Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Specificity of Jumping, Sprinting, and Quick Change-of-Direction Motor Abilities

Salaj, S and Markovic, G. Specificity of jumping, sprinting, and quick change-of-direction motor abilities. J Strength Cond Res 25(5): 1249-1255, 2011-Despite being addressed in a number of previous studies, the controversy regarding the generality vs. specificity of jumping, sprinting, and change-of-direction speed (CODS) abilities still remains unresolved. Here, we tested the hypotheses that jumping, sprinting, and CODS represent separate and specific motor abilities, and that the jumping ability based on concentric and slow stretch-shortening cycle (SSC) is relatively independent of the same ability based on fast SSC. Eighty-seven male college athletes performed 3 concentric/slow SSC and 3 fast SSC jump tests, 4 sprint tests, and 3 CODS tests. The hypotheses were tested by means of the principal component factor analysis (PCA). The applied procedure reduced the greater number of manifest variables to a smaller number of independent latent dimensions or factors and, thereafter, assessed the relationships among them. The PCA revealed a relatively simple and consistent structure consisting of 4 separate factors that explained nearly 80% of variance of the applied tests. The factors appeared to correspond to the sprinting ability, concentric/slow SSC jumping ability, fast SSC jumping ability, and CODS ability. Further analyses revealed that the extracted factors were mainly independent, because they shared only between 6 and 23% of the common variance. These results supported our hypotheses regarding the specificity of jumping, sprinting, and CODS abilities, and specificity of the concentric/slow SSC and fast SSC jumping abilities. Coaches and strength and conditioning professionals should, therefore, use separate performance tests for the assessment of the studied abilities.
Antimicrobial Peptides in Gastrointestinal Inflammation

Acute and chronic inflammations of mucosal surfaces are complex events in which the effector mechanisms of innate and adaptive immune systems interact with pathogenic and commensal bacteria. The role of constitutive and inducible antimicrobial peptides in intestinal inflammation has been investigated thoroughly over the recent years, and their involvement in various disease states is expanded ever more. Especially in the intestines, a critical balance between luminal bacteria and the antimicrobial peptides is essential, and a breakdown in barrier function by impaired production of defensins is already implicated in Crohn's disease. In this paper, we focus on the role of antimicrobial peptides in inflammatory processes along the gastrointestinal tract, while considering the resident and pathogenic flora encountered at the specific sites. The role of antimicrobial peptides in the primary events of inflammatory bowel diseases receives special attention.
A Prospective, Cross-sectional Survey Study of the Natural History of Niemann-Pick Disease Type B

OBJECTIVE. The objective of this study was to characterize the clinical features of patients with Niemann-Pick disease type B and to identify efficacy end points for future clinical trials of enzyme-replacement therapy. METHODS. Fifty-nine patients who had Niemann-Pick disease type B, were at least 6 years of age, and manifested at least 2 disease symptoms participated in this multicenter, multinational, cross-sectional survey study. Medical histories; physical examinations; assessments of cardiorespiratory function, clinical laboratory data, and liver and spleen volumes; radiographic evaluation of the lungs and bone age; and quality-of-life assessments were obtained during a 2- to 3-day period. RESULTS. Fifty-three percent of the patients were male, 92% were white, and the median age was 17.6 years. The R608del mutation accounted for 25% of all disease alleles. Most patients initially presented with splenomegaly (78%) or hepatomegaly (73%). Frequent symptoms included bleeding (49%), pulmonary infections and shortness of breath (42% each), and joint/limb pain (39%). Growth was markedly delayed during adolescence. Patients commonly had low levels of platelets and high-density lipoprotein, elevated levels of low-density lipoprotein, very-low-density lipoprotein, triglycerides, leukocyte sphingomyelin, and serum chitotriosidase, and abnormal liver function test results. Nearly all patients had documented splenomegaly and hepatomegaly and interstitial lung disease. Patients commonly showed restrictive lung disease physiology with impaired pulmonary gas exchange and decreased maximal exercise tolerance. Quality of life was only mildly decreased by standardized questionnaires. The degree of splenomegaly correlated with most aspects of disease, including hepatomegaly, growth, lipid profile, hematologic parameters, and pulmonary function. CONCLUSIONS. This study documents the multisystem involvement and clinical variability of Niemann-Pick B disease. Several efficacy end points were identified for future clinical treatment studies. Because of its correlation with disease severity, spleen volume may be a useful surrogate end point in treatment trials, whereas biomarkers such as chitotriosidase also may play a role in monitoring patient treatment responses.
An Exploration of Relational Aggression in the Nursing Workplace

OBJECTIVE: This study provides a 1st look at relational aggression (RA) and the consequences among nurses. BACKGROUND: Interpersonal hostility, bullying, and a toxic work environment (WE) can impact patient care delivery as well as nurses’ personal health and job satisfaction. METHODS: The Relational Aggression Assessment Scale, measuring aggressors, victims, and bystanders, was used to measure RA in a sample of 842 nurses. Additional variables measured included a demographic profile, job satisfaction, and intent to leave. RESULTS: Nurses were most likely to identify with victim behaviors, but a minority of nurses reported relying on aggressor behaviors and bystander behaviors. There was a positive correlation among aggressor, victim, and bystander items, suggesting overlap in roles. CONCLUSIONS: A few relationally aggressive individuals can create a toxic WE. Interventions to address RA among nurses must be tested, as well as strategies for improving job satisfaction and promoting healthy WEs through positive relationships.
Choice of pension scheme and job mobility in Britain

This paper examines the choice of pension scheme and job mobility in Britain. Workers in Britain can choose to belong wholly to the social security (public pension) programme, or to a company-provided plan (occupational pension), or to purchase their own individual pension. We use household panel data for the 1990s to show that individuals that subsequently move job select pension arrangements that a priori impose lower costs on job mobility. A feature of the British policy experiment, and of the data, is that we can differentiate between choice of actual pension arrangement by the individual and what pension arrangements were offered to that individual. This permits us to test indirectly whether the observed relationship arises from employer selection or from pension scheme design.
Representational Issues in Meta-Learning

To address the problem of algorithm selection for the classification task, we equip a relational case base with new similarity measures that are able to cope with multirelational representations. The proposed approach builds on notions from clustering and is closely related to ideas developed in similarity-based relational learning. The results provide evidence that the relational representation coupled with the appropriate similarity measure can improve performance. The ideas presented are pertinent not only for meta-learning representational issues, but for all domains with similar representation requirements.
Branching time and abstraction in bisimulation semantics

In comparative concurrency semantics, one usually distinguishes between linear time and branching time semantic equivalences. Milner's notion of observatin equivalence is often mentioned as the standard example of a branching time equivalence. In this paper we investigate whether observation equivalence really does respect the branching structure of processes, and find that in the presence of the unobservable action τ of CCS this is not the case. Therefore, the notion of branching bisimulation equivalence is introduced which strongly preserves the branching structure of processes, in the sense that it preserves computations together with the potentials in all intermediate states that are passed through, even if silent moves are involved. On closed CCS-terms branching bisimulation congruence can be completely axiomatized by the single axion scheme: a. (τ.(y+z)+y)=a. (y+z) (where a ranges over all actions) and the usual loaws for strong congruence. We also establish that for sequential processes observation equivalence is not preserved under refinement of actions, whereas branching bisimulation is. For a large class of processes, it turns out that branching bisimulation and observation equivalence are the same. As far as we know, all protocols that have been verified in the setting of observation equivalence happen to fit in this class, and hence are also valid in the stronger setting of branching bisimulation equivalence.
Frontiers of fracture and fatigue: Some recent applications of the local strain energy density

The phenomenon of brittle fracture occurs too often in various branches of engineering being the reason of unexpected termination of anticipated service lives of an engineering objects. This leads to unfortunate catastrophic structural failures resulting in loss of lives and in excessive costs. The theory of fracture mechanics enables the analysis of brittle and fatigue fracture and helps to prevent the occurrence of brittle failure. This field has engaged researchers from various fields of engineering from the early days until today. As its own scientific discipline, it is now less than fifty years old and encourages scientists and engineers to speak the same language when dealing with the design and manufacturing of the classical machinery as well as various intricate devices of nanometer scale, or even smaller, reasoning significant scale effects that arise. Attempting to strike a common ground will connect various physical events/phenomena as a natural result of curiosity arising in course of joint research activities. The interpretation provided by the strain energy density to face different problems and applications is presented in this paper considering some recent outcomes at different scale levels.
Mining Patterns in the Presence of Domain Knowledge

One of the main difficulties of pattern mining is to deal with items of different nature in the same itemset, which can occur in any domain except basket analysis. Indeed, if we consider the analysis of any transactional database composed by several entities and relationships, it is easy to understand that the equality function may be different for each element, which difficult the identification of frequent patterns. This situation is just one example of the need for using domain knowledge to manage the discovery process, but several other, no less important can be enumerated, such the need to consider patterns at higher levels of abstraction or the ability to deal with structured data. In this paper, we show how the Onto4AR framework can be explored to overcome these situations in a natural way, illustrating its use in the analysis of two distinct case studies. In the first one, exploring a cinematographic dataset, we capture patterns that characterize kinds of movies in accordance to the actors present in their casts and their roles. In the second one, identifying molecular fragments, we find structured patterns, including chains, rings and stars.
Right Attachment and Preference Semantics .

The paper claims that the right attachment rules for phrases originally suggested by Frazier and Fodor are wrong, and that none of the subsequent patchings of the rules by syntactic methods have improved the situation. For each rule there are perfectly straightforward and indefinitely large classes of simple counter-examples. We then examine suggestions by Ford et al., Schubert and Hirst which are quasi-semantic in nature and which we consider ingenious but unsatisfactory. We point towards a straightforward solution within the framework of preference semantics, set out in detail elsewhere, and argue that the principal issue is not the type and nature of information required to get appropriate phrase attachments, but the issue of where to store the information and with what processes to apply it.
A Greedy Approach to Establish Singleton Arc Consistency

In this paper, we propose a new approach to establish Singleton Arc Consistency (SAC) on constraint networks. While the principle of existing SAC algorithms involves performing a breadth-first search up to a depth equal to 1, the principle of the two algorithms introduced in this paper involves performing several runs of a greedy search (where at each step, arc consistency is maintained). It is then an original illustration of applying inference (i.e. establishing singleton arc consistency) by search. Using a greedy search allows benefiting from the incrementality of arc consistency, learning relevant information from conflicts and, potentially finding solution(s) during the inference process. Further-more, both space and time complexities are quite competitive.
Electro-Active Polymer Based Self-Folding Approach Devoted to Origami-Inspired Structures

In the growing field of origami engineering, self-folding is of a high regard. The latter is regularly used by nature as an efficient approach for autonomous growing and reorganizing. In this work, we present a self-folding approach based on Electro-Active Polymer (EAP), especially Conductive Polymers (CP). This approach proposes lightweight, compact and energy efficient self-folding structures, as well as large angle and reversible folding. We study the behavior of a three-segment milli-structure containing two passive segments made of paper, separated by an active segment made of CP. The folding motion of the structure was modeled and experimentally validated. Furthermore, as a proof of concept, a self-folding origami cube is presented.
Untethered soft robotic jellyfish

Inspired by natural creatures, soft robots possess the unique advantages of large actuation and excellent adaptability. Untethered designs of soft robots are drawing more attention to researchers, but current research is limited. Also, there is an increasing need to improve the performance of bio-mimetic robots. This work describes an untethered soft robotic jellyfish with high mobility that can mimic a natural jellyfish’s performance. The electrode of the robotic jellyfish is made by sandwiching carbon grease between two layers of dielectric elastomer film. The frame of the material, where six plastic paddles are attached, is made from a silicone elastomer. The robotic jellyfish has a maximum recorded swim speed of up to 1 cm s−1, with a peak thrust force of 0.000 12 N. A finite element simulation is developed to study the performance of the robotic jellyfish in a theoretical manner. By embedding a compact remote-controlled power source, the robotic jellyfish is made autonomous. In this case, the max peak speed is around 0.5 cm s−1. Ultimately, the working principles of the bio-mimetic robotic jellyfish can be useful in field studies and to guide the design of soft robots and flexible devices.
Cytoskeletal interactions with post-mitotic migrating nuclei in the oyster mushroom fungus, Pleurotus ostreatus: evidence against a force-generating role for astral microtubules

Nuclei of Pleurotus ostreatus migrate in a highly predictable manner following conjugate mitosis at clamp connections. Parameters were determined by observations in living hyphae and these data were used to predict the living behaviour of freezesubstituted nuclei. Three of four classes of nucleus migrate immediately after telophase and move at similar speeds. Freeze-substitution electron microscopy shows that these nuclei have prominent nucleus-associated organelles (NAOs) with large astral microtubule (MT) arrays. Although the NAOs do not have a consistent position with respect to the nuclear motion, they are preferentially located near the hyphal axis. The fourth class of nucleus remains in the developing clamp until it fuses with the main hypha, whereupon it migrates to its interphase position at a rate much faster than the other classes. This class of nucleus has a small NAO and no astral MTs. Treatment of hyphae with a MTdisrupting drug, MBC, reduced the astral arrays in the first three classes but did not slow their rate of movement. Moreover, serial section analysis of drug-treated nuclei whose migration rate at the time of fixation was known showed no relationship, positive or negative, between astral MT number and rate of movement. These data suggest that astral MTs neither generate nor transduce force for post-mitotic nuclear migration in P. ostreatus . The role of astral MTs and possible mechanisms of postmitotic nuclear migration are discussed.
Recent advances in noninvasive glucose monitoring

The race for the next generation of painless and reliable glucose monitoring for diabetes mellitus is on. As technology advances, both diagnostic techniques and equipment improve. This review describes the main technologies currently being explored for noninvasive glucose monitoring. The principle of each technology is mentioned; its advantages and limitations are then discussed. The general description and the corresponding results for each device are illustrated, as well as the current status of the device and the manufacturer; internet references for the devices are listed where appropriate. Ten technologies and eleven potential devices are included in this review. Near infrared spectroscopy has become a promising technology, among others, for blood glucose monitoring. Although some reviews have been published already, the rapid development of technologies and information makes constant updating mandatory. While advances have been made, the reliability and the calibration of noninvasive instruments could still be improved, and more studies carried out under different physiological conditions of metabolism, bodily fluid circulation, and blood components are needed.
LOW REDUNDANCY IN STATIC DICTIONARIES WITH CONSTANT QUERY TIME

A static dictionary is a data structure storing subsets of a finite universe U , answering membership queries. We show that on a unit cost RAM with word size Θ(log |U |), a static dictionary for n-element sets with constant worst case query time can be obtained using B+O(log log |U |)+o(n) bits of storage, where B = dlog2 (|U| n )e is the minimum number of bits needed to represent all nelement subsets of U .
Commensal bacteria trigger a full dendritic cell maturation program that promotes the expansion of non‐Tr1 suppressor T cells

Dendritic cells (DCs) orchestrate the immune response establishing immunity versus tolerance. These two opposite functions may be dictated by DC maturation status with maturity linked to immunogenicity. DCs directly interact with trillions of noninvasive intestinal bacteria in vivo, a process that contributes to gut homeostasis. We here evaluated the maturation program elicited in human DCs by direct exposure to commensal‐related bacteria (CB) in the absence of inflammatory signals. We showed that eight gram+ and gram− CB strains up‐regulated costimulatory molecule expression in DCs and provoked a chemokine receptor switch similar to that activated by gram+ pathogens. CB strains may be classified into three groups according to DC cytokine release: high IL‐12 and low IL‐10; low IL‐12 and high IL‐10; and low IL‐12 and IL‐10. All CB‐treated DCs produced IL‐1β and IL‐6 and almost no TGF‐β. Yet, CB instructed DCs to convert naive CD4+ T cells into hyporesponsive T cells that secreted low or no IFN‐γ, IL‐10, and IL‐17 and instead, displayed suppressor function. These data demonstrate that phenotypic DC maturation combined to an appropriate cytokine profile is insufficient to warrant Th1, IL‐10‐secreting T regulatory Type 1 (Tr1), or Th17 polarization. We propose that commensal flora and as such, probiotics manipulate DCs by a yet‐unidentified pathway to enforce gut tolerance.
Dynamically Tunable Dry Adhesion via Subsurface Stiffness Modulation

Tunable dry adhesion has a range of applications, including transfer printing, climbing robots, and gripping in automated manufacturing processes. Here, a novel concept to achieve dynamically tunable dry adhesion via modulation of the stiffness of subsurface mechanical elements is introduced and demonstrated. A composite post structure, consisting of an elastomer shell and a core with a stiffness that can be tuned via application of electrical voltage, is fabricated. In the nonactivated state, the core is stiff and the effective adhesion strength between the composite post and contact surface is high. Activation of the core via application of electrical voltage reduces the stiffness of the core, resulting in a change in the stress distribution and driving force for delamination at the interface and, thus a reduction in the effective adhesion strength. The adhesion of composite posts with a range of dimensions is characterized and activation of the core is shown to reduce the adhesion by as much as a factor of 6. The experimentally observed reduction in adhesion is primarily due to the change in stiffness of the core. However, the activation of the core also results in heating of the interface and this plays a secondary role in the adhesion change.
Novel surfactant-free waterborne acrylic-silicone modified alkyd hybrid resin coatings containing nano-silica for the corrosion protection of carbon steel

ABSTRACT We report a novel waterborne acrylic-silicone modified alkyd nanocomposite latex containing nano-silica prepared by the surfactant-free miniemulsion polymerization. The influences of γ-methacryloxy-propyltrimethoxysilane- (MPS-) modified nano-silica particle contents to the thermal, mechanical and anti-corrosion performance of hybrid latex coatings were studied. The results revealed that the incorporation of nano-silica particles into latex films could directly increase the thermal stability and mechanical properties. Electrochemical corrosion studies revealed that these nanocomposite coatings exhibited superior corrosion resistance performance (inhibition efficiency 99.36% and corrosion rate 1.09 × 10 −3 mm per year) than that of the control system (without SiO2 NPs). GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT