Single Contraction Research Articles

ClC-1 Inhibition as a Mechanism for Accelerating Skeletal Muscle Recovery After Neuromuscular Block in Rats

Neuromuscular blocking agents are used commonly to induce skeletal muscle relaxation during surgery. While muscle relaxation facilitates surgical procedures and tracheal intubation, adequate recovery of muscle function after surgery is required to support pulmonary function, and even mild residual neuromuscular block increases the risk of severe postoperative pulmonary complications. While recovery of muscle function after surgery involving neuromuscular blocking agents can be monitored and, in addition, be accelerated by use of current antagonists (reversal agents), there is a clear clinical need for a safe drug to antagonize all types of neuromuscular blocking agents. Here, we show that inhibition of the skeletal muscle-specific chloride ion (Cl-) channel, the ClC-1 channel, markedly accelerates recovery of both single contraction (twitch) and, important physiologically, sustained (tetanic) contractions in a rat model mimicking neuromuscular blocking agent-induced muscle block used during surgery. This suggests ClC-1 inhibition as a mechanism for fast and efficacious recovery of neuromuscular function induced by any neuromuscular blocking agents.

Effects Of Blood Flow Restriction On Motor Unit Behavior During A Single High-Load Contraction

Effects Of Blood Flow Restriction On Motor Unit Behavior During A Single High-Load Contraction

Screen Failures and Causes in Inflammatory Bowel Disease Randomized Controlled Trials: A Study of 16913 Screened Patients.

While recruitment rates in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) trials are continuously decreasing, the underlying reasons are likely multifactorial but remain poorly defined. Screen failure (SF) proportions and causes have not been extensively explored in IBD. We assessed SF proportions and underlying SF reasons in IBD phase 2 and 3 clinical trials. We analyzed SF-related data from 17 randomized controlled phase 2 or 3 IBD trials. Twelve trials were in ulcerative colitis (UC) and 5 trials were in Crohn's disease (CD) operated by a single contract research organization, IQVIA. Differences between patient groups were tested for significance by Mann-Whitney and Fisher's tests when appropriate. We analyzed a total of 11 161 patients with UC and 5752 patients with CD. The mean SF proportion was 0.43 per trial in UC. The primary reason for SFs in UC was not meeting the overall (modified) Mayo score inclusion threshold and/or the endoscopic subscore of at least 2 (33.8% of all SF). In CD clinical trials, the mean SF proportion was at 0.53. The primary cause for SFs was not meeting the CDAI eligibility criteria (23.1% of all SFs). SF proportions were significantly higher in CD versus UC trials (P = .027). Clostridium difficile or any other intestinal infection and not meeting tuberculosis screening criteria were other major reasons for SFs both in UC and CD. High SF proportion in IBD clinical trials, particularly for CD studies, pose obstacles to patient recruitment. While underlying causes are diverse, arbitrarily defined clinical and/or endoscopic eligibility criteria remain the major limiting factors.

Data-driven contract design

We propose a prior-free model of incentive contracting in which the principal's beliefs about the agent's production technology are characterized by revealed preference data. The principal and the agent are each financially risk neutral and the agent's preferences are understood to be quasilinear in effort. Prior to contracting with the agent, the principal observes the output produced by a population of identical agents in best response to finitely many exogenously-specified contracts. She views any technology that rationalizes this data as plausible and evaluates contracts according to their guaranteed expected payoff against the set of all such technologies. This paper does four things. First, we characterize the set of technologies that are consistent with the revealed preference data. Second, we show that robustly optimal contracts are either empirical contracts or equity bonus contracts that supplement mixtures of contracts from the data with equity payments. Third, we provide conditions under which these optimal contracts append equity payments to only a single contract from the data. Fourth, and finally, we show that all of our results generalize without complication to a setting in which there might be arbitrary forms of unobserved heterogeneity within the population of agents.

Robust Contracts: A Revealed Preference Approach

Abstract We study an agency model in which the principal knows the agent-optimal actions in response to K “known” contracts but is unaware of other actions available or their costs, and seeks a contract to maximize worst-case profits. The optimal contract is a mixture of the known contracts and output. Moreover, when K = 1, the single known contract maximizes the principal's profit guarantee, whereas with two known contracts, the optimal mixture puts positive weight on one of the known contracts. Our methodology is straightforward to implement, a point that we demonstrate using data from an experimental study of different incentive schemes.

Determination of Murabahah Fines at Wates Jaya Phone According to Fatwa DSN MUI No. 17 of 2000

Wates Jaya Phone is one of the Wates Mulyo BUM Desa business units which is engaged in buying and selling smartphones and other electronic equipment, their buying and selling practices are based on sharia. This financing is murabahah which is used as a principle in buying and selling smartphones that are ordered on a firm basis without a down payment with competitive margins. Unfortunately, even though murabahah installment payments are made very easily, there are still customers who deliberately delay payments and cause significant problems for Wates Jaya Phone. This research aims to analyze the implementation of Murabahah transactions and the determination of Murabahah fines on Wates Jaya cell phones according to the MUI DSN Fatwa Number 17 of 2000. The research method used is descriptive with a qualitative approach using literature studies and case studies on Wates Jaya cellphones. The results of this research show that the murabahah contract carried out on Wates Jaya Phone is carried out with a single contract only (according to Islamic rules and legal rules), in contrast to other sharia institutions mentioned in previous research which camouflage murabahah and wakalah contracts, then determine Murabahah Fines on Wates Jaya Phone is also in accordance with the MUI DSN Fatwa Number 17 of 2000, namely the application of fines following the principle of ta'zir/fines in the form of money amounting to 1.5% of the transaction price plus a margin for each month, outside of transaction financing so that customers are more disciplined, in the future fines.

Evaluation of the impact of the single contract and the provincial approach in the implementation of health system reform at intermediate level in Maniema, DR Congo

Evaluation of the impact of the single contract and the provincial approach in the implementation of health system reform at intermediate level in Maniema, DR Congo

Effects of membrane cholesterol-targeting chemicals on skeletal muscle contractions evoked by direct and indirect stimulation.

Cholesterol is one of the major components of plasma membrane, where its distribution is nonhomogeneous and it participates in lipid raft formation. In skeletal muscle cholesterol and lipid rafts seem to be important for excitation-contraction coupling and for neuromuscular transmission, involving cholesterol-rich synaptic vesicles. In the present study, nerve and muscle stimulation-evoked contractions were recorded to assess the role of cholesterol in contractile function of mouse diaphragm. Exposure to cholesterol oxidase (0.2 U/ml) and cholesterol-depleting agent methyl-β-cyclodextrin (1 mM) did not affect markedly contractile responses to both direct and indirect stimulation at low and high frequency. However, methyl-β-cyclodextrin at high concentration (10 mM) strongly decreased the force of both single and tetanus contractions induced by phrenic nerve stimulation. This decline in contractile function was more profoundly expressed when methyl-β-cyclodextrin application was combined with phrenic nerve activation. At the same time, 10 mM methyl-β-cyclodextrin had no effect on contractions upon direct muscle stimulation at low and high frequency. Thus, strong cholesterol depletion suppresses contractile function mainly due to disturbance of the neuromuscular communication, whereas muscle fiber contractility remains resistant to decline.

Effect of Procurement Planning on Public Institutions Performance: A Case of Rwanda Development Board

The purpose of this study was to assess the effect of procurement planning on public institutions performance. The Rwandan Development Board (RDB) has included state agencies in the creation of procurement strategies, but their efforts have been fruitless so far. An everyday scenario would be an organization's signed contracts with its contractors seeing a rise in the amounts due to the unexpectedly high pricing on global marketplaces. In conducting this research, three objectives were laid out to assess the effects of procurement needs identification and specifications on performance of Rwanda Development Board, to find out the effect of procurement budgeting on performance of Rwanda Development Board and to examine the effect of procurement risk management on the performance of Rwanda Development Board. To accomplish these goals, we first conducted a literature study that centered on the resource-based perspective, stakeholder theory, and relationship management theory; then, we used a census sample approach to choose 156 RDB workers from whom we gathered data. Methods for gathering information included an interview guide, documentation, and a questionnaire. We used quantitative and qualitative data to examine the data. The results show that, with all procurement planning set to zero, the performance of RDB will be 147.4 percent; there will be a 36.8 percent boost in RDB performance with an increase of one unit in the use of procurement needs identification and specifications; a 63.2% boost in RDB performance with an increase of one percent in the use of procurement budgeting; and a 68.4 percent boost in RDB performance with an increase of one percentage point in the use of procurement risk management planning. From a high level of analysis, it was found that procurement risk management planning, procurement budgeting, and procurement requirements identification and specifications were the three factors that had the most impact on the performance of public institutions at RDB. Procurement requirements identification and specifications, procurement budgeting, and procurement risk management planning all had 0.011, 0.018, and 0.31 levels of significance, respectively, at a 5% level of significance and a 95% level of confidence. With p<0.05, all of the factors were considerably different. Also, the Rwanda Development Board's procurement plans and the performance of public institutions are significantly different (p=.000), according to the ANOVA test. Public sector organizations' efficiency and effectiveness are both improved by procurement planning, according to the research. Procurement planning allows the government agency to save money by consolidating comparable needs under a single contract and by dividing more complicated needs into smaller, more manageable packages. The researcher concluded that RDB could benefit from identifying possible product issues before purchase through procurement needs identification and specifications; as a result, the researcher advised that RDB and suppliers typically enter into a transactional relationship. It is recommended to collaborate with suppliers when acquiring commodities that have a greater supply risk.

Judged by Their Deeds: Outcomes for Properties Acquired by Contract Sellers Following the Foreclosure Crisis in Detroit

Prior research has documented the reemergence of predatory land contracts in majority-Black neighborhoods in the wake of the foreclosure crisis. Though land contracts facilitate property transfers involving lower-value properties and credit-constrained households, they are less regulated and often include risky terms. This paper investigates outcomes associated with properties sold using land contracts signed between 2008 and 2015 in Detroit, leveraging real estate transaction, tax foreclosure, and eviction and land contract forfeiture records. We also assess outcomes for the broader portfolio of properties purchased by large contract sellers. We find that sales by large contract sellers are generally associated with higher odds of near-term failure. We also find that investors using contract sales withheld property taxes on much of their inventory, consistent with a short-term triage-based business strategy. Conversely, the single large non-profit contract seller in our study had a far higher rate of success compared to all other contract sales. These results provide evidence of negative outcomes for sales initiated by problematic entities and supports arguments for stronger regulation of land contracts and upstream interventions to prevent predatory investors from acquiring discounted homes from public and institutional sources.

서울시 공동주택 공용관리비 영향요인 분석

The purpose of this study is to identify differences in common management fees depending on the various characteristics of apartment complexes and the factors affecting common management costs, and to seek improvement measures to impose appropriate management fees. The research method analyzed the common management costs of 2,574 apartments in Seoul from January to December 2022. As the number of households increases, common management costs decrease. The common management fees was lower for staircases than for hallways. The older the apartment complex, the lower the common management fee. The common management fees of a pre-sale apartment was lower than that of a rental apartment. In addition, the common management fees in the southeastern living areas was higher than in other living areas. As for the electricity rate contract, the common management fee was higher in the comprehensive contract than in the single contract. Additionally, management method, and heating method were found to have no significant effect on common management fees. The conclusion is as follows. Factors influencing common management fees have become more complex and diversified, and regional factors influencing management costs have increased. Additionally, management factors must be carefully considered.

Multiple Contracts with Simple Interest: The Case of SACRE-F

In a previous paper de Faro and Lachtermacher (2023), considering a particular version of the so-called System of Increasing Amortization in Real Terms, SACRE-F, in the case of compound interest, was shown that if a single contract is substituted by multiple contracts, one for each payment of the single contract, the financing institution may derive substantial fiscal gains. In terms of the present value of the corresponding income taxes.
 Notwithstanding, the Brazilian Jurisprudence, cf. Jusbrasil (2023), has repeatedly determined that the use of compound interest implies the occurrence of anatocism. The payment of interest on interest. Mari & Aretusi (2019) reported the same kind of determination by the Italian justice.
 Therefore, the analysis should also consider the hypothesis of the use of simple interest. SACRE-F, in the case of simple interest has shown that if a single contract is substituted by multiple contracts, one for each payment of the single contract, the financing institution may derive substantial fiscal gains, as in the compound interest case.

HGX: the anatomy of high growth exporters

AbstractPrevious work has found that a small number of export superstars contribute disproportionally to the economy’s overall exports. Differently from export superstars, this study is the first to define high growth exporters (HGXs) (that are not export superstars) as a new firm category. We provide their economic importance and depict their micro-level anatomy. By tracking HGXs in Croatia for over a quarter of a century, 44 out of 100 export superstars in 2019 were previously HGXs. HGXs represent only 0.5% of all firms and 18% of high growth firms (HGFs) in the economy, but are responsible for about 25% of new exports and 5% of new jobs. During their growth episode, HGXs hire more employees from technology intensive industries with previous experience in exporting. They often hire on a single year work contract, and more frequently send new employees to work abroad. HGX also increase their presence in more advanced markets, increase the number of new export products and decrease their reliance on the largest product or largest export market. We argue HGXs represent an under-researched category of firms.

XFuzz: Machine Learning Guided Cross-Contract Fuzzing

Smart contract transactions are increasingly interleaved by cross-contract calls. While many tools have been developed to identify a common set of vulnerabilities, the cross-contract vulnerability is overlooked by existing tools. Cross-contract vulnerabilities are exploitable bugs that manifest in the presence of more than two interacting contracts. Existing methods are however limited to analyze a maximum of two contracts at the same time. Detecting cross-contract vulnerabilities is highly non-trivial. With multiple interacting contracts, the search space is much larger than that of a single contract. To address this problem, we present <small>xFuzz</small>, a machine learning guided smart contract fuzzing framework. The machine learning models are trained with novel features (e.g., word vectors and instructions) and are used to filter likely benign program paths. Comparing with existing static tools, machine learning model is proven to be more robust, avoiding directly adopting manually-defined rules in specific tools. We compare <small>xFuzz</small> with three state-of-the-art tools on 7,391 contracts. <small>xFuzz</small> detects 18 exploitable cross-contract vulnerabilities, of which 15 vulnerabilities are exposed for the first time. Furthermore, our approach is shown to be efficient in detecting non-cross-contract vulnerabilities as well&#x2014;using less than 20&#x0025; time as that of other fuzzing tools, <small>xFuzz</small> detects twice as many vulnerabilities.

An asymptotic approach to centrally planned portfolio selection

AbstractWe formulate a centrally planned portfolio selection problem with the investor and the manager having S-shaped utilities under a recently popular first-loss contract. We solve for the closed-form optimal portfolio, which shows that a first-loss contract can sometimes behave like an option contract. We propose an asymptotic approach to investigate the portfolio. This approach can be adopted to illustrate economic insights, including the fact that the portfolio under a convex contract becomes more conservative when the market state is better. Furthermore, we discover a means of Pareto improvement by simultaneously considering the investor’s utility and increasing the manager’s incentive rate. This is achieved by establishing the collection of Pareto points of a single contract, proving that it is a strictly decreasing and strictly concave frontier, and comparing the Pareto frontiers of different contracts. These results may be helpful for the illustration of risk choices and the design of Pareto-optimal contracts.

Blood flow restriction increases necessary muscle excitation of the elbow flexors during a single high-load contraction.

To investigate the effects of blood flow restriction (BFR) on electromyographic amplitude (EMGRMS)-force relationships of the biceps brachii (BB) during a single high-load muscle action. Twelve recreationally active males and eleven recreationally active females performed maximal voluntary contractions (MVCs), followed by an isometric trapezoidal muscle action of the elbow flexors at 70% MVC. Surface EMG was recorded from the BB during BFR and control (CON) visits. For BFR, cuff pressure was 60% of the pressure required to completely occlude blood at rest. Individual b (slope) and a terms (gain) were calculated from the log-transformed EMGRMS-force relationships during the linearly increasing and decreasing segments of the trapezoid. EMGRMS during the steady force segment was normalized to MVC EMGRMS. For BFR, the b terms were greater during the linearly increasing segment than the linearly decreasing segment (p<0.001), and compared to the linearly increasing segment for CON (p<0.001). The a terms for BFR were greater during the linearly decreasing than linearly increasing segment (p=0.028). Steady force N-EMGRMS was greater for BFR than CON collapsed across sex (p=0.041). BFR likely elicited additional recruitment of higher threshold motor units during the linearly increasing- and steady force-segment. The differences between activation and deactivation strategies were only observed with BFR, such as the b terms decreased and the a terms increased for the linearly decreasing segment in comparison to the increasing segment. However, EMGRMS-force relationships during the linearly increasing- and decreasing-segments were not different between sexes during BFR and CON.

Hierarchical Incentive Mechanism for Federated Learning: A Single Contract to Dual Contract Approach for Smart Industries

Federated learning (FL) has shown promise in smart industries as a means of training machine-learning models while preserving privacy. However, it contradicts FL’s low communication latency requirement to rely on the cloud to transmit information with data owners in model training tasks. Furthermore, data owners may not be willing to contribute their resources for free. To address this, we propose a single contract to dual contract approach to incentivize both model owners and workers to participate in FL-based machine learning tasks. The single-contract incentivizes model owners to contribute their model parameters, and the dual contract incentivizes workers to use their latest data to participate in the training task. The latest data draw out the trade-off between data quantity and data update frequency. Performance evaluation shows that our dual contract satisfies different preferences for data quantity and update frequency, and validates that the proposed incentive mechanism is incentive compatible and flexible.

Sustained participation in a Payments for Ecosystem Services program reduces deforestation in a Mexican agricultural frontier

Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) provide conditional incentives for forest conservation. PES short-term effects on deforestation are well-documented, but we know less about program effectiveness when participation is sustained over time. Here, we assess the impact of consecutive renewals of PES contracts on deforestation and forest degradation in three municipalities of the Selva Lacandona (Chiapas, Mexico). PES reduced deforestation both after a single 5-year contract and after two consecutive contracts, but the impacts are only detectable in higher deforestation-risk parcels. Enrollment duration increases PES impact in these parcels, which suggests a positive cumulative effect over time. These findings suggest that improved spatial targeting and longer-term enrollment are key enabling factors to improve forest conservation outcomes in agricultural frontiers.

Multiencoder‐based federated intelligent deep learning model for brain tumor segmentation

AbstractGlioma, a primary tumor derived from brain glial cells, is around 45% of all intracranial tumors. Magnetic resonance imaging's (MRI's) precise glioma segmentation is crucial for clinical purposes. This article presents a novel automatic brain tumor segmentation approach based on a multi‐encoder‐based federated intelligent deep learning framework. The suggested method uses a U‐shaped network design that multiplies the single contraction path into several paths to explore semantic information modalities deeply. The basic convolutional layer uses an Inception module and dilated convolutions to extract multi‐scale features from the images using artificial intelligent. To emphasize segmentation‐related information while ignoring redundant channel dimension information and improving the accuracy of network segmentation, lightweight channel attention efficient channel attention (ECA) modules are inserted into the bottleneck layer and decoder. The collection of data for the 2018 Brain Tumor Segmentation Challenge (BraTS 2018) is used to test the effectiveness of the suggested structure, and the findings indicate that the growth core, for the entire tumor and the augmented tumor regions, respectively, the average Dice coefficients are 0.880, 0.784, and 0.757. These findings support the proposed algorithm's ability to accurately and successfully segregate multimodal MRI brain tumors.

Technology licensing contract design considering royalty transparency and demand information asymmetry with downstream co-opetition

This paper studies how technology suppliers can optimally design licensing contracts when there is incomplete information on the licensee’s demand potential for the product in a high-technology supply chain. A licensing contract typically contains an up-front payment and royalties on product sales. The licensor decides to license one technology to a licensee, which designs products based on the supplier’s technology and outsources the product manufacturing to a competitive downstream manufacturer. We apply principal-agent models to formulate the licensor’s contracting problem while considering the transparency of the licensing royalty and find that under demand information asymmetry, the optimal contract structure changes with the demand potential. More specifically, both the separating and pooling strategies can be the optimal strategies for the licensor under the observable contract case. Conversely, under the unobservable case, only the separating strategy is the optimal licensing strategy. And the licensor can always charge zero royalty to a high-type design firm regardless of the menu strategy or the single contract. Furthermore, we examine the effect of licensing royalty transparency on licensing decisions and firms’ profits and highlight the effect of downstream competition on the licensor’s profit. Our results show that the licensor can be better off in the observable contract case. By contrast, the design firm may be better off in the unobservable contract case. We provide a rationale for the licensing contract design under demand information asymmetry and further shed light on the choice between public and secret licensing terms.