nils-herrmann/clean_scirepeval huggingface dataset:
Effects of Orthokeratology on Choroidal Thickness and Axial Length
Venue: Optometry and vision science official publication of the American Academy of Optometry

To investigate the effect of orthokeratology (ortho k) treatment on choroidal thickness and its relationship with axial length change.  Seventy seven myopic subjects aged between 7 and 17 years were treated with ortho k lenses (n 39) or single vision spectacle lenses (SVL, n 38) Choroidal thickness and axial length measurements were taken at baseline and repeated 1 week and 3 weeks after lens wear for the ortho k group and at 3 weeks for the SVL group. Parafoveal choroidal thickness was assessed using optical coherence tomography and segmented into nine regions according to the Early Treatment Diabetic Retinopathy Study (ETDRS) within a 6 x 6 mm circular zone centered on the fovea. Axial length was measured using partial coherence interferometry. The changes in subfoveal choroidal thickness were compared to the changes in axial length in both study groups.  The change in axial length was significantly correlated with the change in choroidal thickness in both groups at 3 weeks (ortho k, r 0.351, p 0.028 vs. SVL, r 0.408, p 0.011) Parafoveal choroidal thickness increased after 3 weeks of lens wear in the ortho k group (mean, 21.8 25.2 &mgr;m) but did not change in the SVL group (mean, 0.1 19.7 &mgr;m) Choroidal thickness significantly varied across the posterior retinal regions (F 82.14, p 0.001) with the temporal regions being thickest and nasal regions being thinnest. After 3 weeks of ortho k treatment, the magnitude of change (range, 14.1 27.6 &mgr;m) in choroidal thickness of the nine ETDRS regions was proportional to the baseline choroidal thickness in those regions (r 0.88, p 0.002) Axial length did not significantly change over time (F 0.001, p 0.975) and did not differ between the two treatment modalities (F 0.305, p 0.582) Conclusions Choroidal thickness increases after short term ortho k treatment. Regional choroidal thickening after ortho k treatment may be attributable to the altered retinal defocus profile associated with ortho k lens wear.
Steering of Educational Processes in a Digital Medium Environment

This article is about challenges to steering and leadership of educational interaction in classrooms provided by the new medium environment that comes with digital media. In the new medium environment, the old way of steering what is going on in the classroom appears not to work any more since it was developed in the image of the industrial society and based on a closed classroom. Now with the digital media and wireless networks the classroom is opened and the old way of organizing teaching has become inadequate: The students are disturbed by the new media, instead of learning through them. Inspired by systems theory the paper sketches an outline of a more adequate way of teaching in the new medium environment a teaching that can manage the new situation and use the new possibilities provided by the digital media. The paper builds on empirical findings from the action research project Socio Media Education (SME) which has worked with possibilities and problems in regard to the digital medium revolution's disruption of the Danish upper secondary school (Author 1 Author 2 2015a, b, 2014, 2013a, b, c, 2012)
Hamstring injuries have increased by 4% annually in men's professional football, since 2001: a 13 year longitudinal analysis of the UEFA Elite Club injury study
Venue: British Journal of Sports Medicine

There are limited data on hamstring injury rates over time in football.  To analyse time trends in hamstring injury rates in male professional footballers over 13 consecutive seasons and to distinguish the relative contribution of training and match injuries. Methods 36 clubs from 12 European countries were followed between 2001 and 2014. Team medical staff recorded individual player exposure and time loss injuries. Injuries per 1000 h were compared as a rate ratio (RR) with 95% CI. Injury burden was the number of lay off days per 1000 h. Seasonal trend for injury was analysed using linear regression.  A total of 1614 hamstring injuries were recorded; 22% of players sustained at least one hamstring injury during a season. The overall hamstring injury rate over the 13 year period was 1.20 injuries per 1000 h; the match injury rate (4.77) being 9 times higher than the training injury rate (0.51; RR 9.4; 95% CI 8.5 to 10.4) The time trend analysis showed an annual average 2.3% year on year increase in the total hamstring injury rate over the 13 year period (R2=0.431, b=0.023, 95% CI 0.006 to 0.041, p=0.015) This increase over time was most pronounced for training injuries these increased by 4.0% per year (R2=0.450, b=0.040, 95% CI 0.011 to 0.070, p=0.012) The average hamstring injury burden was 19.7 days per 1000 h (annual average increase 4.1% (R2=0.437, b=0.041, 95% CI 0.010 to 0.072, p=0.014)  Training related hamstring injury rates have increased substantially since 2001 but match related injury rates have remained stable. The challenge is for clubs to reduce training related hamstring injury rates without impairing match performance.
Digestive enzymes of human and nonhuman primates
Venue: Evolutionary anthropology

All living organisms need to consume nutrients to grow, survive, and reproduce, making the successful acquisition of food resources a powerful selective pressure. However, acquiring food is only part of the challenge. While all animals spend much of their daily activity budget hunting, searching for, or otherwise procuring food, a large part of what is involved in overall nutrition occurs once the meal has been swallowed. Most nutritional components are too complex for immediate use and must be broken down into simpler compounds, which can then be absorbed by the body. This process, digestion, is catalyzed by enzymes that are either endogenous or produced by the host's microbial population.1 Research shows that the nutritional value of food is partially constrained by the digestive abilities of the microbial community present in the host's gut and that these microbes rapidly adapt to changes in diet and other environmental pressures.2 An accumulating body of evidence suggests that endogenously produced digestive enzymes also have been, and still are, common targets of natural selection, further cementing their crucial role in an organism's digestive system.3 5
Evolution of Digestive Enzymes and RNASE1 Provides Insights into Dietary Switch of Cetaceans
Venue: Molecular biology and evolution

Although cetaceans (whales, porpoises, and dolphins) have multi chambered stomachs, feeding habits of modern cetaceans have dramatically changed from herbivorous to carnivorous. However, the genetic basis underlying this dietary switch remains unexplored. Here, we present the first systematic investigation of 10 digestive enzymes genes (i.e. CYP7A1, CTRC, LIPC, LIPF, PNLIP, PGC, PRSS1, SI, SLC5A1, and TMPRSS15) of representative cetaceans, and the evolutionary trajectory of RNASE1 in cetartiodactylans. Positive selections were detected with proteinases (i.e. CTRC, PRSS1, and TMPRSS15) and lipases (i.e. CYP7A1, LIPF, and PNLIP) suggesting that cetaceans have evolved an enhanced digestion capacity for proteins and lipids, the major nutritional components of their prey (fishes and invertebrates) In addition, it was found that RNASE1 gene duplicated after the cetartiodactylan speciation and two independent gene duplication events took place in Camelidae and Ruminantia. Positive selection was detected with RNASE1 of Camelidae and Bovidae, suggesting enhanced digestive efficiency in the ruminants. Remarkably, even though the ancestors of cetaceans were terrestrial artiodactyls that are herbivorous, modern cetaceans lost the pancreatic RNASE1 copy with digestive function, which is in accordance with the dietary change from herbivorous to carnivorous. In sum, this is the first study that provides new insights into the evolutionary mechanism of dietary switch in cetaceans.
Proteome analysis of digestive fluids in Nepenthes pitchers.
Venue: Annals of botany

Carnivorous plants have developed strategies to enable growth in nutrient poor soils. For the genus Nepenthes, this strategy represents producing pitcher modified leaves that can trap and digest various prey. These pitchers produce a digestive fluid composed of proteins, including hydrolytic enzymes. The focus of this study was on the identification of these proteins.  In order to better characterize and have an overview of these proteins, digestive fluid was sampled from pitchers at different stages of maturity from five species of Nepenthes (N. mirabilis, N. alata, N. sanguinea, N. bicalcarata and N. albomarginata) that vary in their ecological niches and grew under different conditions. Three complementary approaches based on transcriptomic resources, mass spectrometry and in silico analysis were used.  This study permitted the identification of 29 proteins excreted in the pitchers. Twenty of these proteins were never reported in Nepenthes previously and included serine carboxypeptidases, a and b galactosidases, lipid transfer proteins and esterases/lipases. These 20 proteins display sequence signals allowing their secretion into the pitcher fluid.  Nepenthes pitcher plants have evolved an arsenal of enzymes to digest prey caught in their traps. The panel of new proteins identified in this study provides new insights into the digestive process of these carnivorous plants.
Online Contrastive Divergence with Generative Replay: Experience Replay without Storing Data
Venue: ArXiv

Conceived in the early 1990s, Experience Replay (ER) has been shown to be a successful mechanism to allow online learning algorithms to reuse past experiences. Traditionally, ER can be applied to all machine learning paradigms (i.e. unsupervised, supervised, and reinforcement learning) Recently, ER has contributed to improving the performance of deep reinforcement learning. Yet, its application to many practical settings is still limited by the memory requirements of ER, necessary to explicitly store previous observations. To remedy this issue, we explore a novel approach, Online Contrastive Divergence with Generative Replay (OCD_GR) which uses the generative capability of Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs) instead of recorded past experiences. The RBM is trained online, and does not require the system to store any of the observed data points. We compare OCD_GR to ER on 9 real world datasets, considering a worst case scenario (data points arriving in sorted order) as well as a more realistic one (sequential random order data points) Our results show that in 64.28% of the cases OCD_GR outperforms ER and in the remaining 35.72% it has an almost equal performance, while having a considerably reduced space complexity (i.e. memory usage) at a comparable time complexity.
Insurance Market Response to Flood Hazards: Empirical Evidence from the Housing Market

This study analyzes the impact of actuarial floodplain location on property prices and evaluates the risk perception of residential homeowners in Dresden, Germany. We combine hand collected, insurance based data for flood zone identification and property offering records in order to run a hedonic Spatial Durbin Model. Even for an entirely voluntary and private insurance market, we find that a property location at risk lowers the asking prices for houses and condominiums. Price differentials for houses exceed the present value of insurance premiums, while for condominiums, results vary around the present value according to specific flood zones.
Attitudes to systemic risk: The impact of flood risk on the housing market in Dublin
Venue: 2016 18th Mediterranean Electrotechnical Conference (MELECON)

The concatenated effects of increased frequency of intense precipitations due to climate change and anthropogenic impacts in the form of construction in floodplains, channel straightening and increased presence of impermeable surfaces are increasing the incidence of floods in urban areas. This paper investigates behavioral responses to a natural hazard (flooding) by examining residential property values. The results of this investigation can be used to develop benefit/cost studies to assess the economic merits of policies that mitigates the risk of floods by using the residential housing market as a proxy for estimating these values since the choice of where to live often includes the choice of hazard level. The methodology described here also provides a mechanism for testing consumer behavior under uncertainty. This study uses a hedonic property price function to estimate the effects of flood hazards on residential property values. The study utilizes data from 158,890 residential home sales in Dublin, Ireland between 2006 and 2015. This area experienced significant flooding in October 2011. GIS is used to spatially characterize the houses included in the analysis by linking them to the following set of parameters included into the baseline regression: house price, house type and size (number of bedrooms and bathrooms) when it was on the market, and its location. Once the baseline regression model is built, then the variables included in it are regressed against the flood risk. The distance between a set of amenities and the properties is also calculated using GIS. Results show that a house located within a floodplain has a lower market value than an equivalent house located outside the floodplain. Finally, the benefits resulting from the use of GIS based spatial indicators of properties in hedonic regression models to quantify the accessibility to amenities as network travel distances are also demonstrated.
Housing Prices and the Public Disclosure of Flood Risk: A Difference in Differences Analysis in Finland

Information gaps and asymmetries are common in the housing market and this is frequently the case with the risks of natural processes, especially in coastal areas where the amenity dimension may dominate the risk aspect. Flood risk disclosure through maps is a policy instrument aimed at addressing this situation. We assess its effectiveness by identifying whether such maps induce a price differential for single family coastal dwellings in three Finnish cities, and by estimating the discount per square meter for various flooding probabilities (return times) The estimations indicate a significant price drop after the information disclosure for properties located in flood prone areas as indicated by the maps. In the case of sea flooding information in Helsinki, the price effect is sensitive to the communicated probability of flooding. Overall, the discussed policy instrument appears to have functioned as intended, correcting information gaps and asymmetries related to flood risk. The identified effect is spatially selective; it caused a short term localized shock in market prices in conjunction with some reorientation of demand from risky coastal properties towards ones that represent a similar level of coastal amenity, but are less risky in terms of flooding. This hints at the potential for incorporating the shocks associated with flood events or risk information into broader scoped urban modelling and simulation. Similarly, the reasonable accuracy with which the housing market processes the additional information shows a potential for wider use of the disclosure of non obvious risks in real estate markets. In the case of adapting to climate change risks, additional uncertainties may make the disclosure instrument less effective, if used as a single tool.
Engineering and mapping nanocavity emission via precision placement of DNA origami
Venue: Nature

Many hybrid devices integrate functional molecular or nanoparticle components with microstructures, as exemplified by the nanophotonic devices that couple emitters to optical resonators for potential use in single molecule detection, precision magnetometry, low threshold lasing and quantum information processing. These systems also illustrate a common difficulty for hybrid devices: although many proof of principle devices exist, practical applications face the challenge of how to incorporate large numbers of chemically diverse functional components into microfabricated resonators at precise locations. Here we show that the directed self assembly of DNA origami onto lithographically patterned binding sites allows reliable and controllable coupling of molecular emitters to photonic crystal cavities (PCCs) The precision of this method is sufficient to enable us to visualize the local density of states within PCCs by simple wide field microscopy and to resolve the antinodes of the cavity mode at a resolution of about one tenth of a wavelength. By simply changing the number of binding sites, we program the delivery of up to seven DNA origami onto distinct antinodes within a single cavity and thereby digitally vary the intensity of the cavity emission. To demonstrate the scalability of our technique, we fabricate 65,536 independently programmed PCCs on a single chip. These features, in combination with the widely used modularity of DNA origami, suggest that our method is well suited for the rapid prototyping of a broad array of hybrid nanophotonic devices.
Controlled mechanical buckling for origami inspired construction of 3D microstructures in advanced materials.
Venue: Advanced functional materials

Origami is a topic of rapidly growing interest in both the scientific and engineering research communities due to its promising potential in a broad range of applications. Previous assembly approaches of origami structures at the micro/nanoscale are constrained by the applicable classes of materials, topologies and/or capability of control over the transformation. Here, we introduce an approach that exploits controlled mechanical buckling for autonomic origami assembly of 3D structures across material classes from soft polymers to brittle inorganic semiconductors, and length scales from nanometers to centimeters. This approach relies on a spatial variation of thickness in the initial 2D structures as an effective strategy to produce engineered folding creases during the compressive buckling process. The elastic nature of the assembly scheme enables active, deterministic control over intermediate states in the 2D to 3D transformation in a continuous and reversible manner. Demonstrations include a broad set of 3D structures formed through unidirectional, bidirectional, and even hierarchical folding, with examples ranging from half cylindrical columns and fish scales, to cubic boxes, pyramids, starfish, paper fans, skew tooth structures, and to amusing system level examples of soccer balls, model houses, cars, and multi floor textured buildings.
Kindergarten children demonstrating numeracy concepts through drawings and explanations: Intentional teaching within play based learning

Using both child guided and adult guided learning, Intentional Teaching in the early years can be a powerful tool for enhancing young children's numeracy skills. As Epstein (2009) notes, this can include providing "opportunities for children to represent things by drawing, building and moving" (p. 47) This paper investigates how kindergarten (four five year olds) children represented and demonstrated numeracy concepts through their drawings and explanations, completed for a research study that used arts based strategies to enhance children's environmental understanding. This research study involved kindergarten children in Australia creating and exchanging postcards (drawings and explanations) of their local environments with their peers in Canada. Findings include that the kindergarten children, through creating postcards of their physical environments and explanations, demonstrated their growing understanding of numeracy concepts, such as spatial orientation, quantification and attributes of objects. The study argues for quality Intentional Teaching and the development of an 'early childhood numeracy progress monitoring framework' that maps and assesses children's mathematical development.
Addressing potential challenges in co creating learning and teaching: overcoming resistance, navigating institutional norms and ensuring inclusivity in student staff partnerships

Against a backdrop of rising interest in students becoming partners in learning and teaching in higher education, this paper begins by exploring the relationships between student engagement, co creation and student staff partnership before providing a typology of the roles students can assume in working collaboratively with staff. Acknowledging that co creating learning and teaching is not straightforward, a set of examples from higher education institutions in Europe and North America illustrates some important challenges that can arise during co creation. These examples also provide the basis for suggestions regarding how such challenges might be resolved or re envisaged as opportunities for more meaningful collaboration. The challenges are presented under three headings: resistance to co creation; navigating institutional structures, practices and norms; and establishing an inclusive co creation approach. The paper concludes by highlighting the importance of transparency within co creation approaches and of changing mindsets about the potential opportunities and institutional benefits of staff and students co creating learning and teaching.
Effects of Strength Training on Squat and Sprint Performance in Soccer Players
Venue: Journal of strength and conditioning research

Styles, WJ, Matthews, MJ, and Comfort, P. Effects of strength training on squat and sprint performance in soccer players.  2016 Researchers have demonstrated that increases in strength result in increases in athletic performance, although the development of strength is still neglected in some sports. Our aim was to determine whether a simple in season strength training program would result in increases in maximal squat strength and short sprint performance, in professional soccer players. Professional soccer players (n 17, age 18.3 1.2 years, height 1.79 0.06 m, body mass [BM] 75.5 6.1 kg) completed 1 repetition maximum (1RM) back squat and sprint tests (5, 10, and 20 m) before and after a 6 week (x2 week) in season strength training (85 90% 1RM) intervention. Strength training resulted in significant improvements in absolute and relative strength (before 125.4 13.8 kg, after 149.3 16.2 kg, p 0.001, Cohen's d 0.62; 1RM/BM before: 1.66 0.24 kg*kg 1, after 1.96 0.29 kg*kg 1, p 0.001, Cohen's d 0.45; respectively) Similarly, there were small yet significant improvements in sprint performance over 5 m (before 1.11 0.04 seconds, after 1.05 0.05 seconds, p 0.001, Cohen's d 0.55) 10 m (before 1.83 0.05 seconds, after 1.78 0.05 seconds, p 0.001, Cohen's d 0.45) and 20 m (before 3.09 0.07 seconds, after 3.05 0.05 seconds, p 0.001, Cohen's d 0.31) Changes in maximal squat strength seem to be reflected in improvements in short sprint performance highlighting the importance of developing maximal strength to improve short sprint performance. Moreover, this demonstrates that these improvements can be achieved during the competitive season in professional soccer players.
On Democratic Backsliding

Democratic backsliding (meaning the state led debilitation or elimination of the political institutions sustaining an existing democracy) has changed dramatically since the Cold War. Open ended coups d'etat, executive coups, and blatant election day vote fraud are declining while promissory coups, executive aggrandizement and strategic electoral manipulation and harassment are increasing. Contemporary forms of backsliding are especially vexing because they are legitimated by the very institutions democracy promoters prioritize but, overall, backsliding today reflects democracy's advance and not its retreat. The current mix of backsliding is more easily reversible than the past mix and successor dictatorships are shorter lived and less authoritarian.