LLukas22/scidocs huggingface dataset:
In chronic low back pain, low level laser therapy combined with exercise is more beneficial than exercise alone in the long term: a randomised trial.

QUESTION
Is low level laser therapy an effective adjuvant intervention for chronic low back pain?


DESIGN
Randomised trial with concealed allocation, blinded assessors and intention-to-treat analysis.


PARTICIPANTS
Sixty-one patients who had low back pain for at least 12 weeks.


INTERVENTION
One group received laser therapy alone, one received laser therapy and exercise, and the third group received placebo laser therapy and exercise. Laser therapy was performed twice a week for 6 weeks.


OUTCOME MEASURES
Outcomes were pain severity measured using a 10-cm visual analogue scale, lumbar range of motion measured by the Schober Test and maximum active flexion, extension and lateral flexion, and disability measured with the Oswestry Disability Index on admission to the study, after 6 weeks of intervention, and after another 6 weeks of no intervention.


RESULTS
There was no greater effect of laser therapy compared with exercise for any outcome, at either 6 or 12 weeks. There was also no greater effect of laser therapy plus exercise compared with exercise for any outcome at 6 weeks. However, in the laser therapy plus exercise group pain had reduced by 1.8 cm (95% CI 0.1 to 3.3, p = 0.03), lumbar range of movement increased by 0.9 cm (95% CI 0.2 to 1.8, p < 0.01) on the Schober Test and by 15 deg (95% CI 5 to 25, p < 0.01) of active flexion, and disability reduced by 9.4 points (95% CI 2.7 to 16.0, p = 0.03) more than in the exercise group at 12 weeks.


CONCLUSION
In chronic low back pain low level laser therapy combined with exercise is more beneficial than exercise alone in the long term.
Unsteady Boundary Layer Flow and Heat Transfer of a Casson Fluid past an Oscillating Vertical Plate with Newtonian Heating

In this paper, the heat transfer effect on the unsteady boundary layer flow of a Casson fluid past an infinite oscillating vertical plate with Newtonian heating is investigated. The governing equations are transformed to a systems of linear partial differential equations using appropriate non-dimensional variables. The resulting equations are solved analytically by using the Laplace transform method and the expressions for velocity and temperature are obtained. They satisfy all imposed initial and boundary conditions and reduce to some well-known solutions for Newtonian fluids. Numerical results for velocity, temperature, skin friction and Nusselt number are shown in various graphs and discussed for embedded flow parameters. It is found that velocity decreases as Casson parameters increases and thermal boundary layer thickness increases with increasing Newtonian heating parameter.
An intelligent decision support system for manufacturing technology investments

Making strategic decision on new manufacturing technology investments is difficult. New technologies are usually costly, affected by numerous factors, and the potential benefits are often hard to justify prior to implementation. Traditionally, decisions are made based upon intuition and past experience, sometimes with the support of multicriteria decision support tools. However, these approaches do not retain and reuse knowledge, thus managers are not able to make effective use of their knowledge and experience of previously completed projects to help with the prioritisation of future projects. In this paper, a hybrid intelligent system integrating case-based reasoning (CBR) and the fuzzy ARTMAP (FAM) neural network model is proposed to support managers in making timely and optimal manufacturing technology investment decisions. The system comprises a case library that holds the details of past technology investment projects. Each project proposal is characterised by a set of features determined by human experts. The FAM network is then employed to match the features of a new proposal with those from historical cases. Similar cases are retrieved and adapted, and information on these cases can be utilised as an input to prioritisation of new projects. A case study is conducted to illustrate the applicability and effectiveness of the approach, with the results presented and analysed. Implications of the proposed approach are discussed, and suggestions for further work are outlined. r 2005 Published by Elsevier B.V.
Miniaturized optical-based force sensors for tendon-driven robots

In this paper, an innovative sensor based on optoelectronic components and compliant frames for the measurement of the tendon tension is presented. With respect to conventional solutions for force sensing, like strain-gauge or Bragg-grating based force sensors, this sensor presents several advantages, mainly in terms of compactness, simplicity of the implementation and conditioning electronics. The proposed sensor exploits the properties of optoelectronic components with a narrow angle of view to measure the very small deformation of a compliant frame caused by the tendon tension. The sensor can be placed at the tendon ends as such as in any position along the tendon. The paper reports the basic working principle and a simplified procedure for the design of the sensor frame together with the results of an experimental testbench where a couple of the proposed sensors are use for the feedback control of a tendon-driven robotic joint.
Relationship between mental toughness and physical endurance.

This study tested the criterion validity of the inventory, Mental Toughness 48, by assessing the correlation between mental toughness and physical endurance for 41 male undergraduate sports students. A significant correlation of .34 was found between scores for overall mental toughness and the time a relative weight could be held suspended. Results support the criterion-related validity of the Mental Toughness 48.
Optical Analysis of Phosphor's Location for High-Power Light-Emitting Diodes

High-power-light-emitting-diode (LED) packaging is crucial for the development of solid-state lighting. Phosphor's location could affect the LED packaging performance such as light extraction and correlated color temperature (CCT). This paper systematically analyzes first the effects of phosphor's location on LED packaging performance. A two-light-source step computation method based on the Monte Carlo theory is developed, and five different optical structures are discussed. Results show that the location of phosphor has small impact on light extraction but could greatly affect CCT. Remote phosphor location presents higher light extraction than proximate phosphor location. However, the increase is slight, and too remote location could reduce light extraction. A convex phosphor layer has higher light extraction but lower yellow-blue ratio than a plane phosphor layer. Considering the significant variation of CCT, it is suggested that an optical structure with plane and remote phosphor location should be a suitable choice for LED packaging.
Micronutrients and pregnancy; effect of supplementation on pregnancy and pregnancy outcomes: a systematic review

INTRODUCTION
Every year more than 20 million infants are born with low birth weight worldwide. About 3.6 million infants die during the neonatal period. More than one third of child deaths are thought to be attributable to maternal and child under nutrition.


OBJECTIVES
To systematically review the effect of supplementing various combinations and types of micronutrients on the course and outcomes of pregnancy.


METHODS
Electronic search of Medline, Pub Med, Health Internetwork access to Research Initiative, and Google Scholar databases was conducted. Outcomes of interest were birth weight, low birth weight, small size for gestational age, prenatal mortality and neonatal mortality. After exclusion of irrelevant /incomplete ones, 17 out of 115 articles were considered for the final analysis.


FINDINGS
Majority of the articles reviewed favored the supplementation of micronutrients to pregnant mother. Some studies suggested calcium supplementation is associated with a significant protective benefit in the prevention of pre-eclampsia. The remaining articles reviewed, showed significant benefit of Multiple Micronutrients supplementation during pregnancy in reducing low birth weight, small for Gestational Age births as compared to the usual iron-folate supplements.


CONCLUSIONS
Supplying micronutrients, mainly multiple micronutrients have beneficial effect in reducing the risk of low birth weight and other complications. Further studies at various combination and doses of micronutrient supplements are recommended.
Willingness to Communicate and Action Control.

Being willing to communicate is part of becoming fluent in a second language, which often is the ultimate goal of L2 learners. Julius Kuhl’s theory of action control is introduced as an expansion of the conceptual framework for the study of Willingness to Communicate. Kuhl proposed three key concepts, preoccupation, volatility, and hesitation, which form part of the base from which WTC in the second language is built. In essence, we propose that a lack of WTC inside and outside the language classroom is related to tendencies for a disruption in action control. Using path analysis, we find support for the proposed model that also integrates perceived competence and communication anxiety. Implications for the trait and dynamic conceptions of WTC are discussed. 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Graph-Based Global Reasoning Networks

Globally modeling and reasoning over relations between regions can be beneficial for many computer vision tasks on both images and videos. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) excel at modeling local relations by convolution operations, but they are typically inefficient at capturing global relations between distant regions and require stacking multiple convolution layers. In this work, we propose a new approach for reasoning globally in which a set of features are globally aggregated over the coordinate space and then projected to an interaction space where relational reasoning can be efficiently computed. After reasoning, relation-aware features are distributed back to the original coordinate space for down-stream tasks. We further present a highly efficient instantiation of the proposed approach and introduce the Global Reasoning unit (GloRe unit) that implements the coordinate-interaction space mapping by weighted global pooling and weighted broadcasting, and the relation reasoning via graph convolution on a small graph in interaction space. The proposed GloRe unit is lightweight, end-to-end trainable and can be easily plugged into existing CNNs for a wide range of tasks. Extensive experiments show our GloRe unit can consistently boost the performance of state-of-the-art backbone architectures, including ResNet [15, 16], ResNeXt [33], SE-Net [18] and DPN [9], for both 2D and 3D CNNs, on image classification, semantic segmentation and video action recognition task.
Brain-brain integration in 2035: metaphysical and ethical implications

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to think ahead into the year 2035 and reflect on the ethical implications of brain-to-brain linking. Design/methodology/approach – Philosophical argument. Findings – It is quite likely that the direction of technological research today is heading toward a closer integration of mind and machine in 2035. What is interesting is that the integration also makes mind-mind or brain-brain integration possible too. There is nothing in principle that would prevent hooking up more than one brain to a machine, or connecting two or more brains together to harness their processing power to tackle a very complicated task. If that happens, the whole notion of what it is to be an individual and a self will have to be rethought. I have offered a way in which that can be done: Instead of viewing the self as being contained in a closed space traditionally defined by the skin, the self can expand outside of the skin and merge temporarily with other selves too. This also has profound implications on the notion of privacy, especially on how it is conceptualized and justified. Research limitations/implications – This research is limited to theoretical argumentation only. It relies on the current empirical and scientific investigations that are going on at the moment and provide ethical reflections on them. Practical implications – We need to anticipate technological innovations to be more proactive in deliberating and formulating policy and ethical guidelines; otherwise, ethicists will just muse after the fact, implying that there is nothing further to be done. Social implications – Brain-to-brain linking has tremendous social implications, so is the ethical reflection on the issue. Originality/value – Argument purporting to show the specific content in ethical guidelines on brain-to-brain interlinking based on the metaphysics of the self that is directly implicated by the technology has not been done before, according to the author’s best knowledge.
NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES DOES MENTORING REDUCE TURNOVER AND IMPROVE SKILLS OF NEW EMPLOYEES ? EVIDENCE FROM TEACHERS IN NEW YORK CITY

Mentoring has become an extremely popular policy for improving the retention and performance of new teachers, but we know little about its effects on teacher and student outcomes. I study the impact of mentoring in New York City, which adopted a nationally recognized mentoring program in 2004. I use detailed program data to examine the relationship between teacher and student outcomes and measures of mentoring quality, such as hours of mentoring received and the characteristics of mentors. Although assignment of teachers to mentors was non-random, I use instrumental variables and school fixed effects to address potential sources of bias. I find strong relationships between measures of mentoring quality and teachers' claims regarding the impact of mentors on their success in the classroom, but weaker evidence of effects on teacher absences, retention, and student achievement. The most consistent finding is that retention within a particular school is higher when a mentor has previous experience working in that school, suggesting that an important part of mentoring may be the provision of school specific knowledge. I also find evidence that student achievement in both reading and math were higher among teachers that received more hours of mentoring, supporting the notion that time spent working with a mentor does improve teaching skills. Jonah E. Rockoff Columbia University Graduate School of Business 3022 Broadway #603 New York, NY 10027-6903 and NBER jonah.rockoff@columbia.edu
What Determines Government Spending Multipliers

This paper studies how the effects of government spending vary with the economic environment. Using a panel of OECD countries, we identify fiscal shocks as residuals from an estimated spending rule and trace their macroeconomic impact under different conditions regarding the exchange rate regime, public indebtedness, and health of the financial system. The unconditional responses to a positive spending shock broadly confirm earlier findings. However, conditional responses differ systematically across exchange rate regimes, as real appreciation and external deficits occur mainly under currency pegs. We also find output and consumption multipliers to be unusually high during times of financial crisis. JEL Classification Numbers: E62, E63, F41
Ultraminiaturized High-Speed Permanent-Magnet Generators for Milliwatt-Level Power Generation

This paper presents the design, fabrication, and characterization of millimeter-scale rotary electromagnetic generators. The axial-flux synchronous machines consist of a three-phase microfabricated surface-wound copper coil and a multipole permanent-magnet (PM) rotor measuring 2 mm in diameter. Several machines with various geometries and numbers of magnetic poles and turns per pole are designed and compared. Moreover, the use of different PM materials is investigated. Multipole magnetic rotors are modeled using finite element analysis to analyze magnetic field distributions. In operation, the rotor is spun above the microfabricated stator coils using an off-the-shelf air-driven turbine. As a result of design choices, the generators present different levels of operating frequency and electrical output power. The four-pole six-turn/pole NdFeB generator exhibits up to 6.6 mWrms of ac electrical power across a resistive load at a rotational speed of 392 000 r/min. This milliwatt-scale power generation indicates the feasibility of such ultrasmall machines for low-power applications. [2008-0078].
Predictive analytics and data mining

Description: Put Predictive Analytics into Action Learn the basics of Predictive Analysis and Data Mining through an easy to understand conceptual framework and immediately practice the concepts learned using the open source RapidMiner tool. Whether you are brand new to Data Mining or working on your tenth project, this book will show you how to analyze data, uncover hidden patterns and relationships to aid important decisions and predictions. Data Mining has become an essential tool for any enterprise that collects, stores and processes data as part of its operations. This book is ideal for business users, data analysts, business analysts, business intelligence and data warehousing professionals and for anyone who wants to learn Data Mining. You'll be able to: 1. Gain the necessary knowledge of different data mining techniques, so that you can select the right technique for a given data problem and create a general purpose analytics process. 2. Get up and running fast with more than two dozen commonly used powerful algorithms for predictive analytics using practical use cases. 3. Implement a simple step-by-step process for predicting an outcome or discovering hidden relationships from the data using RapidMiner, an open source GUI based data mining tool Predictive analytics and Data Mining techniques covered: Exploratory Data Analysis, Visualization, Decision trees, Rule induction, k-Nearest Neighbors, Naïve Bayesian, Artificial Neural Networks, Support Vector machines, Ensemble models, Bagging, Boosting, Random Forests, Linear regression, Logistic regression, Association analysis using Apriori and FP Growth, K-Means clustering, Density based clustering, Self Organizing Maps, Text Mining, Time series forecasting, Anomaly detection and Feature selection. Implementation files can be downloaded from the book companion site
Disease activity score-driven therapy versus routine care in patients with recent-onset active rheumatoid arthritis: data from the GUEPARD trial and ESPOIR cohort

OBJECTIVES
To compare the efficacy of disease activity score in 28 joints (DAS28ESR)-driven therapy with anti-tumour necrosis factor (patients from the GUEPARD trial) and routine care in patients with recent-onset rheumatoid arthritis (patients of the ESPOIR cohort).


RESULTS
After matching GUEPARD and ESPOIR patients on the basis of a propensity score and a 1:2 ratio, at baseline all patients had comparable demographic characteristics, rheumatoid factor, anticyclic citrullinated peptide antibody positivity and clinical disease activity parameters: erythrocyte sedimentation rate, C-reactive protein, mean DAS (6.26±0.87), Sharp/van der Heijde radiographic score (SHS), health assessment questionnaire (HAQ). Disease duration was longer in GUEPARD patients (5.6±4.6 vs 3.5±2.0 months, p<0.001). After 1 year, the percentage of patients in remission with an HAQ (<0.5) and an absence of radiological progression was higher in the tight control group (32.3% vs 10.2%, p=0.011) as well as the percentage of patients in low DAS with an HAQ (<0.5) and an absence of radiological progression (36.1% vs 18.9%, p=0.045). However, there was no difference in the decrease in DAS, nor in the percentage of EULAR (good and moderate), ACR20, ACR50 and ACR70 responses. More patients in the tight control group had an HAQ below 0.5 (70.2% vs 45.2%, p=0.005). Overall, pain, patient and physician assessment and fatigue decreased more in the tight control group. The mean SHS progression was similar in the two groups as was the percentage of patients without progression.


CONCLUSIONS
In patients with recent onset active rheumatoid arthritis, a tight control of disease activity allows more patients to achieve remission without disability and radiographic progression.
Can organic farming help to reduce N-losses?

This study is in two parts. In the first part, nitrogen (N) losses per unit of milk and meat in Danish conventional and organic pig and dairy farming were compared on the basis of farm data. In the second part, organic and conventional dairy farming were compared in detail, using modelling. N-surpluses at different livestock densities, fodder intensities, and soil types were simulated. Finally, simulated N-surpluses were used in national scenarios for conversion to organic dairy farming in Denmark. In Part one, pig farming was found to have a higher N-efficiency than dairy farming. Organic pig production had a lower N-efficiency and a higher N-surplus per kg meat than conventional pig production. The possibilities to reduce N-loss by conversion to organic pig production therefore appear to be poor. Organic dairy farming had a higher N-efficiency and a lower N-surplus per kg milk than conventional dairy farming. Conversion from conventional to organic dairy farming may therefore reduce N-losses. In Part two, a positive correlation between livestock density and N-surplus ha-1 was found for dairy farming. For all simulated livestock densities, fodder feeding intensities and soil types, organic systems showed a lower N-surplus per unit of milk produced than conventional systems. National scenarios for dairy farming showed that the present Danish milk production could be achieved with a 24% lower total N-surplus if converted from intensive conventional farming to extensive organic farming. At the same time, N-surplus ha-1 and N-surplus (t milk)-1 would be lowered by 50% and 25% respectively. Changing from intensive to extensive conventional dairy farming with a livestock density equal to that in the organic scenario resulted in a reduction in N-surplus ha-1 of 15%. It was concluded that a reduction in total N-loss from agriculture is possible by converting from conventional to organic dairy farming but at the cost of either lower production on the present dairy farm area, or the current production on a substantially larger area.