LLukas22/scidocs huggingface dataset:
The Relationship Between Self-Esteem and Sexual Self-Concept in People With Physical-Motor Disabilities

BACKGROUND
Self-esteem is the value that the individuals give themselves, and sexual self-concept is also a part of individuality or sexual-self. Impairment or disability exists not only in the physical body of disabled people but also in their attitudes. Negative attitudes affect the mental health of disabled people, causing them to have lower self-esteem.


OBJECTIVES
This study aimed to examine the relationship between self-esteem and sexual self-concept in people with physical-motor disabilities.


PATIENTS AND METHODS
This cross-sectional study was conducted on 200 random samples with physical-motor disabilities covered by Isfahan Welfare Organization in 2013. Data collection instruments were the Persian Eysenck self-esteem questionnaire, and five domains (sexual anxiety, sexual self-efficacy, sexual self-esteem, sexual fear and sexual depression) of the Persian multidimensional sexual self-concept questionnaire. Because of incomplete filling of the questionnaires, the data of 183 people were analyzed by the SPSS 16.0 software. Data were analyzed using the t-test, Man-Whitney and Kruskal-Wallis tests and Spearman correlation coefficient.


RESULTS
The mean age was 36.88 ± 8.94 years for women and 37.80 ± 10.13 for men. The mean scores of self-esteem among women and men were 15.80 ± 3.08 and 16.2 ± 2.90, respectively and there was no statistically significance difference. Comparison of the mean scores of sexual anxiety, sexual self-efficacy, sexual self-esteem, sexual fear and sexual depression among men and women showed that women scored higher than men in all domains. This difference was statistically significant in other domains except the sexual self-esteem (14.92 ± 3.61 vs. 13.56 ± 4.52) (P < 0.05). The Kruskal-Wallis test showed that except for sexual anxiety and sexual self-esteem, there was a statistical difference between other domains of people's sexual self-concept and degree of disability (P < 0.05). Moreover, Spearman coefficient showed that there was only a correlation between men's sexual anxiety, sexual self-esteem and sexual self-efficacy with their self-esteem. This correlation was positive in sexual anxiety and negative in two other domains.


CONCLUSIONS
Lack of difference in self-esteem of disabled people in different degrees of disability and in both men and women suggests that disabled people should not be presumed to have low self-esteem, and their different aspects of life should be attended to, just like others. Furthermore, studies should be designed and implemented based on psychological, social and environmental factors that can help disabled people to promote their positive sexual self-concept through marriage, and reduce their negative self-concept.
The impact of the sovereign debt crisis on the activity of Italian banks

We assess the effects of the sovereign debt crisis on Italian banks’ activity using aggregate data on funding and loan rates, lending quantities and income statements for the period 1991-2011. We augment standard reduced-form equations for the variables of interest with the spread on 10-year sovereign bonds as an additional explanatory variable. We find that, even when controlling for the standard economic variables that influence bank activity, a rise in the spread is followed by an increase in the cost of wholesale and of certain forms of retail funding for banks and in the cost of credit to firms and households; the impact tends to be larger during periods of financial turmoil. An increase in the spread also has a direct negative effect on lending growth, beyond that implied by the rise in lending rates. Finally, we document a negative impact of the spread on banks’ profitability, stronger for larger intermediaries. JEL Classification: E44, E51, G21.
More Guns, More Crime

This paper examines the relationship between gun ownership and crime. Previous research has suffered from a lack of reliable data on gun ownership. I exploit a unique data set to reliably estimate annual rates of gun ownership at both the state and the county levels during the past two decades. My findings demonstrate that changes in gun ownership are significantly positively related to changes in the homicide rate, with this relationship driven almost entirely by an impact of gun ownership on murders in which a gun is used. The effect of gun ownership on all other crime categories is much less marked. Recent reductions in the fraction of households owning a gun can explain one‐third of the differential decline in gun homicides relative to nongun homicides since 1993. Disciplines Other Business | Other Education | Other Mental and Social Health This journal article is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/hcmg_papers/131 1086 [Journal of Political Economy, 2001, vol. 109, no. 5] 2001 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0022-3808/2001/10905-0006$02.50 More Guns, More Crime
Machine learning approaches in medical image analysis: From detection to diagnosis

Machine learning approaches are increasingly successful in image-based diagnosis, disease prognosis, and risk assessment. This paper highlights new research directions and discusses three main challenges related to machine learning in medical imaging: coping with variation in imaging protocols, learning from weak labels, and interpretation and evaluation of results.
Theories in Computer human interaction Fitts ’ Law : Modeling Movement Time in HCI

Fitts' law is a model of human psychomotor behavior developed in 1954 [6]. Extending Shannon’s theorem 17 in information theory (a formulation of effective information capacity of a communication channel), Fitts discovered a formal relationship that models speed/accuracy tradeoffs in rapid, aimed movement (not drawing or writing). According to Fitts’ Law, the time to move and point to a target of width W at a distance A is a logarithmic function of the spatial relative error (A/W), that is [11]:
Tightly Coupled MEMS INS/GPS Integration with INS Aided Receiver Tracking Loops

............................................................................................................................. iii Acknowledgements............................................................................................................. v Table of
Congestion control for multimedia services

The problem of congestion control in high-speed networks for multimedia traffic, such as voice and video, is considered. It is shown that the performance requirements of high-speed networks involve delay, delay-jitter, and packet loss. A framing congestion control strategy based on a packet admission policy at the edges of the network and on a service discipline called stop-and-go queuing at the switching nodes is described. This strategy provides bounded end-to-end delay and a small and controllable delay-jitter. The strategy is applicable to packet switching networks in general, including fixed cell length asynchronous transfer mode (ATM), as well as networks with variable-size packets.<<ETX>>
A resilience-based framework for evaluating adaptive co-management : Linking ecology , economics and society in a complex world

Article history: Received 31 July 2006 Received in revised form 25 September 2006 Accepted 26 September 2006 Available online 21 November 2006 Adaptive co-management brings together collaborative and adaptive approaches in pursuit of sustainable resource use and social–ecological resilience. Enthusiasm for this management approach, however, is countered by recent critiques regarding outcomes. A lack of evidence from consistent evaluation of adaptive co-management further exacerbates this situation. This paper revisits the issue of evaluation in natural resource management and recasts it in light of complex adaptive systems thinking. An evaluative framework for adaptive co-management is developed which directs attention toward three broad components: ecosystem conditions, livelihood outcomes and process and institutional conditions. Scale-specific parameters are offered for each component to facilitate systematic learning from experience and encourage cross-site comparisons. Conclusions highlight the importance of systematically incorporating evaluation into the adaptive co-management process and recognize the challenge for resource agencies and researchers to shift from a conventional to a complex adaptive system perspective. © 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
CHEMICAL LOOPING GASIFICATION OF BIOMASS FOR HYDROGEN-ENRICHED GAS PRODUCTION

Environmental concerns and energy security are two major forces driving the fossil fuel based energy system towards renewable energy. In this context, hydrogen is gaining more and more attention in this 21 century. Presently, hydrogen is produced from reformation of fossil fuels, a process that could not address above two problems. For this it needs to be produced from a renewable carbon neutral energy source. Biomass has been identified as such a renewable energy source. Conversion of biomass through thermo-chemical gasification process in the presence of steam could provide a viable renewable source of hydrogen. This thesis presents an innovative system based on chemical looping gasification for producing hydrogen-enriched gas from biomass. The other merit of this system is that it produces a pure stream of carbon dioxide by conducting in-process capture and regeneration of sorbent. A laboratory scale chemical looping gasification (CLG) system based on a circulating fluidized bed (CFB) is developed and tested. Experiments conducted to gasify sawdust in CFB-CLG system shows that it could produce a gas with as much as 80% hydrogen and as little as 5% carbon dioxide. A kinetic model is developed to predict the performance of the gasifier of a CFB-CLG system, and is validated against experimental results. To understand the science of biomass gasification in the presence of steam and CaO, a number of additional studies are conducted. It show that for higher hydrogen and lower carbon dioxide concentration in the product gas, the optimum values of steam to biomass ratio, sorbent to biomass ratio, and operating temperature are 0.83, 2.0 and 670C respectively. In CFB-CLG system the sorbent goes through a series of successive calcinationcarbonation cycles. Calcination studies in presence of three alternate media, nitrogen, carbon dioxide and steam show, that steam calcination is best among them. An empirical relation for calcination in presence of three media is developed. Owing to the sintering, irrespective of medium used for calcination, the conversion of CaO reduces progressively as it goes through alternate calcination-carbonation cycles. An additional empirical equation is developed to predict the loss in sorbent’s ability during carbonation. CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION This chapter explains the background of this research and defines the objectives, scope and limitation of this thesis.
Version Management of XML Documents

ABSTRACT The problem of ensuring e cient storage and fast retrieval for multi-version structured documents is important because of the recent popularity of XML documents and semistructured information on the web. Traditional document version control systems, e.g. RCS, which model documents as a sequence of lines of text and use the shortest edit script to represent version di erences are inadequate since they do not preserve the logical structure of the original document. Instead we propose a new approach where the structure of the document is preserved intact, and their sub-objects are timestamped hierarchically for e cient reconstruction of current and past versions. Our technique, called the Usefulness Based Copy Control (UBCC), is geared towards efcient version reconstruction while using small space overhead. Our analysis and experiments illustrate the e ectiveness of the overall approach to version control for structured documents.
Multi-candidate reduction: Sentence compression as a tool for document summarization tasks

This article examines the application of two single-document sentence compression techniques to the problem of multidocument summarization—a ‘‘parse-and-trim’’ approach and a statistical noisy-channel approach. We introduce the multi-candidate reduction (MCR) framework for multi-document summarization, in which many compressed candidates are generated for each source sentence. These candidates are then selected for inclusion in the final summary based on a combination of static and dynamic features. Evaluations reveal that sentence compression is a valuable component of a larger multi-document summarization framework. 2007 Published by Elsevier Ltd.
Background Recovery by Fixed-Rank Robust Principal Component Analysis

Background recovery is a very important theme in computer vision applications. Recent research shows that robust principal component analysis (RPCA) is a promising approach for solving problems such as noise removal, video background modeling, and removal of shadows and specularity. RPCA utilizes the fact that the background is common in multiple views of a scene, and attempts to decompose the data matrix constructed from input images into a low-rank matrix and a sparse matrix. This is possible if the sparse matrix is sufficiently sparse, which may not be true in computer vision applications. Moreover, algorithmic parameters need to be fine tuned to yield accurate results. This paper proposes a fixed-rank RPCA algorithm for solving background recovering problems whose low-rank matrices have known ranks. Comprehensive tests show that, by fixing the rank of the low-rank matrix to a known value, the fixed-rank algorithm produces more reliable and accurate results than existing low-rank RPCA algorithm.
Polymeric nanoparticles-based topical delivery systems for the treatment of dermatological diseases.

Human skin not only functions as a permeation barrier (mainly because of the stratum corneum layer) but also provides a unique delivery pathway for therapeutic and other active agents. These compounds penetrate via intercellular, intracellular, and transappendageal routes, resulting in topical delivery (into skin strata) and transdermal delivery (to subcutaneous tissues and into the systemic circulation). Passive and active permeation enhancement methods have been widely applied to increase the cutaneous penetration. The pathology, pathogenesis, and topical treatment approaches of dermatological diseases, such as psoriasis, contact dermatitis, and skin cancer, are then discussed. Recent literature has demonstrated that nanoparticles-based topical delivery systems can be successful in treating these skin conditions. The studies are reviewed starting with the nanoparticles based on natural polymers especially chitosan, followed by those made of synthetic, degradable (aliphatic polyesters), and nondegradable (polyacrylates) polymers; emphasis is given to nanospheres made of polymers derived from naturally occurring metabolites, the tyrosine-derived nanospheres (TyroSpheres™). In summary, the nanoparticles-based topical delivery systems combine the advantages of both the nanosized drug carriers and the topical approach, and are promising for the treatment of skin diseases. For the perspectives, the penetration of ultra-small nanoparticles (size smaller than 40 nm) into skin strata, the targeted delivery of the encapsulated drugs to hair follicle stem cells, and the combination of nanoparticles and microneedle array technologies for special applications such as vaccine delivery are discussed.
Nonparametric Bayesian Models for Joint Analysis of Imagery and Text

Nonparametric Bayesian Models for Joint Analysis of Imagery and Text
A randomized walking trial in postmenopausal women: effects on physical activity and health 10 years later.

BACKGROUND
It is important to determine if permanent lifestyle changes may result from physical activity interventions and whether health may be affected by these changes.


OBJECTIVE
To conduct a 10-year follow-up of physical activity and self-reported health status in participants of a randomized clinical trial of walking intervention.


METHODS
Of the original 229 volunteer postmenopausal women who participated in the original clinical trial, 196 (N = 96 intervention and 100 controls) completed the 10-year follow-up telephone interview. The interview protocol included questions on self-reported walking for exercise and purposes other than exercise, the Paffenbarger sport and exercise index, functional status, and various chronic diseases and conditions.


RESULTS
The median values for both usual walking for exercise and total walking were significantly higher for walkers compared with controls (for both, P = .01), with median differences of 706 and 420 kcal/wk, respectively. After excluding women who reported heart disease during the original trial, 2 women in the walking group (2%) and 11 women in the control group (12%) reported physician-diagnosed heart disease over the last 10 years (P = .07). There were also fewer hospitalizations, surgeries, and falls among women in the walking group, although these differences were not statistically significant (P>.05).


CONCLUSIONS
Although limited by self-report, this study may be the first to demonstrate long-term exercise compliance to a randomized control trial in older women and to suggest that health benefits may have ensued as a result of these increased activity levels.
Neural Network Adaptive Beamforming for Robust Multichannel Speech Recognition

Joint multichannel enhancement and acoustic modeling using neural networks has shown promise over the past few years. However, one shortcoming of previous work [1, 2, 3] is that the filters learned during training are fixed for decoding, potentially limiting the ability of these models to adapt to previously unseen or changing conditions. In this paper we explore a neural network adaptive beamforming (NAB) technique to address this issue. Specifically, we use LSTM layers to predict time domain beamforming filter coefficients at each input frame. These filters are convolved with the framed time domain input signal and summed across channels, essentially performing FIR filter-andsum beamforming using the dynamically adapted filter. The beamformer output is passed into a waveform CLDNN acoustic model [4] which is trained jointly with the filter prediction LSTM layers. We find that the proposed NAB model achieves a 12.7% relative improvement in WER over a single channel model [4] and reaches similar performance to a “factored” model architecture which utilizes several fixed spatial filters [3] on a 2,000-hour Voice Search task, with a 17.9% decrease in computational cost.
Zotarolimus-eluting durable-polymer-coated stent versus a biolimus-eluting biodegradable-polymer-coated stent in unselected patients undergoing percutaneous coronary intervention (SORT OUT VI): a randomised non-inferiority trial

BACKGROUND
New-generation drug-eluting coronary stents have reduced the risk of coronary events, especially in patients with complex disease or lesions. To what extent different stent platforms, polymers, and antiproliferative drugs affect outcomes, however, is unclear. We investigated the safety and efficacy of a third-generation stent by comparing a highly biocompatible durable-polymer-coated zotarolimus-eluting stent with a biodegradable-polymer-coated biolimus-eluting stent.


METHODS
This open-label, randomised, multicentre, non-inferiority trial was done at three sites across western Denmark. All patients who presented with stable coronary artery disease or acute coronary syndromes and at least one coronary artery lesion (more than 50% stenosis) from March, 2011, to August, 2012, were assessed for eligibility. Patients were randomly assigned in a 1:1 ratio to receive either the durable-polymer zotarolimus-eluting stent or the biodegradable-polymer biolimus-eluting stent. The primary endpoint was a composite of safety (cardiac death and myocardial infarction not clearly attributable to a non-target lesion) and efficacy (target-lesion revascularisation) at 12 months, analysed by intention to treat. The trial was powered to assess non-inferiority of durable-polymer zotarolimus-eluting stent compared with the biodegradable-polymer biolimus-eluting stent with a predetermined non-inferiority margin of 0·025. This trial is registered with ClinicalTrials.gov, number NCT01956448.


FINDINGS
Of 7103 screened, 1502 patients with 1883 lesions were assigned to receive the durable-polymer zotarolimus-eluting stent and 1497 patients with 1791 lesions to receive the biodegradable-polymer biolimus-eluting stent. 79 (5·3%) and 75 (5·0%) patients, respectively, met the primary endpoint (absolute risk difference 0·0025, upper limit of one-sided 95% CI 0·016%; p=0·004). The individual components of the primary endpoint did not differ significantly between stent types at 12 months.


INTERPRETATION
The durable-polymer-coated zotarolimus-eluting stent was non-inferior to the biodegradable-polymer-coated biolimus-eluting stent in unselected patients.


FUNDING
Medtronic Cardiovascular and Biosensors Interventional Technologies.
The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants

This edition of The Alogirthmic Beauty of Plants is the electronic version of the book that was published by Springer-Verlag, New York, in 1990 and reprinted in 1996. The electronic version has been produced using the original L A T E X files and digital illustrations. [1990]) were modeled using L-systems. Distributed ray-tracing with one extended light source was used to simulate depth of field. The roses were placed on a background image (photgraphy by G. Rossbach), which was scanned digitally and post-processed. Preface The beauty of plants has attracted the attention of mathematicians for Mathematics and beauty centuries. Conspicuous geometric features such as the bilateral symmetry of leaves, the rotational symmetry of flowers, and the helical arrangements of scales in pine cones have been studied most extensively. This focus is reflected in a quotation from Weyl [159, page 3], " Beauty is bound up with symmetry. " This book explores two other factors that organize plant structures and therefore contribute to their beauty. The first is the elegance and relative simplicity of developmental algorithms, that is, the rules which describe plant development in time. The second is self-similarity, characterized by Mandelbrot [95, page 34] as follows: When each piece of a shape is geometrically similar to the whole, both the shape and the cascade that generate it are called self-similar. This corresponds with the biological phenomenon described by Herman, Lindenmayer and Rozenberg [61]: In many growth processes of living organisms, especially of plants, regularly repeated appearances of certain multicel-lular structures are readily noticeable.... In the case of a compound leaf, for instance, some of the lobes (or leaflets), which are parts of a leaf at an advanced stage, have the same shape as the whole leaf has at an earlier stage. Thus, self-similarity in plants is a result of developmental processes. Growth and form By emphasizing the relationship between growth and form, this book follows a long tradition in biology. D'Arcy Thompson [143] traces its origins to the late seventeenth century, and comments: Organic form itself is found, mathematically speaking, to be a function of time.... We might call the form of an organism an event in space-time, and not merely a configuration in space. The idea of the form implicitly contains also the history of such a form. vi Preface The developmental processes are captured using the formalism of L-systems. They were introduced in 1968 by Lindenmayer [82] …