Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Differences in Left Ventricular Global Function and Mechanics in Paralympic Athletes with Cervical and Thoracic Spinal Cord Injuries

Following a spinal cord injury, there are changes in resting stroke volume (SV) and its response to exercise. The purpose of the following study was to characterize resting left ventricular structure, function, and mechanics in Paralympic athletes with tetraplegia (TETRA) and paraplegia (PARA) in an attempt to understand whether the alterations in SV are attributable to inherent dysfunction in the left ventricle. This retrospective study compared Paralympic athletes with a traumatic, chronic (>1 year post-injury), motor-complete spinal cord injury (American Spinal Injury Association Impairment Scale A-B). Eight male TETRA wheelchair rugby players (34 ± 5 years, C5-C7) and eight male PARA alpine skiers (35 ± 5 years, T4-L3) were included in the study. Echocardiography was performed in the left lateral decubitus position and indices of left ventricular structure, global diastolic and systolic function, and mechanics were derived from the average across three cardiac cycles. Blood pressure was measured in the supine and seated positions. All results are presented as TETRA vs. PARA. There was no difference in left ventricular dimensions between TETRA and PARA. Additionally, indices of global diastolic function were similar between groups including isovolumetric relaxation time, early (E) and late (A) transmitral filling velocities and their ratio (E/A). While ejection fraction was similar between TETRA and PARA (59 ± 4 % vs. 61 ± 7 %, p = 0.394), there was evidence of reduced global systolic function in TETRA including lower SV (62 ± 9 ml vs. 71 ± 6 ml, p = 0.016) and cardiac output (3.5 ± 0.6 L/min vs. 5.0 ± 0.9 L/min, p = 0.002). Despite this observation, several indices of systolic and diastolic mechanics were maintained in TETRA but attenuted in PARA including circumferential strain at the level of the papillary muscle (−23 ± 4% vs. −15 ± 6%, p = 0.010) and apex (−36 ± 10% vs. −23 ± 5%, p = 0.010) and their corresponding diastolic strain rates (papillary: 1.90 ± 0.63 s−1 vs. 1.20 ± 0.51 s−1, p = 0.028; apex: 3.03 ± 0.71 s−1 vs. 1.99 ± 0.69 s−1, p = 0.009). All blood pressures were lower in TETRA. The absence of an association between reduced global systolic function and mechanical dysfunction in either TETRA or PARA suggests any reductions in SV are likely attributed to impaired loading rather than inherent left ventricular dysfunction.
Visual Pursuit in 109 White and 142 Negro Newborn Infants1

of the problems arising from the following considerations: At what stage of development are the various oculo-motor processes during the first few hours subsequent to delivery? The "various processes" include: (a) negative movements of the eye-balls to light, (b) protective eye-lid reactions, (c) iris reflexes, (d) accommodation of the lens, (e) squint, or incoordinate binocular movements, (f) binocular fixation of stationary objects, (g) binocular fixation of successively displaced objects, (h) binocular convergence (adaptive to changing distance of object), (i) binocular pursuit of continuously moving objects. There are quite possibly other important functions, which will arise in the course of investigation applied to these. To what extent are significant individual differences exhibited at this early period, and if they are marked with what known factors can they be correlated? Certain of these possible factors are: (a) race, (b) good stock as indicated by the "vitality" or more specific organic or glandular characteristics of the parents, (c) nutritional factors of the mother during term, (d) conditions of delivery. These are only suggestive of pertinent items, which may yield important relationships. At what age levels do significant changes from the birth condition occur? Which processes develop first, most rapidly? What intercorrelations between these processes and other behavior obtain? What influence has early practice upon accelerating the development of these functions? For example, does practicing binocular pursuit reduce the age at which certain standards of pursuit are attained? Or does lack of practice advance the age at which certain standards of performance are usually reached? Problems are here in large number; they are definite and important. They are practically untouched, insofar as systematic research is concerned. In the literature one finds only occasional sampling taken with reference to each of the problems and processes mentioned above. The fundamental problems remain unsolved. A step in the 1 These experiments are being conducted in the Women's Clinic of the Johns Hopkins Hospital. The writer is appreciative of the co6peration extended by the Staff of the Department of Obstetrics, and particularly by Dr. J. M. Bergland, Dr. I. Hofbauer and Dr. F. F. Snyder.
Characterizing Membrane Surface Charge by Contact Angle Titration

ABSTRACT Accurate characterization of membrane surface charge is vital for understanding membrane surface chemistry, separation performance, and fouling resistance. Streaming potential is the standard electrokinetic phenomena used to characterize a membrane’s isoelectric point and zeta potential, which is related to the dynamic charge functionality at the membranesolution interface as function of solution pH and ionic composition. We have recently developed a new method for directly measuring membrane surface charge via direct surface titration. Direct surface titration enables identification of maximum surface charge density, fractional ionization as a function of pH, and the apparent pKa of a charged surface. We have employed this new characterization technique to assess the charge of several commercial polyamide reverse osmosis membranes and compare these results to charge determined from classical electrokinetic measurements.
Defect list compression

We consider a setting relevant to the design of storage systems in which a list of defective storage blocks, as determined at manufacture time, is stored in a high-speed system controller memory to enable the efficient bypassing of defective blocks in a transparent manner, external to the system. Conventionally, such lists have been compressed losslessly to save on the cost of the controller memory. Under the assumption of a total system cost that is a linear combination of the number of storage blocks and the controller memory size, we study the potential benefits of compressing the defect list using lossy algorithms, with the restriction that the reconstructed defect list not label any defective storage blocks as being non-defective.
Perceptions of quality in higher education: a comparative study of Turkish and Australian business academics

Finding a common definition of ‘quality’ in studies of quality and quality improvement in higher education institutions is very important. This study identifies the views of a key stakeholder group, academics, with reference to their beliefs (what is currently occurring) and their attitudes (what ought to be occurring) in relation to quality in their departments. The focus of this paper is on the collection of data from 64 business administration academics in Turkish universities. Face-to-face interviews were conducted using an instrument titled ‘Quality in Accounting Education Survey’. The questionnaire was developed by Watty and is based on the conceptions of quality framework, developed by Harvey and Green. The results are compared with the beliefs and attitudes of Australian accounting academics as reported in an earlier paper by Watty. The findings show that academics from Turkey adopt the perspective of quality as excellent or élitist, both in their beliefs (current situation perception) and in their attitudes (desired situation perception). This compares with the findings that Australian academics’ attitudes reflect a quality perspective as fitness for purpose in the current situation and beliefs that reflect a transformational quality perspective as the desired situation (what ought to be).
Simple sybil-proof mechanisms for multi-level marketing

Multi-level marketing refers to a marketing approach in which buyers are encouraged to take an active role in promoting the product. This is done by offering them a reward for each successful referral of the product to other prospective buyers. To encourage potential customers to buy early and to give referrals to influential people, these mechanisms also reward indirect referrals - direct referrals linked to the buyer through other direct referrals. One potential drawback to multi-level mechanisms is that they could allow for sybil attacks. A sybil attack consists of a user purchasing multiple copies of the product under false identities to increase its reward. For example, a user can create two identities, the second with a referral from the first. Then, for each referral made through the second identity both identities would capture some reward. The additional reward captured could be greater than the cost of buying additional product. A sybil at tack is undesirable because it reduces the profits of the seller, since buyers are getting higher rewards than what the seller intended for them to receive. After a sybil attack, an ancestor of the attacker is farther in the referral tree from the children of the attacker. In many reward mechanisms, this means that the ancestor gets less reward from each child, reducing his incentive to make referrals.
Decisions With Uncertainty: The Glass Half Full

Each of us makes important decisions involving uncertainty in domains in which we are not experts, such as retirement planning, medical treatment, and precautions against severe weather. Often, reliable information about uncertainty is available to us, although how effectively we incorporate it into the decision process remains in question. Previous research suggests that people are error-prone when reasoning with probability. However, recent research in weather-related decision making is more encouraging. Unlike earlier work that compares people’s decisions with a rational standard, this research compares decisions made by people with and without uncertainty information. The results suggest that including specific numeric uncertainty estimates in weather forecasts increases trust and gives people a better idea of what to expect in terms of both the range of possible outcomes and the amount of uncertainty in the particular situation, all of which benefit precautionary decisions. However, the advantage for uncertainty estimates depends critically on how they are expressed. It is crucial that the expression is compatible with both the decision task and cognitive processes of the user.
Effects of Qigong on Depression: A Systemic Review

Physical exercises and relaxation have been found to be beneficial for depression. However, there is little evidence on the use of Qigong, a mind-body practice integrating gentle exercise and relaxation, in the management of depression. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the effects of Qigong on depression. The paper examined clinical trials measuring the effect of Qigong on depression within six large-scale medical research databases (PubMed, Medline, ProQuest, Science Direct, EMBASE, and PsycInfo) till October 2011. Key words “Qigong,” “depression,” and “mood” were used. Ten studies were identified as original randomized controlled trial (RCT) studies investigating the effect of Qigong on depression as primary (n = 2) or secondary outcome (n = 8). Four studies reported positive results of the Qigong treatment on depression; two reported that Qigong effect on depression was as effective as physical exercise. One study reported that Qigong was comparable to a conventional rehabilitation program, but the remaining three studies found no benefits of Qigong on depression. While the evidence suggests the potential effects of Qigong in the treatment of depression, the review of the literature shows inconclusive results. Further research using rigorous study designs is necessary to investigate the effectiveness of Qigong in depression.
Active Learning for Semi-Supervised K-Means Clustering

K-Means algorithm is one of the most used clustering algorithm for Knowledge Discovery in Data Mining. Seed based K-Means is the integration of a small set of labeled data (called seeds) to the K-Means algorithm to improve its performances and overcome its sensitivity to initial centers. These centers are, most of the time, generated at random or they are assumed to be available for each cluster. This paper introduces a new efficient algorithm for active seeds selection which relies on a Min-Max approach that favors the coverage of the whole dataset. Experiments conducted on artificial and real datasets show that, using our active seeds selection algorithm, each cluster contains at least one seed after a very small number of queries and thus helps reducing the number of iterations until convergence which is crucial in many KDD applications.
Led rather than leading? Research on homelessness in Britain

This article examines the history of British homelessness research and its politicization over the past 40 years. The relationship between homelessness research and policy has been developing since the 1960s, and by the 1990s the majority of research was undertaken within the policy arena. In part, this has arisen because of the way in which research has been funded in the UK, with funding being dominated by government or those seeking to criticize its policies. To varying degrees, this is also attributable to the acceptance of a homelessness paradigm, which was ultimately no more than an ideological construct, the ‘definitions’ of homelessness within British legislation. Fuelled by the growth of homelessness and an increase in charitable activity, the volume of research grew during the 1980s and 1990s, but without concurrent methodological and theoretical development. Recent academic critiques of British homelessness research are reviewed, including the movement towards re-conceptualizating homelessness. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Must I Be a Womanist?

I’m a black female religious scholar, but I’m not sure I’m a womanist. I was a black feminist before I heard of “womanist. ” I discovered black feminists in college when studying the black arts movements of the 1970s. I identifi ed black feminism with the 1970s—black power, poetry, literature, and defi ance. In my eyes, black feminists were radical, fi re-eating, justice-loving, law-defying women. Later in my college career, I came to the term womanist through literature. While writing a paper on Their Eyes Were Watching God, I read Alice Walker’s essays about recovering Zora Neale Hurston. I appreciated and related to Walker’s quest for a role model: “I write all the things I should have been able to read. ”1 I later learned of the womanist movement in religious scholarship. While looking for religious themes in black women’s writings, I came across Katie G. Cannon’s Black Womanist Ethics (1988). 2 It was the fi rst time I read about black women’s literature from the perspective of a religious scholar. As a result of Cannon’s work and that of other womanists, I never once doubted that I could have a place in religious scholarship. I never felt the pain that no one was talking about my experience, my literature, or my role models. I know that the fi rst
The well-being of children of incarcerated mothers: An exploratory study for the Netherlands

Little empirical research exists on children whose mothers are incarcerated. We examined Dutch children’s experiences regarding their mother’s incarceration, using a mixed methods approach. We found that, although children stay in various care-giving situations, a large proportion of them were already living apart from their mothers when maternal incarceration started. The children report elevated levels of problem behaviour and decreased well-being. There is evidence that these may also be due to the negative life events they experienced before their mother’s incarceration. Recommendations for future research are discussed.
Extract-biased pseudo-revelance feedback

Successfully retrieving a web document is a twofold problem: having an adequate query that can usefull y and properly help filtering relevant documents from hug e collections, and presenting the user those that m ay indeed fulfill his/her needs. In this paper, we focus on t he first issue ‐ the problem of having a misleading user query. The aim of the work is to refine a query by using extra cts instead of full documents. Extracts, in our con text, are actually summaries of documents of a hitlist produced by an extractive automatic summarizer. Automatic summarization of single and multi-documents is explored through Gist Summ, our Gist Summ arizer, which is based on the gist of a document, hence its name. Results on pseudo-relevance feedback for the Portuguese CHAVE collection show that gist-based extracts may improve information retriev al.
Evidence for an essential role of the sucrose transporter in phloem loading and assimilate partitioning.

Sucrose is the principal transport form of assimilates in most plants. In many species, translocation of assimilates from the mesophyll into the phloem for long distance transport is assumed to be carrier mediated. A putative sucrose proton cotransporter cDNA has been isolated from potato and shown to be expressed mainly in the phloem of mature exporting leaves. To study the in vivo role and function of the protein, potato plants were transformed with an antisense construct of the sucrose transporter cDNA under control of the CaMV 35S promoter. Upon maturation of the leaves, five transformants that expressed reduced levels of sucrose transporter mRNA developed local bleaching and curling of leaves. These leaves contained > 20‐fold higher concentrations of soluble carbohydrates and showed a 5‐fold increase in starch content as compared with wild type plants, as expected from a block in export. Transgenic plants with a reduced amount of sucrose carrier mRNA show a dramatic reduction in root development and tuber yield. Maximal photosynthetic activity was reduced at least in the strongly affected transformants. The effects observed in the antisense plants strongly support an apoplastic model for phloem loading, in which the sucrose transporter located at the phloem plasma membrane represents the primary route for sugar uptake into the long distance distribution network.
The Yersinia pestis YscY Protein Directly Binds YscX, a Secreted Component of the Type III Secretion Machinery

ABSTRACT Human pathogenic yersiniae organisms export and translocate the Yop virulence proteins and V antigen upon contact with a eukaryotic cell.Yersinia pestis mutants defective for production of YscX or YscY were unable to export the Yops and V antigen. YscX and YscY were both present in the Y. pestis cell pellet fraction; however, YscX was also found in the culture supernatant. YscY showed structural and amino acid sequence similarities to the Syc family of proteins. YscY specifically recognized and bound to a region of YscX that included a predicted coiled-coil region. These data suggest that YscY may function as a chaperone for YscX in Y. pestis.
MIMO spatial turbo coding with iterative equalization

This paper proposes a structure that combines iterative equalization and turbo decoding, denoted as spatial turbo coding (STC), for single carrier signaling to achieve near capacity performance in multipath-rich fading channels. Instead of multiplexing the encoded bits in the time domain as in the standard turbo codes, the proposed STC transmits coded bits in the space domain by employing multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transceiver to exploit space diversity, path diversity and coding gains through the decoding branches at the receiver. The considered MIMO detector is a MIMO frequency domain soft-cancelation and minimum mean square error equalizer (FD/SC-MMSE). Extrinsic Information Transfer (EXIT) chart analysis confirms that bit-error-rate (BER) pinch-off is achieved in 64-path Rayleigh fading channels with equal average path gains power which is just by about 1dB away from the static channel capacity/dimension of 2×2 MIMO systems.
Changing Interpretations of ‘Flexibility’ in the Planning Literature: From Opportunism to Creativity?

This article reflects on changing interpretations of flexibility in planning literature from the planning scholars' point of view. Flexibility was seen as a negative feature in the 1960s in the literature. In time, the literature shifted towards the idea that flexibility may be a positive asset that helps the stakeholders of urban development to cope with the challenges of growing complexity and diversity in urban space and society. In the recent literature, flexibility is associated with creativity. The article discusses recent trends in planning literature practice to explain this change.
A Digital Sensor Simulator of the Pushbroom Offner Hyperspectral Imaging Spectrometer

Sensor simulators can be used in forecasting the imaging quality of a new hyperspectral imaging spectrometer, and generating simulated data for the development and validation of the data processing algorithms. This paper presents a novel digital sensor simulator for the pushbroom Offner hyperspectral imaging spectrometer, which is widely used in the hyperspectral remote sensing. Based on the imaging process, the sensor simulator consists of a spatial response module, a spectral response module, and a radiometric response module. In order to enhance the simulation accuracy, spatial interpolation-resampling, which is implemented before the spatial degradation, is developed to compromise the direction error and the extra aliasing effect. Instead of using the spectral response function (SRF), the dispersive imaging characteristics of the Offner convex grating optical system is accurately modeled by its configuration parameters. The non-uniformity characteristics, such as keystone and smile effects, are simulated in the corresponding modules. In this work, the spatial, spectral and radiometric calibration processes are simulated to provide the parameters of modulation transfer function (MTF), SRF and radiometric calibration parameters of the sensor simulator. Some uncertainty factors (the stability, band width of the monochromator for the spectral calibration, and the integrating sphere uncertainty for the radiometric calibration) are considered in the simulation of the calibration process. With the calibration parameters, several experiments were designed to validate the spatial, spectral and radiometric response of the sensor simulator, respectively. The experiment results indicate that the sensor simulator is valid.
The Impact of Metropolitan Residential Segregation on the Employment Chances of Blacks and Whites in the United States

Studies of residential segregation's role in creating employment inequality between blacks and whites have focused on the characteristics of neighborhoods (e.g., mean SES or distance from job centers). in contrast, this study considers the broader structure of metropolitan segregation in which neighborhoods are situated and its impact on the racial disparity in access to employment opportunities. the study employs multilevel analyses and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to test the effects of metropolitan segregation in 1980 on respondents’ probability of being employed by 1990 net of individual and family level characteristics, and to assess the role of segregation in explaining the race gap in employment between blacks and whites. the analyses reveal that residential segregation decreases employment odds for blacks, but not for whites, and explains the residual race gap in the probability of being employed. in addition, the depressive effect of segregation on employment is weaker for black women than it is for black men.