Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
U.S. Cohort Differences in Body Composition Outcomes of a 6-Month Pedometer-Based Physical Activity Intervention: The ASUKI Step Study

Background: Regular physical activity (PA) enhances health and is an important factor in disease prevention and longevity. The 2008 U.S. Physical Activity Guidelines recommends that all healthy adults attain at least 150 minutes per week of moderate intensity aerobic PA (e.g., brisk walking) to maintain and promote PA. Objectives: This study determined the effects of a 6-month pedometer-based worksite walking intervention with participants focusing on a goal of achieving 10,000 steps per day, on body composition in adults with a wide range of body mass index (BMI) values and compares the changes with outcomes of similar studies. Materials and Methods: The design was a single group, quasi-experimental study. All participants received a pedometer and were asked to register the daily number of steps. Men and women (n = 142; age = 41 ± 11.5 years; BMI = 27.2 ± 7.25 kg.m-2) received body composition measures at 1, 3, and 6 months. A multilevel growth modeling approach was used to explore change over time and to predict change by steps, age, gender, and fat category categorized as normal and overweight/obese. Results: Significant individual differences in linear slopes and change over time were observed for waist circumference (WC) (-3.0 cm) only in unconditional model (t = -0.67, P = 0.02). Conclusions: A 3.0 cm loss in WC shows that a 10,000 step per day walking program has the potential to influence changes in body composition measures that are correlated with adverse health outcomes. While significant changes did occur there are some limitations. The analysis did not consider the data regarding completing of 10,000 steps per day and other potential factors that could influence the results. Compliance to the walking dose and initial physical activity and body composition levels are important to consider when studying body composition changes in such programs.
Endogenous Corruption, Inequality and Growth: Econometric Evidence

This paper empirically addresses three questions. First, what is corruption's effect on economic growth? Second, what are the factors that determine corruption? Third, what is the relationship among corruption, economic growth, and income distribution? I use a cross section of countries, both developed and underdeveloped. I find that corruption is an important determinant of both per-capita real growth and of the distribution of income. Corruption is positively and significantly correlated with growth, implying that corruption has efficiency-enhancing qualities. Corruption is positively and significantly correlated with inequality, implying that increased income inequality is associated with greater corruption. The most robust specification, which associates three jointly dependent equations using a two-stage least squares estimation technique, reinforces the proposition that corruption enhances efficiency, justifies inequality's role in determining growth rates, and lends support to the theory of international convergence of growth rates.
MIMO OFDM capacity maximizing beamforming for large Doppler scenarios

Performance of OFDM systems is limited by inter carrier interference (ICI) under high Doppler scenarios such as that encountered in high speed trains such as TGV. Several publications have addressed the receiver design for SISO (single input single output) and SIMO (single input multiple output) to combat ICI. Notably, the use of multiple receive antennas is a very effective way to combat ICI. In this paper, we consider a MIMO (multiple input multiple output) scenario and iteratively design a transmit beamformer to maximize the sum capacity across all the subcarriers in the presence of ICI. Our interest lies in analyzing the impact of excess of transmit (Tx) antennas in combating ICI. A time varying frequency selective channel is considered. In particular, we consider a linear model for the channel variation across the OFDM symbol as we focus on LTE (long term evolution)-like systems and train velocities up to 450kmph. As the original cost function is non-convex, we first follow the difference of convex functions (DC) approach to obtain a convex cost function. However, we later reinterpret the DC approach as a majorization technique. To solve the joint problem of power allocation across subcarriers and precoder design for all the useful subcarriers, we employ the cyclic minimization approach to alternately optimize the precoder design and transmit power allocation across subcarriers. The convergence of the iterative approach is proved and the theory is validated via numerical simulations.
Handball Injuries in Elite Asian Players

3 Abstract: The purpose of this study was to investigate the injury incidence and mechanism of injuries in elite Asian handball players using descriptive questionnaire. On the whole, during the last year, 63 injuries were recorded. The incidence of injuries per 1000 hours of competition was found to be 20.7 while per 1000 hours of training . 96 injuries happened. The results showed that acute injuries (82.54%) was significantly much higher than chronic injuries (17.46%) (X -26.683, P=0.000). According to findings 15% of the injuries were severe. The 2 highest incidence of injuries (41%) was in left and right backs. The findings also show that there is a meaningful difference in the incidence of injuries made to different parts of the body in handball players (X -37.07, P=0.00) 2 in a way that majority of the injuries happened in the ankle (23.8%), knee (15.9%) and shoulder (11.1%). Based on results 65% of the injuries in handball are of the non-contact kind while 35% were the consequence of players' contact with their opponents (X -5.730, P=0.00). The main machanism leading to injuries included, plant 2 and cutting (28.5%) and blocking (22.2%) (X -18.810, P=0.00). Also the results of analysis showed that 65% of 2 the injuries in handball happen in the second half of the game whiles the remaining 35% happened in the first half. These results showed that the incidence of injuries in elite Asian handball players is quite high and prevention should focus on ankle and knee injuries. In addition, In order to decrease injuries that arise from plant and cutting movement, there seems to be a need for teaching appropriate techniques to athlete and also doing balance-promoting training.
M1 and M4 muscarinic acetylcholine receptor regulation of neurotransmission and cell excitability in rodent hippocampus and prefrontal cortex.

Muscarinic acetylcholine receptors (mAChRs), specifically M1 and M4 subtypes, provide viable targets for the treatment of multiple central nervous system disorders. However, highly selective activators of either M1 or M4 have not been available, making it difficult to determine the in vivo effects of selective activation of these receptors. We have used cheminformatics and medicinal chemistry to develop new, highly selective M1 and M4 positive allosteric modulators (PAMs). VU10010 potentiated the functional M4 response to acetylcholine while having no activity at other mAChR subtypes. Whole-cell patch clamp recordings revealed that VU10010 increased carbachol-induced depression of transmission at excitatory but not inhibitory synapses at the Schaffer collateral-CA1 (SC-CA1) synapse in the hippocampus. Chemical optimization of VU10010 afforded two centrally penetrant analogs, VU0152099 and VU0152100, which are also potent, selective M4 PAMs. Interestingly, these compounds reversed amphetamine-induced hyperlocomotion in rats, a model that is predictive of clinical antipsychotic efficacy in humans. A growing body of literature also supports M1 receptors as a viable target for treatment of disorders involving impaired cognitive function. Data in this thesis reports the molecular characterization of a novel compound, BQCA, which is a potent, highly selective PAM of the rat M1 receptor. BQCA induced a robust inward current and increased spontaneous EPSCs in mPFC layer V pyramidal cells, effects which were absent in acute slices from M1 receptor knockout mice. Furthermore, multiple single-unit recordings were obtained from the mPFC of rats which showed that BQCA increased
MAOA, Drug Selling, and Violent Victimization

Involvement in drug markets is a significant risk factor for criminal victimization. Separately, the monoamine oxidase A (MAOA) gene has been identified as correlating with risky and antisocial behaviors and moderating the effects of environmental risk factors on antisocial behaviors. Using a sample drawn from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (N = 8,860), we explore whether MAOA genotype moderates the effect of drug selling on violent victimization. Results show that drug selling increases violent victimization among males, but not females. Additionally, the effect of drug selling on violent victimization among males is greater among the carriers of the 2R/3R alleles of MAOA, providing evidence of Gene × Environment interaction. These results appear despite a number of controls that potentially make the drug selling–violent victimization relationship spurious. Implications of the findings are discussed.
Management Communication and Employee Performance: The Contribution of Perceived Organizational Support

This study used a cross-lagged panel design to examine the temporal relationship between management communication and perceived organizational support (POS), and its consequences for performance. We assessed management communication and POS 2 times, separated by a 3-year interval, in a social services organization (N = 236). Our findings suggest that management communication was positively associated with a temporal change in POS. In addition, we found that POS fully mediates the relationship between management communication and both in-role and extra-role performance. The present study advances our theoretical knowledge concerning how management communication affects performance, with implications for practice. Specifically, it reveals that management communication affects performance mainly because it signals that the organization cares about the well-being and values the contributions of its employees.
Allerdictor: fast allergen prediction using text classification techniques

MOTIVATION Accurately identifying and eliminating allergens from biotechnology-derived products are important for human health. From a biomedical research perspective, it is also important to identify allergens in sequenced genomes. Many allergen prediction tools have been developed during the past years. Although these tools have achieved certain levels of specificity, when applied to large-scale allergen discovery (e.g. at a whole-genome scale), they still yield many false positives and thus low precision (even at low recall) due to the extreme skewness of the data (allergens are rare). Moreover, the most accurate tools are relatively slow because they use protein sequence alignment to build feature vectors for allergen classifiers. Additionally, only web server implementations of the current allergen prediction tools are publicly available and are without the capability of large batch submission. These weaknesses make large-scale allergen discovery ineffective and inefficient in the public domain. RESULTS We developed Allerdictor, a fast and accurate sequence-based allergen prediction tool that models protein sequences as text documents and uses support vector machine in text classification for allergen prediction. Test results on multiple highly skewed datasets demonstrated that Allerdictor predicted allergens with high precision over high recall at fast speed. For example, Allerdictor only took ∼6 min on a single core PC to scan a whole Swiss-Prot database of ∼540 000 sequences and identified <1% of them as allergens. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION Allerdictor is implemented in Python and available as standalone and web server versions at http://allerdictor.vbi.vt.edu CONTACT: lawrence@vbi.vt.edu Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Pre-miR-27a rs895819A/G Polymorphisms in Cancer: A Meta-Analysis

Background MicroRNAs (miRNAs) negatively regulate the 3′ untranslated region (3′-UTR) of coding genes by suppressing translation or degrading mRNAs, and they act as oncogenes or tumor suppressors. Recently, several studies investigated the association between pre-miR-27a rs895819 polymorphism and the risks of various cancers, but the results were inconsistent. Methodology/Principal Findings We conducted a meta-analysis of 13 studies that included 6501 cancer cases and 7571 controls to address this association. Overall, this meta-analysis showed that the pre-miR-27a rs895819 A/G polymorphism was not statistically associated with cancers risk in all genetic models. In the stratified analysis by cancer types, when compared with the ancestral A allele, individuals with the variant G allele was consistently associated with reduced risks of breast cancer (OR = 0.92, 95% CI = 0.85–0.99), renal cell cancer (OR = 0.81, 95% CI = 0.67–0.97) and nasopharyngeal cancer (OR = 0.84, 95% CI = 0.72–0.97). Inversely, individuals with the heterozygote AG was associated with an increased risk of digestive tract cancers compared with AA genotype (AG vs. AA: OR = 1.16, 95% CI = 1.01–1.32). In the stratified analysis by ethnicity, the pre-miR-27a rs895819 polymorphism showed statistically significant association with decreased risks of cancers in Caucasians (G vs. A allele: OR = 0.90, 95% CI = 0.83–0.97; AG vs. AA: OR = 0.84, 95% CI = 0.75–0.94; AG/GG vs. AA: OR = 0.85, 95% CI = 0.76–0.94) but not in Asians. Conclusion/Significance This meta-analysis suggests that the pre-miR-27a rs895819 polymorphism may contribute to the susceptibilities of some specific-type of cancers, including breast cancer, renal cell cancer, nasopharyngeal cancer and digestive tract cancers, as well as the susceptibilities of cancers in Caucasians to some extent.
Unsupervised Query Segmentation Using Monolingual Word Alignment Method

In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised approach to query segmentation using the word alignment model which is usually adopted in statistical machine translation system. Query segmentation is to obtain complete phrases or concepts in a query by segmenting a sequence of query terms, which is an important query processing procedure for improving information retrieval performance in search engines. In this work, we use a novel monolingual word alignment method to segment queries and automatically obtain the query structure in the form of multilevel segmentation. Our approach is language independent and unsupervised so that it is easy to be applied to various language scenarios. Experimental results on a real-world query dataset show that our approach outperforms the state of the art language model based method, which demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed approach in query segmentation.
Development of a metabolic biosignature for detection of early Lyme disease.

BACKGROUND Early Lyme disease patients often present to the clinic prior to developing a detectable antibody response to Borrelia burgdorferi, the etiologic agent. Thus, existing 2-tier serology-based assays yield low sensitivities (29%-40%) for early infection. The lack of an accurate laboratory test for early Lyme disease contributes to misconceptions about diagnosis and treatment, and underscores the need for new diagnostic approaches. METHODS Retrospective serum samples from patients with early Lyme disease, other diseases, and healthy controls were analyzed for small molecule metabolites by liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS). A metabolomics data workflow was applied to select a biosignature for classifying early Lyme disease and non-Lyme disease patients. A statistical model of the biosignature was trained using the patients' LC-MS data, and subsequently applied as an experimental diagnostic tool with LC-MS data from additional patient sera. The accuracy of this method was compared with standard 2-tier serology. RESULTS Metabolic biosignature development selected 95 molecular features that distinguished early Lyme disease patients from healthy controls. Statistical modeling reduced the biosignature to 44 molecular features, and correctly classified early Lyme disease patients and healthy controls with a sensitivity of 88% (84%-95%), and a specificity of 95% (90%-100%). Importantly, the metabolic biosignature correctly classified 77%-95% of the of serology negative Lyme disease patients. CONCLUSIONS The data provide proof-of-concept that metabolic profiling for early Lyme disease can achieve significantly greater (P < .0001) diagnostic sensitivity than current 2-tier serology, while retaining high specificity.
Non-Blind Structure-Preserving Substitution Watermarking of H.264/CAVLC Inter-Frames

In this work we propose a novel non-blind H.264/CAVLC structure-preserving substitution watermarking algorithm. The proposed watermarking algorithm enables extremely efficient watermark embedding by simple bit substitutions (substitution watermarking). The bit-substitutions change the motion vector differences of non-reference frames. Furthermore our watermarking algorithm can be applied in applications scenarios which require that watermarking preserves the length of the bitstream units (structure-preserving watermarking). The watermark detection works in the image domain and thus is robust to video format changes. The quality and robustness of the approach are in depth evaluated and analyzed, the quality evaluation is backed up by subjective evaluations. Comparison to the state-of-the-art indicates a superior performance of our watermarking algorithm.
Hybrid RFID-GPS Real-Time Location System for Human Resources: Development, Impacts and Perspectives

Radio frequency identification (RFID), including real-time location systems (RTLS,) and Global Positioning Systems (GPS) are technologies that have evolved considerably in the past few years. These technologies have the potential to provide a means by which organizations can follow employees in real time. However, this permanent surveillance might have unpredictable impacts on the employee and on the organization itself. We followed the systems development research process to build a hybrid RFID-GPS system, allowing for the real-time location of human resources both indoors and outdoors. We tested this system in the security service of a Canadian university and we explored the impacts on the workgroup and its employees. Our results showed that this kind of system can work in a genuine context, and that it has distinct impacts on the individual and on the organization which are usually not observed with more traditional information systems.
Augmented negative selection algorithm with variable-coverage detectors

An augmentation of negative selection algorithm is developed featuring detectors that have variable coverage. While the detectors can have different kinds of variable properties in the light of this concept, the paper mainly describes the experiments of variable-sized detectors in real-valued space. Effects of the two main control parameters, self radius and expected coverage, are discussed and experimented with both synthesized and real-world datasets. The approach improves efficiency and reliability without compromising the order of magnitude of complexity.
Brief report: Academic attainment in children with sickle cell disease.

OBJECTIVE To examine the impact of sickle cell disease (SCD) on academic attainment; the relation between academic attainment and achievement in SCD; and determinants of attainment in SCD. METHODS Children with SCD and demographically matched peers were compared on academic attainment. Hematocrit, illness frequency, cognitive ability, and socioeconomic status were used to model the predictors of attainment problems. RESULTS Attainment problems were more frequent in children with SCD (> or =31% vs. 14%). A significant number of children showed difficulties with only attainment or academic achievement. Cognitive ability was a strong predictor of both academic outcome measures. Illness-related school absences predicted academic attainment but not achievement. CONCLUSIONS Academic attainment is affected by SCD. Tests of academic achievement are meaningful predictors of functional impairments for children with SCD; however, school outcomes are best evaluated with both achievement and attainment measures.
Web-based Spatial Training Using Handheld Touch Screen Devices

This paper attempts to harness the opportunities for mobility and the new user interfaces that handheld touch screen devices offer, in a non-formal learning context, with a view to developing spatial ability. This research has addressed two objectives: first, analyzing the effects that training can have on spatial visualisation using the educational content developed for this pilot study; and second, evaluating the experience of users in the use of handheld touch screen devices and their degree of satisfaction with the on-line course proposed. Two study groups were used: an experimental group, which undergoes a one week training programme, and a control group, which does no spatial training tasks during this period. The results show a significant improvement in average spatial visualisation scores among the experimental group in comparison with the control group. Students value positively the course accomplished and they expressed their preference for these multimedia contents over the conventional pencil and paper formats, and for the on-line learning over a face to face course. They also consider that having materials of this kind available in their study programme subjects and the possibility of accessing this material at any time and in any place to be a positive aspect.
Combined Treatment with Antiviral Therapy and Rituximab in Patients with Mixed Cryoglobulinemia: Review of the Literature and Report of a Case Using Direct Antiviral Agents-Based Antihepatitis C Virus Therapy

Mixed cryoglobulinemia (MC) is an autoimmune/B-cell lymphoproliferative disorder associated with Hepatitis C Virus (HCV) infection, manifesting as a systemic vasculitis. In the last decade, antiviral treatment (AT) with pegylated interferon (Peg-IFN) plus ribavirin (RBV) was considered the first therapeutic option for HCV-MC. In MC patients ineligible or not responsive to antivirals, the anti-CD20 monoclonal antibody rituximab (RTX) is effective. A combined AT plus RTX was also suggested. Since the introduction of direct acting antivirals (DAAs), few data were published about MC and no data about a combined schedule. Here, we report a complete remission of MC after a sustained virological response following a combined RTX/Peg-IFN+RBV+DAA (boceprevir) treatment and review the literature about the combined RTX/AT.
Near-ideal electrical properties of InAs/WSe2 van der Waals heterojunction diodes

Here, we present the fabrication and electrical analysis of InAs/WSe2 van der Waals heterojunction diodes formed by the transfer of ultrathin membranes of one material upon another. Notably, InAs and WSe2 are two materials with completely different crystal structures, which heterojunction is inconceivable with traditional epitaxial growth techniques. Clear rectification from the n-InAs/p-WSe2 junction (forward/reverse current ratio >106) is observed. A low reverse bias current <10−12A/μm2 and ideality factor of ∼1.1 were achieved, suggesting near-ideal electrically active interfaces.