Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Changes in physical fitness profile in female basketball players during the competitive season including explosive type strength training.

Ten female basketball players served as subjects in order to examine changes in a physical fitness profile during a 22-week official competitive season. Specific explosive type strength training (1-2 sessions per week) was utilized throughout the season. The present findings showed that the entire competitive season led to no systematic changes in the maximum oxygen uptake (from 48.0 +/- 6.6 to 47.0 +/- 6.0 ml.kg-1.min-1), in anthropometric characteristics or in maximal isometric force of the leg extensor muscles (from 2567 +/- 490 to 2622 +/- 747 N). However, significant (p < 0.05) increases occurred during the season both in the average power output during the first 15 s work in an anaerobic jumping test and in the maximal vertical jumping heights in the squat jump (from 21.7 +/- 2.3 to 24.2 +/- 2.4 cm) and in the counter movement jump (from 24.9 +/- 2.6 to 26.3 +/- 2.9 cm). A considerable change occurred also in the shape of the isometric force-time curve of the leg extensor muscles so that the times to produce submaximal force level shortened (p < 0.05). The individual changes during the competitive season both in the power output and in the times of rapid force production correlated negatively (p < 0.05) with the individual initial values recorded before the season. The present findings suggest that the prolonged competitive season in the present female basketball players seemingly placed sufficient demands on the athletes in energy production through aerobic processes to maintain their level of VO2max. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
FILTER BANK FEATURE EXTRACTION FOR GAUSSIAN MIXTURE MODEL SPEAKER RECOGNITION

Speaker Recognition is the task of identifying an individual from their voice. Typically this task is performed in two consecutive stages: feature extraction and classification. Using a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) classifier different filter-bank configurations were compared as feature extraction techniques for speaker recognition. The filter-banks were also compared to the popular Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) with respect to speaker recognition performance on the CSLU Speaker Recognition Corpus. The empirical results show that a uniform filter-bank outperforms both the mel-scale filter bank and the MFCC as a feature extraction technique. These results challenge the notion that the mel-scale is an appropriate division of the spectrum for speaker recognition.
17-Acetoxymulinic acid

The title compound, [systematic name: 5a-acetoxymethyl-3-isopropyl-8-methyl-1,2,3,3a,4,5,5a,6,7,10,10a,10b-dodecahydro-7,10-endo-epidioxycyclohepta[e]indene-3a-carboxylic acid], C22H32O6 (I), is closely related to methyl 5a-acetoxymethyl-3-isopropyl-8-methyl-1,2,3,3a,4,5,5a,6,7,10,10a,10b-dodecahydro-7,10-endo-epidioxycyclohepta[e]indene-3a-carboxylate, (II) [Brito et al., (2008 ▶). Acta Cryst. E64, o1209]. There are two molecules in the asymmetric unit, which are linked by two strong intramolecular O—H⋯O hydrogen bonds with graph-set motif R 2 2(8). In both (I) and (II), the conformation of the three fused rings are almost identical. The five-membered ring has an envelope conformation, the six-membered ring has a chair conformation and the seven-membered ring has a boat conformation. The most obvious differences between the two compounds is the observed disorder of the acetoxymethyl fragments in both molecules of the asymmetric unit of (I). This disorder is not observed in (II). The crystal structure and the molecular conformation is stabilized by intermolecular C—H⋯O hydrogen bonds. The ability to form hydrogen bonds is different in the two compounds. The crystal studied was a non-merohedral twin, the ratio of the twin components being 0.28 (1):0.72 (1)
TimeWarp: Rethinking timekeeping and performance monitoring mechanisms to mitigate side-channel attacks

Over the past two decades, several microarchitectural side channels have been exploited to create sophisticated security attacks. Solutions to this problem have mainly focused on fixing the source of leaks either by limiting the flow of information through the side channel by modifying hardware, or by refactoring vulnerable software to protect sensitive data from leaking. These solutions are reactive and not preventative: while the modifications may protect against a single attack, they do nothing to prevent future side channel attacks that exploit other microarchitectural side channels or exploit the same side channel in a novel way. In this paper we present a general mitigation strategy that focuses on the infrastructure used to measure side channel leaks rather than the source of leaks, and thus applies to all known and unknown microarchitectural side channel leaks. Our approach is to limit the fidelity of fine grain timekeeping and performance counters, making it difficult for an attacker to distinguish between different microarchitectural events, thus thwarting attacks. We demonstrate the strength of our proposed security modifications, and validate that our changes do not break existing software. Our proposed changes require minor - or in some cases, no - hardware modifications and do not result in any substantial performance degradation, yet offer the most comprehensive protection against microarchitectural side channels to date.
Predicting Upcoming Values of Stress While Driving

The levels of stress while driving affect the way we drive and have an impact on the likelihood of having an accident. Different types of sensors, such as heart rate or skin conductivity sensors, have been previously used to measure stress related features. Estimated stress levels could be used to adapt the driver’s environment to minimize distractions in high cognitive demanding situations and to promote stress-friendly driving behaviors. The way we drive has an impact on how stressors affect the perceived cognitive demands by drivers, and at the same time, the perceived stress has an impact on the actions taken by the driver. In this paper, we evaluate how effectively upcoming stress levels can be predicted considering current stress levels, current driving behavior, and the shape of the road. We use features, such as the positive kinetic energy and severity of curves on the road to estimate how stress levels will evolve in the next minute. Different machine learning techniques are evaluated and the results for both intra and inter-city driving and for both intra and inter driver data are presented. We have used data from four different drivers with three different car models and a motorbike and more than 220 test drives. Results show that upcoming stress levels can be accurately predicted for a single user (correlation r = 0.99 and classification accuracy 97.5%) but prediction for different users is more limited (correlation r = 0.92 and classification accuracy 46.9%).
Intracellular Salmonella metabolism

Growth of Salmonella inside infected host cells is a key aspect of their ability to cause local enteritis or systemic disease. This growth depends on exploitation of host nutrients through a large Salmonella metabolism network with hundreds of metabolites and enzymes. Studies in cell culture infection models are unravelling more and more of the underlying molecular and cellular mechanisms but also show striking Salmonella metabolic plasticity depending on host cell line and experimental conditions. In vivo studies have revealed a qualitatively diverse, but quantitatively poor, host‐Salmonella nutritional interface, which on one side makes Salmonella fitness largely resilient against metabolic perturbations, but on the other side severely limits Salmonella biomass generation and growth rates. This review discusses goals and techniques for studying Salmonella intracellular metabolism, summarises main results and implications, and proposes key issues that could be addressed in future studies.
Reducing Heart Rate Reactivity to Stress with Feedback Generalization Across Task and Time

Heart rate (HR) reactions to two behavioral stressors (videogame and mental arithmetic) were measured in 8 experimental subjects who received biofeedback training and 8 matched control subjects during three assessment periods: pretraining, posttraining, and one-week follow-up. Experimental subjects exhibited significant reductions in HR following a training session in which they received ongoing HR feedback while playing a videogame. Control subjects, who played the same number of videogames without HR feedback, showed smaller HR reductions. During the training session, all subjects were instructed to reduce HR while maximizing game perlormance. In comparison to controls, experimental subjects (a) maintained lower HRs during videogame presentations after a one-week period and (b) generalized these HR reductions to the mental arithmetic challenge at follow-up. Performance on the videogame declined from post-training to follow-up for experimental subjects but not for control subjects. No group difference in mental arithmetic performance was observed.
Promoting Moderate-Vigorous Physical Activity in Overweight Minority Girls

There is limited research on the types of activities that are most effective for promoting MVPA in children. Purpose. To assess which types of activities elicit MVPA in overweight minority girls. Methods. Sample consisted of 31 overweight (BMI ≥ 85th percentile) Latina and African-American girls (mean age 10.3 ± 1.2 years). Participants wore an Actical accelerometer each day for 8 hours for 15 days to assess engagement in MVPA during their participation in a three-week activity intervention that included traditional fitness, sport skills, games, dancing, and flexibility sessions. Results. On average 62% of participants met the MVPA recommended guidelines (60 min/5d/wk) with an average of 68.5 ± 14 minutes of MVPA across the three weeks. Traditional fitness sessions elicited the highest percent of MVPA (mean time spent in MVPA = 32%), followed by dancing and games (mean time spent in MVPA = 21%), sports skills (mean time spent in MVPA = 18%), and flexibility (mean time spent in MVPA = 7%). Step aerobics and rumba fitness elicited the highest proportions of MVPA. Conclusion. Traditional fitness activities were identified as the most successful in eliciting MVPA in overweight Latina and African American girls.
Secondary Prevention in Patients with Coronary Heart Diseases: What Factors Are Associated with Health Status in Usual Primary Care?

Background For patients with coronary heart diseases a substantial part of secondary prevention is delivered in primary care. Along with the growing importance of prevention, health-related quality of life (HRQoL) is an indicator of patient-centered care that has gained increased attention. Different approaches for reorganization in primary care have been associated with improvements in HRQoL. However, these are often results of complex interventions. Evidence on aspects concerning usual primary care that actually have an impact on HRQoL remains scarce. Therefore, this observational study aimed to identify factors which are associated with HRQoL in usual primary care at practice and patient-level. Methods This observational study was conducted in eight European countries. We were able to match data from survey instruments for 3505 patients with coronary heart disease (CHD) in 228 practices. A multilevel analysis was performed to identify associations of EQ-5D scores at patient and practice-level. Results After dropping patients with missing information, our cohort consisted of 2656 patients. In this sample, 30.5% were female and the mean age was 67.5 years (SD 10.1). The final model included a total set of 14 potential explanatory variables. At practice-level no variable was associated with EQ-5D. At patient-level, lower education (r = −0.0381, p<0.0001), female gender (r = −0.0543, p<0.0001) and a higher number of other conditions (r = −0.0340, p<0.0001), had a strong negative effect on HRQoL. Strong positive associations with HRQoL were found for a good medication adherence (Morisky) (r = 0.0195, p<0.0001) and more positive evaluations of physicians' clinical behavior (r = 0.0282, p = 0.002). In terms of HRQoL no differences between single-handed and group practices exist. Conclusion The results of our study suggest that a better patient-physician relationship rather than organization of CHD care is associated with higher HRQOL in the primary care setting. The results may imply that interventions to improve HRQoL require a strong patient-centered approach.
Adaptive Sensing Relevance Exploiting Social Media Mining in Smart Cities

Wireless sensor networks are an important part of smart cities, but there are still many challenging issues, demanding optimizations in those networks for higher efficiency. Events of interest may be identified analyzing data posted in social media, and such events may be used to assign priority levels to sensor nodes. This paper proposes an automatic mechanism to update sensors' priorities based on events mined and identified in social medias, which may be then optimized for higher monitoring efficiency.
Effect of Shrinkage Reducing Admixture on the Strength and Shrinkage of Alkali Activated Cementitious Mortar

The effect of a shrinkage reducing admixture (SRA) on the mechanical properties and drying shrinkage of a proprietary alkali activated cementitous material (AACM) was investigated. Five AACM mortar mixes were prepared. SRA replaced the liquid activator at a dosage of 0%, 1%, 2%, 4% and 7%. The liquid/binder ratio was 0.38. The samples were cured in water. The flexural and compressive strengths of all mixes were determined at 1day, 2 days, 7 days and 28 days and the drying shrinkage was determined up to 80 days. The results show that SRA reduced the shrinkage of AACM mortar by up to 69% after 80 days at 7% dosage. However, SRA also reduced the compressive and flexural strengths of AACM mortars. Increasing dosages of SRA reduced the compressive and flexural strength while recording less shrinkage. Regardless of the dosage of SRA, a unique relationship exists between flexural strength and compressive strength, which correlates with the data of previous research. The AACM mortar maintained strength of over 43MPa (greater than 75% of the control mix at 0% SRA dosage) at 7% SRA dosage, which is classified as high strength in accordance with British Standard PAS 8820:2016.
Fabrication and Characterization of Graphene Oxide Doped SU-8 Polymer Waveguide

In this paper, graphene oxide (GO) was doped into SU-8 polymer to examine the functionalities of polymer waveguide material via dopant inclusion. In material preparation, step by step processes starting from cyclopentanone mixing will be explained. It is shown that doped material's refractive index can be tailored by having different weight percentage of GO. Finally, a single mode ridge waveguide loss of GO doped SU-8 has been characterized to be 1.9 dB/cm at 1550 nm wavelength.
BIOSMILE web search: a web application for annotating biomedical entities and relations

BIOSMILE web search (BWS), a web-based NCBI-PubMed search application, which can analyze articles for selected biomedical verbs and give users relational information, such as subject, object, location, manner, time, etc. After receiving keyword query input, BWS retrieves matching PubMed abstracts and lists them along with snippets by order of relevancy to protein–protein interaction. Users can then select articles for further analysis, and BWS will find and mark up biomedical relations in the text. The analysis results can be viewed in the abstract text or in table form. To date, BWS has been field tested by over 30 biologists and questionnaires have shown that subjects are highly satisfied with its capabilities and usability. BWS is accessible free of charge at http://bioservices.cse. yzu.edu. tw/BWS.
Machine Learning of Jazz Grammars

In the context of an educational software tool that can generate novel jazz solos using a probabilistic grammar (Keller 2007), this article describes the automated learning of such grammars. Learning takes place from a corpus of transcriptions, typically from a single performer, and our methods attempt to improvise solos representative of such a style. In order to capture idiomatic gestures of a specific soloist, we extend an earlier grammar representation (Keller and Morrison 2007) with a technique for representing melodic contour. Representative contours are extracted from a corpus using clustering, and sequencing among contours is done using Markov chains that are encoded into the grammar. This article first defines the basic building blocks for contours of typical jazz solos, which we call slopes, then shows how these slopes may be incorporated into a grammar wherein the notes are chosen according to tonal categories relevant to jazz playing. We show that melodic contours can be accurately portrayed using slopes learned from a corpus. Experimental results, including blind comparisons of solos generated from grammars based on several corpora, are reported.
Evaluation of absolute serum α-fetoprotein levels in liver transplant for hepatocellular cancer.

HYPOTHESIS An elevated serum α-fetoprotein (AFP) level before orthotopic liver transplant (OLT) is predictive of mortality after OLT for hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). DESIGN Retrospective analysis of a population-based cohort. SETTING United Network for Organ Sharing registry (2003-2008). PATIENTS We identified 2253 patients who underwent OLT for HCC with available pre-OLT serum AFP values. METHODS Patients were stratified by AFP levels into low (<20 ng/mL), medium (20-399 ng/mL), or high (≥400 ng/mL) groups. Clinical and pathological characteristics were compared among groups. Survival curves were constructed by the Kaplan-Meier method, and univariate and multivariate Cox-regression analysis was performed. RESULTS Of the 2253 patients, 1210 (53.7%), 805 (35.7%), and 238 (10.6%) were in the low, medium, and high AFP groups, respectively. On univariate analysis, the low AFP group demonstrated the best 4-year survival (76%) compared with the medium (65%; P = .001) and high (57%; P < .001) AFP groups. When AFP levels in patients with only stage II HCC underwent assessment, improved survival in the low AFP group was still observed (P < .001). On multivariate analysis, the medium and high AFP groups were associated with higher mortality (hazard ratios, 1.50 [95% confidence interval, 1.19-1.89; P = .001] and 2.11 [1.55-2.88; P < .001], respectively). CONCLUSIONS Serum AFP level is an independent prognostic predictor of outcome after OLT for HCC. The association between serum AFP value and post-OLT survival warrants further investigation to potentially better allocate donor allografts for HCC.
The Oryza BAC resource : a genus-wide and genome scale tool for exploring rice genome evolution and leveraging useful genetic diversity from wild relatives

Rice was the first crop to have a high-quality reference genome sequence and is now at the forefront of intense functional and evolutionary research for two reasons-its central role in world food security, and its status as a model system for grasses. A thorough characterization of the rice genome cannot be accomplished without a deep understanding of its evolutionary history. The genus Oryza contains two cultivated and 22 wild rice species that represent 10 distinct genome types embedded within a robust phylogeny spanning a ~15 million year time span. The genus contains an untapped reservoir of agriculturally important traits and a historical record of genomic changes (especially those related to domestication, polyploidy, speciation and adaption). The two main objectives of the 'Oryza Map Alignment Project' (OMAP) were to functionally characterize the rice genome from a comparative standpoint and to provide essential tools to leverage the novel genetic diversity from wild relatives for rice improvement. The objective of this review is to summarize our efforts towards developing the most comprehensive genus-wide set of publicly available BAC resources for the genus Oryza, the first of its kind among plants (and perhaps higher eukaryotes), and their applications.
An analysis of near optimal call admission and routing model for multi-service loss networks

A state-dependent call admission and routing policy for a multiservice circuit-switched network is analyzed. The policy is based on decomposition of the Markov decision problem into a set of separable link problems. To provide an exact link analysis model a value iteration algorithm was offered. This allows examination of the accuracy of several approximations used to reduce the complexity of the problem. The numeral study showed that the convergence of the analyzed strategy is achieved in at most two iterations. The study also showed the good traffic efficiency of the approach and confirmed the predicted ability to control the distribution of call classes grade of service. The approach, together with its sensitivity analysis with respect to the arrival rates, provides a very general framework for studying, constructing, and optimizing other call admission and routing strategies. The results of sensitivity analysis are used to compare the proposed decomposition approach with the decomposition approach developed by F.P. Kelly (1988) for optimization of a load sharing policy. Also, the relationship to other routing strategies based on Markov decision theory is investigated. <<ETX>>
Embryonic stem cells

Abstract. Embryonic stem cells have huge potential in the field of tissue engineering and regenerative medicine as they hold the capacity to produce every type of cell and tissue in the body. In theory, the treatment of human disease could be revolutionized by the ability to generate any cell, tissue, or even organ, ‘on demand’ in the laboratory. This work reviews the history of murine and human ES cell lines, including practical and ethical aspects of ES cell isolation from pre‐implantation embryos, maintenance of undifferentiated ES cell lines in the cell culture environment, and differentiation of ES cells in vitro and in vivo into mature somatic cell types. Finally, we discuss advances towards the clinical application of ES cell technology, and some of the obstacles which must be overcome before large scale clinical trials can be considered.
Solving Rational Eigenvalue Problems via Linearization

The rational eigenvalue problem is an emerging class of nonlinear eigenvalue problems arising from a variety of physical applications. In this paper, we propose a linearization-based method to solve the rational eigenvalue problem. The proposed method converts the rational eigenvalue problem into a well-studied linear eigenvalue problem, and meanwhile, exploits and preserves the structure and properties of the original rational eigenvalue problem. For example, the low-rank property leads to a trimmed linearization. We show that solving a class of rational eigenvalue problems is just as convenient and efficient as solving linear eigenvalue problems.