Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Back Muscle Fatigability Is Associated With Knee Extensor Inhibition in Subjects With Low Back Pain

Study Design. Cross-sectional study of 25 male golfers with chronic low back pain and 16 healthy controls of similar age. Objectives. To assess the association between functional capacity of the back extensors and the quadriceps muscles. Summary of Background Data. Chronic low back pain has been shown to lead to changes in muscle activation patterns of the abdominals and the gluteus maximus. The effect of chronic low back pain on lower limb function has not been investigated. Methods. Back extensor endurance was assessed by a Biering-Sørensen test; surface EMG was measured bilaterally on the erector spinae at T12 and L4–L5. Muscle inhibition in the quadriceps was assessed by applying an electrical twitch to the maximally contracted muscle. The associations between holding time, decrease in EMG median frequency (i.e., the slope of the regression line on median frequency vs. time), and muscle inhibition were compared for study participants with chronic low back pain and controls. Results. Mean back extensor holding times were 88 ± 30 seconds for study participants with chronic low back pain and 92 ± 17 seconds for controls. Both groups showed bilaterally similar decreases in EMG median frequency at L4–L5 and T12; however, the slopes were significantly steeper at L4–L5 than T12. Study participants with chronic low back pain with poor back endurance had significantly higher muscle inhibition compared with study participants with chronic low back pain with good back endurance, whereas such an association was not evident in healthy controls. Conclusions. In golfers with chronic low back pain reduced back endurance was associated with significant inhibition of the knee extensors, indicating that this muscle group cannot be activated to a full extent. These findings suggest a possible association between back extensor fatigability and knee extensor dysfunction in male golfers with chronic low back pain.
Production , Manufacturing and Logistics Using component technology to develop a simulation library for business process modelling

Though much of the hype about business process change and re-engineering has, thankfully, died away it remains true that many organizations wish to improve their business processes. To meet this need, Business Process Simulation has been promoted, often by consultants and software companies, the latter with their proprietary software. Most of the software tools are very easy-to-use, but lack flexibility beyond pre-defined constructs. BPSim++ is a re-usable library of modelling components for simulating business processes, implemented in C++ using the Visual Component Library of Borland C++ Builder. It combines the ease-of-use of a graphical user interface with the flexibility of a component framework. To illustrate and assess the library, a case study of a call handling process is described and the strengths and limitations of the approach are discussed. The paper concludes that component technology as used in BPSim++ can be profitably employed to address both ease-of-use and flexibility. 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Benchmark Object for Virtual Machines

The most cost effective approach to study the performance of virtualization technology is to use the benchmark. In this paper, we present a new evaluation methodology to deploy a benchmark evaluation with a Benchmark Object. By encapsulating three steps of traditional benchmark processes and implementing an instance from a Benchmark Object, users need not evaluate manually. Furthermore, a Benchmark Object simplifies the use of benchmarks and saves a great deal of duplicate work to deploy, configure and execute benchmarks and analyze their results. We develop the virtualization system performance evaluation management facility to implement and manage the concept of a Benchmark Object. We discuss this performance evaluation tool in detail, test the performance of the tool, and draw some conclusions.
Linguistic Problems Based on Text Corpora

The paper is focused on self-contained linguistic problems based on text corpora. We argue that corpus-based problems differ from traditional linguistic problems because they make it possible to represent language variation. Furthermore, they often require basic statistical thinking from the students. The practical value of using data obtained from text corpora for teaching linguistics through linguistic problems is shown.
Psychometric properties of a shortened version of the Physical Self-Concept Questionnaire (PSQ-S).

INTRODUCTION The four-dimensional model of physical self-concept which differentiates the physical self-perceptions of ability, condition, attractiveness and strength is widely accepted. In the last two decades much research has been done on the physical self-concept and its relations with the psychological well-being/distress, anxiety disorders or Eating Behavior Disorders (EBD). OBJECTIVE To validate a shortened version of the Physical Self-Concept Questionnaire (PSQ-S) and verify its ability to discriminate between people with different levels of EBD. METHOD Responses of 1478 subjects between 13 and 21 years old to the shortened version of the PSQ were analyzed in order to check indexes of reliability and validity. Furthermore, the scores of 96 women aged 14 to 23 years old diagnosed of EBD were compared to 96 others without clinical diagnosis. RESULTS The results indicate a reliability of 0.93 and confirm the tetrafactorial structure of the physical selfconcept. The highest physical self-concept is that of those without a clinical diagnosis of EBD. CONCLUSIONS The Shortened-PSQ is a simple, reliable and suitable screening tool both for educational and clinical settings. It also provides a sufficient measure of physical self-concept for research purposes.
Character computing: challenges and opportunities

Systems that adapt to the states of users show great potential for creating novel user experiences. However, most approaches in affective computing only rely on the current state of the user. Furthermore, personality computing has recently evolved, it shows a few examples of how personality traits can be inferred from different types of behavioral evidence. We envision introducing novel user experiences by learning more about the user through extracting the building blocks of their character including; morals, mentalities and believes. In this workshop we aim to introduce Character Computing, a novel approach to examine and leverage characters to build ubiquitous and non-obtrusive character-aware adaptive systems. This workshop aims at engaging participants in reflection and practical work exploring the evolving research strand in hand.
‘My body is mine’: Qualitatively exploring agency among internally displaced women participants in a small-group intervention in Leogane, Haiti

The 2010 earthquake resulted in the breakdown of Haiti's social, economic and health infrastructure. Over one-quarter of a million people remain internally displaced (ID). ID women experience heightened vulnerability to intimate partner violence (IPV) due to increased poverty and reduced community networks. Scant research has examined experiences of IPV among ID women in post-earthquake Haiti. We conducted a qualitative study to explore the impact of participating in Famn an Aksyon Pou Santé Yo (FASY), a small-group HIV prevention intervention, on ID women's agency in Leogane, Haiti. We conducted four focus groups with ID women, FASY participants (n = 40) and in-depth individual interviews with peer health workers (n = 7). Our study was guided by critical ethnography and paid particular attention to power relations. Findings highlighted multiple forms of IPV (e.g., physical, sexual). Participants discussed processes of intrapersonal (confidence), interpersonal (communication), relational (support) and collective (women's rights) agency. Yet structural factors, including patriarchal gender norms and poverty, silenced IPV discussions and constrained women's agency. Findings suggest that agency among ID women is a multi-level, non-linear and incremental process. To effectively address IPV among ID women in Haiti, interventions should address structural contexts of gender inequity and poverty and concurrently facilitate multi-level processes of agency.
The spontaneous activity of neurones in the cat’s cerebral cortex

Chronically implanted microelectrodes have been used to obtain extracellular records of trains of spontaneous action potentials from 30 neurones in the cerebral cortices of 13 unrestrained cats. Recorded neurones were in or near to primary visual cortex, primary auditory cortex, and in the supra-sylvian gyrus. Records were made with animals in several different behavioural states, which included sleep with rapid eye-movements and quiet sleep, peacefully awake, and alarmed. Interval distributions derived from trains of 200 action potentials recorded in less than 80 s did not differ significantly from curves in which the probability of any interval is normally distributed about a modal interval, when plotted on a logarithmic time-axis. Thus the complete interval distributions of neurones firing faster than 2.5/s can be described by two parameters – a modal interval, and a geometric standard deviation. This quantitative description of interval distributions proved equally applicable to neurones in all three cortical areas and was valid over the whole range of behavioural states examined. It does not usually hold when the discharge frequency of a neurone is lower than 2.5 action potentials per second. An acceptable fit for a log-normal curve can then only be obtained for intervals that are shorter than about ten times the modal interval. It is pointed out that mean frequency of discharge is a measure of neural activity which is a secondary parameter, since it is dependent upon both modal interval and geometric standard deviation. Our preliminary data show that the two parameters which define the best-fit log-normal curves can vary independently with the behavioural state of the animal in a way that suggests that they may be physiologically important.
CORRELATION BETWEEN GAS AND LIQUID PERMEABILITY IN SOME NANOSILVER-IMPREGNATED AND UNTREATED

TAGHIYARI HR. 2012. Correlation between gas and liquid permeability in some nanosilver-impregnated and untreated hardwood. Permeability is an important physical property of wood as a porous material that determines many of its applications. The present study was therefore aimed at analysing the effects of nanosilver impregnation on specific longitudinal gas permeability as well as two longitudinal liquid permeability, i.e. first drop time and 5-cm lowering time using Rilem tube test method. Relationship between these permeability times were analysed in three native solid wood, Populus nigra (poplar), Fagus orientalis (beech) and Carpinus betulus (hornbeam). Specific longitudinal gas permeability values obtained were 20.77 × 10-13, 8.20 × 10-13, 7.85 × 10-13 and 6.10 × 10-13 m3 m-1 in poplar, beech, hornbeam sapwood and hornbeam heartwood respectively. Empty-cell impregnation process of nanosilver suspension not only washed out part of the extractives but also the pressure might have removed some of the tiny physical tissues and natural obstacles in vessel elements. Consequently, permeability increased by more than 50% in poplar and hornbeam heartwood which had simple perforation plates. However, permeability was decreased by 3.7% in beech. We hypothesised that this was due to first, the settlement of nanosilver particles or extractives that were dissolved in the suspension within scalariform perforation plates, thus, blocking fluid transfer process; and second, collapsing and accumulation of the scalariform perforation plates due to the high pressure in impregnation vessel. Clear direct relation was found between gas and liquid permeabilitiy.
Review article: albumin for circulatory support in patients with cirrhosis

Renal function abnormalities and ascites in cirrhosis are the final consequence of a circulatory dysfunction characterized by marked splanchnic arterial vasodilation. This causes a reduction in effective arterial blood volume and the homoeostatic activation of vasoconstrictor and sodium‐retaining systems. Albumin is very effective in preventing renal failure associated with large‐volume paracentesis and spontaneous bacterial peritonitis, conditions that are known to cause an impairment of circulatory function in patients with cirrhosis and ascites. Moreover, albumin administration improves survival in patients with spontaneous bacterial peritonitis. In patients with hepatorenal syndrome the administration of vasoconstrictor drugs in combination with albumin improves circulatory and renal function markedly and survival slightly. By contrast, the administration of albumin without vasoconstrictors has marginal or no effects on renal function in this setting.
Hybrid HIV/MSCV LTR Enhances Transgene Expression of Lentiviral Vectors in Human CD34+ Hematopoietic Cells

HIV‐based lentiviral vectors can transduce nondividing cells, an important advantage over murine leukemia virus (MLV)‐based vectors when transducing slowly dividing hematopoietic stem cells. However, we find that in human CD34+ hematopoietic cells, the HIV‐based vectors with an internal cytomegalovirus (CMV) promoter express transgenes 100‐ to 1,000‐fold less than the MLV‐based retroviral vector murine stem cell virus (MSCV). To increase the expression of the integrated lentivirus, we replaced CMV promoter with that of the Rous sarcoma virus or MSCV and obtained a modest augmentation in expression. A more dramatic effect was seen when the CMV enhancer/promoter was removed and the HIV long‐terminal repeat (LTR) was replaced by a novel HIV/MSCV hybrid LTR. This vector retains the ability to transduce nondividing cells but now expresses its transgene (enhanced green fluorescent protein) 10‐ to 100‐fold greater than the original HIV‐based vector. When compared under identical conditions, the HIV vector with the hybrid LTR transduced a higher percentage of CD34+ cells than the MSCV‐based retroviral vector (19.4% versus 2.4%). The number of transduced cells and level of transgene expression remain constant over 5‐8 weeks as determined by long‐term culture‐initiating cells, fluoresence‐activated cell sorting, and nonobese diabetic/severe combined immunodeficiency repopulation assay.
A new approach for collaborative filtering based on Bayesian network inference

Collaborative filtering (CF) is one of the most popular algorithms, for recommendation in cases, the items which are recommended to users, have been determined by relying on the outcomes done on surveying their communities. There are two main CF-approaches, which are memory-based and model-based. The model-based approach is more dominant by real-time response when it takes advantage of inference mechanism in recommendation task. However the problem of incomplete data is still an open research and the inference engine is being improved more and more so as to gain high accuracy and high speed. I propose a new model-based CF based on applying Bayesian network (BN) into reference engine with assertion that BN is an optimal inference model because BN is user's purchase pattern and Bayesian inference is evidence-based inferring mechanism which is appropriate to rating database. Because the quality of BN relies on the completion of training data, it gets low if training data have a lot of missing values. So I also suggest an average technique to fill in missing values.
Oxygen Initiation of Respiration and Mitochondrial Biogenesis in Rice*

Rice growth under aerobic and anaerobic conditions allowed aspects of mitochondrial biogenesis to be identified as dependent on or independent of an oxygen signal. Analysis of transcripts encoding mitochondrial components found that a subset of these genes respond to oxygen (defined as aerobic), whereas others are relatively unaffected by oxygen availability. Mitochondria formed during growth in anaerobic conditions had reduced protein levels of tricarboxylic acid cycle components and cytochrome-containing complexes of the respiratory chain and repressed respiratory functionality. In general, the capacity of the general import pathway was found to be significantly lower in mitochondria isolated from tissue grown under anaerobic conditions, whereas the carrier import pathway capacity was not affected by changes in oxygen availability. Transcript levels of genes encoding components of the protein import apparatus were generally not affected by the absence of oxygen, and their protein abundance was severalfold higher in mitochondria isolated from anaerobically grown tissue. However, both transcript and protein abundances of the subunits of the mitochondrial processing peptidase, which in plants is integrated into the cytochrome bc1 complex, were repressed under anaerobic conditions. Therefore, in this system, an increase in import capacity is correlated with an increase in the abundance of the cytochrome bc1 complex, which is ultimately dependent on the presence of oxygen, providing a link between the respiratory chain and protein import apparatus.
Safelog: Supporting Web Search and Mining by Differentially-Private Query Logs

Query logs can be very useful for advancing web search and web mining research. Since these web query logs contain private, possibly sensitive data, they need to be effectively anonymized before they can be released for research use. Anonymization of query logs differs from that of structured data since they are generated based on natural language and the vocabulary (domain) is inﬁnite. This unstructured, unbounded data set poses different challenges for producing privacy-preserving query logs. To mitigate these challenges, we propose using a differential privacy framework called Safelog to generate anonymized query logs that contain sufﬁcient contextual information to allow existing web search and web mining algorithms to use the data and attain meaningful results. The key to achieving high privacy guarantees is the introduction of a query pool for augmenting the query log during the sanitation process. We empirically validate the effectiveness of our framework for generating usable, privacy preserving logs for web search, and demonstrate that it is possible to maintain high utility for this task while guar-anteeing sufﬁcient levels of privacy. We conclude with a discussion of other web mining tasks that can be supported by these anonymized logs and show some preliminary results for the task of website clustering.
A novel robot-task-description for a variety of dynamic behaviors

This paper aims to unify the “robot language” approach and the reinforcement learning (RL) framework in order to design behaviors of robots with a simple description. We develop a kind of robot language where we describe a robot task, then the robot employs an RL method to acquire the corresponding behavior. The remarkable feature of this approach is that we do not have to specify the procedure of the behavior, and the models of the environment and the robot. To accomplish this approach, we employ the C++ RL library SkyAI as the base system, then we extend the SkyAI's script interface so that we can describe tasks simply. In this mechanism, a task is described with several event-driven functions where the reward and the end-of-episode condition are defined. As the demonstration, we design six kinds of behaviors for a humanoid robot; a crawling, a handstanding, a jumping, a forward rolling, a backward rolling, and a turning task.
Physical Performance and Metabolic Recovery Among Lean, Healthy Men Following a Prolonged Energy Deficit

Previous studies have demonstrated that full recovery from weight loss may take months or years. The present investigation examined short-term recovery (5 wks "post") of physical performance (muscular strength, muscular power, vertical jump), body composition, metabolic hormones (testosterone, luteinizing hormone, sex hormone binding globulin, insulin-like growth factor-1, triiodothyronine, thyroxine, thyroid binding globulin, and thyroid-stimulating hormone) and metabolic markers (transferrin, ferritin, prealbumin, glycerol, nonesterified fatty acids, high-density lipoproteins, and lactate) in 10 healthy young men after an 8-week Army course with an energy deficit (1000 kcal/d) and loss of body mass (-12%). Subjects ate ad libitum after the course ended ("post"). Body composition was determined by dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry; strength from a simulated power clean, power from body mass and jump height, and metabolic hormones were measured in morning-fasted blood by radioimmunoassay. With the exception of transferrin and glycerol, all study parameters were significantly (p<.05) altered by the training course. At 5 weeks post fat-free mass along with all physical performance measures returned to initial levels; however, fat mass had significantly (p<.05) increased over initial levels. Also, with the exception of lactate, all measured hormones and markers were close to initial levels and within normal ranges. Reported complications during recovery included sleep irregularities, diarrhea, loss of motivation and feelings of fatigue. While the long range effect of this energy deprivation experience is uncertain, these data do suggest that severe weight loss does not result in lasting alterations of the contractile and metabolic properties of skeletal muscle in young, lean, healthy men.
Performance Synthesis of Permanent-Magnet Synchronous Machines During the Driving Cycle of a Hybrid Electric Vehicle

This paper presents a comparative study of two surface-mounted permanent-magnet synchronous machines (PMSMs): the first with integral slot windings and the other with fractional slot windings. These machines have the same winding distribution on the stator and the same magnet volume on the rotor but different rotor pole numbers. The objective is to give the advantages of PMSMs with fractional slot windings. This paper also presents a computation method of average copper losses, including the flux weakening and that of average iron losses during the driving cycle for a hybrid electric vehicle (HEV). In this paper, in the electrical motorization of a truck, the specification characteristics give a maximum torque of 500 Nm and a maximum speed of 3000 returns per minute (rpm). Finally, a comparative study in terms of average losses during the driving cycle of the HEV has been presented. The energetic efficiency of the electric motor in the vehicle is shown.
The PADRES Publish/Subscribe System

This chapter introduces PADRES, the publish/subscribe model with the capability to correlate events, uniformly access data produced in the past and future, balance the traffic load among brokers, and handle network failures. The new model can filter, aggregate, correlate and project any combination of historic and future data. A flexible architecture is proposed consisting of distributed and replicated data repositories that can be provisioned in ways to tradeoff availability, storage overhead, query overhead, query delay, load distribution, parallelism, redundancy and locality. This chapter gives a detailed overview of the PADRES content-based publish/subscribe system. Several applications are presented in detail that can benefit from the content-based nature of the publish/subscribe paradigm and take advantage of its scalability and robustness features. A list of example applications are discussed that can benefit from the content-based nature of publish/subscribe paradigm and take advantage of its scalability and robustness features. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-697-6.ch008