Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effects of Corrective Exercise for Thoracic Hyperkyphosis on Posture, Balance, and Well-Being in Older Women: A Double-Blind, Group-Matched Design

Background and Purpose: The purpose of this study was to identify the effects of a corrective exercise for thoracic hyperkyphosis on posture, balance, and well-being in Korean community-dwelling older women. Methods: Fifty women 65 years of age and older, recruited from 2 senior centers, participated in this study. Participants were assigned to either the experimental group (EG) or the control group (CG) on the basis of convenience of location, and 22 in each were analyzed. Participants in the EG underwent a thoracic corrective exercise program 1 hour each session, twice per week for 8 weeks (a total of 16 sessions), which consisted of specific exercises to enhance breathing, thoracic mobility and stability, and awareness of thoracic alignment. The CG received education on the same thoracic corrective exercise program and a booklet of the exercises. Outcome measures included the extent of postural abnormality (angle of thoracic kyphosis, kyphosis index calculated both in relaxed- and best posture using flexicurve, the ratio of the kyphosis index calculated best posture/relaxed posture, craniovertebral angle, and tragus-to-wall distance), balance (Short Physical Performance Battery and limit of stability), and well-being (Geriatric Depression Scale Short Form and the 36-Item Short Form Health Survey [SF-36]). All data were collected by 6 blinded assessors at baseline, at 8 weeks after the completion of intervention, and at 16 weeks for follow-up. Results and Discussion: For participants of the EG, means of all parameters showed significant improvements over time (P < .05), with improved values both in comparison of baseline to postintervention and baseline to follow-up. Means of CG parameters were significantly improved in only the angle of thoracic kyphosis and the tragus-to-wall distance (P < .05). Furthermore, in all parameters, percent change between baseline and postintervention data was significantly (P < .05) higher for the EG than that for the CG, except for the limit of stability and SF-36 which improved but not significantly. All parameters between baseline and follow-up data were significantly (P < .05) higher for the EG than those for the CG, except for the limit of stability. Conclusions: The findings of this study suggest that a well-designed exercise program may be beneficial to improve spinal posture, balance, and well-being in older women with thoracic hyperkyphosis. We recommend the use of the therapeutic strategies utilized in this study to enhance thoracic posture, balance, and well-being of older women with thoracic hyperkyphosis. Future research is needed to apply this exercise protocol on a larger and more diverse population.
Formalization of the Java 5 . 0 Type System

With the introduction of Java 5.0 the type system has been extended by parameterized types, type variables, type terms, and wildcards. As a result very complex types can arise. The term Vector<? extends Vector<AbstractList<Integer>>> is for example a correct type in Java 5.0. In this paper we present a formalization of this type system. We define the set of correct Java 5.0 type terms, formally. We give a formal definition of the Java 5.0 subtyping ordering. Finally, we consider the properties of the subtyping ordering, which follow from the introduction of wildcards.
Direct Measurement of Conduction Velocity in In situ Specialized Conducting System of Mammalian Heart.∗

Summary By use of a pump-oxygenator and cardiopulmonary bypass, bipolar electro-grams have been recorded under direct vision from the bundle of His, the right and left bundle branches and peripheral Purkinje system of dog hearts. Conduction velocity from the bundle of His to bundle branches is 1.0-1.5 m/sec, while in the false tendons this value is 3-4 m/sec at 36°C.
Sclerochronological records of Arctica islandica from the inner German Bight

Sclerochronological records of interannual shell growth variability were established for eight modern shells (26 to 163 years of age) of the bivalve Arctica islandica, which were sampled at one site in the inner German Bight. The records indicate generally low synchrony between individuals. Spectral analysis of the whole 163-yr masterchronology indicated a cyclic pattern with a period of 5 and 7 years. The masterchronology correlated poorly to time series of environmental parameters over the last 90 years. High environmental variability in time and space of the dynamic and complex German Bight hydrographic system results in an extraordinarily high ‘noise’ level in the shell growth pattern of Arctica islandica.
Cellular Responses to Excess Phospholipid*

Phosphatidylcholine (PtdCho) is the major membrane phospholipid in mammalian cells, and its synthesis is controlled by the activity of CDP:phosphocholine cytidylyltransferase (CCT). Enforced CCT expression accelerated the rate of PtdCho synthesis. However, the amount of cellular PtdCho did not increase as a result of the turnover of both the choline and glycerol components of PtdCho. Metabolic labeling experiments demonstrated that cells compensated for elevated CCT activity by the degradation of PtdCho to glycerophosphocholine (GPC). Phospholipase D-mediated PtdCho hydrolysis and phosphocholine formation were unaffected. Most of the GPC produced in response to excess phospholipid production was secreted into the medium. Cells also degraded the excess membrane PtdCho to GPC when phospholipid formation was increased by exposure to exogenous lysophosphatidylcholine or lysophosphatidylethanolamine. The replacement of the acyl moiety at the 1-position of PtdCho with a non-hydrolyzable alkyl moiety prevented degradation to GPC. Accumulation of alkylacyl-PtdCho was associated with the inhibition of cell proliferation, demonstrating that alternative pathways of degradation will not substitute. GPC formation was blocked by bromoenol lactone, implicating the calcium-independent phospholipase A2 as a key participant in the response to excess phospholipid. Owing to the fact that PtdCho is biosynthetically converted to PtdEtn, excess PtdCho resulted in overproduction and exit of GPE as well as GPC. Thus, general membrane phospholipid homeostasis is achieved by a balance between the opposing activities of CCT and phospholipase A2.
Intracellular Calcium Homeostasis in Cardiac Myocytes

Calcium homeostasis in cardiac myocytes results from the integrated function of transsarcolemmal Ca2+ influx and efflux pathways modulated by membrane potential and from intracellular Ca2+ uptake and release caused predominantly by SR function. These processes can be importantly altered in different disease states as well as by pharmacological agents, and the resulting changes in systolic and diastolic [Ca2+]i can cause clinically significant alterations in contraction and relaxation of the heart. It may be anticipated that a rapid increase in our understanding of the pathophysiology of Ca2+ homeostasis in cardiac myocytes will be forthcoming as the powerful new tools of molecular and structural biology are used to investigate the regulation of Ca2+ transport systems.
Evaluation of costs accrued through inadvertent continuation of hospital-initiated proton pump inhibitor therapy for stress ulcer prophylaxis beyond hospital discharge: a retrospective chart review

Background Stress ulcers and related upper gastrointestinal bleeding are well-known complications in intensive care unit (ICU) patients. Proton pump inhibitor (PPI)-based stress ulcer prophylaxis (SUP) has been widely prescribed in noncritically ill patients who are at low risk for clinically significant bleeding, which is then injudiciously continued after hospital discharge. This study aimed to evaluate the incidence of inappropriate prescribing of PPI-based preventative therapy in ICU versus non-ICU patients that subsequently continued postdischarge, and to estimate the costs incurred by the unwarranted outpatient continuation of PPI therapy. Methods A retrospective review of patient data at a major teaching hospital in Korea was performed. During the 4-year study period, adult patients who were newly initiated on PPI-based SUP during hospital admission and subsequently discharged on a PPI without a medical indication for such therapy were captured for data analysis. The incidence rates of inappropriate prescribing of PPIs were compared between ICU and non-ICU patients, and the costs associated with such therapy were also examined. Results A total of 4,410 patients, more than half of the inpatient-initiated PPI users, were deemed to have been inadvertently prescribed a PPI at discharge in the absence of a medical need for acid suppression. The incidence of inappropriate outpatient continuation of the prophylaxis was higher among ICU patients compared with non-ICU patients (57.7% versus 52.2%, respectively; P=0.001). The total expenditure accrued through the continuation of nonindicated PPI therapy was approximately US$40,175. Conclusion This study confirmed that excess usage of PPIs for SUP has spread to low-risk, non-ICU patients. The overuse of unwarranted PPI therapy can incur large health care expenditure, as well as clinical complications with minimal therapeutic benefits. Educating clinicians regarding SUP guidelines and the adverse effects of long-term use of acid suppression can improve the cost effectiveness of PPI therapy.
Retrieval method of enormous POI in vehicle navigation system

In Vehicle Navigation System, POI(Points of Interest) Retrieval is important. Since the restriction of the Embedded System, the retrieval should deal with enormous POI data in limited external memory and internal memory, when the retrieval speed should fit for the vehicle navigation. The rapid retrieval method is designed for solving the problem. The method is based on Chinese Pinyin. It includes the storage method of search table with Digital Search Tree and Character Compression. The method for retrieving in the compressed data is also designed. By the design, the size of the file for the POI retrieval is reduced, so the demand of external and internal memory is lower, when the retrieval is fast enough for the vehicle navigation.
Automated Evaluation System for Human Pupillary Behavior

Analyzing human pupillary behavior is a non-invasive method for evaluating neurological activity. This method contributes to the medical field because changes in pupillary behavior can be correlated with several health conditions such as Parkinson, Alzheimer, autism and diabetes. Analyzing human pupillary behavior is simple and low-cost, and may be used as a complementary diagnosis. Therefore, this work aims to develop an automated system to evaluate human pupillary behavior. The solution consists of a portable recording device, a pupillometer; integrated with a recording and evaluation software based on computer vision. The system is able to stimulate, record, measure and extract relevant features of human pupillary behavior. The results show that the proposed system is fast and accurate, and can be used as an assessment tool for real and extensive clinical practice and research.
A COMPUTATIONAL METHOD TO EMULATE BOTTOM-UP ATTENTION TO REMOTE SENSING IMAGES

: In this paper, we propose a computational model which is capable of emulating the expert’s bottom-up attention to remote sensing images. The bottom-up visual attention is a relatively primary step in neuroscience, and it can perfectly perform recognition if combined with context. Thus, efficient and fast bottom-up model is in need to give convenience to process context in following step. Our computational model well conforms to these conditions. The model cut down uncertain complication of visual attention by introduction of textons based on neurobiology and information entropy. First, our model processes images extremely rapidly while achieves relatively high hit rates. Second, our model provides rarity hierarchy by converting unique or rare visual attributes to number rare attribute for future processing. Third, our results provide size, shape and location information for the future context attention computation.
Albanian Higher Education Strategy

Since its inception, the governments of 29 European countries (member states of the Bologna Declaration in 1999) had as their main target the creation of a common and coherent system of Higher Education Area in Europe (EHEA). The main intention for the creation of a ‘European Education Area’ was the fostering of student mobility and employability in order to strengthen competition and to make the European Higher Education more attractive. The main focus of this paper is the analysis of the National Periodic Reports for the period 2004-2009, the Albanian National Strategy for Higher Education 2014-2020, and a study on the presence of Quality Assurance Institutions in Higher Education, based on the report from the Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency. The methodology chosen by the authors of this paper is to divide into four groups the countries that have established a national or private Quality Assurance Institution as part of their higher education system in order to assess whether the existence/presence of such institutions act as key instruments to ensuring the quality of higher education. It is recommended that Albania even though listed in the group of countries establishing a National Quality Assurance Agency, can ‘maybe’ follow the model of those European countries that have established a further Private Quality Assurance Agency in addition to the National Quality Assurance Agency. It is believed that the further establishment of a carefully chosen private quality assurance agency (ENQA or EQAR) would ensure quality and guarantee transparency in higher education.
Book Reviews: Coherence in Natural Language: Data Stuctures and Applications, by Florian Wolf and Edward Gibson

In his blurb on the back cover, Mark Liberman calls this book " the biggest step forward [in research on discourse structure] since Aristotle. " Given this eminent recommendation , I read the book with great interest and some anticipation. Wolf and Gibson's book contributes to the growing body of work on computational models of text structure. Following a tradition originating with Mann and Thompson (1988) and Hobbs (1985), Wolf and Gibson assume a " relational " account of coherence: the coherence of a text is attributed to the presence of relations holding at various levels of hierarchy between its constituent elements. Traditionally, relations hold between pairs of propositions; canonical examples are CAUSE, TEMPORAL SEQUENCE, and ELABORATION. Work on relational models of text has pursued two related questions. One question concerns how to characterize the set of special relations whose presence can confer coherence on a text. How many such relations are there, and how should each relation be defined? A second question concerns where in a text we expect these special relations to be found. Answering this question involves using relations as building blocks in a theory of text structure. Wolf and Gibson's book addresses this latter question: their main aim is to propose and argue for a particular theory about the structure of relations in coherent text. Broadly speaking, there are two alternative theories about the arrangement of relations in coherent text. Both are expressed using the terminology of graph theory: the sequence of atomic discourse segments in a text is interpreted as a set of nodes in a graph, ordered by adjacency, and relations introduce arcs (and sometimes additional nodes) into this graph. One theory proposes that the relations in a coherent text must form a tree structure. In this model, each relation holds between two adjacent nodes, and creates a new node representing a unit of text spanning both nodes which can itself be linked to other units by other relations; see Figure 1 for an example. The other theory is less restrictive, requiring only that the relations in a coherent text form a connected graph. In this model, arcs directly denote relations; see Figure 2 for an example. Note that in the graph model, relations can hold between discontiguous text segments and participate in crossing dependencies between segments, and that a single text segment can be involved in several relations. Wolf and Gibson's central proposal …
A modified E-shaped triple-band patch antenna for LTE communication applications

In this paper, an E-shaped triple-band patch antenna is proposed for LTE operation at lower band (920-960 MHz), middle band (1.9-2.2 GHz) and upper band (3.4-3.8 GHz). The proposed E-shaped patch antenna is fed by coaxial probe. Two metal shorted pins are used to connect the E-shaped patch to the ground and two rectangle slots are etched on the ground plane to obtain the desired triple-band operation. The simulation results show that the proposed E-shaped patch antenna not only covers three LTE bands, but also has the good directional radiation patterns, which can be used in most of the LTE communication systems.
Performance evaluation of adaptivity in software transactional memory

Transactional memory (TM) is an attractive platform for parallel programs, and several software transactional memory (STM) designs have been presented. We explore and analyze several optimization opportunities to adapt STM parameters to a running program. This paper uses adaptSTM, a flexible STM library with a non-adaptive baseline common to current fast STM libraries to evaluate different performance options. The baseline is extended by an online evaluation system that enables the measurement of key runtime parameters like read- and write-locations, or commit- and abort-rate. The performance data is used by a thread-local adaptation system to tune the STM configuration. The system adapts different important parameters like write-set hash-size, hash-function, and write strategy based on runtime statistics on a per-thread basis. We discuss different self-adapting parameters, especially their performance implications and the resulting trade-offs. Measurements show that local per-thread adaptation outperforms global system-wide adaptation. We position local adaptivity as an extension to existing systems. Using the STAMP benchmarks, we compare adaptSTM to two other STM libraries, TL2 and tinySTM. Comparing adaptSTM and the adaptation system to TL2 results in an average speedup of 43% for 8 threads and 137% for 16 threads. adaptSTM offers performance that is competitive with tinySTM for low-contention benchmarks; for high-contention benchmarks adaptSTM outperforms tinySTM. Thread-local adaptation alone increases performance on average by 4.3% for 16 threads, and up to 10% for individual benchmarks, compared to adaptSTM without active adaptation.
An interpretive and postulational model for perception and adoption of innovation

The problem with which this research is dealing is the lack of any explanatory model which explains both the perception and the adoption of new products. One objective of this study is to advance a new conceptual framework concerning both the perception and the adoption of new products. The second objective of this study is to evaluate this new framework theoretically and empirically. Bunge's evaluative criteria are used to evaluate the new model theoretically while Hunter, Schmidt, and Jackson's meta-analysis technique is used to evaluate the model empirically. An extensive review of literature pertaining to the definition of innovation, the adoption process, and innovativeness is included in the second chapter. Chapter three covers research plan and methods. The new model and its assumptions are presented in chapter four. The results of both theoretical and empirical investigations of the new model are reported in chapter five. Finally, chapter six includes a discussion of the main findings and provides some suggestions for future research. An interpretive and postulational model is introduced in this study. The model is built on three main assumptions and contains thirty-one different theoretical constructs. Those constructs are bounded together by forty-six theoretical propositions. Those propositions are the postulates or the axioms which state the nature of the interrelationships among all constructs included in the model.
MEF9, an E-Subclass Pentatricopeptide Repeat Protein, Is Required for an RNA Editing Event in the nad7 Transcript in Mitochondria of Arabidopsis1[C][OA]

RNA editing in plants alters specific nucleotides from C to U in mRNAs in plastids and in mitochondria. I here characterize the nuclear gene MITOCHONDRIAL EDITING FACTOR9 (MEF9) that is required for RNA editing of the site nad7-200 in the nad7 mitochondrial mRNA in Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana). The MEF9 protein belongs to the E subfamily of pentatricopeptide repeat proteins and unlike the three previously identified mitochondrial editing factors MEF1 and MEF11 in Arabidopsis and OGR1 in rice (Oryza sativa) does not contain a DYW C-terminal domain. In addition, the E domain is incomplete, but seems to be functionally required, since one of the two independent EMS mutants encodes a MEF9 protein truncated by a stop codon at the beginning of the E domain. In both mutant plants premature stop codons in MEF9 inactivate RNA editing at site nad7-200. The homozygous mutant plants are viable and develop rather normally. The lack of RNA editing at site nad7-200 thus seems to be tolerated although this editing event is conserved in most plant species or the genomic sequence already codes for a T at this position, resulting in a generally conserved amino acid codon.
Mobile kits and laptop trays: managing multiple devices in mobile information work

A study at a large IT company shows that mobile information workers frequently migrate work across devices (here: smartphones, desktop PCs, laptops). While having multiple devices provides new opportunities to work in the face of changing resource deprivations, the management of devices is often problematic. The most salient problems are posed by 1) the physical effort demanded by various management tasks, 2) anticipating what data or functionality will be needed, and 3) aligning these efforts with work, mobility, and social situations. Workers' strategies of coping with these problems center on two interwoven activities: the physical handling of devices and cross-device synchronization. These aim at balancing risk and effort in immediate and subsequent use. Workers also exhibit subtle ways to handle devices in situ, appropriating their physical and operational properties. The design implications are discussed.
Diffusion LMS for multitask problems with overlapping hypothesis subspaces

There are many important applications that are multitask-oriented in the sense that there are multiple optimum parameter vectors to be inferred simultaneously by networked agents. In this paper, we formulate an online multitask learning problem where node hypothesis spaces partly overlap. A cooperative algorithm based on diffusion adaptation is derived. Some results on its stability and convergence properties are also provided. Simulations are conducted to illustrate the theoretical results.
Effect of the polarization on SISAR imaging and feature recognition in forward scattering radar

In this paper, the effect of the polarization and the multipath on shadow inverse synthetic aperture radar (SISAR) imaging is analyzed respectively in forward scattering radar (FSR). The multi-polarization and the multipath imaging results of targets, based on SISAR, are discussed respectively. In addition, the target forward scattering (FS) RCS under multi-polarization conditions are also obtained using CST simulation software to research the effect of multi-polarization on moving target feature recognition in FSR.