Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Using pedometers to increase physical activity and improve health: a systematic review.

CONTEXT Without detailed evidence of their effectiveness, pedometers have recently become popular as a tool for motivating physical activity. OBJECTIVE To evaluate the association of pedometer use with physical activity and health outcomes among outpatient adults. DATA SOURCES English-language articles from MEDLINE, EMBASE, Sport Discus, PsychINFO, Cochrane Library, Thompson Scientific (formerly known as Thompson ISI), and ERIC (1966-2007); bibliographies of retrieved articles; and conference proceedings. STUDY SELECTION Studies were eligible for inclusion if they reported an assessment of pedometer use among adult outpatients, reported a change in steps per day, and included more than 5 participants. DATA EXTRACTION AND DATA SYNTHESIS Two investigators independently abstracted data about the intervention; participants; number of steps per day; and presence or absence of obesity, diabetes, hypertension, or hyperlipidemia. Data were pooled using random-effects calculations, and meta-regression was performed. RESULTS Our searches identified 2246 citations; 26 studies with a total of 2767 participants met inclusion criteria (8 randomized controlled trials [RCTs] and 18 observational studies). The participants' mean (SD) age was 49 (9) years and 85% were women. The mean intervention duration was 18 weeks. In the RCTs, pedometer users significantly increased their physical activity by 2491 steps per day more than control participants (95% confidence interval [CI], 1098-3885 steps per day, P < .001). Among the observational studies, pedometer users significantly increased their physical activity by 2183 steps per day over baseline (95% CI, 1571-2796 steps per day, P < .0001). Overall, pedometer users increased their physical activity by 26.9% over baseline. An important predictor of increased physical activity was having a step goal such as 10,000 steps per day (P = .001). When data from all studies were combined, pedometer users significantly decreased their body mass index by 0.38 (95% CI, 0.05-0.72; P = .03). This decrease was associated with older age (P = .001) and having a step goal (P = .04). Intervention participants significantly decreased their systolic blood pressure by 3.8 mm Hg (95% CI, 1.7-5.9 mm Hg, P < .001). This decrease was associated with greater baseline systolic blood pressure (P = .009) and change in steps per day (P = .08). CONCLUSIONS The results suggest that the use of a pedometer is associated with significant increases in physical activity and significant decreases in body mass index and blood pressure. Whether these changes are durable over the long term is undetermined.
Acute Failure of a Glenoid Component in Anatomic Shoulder Arthroplasty

Glenoid loosening is the most common cause of failure in primary total shoulder arthroplasty (TSA) and often occurs years after the initial surgery. It is rare for a glenoid component to fail acutely. Several case reports of complete glenoid dissociation appear in the literature. It is important to report these failures to identify technical errors or component design flaws to improve outcomes in TSA. In this case report, we present an unrecognized acute failure of a cemented hybrid glenoid component at the time of surgery.
NEAR-INFRARED IMAGING POLARIMETRY OF S106 CLUSTER-FORMING REGION WITH SIRPOL

We present the results of wide-field JHKS polarimetry toward the H ii region S106 using the Infrared Survey Facility telescope. Our polarimetry data revealed an extended (up to ∼5′) polarized nebula over S106. We confirmed the position of the illuminating source of most of the nebula as consistent with S106 IRS 4 through an analysis of polarization vectors. The bright portion of the polarized intensity is consistent with the red wing component of the molecular gas. Diffuse polarized intensity emission is distributed along the north–south molecular gas lanes. We found the interaction region between the radiation from S106 IRS 4 and the dense gas. In addition, we also discovered two small polarization nebulae, SIRN 1 and SIRN 2, associated with a young stellar object (YSO). Aperture polarimetry of point-like sources in this region was carried out for the first time. The regional magnetic field structures were derived using point-like source aperture polarimetry, and the magnetic field structure position angle around the cluster region in S106 was found to be ∼120°. The magnetic fields in the cluster region, however, have three types of position angles: ∼20°, ∼80°, and ∼120°. The present magnetic field structures are consistent with results obtained by submillimeter continuum observations. We found that the magnetic field direction in the dense gas region is not consistent with that of the low-density gas region.
Damage and Failure Analysis of Brittle Materials by Acoustic Emission

Application of stress or changes in environmental conditions can cause a material such as concrete or rock to become damaged, thereby affecting the performance of the structure. Because damage processes produce microseismic events called acoustic emission (AE), the growth of damage and the onset of failure can be identified by monitoring AE. In particular, a probability density function of acoustic emission events was used to describe the development of damage. It was observed that more porous or cracked materials displayed a higher AE rate than less porous or cracked materials at the same percentage of the maximum stress prior to failure. This suggests that the AE technique may be applied to diagnose the level of damage in a brittle material and may be useful to select materials for certain applications. Also, the experimental results indicated that the average root-mean-square value from a number of AE signals could be used as a real-time monitoring tool to predict the onset of failure.
Polypropylene Fibres: Exploration of Conditions Resulting in High Tenacity

Paracrystalline as-spun fibres of low orientation were identified previously as suitable precursors for the production of drawn fibres of very high tenacity. This study is concerned with the effects of heat treatment, single-stage and two-stage drawing on the structure and properties of the resulting fibres. It is shown that a feasible route to continuous filament yarns of high tenacity requires that the orientation of paracrystalline fibres is first increased and only thereafter is the structure converted into the α-monoclinic form.
Real-Time Lighting Effects Using Deferred Shading

In this book we present a real-time rendering system that displays realistic images at interactive frame rates on OpenGL 3 capable hardware while utilizing the power of the GPU. Our system does not rely on any kind of pre-computation and can display fully-dynamic scenes with animated lights and objects. The core of our system is a Deferred Shading pipeline, a typical pipeline used by modern video games. Our system performs HDR rendering and allows various tone-mapping operators to enhance the visual quality of output images. We also allow lights to cast shadows, which is done with the help of Shadow Mapping. Since Deferred Shading does not directly support rendering of transparent objects, we use the Stencil Routed A-Buffer for rendering of transparent objects. The system is open for extension and thanks to increasing GPU speeds is a viable option for real-time display.
Reconciling software extensibility with modular program reasoning

Programming languages that support the creation of reusable software components help make programs easier to create, maintain, and understand. To accrue these benefits in practice, a component must be extensible, able to be easily augmented from the outside by clients. A component must also support modular reasoning, providing an interface to clients that specifies the component's behavior and constraints for its proper usage. Unfortunately, the goals of component extensibility and modular reasoning are inherently in conflict: the more extensible a component is, the harder it is to ensure properties of the component in isolation from its clients. Mainstream object-oriented (OO) and functional languages support modular reasoning in the form of modular static typechecking, which provides basic well-formedness guarantees about components. However, these languages lack some common forms of extensibility. For example, OO languages lack the functional ability to lack OO-style subclassing. The conflict between extensibility and modular reasoning has forced previous languages that support these missing extensibility idioms to forgo modular typechecking. In this dissertation, I show how programming languages can support both the OO and functional extensibility idioms while maintaining modular typechecking of components. I develop a modular type system for a simple but flexible calculus. I then apply this theoretical work to the design of practical extensions to mainstream OO and functional languages.
Phase noise in sampling and its importance to wideband multicarrier base station receivers

Future base stations for the narrowband cellular standards, e.g. GSM and D-AMPS, will deploy wideband multicarrier receivers. In these receivers the phase noise of the sampling stage is crucial in order to meet the blocking performance specified in the standards. An expression relating the single sideband phase noise power density to carrier ratio of a sampled signal to that of the sampling clock is derived. The implications of the theory for the clock local oscillator (LO) and clock drive amplifier for a GSM-1900 receiver are shown.
Toward global surface reconstruction by purposive viewpoint adjustment

The following problem is considered: how should an observer change viewpoint in order to generate a dense image sequence of an arbitrary smooth surface so that it can be incrementally reconstructed using the occluding contour and the epipolar parameterization? A collection of qualitative behaviors is presented that, when integrated appropriately, purposefully control viewpoint based on the appearance of the surface in order to provably solve this problem. <<ETX>>
Glutathione Peroxidase-1 Plays a Major Role in Protecting Against Angiotensin II–Induced Vascular Dysfunction

Levels of reactive oxygen species, including hydrogen peroxide, increase in blood vessels during hypertension and in response to angiotensin II (Ang II). Although glutathione peroxidases are known to metabolize hydrogen peroxide, the role of glutathione peroxidase during hypertension is poorly defined. We tested the hypothesis that glutathione peroxidase-1 protects against Ang II–induced endothelial dysfunction. Responses of carotid arteries from Gpx1-deficient (Gpx1+/− and Gpx1−/−) and Gpx1 transgenic mice, and their respective littermate controls, were examined in vitro after overnight incubation with either vehicle or Ang II. Under control conditions, relaxation to acetylcholine (ACh; an endothelium-dependent agonist) was similar in control, Gpx1+/−, and Gpx1 transgenic mice, whereas in Gpx1−/− mice, responses to ACh were impaired. In control mice, ACh-induced vasorelaxation was not affected by 1 nmol/L of Ang II. In contrast, relaxation to ACh in arteries from Gpx1+/− mice was inhibited by ≈60% after treatment with 1 nmol/L of Ang II, indicating that Gpx1 haploinsufficiency markedly enhances Ang II–induced endothelial dysfunction. A higher concentration of Ang II (10 nmol/L) selectively impaired relaxation to ACh in arteries from control mice, and this effect was prevented in arteries from Gpx1 transgenic mice or in arteries from control mice treated with polyethylene glycol-catalase (which degrades hydrogen peroxide). Thus, genetic and pharmacological evidence suggests a major role for glutathione peroxidase-1 and hydrogen peroxide in Ang II–induced effects on vascular function.
GridLAB-D: An Agent-Based Simulation Framework for Smart Grids

Simulation of smart grid technologies requires a fundamentally new approach to integrated modeling of power systems, energy markets, building technologies, and the plethora of other resources and assets that are becoming part of modern electricity production, delivery, and consumption systems. As a result, the US Department of Energy’s Office of Electricity commissioned the development of a new type of power system simulation tool called GridLAB-D that uses an agent-based approach to simulating smart grids. This paper presents the numerical methods and approach to time-series simulation used by GridLAB-D and reviews applications in power system studies, market design, building control system design, and integration of wind power in a smart grid.
Classification of various colon diseases in Colonoscopy video using Cross-Wavelet features

One of the leading cause of deaths from cancer being colon cancer, which is observed in 10% of men and 9.2% in case of women [1], prevention technique has been approached where the major chance lies in detection in early stage during Optical Colonoscopy (OC) of the subject. This paper proposes a novel scheme for detecting various colon diseases through Colonoscopy videos using Cross-Wavelet Transform (XWT) [2]. The datasets consist of five different colonoscopy videos which are split into five sets of image datasets i.e., Colon Polyp, Colon Ulcer, Chron's Diseases, Sigmoidal Colon and Normal Colon collected from American College of Gastroenterology [3], Medico Gastroenterologo [4] and Gastrolab [5]. A novel cross-wavelet transform, is opted for extracting the features from the datasets. This is followed by a multiclass classification using Multiclass Support Vector Machine (MSVM). The recognition rate using this improved technique (XWT_MSVM) is 98.46% which is far better than any other well-known and benchmark procedures.
Outdoor Air Pollution and Cardiovascular Diseases in Lebanon: A Case-Control Study

Outdoor air pollution is increasingly considered as a serious threat for cardiovascular diseases (CVD). The aim of this study is to investigate the association between outdoor pollutants and cardiovascular diseases among adults in Lebanon and to examine the possible moderator effect of cigarette smoking status on this association. A multicenter case-control study was conducted between October 2011 and October 2012. Cases were hospitalized patients diagnosed with CVD by a cardiologist while the control group subjects were free of any cardiac diseases. Information on sociodemographic characteristics, tobacco consumption, self-rated global health, pollution exposure, and other risk factors was collected using a questionnaire. The results of the logistic regression revealed that living near busy highway (OR 5.04, 95% CI (4.44–12.85), P < 0.001) and close to local diesel generator (OR 4.76, 95% CI (2.07–10.91), P < 0.001) was significantly associated with CVD. The association between the CVD and exposure to outside pollutants differed by cigarette smoking status. A clear difference was noted between nonsmokers and current smokers OR 4.6, 95% CI (1.10–19.25) and OR 10.11, 95% CI (7.33–20.23), respectively. Forthcoming studies are needed to clarify the potential link between outdoor air pollution and cardiovascular diseases in Lebanon. Public health interventions must be implemented to reduce air pollution and to improve air quality.
A Perspective for Innovation Enabling Education for Japanese Engineers

Innovation-related education is regarded increasingly important in Japan these days, especially for engineers, and a corresponding education, innovation enabling education entitled "Innovation Engineering", has been developed as part of a planned MOT course at Musashi Institute of Technology, and verified through trial provision of the education. Considering some inherent features of Japanese companies, such as an inward-looking attitude in thinking and a middle manager's role characterized by the middle-up-down management model, emphases in the development has been placed on the following three points; expanding the horizon of engineers, providing a practical tool for engineers, and working on innovation enabling environments of business practices, and the intended students were set to be engineers at middle management positions. We have proposed a new concept of innovation enabling in practical business environments, as a core of the innovation enabling education for engineers, and named it "Innovation Engineering. " A framework, called 2D Matrix, is developed along with this concept, in order to offer some objective and analytical perspectives to middle-management engineers, by especially distinguishing management activities and operational practices.The developed education course of twelve modules has been shortened to four-module seminar, and tested through the trial provision. By taking appraisal of the attendants there, the contents of education and the background concept have been proven to be well-accepted and verified for its importance. This kind of methodological approach could be a good first step for them to expand organizational and managerial horizon in an organization.
MEMS Power Receiver using Piezoelectric Cantilever Beams and Interdigitated Electrodes

Over the years, there has been a growing interest in the field of power transmission technologies for low-power electronic devices, such as wireless sensor networks and biomedical sensor applications. Among all possible energy sources, the mechanical vibrations have been considered as a potential choice for power transmission in a wide variety of applications. This paper presents the development of a piezoelectric MEMS transducer which has the ability to receive mechanical energy of ambient vibrations from an external generator and transform it into electrical energy that can be used in energy storage applications. The piezoelectric MEMS transducer comprises of a beam structure based on the silicon wafer and a pair of interdigitated electrodes placed in between the lead zirconate titanate (Pb(Zr,Ti)O3, PZT) material and the beam structure. This transducer transforms mechanical strain energy into electrical charge with the d33 mode of PZT. An optional proof mass can be built at the tip of the beam to adjust the structure resonant frequency of the transducer for most adaptable frequency matching to the various vibration generators. A theoretical model is also presented to investigate the relations between the charge generation ability and the design parameters of the transducer. To optimize the fabrication, a customized PZT deposition chamber which could deposit PZT thin film up to tens micron in minutes was used to deposit the piezoelectric layer on the beam structure.
Knowledge and Information Systems Feature Weighting and Instance Selection for Collaborative Filtering : An Information-Theoretic Approach

Collaborative filtering (CF) employing a consumer preference database to make personal product recommendations is achieving widespread success in ECommerce. However, it does not scale well to the ever-growing number of consumers. The quality of the recommendation also needs to be improved in order to gain more trusts from consumers. This paper attempts to improve the accuracy and the efficiency of collaborative filtering. We present a unified information-theoretic approach to measure the relevance of features and instances. Feature weighting and instance selection methods are proposed for collaborative filtering. The proposed methods are evaluated on the well-known EachMovie data set and the experimental results demonstrate a significant improvement in accuracy and efficiency.
Observations of the ozone and nitrogen dioxide profiles in train expeditions

* Corresponding author. ** The work was partially supported by the Russian Foundation of Basic Researches by grant 05-05-65139. Abstract – For investigation of the vast area of Russia a mobile scientific facility based in a railway carriage was developed. It was equipped with spectrometers for remote sensing of ozone and nitrogen dioxide in the atmosphere for expeditions along a way from Moscow to Khabarovsk and back performed from February 18 to March 5, 1998 and from March 19 to April 1, 2004. A novel DOAS-type retrieval algorithm, which is applicable to UV observations with strong absorption (by ozone), was developed. It completely takes into account multiple scattering of sunlight. The linearized radiative transfer model MCC++ was used in radiance calculations. Unlike the NO2 retrieval, account of multiple scattering and albedo is significant for ozone retrieval. A modification of the twilight DOAS method used at the NDSC was applied for retrieval of nitrogen dioxide profiles basing on spectral measurements at visible wavelengths.
Fingerprint quality assessment using a no-reference image quality metric

The quality assessment of the acquired biometric raw data is very important as it deeply affects the performance of biometric systems and consequently their usability. Poor quality samples increase the enrolment failures, and decrease the system performance. In this paper, we present a new quality assessment metric of fingerprints. Its main originality lies in the use of a no-reference image quality metric. The proposed quality metric combines two types of parameters through a weighted sum optimized by a genetic algorithm: 1) image quality criterion and 2) pattern-based quality criteria (salient and patch-based features). BOZORTH3 matching system and the FVC2002 DB3 fingerprint database are used to clarify the benefits of the presented quality metric.
The regulatory network of B-cell differentiation: a focused view of early B-cell factor 1 function

During the last decades, many studies have investigated the transcriptional and epigenetic regulation of lineage decision in the hematopoietic system. These efforts led to a model in which extrinsic signals and intrinsic cues establish a permissive chromatin context upon which a regulatory network of transcription factors and epigenetic modifiers act to guide the differentiation of hematopoietic lineages. These networks include lineage‐specific factors that further modify the epigenetic landscape and promote the generation of specific cell types. The process of B lymphopoiesis requires a set of transcription factors, including Ikaros, PU.1, E2A, and FoxO1 to ‘prime’ cis‐regulatory regions for subsequent activation by the B‐lineage‐specific transcription factors EBF1 and Pax‐5. The expression of EBF1 is initiated by the combined action of E2A and FoxO1, and it is further enhanced and maintained by several positive feedback loops that include Pax‐5 and IL‐7 signaling. EBF1 acts in concert with Ikaros, PU.1, Runx1, E2A, FoxO1, and Pax‐5 to establish the B cell‐specific transcription profile. EBF1 and Pax‐5 also collaborate to repress alternative cell fates and lock cells into the B‐lineage fate. In addition to the functions of EBF1 in establishing and maintaining B‐cell identity, EBF1 is required to coordinate differentiation with cell proliferation and survival.
A 0.5V 0.5mW switching current source oscillator

This paper proposes a new RF oscillator topology that is suitable for ultra-low voltage and power applications. By employing alternating current source transistors, the structure combines the benefits of low supply voltage operation of conventional NMOS cross-coupled oscillators together with high current efficiency of the complementary push-pull oscillators. In addition, the 1/f noise upconversion is also reduced. The 40nm CMOS prototype exhibits an average FoM of 189.5 dBc/Hz over 4-5 GHz tuning range, dissipating 0.5mW from 0.5V power supply, while abiding by the technology manufacturing rules.
Exponential growth bias and financial literacy

The tendency to underestimate the future value of a variable growing at a constant rate, an example of exponential growth bias, has been linked to household financial decision-making. We show that exponential growth bias and standard measures of financial literacy are negatively correlated in a representative sample of Swedish adults. Since financial literacy is linked to household decision-making, our results indicate that examining the relationship between exponential growth bias and household finance without adequate controls for financial literacy may generate biased results.