Effects of tendon viscoelasticity in the distribution of forces over sutures in a model tendon-to-bone repair

Tears to the rotator cuff often require surgical repair. These repairs often culminate in re-tearing when the sutures break through the tendon in the weeks following repair. Although numerous studies have been performed to identify suturing strategies that reduce this risk by balancing forces across sutures, none have accounted for how the viscoelastic nature of tendon influences load sharing. With the aim of providing insight into this problem, we studied howviscoelasticity, tendon stiffness, and spacing affect this balancing of forces across sutures. Results from a model of a three-row sutured re-attachment demonstrated that an optimized distribution of the stiffness and spacing of the sutures can balance the forces across sutures to within a few percent, even when accounting for tendon viscoelasticity. Non-optimized distributions resulted in concentrated force, typically in the outermost sutures. Results underscore the importance of accounting for viscoelastic effects in the design of tendon to bone repairs

Distribution of Optimized Public Assets Utilization in Yogyakarta Province

Public asset is an integral part of regional assets that is owned and controlled by regional government, this asset could be financed partly or wholly by regional budget. Asset should be distributed proportionally to optimally support the economic development. This study examines the distribution of assets to boost regional economic growth that eventually will increase the regional government revenue. The optimized distribution of public assets is expected to be a source of regional financing and asset management is one of the keys to successfully manage regional economic. The conclusion is that the asset management with innovation and technology could optimize the utilization of regional assets in boosting the economy.

A Versatile Illumination System for Real-Time Terahertz Imaging

Terahertz technologies are attracting strong interest from high-end industrial fields, and particularly for non-destructive-testing purposes. Currently lacking compactness, integrability as well as adaptability for those implementations, the development and commercialisation of more efficient sources and detectors progressively ensure the transition toward applicative implementations, especially for real-time full-field imaging. In this work, a flexible illumination system, based on fast beam steering has been developed and characterized. Its primary goal is to suppress interferences induced by the coherence length of certain terahertz sources, spoiling terahertz images. The second goal is to ensure an enhanced signal-to-noise ratio on the detector side by the full use and optimized distribution of the available power. This system provides a homogeneous and adjustable illumination through a simplified setup to guarantee optimum real-time imaging capabilities, tailored to the sample under inspection. Working toward industrial implementations, different illumination process are conveniently assessed as a result of the versatility of this method.

Noise resistance in communication: Quantifying uniformity and optimality

Over the past decade and a half, several lines of research have investigated aspects of the smooth signalling redundancy hypothesis. This hypothesis proposes that speakers distribute the information in linguistic utterances as evenly as possible, in order to make the utterance more robust against noise for the hearer. Several studies have shown evidence for this hypothesis in limited linguistic domains, showing that speakers manipulate acoustic and syntactic features to avoid drastic spikes or troughs in information content. In theory, the mechanism behind this is that these spikes would make utterances more vulnerable to noise events, and thus, communicative failure. However, this previous work doesn't consider information density across entire utterances, and only rarely has this mechanism been directly explored. Here, we introduce a new descriptive statistic that quantifies the uniformity of information across an entire utterance, alongside an algorithm that can measure the uniformity of actual utterances against an optimized distribution. Using a simple simulation, we show that utterances optimized for more uniform distributions of information are, in fact, more robust against noise.

A Novel Distribution and Optimization Procedure of Boundary Conditions to Enhance the Classical Perturbation Method Applied to Solve Some Relevant Heat Problems

This work introduces a novel modification of classical perturbation method (PM), denominated Optimized Distribution of Boundary Conditions Perturbation Method (ODBCPM) with the purpose to improve the performance of PM in the solution of ordinary differential equations (ODES). We will see that the main proposal of ODBCPM rests above all in the redistribution and optimization of the boundary conditions of the problem to be solved among the iterations of the proposed method. The solution of a couple of heat relevant problems indicates the potentiality of ODBCPM even for the case of large values of the perturbative parameter.