LLukas22/scidocs huggingface dataset:
Effects of perceived treatment on quality of life and medical outcomes in a double-blind placebo surgery trial.

CONTEXT
This study was part of a large double-blind sham surgery-controlled trial designed to determine the effectiveness of transplantation of human embryonic dopamine neurons into the brains of persons with advanced Parkinson's disease. This portion of the study investigated the quality of life (QOL) of participants during the 1 year of double-blind follow-up.


OBJECTIVES
To determine whether QOL improved more in the transplant group than in the sham surgery group and to investigate outcomes at 1 year based on perceived treatment (the type of surgery patients thought they received).


DESIGN
Participants were randomly assigned to receive either the transplant or sham surgery. Reported results are from the 1-year double-blind period.


SETTING
Participants were recruited from across the United States and Canada. Assessment and surgery were conducted at 2 separate university medical centers.


PARTICIPANTS
A volunteer sample of 40 persons with idiopathic Parkinson's disease participated in the transplant ("parent") study, and 30 agreed to participate in the related QOL study: 12 received the transplant and 18 received sham surgery.


INTERVENTIONS
Interventions in the parent study were transplantation and sham brain surgery. Assessments of QOL were made at baseline and 4, 8, and 12 months after surgery.


MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES
Comparison of the actual transplant and sham surgery groups and the perceived treatment groups on QOL and medical outcomes. We also investigated change over time.


RESULTS
There were 2 differences or changes over time in the transplant and sham surgery groups. Based on perceived treatment, or treatment patients thought they received, there were numerous differences and changes over time. In all cases, those who thought they received the transplant reported better scores. Blind ratings by medical staff showed similar results.


CONCLUSIONS
The placebo effect was very strong in this study, demonstrating the value of placebo-controlled surgical trials.
Secure and Sustainable Load Balancing of Edge Data Centers in Fog Computing

Fog computing is a recent research trend to bring cloud computing services to network edges. EDCs are deployed to decrease the latency and network congestion by processing data streams and user requests in near real time. EDC deployment is distributed in nature and positioned between cloud data centers and data sources. Load balancing is the process of redistributing the work load among EDCs to improve both resource utilization and job response time. Load balancing also avoids a situation where some EDCs are heavily loaded while others are in idle state or doing little data processing. In such scenarios, load balancing between the EDCs plays a vital role for user response and real-time event detection. As the EDCs are deployed in an unattended environment, secure authentication of EDCs is an important issue to address before performing load balancing. This article proposes a novel load balancing technique to authenticate the EDCs and find less loaded EDCs for task allocation. The proposed load balancing technique is more efficient than other existing approaches in finding less loaded EDCs for task allocation. The proposed approach not only improves efficiency of load balancing; it also strengthens the security by authenticating the destination EDCs.
HISTORY OF MINIMALLY INVASIVE SPINE SURGERY

The history of spine surgery goes back at least 5000 years. The first evidence of spinal surgery was found in Egyptian mummies from 3000 BC and elucidated 15 centuries later in the Edwin Smith papyrus in 1550 BC (1,2). Most spine surgeons believe that Hippocrates is the father of spine surgery because of his extensive writings and treatment principles he proposed. For example the first traction procedure was proposed by Hippocrates in 390 BC (3). In the 7th century, the first operative treatment of spinal surgery was performed by Paulus of Aegina (4). In the 14th century, Serafettin Sabuncuoglu elucidated the treatment of spinal fracture dislocations in his surgical atlas (5). Before the relatively recent evolution of technological advancements such as high speed drills microscopic surgical techniques and spinal instrumentation, spinal surgery consisted mainly of spinal decompressions, different fusion procedures and external corrective orthoses with staged operations. These early surgical maneuvers were often very lengthy, highly morbid and caused prolonged disability and negative psychological sequelae. The development of rigid and semi-rigid internal metallic fixation allowed the spine surgeons to rapidly stabilize the pathological spine in the early 1980s. Nowadays, it has become a worldwide standard of care. However, the placement of spinal implants often require long and extensive surgical exposures which strip away the overlying soft-tissues, thereby oftentimes denervation and regional ischemia to the adjacent soft tissues. These iatrogenic injuries can cause significant postoperative pain and disability. With the advent of modern surgical technologies such as digital fluoroscopy, image guidance, highresolution endoscopy, and minimally invasive surgical tools, less invasive approaches have become more popular. The majority of these minimally invasive techniques use a small corridor focusing on the area of anatomy, thereby minimizing the resultant injury to the dorsal neural, muscular and ligamentous soft tissues. Minimally invasive techniques have been successfully applied to the cervical spine, thoracic spine and the lumbar region since the 1990’s (6,7,8,9,10,11).
A powered self-contained knee and ankle prosthesis for near normal gait in transfemoral amputees

To my wife and son iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Reflecting upon my graduate career, I am deeply grateful to the many people whose help, insight, and guidance has brought me to where I am at today. I would first like to thank Dr. Ty Newell, who helped a former student find his direction and motivated him to enter graduate school. Next, I would like to thank my advisor Dr. Michael Goldfarb for taking me on as a student and sharing his knowledge and insight over the duration of my graduate career. He has taught me to think creatively and independently and has given me an invaluable tool set to tackle complex problems. I would also like to express my appreciation to the members of my dissertation committee, Dr. The sum is greater than the parts. This has certainly proven to be true of my collaboration on this work with the soon to be Dr. Atakan Varol. His rigor and genius helped keep the project on track and above expectations. I look forward to seeing the fruition of his work beyond graduation. All the members of the Center for Intelligent Mechatronics during my time here have been integral and deserve special recognition. The lab fosters a collaborative environment that allows all of the members to push beyond their bounds. I thank Dr. Thomas Withrow and Jason Mitchell who have been invaluable for their advice and assistance. A special thanks goes to Craig who went above and beyond in helping us test and who without the project could not have gone so far. It almost goes without saying that I am incredibly grateful to my entire family for their unfailing love, support, confidence and encouragement. I would especially like to thank my parents for everything they iv have done for me over the years. I thank them for pushing me to excel, for teaching me to love learning and for encouraging me to be a better person. Most importantly, I would like to acknowledge the incredible tolerance and patience displayed by my wife, Lara, during my graduate career. It has not been easy, but she has made it fun. Her continuous love, support and sacrifice has helped make this dream a reality. She helps me to find the best in myself and I look forward to taking on the next challenge with her by my side. Finally, I thank my son, Frank, for keeping …
Cost analysis of the Communication and Low Mood (CALM) randomised trial of behavioural therapy for stroke patients with aphasia.

OBJECTIVE
To evaluate the cost effectiveness of a behavioural therapy intervention shown to be clinically effective in comparison with usual care for stroke patients with aphasia.


DESIGN
Randomised controlled trial with comparison of costs and calculation of incremental cost effectiveness ratio.


SETTING
Community.


PARTICIPANTS
Participants identified as having low mood on either the Visual Analog Mood Scale sad item (≥50) or Stroke Aphasic Depression Questionnaire Hospital version 21 (SADQH21) (≥6) were recruited.


INTERVENTIONS
Participants were randomly allocated to behavioural therapy or usual care using internet-based randomisation generated in advance of the study by a clinical trials unit.


MAIN MEASURES
Outcomes were assessed at six months after randomisation, blind to group allocation. The costs were assessed from a service use questionnaire. Effectiveness was defined as the change in SADQH21 scores and a cost-effectiveness analysis was performed comparing the behavioural group with the usual care control group. The cost analysis was undertaken from the perspective of the UK NHS and Social Services.


RESULTS
The greatest difference was in home help costs where there was a saving of £56.20 in the intervention group compared to an increase of £61.40 in the control group. At six months the SADQH21 score for the intervention group was 17.3 compared to the control group value of 20.4. This resulted in a mean increase of 0.7 in the control group, compared to a mean significant different decrease of 6 in the intervention group (P = 0.003). The Incremental Cost-Effectiveness Ratio indicated that the cost per point reduction on the SADQH21 was £263.


CONCLUSION
Overall the behavioural therapy was found to improve mood and resulted in some encouraging savings in resource utilisation over the six months follow-up.
Computational Higher Type Theory I: Abstract Cubical Realizability

The goal of this work is to develop a computation-based account of higher-dimensional type theory for which canonicity at observable types is true by construction. Types are considered as descriptions of the computational behavior of terms, rather than as formal syntax to which meaning is attached separately. Types are structured as collections of terms of each finite dimension. At dimension zero the terms of a type are its ordinary members; at higher dimension terms are lines between terms of the next lower dimension. The terms of each dimension satisfy coherence conditions ensuring that the terms may be seen as abstract cubes. Each line is to be interpreted as an identification of two cubes in that it provides evidence for their exchangeability in all contexts. It is required that there be sufficiently many lines that this interpretation is tenable. For example, lines must be reversible and closed under concatenation, so that the identifications present the structure of a pre-groupoid. Moreover, there must be further lines witnessing the unit, inverse, and associativity laws of concatention, the structure of an ∞-groupoid. In this paper we give a “meaning explanation” of a computational higher type theory in the style of Martin-Löf and of Constable and Allen, et al. [Martin-Löf, 1984; Martin-Löf, 1984; Constable, et al., 1985; Allen et al., 2006]. Such an explanation starts with a dimension-stratified collection of terms endowed with a deterministic operational semantics defining what it means to evaluate closed terms of any dimension to canonical form. The dimension of a term is the finite set of dimension names it contains; these dimension names may be thought of as variables ranging over an abstract interval, in which case terms may be thought of as tracing out lines in a type. The end points, 0 and 1, of the interval may be substituted to obtain the end points of such lines. Dimension names may be substituted for one another without restriction, allowing dimensions to be renamed, identified, or duplicated. The semantics of types is given by specifying, at each dimension, when canonical elements are equal, when general elements are equal, and when these
Extensions of the multicriteria analysis with pairwise comparison under a fuzzy environment

Multicriteria decision-making (MCDM) problems often involve a complex decision process in which multiple requirements and fuzzy conditions have to be taken into consideration simultaneously. The existing approaches for solving this problem in a fuzzy environment are complex. Combining the concepts of grey relation and pairwise comparison, a new fuzzy MCDM method is proposed. First, the fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (AHP) is used to construct fuzzy weights of all criteria. Then, linguistic terms characterized by L–R triangular fuzzy numbers are used to denote the evaluation values of all alternatives versus subjective and objective criteria. Finally, the aggregation fuzzy assessments of different alternatives are ranked to determine the best selection. Furthermore, this paper uses a numerical example of location selection to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed method. The study results show that this method is an effective means for tackling MCDM problems in a fuzzy environment. 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Gender and motivation

The role of gender in shaping achievement motivation has a long history in psychological and educational research. In this review, gender differences in motivation are examined using four contemporary theories of achievement motivation, including attribution, expectancy-value, selfefficacy, and achievement goal perspectives. Across all theories, findings indicate girls’ and boys’ motivation-related beliefs and behaviors continue to follow gender role stereotypes. Boys report stronger ability and interest beliefs in mathematics and science, whereas girls have more confidence and interest in language arts and writing. Gender effects are moderated by ability, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and classroom context. Additionally, developmental research indicates that gender differences in motivation are evident early in school, and increase for reading and language arts over the course of school. The role of the home and school environment in the development of these gender patterns is examined. Important implications for school professionals are highlighted. D 2006 Society for the Study of School Psychology. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
The relationship between change in apathy and changes in cognition and functional outcomes in currently non-depressed SSRI-treated patients with major depressive disorder.

AIMS
Apathy in the context of treated major depressive disorder (MDD) is a frequently observed phenomenon in clinical practice. This study aimed to assess the validity of the Rothschild Scale for Antidepressant Tachyphylaxis® (RSAT) and the Massachusetts General Hospital Cognitive and Physical Functioning Questionnaire (CPFQ) for measuring apathy, and to assess the relationship between apathy and possible contributing factors, in patients with MDD and residual apathy in the absence of depressed mood.


METHODS
The underlying structure and validity of the RSAT and CPFQ were assessed via factor analysis and correlation with the Apathy Evaluation Scale-Clinician rated version (AES-C) in 483 patients who had previously responded to treatment with a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor. The relationship between apathy and contributing variables was investigated via structural equation modeling. Correlation and regression analyses were conducted to examine the relationship between the Sheehan Disability Scale (SDS) and the RSAT, CPFQ, and AES-C.


RESULTS
The RSAT and CPFQ were validated with the AES-C with respect to energy and motivation. The latent variable "Energy and Interest", based on the energy, motivation, and interest items (RSAT and CPFQ), was a major contributing factor to apathy. Improvements in function (SDS) were significantly correlated with, and predicted by, improvements in apathy and cognitive and physical functioning (assessed by the RSAT, CPFQ, and AES-C).


CONCLUSIONS
These analyses provide further information on apathy and its assessment in the context of treated MDD. A better understanding of apathy will aid further investigation of this phenomenon and, ultimately, determination of the most appropriate approach for its clinical management.
Market Morality: Robert Nozick and the Question of Economic Justice

Abstract. The study of markets and market prices has been a central feature of economic inquiry since the 18th Century. There have always been lingering questions on the meaning of market prices. Most moderneconomists argue that there are no normative implications to price analysis. The disclaimers of some economists about normative judgments ring hollow in the light of their vigorous advocacy of free market solutions to economic and other problems. Either free market solutions are superior alternatives or they are not; one cannot have a value free analysis and an ideological advocacy at the same time. The philosopher, Robert Nozick, in Anarchy, State, and Utopia, clearly finds meaning in the market place. His entitlement theory is predicated upon free exchange of goods and productive services. The normative use of free markets in general and of Robert Nozick's formulation in particular, it is contended, are inconsistent, illogical, and unscientific.
Passive detection of image forgery using DCT and local binary pattern

With the development of easy-to-use and sophisticated image editing software, the alteration of the contents of digital images has become very easy to do and hard to detect. A digital image is a very rich source of information and can capture any event perfectly, but because of this reason, its authenticity is questionable. In this paper, a novel passive image forgery detection method is proposed based on Local Binary Pattern (LBP) and Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) to detect copy-move and splicing forgeries. First, from the chrominance component of the input image, discriminative localized features are extracted by applying 2D DCT in LBP space. Then, support vector machine (SVM) is used for detection. Experiments carried out on three image forgery benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of the method over recent methods in terms of detection accuracy.
Apps to promote physical activity among adults: a review and content analysis

BACKGROUND
In May 2013, the iTunes and Google Play stores contained 23,490 and 17,756 smartphone applications (apps) categorized as Health and Fitness, respectively. The quality of these apps, in terms of applying established health behavior change techniques, remains unclear.


METHODS
The study sample was identified through systematic searches in iTunes and Google Play. Search terms were based on Boolean logic and included AND combinations for physical activity, healthy lifestyle, exercise, fitness, coach, assistant, motivation, and support. Sixty-four apps were downloaded, reviewed, and rated based on the taxonomy of behavior change techniques used in the interventions. Mean and ranges were calculated for the number of observed behavior change techniques. Using nonparametric tests, we compared the number of techniques observed in free and paid apps and in iTunes and Google Play.


RESULTS
On average, the reviewed apps included 5 behavior change techniques (range 2-8). Techniques such as self-monitoring, providing feedback on performance, and goal-setting were used most frequently, whereas some techniques such as motivational interviewing, stress management, relapse prevention, self-talk, role models, and prompted barrier identification were not. No differences in the number of behavior change techniques between free and paid apps, or between the app stores were found.


CONCLUSIONS
The present study demonstrated that apps promoting physical activity applied an average of 5 out of 23 possible behavior change techniques. This number was not different for paid and free apps or between app stores. The most frequently used behavior change techniques in apps were similar to those most frequently used in other types of physical activity promotion interventions.
An error passivation approach to filtering for switched neural networks with noise disturbance

In this paper, an error passivation approach is used to derive a new passive and exponential filter for switched Hopfield neural networks with time-delay and noise disturbance. Based on Lyapunov-Krasovskii stability theory, Jensen’s inequality, and linear matrix inequality (LMI), a new sufficient criterion is established such that the filtering error system is exponentially stable and passive from the noise disturbance to the output error. It is shown that the unknown gain matrix of the proposed switched passive filter can be determined by solving a set of LMIs, which can be easily facilitated by using some standard numerical packages. An illustrative example is given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed switched passive filter.
The psychometric properties of the AUDIT: a survey from a random sample of elderly Swedish adults

BACKGROUND
Increasing alcohol consumption and related harms have been reported among the elderly population of Europe. Consequently, it is important to monitor patterns of alcohol use, and to use a valid and reliable tool when screening for risky consumption in this age group. The aim was to evaluate the internal consistency reliability and construct validity of the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT) in elderly Swedish adults, and to compare the results with the general Swedish population. Another aim was to calculate the level of alcohol consumption (AUDIT-C) to be used for comparison in future studies.


METHODS
The questionnaire was sent to 1459 Swedish adults aged 79-80 years with a response rate of 73.3%. Internal consistency reliability, were assessed using Cronbach alpha, and confirmatory factor analysis assessed construct validity of the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT) in elderly population as compared to a Swedish general population sample.


RESULTS
The results showed that AUDIT was more reliable and valid among the Swedish general population sample than among the elderly and that Item 1 and 4 in AUDIT was less reliable and valid among the elderly.


CONCLUSIONS
While the AUDIT showed acceptable psychometric properties in the general population sample, it's performance was of less quality among the elderly respondents. Further psychometric assessments of the AUDIT in elderly populations are required before it is implemented more widely.
Mismatch of classroom furniture and student body dimensions: empirical findings and health implications.

PURPOSE
To examine possible mismatch between the individual body dimensions of students and the classroom furniture they use.


METHODS
A total of 74 (37 male and 37 female) sixth-through eighth-grade students in a Michigan school district participated in the study; their ages ranged from 10 years, 11 months to 14 years, 3 months. Anthropometric measurements (including elbow height, shoulder height, upper arm length, knee height, popliteal height, buttock-popliteal length, and stature) were gathered in several physical education classes, each during a single session. In addition, the furniture dimensions were measured for three styles of chairs and three styles of desks prevalent in the students' classrooms. Based on both the information about student body dimensions and furniture dimensions, measures of fit or mismatch were constructed.


RESULTS
The data indicate a substantial degree of mismatch between the students' bodily dimensions and the classroom furniture available to them. Fewer than 20% of students can find acceptable chair/desk combinations. Most students are sitting in chairs with seats that are too high or too deep and at desks that are too high. Even after controlling for body stature, girls are less likely to find fitting chairs.


CONCLUSIONS
Based on the evidence presented, many sixth through eighth graders must endure seating arrangements in their classrooms that are not conducive to learning.