Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Physical activity, body composition and bone density in ballet dancers

The main purpose of the present study was to examine factors that affect bone mineral density (BMD) in female ballet dancers. Training history, Ca intake, body composition, total body BMD (TBMD) and site-specific BMD, and bone mineral content were described in twenty-four female ballet dancers (mean age 22·6 (SD 4·5) years). Training history was determined by questionnaires, Ca intake by 7 d dietary record, BMD and bone mineral content by dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA), total body water by 2H dilution, extracellular water by bromide dilution, body fat by underwater weighing (UWW; two-component model), DXA, and the four-component (4C) model. Dancers had a significantly lower body mass index (BMI 18·9 (SD 1·0) kg/m2) than controls (21·3 (SD 19) kg/m2), with significantly lower percentage body fat (17·4 (SD 3·9) v. 24·4 (SD 5·1)) but comparable fat-free mass. Mean TBMD (1·147 (SD 0 ·069) g/cm2) was significantly higher (6 %) compared with that of a reference population. These high values could be attributed to the high BMD of legs and pelvis, the weight-bearing sites of the dancer's body. No relationship was found between age, start of ballet classes, period (years) of dancing, Ca intake, and BMD (total and site-specific). However, TBMD was positively related to BMI, and negatively related to the age of menarche. BMD of the legs was significantly related to daily period (h) of training. Depending on the method used the percentage body fat ranged from 16·4 (by DXA) to 18·3 by the 4C model. These differences were significantly related to the TBMD. Percentage body fat by the different methods was not significantly different, except for DXA and 4C model. The present study showed that, despite the factors that have a negative effect on BMD, such as low body mass and late menarche, BMD in female ballet dancers was relatively high. These high values were probably caused by high levels of weight-bearing physical activity.
Fast Discriminative Component Analysis for Comparing Examples

Two recent methods, Neighborhood Components Analysis (NCA) and Informative Discriminant Analysis (IDA), search for a class-discriminative subspace or discriminative components of data, equivalent to learning of distance metrics invariant to changes perpendicular to the subspace. Constraining metrics to a subspace is useful for regularizing the metrics, and for dimensionality reduction. We introduce a variant of NCA and IDA that reduces their computational complexity from quadratic to linear in the number of data samples, by replacing their purely non-parametric class density estimates with semiparametric mixtures of Gaussians. In terms of accuracy, the method is shown to perform as well as NCA on benchmark data sets, outperforming several popular linear dimensionality reduction methods.
Pediatric Medication Administration Errors and Workflow Following Implementation of a Bar Code Medication Administration System

&NA; Direct observation was used to detect medication errors and Bar Code Medication Administration (BCMA) workarounds on two pediatric units and one neonatal unit at UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital. The study (1) measured the frequency of nursing medication administration‐related errors, (2) characterized the types of medication errors, (3) assessed compliance with the institution's six medication administration safety processes, and (4) identified observed workarounds following BCMA implementation. The results of the direct observation were compared to medication administration‐related incident reports (IRs) for the same period. The frequency of medication errors was 5% for the three units. Compliance with the process measures was achieved 86% of the time (range 23–100%). Seven medication administration‐related IRs were submitted during the same observation period. Three BCMA workarounds were identified; (1) failure to visually confirm patient's identification, (2) failure to compare the medication to the electronic medication administration record at least twice before administration, and (3) charting administration of medication before actual administration. The direct observation methodology identified a low frequency of medication administration errors (MAEs) consistent with post‐BCMA implementation. The incident reporting system identified different MAEs than direct observation suggesting that both methods should be used to better characterize the scope of MAEs.
A meta-analysis of adult-rated child personality and academic performance in primary education.

BACKGROUND Personality is reliably associated with academic performance, but personality measurement in primary education can be problematic. Young children find it difficult to accurately self-rate personality, and dominant models of adult personality may be inappropriate for children. AIMS This meta-analysis was conducted to determine the validity of the Five-Factor Model (FFM) of personality for statistically predicting children's academic performance. SAMPLE Literature search identified 12 reports, with cumulative sample sizes ranging from 4,382 (19 correlations) to 5,706 (23 correlations) for correlations with Emotional Stability and Conscientiousness respectively. METHOD Hunter-Schmidt random-effects meta-analysis was used, and moderators were tested using sample-weighted regression. RESULTS When compared with self-rated measures, adult-rated Conscientiousness and Openness were more strongly correlated with academic performance, but adult-rated Agreeableness was less strongly correlated. Q-set-based assessments had lower validity, which appeared to explain moderating effects of rating source. Moderating effects were not found for age, year of education (grades 1-7), or language within which the study was conducted. CONCLUSIONS Conscientiousness and Openness had two of the strongest correlations with academic performance yet reported, comparable with previous meta-analytic correlations of academic performance with instructional quality, cognitive ability, and feedback. The FFM appears to be valid for educational research with children. Openness, which has no counterpart in models of children's temperament, should be further researched with children. Future research should examine the measurement of childhood personality, its relationship with intelligence, the extent to which it is malleable in primary education, and its causal relationship with academic performance.
Activity of the AMPA receptor regulates drebrin stabilization in dendritic spine morphogenesis

Spine morphogenesis mainly occurs during development as a morphological shift from filopodia-like thin protrusions to bulbous ones. We have previously reported that synaptic clustering of the actin-binding protein drebrin in dendritic filopodia governs spine morphogenesis and synaptic PSD-95 clustering. Here, we report the activity-dependent cellular mechanisms for spine morphogenesis, in which the activity of AMPA receptors (AMPARs) regulates drebrin clustering in spines by promoting drebrin stabilization. In cultured developing hippocampal neurons, pharmacological blockade of AMPARs, but not of other glutamate receptors, suppressed postsynaptic drebrin clustering without affecting presynaptic clustering of synapsin I (synapsin-1). Conversely, the enhancement of the action of AMPARs promoted drebrin clustering in spines. When we explored drebrin dynamics by photobleaching individual spines, we found that AMPAR activity increased the fraction of stable drebrin without affecting the time constant of drebrin turnover. An increase in the fraction of stable drebrin corresponded with increased drebrin clustering. AMPAR blockade also suppressed normal morphological maturation of spines and synaptic PSD-95 clustering in spines. Together, these data suggest that AMPAR-mediated stabilization of drebrin in spines is an activity-dependent cellular mechanism for spine morphogenesis.
EmptyHeaded: A Relational Engine for Graph Processing

There are two types of high-performance graph processing engines: low- and high-level engines. Low-level engines (Galois, PowerGraph, Snap) provide optimized data structures and computation models but require users to write low-level imperative code, hence ensuring that efficiency is the burden of the user. In high-level engines, users write in query languages like datalog (SociaLite) or SQL (Grail). High-level engines are easier to use but are orders of magnitude slower than the low-level graph engines. We present EmptyHeaded, a high-level engine that supports a rich datalog-like query language and achieves performance comparable to that of low-level engines. At the core of EmptyHeaded's design is a new class of join algorithms that satisfy strong theoretical guarantees but have thus far not achieved performance comparable to that of specialized graph processing engines. To achieve high performance, EmptyHeaded introduces a new join engine architecture, including a novel query optimizer and data layouts that leverage single-instruction multiple data (SIMD) parallelism. With this architecture, EmptyHeaded outperforms high-level approaches by up to three orders of magnitude on graph pattern queries, PageRank, and Single-Source Shortest Paths (SSSP) and is an order of magnitude faster than many low-level baselines. We validate that EmptyHeaded competes with the best-of-breed low-level engine (Galois), achieving comparable performance on PageRank and at most 3x worse performance on SSSP.
Dynamic Multipath Allocation in Ad Hoc Networks

Ad hoc networks are characterized by fast dynamic changes in the topology of the network. A known technique to improve QoS is to use multipath routing where packets (voice/video/.) from a source to a destination travel in two or more maximal disjoint paths. We observe that the need to find a set of maximal disjoint paths can be relaxed by finding a set of paths S wherein only bottlenecked links are bypassed. In the proposed model we assume that there is only one edge along a path in S is a bottleneck and show that by selecting random paths in S the probability that bottlenecked edges get bypassed is high. We implemented this idea in the MRA system which is a highly accurate visual ad hoc simulator currently supporting two routing protocols AODV and MRA. We have extended the MRA protocol to use multipath routing by maintaining a set of random routing trees from which random paths can be easily selected. Random paths are allocated/released by threshold rules monitoring the session quality. The experiments show that: (1) session QoS is significantly improve, (2) the fact that many sessions use multiple paths in parallel does not depredate overall performances, (3) the overhead in maintaining multipath in the MRA algorithm is negligible.
Robots without faces: non-verbal social human-robot interaction

Non-facial and non-verbal methods of affective expression are essential for naturalistic social interaction in robots that are designed to be functional and lack expressive faces (appearance-constrained) such as those used in search and rescue, law enforcement, and military applications. This research identifies five main methods of non-facial and non-verbal affective expression (body movement, posture, orientation, color, and sound). From the psychology, computer science, and robotics literature a set of prescriptive recommendations was distilled for the appropriate nonfacial and non-verbal affective expression methods for each of three proximity zones of interest (intimate: contact–0.46 m, personal: 0.46–1.22 m, and social: 1.22–3.66 m). These recommendations serve as design guidelines for adding retroactively affective expression through software with minimal or no physical modifications to a robot or designing a new robot. This benefits both the human-robot interaction (HRI) and robotics communities. A large-scale, complex human-robot study was conducted to verify these design guidelines using 128 participants, and four methods of evaluation (self-assessments, psychophysiological measures, behavioral observations, and structured interviews) for convergent validity. The study was conducted in a high-fidelity, confined-space simulated disaster site with all robot interactions performed in the dark. This research investigated whether the use of non-facial and non-verbal affective expression provided a mechanism for naturalistic social interaction between a functional, appearance-constrained robot and the human with which it interacted. As part of this research study, the valence and arousal dimensions of the Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) were validated for use as an assessment tool for future HRI human-robot studies. Also presented is a set of practical recommendations for designing, planning, and executing a successful, large-scale complex human-robot study using appropriate sample sizes and multiple methods of evaluation for validity and reliability in HRI studies. As evidenced by the results, humans were calmer with robots that exhibited non-facial and non-verbal affective expressions for social human-robot interactions in urban search and rescue applications. The results also indicated that humans calibrated their responses to robots based on their first robot encounter.
The Use of Mass Nouns to Quantify Over Individuals

Theories of the mass-count distinction in linguistics, philosophy and psychology commonly argue that count nouns are distinguished from mass nouns by their reference to, and quantification over, individuals (e.g., Bloom, 1999; Wisniewski, Imai & Casey, 1996). We present experimental evidence that both children and adults interpret some mass nouns as quantifying over individuals, and suggest a model of the mass-count distinction that includes these cases.
Improved single-channel nonstationary noise tracking by an optimized MAP-based postprocessor

In this paper we present an improved version of the recently proposed Maximum A-Posteriori (MAP) based noise power spectral density estimator. An empirical bias compensation and bandwidth adjustment reduce bias and variance of the noise variance estimates. The main advantage of the MAP-based postprocessor is its low estimation variance. The estimator is employed in the second stage of a two-stage single-channel speech enhancement system, where eight different state-of-the-art noise tracking algorithms were tested in the first stage. While the postprocessor hardly affects the results in stationary noise scenarios, it becomes the more effective the more nonstationary the noise is. The proposed postprocessor was able to improve all systems in babble noise w.r. t. the perceptual evaluation of speech quality performance.
Sexual Coercion: Men Victimized by Women

A 12-item inventory designed to assess mild, moderate, and severe forms of sexual coercion was administered to an ethnically diverse sample of 182 college men at California State University, Long Beach. Results reveal that 70% of subjects reported experiencing some form of sexual coercion within the past five years. Mild and moderate forms of sexual coercion were most commonly experienced. Younger men were somewhat more likely than older men to report being sexually coerced. An ethnic difference in response was found on one item.
Head-to-Head Comparison of Two Popular Cortical Thickness Extraction Algorithms: A Cross-Sectional and Longitudinal Study

Background and Purpose The measurement of cortical shrinkage is a candidate marker of disease progression in Alzheimer’s. This study evaluated the performance of two pipelines: Civet-CLASP (v1.1.9) and Freesurfer (v5.3.0). Methods Images from 185 ADNI1 cases (69 elderly controls (CTR), 37 stable MCI (sMCI), 27 progressive MCI (pMCI), and 52 Alzheimer (AD) patients) scanned at baseline, month 12, and month 24 were processed using the two pipelines and two interconnected e-infrastructures: neuGRID (https://neugrid4you.eu) and VIP (http://vip.creatis.insa-lyon.fr). The vertex-by-vertex cross-algorithm comparison was made possible applying the 3D gradient vector flow (GVF) and closest point search (CPS) techniques. Results The cortical thickness measured with Freesurfer was systematically lower by one third if compared to Civet’s. Cross-sectionally, Freesurfer’s effect size was significantly different in the posterior division of the temporal fusiform cortex. Both pipelines were weakly or mildly correlated with the Mini Mental State Examination score (MMSE) and the hippocampal volumetry. Civet differed significantly from Freesurfer in large frontal, parietal, temporal and occipital regions (p<0.05). In a discriminant analysis with cortical ROIs having effect size larger than 0.8, both pipelines gave no significant differences in area under the curve (AUC). Longitudinally, effect sizes were not significantly different in any of the 28 ROIs tested. Both pipelines weakly correlated with MMSE decay, showing no significant differences. Freesurfer mildly correlated with hippocampal thinning rate and differed in the supramarginal gyrus, temporal gyrus, and in the lateral occipital cortex compared to Civet (p<0.05). In a discriminant analysis with ROIs having effect size larger than 0.6, both pipelines yielded no significant differences in the AUC. Conclusions Civet appears slightly more sensitive to the typical AD atrophic pattern at the MCI stage, but both pipelines can accurately characterize the topography of cortical thinning at the dementia stage.
The Effect of Imperfect CSI in a Multi-Cell Multi-User MIMO System

One of the promising candidates for mitigating the inter-cell interference in multi-cell networks is coordinated beamforming (CB), where cells are allowed to cooperate such that the transmission from each cell takes into account the interference it would cause to the users of other cells. In this work, we study the performance of a centralized algorithm which enables beam coordination in multi-cell multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) network. The algorithm aims at maximizing the weighted sum rate (WSR) via weighted sum mean squared error (WSMSE) minimization, taking into account the estimation noise of channel state information (CSI). The performance is studied in a seven-cell network and the numerical results show that also with inaccurate CSI, CB outperforms traditional orthogonal access (OA) scheme where the same frequency resources are not reused between cells.
Optimal Control of Planar Flow of Incompressible Non-Newtonian Fluids

We consider an optimal control problem for the evolutionary flow of incompressible non-Newtonian fluids in a two-dimensional domain. The existence of optimal controls is proven. Furthermore, we investigate first-order necessary as well as second-order sufficient optimality conditions. The analysis relies on new results providing solutions with bounded gradients for the flow equations.
Bone Marrow-Derived Stem Cell (BMDSC) Transplantation Improves Fertility in a Murine Model of Asherman's Syndrome

Asherman's Syndrome is characterized by intrauterine adhesions or fibrosis resulting as a consequence of damage to the basal layer of endometrium and is associated with infertility due to loss of normal endometrium. We have previously shown that bone marrow derived stem cells (BMDSCs) engraft the endometrium in mice and humans and Ischemia/reperfusion injury of uterus promoted BMDSCs migration to the endometrium; however, the role of BMDSCs in Asherman's syndrome has not been characterized. Here a murine model of Asherman's syndrome was created by traumatizing the uterus. We evaluate stem cell recruitment and pregnancy after BMDSCs transplantation in a model of Asherman's syndrome. In the Asheman's syndrome model, after BMDSC transplant, the Y chromosome bearing CD45-cells represented less than 0.1% of total endometrial cells. Twice the number of Y+CD45- cells was identified in the damaged uterus compared to the uninjured controls. There was no significant difference between the damaged and undamaged uterine horns in mice that received injury to a single horn. In the BMDSC transplant group, 9 of the 10 mice conceived, while only 3 of 10 in the non-transplanted group conceived (Chi-Square p = 0.0225); all mice in an uninjured control group conceived. The time to conception and mean litter size were not different between groups. Taken together, BMDSCs are recruited to endometrium in response to injury. Fertility improves after BMDSC transplant in Asherman's Syndrome mice, demonstrating a functional role for these cells in uterine repair. BMDSC transplantation is a potential novel treatment for Asherman's Syndrome and may also be useful to prevent Asherman's syndrome after uterine injury.
Stromal Matrix Metalloproteinase-9 Regulates the Vascular Architecture in Neuroblastoma by Promoting Pericyte Recruitment

Advanced stages of neuroblastoma show increased expression of matrix metalloproteinases MMP-2 and MMP-9 (Y. Sugiura et al., Cancer Res., 58: 2209–2216, 1998) that have been implicated in many steps of tumor progression, suggesting that they play a contributory role. Using pharmacological and genetic approaches, we have examined the role of these MMPs in progression of SK-N-BE (2). 10 human neuroblastoma tumors orthotopically xenotransplanted into immunodeficient mice. Mice treated with Prinomastat, a synthetic inhibitor of MMPs, showed an inhibition of tumor cell proliferation in implanted tumors and a prolonged survival (50 versus 39 days in control group, P < 0.035). Treatment with Prinomastat did not affect formation of liver metastases (P = 0.52) but inhibited intravascular colonization by the tumor cells in the lung by 73.8% (P = 0.03) and angiogenesis in both primary tumors and experimental liver metastases. The primary tumors from Prinomastat-treated mice showed a 39.3% reduction in endothelial area detected by PECAM/CD31 staining in tumor sections (P < 0.001), primarily due to the presence of smaller vessels (P = 0.004). MMP-2 is expressed by neuroblastoma tumor cells and stromal cells, whereas MMP-9 is exclusively expressed by stromal cells, particularly vascular cells. To examine the contribution of MMP-9 to tumor angiogenesis, we generated RAG1/MMP-9 double-deficient mice. We observed a significant inhibition of angiogenesis in the immunodeficient RAG1/MMP-9 double-deficient mice orthotopically implanted with tumor cells (P = 0.043) or implanted s.c. with a mixture of tumor cells and Matrigel (P < 0.001). Using an FITC-labeled lectin, we demonstrated an inhibition in the architecture of the tumor vasculature in MMP-9-deficient mice, resulting in fewer and smaller blood vessels. These changes were associated with a 48% decrease in pericytes present along microvessels. Taken together, the data demonstrate that in neuroblastoma, stromally derived MMP-9 contributes to angiogenesis by promoting blood vessel morphogenesis and pericyte recruitment.
The sociology of social recognition: competition in social recognition games

Evidence shows that social recognition works as a motive for many of peopleÂ’s behavior. Within sociology, a longstanding tradition has shown that this recognition motive produces social and symbolic boundaries, encompassing consumption patterns and different lifestyles, and that the need for social recognition can, for example, explain violent behavior. In this paper, I provide a conceptual framework of how social interactions are affected by the need for social recognition. A natural starting point to theorize about social interactions is Goffmanian Game Theory. However, Goffman excludes underlying motivations in his analyses. Therefore, I supplement the analysis with elements from rational choice theory; a theory that, in itself, scarcely bears attention to the internal structure of social interactions. This study results in an analytical scheme of the actors and factors that affect social recognition games. Also, it reveals the competition that is likely to occur within particular social recognition games. As a result, this framework allows a better understanding of how social recognition affects social interactions, and offers a heuristic tool for the analysis of the impact of social recognition on a variety of behavioral domains.