nils-herrmann/clean_scirepeval huggingface dataset:
Inclination dependent changes of the critical shoulder angle significantly influence superior glenohumeral joint stability.
Venue: Clinical biomechanics

The critical shoulder angle combines the acromion index and glenoid inclination and has potential to discriminate between shoulders at risk for rotator cuff tear or osteoarthritis and those that are asymptomatic. However, its biomechanics, and particularly the role of the glenoid inclination, are not yet fully understood.  A shoulder simulator was used to analyze the independent influence of glenoid inclination during abduction from 0 to 60deg. Spindle motors transferred tension forces by a cable pulley on human cadaveric humeri. A six degree of freedom force transducer was mounted directly behind the polyethylene glenoid to measure shear and compressive joint reaction force and calculate the instability ratio (ratio of shear and compressive joint reaction force) with the different force ratios of the deltoid and supraspinatus muscles (2:1 and 1:1) A stepwise change in the inclination by 5deg increments allowed simulation of a critical shoulder angle range of 20deg to 45deg.  Tilting the glenoid to cranial (increasing the critical shoulder angle) increases the shear joint reaction force and therefore the instability ratio. A balanced force ratio (1:1) between the deltoid and the supraspinatus allowed larger critical shoulder angles before cranial subluxation occurred than did the deltoid dominant ratio (2:1) INTERPRETATION Glenoid inclination dependent changes of the critical shoulder angle have a significant impact on superior glenohumeral joint stability. The increased compensatory activity of the rotator cuff to keep the humeral head centered may lead to mechanical overload and could explain the clinically observed association between large angles and degenerative rotator cuff tears.
A review of the global ecology, genomics, and biogeography of the toxic cyanobacterium, Microcystis spp.
Venue: Harmful algae

This review summarizes the present state of knowledge regarding the toxic, bloom forming cyanobacterium, Microcystis, with a specific focus on its geographic distribution, toxins, genomics, phylogeny, and ecology. A global analysis found documentation suggesting geographic expansion of Microcystis, with recorded blooms in at least 108 countries, 79 of which have also reported the hepatatoxin microcystin. The production of microcystins (originally "Fast Death Factor" by Microcystis and factors that control synthesis of this toxin are reviewed, as well as the putative ecophysiological roles of this metabolite. Molecular biological analyses have provided significant insight into the ecology and physiology of Microcystis, as well as revealed the highly dynamic, and potentially unstable, nature of its genome. A genetic sequence analysis of 27 Microcystis species, including 15 complete/draft genomes are presented. Using the strictest biological definition of what constitutes a bacterial species, these analyses indicate that all Microcystis species warrant placement into the same species complex since the average nucleotide identity values were above 95% 16S rRNA nucleotide identity scores exceeded 99% and DNA DNA hybridization was consistently greater than 70% The review further provides evidence from around the globe for the key role that both nitrogen and phosphorus play in controlling Microcystis bloom dynamics, and the effect of elevated temperature on bloom intensification. Finally, highlighted is the ability of Microcystis assemblages to minimize their mortality losses by resisting grazing by zooplankton and bivalves, as well as viral lysis, and discuss factors facilitating assemblage resilience.
Exposure of marine mussels Mytilus spp. to polystyrene microplastics: Toxicity and influence on fluoranthene bioaccumulation.
Venue: Environmental pollution

The effects of polystyrene microbeads (micro PS; mix of 2 and 6 mm; final concentration: 32 mg L( 1) alone or in combination with fluoranthene (30 mg L( 1) on marine mussels Mytilus spp. were investigated after 7 days of exposure and 7 days of depuration under controlled laboratory conditions. Overall, fluoranthene was mostly associated to algae Chaetoceros muelleri (partition coefficient Log Kp 4.8) used as a food source for mussels during the experiment. When micro PS were added in the system, a fraction of FLU transferred from the algae to the microbeads as suggested by the higher partition coefficient of micro PS (Log Kp 6.6) which confirmed a high affinity of fluoranthene for polystyrene microparticles. However, this did not lead to a modification of fluoranthene bioaccumulation in exposed individuals, suggesting that micro PS had a minor role in transferring fluoranthene to mussels tissues in comparison with waterborne and foodborne exposures. After depuration, a higher fluoranthene concentration was detected in mussels exposed to micro PS and fluoranthene, as compared to mussels exposed to fluoranthene alone. This may be related to direct effect of micro PS on detoxification mechanisms, as suggested by a down regulation of a P glycoprotein involved in pollutant excretion, but other factors such as an impairment of the filtration activity or presence of remaining beads in the gut cannot be excluded. Micro PS alone led to an increase in hemocyte mortality and triggered substantial modulation of cellular oxidative balance: increase in reactive oxygen species production in hemocytes and enhancement of anti oxidant and glutathione related enzymes in mussel tissues. Highest histopathological damages and levels of anti oxidant markers were observed in mussels exposed to micro PS together with fluoranthene. Overall these results suggest that under the experimental conditions of our study micro PS led to direct toxic effects at tissue, cellular and molecular levels, and modulated fluoranthene kinetics and toxicity in marine mussels.
Bifidobacteria and Butyrate Producing Colon Bacteria: Importance and Strategies for Their Stimulation in the Human Gut
Venue: Front. Microbiol.

With the increasing amount of evidence linking certain disorders of the human body to a disturbed gut microbiota, there is a growing interest for compounds that positively influence its composition and activity through diet. Besides the consumption of probiotics to stimulate favorable bacterial communities in the human gastrointestinal tract, prebiotics such as inulin type fructans (ITF) and arabinoxylan oligosaccharides (AXOS) can be consumed to increase the number of bifidobacteria in the colon. Several functions have been attributed to bifidobacteria, encompassing degradation of non digestible carbohydrates, protection against pathogens, production of vitamin B, antioxidants, and conjugated linoleic acids, and stimulation of the immune system. During life, the numbers of bifidobacteria decrease from up to 90% of the total colon microbiota in vaginally delivered breast fed infants to <5% in the colon of adults and they decrease even more in that of elderly as well as in patients with certain disorders such as antibiotic associated diarrhea, inflammatory bowel disease, irritable bowel syndrome, obesity, allergies, and regressive autism. It has been suggested that the bifidogenic effects of ITF and AXOS are the result of strain specific yet complementary carbohydrate degradation mechanisms within cooperating bifidobacterial consortia. Except for a bifidogenic effect, ITF and AXOS also have shown to cause a butyrogenic effect in the human colon, i.e. an enhancement of colon butyrate production. Butyrate is an essential metabolite in the human colon, as it is the preferred energy source for the colon epithelial cells, contributes to the maintenance of the gut barrier functions, and has immunomodulatory and anti inflammatory properties. It has been shown that the butyrogenic effects of ITF and AXOS are the result of cross feeding interactions between bifidobacteria and butyrate producing colon bacteria, such as Faecalibacterium prausnitzii (clostridial cluster IV) and Anaerostipes, Eubacterium, and Roseburia species (clostridial cluster XIVa) These kinds of interactions possibly favor the co existence of bifidobacterial strains with other bifidobacteria and with butyrate producing colon bacteria in the human colon.
Bifidobacteria and Their Role as Members of the Human Gut Microbiota
Venue: Front. Microbiol.

Members of the genus Bifidobacterium are among the first microbes to colonize the human gastrointestinal tract and are believed to exert positive health benefits on their host. Due to their purported health promoting properties, bifidobacteria have been incorporated into many functional foods as active ingredients. Bifidobacteria naturally occur in a range of ecological niches that are either directly or indirectly connected to the animal gastrointestinal tract, such as the human oral cavity, the insect gut and sewage. To be able to survive in these particular ecological niches, bifidobacteria must possess specific adaptations to be competitive. Determination of genome sequences has revealed genetic attributes that may explain bifidobacterial ecological fitness, such as metabolic abilities, evasion of the host adaptive immune system and colonization of the host through specific appendages. However, genetic modification is crucial toward fully elucidating the mechanisms by which bifidobacteria exert their adaptive abilities and beneficial properties. In this review we provide an up to date summary of the general features of bifidobacteria, whilst paying particular attention to the metabolic abilities of this species. We also describe methods that have allowed successful genetic manipulation of bifidobacteria.
Gut Bifidobacteria Populations in Human Health and Aging
Venue: Front. Microbiol.

The intestinal microbiota has increasingly been shown to have a vital role in various aspects of human health. Indeed, several studies have linked alterations in the gut microbiota with the development of different diseases. Among the vast gut bacterial community, Bifidobacterium is a genus which dominates the intestine of healthy breast fed infants whereas in adulthood the levels are lower but relatively stable. The presence of different species of bifidobacteria changes with age, from childhood to old age. Bifidobacterium longum, B. breve, and B. bifidum are generally dominant in infants, whereas B. catenulatum, B. adolescentis and, as well as B. longum are more prevalent in adults. Increasingly, evidence is accumulating which shows beneficial effects of supplementation with bifidobacteria for the improvement of human health conditions ranging from protection against infection to different extra and intra intestinal positive effects. Moreover, bifidobacteria have been associated with the production of a number of potentially health promoting metabolites including short chain fatty acids, conjugated linoleic acid and bacteriocins. The aim of this mini review is to describe the bifidobacteria compositional changes associated with different stages in life, highlighting their beneficial role, as well as their presence or absence in many disease states.
La competencia digital de la Generacion Z: claves para su introduccion curricular en la Educacion Primaria

Media convergence and massive usage of Internet connected devices, distinguishing features of our current society, cause changes in the way that new generations learn and access knowledge. In addition, emerging new digital skills are necessary for the Z generation to face the challenges of a digital society. This quantitative study, with a sample of 678 Primary School students, aims to provide empirical evidence about the level of digital skills of students belonging to this generation. The results show that the acquisition of digital competences is not inherent to use, but require specific instruction. Otherwise, there is a danger of creating a digital divide, not due to frequency of use or access to connected devices but to lack of instruction on how to use them. The absence of significant variance in the overall level of digital competence among Primary School students of different grades reflects, to some extent, that this level is largely acquired by informal activities with ICTs in an informal context, rather than by developing competences in a school context that affords gradual and progressive skills acquisition. The results show the need to address digital competence in schools, focusing on the systematic development and enhancement of its component areas to move beyond the informal level and reach the academic level, thus facilitating digital natives' access to future employment.
El impacto del Modelo "Un Ordenador Por Nino" en la Educacion Primaria: Un estudio de caso

El presente articulo analiza los efectos de los modelos 1:1 para la integracion de las TIC en las aulas de los centros escolares de Educacion Primaria. Estos modelos se caracterizan por la dotacion de un ordenador a cada estudiante (One Laptop Per Child) para el proceso de aprendizaje. Con este objetivo, se ha construido un cuestionario para identificar las expectativas y visiones del profesorado implicado en la iniciativa 1:1 en la Comunidad Autonoma del Pais Vasco (Espana) en la que participaron 364 docentes. Las dimensiones recogidas giraron en torno al impacto en la practica docente tanto para el profesorado como para el alumnado. Los resultados mas relevantes obtenidos informan que la mayor dotacion de recursos e infraestructura para el aula ha supuesto una oportunidad para el reciclaje y el perfeccionamiento docente, asi como una mayor motivacion del alumnado en su aprendizaje. No obstante, se concluye que existe una falta de un impacto sustancial, tanto organizativo y pedagogico, en los procesos de ensenanzaaprendizaje.
The Southampton York Natural Scenes (SYNS) dataset: Statistics of surface attitude
Venue: Scientific reports

Recovering 3D scenes from 2D images is an under constrained task; optimal estimation depends upon knowledge of the underlying scene statistics. Here we introduce the Southampton York Natural Scenes dataset (SYNS: https:/syns.soton.ac.uk) which provides comprehensive scene statistics useful for understanding biological vision and for improving machine vision systems. In order to capture the diversity of environments that humans encounter, scenes were surveyed at random locations within 25 indoor and outdoor categories. Each survey includes (i) spherical LiDAR range data (ii) high dynamic range spherical imagery and (iii) a panorama of stereo image pairs. We envisage many uses for the dataset and present one example: an analysis of surface attitude statistics, conditioned on scene category and viewing elevation. Surface normals were estimated using a novel adaptive scale selection algorithm. Across categories, surface attitude below the horizon is dominated by the ground plane (0deg tilt) Near the horizon, probability density is elevated at 90deg/270deg tilt due to vertical surfaces (trees, walls) Above the horizon, probability density is elevated near 0deg slant due to overhead structure such as ceilings and leaf canopies. These structural regularities represent potentially useful prior assumptions for human and machine observers, and may predict human biases in perceived surface attitude.
No reference image quality assessment based on nonsubsample shearlet transform and natural scene statistics

A novel no reference (NR) image quality assessment (IQA) method is proposed for assessing image quality across multifarious distortion categories. The new method transforms distorted images into the shearlet domain using a non subsample shearlet transform (NSST) and designs the image quality feature vector to describe images utilizing natural scenes statistical features: coefficient distribution, energy distribution and structural correlation (SC) across orientations and scales. The final image quality is achieved from distortion classification and regression models trained by a support vector machine (SVM) The experimental results on the LIVE2 IQA database indicate that the method can assess image quality effectively, and the extracted features are susceptive to the category and severity of distortion. Furthermore, our proposed method is database independent and has a higher correlation rate and lower root mean squared error (RMSE) with human perception than other high performance NR IQA methods.
Blind Image Quality Assessment Based on High Order Statistics Aggregation
Venue: IEEE Transactions on Image Processing

Blind image quality assessment (BIQA) research aims to develop a perceptual model to evaluate the quality of distorted images automatically and accurately without access to the non distorted reference images. The state of the art general purpose BIQA methods can be classified into two categories according to the types of features used. The first includes handcrafted features which rely on the statistical regularities of natural images. These, however, are not suitable for images containing text and artificial graphics. The second includes learning based features which invariably require large codebook or supervised codebook updating procedures to obtain satisfactory performance. These are time consuming and not applicable in practice. In this paper, we propose a novel general purpose BIQA method based on high order statistics aggregation (HOSA) requiring only a small codebook. HOSA consists of three steps. First, local normalized image patches are extracted as local features through a regular grid, and a codebook containing 100 codewords is constructed by K means clustering. In addition to the mean of each cluster, the diagonal covariance and coskewness (i.e. dimension wise variance and skewness) of clusters are also calculated. Second, each local feature is softly assigned to several nearest clusters and the differences of high order statistics (mean, variance and skewness) between local features and corresponding clusters are softly aggregated to build the global quality aware image representation. Finally, support vector regression is adopted to learn the mapping between perceptual features and subjective opinion scores. The proposed method has been extensively evaluated on ten image databases with both simulated and realistic image distortions, and shows highly competitive performance to the state of the art BIQA methods.
Robust Proportional Control for Trajectory Tracking of a Nonlinear Robotic Manipulator: LMI Optimization Approach

This paper proposes a new control configuration that is simple, model free and robust for trajectory tracking control of a multi input multi output nonlinear robotic manipulator system. The proposed controller consists of two terms. The first term is a linear controller in proportional (P) control structure, and the second term is a nonlinear robustness term in sliding mode structure. This combined nonlinear controller exploits the simplicity and easy implementation properties of proportional integral derivative control and robustness properties of the sliding mode control (SMC) against system uncertainties and parameter variations. Important feature of the proposed controller is avoiding the need to determine the accurate dynamic model of the plant, which is a necessity in standard SMC. Stability analysis is performed, and stability in closed loop is proved for the proposed control method. A control problem is restated as a convex optimization problem based on linear matrix inequality technique, and optimal gain of P controller is obtained. A simulation model of the plant is built in MATLAB Simulink environment for testing the proposed controller. Closed loop system performances are observed for standard SMC, computed torque control, SMC with proportional derivative control and proposed control. Simulation results reveal the effectiveness of proposed method in response to system uncertainties, random noise and external disturbance.
Implementation of a new iterative learning control algorithm on real data.
Venue: The Review of scientific instruments

In this paper, a newly presented approach is proposed for closed loop automatic tuning of a proportional integral derivative (PID) controller based on iterative learning control (ILC) algorithm. A modified ILC scheme iteratively changes the control signal by adjusting it. Once a satisfactory performance is achieved, a linear compensator is identified in the ILC behavior using casual relationship between the closed loop signals. This compensator is approximated by a PD controller which is used to tune the original PID controller. Results of implementing this approach presented on the experimental data of Damavand tokamak and are consistent with simulation outcome.
COMPARING COORDINATION STRUCTURES FOR CRISIS MANAGEMENT IN SIX COUNTRIES

The article analyses organizational structures and coordination mechanisms for crisis management in six European countries, focusing on the prevalence of hierarchical and network arrangements, administrative culture and perceptions of coordination quality. Our main research question concerns the importance of collaboration and cooperation in the management of crises. We apply a structural instrumental and a cultural perspective, and examine data on formal organizational structures as well as survey data from administrative executives. The mapping reveals hybrid coordination arrangements with different national 'flavours' The survey data show that the executives accorded significant weight to coordination, but the use of different coordination mechanisms was only loosely linked to their assessments of coordination quality. Our findings support a view of public administration as a largely composite system combining contradictory organizational principles that have evolved through institutional layering. National context and the specific challenges from different types of crises therefore influence crisis management capacity profoundly.
Pressure Measurements on Yacht Sails: Development of a New System for Wind Tunnel and Full Scale Testing

The paper presents an overview of a joint project developed among Politecnico di Milano, CSEM and North Sails, aiming at developing a new sail pressure measurement system based on MEMS sensors (an excellent compromise between size, performance, costs and operational conditions) and pressure strips and pads technology. These devices were designed and produced to give differential measurement between the leeward and windward side of the sails. The project has been developed within the Lecco Innovation Hub Sailing Yacht Lab, a 10 m length sailing dynamometer which intend to be the reference contemporary full scale measurement device in the sailing yacht engineering research field, to enhance the insight of sail steady and unsteady aerodynamics  The pressure system is described in details as well as the data acquisition process and system metrological validation is provided; furthermore, some results obtained during a wind tunnel campaign carried out at Politecnico di Milano Wind Tunnel, as a benchmark of the whole measuring system for future full scale application, are reported and discussed in details. Moreover, the system configuration for full scale testing, which is still under development, is also described.