Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Influence of Task Constraints and Device Properties on Motor Patterns in a Realistic Control Situation

ABSTRACT The influences of task difficulty (index difficulty: 2–4), input device of different length, range of motion and mode of resistance (joystick or rotorcraft stick), and directions of movement (leftward rightward) on motor patterns in a realistic control situation were examined with a multilevel analysis (joint kinematics and muscular variables, and global task performance). Eight subjects controlled the displacements of a virtual object during a slalom task characterized by a realistic inertial model. Pilots adapted the endpoint kinematic organization to increasing accuracy constraints to preserve task success whatever the device and the direction. However, the rotorcraft stick manipulation remains highly complex in comparison to the joystick due to poorer proprioceptive information, higher inertial constraints, and an asymmetrical muscle control.
The effects of physical exercise in children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder: a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized control trials.

OBJECTIVE The aim of this systematic review and meta-analysis was to examine the evidence for the effectiveness of exercise interventions on attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)-related symptoms such as inattention, hyperactivity/impulsivity, anxiety and cognitive functions in children and adolescents. METHOD Five databases covering the period up to November 2014 (PubMed, Scopus, EMBASE, EBSCO [E-journal, CINAHL, SportDiscus] and The Cochrane Library) were searched. Methodological quality was assessed using the Cochrane tool of bias. Standardized mean differences (SMD) and 95% confidence intervals were calculated, and the heterogeneity of the studies was estimated using Cochran's Q-statistic. RESULTS Eight randomized controlled trials (n = 249) satisfied the inclusion criteria. The studies were grouped according to the intervention programme: aerobic and yoga exercise. The meta-analysis suggests that aerobic exercise had a moderate to large effect on core symptoms such as attention (SMD = 0.84), hyperactivity (SMD = 0.56) and impulsivity (SMD = 0.56) and related symptoms such as anxiety (SMD = 0.66), executive function (SMD = 0.58) and social disorders (SMD = 0.59) in children with ADHD. Yoga exercise suggests an improvement in the core symptoms of ADHD. CONCLUSIONS The main cumulative evidence indicates that short-term aerobic exercise, based on several aerobic intervention formats, seems to be effective for mitigating symptoms such as attention, hyperactivity, impulsivity, anxiety, executive function and social disorders in children with ADHD.
The Role of Configural Processing in Face Classification by Race: An ERP Study

The current study investigated the time course of the other-race classification advantage (ORCA) in the subordinate classification of normally configured faces and distorted faces by race. Slightly distorting the face configuration delayed the categorization of own-race faces and had no conspicuous effects on other-race faces. The N170 was sensitive neither to configural distortions nor to faces' races. The P3 was enhanced for other-race than own-race faces and reduced by configural manipulation only for own-race faces. We suggest that the source of ORCA is the configural analysis applied by default while processing own-race faces.
Automatic acquisition device identification from speech recordings

In this paper we present a study on the automatic identification of acquisition devices when only access to the output speech recordings is possible. A statistical characterization of the frequency response of the device contextualized by the speech content is proposed. In particular, the intrinsic characteristics of the device are captured by a template, constructed by appending together the means of a Gaussian mixture trained on the device speech recordings. This study focuses on two classes of acquisition devices, namely, landline telephone handsets and microphones. Three publicly available databases are used to assess the performance of linear- and mel-scaled cepstral coefficients. A Support Vector Machine classifier was used to perform closed-set identification experiments. The results show classification accuracies higher than 90 percent among the eight telephone handsets and eight microphones tested.
Knowledge Nebula Crystallizer for Knowledge Liquidization & Crystallization – from a Theory to a Methodology of Knowledge Management -

We propose a new concept of knowledge management “Knowledge Liquidization and Crystallization”, and a system “Knowledge Nebula Crystallizer” to support the process. Though there are several theories about knowledge creation (Nonaka et al. 1995)(Fischer et al. 2001)(Shneiderman 1998) and a number of companies have realized their importance, most of them face to difficulty of applying them to their real workflows. It is because they have not mentioned how companies should apply them to their workflows. Though traditional knowledge management methods have tried to capture and accumulate “knowledge” itself, it is impossible because knowledge is not something clear-shaped but is embedded in a “context” where a person interacts with an artefact. What can be captured is data or information that describes knowledge and can be used to generate new knowledge (Hackbarth and Grover 1999). In this paper, we are going to describe our approach to a new methodology for knowledge management. As exhibition designing is an example of a task that highly depends on implicit knowledge of professionals and that requires a methodology of knowledge management, it was chosen as an application of our concept to a real work place. A methodology for knowledge acquisition in the domain and “Knowledge Nebula Crystallizer for Exhibition Designing” are described.
Mining Very Large Databases

Established companies have had decades to accumulate masses of data about their customers, suppliers, products and services, and employees. Data mining, also known as knowledge discovery in databases, gives organizations the tools to sift through these vast data stores to find the trends, patterns, and correlations that can guide strategic decision making. Traditionally, algorithms for data analysis assume that the input data contains relatively few records. Current databases however, are much too large to be held in main memory. To be efficient, the data mining techniques applied to very large databases must be highly scalable. An algorithm is said to be scalable if (given a fixed amount of main memory), its runtime increases linearly with the number of records in the input database. Recent work has focused on scaling data mining algorithms to very large data sets. The authors describe a broad range of algorithms that address three classical data mining problems: market basket analysis, clustering, and classification.
Telmisartan reduces mortality and left ventricular hypertrophy with sympathoinhibition in rats with hypertension and heart failure.

BACKGROUND Angiotensin II type 1 receptor (AT1R) blockers have various benefits on hypertension and/or heart failure. We demonstrated that telmisartan (TLM), an AT1R blocker, causes sympathoinhibition by reduction of reactive oxygen species (ROS) in the rostral ventrolateral medulla (RVLM) of stroke-prone spontaneously hypertensive rats (SHRSPs). The aim of this study was to determine whether TLM improves survival in rats with hypertension and heart failure. METHODS Angiotensin II-infused and salt-loaded SHRSPs were divided into TLM-treated, candesartan cilexetil (CAN)-treated, and control groups. We determined the dose of TLM or CAN with similar depressor effects. We examined survival, urinary norepinephrine excretion (uNE) as a parameter of sympathoexcitation, ROS in the RVLM, and left ventricular (LV) end-diastolic pressure (LVEDP). LV hypertrophy (LVH) was assessed by echocardiography and heart/body weight. RESULTS Compared with the control group, TLM improved survival to a greater extent than CAN. At 4 weeks after treatment, ROS in the RVLM and uNE were significantly lower in the TLM-treated group than in the CAN-treated group, despite the similar depressor effects. At 8 weeks after the treatments, LVH and LVEDP were attenuated in the TLM-treated group compared with the CAN-treated group. CONCLUSIONS Our results suggest that TLM has the potential to reduce mortality, LVH, and LVEDP and that enhanced sympathoinhibition by reduction of ROS in the RVLM might be one of the mechanisms contributing to the beneficial actions of TLM in a model of rats with severe hypertension and heart failure.
PUBLIC LINEAR PROGRAMMING SOLUTION FOR THE DESIGN OF SECURE AND EFFICIENT COMPUTING IN CLOUD

This next generation of computing holds enormous po tential to stimulate economic growth and enable gov ernments to reduce costs, increase transparency and expand services to citize ns. Cloud computing robust computational power to the s ociety at reduced cost and enables customers with limited computational resour ces to outsource their large computation workloads to the cloud, and economically enjoy the massive computational power, bandwidth, s torage, and even appropriate software that can be s hared in a pay-per-use manner. Despite the tremendous benefits, security is the pr imary obstacle that prevents the wide adoption of t his promising computing model, especially for customers when their confidential da ta are consumed and produced during the computation .
Who Wears Me? Bioimpedance as a Passive Biometric

Mobile and wearable systems for monitoring health are becoming common. If such an mHealth system knows the identity of its wearer, the system can properly label and store data collected by the system. Existing recognition schemes for such mobile applications and pervasive devices are not particularly usable - they require active engagement with the person (e.g., the input of passwords), or they are too easy to fool (e.g., they depend on the presence of a device that is easily stolen or lost). We present a wearable sensor to passively recognize people. Our sensor uses the unique electrical properties of a person's body to recognize their identity. More specifically, the sensor uses bioimpedance - a measure of how the body's tissues oppose a tiny applied alternating current - and learns how a person's body uniquely responds to alternating current of different frequencies. In this paper we demonstrate the feasibility of our system by showing its effectiveness at accurately recognizing people in a household 90% of the time.
Don't shed tears over breaks

This essay deals with ‘discontinuous phenomena’ in time-series. It is an introduction to, and a brief survey of aspects concerning the concepts of segmentation into ‘smooth’ pieces on the one hand, and the complementary notion of the identification of jumps, on the other hand. We restrict ourselves to variational approaches, both in discrete, and in continuous time. They will define ‘filters’, with data as ‘inputs’ and minimizers of functionals as ‘outputs’. The main example is a particularly simple model, which, for historical reasons, we decided to call the Potts functional. We will argue that it is an appropriate tool for the extraction of the simplest and most basic morphological features from data. This is an attempt to interpret data from a well-defined point of view. It is in contrast to restoration of a true signal perhaps distorted and degraded by noise which is not in the main focus of this paper. The discussion proceeds along two real-world data sets, one from brain mapping, and one from functional genomics. These are typical examples, where little or no ground truth is available. The standard paradigm of statistical modelling based on the assumption that data are samples from distributions in a specific class clearly does not make sense in such a situation. Therefore we adopt the philosophy, that models are a step towards the construction of necessarily nonlinear filters which finally extract the envisaged features. In view of the indistinct nature of such data, the whole procedure should follow the principle of parsimony or sparsity. Which characteristic features we want to, or have to extract from data is dictated by the concrete application, or rather the needs of our partners from life sciences. In the context of edge-preserving smoothing, various types of variational models can be found in the literature. Most of them are closely related, or are limits of each other as model parameters or the sampling rate vary. We aim at an integral view; to ∗Partially supported by DFG Graduate Programme ‘Applied Algorithmic Mathematics’ at the TU München and DFG grant SFB 386 at the LMU München
Potato Virus X Amplicons in Arabidopsis Mediate Genetic and Epigenetic Gene Silencing

Amplicon transgenes from potato virus X (PVX) are based on a modified version of the viral genome and are efficient activators of post-transcriptional gene silencing (PTGS). To determine whether PVX amplicons activate PTGS in Arabidopsis, we used constructs based on the genome of PVX carrying a green fluorescent protein (GFP) reporter gene. Our analysis of the transgene phenotype exploited previous observations indicating that PTGS is associated with short 25-nucleotide RNA species, transgene methylation, and homology-dependent virus resistance. We also used the ability of turnip mosaic virus to suppress gene silencing as a means of dissecting stages of the mechanism. The results showed that a PVX:GFP amplicon induces weak PTGS and that this PTGS was enhanced in the presence of a GFP reporter gene. Our interpretation of these data is that the PTGS induced by the amplicon was genetically determined and equivalent to the initiation stage of the PTGS mechanism. The PTGS induced by the combined amplicon and reporter gene was equivalent to the maintenance stage and was associated with an epigenetic conversion of the transgene. The distinction between genetic and epigenetic PTGS explains the well-characterized effects of transgene dosage on PTGS that have been previously interpreted in terms of RNA expression thresholds.
Compiler-directed content-aware prefetching for dynamic data structures

We describe compiler-directed content-aware prefetching (CDCAP), an integrated compiler and hardware approach for prefetching dynamic data structures. The approach utilizes compiler-inserted prefetch instructions to convey information about a dynamic data structure to a prefetching engine. The technique eliminates the need to transform the data structure without the use of excessive prefetches and does not require prior knowledge of data traversals. The approach also eliminates the need for large hardware structures and reduces unnecessary prefetches. For pointer intensive programs, the CDCAP approach reduces memory stall time by up to 40% and out performs previously proposed prefetching techniques.
Re-Seeing Resistances: Telling Stories.

/ tried to explain the focus of this paper—the embodied theorizing about teaching I was trying to articulate, the lure of teacher stories about our "resistant" students that I wanted to understand—to my mother several weeks ago. She's been a math teacher and a professional tutor for more than a quarter ofa century. These years in a range of teaching positions have coalesced into what often seems to me an enviably uncomplicated theory of teaching: "You figure out what you want to happen in a class, what you want kids to learn, and then you try to find the best way to make that happen. Things don't always work out like you planned, and you need to think about why that happens, too. " "I'm writing about student resistance in the classes I teach, " / told her, "trying to think about roots of it and better ways to respond to it. I am going to call the paper 'Re-Seeing Resistances. 'I want to think about the stories we tell and the metaphors we use. " She looked at me, blinking a few times. I tried again. "You know, when students resist you, when. " Talking about Henry Giroux, Paulo Freire, Ira Shor, or Robert Brooke probably wouldn 't make this project any more transparent for her, andlcouldn 't think of another way to explain the project except through stories that bordered on complaint. Days later, she told me about a troubling student: distracted, unwilling to listen to her suggestions, complaining that the problems were too hard and had no purpose in the real world. "He's wasting his parents 'money, " she sighed, "and he just won't try. " Resistance, I thought. You know it when you see it. '
Gewinnt der Mensch nur da, wo er spielt? Ein Essay über Gamification zur Bewältigung von Anforderungen der Arbeitswelt

Unternehmen sind erfinderisch geworden. In unserer an Output-Steigerung orientierten Marktgesellschaft werden unter dem Schlagwort Â„GamificationÂ“ bewusst spielerische Elemente in gewohnliche Arbeitsprozesse implementiert. Dies erfolgt u.a. , um die Arbeitsleistung der Mitarbeitenden zu steigern. Kreativ und frei arbeiten, ja, aber nur innerhalb der Vorgaben und analog zur Unternehmensphilosophie? Ergebnisorientierung und Effizienz, ja, und zugleich eine ausgewogene Work-Life-Balance? Der vorliegende Beitrag hinterfragt, ob die Implementierung von Spielelementen helfen kann, den kontraren Anforderungen der westlichen Arbeitswelt gerecht zu werden. Hierfur wird insbesondere auf Friedrich Schiller zuruckgegriffen, der den Spieltrieb als vermittelnde Instanz zwischen dem sinnlichen Stofftrieb und dem vernunftgeleiteten Formtrieb definierte. Darauf aufbauend wird der Begriff Â„GamificationÂ“ expliziert. Den Abschluss bilden Ableitungen fur Bildungsbestrebungen. (DIPF/Orig.) Companies have become inventive. In our free market society, which is oriented to increasing output, the term Â“gamificationÂ” refers to the conscious integration of playful elements into normal working processes. This is done, among other reasons, to increase employee work performance. To work creatively and freely, yes, but only according to the rules and in line with the company's philosophy? To work result-oriented and efficiently, yes, while achieving a good work-life balance? This article examines whether the integration of elements of play can help to satisfy the contrary demands of the world of work in the West. Reference is made to Friedrich Schiller, who defined the play drive as the mediating instance between the sense drive and the form drive, the latter of which is guided by reason. The term Â“gamificationÂ” is explicated in reference to these terms. The article ends with conclusions for educational endeavours. (DIPF/Orig.)
A general framework for adaptive processing of data structures

A structured organization of information is typically required by symbolic processing. On the other hand, most connectionist models assume that data are organized according to relatively poor structures, like arrays or sequences. The framework described in this paper is an attempt to unify adaptive models like artificial neural nets and belief nets for the problem of processing structured information. In particular, relations between data variables are expressed by directed acyclic graphs, where both numerical and categorical values coexist. The general framework proposed in this paper can be regarded as an extension of both recurrent neural networks and hidden Markov models to the case of acyclic graphs. In particular we study the supervised learning problem as the problem of learning transductions from an input structured space to an output structured space, where transductions are assumed to admit a recursive hidden statespace representation. We introduce a graphical formalism for representing this class of adaptive transductions by means of recursive networks, i.e., cyclic graphs where nodes are labeled by variables and edges are labeled by generalized delay elements. This representation makes it possible to incorporate the symbolic and subsymbolic nature of data. Structures are processed by unfolding the recursive network into an acyclic graph called encoding network. In so doing, inference and learning algorithms can be easily inherited from the corresponding algorithms for artificial neural networks or probabilistic graphical model.
Effects of fish oil supplementation on the fatty acid profile in erythrocyte membrane and plasma phospholipids of pregnant women and their offspring: a randomised controlled trial

We aimed to investigate the effects of fish oil (FO) supplementation to pregnant women on the maternal and fetal fatty acid profile in plasma and erythrocyte phospholipids (PL) and to identify the best compartment for the assessment of fatty acid status. A multi-centre, double-blind, controlled trial was conducted. Healthy pregnant women from three European centres were randomly assigned to receive from week 20 of gestation until delivery a daily dietary supplement with either FO (500 mg DHA+150 mg EPA), 400 μg 5-methyltetrahydrofolate, both or placebo. Fatty acids in plasma and erythrocyte PL were determined in maternal blood (week 20, week 30 of pregnancy and delivery) and in cord blood (delivery). FO supplementation increased DHA levels in maternal and cord plasma and erythrocyte PL. Higher percentage changes were observed in erythrocyte PL than in plasma PL. There were significant correlations between plasma and erythrocyte fatty acid levels in maternal and cord blood. Significant correlations between maternal and cord fatty acid levels at delivery in plasma and erythrocytes were also observed; however, correlation coefficients were higher for erythrocyte phophatidylethanolamine. FO supplementation increases maternal and fetal DHA status. Both plasma and erythrocytes appear to be suitable to evaluate the fatty acid status of mothers but erythrocytes seem to be a more reliable marker in neonates.
Association of human SCN5A polymorphisms with idiopathic ventricular arrhythmia in a Chinese Han cohort.

BACKGROUND Mutations of human cardiac sodium channel alpha subunit gene (SCN5A) have been implicated in risk of various cardiac arrhythmias. The present study aimed to investigate whether SCN5A polymorphism was related to the occurrence of idiopathic ventricular arrhythmia (IVA) in Chinese Han patients. METHODS AND RESULTS Genotyping for polymorphic variance of SCN5A was performed by polymerase chain reaction and automated gene scan sequencing analysis in 31 unrelated Chinese patients with IVA (IVA group) and 103 healthy controls (control group). The allele frequencies of c.87G>A (p.Ala29Ala) and c.1673A>G (p.His558Arg) were higher in men than in women for control group (p=0.023 and p=0.027, respectively). For women, patients with IVA had higher allele frequency of c.87G>A than controls (0.455 vs 0.198, p=0.013, odds ratio (OR) 3.382), whereas for men, minor allele c.1673A>G was significantly less prevalent in IVA patients compared with controls (0.025 vs 0.175, p=0.017, OR 0.121). Significant difference existed in occurrence of ventricular arrhythmia between female patients with 87GA/AA and those with 87GG genotypes (0.348 vs 0.097, p=0.039, OR 4.978) and between male patients with 1673AA and those with 1673AG/GG genotypes (0.311 vs 0.053, p=0.031, OR 8.143). The frequency of haplotype GG (87G-1673G) was significantly lower in IVA patients than in controls (0.016 vs 0.128, p=0.009, OR 0.109). CONCLUSIONS The present study indicates that Chinese Han people have significant difference in distribution of 2 single nucleotide polymorphisms (c.87G>A and c.1673A>G) between healthy male and females. The 87A allele might be associated with an increased risk of IVA in females, whereas 1673G allele might have been positively selected because of its protective effects against ventricular arrhythmia in males.