OBJECTIVE Individuals experiencing low back pain often present clinically with intervertebral joint dysfunction. The purpose of this study was to determine whether relative changes in stiffness at a single spinal joint alters neural responsiveness of lumbar muscle spindles to either vertebral movement or position. METHODS Muscle spindle discharge was recorded in response to 1mm L6 ramp and ho...

The rapid analyte measurement platform (RAMP) system is an immunoassay test for West Nile virus (WNV) detection. Although reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) methodology has been regarded as the gold standard for confirming WNV presence, usage of RAMP testing kits has increased in the past years. We collected RAMP test result data that were subsequently confirmed with RT-PC...

To ensure higher Level of Service (LoS) at urban motorways, new traffic control concepts are being applied since in most cases there is no available space for infrastructural build-up. For urban motorways, the mostly used control methods are ramp metering combined with additional control methods like variable speed limit control (VSLC). This paper gives a review of the current ramp metering app...

[Purpose] This study compared and analyzed use of an existing ankle ramp and a newly developed ankle ramp for stretching exercises. [Subjects] Fourteen subjects were included; they were stroke patients more than 6 months after onset, with no orthopedic or biological problems in the legs, so independent gait was possible. [Methods] The subjects performed stretching exercises for 5 min with an ex...

Ramp secret sharing (SS) schemes can be classified into strong ramp SS schemes and weak ramp SS schemes. The strong ramp SS schemes do not leak out any part of a secret explicitly even in the case that some information about the secret leaks out from some set of shares, and hence, they are more desirable than the weak ramp SS schemes. In this paper, it is shown that for any feasible general acc...

Ramp metering has been recognized as an effective freeway management strategy to either avoid or ameliorate freeway traffic congestion by limiting access to the freeway. California has applied ramp metering widely in major metropolitan areas. Currently, California has three major ramp metering systems: San Diego Ramp Metering System (SDRMS), Semi-Actuated Traffic Management System (SATMS), and ...

Continuously shrinking device parameters and the enlargement of wafer diameters in semiconductor industry require best temperature homogeneity in Rapid Thermal Processing (RTP). This together with the requirement of high ramp rates in the range of 200 °C s as advantageously used in ultra shallow junction processes [1] challenges temperature control in RTP technology. In order to design advanced...

The ramp loss is a robust but non-convex loss for classification. Compared with other non-convex losses, a local minimum of the ramp loss can be effectively found. The effectiveness of local search comes from the piecewise linearity of the ramp loss. Motivated by the fact that the `1-penalty is piecewise linear as well, the `1-penalty is applied for the ramp loss, resulting in a ramp loss linea...

We evaluated the commercially available Rapid Analyte Measurement Platform (RAMP) West Nile virus (WNV) antigen detection test for sensitivity and consistency with real-time reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) confirmation testing. Panels of samples consisting of WNV-spiked mosquito pools and negative control pools were sent to 20 mosquito abatement districts (MADs) that pr...