PREFERENCE TEST OF THE WEIGHTED SHOES

The purpose of this study was to use paired comparison approach to test the weighted shoe preference of the subjects. Forty subjects were recruited to put on five different weighted shoes and choose the preferred one after completing four paired comparisons. During the test, subjects were blind of any information from the shoes. The results showed that thirty-two (80%) out of the forty subjects preferred Shoe D or E, which centre of mass was close to the rear end of the shoe. Significant difference was found in shoe preference between the males and females (?24=10.500, p=.033), while was not found between the lighters and heaviers (?24=5.583, p=.233). The mechanism of the gender effect on the preference decision are unclear. The results of the weighted shoe preference test could be applied to athlete training or rehabilitation shoe design to be comfortable for the users

Win-Win on E-Business by Complementary Assets with IT Competence and Innovative Capabilities

Information Technology (IT) has been widely applied to business operations and service systems and derived various innovative business models and novel areas, especially e-business. E-business provides service by websites via IT with online information or systems to create multiple innovative values which change user behavior. Under this trend, e-business (hereinafter referred to as native e-business firms) has deeply threatened the survival of traditional service firms. To overcome difficulties, many traditional firms select bottom-up integration to increase e-services (hereinafter referred to as tradition-to-e-business firms) for expanding their multiple marketing channels. To face the challenge, native e-business firms, on the other hand, choose top-down integration, including physical stores, logistics, cash flow, supply chain, etc., to increase service values. Under competition in many years, the tradition-to-e-business firms are hard to surpass native e-business firms. On the contrary, native e-business firms cannot defeat traditional firms also. In this study, we explore the reason why native e-business and traditional firms cannot supersede each other. We find that the nature of firms and development strategy influences business focus, growth trajectory and advantage position. In the emerging stage, “e-business” is core business in native e-business firms. The firms are led by entrepreneur insights and their IT capabilities. Traditional firms were forced to build e-business, when they perceived customer disappearance. E-business is just one of their marketing channels. In the growth stage, e-Business and complementary assets oppositely lead enterprise resource integration, and the capability of which affects the company\u27s competitive advantage. This article adopts qualitative research methods to investigate innovative capability, IT competence and complementary assets which derive the impact of e-business value creation on firms with different origins and background. Then we interpret the phenomenon of change by resource-based view (RBV) and structure inertia theory, analyze the advantages and limitation of native e-business firms and traditional service firms, and explain why it is difficult to surpass and hard to be defeated by each other. Finally, we proposed theory contribution and management implication

GSAE: an autoencoder with embedded gene-set nodes for genomics functional characterization

Bioinformatics tools have been developed to interpret gene expression data at the gene set level, and these gene set based analyses improve the biologists' capability to discover functional relevance of their experiment design. While elucidating gene set individually, inter gene sets association is rarely taken into consideration. Deep learning, an emerging machine learning technique in computational biology, can be used to generate an unbiased combination of gene set, and to determine the biological relevance and analysis consistency of these combining gene sets by leveraging large genomic data sets. In this study, we proposed a gene superset autoencoder (GSAE), a multi-layer autoencoder model with the incorporation of a priori defined gene sets that retain the crucial biological features in the latent layer. We introduced the concept of the gene superset, an unbiased combination of gene sets with weights trained by the autoencoder, where each node in the latent layer is a superset. Trained with genomic data from TCGA and evaluated with their accompanying clinical parameters, we showed gene supersets' ability of discriminating tumor subtypes and their prognostic capability. We further demonstrated the biological relevance of the top component gene sets in the significant supersets. Using autoencoder model and gene superset at its latent layer, we demonstrated that gene supersets retain sufficient biological information with respect to tumor subtypes and clinical prognostic significance. Superset also provides high reproducibility on survival analysis and accurate prediction for cancer subtypes.Comment: Presented in the International Conference on Intelligent Biology and Medicine (ICIBM 2018) at Los Angeles, CA, USA and published in BMC Systems Biology 2018, 12(Suppl 8):14

Optical transitions between Landau levels: AA-stacked bilayer graphene

The low-frequency optical excitations of AA-stacked bilayer graphene are investigated by the tight-binding model. Two groups of asymmetric LLs lead to two kinds of absorption peaks resulting from only intragroup excitations. Each absorption peak obeys a single selection rule similar to that of monolayer graphene. The excitation channel of each peak is changed as the field strength approaches a critical strength. This alteration of the excitation channel is strongly related to the setting of the Fermi level. The peculiar optical properties can be attributed to the characteristics of the LL wave functions of the two LL groups. A detailed comparison of optical properties between AA-stacked and AB-stacked bilayer graphenes is also offered. The compared results demonstrate that the optical properties are strongly dominated by the stacking symmetry. Furthermore, the presented results may be used to discriminate AABG from MG, which can be hardly done by STM

A Novel Family of Cyst Proteins with Epidermal Growth Factor Repeats in Giardia lamblia

The biological goal of Giardia lamblia life cycle is differentiation into a cyst form (encystation) that can survive in the environment and infect a new host. Since cystic stages are key to transmission of parasites, this differentiation may be a target for interruption of the life cycle. Synthesis and assembly of the extracellular cyst wall are the major hallmarks of this important differentiation. During encystation, cyst wall structural proteins are coordinately synthesized and are mainly targeted to the cyst wall. However, only a few such proteins have been identified to date. In this study, we used a combination of bioinformatics and molecular approaches to identify new cyst structural proteins from G. lamblia and found a group of Epidermal Growth Factor (EGF)-like Repeats containing Cyst Proteins (EGFCPs). Interestingly, the levels of EGFCPs proteins increased significantly during encystation, which matches the characteristics of the Giardia cyst wall protein. Further characterization and localization studies suggest that EGFCPs may function like cyst wall proteins, involved in differentiation of G. lamblia trophozoites into cysts. Our results provide valuable information regarding the function of a new group of cyst proteins in parasite differentiation into cysts and help develop ways to interrupt the parasite life cycle

THE ANALYSIS OF ANGULAR MOMENTUM OF SIDE-VOLLEY SOCCER SHOTS PERFORMED AT THREE BALL-HEIGHT

The purpose of this study was to examine side-volley soccer shots performed at three ballheight. Five amateur, right leg dominant, male soccer players (height = 173 ±2.86 cm; weight = 68 ±6.04 kg; age = 20.5 ±0.5 yrs) participated in this study. Two electrically synchronized highspeed video cameras (Redlake) were used to sample the kicking motion at 250 Hz. By the three-dimensional cinematographic technical analysis, the kicking leg was modeled as a threelink kinetic chain composed of thigh, shank, and foot, from which angular velocities and angular momentum were computed. Significantly greater ball velocity and foot velocity were achieved in kicking lower ball-height, with a shorter leg-swing time. The foot moment of inertia exhibited a high value in side-volley shot performed at the lower ball-height. These results indicated that the side-volley soccer shots performed at the lower ball-height would made higher value of foot angular momentum, and benefited ball velocity

Using Hybrid Angle/Distance Information for Distributed Topology Control in Vehicular Sensor Networks

In a vehicular sensor network (VSN), the key design issue is how to organize vehicles effectively, such that the local network topology can be stabilized quickly. In this work, each vehicle with on-board sensors can be considered as a local controller associated with a group of communication members. In order to balance the load among the nodes and govern the local topology change, a group formation scheme using localized criteria is implemented. The proposed distributed topology control method focuses on reducing the rate of group member change and avoiding the unnecessary information exchange. Two major phases are sequentially applied to choose the group members of each vehicle using hybrid angle/distance information. The operation of Phase I is based on the concept of the cone-based method, which can select the desired vehicles quickly. Afterwards, the proposed time-slot method is further applied to stabilize the network topology. Given the network structure in Phase I, a routing scheme is presented in Phase II. The network behaviors are explored through simulation and analysis in a variety of scenarios. The results show that the proposed mechanism is a scalable and effective control framework for VSNs