Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The 6MWT: Will Different Methods of Instruction and Measurement Affect Performance of Healthy Aging and Older Adults?

Background and Purpose:The Six-Minute Walk Test (6MWT) is commonly used to assess the fitness level of healthy adults and of older adults with disabilities. It can also be used as an intervention to increase walking endurance. However, its use may be limited in certain rehabilitation settings due to space requirements. If it can be shown that the measured linear distance walked in the 6-minute walk is comparable to the distance walked as measured by a pedometer, the test may be more widely used in a variety of rehabilitation settings. In addition, questions exist as to whether the method of instruction (“walk as far as you can” vs “walk as fast as you can”) can impact the rate of perceived exertion of the person performing the test. The purposes of this study were to assess for differences in the measured linear distance and from the gender-based predicted value when compared to the pedometer measurement. In addition, we assessed the difference, if any, in the rate of perceived exertion (RPE) using the 2 different methods of administration. Furthermore, the distance in meters walked using the 2 different methods of instruction was compared; likewise, comparisons were made of these values to predicted values. Methods:A group of 26 older adults participated in this descriptive study. After a practice trial, each person completed 2 linear trials using different methods of instruction, (“walk as fast as you can” or “walk as far as you can”) of the 6MWT while wearing a DIGI-WALKER SW-651 pedometer. Vital signs were taken before and after each trial. Linear distance, pedometer distance, and numeric value RPE were recorded. Results:Paired t tests demonstrated no gender differences. An intraclass correlation coefficient (2,1) of 0.822 was calculated between all dependent variables. A repeated measures MANOVA was conducted to assess for differences between all variables resulting in no differences (F = 1.98; P = .13). Pairwise comparisons were also insignificant for the distance measurements except predicted value and pedometer fast P = . 024. Paired t tests also demonstrated differences between RPE between trials (t = 2.15; P = .041). Conclusion:There was good agreement between these distance measures for the 6MWT. The use of a pedometer was found to be a valid measure of walking distance during the 6MWT. It was also found that the method of instruction made no differences in walking distance. Although the change was minimal on the Borg scale, the RPE was found to be significantly different between far and fast trials in healthy adults. From this study, it appears that that either mode of instruction is valid in healthy community-dwelling populations. Future studies should include populations with impairments.
A new approach to accurate measurement of uniaxial joint angles based on a combination of accelerometers and gyroscopes

A new method of measuring joint angle using a combination of accelerometers and gyroscopes is presented. The method proposes a minimal sensor configuration with one sensor module mounted on each segment. The model is based on estimating the acceleration of the joint center of rotation by placing a pair of virtual sensors on the adjacent segments at the center of rotation. In the proposed technique, joint angles are found without the need for integration, so absolute angles can be obtained which are free from any source of drift. The model considers anatomical aspects and is personalized for each subject prior to each measurement. The method was validated by measuring knee flexion-extension angles of eight subjects, walking at three different speeds, and comparing the results with a reference motion measurement system. The results are very close to those of the reference system presenting very small errors (rms=1.3, mean=0.2, SD=1.1 deg) and excellent correlation coefficients (0.997). The algorithm is able to provide joint angles in real-time, and ready for use in gait analysis. Technically, the system is portable, easily mountable, and can be used for long term monitoring without hindrance to natural activities.
Symbolic Model Checking for Incomplete Designs with Flexible Modeling of Unknowns

We consider the problem of checking whether an incomplete design (i.e., a design containing "unknown parts", so-called Black Boxes) can still be extended to a complete design satisfying a given property or whether the property is satisfied for all possible extensions. There are many applications of property checking for incomplete designs, such as early verification checks for unfinished designs, error localization in faulty designs and the abstraction of complex parts of a design in order to simplify the property checking task. To process incomplete designs we present an approximate, yet sound algorithm. The algorithm is flexible in the sense that for every Black Box a different approximation method can be chosen. This permits us to handle less relevant Black Boxes (in terms of the property) with larger approximation and thus faster, whereas we do not lose important information when the possible effect of more relevant Black Boxes is modeled by more exact methods. Additionally, we present a concept to decide exactly whether Black Boxes with bounded memory can be implemented so that they satisfy a given property. This question is reduced to conventional symbolic model checking. The effectiveness and feasibility of the methods is demonstrated by a series of experimental results.
Macroregenerative nodules in a series of adult cirrhotic liver explants: Issues of classification and nomenclature

Macroregenerative nodules (MRNs), probably representing a pathway for human hepatocarcinogenesis, are generally classified into type I MRNs (or ordinary adenomatous hyperplasia) and type II MRNs (or atypical adenomatous hyperplasia), on the basis of imprecise definitions of cytological and architectural atypia. It is currently believed that type II MRNs are probably true precursors of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), whereas type I lesions may simply represent large regenerative nodules. A series of 155 consecutive adult cirrhotic liver explants were examined for evidence of MRNs, HCC, and liver cell dysplasia (LCD) of large and small cell types, and their appearance, in terms of proposed classification schemes, was reviewed. There was evidence indicating that the presence of either type of MRN was associated with an increased incidence of HCC (all MRNs, P < .00019; type I MRNs, P < .067; type II MRNs, P < .012) compared with cirrhotic livers without MRNs. A subset of younger patients with a large (uncountable) number of MRNs in their livers, who did not show any increased incidence of carcinoma, was identified. Excluding these cases from statistical analysis, all associations were strengthened, implying either that malignant progression had not had time to occur in this younger population or that these nodules were simply large regenerative nodules without malignant potential. MRNs from these livers were histologically indistinguishable from MRNs occurring in more limited numbers, although atypical changes other than large cell type LCD were less frequent. No independent association between LCD of large cell type and HCC was found in the entire series. Deleting this feature from the criteria for cytological atypia resulted in a stronger association of both types of MRNs with HCC (redefined type II MRNs/HCC, P < .0001; redefined type I MRNs/HCC, P < .0306). Some of the type II MRNs remaining after exclusion of large cell type LCD showed “borderline” changes insufficient for a diagnosis of HCC, but most type II MRNs (82%) contained expansile “nodule‐in‐nodule” growth patterns. The conclusions of this report are that (1) histological examination of type I MRNs is insufficient in many cases to distinguish large regenerative nodules from neoplastic ones; (2) LCD of large cell type should not be used as a criterion for terming an MRN atypical; and (3) expansile “nodule‐in‐nodule” formation in MRNs should be considered to represent evidence of architectural atypia.
Process-Based Habit Mining: Experiments and Techniques

Independently of the specific task to be enacted in a smart space, it is always crucial to mine a set of models representing environmental dynamics and, noteworthy, user habits, desires. Many different formalisms have been proposed to model human habits, but the vast majority of them are either difficult to read, evaluate or their definition requires a huge amount of work from either experts or users. In this paper we propose to employ process mining techniques in order to model human habits,, we experimentally evaluate such an approach on a dataset built adopting the Smart-Home-in-a-Box toolkit with real users.
Protein Packing Quality Using Delaunay Complexes

A new method for estimating the packing quality of protein structures is presented. Atoms in high quality protein crystal structures are very uniformly distributed which is difficult to reproduce using structure prediction methods. Packing quality measures can therefore be used to assess structures of low quality and even to refine them. Previous methods mainly use the Voronoi cells of atoms to assess packing quality. The presented method uses only the lengths of edges in the Delaunay complex which is faster to compute since volumes of Voronoi cells are not evaluated explicitly. This is a novel application of the Delaunay complex that can improve the speed of packing quality computations. Doing so is an important step for, e.g., integrating packing measures into structure refinement methods. High- and low-resolution X-ray crystal structures were chosen to represent well- and poorly-packed structures respectively. Our results show that the developed method is correlated to the well-established RosettaHoles2 but three times faster.
High resolution‐HMBC (HR‐HMBC), a new method for measuring heteronuclear long‐range coupling constants

A useful pulse sequence for measuring long‐range CH coupling constants (JCH) named high resolution‐HMBC (HR‐HMBC) has been developed. In this pulse sequence, the J‐scaling pulse [(nt1)/2180° (H/C) − (nt1)/2] is incorporated after the spin evolution period, and then followed by an 1H 180° pulse to reverse the magnetization of JCH couplings. As a result, splittings of the cross peaks due to the long‐range JCH are realigned with separations of nJCH along the F1 dimension, and thus even the small long‐range JCH values can easily be determined. The efficiency of measuring the long‐range JCH using the proposed pulse sequences has been demonstrated in application to the complicated natural product, portmicin. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Latent Semantic Social Graph Model for Expert Discovery in Facebook

Expert finding systems employ social networks analysis and natural language processing to identify candidate experts in organization or enterprise datasets based on a user’s profile, her documents, and her interaction with other users. Expert discovery in public social networks such as Facebook faces the challenges of matching users to a wide range of expertise areas, because of the diverse human interests. In this paper we analyze the social graph and the user’s interactions in the form of posts and group memberships to model user interests and fields of expertise. The proposed model reflects expertise and interests of users based on experimental analysis of the explicit and implicit social data in Online Social Networks (OSNs). It employs social networks analysis, text mining, text classification, and semantic text similarity techniques to analyze and discover the latent semantic social graph model that can express user’s expertise. The proposed model also considers the semantic similarity between user’s posts and his groups, Influence of friendship on group’s membership, and Influence of friendship on user’s posts. Experiments on the Facebook data show significant validity of the proposed model.
Graphene Nanogrids FET Immunosensor: Signal to Noise Ratio Enhancement

Recently, a reproducible and scalable chemical method for fabrication of smooth graphene nanogrids has been reported which addresses the challenges of graphene nanoribbons (GNR). These nanogrids have been found to be capable of attomolar detection of biomolecules in field effect transistor (FET) mode. However, for detection of sub-femtomolar concentrations of target molecule in complex mixtures with reasonable accuracy, it is not sufficient to only explore the steady state sensitivities, but is also necessary to investigate the flicker noise which dominates at frequencies below 100 kHz. This low frequency noise is dependent on the exposure time of the graphene layer in the buffer solution and concentration of charged impurities at the surface. In this paper, the functionalization strategy of graphene nanogrids has been optimized with respect to concentration and incubation time of the cross linker for an enhancement in signal to noise ratio (SNR). It has been interestingly observed that as the sensitivity and noise power change at different rates with the functionalization parameters, SNR does not vary monotonically but is maximum corresponding to a particular parameter. The optimized parameter has improved the SNR by 50% which has enabled a detection of 0.05 fM Hep-B virus molecules with a sensitivity of around 30% and a standard deviation within 3%. Further, the SNR enhancement has resulted in improvement of quantification accuracy by five times and selectivity by two orders of magnitude.
Preferential attachment of membrane glycoproteins to the cytoskeleton at the leading edge of lamella

The active forward movement of cells is often associated with the rearward transport of particles over the surfaces of their lamellae. Unlike the rest of the lamella, we found that the leading edge (within 0.5 microns of the cell boundary) is specialized for rearward transport of membrane-bound particles, such as Con A-coated latex microspheres. Using a single-beam optical gradient trap (optical tweezers) to apply restraining forces to particles, we can capture, move and release particles at will. When first bound on the central lamellar surface, Con A-coated particles would diffuse randomly; when such bound particles were brought to the leading edge of the lamella with the optical tweezers, they were often transported rearward. As in our previous studies, particle transport occurred with a concurrent decrease in apparent diffusion coefficient, consistent with attachment to the cytoskeleton. For particles at the leading edge of the lamella, weak attachment to the cytoskeleton and transport occurred with a half- time of 3 s; equivalent particles elsewhere on the lamella showed no detectable attachment when monitored for several minutes. Particles held on the cell surface by the laser trap attached more strongly to the cytoskeleton with time. These particles could escape a trapping force of 0.7 X 10(-6) dyne after 18 +/- 14 (sd) s at the leading edge, and after 64 +/- 34 (SD) s elsewhere on the lamella. Fluorescent succinylated Con A staining showed no corresponding concentration of general glycoproteins at the leading edge, but cytochalasin D-resistant filamentous actin was found at the leading edge. Our results have implications for cell motility: if the forces used for rearward particle transport were applied to a rigid substratum, cells would move forward. Such a mechanism would be most efficient if the leading edge of the cell contained preferential sites for attachment and transport.
What do we learn from the Implicit Association Test about intergroup attitudes in Hong Kong? the case of social identification inclusiveness and need for closure

The current study tests an implication of the Associative-Propositional Evaluation model of implicit and explicit attitude measures in Hong Kong's intergroup context. We argued that the Implicit Association Test taps associative intergroup evaluations that are not necessarily consistent with the propositional implications of one's social identification inclusiveness and need for closure. In contrast, explicit intergroup attitude measures tap propositional evaluations resulting from validating the inferences drawn from pertinent propositional information in the evaluation context. Thus, explicit intergroup attitude should be consistent with the propositional implications of social identification inclusiveness and need for closure. We tested and found support for these hypotheses in a study of Hong Kong adolescents' (N = 65) perception of Hong Kong people and Mainland Chinese.
Threat construction in the Bush administration's post-9/11 foreign policy: (critical) security implications for Southeast Asia

Abstract The Bush Administration's ‘war on terror’ was both a set of policies as well as a powerful security narrative that informed the way that threat was understood and constructed post-9/11. This idea is explored specifically with regard to how the articulation of threat in the ‘war on terror’ informed American relations with Southeast Asia, which in turn had active consequences for regional state and non-state actors alike. The importance of discourse is explained with a focus on how the discursive construction of threat within the ‘war on terror’ security narrative is intrinsic to the ‘security project’ of the American state, as well as to American national identity more generally (Campbell 1998, Jackson 2005). From this analytical perspective, this paper contends that irruptions of the Bush Administration's post-9/11 foreign policy discourse in Southeast Asia were observable, and that these manifestations of discursive construction engendered consequences that contributed to an increase in anti-Americanism and terrorist activities aimed at ‘Western’ targets, and to a proliferation of anti-democratic and repressive behaviors by Southeast Asian governments under the guise of anti-terror measures.
Combining Collocations, Lexical and Encyclopedic Knowledge for Metonymy Resolution

This paper presents a supervised method for resolving metonymies. We enhance a commonly used feature set with features extracted based on collocation information from corpora, generalized using lexical and encyclopedic knowledge to determine the preferred sense of the potentially metonymic word using methods from unsupervised word sense disambiguation. The methodology developed addresses one issue related to metonymy resolution - the influence of local context. The method developed is applied to the metonymy resolution task from SemEval 2007. The results obtained, higher for the countries subtask, on a par for the companies subtask - compared to participating systems - confirm that lexical, encyclopedic and collocation information can be successfully combined for metonymy resolution.
Exploring Dialect Phonetic Variation Using PARAFAC

In this paper we apply the multi-way decomposition method parafac in order to detect the most prominent sound changes in dialect variation. We investigate various phonetic patterns, both in stressed and unstressed syllables. We proceed from regular sound correspondences which are automatically extracted from the aligned transcriptions and analyzed using parafac. This enables us to analyze simultaneously the co-occurrence patterns of all sound correspondences found in the data set and determine the most important factors of the variation. The first ten dimensions are examined in more detail by recovering the geographical distribution of the extracted correspondences. We also compare dialect divisions based on the extracted correspondences to the divisions based on the whole data set and to the traditional scholarship as well. The results show that parafac can be successfully used to detect the linguistic basis of the automatically obtained dialect divisions.
Increased levels of plasma glial-derived neurotrophic factor in children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder

Abstract Background: Recent evidence suggests that neurotrophic growth factor systems, including brain-derived neurotrophic factor, might be involved in the pathophysiology of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Glial cell line-derived neurotrophic factor (GDNF) is from the transforming growth factor-β family and is abundantly expressed in the central nervous system, where it plays a role in the development and function of hippocampal cells. To date, no association studies have been done between ADHD and GDNF. Thus, here we investigate the hypothesis that there are differences in plasma GDNF levels between children with ADHD and healthy controls. Methods: Plasma GDNF levels were measured in 86 drug-naïve children with ADHD and 128 healthy children. The severity of ADHD symptoms was determined by scores on the Korean ADHD Rating Scale (K-ARS) in patients and healthy controls. Results: The median plasma GDNF levels in ADHD patients was 74.0 (IQR: 23.4–280.1) pg/ml versus 24.6 (IQR: 14.5–87.3) pg/ml in healthy controls; thus the median plasma GDNF levels in ADHD patients were significantly higher than in healthy controls (Mann–Whitney U-test, P < 0.01). Plasma GDNF levels were correlated positively with K-ARS subscale scores (inattention, hyperactivity–impulsivity and total), determined by Spearman's correlation test in ADHD patients and healthy controls (r = 0.371, P < 0.01; r = 0.331, P < 0.01; and r = 0.379, P < 0.01, respectively). Conclusions: These findings suggest increased plasma GDNF levels in untreated ADHD patients. In addition, plasma GDNF levels had a significant positive correlation with inattention, hyperactivity–impulsivity and K-ARS total scores in ADHD patients and healthy controls. Further studies are required to determine the source and role of circulating GDNF in ADHD.
Mouse potency assay for Bordetella bronchiseptica bacterins

A potency assay for Bordetella bronchiseptica bacterins has been developed using mice. The immunogenicities of three bacterins, B, C, and D, were evaluated for ability to prevent death in mice as compared with a reference standard bacterin (RSB-A). Bacterins RSB-A, B, and C were evaluated for ability to prevent death in mice as compared with a reference standard bacterin (RSB-A). Bacterins RSB-A, B, and C were evaluated in swine for efficacy against nasal turbinate atrophy. Swine immunized with RSB-A demonstrated 25% gross nasal turbinate atrophy (GNTA), whereas nonimmunized swine had 85% GNTA. Swine vaccinated with bacterins B and C demonstrated 0 and 100% GNTA, respectively, whereas the nonimmunized groups had 64 and 75% GNTA, respectively. RSB-A and bacterins B, C, and D provided average mouse survivals of 94, 88, 49, and 32%, respectively when the mice were given 1/10,000 of a recommended swine-immunizing dose, whereas an average of 88% of the unvaccinated mice died.