LLukas22/scidocs huggingface dataset:
A taxonomy of virtual worlds usage in education

Virtual Worlds are an important tool in modern educ ation practices as well as providing socialisation, entertainment and a laboratory for c llaborative work. This paper focuses on the uses of virtual worlds for education and synthesise s over 100 published academic papers, reports and educational websites from around the world. A t axonomy is then derived from these articles, delineating current theoretical and practical work n Virtual World usage, specifically in the field of education. The taxonomy identifies rich veins of current research and practice in associated educational theory and in simulated worlds or envir onments, yet it also demonstrates the paucity of work in important areas such as evaluation, grad ing and accessibility. Introduction Internet technologies have been deployed in busines , ducation and academic life. Visual environments have developed from the original onlin e games of over 40 years ago. Multi User Dungeon (MUD) games were developed in the 1970s (Ba rtle, 1990). By the 1990s fully graphical multimedia MUD Object Oriented systems had been dev eloped along with Multi Player Online Games (MMOGs). One of the most widely known MMOG is World of Warcraft, (http://www.worldofwarcraft.com) with over 11 million active subscriptions. Visual environments have been developed further fro m 3D Web-based technologies to form Multi-user Virtual Environments (MUVEs) such as Sec ond Life and Active World (http://secondlife.com/ ; www.activeworlds.com). A MUVE enables multiple simultaneous participants to access virtual contexts, interact w ith digital artefacts, and represent themselves through avatars (online persona), communicate with o er participants, and take part in experiences incorporating modelling and mentoring a bout problems similar to those in a real world context (Dieterle & Clarke, 2005). A virtual world, by comparison, is also a computerbased simulated environment but which may not have multiple users playing simultaneously online. According to Mennecke (2008), virtual world s are part of the domain of multiplayer online games but without the organised game play. A virtual world could be entered on an off-line personal computer, such as with the game Sims ( http://thesims.ea.com/en_us/home ), but a MUVE implies on-line interaction with other users. MUVEs allow multi users to access 3D virtual enviro nments at the same time. The use of MUVEs has not only attracted gamers who enjoy explo ring on-line virtual worlds, but also businesses and academic researchers. The educationa l use of MUVEs has become a key area of research (Bellotti, Berta, De Gloria, & Primavera, 2010; Edirisingha, Nie, Pluciennik, & Young, 2009; Falloon, 2010; Hew & Cheung, 2010; Jestice & Kahai, 2010; Oliver & Carr, 2009; Petrakou, 2010; Salmon, 2009).
Bleach treatment of sputum samples aids pulmonary tuberculosis screening among HIV-infected patients in Laos.

BACKGROUND
Laos has a high prevalence of tuberculosis (TB) and a slowly increasing prevalence of human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immunedeficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS). Sputum smear microscopy is the only method currently available for routine screening of pulmonary TB, although it only detects one in three cases among persons living with HIV (PLWH). Bleach treatment of sputum samples (bleach method) has been shown to significantly improve the sensitivity of the test; however, its effectiveness in PLWH remains to be determined in Laos.


OBJECTIVES
To determine the performance of the bleach method as a diagnostic tool for pulmonary TB in PLWH and to assess its cost-effectiveness in Laos.


RESULTS
Of 174 sputum samples collected from 92 patients, 29 were culture-positive for Mycobacterium tuberculosis in 17 patients. The sensitivity of the direct method and the bleach method was respectively 59% and 93%, and specificity was 100% for both methods. The incremental cost-effectiveness ratio for screening an additional case was US$17.40.


CONCLUSION
The bleach method is simple, cheap, easy to perform and cost-effective in PLWH. Its implementation in laboratories involved in routine screening of pulmonary TB among PLWH would allow practitioners to start the treatment of this life-threatening co-infection earlier.
Citalopram neuropharmacological challenge in alcohol-dependent patients and controls: pharmacogenetic, endocrine and psychobehavioral results.

AIM
Alcoholism has been associated with long-lasting alterations in LHPA (limbic-hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal) axis function, related to a dysfunction of the serotonergic neurotransmission. Functional polymorphisms of the serotonin system were previously reported to have significant influence on serotonin-induced neuroendocrine response. The aim of the study is to investigate in a double-blind, placebo-controlled approach, whether citalopram (a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, SSRI) would affect LHPA axis function as measured with ACTH (adrenocorticotrophic hormone) levels representing endocrine responsivity in 11 alcohol-dependent individuals compared to 12 controls. Furthermore we wanted to know whether functional polymorphisms (5-HTTLPR and 5HT2C Ser23Cys), have any influence on this responsivity.


PATIENTS AND METHODS
Alcohol-dependent inpatients aged 36.45+/-7.7 years who were detoxified, without comorbid psychiatric/medical disorders or concurrent psychotropic medications, and 12 age-matched healthy controls aged 32.50+/-6.4 years were enrolled. Subjects also reported their subjective experiences like anxiety, craving and intoxication using visual analogue scales (VAS), side-effects were assessed by the serotonin syndrome scale (SSS). Measurements were taken at 8 timepoints at 30 mins interval, from -2 (60 mins pre-application) to +6 (180 mins post-application). Patients had a mean duration of illness of 8.91+/-3.4 years, consumed a mean of 326.36+/-220.8 g alcohol/day whereas control subjects consumed a mean of 32.50+/-41.4 g alcohol/day. A 0.4 mg citalopram/kg body weight dose was administered intravenously to patients (31.96+/-4.45 mg), and to controls (34.22+/-7.65 mg).


RESULTS
ACTH levels were higher for both groups in the verum compared to placebo administrations across timepoints. 5HT2C Ser23 alleles effected significantly higher ACTH responses under placebo administration but attenuated the responses under citalopram administration. Considering both groups together, no influence of 5-HTTLPR alleles was found on ACTH levels in either group under either regimen. While citalopram administration did not reduce craving in alcohol-dependent patients, it increased anxiety in patients and controls compared to placebo administration.


CONCLUSION
Despite the small differences in endocrine and subjective responses between alcoholic patients and controls, the effect of SSRI on endocrine response with respect to 5HT2C functional alleles deserves further investigation in larger samples to clarify whether this genetic variant constitutes a potential risk factor for changes in neuroendocrine functioning and subsequent psychiatric disorders.
HLA-G and HLA-E gene polymorphism in patients with Idiopathic Recurrent Pregnancy Loss in Gaza strip

IV HLA-G and HLA-E alleles and RPL HLA-G and HLA-E gene polymorphism in patients with Idiopathic Recurrent Pregnancy Loss in Gaza strip
Automatically Tuning Parallel and Parallelized Programs

In today’s multicore era, parallelization of serial code is essential in order to exploit the architectures’ performance potential. Parallelization, especially of legacy code, however, proves to be a challenge as manual efforts must either be directed towards algorithmic modifications or towards analysis of computationally intensive sections of code for the best possible parallel performance, both of which are difficult and time-consuming. Automatic parallelization uses sophisticated compiletime techniques in order to identify parallelism in serial programs, thus reducing the burden on the program developer. Similar sophistication is needed to improve the performance of hand-parallelized programs. A key difficulty is that optimizing compilers are generally unable to estimate the performance of an application or even a program section at compiletime, and so the task of performance improvement invariably rests with the developer. Automatic tuning uses static analysis and runtime performance metrics to determine the best possible compile-time approach for optimal application performance. This paper describes an offline tuning approach that uses a source-to-source parallelizing compiler, Cetus, and a tuning framework to tune parallel application performance. The implementation uses an existing, generic tuning algorithm called Combined Elimination to study the effect of serializing parallelizable loops based on measured whole program execution time, and provides a combination of parallel loops as an outcome that ensures to equal or improve performance of the original program. We evaluated our algorithm on a suite of hand-parallelized C benchmarks from the SPEC OMP2001 and NAS Parallel benchmarks and provide two sets of results. The first ignores hand-parallelized loops and only tunes application performance based on Cetus-parallelized loops. The second set of results considers the tuning of additional parallelism in hand-parallelized code. We show that our implementation always performs near-equal or better than serial code while tuning only Cetus-parallelized loops and equal to or better than hand-parallelized code while tuning additional parallelism.
Link Weight Prediction in Signed Networks

The Internet has witnessed an explosive growth of on-line communities. These communities often involve ratings between users, which can be modeled as weighted links between nodes (users) in a weighted signed network (WSN). A strong positive link may indicate the user trusts or likes the other user very much, while a weak negative link indicates the user distrusts or disagrees with the other user a little bit.
Simulation of modern Traffic Lights Control Systems using the open source Traffic Simulation SUMO

Within the project “OIS” (optical information systems) new traffic control mechanisms had to be invented and tested. One of the most important topics was to optimize the flow over a junction using information from the OIS sensors which can not be measured using normal sensors such as induct loops. For this purpose, an “agentbased” traffic lights logic algorithm was used, which uses the length of a jam in front of a traffic light as input. As we had no possibility to test the traffic lights control within the reality, the improvement of the flow throughput of such junctions was shown using the open source traffic Simulation “SUMO” (Simulation of Urban MObility) [1, 2]. This publication describes the algorithm itself and how it was embedded within the simulation. Furthermore, the simulation results are given.
Dynamic Vision - From Images to Face Recognition

Only for you today! Discover your favourite dynamic vision from images to face recognition book right here by downloading and getting the soft file of the book. This is not your time to traditionally go to the book stores to buy a book. Here, varieties of book collections are available to download. One of them is this dynamic vision from images to face recognition as your preferred book. Getting this book b on-line in this site can be realized now by visiting the link page to download. It will be easy. Why should be here?
Preventive and Protective Properties of Zingiber officinale (Ginger) in Diabetes Mellitus, Diabetic Complications, and Associated Lipid and Other Metabolic Disorders: A Brief Review

Zingiber officinale (ginger) has been used as herbal medicine to treat various ailments worldwide since antiquity. Recent evidence revealed the potential of ginger for treatment of diabetes mellitus. Data from in vitro, in vivo, and clinical trials has demonstrated the antihyperglycaemic effect of ginger. The mechanisms underlying these actions are associated with insulin release and action, and improved carbohydrate and lipid metabolism. The most active ingredients in ginger are the pungent principles, gingerols, and shogaol. Ginger has shown prominent protective effects on diabetic liver, kidney, eye, and neural system complications. The pharmacokinetics, bioavailability, and the safety issues of ginger are also discussed in this update.
Possible Impacts of Climatic Warming on Polar Bears

If climatic warming occurs, the first impacts on polar bears (Ursus maritirnus) will be felt at the southern limits of their distribution, such as in James and Hudson bays, where the whole population is already forced to fast for approximately four months when the sea ice melts during the summer. Prolonging the ice-free period will increase nutritional stress on this population until they are no longer able to store enough fat to survive the ice-free period. Early signs of impact will include declining body condition, lowered reproductive rates, reduced survival of cubs, and an increase in polar bear-human interactions. Although most of these changes are currently detectable in the polar bears of western Hudson Bay, it cannot yet be determined if climatic change is involved. In the High Arctic, a decrease in ice cover may stimulate an initial increase in biological productivity. Eventually however, it is likely that s e a l populations will decline wherever the quality and availability of breeding habitat are reduced. Rain during the late winter may cause polar bear maternity dens to collapse, causing the death of occupants. Human-bear problems will increase as the open water period becomes longer and bears fasting and relying on their fat reserves become food stressed. If populations of polar bears decline, harvest quotas for native people will be reduced and eventually be eliminated. Tourism based on viewing polar bears in western Hudson Bay will likely disappear. Should the Arctic Ocean become seasonally ice free for a long enough period, it is likely polar bears would become extirpated from at least the southern part of their range. If climatic warming occurs, the polar bear is an ideal species through which to monitor the cumulative effects in arctic marine ecosystems because of its position at the top of the arctic marine food chain.
Scheduling precedence-constrained jobs on two resources to minimize the total weighted completion time

We study a problem of scheduling precedence-constrained jobs on two pre-specified resources, in which a job may require either resource or both resources with the objective of minimizing the weighted completion time. We present two mathematical formulations of the problem: a dynamic programming (DP) model and a binary integer programming (BIP) model. Due to the strong NP-hardness of the problem, we restrict our analysis to series-parallel (s/p) graphs. We focus on reducing the state space in the DP model to obtain an optimal, or near optimal, solution. We compare, through a number of experiments with varying number of jobs, resource requirements, and topology of the precedence among the jobs, the performance of the DP and the BIP models relative to the quality of the final result and the time taken to reach a conclusion.
Understanding electrical treeing phenomena in XLPE cable insulation under harmonic AC voltages adopting UHF technique

In the present study, impact of high frequency ac voltage and harmonics in ac voltages on treeing were studied. When the applied voltage is high, a bush type tree forms irrespective of frequency of the supply voltage. Influence of harmonics on shape of tree formed indicates that a voltage wave with high total harmonic distortion have characteristics much similar to high frequency ac voltage. It is observed that the tree inception time is much lower with 11th harmonic ac voltages with higher THD. Presence of odd harmonics of equal magnitude, irrespective of amount of total harmonic distortion, the shape of the tree formed is almost same as the tree generated with 50 Hz ac voltage. The injected PD current pulses during treeing process have rise time of few nanoseconds. The UHF signals generated during tree growth (at the point of inception and propagation) have signal bandwidth in the range of 1-2 GHz. Measure of UHF signal magnitude during treeing process could help one to classify the shape of tree formed. Weibull distribution studies were carried out to estimate the life of XLPE cable insulation failure due to electrical treeing under different harmonic ac voltages. Independent higher order harmonic ac voltages with increase in total harmonic distortion reduce the life of cable insulation due to electrical treeing.
The accuracy of the extramedullary and intramedullary femoral alignment system in total knee arthroplasty for varus osteoarthritic knee

The intramedullary (IM) femoral alignment system does not alway guarantee accuracy of the component position in the total knee arthroplasty (TKA). In some cases, the extramedullary (EM) femoral alignment system in total knee arthroplasty (TKA) is a useful alternative surgical option to adjust femoral component alignment. In the EM technique, accuracy of the femoral head center location is mandatory. The purpose of this prospective randomized study was to compare the alignment after TKA using two different femoral alignment systems. From January 2009 to December 2009, 91 patients (106 knees) with osteoarthritis underwent TKA. The IM femoral alignment system was used in 50 TKAs, and the EM system was used in 56 TKAs. We measured the coronal, sagittal alignment of the femoral component, and overall alignment from full-length standing. Anteroposterior radiographs were taken 1 year after surgery. The overall limb alignment was 0.2° ± 1.9° varus in the EM group and 1.1° ± 1.9° valgus in the IM group (p = 0.001). The coronal alignment of the femoral component was 90.0° ± 1.1° in the EM group and 90.3° ± 1.2° in the IM group, not statistically different (n.s.). The sagittal alignment of the femoral component was 2.3° ± 1.7° in the EM group and 2.5° ± 1.0° in the IM group (n.s.). Clinically acceptable overall limb alignment was achieved in 91.1 % of EM group and 84.0 % of IM group (n.s.). The present study suggests that by applying our EM technique that uses a newly designed mechanical axis marker system, the alignment of the femoral component and overall limb alignment is reliable and at least as accurate as the standard IM technique. I.
Dose-response and efficacy of spinal manipulation for care of chronic low back pain: a randomized controlled trial.

BACKGROUND CONTEXT
There have been no full-scale trials of the optimal number of visits for the care of any condition with spinal manipulation.


PURPOSE
To identify the dose-response relationship between visits to a chiropractor for spinal manipulation and chronic low back pain (cLBP) outcomes and to determine the efficacy of manipulation by comparison with a light massage control.


STUDY DESIGN/SETTING
Practice-based randomized controlled trial.


PATIENT SAMPLE
Four hundred participants with cLBP.


OUTCOME MEASURES
The primary cLBP outcomes were the 100-point modified Von Korff pain intensity and functional disability scales evaluated at the 12- and 24-week primary end points. Secondary outcomes included days with pain and functional disability, pain unpleasantness, global perceived improvement, medication use, and general health status.


METHODS
One hundred participants with cLBP were randomized to each of four dose levels of care: 0, 6, 12, or 18 sessions of spinal manipulation from a chiropractor. Participants were treated three times per week for 6 weeks. At sessions when manipulation was not assigned, they received a focused light massage control. Covariate-adjusted linear dose effects and comparisons with the no-manipulation control group were evaluated at 6, 12, 18, 24, 39, and 52 weeks.


RESULTS
For the primary outcomes, mean pain and disability improvement in the manipulation groups were 20 points by 12 weeks and sustainable to 52 weeks. Linear dose-response effects were small, reaching about two points per six manipulation sessions at 12 and 52 weeks for both variables (p<.025). At 12 weeks, the greatest differences from the no-manipulation control were found for 12 sessions (8.6 pain and 7.6 disability points, p<.025); at 24 weeks, differences were negligible; and at 52 weeks, the greatest group differences were seen for 18 visits (5.9 pain and 8.8 disability points, p<.025).


CONCLUSIONS
The number of spinal manipulation visits had modest effects on cLBP outcomes above those of 18 hands-on visits to a chiropractor. Overall, 12 visits yielded the most favorable results but was not well distinguished from other dose levels.
Impacts of supply disruptions and customer differentiation on a partial-backordering inventory system

In this paper, we study a single-product inventory system which involves a supplier, a retailer, and differentiated customers. The supplier provides products to the retailer which in turn sells products to its customers. The supplier is unreliable and is subject to random disruptions. The retailer adopts a periodic-review inventory policy, under which the retailer reviews its inventory position every a fixed period of time and decides whether a replenishment is needed or not. Partial backordering is applied when a stockout occurs. That is, under the situations of stockouts, customers can choose either to backorder products or to abandon the purchase. Customers are segmented into two classes according to their backordering probabilities. The customer class with high backordering probability is provided with high priority to receive backorders. In this paper we allow more than one outstanding orders to exist, which is not the case in the previous literature. We develop a simulation model for such an inventory system and investigate the impacts of supply disruptions and customer differentiation on this inventory system. 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
A new remote user authentication scheme using smart cards

In this article, we propose a new remote user authentication scheme using smart cards. The scheme is based on the ElGamal’s public key cryptosystem. Our scheme does not require a system to maintain a password table for verifying the legitimacy of the login users. In addition, our scheme can withstand message replaying attack.
An Algorithm for Parallel Sn Sweeps on Unstructured Meshes

We develop a new algorithm for performing parallel Sn sweeps on unstructured meshes. The algorithm uses a low-complexity list ordering heuristic to determine a sweep ordering on any partitioned mesh. For typical problems and with \normal" mesh partitionings we have observed nearly linear speedups on up to 126 processors. This is an important and desirable result, since although analyses of structured meshes indicate that parallel sweeps will not scale with normal partitioning approaches, we do not observe any severe asymptotic degradation in the parallel eÆciency with modest ( 100) levels of parallelism. This work is a fundamental step in the development of parallel Sn methods.
The effect of spin on the flight of a baseball

Measurements are presented of the Magnus force on a spinning baseball. The experiment utilizes a pitching machine to project the baseball horizontally, a high-speed motion analysis system to determine the initial velocity and angular velocity and to track the trajectory over 5 m of flight, and a ruler to measure the total distance traversed. Speeds in the range v=50–110 mph and spin rates topspin or backspin in the range 1500–4500 rpm were utilized, corresponding to Reynolds numbers of Re= 1.1–2.4 105 and spin factors S R /v in the range 0.090–0.595. Least-squares fits were used to extract the initial parameters of the trajectory and to determine the lift coefficients. Comparison is made with previous measurements and parametrizations, and implications for the effect of spin on the flight of a baseball are discussed. The lift coefficient CL is found not to depend strongly on v at fixed values of S. © 2008 American Association of Physics Teachers. DOI: 10.1119/1.2805242