Nature of Volleyball Sport, Performance Analysis in Volleyball, and the Recent Advances of Machine Learning Application in Sports

This chapter presents the overview, nature, and history of the volleyball sport. The chapter also highlights the performance -related parameters that contribute to the successful delivery of performance in this sport. The recent advances in the application of various machine learning models towards solving the classification and regression problems associated with the data often acquired in the sporting domain are also provided. Moreover, the detailed procedures of the participants’ recruitment, data collection techniques via performance analysis as well as various univariate statistical analyses employed to achieve the purpose of the present study have also been presented. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Lt

The Effect of Competition Strategies in Influencing Volleyball Performance

In this chapter, we examine the importance of key competitive psychological strategic elements that could be used to identify high- performance players in elite indoor men volleyball tournaments. It is demonstrated that a set of competitional psychological strategic elements , namely self-talk, activation, imagery, emotion control, automaticity, relaxation, goal setting, as well as negative thinking, are essential in determining performance and consequently serve as the indicators that significantly favour high performance in the elite volleyball game. In addition, it was demonstrated that a high classification accuracy in discerning the class, i.e. the performance of the players, could be attained via the k-nearest neighbours classifier. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Lt

New hybrid BFGS-CG method for solving unconstrained optimization

Conjugate gradient method and quasi-Newton (QN) method are both well known solvers for solving unconstrained optimization problems. In this paper, we proposed a new conjugate gradient method denoted as Wan, Asrul and Mustafa (WAM) method. This WAM method is then combined with the QN method to produce a new hybrid search direction which is QN-WAM. Based on numerical results, the proposed hybrid method proved to be more efficient compared to the original quasi-Newton method and other hybrid methods

In vitro antiviral activity of plant extracts from Clinacanthus nutans

Clinacanthus nutans is generally used to treat many diseases in folklore remedies. Whole dried plants were macerated with methanol for crude extract preparation. The aim of this study was to evaluate the cytotoxicity and antiviral activities of C. nutans crude extract. Cytotoxicity screening against Vero cells using MTT assay showed that the CC50 values for crude extract of C. nutans was 1.625 mg/mL. These results demonstrate that the extract prepared from C. nutans was non-cytotoxic to the cell with potential antiviral activity. Plaque reduction assays were carried out to evaluate the antiviral activity of C. nutans extract against herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1). These include post-treatment, pre-treatment and virucidal assays. The selective indices (SI = CC50 / EC50) of C. nutans extract in post-treatment, pre-treatment and virucidal assays were 11, 6 and 3 respectively. In conclusion, this study showed that C. nutans extract has promising potential to be explored as anti-HSV-1 agent regardless of the mode of treatment

Site directed Mutagenesis of Carbohydrate Binding Module Family 40 (CBM40) domain from Vibrio cholerae Non-01 sialidase

The location of sialic acid at the termini of various carbohydrate complexes often exploited by microbial pathogens (influenza and parainfluenza viruses) to bind and gain entry to the host cell during the initial stages of pathogenesis thus mediating specific role in human health and diseases. Carbohydrate-binding modules (CBMs) help target the main enzyme to appropriate substrates and increase their catalytic efficiency. However, proteins with weak binding affinity often use site-directed mutagenesis approach to enhance protein affinity via an avidity effect. In this study, a wild-type Family 40 Carbohydrate Binding Module (WT-CBM40) was genetically modified by site-directed mutagenesis to form a stable mutant CBM40 (M-CBM40) to improve domain affinity towards sialic acid. In this study, a gene encoding for Family 40 Carbohydrate Binding Module (CBM40) from Vibrio cholerae Non-O1 sialidase was cloned in pET22b(+) and successfully expressed in E. coli BL21 (DE3) strain. The CBM40 encodes for 195 amino acids with 585 bp of nucleotide sequence. Mutation of Thr200 to Asn200 was successfully performed using the QuikChange II Site-Directed Mutagenesis Kit (Agilent). This study also deals with the generation of a 3-D model of the mutant CBM40 with 2w68.1.A as a template. The validation of mutant CBM40 brings to 0.99 Global Model Quality Estimation (GMQE) scores and 1.14 Quality Model Energy Analysis (QMEAN) Z-scores. Both results indicate the reliability of the mutant model. The analysis visualization of mutant CBM40 by UCSF Chimera proved by MatchMaker sequence alignment score of 1005.9 and RMSD score of 0.08 Å demonstrated both wild type CBM40 and mutant CBM40 structure were closely related. The results gained by Arpeggio web server revealed that the affinity of mutant CBM40 higher than wild type CBM40. For the protein expression study, mutant CBM40 was successfully expressed at 25 ˚C when induced with 1 mM IPTG whereas for wild-type CBM40 was successfully expressed at 18 ˚C, the best IPTG concentration used was 1.5 mM. Maximum expression was achieved at 20 hours after post-induction time. SDS-PAGE analysis of the expressed wild-type and mutant CBM40 proteins displayed a protein band with a molecular mass of 21 kDa. This contruct has a big potential to be developed as therapeutics agent especially as biologics to prevent harmful pathogens gain entry through sialic acid binding present on human and mammalian cell surfaces The optimum characterization conditions established would further lead to the discovery of the true potential of CBM40 protein in enhancing substrate binding affinity, protein-carbohydrate recognition which underpins its broad applications in biotechnology and protein engineering fields

A comparative study of ebay and amazon electronic commerce platforms

The key target of this documentation is to study and compare e-commerce platforms between e-Bay and Amazon. While Amazon.com gained more promotions and underlying exposure to web-based businesses, eBay has secretly built inventories that are truly Internet-friendly. The research used an analytical method to find the difference between these two platforms. Initially, Amazon was only trying to reproduce a list of action plans on the web. The innovation may be inventive, but the design of the action is certainly not. Once again, eBay has a great idea of the Internet network and has empowered supply and demand on the web with incredible outcomes. The sales position is the winner. Besides, eBay clearly shows that the benefits do not need to be in the idea of development - a dispute that Bezos never made. Amazon initially centered around BN.com as a competitor. After a while, Amazon saw eBay as a competitor. The underlying attack was a tremendous disappointment. Currently, Amazon is endeavoring to contend with eBay by driving sales and consolidating its partner programs

Characteristics of physical environment in Arabic classroom: A preliminary study in Malaysian public universities

This study discusses the characteristics of the physical environment in the classroom at Malaysian public universities. The study of the physical environment is essential because the mastery of Arabic learners is crucial. Research is usually done only on aspects of teaching and learning. While aspects of the environment are rarely found, therefore, this study will describe the characteristics of the physical environment conducive to teaching and learning in the classroom at Malaysian public universities. A total of 494 students from eight Malaysian public universities responded to the questionnaire distributed. This study uses descriptive quantitative research methods. The instruments are composed of four structures, namely furniture and equipment, lighting, technology and air quality indoors. The researcher uses the Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS-22) software for factor analysis ( EFA), and factor validation analysis (CFA). The result found that the nature of the physical learning environment in the Arabic classroom has been interpreted from the analysis of the perceptual score obtained. Although students at public universities in Malaysia regard the Arabic language learning atmosphere in this classroom favourably, they wish to enhance the real learning experience in the classroom in all four constructs

Comparative spectroscopic studies on luminescence performance of er3+ doped tellurite glass embedded with different nanoparticles (Ag co and fe) at 0.55 μm emission

The spectroscopic performance of Er doped glass at 0.55 μm emission contain different nanoparticles NPs have been comparatively evaluated. Glass containing 1.0 mol % of Er doped with different NPs (Ag, Co and Fe ) have been prepared using melt quenching technique. X-ray diffraction analysis reveals the all the prepared samples are amorphous. The UV-Vis absorption spectra of all glasses show several prominent peaks at 525 nm, 660 nm, 801nm, 982 nm and 959 nm due to transition from ground state I15/2 to different excited of H11/2, F9/2, I9/2, I11/2, and I13/2. The emission of Er at 0.55 μm for glass contain Ag NP shows significant enhancement about 3 folds up to 0.6 mol%. On the other hand, the emission of Er at 0.55 μm for glass containing Fe NPs and Co NPs intensely quench probably due to the energy-transfer from Er ion to NPs and magnetic contributions