LLukas22/scidocs huggingface dataset:
Surface erosion due to partial discharges on several kinds of epoxy nanocomposites

Resistance to partial discharge (PD) was investigated for four kinds of epoxy nanocomposites, an epoxy resin without fillers, and an epoxy resin with SiO/sub 2/ micro-filler. The nano-fillers used were TiO/sub 2/, two different particle sizes of SiO/sub 2/, and layered silicate. Filler content was 5 wt % in all nano- and microcomposites. Such materials were subjected to PDs under a rod-gap-plane electrode. It is concluded that all the nanocomposites are more resistant to PDs than that without fillers and with microfillers. And epoxy/SiO/sub 2/ nanocomposites are more resistant to PDs than the other nanocomposites. Moreover, the epoxy/SiO/sub 2/ nanocomposite of smaller particle size is superior in PD resistance to that of larger size.
French Women Physicists: Progress and Stability

Here we present a few gender-disaggregated data on women physicists in universities and in public research institutions. We introduce a statistical indicator, the “men’s advantage,” which will help us estimate the glass-ceiling effect in physics as compared with other disciplines. We describe the recently established structures in favor of women scientists in France, which, hopefully, should help empower French women physicists.
Towards Automatic Animated Storyboarding

In this paper, we propose a machine learning-based NLP system for automatically creating animated storyboards using the action descriptions of movie scripts. We focus particularly on the importance of verb semantics when generating graphics commands, and find that semantic role labelling boosts performance and is relatively robust to the effects of
Randomised controlled trial of pelvic floor muscle training during pregnancy.

OBJECTIVES
To examine a possible effect on labour of training the muscles of the pelvic floor during pregnancy.


DESIGN
Randomised controlled trial.


SETTING
Trondheim University Hospital and three outpatient physiotherapy clinics in a primary care setting.


PARTICIPANTS
301 healthy nulliparous women randomly allocated to a training group (148) or a control group (153).


INTERVENTION
A structured training programme with exercises for the pelvic floor muscles between the 20th and 36th week of pregnancy.


MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES
Duration of the second stage of labour and number of deliveries lasting longer than 60 minutes of active pushing among women with spontaneous start of labour after 37 weeks of pregnancy with a singleton fetus in cephalic position.


RESULTS
Women randomised to pelvic floor muscle training had a lower rate of prolonged second stage labour (24%, 95% confidence interval 16% to 33%; 22 out of 105 women were at risk (undelivered) at 60 minutes in the survival analysis) than women allocated to no training (38% (37/109), 28% to 47%). The duration of the second stage was not significantly shorter (40 minutes v 45 minutes, P = 0. 06).


CONCLUSIONS
A structured training programme for the pelvic floor muscles is associated with fewer cases of active pushing in the second stage of labour lasting longer than 60 minutes.
Fuzzy control for linear plants with uncertain output backlashes

In this correspondence, a new approach to design a fuzzy controller for systems with uncertain output backlash to have good tracking performance is presented. Without using a compensation mechanism or a backlash inverse, the fuzzy control mechanism is designed to implicitly compensate the delay effect arising from an uncertain output backlash and to make the output backlash system stable without limit cycles. Also, the proposed fuzzy controller is presented to be insensitive to the variations of the backlash and system plant parameters. Moreover, the proposed approach is extended to design a fuzzy controller for a two-input two-output (TITO) linear plant with output backlash. The effectiveness of the designed fuzzy controller is illustrated by the simulation results on linear, low-order, nonlinear plants and the experimental results on an amplifier-motor system with a gear train.
Idea: A System for Efficient Failure Management in Smart IoT Environments

IoT enabled smart environments are expected to proliferate significantly in the near future, particularly in the context of monitoring services for wellness living, patient healthcare and elderly care. Timely maintenance of failed sensors is of critical importance in such deployments to ensure minimal disruption to monitoring services. However, maintenance of large and geographically spread deployments can be a significant challenge. We present Idea that significantly increases the vtime-before-repair for a smart home deployment, thereby reducing the maintenance overhead. Specifically, our approach leverages the facts that (a) there is inherent sensor redundancy when combinations of sensors monitor activities of daily living (ADLs) in smart environments, and (b) the impact of each sensor failure depends on the activities being monitored and the functional redundancy afforded by rest of the heterogeneous sensors available for detecting the activities. Consequently, Idea identifies homes that need to be fixed based on expected degradation in ADL detection performance, and optimizes maintenance scheduling accordingly. We demonstrate that our approach leads to 3--40 times fewer maintenance personnel than a scheme in which failed sensors are fixed without considering their impact.
A Statistical Test Suite for Random and Pseudorandom Number Generators for Cryptographic Application

This paper discusses some aspects of testing random and pseudorandom number generators. A Statistical Test Suite for Random and Pseudorandom Number Generators for Cryptographic Applications (NIST Special Publication) is presented. This paper also demonstrates the software implementation of the test suite with output protocols and presents experiences from testing some random and pseudorandom generators.
Fusion of background knowledge and streams of events

Usage of background knowledge about events and their relations to other concepts in the application domain can improve the expressiveness and flexibility of complex event processing systems. Huge amounts of domain background knowledge stored in external knowledge bases can be used in combination with event processing in order to achieve more knowledgeable complex event processing. In this paper, we discuss the benefits of background knowledge for event processing and describe different categories of event query rules. We propose different event processing approaches used for the fusion of background knowledge with real-time event streams, like plan-based event processing or event query preprocessing. We have implemented some of the proposed event processing methods for the stock market monitoring domain by using available real-time stock events and background knowledge about joint-stock companies from the linked open data. Our experiments show that some of the approaches can improve the performance of event processing compared to more basic approaches.
Improving Multi-Modal Representations Using Image Dispersion: Why Less is Sometimes More

Models that learn semantic representations from both linguistic and perceptual input outperform text-only models in many contexts and better reflect human concept acquisition. However, experiments suggest that while the inclusion of perceptual input improves representations of certain concepts, it degrades the representations of others. We propose an unsupervised method to determine whether to include perceptual input for a concept, and show that it significantly improves the ability of multi-modal models to learn and represent word meanings. The method relies solely on image data, and can be applied to a variety of other NLP tasks.
Improving Referral Communication Using a Referral Tool Within an Electronic Medical Record

Objectives: Poor outpatient referral communication is an important quality and safety issue. We implemented an electronic referral tool to analyze its impact on communication between primary care physicians (PCPs) and specialists. Methods: We studied one practice site that implemented the referral tool and one that did not and surveyed affiliated specialists, PCPs, and patients about referral communication. Results: Specialists more often received information before the referral visit from intervention PCPs versus nonintervention PCPs (62 percent vs. 12 percent, P <0.0001), a finding that persisted after adjustment (OR = 3.3, P = 0.008). Intervention PCPs more often received return communication from specialists (69 percent vs. 50 percent, P = 0.08), a finding of borderline statistical significance. Finally, patients of intervention PCPs were more likely than patients of control PCPs to report that specialists had received information before their visit (70 percent vs. 43 percent, P = 0.007). Conclusion: Referrals are a key outpatient transition of care. Facilitating transmission of referral information electronically can improve physician communication. Introduction Communicating patient information at the time of specialty referral is essential to high-quality consultation and coordinated, safe patient care. Both primary care and specialist physicians value this information exchange for shared patients, but dissatisfaction with the current referral process is widespread among primary care physicians (PCPs) and their consultants. 3, 4 About half the time, the reason for dissatisfaction is a delayed or missing referral letter and reports. Other reasons include dissatisfaction with redundancies in the referral process, missing information in the referral communication, time required to write a referral note, and difficulty in finding a specialist. 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 Studies have highlighted the problem of poor communication between PCPs and specialists in terms of timeliness and content. This represents a major opportunity for improvement. 10 Strategies for improving communication of referral information have been proposed, including scheduling the specialist appointment from the referring physician’s office and providing pertinent information to the specialist, which have been shown to increase referral completion. Specialists who received timely patient referral information reported providing optimal care twice as often as specialists who did not. Other studies have looked at the benefits of physician
Impact of hybrid delivery of education on student academic performance and the student experience.

OBJECTIVES
To compare student academic performance and the student experience in the first-year doctor of pharmacy (PharmD) program between the main and newly opened satellite campuses of the University of Maryland.


METHODS
Student performance indicators including graded assessments, course averages, cumulative first-year grade point average (GPA), and introductory pharmacy practice experience (IPPE) evaluations were analyzed retrospectively. Student experience indicators were obtained via an online survey instrument and included involvement in student organizations; time-budgeting practices; and stress levels and their perceived effect on performance.


RESULTS
Graded assessments, course averages, GPA, and IPPE evaluations were indistinguishable between campuses. Students' time allocation was not different between campuses, except for time spent attending class and watching lecture videos. There was no difference between students' stress levels at each campus.


CONCLUSIONS
The implementation of a satellite campus to expand pharmacy education yielded academic performance and student engagement comparable to those from traditional delivery methods.
Investment climate and employment growth : The impact of access to finance , corruption and regulations across firms

Investment Climate and Employment Growth: The Impact of Access to Finance, Corruption and Regulations Across Firms Using firm level data on 70,000 enterprises in 107 countries, this paper finds important effects of access to finance, business regulations, corruption, and to a lesser extent, infrastructure bottlenecks in explaining patterns of job creation at the firm level. The paper focuses on how the impact of the investment climate varies across sizes of firms. The differences across size categories come from two sources. First, objective conditions of the business environment do vary systematically by firm types. Micro and small firms have less access to formal finance, pay more in bribes than do larger firms, and face greater interruptions in infrastructure services. Larger firms spend significantly more time dealing with officials and red tape. Second, even controlling for these differences in objective conditions, there is evidence of significant non-linearities in their impact on employment growth. The results suggest strong composition effects: A weak business environment shifts downward the size distribution of firms. In the case of finance and business regulations this occurs by reducing the employment growth of all firms, particularly micro and small firms. On the other hand, corruption and poor access to infrastructure reduce employment growth by affecting the growth of medium size and large firms. With significant differences between firms with less than 10 employees and SMEs, these results indicate significant reforms are needed to spur micro firms to grow into the ranks of the SMEs. JEL Classification: J23
EuroHeart score for the evaluation of in-hospital mortality in patients undergoing percutaneous coronary intervention.

AIMS
The applicability of currently available risk prediction models for patients undergoing percutaneous coronary interventions (PCIs) is limited. We aimed to develop a model for the prediction of in-hospital mortality after PCI that is based on contemporary and representative data from a European perspective.


METHODS AND RESULTS
Our analyses are based on the Euro Heart Survey of PCIs, which contains information on 46 064 consecutive patients who underwent PCI for different indications in 176 participating European centres during 2005-08. Patients were randomly divided into a training (n = 23 032) and a validation (n = 23 032) set with similar characteristics. In these sets, 339 (1.5%) and 305 (1.3%) patients died during hospitalization, respectively. On the basis of the training set, a logistic model was constructed that related 16 independent patient or lesion characteristics with mortality, including PCI indication, advanced age, haemodynamic instability, multivessel disease, and proximal LAD disease. In both the training and validation data sets, the model had a good performance in terms of discrimination (C-index 0.91 and 0.90, respectively) and calibration (Hosmer-Lemeshow P-value 0.39 and 0.18, respectively).


CONCLUSION
In-hospital mortality in PCI patients was well predicted by a risk score that contains 16 factors. The score has strong applicability for European practices.
Long-term results with interferon therapy in chronic type B hepatitis: a prospective randomized trial

OBJECTIVES:The aims of this long-term, prospective randomized study were to evaluate the clinical usefulness of α-interferon in treating chronic HBV infection and to establish whether clearance of viral replication markers and normalization of liver function tests induced by α-interferon were sustained.METHODS:Sixty-four patients with chronic wild type (HBeAg-positive) hepatitis B, enrolled between 1983 and 1987, were randomized into two groups. Thirty-three patients received α-interferon (5 MU/m2 three times weekly for 6 months; treated group), and 31 were not treated (controls). Treated and control patients were prospectively followed for a mean of 86.4 ± 6.96 and 79.7 ± 6.8 (p= NS) months, respectively.RESULTS:Clearance of the following viral markers was found in treated and control patients as follows: HBV-DNA, 26 (78.9%) and 18 (58.1%) (p= 0.106); HBeAg, 30 (90.9%) and 19 (61.2%) (p < 0.007); and HBsAg, 12 (36.4%) and three (9.8%) (p < 0.017). Persistent abnormal ALT levels were found in 11 (33.3%) treated and in 22 (70.9%) control patients (p < 0.025). Four control and three treated patients developed portal hypertension whereas two control and one treated patient developed hepatocellular carcinoma. Seven patients (five treated and two controls) were retrospectively found to have hepatitis C virus (HCV) coinfection before enrollment. To date, all coinfected patients remain positive for HCV-RNA. Also, all HCV coinfected patients, except one in the treated group, had persistent increased serum ALT levels. One of the coinfected patients developed portal hypertension.CONCLUSIONS:Chronic HBV hepatitis patients responding to interferon treatment had a faster, more complete, and sustained clearance of viral markers than controls; HCV coinfection does not seem to negatively affect the clearance of HBV replicative markers. However when coinfection occurs, hepatic disease persists despite HBV marker clearance.
A study to investigate dose escalation of doxorubicin in ABVD chemotherapy for Hodgkin lymphoma incorporating biomarkers of response and toxicity

Background:Myelotoxicity during initial cycles of chemotherapy for Hodgkin lymphoma is associated with better outcome, supporting the concept of individualised dosing based on pharmacodynamic end points to optimise results. This study was performed to identify the maximum tolerated dose (MTD) of doxorubicin within cycles 1–3 ABVD (doxorubicin, bleomycin, vinblastine, dacarbazine). Circulating biomarkers of response (nucleosomal DNA, nDNA) and epithelial toxicity (Cytokeratin 18, CK18) were also measured.Methods:Dose escalation of doxorubicin in cycles 1–3 ABVD supported by pegfilgrastim was performed on a six-patient cohort basis (35, 45 and 55 mg m–2) with doxorubicin reduced to 25 mg m–2 or omitted in cycles 4–6 to maintain cumulative exposure of 103–130% standard ABVD. BVD was given at standard doses throughout. Six additional subjects were recruited at the MTD.Results:Twenty-four subjects were recruited. Dose-limiting toxicities (DLTs) of grade 3 neuropathy, pneumonitis, palmar-plantar erythema and neutropenic infection were observed at 55 mg m–2, so 45 mg m–2 was declared the MTD. In patients who subsequently experienced DLT at any time, large increases in CK18 were seen on day 3 of cycle 1 ABVD.Conclusion:Escalated ABVD incorporating doxorubicin at 45 mg m–2 in cycles 1–3 can be delivered safely with pegfilgrastim support. Circulating cell death biomarkers may assist in the development of future individualised dosing strategies.
A Survey of Hardware Trojan Taxonomy and Detection

Editor's note:Today's integrated circuits are vulnerable to hardware Trojans, which are malicious alterations to the circuit, either during design or fabrication. This article presents a classification of hardware Trojans and a survey of published techniques for Trojan detection.
Value Added to What? How a Ceiling in the Testing Instrument Influences Value-Added Estimation

Value-added measures of teacher quality may be sensitive to the quantitative properties of the student tests upon which they are based. This article focuses on the sensitivity of value added to test score ceiling effects. Test score ceilings are increasingly common in testing instruments across the country as education policy continues to emphasize proficiency-based reform. Encouragingly, we show that over a wide range of test score ceiling severity, teachers' value-added estimates are only negligibly influenced by ceiling effects. However, as ceiling conditions approach those found in minimum-competency testing environments, value-added results are significantly altered. We suggest a simple statistical check for ceiling effects.
Contrastive Analysis , Error Analysis , Interlanguage and the Implication to Language Teaching

Students learning a foreign language meet with many kinds of learning problems dealing with its sound system, vocabulary, structure, etc. Linguists try to find out the causes of the problems to be applied in language teaching, to minimize the problems. They propose contrastive analysis, error analysis, interlanguage theory. Contrastive analysis is the systematic study of a pair of languages with a view to identifying their structural differences and similarities between the first language and the target language based on the assumptions that: the similarities facilitate learning while differences cause problems. Via contrastive analysis, problems can be predicted and considered in the curriculum. However, not all problems predicted by contrastive analysis always appear to be difficult for the students. On the other hand, many errors that do turn up are not predicted by contrastive analysis. A counter-theory to contrastive analysis is error analysis. A key finding of error analysis is that many learner errors are produced by learners making faulty inferences about the rules of the new language. These errors can be divided into three subcategories: overgeneralization, incomplete rule application, and the hypothesizing of false concepts. Error analysis was criticized for misdiagnosing student learning problems due to their "avoidance" of certain difficult L2 elements. Most researchers agree that contrastive analysis and error analysis alone can't predict or account for the myriad errors encountered in learning English. In the mid-1970s, Corder and others moved on to a more wideranging approach to learner language, known as interlanguage. The scholars reject the view of learner language as merely an imperfect version of the target language. Interlanguage is continuum between the first language and the target language. Interlanguage is dynamic (constantly adapting to new information) and influenced by the learners.
The Arabic Online Commentary Dataset: an Annotated Dataset of Informal Arabic with High Dialectal Content

The written form of Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), differs quite a bit from the spoken dialects of Arabic, which are the true “native” languages of Arabic speakers used in daily life. However, due to MSA’s prevalence in written form, almost all Arabic datasets have predominantly MSA content. We present the Arabic Online Commentary Dataset, a 52M-word monolingual dataset rich in dialectal content, and we describe our long-term annotation effort to identify the dialect level (and dialect itself) in each sentence of the dataset. So far, we have labeled 108K sentences, 41% of which as having dialectal content. We also present experimental results on the task of automatic dialect identification, using the collected labels for training and evaluation.
An auditory system-based feature for robust speech recognition

An auditory feature extraction algorithm for robust speech recognition in adverse acoustic environments is presented. The feature computation is comprised of an outer-middle-ear transfer function, FFT, frequency conversion from linear to the Bark scale, auditory filtering, nonlinearity, and discrete cosine transform. The feature is evaluated in two tasks: connected-digit recognition and large vocabulary continuous speech recognition. The tested data were under various noise conditions, including handset and hands-free speech data in landline and wireless communications with additive car and babble noise. Compared with the LPCC, MFCC, MELLPCC, and PLPfeatures, the proposed feature has an average 20% to 30% string error rate reduction on the connected-digit task, and 8% to 14% word error rate reduction on the Wall Street Journal task in various additive noise conditions.