What I have learned about the ACL: utilizing a progressive rehabilitation scheme to achieve total knee symmetry after anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction

Anterior cruciate ligament surgery and rehabilitation have changed drastically during the past 30 years. The patellar tendon autograft fixed with buttons provides tight bone-to-bone placement of the graft and quick bony healing, which allows accelerated rehabilitation to obtain full range of motion and strength. Although surgical stability is easily reproducible, long-term patient satisfaction is difficult to guarantee. Full knee range of motion should be compared to that of the contralateral normal knee, including full hyperextension. We followed the progress of all patients to gauge the utility of our rehabilitation program. In order of importance, the lack of normal knee range of motion (within 2° extension and 5° of flexion compared with that of the normal knee), partial or total medial meniscectomy, partial or total lateral meniscectomy, and articular cartilage damage were related to lower subjective scores. Rehabilitation after ACL reconstruction must first strive to achieve full symmetrical knee range of motion before aggressive strengthening can begin. Our current perioperative rehabilitation starts at the time of injury and preoperatively includes aggressive swelling reduction, hyperextension exercises, gait training, and mental preparation. Goals after surgery are to control swelling while regaining full knee range of motion. After quadriceps strengthening goals are reached, patients can shift to sport-specific exercises. When using a graft from the contralateral knee, the conflicting goals of strengthening the donor site and achieving full knee range of motion are divided between the knees. Thus, normal range of motion and strength can be achieved more easily and more quickly than when using an ipsilateral graft. Regardless of the graft source, a systematic rehabilitation program that emphasizes the return to symmetrical knee motion, including hyperextension, is necessary to achieve the optimum result

Balancing Acts: Using a Mixed Test to Ensure Better Results in Rule of Reason Patent Misuse Analysis within Section 337

This Comment addresses the tensions faced by the Federal Circuit in reviewing the ITC’s patent misuse decisions that address § 337 claims. First, this Comment provides relevant background information by explaining § 337 itself, the administrative power and function of the ITC under § 337, and the Federal Circuit’s jurisdiction and deferential stance to the ITC regarding § 337 appeals. Subsequently, this Comment examines both per se and rule of reason patent misuse defenses, within the context of ITC appeals to the Federal Circuit of § 337 claims, by laying out their doctrinal frameworks as set out by the Federal Circuit in U.S. Phillips Corp. v. ITC

Shelbourne Hotel, Menu, 27 December 1927

Table d\u27Hote Breakfast, Shelbourne Hotel, Tuesday 27th December 1927https://arrow.tudublin.ie/menus20c/1004/thumbnail.jp

A plastic survey of Blue Bay and Pointe D'Esny, Mauritius

Plastic waste, in particular neustonic waste poses a threat to wildlife. Blue Bay is situated on the south east coast of Mauritius and is a 20km2 shallow lagoon with a fringing reef and a number of islets. It includes an area designated a marine park in 2000. The lagoon contains 38 species of coral and 125 species of fish. The outer reef protects the island from incoming neustonic plastic fragments creating an opportunity to identify anthropogenic debris from the mainland. Beach surveys and tropical forest surveys used finger-tip searches to a depth of 2cm whereas as underwater surveys used quadrats and the roving diver technique. 28 transects and quadrats were surveyed in total over a 2 week period (March/April 2012). The fragments were analysed using the Resin Identification Code. The results indicate 1 beach location with higher levels of plastic fragments. These represent a threat to the local wildlife primarily through ingestion. Protected areas including the marine park and Ille Aux Aigrette show low levels of plastic debris

An Australian/UK comparison of contemporary teaching and learning technologies

The last decade has delivered substantial changes in construction and property education in Australia and the UK. There has been an increase in the number of courses offered in built environment education and the profile of a typical student has changed. In both countries students are under pressure to balance study and work due to the higher costs of living and education. This has placed demands on providers to deliver teaching and learning which meets student, industry and professional needs. Simultaneously there has been an increase in the application of technology in the business and corporate world which has resulted in increased efficiencies and new challenges. This paper evaluates changes in construction and property education courses to embrace new technology. The focus is on the delivery of innovative teaching and learning materials and the interaction between students, staff and the community. Results from questionnaires from new and existing students at Deakin University and Nottingham Trent University were used alongside examples of teaching and learning as illustrative case studies, the emphasis is placed on pushing the boundaries of the conventional built environment education process. The findings show that by embracing technology there can be a &bdquo;win-win‟ scenario for students, staff and industry stakeholders. Whilst courses adopt varying levels of technology, it seems inevitable that educators must evolve the delivery of education to become efficient and effective as the century progresses.<br /

Morphological diversity of saber‐tooth upper canines and its functional implications

Elongated upper canine teeth, commonly known as saber‐teeth, have evolved three times within the sub‐order Feliformia. The species that wielded them flourished throughout the Cenozoic and have historically been separated into two morphological groups: the dirk‐tooths with longer, flatter canines, and the scimitar‐tooths with shorter, serrated teeth. However, quantitative morphological analysis has not been conducted on these teeth to determine the true amount of diversity within the group, and how the upper canine morphology of extant feliforms compared to their extinct relatives has also not been explored. Using Geometric Morphometric analysis, it is shown that saber‐tooth upper canine morphology is exceptionally diverse, with no extant clade having all its members occupy the same morphospace based on tooth length and curvature. Instead, a neutral basal morphospace is observed for all groups and diversification from this basal position is seen as species become more derived. A distinct and consistent scimitar tooth morphology is also not observed within the morphospace. When compared with extant taxa, several saber‐tooth species are seen to be morphologically similar to extant feliforms, several of which exhibit novel dietary strategies in comparison to the obligate carnivore felids. Biomechanical analyses of different actual and theoretical tooth shapes demonstrate that saber‐teeth upper canines further represent a functional compromise between sharpness, curvature, and length on the one hand, and robustness and material investment on the other

Inference of virtual network functions' state via analysis of the CPU behavior

The on-going process of softwarization of IT networks promises to reduce the operational and management costs of network infrastructures by replacing hardware middleboxes with equivalent pieces of code executed on general-purpose servers. Alongside the benefits from the operator’s perspective, new strategies to provide the network’s resources to users are arising. Following the principle of “everything as a service”, multiple tenants can access the required resources – typically CPUs, NICs, or RAM – according to a Service-Level Agreement. However, tenants’ applications may require a complex and expensive measurement infrastructure to continuously monitor the network function’s state. Although the application’s specific behavior is unknown (and often opaque to the infrastructure owner), the software nature of (virtual) network functions (VNFs) may be the key to infer the behavior of the high-level functions by accessing low-level information, which is still under the control of the operating system and therefore of the infrastructure owner. As such, in the scenario of software VNFs executed on COTS servers, the underlying CPU’s behavior can be used as the sole predictor for the high-level VNF state without explicit in-network measurements: in this paper, we develop a novel methodology to infer high-level characteristics such as throughput or packet loss using CPU data instead of network measurements. Our methodology consists of (i) experimentally analyzing the behavior of a CPU that executes a VNF under different loads, (ii) extracting a correlation between the CPU footprint and the highlevel application state, and (iii) use this knowledge to detect the previously mentioned network metrics. Our code and datasets are publicly available

Critiquing the Critique: Analyzing a Report on the Housing Credit Program

The federal low-income housing tax credit (“LIHTC”) is the largest production resource for affordable rental housing. Advocacy groups have critiques of the program’s administration, but a recent study used to support their arguments contains multiple controversial elements. In evaluating this report, Mark Shelburne also discusses racial desegregation, concentrating poverty, preservation, community revitalization, and other related housing policy issues. This article concludes that those researching the LIHTC program should communicate with state administrators in order to avoid analytical flaws

On the Learnability of Software Router Performance via CPU Measurements

In the last decade the ICT community observed a growing popularity of software networking paradigms. This trend consists in moving network applications from static, expensive, hardware equipment (e.g. router, switches, firewalls) towards flexible, cheap pieces of software that are executed on a commodity server. In this context, a server owner may provide the server resources (CPUs, NICs, RAM) for customers, following a Service-Level Agreement (SLA) about clients' requirements. The problem of resource allocation is typically solved by overprovisioning, as the clients' application is opaque to the server owner, and the resource required by clients' applications are often unclear or very difficult to quantify. This paper shows a novel approach that exploits machine learning techniques in order to infer the input traffic load (i.e., the expected network traffic condition) by solely looking at the runtime CPU footprint