LLukas22/scidocs huggingface dataset:
Pulsed and Tissue Doppler Echocardiographic Changes in Patients with Thalassemia Major

Background: Doppler echocardiographic studies of left ventricle (LV) systolic and diastolic function in patients with β-Thalassemia Major (β-TM) had shown different patterns of systolic and diastolic dysfunction. Aim: This cross-sectional study was designed to study the LV systolic and diastolic function in patients with β-TM using Pulsed Doppler (PD) and Tissue Doppler (TD) echocardiography. Methods: All patients were evaluated clinically and by echocardiography, The study included patients with β-TM (n = 38, age 15.7 ± 8.9 years) compared with an age-matched control group (n = 38, age 15.9 ± 8.9 years). The pulse Doppler indices were normalized for age and heart rate. Results: Compared with control patients, M-Mode showed that patients with β-TM have thicker LV septal wall index (0.659 ± 0.23 vs. 0.446 ± 0.219 cm, P  0.001), posterior wall index (0.659 ± 0.235 vs. 0.437 ± 0.214 cm, P  0.01), and larger LVEDD index is (3.99 ± 0.48 vs. 2.170 ± 0.57 mm. P = 0.035). Pulsed Doppler showed high LV trans-mitral E wave velocity (70.818 ± 10.139 vs. 57.532 ± 10.139, p = 0.027) and E/A ratio (1.54 vs. 1.23, P  0.01). The duration of Deceleration time (DT) and isovolumic relaxation time (IVRT) were significantly shorter in patients with β-TM (150.234 ± 20.0.23 vs. 167.123 ± 19.143 msec, P  0.01) and (60.647 ± 6.77 vs. 75.474 ± 5.83 msec, P  0.001), respectively. The ratio of transmitral E wave velocity to the tissue Doppler E wave at the basal septal mitral annulus E/Emwas significantly higher in β-TM group (14.024 ± 2.29 vs. 12.132 ± 1.82, P  0.01). The Tissue Doppler systolic velocity (Sm) and the early diastolic velocity (Em) were significantly lower in β-TM group compared to control (4.31 ± 1.2 cm/s vs. 6.95 ± 2.1, P  0.01 and 4.31 ± 2.7 cm/s vs. 5.82 ± 2.5, P  0.01) respectively. The tricuspid valve velocity was significantly higher than controls (2.993 ± 0.569 vs. 1.93 ± 0.471 m/sec, respectively, P  0.01). However, the LVEF% and fractional shortening were normal with no significant difference in both groups. Conclusion: In this study, patients with β-thalassemia major compared with controls, have significantly thicker LV wall, and larger LV cavity and LV diastolic filling indices suggestive of restrictive pattern with a higher tricuspid valve velocity. These data showed that left ventricle diastolic indices are compromised initially in patients with β-thalassemia major.
HIV Risk Behaviors among African American Women with at-Risk Male Partners

BACKGROUND
HIV continues to impact African American women at alarming rates. Yet, few researchers have examined the relationship factors promoting unprotected sex within African American communities, especially instances in which women are aware that their male partners are engaging in high risk behaviors. This qualitative study explored the sexual behaviors, relationship characteristics, and HIV prevention strategies utilized by African American women in relationships with African American men at-risk for HIV.


METHOD
To understand the issues that should be addressed in a sexual risk-reduction intervention, data were collected from three, two-hour focus group discussions (n=24) comprised primarily of low-income African American women with histories of at-risk male sex partners. At-risk partners included specifically men who had sex with other men or with transgender individuals, used crack cocaine or injection drugs, had lengthy incarceration periods, or an unknown sexual history. Discussion questions examined external factors affecting sexual risk behaviors such as societal pressures, peer norms, and financial vulnerability. Discussions were audiotaped, transcribed, and analyzed using a consensual qualitative research approach.


RESULTS
Five themes, including self-esteem, social influences on behavior, relationship fidelity, sexual risk behavior, and partners' sexual behaviors, were identified as placing women at increased risk for HIV. Reasons for inconsistent condom use included concern for maintaining the relationship and substance use before and during sex. African American women also believed that men who have sex with men and women (MSMW) were dishonest about their sexuality due to stigma towards homosexuality/bisexuality. Despite these challenges, participants indicated that African American women have a strong sense of pride that can positively impact behaviors in relationships.


CONCLUSION
The findings of this study support that social and contextual factor such as emotional and financial issues, culture, history, and relationship dynamics need to be considered when developing tailored sexual health interventions for this population.
Do Language Learners Recognize Pragmatic Violations? Pragmatic Versus Grammatical Awareness in Instructed L2 Learning.

L2 learners often develop grammatical competence in the absence of concomitant pragmatic competence (Bardovi-Harlig & Hartford, 1990, 1993). In an attempt to better understand how this developmental stage arises, this study explores the extent to which instructed L2 learners of English are aware of differences in learners’ and target-language production in grammar, which addresses the accuracy of utterances, and pragmatics, which addresses the appropriateness of utterances given specific situations, speakers, and content. We used a videotape with 20 scenarios to test 543 learners and their teachers (N = 53) in two countries (Hungary and the U.S.) as well as a secondary sample of 112 EFL speakers in Italy. The results show that whereas EFL learners and their teachers consistently identified and ranked grammatical errors as more serious than pragmatic errors, ESL learners and their teachers showed the opposite pattern, ranking pragmatic errors as more serious than grammatical errors. We discuss the possible causes of this pattern and its implications for teaching.
Discovering Knowledge in Data: An Introduction to Data Mining

Description: The field of data mining lies at the confluence of predictive analytics, statistical analysis, and business intelligence. Due to the ever–increasing complexity and size of data sets and the wide range of applications in computer science, business, and health care, the process of discovering knowledge in data is more relevant than ever before. This book provides the tools needed to thrive in today s big data world. The author demonstrates how to leverage a company s existing databases to increase profits and market share, and carefully explains the most current data science methods and techniques. The reader will learn data mining by doing data mining . By adding chapters on data modelling preparation, imputation of missing data, and multivariate statistical analysis, Discovering Knowledge in Data, Second Edition remains the eminent reference on data mining .
Pelvic Girdle Pain during or after Pregnancy: a review of recent evidence and a clinical care path proposal

PROBLEM STATEMENT
Pelvic girdle pain (PGP) is a common condition during or after pregnancy with pain and disability as most important symptoms. These symptoms have a wide range of clinical presentation. Most doctors perceive pregnancy related pelvic girdle pain (PPGP) as 'physiologic' or 'expected during pregnancy', where no treatment is needed. As such women with PPGP mostly experience little recognition. However, many scientific literature describes PPGP as being severe with considerable levels of pain and disability and socio-economic consequences in about 20% of the cases.


OBJECTIVES
We aimed to (1) inform the gynecologist/obstetrician about the etiology, diagnosis, risk factors, and treatment options of PPGP and (2) to make a proposition for an adequate clinical care path.


METHODS
A systematic search of electronic databases and a check of reference lists for recent researches about the diagnosis, etiology, risk factors and treatment of PPGP.


RESULTS
Adequate treatment is based on classification in subgroups according to the different etiologic factors. The various diagnostic tests can help to make a differentiation in the several pelvic girdle pain syndromes and possibly reveal the underlying biomechanical problem. This classification can guide appropriate multidimensional and multidisciplinary management. A proposal for a clinical care path starts with recognition of gynecologist and midwife for this disorder. Both care takers can make a preliminary diagnosis of PPGP and should refer to a physiatrist, who can make a definite diagnosis. Together with a physiotherapist, the latter can determine an individual tailored exercise program based on the influencing bio-psycho-social factors.
TMS Enhances Retention of a Motor Skill in Parkinson's Disease

BACKGROUND
In Parkinson's disease (PD), skill retention is poor, even when acquisition rate is generally preserved. Recent work in normal subjects suggests that 5 Hz-repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (5Hz-rTMS) may induce phenomena of long-term potentiation at the cortical level.


OBJECTIVE/HYPOTHESIS
We thus verified whether, in PD, 5Hz-rTMS enhances retention of a visuo-motor skill that involves the activity of the right posterior parietal cortex.


METHODS
A group of patients with PD was tested in two two-day sessions, separated by one week (treatment and placebo sessions). The first day of each session, they learned to adapt their movements to a step-wise 60° visual rotation. Immediately after the task, either real 5Hz-rTMS (treatment) or sham (placebo) stimulation was applied over the right posterior parietal cortex (P6). Retention of this motor skill was tested the following day.


RESULTS
In patients with PD, adaptation achieved at the end of training was comparable in the treatment and placebo sessions and was similar to that of a group of age-matched controls. However, retention indices tested on the following day were significantly lower in the placebo compared to the treatment session in which retention indices were restored to the level of the controls. Importantly, reaction and movement time as well as other kinematic measures were the same in the treatment and placebo sessions.


CONCLUSION
These results suggest that rTMS applied after the acquisition of a motor skill over specific areas involved in this process might enhance skill retention in PD.
Institutional and Individual Influences on Scottish Geological Maps, 1804–1847: A Cornucopia of Publication or a Mere Trickle?

Abstract The shape, form and pace of the development of Scottish geological cartography during the first half of the nineteenth century are described. The part played by Scottish scientific societies in publishing geological maps is assessed, comparison being made with that of the Geological Society of London. The attempts made to devise graphic representations of the strata, and the problems encountered in publishing the results, are also discussed.
LEXICON-TO-ONTOLOGY CONCEPT ASSOCIATION USING A BILINGUAL DICTIONARY

This paper describes a semi-automatic method for associating a Japanese lexicon with a semantic concept taxonomy called an ontology, using a Japanese-English bilingual dictionary as a "bridge". The ontology supports semantic processing in a knowledge-based machine translation system by providing a set of language-neutral symbols with semantic information. To put the ontology to use, lexical items of each language of interest must be linked to appropriate ontology items. The association of ontology items with lexical items of various languages is a process fraught with difficulty: since much of this work depends on the subjective decisions of human workers, large MT dictionaries tend to be subject to some dispersion and inconsistency. The problem we focus on here is how to associate concepts in the ontology with Japanese lexical entities by automatic methods, since it is too difficult to define adequately many concepts manually. We have designed three algorithms to associate a Japanese lexicon with the concepts of the ontology: the equivalent-word match, the argument match, and the example match.
In situ growth of hollow gold-silver nanoshells within porous silica offers tunable plasmonic extinctions and enhanced colloidal stability.

Porous silica-coated hollow gold-silver nanoshells were successfully synthesized utilizing a procedure where the porous silica shell was produced prior to the transformation of the metallic core, providing enhanced control over the structure/composition of the bimetallic hollow core. By varying the reaction time and the precise amount of gold salt solution added to a porous silica-coated silver-core template solution, composite nanoparticles were tailored to reveal a readily tunable surface plasmon resonance that could be centered across the visible and near-IR spectral regions (∼445-800 nm). Characterization by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy, scanning electron microscopy, and transmission electron microscopy revealed that the synthetic methodology afforded particles having uniform composition, size, and shape. The optical properties were evaluated by absorption/extinction spectroscopy. The stability of colloidal solutions of our composite nanoparticles as a function of pH was also investigated, revealing that the nanoshells remain intact over a wide range of conditions (i.e., pH 2-10). The facile tunability, enhanced stability, and relatively small diameter of these composite particles (∼110 nm) makes them promising candidates for use in tumor ablation or as photothermal drug-delivery agents.
Implicit Weight Uncertainty in Neural Networks

Modern neural networks tend to be overconfident on unseen, noisy or incorrectly labelled data and do not produce meaningful uncertainty measures. Bayesian deep learning aims to address this shortcoming with variational approximations (such as Bayes by Backprop [3] or Multiplicative Normalising Flows [24]). However, current approaches have limitations regarding flexibility and scalability. We introduce Bayes by Hypernet (BbH), a new method of variational approximation that interprets hypernetworks [11] as implicit distributions. It naturally uses neural networks to model arbitrarily complex distributions and scales to modern deep learning architectures. In our experiments, we demonstrate that our method achieves competitive accuracies and predictive uncertainties on MNIST and a CIFAR5 task, while being the most robust against adversarial attacks.
Detection of Computer-Generated Papers in Scientific Literature

Meaningless computer generated scientific texts can be used in several ways. For example, they have allowed Ike Antkare to become one of the most highly cited scientists of the modern world. Such fake publications are also appearing in real scientific conferences and, as a result, in the bibliographic services (Scopus, ISI-Web of Knowledge, Google Scholar,...). Recently, more than 120 papers have been withdrawn from subscription databases of two high-profile publishers, IEEE and Springer, because they were computer generated thanks to the SCIgen software. This software, based on a Probabilistic Context Free Grammar (PCFG), was designed to randomly generate computer science research papers. Together with PCFG, Markov Chains (MC) are the mains ways to generated Meaning-less texts. This paper presents the mains characteristic of texts generated by PCFG and MC. For the time being, PCFG generators are quite easy to spot by an automatic way, using intertextual distance combined with automatic clustering, because these generators are behaving like authors with specifics features such as a very low vocabulary richness and unusual sentence structures. This shows that quantitative tools are effective to characterize originality (or banality) of authors’ language. Cyril Labbé Univ. Grenoble Alpes, LIG, F-38000 Grenoble, France, e-mail: first.last@imag.fr CNRS, LIG, F-38000 Grenoble, France Dominique Labbé Univ. Grenoble Alpes, PACTE, F-38000 Grenoble, France, e-mail: first.last@pacte.fr CNRS, PACTE, F-38000 Grenoble, France François Portet Univ. Grenoble Alpes, LIG, F-38000 Grenoble, France, e-mail: first.last@imag.fr CNRS, LIG, F-38000 Grenoble, France
Comprehensive effects of supplemented essential amino acids in patients with severe COPD and sarcopenia.

AIM
Aim of the study was to investigate whether or not oral supplementation of essential amino acids (EAAs) may improve body composition, muscle metabolism, physical activity, cognitive function, and health status in a population of subjects with severe chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and sarcopenia.


METHODS
Thirty-two patients (25 males) (FEV1/FVC < 40% predicted), age 75 +/- 7 years, were randomised (n = 16 in both groups) to receive 4 gr/bid EAAs or placebo according to a double-blind design. When entered the study (T0), after four (T4), and after twelve (T12) weeks of treatments, body weight, fat free-mass (FFM), plasma lactate concentration (micromol/l), arterial PaCO2 and PaO2, physical activity (n degree steps/day), cognitive function (Mini Mental State Examination; MMSE), health status (St. George's Respiratory Questionnaire; SGRQ) were measured.


RESULTS
EAAs supplemented, but not patients assuming placebo, progressively improved all baseline variables overtime. In particular, at T12 of EAAs supplementation, body weight (BW) increased by 6 Kg (p = 0.002), FFM by 3.6 Kg (p = 0.05), plasma lactate decreased from 1.6 micromol/l to 1.3 micromol/l (p = 0.023), PaO2 increased by 4.6 mmHg (p = 0.01), physical activity increased by 80% (p = 0.01). Moreover, the score for cognitive dysfunction improved from 19.1 scores to 20.8 (p = 0.011), while the SRGQ score also improved from 723 to 69.6 even though this trend did not reach the statistical significance. CONCLUSIONS. A three-month EAAs supplementation may have comprehensive effects on nutritional status; muscle energy metabolism; blood oxygen tension, physical autonomy; cognitive function, and perception of health status in patients with severe COPD and secondary sarcopenia.
Single Shock Endocavitary Low Energy Intracardiac Cardioversion of Chronic Atrial Fibrillation

Background.Discomfort related to low-energy internal cardioversion (LEIC) represents a real problem in patients (pts) with atrial fibrillation (AF). The aim of our study was to verify if a single shock could restore sinus rhythm (SR) with a lower discomfort for the pt. Methods. Thirty pts with chronic AF were randomized to receive a single 350 V shock (15 pts) or multiple shocks of increasing energy (15 pts). Three leads were positioned, respectively, in the coronary sinus and in the lateral right wall for shock delivery, and in the right ventricular apex for R wave synchronization. Truncated, biphasic shocks were used. In the first group a single 350 V shock was directly delivered and a second 400 V shock was given only if SR has not been restored. In the second group, beginning at 50 volts the voltage was increased in steps of 50 volts until SR restoration. No patient was sedated. After each shock the pts were asked to rate their discomfort on a scale of 1 to 5 (1 = not perceived, 5 = severe discomfort) Results. SR was restored in all the subjects. In group 1 SR was obtained in 12/15 (80%) pts with the first 350 V (8.1±0.8 joules) shock, while the remaining 3 patients required the second 400 V (10.2±10.3 joules) shock. In group 2 the mean atrial defibrillation threshold was 346.7±29.7 volts (8.0±1.5 joules). Then discomfort score was 2.5±0.6 in group 1 and 3.3±0.6 in group 2 (p < 0.01). Conclusions. A single shock of 350 V restores SR in the majority of pts with chronic AF; by use this new approach, LEIC is tolerated better than the multiple shocks step-up protocol.
Unruptured large and giant carotid artery aneurysms presenting with cranial nerve palsy: comparison of clinical recovery after selective aneurysm coiling and therapeutic carotid artery occlusion.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE
Internal carotid artery (ICA) aneurysms may present with cranial nerve dysfunction. Therapeutic ICA occlusion, when tolerated, is an effective treatment resulting in improvement or cure of symptoms in most patients. When ICA occlusion is not tolerated, selective endovascular aneurysm occlusion can be considered. We compare recovery of cranial nerve dysfunction in patients treated with selective coil occlusion and with therapeutic ICA occlusion.


MATERIALS AND METHODS
In 16 patients with 17 large or giant (11-45 mm) unruptured ICA aneurysms presenting with dysfunction of cranial nerves (CN) II, III, IV, or VI, selective coil occlusion was performed. From a cohort of 39 patients with ICA aneurysms treated with ICA occlusion and long-term follow-up, we selected 31 patients with aneurysms presenting with cranial nerve dysfunction. Clinical recovery at follow-up from oculomotor dysfunction and visual symptoms was compared for both treatment modalities.


RESULTS
Of 17 aneurysms treated with selective coiling, symptoms of cranial nerve dysfunction resolved in 3, improved in 10, and remained unchanged in 4. In 9 of 17 patients, additional coiling during follow-up was required. Of 31 aneurysms treated with carotid artery occlusion, cranial nerve dysfunction resolved in 19, improved in 9, and remained unchanged in 3. These differences were not significant. There were no complications of treatment.


CONCLUSION
Recovery of ICA aneurysm-induced cranial nerve dysfunction occurs in most patients, both after ICA occlusion and after selective coiling. In patients who cannot tolerate ICA occlusion, selective aneurysmal occlusion with coils is a valuable alternative.
Recovering punctuation marks for automatic speech recognition

This paper shows results of recovering punctuation over speech transcriptions for a Portuguese broadcast news corpus. The approach is based on maximum entropy models and uses word, part-of-speech, time and speaker information. The contribution of each type of feature is analyzed individually. Separate results for each focus condition are given, making it possible to analyze the differences of performance between planned and spontaneous speech.
PPT: a COTS integration case study

T. Rowe Price Investment Technologies built The Product and Project Tracking System (PPT) to reduce the human resources needed to track and forecast Information Technology projects. Instead of developing or purchasing a new system, the need was met by integrating Commercial-off-the-Shelf (COTS) products already used and licensed by the company. The conclusion can be made that this approach reduces development costs while providing more flexibility than a single vendor solution. This paper described the process used and issues encountered in building a system from software products generally intended for stand-alone applications. It discusses the rationale behind the system, the choice of products, the software engineering process used, the handling of changes, and modifications made in business practice. A discussion will be made of the initial Return on Investment and ongoing support requirements.