Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Abnormal Regional Body Fat Distribution Also Exists in Non-Obese Subjects with High Blood Pressure

A cross-sectional analysis was performed to explore the relationship between regional body fat distribution and blood pressure in non-obese subjects with different status of blood pressure. Dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry was performed to measure fat mass. Obesity was defined as present body fat ≥25% in males and ≥35% in females. The ratio of leg fat mass to total fat mass (L/T) decreased gradually while the ratio of trunk fat mass to total fat mass (Tr/T) increased gradually with the increasing blood pressure for both genders in non-obese subjects (P < .01), which was consistent with the change in obese ones; and the blood pressure status in the low Tr/T + high L/T group was better than that in the high Tr/T + low L/T group, obviously. After adjustment for confounding factors, blood pressure was still positively related with Tr/T but negatively associated with L/T in non-obese groups. A multiple linear regression analysis showed that L/T was the major negative factors of blood pressure in the non-obese population. Abnormal fat distribution also exists in non-obese subjects with high blood pressure; compared to trunk fat, leg fat may be a more important factor against blood pressure.
Bio-, Agro- or even Social Fuels: Discourse Dynamics on Biofuels in Germany

Within the EU, Germany took a pioneering role in the production and promotion of biofuels. To explain this role the article analytically examines public discourses on biofuels. The analysis points out how the subject is interpreted and positioned by relevant actors and thus results in a specific public perception of biofuels in Germany. This perception in turn influences political decision-making processes. Since the analysis of discourses contributes to a better understanding of today's biofuel policy in Germany, the article characterises the biofuel discourse during the genesis of this policy. Additionally, it analytically traces changes of discourse constellations in the course of the biofuel policy path.
A Comparative Study of the Bone Regenerative Effect of Chemically Modified RNA Encoding BMP-2 or BMP-9

Employing cost-effective biomaterials to deliver chemically modified ribonucleic acid (cmRNA) in a controlled manner addresses the high cost, safety concerns, and lower transfection efficiency that exist with protein and gene therapeutic approaches. By eliminating the need for nuclear entry, cmRNA therapeutics can potentially overcome the lower transfection efficiencies associated with non-viral gene delivery systems. Here, we investigated the osteogenic potential of cmRNA-encoding BMP-9, in comparison to cmRNA-encoding BMP-2. Polyethylenimine (PEI) was used as a vector to increase in vitro transfection efficacy. Complexes of PEI-cmRNA (encoding BMP-2 or BMP-9) were fabricated at an amine (N) to phosphate (P) ratio of 10 and characterized for transfection efficacy in vitro using human bone marrow stromal cells (BMSCs). The osteogenic potential of BMSCs treated with these complexes was determined by evaluating the expression of bone-specific genes as well as through the detection of bone matrix deposition. It was found that alkaline phosphatase (ALP) expression 3 days post transfection in the group treated with BMP-9-cmRNA was significantly higher than that in the group that received BMP-2-cmRNA treatment. Alizarin red staining and atomic absorption spectroscopy demonstrated enhanced osteogenic differentiation as evidenced by increased bone matrix production by the BMSCs treated with BMP-9-cmRNA when compared to cells treated with BMP-2-cmRNA. In vivo studies showed increased bone formation in calvarial defects treated with the BMP-9-cmRNA and BMP-2-cmRNA collagen scaffolds when compared to empty defects. The connectivity density of the regenerated bone was higher (2-fold-higher) in the group that received BMP-9-cmRNA compared to BMP-2-cmRNA. Together, these findings suggest that cmRNA-activated matrix encoding osteogenic molecules can provide a powerful strategy for bone regeneration with significant clinical translational potential.
Narrative Structures in Computer and Video Games: Part 1: Context, Definitions, and Initial Findings

This essay is the first of a two-part article examining the use of narrative in computer and video games, which provides an overview and discussion of the definitions and representation of stories, plots, and narratives. A range of traditional and emerging narrative techniques are considered, including The Hero’s Journey, three-act structure, the portrayal of human emotions, and character archetypes, from where an in-depth examination of interactive narrative is performed on a range of old and modern games. Initial results pertaining to the time allocated to narrative, the use of back stories, cut scenes, on-screen text, prompts, and game structure are also presented, which reveal a distinct level of uniformity of how interactive narrative is depicted in games spanning over two decades of industry development. The analysis is concluded in the second article, where further results are revealed to help uncover the precise nature of game narratives.
Generating emphasis from neutral speech using hierarchical perturbation model by decision tree and support vector machine

In a computer-aided pronunciation training (CAPT) system, corrective feedback is desired to provide contrastive comparisons between user's and canonical pronunciations. This paper presents a hierarchical perturbation model to generate emphasis for English by modifying acoustic features of neutral speech to highlight such important speech segments. Synthesis of emphasis needs to be realized hierarchically at word, syllable and phone layers. A two-pass decision tree is constructed to cluster acoustic variations between emphatic and neutral speeches. The questions for decision tree construction are designed according to the above layers. The questions related to word and syllable layers are used to construct the main tree and then the questions related to phone layer are used to expand the leaves of main tree (deriving a set of subtrees). Support vector machines (SVMs) are used to predict acoustic variations for all the leaves of main tree (at word and syllable layers) and sub-trees (at phone layer). Experiments indicate that the proposed hierarchical perturbation model can generate emphatic speech with high quality for both naturalness and emphasis.
Musicking, embodiment and participatory enaction of music: outline and key points

ABSTRACT This paper proposes a way of understanding the confluence of the enactive approach to cognition and musicology in a wider sense. The implication is that existing socio-cultural approaches to meaning in music – whereby music is seen as a total social phenomenon, and the naturalistic view of music cognition may be articulated via the life-mind continuum proposed by enactivism. On the one hand, discussions on embodied music cognition are presented with the opportunity to overcome their de facto individualism in a principled, naturalistic way. On the other hand, for the socio-cultural-historical approaches the opportunity seems to be to move beyond the biology-culture divide without submitting to reductionism. A wider explanatory unit is presented. The explanatory utility of embodiment is examined in relation to the wider frame of social-life in dialectical fashion. A definition of musicking is sketched considering it as an instance of processes of social-life. This paper signals a direction to take, yet methodologies, results, and homologies with other disciplines are left open to further discussion.
Effectiveness of Four Disinfectants against Ebola Virus on Different Materials

The West Africa Ebola virus (EBOV) outbreak has highlighted the need for effective disinfectants capable of reducing viral load in a range of sample types, equipment and settings. Although chlorine-based products are widely used, they can also be damaging to equipment or apparatus that needs continuous use such as aircraft use for transportation of infected people. Two aircraft cleaning solutions were assessed alongside two common laboratory disinfectants in a contact kill assay with EBOV on two aircraft relevant materials representative of a porous and non-porous surface. A decimal log reduction of viral titre of 4 is required for a disinfectant to be deemed effective and two of the disinfectants fulfilled this criteria under the conditions tested. One product, Ardrox 6092, was found to perform similarly to sodium hypochlorite, but as it does not have the corrosive properties of sodium hypochlorite, it could be an alternative disinfectant solution to be used for decontamination of EBOV on sensitive apparatus.
Teaching Active Citizenship: A Companion to the Traditional Political Science Curriculum

ABSTRACT The authors of this article advocate a new curriculum that can be applied to American government, introduction to political science, and state and local government courses. For the past half-century, high school and college general-education requirements have deemphasized civics, government, and political science. In response to the corresponding decrease in the nation’s civic health, this proposal is based on three principles. First, teaching citizenship is different than teaching civics. Second, citizenship is taught most effectively by engagement in the “real world,” with students completing projects that take them step by step through the policy-change process. Finally, the education and preparation of future high school government teachers needs to change to encourage them to teach their students the rights, responsibilities, and competencies of active citizenship.
A spiking network model for passage-of-time representation in the cerebellum

In Pavlovian delay eyeblink conditioning, the cerebellum represents the passage‐of‐time (POT) between onsets of conditioned and unconditioned stimuli (CS and US, respectively). To study possible computational mechanisms of the POT representation we built a large‐scale spiking network model of the cerebellum. Consistent with our previous rate‐coding model, we found two conditions necessary for the present model to represent the POT with a dynamic population of active granule cells: (i) long temporal integration of input signals; and (ii) random recurrent connections between granule and Golgi cells. When these conditions were satisfied, a nonrecurrent sequence of active granule cell populations was generated in response to a CS and, conversely, the POT from the CS onset was able to be read out from the sequence. Specifically, simulated N‐methyl‐D‐aspartate (NMDA) channels with a long decay time constant at granule and Golgi cells were responsible for the long temporal integration. Thus, blocking the NMDA channels or ablating Golgi cells impaired the POT representation. Simulated glomerulus structure made POT representation robust against noise in mossy fibre inputs. Long‐term potentiation induced at mossy fibre synapses on granule cells also served to enhance the robustness. We reproduced some experimental results of Pavlovian delay eyeblink conditioning using the present model. These results suggest that the recurrent network in the granular layer and NMDA channels in granule and Golgi cells play an essential role in the timing mechanisms in the cerebellum, whereas the glomerulus serves to realize a robust representation of time.
Noise-robust reverberation time estimation using spectral decay distributions with reduced computational cost

Reverberation Time (T60) is an important measure of the acoustic properties of a room. It can provide information about the acoustic environment, the intelligibility, and quality of speech recorded in the room, and help improve the performance of speech processing algorithms with reverberant speech. Where the acoustic impulse response of the room is not available, the T60 must be estimated non-intrusively from reverberant speech. State-of-the-art non-intrusive T60 estimators have been shown to be strongly biased in the presence of noise. We describe a novel T60 estimation algorithm based on spectral decay distributions that provides robustness to additive noise for a range of realistic noise types for signal-to-noise ratios in the range 0 to 35 dB and T60s between 200 and 950 ms. The proposed method also has much reduced computational cost.
The FL/AC ratio for prediction of shoulder dystocia in women with gestational diabetes

Abstract Purpose: To determine if sonographic variables, including fetal femur length to abdominal circumference (FL/AC) ratio, are associated with shoulder dystocia in women with gestational diabetes. Methods: This was a retrospective cohort study of women with gestational diabetes who delivered singleton infants at Parkland Hospital from 1997 to 2015. Diagnosis and treatment of gestational diabetes were uniform including sonography at 32–36 weeks. Biometric calculations were evaluated for correlation with shoulder dystocia. Results: During the study period, 6952 women with gestational diabetes underwent a sonogram at a mean gestation of 34.8 ± 1.8 weeks. Of 4183 vaginal deliveries, 66 experienced shoulder dystocia (16/1000). The FL/AC was associated with shoulder dystocia (p < 0.001) with an AUC of 0.70 (95% CI: 0.64–0.77). This was similar to age-adjusted AC and head circumference to AC ratio (HC/AC) (both with an AUC of 0.72). All other measurements, including estimated fetal weight, were inferior. When examining the 257 women with multiple sonograms after 32 weeks’ gestation, FL/AC was stable with advancing gestational age (p = 0.54) whereas age-adjusted AC and HC/AC were not (p < 0.001). Conclusions: The FL/AC is associated with shoulder dystocia in women with gestational diabetes. Additionally, it is a simple ratio that is independent of the reference used and remains stable, unlike age-adjusted AC and HC/AC ratio.
Walking economy during cued versus non-cued self-selected treadmill walking in persons with Parkinson's disease.

BACKGROUND Gait impairments related to Parkinson's disease (PD) include variable step length and decreased walking velocity, which may result in poorer walking economy. Auditory cueing is a common method used to improve gait mechanics in PD that has been shown to worsen walking economy at set treadmill walking speeds. It is unknown if auditory cueing has the same effects on walking economy at self-selected treadmill walking speeds. OBJECTIVES To determine if auditory cueing will affect walking economy at self-selected treadmill walking speeds and at speeds slightly faster and slower than self-selected. METHODS Twenty-two participants with moderate PD performed three, 6-minute bouts of treadmill walking at three speeds (self-selected and ± 0.22 m·sec-1). One session used cueing and the other without cueing. Energy expenditure was measured and walking economy was calculated (energy expenditure/power). RESULTS Poorer walking economy and higher energy expenditure occurred during cued walking at a self-selected and a slightly faster walking speed, but there was no apparent difference at the slightly slower speed. CONCLUSION These results suggest that potential gait benefits of auditory cueing may come at an energy cost and poorer walking economy for persons with PD at least at some treadmill walking speeds.
Lupe: information access method based on distance between user and sensor nodes using AR technology

This paper proposes the information access method that is based on the distance between users and objects. In Addition, demonstrate Lupe system, which visualizes WSN status information utilizing our method. The evaluative experiment shows that our method is useful in where a number of sensors are setup. As a result our method and Lupe system enable to easily brows WSN status information for end-user.
Exploiting Classes of Virtual Machines for Scalable IaaS Cloud Management

A major challenge of IaaS cloud data centers is the placement of a huge number of Virtual Machines (VMs) over a physical infrastructure with a high number of nodes. The VMs placement process must strive to reduce as much as possible the number of physical nodes to improve management efficiency, reduce energy consumption and guarantee economical savings. However, since each VM is considered as a black box with independent characteristics, the VMs placement task presents scalability issues due to the amount of involved data and to the resulting number of constraints in the underlying optimization problem. For large data centers, this condition often leads to the impossibility to reach an optimal solution for VMs placement. Existing solutions typically exploit heuristics or simplified formulations to solve the placement problem, at the price of possibly sub-optimal solutions. We propose an innovative VMs placement technique, namely Class-Based, that takes advantage from existing solutions to automatically group VMs showing similar behavior. The Class-Based technique solves a placement-problem that considers only some representatives for each class, and that can be replicated as a building block to solve the global VMs placement problem. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed technique is viable and can significantly improve the scalability of the VMs placement in IaaS Cloud systems with respect to existing alternatives.
The Effects of Ambiguity: A Feminist Study of Human Signifiers in Human-Computer Interaction

s on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI EA ’13 (pp. 2447–2454). New York, NY, USA: ACM. Retrieved February 24, 2014, from http://doi.acm. org/10.1145/2468356.2468799 Dray, S. M. , Peters, A. N. , Brock, A. M. , Peer, A. , Druin, A. , Gitau, S. , Kumar, J., et al. (2013). Leveraging the Progress of Women in the HCI Field to Address the Diversity Chasm. CHI ’13 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI EA ’13 (pp. 2399– 2406). New York, NY, USA: ACM. Retrieved February 24, 2014, from http://doi.acm. org/10.1145/2468356.2468785 Edworthy, J., Hellier, E. , & Rivers, J. (2003). The use of male or female voices in warnings systems: a question of acoustics. Noise & Health, 6(21), 39–50. Enders, J. (2013, July 14). Sex and Gender. Formulate Information Design. Retrieved November 28, 2015, from http://www.formulate. com.au/blog/sex-and-gender Finson, K. D. (2003). Applicability of the DAST-C to the images of scientists drawn by students of different racial groups. Journal of Elementary Science Education, 15(1), 15–26. Fort, D. , & Varney, H. (1989). How students see scientists: Mostly male, mostly white, and mostly benevolent. Science and Children, 26(8), 8–13. Gaines, E. (2006). Communication and the Semiotics of Space. Journal of Creative Communications,
Temporal Preference Optimization as Weighted Constraint Satisfaction

We present a new efficient algorithm for obtaining utilitarian optimal solutions to Disjunctive Temporal Problems with Preferences (DTPPs). The previous state-of-the-art system achieves temporal preference optimization using a SAT formulation, with its creators attributing its performance to advances in SAT solving techniques. We depart from the SAT encoding and instead introduce the Valued DTP (VDTP). In contrast to the traditional semiring-based formalism that annotates legal tuples of a constraint with preferences, our framework instead assigns elementary costs to the constraints themselves. After proving that the VDTP can express the same set of utilitarian optimal solutions as the DTPP with piecewise-constant preference functions, we develop a method for achieving weighted constraint satisfaction within a meta-CSP search space that has traditionally been used to solve DTPs without preferences. This allows us to directly incorporate several powerful techniques developed in previous decision-based DTP literature. Finally, we present empirical results demonstrating that an implementation of our approach consistently outperforms the SAT-based solver by orders of magnitude.
Rates of Cognitive Change in Alzheimer Disease: Observations Across a Decade of Placebo-controlled Clinical Trials With Donepezil

Treatment success in Alzheimer disease (AD) trials is generally based on benefits over placebo-treated controls. Consequently, variation in rates of decline among placebo-treated patients could impact outcomes from AD trials. In the present analyses, individual patient data [baseline Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE): 10 to 26] were pooled from randomized, placebo-controlled studies of donepezil for AD conducted during the 1990s, and grouped by initiation year—group 1: 1990 to 1994; group 2: 1996 to 1999. Changes in MMSE and Alzheimer's Disease Assessment Scale-cognitive subscale (ADAS-cog) were compared between groups 1 and 2 for placebo, and then between donepezil and placebo. Data were available from 3403 patients in 13 trials. Group 2 (post-1995) included patients with lower baseline MMSE scores, older patients, fewer males, more comorbidity, and more concomitant medications. MMSE decline by week 24 was significantly greater among group 1 (pre-1995) placebo patients versus group 2; a similar trend was observed with the ADAS-cog. Nevertheless, donepezil-mediated treatment effects were consistent over the decade of enrollment. These analyses suggest that patients are showing slower rates of cognitive decline in more recent trials compared with older trials, although having more comorbidities. This finding may have important potential implications for future clinical trial design.
Probabilistic Group Nearest Neighbor Queries in Uncertain Databases

The importance of query processing over uncertain data has recently arisen due to its wide usage in many real-world applications. In the context of uncertain databases, previous works have studied many query types such as nearest neighbor query, range query, top-k query, skyline query, and similarity join. In this paper, we focus on another important query, namely, probabilistic group nearest neighbor (PGNN) query, in the uncertain database, which also has many applications. Specifically, given a set, Q, of query points, a PGNN query retrieves data objects that minimize the aggregate distance (e.g., sum, min, and max) to query set Q. Due to the inherent uncertainty of data objects, previous techniques to answer group nearest neighbor (GNN) query cannot be directly applied to our PGNN problem. Motivated by this, we propose effective pruning methods, namely, spatial pruning and probabilistic pruning, to reduce the PGNN search space, which can be seamlessly integrated into our PGNN query procedure. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the efficiency and effectiveness of our proposed approach, in terms of the wall clock time and the speed-up ratio against linear scan.
ERK activation promotes neuronal degeneration predominantly through plasma membrane damage and independently of caspase-3

Our recent studies have shown that extracellular-regulated protein kinase (ERK) promotes cell death in cerebellar granule neurons (CGN) cultured in low potassium. Here we report that the “death” phenotypes of CGN after potassium withdrawal are heterogeneous, allowing the distinction between plasma membrane (PM)–, DNA-, and PM/DNA-damaged populations. These damaged neurons display nuclear condensation that precedes PM or DNA damage. Inhibition of ERK activation either by U0126 or by dominant-negative mitogen-activated protein kinase/ERK kinase (MEK) overexpression results in a dramatic reduction of PM damaged neurons and nuclear condensation. In contrast, overexpression of constitutively active MEK potentiates PM damage and nuclear condensation. ERK-promoted cellular damage is independent of caspase-3. Persistent active ERK translocates to the nucleus, whereas caspase-3 remains in the cytoplasm. Antioxidants that reduced ERK activation and PM damage showed no effect on caspase-3 activation or DNA damage. These data identify ERK as an important executor of neuronal damage involving a caspase-3–independent mechanism.