LLukas22/scidocs huggingface dataset:
Variability of GPS units for measuring distance in team sport movements.

PURPOSE
To examine the difference in distance measured by two global positioning system (GPS) units of the same model worn by the same player while performing movements common to team sports.


METHODS
Twenty elite Australian football players completed two trials of the straight line movement (10, 20, 40 m) at four speeds (walk, jog, stride, sprint), two trials of the changes of direction (COD) courses of two different frequencies (gradual and tight), and five trials of a team sport running simulation circuit. To assess inter-unit variability for total and high intensity running (HIR) distance measured in matches, data from eight field players were collected in three Australian Hockey League (AHL) matches during the 2009 season. Each subject wore two GPS devices (MinimaxX v2.5, Catapult, Australia) that collected position data at 5 Hz for each movement and match trial. The percentage difference ±90% confidence interval (CI) was used to determine differences between units.


RESULTS
Differences (±90% CI) between the units ranged from 9.9 ± 4.7% to 11.9 ± 19.5% for straight line running movements and from 9.5 ± 7.2% to 10.7 ± 7.9% in the COD courses. Similar results were exhibited in the team sport circuit (11.1 ± 4.2%). Total distance (10.3 ± 6.2%) and HIR distance (10.3 ± 15.6) measured during the match play displayed similar variability.


CONCLUSION
It is recommended that players wear the same GPS unit for each exercise session to reduce measurement error. The level of between-unit measurement error should be considered when comparing results from players wearing different GPS units.
A phase II study of combination chemotherapy with capecitabine and cisplatin in patients with metastatic or recurrent squamous cell carcinoma of the head and neck.

BACKGROUND
The purpose of this study was to assess the efficacy and toxicity of capecitabine and cisplatin (XP) combination chemotherapy in patients with metastatic or recurrent squamous cell carcinoma of the head and neck (SCCHN).


PATIENTS AND METHODS
The chemotherapy regimen consisted of capecitabine 1250 mg/m(2) orally twice a day on day 1 to day 14 and cisplatin 60 mg/m(2) i.v. on day 1. Each cycle was repeated every 3 weeks up to a maximum of six cycles.


RESULTS
By intent-to-treat analysis, the overall response rate was 50% [complete response, 0/36; partial response, 18/36; 95% confidence interval (CI) 32% to 67%]. The median progression-free survival was 3.7 months (95% CI 2.1-5.3 months), and the median response duration was 4.9 months. The median overall survival and 1-year survival rate were 10.3 months (95% CI 8.5-12.1 months) and 43.3%, respectively. The common grade 3 or 4 nonhematologic adverse events were anorexia (8.8%), fatigue (4.4%), diarrhea (4.4%), stomatitis (3.6%), and the hand-foot syndrome (1.5%). The most common grade 3 or 4 hematologic adverse event was neutropenia (14.6%), followed by anemia (1.5%). There was no treatment-related death.


CONCLUSION
The XP combination regimen has antitumor activity and acceptable safety profile in patients with metastatic or recurrent SCCHN.
Motor-learning-related changes in piano players and non-musicians revealed by functional magnetic-resonance signals

 In this study, we investigated blood-flow-related magnetic-resonance (MR) signal changes and the time course underlying short-term motor learning of the dominant right hand in ten piano players (PPs) and 23 non-musicians (NMs), using a complex finger-tapping task. The activation patterns were analyzed for selected regions of interest (ROIs) within the two examined groups and were related to the subjects’ performance. A functional learning profile, based on the regional blood-oxygenation-level-dependent (BOLD) signal changes, was assessed in both groups. All subjects achieved significant increases in tapping frequency during the training session of 35 min in the scanner. PPs, however, performed significantly better than NMs and showed increasing activation in the contralateral primary motor cortex throughout motor learning in the scanner. At the same time, involvement of secondary motor areas, such as bilateral supplementary motor area, premotor, and cerebellar areas, diminished relative to the NMs throughout the training session. Extended activation of primary and secondary motor areas in the initial training stage (7–14 min) and rapid attenuation were the main functional patterns underlying short-term learning in the NM group; attenuation was particularly marked in the primary motor cortices as compared with the PPs. When tapping of the rehearsed sequence was performed with the left hand, transfer effects of motor learning were evident in both groups. Involvement of all relevant motor components was smaller than after initial training with the right hand. Ipsilateral premotor and primary motor contributions, however, showed slight increases of activation, indicating that dominant cortices influence complex sequence learning of the non-dominant hand. In summary, the involvement of primary and secondary motor cortices in motor learning is dependent on experience. Interhemispheric transfer effects are present.
Anxious–Retarded Depression: Relation with Plasma Vasopressin and Cortisol

Recently, we published a report on the effects of repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) on plasma levels of neuroactive steroids in major depression (Padberg et al, 2002). We meanwhile noticed that the progesterone levels reported in Figure 2 in this paper were above those usually found in human plasma. We therefore have reanalyzed our GC/MS data. By doing so we found that, when switching from steroid analysis by GC/MS from the electron impact (EI) mode that was employed in our previous study in depression (Romeo et al, 1998) to the negative chemical ionization (NCI) mode, we made a mistake with the calculation of progesterone concentrations. In our paper (Padberg et al, 2002) we reported on calculations based on Neuropsychopharmacology (2003) 28, 610–611 & 2003 Nature Publishing Group All rights reserved 0893-133X/03 $25.00
Deep Active Learning for Dialogue Generation

We use hamming-diverse Beam Search [2] to generate K responses at each turn. The beams are diversified by maximizing an objective that consists of a standard sequence likelihood term and a dissimilarity metric between the beams. Beam Search: Likely to produce almost identical beams like “I don’t care!” and “I don’t care.”. Diverse Beam Search: Likely to produce beams like “I don’t care!” and “Who cares?”.
Semantic Shot Classification in Sports Video

In this paper, we present a unified framework for semantic shot classification in sports videos. Unlike previous approaches, which focus on clustering by aggregating shots with similar low-level features, the proposed scheme makes use of domain knowledge of specific sport to perform a top-down video shot classification, including identification of video shot classes for each sport, and supervised learning and classification of given sports video with low-level and middle-level features extracted from the sports video. It is observed that for each sport we can predefine a small number of semantic shot classes, 5~10, which covers 90~95% of sports broadcasting video. With supervised learning method, we can map the low-level features to middle-level semantic video shot attributes such as dominant object motion (a player), camera motion patterns, and court shape, etc. On the basis of the appropriate fusion of those middle-level shot classes, we classify video shots into the predefined video shot classes, each of which has a clear semantic meaning. The proposed method has been tested over 4 types of sports videos: tennis, basketball, volleyball and soccer. Good classification accuracy 85~95% has been achieved. With correctly classified sports video shots further structural and temporal analysis will be greatly facilitated.
PipeCloud: using causality to overcome speed-of-light delays in cloud-based disaster recovery

Disaster Recovery (DR) is a desirable feature for all enterprises, and a crucial one for many. However, adoption of DR remains limited due to the stark tradeoffs it imposes. To recover an application to the point of crash, one is limited by financial considerations, substantial application overhead, or minimal geographical separation between the primary and recovery sites. In this paper, we argue for cloud-based DR and pipelined synchronous replication as an antidote to these problems. Cloud hosting promises economies of scale and on-demand provisioning that are a perfect fit for the infrequent yet urgent needs of DR. Pipelined synchrony addresses the impact of WAN replication latency on performance, by efficiently overlapping replication with application processing for multi-tier servers. By tracking the consequences of the disk modifications that are persisted to a recovery site all the way to client-directed messages, applications realize forward progress while retaining full consistency guarantees for client-visible state in the event of a disaster. PipeCloud, our prototype, is able to sustain these guarantees for multi-node servers composed of black-box VMs, with no need of application modification, resulting in a perfect fit for the arbitrary nature of VM-based cloud hosting. We demonstrate disaster failover to the Amazon EC2 platform, and show that PipeCloud can increase throughput by an order of magnitude and reduce response times by more than half compared to synchronous replication, all while providing the same zero data loss consistency guarantees.
The effect of the addition of hip strengthening exercises to a lumbopelvic exercise programme for the treatment of non-specific low back pain: A randomized controlled trial.

OBJECTIVES
To compare the efficacy of two exercise programmes in reducing pain and disability for individuals with non-specific low back pain and to examine the underlying mechanical factors related to pain and disability for individuals with NSLBP.


DESIGN
A single-blind, randomized controlled trial.


METHODS
Eighty participants were recruited from eleven community-based general medical practices and randomized into two groups completing either a lumbopelvic motor control or a combined lumbopelvic motor control and progressive hip strengthening exercise therapy programme. All participants received an education session, 6 rehabilitation sessions including real time ultrasound training, and a home based exercise programme manual and log book. The primary outcomes were pain (0-100 mm visual analogue scale), and disability (Oswestry Disability Index V2). The secondary outcomes were hip strength (N/kg) and two-dimensional frontal plane biomechanics (°) measure during the static Trendelenburg test and while walking. All outcomes were measured at baseline and at 6-week follow up.


RESULTS
There was no statistical difference in the change in pain (x¯ = -4.0 mm, t = -1.07, p = 0.29, 95%CI -11.5, 3.5) or disability (x¯ = -0.3%, t = -0.19, p = 0.85, 95%CI -3.5, 2.8) between groups. Within group comparisons revealed clinically meaningful reductions in pain for both Group One (x¯ = -20.9 mm, 95%CI -25.7, -16.1) and Group Two (x¯ = -24.9, 95%CI -30.8, -19.0).


CONCLUSIONS
Both exercise programmes had similar efficacy in reducing pain. The addition of hip strengthening exercises to a motor control exercise programme does not appear to result in improved clinical outcome for pain for individuals with non-specific low back pain.
Regulation of glioblastoma stem cells by retinoic acid: role for Notch pathway inhibition

It is necessary to understand mechanisms by which differentiating agents influence tumor-initiating cancer stem cells. Toward this end, we investigated the cellular and molecular responses of glioblastoma stem-like cells (GBM-SCs) to all-trans retinoic acid (RA). GBM-SCs were grown as non-adherent neurospheres in growth factor supplemented serum-free medium. RA treatment rapidly induced morphology changes, induced growth arrest at G1/G0 to S transition, decreased cyclin D1 expression and increased p27 expression. Immunofluorescence and western blot analysis indicated that RA induced the expression of lineage-specific differentiation markers Tuj1 and GFAP and reduced the expression of neural stem cell markers such as CD133, Msi-1, nestin and Sox-2. RA treatment dramatically decreased neurosphere-forming capacity, inhibited the ability of neurospheres to form colonies in soft agar and inhibited their capacity to propagate subcutaneous and intracranial xenografts. Expression microarray analysis identified ∼350 genes that were altered within 48 h of RA treatment. Affected pathways included retinoid signaling and metabolism, cell-cycle regulation, lineage determination, cell adhesion, cell–matrix interaction and cytoskeleton remodeling. Notch signaling was the most prominent of these RA-responsive pathways. Notch pathway downregulation was confirmed based on the downregulation of HES and HEY family members. Constitutive activation of Notch signaling with the Notch intracellular domain rescued GBM neurospheres from the RA-induced differentiation and stem cell depletion. Our findings identify mechanisms by which RA targets GBM-derived stem-like tumor-initiating cells and novel targets applicable to differentiation therapies for glioblastoma.
Addressing Stigma Relating to Mental Illness in Low- and Middle-Income Countries

INTRODUCTION Mental health disorders (especially psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia) constitute the leading cause of disabilityadjusted life years (DALYs) from all non-communicable diseases (1). These disorders relate to severe social, educational and occupational impairment, physical illness, and premature mortality (2). Approximately, three-quarters of the burden of mental illness comes from lowand middle-income countries (LMICs) (3). Governments from LMICs spend the lowest percentages on mental health worldwide (4). Most of these countries model their mental health systems based on care that is primarily delivered through psychiatric institutions. Hence, the implementation of community mental health models has been extremely difficult, given that attaining the additional funds required to establish outpatient services has frequently not been available in these countries. Additionally, human resources are limited and inequitably distributed. This explains why in LMICs more than 75% of people that require mental health care do not receive any kind of intervention (5). This statistic refers to the “treatment gap”: the proportion of people who need but do not receive care. The World Health Organization (WHO) has reported that the treatment gap for serious mental disorders is 35–50% in developed countries and 76– 90% in LMICs (6). Stigma comprises a major problem related to help seeking in people with mental health difficulties in developing countries. Stigmatized individuals may anticipate devaluation and discrimination from others, leading them to adopt harmful coping mechanisms such as secrecy or withdrawal (7). Studies conducted in LMIC such as Ethiopia and India have reported this tendency, whereby consumers prefer to not disclose their problems or symptoms with health professionals or even with their own relatives (8). Such harmful coping strategies further obstruct effective treatment use. Several authors have recommended the implementation of national public education campaigns and local interventions to increase mental health literacy to reduce discrimination in these countries (9).
Singular and combined effects of nebivolol and lifestyle modification on large artery stiffness in hypertensive adults.

BACKGROUND
We hypothesized that the combination of nebivolol and lifestyle modification would reduce large artery stiffness in middle-aged and older hypertensive adults more than either intervention alone.


METHODS
To address this, 45 men and women (age 40-75 years) with stage I hypertension were randomized to receive either nebivolol (NB; forced titration to 10 mg OD; n = 15; age 57.2 ± 11.4 years; body mass index [BMI] 30.8 ± 5.8 kg/m(2)), lifestyle modification (LM; 5-10% weight loss via calorie restriction and physical activity; n = 15; age 52.7 ± 8.5 years; BMI 33.9 ± 7.2 kg/m(2)) or nebivolol plus lifestyle modification (NBLM; n = 15; age 58.9 ± 9.4 years; BMI 32.5 ± 4.9 kg/m(2)) for 12 weeks. β-stiffness index, a blood-pressure-independent measure of arterial stiffness, and arterial compliance were measured via high-resolution ultrasound and tonometry at baseline and after the 12-week intervention. There was no difference between groups in age, body weight or composition, blood pressure, or in β-stiffness index or arterial compliance at baseline (all p > 0.05).


RESULTS
Following the 12-week intervention, body weight decreased ~5% (p < 0.05) in the LM and NBLM groups but did not change from baseline in the NB group (p > 0.05). Supine brachial and carotid systolic and diastolic blood pressure declined following treatment in each of the groups (p < 0.05). However, the magnitude of reduction was not different (p < 0.05) between groups. β-stiffness index declined (-2.03 ± 0.60, -1.87 ± 0.83 and -2.51 ± 0.90 U) and arterial compliance increased similarly (both p > 0.05) in the NB, LM and NBLM groups, respectively.


CONCLUSION
In summary, our findings indicate that the combination of nebivolol and lifestyle modification reduced large artery stiffness to a similar degree as either intervention alone in middle-aged and older hypertensive adults.
Validation and Verification of Smart Contracts: A Research Agenda

Smart contracts might encode legal contracts written in natural language to represent the contracting parties’ shared understandings and intentions. The issues and research challenges involved in the validation and verification of smart contracts, particularly those running over blockchains and distributed ledgers, are explored.
Visual memory for random block patterns defined by luminance and color contrast

We studied the ability of human subjects to memorize the visual information in computer-generated random block patterns defined either by luminance contrast, by color contrast, or by both. Memory performance declines rapidly with increasing inter-stimulus interval, showing a half-life of approximately 3 s. We further show that memory performance declines with eccentricity approximately as a Gaussian function of position. Memory decay functions did not depend on whether the patterns were defined by luminance or color contrast. Changing both luminance and color components of block patterns in conjunction did not improve performance suggesting a single memory mechanism is used to store luminance and color derived pattern information. Our results further suggest that color identity (hue, saturation) and pattern information extracted from color- or luminance-contrast are stored independently of each other.
Is There an Association Between Patient Safety Indicators and Hospital Teaching Status

Objective: We compared discharges from teaching and nonteaching hospitals for relative rates and likelihood of potentially preventable adverse events. Methods: We applied Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) Patient Safety Indicators (PSIs) to adult male patient discharges from Veterans Health Administration (VA) and non-Federal hospitals, calculated risk-adjusted PSI rates, and compared the likelihood of incurring a PSI event, controlling for case-mix and hospital characteristics. Results: PSI rates were higher in major teaching hospitals than in nonteaching hospitals for iatrogenic pneumothorax and selected infections due to medical care in both VA and non-Federal hospitals and for postoperative pulmonary embolism or deepvein thrombosis in non-Federal hospitals. In non-Federal hospitals, likelihood of a PSI event was higher in major teaching hospitals for decubitus ulcer and postoperative wound dehiscence in addition to those PSIs with higher stratified rates. Conclusion: Further research is needed on the relationship of residency programs to adverse events. Differences between VA and non-Federal hospitals suggest that if residency programs increase risk to patients, the causes may be actionable at the organizational level.
EEG correlates of Fitts’s law during preparation for action

Humans' inability to move fast and accurately at the same time is expressed in Fitts's law. It states that the movement time between targets depends on the index of difficulty, which is a function of the target width and the inter-target distance. The present study investigated the electrophysiological correlates of Fitts's law during action planning using high-density electroencephalography. Movement times were scaled according to Fitts's law, indicating that participants could not overcome the speed-accuracy trade-off during a 1-s preparation period. Importantly, the index of difficulty of the planned movement correlated linearly with the amplitudes of the cognitive N2 and P3b components, which developed during the planning period over parieto-occipital areas. These results suggest that the difficulty of a movement during action planning is represented at a level where perceptual information about the difficulty of the ensuing action is linked to motor programming of the required movement.
A comparison of concurrent languages: a class project

This paper describes a class project for a graduate level course in systems programming which emphasizes concurrency issues.
SPACE EFFICIENCY IN HIGH-RISE

“Given the high land values in central business sections of our leading cities, the skyscraper is not only the most efficient, but the only economic utilization of certain strategic plots. An exhaustive investigation... has conclusively demonstrated that the factors making for diminishing returns in the intensive development of such plots are more than offset by the factors making for increasing returns...” (Klaber, 1930).
Place your bets: psychophysiological correlates of decision-making under risk

Emotions and their psychophysiological correlates are thought to play an important role in decision-making under risk. We used a novel gambling task to measure psychophysiological responses during selection of explicitly presented risky options and feedback processing. Active-choice trials, in which the participant had to select the size of bet, were compared to fixed-bet, no-choice trials. We further tested how the chances of winning and bet size affected choice behavior and psychophysiological arousal. Individual differences in impulsive and risk-taking traits were assessed. The behavioral results showed sensitivity to the choice requirement and to the chances of winning: Participants were faster to make a response on no-choice trials and when the chances of winning were high. In active-choice trials, electrodermal activity (EDA) increased with bet size during both selection and processing of losses. Cardiac responses were sensitive to choice uncertainty: Stronger selection-related heart rate (HR) decelerations were observed in trials with lower chances of winning, particularly on active-choice trials. Finally, betting behavior and psychophysiological responsiveness were moderately correlated with self-reported impulsivity-related traits. In conclusion, we demonstrate that psychophysiological arousal covaries with risk-sensitive decision-making outside of a learning context. Our results further highlight the differential sensitivities of EDA and HR to psychological features of the decision scenario.