Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Gaze and Postural Reorientation in the Control of Locomotor Steering After Stroke

Background. Steering of locomotion is a complex task involving stabilizing and anticipatory orienting behavior essential for the maintenance of balance and for establishing a stable frame of reference for future motor and sensory events. How these mechanisms are affected by stroke remains unknown. Objectives. To compare locomotor steering behavior between stroke and healthy individuals and to determine whether steering abilities are influenced by walking speed, turning direction and walking capacity in stroke individuals. Methods. Gaze and body kinematics were recorded in 8 stroke and 7 healthy individuals while walking and turning in response to a visual cue. Horizontal orientation of gaze, head, thorax, pelvis, and feet with respect to spatial and heading coordinates were examined. Results. Temporal and spatial coordination of gaze and body movements revealed stabilizing and anticipatory orienting mechanisms in the healthy individuals. Changing walking speed affected the onset time but not the sequencing of segment reorientation. In the individuals with stroke, abnormally large and uncoordinated head and gaze motion were observed. The sequence of gaze, head, thorax and pelvis horizontal reorientation also was also disrupted. Alterations in orienting behaviors were more pronounced at the slowest walking speeds and turning to the nonparetic side in 3 of the most severely disabled individuals. Conclusion. The results in this convenience sample of slow and faster walkers suggest that stroke alters the stabilizing and orienting behavior during steering of locomotion. Such alterations are not caused by the inherently slow walking speed, but rather by a combination of biomechanical factors and defective sensorimotor integration, including altered vestibulo-ocular reflexes.
The Role of Off-the-Job vs. On-the-Job Training for the Mobility of Women Workers

The transition from school to work is typically a period in which many young workers experience a wide range of different jobs and experience some of their most rapid wage growth over their working life. Robert Hall (1982) has estimated that the first 10 years of an individual's working career will include approximately two-thirds of all lifetime job changes. Robert Topel and Michael Ward (1988) found that over half of young male new entrants held six or more jobs over the first 10 years of their work experience. Only one young male worker in twenty held a single job for 10 years in their sample. All of this suggests that young workers' early years in the labor market involve several employment transitions. The purpose of this paper is to examine for young workers in their first years of work the determinants of leaving an employer. In particular, this paper focuses on the role of different types of training on the probability of leaving an employer. In previous work (1990) I have examined the impact of private-sector training on the determination of wages and wage growth of young workers and reached the following conclusions. First, formal company-provided onthe-job training (ON-JT) appears to be highly firm-specific in the United States and, therefore, is not portable from employer to employer. Company-provided training raises wages in the current job but has no effect on the wages earned in subsequent employment. Second, formal off-the-job training (OFF-JT) received from "for-profit" proprietary institutions has little effect on the wages earned on the current job, but it does raise the expected wage in subsequent employment. Finally, there are important differences by race, gender, and education level in the probability of receiving different types of formal training and in the impact this training has on wages and wage growth. These findings have several implications for the impact of training on mobility. One implication is that if company-provided training is primarily firm-specific, then the probability of leaving an employer should decline if a young worker has experienced some ON-JT. An additional implication is that if a worker participates in an OFF-JT program, it appears that the worker should be more likely to leave the current employer. In this case, OFF-JT allows a young worker to change career paths and find a "better match. " Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey Youth (NLSY) cohort, this paper examines in detail the factors that influence the probability of new entrants leaving their first job, including the differential effects of company-provided training, apprenticeships, and training from for-profit proprietary institutions.
Breakthrough Technologies GoldenBraid 2 . 0 : A Comprehensive DNA Assembly Framework for Plant Synthetic Biology 1 [ C ] [ W ] [ OA ]

Plant synthetic biology aims to apply engineering principles to plant genetic design. One strategic requirement of plant synthetic biology is the adoption of common standardized technologies that facilitate the construction of increasingly complex multigene structures at the DNA level while enabling the exchange of genetic building blocks among plant bioengineers. Here, we describe GoldenBraid 2.0 (GB2.0), a comprehensive technological framework that aims to foster the exchange of standard DNA parts for plant synthetic biology. GB2.0 relies on the use of type IIS restriction enzymes for DNA assembly and proposes a modular cloning schema with positional notation that resembles the grammar of natural languages. Apart from providing an optimized cloning strategy that generates fully exchangeable genetic elements for multigene engineering, the GB2.0 toolkit offers an evergrowing open collection of DNA parts, including a group of functionally tested, premade genetic modules to build frequently used modules like constitutive and inducible expression cassettes, endogenous gene silencing and protein-protein interaction tools, etc. Use of the GB2.0 framework is facilitated by a number of Web resources that include a publicly available database, tutorials, and a software package that provides in silico simulations and laboratory protocols for GB2.0 part domestication and multigene engineering. In short, GB2.0 provides a framework to exchange both information and physical DNA elements among bioengineers to help implement plant synthetic biology projects.
An SVD-based scheme for MFCC compression in distributed speech recognition system

This paper proposes a new scheme for low bit-rate source coding of Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs) in Distributed Speech Recognition (DSR) system. The method uses the compressed ETSI Advanced Front-End (ETSI-AFE) features factorized into SVD components. By investigating the correlation property between successive MFCC frames, the odd ones are encoded using ETSI-AFE, while only the singular values and the nearest left singular vectors index are encoded and transmitted for the even frames. At the server side, the non-transmitted MFCCs are evaluated through their quantized singular values and the nearest left singular vectors. The system provides a compression bit-rate of 2.7 kbps. The recognition experiments were carried out on the Aurora-2 database for clean and multi-condition training modes. The simulation results show good recognition performance without significant degradation, with respect to the ETSI-AFE encoder.
Preferential trade agreements and bilateral trade flow in Latin America

After studying economic integration it doesn’t come as a shock that preferential trade agreements (PTA) have an effect on the countries within the PTA, or outside the PTA for that matter also. The majority of the Latin American countries have been considered as developing countries for the better part of the 21st century, and have, for the most part, been secluded from the world market. Since the introduction of in particular ALADI (Asociacion Latinoamericana de Integracion, 1980), but also Mercosur (Mercado Comun del Sur, 1991), the Latin American trade market has completely changed. The point of ALADI was to create a stable socio-economic environment for the involved countries, as well as ensuring development in a manner that eventually succumbed to a common Latin American market. Mercosur was created a decade later, where the major countries within ALADI had the goal to integrate further, by creating their own common market, where they benefited more towards each other without the remaining ALADI countries. To measure the exact effects that these PTAs have had on the different countries, an econometric estimation must be performed. The regression that will be executed here is the well-known gravity model of trade. A total of 22 countries are included in the equation, which means that there are 462 country-pairs that are examined over the time period of 1975-1995. The study shows that there is a specific correlation between the entry of a preferential trade agreement and the bilateral trade flow, especially concerning Mercosur. Looking at the first estimation, it is evident that the membership of Mercosur has led to an increase in bilateral trade flow with a rather substantial margin. Since there is a problem of multicollinearity in the estimations, this has led to it being hard to analyse ALADI in the specific estimations. However, when looking at the statistics, the evidence shows that countries that have entered a PTA (both ALADI and Mercosur) have increased their bilateral trade flow. This has to do with several factors that will be presented throughout the essay.
Policies on Union Representation in Us Multinationals in the UK: Between Micro-Politics and Macro-Institutions

This paper examines the policies towards unions and collective representation in US multinationals in the UK. It uses detailed case-study data to argue that the dominant 'ideological norms' of anti-unionism in the US business system shape, but do not determine, the behaviour of US multinational subsidiaries in the UK. Within the structural constraints determined by such factors as sector, subsidiary policy and behaviour towards unions are the outcome of the complex interaction of the contrasting 'macro-institutional' forces of home and host business systems, and how these are filtered through the perceptions and interests of actors at different levels of the multinational. The resulting 'micro-politics' generates a complex and evolving pattern of union relations and non-unionism in US subsidiaries. Copyright Blackwell Publishing Ltd/London School of Economics 2005.
Murine Dendritic Cell Type I IFN Production Induced by Human IgG-RNA Immune Complexes Is IFN Regulatory Factor (IRF)5 and IRF7 Dependent and Is Required for IL-6 Production1

Dendritic cell (DC) activation by nucleic acid-containing IgG complexes is implicated in systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) pathogenesis. However, it has been difficult to definitively examine the receptors and signaling pathways by which this activation is mediated. Because mouse FcγRs recognize human IgG, we hypothesized that IgG from lupus patients might stimulate mouse DCs, thereby facilitating this analysis. In this study, we show that sera and purified IgG from lupus patients activate mouse DCs to produce IFN-α, IFN-β, and IL-6 and up-regulate costimulatory molecules in a FcγR-dependent manner. This activation is only seen in sera with reactivity against ribonucleoproteins and is completely dependent on TLR7 and the presence of RNA. As anticipated, IFN regulatory factor (IRF)7 is required for IFN-α and IFN-β production. Unexpectedly, however, IRF5 plays a critical role in IFN-α and IFN-β production induced not only by RNA-containing immune complexes but also by conventional TLR7 and TLR9 ligands. Moreover, DC production of IL-6 induced by these stimuli is dependent on a functional type I IFNR, indicating the need for a type I IFN-dependent feedback loop in the production of inflammatory cytokines. This system may also prove useful for the study of receptors and signaling pathways used by immune complexes in other human diseases.
Tuning range and threshold current of the tunable twin-guide (TTG) laser

The tuning range and threshold current of the tunable twin-guide (TTG) laser are calculated as a function of the relevant device parameters. It is shown that a maximum continuous tuning range up to 6-7 nm and low threshold currents around 25 mA can be expected with adequately designed 2 mu m wide and 400 mu m long 1.56 mu m TTG lasers. A comparison of the calculations to published experimental results shows fair agreement. <<ETX>>
Governing Social Inclusion: Europeanization through Policy Coordination

1. Europeanizing Social Inclusion-Theory Concepts and Methods 2. Policy Coordination in the EU 3. Social Policy Coordination and the Lisbon Strategy 4. Relaunching the Lisbon Strategy and the Streamlining of Policy Coordination 5. Europeanization Through Policy Coordination 6. Economic Constitutionalism and Social Policy Coordination 7. From Lisbon to Lisbon-Europeanization Through Constitutionalism 8. Strengthening the Governance of Social Inclusion
Fighting Radicalism, Not “Terrorism”: Root Causes of an International Actor Redefined

While debate over the root causes of terrorism rages in the West, extremists continue to lure destitute radicals to their cause. Counter-terrorism needs to place the breeding grounds for these impoverished sympathizers at the center of their efforts. A new strategy and a new method ought to be adopted to prevent radicals from becoming a threat in the form of terrorism. “Fighting radicalism with human development”—specifically social and economic development—should emerge as a new public narrative and long-term objective for a smarter effort at strategic counter-terrorism.
Economic Geography and the Role of Profits

In modern economies, the amount of profits distributed to shareholders is far from being negligible. We show that the way they are distributed among agents matters for the space-economy. For example, the existence of mobile rentiers is sufficient to make the symmetric configuration unstable for all transport cost values and to make partial agglomeration of firms stable. Obviously, to account for profits and for their distribution, the assumption of free entry must be abandoned. So doing, we ignore fixed costs and show that it is imperfect competition more than increasing returns that matters for the formation of agglomeration in economic geography.
Young adult smokers' perceptions of plain packaging: a pilot naturalistic study

Aims To explore the impact, if any, that using plain (non-branded) cigarette packs in real-life settings has on young adult smokers. Methods Naturalistic-type research was employed, where smokers used brown ‘plain’ packs for 2 weeks and their regular packs for 2 weeks, in real-life settings. Participants were recruited in Glasgow, Scotland. Of the 140 smokers aged 18–35 years who participated in the naturalistic study, 48 correctly completed and returned all questionnaires. Over the 4-week study period, participants completed a questionnaire twice a week assessing pack perceptions and feelings, feelings about smoking, salience of health warnings and smoking-related behaviours. A subsample of 18 participated in a post-study interview, which employed a semistructured topic guide to assess perceptions and experiences of using plain packs. Results Trends in the data show that in comparison with branded packaging, plain packaging increased negative perceptions and feelings about the pack and about smoking. Plain packaging also increased avoidant behaviour (hiding the pack, covering the pack), certain smoking cessation behaviours, such as smoking less around others and forgoing cigarettes, and thinking about quitting. Almost half (n=8) of those in the post-study interview, predominantly women (n=6), reported that the use of plain packs had either increased avoidant behaviour or reduced consumption. Conclusions This pilot naturalistic study suggests that plain packaging could potentially help reduce tobacco consumption among some young adult smokers, and women in particular. Employing an innovative research methodology, the findings of this study are consistent with, and indeed support, past plain packaging research.
Education ties and investments abroad. Empirical evidence from the US and UK

Abstract. This paper analyses the impact of university student ties on the FDI of the US and UK into 167 countries during the period 1999-2010. University ties are measured by international students flows and alumni associations worldwide. Studies on transnational social networks suggest that effects should be higher on the FDI directed to the developing economies. The paper’s main findings are that international student flows and alumni associations abroad exert a positive influence on the FDI from the US and UK into the students’ home countries. More specifically, their influence is strong and significant in the group of developing countries. Results, similar for the US and UK, are robust to different regressors and econometric specifications.
Comparison of periodontal open flap debridement versus closed debridement with Er,Cr:YSGG laser.

BACKGROUND Traditional periodontal open flap debridement (OFD) results in reduced pocket depth (PD), clinical attachment loss (CAL), gingival recession (GR) and postoperative pain and discomfort. The quest to overcome these shortcomings has led to research into Er,Cr:YSGG laser assisted pocket therapy (ELAPT). This study was designed to compare the clinical outcomes of ELAPT versus OFD. METHODS Fifteen patients with a PD of ≥5 mm and ≤8 mm at two sites were selected. Test sites (Group 1) were treated by ELAPT and the control (Group 2) by OFD. Clinical parameters were recorded at baseline, 3 and 6 months and included Plaque Index (PI), Gingival Index (GI), modified Sulcular Bleeding Index (mSBI), PD, CAL and GR. RESULTS Both treatments produced a reduction in PI, GI, mSBI and PD, an increase in GR, and a gain in CAL at 3 and 6 months. The mean gain of CAL in Group 1 at 3 and 6 months (1.60 ± 0.78 and 1.80 ± 0.63) was similar (p > 0.05) to the value of Group 2 (1.93 ± 0.88 and 2.00 ± 0.54). GR increased significantly (p < 0.05) only in Group 2 at 3 and 6 months (1.80 ± 0.56 and 1.87 ± 0.64) compared to Group 1 (0.50 ± 0.68 and 0.60 ± 0.74). CONCLUSIONS ELAPT compared with OFD results in similar CAL gains with less GR and significant reductions in PD, GI and mSBI, and may be considered as an alternative to surgical therapy.
Deletion 9p22‐pter and loss of Y as primary chromosome abnormalities in a squamous cell carcinoma of the vocal cord

Loss of distal 9p is a common genetic alteration in squamous cell carcinoma of the head and neck. A vocal cord lesion incorporating a carcinoma‐in‐situ and a focus of invasive carcinoma revealed loss of the Y chromosome and a 9p22 rearrangement with loss of 9p22‐pter. Loss of 9p22‐pter appears to be a primary autosomal abnormality in this squamous cell carcinoma. © 1993 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Recurring infection with ecologically distinct human papillomavirus (HPV) types explains high prevalence and diversity

The high prevalence of human papillomavirus (HPV), the most common sexually transmitted infection, arises from the coexistence of over 200 genetically distinct types. Accurately predicting the impact of vaccines that target multiple types requires understanding the factors that determine HPV diversity. The diversity of many pathogens is driven by type-specific or “homologous” immunity, which promotes the spread of variants to which hosts have little immunity. To test for homologous immunity and to identify mechanisms determining HPV transmission, we fitted nonlinear mechanistic models to longitudinal data on genital infections in unvaccinated men. Our results provide no evidence for homologous immunity, instead showing that infection with one HPV type strongly increases the risk of infection with that type for years afterwards. For HPV16, the type responsible for most HPV-related cancers, an initial infection increases the one-year probability of reinfection by 20-fold, and the probability of reinfection remains 14-fold higher two years later. This increased risk occurs in both sexually active and celibate men, suggesting that it arises from auto-inoculation, episodic reactivation of latent virus, or both. Overall our results show that high HPV prevalence and diversity can be explained by a combination of a lack of homologous immunity, frequent reinfections, weak competition between types, and variation in type fitness between host subpopulations. Due to the high risk of reinfection, vaccinating boys that have not yet been exposed may be crucial to reduce prevalence, but our results suggest that there may also be large benefits from vaccinating previously infected individuals.
A New Statecraft? Supranational Entrepreneurs and International Cooperation

Does informal intervention by high officials of international organizations decisively influence the outcomes of multilateral negotiations? In the words of two leading international lawyers, can “faceless international bureaucrats, unelected and without power of purse or sword” really influence the decisions of powerful nation-states? Are we seeing the emergence of a “new statecraft” grounded in international networks managed by supranational political entrepreneurs?
Incidental sonographic diagnosis of neonatal carotid occlusion

Cranial ultrasonography including colour Doppler can detect neonatal carotid flow problems at an early stage, even before symptoms occur. Different pathogeneses can be identified. The condition is more frequent than previously reported. If the circle of Willis is fully developed, this can prevent brain injury even in case of total carotid flow obstruction
Reliability of polycrystalline silicon under long-term cyclic loading

The long-term mechanical behavior of 3.5 /spl mu/m thick and 50 /spl mu/m wide polysilicon tensile specimens under tension-tension cyclic loading was investigated. The initial fracture strength, /spl sigma//sub c/, was 1.1 GPa. If the applied maximum cyclic stress was reduced by about 35% to a value of /spl sigma//sub f/=0.75 GPa, the specimens failed after 10/sup 8/ cycles. No influence of frequency in the range of 50 to 1000 Hz was observed.
Senti17 at SemEval-2017 Task 4: Ten Convolutional Neural Network Voters for Tweet Polarity Classification

This paper presents Senti17 system which uses ten convolutional neural networks (ConvNet) to assign a sentiment label to a tweet. The network consists of a convolutional layer followed by a fully-connected layer and a Softmax on top. Ten instances of this network are initialized with the same word embeddings as inputs but with different initializations for the network weights. We combine the results of all instances by selecting the sentiment label given by the majority of the ten voters. This system is ranked fourth in SemEval-2017 Task4 over 38 systems with 67.4% average recall.
A certain estimate of volatility through return for stochastic volatility models

We study the dependence of volatility on the stock price in the stochastic volatility framework on the example of the Heston model. To be more specific, we consider the conditional expectation of variance (square of volatility) under fixed stock price return as a function of the return and time. The behavior of this function depends on the initial stock price return distribution density. In particular, we show that the graph of the conditional expectation of variance is convex downwards near the mean value of the stock price return. For the Gaussian distribution this effect is strong, but it weakens and becomes negligible as the decay of distribution at infinity slows down.