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Physical activity in Duchenne muscular dystrophy
Publication . Honório, Samuel; Batista, Marco; Martins, Júlio; Ribeiro, Jaime
There are a number of basic interventions using light, intensive activity to relieve the symptoms of Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. These interventions relieve any pain caused, address malformations and maintain some basic functional skills such as: 1) Maintaining and / or improving muscle strength to perform everyday activities such as climbing stairs, 2) to reduce and / or mitigate the development of weakness and contractures in order to prolong the clinic process, 3) maintain cardio-respiratory efficiency and 4) maintain muscle strength and posture to prevent scoliosis. A number of authors have warned about the detrimental effect associated with forceful, repeated high intensity activities which can be extremely harmful, Emery (2000). Moreover, the lack of regular physical activity can promote rapid loss of functionin in the cardiac and respiratory systems. Physical activity programming based on thorough functional assessments for DMD patients is crucial to maintain the quality of life of these children, used in conjunction with other associated resources whenever possible, Guerrero (2007).
Attitudes of Local Population Towards the Impacts of Tourism Development: Evidence From Czechia
Publication . Linderová, Ivica; Scholz, Petr; Almeida, Nuno
Increasing the socio-economic effects caused by the tourism development in the local population, they adopt some attitudes according to the impacts directly or indirectly perceived. However, some of this impact can be considered positive or negative, according to different perspectives. The issue of the resident-tourist relationship has been much-discussed recently. Therefore, many case studies are being conducted that address the impacts on both residents and tourists. The goal of this manuscript is to analyze the attitudes of local residents to the development of tourism in the urban monument zone Předhradí. Primary data were collected in a questionnaire survey for residents who have a permanent residence in a municipality of Předhradí in 2020. In our research, we tried to identify the significant negative impacts of tourism development. In the same way, we evaluate how the locals see positive effects on their quality of life conducted with tourism development. The research finds out that local respondents perceived some negative impacts to increase the economic perspective, as they referred to in the higher traffic load or increased noise. The pandemic crises are perceived as a game-changer in the tourism industry. For that reason, we suggest the primary considerations for future research not only with the academic perfective as for the practical point of view. The local population’s entrepreneurship attitudes must be one of the tools to assume the resilience toward the tourism development impacts.
A Simple Model for Average Reradiation Patterns of Single Trees Based on Weighted Regression at 60 GHz
Publication . Leonor, Nuno R.; Caldeirinha, Rafael F. S.; Fernandes, Telmo R.; Garcia Sanchez, Manuel
Due to their complex and inhomogeneous characteristics, the propagation and radiation parameters of trees and vegetation areas are very difficult and time consuming to obtain. This communication proposes a statistical method, using robust weighted local regression, to minimize the influence of the effect of the tree inhomogeneity on its reradiation pattern, allowing the evaluation of averaged reradiation functions from simple measurements. The proposed method was successfully applied to six tree specimens of both conifer and ficus species, at 60 GHz. Furthermore, once this empirical averaged function is obtained, first-order statistics can be applied to generate several simple reradiation functions, statistically identical to those obtained from measurements. Thus, allowing the full characterization of the tree under study.
A new Profibus-DP interface for CERN's sputter ion pump controllers
Publication . Roda, M.; Mendes, L.; Gomes, P.; Pigny, G.; Faria, S.
This paper proposes an improvement on the read-out and networking of the sputter ion pump (VPI) controllers, used in CERN accelerators for ultra-high vacuum pumping and measurement. The vacuum control systems are built around PLCs (Programmable Logic Controllers), which communicate through Profibus with several distributed IO-stations. The VPI controllers are connected to these stations via individual and simple cabling. A new Profibus-DP slave interface was developed, to be embedded in the VPI controllers, in order to enhance remote access and to reduce cabling complexity. This paper presents the developed hardware and software, together with the corresponding assessment tests.
Deep Learning-Based Event Data Coding: A Joint Spatiotemporal and Polarity Solution
Publication . Seleem, Abdelrahman; Guarda, André F. R.; Rodrigues, Nuno M. M.; Pereira, Fernando
Neuromorphic vision sensors, commonly referred to as event cameras, generate a massive number of pixel-level events, composed by spatiotemporal and polarity information, thus demanding highly efficient coding solutions. Existing solutions focus on lossless coding of event data, assuming that no distortion is acceptable for the target use cases, mostly including computer vision tasks such as classification and recognition. One promising coding approach exploits the similarity between event data and point clouds, both being sets of 3D points, thus allowing to use current point cloud coding solutions to code event data, typically adopting a two-point clouds representation, one for each event polarity. This paper proposes a novel lossy Deep Learning-based Joint Event data Coding (DL-JEC) solution, which adopts for the first time a single-point cloud representation, where the event polarity plays the role of a point cloud attribute, thus enabling to exploit the correlation between the geometry/spatiotemporal and polarity event information. Moreover, this paper also proposes novel adaptive voxel binarization strategies which may be used in DL-JEC, optimized for either quality-oriented or computer vision task-oriented purposes which allow to maximize the performance for the task at hand. DL-JEC can achieve significant compression performance gains when compared with relevant conventional and DL-based state-of-the-art event data coding solutions, notably the MPEG G-PCC and JPEG Pleno PCC standards. Furthermore, it is shown that it is possible to use lossy event data coding, with significantly reduced rate regarding lossless coding, without compromising the target computer vision task performance, notably event classification, thus changing the current event data coding paradigm.