Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effects of 2 days sodium bicarbonate loading on simulated football performance test

The Effects of 2 Days Sodium Bicarbonate Loading on Simulated Football Performance Test Orcun Kurum Introduction There is well-documented researches exist on sodium bicarbonate, however, not many studies have examined the effectiveness of this ergogenic aids during prolonged exercises also including a sport specific performance test. The primary purpose of this study was to determine whether a short-term (2 days) supplementation of sodium bicarbonate (NaHCO3) enhances repeated sprint performance and time to exhaustion in a simulated football performance test (Loughborough Intermittent Sprint Test) which lasts for 90 minutes. Methods Seven healthy males (Mean age = 24 ± 1.6 years and predicted mean V& O2max = 49.4 ml kg min) participated in this experimental study using a double-blind, randomized, crossover study design was used. All subjects completed three conditions, except the control condition, the others included test drinks followed by a 5-day washout period between these two conditions: 1) control (no drinks), 2) placebo/drug (Pl; NaCl; 0.045 gkg-1, Sb; 0,5g/kg bw NaHCO3), and 3) same as 2 condition. During each condition, sprint times, exhaustion times and rating perceived exertion (RPE) were assessed. In addition to this, before the test day, gastro intestinal (GI) distress questionnaires were used to assess the number and severity of symptoms during the supplementation period. Results The main findings were; 1) Sodium bicarbonate loading produced slightly (3.2%) but significantly greater (p = .000) sprint performance than the placebo in some periods of the exercise session (LIST) and 2) Two days of Sb supplementation was sufficient to increase repeated sprint performance compared to the placebo trial. However, in contrast to hypotheses, no benefits from supplementation were observed for time to exhaustion and perception of fatigue (RPE). Conclusion – Considering that this current study found benefits from sodium bicarbonate loading during the 90 minutes simulated football performance test, it suggests that 2 days of sodium bicarbonate supplementation may improve repeated sprint performance. Future research on a greater sample size, a specific athletic population (professionals), and various exercise modes including ball activities would be beneficial in determining if this supplementation is worthwhile. This paper is original and has not been submitted previously in support of a degree qualification or other course. Date __________________________ Signature __________________________ Table of
Konzept für eine bestandsschonendere Nutzung der Dorschvorkommen in der westlichen Ostsee

The introduction of a long-term management plan for the cod socks by the International Baltic Sea Fishery Commission (IBSFC) to ensure stable and high yields and to conserve the fish stocks of the Baltic demands certain conservation measures. One is the use of the Total Allowable Catches (TACs) based on precautionary approches. In addition the exploitation pattern and the selectivy of trawls shall be improved to increase the spawning stock biomass and to reduce the presently high discard rates. The contributation demonstrates by means of model calculations for the cod stock of the ICES Sub-divisions 22 to 24 ( Western Baltic ) the short- and long-term effects of an improvement of the trawl selectivity on stock size, yields and profit.
Concept Development in an Innovating Company: Exploring the Role of Signals taking the Problem Solving Perspective

Matching the needs of potential customer segments is vital for any product and service development of an innovating firm. Concept development and market signals are two significant phenomena through which customer communication is enabled so that a firm can better recognize customer demands, thereby, new business opportunities can be identified and exploited for creating better values for customers. This research project attempts to identify how signals facilitate concept development and also to recognize how innovation opportunities are identified and exploited in the concept development. Along with theoretical study, an empirical investigation of a company working on consumer product and service development and marketing has been performed. Drawing on six semistructured interviews, the elements of signals and costly signals in the concept development process of an innovating firm have been realized. More specifically, it has been found that, to convey business intentions and gain information from the customers, signals such as commitment and accounting signals are being used. To undertake certain actions for the concept development project a number of signals such as building constant customer dialogue and making better value propositions have been exploited. Moreover, signals such as brand name and value perceptions have been used in order to motivate customers to contribute in the company’s concept development project. Apart from the signals, the company in focus also uses costly signals through conspicuous precision and conspicuous reputation to make the imitation of signals difficult/ impossible for its competitors. Additionally, it has been also found that opportunity identification and exploitation in the concept development process is actually being performed according to problem solving perspective (PSP) approach. The PSP approach consists of seven steps including opportunity identification, information gathering, defining different opportunity areas, generating alternative concepts, evaluating, testing and selecting the best concepts, further development of selected concepts, and implementing the best concepts that often occur cyclically rather sequentially. Conclusively, the limited empirical scope of this study is acknowledged, therefore further investigations mainly in other business contexts and other industries are required to ensure the reliability of the findings, and to generalize the results.
Joint modelling of goals and bookings in association football

A multivariate counting process formulation is developed for the quantification of association football event interdependences which permits dynamic prediction as events unfold. We model data from English Premier League and Championship games from the 2009–2010 and 2010–2011 football seasons and assess predictive capacity by using a model‐based betting strategy, applied prospectively to available live spread betting prices. Both the scoreline and the bookings status were predictive of match outcome. In particular, the award of a red card led to increased goal rates for the non‐penalized team and the home team scoring rate decreased once they were ahead. Overall the betting strategy profited with gains made in the bookings markets.
Proatividade: influência das condições para a criatividade considerando a mediação da autoeficácia para criar

The main goal of this study was to investigate the influence of the perception of favorable (manager support, challenging activities, strategy, coworkers, freedom, and physical environment) and unfavorable conditions (manager inadequate attitude, rules, and lack of time) for creativity upon the criterion variable, proactivity, taking into account the mediating effect of “Creative Self-Efficacy (CSE)”. A convenience sample of 297 participants from different organizations took part in this study and the model proposed was tested through the modeling of structural equations, employing the individual level of analysis. The findings have shown that all the dimensions of the aforementioned variable make a significant contribution to proactivity, with the highest contribution being the manager support. The mediating hypothesis has shown that CSE mediates the relationship between the favorable conditions for creativity (manager support, challenging activities, strategy, and coworkers) and proactivity, indicating that the influence of context in proactivity is maximized by CSE.
The Relations

Objective — to identify the spread of mistletoe ( Viscum ) in the dendrological park Olexandria and city plantations in Bila Tserkva, analysis of connections mistletoe-host tree, mechanisms of trees drying affected by mistletoe. Material and methods. Objects of research were tree plantations in arboretum Olexandria , urban and suburban plantations of Bila Tserkva. Some studies were conducted in plantations in Ternopil, Ivano-Frankivsk and Zhyto-myr regions during expeditions surveys in 2015-2016 years. Accounting of mistletoe was carried out in early spring and autumn, in leafless period with the help of four-point scale of I.D. Vasilenko and L.M. Filippova (2013). Results. Observed significant increase in the number of affected trees and the number of mistletoe in the trees. Most mistletoe host plants (28 species) are found in the Olexandria . There is a massive dried peaks of affected trees and mistletoe drying of some of them, there is a pre-vails of drying trees in environmentally adverse ecotypes . Noticed in the decade behavior which to a catastrophic shrinkage of Pinus may justify a principle of formation of the Red Book environ-mental and other registers. Conclusions. The spread of Viscum album and number of hosts types significantly increased in the area of research in the green plantations. Damage of the tree by mistletoe leads to their mass top drying. But now in the study area V. album is not the main and only one cause of death of trees — equally dry trees damaged by mistletoe and tree, not settled by it.
Design and analysis of an accelerated seed generation stage for BLASTP on the Mercury system - Master's Thesis, August 2006

NCBI BLASTP is a popular sequence analysis tool used to study the evolutionary relationship between two protein sequences. Protein databases continue to grow exponentially as entire genomes of organisms are sequenced, making sequence analysis a computationally demanding task. For example, a search of the E. coli. k12 proteome against the GenBank Non-Redundant database takes 36 hours on a standard workstation. In this thesis, we look to address the problem by accelerating protein searching using Field Programmable Gate Arrays. We focus our attention on the BLASTP heuristic, building on work done earlier to accelerate DNA searching on the Mercury platform. We analyze the performance characteristics of the BLASTP algorithm and explore the design space of the seed generation stage in detail. We propose a hardware/software architecture and evaluate the performance of the individual stage, and its effect on the overall BLASTP pipeline running on the Mercury system. The seed generation stage is 13x faster than the software equivalent, and the integrated BLASTP pipeline is predicted to yield a speedup of 50x over NCBI BLASTP. Mercury BLASTP also shows a 2.5x speed Type of Report: Other Department of Computer Science & Engineering Washington University in St. Louis Campus Box 1045 St. Louis, MO 63130 ph: (314) 935-6160 WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY THE HENRY EDWIN SEVER GRADUATE SCHOOL DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE DESIGN AND ANALYSIS OF AN ACCELERATED SEED GENERATION STAGE FOR BLASTP ON THE MERCURY SYSTEM by Arpith Chacko Jacob Prepared under the direction of Jeremy Buhler and Roger Chamberlain A thesis presented to the Henry Edwin Sever Graduate School of Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF SCIENCE August 2006 Saint Louis, Missouri WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY THE HENRY EDWIN SEVER GRADUATE SCHOOL DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE
Flavius Josephus

The works of first century CE Jewish historian Flavius Josephus constitute our main source for the study of Jewish history of the Second Temple period. In this chapter, we briefly discuss Josephus’ career and his four compositions, as well as the condition of the Greek manuscript tradition of his works. The chapter also deals with the Latin translations of Josephus, a late antique Christian adaptation of mainly Judean War in Latin, known as Hegesippus, and the remnants of Judean War in Syriac. Next comes Josippon, a medieval Hebrew adaptation of Josephus and some other sources, and finally the much-discussed Slavonic, or Old Russian, version of the Judean War.
The crystal world : executing a new media materialism

This thesis presents practice-based research to establish new forms of social and artistic production through examinations of the materiality of the technical media, namely the computer, that underpins new media art. Contemporary new media art practice has tended to focus attention on software or hardware interfaces, interactivity and network communications. Whilst explorations of these specific affordances of computational media have been important they have generally avoided a more informed engagement with the material structures that frame, underpin, and ultimately shape the works produced with these media. The hypothesis of the research is that a richer understanding of the creative potentials of computational media as a form of practice can accrue from an active engagement with these material foundations in which any computational device employed in a media art practice is embedded. Thus the research presents a novel methodology for approaching new media art, driven by an imperative to engage with the computational, not from some abstract and universalised point-of-view, but up close with a focus on the materiality of its media and thus on matter itself. Hence a second assumption in the research is that this lacunae has impacted on the geology of ideas around new media theory and practice, and includes a failure to account for the intractable difficulties around the material production of the technical media that underpins new media art. Following Karen Barad, the research employs, a diffractive methodology - a practice of presenting computational materiality through insights and traditions while paying attention to their differences, including the material effects of their constitutive exclusions . Using this methodology, new forms of production have been achieved with the participation of diverse groups of people in workshops, “open laboratories”, and two exhibitions. It is intended that the methodology can be adapted, used and developed by practitioners in new media art, philosophy, media archaeology, museology, ethnography and anthropology.
Analysis and Design of Long Haul Fiber-Optic Communication Systems

This thesis deals with the limiting factors in the design of a long-haul fiber-optic communication system, and the techniques used to suppress their resulting impairments. These limiting factors include both linear and nonlinear effects, such as fiber chromatic dispersion and the Kerr nonlinearity, and the modulator-induced nonlinearity. In Chapter 3, the conditional probability density function (PDF) of the received elect rical signal given transmitted bit '1 '/'0' for a coherent fiber-optic transmission system based on binary phase shift keying (BPSK) is mathematically derived. Both amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) noise and fiber nonlinearity are taken into account . The results show that the conditional PDF of given bit '1' or '0' is asymmetric when intrachannel four-wave mixing (IFWM) is dominant, while it becomes nearly symmetric when the variance of ASE is much larger than that due to IFWM. The standard deviation of t he received signal is calculated analytically. The system parameters , including optimum dispersion map and pre-compensation ratio, are optimized by analytically calculating variance of IFWM. Significant computation efforts can be saved using this approach as compared to full numerical simulations of the nonlinear Schrodinger equation, without losing much accuracy. In Chapter 4, an improved 4-f time-lens configuration is proposed. Fourier transform (FT) and inverse Fourier transform (IFT) can be realized using time lenses such that there is no need for time reversal at the end. A typical 4-f configuration consists of two 2-f systems and a temporal filter. The first 2-f system consisting of a time lens and two dispersive elements produces the Fourier transform (FT) of the input signal. The temporal
Prerequisites for Positive Impact of Foreign Direct Investments on Economic Growth

Prerequisites for Positive Impact of Foreign Direct Investments on Economic Growth The paper concentrates on determination of prerequisites for the positive effect of FDI on economic growth. For this purpose database of "Global Competitiveness Report" is used. Significant evidence was obtained for institutions, infrastructure, health and primary education, meaning that improvements in these variables would lead to increase in positive effect of attracted FDI on economic growth. Warunki Wstępne DLA Pozytywnego Efektu Bezpośrednich Zagranicznych Inwestycji na Wzrost Gospodarczy Artykuł koncentruje się na określeniu warunków niezbędnych dla pozytywnego efektu FDI - FOREIGN DIRECT INVESTMENT ("bezpośrednie zagraniczne inwestycje") - na wzrost gospodarczy. W tym celu skorzystano z bazy danych "Global Competitiveness Report" - "Światowego Raportu Konkurencyjności". W przypadku instytucji, infrastruktury, edukacji zdrowotnej i podstawowej otrzymano znaczące dowody na to, że poprawa tych zmiennych może prowadzić do zwiększenia pozytywnego efektu przyciągniętych "bezpośrednich zagranicznych inwestycji" na wzrost gospodarczy.
ESNEK TEDARİK ZİNCİRİ AĞ TASARIMI PROBLEMİ İÇİN BULANIK BÜTÜNLEŞİK BİR YAKLAŞIM

Supply chain disruptions can occur depending on internal and external factors and cause significant losses for all supply chain members. In order to cope with these disruptions, it is necessary to form resilient supply chain networks by pursuing holistic and proactive approaches. In the study, a resilient supply chain network design (SCND) problem is addressed under different disruption scenarios in a fuzzy environment by taking two of the most applied supply chain resilience strategies into account, namely the fortification of suppliers and using backup suppliers strategies. A two-stage integrated approach is proposed to solve the handled problem. The first stage includes the suppliers' evaluation process using the Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (F-AHP). A fuzzy MultiObjective Linear Programming (F-MLP) model is developed to design the supply chain network in the second stage. The application of this approach is carried out on a realistic hypothetical problem and the results obtained and applicability of the proposed approach are discussed.
Improving customer generation by analysing website visitor behaviour

This dissertation describes the creation of a new integrated Information Technology (IT) system that assisted in the collection of data about the behaviour of website visitors as well as sales and marketing data for those visitors who turned into customers. A key contribution to knowledge was the creation of a method to predict the outcome of visits to a website from visitors’ browsing behaviour. A new Online Tracking Module (OTM) was created that monitored visitors’ behaviour while they browsed websites. When a visitor converted into a customer, then customer and marketing data as well as sales activity was saved in a new Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system that was implemented in this research. The research focused on service websites. The goal of these websites was to promote products and services online and turn enquiries into offline sales. The challenge faced by these websites was to convince as many visitors as possible to enquire. Most websites relied on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising for traffic generation. This research used PPC advertising to generate traffic. An important aspect of PPC advertising was landing page optimisation. The aim of landing page optimisation was to increase the number of visitors to a website who completed a specific action on the website. In the case of the websites investigated in this research the action consisted of completing and sending an enquiry form from the websites. The research looked for meaningful commonalities in the data collected by MS CRM and the OTM and combined this with feedback from the collaborating company’s sales team to create two personas for website visitors who had enquired. Techniques for improving landing pages were identified and these led to changes to landing pages. Some of these changes were targeted at a particular visitor persona. The effect of changes made to a landing page was measured by comparing its conversion rate and bounce rate before and after the changes. Behavioural data collected by the OTM was then analysed using a data mining engine to find models that could predict whether a user would convert based on their browsing behaviour. Models were found that could predict the outcome of a visit to a service website.
Self-authenticity, Optimism, and Neuroticism in relation to Basic Psychological Needs

This paper aimed at investigating the mediating role of one personality construct (i.e., dispositional optimism) on the relationship between self-authenticity and basic psychological needs (BPN) satisfaction. This study also aims to investigate the predictive role of three personality constructs (self-authenticity, optimism, and neuroticism) on basic psychological needs satisfaction. The participants were 566 Romanian adults from the general population (M = 43.66 years old, SD = 10.46), who were asked to fill in multiple questionnaires. Findings reveal that optimism mediates the relationship between self-authenticity and the satisfaction of the need for autonomy (β=.30, R2=.39, p<0.001) and also mediates the relationship between self-authenticity and the satisfaction of the need for competence (β=.51, R2=.36, p<0.001), but does not mediate the relationship between self-authenticity and the need for relatedness. Another result of this study is that the three personality factors (self-authenticity, optimism, and neuroticism) predict altogether the satisfaction of basic psychological needs (β= -.11, R2=.52, p<0.05). These results extend the current knowledge about personality determinants involved in autonomy, competence and relatedness basic needs from self-determination theory. In the end, the authors discuss the implications of the findings, the limits of the present study and future research suggestions.
Chasing the "Big-Time" : football apprenticeship in the 1990s

This qualitative study of Youth Training (YT) is centred specifically around the experiences of trainee professional footballers. Presenting a case-study analysis of one professional English Football League club, it utilizes those methods of sociological enquiry traditionally associated with ethnography (i.e. participant observation, unstructured interviews, and documentary analysis) in order to explore the day-to-day lives of the individuals concerned. The study depicts the way in which YT recruits are socialized into professional football club culture and how their career expectations and aspirations are subsequently shaped by the detailed complexities of institutional experience. In turn, it looks at how trainees learn to adapt to their chosen occupational position, and uncovers their attitudes towards such diverse topics as educational attendance, inter-personal relations and masculine construction. Set against the historical development of football apprenticeship within England, the work examines the impact of new vocational policy upon the football industry as a whole and portrays the role of the Professional Footballers' Association (PFA) - and its subsidiary body The Footballers' Further Education and Vocational Training Society (FFE & VTS) - in relation to the implementation of YT provision. To this end, it attempts to determine the extent to which modern-day forms of football traineeship differ from those methods of indenture employed in previous years. At the same time, the study provides insight into the personal and social lives of the trainees in question. Notably issues of class, sexuality and gender are raised in terms of individual experience and interpretation. Furthermore, the influence of club officials is also considered in relation to the pressures, pitfalls and constraints of trainee development.