Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Acute Warm-up Effects in Submaximal Athletes: An EMG Study of Skilled Violinists.

BACKGROUND Warm-up is commonly recommended for injury prevention and performance enhancement across all activities, yet this recommendation is not supported by evidence for repetitive submaximal activities such as instrumental music performance. PURPOSE The objective of this study is to quantify the effects of cardiovascular, core muscle, and musical warm-ups on muscle activity levels, musical performance, and subjective experience in skilled violinists. METHODS Fifty-five undergraduate, postgraduate, or professional violinists performed five randomly ordered 45-s musical excerpts of varying physical demands both before and after a randomly assigned 15-min, moderate-intensity cardiovascular, core muscle, musical (technical violin exercises), or inactive control warm-up protocol. Surface EMG data were obtained for 16 muscles of the trunk, shoulders, and right arm during each musical performance. Sound recording and perceived exertion (RPE) data were also obtained. Sound recordings were randomly ordered and rated for performance quality by blinded adjudicators. Questionnaire data regarding participant pain sites and fitness levels were used to stratify participants according to pain and fitness levels. Data were analyzed using two- and three-factor ANCOVA (surface EMG and sound recording) and Wilcoxon matched pairs tests (RPE). RESULTS None of the three warm-up protocols had significant effects on muscle activity levels (P ≥ 0.10). Performance quality did not significantly increase (P ≥ 0.21). RPE significantly decreased (P < 0.05) after warm-up for each of the three experimental warm-ups; control condition RPE did not significantly decrease (P > 0.23). CONCLUSION Acute physiological and musical benefits from cardiovascular, core muscle, and musical warm-ups in skilled violinists are limited to decreases in RPE. This investigation provides data from the performing arts in support of sports medical evidence suggesting that warm-up only effectively enhances maximal strength and power performance.
MinEDec: A decision support model that combines text mining with competitive intelligence

In order to monitor and analyse the competitive environment of businesses, we propose to integrate the Five Forces framework and a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis in a decision support system model called MinEDec (Mining Environment for Decisions), which is supported by text-mining technologies.
Cellular prion protein interaction with vitronectin supports axonal growth and is compensated by integrins

The physiological functions of the cellular prion protein, PrPC, as a cell surface pleiotropic receptor are under debate. We report that PrPC interacts with vitronectin but not with fibronectin or collagen. The binding sites mediating this PrPC-vitronectin interaction were mapped to residues 105-119 of PrPC and the residues 307-320 of vitronectin. The two proteins were co-localized in embryonic dorsal root ganglia from wild-type mice. Vitronectin addition to cultured dorsal root ganglia induced axonal growth, which could be mimicked by vitronectin peptide 307-320 and abrogated by anti-PrPC antibodies. Full-length vitronectin, but not the vitronectin peptide 307-320, induced axonal growth of dorsal root neurons from two strains of PrPC-null mice. Functional assays demonstrated that relative to wild-type cells, PrPC-null dorsal root neurons were more responsive to the Arg-Gly-Asp peptide (an integrin-binding site), and exhibited greater αvβ3 activity. Our findings indicate that PrPC plays an important role in axonal growth, and this function may be rescued in PrPC-knockout animals by integrin compensatory mechanisms.
Phylogenetic Origin and Diversification of RNAi Pathway Genes in Insects

Abstract RNA interference (RNAi) refers to the set of molecular processes found in eukaryotic organisms in which small RNA molecules mediate the silencing or down-regulation of target genes. In insects, RNAi serves a number of functions, including regulation of endogenous genes, anti-viral defense, and defense against transposable elements. Despite being well studied in model organisms, such as Drosophila, the distribution of core RNAi pathway genes and their evolution in insects is not well understood. Here we present the most comprehensive overview of the distribution and diversity of core RNAi pathway genes across 100 insect species, encompassing all currently recognized insect orders. We inferred the phylogenetic origin of insect-specific RNAi pathway genes and also identified several hitherto unrecorded gene expansions using whole-body transcriptome data from the international 1KITE (1000 Insect Transcriptome Evolution) project as well as other resources such as i5K (5000 Insect Genome Project). Specifically, we traced the origin of the double stranded RNA binding protein R2D2 to the last common ancestor of winged insects (Pterygota), the loss of Sid-1/Tag-130 orthologs in Antliophora (fleas, flies and relatives, and scorpionflies in a broad sense), and confirm previous evidence for the splitting of the Argonaute proteins Aubergine and Piwi in Brachyceran flies (Diptera, Brachycera). Our study offers new reference points for future experimental research on RNAi-related pathway genes in insects.
Women stepping out: Intersections of welfare policy, work and abuse

Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) was created in 1996, and it effectively abolished the sixty-year-old federal entitlement program for poor women and children known as Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). TANF imposed lifetime limits for receipt of assistance as well as work requirements for all recipients. These changes are problematic for many reasons and hit especially hard for women who are subject to abuse from an intimate partner. In this project, I use a qualitative approach to explore the relationship between women's experiences with battering, work and welfare use.I interviewed 20 women enrolled in a Work First program in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. These women are transitioning from welfare into the paid workforce. I found that many of these women enjoyed the social and financial benefits of paid employment. Women generally view work as beneficial for their families and believe it will afford them greater opportunities and allow them to be good role models for their children. Unfortunately, for all of these women, abuse complicates their journey. For some, work means an escape from violence at home. For others, abuse at home is an insurmountable obstacle to work. Understanding what work and welfare mean to them and the hurdles these women must overcome is critical to assisting them in their quest to break the cycle of dependency on the state or men. We must be sensitive to the variations in women's experiences with welfare and dispel the myths regarding broad stereotypes that doom all poor women and their children to a stigmatized existence.
West Nile Virus Detection in Nonvascular Feathers from Avian Carcasses

West Nile virus (WNV) is a public health threat and has caused the death of thousands of North American birds. As such, surveillance for WNV has been ongoing, utilizing numerous biological specimens and testing methods. Nonvascular (i.e., fully grown) feathers would provide a simple method of collection from either dead or live birds of all ages and molt cycles, with presumably less biosafety risk compared with other specimen types, including feather pulp. The current study evaluates WNV detection in nonvascular feathers removed from naturally infected avian carcasses of several species groups. Feathers of corvid passeriforms had the highest sensitivity of detection (64%), followed by noncorvid passeriforms (43%), columbiforms (33%), and falconiforms (31%). Storing feathers for 1 year at −20°C or at ambient room temperature resulted in detection rates of infectious WNV of 16% and zero, respectively, but had no effect on detection rates of WNV RNA in a subset of matched feather pairs (47% for both storage temperatures). The efficacy of WNV detection in nonvascular feathers is greatly enhanced by testing multiple feathers. The advantages of using nonvascular feathers over other tissues may outweigh the relatively low detectability of WNV RNA in certain situations such as remote areas lacking resources for acquiring other types of samples or maintaining the cold chain.
Using Conjunctions and Adverbs for Author Verification

Linguistics and stylistics have been investigated for author identification for quite a while, but recently, we have testified a impressive growth in the volume with which lawyers and courts have called upon the expertise of linguists in cases of disputed authorship. This motivates computer science researchers to look to the problem of author identification from a different perspective. In this work, we propose a stylometric feature set based on conjunctions and ad- verbs of the Portuguese language to address the problem of author identification. Two different approaches of classification were considered. The first one is called writer-independent and it re- duces the pattern recognition problem to a single model and two classes, hence, makes it possible to build robust system even when few genuine samples per writer are available. The second one is called the personal model, or writer-dependent, which very often performs better but needs a bigger number of samples per writer. Experiments on a database composed of short articles from 30 different authors and Support Vector Machine (SVM) as classifier demonstrate that the proposed strategy can produced results comparable to the literature.
A System-level Network-on-Chip Simulation Framework with Analytical Interconnecting Wire Models

This paper presents a system-level network-on-chip simulation framework employing transaction-level communication fabric models, such as routers and links, to achieve high simulation speed and provide NoC's latency and throughput information. This framework integrates an analytical interconnecting wire model to estimate the wire delay and its overall influence to the system performance and power properties in early design stages. SystemC provides the infrastructure to integrate transaction-level NoC model and analytical wire model seamlessly, making it easy to refine. 6 deep-submicron CMOS processes from 180nm to 45nm are used to evaluate the performance/power of NoC considering the interconnecting wire models, and wire's latency is estimated to be ~5X more than the router's in sub-100nm processes, and it brings 33.1% in average bandwidth degradation. Temporal and spatial NoC power analysis with wire models under different traffics provides more power implications for designers in early design stages
Resolution of Lung Inflammation by CD44

Successful repair after tissue injury and inflammation requires resolution of the inflammatory response and removal of extracellular matrix breakdown products. We have examined whether the cell-surface adhesion molecule and hyaluronan receptor CD44 plays a role in resolving lung inflammation. CD44-deficient mice succumb to unremitting inflammation following noninfectious lung injury, characterized by impaired clearance of apoptotic neutrophils, persistent accumulation of hyaluronan fragments at the site of tissue injury, and impaired activation of transforming growth factor–β1. This phenotype was partially reversed by reconstitution with CD44+ cells, thus demonstrating a critical role for this receptor in resolving lung inflammation.
Deep belief networks

Recently, Hinton et al.[6] derived a way to perform fast, greedy learning of deep belief networks (DBN) one layer at a time, with the top two layers forming an undirected bipartite graph (associate memory). The learning procedure consists of training a stack of Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBM’s) each having only one layer of latent (hidden) feature detectors. The learned feature activations of one RBM are used as the “data” for training the next RBM in the stack. The important aspect of this layer-wise training procedure is that, provided the number of features per layer does not decrease, [6] showed that each extra layer increases a variational lower bound on the log probability of data. So layer-by-layer training can be repeated several times 1 to learn a deep, hierarchical model in which each layer of features captures strong high-order correlations between the activities of features in the layer below. We will discuss three ideas based on greedily learning a hierarchy of features: Nonlinear Dimensionality Reduction. The DBN framework allows us to make nonlinear autoencoders work considerably better [7] than widely used methods such as PCA, SVD, and LLE. The standard way to train autoencoders is to use backpropagation to reduce the reconstruction error. It is difﬁcult, however, to optimize the weights in non-linear autoencoders that have multiple hidden layers with many million parameters [3, 5]. We use our greedy learning algorithm to pretrain autoencoders. This pretraining stage discovers useful features efﬁciently. After the pretraining stage, the model is “unfolded” to produce encoder and decoder networks that initially use the same weights. The global ﬁne-tuning stage then uses backpropagation through the whole autoencoder to ﬁne-tune the weights for optimal reconstruction. The key idea is that the greedy learning algorithm
Substrate rigidity modulates cell matrix interactions and protein expression in human trabecular meshwork cells.

PURPOSE Extracellular matrix (ECM) composition, tension, and rigidity modulate cell-ECM interactions and have substantial impact on cell functions. The authors studied the effects of ECM rigidity on human trabecular meshwork (HTM) cells to assess ECM rigidity as a possible pathophysiologic factor in glaucoma. METHODS Trabecular meshwork cells derived from donor cornea rings and passaged three to seven times were plated on collagen-coated tissue culture plastic or polyacrylamide gels of different rigidity. Cell spreading and focal adhesions were assessed by immunofluorescence microscopy. Expression of focal adhesion kinase (FAK), alpha-smooth muscle actin (alpha-SMA), tubulin, alpha-B-crystallin and GAPDH, as well as phosphorylation of FAK and serum-induced activation of ERK, were studied by Western blot. The subcellular distributions of alpha-SMA and fibronectin were examined by confocal immunofluorescence microscopy. RESULTS ECM rigidity modulated cell spreading and focal adhesion size. FAK activation and serum-induced ERK phosphorylation increased with rising substrate rigidity. Expression of alpha-SMA and recruitment of alpha-SMA to stress fibers were enhanced on rigid substrates, whereas myocilin and alpha-B-crystallin expression increased on soft substrates. The structure of fibronectin deposits differed on stiff and soft matrices. CONCLUSIONS Extracellular matrix rigidity modulates cytoskeletal structures, protein expression patterns, signal transduction, and fibronectin deposition in HTM cells. ECM changes altering trabecular meshwork resiliency may therefore have significant effects on ocular outflow tract functions with implications in glaucoma.
The Frankfurt Funneling Experiment

Funneling is a technique to multiply beam currents of rf-accelerators in several stages at low energies to prevent problems with space charge. The Frankfurt Funneling Experiment is a prototype of such a stage. Two beams are accelerated in a Two-Beam RFQ and combined to one beam axis with a funneling deflector. The last part of the RFQ electrodes of our Two-Beam RFQ has been replaced to achieve a 3d focus of both beams at the beam crossing point behind the RFQ in the center of the deflector. A new designed multi cell funneling deflector and first results of the new experimental set-up will be presented.
The effects of the incarceration of fathers on the health and wellbeing of mothers and children

Title of dissertation: THE EFFECTS OF THE INCARCERATION OF FATHERS ON THE HEALTH AND WELLBEING OF MOTHERS AND CHILDREN Sheri Pruitt Walker Doctor of Philosophy, 2011 Dissertation Directed by: Professor Judith K. Hellerstein, Department of Economics Professor John Ham, Department of Economics The male incarceration rate has risen dramatically in the last several decades. Over half of incarcerated men are fathers of minor children. My dissertation focuses specifically on families and addresses various aspects of how mothers and children have been affected by the incarceration of fathers. This research uses data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (FFCWB) 1 , a national sample of mostly unwed parents and their children, to estimate the causal effect of the incarceration of fathers on various outcomes for mothers and children. 1 The Fragile Families Study was funded by a grant from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver NICHD (#R01HD36916) and a consortium of private foundations. Persons interested in obtaining Fragile Families contract data should see http://www.fragilefamilies. princeton.edu for further information. However, since the female partners and children of incarcerated men differ along observable characteristics from other mothers and children in the FFCWB, they are also likely to differ in terms of unobservables, and thus ordinary least squares estimation is unlikely to provide an unbiased estimate of this causal effect. Instead, I employ propensity score matching methods to estimate this effects, exploiting the rich data availability in FFCWB. The first chapter introduces these topics and provides a brief discussion. The second chapter discusses the impact of a father‟s incarceration on the public assistance participation of mothers as measured by welfare and food stamp program participation. A large body of research has examined consequences of incarceration on incarcerated men, while little has analyzed the effect on women who share children with incarcerated men. My research aims to fill this gap. I find robust evidence that, among women with incarcerated partners, a partner‟s incarceration increases the probability that mothers receive both welfare and food stamp benefits. The third chapter considers the effect of father‟s incarceration on the health of mothers and the development of children. The outcome variables I analyze are mothers‟ physical health and mental health as measured by depression and anxiety, as well as child‟s cognitive development and social behavior. My findings indicate that, among children with incarcerated fathers, paternal incarceration adversely affects cognitive development and increases aggressive behavior in children at age five. I also find that, among mothers with incarcerated partners, having a partner that is recently incarcerated adversely affect mothers‟ mental health as measured by depression, but positively affects mothers‟ physical health. THE EFFECTS OF THE INCARCERATION OF FATHERS ON THE HEALTH AND WELLBEING OF MOTHERS AND CHILDREN
A Particle Method for Finding Distributed Objects

Abstract : Detecting and identifying distributed objects in an image is a challenge with wide research application. This search problem is difficult, in part, because the individual, multipixel "spots" that make up a distributed object must be taken in the aggregate to have any relevance, and identification is possible only when the majority of the individual spots are detected and found to conform to an expected pattern. In this paper, particle filtering methods are extended in order to detect, localize, and identify a distributed object in a single cluttered image by maximizing the joint probability that a particular collection of spots is the object of interest. The method is illustrated using a "surrogate" estimation problem. Results demonstrate that the proposed method gives a high probability of correct detection and low object location error when the signal to clutter-plus-noise ratio is above 5 decibels.
Simultaneous separation of intracellular and extracellular lactate NMR signals of human erythrocytes

Intracellular/extracellular lactate (Lac) distribution has been determined before in human and animal erythrocytes (red blood cells [RBCs]) with various methods. However, all previous methods determine intra‐ and extracellular Lac separately or indirectly. Now, 13C‐NMR spectroscopy has been used to monitor intra‐ and extracellular Lac simultaneously in intact RBCs. Isolated human RBCs were incubated with [3‐13C]‐Lac, [3‐13C]‐pyruvate (Pyr), and [1‐13C]‐glucose (Gluc). A distortionless enhancement by polarization transfer (DEPT) sequence was used (TR = 3.3 s, N = 128) to monitor the 13C‐NMR resonances in both compartments. The intra‐ and extracellular methyl group resonances of Lac and Pyr were clearly separated by 9.6 Hz and 7.0 Hz, respectively, under normoxic conditions due to the RBC chemical‐shift effect. The results show that the chemical‐shift effect of RBCs is convenient to monitor intra‐ and extracellular Lac simultaneously in intact RBCs under normoxic conditions. Magn Reson Med 58:213–217, 2007. © 2007 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Analyzing QAR Data Using K-PCA

This paper analyzes the drawbacks of traditional principal component analysis (PCA) firstly, and discusses the kernel principal component analysis (KPCA) as well as its drawbacks of high complexity secondly. Then it proposes the K-PCA method. Comparing with KPCA, the method proposed in this paper could achieve dimensionality reduction with faster speed. The results show that: the proposed method performs an experiment on QAR data has a good effect of dimensionality reduction and high correct classification rate.
PENGEMBANGAN AUTENTIC ASSESMENT BERBASIS PROYEK DENGAN PENDEKATAN SAINTIFIK UNTUK MENINGKATKAN KETERAMPILAN BERPIKIR ILMIAH MAHASISWA

Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengembangkan sistem asesmen autentik pada mata kuliah Pengembangan Konsep Dasar IPA SD untuk meningkatkan keterampilan berpikir ilmiah mahasiswa calon guru SD. Desain penelitian yang digunakan adalah R&D yang diarahkan untuk mengembangkan perangkat asesmen autentik berbasis proyek dengan pendekatan saitifik. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa autentic asessment berbasis proyek dengan pendekatan saintifik yang dikembangkan dapat meningkatkan keterampilan berpikir ilmiah dengan efektif. Setiap aspek keterampilan berpikir ilmiah mahasiswa mengalami peningkatan. Secara keseluruhan peningkatan (gain) keterampilan berpikir ilmiah sebesar 0,86 yang artinya peningkatannya dengan kriteria tinggi. Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengembangkan sistem asesmen autentik pada mata kuliah Pengembangan Konsep Dasar IPA SD untuk meningkatkan keterampilan berpikir ilmiah mahasiswa calon guru SD. Desain penelitian yang digunakan adalah R&D yang diarahkan untuk mengembangkan perangkat asesmen autentik berbasis proyek dengan pendekatan saitifik. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa autentic asessment berbasis proyek dengan pendekatan saintifik yang dikembangkan dapat meningkatkan keterampilan berpikir ilmiah dengan efektif. Setiap aspek keterampilan berpikir ilmiah mahasiswa mengalami peningkatan. Secara keseluruhan peningkatan (gain) keterampilan berpikir ilmiah sebesar 0,86 yang artinya peningkatannya dengan kriteria tinggi.