Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Landing Impact Intensities for Jumping Exercises From the OPTIMA-Ex Trial in Trained and Untrained Women

Supplemental Digital Content is Available in the Text. Abstract Lambert, C, Beck, BR, and Weeks, BK. Landing impact intensities for jumping exercises from the OPTIMA-Ex trial in trained and untrained women. J Strength Cond Res 35(9): 2504–2510, 2021—High-intensity mechanical loads are required to elicit a positive adaptive bone response. Our aim was to quantify the mechanical loads of impact exercises used in each progressive stage of a bone-targeted exercise intervention (the OPTIMA-Ex trial) and to investigate differences in mechanical loads between untrained and trained subjects. A randomized repeated measures experimental design was used to quantify and compare the mechanical loads, including vertical ground reaction force (vGRF) and the rate of loading (RoL) of the landing phase, of all impact exercises applied in the OPTIMA-Ex trial and to determine the load intensity for each training stage of the impact intervention. Fifteen healthy young adult women aged 18–30 years (mean 23.1 ± 3.5 years) were recruited (5 trained and 10 untrained). Overall, vGRF was classified as high impact (>4 times body mass [BM]) for all 7 training stages (4.70 ± 1.89 to 6.79 ± 2.17 BM), whereas RoL ranged from 207.01 ± 175.09 to 371.52 ± 393.43 BM·s−1 across the stages. Furthermore, a significant time effect was observed between training stages for vGRF/BM (p = 0.001) and RoL (p < 0.001). Trained subjects exhibited greater impact loads than untrained subjects for activities at every training stage (p < 0.01). We found that impact activities at every stage of the OPTIMA-Ex trial not only met the GRF criteria for high intensity but also exhibited progressive increases in load for successive stages. Furthermore, trained subjects were capable of producing greater impact loads than untrained subjects.
Simple Method for Predicting Dispersion in Streams

A knowledge of the rate at which pollutants disperse in streams is essential to stream management. It was the purpose of this investigation to develop a simple method for predicting longitudinal dispersion coefficients from mean flow parameters. An analogy was used between the linear one-dimensional flow equation and the linear one-dimensional dispersion equation to define a relation between the solute dispersion coefficient and the flow dispersion coefficient. The flow dispersion coefficient is calculated from mean flow parameters, thus allowing predictions of solute dispersion once the relation between the two is known. Dispersion coefficients calculated by the simple method are compared with observed values for 18 streams that cover a wide range of flow conditions. A standard error of estimate of 30% is indicated.
Sex‐dependency of oestrogen‐induced structural synaptic plasticity: Inhibition of aromatase versus application of estradiol in rodents

Sex‐dependent differences in learning and memory formation in humans have been frequently shown. The mechanisms underlying the formation and retention of memories are assumed to involve synaptic plasticity in the hippocampus. Estradiol was shown to effect synaptic plasticity in the hippocampus of rodents. The effects after exogenous application of estradiol to animals frequently produce inconsistent results, in particular, if sex is not considered in the studies. Recently we provided evidence that locally synthesized estradiol plays an essential role on synaptic connectivity in the hippocampus of females but not of male mice. In females, inhibition of local estradiol synthesis leads to synapse loss, which results from impairment of long‐term potentiation and dephosphorylation of cofilin, and thereby the destabilization of postsynaptic dendritic spines. This sex‐dependency was also seen in the classical aromatase knock‐out mouse. Intriguingly, no differences between sexes have been found in a conditional forebrain‐specific aromatase knock‐out mouse. Altogether, the findings underscore the necessity of including ‘Sex as a Biological Variable’ in studies of sex steroid‐induced synaptic plasticity.
Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry

Modernizing water quality criteria to predict how contaminants affect natural aquatic communities requires that we utilize data obtained across multiple lines of evidence, including laboratory, mesocosm, and field studies. We report the results of 29 mesocosm experiments conducted from 1994 to 2017 at the Colorado State University Stream Research Laboratory (Fort Collins, CO, USA). The primary goal of the present study was to quantify responses of aquatic insect communities collected from 8 different locations to different combinations of cadmium (Cd), copper (Cu), iron (Fe), and zinc (Zn). Treatments that included Cu or Fe, either alone or in combination with other metals, were especially toxic to aquatic insects. The results showed that effects of metals were context dependent and varied significantly among the 8 sites where communities were collected. In particular, effects on communities from smaller streams were significantly greater than those from larger streams. Our analyses also showed that several morphological (body size, shape, gills, degree of sclerotization) and life history (voltinism) traits were significantly correlated with sensitivity to metals. Across all taxa and experiments, aquatic insects broadly classified as small (maximum body length <8mm) were significantly more sensitive to metals than medium or large individuals. These findings demonstrate the advantages of integrating results of mesocosm experiments with species traits to develop a mechanistic understanding of biotic and abiotic factors that influence community responses to contaminants. Environ Toxicol Chem 2019;38:2486–2496. © 2019 SETAC
Human Immunodeficiency Virus Infection and Diverse Physical Health Outcomes: An Umbrella Review of Meta-analyses of Observational Studies

Abstract Background Our aim was to assess both the credibility and strength of evidence arising from systematic reviews with meta-analyses of observational studies and physical health outcomes associated with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) but not acquired immunodeficiency syndrome. Methods We performed an umbrella review of observational studies. Evidence was graded as convincing, highly suggestive, suggestive, weak, or nonsignificant. Results From 3413 studies returned, 20 were included, covering 55 health outcomes. Median number of participants was 18 743 (range 403–225 000 000). Overall, 45 (81.8%) of the 55 unique outcomes reported nominally significant summary results (P < .05). Only 5 outcomes (9.0%; higher likelihood of presence of breathlessness, higher chronic obstructive pulmonary disease [COPD] prevalence, maternal sepsis, higher risk of anemia, and higher risk of all fractures among people living with HIV [PLWHIV]) showed suggestive evidence, with P values < 10–3; only 3 (5.5%; higher prevalence of cough in cross-sectional studies, higher incidence of pregnancy-related mortality, and higher incidence of ischemic heart disease among PLWHIV in cohort studies) outcomes showed stronger evidence using a stringent P value (<10–6). None of the unique outcomes presented convincing evidence (Class I), yet 3 outcomes presented highly suggestive evidence, 5 outcomes presented suggestive evidence, and 37 outcomes presented weak evidence. Conclusions Results show highly suggestive and suggestive evidence for HIV and the presence of a cough, COPD, ischemic heart disease, pregnancy-related mortality, maternal sepsis, and bone fractures. Public health policies should reflect and accommodate these changes, especially in light of the increases in the life expectancy and the incidence of comorbidities in this population.
Validity and reliability of the Slovene version of the Morningness-Eveningness Questionnaire

ABSTRACT Morningness-eveningness (ME) can be defined as individual differences in sleep-wake patterns, and the time of day people feel and perform best. Various self-report instruments that measure ME have been developed. The Horne and Östberg Morningness-Eveningness Questionnaire (MEQ) has most frequently been used for classifying ME types. The aim of this study was to investigate the validity and reliability of the Slovene version of the MEQ (Slovene MEQ). Two hundred and sixty-five participants (65.3% women, 34,7% men, mean age 38,1 years, range 19–67) took the Slovene MEQ twice, 2 weeks apart (MEQ test and retest). Internal consistency of the Slovene MEQ items was high, with Cronbach’s Alpha coefficients of 0.86. The test–retest reliability was also high, with intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) of 0.96. The classification of chronotypes on middle-aged population offered a more balanced representation of the five chronotypes than those proposed by the authors Horne and Östberg . Age changes in chronotype could be confirmed in this study in the supposed direction with older adults being more morning-oriented. The criterion validity of the Slovene MEQ through the relationship of morningness and basic personality traits showed that conscientiousness and agreeableness demonstrated positive and significant correlations with morningness. A low negative correlation was observed between openness and morningness, with higher eveningness among more open participants.
Gating by inhibition during top-down control of willed attention

ABSTRACT In natural settings, the control of attention may be influenced both by external information as well as internal decision-making processes driven by intent (e.g. free will). In past studies of spatial attention, we and others have developed experimental paradigms that permit individuals to choose where to direct their attention on a trial-by-trial basis in the absence of instructive external cues – we term this willed attention. Here we investigate the electrophysiological correlates of willed attention by recording EEG activity when subjects decided to focus covert attention on one of two lateralized target locations versus when they decided to maintain attention at fixation. Independent of the direction of attention, decisions to attend, relative to decisions not to attend, resulted in significant increases in both frontal theta (4–7 Hz) power and central alpha (8–13 Hz) power. We found that focusing spatial attention, as indexed by occipital alpha lateralization was predicted across subjects by the decision-related alpha increases over central scalp regions, but not changes in frontal theta power. This finding is interpreted in terms of the Gating by Inhibition model, where the central alpha EEG signals reflect cortical inhibition of decision processes that lead to the expression of willed attention.
Ustilaginoidin M1, a new bis-naphtho-γ-pyrone from the fungus Villosiclava virens

Abstract Ustilaginoidin M1 (1), a novel bis-naphtho-γ-pyrone, was isolated from the cultures of the fungus Villosiclava virens which was the pathogen of rice false smut disease. Its structure was elucidated by spectroscopic analysis and by comparison of its physical and spectroscopic data with the literature. Compound 1 was tested for its cytotoxicity against five human cancer cell lines.
A Validation Study of the Mini-IPIP Five-Factor Personality Scale in Adults With Cancer

Abstract The Mini International Personality Item Pool (Mini-IPIP) is a brief measure of the Five-Factor Model of personality with documented validity in healthy samples of adults and could be useful for assessing personality in patient populations such as individuals with cancer. The purpose of this study was to examine the psychometric properties of the Mini-IPIP in 2 samples of adults with cancer. A sample of 369 (Sample 1) and a sample of 459 (Sample 2) adults with cancer completed an online survey including the Mini-IPIP. To assess criterion validity, Sample 2 completed measures of emotional distress. Analyses included internal consistency (Samples 1 and 2), confirmatory factor analyses (CFAs; Samples 1 and 2), and correlations and a structural regression model to examine the associations between the 5 personality factors and emotional distress (Sample 2 only). Results showed that the Mini-IPIP demonstrated levels of internal consistency and CFA model fit that were similar to previous validation studies conducted in the general population. Consistent with prior research and theory, this study also found that personality factors measured by the Mini-IPIP were associated with measures of emotional distress in Sample 2. These findings suggest the potential utility of the Mini-IPIP in both research and clinical settings involving individuals with cancer.
Measuring and Modeling Car Park Usage: Lessons Learned from a Campus Field-Trial

Transportation is undergoing significant change due to the growth of ride-sharing, electric cars, car-sharing, and self-driving cars. Organizations that have significant real-estate dedicated to on-premise employee car parking are therefore looking to adapt the use of this space, motivated by the opportunity to become greener, improve sharing, and pursue new revenue opportunities. In this paper, we outline our experiences from instrumenting, measuring, and analyzing car-park usage in our University's multi-storey parking lot, and building a model that explores its use for multiple purposes in the near future. Our specific contributions are as follows: (1)We begin by describing experiences and challenges in measuring car-park usage on our campus and cleaning the collected data; (2)We analyze data collected over 23 weeks (covering teaching and non-teaching periods)and draw insights into the usage patterns, including occupancy patterns by times-of-day and days-of-week, and identifying various user groups based on attributes such as arrival time and duration of stay; (3)We develop a queuing model to optimize the use of parking space for generating revenue from shared cars with minimal impact on private car users. We believe our study guides campus managers wanting to generate more value from their existing parking resources.
Accurate and Efficient Self-Localization on Roads using Basic Geometric Primitives

Highly accurate localization with very limited amount of memory and computational power is one of the big challenges for next generation series cars. We propose localization based on geometric primitives which are compact in representation and further valuable for other tasks like planning and behavior generation. The primitives lack distinctive signature which makes association between detections and map elements highly ambiguous. We resolve ambiguities early in the pipeline by online building up a local map which is key to runtime efficiency. Further, we introduce a new framework to fuse association and odometry measurements based on robust pose graph optimization.We evaluate our localization framework on over 30 min of data recorded in urban scenarios. Our map is memory efficient with less than 8 kB/km and we achieve high localization accuracy with a mean position error of less than 10 cm and a mean yaw angle error of less than 0. 25° at a localization update rate of 50Hz.
Unsupervised Learning of Monocular Depth and Ego-Motion Using Multiple Masks

A new unsupervised learning method of depth and ego-motion using multiple masks from monocular video is proposed in this paper. The depth estimation network and the ego-motion estimation network are trained according to the constraints of depth and ego-motion without truth values. The main contribution of our method is to carefully consider the occlusion of the pixels generated when the adjacent frames are projected to each other, and the blank problem generated in the projection target imaging plane. Two fine masks are designed to solve most of the image pixel mismatch caused by the movement of the camera. In addition, some relatively rare circumstances are considered, and repeated masking is proposed. To some extent, the method is to use a geometric relationship to filter the mismatched pixels for training, making unsupervised learning more efficient and accurate. The experiments on KITTI dataset show our method achieves good performance in terms of depth and ego-motion. The generalization capability of our method is demonstrated by training on the low-quality uncalibrated bike video dataset and evaluating on KITTI dataset, and the results are still good.
Smartphone Integrated Polymer Optical Fiber Humidity Sensor: Towards a Fully Portable Solution for Healthcare

This letter presents a humidity sensor based on the colorimetric change on a silica gel sphere with the increase of the relative humidity, which leads to variations on the optical power transmission in a polymer optical fiber (POF). The sensor setup presented employs a light coupler with two POF ends positioned on a sphere of silica gel. The sensor is characterized with the reflected signal acquired by a spectrometer and the relative fluorescence spectrum of the fibers at different relative humidity is acquired and compared. Then, the sensor is integrated with a smartphone, which is used as the interrogator. In this case, the flashlight and camera are employed as a light source and a photodetector, respectively. Results show the feasibility of the proposed approach, which has some advantageous features such as mechanical robust and compact sensor that presents a linear behavior on the relative humidity range (25%–80%) analyzed. Furthermore, the smartphone integration provides additional advantage for the sensor by increasing its portability and ease to use. Thus, the proposed sensor system can be readily applied in many healthcare applications, including home monitoring, assistive robotics, and medical devices.
An Algorithm for Odor Source Localization based on Source Term Estimation

Finding sources of airborne chemicals with mobile sensing systems finds applications across the security, safety, domestic, medical, and environmental domains. In this paper, we present an algorithm based on source term estimation for odor source localization that is coupled with a navigation method based on partially observable Markov decision processes. We propose an innovative strategy to balance exploration and exploitation in navigation. The method has been evaluated systematically through high-fidelity simulations and in a wind tunnel emulating realistic and repeatable conditions. The impact of multiple algorithmic and environmental parameters has been studied in the experiments.
Sensor-Failure-Resilient Multi-IMU Visual-Inertial Navigation

In this paper, we present a real-time multi-IMU visual-inertial navigation system (mi-VINS) that utilizes the information from multiple inertial measurement units (IMUs) and thus is resilient to IMU sensor failures. In particular, in the proposed mi-VINS formulation, one of the IMUs serves as the “base” of the system, while the rest act as auxiliary sensors aiding in state estimation. A key advantage of this architecture is the ability to seamlessly “promote” an auxiliary IMU as a new base, for example, upon detection of the base IMU failure, thus being resilient to the single point of sensor failure as seen in conventional VINS. Moreover, in order to properly fuse the information of multiple IMUs, both the spatial (relative pose) and temporal (time offset) calibration parameters between each sensor and the base IMU are estimated online. The proposed miVINS with online spatial and temporal calibration is validated in both simulations and real-world experiments, and is shown to be able to provide accurate localization and calibration even in scenarios with IMU sensor failures.
REMEDY: Receiver-Initiated MAC Based on Energy-Efficient Duty-Cycling in the IoUT

As valuable as the Internet of Things (IoT) has been to explore and monitor the land surface of the earth, the Internet of Underwater Things (IoUT) has been crucial to the investigation of the underwater environment. Due to the unique characteristics of the IoUT, such as long propagation delays, high bit error rates, and limited bandwidth, acoustic sensors that use sound waves are preferred for deployment. Consequently, it is difficult to apply the medium access control (MAC) protocol designed for the IoT sensors that use radio frequencies (RFs) in the IoUT. Particularly for densely populated sensor networks, the challenging and dynamic underwater environment leads to the loss of control and data packets, resulting in energy waste and unreliable connections. In addition to a sensor being constrained by energy, replacing its battery is infeasible. Therefore, packet loss and energy conservation should be handled at the MAC layer in order to improve the throughput and longevity of the network. In this paper, we propose a REceiver-Initiated MAC based on Energy-efficient Duty cycling called REMEDY-MAC. Using autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) for data collection, REMEDY allows a group of nodes to conserve energy by announcing the duty cycling schedule until an AUV arrives at a certain location. Once an AUV reaches a location, it receives data according to a pre-established schedule managed by the active sender node and moves to the next set of nodes after completion of its tasks. The simulation results indicate that the proposed REMEDY protocol significantly outperforms other MAC schemes with respect to network parameters such as energy efficiency.
Leveraging Structural Regularity of Atlanta World for Monocular SLAM

A wide range of man-made environments can be abstracted as the Atlanta world. It consists of a set of Atlanta frames with a common vertical (gravitational) axis and multiple horizontal axes orthogonal to this vertical axis. This paper focuses on leveraging the regularity of Atlanta world for monocular SLAM. First, we robustly cluster image lines. Based on these clusters, we compute the local Atlanta frames in the camera frame by solving polynomial equations. Our method provides the global optimum and satisfies inherent geometric constraints. Second, we define the posterior probabilities to refine the initial clusters and Atlanta frames alternately by the maximum a posteriori estimation. Third, based on multiple local Atlanta frames, we compute the global Atlanta frames in the world frame using Kalman filtering. We optimize rotations by the global alignment and then refine translations and 3D line-based map under the directional constraints. Experiments on both synthesized and real data have demonstrated that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
Fast Terminal Sliding Mode Super Twisting Controller For Position And Altitude Tracking of the Quadrotor

This paper proposes a fast terminal sliding mode super twisting controller (FTSMSTC) design for quadrotor position and altitude tracking in the presence of bounded disturbances. A nonlinear fast terminal sliding manifold has been proposed for fast convergence of the tracking error to zero in finite time unlike the conventional sliding mode control (CSMC) that guarantee only asymptotic convergence of the tracking error. The super twisting reaching law has been proposed to deal with the chattering phenomena, which is inherent in the CSMC. The finite time stability of the complete closed loop system is investigated using Lyapunov stability theory and an analytical expression for the convergence time has also been derived. The effectiveness of the designed controller is checked against the CSMC using MATLAB simulation. The controller has been experimentally validated using the DJI Matrice M100 as a proof of utility in real time applications.