THE DISCRIMINATION OF BARBELL WEIGHT FOR WEIGHTLIFTERS

Ten college weightlifters were recruited in this study. The standard barbell weight (Ws) of each participant was set at 80% of personal best snatch record. The test barbell weights that include Ws, Ws+-1kg, Ws+-2kg, and Ws+-5kg were given randomly, then each lifter was asked to identify the difference between the test weight and standard weight. The discrimination was over 86% when the test weight was Ws+-5kg. For the test weight equal to the standard weight, the discrimination was significantly less than that of other test weights (p less than 01). Based on the results, the weightlifter seems to have good discrimination in the barbell mass at the difference of 5 kg. It seems that they could not be aware of the slight difference (ex: less than 2kg) of barbell mass by 80% of their best snatch record

Investigating Zero-Shot Generalizability on Mandarin-English Code-Switched ASR and Speech-to-text Translation of Recent Foundation Models with Self-Supervision and Weak Supervision

This work evaluated several cutting-edge large-scale foundation models based on self-supervision or weak supervision, including SeamlessM4T, SeamlessM4T v2, and Whisper-large-v3, on three code-switched corpora. We found that self-supervised models can achieve performances close to the supervised model, indicating the effectiveness of multilingual self-supervised pre-training. We also observed that these models still have room for improvement as they kept making similar mistakes and had unsatisfactory performances on modeling intra-sentential code-switching. In addition, the validity of several variants of Whisper was explored, and we concluded that they remained effective in a code-switching scenario, and similar techniques for self-supervised models are worth studying to boost the performance of code-switched tasks.Comment: Submitted to ICASSP 2024 Self-supervision in Audio, Speech and Beyond worksho

Kinematic strategies for obstacle-crossing in older adults with mild cognitive impairment

IntroductionMild cognitive impairment (MCI) is considered a transitional stage between soundness of mind and dementia, often involving problems with memory, which may lead to abnormal postural control and altered end-point control when dealing with neuromechanical challenges during obstacle-crossing. The study aimed to identify the end-point control and angular kinematics of the pelvis-leg apparatus while crossing obstacles for both leading and trailing limbs.Methods12 patients with MCI (age: 66.7 ± 4.2 y/o; height: 161.3 ± 7.3 cm; mass: 62.0 ± 13.6 kg) and 12 healthy adults (age: 67.7 ± 2.9 y/o; height: 159.3 ± 6.1 cm; mass: 61.2 ± 12.0 kg) each walked and crossed obstacles of three different heights (10, 20, and 30% of leg length). Angular motions of the pelvis and lower limbs and toe-obstacle clearances during leading- and trailing-limb crossings were calculated. Two-way analyses of variance were used to study between-subject (group) and within-subject (obstacle height) effects on the variables. Whenever a height effect was found, a polynomial test was used to determine the trend. A significance level of α = 0.05 was set for all tests.ResultsPatients with MCI significantly increased pelvic anterior tilt, hip abduction, and knee adduction in the swing limb during leading-limb crossing when compared to controls (p < 0.05). During trailing-limb crossing, the MCI group showed significantly decreased pelvic posterior tilt, as well as ankle dorsiflexion in the trailing swing limb (p < 0.05).ConclusionPatients with MCI adopt altered kinematic strategies for successful obstacle-crossing. The patients were able to maintain normal leading and trailing toe-obstacle clearances for all tested obstacle heights with a specific kinematic strategy, namely increased pelvic anterior tilt, swing hip abduction, and knee adduction during leading-limb crossing, and decreased pelvic posterior tilt and swing ankle dorsiflexion during trailing-limb crossing. The current results suggest that regular monitoring of obstacle-crossing kinematics for reduced toe-obstacle clearance or any signs of changes in crossing strategy may be helpful for early detection of compromised obstacle-crossing ability in patients with single-domain amnestic MCI. Further studies using a motor/cognitive dual-task approach on the kinematic strategies adopted by multiple-domain MCI will be needed for a complete picture of the functional adaptations in such a patient group

How Does Social Media Interactivity Affect Brand Loyalty?

As social media has become a prominent platform for networking, many organizations have begun to establish more than one brand community, as a set of supplements to their branded websites. Once most online brand interactions take place on social networking sites rather than branded sites, such customer-oriented interactions will become much more complicated and unpredictable. It is a real challenge for organizations to build successful customer-brand relationships through social networking sites. Hence, organizations that wish to enhance brand loyalty by running brand communities face the challenge of effectively conducting social customer relationship management (CRM) tactics. As social media users are susceptible to highly interactive features, understanding the nature of social media interactivity in brand communities is the key to building successful social CRM. The aim of the study is to investigate not only the effect of social media interactivity on community benefits, but also the effect of community benefits on brand loyalty. In addition to measuring the direct effects of social influence and media richness on brand loyalty, the study assessed the indirect effect of responsiveness on brand loyalty by means of community benefits, including knowledge gains and sense of membership. The results, based on data collected from 229 social media users who are followers of a Super Basketball League (SBL) team’s Facebook page, indicated that media richness had a strong, positive, and direct effect on brand loyalty, and that responsiveness had direct effects on their knowledge gains and their sense of membership, which in turn affected brand loyalty indirectly

Buyers’ psychological situations in cross-border electronic commerce

Cross-border electronic commerce (CBEC) has emerged as an innovative business model that transforms consumer behaviour and mindsets, in the era of digitalization and globalization. Buyer situations in CBEC are complex due to the separation of global sellers and buyers in terms of geographic distance, language and cultural differences, and buyer preferences. However, few studies have explored buyers’ shopping decisions from a situational perspective. Drawing on the stimulus–organism–response framework, this study conceptualizes a CBEC buyer shopping model that theorizes four psychological situational factors (i.e., CBEC platform design, user–platform interaction, logistics evaluation, and task orientation) as stimuli, cognitive and affective states as organisms, and shopping intention as a response. The model was empirically tested using 241 data through structural equation modelling. The results indicate that all situational factors positively affect two evaluative states, which in turn positively affect shopping intention. Implications for theory and practice are discussed

Sixteen years post radiotherapy of nasopharyngeal carcinoma elicited multi-dysfunction along PTX and chronic kidney disease with microcytic anemia

BACKGROUND: The hypothalamic–pituitary (h-p) unit is a particularly radiosensitive region in the central nervous system. As a consequence, radiation-induced irreversible, progressively chronic onset hypopituitarism (RIH) commonly develops after radiation treatments and can result in variably impaired pituitary function, which is frequently associated with increased morbidity and mortality. CASE PRESENTATION: A 38-year-old male subject, previously having received radiotherapy for treatment of nasopharygeal carcinoma (NPCA) 16 years ago, appeared at OPD complaining about his failure in penile erection, loss of pubic hair, atrophy of external genitalia: testicles reduced to 2×1.5 cm; penile size shrunk to only 4 cm long. Characteristically, he showed extremely lowered human growth hormone, (HGH, 0.115 ng/mL), testosterone (<0.1 ng/mL), total thyroxine (tT4: 4.740 g/mL), free T4 (fT4, 0.410 ng/mL), cortisol (2.34 g/dL); lowered LH (1.37 mIU/mL) and estradiol (22 pg/mL); highly elevated TSH (7.12 IU/mL). As contrast, he had low end normal ACTH, FSH, total T3, free T3, and estriol; high end normal prolactin (11.71 ng/mL), distinctly implicating hypopituitarism-induced hypothyroidism and hypogonadism. serologically, he showed severely lowered Hb (10.6 g/dL), HCT (32.7%), MCV (77.6 fL), MCH (25.3 pg), MCHC (32.6 g/dL), and platelet count (139×103/L) with extraordinarily elevated RDW (18.2%), together with severely lowered ferritin (23.6 ng/mL) and serum iron levels; highly elevated total iron binding capacity (TIBC, 509 g/dL) and transferrin (363.4 mg/dL), suggesting microcytic anemia. Severely reduced estimated glomerular filtration rate (e-GFR) (89 mL/mim/1.73 m2) pointed to CKD2. Hypocortisolemia with hyponatremia indicated secondary adrenal insufficiency. Replacement therapy using androgen, cortisol, and Ringer’s solution has shown beneficial in improving life quality. CONCLUSIONS: To our believe, we are the first group who report such complicate PTX dysfunction with adrenal cortisol insufficiency concomitantly occurring in a single patient

Indomethacin protects rats from neuronal damage induced by traumatic brain injury and suppresses hippocampal IL-1β release through the inhibition of Nogo-A expression

BACKGROUND: Nogo-A is a member of the reticulon family of membrane-associated proteins and plays an important role in axonal remodeling. The present study aimed to investigate alterations in Nogo-A expression following traumatic brain injury (TBI)-induced inflammation and neuronal damage. METHODS: A weight-drop device was used to deliver a standard traumatic impact to rats. Western blot, RT-PCR and ELISA were used to analyze the expression of Nogo-A and IL-1β. Nogo-A antisense, and an irrelevant control oligonucleotide was intracerebroventricularly infused. We also performed H & E staining and luxol fast blue staining to evaluate the neuronal damage and demyelination resulting from TBI and various treatments. RESULTS: Based on RT-PCR and western blot analyses, the expression of Nogo-A was found to be significantly upregulated in the hippocampus beginning eight hours after TBI. In addition, TBI caused an apparent elevation in IL-1β levels and severe neuronal damage and demyelination in the tested animals. All of the TBI-associated molecular and cellular consequences could be effectively reversed by treating the animals with the anti-inflammatory drug indomethacin. More importantly, the TBI-associated stimulation in the levels of both Nogo-A and IL-1β could be effectively inhibited by a specific Nogo-A antisense oligonucleotide. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings suggest that the suppression of Nogo-A expression appears to be an early response conferred by indomethacin, which then leads to decreases in the levels of IL-1β and TBI-induced neuron damage