Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Eccentric exercise in coronary patients: central hemodynamic and metabolic responses.

PURPOSE With lengthening (eccentric) muscle contractions, the magnitude of locomotor-muscle mass and strength increase has been demonstrated to be greater compared with shortening (concentric) muscle contractions. In healthy subjects, energy demand and heart rate responses with eccentric exercise are small relative to the amount of muscle force produced. Thus, eccentric exercise may be an attractive alternative to resistance exercise for patients with limited cardiovascular exercise tolerance. METHODS We tested the cardiovascular tolerance of eccentric exercise in 13 coronary patients (ages 40-66) with preserved and/or mild reduced left ventricular function. Patients were randomly assigned to either an eccentric (ECC; N = 7) or a concentric (CON; N = 6) training group and trained for 8 wk. Training workload was increased progressively (from week 1 to 5) to an intensity equivalent to 60% [OV0312]O(2peak). RESULTS On average, maximum power output achieved with ECC was fourfold compared with CON (357 +/- 96 W vs 97 +/- 21 W; P < 0.005), whereas measures of oxygen uptake and blood lactate were significantly lower (P < 0.05 each), and ratings of perceived exertion were similar for ECC and CON. During a 20-min session of ECC and CON, central hemodynamics was measured by means of right heart catheterization. During ECC, responses of mean arterial blood pressure, systemic vascular resistance, pulmonary capillary pressure, cardiac index, and stroke work of the left ventricle on average were in the normal range of values and similar to those observed during CON. Compared with baseline, after 8 wk of training, echocardiographic left ventricular function was unchanged. CONCLUSION The results indicate uncoupling of skeletal muscle load and cardiovascular stress during ECC. For low-risk patients with coronary heart disease without angina, inducible ischemia, or left ventricular dysfunction, ECC can be recommended as a safe new approach to perform high-load muscular exercise training with minimal cardiovascular stress.
Twittering informal learning and student engagement in first-year units

This chapter outlines an investigation into the utility of the online service Twitter as a tool for facilitating informal learning amongst first-year university students. Twitter was introduced to two first-year student groups, both taking the unit Web Communications 101; one group in a campus-based blended learning mode, which utilized traditional face to face tutorials, while the second version was delivered fully online via Open Universities Australia. The ways in which students used Twitter was recorded and examined, highlighting three main uses: socialising, resource-sharing and posing questions. Students’ perception of Twitter and its effectiveness as an informal learning tool was examined via a quantitative survey and a number of qualitative follow-up interviews. Notable differences emerged between the blended learning group and the fully online learners in terms of their attitude regarding Twitter use for facilitating informal learning. The chapter concludes with four recommendations regarding the implementation of Twitter as an informal learning tool for students.
Vague One-Class Learning for Data Streams

In this paper, we formulate a new research problem of learning from vaguely labeled one-class data streams, where the main objective is to allow users to label instance groups, instead of single instances, as positive samples for learning. The batch-labeling, however, raises serious issues because labeled groups may contain non-positive samples, and users may change their labeling interests at any time. To solve this problem, we propose a Vague One-Class Learning (VOCL) framework which employs a double weighting approach, at both instance and classifier levels, to build an ensembling framework for learning. At instance level, both local and global filterings are considered for instance weight adjustment. Two solutions are proposed to take instance weight values into the classifier training process. At classifier level, a weight value is assigned to each classifier of the ensemble to ensure that learning can quickly adapt to users’ interests. Experimental results on synthetic and real-world data streams demonstrate that the proposed VOCL framework significantly outperforms other methods for vaguely labeled one-class data streams.
Sustainability reporting: An application for the evaluation of special events

Under mounting pressure from internal and external stakeholders, businesses need to be more accountable for their actions, more transparent in their behaviour and more responsible for their wider impact on society. Granted a 'societal licence to operate', many businesses are responding to the challenge by embracing sustainability reporting, which allows them to measure and communicate their progress towards sustainability goals. Special events, which are important for attracting visitors to tourism destinations, also have diverse stakeholders and like business entities, need to be accountable for their economic, environmental social impacts. Sustainability reporting offers a framework for the evaluation of special events, shifting the focus from impact assessment to performance measurement. A set of sustainability performance indicators and a sustainability scorecard will provide the basis for evaluating the sustainability of a range of special events. The scorecard will be pre-tested for its application and will assist tourism organisations that support special events.
Post-Treatment Gliosarcoma Extension into the Pterygomaxillary Fossa: Literature Review and Case Report

Only four primary gliosarcoma case reports are described in the literature with transcranial (intradural to extradural) penetration into the region of the infratemporal fossa. This is the first report of a primary glioblastoma (GBM) that evolved into secondary or post-treatment gliosarcoma without evidence of a second de novo tumor and with extension into the left pterygomaxillary fossa.
Rapidly Prototyping Robots: Using Plates and Reinforced Flexures

In this article, we present plate and reinforced flexure (PARF) fabrication, an inexpensive, rapid fabrication technique for robot mechanisms inspired by the smart composite manufacturing (SCM) used in VelociRoACH [1] and RoboBee [2] designs. PARF extends SCM to larger sizes at low costs. We used PARF to develop a meter-scale hexapedal robot, BigANT [3], a design we made publicly available. Manufacture of BigANT requires minimal tooling-foam board, tape, a saw blade, and a knife; the chassis costs &lt; US$20 in materials, encouraging its use in research, education, and recreation. We present a study of PARF joints, showing several variations spanning a range of fabrication effort and mechanical properties. PARF promises the possibility of quickly and inexpensively building robot mechanisms for tasks as the requirements arise, rather than relying on prefabricated robot bodies.
An automatic timing method for photo finish

Manual detection in photo finishing is subjective and of low efficiency. In this study, an automatic detection method is proposed to detect the finish line on the photograph. The object is abstracted by a self-adaption background substraction algorithm based on the specific feature of line scan image. Then an estimative target region mehod is proposed to detect the effective body part for the finish line. The effectiveness of this method is verified by 1312 samples which contain a single contestant, and achieved the correctness of 86.3% within a tolerance of 4 ms time-accuracy. The experiment indicates the proposed method can achieve objective and accurate detection result.
Developing a typology of tourist harassment in archeological sites: a netnographic approach

ABSTRACT Tourist harassment has received some attention over the past two decades as a major challenge affecting travelers’ personal safety and their perceptions of tourism destinations. However, there is still a need to understand and explore in depth the types of behavior that constitute tourist harassment. Using a qualitative netnographic study approach, this study identified the types of harassment that tourists are likely to experience in archeological sites. Travelers’ anecdotes reporting harassment incidents in two Jordanian archeological sites, Petra and Jerash, were retrieved from TripAdvisor and examined using a hybrid content analysis approach. Six key categories of tourist harassment emerged from the data. These categories were labeled as vendors’ persistence, obtrusive on-site service providers, beggar children, sexual harassment, verbal abuse, and physical abuse. Each category was explored in depth and exemplified using travelers’ anecdotes. A typology of tourists’ response to harassment was also developed based on the anecdotes. Results suggest that vendors’ persistence was the most frequently reported type of harassment. When experiencing harassment, tourists are likely to respond by resisting the harassers. The findings have several theoretical and managerial implications for both researchers and destination managers.
Undemocratic Schooling: Equity and Quality in Mass Secondary Education in Australia

This book, based on a social survey of secondary education in Australia, provides information on students' achievements in relation to their attitudes and values, their perspectives on issues ranging from jobs to discrimination, and their destinations in relation to their backgrounds. It is presented in five main parts: the first part, 'The machine of the curriculum', describes the hierarchical nature of the curriculum, likening it to an economic system which produces outcomes in the form of access to jobs, careers and further education; the second part, 'Historical progress', analyses the growth in social access to mathematics and sciences, and the mixed pattern in humanities and social sciences; part three, 'Hierarchical curriculum, stratified school system', looks at the reasons why social inequalities still exist in the curriculum; part four, 'The results of school' looks at the destinations of young people after schooling; and the final part, 'Lines of reform', examines how schools can be made more effective in terms of equity and quality. The chapters are: Economy and school; The hierarchy of the curriculum in historical perspective; Creating a working-class space in the curriculum, 1985-1998; Social progress in access to mathematics; Social progress in access to the sciences; Progress or regression in the social sciences and humanities; What makes the hard options hard, and for whom? ; Selective schooling and the curriculum; Early leaving; Finishing school and getting a job; Going on to further study; School effectiveness and structural inequality; Vocational education and training in schools; From mass to democratic secondary education.
Measuring and Modulating Mimicry: Insights from Virtual Reality and Autism

Mimicry involves the unconscious imitation of other people’s behaviour. The social top-down response modulation (STORM) model has suggested that mimicry is a socially strategic behaviour which is modulated according to the social context, for example, we mimic more when someone is looking at us or if we want to affiliate with them. There has been a long debate over whether mimicry is different in autism, a condition characterised by differences in social interaction. STORM predicts that autistic people can and do mimic but do not change their mimicry behaviour according to the social context. Using a range of mimicry measures this thesis aimed to test STORM’s predictions. The first study employed a traditional reaction time measure of mimicry and demonstrated that direct gaze socially modulated mimicry responses in non-autistic adults but did not do so in autistic participants, in line with STORM’s predictions. In the next two studies, I found that non-autistic participants mimicked the movement trajectory of both virtual characters and human actors during an imitation game. Autistic participants also mimicked but did so to a lesser extent. However, this type of mimicry was resistant to the effects of social cues, such as eye-gaze and animacy, contrary to the predictions of STORM. In a fourth study, I manipulated the rationality of an actor’s movement trajectory and found that participants mimicked the trajectory even when the trajectory was rated as irrational. In a fifth study, I showed that people’s tendency to mimic the movements of others could change the choices that participants had previously made in private. This tendency was modulated by the kinematics of the character’s pointing movements. This thesis provides mixed support for STORM’s predictions and I discuss the reasons why this might be. I also make suggestions for how to better measure and modulate mimicry.
Research on the Clustering and Composition of P2P-Based Web Services

For the problem that the centralized mechanism for semantic service discovery is still difficult for realization in the server center during service discovery and matching, a novel model of web services is proposed which makes use of some ideas from the peer-to-peer structure and the clustering methods. In this model, a service is firstly matched within its located community in accordance with the semantic information for its function, and then a rather accurate matching is made according to the semantic information from input parameters. Both theoretical analysis and simulation results show that this model is able to raise the recall ratio as well as to improve the matching speed, and moreover, it can also provide users with value-added response from web services composition which may meet user’s further requirements. These features not only satisfy some user’s potential needs, but also deal with the problem of the centralized mechanism for semantic service discovery during the serviceoriented computation. Keywords-P2P; clustering; Web-service; services composition
Ultrasonic location detection with waveguide

Time delay estimation has been used as a research area of significant practical important in many fields such as especially military system like localization, targeting, course acquisition also sonar, seismology, hands-free communications etc. In these applications, it is important to detect the delay and arrival times of ultrasonic echoes comprised in the medium for ultrasonic signals. Here, it is aimed to determine the time delay between the signals arrived from a signal source in order to detect the location. Hence, a system is suggested that uses a multi-surfaced waveguide with only one receiver instead of using receiver arrays. By using this structure, time delay estimation is compared for different signal-to-noise ratios with Cross-Correlation, Maximum Likelihood and Phase Transform methods.
Good reductions of Shimura varieties of Hodge type in arbitrary unramified mixed characteristic. Part I

We prove the existence of good smooth integral models of Shimura varieties of Hodge type in arbitrary unramified mixed characteristic (0, p). As a first application we provide a smooth solution (answer) to a conjecture (question) of Langlands for Shimura varieties of Hodge type. As a second application we prove the existence in arbitrary unramified mixed characteristic (0, p) of integral canonical models of projective Shimura varieties of Hodge type with respect to h‐hyperspecial subgroups as pro‐étale covers of Néron models; this forms progress towards the proof of conjectures of Milne and Reimann. Though the second application was known before in some cases, its proof is new and more of a principle.
AcT-2: A Novel Myotropic and Antimicrobial Type 2 Tryptophyllin from the Skin Secretion of the Central American Red-Eyed Leaf Frog, Agalychnis callidryas

Tryptophyllins are a diverse family of amphibian peptides originally found in extracts of phyllomedusine frog skin by chemical means. Their biological activities remain obscure. Here we describe the isolation and preliminary pharmacological characterization of a novel type 2 tryptophyllin, named AcT-2, from the skin secretion of the red-eyed leaf frog, Agalychnis callidryas. The peptide was initially identified during smooth muscle pharmacological screening of skin secretion HPLC fractions and the unique primary structure—GMRPPWF-NH2—was established by both Edman degradation and electrospray MS/MS fragmentation sequencing. A. cDNA encoding the biosynthetic precursor of AcT-2 was successfully cloned from a skin secretion-derived cDNA library by means of RACE PCR and this contained an open-reading frame consisting of 62 amino acid residues with a single AcT-2 encoding sequence located towards the C-terminus. A synthetic replicate of AcT-2 was found to relax arterial smooth muscle (EC50 = 5.1 nM) and to contract rat urinary bladder smooth muscle (EC50 = 9.3 μM). The peptide could also inhibit the growth of the microorganisms, Staphylococcus aureus, (MIC = 256 mg/L) Escherichia coli (MIC = 512 mg/L), and Candida albicans (128 mg/L). AcT-2 is thus the first amphibian skin tryptophyllin found to possess both myotropic and antimicrobial activities.
Dimensionality reduction in evolutionary multiobjective design: case study

Real-world applications of Pareto-based optimisation commonly involve many objectives. It causes difficulties because of reduced selection pressure for better solutions. Dimensionality Reduction (DR) is a very appealing approach to overcome this problem. A case study of multiobjective Electric Machine (EM) design based on DR of the novel model [3] is considered.
Improving Kinetic or Thermodynamic Stability of an Azoreductase by Directed Evolution

Protein stability arises from a combination of factors which are often difficult to rationalise. Therefore its improvement is better addressed through directed evolution than by rational design approaches. In this study, five rounds of mutagenesis/recombination followed by high-throughput screening (≈10,000 clones) yielded the hit 1B6 showing a 300-fold higher half life at 50°C than that exhibited by the homodimeric wild type PpAzoR azoreductase from Pseudomonas putida MET94. The characterization using fluorescence, calorimetry and light scattering shows that 1B6 has a folded state slightly less stable than the wild type (with lower melting and optimal temperatures) but in contrast is more resistant to irreversible denaturation. The superior kinetic stability of 1B6 variant was therefore related to an increased resistance of the unfolded monomers to aggregation through the introduction of mutations that disturbed hydrophobic patches and increased the surface net charge of the protein. Variants 2A1 and 2A1-Y179H with increased thermodynamic stability (10 to 20°C higher melting temperature than wild type) were also examined showing the distinctive nature of mutations that lead to improved structural robustness: these occur in residues that are mostly involved in strengthening the solvent-exposed loops or the inter-dimer interactions of the folded state.
A Method of Cross-Lingual Question-Answering Based on Machine Translation and Noun Phrase Translation using Web documents - Yokohama National University at NTCIR-6 CLQA

We propose a method of English-Japanese cross lingual question-answering (E-J CLQA) that uses machine translation (MT) and an existing Japanese QA system. We also introduce noun phrase translation using Web documents in order to compensate the insufficiencies in the bilingual dictionary of the MT system. We combine several phrase translation techniques including 1) phrase translation using Wikipedia, 2) phrase translation using Web search results only, 3) phrase translation using Web search results and the information of pronunciation. The experimental result shows that the combination increases the coverage of translation and also improves the accuracy of E-J CLQA. However, the improvement is not so significant because the MT system works well for the NTCIR-6 E-J questions.
Class and Party in American Politics

* List of Tables and Figures * Preface Inequality and Political Debate: The Failed Role of DemocratsConventional Wisdom * Another Look: Reconsidering Political Trends The Puzzling Survival of DemocratsLong-Term Trends * The Argument Social Change and Anticipating Party FortunesThe Presumption of an Emerging Republican Majority * The Persistence of Potential Democratic Issues * Summary Evolving Party Constituencies and ConcernsThe 1950s and Early 1960s: Party Differences with Limits * Initiating Change: Chickens and Eggs * Republican Tensions and Change * The Emergence of Conservative Support * Pursuing a Conservative Agenda * The 1994 Election and After * Attracting Conservatives * The Democrats * The 1950s and Early 1960s * The Emergence of a Liberal Agenda * Political Defections and Debating the Partys Focus * Interpreting the Democratic Situation * Liberal Dominance Within the Democratic Party * Summarizing Evolving Party Differences * Current Party Differences Political RealignmentIssue Concerns and Perception of Party Differences * Reactions to the Parties * Presenting Results * Structuring the Analysis * Middle-Class Political Behavior * The South: Net Party Reactions * Net Party Reactions Outside the South * Net Party Reactions: The Nation * Party Voting Patterns * The South * Outside the South * Party-Line Voting and Split-Ticket Voting * Conclusions Reconsidering Party and Issues in American PoliticsThe Current and Future Debate * The Turnout Issue * The Role of Other Issues * Conclusions * Appendix: The Analysis of Class Divisions in American Politics * Indicators and Different Trends * Neglecting Analysis: Why? * Missed Signals and Bad Luck * Neglecting Class Analysis: The Importance of Other Research * The Measurement of Class * Supporting Evidence: Real Income and Transforming the Public * Supporting Evidence: Intolerance and Doubts About Class Inclinations * The Declining Interest in Constituency-Politiciain Connections * Consequences * References * Index
A conceptual architecture of a trusted mobile environment

Trust is crucial in mobile communications. How to establish a trusted mobile environment is becoming more and more important for mobile device venders, mobile service providers and mobile networking operators. This paper presents a conceptual architecture towards establishing a trusted mobile environment. The contribution of this paper is a) specifying the architecture of a trusted mobile environment; b) by developing the conceptual architecture, explaining key motivations behind the location of every element in the architecture; and c) evaluating the architecture by applying it into a mobile peer-to-peer system