Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Task but not arm restriction influences lower extremity joint mechanics during bilateral landings

ABSTRACT Box and jump landing tasks are commonly used to study lower extremity injury mechanisms, such as anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injuries. Arm restriction during these tasks is typically determined via researcher preference. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to compare three-dimensional lower extremity kinematics and kinetics during bilateral box and jump landings, and to determine the effects of arm restriction. Twenty-eight participants (14 males, 14 females) completed three bilateral landings tasks: box landings with arms unrestricted (BLA), box landings with arms restricted against the trunk (BLNA) and jump landings (JL). Right leg joint kinematics and kinetics were collected and compared between landing tasks. No statistically significant differences were found between BLA and BLNA, therefore arm restriction did not appear to influence lower extremity variables during bilateral box landings. However, specific injury-related variables, such as peak knee adduction moment differed between box and jump landings (BLNA: 0.31 ± 0.3 Nm/(kg·m)); JL: 0.45 ± 0.3 Nm/(kg·m); p = 0.020). Our results suggest that based on study purpose, careful consideration is needed when determining what bilateral landing task to choose during data collection.
A Microfluidic Deformability Assessment of Pathological Red Blood Cells Flowing in a Hyperbolic Converging Microchannel

The loss of the red blood cells (RBCs) deformability is related with many human diseases, such as malaria, hereditary spherocytosis, sickle cell disease, or renal diseases. Hence, during the last years, a variety of technologies have been proposed to gain insights into the factors affecting the RBCs deformability and their possible direct association with several blood pathologies. In this work, we present a simple microfluidic tool that provides the assessment of motions and deformations of RBCs of end-stage kidney disease (ESKD) patients, under a well-controlled microenvironment. All of the flow studies were performed within a hyperbolic converging microchannels where single-cell deformability was assessed under a controlled homogeneous extensional flow field. By using a passive microfluidic device, RBCs passing through a hyperbolic-shaped contraction were measured by a high-speed video microscopy system, and the velocities and deformability ratios (DR) calculated. Blood samples from 27 individuals, including seven healthy controls and 20 having ESKD with or without diabetes, were analysed. The obtained data indicates that the proposed device is able to detect changes in DR of the RBCs, allowing for distinguishing the samples from the healthy controls and the patients. Overall, the deformability of ESKD patients with and without diabetes type II is lower in comparison with the RBCs from the healthy controls, with this difference being more evident for the group of ESKD patients with diabetes. RBCs from ESKD patients without diabetes elongate on average 8% less, within the hyperbolic contraction, as compared to healthy controls; whereas, RBCs from ESKD patients with diabetes elongate on average 14% less than the healthy controls. The proposed strategy can be easily transformed into a simple and inexpensive diagnostic microfluidic system to assess blood cells deformability due to the huge progress in image processing and high-speed microvisualization technology.
Uric acid and sphingomyelin enhance autophagy in iPS cell-originated cardiomyocytes through lncRNA MEG3/miR-7-5p/EGFR axis

Abstract This study aimed to determine the metabolites associated with ventricular septal defect (VSD) and the underlying mechanisms. Blood samples and thymus tissues were collected from VSD patients to perform LC-MS-based metabolomics assay and generate iPS cell-derived cardiomyocytes, respectively. VSD rat model was used in vivo study. RT-PCR, western blotting, immunohistochemistry, luciferase activity assay, GFP-LC3 adenovirus and GFP and RFP tfLC3 assay, and transmission electron microscopy were performed to investigate the underlying mechanisms. The metabolites uric acid (UA) and sphingomyelin (SM) increased in the serum of VSD patients, along with enhanced autophagy. The combination of UA and SM treatment could promote autophagy and inhibit EGFR and AKT3 expressions. Overexpression of EGFR and AKT3 suppressed autophagy in UA and SM-treated cardiomyocytes, respectively. Also, lncRNA MEG3 knockdown and overexpression could enhance and inhibit autophagy in UA and SM-treated cardiomyocytes, respectively, through targeting miR-7-5p. Moreover, miR-7-5p mimics and inhibitors promoted and inhibited autophagy in UA and SM-treated cardiomyocytes, respectively, via target EGFR. In VSD rat model, upregulation of MEG3 could reverse high level of autophagy and decrease serum UA and SM. In conclusion, UA and SM are essential VSD-associated metabolic biomarkers and MEG3/miR-7-5p/EGFR axis is critical to the regulation of autophagy in cardiomyocytes.
DC Marine Power System: Transient Behavior and Fault Management Aspects

DC marine vessels with medium-voltage compact dc power systems are dominated by a significant amount of active loads and a finite number of generation sources. In such scenarios, the network configuration of the dc power system is expected to get dynamically altered to fulfill the required generation and load demands for the desired marine mission. Such varying network configurations make the transient responses significantly different from the conventional ac grids and the prospective dc grids. In this regard, this paper performs systematic transient studies to devise fault management strategies for the dc marine vessels. A platform supply vessel (PSV) is taken as an example of the marine vessel, due to its complex operating scenarios and wider applicability in the marine industry. Pole-to-pole short-circuit faults are considered owing to its severity. A novel current-only directional protection for the dc PSV is proposed based on the directional zonal interlocking and short-time Fourier transform. The efficacy of the proposed method is substantiated by confirming against a range of fault impedances initiated at the generator terminals, load terminals, lines, and buses of the dc PSV. All the analyses are conducted in the real-time simulation model of the dc PSV.
Evaluating the role of gamification and flow in e-consumers: millennials versus generation X

Purpose This research has three main objectives. First, it examines influence of gamification on the behavioral intention to use an e-commerce platform. Second, it analyzes the role of the flow state given its importance in terms of behavior in online environments. Finally, the study aims to detect and analyze differences between Millennials and Generation X. Design/methodology/approach The theoretical basis for this study stems from technology acceptance model. The extended model incorporates gamification and the optimal state of intrinsic motivation, flow state, as additional constructs. An online consumer panel was used to collect data from 253 Spanish Amazon users. A structural equation modeling, partial least squares, is proposed and multi-group moderation was studied. Findings Gamification in Millennials has positive and significant indirect effects on behavioral intention through the flow state. In the case of the Generation X, it has been detected that flow interferes in its perception of ease of use. The behavioral intention of using the Web page is directly correlated with the purchase intention. Companies should offer a fun interface to Millennials and an environment easier to use to the Generation X, for gamification to be successful. Originality/value This study expands the research scope in gamification by focusing on e-commerce sector, a field where scientific research is still scarcely developed. It emphasizes the importance of flow as mediator. Age differences confirm the need for segmentation when applying gamification and marketing strategies in e-commerce.
Title : EVALUATION OF THE STRAY LOAD LOSSES FOR A THREE-PHASE iNDUCTION

approved: K. Wallace The evaluation of the stray-load losses in induction motors is an important part of the efficiency estimation process. However, stray-load losses have several components which are difficult to isolate and calculate. Consequently, they are more readily determined by test. IEEE Standard 112-1996 recommends the testing of electrical induction motors at a rated mode (nominal frequency and voltage). Thus, the iEEE 112 test does not provide us with information about the motor efficiency and stray load losses at supply frequencies which are different from the rated value. At the same time, this information is very important for the correct evaluation of the efficiency of the motors, controlled by the Adjustable Speed Drives (ASDs). This work is dedicated to the investigation of the relation between the motor efficiency, stray-load loss and the supply frequency. The voltages to be applied for the specific values of the frequency were chosen to keep the value of the relative slip constant at 100 % load torque. After performing the series of load tests, it was found that the SLL is proportional to the square of the load and the dependency between SLL and frequency for different load levels is close to linear. The comparison of the efficiency values obtained by the methods IEEE 112 B and 112 E has shown a good correlation of the results. Redacted for Privacy
Impact of pre-Columbian 'geoglyph' builders on Amazonian forests

The Atlantic Ocean is known to have higher sea surface salinity than the Paciﬁc Ocean at all latitudes. This is thought to be associated with the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation and deep water formation in the high latitude NorthAtlantic – a phenomenon not present anywhere in the Paciﬁc. This asymmetry may be a result of salt transport in the ocean or an asymmetry in the surface water ﬂux (evaporation minus precipitation; E − P ) with greater E − P over the Atlantic than the Paciﬁc. In this paper, we focus on the surface water ﬂux. Seven estimates of the net freshwater ﬂux ( E − P − R including run-off, R ), calculated with different methods and a range of data sources (atmospheric and oceanic reanalyses, surface ﬂux data-sets, hydrographic sections), are compared. It is shown that E − P − R over the Atlantic is consistently greater than E − P − R over the Paciﬁc by about 0.4 Sv (1 Sv ≡ 10 6 m 3 s − 1 ). The Atlantic/Paciﬁc E − P − R asymmetry is found at all latitudes between 30 ◦ S and 60 ◦ N. Further analysis with ERA-Interim combined with a run-off data-set demonstrates that the basin E − P − R asymmetry is dominated by an evaporation asymmetry in the northern high-latitudes, but by a precipitation asymmetry everywhere south of 30 ◦ N. At the basin scale, the excess of precipitation over the Paciﬁc compared to the Atlantic ( ∼ 30 ◦ S − 60 ◦ N) dominates the asymmetry. Also it is shown that the asymmetry is present throughout the year and quite steady from year to year. Investigation of the interannual variability and trends suggest that the precipitation trends are not robust between data-sets and are indistinguishable from variability. However, a positive trend in evaporation (comparable to other published estimates) is seen in ERA-Interim, consistent with sea surface temperature increases.
Interactive comment on “ Extrapolating future Arctic ozone losses ” by B . M . Knudsen et al

I tend to agree with the overall conclusion of Gianni that CCMs with all their faults are better than extrapolating observations. Knudsen et al. have barely touched on the impact of water vapour and ozone trends and their impacts on the temperature trends, as indicated in my voluminous but necessary responses. I agree that the relationship between, say, ozone depletion and PSC amounts will likely remain the same as in the past, after allowing for halogen changes. The problems with the Knudsen et al. paper stem from two sources: the lack of a full range of scenarios reflecting all the observational errors and the process of extrapolating trends into the future.
Open Archive Toulouse Archive Ouverte (OATAO)

In this article, we present an analytical model to calculate the perturbation of the magnetic vector potential due to a non-conducting inclusion in a liquid metal translated at constant velocity. The model is valid for a low magnetic Reynolds number, Re m , and a low shielding parameter, S ω . We establish that the ﬁ rst order perturbation of the vector potential can be directly obtained from the value of the unperturbed eddy-current calculated at the location of the inclusion. An ECFM (Eddy-Current FlowMeter) device has been designed to validate the model and to study the frequency e ﬀ ects of the eddy-current and the volume of one inclusion and its location. We observe a good agreement between the model predictions and experimental data within the limit of the validity of the model. Based on scaling analysis, we show that a unique relation exists between the perturbation of the emf (electromotive force) measured with the ECFM and the volume of the inclusion and its location, which re ﬂ ects the self-similarity of the model solution.
Variation in prey availability and feeding success of larval

Supervisory Committee Dr. John F. Dower, Supervisor (Department of Biology) Dr. Asit Mazumder, Departmental Member (Department of Biology) Dr. David L. Mackas, Outside Member (School of Earth and Ocean Sciences) Recruitment of pelagic fish populations is believed to be regulated during the planktonic larval stage due to high rates of mortality during the early life stages. Starvation is thought to be one of the main sources of mortality, despite the fact that there is rarely a strong correlation between the feeding success of larval fish and food availability as measured in the field. This lack of relationship may be caused in part by (i) inadequate sampling of larval fish prey and (ii) the use of total zooplankton abundance or biomass as proxies for larval food availability. Many feeding studies rely on measures of average prey abundance which do not adequately capture the variability, or patchiness, of the prey field as experienced by larval fish. Previous studies have shown that larvae may rely on these patches to increase their feeding success. I assess the variability in the availability of larval fish prey over a range of scales and model the small-scale distribution of prey in Conception Bay, Newfoundland. I show that the greatest variability in zooplankton abundance existed at the meter scale, and that larval fish prey were not randomly distributed within the upper mixed layer. This will impact both how well we can model the stochastic nature of larval fish cohorts, as well as how well we can study larval fish feeding from gut content analyses. Expanding on six years of previous lab and field studies on larval Radiated Shanny (Ulvaria subbifurcata) from Conception Bay, Newfoundland, I assess the feeding success, niche breadth (S) and weight-specific feeding rates (SPC, d) of the larvae to determine whether there are size-based patterns evident across the years. I found that both the amount of food in the guts and the niche breadth of larvae increased with larval iv size. There was a shift from low to high SPC with increasing larval size, suggesting that foraging success increases as the larvae grow. My results suggest that efforts should be made to estimate the variability of prey abundance at scales relevant to larval fish foraging rather than using large-scale average abundance estimates, since small-scale prey patchiness likely plays a role in larval fish feeding dynamics. In addition, the characteristics of zooplankton (density, size and behaviour) should be assessed as not all zooplankton are preyed upon equally by all sizes of larval fish. Overall, this thesis demonstrates that indices based on averages fail to account for the variability in the environment and in individual larval fish, which may be confounding the relationship between food availability and larval growth.
The Role of Cost Accounting System in the Pricing Decision- Making in Industrial Companies of Taiz City, Yemen

This study aims to explain the role of cost accounting systems in the process of pricing decision-making in Yemeni industrial companies of Taiz City. The researcher has used both descriptive and analytical methods which suit the nature of the present study which is mostly based on field work and the theoretical underpinnings. A group of previous studies related to the subject of the study have been utilized in the construction of study tools (questionnaires) which have been distributed in the industrial companies in the Taiz city, Yemen. The study targeted accounting costs, accountants, auditors and managers of financial department‟s in industrial companies. Data analysis through the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) was the use of scientific statistical methods “Frequencies and percentages, SMA, Standard deviation, t-test, Cronbach's alpha test. The results indicate that the cost of the accounting system applied in industrial companies provides quality accounting information; there is an impact of this information on the pricing decision-making; there are areas in which pricing decisions much depend on the information provided by the cost accounting systems. This study contributes to the literature by providing an analysis of the role of cost information in pricing decisions within industrial companies in the Taiz city, Yemen.
THE INFLUENCE OF PERSONALITY TRAITS ON CAREER DECISION AMONG SECONDARY SCHOOL STUDENTS IN YAKURR LOCAL GOVERNMENT AREA OF CROSS RIVER STATE ,

This study investigated the influence of personality traits on career decisions among secondary school students in Yakurr Local Government Area of Cross River State, Nigeria. The research design adopted was the survey design. 200 students drawn from 10 public schools in the area of study, made up the sample of the study and this was done through stratified random sampling technique. The major instrument used for data collection was the personality traits and students’ career decisions questionnaire (PTSCDQ) and data generated were analyzed using the independent t-test analysis. The null hypotheses were tested at 0.05 level of significance. The result obtained indicated that personality traits of attitude and perception have a significant influence on career decision among secondary school students. Based on this among others, it was concluded that career decision among students are not only influenced by their parents and image figures but their attitude, perception and individual traits depending on how they think about such careers. It was therefore recommended that, professional counselors, parents/guardians, teachers and administrators alike should strive to create career awareness and give more attention to the personality trait of attitude and perception as displayed by students.
Efficiently Crawling, Collecting, and Condensing News Comments

Traditionally, public opinion and policy is decided by issuing surveys and performing censuses designed to measure what the public thinks about a certain topic. Within the past five years social networks such as Facebook and Twitter have gained traction for collection of public opinion about current events. Academic research on Facebook data proves difficult since the platform is generally closed. Twitter on the other hand restricts the conversation of its users making it difficult to extract large scale concepts from the microblogging infrastructure. News comments provide a rich source of discourse from individuals who are passionate about an issue. Furthermore, due to the overhead of commenting, the population of commenters is necessarily biased towards individual who have either strong opinions of a topic or in depth knowledge of the given issue. Furthermore, their comments are often a collection of insight derived from reading multiple articles on any given topic. Unfortunately the commenting systems employed by news companies are not implemented by a single entity, and are often stored and generated using AJAX, which causes traditional crawlers to ignore them. To make matters worse they are often noisy; containing spam, poor grammar, and excessive typos. Furthermore, due to the anonymity of comment systems, conversations can often be derailed by malicious users or inherent biases in the commenters. In this thesis we discuss the design and creation of a crawler designed to extract comments from domains across the internet. For practical purposes we create a semiautomatic parser generator and describe how our system attempts to employ user feedback to predict which remote procedure calls are used to load comments. By reducing comment systems into remote procedure calls, we simplify the internet into a much simpler space, where we can focus on the data, almost independently from its presentation. Thus we are able to quickly create high fidelity parsers to extract comments from a web page. Once we have our system, we show the usefulness by attempting to extract meaningful opinions from the large collections we collect. Unfortunately doing so in real time is shown to foil traditional summarization systems, which are designed to handle dozens of well formed documents. In attempting to solve this problem we create a new algorithm, KLSum+, that outperforms all its competitors in efficiency while generally scoring well against the ROUGE SU4 metric. This algorithm factors in background models to boost accuracy, but performs over 50 times faster than alternatives. Furthermore, using the summaries we see that the data collected can provide useful insight into public opinion and even provide the key points of discourse.
ISLAMIC LAW AS ISLAMIC ETHICS

After arguing that Islamic law is more basic to Islamic ethics than is either Islamic theology or philosophy, the author analyzes three basic terms associated with law (and therefore ethics): fiqh> shar\ and sharVah. He then sets forth the four roots (usui) of legal/ethical understanding (Jiqh), describes the manner in which a judgment (hukm) is reached m any particular case, discusses the taxonomy of such judgments, and concludes with some comments on the relation within Islamic law and ethics of knowledge to action One of the perplexities woven into Western studies of Islam is the conflation of Islam as a religious system of faith and practice, parallel in scope to Christianity, with Islam as the whole of the history and custom of Muslims, parallel in scope to India or Christendom. In an attempt to disentangle this conceptual snarl, Marshal Hodgson has introduced a helpful distinction between Islamic as "pertaining to Islam in the proper, the religious sense" and Islamicate as "the social and cultural complex historically associated with Islam and Muslims" (Hodgson, 1974:1:59). If we accept this distinction, then it is arguable that Islamic ethics can refer only to Islamic law and legal theory. Excluded from Islamic ethics would be the cultural practices which distinguish Algerians from Pakistanis, including their behavioral norms, as well as philosophical ethics. These would fall into the domain of Islamicate ethics, and constitute an important field of study in themselves. Yet because ethics is basically a practical science that studies normative action, the purely theoretical efforts of Islamic theologians (such as Mu'tazilites and Ash'arites) to describe, for example, whether God creates and is responsible for human actions, is arguably not part of Islamic ethics either. The Islamic summons has by and large been understood by Muslims to be a call to righteous action in conformity with the guidance of Revelation. There is no doubt that if most Muslims were asked which science is decisive for the determination of right action, they would nominate the Islamic legal sciences, namely, the fig h sciences. Among the Islamicate intellectual disciplines, only Islamic law is both practical and theoretical, concerned with human action in the world, and (strictly speaking) religious. In this sense, Islamic law and legal theory must be the true locus of the discussion of Islamic ethics.