Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Dupla tarefa e mobilidade funcional de idosos ativos

INTRODUCTION: Dual task can be defined as the ability to perform a primary action embedded in a second activity. In the elderly, it is presumed that the performance of concurrent actions disturb the postural balance, favoring falls in this population. AIMS: To evaluate the effect of dual tasks in functional mobility of active seniors and correlate the time used for its realization with the individual's age. METHODS: Cross-sectional, observational study with a convenience sample. Nineteen elderly from Universidade Aberta a Terceira Idade, Universidade Federal do Triângulo Mineiro, Minas Gerais state, Brazil, aged between 60 and 87 years, classified as physically active by the International Physical Activity Questionnaire IPAQ and with a minimum score that reaches 23 points on the Mini-Mental State Examination MMSE were evaluated during 9 sequential tests. The first one required a single task, which was represented by the Timed Up & Go TUG test, used to assess functional mobility of seniors. TUG was repeated in all other tests, in which was included a second action - manual activity in two tests and cognitive activity in six tests. RESULTS: The elderly spent longer period performing associated tasks considering both motor and motor-cognitive combined actions when compared with time spent during the simple task. Positive correlation between age and the tests that incorporate cognitive activity to achieve the TUG was established. CONCLUSION: Physically active seniors require a longer period to perform the dual motor task involving distinct functions and coordinates between the upper limbs, and the same occurs for the performance of motor-cognitive dual tasks. The higher the age, the greater the time to perform double tasks, especially when associated with activities requiring short-term memory.
On the Gaussian K-description problem under symmetric distortion constraints

We consider multiple description (MD) coding for the Gaussian source under the symmetric mean squared error distortion constraints. With focus on the three description problem, we provide inner and outer bounds for the rate region, between which the gap can be bounded by some small constants. At the heart of this result is a novel lower bound for the sum rate, which is derived through generalization of the well-known bounding technique by Ozarow. In contrast to the original method, we expand the probability space by more than one (instead of only one) random variable, and further impose a particular Markov structure on them. The outer bound is then established by applying this technique to several bounding planes of the rate region. For the inner bound, we consider a simple scheme of combining successive refinement coding and lossless multilevel diversity coding (MLD). Both the inner and outer bounds can be written as the intersection of ten half spaces with matching normal directions, and thus can be easily compared. The small gap between them, where the boundary of the MD rate region clearly resides, suggests the surprising competitiveness of this simple achievability scheme. The geometric structure of the MLD rate region provides important guidelines as to the normal directions of the outer bound hyperplanes, which demonstrates an intimate connection between MD and MLD coding. These results can be generalized and improved in various ways which are also discussed.
Full-duplex vs. half-duplex secret-key generation

Secret-key agreement from reciprocal wireless channels has been considered a valuable supplement for security at the physical-layer. On the one hand, full-duplex (FD) communication is regarded as one of the key technologies in future 5G systems. On the other hand, the success of 5G depends, among other things, on the ability to allow for secure communication. However, most key agreement models are based on half-duplex (HD) setups. Therefore, in this work, we propose representations of key generation models in both HD and FD modes. We analyze the performance of FD vs. HD modes by utilizing the key-communication function of secret-key agreement. It turns out that, for the application of key agreement, the FD approach enables advantages over the conventional HD setups. In particular, we derive a condition that guarantees improved performance of FD over HD mode in the high SNR regime.
Recognizing simple human actions by exploiting regularities in pose sequences

The human visual system represents a very complex and important part of brain activity, occupying a very significant portion of the cortex resources. It enables us to see colors, detect motion, perceive dimensions and distance. It enables us to solve a very wide range of problems such as image segmentation, object tracking, as well as object and activity recognition. We perform these tasks so easily that we are not even aware of their enormous complexity. How do we do that? This question has motivated decades of research in the field of computer vision. In this thesis, I make a contribution toward solving the particular problem of visionbased human-action recognition by exploiting the compositional nature of simple actions such as running, walking or bending. Noting that simple actions consist of a series of atomic movements and can be represented as a structured sequence of poses, I designed and implemented a system that learns a model of actions based on human-pose classification from a single frame and from a model of transitions between poses through time. The system comprises three parts. The first part is the pose classifier that is capable of inferring a pose from a single frame. Its role is to take as input an image and give its best estimate of the pose in that image. The second part is a hidden Markov model of the transitions between poses. I exploit structural constraints in human motion to build a model that corrects some of the errors made by the independent single-frame pose classifier. Finally, in the third part, the corrected sequence of poses is used to recognize action based on the frequency of pose patterns, the transitions between the poses and hidden Markov models of individual actions. I demonstrate and test my system on the public KTH dataset, which contains examples of running, walking, jogging, boxing, handclapping, and handwaving, as well as on a new dataset, which contains examples of not only running and walking, but also jumping, crouching, crawling, kicking a ball, passing a basketball, and shooting a basketball. On these datasets, my system exhibits 91% action recognition recall rate.
Selective opening security of practical public-key encryption schemes

The authors show that two well-known and widely employed public-key encryption schemes – RSA optimal asymmetric encryption padding (RSA-OAEP) and Diffie–Hellman integrated encryption scheme (DHIES), instantiated with a one-time pad, – are secure under (the strong, simulation-based security notion of) selective opening security against chosen-ciphertext attacks in the random oracle model. Both schemes are obtained via known generic transformations that transform relatively weak primitives (with security in the sense of one-wayness) to indistinguishability (IND)-CCA secure encryption schemes. The authors also show a similar result for the well-known Fujisaki–Okamoto transformation that can generically turn a one-way secure public key encryption system and a one-time pad into a IND-CCA-secure public-key encryption system. The authors prove that selective opening security comes for free in these transformations. Both DHIES and RSA-OAEP are important building blocks in several standards for public key encryption and key exchange protocols. The Fujisaki–Okamoto transformation is very versatile and has successfully been utilised to build efficient lattice-based cryptosystems. The considered schemes are the first practical cryptosystems that meet the strong notion of simulation-based selective opening (SIM-SO-CCA) security.
Adaptive-Acceleration Data Center TCP

Providing deadline-sensitive services is a challenge in data centers. Because of the conservativeness in additive increase congestion avoidance, current transmission control protocols are inefficient in utilizing the super high bandwidth of data centers. This may cause many deadline-sensitive flows to miss their deadlines before achieving their available bandwidths. We propose an Adaptive-Acceleration Data Center TCP, A2DTCP, which takes into account both network congestion and latency requirement of application service. By using congestion avoidance with an adaptive increase rate that varies between additive and multiplicative, A2DTCP accelerates bandwidth detection thus achieving high bandwidth utilization efficiency. At-scale simulations and real testbed implementations show that A2DTCP significantly reduces the missed deadline ratio compared to D2TCP and DCTCP. In addition, A2DTCP can co-exist with conventional TCP as well without requiring more changes in switch hardware than D2TCP and DCTCP.
Threefolded motion perception during immersive walkthroughs

Locomotion is one of the most fundamental processes in the real world, and its consideration in immersive virtual environments (IVEs) is of major importance for many application domains requiring immersive walkthroughs. From a simple physics perspective, such self-motion can be defined by the three components speed, distance, and time. Determining motions in the frame of reference of a human observer imposes a significant challenge to the perceptual processes in the human brain, and the resulting speed, distance, and time percepts are not always veridical. In previous work in the area of IVEs, these components were evaluated in separate experiments, i. e. , using largely different hardware, software and protocols. In this paper we analyze the perception of the three components of locomotion during immersive walkthroughs using the same setup and similar protocols. We conducted experiments in an Oculus Rift head-mounted display (HMD) environment which showed that subjects largely underestimated virtual distances, slightly underestimated virtual speed, and we observed that subjects slightly overestimated elapsed time.
Effect of Nitroglycerin and Dipyridamole on Regional Coronary Resistance

We studied the changes caused by intravenous injection of nitroglycerin (0.3 to 0.6 mg) and dipyridamole (5 to 10 mg) on the resistance of large and small coronary arteries of dogs. The direction of change in resistance of large conductive vessels (Rc) was estimated by dividing the pressure drop from aorta to a superficial branch by the flow in that vessel. The total resistance (Rt) in the same vessel was estimated by relating aortic pressure to the same flow. The effects of both drugs on aortic pressure were comparable 3 to 7 minutes after injection. Nitroglycerin during this period caused a reduction in Rc, whereas dipyridamole caused a significant reduction in Rt for 12 minutes but no consistent changes in Rc. In the same preparation, small intracoronary doses of the drugs, which hardly affected the aortic pressure, caused comparable changes in resistance. This was also evident in a preparation in which the flow in the coronary vessel was held constant. These two drugs therefore differ in their site of action on the coronary vascular bed, a difference which may explain their contrasting therapeutic effects in chronic coronary disease in man.
Analysis of 3×5 planar array antenna with mutual coupling and optimization using PSO

A 3×5 planar array of dipoles is analyzed taking mutual coupling into account. Multi-objective fitness function considering the Directivity (D), Half Power Beam Width (HPBW) and Front to Side Lobe Level (FSLL) of the antenna is examined and the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm is employed to optimize the planar array using the obtained fitness value. The array is simulated with self developed MOM structure code using MATLAB (7.8.0) and verified using MININEC (14.0) software package. Finally, the optimized results are compared with different types of Yagi-Uda array, optimized using various optimization techniques, to evaluate the performance of the planar array.
Knowledge-based grapheme-to-phoneme conversion of Lithuanian words

This paper presents a knowledge-based approach to graphemeto-phoneme conversion (G2P) of isolated words of Lithuanian. Grapheme-to-phoneme conversion is performed in three consecutive steps: syllable boundary identification, accentuation, and transcription. Automatic accentuation is the most challenging task that is solved by combining lexicon with the accentuation rules formalized for every grammatical category. The algorithm is evaluated on the list of 50 000 word types which is obtained by selecting 100 most frequent word types per grammatical category. The proposed algorithm achieved 93.5% and 98.9% G2P accuracy at word and grapheme level respectively.
Optimizing Scheduling and Intercluster Connection for Application-Specific DSP Processors

Signal processing applications have high instruction level parallelism (ILP) and real-time performance requirements. Embedded and application specific multicluster architecture is desirable to provide the large computation power that these applications need. As technology moves to deep submicron level, it becomes more important and challenging to design an efficient intercluster connection network to satisfy the rapid growing intercluster data transfer needs under the power and cost constraints. This paper addresses the automatic generation of intercluster connection network with partially connected buses. An application specific approach is proposed in this paper to determine the minimum number of required partially connected buses without performance degradation for a given schedule in polynomial time. The intercluster connection topology is then generated with the determined minimum number of partially connected buses to minimize the connection bus segments. Further, a scheduling algorithm is presented in this paper to minimize the intercluster communication needs for the given application and to reduce the minimum number of partially connected buses required in the intercluster connection network under schedule length constraint. Experimental results indicate that an average reduction up to 50.6% in the number of minimum required buses and an average reduction of 64.5% in bus segments can be achieved compared to commonly used intercluster communication aware scheduling techniques and as soon as possible (ASAP) data transfer scheme.
Tuberculous pleural effusions: Lymphocyte phenotypes in comparison with other lymphocyte‐rich effusions

This study investigated whether the analysis of T cell subsets and of activation markers on T cells in pleural fluids can be helpful for diagnostic purposes in tuberculous pleurisy and other lymphocyte‐rich pleural effusions. Pleural effusion fluids were obtained from 18 patients with tuberculous pleurisy (TB), 21 with effusions following radiotherapy (RT) for a malignant disease, and 11 with congestive heart failure (CHF). Lymphocyte subsets were analyzed by a battery of monoclonal antibodies using an immunoperoxidase method. The majority of the lymphocytes were CD3‐positive T cells (TB, 86 ± 7% of lymphocytes; RT, 81 ± 8%; CHF, 84 ± 12%). The ratios of CD4‐positive helper‐inducer to CD8‐positive suppressor‐cytotoxic T cells were higher than those reported for the peripheral blood but not significantly different between the study groups (TB, 3.3 ± 1.9; RT, 2.8 ± 1.1). The activation marker studies revealed that only a few pleural T cells were positive for CD38, CD25 (interleukin‐2 receptor), HLA‐DR antigen, and OKT9 (transferrin receptor), the proportion of CD25‐positive T cells being higher in TB and in RT than in CHF and the proportion of HLA‐DR‐positive T cells being higher in TB than in CHF (P < 0.05). Significant differences were not observed relative to the natural killer‐cytotoxic phenotypes staining positive for Leu‐7 or for CD16. Thus, we concluded that phenotypic analysis of lymphocytes is of limited diagnostic usefulness to differentiate tuberculous from other nonmalignant effusions.
Visual comparative colorimetry. A practical method of estimating operative blood loss.

Most anesthesiologists estimate blood loss by rough visual assessment, by noting its effects on cardiovascular parameters, by weighing of swabs, by substraction of fluids used in surgical irrigation from blood in suction reservoir, either by laboratory estimation or by trusting their experience and instinct. I describe here a simple and practical method of estimating operative blood loss (OBL). It is based on colour comparison of two solutions containing blood using simple equipments readily available in any operating room, without the need to know the patients' initial Hb or Hct or depend on laboratory results. Using visual comparative colorimetry (VCC) in a clinical setting is simple. We collect five ml of patient's blood in a heparinized syringe and use it to prepare a standard 1% solution in water (sample A) (as our pilot study revealed that the optimum concentration of hemoglobin in samples to be compared appears to be about 0.15 gms% i.e. 1% solution). In a large container, a homogenous solution of lost blood is prepared by washing all the soaked swabs. Blood collected in the suction bottle is added to the solution. Sufficient amount of water is then added, so that the final colour of the solution resembles the prepared standard. Now, 10 ml of this solution is taken by a 10 ml syringe in a test tube. Another test tube is filled with 9 ml plain water. Blood from the original patient sample, suitably diluted to 10% (according to the pilot study) is now loaded in an insulin syringe and added drop by drop into the second test tube (sample B). Both solutions are visually compared against an x-ray view box for colour match. Once a colour match is obtained, the amount of blood required to obtain this result (Vb) is noted. OBL is then calculated in ml by using a simple mathematical formula: OBL = Vb / Vc X Vd Where Vb is the volume of blood added to obtain a colour match, Vc is the volume of the sample (10 ml in this case) and Vd is the total volume of the prepared homogenous solution (diluents). Similar samples were sent to the laboratory by a blinded investigator for colour comparison using a spectrophotometer for the naked eye to obtain a colour match. Results revealed that dilute solution 1-2% gave accurate results; the range of error was much higher in readings by spectrophotometer than in our method, the mean error was 2.3%. By using VCC, it is much easier to make an informed decision regarding blood transfusion and avoid unnecessary single unit transfusions. However, the accuracy of the method depends on meticulous preparation of solutions and accurate titrations. Of course, the need to observe universal precautions for handling bio-hazardous material cannot be over-emphasized.
Treatment Refusal and Premature Termination in Psychotherapy, Pharmacotherapy, and Their Combination: A Meta-Analysis of Head-to-Head Comparisons

The purpose of this meta-analysis was to examine rates of treatment refusal and premature termination for pharmacotherapy alone, psychotherapy alone, pharmacotherapy plus psychotherapy, and psychotherapy plus pill placebo treatments. A systematic review of the literature resulted in 186 comparative trials that included a report of treatment refusal and/or premature termination for at least 2 of the 4 treatment conditions. The data from these studies were pooled using a random-effects analysis. Odds Ratio effect sizes were then calculated to compare the rates between treatment conditions, once across all studies and then again for specific client disorder categories. An average treatment refusal rate of 8.2% was found across studies. Clients who were assigned to pharmacotherapy were 1.76 times more likely to refuse treatment compared with clients who were assigned psychotherapy. Differences in refusal rates for pharmacotherapy and psychotherapy were particularly evident for depressive disorders, panic disorder, and social anxiety disorder. On average, 21.9% of clients prematurely terminated their treatment. Across studies, clients who were assigned to pharmacotherapy were 1.20 times more likely to drop out compared with clients who were assigned to psychotherapy. Pharmacotherapy clients with anorexia/bulimia and depressive disorders dropped out at higher rates compared with psychotherapy clients with these disorders. Treatment refusal and dropout are significant problems in both psychotherapy and pharmacotherapy and providers of these treatments should seek to employ strategies to reduce their occurrence.
Templating Wiki Content for Fun and Profit

Content templating enables reuse of content structures between wiki pages. Such a feature is implemented in several mainstream wiki engine. Systematic study of its conceptual models and comparison of the available implementations are unfortunately missing in the wiki literature. In this paper we aim to fill this gap first analyzing template-related user needs, and then reviewing existing approaches at content templating. Our investigation shows that two models emerge—functional and creational templating—and that both have weakness failing to properly fit in “The Wiki Way”. As a solution, we propose the adoption of creational templates enriched with light constraints, showing that such a solution has a low implementative footprint in state-of-the-art wiki engines, and that it has a synergy with semantic wikis. 1. Department of Computer Science, University of Bologna, Mura Anteo Zamboni 7, 40127 Bologna, ITALY
A technical application of quantitative next generation sequencing for chimerism evaluation

At present, the most common genetic diagnostic method for chimerism evaluation following hematopoietic stem cell transplantation is microsatellite analysis by capillary electrophoresis. The main objective was to establish, through repeated analysis over time, if a complete chimerism was present, or if the mixed chimerism was stable, increasing or decreasing over time. Considering the recent introduction of next generation sequencing (NGS) in clinical diagnostics, a detailed study evaluating an NGS protocol was conducted, coupled with a custom bioinformatics pipeline, for chimerism quantification. Based on the technology of Ion AmpliSeq, a 44-amplicon custom chimerism panel was designed, and a custom bioinformatics pipeline dedicated to the genotyping and quantification of NGS data was coded. The custom chimerism panel allowed identification of an average of 16 informative recipient alleles. The limit of detection of the protocol was fixed at 1% due to the NGS background (<1%). The protocol followed the standard Ion AmpliSeq library preparation and Ion Torrent Personal Genome Machine guidelines. Overall, the present study added to the scientific literature, identifying novel technical details for a possible future application of NGS for chimerism quantification.
The Experiences of High School Teachers Who Have Encountered Burnout

The Experiences of High School Teachers Who Have Encountered Burnout by Jimmie Lee McKinley, Jr. EdS, Walden University, 2012 MEd, University of Tennessee, 2004 BM, University of Tennessee, 2002 Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Education