Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Pilot Study of Performance Practices of Twentieth-Century Musicians

This study was the initial phase of a continuing project to investigate the performance practices of twentieth-century musicians. The purpose of the study was to test and refine data-gathering techniques and to use these techniques in a preliminary investigation of the characteristics of intonation and pitch vibrato of performers of stringed instruments. Services of a number of string instrumentalists were obtained. The performers were gathered in groups of like instruments. Each performer was asked to perform, for recording purposes, a selected musical passage—initially as a solo performer and then as a member of an ensemble. The recordings of each solo performance and each musician's contribution to the ensemble performance were analyzed with the aid of electronic equipment that converted the musical stimuli into a graphic representation of the performance. The results and findings of the pilot study were as follows: (1) Pitch vibrato is present in the initial attack at all tones. (2) When each performer uses vibrato, the speed of the vibrato and pitch width are the same in solo playing as in ensemble playing. (3) The pitch vibrato does not appear to be an oscillation above and below conceived pitch but appears to be an oscillation in an upward direction from conceived pitch. The conclusions offered in the pilot study require the support of additional investigations using other performers and additional musical passages.
Influence of socioeconomic conditions on air pollution adverse health effects in elderly people: an analysis of six regions in São Paulo, Brazil

Study objective: To evaluate if the effects of particulate matter (PM10) on respiratory mortality of elderly people are affected by socioeconomic status. Design: Time series studies. The daily number of elderly respiratory deaths were modelled in generalised linear Poisson regression models controlling for long term trend, weather, and day of the week, from January 1997 to December 1999, in six different regions of São Paulo City, Brazil. The regions were defined according to the proximity of air pollution monitoring stations. Three socioeconomic indicators were used: college education, monthly income, and housing. Main results: For a 10 μg/m3 increase in PM10, the percentage increase in respiratory mortality varied from 1.4% (95% CI 5.9 to 8.7) to 14.2% (95% CI 0.4 to 28.0). The overall percentage increase in the six regions was 5.4% (95% CI 2.3 to 8.6). The effect of PM10 was negatively correlated with both percentage of people with college education and high family income, and it was positively associated with the percentage of people living in slums. Conclusions: These results suggest that socioeconomic deprivation represents an effect modifier of the association between air pollution and respiratory deaths.
“We are Purified by Fire”: The Complexification of Motherhood in the Context of Migration

The paper examines the relationship between migration, the reconstruction of motherhood as identity and the transnational mothering role. The complexification of the mothering role in a transnational context is unpacked within a phenomenological approach. An in-depth thematic case study analysis of selected Zimbabwean women who had migrated to Port Elizabeth, South Africa, found that migration has implications for the ongoing identity development and relationship dynamics within the transnational family structure and further impacts on the women's perceptions of their social identity. This identity is mediated by a ‘double-othering’ as a consequence of the rejection of both the host community and her fellow Zimbabwean migrants.
Air pollution analysis using enhanced K-Means clustering algorithm for real time sensor data

Air pollution affects body organs and human systems in addition to the environment. Smart air pollution monitoring consists of wireless sensor nodes, server and a database to store the monitored data. Huge amounts of data are generated by gas sensors in air pollution monitoring system. Traditional methods are too complex to process and analyze the voluminous data. The heterogeneous data are converted into meaningful information by using data mining approaches for decision making. The K-Means algorithm is one of the frequently used clustering method in data mining for clustering massive data sets. In this paper, enhanced K-Means clustering algorithm is proposed to analyze the air pollution data. The correlation coefficient is calculated from the real time monitored pollutant datasets. The Air Quality Index (AQI) value is calculated from the correlation co-efficient to determine the air pollution level in a particular place. The proposed enhanced K-Means clustering algorithm is compared with Possibilistic Fuzzy C-Means (PFCM) clustering algorithm in terms of accuracy and execution time. Experimental results show that the proposed enhanced K-Means clustering algorithm gives AQI value in higher accuracy with less execution time for when compared to existing techniques.
Searching for faces in scrambled scenes

While much is known about how faces are recognized, little is known about how a face is first detected. Five face-detection experiments investigated how faces are localized and detected among either scrambled natural backgrounds or inverted faces. The first two experiments revealed that faces pop out among the former but must be searched for serially among the latter. Two subsequent experiments investigated what properties of a face allow for this pop-out. Colour removal or reversal, blurring, and inversion all had small effects on the visual search slope. The only transformation that reduced the parallel nature of face detection was luminance reversal. These results are considered in the light of models of face processing and systems for automatic face detection.
Streaming Potential

Summary Bioelectric charge transfer at the blood-wall interface may be a crucial factor affecting thrombosis on implant materials. The in-vitro streaming potential test technique offers a very sensitive, yet simple, means for observing this interfacial electrokinetic charge phenomena. Particular attention to test control variables is required, however, to obtain valid, comparative results. Due to the dynamic, changing nature of some surfaces on the molecular scale, reproducibility of results is subject to question and necessitates repeated runs to gain assurance of results. It is demonstrated that this method of evaluation is an extremely sensitive tool in the study of blood-surface inter-actions. Changes in streaming potentials are dramatically revealed upon introduction of minute quantities of blood protein elements and drugs affecting blood coagulation. The techniques for applying this test method to the study of thrombosis are illustrated. Streaming potential testing is a possible tool for realizing quality control in the preparation of anti-thrombogenic materials for cardiovascular implants. It may serve as a check, both on the formation of a proper surface and on the stability of this surface under physiological environment conditions.
The Voluntary Sector in a Changing Communication Environment

Debates about the sociology of news production have recently been influenced by two emerging research trends. The first has focused attention on the power of news sources to pre-structure news and current affairs, the second has addressed the influence of non-official institutions in the news creation process. Drawing on research into communication activity in the British voluntary sector, this article discusses these new trends and provides extensive empirical data on the media strategies and objectives of a large and varied collection of voluntary organizations. The discussion also relates these findings to important contextual developments that are transforming the communication environment of these non-official agencies.
Effective conditioning of female soccer players

We compared the efficacy of three physical conditioning programmes provided over a 12 week period (24 h in total) on selected anthropometric and physical fitness parameters in female soccer players. Two of the groups received physical conditioning training in accordance with speed, agility and quickness (SAQ); one group used specialized resistance and speed development SAQ equipment (equipment group; n = 12), while the other group used traditional soccer coaching equipment (non-equipment group; n = 12). A third group received their regular fitness sessions (active control group; n = 12). All three interventions decreased (P <0.001) the participants' body mass index (−3.7%) and fat percentage (−1.7%), and increased their flexibility (+14.7%) and maximal aerobic capacity ([Vdot]O2max) (+18.4%). The participants in the equipment and non-equipment conditioning groups showed significantly (P <0.005) greater benefits from their training programme than those in the active control group by performing significantly better on the sprint to fatigue (−11.6% for both the equipment and non-equipment groups versus −6.2% for the active control group), 25 m sprint (−4.4% vs −0.7%), left (−4.5% vs −1.0%) and right (−4.0% vs −1.4%) side agility, and vertical (+18.5% vs +4.8%) and horizontal (+7.7% vs +1.6%) power tests. Some of these differences in improvements in physical fitness between the equipment and non-equipment conditioning groups on the one hand and the active control group on the other hand were probably due to the specificity of the training programmes. It was concluded that SAQ training principles appear to be effective in the physical conditioning of female soccer players. Moreover, these principles can be implemented during whole team training sessions without the need for specialized SAQ equipment. Finally, more research is required to establish the relationship between physical fitness and soccer performance as well as the principles underlying the improvements seen through the implementation of SAQ training programmes.
Cost-effectiveness of amlodipine compared with valsartan in preventing stroke and myocardial infarction among hypertensive patients in Taiwan

Hypertension is a major risk factor for strokes and myocardial infarction (MI). Given its effectiveness and safety profile, the calcium channel blocker amlodipine is among the most frequently prescribed antihypertensive drugs. This analysis was conducted to determine the costs and quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) associated with the use of amlodipine and valsartan, an angiotensin II receptor blocker, in preventing stroke and MI in Taiwanese hypertensive patients. A state transition (Markov) model was developed to compare the 5-year costs and QALYs for amlodipine and valsartan. Effectiveness data were based on the NAGOYA HEART Study, local studies, and a published meta-analysis. Utility data and costs of MI and stroke were retrieved from the published literature. Medical costs were based on the literature and inflated to 2011 prices; drug costs were based on National Health Insurance prices in 2014. A 3% discount rate was used for costs and QALYs and a third-party payer perspective adopted. One-way sensitivity and scenario analyses were conducted. Compared with valsartan, amlodipine was associated with cost savings of New Taiwan Dollars (NTD) 2,251 per patient per year: costs were NTD 4,296 and NTD 6,547 per patient per year for amlodipine and valsartan users, respectively. Fewer cardiovascular events were reported in patients receiving amlodipine versus valsartan (342 vs 413 per 10,000 patients over 5 years, respectively). Amlodipine had a net gain of 58 QALYs versus valsartan per 10,000 patients over 5 years. Sensitivity analyses showed that the discount rate and cohort age had a larger effect on total cost and cost difference than on QALYs. However, amlodipine results were more favorable than valsartan irrespective of discount rate or cohort age. When administered to Taiwanese patients for hypertension control, amlodipine was associated with lower cost and more QALYs compared with valsartan due to a lower risk of stroke and MI events.
Characterization of a Novel Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1 Protease Inhibitor, A-790742

ABSTRACT A-790742 is a potent human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) protease inhibitor, with 50% effective concentrations ranging from 2 to 7 nM against wild-type HIV-1. The activity of this compound is lowered by approximately sevenfold in the presence of 50% human serum. A-790742 maintained potent antiviral activity against lopinavir-resistant variants generated in vitro as well as against a panel of molecular clones containing proteases derived from HIV-1 patient isolates with multiple protease mutations. During in vitro selection, A-790742 selected two primary mutations (V82L and I84V) along with L23I, L33F, K45I, A71V/A, and V77I in the pNL4-3 background and two other mutations (A71V and V82G) accompanied by M46I and L63P in the HIV-1 RF background. HIV-1 pNL4-3 clones with a single V82L or I84V mutation were phenotypically resistant to A-790742 and ritonavir. Taking these results together, A-790742 displays a favorable anti-HIV-1 profile against both the wild type and a large number of mutants resistant to other protease inhibitors. The selection of the uncommon V82L and V82G mutations in protease by A-790742 suggests the potential for an advantageous resistance profile with this protease inhibitor.
Visualizing web search results using glyphs: Design and evaluation of a flower metaphor

While the Web provides a lot of useful information to managers and decision makers in organizations for decision support, it requires a lot of time and cognitive effort for users to sift through a search result list returned by search engines to find useful information. Previous research in information visualization has shown that visualization techniques can help users comprehend information and accomplish information tasks more efficiently and effectively. However, only a limited number of such techniques have been applied to Web search result visualization with mixed evaluation results. Using a design science approach, this research designed and implemented a glyph (a graphical object that represents the values of multiple dimensions using multiple visual parameters) and a system for visualizing Web search results. A flower metaphor was adopted in the glyph design to represent the characteristics and metadata of Web documents. Following the cognitive fit theory, an experimental study was conducted to evaluate three displays: a numeric display, a glyph display, and a combined display which showed numbers only, glyphs only, and both, respectively. Experimental results showed that the glyph display and the combined display performed better when task complexity was high, and the numeric display and the combined display performed better when task complexity was low. The combined display also received the best perceived usability from the subjects. Based on the findings, the implications of the study to research and practice are discussed and some future research directions are suggested.
Untangling the relationship between gender and leadership

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to empirically explore the perceptions of leader effectiveness and preference on gender and leadership style. Design/methodology/approach – The interaction between authoritarian and participative leadership style and gender roles was examined for effectiveness and preference using video samples of dramatized leaders. Findings – The results showed that although subjects found participatory leaders to be more effective and also preferred such a style over authoritarian leaders, male leaders were rated to be more effective and more preferred over female leaders. Women leaders who go against their gender stereotype were perceived as even less effective and less preferred than male leaders who exhibited the same style that was identified as a more masculine style. Research limitations/implications – The results suggest that women leaders continue to face challenges overcoming both sexual bias and stereotypes. Women leaders, regardless of style, face an uphill battle in terms of perceptions of effectiveness and preference regardless of who their followers might be. In addition, women leaders who go against the typical gender stereotype might be penalized even more. Practical implications – Despite making progress on gender equity, the study demonstrated the continuing existence of sexual stereotyping and bias in people’s perceptions, even with “younger” subjects. Thus, we need to maintain our focus on actively changing the rules of the workplace (e.g. a recent Harvard Business School experiment) and changing the status quo. Until we level the playing field, we need to continue to play an active role in creating an organizational culture and shaping an environment that is fair and equitable. Originality/value – This paper highlights the current status of gender bias and stereotyping using an innovative methodology of video case studies. The results also highlight the persistence of gender bias and stereotype even in a “neutral” setting with the younger subjects. In addition, the paper empirically demonstrates the double standards women often face in the workplace. Women leaders have often been expected to demonstrate more masculine traits at workplace (as exhibited by the authoritarian style), but when they do, they are penalized for acting out of their gender role.
Current status of operations research/management science education at the United Arab Emirates business schools

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate current status of operations research/management science education at the United Arab Emirates (UAE) business schools in terms of the position of operational research/management science (OR/MS) course in the curriculum, the title assigned to this course, its objectives, contents, teaching methods, text‐books used, assessment methods, and pre‐requisites.Design/methodology/approach – Owing to the nature of this paper (exploratory), and the data collected (non‐numerical) this paper has adopted qualitative approach to analyze the collected data.Findings – Results reveal that all business schools offering this course offer only one OR/MS course. Results also show that OR/MS course is a business core course in the majority of schools offering this course. It is also found that different titles are assigned to this course at different business schools offering this course. Furthermore, results indicate that the main teaching mode used in this course is lectur.
Lactation and Stress: Protective Effects of Breast-feeding in Humans

Whilst most research on breast-feeding has been designed to assess its importance for infant health or to find a human nutrient replacement for infant formula, the effects of breast-feeding on maternal health have received little scientific attention. In several animal studies lactation has been shown to be associated with a marked blunting of physiological and behavioral responses to physical and psychological stress. However, the literature on the effects of lactation on stress in humans remains limited. This review focuses primarily on recent findings on the effects of breast-feeding on neuroendocrine and behavioral responses to acute stress exposure in lactating women. The available data suggest that breast-feeding suppresses the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis response to physical and psychosocial stress. However, lactation in women, in contrast to lactating rats, does not seem to result in a general restraint of the endocrine stress response during the whole period of lactation. Recent data strongly suggest that the blunted HPA axis response to stress in women seems to be counterbalanced if the acute stressor, at least when of a psychosocial nature, occurs later than 1 h after suckling. Further elucidation of the underlying psychobiological mechanisms involved in suppressed stress responses during lactation will no doubt lead to new insights into improved health sequelae of breast-feeding in women and to a better understanding of the psychobiology of human stress protection in general.
Global Optimization of RBF Networks

Several modifications to parameter estimation in a Radial Basis Functions network are introduced. These include a better initializing clustering algorithm and a full gradient descent on centers and weights after weights were found via a matrix inversion. Performance comparison with other RBF algorithms is given on several data-sets. It is found that The proposed method was found superior to Bishop’s EM training algorithm, to Orr’s method [1] for as well as a conventional implementation.
Social Capital Among Women Offenders

Studies investigating the trials and tribulations of women offenders in the United States are becoming increasingly common. One theme in the literature is that successful reentry of women offenders is dependent on support of social networks. Generally, social theorists posit that a variety of positive outcomes is associated with healthy social networks. For example, networks provide social structural resources (“social capital”), which in turn promote acquisition of skills and knowledge (“human capital”) to achieve goals that would otherwise be unattainable. This article investigates the differential distribution of social networks in terms of size and resources (i.e., support) across social groupings (e.g., race, age) using a sample of adult female felons. The results show that (a) better educated and higher income offenders are members of larger social networks, and (b) poorly educated women offenders, women with annual legal incomes below $8,000, and younger offenders have access to lower levels of support.
Compressed sensing of ultrasound images: Sampling of spatial and frequency domains

This paper proposes a comparison between an established (used in magnetic resonance imaging) and a innovative compressed sensing (CS) approach, both adapted to ultrasound (US) imaging. Two undersampling patterns suited to US imaging were investigated in each approach on simulated and in vivo radio-frequency US images. Reconstructions of simulated and in vivo US images using CS show minimal information loss. The best strategy (minimising the errors of reconstruction) was a uniform random sampling in the two directions of the spatial RF US image associated with the reconstruction of its k-space.
Parallel symbolic execution for structural test generation

Symbolic execution is a popular technique for automatically generating test cases achieving high structural coverage. Symbolic execution suffers from scalability issues since the number of symbolic paths that need to be explored is very large (or even infinite) for most realistic programs. To address this problem, we propose a technique, Simple Static Partitioning, for parallelizing symbolic execution. The technique uses a set of pre-conditions to partition the symbolic execution tree, allowing us to effectively distribute symbolic execution and decrease the time needed to explore the symbolic execution tree. The proposed technique requires little communication between parallel instances and is designed to work with a variety of architectures, ranging from fast multi-core machines to cloud or grid computing environments. We implement our technique in the Java PathFinder verification tool-set and evaluate it on six case studies with respect to the performance improvement when exploring a finite symbolic execution tree and performing automatic test generation. We demonstrate speedup in both the analysis time over finite symbolic execution trees and in the time required to generate tests relative to sequential execution, with a maximum analysis time speedup of 90x observed using 128 workers and a maximum test generation speedup of 70x observed using 64 workers.