LLukas22/scidocs huggingface dataset:
Neighborhood predictors of concealed firearm carrying among children and adolescents: results from the project on human development in Chicago neighborhoods.

BACKGROUND
Previous studies of concealed firearm carrying among children and adolescents have focused on individual risk factors.


OBJECTIVE
To identify features of neighborhoods associated with concealed firearm carrying among a representative sample of youth from Chicago, Ill.


DESIGN
Cross-sectional analysis of individual- and neighborhood-level data collected by the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods.


SETTING
Families and neighborhoods in Chicago.


PARTICIPANTS
Population-based sample of 1842 multiethnic youth aged 9 to 19 years and the 218 neighborhoods in which they resided. Main Outcome Measure Whether youth had ever carried a concealed firearm.


RESULTS
Lifetime estimates for concealed firearm carrying were 4.9% for males and 1.1% for females. We found that youth in safer and less disordered neighborhoods were less likely than youth in unsafe and more disordered neighborhoods to carry concealed firearms. Specifically, multilevel nonlinear regression models identified a positive association between concealed firearm carrying and (1) community members' ratings of neighborhoods as unsafe for children; (2) neighborhood social disorder; and (3) neighborhood physical disorder. Neighborhood collective efficacy was negatively associated with concealed firearm carrying. Models controlled for neighborhood economic indicators and individual and family factors associated with the carrying of concealed firearms by youth.


CONCLUSIONS
Youth are less likely to carry concealed firearms in areas where there is less violence and increased safety. Interventions to improve neighborhood conditions such as increasing safety, improving collective efficacy, and reducing social and physical disorder may be efficacious in preventing firearm use and its associated injuries and death among youth.
Improved layout implementation of Mini-Mips in terms of power, performance and chip footprint

This paper proposes a customized implementation of Mini-Mips processor; commencing from Register Transfer Level (RTL) down to GDSii Layout level. The implementation is customized for a string matching specific-application that is given problem for second Iranian National Digital Systems Design contest 2015 at Amirkabir University of Technology. We apply various techniques to make reasonable trade-off between area, delay, and power consumption ranging from loop unrolling in algorithm level to low power techniques such as clock gating in circuit level. Moreover, we utilize compiler optimization techniques to reduce the execution time. Our simulations show that execution time is reduced more than 63% on average. In overall, we come up with an optimized design in terms of chip area, power consumption and total execution time.
How New Zealand has contained expenditure on drugs.

The recent economic crisis has forced Western countries to examine how they contain health spending and improve value for money. Spending on drugs averages around 15% of total health spending for countries in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation andDevelopment (OECD). Improvedmanagement of spending on drugs can therefore make an important contribution to containing health budgets. In recent years, increases in drug costs in New Zealand have been below those experienced in other countries while public coverage has improved. We discuss the Pharmaceutical Management Agency’s (PHARMAC) role in achieving this, its processes for setting priorities, criticisms about its work, and implications for other healthcare systems. History and role
A Design Approach for Collaboration Processes: A Multimethod Design Science Study in Collaboration Engineering

Collaboration Engineering is an approach for the design and deployment of repeatable collaboration processes that can be executed by practitioners without the support of collaboration professionals such as facilitators. A critical challenge in Collaboration Engineering concerns how the design activities have to be executed and which design choices have to be made to create a process design. We report on a four year design science study, in which we developed a design approach for Collaboration Engineering that
A Deep Learning Approach with an Attention Mechanism for Automatic Sleep Stage Classification

Automatic sleep staging is a challenging problem and state-of-the-art algorithms have not yet reached satisfactory performance to be used instead of manual scoring by a sleep technician. Much research has been done to find good feature representations that extract the useful information to correctly classify each epoch into the correct sleep stage. While many useful features have been discovered, the amount of features have grown to an extent that a feature reduction step is necessary in order to avoid the curse of dimensionality. One reason for the need of such a large feature set is that many features are good for discriminating only one of the sleep stages and are less informative during other stages. This paper explores how a second feature representation over a large set of pre-defined features can be learned using an auto-encoder with a selective attention for the current sleep stage in the training batch. This selective attention allows the model to learn feature representations that focuses on the more relevant inputs without having to perform any dimensionality reduction of the input data. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated on a large data set of polysomnography (PSG) night recordings of patients with sleep-disordered breathing. The performance of the autoencoder with selective attention is compared with a regular auto-encoder and previous works using a deep belief network (DBN).
Corneal biomechanical properties and glaucoma-related quantitative traits in the EPIC-Norfolk Eye Study.

PURPOSE
We examined the association of corneal hysteresis (CH) with Heidelberg retina tomograph (HRT)- and Glaucoma Detection with Variable Corneal Compensation scanning laser polarimeter (GDxVCC)-derived measures in a British population.


METHODS
The EPIC-Norfolk Eye Study is nested within a multicenter cohort study--the European Prospective Investigation of Cancer. Ocular response analyzer (ORA), HRT3, and GDxVCC measurements were taken at the research clinic. Three ORA measurements were taken per eye, and the single best value used. Participants meeting predefined criteria were referred for a second examination, including Goldmann applanation tonometry (GAT) and central corneal thickness (CCT) measurement. Generalized estimating equation models were used to examine the associations of CH with HRT and GDxVCC parameters, adjusted for disc area. The GDxVCC analyses were adjusted further for typical scan score to handle atypical retardation.


RESULTS
There were complete research clinic data from 5134 participants. Corneal hysteresis was associated positively with HRT rim area (P < 0.001), and GDxVCC retinal nerve fiber layer (RNFL) average thickness (P = 0.006) and modulation (P = 0.003), and associated negatively with HRT linear cup-to-disc ratio (LCDR, P < 0.001), after adjustment for Goldmann-correlated IOP and other possible confounders. In the 602 participants undergoing the second examination, CH was associated negatively with LCDR (P = 0.008) after adjustment for GAT, CCT, and other possible confounders.


CONCLUSIONS
Lower CH was associated with HRT and GDxVCC parameters in a direction that is seen in glaucoma and with ageing. Further research is required to establish if this is a causal relationship, or due to residual confounding by age, IOP, or CCT.
The Current State of Intervention Research for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Within the Primary Care Setting

Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is common among primary care patients and is associated with significant functional impairment, physical health concerns, and mental health comorbidities. Significant barriers to receiving adequate treatment often exist for primary care patients with PTSD. Mental health professionals operating as part of the primary care team have the potential to provide effective brief intervention services. While good PTSD screening and assessment measures are available for the primary care setting, there are currently no empirically supported primary care-based brief interventions for PTSD. This article reviews early research on the development and testing of primary care-based PTSD treatments and also reviews other brief PTSD interventions (i.e., telehealth and early intervention) that could be adapted to the primary care setting. Cognitive and behavioral therapies currently have the strongest evidence base for establishing an empirically supported brief intervention for PTSD in primary care. Recommendations are made for future research and clinical practice.
Harnessing the Crowdsourcing Power of Social Media for Disaster Relief

This article briefly describes the advantages and disadvantages of crowdsourcing applications applied to disaster relief coordination. It also discusses several challenges that must be addressed to make crowdsourcing a useful tool that can effectively facilitate the relief progress in coordination, accuracy, and security.
Characterization of apoptosis and autophagy through Bcl-2 and Beclin-1 immunoexpression in gestational trophoblastic disease

BACKGROUND
The pathogenesis of Gestational Trophoblastic Disease (GTD) is not clearly known.


OBJECTIVE
In this study, immunoexpression of proteins Bcl-2 and Beclin-1 in trophoblastic lesions and normal trophoblastic tissue was conducted to study the mechanism of apoptotic and autophagic cell death that is expected to complete the study of GTD pathogenesis.


MATERIALS AND METHODS
Bcl-2 and Beclin-1 immunoexpression were studied on complete hydatidiform mole, partial hydatidiform mole, invasive mole, choriocarcinoma and normal placenta slides.


RESULTS
The average total scores of Bcl-2 immunoexpression had a decreasing value, starting from partial hydatidiform mole (3.09), complete hydatidiform mole (2.36), invasive mole (1.18) to choriocarcinoma (0) when compared to normal placenta (6). The results showed no significant difference in Beclin-1 immunoexpression total score between complete hydatidiform mole, partial hydatidiform mole and invasive mole, namely that the value of the average total score of Beclin-1 was low (2.27, 2.45 and 2.36), but on the contrary choriocarcinoma showed an increasing strong Beclin-1 expression with the average total score of 4.57.


CONCLUSION
Bcl-2 expression decreases in line with the excessive proliferation of trophoblast cells in hydatidiform mole and leads to malignancy in invasive mole and choriocarcinoma. The decreased expression of Beclin-1 that leads to autophagy defects in complete hydatidiform mole, partial hydatidiform mole and invasive mole shows the role of autophagy as tumor suppressor, whereas strong Beclin-1 expression shows the survival role of autophagy in choriocarcinoma. The change of Bcl-2 activity as antiapoptosis and Beclin-1 as proautophagy plays a role in pathogenesis of GTD.
The effects of surgically implanted acoustic transmitters on laboratory growth, survival and tag retention in hatchery yearling Chinook salmon

Telemetry has proven an effective means for studying the movement of fishes, however, biases associated with tagged animals requires careful scrutiny if accurate conclusions are to be made from field studies. The objective of this study was to evaluate growth, survival, and tag retention in hatchery yearling Chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) juveniles with intracoelomic surgically implanted acoustic transmitters representing 2.6 to 5.6% of body weight. The first trial consisted of three treatments; passive integrated transponder (PIT) tag-only (25 fish), acoustic-tag+PIT-tag (25 fish), and sham-surgery+PIT-tag (25 fish). There were no significant differences in relative growth rate (% change in weight day−1) among treatments over the 221 day trial. Survival in the acoustic-tag treatment (80%) was not significantly different from the PIT-tag-only and sham treatments (92 and 88% respectively). The second trial consisted of three treatments; PIT-tag-only (22 fish), acoustic-tag+PIT-tag with absorbable sutures (12 fish) and acoustic-tag+PIT-tag with non-absorbable sutures (12 fish). There were no significant differences in relative growth rate among treatments over the 160 day trial. Survival in the second trial was 100%. Fish with absorbable sutures healed sooner and with less inflammation compared to fish with non-absorbable sutures. Tag retention was 100% in both trials. The results of this study suggest that acoustic transmitters of less than 5.6% body weight can be effectively used in 1-year old Chinook salmon.
Thoughts and Reflections

SUMMARY The author presents his hopes for the future, shaped by a lifetime of dedication to the field of religion and disability.
Modern features for systems programming languages

This paper presents a case for the design and implementation of a modern programming language for systems programming. It shows that traditional systems languages like C and Fortran possess features no longer relevant to the modern world. The paper also demonstrates how many of these features have a negative impact on the practice of systems programming. Finally, it proposes alternatives to these features that promote better practice.Additionally, the paper presents a number of features that should be included in a modern systems languages and argues in favor of their inclusion. It shows that these features have a beneficial impact on the expressive power of the language or the practices it promotes. The paper also demonstrates that these features do not compromise the objectives of simplicity, efficiency, and direct control that characterize a systems language.
Are labour-intensive efforts to prevent pressure ulcers cost-effective?

BACKGROUND
Pressure ulcers are a major problem in Danish healthcare with a prevalence of 13-43% among hospitalized patients. The associated costs to the Danish Health Care Sector are estimated to be €174.5 million annually. In 2010, The Danish Society for Patient Safety introduced the Pressure Ulcer Bundle (PUB) in order to reduce hospital-acquired pressure ulcers by a minimum of 50% in five hospitals. The PUB consists of evidence-based preventive initiatives implemented by ward staff using the Model for Improvement.


OBJECTIVE
To investigate the cost-effectiveness of labour-intensive efforts to reduce pressure ulcers in the Danish Health Care Sector, comparing the PUB with standard care.


METHODS
A decision analytic model was constructed to assess the costs and consequences of hospital-acquired pressure ulcers during an average hospital admission in Denmark. The model inputs were based on a systematic review of clinical efficacy data combined with local cost and effectiveness data from the Thy-Mors Hospital, Denmark. A probabilistic sensitivity analysis (PSA) was conducted to assess the uncertainty.


RESULTS
Prevention of hospital-acquired pressure ulcers by implementing labour-intensive effects according to the PUB was cost-saving and resulted in an improved effect compared to standard care. The incremental cost of the PUB was -€38.62. The incremental effects were a reduction of 9.3% prevented pressure ulcers and 0.47% prevented deaths. The PSAs confirmed the incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER)'s dominance for both prevented pressure ulcers and saved lives with the PUB.


CONCLUSION
This study shows that labour-intensive efforts to reduce pressure ulcers on hospital wards can be cost-effective and lead to savings in total costs of hospital and social care.


KEY LIMITATIONS
The data included in the study regarding costs and effects of the PUB in Denmark were based on preliminary findings from a pilot study at Thy-Mors Hospital and literature.
Withdrawal of immunosuppression in Crohn's disease treated with scheduled infliximab maintenance: a randomized trial.

BACKGROUND & AIMS
The benefit to risk ratio of concomitant immunosuppressives with scheduled infliximab (IFX) maintenance therapy for Crohn's disease is an issue of debate. We aimed to study the influence of immunosuppressives discontinuation in patients in remission with combination therapy in an open-label, randomized, controlled trial.


METHODS
Patients with controlled disease > or = 6 months after the start of IFX (5 mg/kg intravenously) combined with immunosuppressives were randomized to continue (Con) or to interrupt (Dis) immunosuppressives, while all patients received scheduled IFX maintenance therapy for 104 weeks. Primary end point was the proportion of patients who required a decrease in IFX dosing interval or stopped IFX therapy. Secondary end points included IFX trough levels, safety, and mucosal healing.


RESULTS
A similar proportion (24/40, 60% Con) and (22/40, 55% Dis) of patients needed a change in IFX dosing interval or stopped IFX therapy (11/40 Con, 9/40 Dis). C-reactive protein (CRP) was higher and IFX trough levels were lower in the Dis group (Dis: CRP, 2.8 mg/L; interquartile range [IQR], 1.0-8.0; Con: CRP, 1.6 mg/L; IQR, 1.0-5.6, P < .005; trough IFX: Dis: 1.65 microg/mL; IQR, 0.54-3.68; Con: 2.87 microg/mL; IQR, 1.35-4.72, P < .0001). Low IFX trough levels correlated with increased CRP and clinical score. Mucosal ulcers were absent at week 104 in 64% (Con) and 61% (Dis) of evaluated patients with ongoing response to IFX.


CONCLUSIONS
Continuation of immunosuppressives beyond 6 months offers no clear benefit over scheduled IFX monotherapy but is associated with higher median IFX trough and decreased CRP levels. The impact of these observations on long-term outcomes needs to be explored further.
A power assessment of machining tools

Energy conservation is becoming a more important ideal in today's society, due to the increasing awareness of environmental and economic impacts. This project experimentally measures the power consumption, which is related to the energy consumption, of machines in the Laboratory for Manufacturing and Productivity, in order to determine the energy cost of the machines. This project then compares the results found experimentally to the theoretical minimum energy consumption in order to reference the measurements to the ideal energy consumption. Finally, this project attempts to find documentation of these energy costs in order to project the results found experimentally onto machines not physically available for measurement. This project found that the machines in the Laboratory for Manufacturing and Productivity used more energy than was necessary while running, due to the sometimes large amount of power needed to run the idle machines. The specifications given by the machine's manufacturers were adequate to estimate the maximum power requirements. Combining these estimates with the motor properties allowed one to estimate the power requirements of both unloaded operation (while the machine was idle) as well as loaded operation. Thesis Supervisor: Timothy G. Gutowski Title: Professor
The optimization of success probability for software projects using genetic algorithms

The software development process is usually affected by many risk factors that may cause the loss of control and failure, thus which need to be identified and mitigated by project managers. Software development companies are currently improving their process by adopting internationally accepted practices, with the aim of avoiding risks and demonstrating the quality of their work. This paper aims to develop a method to identify which risk factors are more influential in determining project outcome. This method must also propose a cost effective investment of project resources to improve the probability of project success. To achieve these aims, we use the probability of success relative to cost to calculate the efficiency of the probable project outcome. The definition of efficiency used in this paper was proposed by researchers in the field of education. We then use this efficiency as the fitness function in an optimization technique based on genetic algorithms. This method maximizes the success probability output of a prediction model relative to cost. The optimization method was tested with several software risk prediction models that have been developed based on the literature and using data from a survey which collected information from in-house and outsourced software development projects in the Chilean software industry. These models predict the probability of success of a project based on the activities undertaken by the project manager and development team. The results show that the proposed method is very useful to identify those activities needing greater allocation of resources, and which of these will have a higher impact on the projects success probability. Therefore using the measure of efficiency has allowed a modular approach to identifying those activities in software development on which to focus the project’s limited resources to improve its probability of success. The genetic algorithm and the measure of efficiency presented in this paper permits model independence, in both prediction of success and cost evaluation.
Fault maintenance trees: Reliability centered maintenance via statistical model checking

The current trend in infrastructural asset management is towards risk-based (a.k.a. reliability centered) maintenance, promising better performance at lower cost. By maintaining crucial components more intensively than less important ones, dependability increases while costs decrease. This requires good insight into the effect of maintenance on the dependability and associated costs. To gain these insights, we propose a novel framework that integrates fault tree analysis with maintenance. We support a wide range of maintenance procedures and dependability measures, including the system reliability, availability, mean time to failure, as well as the maintenance and failure costs over time, split into different cost components. Technically, our framework is realized via statistical model checking, a state-of-the-art tool for flexible modelling and simulation. Our compositional approach is flexible and extendible. We deploy our framework to two cases from industrial practice: insulated joints, and train compressors.
3D solid fin model construction from 2D shapes using non-uniform rational B-spline surfaces

A computer aided design (CAD) tool has been specifically developed for rapid and easy design of solid models for surfboard and sailboard fins. This tool simplifies the lofting of advanced fin cross-sectional foils, in this instance based upon the family of standard airfoil series set by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), whilst retaining a basic parametric description at each cross-section. This paper describes the way in which non-uniform rational B-spline (NURBS) surfaces are created from 2D profile splines, and are then used to generate 3D geometrical surfaces of the fins, which can be imported directly into commercial software packages for finite element stress analysis (FEA) and computational fluid dynamics (CFD). Pressure distributions, lift and drag forces are determined from a CFD flow analysis for various fins designed with this tool, and the results suggest that the incorporation of advanced foils into surfboard fins could indeed lead to increased performance over fins foiled using current standard techniques. 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.