Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Psychological Intervention aimed at Controlling Anxiety in a Spanish Greco-Roman Wrestler

This paper describes a single-case psychological intervention with a Spanish National Greco-Roman Wrestling Team wrestler. The aim of the intervention was to reduce pre-competitive anxiety in order to increase his athletic performance through a psychological skills program based on mental imagery, thought stopping, cognitive restructuring and pre-competitive routines. The CSAI-2R was used before, during and after the intervention for assessing anxiety. Self-monitoring registers for mental imagery, thought stopping, cognitive restructuration and precompetitive routines specifically designed for this case were also used. Results showed the athlete highly reduced precompetitive anxiety and increase athletic performance.
AUTOMATIC GENERATION CONTROL OF INTERCONNECTED POWER SYSTEM USING ANN TECHNIQUE BASED ON μ – SYNTHESIS

This paper presents a nonlinear Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) controller based on μ–synthesis for Automatic Generation Control (AGC) of power systems. Power systems such as other industrial plants have some uncertainties and deviations due to multivariable operating conditions and load changes. For this reason, in the design of ANN controller the idea of μ synthesis theory is used. The motivation of using the μ–based robust controller for training the proposed controller is to take the large parametric uncertainties and modeling error into account in such a way that both the stability of the overall system and good performance have been achieved for all admissible uncertainties. The simulation results on a twoarea power system show that the proposed ANN controller is effective and gives good dynamic responses even in the presence of Generation Rate Constraints (GRC). In addition, it is superior to the conventional PI and μ–based robust controllers.
Active safety control for dynamic human-robot interaction

In human-robot interaction (HRI) and especially in close or physical interaction, it is essential to ensure the human's safety. This is achieved by introducing virtual constraints defining a region, in which the robot is allowed to move safely. These safety regions may change over time during human-robot interaction, which may be either due to human motion or changed environmental conditions. In consequence it is important for the applied control scheme to handle dynamic boundaries. This work proposes an invariance-based control approach, which enforces adherence to boundaries with dynamic parameters. We extend the invariance control approach, which provides a computationally efficient and systematic method for defining constraints on system states and outputs, such that it handles the constraint dynamics. Stability and invariance properties are analyzed and validated in an experimental evaluation on a 7-DoF anthropomorphic manipulator.
Multilevel Control of Competence Development and Stress Tolerance in Streptococcus mutans UA159

ABSTRACT Genetic competence appears to be important in establishment of biofilms and tolerance of environmental insults. We report here that the development of competence is controlled at multiple levels in a complex network that includes two signal-transducing two-component systems (TCS). Using Streptococcus mutans strain UA159, we demonstrate that the histidine kinase CiaH, but not the response regulator CiaR, causes a dramatic decrease in biofilm formation and in transformation efficiency. Inactivation of comE or comD had no effect on stress tolerance, but transformability of the mutants was poor and was not restored by addition of competence-stimulating peptide (CSP). Horse serum (HS) or bovine serum albumin (BSA) had no impact on transformability of any strains. Interestingly, though, the presence of HS or BSA in combination with CSP was required for efficient induction of comD, comX, and comYA, and induction was dependent on ComDE and CiaH, but not CiaR. Inactivation of comC, encoding CSP, had no impact on transformation, and CiaH was shown to be required for optimal comC expression. This study reveals that S. mutans integrates multiple environmental signals through CiaHR and ComDE to coordinate induction of com genes and that CiaH can exert its influence through CiaR and as-yet-unidentified regulators. The results highlight critical differences in the role and regulation of CiaRH and com genes in different S. mutans isolates and between S. mutans and Streptococcus pneumoniae, indicating that substantial divergence in the role and regulation of TCS and competence genes has occurred in streptococci.
Challenges in geocoding socially-generated data

An investigation into the difficulties facing researchers attempting to geocode data derived from social networking sites for analysis is presented. A number of issues are identified including the lack of any inherent scale in either the socially-generated data or the results for a geocoder, and the ambiguous nature of place names. A methodology is therefore presented that may be followed by the researcher in order to address these issues, and as such improve the quality and meaning of spatial analysis that is based upon these data.
Cosmic Star Formation History and Its Dependence on Galaxy Stellar Mass

We examine the cosmic star formation rate (SFR) and its dependence on galaxy stellar mass over the redshift range 0.8 < z < 2 using data from the Gemini Deep Deep Survey (GDDS). The SFR in the most massive galaxies (M* > 1010.8 M☉) was 6 times higher at z = 2 than it is today. It drops steeply from z = 2, reaching the present-day value at z ~ 1. In contrast, the SFR density of intermediate-mass galaxies (1010.2 M☉ ≤ M* < 1010.8 M☉) declines more slowly and may peak or plateau at z ~ 1.5. We use the characteristic growth time tSFR ≡ ρ/ρSFR to provide evidence of an associated transition in massive galaxies from a burst to a quiescent star formation mode at z ~ 2. Intermediate-mass systems transit from burst to quiescent mode at z ~ 1, while the lowest mass objects undergo bursts throughout our redshift range. Our results show unambiguously that the formation era for galaxies was extended and proceeded from high- to low-mass systems. The most massive galaxies formed most of their stars in the first ~3 Gyr of cosmic history. Intermediate-mass objects continued to form their dominant stellar mass for an additional ~2 Gyr, while the lowest mass systems have been forming over the whole cosmic epoch spanned by the GDDS. This view of galaxy formation clearly supports "downsizing" in the SFR where the most massive galaxies form first and galaxy formation proceeds from larger to smaller mass scales.
Who prophets from big data in education? New insights and new challenges

Big Data can radically transform education by enabling personalized learning, deep student modeling, and true longitudinal studies that compare changes across classrooms, regions, and years. With these promises, however, come risks to individual privacy and educational validity, along with deep policy and ethical issues. Education is largely a public service targeted primarily at minors. Participation is compulsory in most advanced societies, and in many ways, it is seen as a fundamental right. Academic success is necessary for advancement, but students often have little individual say in the process. For these reasons, it poses unique policy challenges that do not arise in other domains. Big data requires deep and constant monitoring of students, classes, and instructors. Who consents to such monitoring, and how will student or instructor privacy be preserved? Data also has immense commercial value. Who owns it? And who is permitted to profit from its use? In this article, I will discuss some of these unique issues, and I will outline some potential approaches that may be taken to address them.
Embedded Reconfigurable Solutions for Cryptography

We present a cryptography-oriented reconfigurable array called CryptoRA that efficiently supports very long-integer addition/subtraction and comparator unit. We first describe the CryptoRA architecture and show that extending the dedicated carry chains of modern FPGAs over the orthogonal direction, followed by merging two FPGA columns to create computing tiles that support both generate and propagate signals of a carrylookahead network, provides a reduction in operation latency. Then, we show that splitting a tile’s Look-Up Table into two halves provides additional benefits in terms of latency and flexibility in using the dedicated generate and propagate chains. The result of a hardwaresoftware co-design on MicroBlaze embedded system for computing public-key cryptosystem algorithm is also presented and compared to pure software solution. According to our estimations, long-integer addition and comparison widely used in cryptography is more than 4x faster on CryptoRA than on Virtex-II Pro FPGA. Moreover, the area consumption is also reduced by approx. 30% in 1-level Carry-lookahead adder implementation and 75% in comparator unit. These improvements have a large positive impact on implementing cryptography applications in embedded environments, which can further improve the performance of the co-design solution.
Detection of malicious node and development of routing strategy in VANET

Routing in vehicular ad-hoc network is current area of research due to fast mobility of vehicles. A new route in very less time has to be developed to communicate with the base station. If any node behaving like malicious and creates attack on network, than whole communication will be squeeze. This paper presents a routing strategy to prevent from attack and identify the malicious node. The strategy has been implemented on QualNet 5.0 and compared with other routing protocols in the presence of malicious nodes.
Study of the Effect of Surfactants on Extraction and Determination of Polyphenolic Compounds and Antioxidant Capacity of Fruits Extracts

Micelle/water mixed solutions of different surface active agents were studied for their effectiveness in the extraction of polyphenolic compounds from various varieties of apples from west Azerbaijan province in Iran. The total content of polyphenolic compound in fruit extracts were determined using ferrous tartrate and Folin–Ciocalteu assays methods and chromatographic methods and compared with theme. High performance liquid chromatography is one of the most common and important methods in biochemical compound identification. The effect of pH, ionic strength, surfactant type, surfactant concentration, extraction time and common organic solvent in the apple polyphenolics extractions was studied using HPLC-DAD. Mixtures of surfactants, water and methanol at various ratios were examined and micellar-water solutions of Brij surfactant showed the highest polyphenol extraction efficiency. Optimum conditions for the extraction of polyphenolic compounds from apple occurred at 7 mM Brij35, pH 3. Effect of ionic strength on extraction was determined and 2% (W/V) potassium Chloride was determined to be the optimum salt concentration. The procedure worked well with an ultrasound bath. Total antioxidant capacity also was determined in this study. The method can be safely scaled up for pharmaceutical applications.
Hybrid avatars: enabling co-presence in multiple realities

Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) technologies are quickly making their way into people's everyday lives. Typically, these technologies are used separately to create either plain VR or AR applications rather than harnessing the possibilities of combining the two. In this position paper, we introduce a novel concept of hybrid avatar that enables avatar-based interactions between VR and AR users visiting the same place both in the real world and its virtual counterpart. We illustrate a generic architecture for implementing hybrid avatar interactions, present our prototype implementation and discuss the implementation related challenges. Main contribution of this paper is to provide new ideas for research on the areas of VR, AR, and hybrid reality.
Effects of Neuronal Nitric Oxide Synthase on Human Coronary Artery Diameter and Blood Flow In Vivo

Background— Nitric oxide (NO)-mediated local regulation of vascular tone is considered to involve endothelial NO synthase (eNOS). However, we recently reported that human forearm basal microvascular tone in vivo is tonically regulated by neuronal NO synthase (nNOS), in contrast to an acetylcholine-stimulated reduction in tone, which is eNOS dependent. Here, we investigated the in vivo effects of an nNOS-selective inhibitor, S-methyl-l-thiocitrulline (SMTC), on the human coronary circulation and on flow-mediated dilatation in the forearm. Methods and Results— In patients with angiographically normal coronary arteries, intracoronary infusion of SMTC (0.625 &mgr;mol/min) reduced basal coronary blood flow by 34.1±5.2% (n=10; P<0.01) and epicardial coronary diameter by 3.6±1.2% (P=0.02) but had no effect on increases in flow evoked by intracoronary substance P (20 pmol/min). The nonselective NOS inhibitor NG-monomethyl-l-arginine (25 &mgr;mol/min) also reduced basal coronary flow (by 22.3±5.3%; n=8; P<0.01) but, in contrast to SMTC, inhibited substance P-induced increases in flow (P<0.01). In healthy volunteers, local infusion of SMTC (0.2 &mgr;mol/min) reduced radial artery blood flow by 36.0±6.4% (n=10; P=0.03) but did not affect flow-mediated dilatation (P=0.55). In contrast, NG-monomethyl-l-arginine (2 &mgr;mol/min) infusion reduced radial blood flow to a similar degree (by 39.7±11.8%; P=0.02) but also inhibited flow-mediated dilatation by ≈80% (P<0.01). Conclusions— These data indicate that local nNOS-derived NO regulates basal blood flow in the human coronary vascular bed, whereas substance P-stimulated vasodilatation is eNOS mediated. Thus, nNOS and eNOS have distinct local roles in the physiological regulation of human coronary vascular tone in vivo.
Interactive Acquisition and Rendering of Humans

We present a distributed model-based system for interactive acquisition and rendering of free viewpoint video of humans. All current model-based systems are offline. Online systems which can be used for free viewpoint video of humans use few low resolution cameras or use only silhouette information while the method presented here can cope with high resolution images and uses both color and silhouette information. A person is captured with multiple synchronized and calibrated digital video cameras attached to a cluster of pcs. At interactive rates, the shape of the person is estimated and the person can be rendered from novel viewpoints. First the pose of the person is obtained using a real-time motion capturing algorithm. A generic mesh of a human is transformed into this pose to obtain a first approximation of the shape of the recorded person. This mesh is refined to match the input images as closely as possible by translating its vertices along their normals. The refined mesh is rendered using a distributed version of the unstructured lumigraph algorithm.
Sleep quality and duration are related to microvascular function: the Amsterdam Growth and Health Longitudinal Study

Sleep and sleep disorders are related to cardiovascular disease, and microvascular function is an early cardiovascular disease marker. Therefore, the relationship of sleep (measured in sleep quality and duration) with microvascular function was examined in healthy adults. Sleep quality was assessed with the validated Sleep Wake Experience List (SWEL) questionnaire. Duration of sleep was self‐reported in an additional question. Microvascular function was measured using nailfold capillaroscopy. Linear regression analyses were used to examine the relationship between sleep and microvascular function. Potential confounders included physical activity, smoking, blood pressure, body mass index and several biochemical parameters. Analyses were performed in 259 participants (116 men). For women reporting insufficient (<7 h) sleep duration, microvascular function (post‐ischaemic capillary recruitment) was significantly lower (b = −11.17; P = 0.04) compared to women reporting sufficient sleep duration. There was no relationship between sleep quality and microvascular function in females. In males, a trend towards lower capillary recruitment was found in those reporting a combination of poor sleep quality and insufficient duration (b = −7.54; P = 0.09), compared to those reporting good sleep quality as well as sufficient duration. This study suggests an association between sleep and microvascular function. Which aspects of sleep exactly affect microvascular function, and if indeed the association is different between males and females in other samples, needs further research.
Three Approaches to Automatic Assignment of ICD-9-CM Codes to Radiology Reports

We describe and evaluate three systems for automatically predicting the ICD-9-CM codes of radiology reports from short excerpts of text. The first system benefits from an open source search engine, Lucene, and takes advantage of the relevance of reports to one another based on individual words. The second uses BoosTexter, a boosting algorithm based on n-grams (sequences of consecutive words) and s-grams (sequences of non-consecutive words) extracted from the reports. The third employs a set of hand-crafted rules that capture lexical elements (short, meaningful, strings of words) derived from BoosTexter's n-grams, and that are enhanced by shallow semantic information in the form of negation, synonymy, and uncertainty. Our evaluation shows that semantic information significantly contributes to ICD-9-CM coding with lexical elements. Also, a simple hand-crafted rule-based system with lexical elements and semantic information can outperform algorithmically more complex systems, such as Lucene and BoosTexter, when these systems base their ICD-9-CM predictions only upon individual words, n-grams, or s grams.
The Association between Abnormal Long Noncoding RNA MALAT-1 Expression and Cancer Lymph Node Metastasis: A Meta-Analysis

Previous studies have investigated that the expression levels of MALAT-1 were higher in cancerous tissues than matched histologically normal tissues. And, to some extent, overexpression of MALAT-1 was inclined to lymph node metastasis. This meta-analysis collected all relevant articles and explored the association between MALAT-1 expression levels and lymph node metastasis. We searched PubMed, EmBase, Web of Science, Cochrane Library, and OVID to address the level of MALAT-1 expression in cancer cases and noncancerous controls (accessed February 2015). And 8 studies comprising 696 multiple cancer patients were included to assess this association. The odds ratio (OR) and its corresponding 95% confidence interval (CI) were calculated to assess the strength of the association using Stata 12.0 version software. The results revealed there was a significant difference in the incidence of lymph node metastasis between high MALAT-1 expression group and low MALAT-1 expression group (OR = 1.94, 95% CI 1.15–3.28, P = 0.013 random-effects model). Subgroup analysis indicated that MALAT-1 high expression had an unfavorable impact on lymph node metastasis in Chinese patients (OR = 1.87, 95% CI 1.01–2.46). This study demonstrated that the incidence of lymph node metastasis in patients detected with high MALAT-1 expression was higher than that in patients with low MALAT-1 expression in China.
Product Measure Approximation of Symmetric Graph Properties

In the study of random structures we often face a trade-off between realism and tractability, the latter typically enabled by assuming some form of independence. In this work we initiate an effort to bridge this gap by developing tools that allow us to work with independence without assuming it. Let $\mathcal{G}_{n}$ be the set of all graphs on $n$ vertices and let $S$ be an arbitrary subset of $\mathcal{G}_{n}$, e.g., the set of graphs with $m$ edges. The study of random networks can be seen as the study of properties that are true for most elements of $S$, i.e., that are true with high probability for a uniformly random element of $S$. With this in mind, we pursue the following question: What are general sufficient conditions for the uniform measure on a set of graphs $S \subseteq \mathcal{G}_{n}$ to be approximable by a product measure?
1H-NMR-Based Metabolic Profiling of Maternal and Umbilical Cord Blood Indicates Altered Materno-Foetal Nutrient Exchange in Preterm Infants

Background Adequate foetal growth is primarily determined by nutrient availability, which is dependent on placental nutrient transport and foetal metabolism. We have used 1H nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy to probe the metabolic adaptations associated with premature birth. Methodology The metabolic profile in 1H NMR spectra of plasma taken immediately after birth from umbilical vein, umbilical artery and maternal blood were recorded for mothers delivering very-low-birth-weight (VLBW) or normo-ponderal full-term (FT) neonates. Principal Findings Clear distinctions between maternal and cord plasma of all samples were observed by principal component analysis (PCA). Levels of amino acids, glucose, and albumin-lysyl in cord plasma exceeded those in maternal plasma, whereas lipoproteins (notably low-density lipoprotein (LDL) and very low-density lipoprotein (VLDL) and lipid levels were lower in cord plasma from both VLBW and FT neonates. The metabolic signature of mothers delivering VLBW infants included decreased levels of acetate and increased levels of lipids, pyruvate, glutamine, valine and threonine. Decreased levels of lipoproteins glucose, pyruvate and albumin-lysyl and increased levels of glutamine were characteristic of cord blood (both arterial and venous) from VLBW infants, along with a decrease in levels of several amino acids in arterial cord blood. Conclusion These results show that, because of its characteristics and simple non-invasive mode of collection, cord plasma is particularly suited for metabolomic analysis even in VLBW infants and provides new insights into the materno-foetal nutrient exchange in preterm infants.
Teaching with the Flesh: Examining Discourses of the Body and their Implication in Teachers' Professional and Personal Lives

This dissertation examines how teachers understand and use their own bodies in their everyday practice of teaching. Using a poststructural theoretical framework and an ethnographic and artsbased research methodology, I demonstrate how discourses of the body shape experiences of teaching and teachers’ lives. This work is significant not only because it has direct implications for teachers but also because teachers’ bodies are rich and complex sites for theorizing and thinking critically about contemporary practices and discursive understandings that shape our lives. I call the research methodology that I used in this study “embedded performed ethnography”. This methodology involved in-depth ethnographic interviews, creative writing, and dramatic performance with twelve teachers in Ontario. By drawing on three distinct but interrelated fields: critical physical education, feminist and queer curriculum theory and Fat Studies, my research demonstrates the richness and complexity of teachers’ professional lives and the impact that dominant discourses of the body have on educational spaces. I use three key concepts to analyze the experiences and writing of the