LLukas22/scidocs huggingface dataset:
Towards Incorporating Visual Imagery into a Cognitive Architecture

This paper presents a synthesis of cognitive architecture and visual imagery. Visual imagery is a mental process that relies both on cognitive and perceptual mechanisms and is useful for tasks requiring visual-feature and visual-spatial reasoning. Using visual imagery as motivation, we have extended the Soar cognitive architecture to support the construction, transformation, generation, and inspection of visual representations for general problem solving. This paper presents the high-level architectural design and discusses initial results from two domains.
Interventions for promoting smoking cessation during pregnancy.

BACKGROUND
Smoking remains one of the few potentially preventable factors associated with low birthweight, preterm birth and perinatal death.


OBJECTIVES
To assess the effects of smoking cessation programs implemented during pregnancy on the health of the fetus, infant, mother, and family.


SEARCH STRATEGY
We searched the Cochrane Pregnancy and Childbirth Group trials register and the Cochrane Tobacco Addiction Group trials register (July 2003), MEDLINE (January 2002 to July 2003), EMBASE (January 2002 to July 2003), PsychLIT (January 2002 to July 2003), CINAHL (January 2002 to July 2003), and AUSTHEALTH (January 2002 to 2003). We contacted trial authors to locate additional unpublished data. We handsearched references of identified trials and recent obstetric journals.


SELECTION CRITERIA
Randomised and quasi-randomised trials of smoking cessation programs implemented during pregnancy.


DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS
Four reviewers assessed trial quality and extracted data independently.


MAIN RESULTS
This review included 64 trials. Fifty-one randomised controlled trials (20,931 women) and six cluster-randomised trials (over 7500 women) provided data on smoking cessation and/or perinatal outcomes. Despite substantial variation in the intensity of the intervention and the extent of reminders and reinforcement through pregnancy, there was an increase in the median intensity of both 'usual care' and interventions over time. There was a significant reduction in smoking in the intervention groups of the 48 trials included: (relative risk (RR) 0.94, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.93 to 0.95), an absolute difference of six in 100 women continuing to smoke. The 36 trials with validated smoking cessation had a similar reduction (RR 0.94, 95% CI 0.92 to 0.95). Smoking cessation interventions reduced low birthweight (RR 0.81, 95% CI 0.70 to 0.94) and preterm birth (RR 0.84, 95% CI 0.72 to 0.98), and there was a 33 g (95% CI 11 g to 55 g) increase in mean birthweight. There were no statistically significant differences in very low birthweight, stillbirths, perinatal or neonatal mortality but these analyses had very limited power. One intervention strategy, rewards plus social support (two trials), resulted in a significantly greater smoking reduction than other strategies (RR 0.77, 95% CI 0.72 to 0.82). Five trials of smoking relapse prevention (over 800 women) showed no statistically significant reduction in relapse.


REVIEWERS' CONCLUSIONS
Smoking cessation programs in pregnancy reduce the proportion of women who continue to smoke, and reduce low birthweight and preterm birth. The pooled trials have inadequate power to detect reductions in perinatal mortality or very low birthweight.
Should Monetary Policy Be Used to Counteract Financial Imbalances

• To the extent that fi nancial imbalances are specifi c to a sector or market and that a well-targeted prudential tool is available, monetary policy may play a minor role in leaning against the imbalances. However, if the imbalances in a specifi c market can spill over to the entire economy and/or if the prudential tool is broad based, it is more likely that monetary policy will have a role to play. In such a case, there may be a need to coordinate the use of the two policy instruments. T he global fi nancial crisis of 2007–09 serves as a powerful reminder that even the most sophisticated fi nancial systems may be subject to virulent crises that can have a huge impact on the real economy. In the recent crisis, the monetary policy response was forceful: interest rates were moved quickly to historic lows, and unconventional policies were implemented in a number of countries. Together with fi scal stimulus and direct support for fi nancial systems in numerous countries, this response was effective in “cleaning up” after the crisis had broken— contributing to the start of an economic recovery and creating conditions for rebuilding damaged fi nancial systems. Nonetheless, the economic costs of the recession were very large, and many of the policy measures themselves had signifi cant costs.
Practical Thoracoscopy

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High prevalence of cardio-metabolic risk factors among adolescents with intellectual disability.

UNLABELLED
Adults with intellectual disabilities (IDs) have poor lifestyle-related health compared with the general population. Our aim was to study whether such differences are present already in adolescents.


AIM
To compare the prevalence and severity of cardio-metabolic risk factors and cardio-vascular fitness in adolescents with and without IDs.


METHODS
Intellectual disability (ID) students (n = 66) and non-intellectual disability (non-ID) students from practical (non-ID-p) (n = 34) and theoretical (non-ID-t) (n = 56) programmes were recruited from three upper secondary schools. Anthropometric data, blood pressure, body composition, fasting-insulin, fasting-glucose, fasting-lipids and cardio-vascular fitness were measured.


RESULTS
Participants with and without ID differed significantly in the prevalence of cardio-metabolic risk factors with participants with ID having a higher percentage of total fat mass, wider waist circumferences (WCs), lower levels of fat-free mass (FFM), lower bone mineral density (BMD) and higher insulin and homeostasis model assessment of insulin resistance (HOMA) levels and poorer cardio-vascular fitness. The healthiest levels were found in the non-ID-t group compared to the group with ID and the group with non-ID-p in between.


CONCLUSION
The prevalence of cardio-metabolic risk factors and poor cardio-vascular fitness was found to be high in this young population with intellectual disabilities. Measures should be taken to improve the health messages directed towards children and adolescents with intellectual disabilities.
A note on inflationary string cosmology

Abstract Cosmological solutions are obtained by continuation of black D-brane solutions into the region between the horizons. It is investigated whether one can find exponential expansion when probing the cosmology with D-branes. A unique configuration exhibiting exponential expansion is discussed.
A prospective, multicenter, National Cancer Institute Early Detection Research Network study of [-2]proPSA: improving prostate cancer detection and correlating with cancer aggressiveness.

BACKGROUND
The free prostate-specific antigen (PSA) isoform, [-2]proPSA, has been shown to be associated with prostate cancer. The study objective was to characterize the clinical utility of serum [-2]proPSA for prostate cancer detection and assess its association with aggressive disease.


METHODS
From among 669 subjects in a prospective prostate cancer detection study at four National Cancer Institute Early Detection Research Network clinical validation centers, 566 were eligible. Serum PSA, free PSA, and [-2]proPSA were measured (Beckman Coulter Access 2 Analyzer).


RESULTS
Two hundred and forty-five (43%) of the 566 participants had prostate cancer on biopsy. At 70% specificity, the sensitivity of %[-2]proPSA ([-2]proPSA/fPSA) was 54% [95% confidence interval (CI), 48-61%; null hypothesis, 40%]. Including %[-2]proPSA in a multivariate prediction model incorporating PSA and %fPSA improved the performance (P<0.01). In the 2 to 4 ng/mL PSA range, %[-2]proPSA outperformed %fPSA (receiver operator characteristic-areas under the curve, 0.73 versus 0.61; P=0.01). At 80% sensitivity, %[-2]proPSA had significantly higher specificity (51.6%; 95% CI, 41.2-61.8%) than PSA (29.9%; 95% CI, 21.0-40.0%) and %fPSA (28.9%; 95% CI, 20.1-39.0%). In the 2 to 10 ng/mL PSA range, a multivariate model had significant improvement (area under the curve, 0.76) over individual PSA forms (P<0.01 to <0.0001). At 80% sensitivity, the specificity of %[-2]proPSA (44.9%; 95% CI, 38.4-51.5%) was significantly higher than PSA (30.8%; 95% CI, 24.9-37.1%) and relatively higher than %fPSA (34.6%; 95% CI, 28.5-41.4%). %[-2]proPSA increased with increasing Gleason score (P<0.001) and was higher in aggressive cancers (P=0.03).


CONCLUSIONS
In this prospective study, %[-2]proPSA showed potential clinical utility for improving prostate cancer detection and was related to the risk of aggressive disease.


IMPACT
The addition of %[-2]proPSA could affect the early detection of prostate cancer.
A mental health training program for community health workers in India: impact on knowledge and attitudes

BACKGROUND
Unmet needs for mental health treatment in low income countries are pervasive. If mental health is to be effectively integrated into primary health care in low income countries like India then grass-roots workers need to acquire relevant knowledge and skills to be able to recognise, refer and support people experiencing mental disorders in their own communities. This study aims to provide a mental health training intervention to community health workers in Bangalore Rural District, Karnataka, India, and to evaluate the impact of this training on mental health literacy.


METHODS
A pre-test post-test study design was undertaken with assessment of mental health literacy at three time points; baseline, completion of the training, and three month follow-up. Mental health literacy was assessed using the interviewer-administered Mental Health Literacy Survey. The training intervention was a four day course based on a facilitator's manual developed specifically for community health workers in India.


RESULTS
70 community health workers from Doddaballapur, Bangalore Rural District were recuited for the study. The training course improved participants' ability to recognize a mental disorder in a vignette, and reduced participants' faith in unhelpful and potentially harmful pharmacological interventions. There was evidence of a minor reduction in stigmatizing attitudes, and it was unclear if the training resulted in a change in participants' faith in recovery following treatment.


CONCLUSION
The findings from this study indicate that the training course demonstrated potential to be an effective way to improve some aspects of mental health literacy, and highlights strategies for strengthening the training course.
Pulmonary function change in patients with Sauropus androgynus-related obstructive lung disease 15 years later.

BACKGROUND/PURPOSE
Little is understood about the clinical course and prognosis of patients with Sauropus androgynus-related obstructive lung disease. The aim of this study was to investigate their clinical manifestations and pulmonary function change 15 years after the acute episode.


METHODS
A descriptive, observational study of patients with S androgynus-related obstructive lung disease, diagnosed 15 years ago, was conducted. We evaluated their pulmonary function and the Modified Medical Research Council (MMRC) dyspnea scale. Saint George's Respiratory Questionnaire (SGRQ) was also performed. Age- and forced expiratory volume in one second (FEV1)-matched chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) patients were used as a reference group for comparison of clinical manifestations.


RESULTS
Twenty-nine of 49 patients, diagnosed at our hospital 15 years ago, could be contacted. Four patients died and one patient was ventilator-dependent. Sixteen patients were willing to come to our hospital to have pulmonary function and questionnaire evaluation. The FEV1 of these patients declined only 1.6 ± 21.6 mL/year over a 15-year period. Meanwhile, the severity of their dyspnea and their health-related quality of life were better than age- and FEV1-matched COPD patients as shown by the MMRC dyspnea scale (1.4 ± 0.8 vs. 2.0 ± 1.0; p = 0.037) and symptom domain of the SGRQ (32.6 ± 18.4 vs. 43.5 ± 20.3; p = 0.006).


CONCLUSION
After an acute deterioration, patients with S androgynus-related obstructive lung disease had a stationary pulmonary function over a period of 15 years, and their clinical manifestations were less severe than age- and FEV1-matched COPD patients. A further study with a larger sample size may be needed to confirm these findings.
7x1-PT: um Corpus extraído do Twitter para Análise de Sentimentos em Língua Portuguesa (7x1-PT: a Corpus extracted from Twitter for Sentiment Analysis in Portuguese Language)

This paper describes the 7x1­PT corpus that contains a set of tweets, in Portuguese, posted during the match Germany vs Brazil at the FIFA World Cup 2014. We describe data collection, cleaning and organization, and also the current stage of the linguistic annotation of this corpus.
Patient activation increases colorectal cancer screening rates: a randomized trial among low-income minority patients.

BACKGROUND
Colorectal cancer (CRC) screening rates remain low among low-income and minority populations. The purpose of this study was to determine whether providing patients with screening information, activating them to ask for a screening test, and telephone barriers counseling improves CRC screening rates compared with providing screening information only.


METHODS
Patients were randomized to CRC screening information plus patient activation and barriers counseling (n = 138) or CRC screening information (n = 132). Barriers counseling was attempted among activated patients if screening was not completed after one month. CRC screening test completion was determined by medical record review at two months after the medical visit. Logistic regression was used to determine whether activated patients were more likely to complete CRC screening, after adjustment for confounding factors (e.g., demographic characteristics and CRC knowledge).


RESULTS
Patients were African American (72.2%), female (63.7%), had annual household incomes less than $20,000 (60.7%), no health insurance (57.0%), and limited health literacy skills (53.7%). In adjusted analyses, more patients randomized to the activation group completed a screening test (19.6% vs. 9.9%; OR = 2.35, 95% CI: 1.14-5.56; P = 0.020). In addition, more activated patients reported discussing screening with their provider (54.4% vs. 27.5%, OR = 3.29, 95% CI: 1.95-5.56; P < 0.001) and had more screening tests ordered (39.1% vs. 17.6%; OR = 3.40, 95% CI: 1.88-6.15; P < 0.001) compared with those in the control group.


CONCLUSION
Patient activation increased CRC screening rates among low-income minority patients.


IMPACT
Innovative strategies are still needed to increase CRC screening discussions, motivate providers to recommend screening to patients, as well as assist patients to complete ordered screening tests.
New tool for converting high-level representations of finite state machines to verilog HDL

Automated conversion of high-level representation of Finite State Machine (FSM) to correct-by-construction Hardware Description Language (HDL) is of demand with the increasing complexity of the modern digital controller designs. In this paper, we proposed a tool implementing systematic methodology for conversion and verification of high-level FSM to Verilog HDL. User defined options are provided to increase the flexibility and usability of the tool. MCNC91 benchmarks were used to evaluate the tool performance and correctness. Results indicate that the tool is able to correctly convert all given benchmark circuits with good runtime and memory consumption.
Cloud Computing Landscape and Research Challenges Regarding Trust and Reputation

Cloud Computing is an emerging computing paradigm. It shares massively scalable, elastic resources (e.g., data, calculations, and services) transparently among the users over a massive network. The Cloud market is growing rapidly and bringing up numerous research challenges. This paper provides a landscape of Cloud Computing and its research challenges, especially considering the areas of service selection, quality assurance of Cloud services, and trust establishment in Cloud environments. As the latter is known to be one of the major challenges of Cloud Computing, We also provide an overview of the important aspects that need to be considered when integrating trust and reputation concepts into Cloud Computing.
On Controller Performance in Software-Defined Networks

Network architectures in which the control plane is decoupled from the data plane have been growing in popularity. Among the main arguments for this approach is that it provides a more structured software environment for developing network-wide abstractions while potentially simplifying the data plane. As has been adopted elsewhere [11], we refer to this split architecture as Software-Defined Networking (SDN). While it has been argued that SDN is suitable for some deployment environments (such as homes [17, 13], data centers [1], and the enterprise [5]), delegating control to a remote system has raised a number of questions on control-plane scaling implications of such an approach. Two of the most often voiced concerns are: (a) how fast can the controller respond to data path requests?; and (b) how many data path requests can it handle per second? There are some references to the performance of SDN systems in the literature [16, 5, 3]. For example, an oft-cited study shows that a popular network controller (NOX) handles around 30k flow initiation events1 per second while maintaining a sub-10ms flow install time [14]. Unfortunately, recent measurements of some deployment environments suggests that these numbers are far from sufficient. For example, Kandula et al. [9] found that a 1500-server cluster has a median flow arrival rate of 100k flows per second. Also, Benson et al. [2] show that a network with 100 switches can have spikes of 10M flows arrivals per second in the worst case. In addition, the 10ms flow setup delay of an SDN controller would add a 10% delay to the majority of flows (short-lived) in such a network. This disconnect between relatively poor controller performance and high network demands has motivated a
Surface chemical aspects of polymer/metal adhesion

Abstract This paper reports on a three-part study: (1) to determine the effect of surface pretreatment of BDS, a siloxane/polyimide copolymer, on adhesion; (2) to determine the extent of segregation of components of BDS against metal substrates; and (3) to determine the properties of ultrathin polymer films against metal substrates. Surface pretreatment of bds films with aqueous NaOH etched away the top siloxane layer, roughening the polymer surface and producing surface functional groups. These changes resulted in increased wettability and peel strength. Siloxane segregation when bds films were formed against metal surfaces was in the order: Al > Ti > Zn. The relative acidity of the metal oxides as measured by polyvinyl chloride adsorption was in the same order. Reflection-absorption measurements using Fourier transform infra-red spectroscopy were found to be useful in studying the crystallinity of thin polyphenylene sulphide ( pps ) films. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy was used to show that failure occurred through a thin layer of residual pps polymer close to the copper oxide substrate.
Off-line handwritten Arabic character segmentation algorithm: ACSA

Character segmentation is a necessary preprocessing step for character recognition in many OCR systems. It is an important step because incorrectly segmented characters are unlikely to be recognized correctly. The most difficult case in character segmentation is the cursive script. The scripted nature of Arabic written language poses some high challenges for automatic character segmentation and recognition. In this paper, a new character segmentation algorithm (ACSA) of Arabic scripts is presented. The developed segmentation algorithm yields on the segmentation of isolated handwritten words in perfectly separated characters. It is based on morphological rules, which are constructed at the feature extraction phase. Finally, ACSA is combined with an existing handwritten Arabic character recognition system (RECAM).
Elevated Blood Lead Levels of Children in Guiyu, an Electronic Waste Recycling Town in China

BACKGROUND
Electronic waste (e-waste) recycling has remained primitive in Guiyu, China, and thus may contribute to the elevation of blood lead levels (BLLs) in children living in the local environment.


OBJECTIVES
We compared the BLLs in children living in the e-waste recycling town of Guiyu with those living in the neighboring town of Chendian.


METHODS
We observed the processing of e-waste recycling in Guiyu and studied BLLs in a cluster sample of 226 children < 6 years of age who lived in Guiyu and Chendian. BLLs were determined with atomic absorption spectrophotometry. Hemoglobin (Hgb) and physical indexes (height and weight, head and chest circumferences) were also measured.


RESULTS
BLLs in 165 children of Guiyu ranged from 4.40 to 32.67 microg/dL with a mean of 15.3 microg/dL, whereas BLLs in 61 children of Chendian were from 4.09 to 23.10 microg/dL with a mean of 9.94 microg/dL. Statistical analyses showed that children living in Guiyu had significantly higher BLLs compared with those living in Chendian (p < 0.01). Of children in Guiyu, 81.8% (135 of 165) had BLLs > 10 microg/dL, compared with 37.7% of children (23 of 61) in Chendian (p < 0.01). In addition, we observed a significant increasing trend in BLLs with increasing age in Guiyu (p < 0.01). It appeared that there was correlation between the BLLs in children and numbers of e-waste workshops. However, no significant difference in Hgb level or physical indexes was found between the two towns.


CONCLUSIONS
The primitive e-waste recycling activities may contribute to the elevated BLLs in children living in Guiyu.
Strategic Human Resource Management and Organizational Performance in the Nigerian Manufacturing Sector: An Empirical Investigation

Despite the relatively large bulk of literature on strategic HRM, there is still an ongoing debate as to whether it exists in reality or is merely rhetoric. This paper attempted to broaden the scope of existing literature by examining the extent to which Strategic HRM is practiced in the Nigerian manufacturing sector as well as its impact on organizational performance. A multi-respondent survey of 21 Nigerian manufacturing companies was undertaken and data collected was subjected to correlation and regression analysis as well descriptive statistics in pursuance of the stated objective of finding a fit between organizational performance and strategic human resource management practices. Results show that strategic HRM was moderately practiced by the companies operating in the Nigerian manufacturing sector. Results also indicate that line management devolvement, innovative recruitment and selection system, regular training and development of personnel, equity based compensation system, performance appraisal system, effective career planning system and a robust employee participation in the organizations’ decisions and actions are the key strategic HR practices that influence organizational performance in the Nigerian manufacturing sector. It therefore, implies that companies operating in the Nigerian manufacturing sector should pay more attention to these practices with a view to improving their implementation across the industry.