LLukas22/scidocs huggingface dataset:
A colored Petri net model for the France Paris metro system

This paper describes how colored Petri nets can be used for modeling the Paris underground Metro system. This is one of the most complex metro systems in the world. In this paper, the metro system is analyzed and described. The method of analysis is outlined. A working model for three of the major lines was constructed using CPNs. The results and other issues that have to be tackled are explained. Key-Words: Colored Petri Nets, Modeling and Simulation, Systems Analysis, Transport Systems
Risedronate therapy for the prevention of steroid-induced osteoporosis in patients with minimal-change nephrotic syndrome.

BACKGROUND
Minimal-change nephrotic syndrome (MCNS) is treated by the administration of prednisolone (PSL) at high doses. Steroid-induced osteoporosis is a serious adverse effect of this drug.


METHODS
Patients with MCNS were randomly assigned to two groups, the risedronate (2.5 mg/day) + alfacalcidol (0.25 µg/day) group (n=20) and the alfacalcidol (0.25 µg/day)-alone group (n=20). All the patients had received PSL and the clinical characteristics were compared between the two groups at baseline and at 12 months.


RESULTS
A significant decrease of the mean bone mineral density (BMD) of the lumbar spine from 0.710±0.162 (g/cm(2)) to 0.588±0.125 was observed in the alfacalcidol-alone group (p=0.02), while no such decrease of the bone mineral density was found in the risedronate + alfacalcidol group (0.663±0.169 at baseline and 0.626±0.129 at 12 months). No significant differences in the results of other biochemical tests performed at the baseline and at 12 months were observed between the two groups. The likelihood of development of steroid-induced osteoporosis was influenced by the cumulative dose of PSL, the mean BMD at the baseline, occurrence of disease relapse, and risedronate therapy.


CONCLUSION
Risedronate appears to be effective in preventing steroid-induced osteoporosis. It is necessary to use bisphosphonates to maintain the BMD in patients with MCNS receiving prolonged steroid therapy.
Using podcasts to replace lecture: Effects on student achievement

This study examined achievement when podcasts were used in place of lecture in the core technology course required for all students seeking teacher licensure at a large research-intensive university in the Southeastern United States. Further, it examined the listening preferences of the podcast group and the barriers to podcast use. The results revealed that there was no significant difference in the achievement of preservice teachers who experienced podcast instruction versus those who received lecture instruction. Further, there was no significant difference in their study habits. Participants preferred to use a computer and Blackboard for downloading the podcasts, which they primarily listened to at home. They tended to like the podcasts as well as the length of the podcasts and felt that they were reasonably effective for learning. They agreed that the podcasts were easy to use but disagreed that they should be used to replace lecture. Barriers to podcast use include unfamiliarity with podcasts, technical problems in accessing and downloading podcasts, and not seeing the relevance of podcasts to their learning. 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Comparison of clinical outcomes with the utilization of monitored anesthesia care vs. general anesthesia in patients undergoing transcatheter aortic valve replacement.

BACKGROUND
There is no clear consensus in regard to the optimal anesthesia utilization during transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR). The aim was to compare outcomes of transfemoral (TF) TAVR under monitored anesthesia care (MAC) vs. general anesthesia (GA) and evaluate the rates and causes of intra-procedural MAC failure.


METHODS
All consecutive patients who underwent TF TAVR from April 2007 through March 2015 were retrospectively analyzed and dichotomized into two groups: TAVR under MAC vs. GA. The main endpoints of the study included 30-day and 1-year mortality, the rates and reasons for failure of MAC, in-hospital clinical safety outcomes, and post-procedural hospital and intensive care unit length-of-stays.


RESULTS
A total of 533 patients (51% male, mean-age 83years) underwent TF TAVR under MAC (n=467) or GA (n=66). Fifty-six patients (12%) in the MAC group required conversion to GA. The MAC group had significantly shorter post-procedural hospital (6.0 vs. 7.9, p=0.023) and numerically shorter ICU (2.4 vs. 2.8, p=0.355) mean length-of-stays in days. The clinical safety outcomes were similar in both groups. Kaplan-Meier unadjusted cumulative in-hospital and 30-day mortality rates were higher in the GA group but similar in both groups at 1-year.


CONCLUSIONS
TF TAVR under MAC is feasible and safe, results in shorter hospital stays, can be performed in the majority of cases, and should be utilized as the default strategy. Trans-esophageal echocardiography utilization during TAVR with MAC is safe and feasible. The most common cause for conversion of MAC to GA is cardiac instability and hypotension. The complete heart team should be available at all times in case the need arises for a rapid conversion to GA.
Effects of a weighted vest on attention to task and self-stimulatory behaviors in preschoolers with pervasive developmental disorders.

OBJECTIVE
This study examined the effectiveness of using a weighted vest for increasing attention to a fine motor task and decreasing self-stimulatory behaviors in preschool children with pervasive developmental disorders (PDD).


METHOD
Using an ABA single-subject design, the duration of attention to task and self-stimulatory behaviors and the number of distractions were measured in five preschool children with PDD over a period of 6 weeks.


RESULTS
During the intervention phase, all participants displayed a decrease in the number of distractions and an increase in the duration of focused attention while wearing the weighted vest. All but 1 participant demonstrated a decrease in the duration of self-stimulatory behaviors while wearing a weighted vest; however, the type of self-stimulatory behaviors changed and became less self-abusive for this child while she wore the vest. During the intervention withdrawal phase, 3 participants experienced an increase in the duration of self-stimulatory behaviors, and all participants experienced an increase in the number of distractions and a decrease in the duration of focused attention. The increase or decrease, however, never returned to baseline levels for these behaviors.


CONCLUSION
The findings suggest that for these 5 children with PDD, the use of a weighted vest resulted in an increase in attention to task and decrease in self-stimulatory behaviors. The most consistent improvement observed was the decreased number of distractions. Additional research is necessary to build consensus about the effectiveness of wearing a weighted vest to increase attention to task and decrease self-stimulatory behaviors for children with PDD.
The Effects of Interleaved Practice

Previous research shows that interleaving rather than blocking practice of different skills (e.g. abcbcacab instead of aaabbbccc) usually improves subsequent test performance. Yet interleaving, but not blocking, ensures that practice of any particular skill is distributed, or spaced, because any two opportunities to practice the same task are not consecutive. Hence, because spaced practice typically improves test performance, the previously observed test benefits of interleaving may be due to spacing rather than interleaving per se. In the experiment reported herein, children practiced four kinds of mathematics problems in an order that was interleaved or blocked, and the degree of spacing was fixed. The interleaving of practice impaired practice session performance yet doubled scores on a test given one day later. An analysis of the errors suggested that interleaving boosted test scores by improving participants’ ability to pair each problem with the appropriate procedure. Copyright # 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Influence of Machining Parameters on Electric Discharge Machining of Maraging Steels - An Experimental Investigation

thermoelectric process in which heat energy of spark is used to remove material from the work piece. The machining process involves controlled erosion of electrically conducting material by the initiation of rapid and repetitive electrical spark discharges between the tool and workpiece separated by the dielectric medium. The present work is aimed at characterizing the electric discharge machining of maraging steels on EDM. 27 experiments are conducted by varying EDM parameters such as current, pulse-on-time, and duty factor. The performance measures like Material removal rate, surface roughness, and hardness are assessed. It is concluded that metal removal rate, and surface roughness increases with increase in current, duty factor. But, as the pulse-on-time increases MRR and surface roughness decreases. Hardness value increases as the current value increases from 5A to 10A amps and then decreases as the current increases from 10A to 15A. The same effect is observed as in case of duty factor and pulse on-time. Average crack length and recast layer thickness increases with increase in current and duty factor. But, there will be decreasing trend in case of pulse-on-time.
Bridging the Human Resource Gap in Primary Health Care Delivery Systems of Developing Countries With mHealth: Narrative Literature Review

BACKGROUND
Mobile health (mHealth) has the potential to solve human resource issues in the health care sector. mHealth is of particular interest in developing countries, where widespread mobile networks and access to devices are connecting people like never before.


OBJECTIVE
The aim of this paper was to review published and unpublished literature, field projects, and pilot studies on mHealth usage in overcoming shortage of human health resources in developing countries.


METHODS
A narrative literature review was undertaken using an iterative approach in extracting literature focused on mHealth and human health resources of low-income countries, especially India. The present review has undertaken comprehensive coverage of the work on related field projects that have been either published, accepted for publication, or pilot tested.


RESULTS
This review presented the use of mHealth across various dimensions of primary health care, including data collection, disease surveillance, health education, supervision, monitoring, and feedback. Field studies of fast, error-free data collection and transmission using mHealth were also documented. New apps for supervision, monitoring, and utilization of innovative health education tools were documented in the current review. Practical limitations of mHealth and challenges set forth in developing countries included issues of data security, cost constraints, health provider privacy, and technical barriers.


CONCLUSIONS
In the present review, we have documented a few mHealth projects that contribute to the proficient use of human resources. These projects pave the path for the efficient utilization of mHealth, offering solutions to emerging human resource challenges and simultaneously revamping the health care delivery in resource-limited settings.
Fingerprint image quality analysis

This paper discusses methods in evaluating fingerprint image quality on a local level. Feature vectors covering directional strength, sinusoidal local ridge/valley pattern, ridge/valley uniformity and core occurrences are first extracted from fingerprint image subblocks. Each subblock is then assigned a quality level through pattern classification. Three different classifiers are employed to compare each of its different effectiveness. Positive results have been obtained based on our database.
Dementelcoach: effect of telephone coaching on carers of community-dwelling people with dementia.

BACKGROUND
Dementelcoach is a new telephone intervention to support informal caregivers of community dwelling people with dementia. The effectiveness of this intervention was evaluated on burden and mental health problems of informal caregivers.


METHODS
A pre-test/post-test comparison group design was used with three groups of informal caregivers.Two of the groups were experimental and received either (1) telephone coaching or (2) telephone coaching in combination with respite care (psychogeriatric day care); the third was a comparison group which received day care only. Telephone coaching was offered by trained coaches once every two to three weeks over a period of 20 weeks.


RESULTS
Informal caregivers who received telephone coaching in combination with respite care reported significantly less burden compared to caregivers who received telecoaching only, and they experienced significantly fewer mental health problems than those who received day care only.


CONCLUSION
Telecoaching according to the principles of Dementelcoach combined with respite care(psychogeriatric day care) is more effective in reducing burden and health complaints in informal caregivers of community-dwelling people with dementia than telecoaching or day care only.
Treatment of the lumbar disc herniation with intradiscal and intraforaminal injection of oxygen-ozone.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE
Oxygen-ozone therapy is a minimally invasive treatment for lumbar disk herniation that exploits the biochemical properties of a gas mixture of oxygen and ozone. The purpose of our study was to prospectively evaluate the clinical effectiveness of oxygen-ozone therapy and compared the therapeutic outcome of injection of oxygen-ozone combined steroid with injection of ozone alone at different follow-up period.


MATERIAL AND METHODS
From Aug 2005 to Mar 2009, 172 consecutive adult patients (92 men, 80 women; age range: 23-59 years) with low back pain and radicular pain were included in this study and were randomly assigned to two groups. 90 patients (group A) underwent intradiscal and intraforaminal injection of oxygen-ozone and 82 patients (group B) received the same treatment with additional injection of 1ml of compound betamethasone. Visual analogue scale (VAS) and the Japanese Orthopedic Association's evaluation system for lower back pain syndrome (JOA score) were administered before treatment and at 3 weeks, 6 and 12-month follow-up period to evaluate the clinical results.


RESULTS
Satisfactory clinical outcomes were obtained in both groups. The reduction of VAS score from baseline to the end of the study was 7.68 to 2.17 and 7.49 to 2.23 in group A and group B respectively, and there were remarkable improvements of mean JOA score and recovery rate in every follow-up time in both groups. Furthermore, in 3 weeks follow-up the JOA recovery rate of group B is higher than that of group A, which there was significant different, but there were no significant differences between two groups in 6 and 12 months.


CONCLUSION
In our study, oxygen-ozone nucleolysis provides excellent pain relief in most herniated disc patients who failed to respond to conservative therapy. And there was no significant statistical difference between treatment of injection of oxygen-ozone combined with steroid and ozone only in the 6 and 12 months follow-up. Therefore, O2-O3 seems to play a role in pain relief, and we suggest the administration of the O2-O3 mixture as a first-choice treatment before recourse to surgery or when surgery is not possible and the addition of epidural steroid infiltration is not required.


LEVEL OF EVIDENCE
Level 1-1 (prospective study).
Exploring online dating and customer relationship management

Purpose – To explore and add insight to the online-dating services phenomena which is the next product and beneficiary of the internet revolution that offers customers a convenient and affordable alternate to traditional methods of dating. Design/methodology/approach – Empirically investigated through conceptual models and statistical methods was the value proposition of online matchmaking services, which boils down to the ability to provide appropriate matches through successfully business-to-customer (B2C) customer service enhanced by the web and based on sound customer relations management practices. Findings – The differentiation of the marketplace includes unique ways to collect user-based information and customized, proprietary algorithms that generate what are believed to be the best matches, based on user and matchmaking service criteria. Online dating services use statistics, data mining, and activity monitoring to provide appropriate matches; thus, differentiating their services and understanding the success of their product offering. Research limitations/implications – The basic strategic business model created by online dating industry that is researched in this paper is built around B2C customer service in a privacy and security conscious environment. Internet dating service providers are gaining increased acceptance though successful use of customized software that helps generate a potential valued-added match for the
Joint pricing and inventory control with a Markovian demand model

We consider the joint pricing and inventory control problem for a single product with a finite horizon and periodic review. The demand distribution in each period is determined by an exogenous Markov chain. Pricing and ordering decisions are made at the beginning of each period and all shortages are backlogged. The surplus costs as well as fixed and variable costs are state dependent. We show the existence of an optimal (s, S, p)-type feedback policy for the additive demand model. We extend the model to the case of emergency orders and also incorporate capacity and service level constraints. We compute the optimal policy for a class of Markovian demand and illustrate the benefits of dynamic pricing over fixed pricing strategies through numerical examples. The results indicate that it is more beneficial to implement the dynamic pricing strategy in a Markovian demand environment with a high fixed ordering cost or with high demand uncertainty.
Gaming addiction, definition and measurement: A large-scale empirical study

Although the general public appears to have embraced the term ‘videogame addiction’, the scientific debate as to whether ‘gaming addiction’ can actually be considered an addiction similar to substance addictions of DSM-IV is still unsettled. To date, research on gaming addiction has focused on problematic behavior from the gaming activity itself and there has been little empirical research related to pathological personality patterns that usually are associated with substance addictions. Therefore, the current study examined how game exposure and ‘problematic gaming behavior’ are related to personality patterns associated with addiction by means of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 (MMPI-2). A large-scale survey study was performed among 1004 adolescent boys (age-range 11–18, M = 14.18, SD = 1.36) measuring problematic gaming behavior, physical game-related symptoms, gaming behavior and three MMPI-2 subscales measuring personality patterns usually associated with substance addiction (MAC-R, APS, AAS). Results showed that problematic gaming and physical symptoms were positively related to all MMPI-2 subscales, while game exposure was not related to the indirect measures of addictive personality patterns (i.e., MAC-R, APS). Thus, problematic gaming should be clearly distinguished from high game exposure. High game exposure merely indicates enthusiasm for some although it may be psychopathological for others. 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
On the Origin of Reverse Transcriptase-Using CRISPR-Cas Systems and Their Hyperdiverse, Enigmatic Spacer Repertoires

Cas1 integrase is the key enzyme of the clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat (CRISPR)-Cas adaptation module that mediates acquisition of spacers derived from foreign DNA by CRISPR arrays. In diverse bacteria, the cas1 gene is fused (or adjacent) to a gene encoding a reverse transcriptase (RT) related to group II intron RTs. An RT-Cas1 fusion protein has been recently shown to enable acquisition of CRISPR spacers from RNA. Phylogenetic analysis of the CRISPR-associated RTs demonstrates monophyly of the RT-Cas1 fusion, and coevolution of the RT and Cas1 domains. Nearly all such RTs are present within type III CRISPR-Cas loci, but their phylogeny does not parallel the CRISPR-Cas type classification, indicating that RT-Cas1 is an autonomous functional module that is disseminated by horizontal gene transfer and can function with diverse type III systems. To compare the sequence pools sampled by RT-Cas1-associated and RT-lacking CRISPR-Cas systems, we obtained samples of a commercially grown cyanobacterium-Arthrospira platensis Sequencing of the CRISPR arrays uncovered a highly diverse population of spacers. Spacer diversity was particularly striking for the RT-Cas1-containing type III-B system, where no saturation was evident even with millions of sequences analyzed. In contrast, analysis of the RT-lacking type III-D system yielded a highly diverse pool but reached a point where fewer novel spacers were recovered as sequencing depth was increased. Matches could be identified for a small fraction of the non-RT-Cas1-associated spacers, and for only a single RT-Cas1-associated spacer. Thus, the principal source(s) of the spacers, particularly the hypervariable spacer repertoire of the RT-associated arrays, remains unknown.IMPORTANCE While the majority of CRISPR-Cas immune systems adapt to foreign genetic elements by capturing segments of invasive DNA, some systems carry reverse transcriptases (RTs) that enable adaptation to RNA molecules. From analysis of available bacterial sequence data, we find evidence that RT-based RNA adaptation machinery has been able to join with CRISPR-Cas immune systems in many, diverse bacterial species. To investigate whether the abilities to adapt to DNA and RNA molecules are utilized for defense against distinct classes of invaders in nature, we sequenced CRISPR arrays from samples of commercial-scale open-air cultures of Arthrospira platensis, a cyanobacterium that contains both RT-lacking and RT-containing CRISPR-Cas systems. We uncovered a diverse pool of naturally occurring immune memories, with the RT-lacking locus acquiring a number of segments matching known viral or bacterial genes, while the RT-containing locus has acquired spacers from a distinct sequence pool for which the source remains enigmatic.
On Text-based Mining with Active Learning and Background Knowledge Using SVM

Text mining, intelligent text analysis, text data mining and knowledge-discovery in text are generally used aliases to the process of extracting relevant and non-trivial information from text. Some crucial issues arise when trying to solve this problem, such as document representation and deficit of labeled data. This paper addresses these problems by introducing information from unlabeled documents in the training set, using the support vector machine (SVM) separating margin as the differentiating factor. Besides studying the influence of several pre-processing methods and concluding on their relative significance, we also evaluate the benefits of introducing background knowledge in a SVM text classifier. We further evaluate the possibility of actively learning and propose a method for successfully combining background knowledge and active learning. Experimental results show that the proposed techniques, when used alone or combined, present a considerable improvement in classification performance, even when small labeled training sets are available.
An examination of software engineering work practices

This paper presents work practice data of the daily activities of software engineers. Four separate studies are presented; one looking longitudinally at an individual SE; two looking at a software engineering group; and one looking at companywide tool usage statistics. We also discuss the advantages in considering work practices in designing tools for software engineers, and i clude some requirements for a tool we have developed as a result of our studies.