Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
On the accuracy of Malley probe measurements of aero-optical effects: a numerical investigation

Abstract. Numerical databases established by large-eddy simulations of subsonic turbulent boundary layers and separated shear layers are utilized to simulate Malley probe measurements and investigate their accuracy and consistency with the data obtained from two-dimensional (2-D) wavefront sensors. It is found that the Malley probe data give a good approximation for the boundary layer and a reasonable approximation for the separated shear layer in terms of the root mean square of optical path difference (OPDrms) and the streamwise correlations of OPD. The OPDrms from the Malley probe is slightly smaller than that from the 2-D wavefront sensor with the same streamwise aperture size for both flows. It is shown that the use of multiple Malley probes in the transverse direction of the flow can enhance the accuracy of measurements. The spatial correlations of OPD obtained from simulated multi-Malley-probe data are also examined and compared to those from 2-D wavefront sensors.
Pharmacokinetics of intranasal amiloride in healthy volunteers

Anxiety and panic disorders are the most common mental illnesses in the United States and lack effective treatment options. Acid‐sending ion channels (ASICs) in the brain were shown to be associated with fear conditioning and anxiety responses and therefore are potential targets for treating panic disorder. Amiloride is an inhibitor of the ASICs in the brain and was shown to reduce panic symptoms in preclinical animal models. An intranasal formulation of amiloride will be highly beneficial to treat acute panic attacks due to advantages such as the rapid onset of action and patient compliance. The aim of this single‐center, open‐label trial was to evaluate the basic pharmacokinetics (PKs) and safety of amiloride after intranasal administration in healthy human volunteers at three doses (0.2, 0.4, and 0.6 mg). Amiloride was detected in plasma within 10 min of intranasal administration and showed a biphasic PK profile with an initial peak within 10 min of administration followed by a second peak between 4 and 8 h of administration. The biphasic PKs indicate an initial rapid absorption via the nasal pathway and later slower absorption by non‐nasal pathways. Intranasal amiloride exhibited a dose‐proportional increase in the area under the curve and did not exhibit any systemic toxicity. These data indicate that intranasal amiloride is rapidly absorbed and safe at the doses evaluated and can be further considered for clinical development as a portable, rapid, noninvasive, and nonaddictive anxiolytic agent to treat acute panic attacks.
A series of the first 13 combined Magseed and Magtrace cases in a single centre in regional Victoria

The standard journey for a patient with impalpable breast cancer wishing to undergo breast‐conserving surgery involves placement of a guidewire and lymphoscintigraphy pre‐operatively. Access to these procedures is limited in the regional centres, this scheduling can require overnight stays away from home and can delay theatre which can increase patient distress. The Sentimag technology uses magnetism for localisation of preoperatively inserted Magseeds (for impalpable breast lesions) and Magtrace (for sentinel node biopsy), avoiding guidewire placement and nuclear medicine. This study evaluates the first 13 cases using this combined technique by a single specialist breast surgeon in a regional centre.
Prevalence and Normalization of Stress Urinary Incontinence in Female Strength Athletes

Supplemental Digital Content is Available in the Text. Abstract Mahoney, K, Heidel, RE, and Olewinski, L. Prevalence and normalization of stress urinary incontinence in female strength athletes. J Strength Cond Res 37(9): 1877–1881, 2023—Strength training is increasing in popularity in women but is also a potential risk factor for stress urinary incontinence (SUI). There is potential for normalization of SUI in sports with high rates of SUI. Pelvic floor physical therapy is an effective treatment for SUI in both athletes and nonathletes, but female strength athletes may not be aware of this option. Our study sought to assess prevalence, normalization, rates of treatment, and preferred sources of information about SUI in female strength athletes. A novel cross-sectional survey was distributed online through social media groups dedicated to female strength athletes with 425 women responding within 4 days. Statistical significance of results was assumed at a 2-sided alpha value of 0.05. 43.5% of athletes experienced incontinence with daily tasks, 59.1% experienced incontinence with normal strength training, and 50.2% experienced incontinence during competition. Of the athletes who experienced incontinence, 61.4% did not have incontinence before starting their sport and only 9.4% had ever sought treatment. 67.9% of all athletes surveyed believed that urinary incontinence was a normal part of their sport. Our findings indicate that SUI is common in female strength athletes and may be a consequence of the sport itself. Normalization of SUI is common, and few athletes seek treatment.
The Qualitative Synthesis of Parallel Manipulators

As shown in this paper, when designing parallel manipulators for tasks involving less than six degrees of freedom, the topology can be laid out by resorting to qualitative reasoning. More specifically, the paper focuses on cases whereby the manipulation tasks pertain to displacements with the algebraic structure of a group. Besides the well-known planar and spherical displacements, this is the case of displacements involving: rotation about a given axis and translation in the direction of the same axis (cylindrical subgroup); translation in two and three dimensions (two- and three-dimensional translation subgroups); three independent translations and rotation about an axis of fixed direction, what is known as the Schonflies subgroup; and similar to the Schonflies subgroup, but with the rotation and the translation in the direction of the axis of rotation replaced by a screw displacement. For completeness, the fundamental concepts of motion representation and groups of displacements, as pertaining to rigid bodies, are first recalled. Finally, the concept of H-joint, introduced elsewhere, is generalized to two and three degrees of freedom, thereby ending up with the Π 2 -and the Π 3 -joints, respectively.
Paradoxical kinesia may no longer be a paradox waiting for 100 years to be unraveled

Abstract Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder mainly characterized by bradykinesia and akinesia. Interestingly, these motor disabilities can depend on the patient emotional state. Disabled PD patients remain able to produce normal motor responses in the context of urgent or externally driven situations or even when exposed to appetitive cues such as music. To describe this phenomenon Souques coined the term “paradoxical kinesia” a century ago. Since then, the mechanisms underlying paradoxical kinesia are still unknown due to a paucity of valid animal models that replicate this phenomenon. To overcome this limitation, we established two animal models of paradoxical kinesia. Using these models, we investigated the neural mechanisms of paradoxical kinesia, with the results pointing to the inferior colliculus (IC) as a key structure. Intracollicular electrical deep brain stimulation, glutamatergic and GABAergic mechanisms may be involved in the elaboration of paradoxical kinesia. Since paradoxical kinesia might work by activation of some alternative pathway bypassing basal ganglia, we suggest the IC as a candidate to be part of this pathway.
Revisiting the target-constrained interference-minimized filter (TCIMF)

The Orthogonal Subspace Projection (OSP) and Constrained Energy Minimization (CEM) have been used in hyperpsectral target detection and classification. A target-constrained interference-minimized filter (TCIMF) was recently proposed to extend the CEM to improve signal detectability to annihilating undesired target signal sources as the way carried out in the OSP. In this paper, we revisit the TCIMF from a signal processing viewpoint where signals can be characterized by three types of information sources, desired target sources and undesired target sources, both of which are provided a priori, and interferers which are unknown interfering sources. By virtue of such signal decomposition, we chan show that the TCIMF is actually a generalization of the OSP and CEM. In particular, we investigate assumptions made for the OSP and CEM in terms of these three types of signal sources and exploit insights into their filter design. As will be shown in this paper, the OSP and the CEM perform the same tasks by operating different levels of information and both can be viewed as special cases of the TCIMF.
The Nature of Elementary Particles

The question, “What is an elementary particle? ” must find its answer primarily in experiment, although it must also be confronted with philosphical considerations. I will therefore begin by giving a short survey of the important experimental results of the last fifty years. This survey will show that a critical unbiased study of these results already gives an answer to the question; theory, as we shall see, cannot add much to this answer.
Systems Considerations and Design Options for' Microspacecraft Propulsion Systems

Future microspacecraft will require significant propulsive capability in order to accomplish the wide array of missions currently envisioned. The development of candidate propulsion systems including cold gas, chemical and ion thrusters will be necessary to fulfill maneuvering requirements. This study focuses on the design considerations associated with scaling propulsion systems for use on microspacecraft. Scaling issues that affect device performance as well as systems limitations of microspacecraft are presented. General considerations are presented for nozzle flows, ion formation, combustion and heat transfer at micro-scales.
Structure of turbulent line vortices

A theory is given to explain the observed dependence on Reynolds number of the decay of turbulent line vortices. It is argued that the turbulent vortex has a triple structure. There is an outer region for r > r1 (r1 is the radius of maximum tangential velocity) with a logarithmic distribution of circulation, and for r < r1 an inner region and viscous core in both of which the motion is close to solid body rotation. It is predicted that r1 ~ (vT1 t2)1/4, where 1 is the circulation at r1. Further, T1/T0 is predicted to be a slowly decreasing function of T0/v, where T0 is the strength of the vortex. The development of an overshoot of circulation in the outer region is discussed, and the axial velocities produced by growth of a trailing vortex are calculated.
Compressive Sensing via Variational Bayesian Inference under Two Widely Used Priors: Modeling, Comparison and Discussion

Compressive sensing is a sub-Nyquist sampling technique for efficient signal acquisition and reconstruction of sparse or compressible signals. In order to account for the sparsity of the underlying signal of interest, it is common to use sparsifying priors such as Bernoulli–Gaussian-inverse Gamma (BGiG) and Gaussian-inverse Gamma (GiG) priors on the components of the signal. With the introduction of variational Bayesian inference, the sparse Bayesian learning (SBL) methods for solving the inverse problem of compressive sensing have received significant interest as the SBL methods become more efficient in terms of execution time. In this paper, we consider the sparse signal recovery problem using compressive sensing and the variational Bayesian (VB) inference framework. More specifically, we consider two widely used Bayesian models of BGiG and GiG for modeling the underlying sparse signal for this problem. Although these two models have been widely used for sparse recovery problems under various signal structures, the question of which model can outperform the other for sparse signal recovery under no specific structure has yet to be fully addressed under the VB inference setting. Here, we study these two models specifically under VB inference in detail, provide some motivating examples regarding the issues in signal reconstruction that may occur under each model, perform comparisons and provide suggestions on how to improve the performance of each model.
Applying Segment-Level Attention on Bi-Modal Transformer Encoder for Audio-Visual Emotion Recognition

Emotions can be expressed through multiple complementary modalities. This study selected speech and facial expressions as modalities by which to recognize emotions. Current audiovisual emotion recognition models perform supervised learning using signal-level inputs. Such models are presumed to characterize the temporal relationships in signals. In this study, supervised learning was performed on segment-level signals, which are more granular than signal-level signals, to precisely train an emotion recognition model. Effectively fusing multimodal signals is challenging. In this study, sequential segments of audiovisual signals were obtained, and features were extracted and applied to estimate segment-level attention weights according to the emotional consistency of the two modalities using a neural tensor network. A proposed bimodal Transformer Encoder was trained using signal-level and segment-level emotion labels in which temporal context was incorporated into the signals to improve upon existing emotion recognition models. In bimodal emotion recognition, the experimental results demonstrated that the proposed method achieved 74.31% accuracy (3.05% higher than the method of fusing correlation features) on the audio-visual emotion dataset BAUM-1, which is based on fivefold cross-validation, and 76.81% accuracy (2.57% higher than the Multimodal Transformer Encoder) on the multimodal emotion data set CMU-MOSEI, which is composed of training, validation, and testing sets.
Mandatory greenhouse gas emissions reporting and firm environmental litigation risk

ABSTRACT We investigate the impact of mandatory non-financial reporting on corporate environmental litigation risk. Using a difference-in-difference research design, we reveal that the introduction of the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program (GHGRP) in the U.S. reduces corporate environmental litigation risks. The result is robust to various sensitivity checks, including placebo tests. Further analysis documents that the enhanced corporate social responsibility in the post-GHGRP period serves as a channel for the lowered litigation risk. We also find that the effect of GHGRP on reducing litigation risk is more pronounced in the headquarters location with a large population because firms face greater community stakeholder pressure. Further empirical evidence shows that GHGRP attracts more investors’ attention, thereby leading to worsened stock returns around the litigation. Overall, the study emphasizes the critical role of mandatory GHG emissions reporting practice in shaping firms’ environment-related behavior.
Financial Development and Environmental
Quality: Differences in Renewable Energy Use
and Economic Growth

This paper uses feasible generalized least squares (FGLS) to empirically investigate the effect of financial development on environmental quality via carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) emissions for 148 countries from 1990 to 2019. The advantage of FGLS is overcoming the heteroskedasticity and serial and cross-sectional correlations and giving more efficient results than the Ordinary least squares estimate. Research innovations include the development of general regression models that establish the links among financial liberalization, renewable energy use, and economic development, which has been largely neglected in previous research. Initial findings indicate that the total effect of financial development on CO 2 emissions depends on economic growth and consumption of renewable energy. Notably, while the use of renewable energy may reduce the emissions-increasing effect of economic growth, economic growth may exacerbate the problem of environmental degradation caused by economic growth. The magnitude of the effect varies by income group. The role of renewable energy consumption holds true in countries with high and middle incomes but not in countries with low incomes. Regarding the effect of economic growth, research finds that economic growth may worsen (improve) the impact of financial development on environmental quality among high- and middle-income groups (low-income groups). The findings are robust across financial development dimensions (including the financial institution and the financial market). Thus, the implications are that governments in high- and middle-income countries should promote green credit policies and focus on technology related to environmentally friendly technological innovations to improve environmental quality.
High-Fidelity MRI Reconstruction Using Adaptive Spatial Attention Selection and Deep Data Consistency Prior

Compressed sensing (CS) has shown great potential for fast magnetic resonance imaging (fastMRI). Traditional CS methods model the inverse problem by leveraging the sparsity prior to guarantee the success of signal recovery, which is not rich enough to capture the detailed features of MRI modality. The other challenge is computational complexity in CS methods which often include an iterative optimization-based solver, hindering the growth and development of modern high resolution MRI. Inspired by existing researches in machine vision tasks, two novel network blocks are presented here which respectively leverage a) the spatial correlations and b) data consistency prior, and a novel multi-level densely connected framework is devised to improve the model capacity for removing aliasing artifacts from the under-sampled MR images and recovering missing anatomical information in high resolution MRIs. It is demonstrated that the framework produces more realistic and faithful structures and textural details, providing superior reconstructions in terms of less visual artifacts and relevant metrics.
Biodegradable Nanofibrillated Cellulose/Poly-(butylene adipate-co-terephthalate) Composite Film with Enhanced Barrier Properties for Food Packaging

Biodegradable composites consisting of Poly-(butylene adipate-co-terephthalate) (PBAT), thermoplastic starch, hydrophobically modified nanofibrillated cellulose (HMNC), and green surfactant (sucrose fatty acid ester) were prepared via the melt-mixing and film-blowing process (PBAT-HMNC). The composites were characterized using the Fourier transform infrared spectroscope (FT-IR), scanning electron microscope (SEM), and thermogravimetric analyzer (TGA). The mechanical and barrier properties were systematically studied. The results indicated that PBAT-HMNC composites exhibited excellent mechanical and barrier properties. The tensile strength reached the maximum value (over 13 MPa) when the HMNC content was 0.6% and the thermal decomposition temperature decreased by 1 to 2 °C. The lowest values of the water vapor transmission rate (WVTR) and the oxygen transmission rate (OTR) were obtained from the composite with 0.6 wt% HMNC, prepared via the film-bowing process with the values of 389 g/(m2·day) and 782 cc/(m2·day), which decreased by 51.3% and 42.1%, respectively. The Agaricus mushrooms still had a commodity value after 11 days of preservation using the film with 0.6 wt% HMNC. PBAT-HMNC composites have been proven to be promising nanocomposite materials for packaging.
In Vitro Bacterial Competition of Staphylococcus aureus, Streptococcus agalactiae, and Escherichia coli against Coagulase-Negative Staphylococci from Bovine Mastitis Milk

Intramammary infection (IMI) from the environment and infected quarters can cause co-infection. The objective of this study was to determine the ability of coagulase-negative staphylococci (CNS) to survive in the same environment as Staphylococcus aureus, Streptococcus agalactiae, and Escherichia coli as major pathogens. In total, 15 and 242 CNS strains were used in Experiment I and Experiment II, respectively. Both experiments were separated into three conditions: culture with CNS 24 h before (PRIOR), after (AFTER), and at the same time (EQUAL). The lack of a clear zone, regardless of size, was determined to be the key to the survival of both. The CNS species’ percentages of survival against major pathogens were tested using Fisher’s exact test. Differences in the percentages of survival were evident among the CNS species in all conditions. For the PRIOR condition, all CNS mostly survived when living with major strains; however, S. chromogenes could degrade S. agalactiae. Although most CNS strains were degraded in the AFTER and EQUAL conditions, some strains of S. hominis and S. simulans could resist S. aureus and S. agalactiae. In conclusion, some specific strains of CNS are able to survive in an environment with major pathogens. Research into the survival strains may indicate that the concept of novel bacteria with bacteriolytic capabilities might be possible as a novel mastitis treatment.
Development and Application of an Optogenetic Manipulation System to Suppress Actomyosin Activity in Ciona Epidermis

Studying the generation of biomechanical force and how this force drives cell and tissue morphogenesis is challenging for understanding the mechanical mechanisms underlying embryogenesis. Actomyosin has been demonstrated to be the main source of intracellular force generation that drives membrane and cell contractility, thus playing a vital role in multi-organ formation in ascidian Ciona embryogenesis. However, manipulation of actomyosin at the subcellular level is impossible in Ciona because of the lack of technical tools and approaches. In this study, we designed and developed a myosin light chain phosphatase fused with a light-oxygen-voltage flavoprotein from Botrytis cinerea (MLCP-BcLOV4) as an optogenetics tool to control actomyosin contractility activity in the Ciona larva epidermis. We first validated the light-dependent membrane localization and regulatory efficiency on mechanical forces of the MLCP-BcLOV4 system as well as the optimum light intensity that activated the system in HeLa cells. Then, we applied the optimized MLCP-BcLOV4 system in Ciona larval epidermal cells to realize the regulation of membrane elongation at the subcellular level. Moreover, we successfully applied this system on the process of apical contraction during atrial siphon invagination in Ciona larvae. Our results showed that the activity of phosphorylated myosin on the apical surface of atrial siphon primordium cells was suppressed and apical contractility was disrupted, resulting in the failure of the invagination process. Thus, we established an effective technique and system that provide a powerful approach in the study of the biomechanical mechanisms driving morphogenesis in marine organisms.
INVESTIGATING THE EFFECTS OF EPISTEMIC CURIOSITY ON INNOVATIVE WORK BEHAVIOUR: A STUDY ON HOTEL EMPLOYEES

Purpose - The main aim is to find out the effects of interest and deprivation type of epistemic curiosity (EC) on innovative work behaviour (IWB) in this study. In addition, the IWB and EC levels of the employees of five-star hotels are compared considering their personal characteristics. Design - Hypotheses were tested within correlational research and causal-comparative research design. Methodology - This research utilized quantitative research methods. Originality of the Research- The current study focuses on a relatively unexplored area, EC in hospitality enterprises and its relationships with IWB. Findings - Data were collected from 247 hotel employees working in five-star hotels in Antalya, Turkey. The results showed that the IWB and EC levels of hotel employees were high. Moreover, the interest and deprivation type of curiosity affected their IWB. In addition, differences in EC level were found in relation to their personal characteristics. However, no difference was found in IWB levels.