LLukas22/scidocs huggingface dataset:
Reliability and validity of the Medical Research Council (MRC) scale and a modified scale for testing muscle strength in patients with radial palsy.

OBJECTIVE
To assess the inter-rater and intra-rater reliability and validity of the original and a modified Medical Research Council scale for testing muscle strength in radial palsy.


DESIGN
Prospective, randomized validation study.


PATIENTS
Thirty-one patients with peripheral paresis of radial innervated forearm muscles were included.


METHODS
Wrist extension, finger extension and grip strength were evaluated by manual muscle testing. Dynamometric measurement of grip strength was performed. Pair-wise weighted kappa coefficients were calculated to determine inter-rater and intra-rater reliability. The 2 scores were compared using the signed-rank test. Spearman's correlation coefficients of the maximal relative force measurements with the median (over-raters) Medical Research Council and modified Medical Research Council scores were calculated to determine validity.


RESULTS
Inter-rater agreement of the Medical Research Council scale (finger extension: 0.77; wrist extension: 0.78; grip strength: 0.78) and the modified Medical Research Council scale (finger extension: 0.81; wrist extension: 0.78; grip strength: 0.81) as well as intra-rater agreement of the Medical Research Council scale (finger extension: 0.86; wrist extension: 0.82; grip strength: 0.84) and the modified Medical Research Council scale (finger extension: 0.84, wrist extension: 0.81; grip strength: 0.88) showed almost perfect agreement. Spearman's correlation coefficients of the maximal relative force measurements with the median Medical Research Council and modified Medical Research Council score were both 0.78.


CONCLUSION
Medical Research Council and modified Medical Research Council scales are measurements with substantial inter-rater and intra-rater reliability in evaluating forearm muscles.
Interventions to promote collaboration between nurses and doctors.

BACKGROUND
Lack of nurse-doctor collaboration contributes to problems in quality and efficiency of patient care.


OBJECTIVES
To assess the effects of interventions designed to improve nurse-doctor collaboration.


SEARCH STRATEGY
We searched the Cochrane Effective Practice and Organisation of Care Group specialised register and database of studies awaiting assessment, the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, the Cochrane Controlled Trials Register, the Database of Abstracts of Reviews of Effectiveness, MEDLINE, and reference lists of articles up to the end of October 1999.


SELECTION CRITERIA
Randomised trials, controlled before-and-after studies and interrupted time series of interventions to improve collaboration between nursing and medical professionals sharing patient care in primary or hospital care settings.


DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS
One reviewer assessed the eligibility of potentially relevant studies, extracted data and assessed the quality of included studies; a second reviewer undertook duplicate assessments on the eligibility of some articles and data abstraction on all included studies.


MAIN RESULTS
Two trials involving 1945 people were included. One six month trial involving 1102 admissions evaluated daily, structured, team ward rounds, in which nurses, doctors and other professionals made care decisions jointly. There was shortened average length of hospital stay (LOS) from 6.06 to 5.46 days, and reduced hospital charges from US$ 8090 to 6681. There were no differences in mortality rates or the type of care to which patients were discharged. Another three month trial involving 843 admissions compared two female wards and evaluated a four times per week round. There were no significant differences between the intervention and control wards in total average length of stay for all patients (11.7 days in intervention ward versus 11.6 in the control ward). Excluding patients who died in hospital revealed shortened length of stay in the intervention ward (intervention ward 10.5 days, control ward 11.9). Mortality rates were not significantly different.


REVIEWER'S CONCLUSIONS
Increasing collaboration improved outcomes of importance to patients and to health care managers. These gains were moderate and affected health care processes rather than outcomes. Further research is needed to confirm these findings. The logistic challenge presented by the complexity of the interventions and the need for large sample sizes due to the likely modest impact and rarity of outcome events may best be met by multi-centre studies. Before launching such studies qualitative research is needed to identify barriers to collaboration. Interventions other than nurse-doctor ward rounds and team meetings should also be tested.
Decentralized virtualization in systems administration education

The Networking and Systems Administration Laboratories are vital components of the applied academic experience of the students of the Networking, Security and Systems Administration Department. Students are currently able to implement multiple heterogeneous computing infrastructures using Symantec's Ghost Solution Suite. This paper presents and explores virtual lab environments that support alternative preparation solutions that will increase laboratory utilization, student productivity, and provide students with exposure to virtualization technology.
HIV Behavioral Research Online

Internet access has caused a global revolution in the way people of all ages and genders interact. Many have turned to the Internet to seek love, companionship, and sex, prompting researchers to move behavioral studies online. The sexual behavior of men who have sex with men (MSM) has been more closely studied than that of any other group online given the abundance of gay-oriented websites and concerns about increasing transmission of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections. Not only does the Internet provide a new medium for the conduct of behavioral research and for participant recruitment into an array of research studies, it has the as yet unrealized potential to reach huge numbers of MSM with innovative harm reduction and prevention messages tailored to individualized needs, interests, and risk behavior. Internet-based research on sexual behavior has many advantages in rapidity of recruitment of diverse samples which include individuals unreachable through conventional methods (i.e., non-gay identified and geographically and socially isolated MSM, etc.). Internet-based research also presents some new methodologic challenges in study design, participant recruitment, survey implementation, and interpretation of results. In addition, there are ethical issues unique to online research including difficulties in verifying informed consent, obstacles to surveying minors, and the ability to assure anonymity. This paper presents a review of Internet-based research on sexual behavior in MSM, a general discussion of the methodologic and ethical challenges of Internet-based research, and recommendations for future interdisciplinary research.
Mindfulness-based stress reduction for older adults: effects on executive function, frontal alpha asymmetry and immune function.

BACKGROUND/AIMS
Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) has enhanced cognition, positive emotion, and immunity in younger and middle-aged samples; its benefits are less well known for older persons. Here we report on a randomized controlled trial of MBSR for older adults and its effects on executive function, left frontal asymmetry of the EEG alpha band, and antibody response.


METHODS
Older adults (n = 201) were randomized to MBSR or waiting list control. The outcome measures were: the Trail Making Test part B/A (Trails B/A) ratio, a measure of executive function; changes in left frontal alpha asymmetry, an indicator of positive emotions or approach motivation; depression, mindfulness, and perceived stress scores, and the immunoglobulin G response to a protein antigen, a measure of adaptive immunity.


RESULTS
MBSR participants had a lower Trails B/A ratio immediately after intervention (p < 0.05); reduced shift to rightward frontal alpha activation after intervention (p = 0.03); higher baseline antibody levels after intervention (p < 0.01), but lower antibody responses 24 weeks after antigen challenge (p < 0.04), and improved mindfulness after intervention (p = 0.023) and at 21 weeks of follow-up (p = 0.006).


CONCLUSIONS
MBSR produced small but significant changes in executive function, mindfulness, and sustained left frontal alpha asymmetry. The antibody findings at follow-up were unexpected. Further study of the effects of MBSR on immune function should assess changes in antibody responses in comparison to T-cell-mediated effector functions, which decline as a function of age.
Critical Thinking What is Critical Thinking ?

Political How to Defeat Terrorism with Neuro-Semantics (2) The President Finally Speaks out about Radial Isalism (3) A Call for Responsible Protests (20) Hidden Frames #1 (21) Behind Hidden Frames #2 (22) What’s Behind It All? #3 (23) The Politics within NLP and Neuro-Semantics Models (24) Ferguson Again? What’s the Real Problem? (35) Give me a Non-Politician (36) Is it Time for Trump to Apologize? (41) Religious Terrorism: The Paris Attacks (49) A Meaningful Antidote for Terrorism (51)
Velocity and Disparity Cues for Robust Real-Time Binocular Tracking

We have designed and implemented a real-time binocular tracking system which uses two independent cues commonly found in the primary functions of biological visual systems to robustly track moving targets in complex environments, without a-priori knowledge of the target shape or texture: a fast optical ow segmentation algorithm quickly locates independently moving objects for target acquisition and provides a reliable velocity estimate for smooth tracking. In parallel, target position is generated from the output of a zero-disparity lter where a phase-based disparity estimation technique allows dynamic control of the camera vergence to adapt the horopter geometry to the target location. The system takes advantage of the optical properties of our custom-designed foveated wide-angle lenses, which exhibit a wide eld of view along with a high resolution fovea. Methods to cope with the distortions introduced by the space-variant resolution, and a robust real-time implementation on a high performance active vision head are presented.
Hybrid approach to crime prediction using deep learning

Prevention is better that Cure. Preventing a crime from occurring is better than investigating what or how the crime had occurred. Just like vaccination is given to a child to prevent disease, in today's world with such higher crime rate and brutal crime happenings, it have become necessary to have a vaccination systems that prevents from crimes happening. By vaccinating society against crime it refers to various methods such as educating peoples, creating awareness, increasing efficiency and proactive policing methods and other deterrent techniques. Inspired by two different existing approach to crime prediction, the first one present a visual analytics approach that provides decision makers with a proactive and predictive environment in order to assist them in making effective resource allocation and deployment decisions. Crime incident prediction has depends mainly on the historical crime record and various geospatial and demographic information [1]. Even though it's promising, they do not take into account the rich and rapidly expanding social & web media context that surrounds incidents of interest. Next approach is based on the semantic analysis and natural language processing of Twitter posts via latent Dirichlet allocation, Topic detection Sentiment analysis[3[4]]. But both the techniques faces inherent limitations. Crime that happens these days are have following key characteristics such as crimes repeating in a periodic fashion, crimes occurring as a result of some other activity and occurrence of crimes pre indicated by some other information.
Meal induced changes in hepatic and splanchnic circulation: a noninvasive Doppler study in normal humans

The haemodynamic effects of a meal on the splanchnic and hepatic circulation were evaluated in 30 healthy volunteers, using Doppler ultrasonography. The resistance index (RI) of the superior mesenteric artery and of the left and right intrahepatic arteries, the portal vein blood flow as well as the ratio between maximal velocity in the left and right intrahepatic arteries and the adjacent portal vein were measured initially, then 15, 30, 45, and 60 min after the ingestion of a standard balanced liquid meal. Postprandial haemodynamic changes were maximal 30 min after the meal; at that time, mesenteric artery RI decreased significantly [mean −11% (SEM 14%)] whereas portal vein blood flow increased markedly [mean +79% (SEM 14%)]; a significant increase in hepatic artery RI was observed in both liver lobes. The ratio between maximal velocities of the intrahepatic artery and the intrahepatic portal vein was reduced significantly; this ratio decreased more markedly in the right lobe of the liver. These findings would suggest that there was an adaptation of hepatic artery to portal vein blood flow after a meal. The subsequent increase in intrahepatic portal vein flow velocity was found to be greater in the right lobe of the liver.
Defining ‘Life’

There is no broadly accepted definition of ‘life.’ Suggested definitions face problems, often in theform of robust counter-examples. Here we use insights fromphilosophical investigations into language to argue thatdefining `life' currently poses a dilemma analogous to thatfaced by those hoping to define `water' before the existenceof molecular theory. In the absence of an analogous theoryof the nature of living systems, interminable controversyover the definition of life is inescapable.
Introduction to Derivative-Free Optimization

Introduction to Derivative-Free Optimization Andrew R. Conn, Katya Scheinberg, and Luis N. Vicente The absence of derivatives, often combined with the presence of noise or lack of smoothness, is a major challenge for optimization. This book explains how sampling and model techniques are used in derivative-free methods and how these methods are designed to efficiently and rigorously solve optimization problems. Although readily accessible to readers with a modest background in computational mathematics, it is also intended to be of interest to researchers in the field. 2009 · xii + 277 pages · Softcover · ISBN 978-0-898716-68-9 List Price $73.00 · RUNDBRIEF Price $51.10 · Code MP08
Enhanced hierarchical classification via isotonic smoothing

Hierarchical topic taxonomies have proliferated on the World Wide Web [5, 18], and exploiting the output space decompositions they induce in automated classification systems is an active area of research. In many domains, classifiers learned on a hierarchy of classes have been shown to outperform those learned on a flat set of classes. In this paper we argue that the hierarchical arrangement of classes leads to intuitive relationships between the corresponding classifiers' output scores, and that enforcing these relationships as a post-processing step after classification can improve its accuracy. We formulate the task of smoothing classifier outputs as a regularized isotonic tree regression problem, and present a dynamic programming based method that solves it optimally. This new problem generalizes the classic isotonic tree regression problem, and both, the new formulation and algorithm, might be of independent interest. In our empirical analysis of two real-world text classification scenarios, we show that our approach to smoothing classifier outputs results in improved classification accuracy.
Deep learning at the shallow end: Malware classification for non-domain experts

Current malware detection and classification approaches generally rely on time consuming and knowledge intensive processes to extract patterns (signatures) and behaviors frommalware, which are then used for identification. Moreover, these signatures are often limited to local, contiguous sequences within the data whilst ignoring their context in relation to each other and throughout the malware file as a whole. We present a Deep Learning based malware classification approach that requires no expert domain knowledge and is based on a purely data driven approach for complex pattern and feature identification. © 2018 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of DFRWS. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
Stop Wasting My Gradients: Practical SVRG

I Skip evaluating gradient at exponentially-increasing interval if it remains at zero. Algorithm 2 Heuristic for skipping evaluations of fi at x if ski = 0 then compute f ′ i (x). if f ′ i (x) = 0 then psi = psi + 1. {Update the number of consecutive times f ′ i (x) was zero.} ski = 2 max{0,psi−2}. {Skip exponential number of future evaluations if it remains zero.} else psi = 0. {This could be a support vector, do not skip it next time.} end if return f ′ i (x). else ski = ski − 1. {In this case, we skip the evaluation.} return 0. end if
Cascadable Current-Mode Biquad Filter and Quadrature Oscillator Using DO-CCCIIs and OTA

This article introduces a circuit which can function both as a quadrature oscillator and as a universal biquad filter (lowpass, highpass, bandpass). When the circuit functions as a universal biquad filter, the quality factor and pole frequency can be tuned orthogonally via the input bias currents. When it functions as a quadrature oscillator, the oscillation condition and oscillation frequency can be adjusted independently by the input bias currents. The proposed circuit can work as either a quadrature oscillator or a biquad filter without changing the circuit topology. The amplitude of the proposed oscillator can be independently controlled via the input bias currents. The proposed oscillator can be applied to provide amplitude modulated/amplitude shift keyed signals with the above-mentioned major advantages. The circuit is very simple, consisting of four dual-output second generation current controlled current conveyors (DO-CCCIIs), one operational transconductance amplifier (OTA), and two grounded capacitors. Without any external resistors and using only grounded elements, this circuit is therefore suitable for IC architecture. PSPICE simulation results are depicted here, and the given results agree well with the theoretical analysis. The power consumption is approximately 7.32 mW at ±2.5 V supply voltages.
Citation Handling: Processing Citation Texts in Scientific Documents

Title of thesis: CITATION HANDLING: PROCESSING CITATION TEXTS IN SCIENTIFIC DOCUMENTS Michael Alan Whidby Master of Science, 2012 Thesis directed by: Professor Bonnie Dorr Dr. David Zajic Department of Computer Science Citation sentences (sentences that cite other papers) play a key role in the summarization of scientific articles. However, a citation-based summarization system that depends on generic natural language processing components, such as parsers or sentence compressors, will perform poorly if those components cannot handle citations correctly. In this thesis, I examine the effect of citation handling on parsing, sentence compression, and multi-document summarization. There are two types of citations that occur in citation sentences: constituent citations and parenthetical citations. I propose an automatic citation classifier based on training data created through Mechanical Turk tasks. I demonstrate that the use of type-specific citation handling as pre-processing improves the performance of a state-of-the-art generic parser, both for quality of the parse trees and running time. Extrinsic evaluations demonstrate that improving the performance of a parser on citation sentences in turn improves the performance of a sentence compressor, Trimmer Zajic et al. (2007), and a multidocument summarization system, MASCS, according to several summarization measures.
JVM versus CLR: a comparative study

We present empirical evidence to demonstrate that there is little or no difference between the Java Virtual Machine and the .NET Common Language Runtime, as regards the compilation and execution of object-oriented programs. Then we give details of a case study that proves the superiority of the Common Language Runtime as a target for imperative programming language compilers (in particular GCC).
Restrictive right ventricular physiology after tetralogy of Fallot repair is associated with fibrosis of the right ventricular outflow tract visualized on cardiac magnetic resonance imaging.

AIMS
To determine whether the restrictive physiology seen in Tetralogy of Fallot (TOF) patients can be explained by fibrosis of the right ventricular (RV) outflow tract. The aetiology for restrictive RV physiology after TOF repair is not known.


METHODS AND RESULTS
TOF patients (n = 31, 13 girls, 10.2 years ± 2.8) were included 9.2 ± 2.9 years after total correction and examined with cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) and Doppler echocardiography. Cine, flow, and late gadolinium contrast enhanced (LGE) CMR imaging were performed to quantify RV volumes, pulmonary flow and regurgitation (PR), and fibrosis. Healthy children (n = 12) were investigated with CMR of the pulmonary flow. Forward flow during atrial contraction above mean + 2 SD of healthy subjects was set as a marker of restrictive physiology. Four patients were excluded due to suboptimal LGE-CMR. Fisher's exact test was used to determine the association between restrictive physiology and fibrosis. Sixteen patients showed fibrosis in the right ventricular outflow tract (RVOT) on LGE-CMR and 14 of them showed restrictive physiology on CMR. Of the 11 patients without fibrosis in the RVOT, 1 showed restrictive physiology. The odds ratio for RVOT fibrosis in patients with restrictive RV physiology was 70.0 (CI: 5.6-882.7, P < 0.001). The transannular patch repair did not differ between the groups (P = 0.37). The degree of RVOT fibrosis correlated positively with PR (r(2) = 0.38, P < 0.001) and RV volumes (r(2) = 0.51 for end-diastolic volume and r(2) = 0.47 for end-systolic volume, P < 0.001).


CONCLUSION
There is a strong association between the restrictive RV physiology detected on CMR and fibrosis of the RVOT in children after TOF repair.