Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Sedentary behaviour and cardiovascular disease: a review of prospective studies.

BACKGROUND Current estimates from objective accelerometer data suggest that American adults are sedentary for ∼7.7 h/day. Historically, sedentary behaviour was conceptualized as one end of the physical activity spectrum but is increasingly being viewed as a behaviour distinct from physical activity. METHODS Prospective studies examining the associations between screen time (watching television, watching videos and using a computer) and sitting time and fatal and non-fatal cardiovascular disease (CVD) were identified. These prospective studies relied on self-reported sedentary behaviour. RESULTS The majority of prospective studies of screen time and sitting time has shown that greater sedentary time is associated with an increased risk of fatal and non-fatal CVD. Compared with the lowest levels of sedentary time, risk estimates ranged up to 1.68 for the highest level of sitting time and 2.25 for the highest level of screen time after adjustment for a series of covariates, including measures of physical activity. For six studies of screen time and CVD, the summary hazard ratio per 2-h increase was 1.17 (95% CI: 1.13-1.20). For two studies of sitting time, the summary hazard ratio per 2-h increase was 1.05 (95% CI: 1.01-1.09). CONCLUSIONS Future prospective studies using more objective measures of sedentary behaviour might prove helpful in quantifying better the risk between sedentary behaviour and CVD morbidity and mortality. This budding science may better shape future guideline development as well as clinical and public health interventions to reduce the amount of sedentary behaviour in modern societies.
Hedging of Claims with Physical Delivery under Convex Transaction Costs

We study superhedging of contingent claims with physical delivery in a discrete-time market model with convex transaction costs. Our model extends Kabanov's currency market model by allowing for nonlinear illiquidity effects. We show that an appropriate generalization of Schachermayer's robust no-arbitrage condition implies that the set of claims hedgeable with zero cost is closed in probability. Combined with classical techniques of convex analysis, the closedness yields a dual characterization of premium processes that are sufficient to superhedge a given claim process. We also extend the fundamental theorem of asset pricing for general conical models.
HANDOVER TRIGGER SCHEME FOR MOBILE COMMUNICATION IN HIGH SPEED MOBILE ENVIRONMENT

High speed rail has been developed rapidly in recent years. The passengers travelled by trains demand for higher data rate and service continuity in order for them to access the Internet. The realization to provide reliable communication for the users in high speed mobility is challenging due to the frequent request for handover since the trains moving in high speed which resulting heavy overhead implementation. Since the User Equipment (UE) in trains communicates directly to the outside of the Base Station (BS), it reduced handover successful rate and hence, degraded the service quality. This research identified the system parameters to improve handover performance in high speed railway network. Moreover, mathematical equation has been derived by integrating the information of train speed and time travelled across the cell. This research has improved handover performances by reducing the probability of drop call rate and increasing the number of handover successful rate.
Essai sur la crise de la zone euro

In this Ph. D. thesis, we analyze the conditions for the emergence and the aggravation of the recent crisis in Europe from 2008 to 2012. The major objective of this Ph. D. thesis is to develop theoretical models which will be effective in investigating the twin banking and sovereign debt crises in a monetary union with a broadly similar institutional design to the EMU before 2012. Different from 'traditional' financial crisis models that shed light on the role of the central bank in crisis policy response, the models developed in this thesis investigate and underline the importance of fiscal crisis management. White accentuating financial vulnerability, we explore the relationship between the banking sector, the realeconomy and the public budget in the context of a monetary union. This thesis consists of four theoretical models of the banking crisis, with the first framework depicting the financial crisis which burst in 2008 in small European economies outside the EMU and the next three models elucidating the crisis situation in the Eurozone from early 2009 until August 2012.
High Virulence and Antifungal Resistance in Clinical Strains of Candida albicans

Antifungal resistance and virulence properties of Candida albicans are a growing health problem worldwide. To study the expression of virulence and azole resistance genes in 39 clinical strains of C. albicans, we used a model of infection of human vaginal epithelial cells with C. albicans strains isolated from Mexican women with vulvovaginal candidiasis (VVC). The strains were identified by PCR amplification of the ITS1 and ITS2 regions of rRNA. The detection and expression of virulence genes and azole resistance genes MDR1 and CDR1 were performed using PCR and RT-PCR, respectively. All strains were sensitive to nystatin and 38 (97.4%) and 37 (94.9%) were resistant to ketoconazole and fluconazole, respectively. ALS1, SAP4–SAP6, LIP1, LIP2, LIP4, LIP6, LIP7, LIP9, LIP10, and PLB1-PLB2 were present in all strains; SAP1 was identified in 37 (94.8%) isolates, HWP1 in 35 (89.7%), ALS3 in 14 (35.8%), and CDR1 in 26 (66.6%). In nearly all of the strains, ALS1, HWP1, SAP4–SAP6, LIP1–LIP10, PLB1, and PLB2 were expressed, whereas CDR1 was expressed in 20 (51.3%) and ALS3 in 14 (35.8%). In our in vitro model of infection with C. albicans, the clinical strains showed different expression profiles of virulence genes in association with the azole resistance gene CDR1. The results indicate that the strains that infect Mexican patients suffering from VVC are highly virulent and virtually all are insensitive to azoles.
Automated Management of Audio-Visual Presentations for Online Learning Applications

Education is a potentially important application area for intelligent multimedia knowledge management. One source of knowledge is archived recordings of audio presentations including lectures and seminars. Recordings of presentations often contain multiple information streams involving visual and audio data. If the full benefit of these recordings is to be realised these multiple media streams must be properly integrated to enable rapid navigation. This paper describes an approach to the integration of the audio soundtrack with electronic slides from a presentation by automatically synchronizing them. A novel component of the system is the detection of sections of the presentation unsupported by prepared slides, such as discussion and question answering, and automatic development of keypoint slides for these elements of the presentation.
Iterative Learning without Reinforcement or Reward for Multijoint Movements: A Revisit of Bernstein's DOF Problem on Dexterity

A robot designed to mimic a human becomes kinematically redundant and its total degrees of freedom becomes larger than the number of physical variables required for describing a given task. Kinematic redundancy may contribute to enhancement of dexterity and versatility but it incurs a problem of ill-posedness of inverse kinematics from the task space to the joint space. This ill-posedness was originally found by Bernstein, who tried to unveil the secret of the central nervous system and how nicely it coordinates a skeletomotor system with many DOFs interacting in complex ways. In the history of robotics research, such ill-posedness has not yet been resolved directly but circumvented by introducing an artificial performance index and determining uniquely an inverse kinematics solution by minimization. This paper tackles such Bernstein's problem and proposes a new method for resolving the ill-posedness in a natural way without invoking any artificial index. First, given a curve on a horizontal plane for a redundant robot arm whose endpoint is imposed to trace the curve, the existence of a unique ideal joint trajectory is proved. Second, such a uniquely determined motion can be acquired eventually as a joint control signal through iterative learning without reinforcement or reward.
Commonplacing the public domain: Reading the classics socially on the Kindle

Amazon leads the market in ebooks with the Kindle brand, which encompasses a range of dedicated e-reader devices and a large ebook store. Kindle users are able to share the experience of reading ebooks purchased from Amazon by selecting passages of text for upload to the Kindle Popular Highlights website. In this article, I propose that the Kindle Popular Highlights database contains evidence that readers are re-appropriating commonplacing – the act of selecting important passages from a text and recording them in a separate location for later re-use – while reading public domain titles on the Kindle. An analysis of keyness in a corpus of 34,044 shared highlights from public domain titles suggests that readers focus on words relating to philosophy and values to draw an understanding of contemporary society from these classic works. This form of highlighting takes precedence over understanding and sharing key narrative moments. An examination of the top ten most popular authors in the corpus, and case studies of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, demonstrate variation in highlighting practice as readers are choosing to shorten famous commonplaces in order to change their context for an audience that extends beyond the original reader. Through this analysis, I propose that Kindle users’ highlighting patterns are shaped by the behaviour of other readers and reflect a shared understanding of an audience beyond the initial highlighter.
ABA Is Required for Plant Acclimation to a Combination of Salt and Heat Stress

Abiotic stresses such as drought, heat or salinity are a major cause of yield loss worldwide. Recent studies revealed that the acclimation of plants to a combination of different environmental stresses is unique and cannot be directly deduced from studying the response of plants to each of the different stresses applied individually. Here we report on the response of Arabidopsis thaliana to a combination of salt and heat stress using transcriptome analysis, physiological measurements and mutants deficient in abscisic acid, salicylic acid, jasmonic acid or ethylene signaling. Arabidopsis plants were found to be more susceptible to a combination of salt and heat stress compared to each of the different stresses applied individually. The stress combination resulted in a higher ratio of Na+/K+ in leaves and caused the enhanced expression of 699 transcripts unique to the stress combination. Interestingly, many of the transcripts that specifically accumulated in plants in response to the salt and heat stress combination were associated with the plant hormone abscisic acid. In accordance with this finding, mutants deficient in abscisic acid metabolism and signaling were found to be more susceptible to a combination of salt and heat stress than wild type plants. Our study highlights the important role abscisic acid plays in the acclimation of plants to a combination of two different abiotic stresses.
An examination of relationship between teachers’ self-efficacy perception on ICT and their attitude towards ICT usage in the classroom

The aim of this study is to examine the relationship between teachers' self-efficacy perception on ICT and their attitude to ICT usage in their classes. For this purpose, two scales were used: one is "Teachers' Self-efficacy Perception on ICT Scale" and the other is “Teachers’ Attitude towards ICT Usage Scale". 42.307 teachers joined to this study. To analyse the collected data, mean, standard deviation, Pearson correlation and linear regression analysis were used. It is found out that there is a significant relationship between teachers' self-efficacy perception on ICT and their attitude towards ICT usage in their classrooms. According to the findings, it can be said that if teachers’ self-efficacy level is high, teachers can use ICT in learning process effectively and they can develop themselves in ICT use. Moreover, they can make class management perfect while using ICT. Keywords: Self-efficacy; teachers' attitude towards ICT usage; self-efficacy in ICT; teacher.
A QUASI-ASYNCHRONOUS MIGRATION PROTOCOL FOR PVM TASKS

Process migration is a desirable and useful facility for the Network of Workstations (NOW). This paper presents a novel migration protocol called quasi-asynchronous migration for PVM tasks, which allows non-migrating tasks to execute during most of the time of migration. Message flushing and message delaying are the key mechanisms used in quasi-asynchronous migration. Both the analyses of the migration protocol and the experimental results show that quasi-asynchronous migration has lower overhead than other migration protocols do.
Tracking control of nonlinear stochastic systems with actuator nonlinearity

Actuator nonlinearity exists in many physical systems and devices such as electromagnetism, piezoelectric actuators, electronic relay circuits, smart materials, etc. In this paper, we consider tracking control of stochastic system with actuator nonlinearity. We use existing adaptive controller including parameter update law and control law, which can achieve exponential tracking of a class of nonlinear deterministic system. However, the controller cannot be practically applied since the presence of observation noise leads to divergence of parameter update law. Furthermore, the sensitivity of the control law signal induces bursting behavior which may, in practice, damage actuators. We modify both the parameter update law and the control law to avoid divergence and reduce the sensitivity. In addition, we consider two type of filtering techniques, i.e. classical Kalman filter to estimate joint state and parameter of a simplified linear time varying model, and continuous-discrete unscented Kalman filter to estimate state and all unknown parameters of the system. The effectiveness of our proposed control method is clarified by a numerical example of a second order dynamical system with dead-zone nonlinearity. Then, tracking performances obtained from both filtering methods are compared.
Reconnection in a Weakly Stochastic Field

We examine the effect of weak, small-scale magnetic field structure on the rate of reconnection in a strongly magnetized plasma. This affects the rate of reconnection by reducing the transverse scale for reconnection flows and by allowing many independent flux reconnection events to occur simultaneously. Allowing only for the first effect and using Goldreich & Sridhar's model of strong turbulence in a magnetized plasma with negligible intermittency, we find a lower limit for the reconnection speed ~VAℛ-3/16Lℳ3/4, where VA is the Alfvén speed, ℛL is the Lundquist number, and ℳ is the large-scale magnetic Mach number of the turbulence. We derive an upper limit of ~VAℳ2 by invoking both effects. We argue that generic reconnection in turbulent plasmas will normally occur at close to this upper limit. The fraction of magnetic energy that goes directly into electron heating scales as ℛ-2/5Lℳ8/5, and the thickness of the current sheet scales as ℛ-3/5Lℳ-2/5. A significant fraction of the magnetic energy goes into high-frequency Alfvén waves. The angle between adjacent field lines on the same side of the reconnection layer is ~ℛ-1/5Lℳ6/5 on the scale of the current sheet thickness. We claim that the qualitative sense of these conclusions, that reconnection is fast even though current sheets are narrow, is almost independent of the local physics of reconnection and the nature of the turbulent cascade. As the consequence of this the Galactic and solar dynamos are generically fast, i.e., do not depend on the plasma resistivity.
M TECHNOLOGY , PERFORMANCE AND DEGRADATION CHARACTERISTICS OF SLS ELA THIN FILM TRANSISTORS

Low temperature polycrystalline silicon thin film transistors (LTPS poly-Si TFTs) are essential for large area electronics and high performance flat panel displays. In recent years, LTPS TFT performance has substantially increased due to the important breakthroughs in the field of polycrystalline silicon crystallization and also due to the optimization of the process steps that differ from those of typical MOSFETs, mainly because of the requirement for low temperature procedures. In this review we present the electrical characteristics of polycrystalline silicon TFTs, crystallized with different variations of the advanced SLS ELA technique, and the determination of process technological parameters that affect the device performance, in order to further optimize the production of such high performance transistors, in terms of poly-Si microstructure, channel dimensions and topology. Also, the effect of these fabrication parameters on device degradation characteristics is studied, with an attempt to model and predict degradation characteristics.
Validation of Reference Genes for Quantitative Expression Analysis by Real-Time RT-PCR in Four Lepidopteran Insects

Abstract Quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) is an efficient and widely used technique to monitor gene expression. Housekeeping genes (HKGs) are often empirically selected as the reference genes for data normalization. However, the suitability of HKGs used as the reference genes has been seldom validated. Here, six HKGs were chosen (actin A3, actin A1, GAPDH, G3PDH, E2F, rp49) in four lepidopteran insects Bombyx mori L. (Lepidoptera: Bombycidae), Plutella xylostella L. (Plutellidae), Chilo suppressalis Walker (Crambidae), and Spodoptera exigua Hübner (Noctuidae) to study their expression stability. The algorithms of geNorm, NormFinder, stability index, and &Dgr;Ct analysis were used to evaluate these HKGs. Across different developmental stages, actin A1 was the most stable in P. xylostella and C. suppressalis, but it was the least stable in B. mori and S. exigua. Rp49 and GAPDH were the most stable in B. mori and S. exigua, respectively. In different tissues, GAPDH, E2F, and Rp49 were the most stable in B. mori, S. exigua, and C. suppressalis, respectively. The relative abundances of Siwi genes estimated by 2-&Dgr;&Dgr;Ct method were tested with different HKGs as the reference gene, proving the importance of internal controls in qPCR data analysis. The results not only presented a list of suitable reference genes in four lepidopteran insects, but also proved that the expression stabilities of HKGs were different among evolutionarily close species. There was no single universal reference gene that could be used in all situations. It is indispensable to validate the expression of HKGs before using them as the internal control in qPCR.
Inoculant of Arbuscular Mycorrhizal Fungi (Rhizophagus clarus) Increase Yield of Soybean and Cotton under Field Conditions

Nutrient availability is an important factor in crop production, and regular addition of chemical fertilizers is the most common practice to improve yield in agrosystems for intensive crop production. The use of some groups of microorganisms that have specific activity providing nutrients to plants is a good alternative, and arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) enhance plant nutrition by providing especially phosphorus, improving plant growth and increasing crop production. Unfortunately, the use of AMF as an inoculant on a large scale is not yet widely used, because of several limitations in obtaining a large amount of inoculum due to several factors, such as low growth, the few species of AMF domesticated under in vitro conditions, and high competition with native AMF. The objective of this work was to test the infectivity of a Rhizophagus clarus inoculum and its effectiveness as an alternative for nutrient supply in soybean (Glycine max L.) and cotton (Gossypium hirsutum L.) when compared with conventional chemical fertilization under field conditions. The experiments were carried out in a completely randomized block design with five treatments: Fertilizer, AMF, AMF with Fertilizer, AMF with 1/2 Fertilizer, and the Control with non-inoculated and non-fertilized plants. The parameters evaluated were AMF root colonization and effect of inoculation on plant growth, nutrient absorption and yield. The results showed that AMF inoculation increased around 20 % of root colonization in both soybean and cotton; nutrients analyses in vegetal tissues showed increase of P and nitrogen content in inoculated plants, these results reflect in a higher yield. Our results showed that, AMF inoculation increase the effectiveness of fertilizer application in soybean and reduce the fertilizer dosage in cotton.
Towards Generic and Efficient Distributed Top-k Monitoring

Monitoring data streams in a distributed system is the focus of much research in recent years. This paper addresses the generic and efficient processing of distributed top-k monitoring, which is continuously reporting the k largest values according to a user-specified aggregation function over distributed data streams. In practice, the user-specified aggregation function would be arbitrary function. Unfortunately, state-of-art distributed top-k monitoring approaches only support the sum function as the aggregation function. In this paper, we present a generic algorithm for distributed top-k monitoring, which supports not only the sum function but also min, max, count, average, and their compounds. These functions are the most general aggregation functions. In our algorithm, two kinds of arithmetic constraints are maintained at remote stream sources to ensure that the most recently provided top-k answer remains valid to within a user-specified error tolerance. Theoretical analyses results show that, in our algorithm, distributed communication is only necessary on occasion and few objects are necessary transmitted, when constraints are violated, and the communication cost is independent of k.
Estimation of a Transformation Model with Truncation, Interval Observation and Time-Varying Covariates

Abrevaya (1999b) considered estimation of a transformation model in the presence of left truncation. This paper observes that a cross-sectional version of the statistical model considered in Frederiksen et al. (2007) is a generalization of the model considered by Abrevaya (1999b) and the generalized model can be estimated by a pairwise comparison version of one of the estimators in Frederiksen et al. (2007). Specifically, our generalization will allow for discretized observations of the dependent variable and for piecewise constant time-varying explanatory variables. Copyright (C) The Author(s). Journal compilation (C) Royal Economic Society 2010.
Classification Metrics for Improved Atmospheric Correction of Multispectral VNIR Imagery

Multispectral visible/near-infrared (VNIR) earth observation satellites, e.g., Ikonos, Quickbird, ALOS AVNIR-2, and DMC, usually acquire imagery in a few (3 – 5) spectral bands. Atmospheric correction is a challenging task for these images because the standard methods require at least one shortwave infrared band (around 1.6 or 2.2 μm) or hyperspectral instruments to derive the aerosol optical thickness. New classification metrics for defining cloud, cloud over water, haze, water, and saturation are presented to achieve improvements for an automatic processing system. The background is an ESA contract for the development of a prototype atmospheric processor for the optical payload AVNIR-2 on the ALOS platform.