LLukas22/scidocs huggingface dataset:
Safety and efficacy of intravenously administered tedisamil for rapid conversion of recent-onset atrial fibrillation or atrial flutter.

OBJECTIVES
The goal of the present study was to assess the efficacy and safety of intravenous tedisamil, a new antiarrhythmic compound, for conversion of recent-onset atrial fibrillation (AF) or atrial flutter (AFL) to normal sinus rhythm (NSR).


BACKGROUND
Tedisamil is a novel antiarrhythmic drug with predominantly class III activity. Its efficacy and safety for conversion of recent onset AF or AFL to NSR is not known.


METHODS
This was a multicenter, double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled, sequential ascending dose-group trial. A total of 201 patients with symptomatic AF or AFL of 3 to 48 h duration were enrolled in a two-stage study. During stage 1, patients were randomized to receive tedisamil at 0.4 mg/kg body weight or matching placebo; during stage 2, patients received tedisamil at 0.6 mg/kg body weight or matching placebo. Treatments were given as single intravenous infusions. The primary study end point consisted of the percentage of patients converting to NSR for at least 60 s within 2.5 h.


RESULTS
Of 175 patients representing the intention-to-treat sample, conversion to NSR was observed in 41% (25/61) of the tedisamil 0.4 mg/kg group, 51% (27 of 53) of the tedisamil 0.6 mg/kg group, and 7% (4/59) of the placebo group (p < 0.001 for both tedisamil groups vs. placebo). Average time to conversion was 35 min in patients receiving tedisamil. There were two instances of self-terminating ventricular tachycardia: one episode of torsade de pointes and one of monomorphic ventricular tachycardia, both in patients receiving 0.6 mg/kg tedisamil.


CONCLUSIONS
Tedisamil at dosages of 0.4 and 0.6 mg/kg was superior to placebo in converting AF or AFL. Tedisamil has a rapid onset of action leading to conversion within 30 to 40 min in the majority of responders.
Wealth Distribution and Social Mobility in the Us: A Quantitative Approach

We quantitatively identify the factors that drive wealth dynamics in the U.S. and are consistent with its skewed cross-sectional distribution and with social mobility. We concentrate on three critical factors: i) skewed earnings, ii) differential saving rates across wealth levels, and iii) stochastic idiosyncratic returns to wealth. All of these are fundamental for matching both distribution and mobility. The stochastic process for returns which best fits the cross-sectional distribution of wealth and social mobility in the U.S. shares several statistical properties with those of the returns to wealth uncovered by Fagereng et al. (2017) from tax records in Norway.
Potential adverse events of endosseous dental implants penetrating the maxillary sinus: long-term clinical evaluation.

OBJECTIVES/HYPOTHESIS
The aim of this study was to evaluate the nature and incidence of long-term maxillary sinus adverse events related to endosseous implant placement with protrusion into the maxillary sinus.


STUDY DESIGN
Retrospective cohort study.


METHODS
All patients who underwent placement of endosseous dental implants with clinical evidence of implant penetration into the maxillary sinus with membrane perforation were included in this study. Only patients with a minimum follow-up of 5 years after implant placement were included in this study. Maxillary sinus assessment was both clinical and radiological.


RESULTS
Eighty-three implants with sinus membrane perforation in 70 patients met the study's inclusion criteria. Mean age was 65.96 years ± 14.23. Twelve patients had more than one implant penetrating the maxillary sinus, and seven of them had bilateral sinus perforation. Estimated implant penetration was ≤ 3 mm in all cases. The average clinical and radiological follow-up was 9.98 years ± 3.74 (range 60-243 months). At the follow-up appointments, there were no clinical or radiological signs of sinusitis in any patient.


CONCLUSION
This long-term study, spreading over a period of up to 20 years, indicates that no sinus complication was observed following implant penetration into the maxillary sinus. Furthermore, absence of occurrence of such complications is related to the maintenance of successful osseointegration. A contrario, and in the presence of an acute or chronic maxillary sinusitis, the differential diagnosis must always consider other potential odontogenic and nonodontogenic etiologies.
Piezoelectric Deflection Sensor for a Bi-Bellows Actuator

We employ a piezoelectric transducer polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) for a new application: tracking the shape of a highly flexible cantilever. The sensor was attached to the bi-bellows, a pneumatic actuator developed by the authors. We demonstrate how the sensor responds to changes of the actuator's shape and discuss its limitations. The combination of an internal pressure sensor and a PVDF sensor enables measurements of external forces applied on the actuator, in addition to its self position.
Resonant-Clock Design for a Power-Efficient, High-Volume x86-64 Microprocessor

AMD's 32-nm x86-64 core code-named “Piledriver” features a resonant global clock distribution to reduce clock distribution power while maintaining a low clock skew. To support a wide range of operating frequencies expected of the core, the global clock system operates in two modes: a resonant-clock (rclk) mode for energy-efficient operation over a desired frequency range and a conventional, direct-drive mode (cclk) to support low-frequency operation. This dual-mode feature was implemented with minimal area impact to achieve both reduced average power dissipation and improved power-constrained performance. In Piledriver, resonant clocking achieves a peak 25% global clock power reduction at 75 °C, which translates to a 4.5% reduction in average application core power.
Corporate and Governmental Deviance: Problems of Organizational Behavior in Contemporary Society

Corporate and Governmental Deviance , Fifth Edition, is a reader intended for use in courses on corporate crime in departments of sociology and criminology. This edition has been updated with several new readings, including an article on the recently uncovered government experiments with radiation. This book is intended for undergraduate and graduate courses in criminology, social deviance and social problems.
Enterprise 2.0: the dawn of emergent collaboration

This publication contains reprint articles for which IEEE does not hold copyright. Full text is not available on IEEE Xplore for these articles.
An Assistive Navigation Framework for the Visually Impaired

This paper provides a framework for context-aware navigation services for vision impaired people. Integrating advanced intelligence into navigation requires knowledge of the semantic properties of the objects around the user's environment. This interaction is required to enhance communication about objects and places to improve travel decisions. Our intelligent system is a human-in-the-loop cyber-physical system that interprets ubiquitous semantic entities by interacting with the physical world and the cyber domain, viz., 1) visual cues and distance sensing of material objects as line-of-sight interaction to interpret location-context information, and 2) data (tweets) from social media as event-based interaction to interpret situational vibes. The case study elaborates our proposed localization methods (viz., topological, landmark, metric, crowdsourced, and sound localization) for applications in way finding, way confirmation, user tracking, socialization, and situation alerts. Our pilot evaluation provides a proof of concept for an assistive navigation system.
Slouching towards Bethlehem -- : and further psychoanalytic explorations

Nina Coltart is a member of the Independent Group. In her essays she explores the parameters of psychoanalysis against a background of broader cultural issues. The title essay is justly famous - an account of an apparently hopeless analysis, in which Dr Coltart's intervention produced remarkable results.
Multicentre audit of inpatient management of acute exacerbations of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease: comparison with clinical guidelines.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE
Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) exacerbations are a major cause of hospital admission and clinical guidelines for optimised management are available. However, few data assessing concordance with these guidelines are available. We aimed to identify gaps and document variability in clinical practices for COPD admissions.


METHODS
Medical records of all admissions over a 3-month period as COPD with non-catastrophic or severe comorbidities or complications at eight acute-care hospitals within the Hunter New England region were retrospectively audited.


RESULTS
Mean (SD) length of stay was 6.3 (6.1) days for 221 admissions with mean age of 71 (10), 53% female and 34% current smokers. Spirometry was performed in 34% of admissions with a wide inter-hospital range (4-58%, P < 0.0001): mean FEV1 was 36% (18) predicted. Arterial blood gases were performed on admission in 54% of cases (range 0-85%, P < 0.0001). Parenteral steroids were used in 82% of admissions, antibiotics in 87% and oxygen therapy during admission in 79% (with oxygen prescription in only 3% of these). Bronchodilator therapy was converted from nebuliser to an inhaler device in 51% of cases early in admission at 1.6 (1.7) days. Only 22% of patients were referred to pulmonary rehabilitation (inter-hospital range of 0-50%, P = 0.002). Re-admission within 28 days was higher in rural hospitals compared with metropolitan (27% vs 7%, P < 0.0001).


CONCLUSIONS
We identified gaps in best practice service provision associated with wide inter-hospital variations, indicating disparity in access to services throughout the region.
Large vocabulary Russian speech recognition using syntactico-statistical language modeling

Speech is the most natural way of human communication and in order to achieve convenient and efficient human–computer interaction implementation of state-of-the-art spoken language technology is necessary. Research in this area has been traditionally focused on several main languages, such as English, French, Spanish, Chinese or Japanese, but some other languages, particularly Eastern European languages, have received much less attention. However, recently, research activities on speech technologies for Czech, Polish, Serbo-Croatian, Russian languages have been steadily increasing. In this paper, we describe our efforts to build an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system for the Russian language with a large vocabulary. Russian is a synthetic and highly inflected language with lots of roots and affixes. This greatly reduces the performance of the ASR systems designed using traditional approaches. In our work, we have taken special attention to the specifics of the Russian language when developing the acoustic, lexical and language models. A special software tool for pronunciation lexicon creation was developed. For the acoustic model, we investigated a combination of knowledge-based and statistical approaches to create several different phoneme sets, the best of which was determined experimentally. For the language model (LM), we introduced a new method that combines syntactical and statistical analysis of the training text data in order to build better n-gram models. Evaluation experiments were performed using two different Russian speech databases and an internally collected text corpus. Among the several phoneme sets we created, the one which achieved the fewest word level recognition errors was the set with 47 phonemes and thus we used it in the following language modeling evaluations. Experiments with 204 thousand words vocabulary ASR were performed to compare the standard statistical n-gram LMs and the language models created using our syntactico-statistical method. The results demonstrated that the proposed language modeling approach is capable of reducing the word recognition errors. 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Advantage of a precurved fenestrated endograft for aortic arch disease: simplified arch aneurysm treatment in Japan 2010 and 2011.

OBJECTIVE
We evaluated the results of our previous study investigating a precurved fenestrated endograft treatment for thoracic aortic aneurysms and aortic dissection extended to the aortic arch.


METHODS
From February 2010 to December 2011 at 35 Japanese centers, 383 patients (mean age, 75.7 ± 9.4 years) who required stent-graft landing in the aortic arch were treated with a precurved fenestrated endograft. The device has 19 3-dimensional curved stent skeleton types similar to aortic arch configurations and 8 graft fenestration types and is 24 to 44 mm in diameter and 16 to 20 cm long. The endografts were fabricated according to preoperative 3-dimensional computed tomographic images.


RESULTS
Technical and initial successes were achieved in 380 and 364 cases, respectively. Device proximal end was at zones 0 to 2 in 363, 15, and 2 patients, respectively. Lesions' proximal end ranged from zone 0 to 3 in 16, 125, 195, and 44 patients, respectively. The mean operative and fluoroscopic times were 161 ± 76 and 26 ± 13 min, respectively. The complications included stroke (7 patients), permanent paralysis (3), and perioperative death (6). No branch occlusion or proximal migration of the device occurred during follow-up.


CONCLUSIONS
A precurved fenestrated endograft for endovascular repair in aortic arch disease rendered catheter manipulation simple and minimized operative complication risks. Although most patients had inadequate proximal landing zone and severely angled complex configuration, low mortality and morbidity and satisfactory clinical success were early outcomes, suggesting that this simplified treatment may be effective for aortic arch disease.
Do Executive Stock Options Generate Incentives for Earnings Management ? Evidence from Accounting

In a sample of 224 firms that announced restating their financial statements from January 1997 to June 2002 due to accounting irregularities and a control group of all non-restating firms with data on ExecuComp, we examine the effect of pay for performance incentives on the incentives for earnings management. Controlling for the endogeneity of pay for performance incentives, we find a significant positive effect of incentives on the probability of restating. In our sample, average value of executive option holdings increases by $21 for every $1000 change in equity value. Increasing incentives by 90 cents or 4.3% from the above mean increases the probability of restatement by 1%. We find that stock and options differ in the incentives generated for earnings management. There is no evidence that equity holdings generate incentives for earnings management. Further, large managerial ownership mitigates the positive effect of stock options on the incentive to manage earnings.
Dielectric Properties of Epoxy Nanocomposites containing TiO 2 , Al 2 O 3 and ZnO fillers

The paper presents results of dielectric spectroscopy and space charge (PEA) measurements on epoxy resin filled with 10% w/w microand nanosized particles of TiO2, Al3O2 and ZnO. The results appear to show that the material from which the nano-particle is made is not highly significant in influencing these results. The results support the proposition that the dielectric properties of such nano-filled composites are controlled by Stern-Gouy-Chapman layers (“interaction zones”) around the particles.
Alcohol screening and brief counseling in a primary care hypertensive population: a quality improvement intervention.

AIMS
To determine the effect of an intervention to improve alcohol screening and brief counseling for hypertensive patients in primary care.


DESIGN
Two-year randomized, controlled trial.


SETTING/PARTICIPANTS
Twenty-one primary care practices across the United States with a common electronic medical record.


INTERVENTION
To promote alcohol screening and brief counseling. Intervention practices received site visits from study personnel and were invited to annual network meetings to review the progress of the project and share improvement strategies.


MEASUREMENTS
Main outcome measures included rates of documented alcohol screening in hypertensive patients and brief counseling administered in those diagnosed with high-risk drinking, alcohol abuse or alcohol dependence. Secondary outcomes included change in blood pressure among patients with these diagnoses.


FINDINGS
Hypertensive patients in intervention practices were significantly more likely to have been screened after 2 years than hypertensive patients in control practices [64.5% versus 23.5%; adjusted odds ratio (OR) = 8.1; 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.7-38.2; P < 0.0087]. Patients in intervention practices diagnosed with high-risk drinking, alcohol abuse or alcohol dependence were more likely than those in control practices to have had alcohol counseling documented (50.5% versus 29.6%; adjusted OR = 5.5, 95% CI 1.3-23.3). Systolic (adjusted mean decline = 4.2 mmHg, P = 0.036) and diastolic (adjusted mean decline = 3.3 mmHg, P = 0.006) blood pressure decreased significantly among hypertensive patients receiving alcohol counseling.


CONCLUSIONS
Primary care practices receiving an alcohol-focused intervention over 2 years improved rates of alcohol screening for their hypertensive population. Implementation of alcohol counseling for high-risk drinking, alcohol abuse or alcohol dependence also improved and led to changes in patient blood pressures.
Battery Energy Storage System for Power Conditioning of Renewable Energy Sources

Renewable energy sources such as wind, hydro, etc. are intermittent in nature. Generators connected to the local grid may lead to severe power quality problems. These issues are voltage dip while connection/ disconnection of the generator, uncertainty of supply, unbalanced and distorted power supply. In this paper, the power conditioning of micro hydro driven induction generator connected to the local grid using battery energy storage system (BESS) is simulated for voltage regulation, load leveling, harmonics elimination and power factor improvement
Trends in Green Wireless Access

Reducing CO2 emissions is an important global environmental issue. Over the recent years, wireless and mobile communications have increasingly become popular with consumers. Today’s typical wireless access network consumes more than 50% of the total power consumption of mobile communications networks. Growth of mobile Internet service usage is expected to drive the growth in wireless access data rates and usage. The current rate of power consumption per unit of data cannot be sustained as we move towards broadband wireless access networks and anticipated increases in wireless data traffic. This paper, first, examines typical energy consumption in mobile communications networks and traffic trends, and it subsequently discusses target power consumption reduction for the evolving broadband wireless networks to be environmentally acceptable and sustainable. It describes several technologies that can contribute towards reaching this target.
Chronic osteomyelitis in Ilorin, Nigeria.

AIM
To review cases of chronic osteomyelitis managed at a private health institution (Ela Memorial Medical Centre, Ilorin, Nigeria) between March 1995 and February 2005. PATIENTS AND METHODS; Case notes and X-rays of the patients who presented at EMMC with chronic osteomyelitis were reviewed retrospectively. Age, sex, sites of bone involvement and outcome of treatment were recorded. Local surgical debridement (including saucerisation, sequestrectomy and curettage) was the cornerstone of treatment. All patients received antibiotics for at least 6 weeks.


RESULTS
Of the 107 cases, 71 (66.4%) were males, with a male-to-female ratio of 2:1. The mean age was 21.9 years (range 1.5 - 80 years). Chronic osteomyelitis is most common in the first and second decades of life (55.2%) and mostly affects people < 50 years of age (93.5%). Haematogenous osteomyelitis was the most common cause of chronic osteomyelitis (81.3%). The most common bone site was the tibia (32.7%). Nearly all (103) were adjudged cured; only 3 patients suffered a recurrence.


CONCLUSION
Chronic osteomyelitis is common in Nigeria. Most cases occur in the first and second decades of life, with haematogenous osteomyelitis being the most common cause. A high index of suspicion of osteomyelitis in children with septicaemia, and the proper treatment of patients with open fractures, will help to reduce the occurrence of the disease.
Stability and predictive utility, over 3 years, of the illness beliefs of individuals recently diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes mellitus.

AIM
To determine the stability of beliefs of patients with Type 2 diabetes about their diabetes over 3 years, following diagnosis.


METHODS
Data were collected as part of a multicentre cluster randomized controlled trial of a 6-h self-management programme, across 207 general practices in the UK. Participants in the original trial were eligible for follow-up with biomedical data (HbA1c levels, blood pressure, weight, blood lipid levels) collected at the practice, and questionnaire data collected by postal distribution and return. Psychological outcome measures were depression (Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale) and diabetes distress (Problem Areas in Diabetes scale). Illness beliefs were assessed using the Illness Perceptions Questionnaire-Revised and the Diabetes Illness Representations Questionnaire scales.


RESULTS
At 3-year follow-up, all post-intervention differences in illness beliefs between the intervention and the control group remained significant, with perceptions of the duration of diabetes, seriousness of diabetes and perceived impact of diabetes unchanged over the course of the 3-year follow-up. The control group reported a greater understanding of diabetes during the follow-up, and the intervention group reported decreased responsibility for diabetes outcomes during the follow-up. After controlling for 4-month levels of distress and depression, the perceived impact of diabetes at 4 months remained a significant predictor of distress and depression at 3-year follow-up.


CONCLUSIONS
Peoples' beliefs about diabetes are formed quickly after diagnosis, and thereafter seem to be relatively stable over extended follow-up. These early illness beliefs are predictive of later psychological distress, and emphasize the importance of initial context and provision of diabetes care in shaping participants' future well-being.
Regularization of Linear Descriptor Systems with Variable Coefficients

We study linear descriptor control systems with rectangular variable coefficient matrices. We introduce condensed forms for such systems under equivalence transformations and use these forms to detect whether the system can be transformed to a uniquely solvable closed loop system via state or derivative feedback. We show that under some mild assumptions every such system consists of an underlying square subsystem that behaves essentially like a standard state space system, plus some solution components that are constrained to be zero.
An open-source simulator for cognitive robotics research: the prototype of the iCub humanoid robot simulator

This paper presents the prototype of a new computer simulator for the humanoid robot iCub. The iCub is a new open-source humanoid robot developed as a result of the "RobotCub" project, a collaborative European project aiming at developing a new open-source cognitive robotics platform. The iCub simulator has been developed as part of a joint effort with the European project "ITALK" on the integration and transfer of action and language knowledge in cognitive robots. This is available open-source to all researchers interested in cognitive robotics experiments with the iCub humanoid platform.