LLukas22/scidocs huggingface dataset:
Dense electronic excitation induced modification in TiO2 doped SnO2 nanocomposite films

Abstract Nanocomposite thin films of TiO 2 doped SnO 2 were grown on silicon and quartz matrices by electron beam evaporation deposition technique using sintered nanocomposite pellet of SnO 2 /TiO 2 taken in the mass percentage ratio of 90:10. The deposition was done in high vacuum (~10 −6  mbar) condition. 100 MeV Au 8+ Swift Heavy Ion (SHI) beam were used at Inter University Accelerator Center, New Delhi, India for dense electronic excitation in these nanocomposite thin films. The SHI irradiation fluencies were varied from 1 × 10 11  ions/cm 2 to 5 × 10 13  ions/cm 2 . Surface morphology studies and grain growth due to swift heavy ion irradiation induced dense electronic excitation at different ion fluencies characterized by Atomic Force Microscopy–Magnetic Force Microscopy (AFM–MFM) technique using Nanoscope – IIIA shows magnetic nature of grains. Sectional analysis of AFM images shows dependence of grain size on irradiation fluence. Grain size varies between 15 nm and 100 nm at different irradiation ion fluencies. The variation in roughness exponent as calculated from power spectral density data and RMS roughness with respect to irradiation fluence are similar in nature. Amorphous to crystalline phase transformation occurs due to SHI irradiation. The SnO 2 dominated crystalline planes observed at irradiation fluence of 1 × 10 13  ions/cm 2 and 5 × 10 13  ions/cm 2 were (0 2 0), (0 2 1), (1 2 4) and (2 0 4). Literature survey suggests these planes were not achieved by thermal annealing as observed from GAXRD data. At low irradiation fluencies up to 5 × 10 12  ions/cm 2 the variation in optical band gap (∼3.7 eV) was negligible as studied by UV–Visible Spectroscopy. Rutherford Backscattering (RBS) results supports transformation from lower crystalline to higher crystalline state due to absence of any impurities in the samples by 100 MeV Au 8+ SHI irradiation and reduction in RBS yield for Sn and O at highest fluence of 5 × 10 13  ions/cm 2 .
MimicTile: a variable stiffness deformable user interface for mobile devices

MimicTile is a novel variable stiffness deformable user interface for mobile devices that implements two key features. The first feature is an input interface that accepts a variety of deformation-based gestures, providing a user with several ways of interacting with a small mobile device. The other feature is the ability to provide information to the user through haptic feedback by varying the stiffness of the interface. The features are suitable for enhancing mobile applications. They were implemented using only shape memory alloy (SMA) wires as the actuator. SMA wire is extremely flexible, making it ideal for deformable user interfaces. In MimicTile, SMA wires act as both actuators and external input sensors. The actuator function works by altering stiffness based on user input. This study also discusses ideas for further development of deformable user interfaces.
Nested saturation control of an UAV carrying a suspended load

This paper addresses the problem of using unmanned aerial vehicles for the transportation of suspended loads. The proposed solution introduces a novel control law capable of steering the aerial robot to a desired reference while simultaneously limiting the sway of the payload. The stability of the equilibrium is proven rigorously through the application of the nested saturation formalism. Numerical simulations demonstrating the effectiveness of the controller are provided.
Procalcitonin testing for diagnosis and short-term prognosis in bacterial infection complicated by congestive heart failure: a multicenter analysis of 4,698 cases

INTRODUCTION
Procalcitonin (PCT) is a biomarker for the clinical diagnosis of bacterial infection that is more specific and earlier than fever, changes in white blood cell count, and blood cultures. Congestive heart failure is an important cause of endotoxin resorption from the intestine, which significantly increases PCT expression in noninfected patients with heart failure. The diagnostic performance and cut-off value of PCT in patients with bacterial infection complicated by congestive heart failure needs to be confirmed.


METHODS
A total of 4,698 cases from different cities in China, including those with different classes of congestive heart failure, bacterial infection, bacterial infection complicated by heart failure and healthy individuals, were chosen for the diagnostic value analysis of PCT and screening candidate predictors of mortality in subjects with bacterial infection complicated by congestive heart failure.


RESULTS
Patients with simple heart failure had significantly higher PCT levels than normal controls (P < 0.01), whereas patients with bacterial infection complicated by congestive heart failure had significantly higher PCT levels than those with simple infection (P < 0.01). Although it was useful for the diagnosis of infection (area under the receiver operating characteristic curve >80%), the positive predictive value of PCT decreased significantly with increasing severity of heart failure (P < 0.05), and the cut-off value of PCT concentrations for infection complicated by classes II, III and IV heart failure were 0.086, 0.192 and 0.657 μg/L, respectively. Heart failure degree, PCT level, and age were the candidate predictors of mortality in patients with bacterial infection complicated by congestive heart failure.


CONCLUSIONS
These data suggest that complicated heart failure elevates the PCT level in patients with bacterial infection. Thus, the results of the PCT test must be analyzed correctly in consideration of the severity of heart failure. Close attention should be paid to cardiac function and PCT expression in aged patients with infection complicated by congestive heart failure.
Creating persuasive technologies: an eight-step design process

This paper outlines eight steps to follow as best practices in the early stages of persuasive technology design. The eight-step process, drawn from demonstrated successes in industry practice, begins with defining the persuasion goal to match a target audience with an appropriate technology channel. Subsequent steps include imitating successful examples of persuasive design, performing rapid trials, measuring behavioral outcomes, and building on small successes.
Cannabis in Pain Treatment: Clinical and Research Considerations.

UNLABELLED
Cannabinoids show promise as therapeutic agents, particularly as analgesics, but their development and clinical use has been complicated by recognition of their botanical source, cannabis, as a substance of misuse. Although research into endogenous cannabinoid systems and potential cannabinoid pharmaceuticals is slowly increasing, there has been intense societal interest in making herbal (plant) cannabis available for medicinal use; 23 U.S. States and all Canadian provinces currently permit use in some clinical contexts. Whether or not individual professionals support the clinical use of herbal cannabis, all clinicians will encounter patients who elect to use it and therefore need to be prepared to advise them on cannabis-related clinical issues despite limited evidence to guide care. Expanded research on cannabis is needed to better determine the individual and public health effects of increasing use of herbal cannabis and to advance understanding of the pharmaceutical potential of cannabinoids as medications. This article reviews clinical, research, and policy issues related to herbal cannabis to support clinicians in thoughtfully advising and caring for patients who use cannabis, and it examines obstacles and opportunities to expand research on the health effects of herbal cannabis and cannabinoids.


PERSPECTIVE
Herbal cannabis is increasingly available for clinical use in the United States despite continuing controversies over its efficacy and safety. This article explores important considerations in the use of plant Cannabis to better prepare clinicians to care for patients who use it, and identifies needed directions for research.
The role of patients and their relatives in 'speaking up' about their own safety - a qualitative study of acute illness.

BACKGROUND
Poor recognition of and response to acute illness in hospitalized patients continues to cause significant harm despite the implementation of safety strategies such as early warning scores. Patients and their relatives may be able to contribute to their own safety by speaking up about changes in condition, but little is known about the factors that influence this. This study examined the experiences and views of patients and their relatives to determine the potential for involvement in promoting their own safety.


METHODS
This data set is drawn from a wider ethnographic study of the management of the acutely ill patient in hospital. Thirteen patients and seven relatives from two medical settings in two UK NHS Trusts were interviewed. Thematic analysis identified factors likely to influence patients' and their relatives' ability to contribute to the management of deterioration.


RESULTS
All patients interviewed had experienced their acute illness within the context of a long-term health problem. Speaking up was influenced by the ability to recognize changes in clinical condition, self-monitoring, confidence and trust, and culture and system of health care. When patients or relatives did raise concerns, health-care staff had a mediating effect on their comfort with and the effectiveness of speaking up.


IMPLICATIONS
Safety strategies based on patient involvement must take account of the complexities of acute illness. Those that promote partnership may be more acceptable to patients, their families and staff than those that promote challenging behaviour and may ultimately prove to be most safe and effective.
Distributed Consensus Algorithms in Blockchains

A Blockchain is a public immutable distributed ledger and stores a various kinds of transactions. Because there is no central authority that regulates the system and users don’t trust eath other, a blockchain system needs an algorithm for users to reach consensus on block creation. In this report, we will explore 3 consensus algorithms: Proof-of-Work, Proof-ofStake and Proof-of-Activity.
A bias correction function for classification performance assessment in two-class imbalanced problems

This paper introduces a framework that allows to mitigate the impact of class imbalance on most scalar performance measures when used to evaluate the behavior of classifiers. Formally, a correction function is defined with the aim of highlighting those classification results that present moderately higher prediction rates on the minority class. Besides, this function punishes those scenarios that are biased towards the majority class, but also those that are strongly biased to favor the minority class. This strategy assumes a typical imbalance task, in which the minority class contains the most relevant samples to the research purposes. A novel experimental framework is designed to show the advantages of our approach when compared to the standard use of well-established measures, demonstrating its consistency and validity. Most of traditional learning methods assume that the classes of the problem share similar prior probabilities and/or misclassifi-cation costs. However, in many real-world tasks the ratios of prior probabilities between classes are significantly skewed. This situation is typically known as the imbalance problem. A two-class data set is said to be imbalanced when one of the classes (the minority one) is heavily under-represented regarding the other class (the majority one) [1]. Paradoxically, the minority class is often the most important and usually the one with the highest misclassifi-cation costs. Some typical real-life applications where this problem arises are prediction of microarray gene expression [2], prediction of corporate bankruptcy [3] and credit risk [4], fraud detection in mobile telephone communications [5] and text categorization [6]. Because of examples of the minority and majority classes usually represent the presence and absence of rare cases respectively, they are also referred to as positive and negative examples. As pointed out by many authors [7–10], the use of plain accuracy and/or error rates to evaluate the performance of classifiers in imbal-anced domains might produce misleading conclusions, since they do not take misclassification costs into account, are strongly biased to favor the majority class, and are non-sensitive to class skews. A plethora of alternative scalar and graphical methods have been proposed to properly assess classification performance on imbalanced scenarios. Graphical approaches depict trade-offs between two or more evaluation perspectives, allowing a richer analysis of results but making the comparison of learning algorithms a non-trivial issue. Some well-studied examples are the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve [11,12], the Precision–Recall (P–R) curve [13], cost curves [14] and the Bayesian Receiver Operating Characteristic (B-ROC) curve …
Periosteal ganglion: a report of three new cases including MRI findings and a review of the literature

 Objective. To clarify the clinicopathological features of periosteal ganglion. Design. Three patients with periosteal ganglion were studied clinicopathologically. Patients. One patient was selected from the files of our institute and two from a consultation file. Results and conclusions. All three lesions were located over the medial aspect of the tibia. Plain radiographs showed cortical erosions of varying degrees and mild periosteal reaction of the medial side of the tibia. MR images demonstrated well-circumscribed lesions overlying the cortical bone of the tibia, shown as low-intensity areas on T1-weighted images. On T2-weighted images, lesions were homogeneous, lobulated, and showed a characteristic markedly increased signal intensity. These findings are helpful in making a diagnosis of periosteal ganglion. Each patient had an uneventful clinical course after an excision involving the wall of the ganglion, the adjoining periosteum, and the underlying sclerotic cortical bone.
Detailed screening for fetal anomalies and cardiac defects at the 11-13-week scan.

OBJECTIVE
To assess the diagnostic efficacy of the first-trimester anomaly scan including first-trimester fetal echocardiography as a screening procedure in a 'medium-risk' population.


METHODS
In a prospective study, we evaluated 3094 consecutive fetuses with a crown-rump length (CRL) of 45-84 mm and gestational age between 11 + 0 and 13 + 6 weeks, using transabdominal and transvaginal ultrasonography. The majority of patients were referred without prior abnormal scan or increased nuchal translucency (NT) thickness, the median maternal age was, however, 35 (range, 15-46) years, and 53.8% of the mothers (1580/2936) were 35 years or older. This was therefore a self-selected population reflecting an increased percentage of older mothers opting for prenatal diagnosis. The follow-up rate was 92.7% (3117/3363).


RESULTS
The prevalence of major abnormalities in 3094 fetuses was 2.8% (86/3094). The detection rate of major anomalies at the 11 + 0 to 13 + 6-week scan was 83.7% (72/86), 51.9% (14/27) for NT < 2.5 mm and 98.3% (58/59) for NT >or= 2.5 mm. The prevalence of major congenital heart defects (CHD) was 1.2% (38/3094). The detection rate of major CHD at the 11 to 13 + 6-week scan was 84.2% (32/38), 37.5% (3/8) for NT < 2.5 mm and 96.7% (29/30) for NT >or= 2.5 mm.


CONCLUSION
The overall detection rate of fetal anomalies including fetal cardiac defects following a specialist scan at 11 + 0 to 13 + 6 weeks' gestation is about 84% and is increased when NT >or= 2.5 mm. This extends the possibilities of a first-trimester scan beyond risk assessment for fetal chromosomal defects. In experienced hands with adequate equipment, the majority of severe malformations as well as major CHD may be detected at the end of the first trimester, which offers parents the option of deciding early in pregnancy how to deal with fetuses affected by genetic or structural abnormalities without pressure of time.
Seasonal variations in glycemic control of type 2 diabetes in Korean women.

BACKGROUND AND AIMS
Seasonal variations in lifestyle, such as food intake and physical activity, have been reported. Glycemic control in type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) may be affected by such changes. We investigated seasonal variations in glycemic control, food intake, and physical activity in type 2 diabetic patients.


METHODS
This prospective observational study included 37 Korean female patients who had <8.0 % hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) and managed diabetes by oral anti-diabetic drugs or lifestyle modification only. Participants underwent four or five assessments, including total physical activity (household, leisure-time, and occupational activity) (metabolic equivalent of test-h/day), food intake (kcal/day), HbA1c, and anthropometry every 3 months (August, November, February, May, and August in the Northern Hemisphere) over 1 year. When anti-diabetic drugs were changed, we analyzed the data just before the changes.


RESULTS
The mean HbA1c levels (%) of August and November in 2008, and February, May, and August in 2009 were 7.0 ± 0.1, 6.9 ± 0.1, 7.2 ± 0.2, 7.4 ± 0.2, and 7.2 ± 0.2, respectively (P = 0.018). The change of HbA1c was nearly 0.5 % for the 1-year period. From August to May of the following year, there were also seasonal variations in food intake (1,872 ± 143, 1,739 ± 97, 1,673 ± 86, 1,561 ± 132, respectively; P = 0.013), and total physical activity [7.7 (3.7-14.6), 6.3 (2.8-10.4), 5.1 (2.7-12.6), and 11.2 (4.7-20.5), respectively; P = 0.048]. However, the seasonal variations of HbA1c and total physical activity became non-significant when farmers were excluded.


CONCLUSIONS
These data suggested that glycemic control, total physical activity, and food intake varied seasonally in Korean T2DM patients. These seasonal variations should be considered in education for glycemic control.
The local progestational effect of the levonorgestrel-releasing intrauterine system: a sonographic and Doppler flow study.

BACKGROUND
We aimed to evaluate the effect of the levonorgestrel-releasing intrauterine system (LNG-IUS) on the uterine vasculature and the endometrium.


METHODS
The study was a prospective controlled study evaluating the local effects of LNG-IUS compared with the copper intrauterine device (IUD). Forty-seven women carrying LNG-IUS (group A) were compared with 35 women carrying copper IUD in a control group (group B). Clinical measures of menstrual bleeding, endometrial thickness and Doppler flow of the cervical branch of the uterine artery and spiral artery were evaluated and compared between the two groups.


RESULTS
Doppler flow in the cervical branch of the uterine artery did not reveal any changes between the groups (resistance index = 0.6 +/- 0.01 in both groups). Endometrial width was significantly thinner in group A (4.1 +/- 0.2 mm) compared with group B (7.3 +/- 0.2 mm) (P < 0.0001). Subendometrial flow in the spiral artery was significantly reduced in 35 women of group A (75%) and in none of group B (P < 0.0001).


CONCLUSIONS
The present study offers an explanation for the oligomenorrhoea in LNG-IUS users, i.e. a local progestational effect on the endometrium with no change in the blood flow in the uterine artery. This should be presented to the women in the pre-contraceptive counselling in order to lessen the discontinuation rate.
Semantic security against web application attacks

In this paper, we propose a method of detecting and classifying web application attacks. In contrast to current signature-based security methods, our solution is an ontology based technique. It specifies web application attacks by using semantic rules, the context of consequence and the specifications of application protocols. The system is capable of detecting sophisticated attacks effectively and efficiently by analyzing the specified portion of a user request where attacks are possible. Semantic rules help to capture the context of the application, possible attacks and the protocol that was used. These rules also allow inference to run over the ontological models in order to detect, the often complex polymorphic variations of web application attacks. The ontological model was developed using Description Logic that was based on the Web Ontology Language (OWL). The inference rules are Horn Logic statements and are implemented using the Apache JENA framework. The system is therefore platform and technology independent. Prior to the evaluation of the system the knowledge model was validated by using OntoClean to remove inconsistency, incompleteness and redundancy in the specification of ontological concepts. The experimental results show that the detection capability and performance of our system is significantly better than existing state of the art solutions. The system successfully detects web application attacks whilst generating few false positives. The examples that are presented demonstrate that a semantic approach can be used to effectively detect zero day and more sophisticated attacks in a real-world environment. 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Short-term hydrothermal generation scheduling model using a genetic algorithm

A new model to deal with the short-term generation scheduling problem for hydrothermal systems is proposed. Using genetic algorithms (GAs), the model handles simultaneously the subproblems of short-term hydrothermal coordination, unit commitment, and economic load dispatch. Considering a scheduling horizon period of a week, hourly generation schedules are obtained for each of both hydro and thermal units. Future cost curves of hydro generation, obtained from long and mid-term models, have been used to optimize the amount of hydro energy to be used during the week. In the genetic algorithm (GA) implementation, a new technique to represent candidate solutions is introduced, and a set of expert operators has been incorporated to improve the behavior of the algorithm. Results for a real system are presented and discussed.
Electoral Rules and Constitutional Structures as Constraints on Corruption

Electoral rules and constitutional structures can influence the level of political corruption. We show that proportional representation (PR) systems are more susceptible to corrupt political rent-seeking than plurality systems. We argue that this result depends on the different loci of rents in PR and plurality systems, and on the monitoring difficulties faced by both voters and opposition parties under PR. We also examine the interaction between electoral rules and presidentialism. We test our main predictions and interaction effects on a cross-section of up to ninety-four democracies. The empirical findings strongly support our hypothesis that PR systems, especially together with presidentialism, are associated with higher levels of corrupt political rent-seeking.
cvpaper.challenge in 2015 - A review of CVPR2015 and DeepSurvey

The “cvpaper.challenge” is a group composed of members from AIST, Tokyo Denki Univ. (TDU), and Univ. of Tsukuba that aims to systematically summarize papers on computer vision, pattern recognition, and related fields. For this particular review, we focused on reading the ALL 602 conference papers presented at the CVPR2015, the premier annual computer vision event held in June 2015, in order to grasp the trends in the field. Further, we are proposing “DeepSurvey” as a mechanism embodying the entire process from the reading through all the papers, the generation of ideas, and to the writing of paper.