Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Improving strength and postural control in young skiers: whole-body vibration versus equivalent resistance training.

CONTEXT Several groups have undertaken studies to evaluate the physiologic effects of whole-body vibration (WBV). However, the value of WBV in a training program remains unknown. OBJECTIVE To investigate whether a WBV program results in a better strength and postural control performance than an equivalent exercise program performed without vibration. DESIGN Randomized, controlled trial. SETTING Laboratory. PATIENTS OR OTHER PARTICIPANTS Thirty-three Belgian competitive skiers (ages = 9-15 years). INTERVENTION(S) Subjects were assigned to either the WBV group or the equivalent resistance (ER) group for 6 weeks of training at 3 times per week. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE(S) Isokinetic plantar and dorsiflexion peak torque, isokinetic knee flexion and extension peak torque, explosive strength (high box test), and postural control were assessed before and after the training period. RESULTS Both training programs significantly improved isokinetic ankle and knee muscle strength and explosive strength. Moreover, the increases in explosive strength and in plantar-flexor strength at low speed were significantly higher in the WBV group than in the ER group after 6 weeks. However, neither WBV training nor ER training seemed to have an effect on postural control. CONCLUSIONS A strength training program that includes WBV appears to have additive effects in young skiers compared with an equivalent program that does not include WBV. Therefore, our findings support the hypothesis that WBV training may be a beneficial supplementary training technique in strength programs for young athletes.
PICK1 Loss of Function Occludes Homeostatic Synaptic Scaling

Homeostatic synaptic scaling calibrates neuronal excitability by adjusting synaptic strengths during prolonged changes in synaptic activity. The molecular mechanisms that regulate the trafficking of AMPA receptors (AMPARs) during synaptic scaling are largely unknown. Here, we show that chronic activity blockade reduces PICK1 protein level on a time scale that coincides with the accumulation of surface AMPARs. PICK1 loss of function alters the subunit composition and the abundance of GluA2-containing AMPARs. Due to aberrant trafficking of these receptors, the increase in synaptic strength in response to synaptic inactivity is occluded in neurons generated from PICK1 knock-out mouse. In agreement with electrophysiological recordings, no defect of AMPAR trafficking is observed in PICK1 knock-out neurons in response to elevated neuronal activity. Overall, our data reveal an important role of PICK1 in inactivity-induced synaptic scaling by regulating the subunit composition, abundance, and trafficking of GluA2-containing AMPARs.
Lock-Free Optimization for Non-Convex Problems

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and its variants have attracted much attention in machine learning due to their efficiency and effectiveness for optimization. To handle large-scale problems, researchers have recently proposed several lock-free strategy based parallel SGD (LF-PSGD) methods for multi-core systems. However, existing works have only proved the convergence of these LF-PSGD methods for convex problems. To the best of our knowledge, no work has proved the convergence of the LF-PSGD methods for non-convex problems. In this paper, we provide the theoretical proof about the convergence of two representative LF-PSGD methods, Hogwild! and AsySVRG, for non-convex problems. Empirical results also show that both Hogwild! and AsySVRG are convergent on non-convex problems, which successfully verifies our theoretical results.
Image retrieval system using a decomposition of shape information

In this paper, we propose an image retrieval system using the decomposition of shape information. First, the system extracts the boundary of the object using Minimum Error Thresholding and some morphological image processing method. After that, to extract the local feature, the image is divided into smaller areas. The feature relies on the discrete wavelet transform and singular value decomposition of the shape information. Next step, we compare the differences between the feature of the query image and all the images in the database. Finally, based on the differences measures and threshold, the best possible candidate matches are given as result. The experimental results showed that the proposed system effectively searched for the relevant images with various projective distortions.
The Role of Discount Factor in Risk Sensitive Markov Decision Processes

Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) have long been the framework for modeling optimal decisions in stochastic environments. Although less known, Risk Sensitive Markov Decision Processes (RSMDP) extend MDPs by allowing arbitrary risk attitude. However, not every environment is well-defined in MDPs and RSMDPs and both versions make use of discount in costs to turn every problem well-defined, because of the exponential grow in RSMDPs, the problem of a well-defined problem is even harder. Here, we show that the use of discount in costs: (i) in MDPs induces a risk-prone attitude in MDPs, and (ii) in MDPs, hinders risk-averse attitude for some scenarios.
Half-duplex relaying for the multiuser channel

This work focuses on studying the half-duplex (HD) relaying in the Multiple Access Relay Channel (MARC) and the Compound Multiple Access Channel with a Relay (cMACr). A generalized Quantize-and-Forward (GQF) has been proposed to establish the achievable rate regions. Such scheme is developed based on the variation of the Quantize-and-Forward (QF) scheme and single block with two slots coding structure. The results in this paper can also be considered as a significant extension of the achievable rate region of Half-Duplex Relay Channel (HDRC). Furthermore, the rate regions based on GQF scheme are extended to the Gaussian channel case. The scheme performance is shown through some numerical examples.
Anchored protein kinase A signalling in cardiac cellular electrophysiology

The cyclic adenosine monophosphate (cAMP)‐dependent protein kinase (PKA) is an elementary molecule involved in both acute and chronic modulation of cardiac function. Substantial research in recent years has highlighted the importance of A‐kinase anchoring proteins (AKAP) therein as they act as the backbones of major macromolecular signalling complexes of the β‐adrenergic/cAMP/PKA pathway. This review discusses the role of AKAP‐associated protein complexes in acute and chronic cardiac modulation by dissecting their role in altering the activity of different ion channels, which underlie cardiac action potential (AP) generation. In addition, we review the involvement of different AKAP complexes in mechanisms of cardiac remodelling and arrhythmias.
Towards a low-power and high-performance device for sleep apnea monitoring

Lately, many clinical and academic researches have shown that it is feasible to determine different sleep phases and obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) occurrence without EEG signals, which is always the essential foundation of polysomnography (PSG). In order to conduct further research of OSA screening, we have developed a novel device acquiring some other physiological signals with different sensors. The proposed portable device is characterized by low power consumption, high performance and high precision during long-term monitoring. This paper will present the hardware design of proposed system in details, mainly consisted of signals acquisition modules, digital sub-system and power supply module.Many excellent, low-power chips have been utilized in this device, and play important roles in signal acquiring and data processing. The result of performance tests has shown that the proposed device for sleep apnea monitoring is comparable to mature products, and capable ofproviding feasible method for OSA diagnosis and further researches.
Information Flow in the 21st Century: The Dynamics of Agenda-Uptake

Although the theory of agenda-setting is a pillar of political communication research, understanding the dynamics of public attention remains an important challenge as the communication system becomes increasingly fragmented. The development of ideologically oriented niche media and the ability of the mainstream media to carefully track the interests of their audience suggest that both public interest and niche media attention to an issue could affect the mainstream media’s agenda itself. We develop and test the theory of agenda-uptake to isolate when mainstream media influences both public and niche media attention to issues and when public interest and niche media attention influence the mainstream media to cover an issue. Analyzing mainstream and niche media coverage along with Google Trends individual search data for 4 issues in 2008, we provide evidence that the dynamics of agenda-uptake are crucial to understanding the character and content of the information environment in the 21st century.
Modelling the broad-band spectral energy distribution of the microquasars XTE J1550−564 and H 1743−322

We report results from a systematic study of the spectral energy distribution (SED) and spectral evolution of XTE J1550−564 and H 1743−322 in outbursts. The jets of both sources have been directly imaged at both radio and X-ray frequencies, which makes it possible to constrain the spectrum of the radiating electrons in the jets. We modelled the observed SEDs of the jet ‘blobs’ with synchrotron emission alone and with synchrotron emission plus inverse Compton scattering. The results favour a pure synchrotron origin of the observed jet emission. Moreover, we found evidence that the shape of the electron spectral distribution is similar for all jet ‘blobs’ seen. Assuming that this is the case for the jet as a whole, we then applied the synchrotron model to the radio spectrum of the total emission and extrapolated the results to higher frequencies. In spite of significant degeneracy in the fits, it seems clear that, while the synchrotron radiation from the jets can account for nearly 100 per cent of the measured radio fluxes, it contributes little to the observed X-ray emission, when the source is relatively bright. In this case, the X-ray emission is most likely dominated by emission from the accretion flows. When the source becomes fainter, however, the jet emission becomes more important, even dominant, at X-ray energies. We also examined the spectral properties of the sources during outbursts and the correlation between the observed radio and X-ray variabilities. The implication of the results is discussed.
Cardiac and Skeletal Muscles Show Molecularly Distinct Responses to Cancer 1 Cachexia 2 3

Cardiac and Skeletal Muscles Show Molecularly Distinct Responses to Cancer 1 Cachexia 2 3 Angie M.Y. Shum, David C.Y Fung, Susan M. Corley, Max C. McGill, Nicholas 4 Bentley, Timothy C. Tan, Marc R. Wilkins and Patsie Polly* 5 6 Inflammation and Infection Research Centre and Department of Pathology, New South 7 Wales Systems Biology Initiative, School of Biotechnology and Biomolecular Sciences, 8 Faculty of Science, UNSW Australia, NSW 2052, Australia. Mitochondrial Bioenergetics 9 Group, Department of Pharmacology, School of Medical Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, 10 UNSW Australia, NSW 2052, Australia. Blacktown Clinical School and Blacktown 11 Hospital, 18 Blacktown Road, Blacktown, NSW 2148, Australia. Cardiac Ultrasound 12 Laboratory, Massachusetts General Hospital, MA02114, USA. 13 14 15 16 †First co-authors 17 18 *Corresponding author: 19 A/Prof Patsie Polly 20 School of Medical Sciences, 21 Faculty of Medicine, 22 Rm 420 Wallace Wurth EAST Building, 23 UNSW Australia, 24 High Street, Kensington, 25 NSW 2052, AUSTRALIA 26 27 Email: patsie.polly@unsw.edu. au 28 Telephone: +612-9385-2924 29 Fax: +612-9385-1389 30 31 Running title: Different Molecular Responses to Cancer Cachexia in Muscle 32 33 Articles in PresS. Physiol Genomics (September 22, 2015). doi:10.1152/physiolgenomics.00128. 2014
Model-Based Testing of Stateful APIs with Modbat

Modbat makes testing easier by providing a user-friendly modeling language to describe the behavior of systems, from such a model, test cases are generated and executed. Modbat's domain-specific language is based on Scala, its features include probabilistic and non-deterministic transitions, component models with inheritance, and exceptions. We demonstrate the versatility of Modbat by finding a confirmed defect in the currently latest version of Java, and by testing SAT solvers.
Analysis and Design of Public Places Crowd Stampede Early-Warning Simulating System

With the development of the society, in recent years, frequent crowd stampede accidents have posed great threats to public security. Based on the traditional video surveillance technology, making full use of computer vision, image processing, pattern recognition and other related technology to detect target and recognize abnormal human behavior in monitoring scene as well as conducting a risk assessment of the state of crowds in public places for timely warning has been the focus of attention around people. In this paper, the requirements of public places crowd stampede early-warning simulating system were analyzed, and the basic design of the two aspects including system functions and system processes was presented. In addition, the basic functions of the system were initially realized.
The Internet of Toys: A Posthuman and Multimodal Analysis of Connected Play

Background The study reported in this article focuses on an exploration of the role and nature of play in young children's use of toys that connect physical and digital domains. Purpose The purpose of the article is to explore the nature of the connections that are made in play that transverses physical and virtual domains. The article draws on posthuman theory to explain some of the complexity of the play that occurs in these contexts. Research Design The research took place in the United Kingdom, and the overall study consisted of four distinct stages: (a) A survey of 2,000 parents of children aged 0–5 years, focusing on children's access to and use of tablet apps; (b) case studies of preschool children's use of apps in six families; (c) observations of children aged 3–5 years in a school using apps; and (d) content and multimodal analysis of apps. The focus of this article is on (b), although some of the survey data from the first stage of the study are also shared to provide context. Data Collection and Analysis The focus for this article is the play of a three-year-old girl, Amy. In addition to ethnographic data constructed over a 2-month period (field notes, interviews, photographs, and films), Amy's mother collected data between the researchers’ visits by making films of her daughter's use of apps. Amy also collected data herself by wearing a GoPro chestcam. The data that inform the analysis in this article are from a film created by Amy (11:05 minutes) and a video filmed by Amy's mother (5.21 minutes). Data were both inductively analyzed using multimodal (inter)action analysis and deductively analyzed using a posthumanist approach. Findings Amy's play connected digital and nondigital components in complex ways. An app and related physical object that typify the Internet of Toys provided opportunities for Amy's play to take place across physical and digital domains, and the inorganic objects embedded in the electronic toy and related app were an important element of this play, shaping Amy's responses at times. However, Amy's play was not always determined by the design of the electronic objects, and she demonstrated agency within play episodes. There were multiple connections made across a variety of domains/ dimensions, which added to the complexity of the play. Conclusions/Recommendations Young children's play increasingly connects digital and nondigital domains, and posthumanist theories can enhance understanding of how connections across these time/spaces are made.
Rethinking Multicultural Group Work as Intercultural Learning

This article presents our findings of an exploration of students’ perceptions of multicultural group work when specific changes in pedagogy and methods of evaluation were made to include the processes students navigate, instead of merely the end product of their collaboration. Shifting demographics and increasing cultural diversity in higher education classrooms have presented the need for educators to rethink the formation, preparation, and evaluation of group work. This paper argues for learning to include the process of working with others rather than merely the product of group work. The findings from this study support previous literature advocating for more intentional approaches by providing evidence that changes to the preparation of groups, the formation of groups, and the evaluation of group work enhanced intercultural learning and improved the experience of working in a multicultural group for the majority of the participants.
Progressive Random Indexing

The vector space model is undoubtedly among the most popular data representation models used in the processing of large networks. Unfortunately, the vector space model suffers from the so-called curse of dimensionality, a phenomenon where data become extremely sparse due to an exponential growth of the data space volume caused by a large number of dimensions. Thus, dimensionality reduction techniques are necessary to make large networks represented in the vector space model available for analysis and processing. Most dimensionality reduction techniques tend to focus on principal components present in the data, effectively disregarding local relationships that may exist between objects. This behavior is a significant drawback of current dimensionality reduction techniques, because these local relationships are crucial for maintaining high accuracy in many network analysis tasks, such as link prediction or community detection. To rectify the aforementioned drawback, we propose Progressive Random Indexing, a new dimensionality reduction technique. Built upon Reflective Random Indexing, our method significantly reduces the dimensionality of the vector space model while retaining all important local relationships between objects. The key element of the Progressive Random Indexing technique is the use of the gain value at each reflection step, which determines how much information about local relationships should be included in the space of reduced dimensionality. Our experiments indicate that when applied to large real-world networks (Facebook social network, MovieLens movie recommendations), Progressive Random Indexing outperforms state-of-the-art methods in link prediction tasks.
A Silhouette-Based Algorithm for Texture Registration and Stitching

In this paper a system is presented that automatically registers and stitches textures acquired from multiple photographic images onto the surface of a given corresponding 3D model. Within this process the camera position, direction, and field of view must be determined for each of the images. For this registration, which aligns a 2D image to a 3D model, we present an efficient hardware-accelerated silhouette-based algorithm working on different image resolutions that accurately registers each image without any user interaction. Besides the silhouettes, the given texture information also can be used to improve accuracy by comparing one stitched texture to already registered images resulting in a global multiview optimization. After the 3D? 2D registration for each part of the 3D model's surface the view is determined which provides the best available texture. Textures are blended at the borders of regions assigned to different views.
Male–male competition and nuptial–colour displacement as a diversifying force in Lake Victoria cichlid fishes

We propose a new mechanism for diversification of male nuptial–colour patterns in the rapidly speciating cichlid fishes of Lake Victoria. Sympatric closely related species often display nuptial colours at opposite ends of the spectrum with males either blue or yellow to red. Colour polymorphisms within single populations are common too. We propose that competition between males for breeding sites promotes such colour diversification, and thereby speciation. We hypothesize that male aggression is primarily directed towards males of the common colour, and that rare colour morphs enjoy a negatively frequency–dependent fitness advantage. We test our hypothesis with a large dataset on the distributions and nuptial colorations of 52 species on 47 habitat islands in Lake Victoria, and with a smaller dataset on the within–spawning–site distributions of males with different coloration. We report that territories of males of the same colour are negatively associated on the spawning site, and that the distribution of closely related species over habitat islands is determined by nuptial coloration in the fashion predicted by our hypothesis. Whereas among unrelated species those with similar nuptial colour are positively associated, among closely related species those with similar colour are negatively associated and those with different colour are positively associated. This implies that negatively frequency–dependent selection on nuptial coloration among closely related species is a sufficiently strong force to override other effects on species distributions. We suggest that male–male competition is an important and previously neglected agent of diversification among haplochromine cichlid fishes.
Evaluation of a Collaborative Volume Rendering Application in a Distributed Virtual Environment

In this paper, we present a collaborative volume rendering application which can be used in distributed virtual environments. The application allows the users to collaboratively view volumetric data and manipulate the transfer functions. Furthermore, 3D markers can be used to support communication. The collaborative setup includes a full duplex audio channel between the virtual environments. The developed software was evaluated with external users who were asked to solve tasks in two scenarios which resembled real-world situations from the medical field: a presentation and a time-constrained search task. For the evaluation, two 4-sided CAVE-like virtual environments were linked. The collaborative application was analyzed for both technical and social aspects.
The Ties that Bind Beyond the Battlefield: An Examination of the Diffusion Patterns of Veterans Treatment Courts

Objectives The growing number of veterans on court dockets with mental health and substance abuse issues has resulted in the proliferation of veterans treatment courts (VTCs). Given the ubiquity of substance abuse and mental illness across communities, it is unclear why some local courts innovate and, more importantly, why some do so earlier than others. Methods Using data from 2008 to 2014, the study applies event history modeling to investigate the extent to which, if any, presiding judgesâ€™ connection to the armed forces, either personally or through immediate family members (e.g., parents, children), accelerates the adoption of statesâ€™ initial VTCs. Results Findings show significant support for both the hastening effect of personal knowledge of the military and, to a lesser extent, the increased presence VA Communityâ€ Based Outpatient Clinics have on VTC innovation. Conclusions Judgesâ€™ social group membership and the availability of government resources in a community influence court organization innovation.