LLukas22/scidocs huggingface dataset:
The relationship between macular pigment and visual performance

This study was designed to assess whether macular pigment optical density (MPOD) is associated with visual performance. One hundred and forty-two young healthy subjects were recruited. Macular pigment optical density and visual performance were assessed by psychophysical tests including best corrected visual acuity (BCVA), mesopic and photopic contrast sensitivity, glare sensitivity, photostress recovery time (PRT). Measures of central visual function, including BCVA and contrast sensitivity, were positively associated with MPOD (p<0.05, for all). Photostress recovery and glare sensitivity were unrelated to MPOD (p>0.05). A longitudinal, placebo-controlled and randomized supplementation trial will be required to ascertain whether augmentation of MPOD can influence visual performance.
The meaning of style? Style reflexivity among Danish high school youths

In much of the cultural theory literature on youth, style has been said to have started as an expression of subcultural class and transformed into individualized identity projects in neo-tribal sociality. This article discusses young, Danish consumers' discourses on style and style practice. The key characteristic of their style practice is the reflexivity they bring to bear on their negotiation of global style expression in local identity projects. This style reflexivity manifests itself in two themes: style switching and style code reflexivity. The article shows that consumers' reflexivity of style consumption constitutes not only a ‘folk theory’ of consumption that reflects the academic and popular vernacular of style, but also postmodern consumer research scholarship's mode of expression about style. How individual consumers handle style in a reflexive manner through folk theories of the market is unexplored in previous research on the consumption of style. 
 
 
 
 
Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Instructional functions in large, under-resourced science classes: Perspectives of South African teachers

Following the implementation of the new outcomes-based Curriculum 2005, teacher competence in teaching reform-based science in large classes is one of the challenges in the continuing reform of South Africa's education system. Most school teachers have little experience, meagre training and are operating in large and poorly resourced science classrooms. As part of the understanding of the teaching and learning that takes place in such contexts, this study focuses on science teachers' perspectives on their current classroom practices. Data collected through surveys and questionnaires to participating science teachers revealed their perspectives of the reality of teaching large under-resourced science classes and the typical patterns of classroom teaching. The essential components of their instructional functions are identified together with the implications these have for teacher education.
ATM Location Problem and Cash Management in Automated Teller Machines

Automated Teller Machines (ATMs) can be considered among one of the most important service facilities in the banking industry. The investment in ATMs and the impact on the banking industry is growing steadily in every part of the world. The banks take into consideration many factors like safety, convenience, visibility, and cost in order to determine the optimum locations of ATMs. Today, ATMs are not only available in bank branches but also at retail locations. Another important factor is the cash management in ATMs. A cash demand model for every ATM is needed in order to have an efficient cash management system. This forecasting model is based on historical cash demand data which is highly related to the ATMs location. So, the location and the cash management problem should be considered together. This paper provides a general review on studies, efforts and development in ATMs location and cash management problem. Keywords—ATM location problem, cash management problem, ATM cash replenishment problem, literature review in ATMs.
Non-pharmacological, multicomponent group therapy in patients with degenerative dementia: a 12-month randomzied, controlled trial

BACKGROUND
Currently available pharmacological and non-pharmacological treatments have shown only modest effects in slowing the progression of dementia. Our objective was to assess the impact of a long-term non-pharmacological group intervention on cognitive function in dementia patients and on their ability to carry out activities of daily living compared to a control group receiving the usual care.


METHODS
A randomized, controlled, single-blind longitudinal trial was conducted with 98 patients (follow-up: n = 61) with primary degenerative dementia in five nursing homes in Bavaria, Germany. The highly standardized intervention consisted of motor stimulation, practice in activities of daily living, and cognitive stimulation (acronym MAKS). It was conducted in groups of ten patients led by two therapists for 2 hours, 6 days a week for 12 months. Control patients received treatment as usual. Cognitive function was assessed using the cognitive subscale of the Alzheimer's Disease Assessment Scale (ADAS-Cog), and the ability to carry out activities of daily living using the Erlangen Test of Activities of Daily Living (E-ADL test) at baseline and after 12 months.


RESULTS
Of the 553 individuals screened, 119 (21.5%) were eligible and 98 (17.7%) were ultimately included in the study. At 12 months, the results of the per protocol analysis (n = 61) showed that cognitive function and the ability to carry out activities of daily living had remained stable in the intervention group but had decreased in the control patients (ADAS-Cog: adjusted mean difference: -7.7, 95% CI -14.0 to -1.4, P = 0.018, Cohen's d = 0.45; E-ADL test: adjusted mean difference: 3.6, 95% CI 0.7 to 6.4, P = 0.015, Cohen's d = 0.50). The effect sizes for the intervention were greater in the subgroup of patients (n = 50) with mild to moderate disease (ADAS-Cog: Cohen's d = 0.67; E-ADL test: Cohen's d = 0.69).


CONCLUSIONS
A highly standardized, non-pharmacological, multicomponent group intervention conducted in a nursing-home setting was able to postpone a decline in cognitive function in dementia patients and in their ability to carry out activities of daily living for at least 12 months.


TRIAL REGISTRATION
http://www.isrctn.com Identifier: ISRCTN87391496.
User stories don't help users: introducing persona stories

User stories are one of the most popular alternatives to traditional user requirement specifications (see Figure 1). But despite their promising name, user stories are not about – and don’t necessarily help – users at all. In most cases, user stories are written about roles that users adopt and take no account of the needs and behaviours of real users. Were that not indictment enough, user stories suffer from demonstrable flaws in structure and are often written by the wrong people at the wrong time.
Raman spectroscopy of the interlayer shear mode in few-layer MoS2 flakes

Related Articles Modification of the optical reflectance spectra of epitaxial gallium arsenide by weak magnetic fields J. Appl. Phys. 112, 073513 (2012) Nanocluster Si sensitized Er luminescence: Excitation mechanisms and critical factors for population inversion Appl. Phys. Lett. 101, 141907 (2012) Hyperspectral optical near-field imaging: Looking graded photonic crystals and photonic metamaterials in color Appl. Phys. Lett. 101, 141108 (2012) Photonic crystal fabrication in lithium niobate via pattern transfer through wet and dry etched chromium mask J. Appl. Phys. 112, 074303 (2012) Optically induced two-dimensional photonic quasicrystal lattices in iron-doped lithium niobate crystal with an amplitude mask Appl. Phys. Lett. 101, 141104 (2012)
The Scottish perinatal neuropathology study: clinicopathological correlation in early neonatal deaths.

BACKGROUND
A proportion of neonatal deaths from asphyxia have been shown to be associated with pre-existing brain injury.


OBJECTIVES
(a) To compare the epidemiology of infants displaying signs of birth asphyxia with those not showing signs; (b) to examine the neuropathology and determine if possible the timing of brain insult comparing asphyxiated with non-asphyxiated infants; (c) to compare the clinical features of those born with birth asphyxia with and without pre-labour damage.


METHODS
Over a two year period, all 22 Scottish delivery units collected clinical details on early neonatal deaths. Requests for post mortem included separate requests for detailed neuropathological examination of the brain. Infants were classified into two groups: birth asphyxia and non-birth asphyxia. Clinicopathological correlation was used to attempt to define the time of brain insult.


RESULTS
Detailed clinical data were available on 137 of 174 early neonatal deaths that met the inclusion criteria. Seventy of 88 parents who had agreed to post mortem examination consented to a detailed examination of additional samples from the brain; in 53 of these cases the infant was born in an asphyxiated condition. All asphyxiated and encephalopathic infants, 38% of mature and 52% of preterm infants with features of birth asphyxia but without encephalopathy, and only one of 12 infants without any signs of birth asphyxia showed damage consistent with onset before the start of labour.


CONCLUSIONS
In a large proportion of neonatal deaths, brain injury predates the onset of labour. This is more common in infants born in an asphyxiated condition.
Changes of neural activity correlate with the severity of cortical ischemia in patients with unilateral major cerebral artery occlusion.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE
In major cerebral arterial steno-occlusive diseases, there can be remarkably decreased hemodynamic reserve without marked neurological impairments. In such settings, it is not known whether the neural activity is well maintained or disturbed according to the severity of cerebral ischemia. The present study was therefore undertaken to examine the neural activity under mild cerebral ischemia resulting from major cerebral arterial occlusion.


METHODS
Seven patients with minor neurological impairment as well as either unilateral internal carotid artery or middle cerebral artery occlusion were studied. The severity of the cortical ischemia was assessed by measuring regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) with positron emission tomography. The change in neural activity in the ischemic brain was then evaluated by means of somatosensory evoked magnetic field with magnetoencephalography.


RESULTS
The rCBF in the primary sensory area and the strength of the initial component of somatosensory evoked magnetic field (N20 m) were significantly reduced (P<0.01) and the second component (P30 m) was significantly augmented (P<0.05) in the lesioned cerebral hemisphere as compared with the nonlesioned hemisphere. The asymmetry indexes for N20 m were positively correlated (r=0.78) and those for P30 m were inversely correlated (r=-0.92) with asymmetry indexes for rCBF.


CONCLUSIONS
In patients with either unilateral internal carotid artery or middle cerebral artery occlusion and minor neural impairments, there was a reduction of afferent signal and an augmentation of the secondary response of the neurons in the primary sensory area. This showed correlation with the severity of cortical ischemia.
CNN for license plate motion deblurring

In this work we explore the previously proposed approach of direct blind deconvolution and denoising with convolutional neural networks (CNN) in a situation where the blur kernels are partially constrained. We focus on blurred images from a real-life traffic surveillance system, on which we, for the first time, demonstrate that neural networks trained on artificial data provide superior reconstruction quality on real images compared to traditional blind deconvolution methods. The training data is easy to obtain by blurring sharp photos from a target system with a very rough approximation of the expected blur kernels, thereby allowing custom CNNs to be trained for a specific application (image content and blur range). Additionally, we evaluate the behavior and limits of the CNNs with respect to blur direction range and length.
The Influence of Ad-atom Adsorption on Reaction Rates and Mechanisms

The sections in this article are 
 
 
Introduction 
Metal Ad-atoms Deposited in the Underpotential Region 
Electrocatalysis by Ad-atoms 
Reactions Catalyzed by Ad-atoms 
Reduction of Oxygen 
Reduction of Nitro and Nitroso Compounds 
Oxidation of Small Organic Molecules 
Oxidation of Bigger Organic Molecules 
Reversible Redox Reactions 
Inorganic Electrochemical Reactions 
 
 
Conclusion
Association of Positive Transection Margins with Gastric Cancer Survival and Local Recurrence

To examine the association between positive resection margins and survival and local recurrence in patients with gastric cancer undergoing resection with curative intent. Patients who underwent curative intent resection for gastric carcinoma from 1985 to 2010 were identified from a prospectively maintained database. Positive margins were defined as disease present at the line of luminal transection. Clinicopathological features and outcome of patients undergoing gastrectomy with negative and positive margins were compared. Among 2384 patients undergoing curative intent resection, 108 (4.5 %) had positive margins. Positive margins were associated with higher American Joint Committee on Cancer (AJCC) stage, T stage, N stage, median number of positive nodes, diffuse Lauren type, and poorly differentiated tumors. Treatment of positive margins consisted of: observation (39 %), chemoradiotherapy (26 %), chemotherapy (20 %), repeat resection (10 %), radiotherapy (4 %), and unknown (1 %). Multivariate analysis of the entire cohort demonstrated margin status, T stage, N stage, grade, and perineural invasion to be independent predictors of survival. Margin status was an independent predictor of survival in patients with ≤3 positive nodes or T1–2 disease but was not in patients with >3 positive nodes or T3–4 disease. Local recurrence occurred in 16 % of patients with a positive margin. We identified no factors predictive of local recurrence in patients with positive margins. Positive resection margin is associated with advanced AJCC stage and aggressive tumor biology but remains an independent predictor of worse survival. The significance of a positive margin in gastric cancer is confined to patients with nontransmural disease and/or limited nodal involvement.
Shoe-last design innovation for better shoe fitting

Shoe-last, a 3D mould used for making footwear, influence the shape, size and fitting of footwear. Current shoe-last design software has focused mainly on reverse engineering of existing shoe-last and modification. Shoe-last designers have generally preferred to design the shoe-last manually due to limitations of design software. In order to solve these problems, a new software based on CATIA platform was developed. The shoe-last model is based on foot shape measurement data and foot biomechanics. Using the existing shoe-last design standards and the sections from existing shoe-lasts, design tables and relationship equations enables the design of shoe-last with different toe type, heel height and custom shoe-last. The design includes comfort and fit aspects as well as design aspect, therefore enables design of aesthetical comfortable shoes. Since the design can be modified instantaneously, the designers could visualize design changes leading to a reduction in shoe-last design cycle. 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Iterative and incremental developments. a brief history

Although many view iterative and incremental development as a modern practice, its application dates as far back as the mid-1950s. Prominent software-engineering thought leaders from each succeeding decade supported IID practices, and many large projects used them successfully. These practices may have differed in their details, but all had a common theme-to avoid a single-pass sequential, document-driven, gated-step approach.
High performance comparison-based sorting algorithm on many-core GPUs

Sorting is a kernel algorithm for a wide range of applications. We present a new algorithm, GPU-Warpsort, to perform comparison-based parallel sort on Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). It mainly consists of a bitonic sort followed by a merge sort. Our algorithm achieves high performance by efficiently mapping the sorting tasks to GPU architectures. Firstly, we take advantage of the synchronous execution of threads in a warp to eliminate the barriers in bitonic sorting network. We also provide sufficient homogeneous parallel operations for all the threads within a warp to avoid branch divergence. Furthermore, we implement the merge sort efficiently by assigning each warp independent pairs of sequences to be merged and by exploiting totally coalesced global memory accesses to eliminate the bandwidth bottleneck. Our experimental results indicate that GPU-Warpsort works well on different kinds of input distributions, and it achieves up to 30% higher performance than previous optimized comparison-based GPU sorting algorithm on input sequences with millions of elements.
Predicting player disengagement and first purchase with event-frequency based data representation

In the game industry, especially for free to play games, player retention and purchases are important issues. There have been several approaches investigated towards predicting them by players' behaviours during game sessions. However, most current methods are only available for specific games because the data representations utilised are usually game specific. This work intends to use frequency of game events as data representations to predict both players' disengagement from game and the decisions of their first purchases. This method is able to provide better generality because events exist in every game and no knowledge of any event but their frequency is needed. In addition, this event frequency based method will also be compared with a recent work by Runge et al. [1] in terms of disengagement prediction.
Z3: An Efficient SMT Solver

Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) problem is a decision problem for logical first order formulas with respect to combinations of background theories such as: arithmetic, bit-vectors, arrays, and uninterpreted functions. Z3 is a new and efficient SMT Solver freely available from Microsoft Research. It is used in various software verification and analysis applications.
Discourse Topics and Metaphors

Using metaphor-annotated material that is sufficiently representative of the topical composition of a similar-length document in a large background corpus, we show that words expressing a discourse-wide topic of discussion are less likely to be metaphorical than other words in a document. Our results suggest that to harvest metaphors more effectively, one is advised to consider words that do not represent a discourse topic. Traditionally, metaphor detectors use the observation that a metaphorically used item creates a local incongruity because there is a violation of a selectional restriction, such as providing a non-vehicle object to the verb derail in Protesters derailed the conference. Current state of art in metaphor detection therefore tends to be “localistic” – the distributional profile of the target word in its immediate grammatical or collocational context in a background corpus or a database like WordNet is used to determine metaphoricity (Mason, 2004; Krishnakumaran and Zhu, 2007; Birke and Sarkar, 2006; Gedigian et al., 2006; Fass, 1991). However, some theories of metaphor postulate certain features of metaphors that connect it to the surrounding text beyond the small grammatical or proximal locality. For example, for Kittay (1987) metaphor is a discourse phenomenon; although the minimal metaphoric unit is a clause, often much larger chunks of text constitute a metaphor. Consider, for example, the TRAIN metaphor in the following excerpt from a Sunday Times article on 20 September 1992: Thatcher warned EC leaders to stop their endless round of summits and take notice of their own people. “There is a fear that the European train will thunder forward, laden with its customary cargo of gravy, towards a destination neither wished for nor understood by electorates. But the train can be stopped,” she said. In the example above, the quotation is not in itself a metaphor, as there is no indication that something other than the actual train is being discussed (and so no local incongruities exist). Only when situated in the context prepared by the first sentence (and indeed the rest of the article), the train imagery becomes a metaphor. According to Kittay, a metaphor occurs when a semantic field is used to discuss a different content domain. The theory therefore predicts that a metaphorically used semantic domain would be offtopic in the given document. Although a single document can have singular, idiosyncratic topics, it is likelier to discuss a mix of topics that are typical of the discourse of which it is part. We therefore derive the following hypothesis: Words in a given document that represent a common topic of discussion in a corpus of relevant documents would be predominantly non-metaphorical. That is, a smaller share of metaphorically used words in a document would fall in such topical words than the share of topical words in the document. We test this hypothesis in the current article.
Clinical and Procedural Predictors of Outcomes From the Endovascular Treatment of Posterior Circulation Strokes.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE
Patients with posterior circulation strokes have been excluded from recent randomized endovascular stroke trials. We reviewed the recent multicenter experience with endovascular treatment of posterior circulation strokes to identify the clinical, radiographic, and procedural predictors of successful recanalization and good neurological outcomes.


METHODS
We performed a multicenter retrospective analysis of consecutive patients with posterior circulation strokes, who underwent thrombectomy with stent retrievers or primary aspiration thrombectomy (including A Direct Aspiration First Pass Technique [ADAPT] approach). We correlated clinical and radiographic outcomes with demographic, clinical, and technical characteristics.


RESULTS
A total of 100 patients were included in the final analysis (mean age, 63.5±14.2 years; mean admission National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale score, 19.2±8.2). Favorable clinical outcome at 3 months (modified Rankin Scale score ≤2) was achieved in 35% of patients. Successful recanalization and shorter time from stroke onset to the start of the procedure were significant predictors of favorable clinical outcome at 90 days. Stent retriever and aspiration thrombectomy as primary treatment approaches showed comparable procedural and clinical outcomes. None of the baseline advanced imaging modalities (magnetic resonance imaging, computed tomographic perfusion, or computed tomography angiography assessment of collaterals) showed superiority in selecting patients for thrombectomy.


CONCLUSIONS
Time to the start of the procedure is an important predictor of clinical success after thrombectomy in patients with posterior circulation strokes. Both stent retriever and aspiration thrombectomy as primary treatment approaches are effective in achieving successful recanalization.