Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Exergame Apps and Physical Activity: The Results of the ZOMBIE Trial

Background: Although there are thousands of health and fitness smartphone apps currently available, little research exists regarding the effects of mobile app technology on physical activity behavior. Purpose: The purpose of this study was to test whether Exergame smartphone applications increase physical activity levels. Methods: This was a 12-week randomized, controlled, parallel group trial. The intervention consisted of the use of Exergame smartphone apps and motivational messaging. Validated instruments were used to measure physical activity, enjoyment, motivation, and competence. Results: Forty subjects were randomized and completed baseline assessments; 39 (97.5%) completed the 12-week follow-up. Median age was 32 years (interquartile range [IQR] = 25, 41.75); 85% were women. No differences between groups were identified in primary or secondary outcomes. Within group, physical activity decreased in the controls and autonomous motivation increased in the intervention group. Discussion: Exploratory findings were interesting regarding the use of Exergames to encourage physical activity. The intervention group showed less of a decline in activity, suggesting a possible attenuation of the observed seasonal fluctuation by the use of the Exergames. Translation to Health Education Practice Given their popularity, health educators should continue to explore the use of Exergame apps as a tool to facilitate physical activity.
Pump and Channel K+ (Rb+) Fluxes in Apoptosis of Human Lymphoid Cell Line U937

Ouabain-sensitive (OS) and -resistant (OR) Rb<sup>+</sup> influx was examined in three sublines of U937 cells to compare alterations of K<sup>+</sup> channel permeability and the Na<sup>+</sup>,K<sup>+</sup>-ATPase pump leading to the shift in ion and water balance during apoptosis induced by 0.2 and 1µM staurosporine (STS) for 4-5 h. Cell K<sup>+</sup>, Rb<sup>+</sup>, Na<sup>+</sup> and Cl<sup>-</sup> content was determined by flame photometry and <sup>36</sup>Cl distribution. Changes in cell water content were monitored by measurement of buoyant cell density and distribution of [<sup>3</sup>H]-glycerol or 3-O-methyl-D-[<sup>3</sup>H]glucose. Apoptosis was detected by DNA flow cytometry and light microscopy of the native cells stained with acridine orange. Treatment with 0.2 µM STS for 5 hours led to mild apoptosis with 10-13 % cell dehydration and either moderate increase of channel mediated Rb<sup>+</sup> influx without significant changes in the pump activity or moderate decrease of pump Rb<sup>+</sup> influx without significant change of channel influx, depending on the cell line used. Treatment with 1 µM STS was followed by 18-23 % cell dehydration, a decrease of the pump activity and a small or insignificant increase in the OR Rb<sup>+</sup> influx in all studied sublines. It is concluded that moderate apoptotic cell shrinkage may be associated with both an increase in K<sup>+</sup> channel permeability and inhibition of the pump whereas more remarkable shrinkage occurs presumably due to inhibition of the pump.
The Mediterraneus Protocol: building an SSI native decentralised ecosystem of digital services

This paper presents, for the first time, the Mediterraneous protocol. It is designed to support the development of an Internet of digital services, owned by their creators, and consumed by users by presenting their decentralised digital identity and a proof of service purchase. Mediterraneous is Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) native, integrating the SSI model at the core of its working principles to overcome the limitations resulting from using pseudonyms and centralised access control of existing Web3 solutions.
Implementing Autonomy Support: Insights from a Montessori Classroom

Extant research studies have found that autonomy support has a positive impact on the perceived competence and intrinsic motivation of students. However, few studies have investigated how autonomy supportive classrooms can be implemented. Montessori education is established upon the philosophy of helping each child attain self-mastery and independence. It emphasizes that students be given autonomy to engage freely with their learning environment. This case study of an upper-elementary Montessori classroom found that the Montessori philosophy of education guided how teachers used autonomy supportive strategies. Teachers supported student organizational autonomy by allowing them choice in terms of school work and work partners. They fostered cognitive autonomy by encouraging student independent thinking, encouraging self-initiation, and honoring students’ voice. When implementing control, they acknowledged and respected student feelings, provided rationales for expected behavior, and suppressed criticism. Students surveyed rated themselves highly in terms of intrinsic motivation for schoolwork. Five guidelines are derived from this study to help teachers implement autonomy support in K-12 classrooms.
Kernel-based Approach for Automatic Evaluation of Natural Language Generation Technologies: Application to Automatic Summarization

In order to promote the study of automatic summarization and translation, we need an accurate automatic evaluation method that is close to human evaluation. In this paper, we present an evaluation method that is based on convolution kernels that measure the similarities between texts considering their substructures. We conducted an experiment using automatic summarization evaluation data developed for Text Summarization Challenge 3 (TSC-3). A comparison with conventional techniques shows that our method correlates more closely with human evaluations and is more robust.
Nogood Learning for Mixed Integer Programming

Nogood learning has proven to be an effective CSP technique c ritical to success in today’s top SAT solvers. We extend the technique for use in integer progr amming and mixed integer programming. Our technique generates globally valid cutting p lanes for the 0-1 IP search algorithm from information learned through constraint propagation ( bounds propagation). Nogoods (cutting planes) are generated not only from infeasibility but also f rom bounding. All of our techniques are geared toward yielding tighter LP upper bounds, and thus smaller search trees. Experiments suggest that our nogood learning does not help in integer pro gramming because few cutting planes are generated, and they are weak. We explain why, and identif y problem characteristics that affect the effectiveness. We show how problem structure, such as mu tual exclusivity of indicator variables, or at least one of a set of indicator variables having t o be “on”, can be used to enhance the technique. We show this also for instances that exhibit mult iple occurrences of each of the two structures. We then generalize the technique to mixed-inte ger programming. Then we compare our techniques to Achterberg’s parallel invention of an alm ost identical approach. This comparison yields conclusions about what techniques within the nog ood learning framework for (mixed) integer programming are essential for obtaining speedup. F inally, we lay out several directions for future research down this new and potentially promising ave nue.
Efficient Feature Extraction and Late Fusion Strategy for Audiovisual Emotional Mimicry Intensity Estimation

In this paper, we present a solution for the Cross-Cultural Hu-mor Detection (MuSe-Humor) sub-challenge, which is part of the Multimodal Sentiment Analys Challenge (MuSe) 2023. The MuSe-Humor task aims to detect humor from multimodal data, including video, audio, and text, in a cross-cultural context. The training data consists of German recordings, while the test data consists of English recordings. To tackle this sub-challenge, we propose a method called MMT-GD, which leverages a multimodal transformer model to effectively integrate the multimodal data. Additionally, we incorporate graph distillation to ensure that the fusion process captures discriminative features from each modality, avoiding excessive reliance on any single modality. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of our approach, achieving an Area Under the Curve (AUC) score of 0.8704 on the test set and securing the third position in the challenge.
The Effect of Parental Depression on Cognitive Vulnerability

This paper reports on research on the effect of parental depression on cognitive vulnerability to depression. Although there is extensive literature to suggest that parental depression confers depressotypic cognitive thinking in children, no research has examined the effect of this vulnerability factor in young adults. Data were collected from 38 college-age students, who, after being given a negative mood prime, were measured for dysfunctional attitudes, irrational beliefs, and information processing biases. Results showed a difference between the groups on measures of attributional style and endorsement of depressogenic words. High-risk individuals displayed greater depressotypic cognitive thinking. Implications and potential underlying mechanisms are discussed.
Loss of receptor regulation by a phospholipase D1 mutant unresponsive to protein kinase C

Activation of phosphatidylcholine‐specific phospholipase D (PLD) constitutes an important part of the cellular response to agonist signaling. PLD1 is stimulated in vitro in a direct and synergistic manner by protein kinase C (PKC), ADP‐ribosylation factor (ARF) and Rho family members. However, the direct and specific role of each of these effectors in agonist‐stimulated PLD activation is poorly understood. We have used transposon mutagenesis to generate a library of PLD1 alleles containing random pentapeptide insertions. Forty‐five alleles were characterized to identify functionally important regions. Use of an allele unresponsive to PKC, but otherwise seemingly normal, to examine coupling of PLD1 to a subset of G‐protein‐coupled receptors demonstrates for the first time direct stimulation of PLD1 in vivo by PKC and reveals that this direct stimulation is unexpectedly critical for PLD1 activation.
Dynamic cytoskeleton-integrin associations induced by cell binding to immobilized fibronectin

We have examined the early events of cellular attachment and spreading (10-30 min) by allowing chick embryonic fibroblasts transformed by Rous sarcoma virus to interact with fibronectin immobilized on matrix beads. The binding activity of cells to fibronectin beads was sensitive to both the mAb JG22E and the GRGDS peptide, which inhibit the interaction between integrin and fibronectin. The precise distribution of cytoskeleton components and integrin was determined by immunocytochemistry of frozen thin sections. In suspended cells, the distribution of talin was diffuse in the cytoplasm and integrin was localized at the cell surface. Within 10 min after binding of cells and fibronectin beads at 22 degrees C or 37 degrees C, integrin and talin aggregated at the membrane adjacent to the site of bead attachment. In addition, an internal pool of integrin-positive vesicles accumulated. The mAb ES238 directed against the extracellular domain of the avian beta 1 integrin subunit, when coupled to beads, also induced the aggregation of talin at the membrane, whereas ES186 directed against the intracellular domain of the beta 1 integrin subunit did not. Cells attached and spread on Con A beads, but neither integrin nor talin aggregated at the membrane. After 30 min, when many of the cells were at a more advanced stage of spreading around beads or phagocytosing beads, alpha-actinin and actin, but not vinculin, form distinctive aggregates at sites along membranes associated with either fibronectin or Con A beads. Normal cells also rapidly formed aggregates of integrin and talin after binding to immobilized fibronectin in a manner that was similar to the transformed cells, suggesting that the aggregation process is not dependent upon activity of the pp60v-src tyrosine kinase. Thus, the binding of cells to immobilized fibronectin caused integrin-talin coaggregation at the sites of membrane-ECM contact, which can initiate the cytoskeletal events necessary for cell adhesion and spreading.
Activating AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK) slows renal cystogenesis

Renal cyst development and expansion in autosomal dominant polycystic kidney disease (ADPKD) involves both fluid secretion and abnormal proliferation of cyst-lining epithelial cells. The chloride channel of the cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator (CFTR) participates in secretion of cyst fluid, and the mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR) pathway may drive proliferation of cyst epithelial cells. CFTR and mTOR are both negatively regulated by AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK). Metformin, a drug in wide clinical use, is a pharmacological activator of AMPK. We find that metformin stimulates AMPK, resulting in inhibition of both CFTR and the mTOR pathways. Metformin induces significant arrest of cystic growth in both in vitro and ex vivo models of renal cystogenesis. In addition, metformin administration produces a significant decrease in the cystic index in two mouse models of ADPKD. Our results suggest a possible role for AMPK activation in slowing renal cystogenesis as well as the potential for therapeutic application of metformin in the context of ADPKD.
Do Emotions in Advertising Drive Sales ? Use of Facial Coding to Understand The Relationship between Emotional Responses to Ads and Sales Effectiveness

Ads that evoke emotions keep us entertained and are more memorable, but do they really drive product sales? To answer this question, we conduct the first large-scale facial coding study to quantitatively measure people’s tacit emotional responses to ads. The high temporal resolution of facial coding yields insights into the emotional profile of a “successful” ad. Facial coding provides evidence for discrimination of sales effectiveness and could be used to complement traditional self-report methods.
SceneScript: Reconstructing Scenes With An Autoregressive Structured Language Model

We introduce SceneScript, a method that directly produces full scene models as a sequence of structured language commands using an autoregressive, token-based approach. Our proposed scene representation is inspired by recent successes in transformers&LLMs, and departs from more traditional methods which commonly describe scenes as meshes, voxel grids, point clouds or radiance fields. Our method infers the set of structured language commands directly from encoded visual data using a scene language encoder-decoder architecture. To train SceneScript, we generate and release a large-scale synthetic dataset called Aria Synthetic Environments consisting of 100k high-quality in-door scenes, with photorealistic and ground-truth annotated renders of egocentric scene walkthroughs. Our method gives state-of-the art results in architectural layout estimation, and competitive results in 3D object detection. Lastly, we explore an advantage for SceneScript, which is the ability to readily adapt to new commands via simple additions to the structured language, which we illustrate for tasks such as coarse 3D object part reconstruction.
Surfing therapeutic landscapes: Exploring cyberpilgrimage

The therapeutic landscape (TL) concept recognises that places and settings encompass physical/built, symbolic and social environments that all relate, in combination, to achieving renewal, healing or, at the very least, a sense of well-being. These relationships have been observed repeatedly in the case of material, real-world religious/spiritual pilgrimages and have been shown to be conducive to healing. Employing the TL concept, this phenomenological research specifically explores the experience of cyberpilgrimage, the phenomenon of embarking on pilgrimages over the Internet. A sample of four devotional Catholic cyberpilgrimage websites are explored to shed light on whether they contain elements of the three characteristic TL themes: physical/built, symbolic and social environments. It is found that the websites do, in fact, reflect the TL themes, although differently in manner and extent.
ADAPT to Robustify Prompt Tuning Vision Transformers

The performance of deep models, including Vision Transformers, is known to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Many existing defenses against these attacks, such as adversarial training, rely on full-model fine-tuning to induce robustness in the models. These defenses require storing a copy of the entire model, that can have billions of parameters, for each task. At the same time, parameter-efficient prompt tuning is used to adapt large transformer-based models to downstream tasks without the need to save large copies. In this paper, we examine parameter-efficient prompt tuning of Vision Transformers for downstream tasks under the lens of robustness. We show that previous adversarial defense methods, when applied to the prompt tuning paradigm, suffer from gradient obfuscation and are vulnerable to adaptive attacks. We introduce ADAPT, a novel framework for performing adaptive adversarial training in the prompt tuning paradigm. Our method achieves competitive robust accuracy of ~40% w.r. t. SOTA robustness methods using full-model fine-tuning, by tuning only ~1% of the number of parameters.
Effect of thermal cycling on microleakage between hard chairside relines and denture base acrylic resins.

OBJECTIVES Microleakage is a pre-stage of debonding between hard chairside relines and denture base acrylic resins. Therefore, it is important to assess them with regard to the longevity of the relined denture. This study investigated the effect of thermal cycling on the microleakage at the interface of three hard chairside reline resins and three denture base resins. MATERIAL AND METHODS Rectangular bars (12 mm × 3 mm × 3 mm) of Lucitone 550, Acron MC and QC 20 were made and relined with Kooliner, Tokuyama Rebase Fast II and Ufi Gel Hard, Lucitone 550, Acron MC and QC 20 resins. Specimens were divided into one control and two test groups (n=10). In specimens of the control group, the microleakage was performed after the reline procedure. In Test Group 1, the specimens were stored for 24 h in distilled water at room temperature and in Test Group 2; the specimens were thermal cycled from 5 to 55°C for 5000 cycles with a 30-s dwell time. Subsequently, all specimens were immersed in 50% silver nitrate solutions for 24h. All specimens were sectioned longitudinally into three fractions and the lateral sections were examined (n=20). Silver nitrate stain penetration was examined under a stereoscopic lens with ×30 magnification, and the images were captured. Leica Qwin image analysis software was used to determine microleakage at the interface of the materials. Data were analysed using the Kruskal-Wallis test at a 95% level of significance. RESULTS For all cycles, there were no statistically significant differences between thermal cycled and non-thermal cycled groups (p>0.05). CONCLUSION It can be concluded that thermal cycling had no effect on the microleakage.
EFFECTS OF A COGNITIVE BEHAVIORAL APPROACH AND POSITIVE REINFORCEMENT ON EXERCISE FOR OLDER ADULTS

I conducted a study to determine whether a cognitive behavioral approach to health teaching and the frequency of positive reinforcement affects the amount of physical exercise carried out by elderly subjects. Thirty‐six subjects ranging in age from 58 to 86 (mean age 73) participated in a 3‐month exercise program consisting of supervised weekly group stretching exercises and unsupervised stretching exercises, walking, and other activities. The subjects were pretested, and normal weekly baseline levels were obtained over a 2‐week period. The subjects were divided into three groups: Group 1 was given positive reinforcement by a facilitator every week, Group 2 was reinforced every month, and Group 3 was not given reinforcement. Analysis of variance showed a significant increase in exercise of about an hour per week (p – .0022) for all subjects. Group 2 had significantly lower levels of exercise than Groups 1 and 2 over the 3‐month period (p – .05): Group 1 – 542 min; Group 2 – 443 min; Group 3 ‐520 min. The .
The story of representation (or not) in contributing to the development of a school subject curriculum

This paper prompts us to consider ‘representation’ with respect to a committee structure ‘managing’ the development of the Irish senior cycle physical education framework. The paper is timely due to the national interest in the senior cycle subject development in Ireland and complements work undertaken on the development of policy in senior physical education internationally. Bernstein's [(1990). Class, Code and Control: Volume 4. The Structuring of Pedagogic Discourse. London: Routledge] construction of ‘pedagogic discourse’ and Pitkin's [(1967). The Concept of Representation. University of California Press] notion of ‘representation’ provide a framework for exploring the process by which Senior Cycle Physical Education (SCPE) was ‘managed’ by the Physical Education Course Committee. Interviews were conducted with nine stakeholders who were members of the Committee and the constant comparative method was used to analyse the interview data. The results revolved around representation of individual views in favour of representative roles, interacting within the remit of the Committee structure and activity outside of the formal meetings. A number of conclusions arise in examining the extent to which ‘representation’ provides a framework for exploring the process by which curriculum development within Irish SCPE was ‘managed’ by the appointed Committee. Such a study provides significant points for discussion for those charged with drawing together groups to advise on curriculum development.
Simplified Stereological Evaluation of Renal Morphology after Unilateral Ureteral Obstruction

Objective and methods: This study established a simple stereological method to obtain quantitative information about two- or three-dimensional structures based on observations from kidney sections in the unilateral ureteral obstruction(UUO) model. Results: Tubulointerstitial area(TA) and TA/the area of a rectangular field(RA) were raised gradually, but significantly, in the obstructed kidney from 1 to 3months post-ligation in comparison to the sham kidney of sham-operated rats(SOR). On the contrary, glomerular area(GA) and glomerular volume(GV) were decreased progressively over time, but significantly, in the obstructed kidney from 3weeks to 3months post-ligation compared to the sham kidney of SOR. UUO caused a progressive decline of TA and TA/RA in the contralateral kidney. More specifically, there were significant decreases in TA at 1,2,3months post-ligation, while in TA/RA only at 3months post-ligation in comparison to the right kidney of SOR. In contrast, GA and GV enhanced in a time-dependent manner in the contralateral kidney, in which the difference in GA reached significance only at 3months post-ligation, whereas the difference in GV reached significance from 1 to 3months post-ligation when comparing with the right kidney of SOR. Conclusions: Our results confirmed two typical features of obstructive nephropathy, including widen interstitial space and glomerular atrophy in the obstructed kidney, and compensatory growth of the contralateral kidney.