LLukas22/scidocs huggingface dataset:
What Do Practitioners Vary in Using Scrum?

Background : Agile software development has become a popular way of developing software. Scrum is the most frequently used agile framework, but it is often reported to be adapted in practice. Objective: Thus, we aim to understand how Scrum is adapted in different contexts and what are the reasons for these changes. Method : Using a structured interview guideline, we interviewed ten German companies about their concrete usage of Scrum and analysed the results qualitatively. Results: All companies vary Scrum in some way. The least variations are in the Sprint length, events, team size and requirements engineering. Many users varied the roles, effort estimations and quality assurance. Conclusions: Many variations constitute a substantial deviation from Scrum as initially proposed. For some of these variations, there are good reasons. Sometimes, however, the variations are a result of a previous non-agile, hierarchical organisation.
A study of a multimedia web annotation system and its effect on the efl writing and speaking performance of junior high school students

The aim of this study was to improve students’ English as Foreign Language (EFL) writing and speaking performance with appropriate learning activity design supported by Virtual Pen (VPen), a multimedia web annotation system. Students’ perceptions toward using VPen and learningactivities, attitude toward using VPen, actual VPen usage and their relationships were also investigated. After the experiment the students perceived that VPen was easy to use and useful during learning activities, and generally had a positive attitude toward using VPen. Furthermore, the students believed that learning activities were ‘playful’ and useful for improving writing and speaking performance. Further investigation revealed that the students’ actual VPen usage had a significant correlation with speaking and writing performance and that students’ speaking and writing performance significantly correlated with learning achievement. Based on our findings, we conclude that designed learning activities supported by the VPen system could facilitate students’ writing and speaking performance and therefore improve their learning achievement.
Learning Strict Identity Mappings in Deep Residual Networks

A family of super deep networks, referred to as residual networks or ResNet [14], achieved record-beating performance in various visual tasks such as image recognition, object detection, and semantic segmentation. The ability to train very deep networks naturally pushed the researchers to use enormous resources to achieve the best performance. Consequently, in many applications super deep residual networks were employed for just a marginal improvement in performance. In this paper, we propose âˆŠ-ResNet that allows us to automatically discard redundant layers, which produces responses that are smaller than a threshold âˆŠ, without any loss in performance. The âˆŠ-ResNet architecture can be achieved using a few additional rectified linear units in the original ResNet. Our method does not use any additional variables nor numerous trials like other hyperparameter optimization techniques. The layer selection is achieved using a single training process and the evaluation is performed on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, SVHN, and ImageNet datasets. In some instances, we achieve about 80% reduction in the number of parameters.
Environmental measures for hotels' environmental management systems: ISO 14001

Purpose – Implementation of environmental management systems (EMS) in hotels is gaining popularity world-wide. ISO 14001, which is the only certifying document in the ISO 14000 series, provides guidelines to set up an EMS. However, there is a paucity of information about the actual environmental measures implemented in ISO 14001 certified hotels. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to identify and generalize the environmental measures undertaken by studied hotels and to evaluate the performance of these environmental measures. Design/methodology/approach – Three case studies were carried out to identify the green measures undertaken in ISO 14001-certified hotels. Both qualitative and quantitative data were collected and analyzed. Then, regression analysis was conducted to examine the relationship between monthly utilities input (electricity, gas, fuel oil and water) and activity parameters. Findings – A total of 113 measures were identified, nearly half of which concern energy conservation. Results of multiple regression showed that R 2 for different utilities varied. The explanatory power of equation was strong for electricity consumption, moderate for fuel gas consumption, and weak for both gas and water consumption. Practical implications – The identified measures provide hoteliers with a thorough picture about the actual environmental works involved in this internationally recognized EMS. Hotel operators and owners can use these measures as a reference either for applying EMS certification or for developing their own EMS. Originality/value – The paper, which was based on operational experiences from existing hotels, was a collaborative work between hospitality industry practitioners and educators. The paper is also the first of its kind to unveil the comprehensive environmental measures undertaken in city hotels with ISO 14001 certification.
Emerging drugs in Europe.

PURPOSE OF REVIEW
New psychoactive substances refer to emerging substances that have appeared on the market and are not under international control. NPS have been categorized in different main groups (e.g. synthetic cannabinoids, synthetic cathinones, phenethylamines, piperazines, ketamine and phencyclidine-type substances, tryptamines). This article reviews the recent literature regarding emerging trends of NPS in Europe.


RECENT FINDINGS
According to the last report of the European Union Early warning system (EWS), 73 NPS were officially identified for the first time. The more frequent NPS self-reported or detected are synthetic cannabinoids and cathinones. A combination of different NPS and also mixed with other drugs, mainly cannabis and ecstasy, is usual among experienced drug users. Acute NPS toxicity includes significant psychoactive and sympathomimetic effects.


SUMMARY
This article summarizes new European epidemiological and clinical data published between January and December 2013 on NPS. In the last few years, there has been a rapid increase in the number of NPS launched on the European drugs market. The presence of some of these new substances has been detected through surveys/questionnaires, studies in drug samples and biological fluids, and case reports and NPS-induced fatalities.
Application of Real-Time DEVS to Analysis of Safety-Critical Embedded Control Systems: Railroad Crossing Control Example

This article presents an application of the Discrete Event System Specification (DEVS) framework to the design and safety analysis of a real-time embedded control system, a railroad crossing control system.The authors employ an extension of the DEVS formalism, real-time DEVS (RT-DEVS), which has a sound semantics for the specification of real-time systems in a hierarchical modular fashion. The notion of a clock matrix for communicating RT-DEVS models is proposed, which represents a global time between the models. Based on the composition rules and the clock matrix, an algorithm for the generation of a timed reachability tree is developed that can be used for safety analysis at two phases: an untimed and timed analysis phase. A railroad crossing control example demonstrates that the proposed analysis for RT-DEVS models would be effective to verify the safety property of real-time control systems.
A clinical tool for office assessment of lumbar spine stabilization endurance: prone and supine bridge maneuvers.

OBJECTIVE
: To assess the validity and reliability of an office-based surrogate measure of lumbar spine-stabilization endurance capability; to establish norms and reliability in an asymptomatic group; and to compare their measures with those from a group of chronic mechanical low-back pain patients.


DESIGN
: Eight healthy subjects participated in the tool-validation portion of the study that consisted of surface electromyographic (EMG) measurements of core muscle activation during prone and supine bridging. Subsequently, normative and test-retest reliability measures of prone and supine bridging duration were recorded from 43 subjects without back pain and were compared with those of 32 subjects with chronic mechanical low-back pain.


RESULTS
: Surface EMG indicated significantly preferential activation of anterior core muscles during prone bridging and posterior core muscles during supine bridging. Mean bridge durations for subjects without back pain were 72.5 +/- 32.6 (mean +/- SD) secs in prone and 170.4 +/- 42.5 secs in supine. They were significantly less in subjects with back pain: 28.3 +/- 26.8 secs in prone and 76.7 +/- 48.9 secs in supine. Test-retest reliability using Pearson's correlation for prone and supine bridging was 0.78 and 0.84, respectively.


CONCLUSIONS
: Bridging maneuvers seem to be practical, reliable, and valid methods of reflecting lumbar spine-stabilization endurance capability. Prone bridging preferentially challenges core flexors, whereas supine bridging recruits primarily the core extensors; both are compromised in patients with low-back pain.
Priming for health: gut microbiota acquired in early life regulates physiology, brain and behaviour.

UNLABELLED
The infant gut microbiome is dynamic, and radical shifts in composition occur during the first 3 years of life. Disruption of these developmental patterns, and the impact of the microbial composition of our gut on brain and behaviour, has attracted much recent attention. Integrating these observations is an important new research frontier.


CONCLUSION
Early-life perturbations of the developing gut microbiota can impact on the central nervous system and potentially lead to adverse mental health outcomes.
Finding non-redundant, statistically significant regions in high dimensional data: a novel approach to projected and subspace clustering

Projected and subspace clustering algorithms search for clusters of points in subsets of attributes. Projected clustering computes several disjoint clusters, plus outliers, so that each cluster exists in its own subset of attributes. Subspace clustering enumerates clusters of points in all subsets of attributes, typically producing many overlapping clusters. One problem of existing approaches is that their objectives are stated in a way that is not independent of the particular algorithm proposed to detect such clusters. A second problem is the definition of cluster density based on user-defined parameters, which makes it hard to assess whether the reported clusters are an artifact of the algorithm or whether they actually stand out in the data in a statistical sense.
 We propose a novel problem formulation that aims at extracting axis-parallel regions that stand out in the data in a statistical sense. The set of axis-parallel, statistically significant regions that exist in a given data set is typically highly redundant. Therefore, we formulate the problem of representing this set through a reduced, non-redundant set of axis-parallel, statistically significant regions as an optimization problem. Exhaustive search is not a viable solution due to computational infeasibility, and we propose the approximation algorithm STATPC. Our comprehensive experimental evaluation shows that STATPC significantly outperforms existing projected and subspace clustering algorithms in terms of accuracy.
A Surfeit of SSH Cipher Suites

This work presents a systematic analysis of symmetric encryption modes for SSH that are in use on the Internet, providing deployment statistics, new attacks, and security proofs for widely used modes. We report deployment statistics based on two Internet-wide scans of SSH servers conducted in late 2015 and early 2016. Dropbear and OpenSSH implementations dominate in our scans. From our first scan, we found 130,980 OpenSSH servers that are still vulnerable to the CBC-mode-specific attack of Albrecht et al. (IEEE S&P 2009), while we found a further 20,000 OpenSSH servers that are vulnerable to a new attack on CBC-mode that bypasses the counter-measures introduced in OpenSSH 5.2 to defeat the attack of Albrecht et al. At the same time, 886,449 Dropbear servers in our first scan are vulnerable to a variant of the original CBC-mode attack. On the positive side, we provide formal security analyses for other popular SSH encryption modes, namely ChaCha20-Poly1305, generic Encrypt-then-MAC, and AES-GCM. Our proofs hold for detailed pseudo-code descriptions of these algorithms as implemented in OpenSSH. Our proofs use a corrected and extended version of the "fragmented decryption" security model that was specifically developed for the SSH setting by Boldyreva et al. (Eurocrypt 2012). These proofs provide strong confidentiality and integrity guarantees for these alternatives to CBC-mode encryption in SSH. However, we also show that these alternatives do not meet additional, desirable notions of security (boundary-hiding under passive and active attacks, and denial-of-service resistance) that were formalised by Boldyreva et al.
An effective defensive node against jamming attacks in sensor networks

Jamming is defined as the act of intentionally directing electromagnetic energy towards a communication system to disrupt or prevent signal transmission. In the context of wireless sensor networks (WSNs), jamming is the type of attack which interferes with the radio frequencies used by sensor nodes and may be viewed as a special case of denial of service (DoS) attacks. Herein, we outline the possible jamming attacks a WSN may encounter. The main contribution of this paper is the outline of the design specifications of a prototype node ‘Ares’ that effectively defends jamming attacks. Our focus is on frequency hopping spread spectrum (FHSS) and direct sequence spread spectrum (DSSS), two of the most effective countermeasures against jamming. The main novel aspect of Ares is that it uses a hybrid FHSS–DSSS approach to defend jamming attacks. We suggest the use of a specific FHSS technique in 5 GHz band with 51 frequency channels wherein the channel sequence is generated using a key (which derives from a secret word), known only to the sink and the sensor nodes, as a seed. Each channel uses DSSS modulation with 16-bit pseudo noise (PN) code. The PN code derives from the same key used for FHSS channel generation. The pre-eminence of our method against alternative anti-jamming techniques is demonstrated through extensive simulation tests. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Credit Risk in the Swedish Economy – A quantitative study of default rates

The aim of this research is to produce a model allowing me to estimate the credit risks in the aggregate and the sectors levels of the Swedish economy in response to the evaluation of key macroecon ...
EVALUATION OF NUMERICAL WEATHER PREDICTION FOR SOLAR FORECASTING

Numerical weather prediction models are generally the most accurate tools for forecasting solar irradiation several hours in advance. This study validated the North American Model, Global Forecast System, and European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts global horizontal irradiance forecasts against ground measurement data and persistence forecasts. A ll numerical weather prediction models were biased for measured clear conditions by less than 50 watts per metre and for cloudy conditions the models were biased towards forecasting clear conditions, resulting in large, positive biases. Mean bias errors were obtained for each numerical weather prediction model as a function of solar zenith angle and forecast clear sky index. The North American Model and Global Forecast System were positively biased by up to 150 watts per metre for forecast clear sky conditions, while the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecast mean bias errors were small. Outside of the few clear forecasts that were actually cloudy, the reason for this bias was that the Global Forecasting System and especially the North American Model forecasts can exceed clear sky irradiances by up to 40 percent, indicating an inaccurate clear sky model. For forecast cloudy conditions the North American Model and Global Forecast System models had a moderate negative bias, while European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecast forecasts were most biased. Model output statistics-corrected numerical weather prediction forecasts provided important baseline accuracy for evaluating other forecasting techniques. Model output statistics minimized mean bias errors for all numerical weather prediction models. Root mean square errors were also reduced, especially for intermediate clear sky indices. The model output statistics-corrected Global Forecast System provided the best solar forecasts for the continental United States. The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecast provided the most accurate forecast in cloudy conditions, while the Global Forecast System had the best clear sky accuracy. Please use the following citation for this report: Mathiesen, Patrick, Jan Kleissl. 2012. Evaluation of Numerical Weather Prediction for Solar Forecasting. California Energy Commission. Publication number: CEC-500-2013-115.
Inherited epidermolysis bullosa: updated recommendations on diagnosis and classification.

BACKGROUND
Several new targeted genes and clinical subtypes have been identified since publication in 2008 of the report of the last international consensus meeting on diagnosis and classification of epidermolysis bullosa (EB). As a correlate, new clinical manifestations have been seen in several subtypes previously described.


OBJECTIVE
We sought to arrive at an updated consensus on the classification of EB subtypes, based on newer data, both clinical and molecular.


RESULTS
In this latest consensus report, we introduce a new approach to classification ("onion skinning") that takes into account sequentially the major EB type present (based on identification of the level of skin cleavage), phenotypic characteristics (distribution and severity of disease activity; specific extracutaneous features; other), mode of inheritance, targeted protein and its relative expression in skin, gene involved and type(s) of mutation present, and--when possible--specific mutation(s) and their location(s).


LIMITATIONS
This classification scheme critically takes into account all published data through June 2013. Further modifications are likely in the future, as more is learned about this group of diseases.


CONCLUSION
The proposed classification scheme should be of value both to clinicians and researchers, emphasizing both clinical and molecular features of each EB subtype, and has sufficient flexibility incorporated in its structure to permit further modifications in the future.
Material innovation for MOL, BEOL, and 3D integration

This paper presents new materials and processes for advanced technology node of Si semiconductor devices. For MOL, Co contact plug and amorphous Co-Ti barrier showed a good adhesion, limited growth of Co silicide, and a low contact resistivity of the order of 10<sup>−9</sup> Ωcm<sup>2</sup> on both n+ and p+ Si. For BEOL, a CVD-MnOx layer could be formed conformally in high-aspect ratio contact holes. The ALD-MnOx layer of 1.2 nm thick showed a good diffusion barrier property at 400 °C. For 3D integration, TSV of 10 μm diameter and 80 μm depth could be filled with low resistivity sintered Cu paste without voids.
Differences in Vessel Healing Between Sirolimus- and Everolimus-Eluting Stent Implantation for Bifurcation Lesions: The J-REVERSE Optical Coherence Tomography Substudy.

BACKGROUND
We aimed to clarify the differences in vessel healing after stenting of bifurcation lesions using sirolimus-eluting stents (SESs) or everolimus-eluting stents (EESs).


METHODS
Japanese Registry Study in Comparison Between Everolimus-Eluting Stent and Sirolimus-Eluting Stent for the Bifurcation Lesion (J-REVERSE) is a prospective multicentre registry of 303 bifurcation lesions that were treated with provisional SES or EES with or without final kissing inflation. The first 115 lesions at selected study sites were predefined for inclusion in the optical coherence tomography (OCT) substudy, and 9-month follow-up OCT was conducted in 64 lesions (SES, n = 18; EES, n = 46). In addition to standard OCT parameters, stent eccentricity index (SEI; minimum divided by the maximum stent diameter), neointimal unevenness score (NUS; maximum neointimal thickness in the cross-section [CS] divided by the average neointimal thickness [NIT] of the same CS; uniformity of the neointima suppression) were averaged for each segment (proximal, bifurcation, and distal segments).


RESULTS
Overall, the average stent and luminal area, NIT, and frequency of uncovered struts were similar. The frequency of malapposed struts and SEI were significantly lower in the EES group than in the SES group. The EES group had a significantly smaller NUS in the proximal and distal segments.


CONCLUSIONS
EESs offer homogeneous vessel healing with less malapposition in the treatment of bifurcation lesions.
NMP 22 IS A SENSITIVE , COST-EFFECTIVE TEST IN PATIENTS AT RISK FOR BLADDER CANCER

Purpose: The early diagnosis of bladder cancer is central to its effective treatment. This study was designed to determine the clinical use of NMP22† as a urinary marker for the early detection of transitional cell carcinoma of the bladder in patients with hematuria or other indications at risk for malignancy. The sensitivity and specificity of the NMP22 test were compared with urinary cytology, and the results of both tests were then compared to cystoscopic findings. We also determined if NMP22 provided a cost advantage over our current modalities in our patient population. Materials and Methods: Each patient submitted a single voided urine which was divided in 2 parts, of which 1 was stabilized with the NMP22 urine collection kit and 1 was preserved in the appropriate cytology medium for cytopathological testing. All patients provided the urine samples before cystoscopic examination. Of the 330 patients 114 (34.5%) presented with microscopic hematuria and 66 (20.4%) with gross hematuria. Other indications for cystoscopy included atypical cytology or unexplained voiding symptoms refractory to medical therapy. Results: There were 18 patients with biopsy confirmed bladder cancer and 312 with benign conditions of the bladder. Median NMP22 value for the malignant bladder tumors was 31.6 units per ml. (95% confidence interval 13.4 to 90.9) and 4.3 units per ml. (3.8 to 4.8) for benign conditions of the bladder. The urinary NMP22 values in the bladder cancer group were significantly higher than those in the benign condition group (p ,0.001). The sensitivity of NMP22 was 100% with a specificity of 85% at a reference value of 10.0 units per ml., while cytology had a sensitivity of only 33% and specificity of 100%. Given a negative predictive value of 100% for NMP22, a cost savings of $28,302 to $111,072 (depending on the type of insurance carrier) would have been achieved if it was used alone as the indication for cystoscopy. Conclusions: This study indicates that urinary NMP22 is a simple, noninvasive, cost-effective marker for the detection of bladder cancer.