Freezing of Gait in Parkinson’s Disease: A Perceptual Cuase for a Motor Impairment?

While freezing of gait (FOG) is typically considered a motor impairment, the fact that it occurs more frequently in confined spaces suggests that perception of space might contribute to FOG. The present study evaluated how doorway size influenced characteristics of gait that might be indicative of freezing. Changes in spatiotemporal aspects of gait were evaluated while walking through three different-sized doorways (narrow (0.675 m wide X 2.1 m high), normal (0.9 m wide X 2.1 m high) and wide (1.8 m wide X 2.1 m high)) in three separate groups: 15 individuals with Parkinson’s disease confirmed to be experiencing FOG at the time of test; 16 non-FOG individuals with Parkinson’s disease and 16 healthy age-matched control participants. Results for step length indicated that the FOG group was most affected by the narrow doorway and was the only group whose step length was dependent on upcoming doorway size as indicated by a significant interaction of group by condition (F(4,88)=2.73, p\u3c0.034). Importantly, the FOG group also displayed increased within-trial variability of step length and step time, which was exaggerated as doorway size decreased (F(4,88)=2.99, p\u3c0.023). A significant interaction between group and condition for base of support measures indicated that the non-FOG participants were also affected by doorway size (similar to Parkinson’s disease FOG) but only in the narrow doorway condition. These results support the notion that some occurrences of freezing may be the result of an underlying perceptual mechanism that interferes with online movement planning

Retroreflecting curves in nonstandard analysis

We present a direct construction of retroreflecting curves by means of Nonstandard Analysis. We construct non self-intersecting curves which are of class C(1), except for a hyper-finite set of values, such that the probability of a particle being reflected from the curve with the velocity opposite to the velocity of incidence, is infinitely close to 1. The constructed curves are of two kinds: a curve infinitely close to a straight line and a curve infinitely close to the boundary of a bounded convex set. We shall see that the latter curve is a solution of the problem: find the curve of maximum resistance infinitely close to a given curve.CEOCFCTFEDER/POCT

Evolution of Privacy Loss in Wikipedia

The cumulative effect of collective online participation has an important and adverse impact on individual privacy. As an online system evolves over time, new digital traces of individual behavior may uncover previously hidden statistical links between an individual's past actions and her private traits. To quantify this effect, we analyze the evolution of individual privacy loss by studying the edit history of Wikipedia over 13 years, including more than 117,523 different users performing 188,805,088 edits. We trace each Wikipedia's contributor using apparently harmless features, such as the number of edits performed on predefined broad categories in a given time period (e.g. Mathematics, Culture or Nature). We show that even at this unspecific level of behavior description, it is possible to use off-the-shelf machine learning algorithms to uncover usually undisclosed personal traits, such as gender, religion or education. We provide empirical evidence that the prediction accuracy for almost all private traits consistently improves over time. Surprisingly, the prediction performance for users who stopped editing after a given time still improves. The activities performed by new users seem to have contributed more to this effect than additional activities from existing (but still active) users. Insights from this work should help users, system designers, and policy makers understand and make long-term design choices in online content creation systems

On Gravity localization under Lorentz Violation in warped scenario

Recently Rizzo studied the Lorentz Invariance Violation (LIV) in a brane scenario with one extra dimension where he found a non-zero mass for the four-dimensional graviton. This leads to the conclusion that five-dimensional models with LIV are not phenomenologically viable. In this work we re-examine the issue of Lorentz Invariance Violation in the context of higher dimensional theories. We show that a six-dimensional geometry describing a string-like defect with a bulk-dependent cosmological constant can yield a massless 4D graviton, if we allow the cosmological constant variation along the bulk, and thus can provides a phenomenologically viable solution for the gauge hierarchy problem.Comment: 13 pages, 2 figures. To appear in Physics Letters

Physical properties of the Schur complement of local covariance matrices

General properties of global covariance matrices representing bipartite Gaussian states can be decomposed into properties of local covariance matrices and their Schur complements. We demonstrate that given a bipartite Gaussian state $\rho_{12}$ described by a $4\times 4$ covariance matrix \textbf{V}, the Schur complement of a local covariance submatrix $\textbf{V}_1$ of it can be interpreted as a new covariance matrix representing a Gaussian operator of party 1 conditioned to local parity measurements on party 2. The connection with a partial parity measurement over a bipartite quantum state and the determination of the reduced Wigner function is given and an operational process of parity measurement is developed. Generalization of this procedure to a $n$-partite Gaussian state is given and it is demonstrated that the $n-1$ system state conditioned to a partial parity projection is given by a covariance matrix such as its $2 \times 2$ block elements are Schur complements of special local matrices.Comment: 10 pages. Replaced with final published versio