Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Aerobic Exercise Training Improves Orthostatic Tolerance in Aging Humans

Purpose This study was designed to test the hypothesis that aerobic exercise training of the elderly will increase aerobic fitness without compromising orthostatic tolerance (OT). Methods Eight healthy sedentary volunteers (67.0 ± 1.7 yr old, four women) participated in 1 yr of endurance exercise training (stationary bicycle and/or treadmill) program at the individuals' 65%–75% of HRpeak. Peak O2 uptake (V˙O2peak) and HRpeak were determined by a maximal exercise stress test using a bicycle ergometer. Carotid baroreceptor reflex (CBR) control of HR and mean arterial pressure (MAP) were assessed by a neck pressure–neck suction protocol. Each subject's maximal gain (Gmax), or sensitivity, of the CBR function curves were derived from fitting their reflex HR and MAP responses to the corresponding neck pressure–neck suction stimuli using a logistic function curve. The subjects' OT was assessed using lower-body negative pressure (LBNP) graded to −50 mm Hg; the sum of the product of LBNP intensity and time (mm Hg·min−1) was calculated as the cumulative stress index. Results Training increased V˙O2peak (before vs after: 22.8 ± 0.92 vs 27.9 ± 1.33 mL·min−1·kg−1, P < 0.01) and HRpeak (154 ± 4 vs 159 ± 3 bpm, P < 0.02) and decreased resting HR (65 ± 5 vs 59 ± 5 bpm, P < 0.02) and MAP (99 ± 2 vs 87 ± 2 mm Hg, P < 0.05). CBR stimulus–response curves identified a leftward shift with an increase in CBR-HR Gmax (from −0.13 ± 0.02 to −0.27 ± 0.04 bpm·mm Hg−1, P = 0.01). Cumulative stress index was increased from 767 ± 68 mm Hg·min−1 pretraining to 946 ± 44 mm Hg·min−1 posttraining (P < 0.05). Conclusion Aerobic exercise training improved the aerobic fitness and OT in elderly subjects. An improved OT is likely associated with an enhanced CBR function that has been reset to better maintain cerebral perfusion and cerebral tissue oxygenation during LBNP.
Comparison of Measures of Maximal and Submaximal Fitness in Response to Exercise

Introduction Adoption of physical activity (PA) consistent with current guidelines does not improve maximal cardiorespiratory fitness (mCRF; V˙O2peak) beyond the error of measurement for approximately 30% of adults. Whether PA improves measures of exercise tolerance at submaximal levels (submaximal cardiorespiratory fitness [sCRF]) independent of change in mCRF is unknown. Here we assessed the relationship between exercise-induced changes in mCRF and sCRF. Methods Twenty-five physically inactive men 30–60 yrs old (mean ± SD = 44.3 ± 9.1 yr) completed 4 wk of supervised exercise consisting of 30 min of exercise, five times per week at 65% mCRF. mCRF was assessed using a maximal treadmill test. sCRF was measured as follows: 1) exercise tolerance, the distance traveled during a 12-min time trial on a treadmill, and 2) change in heart rate (HR) at submaximal work rates during the maximal treadmill test. Daily PA was measured by accelerometry at baseline and 4 wk. Results mCRF (P = 0.009) and both measures of sCRF (P < 0.001) improved at 4 wk. No change in measures of daily PA was observed at 4-wk compared with baseline (P > 0.05). No association was observed between exercise-induced change in mCRF and change in either measure of sCRF (P > 0.05) after exercise training. In the group of participants who did not improve mCRF beyond the measurement error (n = 13, or 52%), we observed a significant improvement in both measures of sCRF (P < 0.001). Among these 13 individuals, all improved in at least one measure of sCRF. Conclusion Exercise-induced improvements in mCRF were not associated with improvements in either measure of sCRF. Improvements in submaximal measures of cardiorespiratory fitness are observed in the absence of change in mCRF. Measures of sCRF capture peripheral adaptations to exercise not captured by measures of mCRF alone.
Applying planning to interactive storytelling: Narrative control using state constraints

We have seen ten years of the application of AI planning to the problem of narrative generation in Interactive Storytelling (IS). In that time planning has emerged as the dominant technology and has featured in a number of prototype systems. Nevertheless key issues remain, such as how best to control the shape of the narrative that is generated (e.g., by using narrative control knowledge, i.e., knowledge about narrative features that enhance user experience) and also how best to provide support for real-time interactive performance in order to scale up to more realistic sized systems. Recent progress in planning technology has opened up new avenues for IS and we have developed a novel approach to narrative generation that builds on this. Our approach is to specify narrative control knowledge for a given story world using state trajectory constraints and then to treat these state constraints as landmarks and to use them to decompose narrative generation in order to address scalability issues and the goal of real-time performance in larger story domains. This approach to narrative generation is fully implemented in an interactive narrative based on the “Merchant of Venice. ” The contribution of the work lies both in our novel use of state constraints to specify narrative control knowledge for interactive storytelling and also our development of an approach to narrative generation that exploits such constraints. In the article we show how the use of state constraints can provide a unified perspective on important problems faced in IS.
Object-Oriented Languages

Many of the most popular languages today are object-oriented (hereafter abbreviated as OO). Thus, it is important to understand how they work so that we can use them more effectively. This document describes the basic ideas and concepts behind OO languages, using Java as an example language in the family. These notes are, of course, also applicable to other statically (or mostly statically) typed object-oriented languages such as C++ or Modula-3. Dynamically-typed object-oriented languages, such as Smalltalk, are somewhat different and are not discussed in this chapter. To understand OO languages we need to understand five main concepts: classes, inheritance, overriding, subtyping, and dynamic dispatch. We now discuss each of these in turn. 1.1. Classes and ADT Classes are a mechanism for expressing abstract-data types (ADTs) in object-oriented languages. An ADT groups together data with the operations on the data. For example, the following class, called Point0, groups together the data needed to represent a point in two-dimensional space with the operations on it: A class, such as Point0, looks a lot like a record (or struct in C/C++ terminology) except that it also has operations in it which records typically do not have. You can think Point0 as being a blueprint: it describes the properties of all instances of Point0. One can create an instance of a class by using a creation operation (e.g., new Point0() in Java/C++-like syntax). Instances of class Point0 are often called objects of class Point0. Each instance has a unique name, called its identity. You can think of the identity as being analogous to a social security number: each person in the US has a unique social security number. Different languages implement object identity differently. Some languages, such as C++, use the memory address of an instance as its identity. Java does not use the memory address of an instance as its identity since the memory address of an instance might change if the garbage collector moves the instance. Instead, Java uses a more abstract notion that it calls a reference. Each instance of Point0 has its own private copy of the two instance variables x and y. Instance variables are analogous to fields. Object-oriented languages prefer to use the term " instance variables " instead of " fields " because " instance variables " is more explicit: an instance variable is a variable belonging to an instance of the class.
Breast Cancer and Race: A Rising Tide Does Not Lift All Boats Equally

African American women have a lower overall incidence of breast cancer but a higher overall mortality than do white women. African American women with breast cancer present for medical care at an earlier age, with more advanced stage disease, and with higher-risk tumor biology. While the advanced stage at presentation and higher-risk tumor biology appear to account for much of the excess mortality in African American women, differences persist even after controlling for these factors. This paper discusses the factors that may contribute to differences in survival and differences in stage at diagnosis between African American and white women.
Physical Activity Assessment with the ActiGraph GT3X and Doubly Labeled Water

Purpose To compare the degree to which four accelerometer metrics—total activity counts per day (TAC per day), steps per day (steps per day), physical activity energy expenditure (PAEE) (kcal·kg−1·d−1), and moderate- to vigorous-intensity physical activity (MVPA) (min·d−1)—were correlated with PAEE measured by doubly labeled water (DLW). Additionally, accelerometer metrics based on vertical axis counts and triaxial counts were compared. Methods This analysis included 684 women and 611 men age 43 to 83 yr. Participants wore the Actigraph GT3X on the hip for 7 d twice during the study and the average of the two measurements was used. Each participant also completed one DLW measurement, with a subset having a repeat. PAEE was estimated by subtracting resting metabolic rate and the thermic effect of food from total daily energy expenditure estimated by DLW. Partial Spearman correlations were used to estimate associations between PAEE and each accelerometer metric. Results Correlations between the accelerometer metrics and DLW-determined PAEE were higher for triaxial counts than vertical axis counts. After adjusting for weight, age, accelerometer wear time, and fat free mass, the correlation between TAC per day based on triaxial counts and DLW-determined PAEE was 0.44 in women and 0.41 in men. Correlations for steps per day and accelerometer-estimated PAEE with DLW-determined PAEE were similar. After adjustment for within-person variation in DLW-determined PAEE, the correlations for TAC per day increased to 0.61 and 0.49, respectively. Correlations between MVPA and DLW-determined PAEE were lower, particularly for modified bouts of ≥10 min. Conclusions Accelerometer measures that represent total activity volume, including TAC per day, steps per day, and PAEE, were more highly correlated with DLW-determined PAEE than MVPA using traditional thresholds and should be considered by researchers seeking to reduce accelerometer data to a single metric.
Set cover algorithms for very large datasets

The problem of Set Cover - to find the smallest subcollection of sets that covers some universe - is at the heart of many data and analysis tasks. It arises in a wide range of settings, including operations research, machine learning, planning, data quality and data mining. Although finding an optimal solution is NP-hard, the greedy algorithm is widely used, and typically finds solutions that are close to optimal. However, a direct implementation of the greedy approach, which picks the set with the largest number of uncovered items at each step, does not behave well when the input is very large and disk resident. The greedy algorithm must make many random accesses to disk, which are unpredictable and costly in comparison to linear scans. In order to scale Set Cover to large datasets, we provide a new algorithm which finds a solution that is provably close to that of greedy, but which is much more efficient to implement using modern disk technology. Our experiments show a ten-fold improvement in speed on moderately-sized datasets, and an even greater improvement on larger datasets.
PRIMARY TUBERCULOSIS OF THE PENIS IN A RENAL TRANSPLANT PATIENT

Background: Extrapulmonary tuberculosis is a complication of pulmonary tuberculosis that is disseminated through hematogenous or lymphatic system and may involve any organs. We present a case of primary tuberculosis of the penis that is a very rare presentation of tuberculosis. Patient: The patient was a 43-year-old man who had kidney transplantation. He admitted with painful ulceration on the glans of penis. Physical examination strongly suggested ulcer lesion that resemble to carcinoma or herpetic ulcer. He did not have any evidence of pulmonary tuberculosis. Having received empiric treatment against herpetic, bacterial and fungal infection, his condition did not improve and he was ordered biopsy of the lesion. Histopathologic studies and PCR revealed Mycobacterium tuberculosis, thus, anti-TB drugs were commenced. The ulcer was improved without any recurrence during a two-year follow up. Conclusion: In patients with kidney transplantation especially in countries endemic for Mycobacterium tuberculosis, chronic ulcer not responding to empiric therapy should be evaluated for Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection.
Television Viewing Time and Inflammatory-Related Mortality

Purpose Television (TV) viewing time is associated with increased risk of all-cause, cardiovascular and cancer mortality. Although TV time is detrimentally associated with key inflammatory markers, the associations of TV time with other inflammatory-related mortality (with a predominant inflammatory, oxidative or infectious component, but not attributable to cancer or cardiovascular causes), are unknown. Methods Among 8933 Australian adults (4593 never-smokers) from the baseline (1999–2000) Australian Diabetes, Obesity and Lifestyle Study (median follow-up, 13.6 yr), we examined TV time in relation to noninflammatory and inflammatory-related mortality (not attributable to cancer or cardiovascular causes, hereafter “inflammatory-related” mortality). Because smoking has a significant inflammatory component, we also examined this relationship in never-smokers. Results Of 896 deaths, 248 were attributable to cardiovascular disease, 346 to cancer, 130 to other inflammatory-related causes (71 for never-smokers), and 172 to noninflammatory-related causes (87 for never-smokers). After multivariate adjustment for age, sex, education, household income, smoking status, alcohol intake, energy intake, diet, and cardiometabolic risk biomarkers (model 3), every additional hours per day of TV time was associated with increased risk of inflammatory-related mortality in the overall population (hazard ratio, 1.12; 95% confidence interval, 1.00–1.25) and in never-smokers (1.18; 1.00, 1.40). These results were attenuated after additional adjustment for leisure-time physical activity. After multivariate adjustment (model 3), no association was observed for noninflammatory mortality in the overall population (0.95; 0.85, 1.07), but risk tended to decrease for never-smokers (0.85; 0.75, 1.02). Conclusions In summary, before adjustment for leisure-time physical activity, TV time was associated with increased risk of inflammatory-related mortality. This is consistent with the hypothesis that high TV viewing may be associated with a chronic inflammatory state.
Collaborative future event recommendation

We demonstrate a method for collaborative ranking of future events. Previous work on recommender systems typically relies on feedback on a particular item, such as a movie, and generalizes this to other items or other people. In contrast, we examine a setting where no feedback exists on the particular item. Because direct feedback does not exist for events that have not taken place, we recommend them based on individuals' preferences for past events, combined collaboratively with other peoples' likes and dislikes. We examine the topic of unseen item recommendation through a user study of academic (scientific) talk recommendation, where we aim to correctly estimate a ranking function for each user, predicting which talks would be of most interest to them. Then by decomposing user parameters into shared and individual dimensions, we induce a similarity metric between users based on the degree to which they share these dimensions. We show that the collaborative ranking predictions of future events are more effective than pure content-based recommendation. Finally, to further reduce the need for explicit user feedback, we suggest an active learning approach for eliciting feedback and a method for incorporating available implicit user cues.
Pulmonary Vascular Function and Aerobic Exercise Capacityat Moderate Altitude.

PURPOSE There has been suggestion that a greater "pulmonary vascular reserve" defined by a low pulmonary vascular resistance (PVR) and a high lung diffusing capacity (DL) allows for a superior aerobic exercise capacity. How pulmonary vascular reserve might affect exercise capacity at moderate altitude is not known. METHODS Thirty-eight healthy subjects underwent an exercise stress echocardiography of the pulmonary circulation, combined with measurements of DL for nitric oxide (NO) and carbon monoxide (CO) and a cardio-pulmonary exercise test at sea level and at the altitude of 2250m. RESULTS At rest, moderate altitude decreased arterial oxygen content (CaO2) from 19.1±1.6 to 18.4±1.7 ml/dl, p<0.001 and slightly increased PVR, DLNO and DLCO. Exercise at moderate altitude was associated with decreases in maximum O2 uptake (VO2max), from 51±9 to 43±8 ml/kg/min, p<0.001 and CaO2 to 16.5±1.7 ml/dl, p<0.001 but no different cardiac output, PVR and pulmonary vascular distensibility. DLNO was inversely correlated to the ventilatory equivalent of CO2 (VE/VCO2) at sea level and at moderate altitude. Independent determinants of VO2max as determined by a multivariable analysis were the slope of mean pulmonary artery pressure-cardiac output relationship, resting stroke volume and resting DLNO at sea level as well as at moderate altitude. The magnitude of the decrease in VO2max at moderate altitude was independently predicted by more pronounced exercise-induced decrease in CaO2 at moderate altitude. CONCLUSION Aerobic exercise capacity is similarly modulated by pulmonary vascular reserve at moderate altitude and at sea level. Decreased aerobic exercise capacity at moderate altitude is mainly explained by exercise-induced decrease in arterial oxygenation.
Fitness Moderates Glycemic Responses to Sitting and Light Activity Breaks

Purpose This study aimed to experimentally determine whether cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF) modifies postprandial glycemia during prolonged sitting and investigated the potentially blunting influence this may have on the benefits of interrupting postprandial sitting time with light activity breaks. Methods Thirty-four adults (18 women; 16 men; mean ± SD age, 40 ± 9 yr, body mass index, 24.5 ± 3 kg·m−2) undertook two 7.5-h experimental conditions in a randomized order: 1) Prolonged sitting; 2) Sitting interspersed with 5 min light walking bouts every 30 min. Blood samples were obtained while fasting and postprandially after ingestion of two identical meals. Incremental area under the curve (iAUC) was calculated for glucose and insulin throughout experimental conditions. Maximal exercise testing quantified peak oxygen consumption (V˙O2 peak) as a measure of CRF. A repeated-measures ANOVA investigated whether V˙O2 peak modified glucose and insulin iAUC between conditions. Results Breaking sedentary time with light walking breaks reduced blood glucose iAUC from 3.89 ± 0.7 to 2.51 ± 0.7 mmol·L−1·h−1 (P = 0.015) and insulin iAUC from 241 ± 46 to 156 ± 24 mU·L−1·h−1 (P = 0.013) after adjustment for V˙O2 peak and sex. A significant interaction between treatment response and V˙O2 peak was observed for glucose (P = 0.035), but not insulin (P = 0.062), whereby the treatment effect reduced with higher CRF. Average blood glucose iAUC responses for a man at the 25th centile of CRF within our cohort (42.5 mL·kg−1·min−1) went from 5.80 to 2.98 mmol·L−1·h−1 during the prolonged sitting and light walking break conditions respectively, whereas average responses for a man at the 75th centile of CRF (60.5 mL·kg−1·min−1) went from 1.99 to 1.78 mmol·L−1·h−1. Similar trends were observed for women. Conclusions Individuals with low CRF gained the most metabolic benefit from breaking prolonged sitting with regular bouts of light walking.
Discovering users' topics of interest on twitter: a first look

Twitter, a micro-blogging service, provides users with a framework for writing brief, often-noisy postings about their lives. These posts are called "Tweets. " In this paper we present early results on discovering Twitter users' topics of interest by examining the entities they mention in their Tweets. Our approach leverages a knowledge base to disambiguate and categorize the entities in the Tweets. We then develop a "topic profile," which characterizes users' topics of interest, by discerning which categories appear frequently and cover the entities. We demonstrate that even in this early work we are able to successfully discover the main topics of interest for the users in our study.
Age Modulates Physiological Responses during Fan Use under Extreme Heat and Humidity

Purpose We examined the effect of electric fan use on cardiovascular and thermoregulatory responses of nine young (26 ± 3 yr) and nine aged (68 ± 4 yr) adults exposed to extreme heat and humidity. Methods While resting at a temperature of 42°C, relative humidity increased from 30% to 70% in 2% increments every 5 min. On randomized days, the protocol was repeated without or with fan use. HR, core (Tcore) and mean skin (Tsk) temperatures were measured continuously. Whole-body sweat loss was measured from changes in nude body weight. Other measures of cardiovascular (cardiac output), thermoregulatory (local cutaneous and forearm vascular conductance, local sweat rate), and perceptual (thermal and thirst sensations) responses were also examined. Results When averaged over the entire protocol, fan use resulted in a small reduction of HR (−2 bpm, 95% confidence interval [CI], −8 to 3), and slightly greater Tcore (+0.05°C; 95% CI, −0.13 to 0.23) and Tsk (+0.03°C; 95% CI, −0.36 to 0.42) in young adults. In contrast, fan use resulted in greater HR (+5 bpm; 95% CI, 0–10), Tcore (+0.20°C; 95% CI, 0.00–0.41), and Tsk (+0.47°C; 95% CI, 0.18–0.76) in aged adults. A greater whole-body sweat loss during fan use was observed in young (+0.2 kg; 95% CI, −0.2 to 0.6) but not aged (0.0 kg; 95% CI, −0.2 to 0.2) adults. Greater local sweat rate and cutaneous vascular conductance were observed with fan use in aged adults. Other measures of cardiovascular, thermoregulatory, and perceptual responses were unaffected by fan use in both groups. Conclusions During extreme heat and humidity, fan use elevates physiological strain in aged, but not young, adults.