, we focus on the analysis of the statistical properties of the instantaneous capacity of sparse SOC-based multipath fading channels under line-of-sight (LOS) conditions. The probability density function (PDF), the cumulative distribution function (CDF), the level-crossing rate (LCR), and the average duration of fades (ADF) of the channel capacity are studied. The asymptotic behavior of the capacity is also investigated by providing an approximate solution to the distribution of the outage intervals for low capacity thresholds. Our study shows that the capacity of mobile radio channels behaves in sparse scattering environments completely different from what is known from previous studies assuming rich scattering. However, on average and on specific conditions, the channel capacity behaves like that of the reference (Rayleigh/Rice) model which assumes rich scattering. Finally, the validity of the analytical expressions is checked by computer simulations.
Boom chameleon: simultaneous capture of 3D viewpoint, voice and gesture annotations on a spatially-aware display

We review the Boom Chameleon, a novel input/output device consisting of a flat-panel display mounted on a tracked mechanical armature. The display acts as a physical window into 3D virtual environments, through which a one-to-one mapping between real and virtual space is preserved. The Boom Chameleon is further augmented with a touch-screen and a microphone/speaker combination. We created a 3D annotation application that exploits this unique configuration in order to simultaneously capture viewpoint, voice and gesture information. Results of an informal user study show that the Boom Chameleon annotation facilities have the potential to be an effective, and intuitive system for reviewing 3D designs.
Naproxen Reduces Excitotoxic Neurodegeneration in Vivo with an Extended Therapeutic Window

The purpose of this study was to examine the optimal dose and therapeutic window of opportunity of the nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug naproxen in an animal model of excitotoxic neuronal injury. Injection of N-methyl-d-aspartate (NMDA; 18-20 nmol) into the CA1 region of the left hippocampus resulted in significant brain edema as measured by the percentage of total forebrain water content that occurred 24 h after intrahippocampal microinjection of NMDA with ≈50% loss of CA1 neurons assessed 72 h later. Naproxen pretreatment (20 mg/kg) resulted in significantly less brain edema. Ten, 15, or 20 mg/kg naproxen, administered systemically 1 day (b.i.d.) before and for 3 days after (b.i.d.) NMDA injection, attenuated the neuronal damage by 27.2 ± 7.8, 39.6 ± 11.1, and 57.0 ± 5.2%, respectively. By comparison, a single dose of MK-801 (2 mg/kg i.p.) given 20 min before NMDA injection inhibited subsequent hippocampal injury by 65.6 ± 8.8%. Most importantly, neuroprotection was still evident when naproxen treatment (20 mg/kg i.p.) was initiated 6 h after NMDA microinjection. Protection was lost if administration of naproxen was delayed for 20 h. These findings demonstrate that naproxen can prevent excitotoxic neuronal injury in vivo, that it is nearly as effective as direct NMDA receptor antagonism, and that it has an extended therapeutic time window. As such, naproxen may be a particularly promising pharmaceutical for the treatment of neurological diseases associated with overactivation of NMDA receptors.
Effect of an Arm Swing on Countermovement Vertical Jump Performance in Elite Volleyball Players

Abstract The aim of this study was to determine how elite volleyball players employed the arm swing (AS) to enhance their jump performance. The study assessed how the AS influenced the duration and magnitude of the vertical ground reaction force (VGRF) during the main phases (preparatory, braking and accelerating) of the countermovement vertical jump (CMVJ), the starting position of the body at the beginning of the accelerating phase and the moment when the AS began contributing to increasing the jump height. Eighteen elite volleyball players performed three CMVJs with and without an AS. Kinetics and kinematics data were collected using two Kistler force plates and the C-motion system. The time and force variables were evaluated based on the VGRF, and the position of the body and the trajectory of the arm movement were determined using kinematic analysis. The AS improved the CMVJ by increasing the jump height by 38% relative to jumping without an AS. The AS significantly shortened the braking phase and prolonged the accelerating phase, however, it did not influence the preparatory phase or the overall jump duration. The AS also significantly increased the average force during the accelerating phase as well as the accelerating impulse. The AS upward began at 76% into the overall jump duration. The AS did not influence the body position at the beginning of the accelerating phase. These findings can be used to improve performance of the CMVJ with the AS and in teaching beginning volleyball players proper jumping technique.
A 148ps 135mW 64-bit adder with Constant-Delay logic in 65nm CMOS

A 148ps, single-cycle 64-bit Ling adder with Constant-Delay (CD) logic implemented in the critical path is fabricated in a 65nm, 1V CMOS process. The pre-evaluation and constant delay (regardless of the logic expressions) features of CD logic makes it up to 2X faster than dynamic logic in realizing complex logic functions such as addition. At 1V supply, this adder's worst-case measured power and leakage power are 135mW and 0.22mW, respectively.
Issues and Challenges in Situation Assessment (Level 2 Fusion)

Abstract : Situation assessment (SA) involves deriving relations among entities, e.g., the aggregation of object states (i.e., classification and location). While SA has been recognized in the information fusion and human factors literature, there still exist open questions regarding knowledge representation and reasoning methods to afford SA. For instance, while lots of data is collected over a region of interest, how does this information get presented to an attention constrained user? The information overload can deteriorate cognitive reasoning so a pragmatic solution to knowledge representation is needed for effective and efficient situation understanding. In this paper, we present issues associated with Level 2 Information Fusion (Situation Assessment) including: (1) user perception and perceptual reasoning representation, (2) knowledge discovery process models, (3) procedural versus logical reasoning about relationships, (4) userfusion interaction through performance metrics, and (5) syntactic and semantic representations. While a definitive conclusion is not the aim of the paper, many critical issues are proposed in order to characterize future successful strategies for knowledge representation, presentation, and reasoning for situation assessment.