A difficulty of using confocal microscopy to study Ca2+ sparks is the uncertainty of the linescan position with respect to the source of Ca2+ release. Random placement of the linescan is expected to result in a broad distribution of measured Ca2+ spark amplitudes (a) even if all Ca2+ sparks were generated identically. Thus variations in Ca2+ spark amplitude due to positional differences between...

Conventional tests for investigating the minimum ignition energy (MIE) of dust clouds are restricted to energies above a few mJ, due to the challenges of producing sparks of very low energies that can be synchronised with a transient dust cloud. In this paper, a new circuit for generating capacitive sparks of significantly lower energies than 1mJ is presented. A measurement system for capturing...

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of SPARK Physical Education (PE) program on fundamental motor skills in 4-6 year children. SPARK (Sports, Play, and Active Recreation for Kids) is an evidence based PE program designed in order to promote the lifelong wellbeing. METHODS In total, 90 children aged 4 to 6 years were selected randomly. The children were allocated ...

In cardiac muscle, Ca2+ is released from the sarcoplasmic reticulum (SR) in units called Ca2+ sparks. Ca2+ spark characteristics have been studied almost entirely at room temperature. This study compares characteristics of spontaneous sparks detected with fluo 3 in resting mouse ventricular myocytes at 22 and 37 degrees C. The incidence and frequency of Ca2+ sparks decreased dramatically at 37 ...

Through theoretical analysis of the statistics of stochastic calcium (Ca) release (i.e., the amplitude, duration and inter-event interval of simulated Ca puffs and sparks), we show that a Langevin description of the collective gating of Ca channels may be a good approximation to the corresponding Markov chain model when the number of Ca channels per Ca release unit (CaRU) is in the physiologica...

We consider the numerical solution of systems of index 2 implicit differential-algebraic equations (DAEs) by a class of super partitioned additive Runge-Kutta (SPARK) methods. The families of Lobatto IIIA-B-C-C-D methods are included. We show super-convergence of optimal order 2s−2 for the s-stage Lobatto families provided the constraints are treated in a particular way which strongly relies on...

Parallel algorithms, such as the ant colony algorithm, take a long time when solving large-scale problems. In this paper, the MAX-MIN Ant System algorithm (MMAS) is parallelized to solve Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) based on a Spark cloud computing platform. We combine MMAS with Spark MapReduce to execute the path building and the pheromone operation in a distributed computer cluster. To im...

While sequential pattern mining (SPM) is an import application in uncertain databases, it is challenging in efficiency and scalability. In this paper, we develop a dynamic programming (DP) approach to mine probabilistic frequent sequential patterns in distributed computing platform Spark. Directly applying the DP method to Spark is impractical because its memory-consuming characteristic may cau...

Machine learning practitioners are increasingly interested in applying their algorithms to Big Data. Unfortunately, current high-level languages for data analytics in the cloud (e.g., [2, 15, 16, 5]) do not fully cover this domain. One key missing ingredient is means to express iteration over the data (e.g., [19]). Zaharia et al., were the first to answer this call from a systems perspective wi...