Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Validity and reliability of a novel iPhone app for the measurement of barbell velocity and 1RM on the bench-press exercise

ABSTRACT The purpose of this study was to analyse the validity and reliability of a novel iPhone app (named: PowerLift) for the measurement of mean velocity on the bench-press exercise. Additionally, the accuracy of the estimation of the 1-Repetition maximum (1RM) using the load–velocity relationship was tested. To do this, 10 powerlifters (Mean (SD): age = 26.5 ± 6.5 years; bench press 1RM · kg−1 = 1.34 ± 0.25) completed an incremental test on the bench-press exercise with 5 different loads (75–100% 1RM), while the mean velocity of the barbell was registered using a linear transducer (LT) and Powerlift. Results showed a very high correlation between the LT and the app (r = 0.94, SEE = 0.028 m · s−1) for the measurement of mean velocity. Bland–Altman plots (R2 = 0.011) and intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC = 0.965) revealed a very high agreement between both devices. A systematic bias by which the app registered slightly higher values than the LT (P < 0.05; mean difference (SD) between instruments = 0.008 ± 0.03 m · s−1). Finally, actual and estimated 1RM using the app were highly correlated (r = 0.98, mean difference (SD) = 5.5 ± 9.6 kg, P < 0.05). The app was found to be highly valid and reliable in comparison with a LT. These findings could have valuable practical applications for strength and conditioning coaches who wish to measure barbell velocity in the bench-press exercise.
Temperature dependent structural properties and bending rigidity of pristine and defective hexagonal boron nitride

Structural and thermodynamical properties of monolayer pristine and defective boron nitride sheets (h-BN) have been investigated in a wide temperature range by carrying out atomistic simulations using a tuned Tersoff-type inter-atomic empirical potential. The temperature dependence of lattice parameter, radial distribution function, specific heat at constant volume, linear thermal expansion coefficient and the height correlation function of the thermally excited ripples on pristine as well as defective h-BN sheet have been investigated. Specific heat shows considerable increase beyond the Dulong–Petit limit at high temperatures, which is interpreted as a signature of strong anharmonicity present in h-BN. Analysis of the height fluctuations, ⟨h2⟩ ? >, shows that the bending rigidity and variance of height fluctuations are strongly temperature dependent and this is explained using the continuum theory of membranes. A detailed study of the height–height correlation function shows deviation from the prediction of harmonic theory of membranes as a consequence of the strong anharmonicity in h-BN. It is also seen that the variance of the height fluctuations increases with defect concentration.
Age-related differences in emotion matching are limited to low intensity expressions

ABSTRACT Multi-label tasks confound age differences in perceptual and cognitive processes. We examined age differences in emotion perception with a technique that did not require verbal labels. Participants matched the emotion expressed by a target to two comparison stimuli, one neutral and one emotional. Angry, disgusted, fearful, happy, and sad facial expressions of varying intensity were used. Although older adults took longer to respond than younger adults, younger adults only outmatched older adults for the lowest intensity disgust and fear expressions. Some participants also completed an identity matching task in which target stimuli were matched on personal identity instead of emotion. Although irrelevant to the judgment, expressed emotion still created interference. All participants were less accurate when the apparent difference in expressive intensity of the matched stimuli was large, suggesting that salient emotion cues increased difficulty of identity matching. Age differences in emotion perception were limited to very low intensity expressions.
Multidimensional Analysis of Curved Root Canal Preparation Using Continuous or Reciprocating Nickel-titanium Instruments

Objective: To evaluate transportation (T) and centering ability (CA) of root canal preparations using continuous or reciprocating nickel-titanium endodontic files. Materials and Methods: Ninety-six mesiobuccal root canals of mandibular first and second molars were randomly divided into 6 groups (n=16) according to the rotary file used: 1. ProTaper Next; 2. ProTaper Gold; 3. Mtwo; 4. BioRaCe; 5. WaveOne Gold; 6. Reciproc. Root canals were prepared according to manufacturer’s instructions. Cone beam computed tomography scans were obtained before and after root canal preparation. Measurements were made at six different reference points: 2, 3 and 4 mm from the apex and 2, 3 and 4 mm below furcation in different directions. Results: The greatest Mesiodistal (MD) Transportation (T) was found for Reciproc files (p<0.05), and the greatest buccolingual (BL) T, for Reciproc, ProTaper Gold and ProTaper Next files (p<0.05). The greatest Mesiodistal (MD) Centering Ability (CA) was found for BioRaCe files (p<0.05), and the greatest Buccolingual (BL) CA, for BioRaCe and Mtwo files (p<0.05). Conclusion: All systems produced root canal transportation. No file system achieved perfect CA of root preparation. Reciproc files had the greatest MD T and BL T. BioRaCe files had the greatest MD CA, whereas BL CA was similar for BioRaCe and Mtwo files.
Inhaled nitric oxide and cognition in pediatric severe malaria: A randomized double-blind placebo controlled trial

Background Severe malaria is a leading cause of acquired neurodisability in Africa and is associated with reduced nitric oxide (NO) bioavailability. A neuroprotective role for inhaled NO has been reported in animal studies, and administration of inhaled NO in preterm neonates with respiratory distress syndrome is associated with a 47% reduced risk of cognitive impairment at two years of age. Methods A randomized double-blind placebo-controlled trial of inhaled NO versus placebo as an adjunctive therapy for severe malaria was conducted in Uganda between 2011 and 2013. Children received study gas for a maximum 72 hours (inhaled NO, 80 parts per million; room air placebo). Neurocognitive testing was performed on children<5 years at 6 month follow-up. The neurocognitive outcomes assessed were overall cognition (a composite of fine motor, visual reception, receptive language, and expressive language), attention, associative memory, and the global executive composite. Main outcomes were attention, associative memory, and overall cognitive ability. Results Sixty-one children receiving iNO and 59 children receiving placebo were evaluated. Forty-two children (35.0%) were impaired in at least one neurocognitive domain. By intention-to-treat analysis, there were no differences in unadjusted or unadjusted age-adjusted z-scores for overall cognition (β (95% CI): 0.26 (-0.19, 0.72), p = 0.260), attention (0.18 (-0.14, 0.51), p = 0.267), or memory (0.14 (-0.02, 0.30), p = 0.094) between groups by linear regression. Children receiving inhaled NO had a 64% reduced relative risk of fine motor impairment than children receiving placebo (relative risk, 95% CI: 0.36, 0.14–0.96) by log binomial regression following adjustment for anticonvulsant use. Conclusions Severe malaria is associated with high rates of neurocognitive impairment. Treatment with inhaled NO was associated with reduced risk of fine motor impairment. These results need to be prospectively validated in a larger study powered to assess cognitive outcomes in order to evaluate whether strategies to increase bioavailable NO are neuroprotective in children with severe malaria. Trial registration ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT01255215.
MEK inhibitors under development for treatment of non-small-cell lung cancer

ABSTRACT Introduction: The mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) pathway is intimately implicated in the molecular pathogenesis of non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Aberrant MAPK signaling resulting from the upstream activating mutations converges on mitogen-activated protein kinase kinase 1/2 (MEK1/2), making MEK inhibition an attractive strategy for the treatment of NSCLC. Several MEK inhibitors have demonstrated anticancer activity in patients with NSCLC. Areas covered: In this article, we discuss the biological rationale for the use of MEK inhibitors and summarize the clinical experience with MEK1/2 inhibitors for the treatment of NSCLC, from initial phase I studies to phase II/III studies, both as monotherapy or in combination with other anticancer agents. Expert opinion: Trametinib in combination with the BRAF inhibitor dabrafenib represents the first MEK1/2 inhibitor containing regimen that is approved for advanced BRAFV600E-mutant NSCLC. Other MEK1/2 inhibitors that are also in advanced stages of clinical development include selumetinib, cobimetinib, and binimetinib. Several studies of MEK inhibitor combination therapies are underway, including trials using combined MEK inhibition and immune checkpoint blockade. Further research aimed at discovering biomarkers of response and resistance to MEK1/2 inhibitors will be needed to develop rational combination strategies for the treatment of NSCLC driven by aberrant MAPK signaling.
The effects of mercerization and acetylation treatments on the properties of sisal fiber and its interfacial adhesion characteristics on polypropylene

The objective of this work was to investigate the influence of chemical treatment processes namely mercerization and acetylation on the surface morphology, structure and interfacial adhesion characteristics of sisal fiber within a polypropylene matrix. the effect of these treatments was studied using SEM, FT-IR, XRD, tensile and single fiber pull-out test. the two pre-treatment processes were observed to enhance removal of deleterious surface impurities and increase fiber roughness. this is advantageous for fiber to matrix adhesion as it facilitates mechanical interlocking from the increased surface area available for contact with matrix. interfacial adhesion shear strength for alkali treated and acetylated fibers improved by 173% and 435% correspondingly compared to untreated fiber. the FT-IR analysis revealed a reduction of lignin and hemicelluloses which are detrimental to the bonding strength of composite. fibers treated with Naoh showed greater exposure of cellulose cell walls. The degree of cellulose swelling was found to be influenced by pre-treatment scheme variables such as mercerization time and concentration of the solution. improvement in both crystallinity and tensile modulus of the fibers was observed. fiber extraction technique was also observed to have an impact on fiber quality as shown by fractures sustained by cellulose helical spirals from the adopted green retting protocol. Keywords : acetylation, mercerization, sisal, tensile, single fiber pull-out
Multi-Region bilinear convolutional neural networks for person re-identification

In this work we propose a new architecture for person re-identification. As the task of re-identification is inherently associated with embedding learning and non-rigid appearance description, our architecture is based on the deep bilinear convolutional network (Bilinear-CNN) that has been proposed recently for fine-grained classification of highly non-rigid objects. While the last stages of the original Bilinear-CNN architecture completely removes the geometric information from consideration by performing orderless pooling, we observe that a better embedding can be learned by performing bilinear pooling in a more local way, where each pooling is confined to a predefined region. Our architecture thus represents a compromise between traditional convolutional networks and bilinear CNNs and strikes a balance between rigid matching and completely ignoring spatial information. We perform the experimental validation of the new architecture on the three popular benchmark datasets (Market-1501, CUHK01, CUHK03), comparing it to baselines that include Bilinear-CNN as well as prior art. The new architecture outperforms the baseline on all three datasets, while performing better than state-of-the-art on two out of three. The code and the pretrained models of the approach will be made available at the time of publication.
Endotracheal angiomatoid 'malignant' fibrous histiocytoma: EWSR1 gene rearrangement.

Sir, Angiomatoid ‘malignant’ fibrous histiocytoma is a rare tumour of intermediate biological potential. It was first described by Enzinger and termed angiomatoid malignant fibrous histocytoma. A subsequent large study revealed that the tumour had a local recurrence and metastasis rate of 12% and 4.6%, respectively. Because of the relative rarity of metastasis and the overall excellent clinical course, it was classified as an intermediate tumour in WHO 2002. Typically it arises in the extremity soft tissue of children and young adults. Besides somatic soft tissue, the tumour has been reported to occur in other sites such as the hard palate, mediastinum, vulva, retroperitoneum, ovary and lung. Among these unusual sites, the lung is the predilection site of non-somatic angiomatoid ‘malignant’ fibrous histiocytoma. Here we described a case that located in the trachea, which was the sixth reported case of angiomatoid ‘malignant’ fibrous histiocytoma of the lower respiratory tract, with some features that have not been described in the previous reported cases. The patient was a 27-year-old man. He complained of persistent cough for 1 year with sputum production, haemoptysis and dyspnoea on exertion. The patient had no history of tuberculosis or exposure to asbestos. Imaging by computed tomography showed a 15 mm lesion in the right wall of the infraglottic cavity with clear margins (Fig. 1A). The tumour was located between the glottis and the upper edge of the seventh cervical vertebrae and had a uniform density. It was pressing the cricoid cartilage but no destruction of the bone was found. There was no lymph node enlargement. The patient’s lung function tests showed morderate to severe obstructive ventilatory dysfunction. Bronchoscopy revealed a non-ulcerated polypoid mass located at the right wall of the hypolarynx trachea. The lumen of the trachea was severely narrowed (Fig. 1B). The tumour was clinically thought to be a carcinoid tumour and was biopsied, after which a sleeve resection of the lesion was performed. The biopsy specimen measured 2 mm in diameter. Histologically, the lesion revealed perivascular lymphocytes and plasma cells embedded in oedematous connective tissue. The
Clipped Action Policy Gradient

Many continuous control tasks have bounded action spaces and clip out-of-bound actions before execution. Policy gradient methods often optimize policies as if actions were not clipped. We propose clipped action policy gradient (CAPG) as an alternative policy gradient estimator that exploits the knowledge of actions being clipped to reduce the variance in estimation. We prove that CAPG is unbiased and achieves lower variance than the original estimator that ignores action bounds. Experimental results demonstrate that CAPG generally outperforms the original estimator, indicating its promise as a better policy gradient estimator for continuous control tasks.
Resolution for Temporal Logics of Knowledge

A resolution based proof system for a temporal logic of knowledge is presented and shown to be correct. Such logics are useful for proving properties of distributed and multi-agent systems. Examples are given to illustrate the proof system. An extension of the basic system to the multi-modal case is given and illustrated using the ‘muddy children problem’.
Data-driven system to predict academic grades and dropout

Nowadays, the role of a tutor is more important than ever to prevent students dropout and improve their academic performance. This work proposes a data-driven system to extract relevant information hidden in the student academic data and, thus, help tutors to offer their pupils a more proactive personal guidance. In particular, our system, based on machine learning techniques, makes predictions of dropout intention and courses grades of students, as well as personalized course recommendations. Moreover, we present different visualizations which help in the interpretation of the results. In the experimental validation, we show that the system obtains promising results with data from the degree studies in Law, Computer Science and Mathematics of the Universitat de Barcelona.
Automatic methods for low-cost evaluation and position-aware models for neural information retrieval

An information retrieval (IR) system assists people in consuming huge amount of data, where the evaluation and the construction of such systems are important. However, there exist two difficulties: the overwhelmingly large number of query-document pairs to judge, making IR evaluation a manually laborious task; and the complicated patterns to model due to the non-symmetric, heterogeneous relationships between a query-document pair, where different interaction patterns such as term dependency and proximity have been demonstrated to be useful, yet are non-trivial for a single IR model to encode. In this thesis we attempt to address both difficulties from the perspectives of IR evaluation and of the retrieval model respectively, by reducing the manual cost with automatic methods, by investigating the usage of crowdsourcing in collecting preference judgments, and by proposing novel neural retrieval models. In particular, to address the large number of query-document pairs in IR evaluation, a low-cost selective labeling method is proposed to pick out a small subset of representative documents for manual judgments in favor of the follow-up prediction for the remaining query-document pairs; furthermore, a language-model based cascade measure framework is developed to evaluate the novelty and diversity, utilizing the content of the labeled documents to mitigate incomplete labels. In addition, we also attempt to make the preference judgments practically usable by empirically investigating different properties of the judgments when collected via crowdsourcing; and by proposing a novel judgment mechanism, making a compromise between the judgment quality and the number of judgments. Finally, to model different complicated patterns in a single retrieval model, inspired by the recent advances in deep learning, we develop novel neural IR models to incorporate different patterns like term dependency, query proximity, density of relevance, and query coverage in a single model. We demonstrate their superior performances through evaluations on different datasets.
Comparison of Methods for Molecular Species Delimitation Across a Range of Speciation Scenarios

Abstract. — Species are fundamental units in biological research and can be defined on the basis of various operational criteria. There has been growing use of molecular approaches for species delimitation. Among the most widely used methods, the generalized mixed Yule‐coalescent (GMYC) and Poisson tree processes (PTP) were designed for the analysis of single‐locus data but are often applied to concatenations of multilocus data. In contrast, the Bayesian multispecies coalescent approach in the software Bayesian Phylogenetics and Phylogeography (BPP) explicitly models the evolution of multilocus data. In this study, we compare the performance of GMYC, PTP, and BPP using synthetic data generated by simulation under various speciation scenarios. We show that in the absence of gene flow, the main factor influencing the performance of these methods is the ratio of population size to divergence time, while number of loci and sample size per species have smaller effects. Given appropriate priors and correct guide trees, BPP shows lower rates of species overestimation and underestimation, and is generally robust to various potential confounding factors except high levels of gene flow. The single‐threshold GMYC and the best strategy that we identified in PTP generally perform well for scenarios involving more than a single putative species when gene flow is absent, but PTP outperforms GMYC when fewer species are involved. Both methods are more sensitive than BPP to the effects of gene flow and potential confounding factors. Case studies of bears and bees further validate some of the findings from our simulation study, and reveal the importance of using an informed starting point for molecular species delimitation. Our results highlight the key factors affecting the performance of molecular species delimitation, with potential benefits for using these methods within an integrative taxonomic framework.
Near- and Sub- $V_{t}$ Pipelines Based on Wide-Pulsed-Latch Design Techniques

This paper presents a methodology and chip demonstration to design near-/sub-threshold voltage (<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$V_{t}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>) pipelines using pulsed latches that are clocked at very wide pulses. Pulsed-latch-based design is known for time borrowing capability but the amount of time borrowing is limited due to hold time constraint. To enable more cycle borrowing, in this paper, we aim to pad short paths to ~1/3 cycle time using multi-<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$V_{t}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> cell library. While delay padding using multi-<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$V_{t}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> cells is common in super-<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$V_{t}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> design, the small delay difference among multi-<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$V_{t}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> cells has not allowed such extensive short path padding due to large area overhead. However, in near-/sub-<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$V_{t}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> regime, circuits delay becomes exponentially sensitive to <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$V_{t}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>, suggesting that high-<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$V_{t}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> cells can significantly reduce the overhead of padding. We build a semi-automatic short path padding flow around this idea, and use it to design: 1) ISCAS benchmark circuits and 2) an 8-bit 8-tap finite impulse response (FIR) core, the latter fabricated in a 65-nm CMOS technology. The chip measurement shows that the proposed FIR core achieves 45.2% throughput (frequency), 11% energy efficiency (Energy/cycle), and 38% energy-delay-product improvements at 0.35 V over the flip-flop-pipelined baseline. The measurement results also confirm that the proposed FIR core operates with the same pulsewidth setting robustly across process, voltage, and temperature variations.
Cyberframing Cancer: An Exploratory Investigation of Valenced Cybercoping on Cancer Blogs

ABSTRACT Although scholarship on coping with cancer implies many ways that coping is communicative, the discursive features of coping have been understudied. The purpose of the present investigation was to theorize the content of cancer blogs, a form of cybercoping, by examining valenced coping-relevant frames that bloggers use to describe their experiences with cancer. This research is both theoretically and methodologically innovative. Theoretically, we advance the concept of cyberframing by connecting the rather disconnected literatures on coping and framing and by studying this topic from a communication perspective. Methodologically, this is one of the few studies of coping with cancer that has used naturally occurring communication data to its advantage. A content analysis of cancer blog entries (N = 194) indicated that more than 90% of cancer blog posts were embedded in a valenced frame. The frames were either negative, positive, or balanced; balanced frames varied in the intensity of the valence. The most common frames were positive and balanced with low affect.