Repair severed nerve connections through a multi-branch microchannel scaffold to control the direction of the regenerated nerve

Damage to the peripheral nervous system may result in functional abnormalities due to disrupted nerve connections. Existing methods of repairing severed nerve connections in the peripheral nervous system have limitations and disadvantages such as a limited availability of donor nerves and a lack of control of the direction of nerve regeneration within nerve conduits. A handcrafted multi-branch microchannel scaffold improves upon the current methods of nerve repair by incorporating microchannels, which guide and accommodate the nerve regeneration to distal ends, allowing for the treatment of nerve injuries involving multiple branches with fewer surgeries. This scaffold is also made more accessible by being fabricated with commercially available materials, microwires, silastic tubes and PDMS. Moreover, the designs of the multi-branch scaffold can be modified for any branching nerve using the procedure. The scaffold used in the study was designed specifically for the sciatic nerve, which branches out to the tibial, sural, and common peroneal serves, and was implanted in the Lewis rats with a severed sciatic nerve and three distal nerve branches to demonstrate the effectiveness of the nerve scaffold

Complementarity between human capital and trade in regional technological progress

The effect of openness and trade orientation on economic growth remains a highly contentious issue. Trade facilitates knowledge diffusion and the adoption of more advanced and efficient technologies which faster total factor productivity (TFP) growth and, hence, per capita income. New technologies that diffuse by trade require a sufficiently qualified labour force to adapt them into the domestic productive environment. Thus, openness and human capital accumulation will lead to TFP growth, and the larger the complementarity between both variables the higher TFP growth. The paper discusses the implications of these assumptions and tests their empirical validity using a pool of data for the industrial sector in the Spanish regions in a period in which both the stock of human capital and openness experienced a not able improvement. Key words: trade, human capital, technological progress and regions. JEL category: C23, D24, O33.

Complementarity between human capital and trade in regional technological progress

The effect of openness and trade orientation on economic growth remains a highly contentious issue in the literature. Trade facilitates the spread of knowledge and the adoption of more advanced and efficient technologies, which hastens total factor productivity (TFP) growth and, hence, per capita income. New technologies that spread through trade require a sufficiently skilled labour force to adapt them to the domestic productive environment. Thus, openness and human capital accumulation will lead to TFP growth and the greater the complementarity between both variables, the higher the TFP growth. This paper discusses the implications of these assumptions and tests their empirical validity, using a pool of data for manufacturing industry in Spanish regions in a period in which both the stock of human capital and openness experienced a notable increase.technological progress, industry, human capital, trade

OFAR-CM: Efficient Dragonfly networks with simple congestion management

Dragonfly networks are appealing topologies for large-scale Data center and HPC networks, that provide high throughput with low diameter and moderate cost. However, they are prone to congestion under certain frequent traffic patterns that saturate specific network links. Adaptive non-minimal routing can be used to avoid such congestion. That kind of routing employs longer paths to circumvent local or global congested links. However, if a distance-based deadlock avoidance mechanism is employed, more Virtual Channels (VCs) are required, what increases design complexity and cost. OFAR (On-the-Fly Adaptive Routing) is a previously proposed routing that decouples VCs from deadlock avoidance, making local and global misrouting affordable. However, the severity of congestion with OFAR is higher, as it relies on an escape sub network with low bisection bandwidth. Additionally, OFAR allows for unlimited misroutings on the escape sub network, leading to unbounded paths in the network and long latencies. In this paper we propose and evaluate OFAR-CM, a variant of OFAR combined with a simple congestion management (CM) mechanism which only relies on local information, specifically the credit count of the output ports in the local router. With simple escape sub networks such as a Hamiltonian ring or a tree, OFAR outperforms former proposals with distance-based deadlock avoidance. Additionally, although long paths are allowed in theory, in practice packets arrive at their destination in a small number of hops. Altogether, OFAR-CM constitutes the first practicable mechanism to the date that supports both local and global misrouting in Dragonfly networks.The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007-2013) / ERC Grant Agreement n. ERC-2012-Adg-321253- RoMoL, the Spanish Ministry of Science under contracts TIN2010-21291-C02-02, TIN2012-34557, and by the European HiPEAC Network of Excellence. M. García participated in this work while affiliated with the University of Cantabria.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

BELIEFS ABOUT THE EFFECTS OF CHILDREN WITNESSING DOMESTIC VIOLENCE AMONG TITLE IV-E STUDENTS

This study analyzed the beliefs about the effects of children witnessing domestic violence among Title IV-E students at California State University San Bernardino. The study sample consists of eight Title IV-E students with at least one year of experience working in child welfare. Utilizing knowledge gained from various studies an instrument was developed to interview participants. In analyzing the responses, six core themes emerged as dominant beliefs about the effects of children witnessing domestic violence. Respondents indicated that mental illness, parental attachment, improving treatment, negative effects, external behaviors, and coping mechanisms are issues to consider when discussing the effects of children exposed to domestic violence

Towards a Human Security-Oriented Conception of Public Security in the Context of Globalization

Se persigue, por un lado, dar cuenta de las condiciones que en el ámbito internacional han hecho posible el surgimiento de conceptos como el de Seguridad Humana y Desarrollo Humano, donde se sostiene que tienen que ver con la implementación, por parte de la comunidad internacional, de ciertos programas y medidas de política pública orientadas a mitigar los efectos negativos de la globalización. Por otro lado, se intenta mostrar cómo dichos conceptos, los cuales se basan en una visión renovada del bienestar de la gente, modifican positivamente la forma tradicional de concebir una de las funciones más importantes que al Estado le corresponde desempeñar: la seguridad pública.Se persigue, por un lado, dar cuenta de las condiciones que en el ámbito internacional han hecho posible el surgimiento de conceptos como el de Seguridad Humana y Desarrollo Humano, donde se sostiene que tienen que ver con la implementación, por parte de la comunidad internacional, de ciertos programas y medidas de política pública orientadas a mitigar los efectos negativos de la globalización. Por otro lado, se intenta mostrar cómo dichos conceptos, los cuales se basan en una visión renovada del bienestar de la gente, modiÀcan positivamente la forma tradicional de concebir una de las funciones más importantes que al Estado le corresponde desempeñar: la seguridad pública

Network unfairness in dragonfly topologies

Dragonfly networks arrange network routers in a two-level hierarchy, providing a competitive cost-performance solution for large systems. Non-minimal adaptive routing (adaptive misrouting) is employed to fully exploit the path diversity and increase the performance under adversarial traffic patterns. Network fairness issues arise in the dragonfly for several combinations of traffic pattern, global misrouting and traffic prioritization policy. Such unfairness prevents a balanced use of the resources across the network nodes and degrades severely the performance of any application running on an affected node. This paper reviews the main causes behind network unfairness in dragonflies, including a new adversarial traffic pattern which can easily occur in actual systems and congests all the global output links of a single router. A solution for the observed unfairness is evaluated using age-based arbitration. Results show that age-based arbitration mitigates fairness issues, especially when using in-transit adaptive routing. However, when using source adaptive routing, the saturation of the new traffic pattern interferes with the mechanisms employed to detect remote congestion, and the problem grows with the network size. This makes source adaptive routing in dragonflies based on remote notifications prone to reduced performance, even when using age-based arbitration.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Long-term Activities Segmentation using Viterbi Algorithm with a k-minimum-consecutive-states Constraint

AbstractIn the last years, several works have made use of acceleration sensors to recognize simple physical activities like: walking, running, sleeping, falling, etc. Many of them rely on segmenting the data into fixed time windows and computing time domain and/or frequency domain features to train a classifier. A long-term activity is composed of a collection of simple activities and may last from a few minutes to several hours (e.g., shopping, exercising, working, etc.). Since long-term activities are more complex and their duration varies greatly, generating fixed length segments is not suitable. For this type of activities the segmentation should be done dynamically. In this work we propose the use of the Viterbi algorithm on a Hidden Markov Model with the addition of a k-minimum-consecutive-states constraint to perform the long-term activity recognition and segmentation from accelerometer data. This constraint allows the algorithm to perform a more informed search by incorporating prior knowledge about the minimum duration of each long-term activity. Our experiments showed good results for the activity recognition task and it was demonstrated that the accuracy was significantly increased by adding the k-minimum-consecutive-states constraint