LLukas22/scidocs huggingface dataset:
Re-examining price as a predictor of answer quality in an online q&a site

Online question-answering services provide mechanisms for knowledge exchange by allowing users to ask and answer questions on a wide range of topics. A key question for designing such services is whether charging a price has an effect on answer quality. Two field experiments using one such service, Google Answers, offer conflicting answers to this question. To resolve this inconsistency, we re-analyze data from Harper et al. [5] and Chen et al. [2] to study the price effect in greater depth. Decomposing the price effect into two different levels yields results that reconcile those of the two field experiments. Specifically, we find that: (1) a higher price significantly increases the likelihood that a question receives an answer and (2) for questions that receive an answer, there is no significant price effect on answer quality. Additionally, we find that the rater background makes a difference in evaluating answer quality.
Five new species of coccidia (Apicomplexa: Eimeriidae) from Madagascan chameleons (Sauria: Chamaeleonidae)

Coprological examination of 19 Madagascan chameleons of the genera Furcifer and Brookesia revealed the presence of five new coccidian species. Isospora brygooi n. sp. from Furcifer pardalis has spherical to subspherical oöcysts with a slightly pitted wall, 20.7 (17–24.5) × 19.3 (16–23) μm and broadly ellipsoidal sporocysts, 12.2 (11.5–13) × 8.1 (8–8.5) μm, with Stieda and substieda bodies. Oöcysts of Eimeria glawi n. sp. from Furcifer pardalis are cylindrical to ellipsoidal, 27.7 (26–29.5) × 18.4 (17–19) μm, with ellipsoidal sporocysts, 7.3 (6.5–8) × 5.2 (5–5.5) μm. E. vencesi n. sp. described from F. pardalis has spherical to subspherical oöcysts, 14.3 (13–15.5) × 13.0 (12–13) μm, with small granules, one to three globular polar granules and ellipsoidal sporocysts, 7.3 (6.5–8) × 5.2 (5–5.5) μm. E. worthi n. sp., described from Furcifer oustaleti has spherical oöcysts, 17.9 (17.5–19.0) × 15.0 (14.5–16.0) μm without a polar granule and ellipsoidal to cylindroidal sporocysts, 8.2 (7.0–9.5) × 5.8 (5.0–6.5) μm. Oöcysts of E. brookesiae n. sp. from Brookesia decaryi are cylindrical, 25.6 (23–27) × 15.0 (13–16) μm with ellipsoidal sporocysts, 10.1 (9–11) × 6.9 (6–7) μm. Endogenous development of E. vencesi is confined to the intestine, while that of E. glawi occurs in the gall-bladder.
An Infrastructure for Rule-Driven Negotiating Software Agents

Most strategy-enabled automated negotiation platforms use hard-coded, predefined, and non-adaptive negotiation strategies. This is evidently insufficient in regard to the ambitions of automated negotiations research. In this paper, we introduce INSULA, an infrastructure for representing, managing, and exploring negotiation strategies that is versatile, easy to use, and that encompasses a wide spectrum of negotiation types. We treat negotiation strategies as declarative knowledge, and thus we represent them as if-then rules which software agents can exploit using an inference engine. The first part of the paper examines negotiation strategies and the possibility of using a rule-based approach to represent them. The second part details the architecture of INSULA, and some of the ongoing experimentations.
Early Life Risk Factors That Contribute to Irritable Bowel Syndrome in Adults: A Systematic Review

BACKGROUND:Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is a common disorder that occurs in adults. The natural history of symptoms and risk factors that contribute to IBS may begin in childhood. The aim of this systematic review was to determine what early life factors contribute to the development of IBS in adolescents and adults.METHODS:A computer-assisted search of the PubMed database from 1966 to 2007 was performed. The selection criteria were: (a) studies conducted in adolescents or adults with IBS that (b) investigate premorbid factors occurring specifically during the childhood period and are (c) associated with the outcomes of symptoms, quality of life, health-care utilization, and interferences with work or disability.RESULTS:Twenty-five articles met inclusion criteria. The studies were categorized into articles examining the persistence of childhood gastrointestinal symptoms into adulthood, affluent childhood socioeconomic status and adult IBS, infantile and childhood trauma associated with the development of adult IBS, and social learning of illness behavior as predictors of adult IBS.CONCLUSION:Pediatricians should be aware of potentially modifiable childhood risk factors and should consider interventions such as early symptom management of recurrent functional abdominal pain with cognitive therapies and parent education about social learning of illness behavior. Early treatment may have a long-term impact. Research examining the effect of affluent childhood socioeconomic status and early childhood trauma in the evolution of functional gastrointestinal disorders may help identify causative factors of IBS.
ChemSpot: a hybrid system for chemical named entity recognition

MOTIVATION
The accurate identification of chemicals in text is important for many applications, including computer-assisted reconstruction of metabolic networks or retrieval of information about substances in drug development. But due to the diversity of naming conventions and traditions for such molecules, this task is highly complex and should be supported by computational tools.


RESULTS
We present ChemSpot, a named entity recognition (NER) tool for identifying mentions of chemicals in natural language texts, including trivial names, drugs, abbreviations, molecular formulas and International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry entities. Since the different classes of relevant entities have rather different naming characteristics, ChemSpot uses a hybrid approach combining a Conditional Random Field with a dictionary. It achieves an F(1) measure of 68.1% on the SCAI corpus, outperforming the only other freely available chemical NER tool, OSCAR4, by 10.8 percentage points.


AVAILABILITY
ChemSpot is freely available at: http://www.informatik.hu-berlin.de/wbi/resources.
“Corresponding with the Professor”: A Didactic Tool for Fostering Students’ Ability to Identify Scholastic Difficulties and Ways of Coping with Them

During their school years, students encounter difficulties of various types from both content-related and emotional aspects. Often, when asked directly about their learning difficulties, students struggle to express these difficulties explicitly and clearly; as a result, teachers find it a challenge to provide them with a suitable and satisfactory response. In order to help students express their scholastic difficulties, particularly cognitive and emotional ones, and foster their ability to chart out courses of action for coping with these difficulties, we have developed a tool we call “Corresponding with the Professor”. Specifically, this involves writing a letter to an imaginary Professor which contains a description of a difficulty (or difficulties) followed by writing a detailed letter of response from the Professor (to oneself actually) that offers suggestions and recommendations aimed at possible ways of coping with the difficulty (or difficulties). In developing this tool, we have relied on research literature related to writing a “letter to myself”. In this paper, we shall present the tool and its theoretical basis.
Short-term effects of Mulligan mobilization with movement on pain, disability, and kinematic spinal movements in patients with nonspecific low back pain: a randomized placebo-controlled trial.

OBJECTIVE
The purpose of this clinical study was to compare the immediate- and short-term effects of lumbar Mulligan sustained natural apophyseal glides (SNAGs) on patients with nonspecific low back pain with respect to 2 new kinematic algorithms (KA) for range of motion and speed as well as pain, functional disability, and kinesiophobia.


METHODS
This was a 2-armed randomized placebo-controlled trial. Subjects, blinded to allocation, were randomized to either a real-SNAG group (n = 16) or a sham-SNAG group (n = 16). All patients were treated during a single session of real/sham SNAG (3 × 6 repetitions) to the lumbar spine from a sitting position in a flexion direction. Two new KA from a validated kinematic spine model were used and recorded with an optoelectronic device. Pain at rest and during flexion as well as functional disability and kinesiophobia was recorded by self-reported measures. These outcomes were blindly evaluated before, after treatment, and at 2-week follow-up in both groups.


RESULTS
Of 6 variables, 4 demonstrated significant improvement with moderate-to-large effect sizes (ES) in favor of the real-SNAG group: KA-R (P = .014, between-groups ES Cliff δ = -.52), pain at rest and during flexion (visual analog scale, P < .001; ES = -.73/-.75), and functional-disability (Oswestry Disability Index, P = .003 and ES = -.61). Kinesiophobia was not considered to be significant (Tampa scale, P = .03) but presented moderate ES = -.46. Kinematic algorithms for speed was not significantly different between groups (P = .118) with a small ES = -.33. All 6 outcome measures were significantly different (P ≤ .008) during within-group analysis (before and after treatment) only in the real-SNAG group. No serious or moderate adverse events were reported.


CONCLUSION
This study showed evidence that lumbar spine SNAGs had a short-term favorable effect on KA-R, pain, and function in patients with nonspecific low back pain.
Using semantic networks for knowledge representation in an intelligent environment

When building intelligent spaces, the knowledge representation for encapsulating rooms, users, groups, roles, and other information is a fundamental design question. We present a semantic network as such a representation, and demonstrate its utility as a basis for ongoing work.
A method for evaluating computer-supported collaborative learning processes

Understanding and analyzing collaborative learning processes requires a ®negrained sequential analysis of the group interaction in the context of learning goals. Several researchers in the area of cooperative work take the quality of the group outcome as a success criterion. Nevertheless, recent ®ndings are giving importance to the quality of the cooperation process itself. This paper presents a set of indicators the main objective of which is to evaluate the collaborative learning process. In this paper our aim is to present a method, which can be used in analyzing the interaction processes in a CSCL environment. We have de®ned an experiment to gather data from groups working on a simple task. These data are then used to build some cooperation indicators, which in turn allow us to estimate the quality of the work process.
Neurological damage after transcatheter aortic valve implantation compared with surgical aortic valve replacement in intermediate risk patients

The risk of neurological damage following transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI) vs. surgical aortic valve replacement (SAVR) in severe aortic stenosis patients deemed to be at intermediate surgical risk is unknown. In this target population, the degree of neurological damage was compared using brain diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (DW-MRI) and cognitive testing. Forty-six consecutive patients undergoing TAVI (78.0 ± 8.3 years; STS score 4.4 ± 1.7) and 37 patients undergoing SAVR (78.9 ± 6.2 years, STS score 4.7 ± 1.7) were compared. DW-MRI was performed in 67 patients (40 in TAVI vs. 27 in SAVR group) within the first 15 days post-procedure. A cognitive assessment was performed at baseline and at 3 months follow-up. The occurrence of potential cognitive impairment post-intervention was determined using the reliable change index (RCI). Baseline characteristics were comparable in TAVI and SAVR groups except for the presence of severe calcified aorta, which occurred more frequently in the TAVI group [17 (37 %) vs. 0 (0 %), p < 0.001]. Three patients presented a clinical stroke: 1 (2.2 %) in TAVI group vs. 2 (5.4 %) in SAVR group, (p = 0.58). No differences were observed in the rate of acute ischemic cerebral lesions detected by DWI in patients undergoing TAVI vs. SAVR [18 (45 %) in TAVI vs. 11 (40.7 %) in SAVR, adjusted OR 0.95; 95 % CI 0.25–3.65; p = 0.94]. TAVI was associated with a lower number of DWI lesions (adjusted OR 0.54; 95 % IC 0.37–0.79; p = 0.02). An older age was a predictor of the occurrence of acute lesions (OR 1.13; 95 % CI 1.03–1.23; p = 0.01), and the use of vitamin-K antagonist therapy had a protective effect (OR 0.25; 95 % CI 0.07–0.92; p = 0.037) regardless the type of intervention. Overall no significant changes were observed in global cognitive scores post-intervention (p = 0.23). The RCI showed mild cognitive decline in nine patients undergoing TAVI (26.4 %) and in six patients in the SAVR group (30.0 %) (p = 0.96). There was no association between the number and total volume of lesions and the occurrence of cognitive decline (CC Spearman 0.031, p = 0.85 and −0.011, p = 0.97, respectively). TAVI and SAVR were associated with a similar rate of acute silent ischemic cerebral lesions in intermediate risk patients. Although acute lesions occurred very frequently in both strategies, their cognitive impact was not clinically relevant.
High power medium voltage drives - innovations, portfolio, trends

The paper gives an overview over high power medium voltage drive inverters in the range between one and one hundred megawatts. First the applications and their key requirements are summarized. Then the available power semiconductors and the different inverter circuit topologies with their different properties, advantages and drawbacks are presented. The key features are compared and suitable converter types for the applications and industry branches are identified. Finally, future trends of technology, manufacturing and market are outlined
Are major laparoscopic pancreatic resections worthwhile? A prospective study of 32 patients in a single institution

Laparoscopic surgery has been used increasingly as a less invasive alternative to conventional open surgery. Recently, laparoscopic therapy for pancreatic diseases has made significant strides. The current investigation studied pancreatic resection by laparoscopy. The objective of this study was to assess the feasibility, safety, and outcome of laparoscopic pancreatic major resection for benign and malignant lesions of the pancreas. A prospective study of laparoscopic pancreatic resections was undertaken in patients with benign and malignant lesions of the pancreas. Over an 8-year period, 32 patients underwent laparoscopic pancreatic major resection: 21 left pancreatectomies (1 performed using a retroperitoneal approach), and 11 pancreatoduodenectomies (10 Whipple procedures and 1 total pancreatectomy). All the operations were performed in a single institution. The operations were performed without serious complications. Only one left pancreatectomy was converted to laparotomy because of massive splenic bleeding, and one Whipple procedure was converted because of adhesion to the portal vein. In four of the Whipple operations, the resection was performed completely laparoscopically, and the reconstruction was done via a small midline incision. There was no operative mortality. In 16 patients of the left pancreatectomy group, the spleen was preserved. The mean blood loss was 150 and 162 ml; and the mean operating time was 154 and 284 min, respectively, for the left pancreatectomy and the Whipple procedure. Postoperative complications occurred for five patients after left pancreatectomy and for three patients after the Whipple procedure. Two patients needed surgical reexploration after left pancreatectomy because of intraperitoneal haemorrhage and eventration of the extraction site. Two patients underwent reoperation after the Whipple procedure: one because of intraabdominal bleeding and the other because of small bowel obstruction.The mean hospital stay was 10.8 days after left the pancreatectomy and 13.6 days after the whipple procedure. Laparoscopic left pancreatectomy for benign and malignant lesions is feasible, safe, and beneficial. We believe that pancreatoduodenectomy should be performed only in selected cases and by a highly skilled laparoscopic surgeon. If there is any doubt, an open resection should be performed.
Energy and exergy analysis of kalina cycle system (KCS) 34 with mass fraction ammonia-water mixture variation

Further utilization of waste heat produced by power plant system will increase the efficiency of the whole power plant system. The Kalina Cycle offers alternative solution to generate additional power from waste heat or from low temperature geothermal resources. The modeling application on energy system is used to study the basic design of thermal system, which uses Kalina Cycle for further utilization of geothermal brine water. If this geothermal brine water were not used in the Kalina Cycle, it would be reinjected to the geothermal reservoir and its remaining energy content would have been wasted. The study of this process is done by Cycle Tempo 5.0 simulation software, to obtain the data of efficiency, energy and exergy that could be generated from the heat source. An ammonia-water mixture is used as a working fluid on Kalina cycle system (KCS) 34. In order to obtain the maximum power output and maximum efficiency, the system will be optimized on the mass fraction of working fluid and also on the turbine output pressure. The result of the study shows that the maximum efficiency and power output are achieved at 78% ammonia-water mixture.
Efficient Interactive Annotation of Segmentation Datasets with Polygon-RNN++

Manually labeling datasets with object masks is extremely time consuming. In this work, we follow the idea of Polygon-RNN [4] to produce polygonal annotations of objects interactively using humans-in-the-loop. We introduce several important improvements to the model: 1) we design a new CNN encoder architecture, 2) show how to effectively train the model with Reinforcement Learning, and 3) significantly increase the output resolution using a Graph Neural Network, allowing the model to accurately annotate high-resolution objects in images. Extensive evaluation on the Cityscapes dataset [8] shows that our model, which we refer to as Polygon-RNN++, significantly outperforms the original model in both automatic (10% absolute and 16% relative improvement in mean IoU) and interactive modes (requiring 50% fewer clicks by annotators). We further analyze the cross-domain scenario in which our model is trained on one dataset, and used out of the box on datasets from varying domains. The results show that Polygon-RNN++ exhibits powerful generalization capabilities, achieving significant improvements over existing pixel-wise methods. Using simple online fine-tuning we further achieve a high reduction in annotation time for new datasets, moving a step closer towards an interactive annotation tool to be used in practice.
Relationship between clinical signs and symptoms of convergence insufficiency.

PURPOSE
The percentage of children who are symptomatic has been shown to increase with the number of signs of convergence insufficiency (CI). Our goal was to investigate whether there is a relationship between the severity of the clinical signs of CI and symptom level reported in children with a three-sign symptomatic CI.


METHODS
The Convergence Insufficiency Treatment Trial enrolled 221 children with symptomatic CI from ages 9 to 17 years. Inclusion criteria included the following three signs of CI: (1) exophoria at near at least 4Δ greater than at distance, (2) insufficient positive fusional vergence (PFV) at near, and (3) a receded near point of convergence (NPC) of 6 cm break or greater. The relationships between the severity of each sign of CI (mild, moderate, and severe) and the level of symptoms as measured by the Convergence Insufficiency Symptom Survey (CISS) at baseline were evaluated.


RESULTS
Mean CISS scores were not significantly different between mild, moderate, and severe exophoria (p = 0.60), PFV blur (p = 0.99), Sheard's criterion (p = 0.89), or NPC break (p = 0.84). There was also no difference between the frequency of subjects scoring at mild, moderate, or severe levels on the CISS and the severity of each sign of CI. Correlations between individual clinical signs and the CISS score were very low and not statistically significant.


CONCLUSIONS
Among symptomatic children with a CISS score of 16 or higher and three clinical signs of CI, there is no further association between the severity of the clinical signs and their level of symptoms.
Defaults in update semantics

The aim of this paper is twofold: (i) to introduce the framework of update semantics and to explain what kind of phenomena may successfully be analysed in it; (ii) to give a detailed analysis of one such phenomenon: default reasoning.
Inferring clinical depression from speech and spoken utterances

In this paper, we investigate the problem of detecting depression from recordings of subjects' speech using speech processing and machine learning. There has been considerable interest in this problem in recent years due to the potential for developing objective assessments from real-world behaviors, which may provide valuable supplementary clinical information or may be useful in screening. The cues for depression may be present in “what is said” (content) and “how it is said” (prosody). Given the limited amounts of text data, even in this relatively large study, it is difficult to employ standard method of learning models from n-gram features. Instead, we learn models using word representations in an alternative feature space of valence and arousal. This is akin to embedding words into a real vector space albeit with manual ratings instead of those learned with deep neural networks [1]. For extracting prosody, we employ standard feature extractors such as those implemented in openSMILE and compare them with features extracted from harmonic models that we have been developing in recent years. Our experiments show that our features from harmonic model improve the performance of detecting depression from spoken utterances than other alternatives. The context features provide additional improvements to achieve an accuracy of about 74%, sufficient to be useful in screening applications.
A Copula-Based Joint Multinomial Discrete–Continuous Model of Vehicle Type Choice and Miles of Travel

In this paper, a joint model of vehicle type choice and utilization is formulated and estimated on a data set of vehicles drawn from the 2000 San Francisco Bay Area Travel Survey. The joint discrete-continuous model system formulated in this study explicitly accounts for common unobserved factors that may affect the choice and utilization of a certain vehicle type (i.e., self-selection effects). A new copula-based methodology is adopted to facilitate model estimation without imposing restrictive distribution assumptions on the dependency structures between the errors in the discrete and continuous choice components. The copula-based methodology is found to provide statistically superior goodness-of-fit when compared with previous estimation approaches for joint discrete-continuous model systems. The model system, when applied to simulate the impacts of a doubling in fuel price, shows that individuals are more likely to shift vehicle type choices than vehicle usage patterns.