Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Improving ethnic monitoring for telephone-based healthcare: a conversation analytic study

Objectives Medical and healthcare organisations—including the national cancer support and helpline organisation that is the subject of this study—are expected to collect and monitor information about the ethnicity of their client populations. Information about ethnicity is important for a variety of reasons, including monitoring need and targeting healthcare services appropriately. Previous survey and interview research has suggested that collecting ethnicity data from service users can be incomplete and of variable quality—pointing to a need for an improved understanding of the (interactional) difficulties involved when call-handlers ask callers about their ethnicity. Design This study analyses a corpus of real-life audio-recorded calls to a national cancer helpline in the UK, focusing on the way that call-handlers collect the ethnic monitoring data. Setting A major national cancer helpline in the UK. Participants A sample of 273 recorded calls were recorded, of which 267 were frontline calls in which call-handlers are expected to ask the ethnicity monitoring question. Results Findings suggest that caller uncertainty about how to answer the question, resistance to answering and call-handler presumption can compromise the effectiveness of ethnic monitoring. It is likely to be improved by changing how the ethnicity monitoring question is asked. Changes include avoiding open question formats to ease caller uncertainty; offering callers a rationale (account) for the question to minimise resistance and confirming the accuracy of the ethnic category recorded. Conclusions We recommend that telephone-based healthcare personnel avoid asking the ethnicity monitoring question in an ‘open’ format; instead, a question containing a (short) standardised list can assist callers in responding. A training tool has been developed that applies this and other findings, with a view to improving ethnic monitoring.
High-Resolution Intracranial Pressure Burden and Outcome in Subarachnoid Hemorrhage

Background and Purpose— Intracranial pressure (ICP) control is a therapeutic target in patients with aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage, although only a limited number of studies assessed its course and effect on outcome. Pressure–time dose (PTDICP) is a method to quantify the burden and the time spent above a defined threshold of ICP. PTDICP or its relationship with outcome has never been evaluated in aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage. Methods— Analysis of data prospectively collected from aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage patients admitted to Neurointensive Care Unit. Monitored data, including intraparenchymal ICP, were digitally recorded minute-by-minute in the first 7 days. PTDICP (mm Hg h) was computed using 4 predefined thresholds (15, 20, 25, and 30 mm Hg). Outcome was assessed through Extended Glasgow Outcome Scale at hospital discharge and at 6 months. Results— Fifty-five patients were enrolled. Forty-two patients (76%) presented with a poor clinical grade. Overall, mortality was 17% at hospital discharge and 34% at 6 months. Half of patients required extensive therapy to control high ICP during day 1. Median ICP was 10 mm Hg (4–75), whereas median PTDICP15, PTDICP20, PTDICP25, PTDICP30 were, respectively, 13, 4, 2, and 1 mm Hg h. We observed an association between mortality at hospital discharge and higher level of PTDICP using 20, 25, and 30 mm Hg as thresholds and between exposure to a moderate-level PTDICP30 and unfavorable long-term outcome. Conclusions— PTDICP may better define one of the insults that the brain suffers after aneurysmal rupture, and exposure to moderate PTDICP30 was significant prognostic factor of 6-month unfavorable outcome.
The coherence function in blind source separation of convolutive mixtures of non-stationary signals

We propose a novel performance criteria and update mechanism for the blind decorrelation of an array of sensor measurements into independent sources, assuming each sensor measures a different convolutive mixture of statistically independent non-stationary sources. Specifically, the criteria is the sum of the magnitude squared coherence functions between all possible distinct pairs of outputs produced by a matrix of adaptable filters operating on the sensor measurements in the frequency domain. We then derive an efficient overlap-save online update equation based on stochastic gradient descent and recursive estimation of the coherence functions. We demonstrate separation within fractions of a second and convergence within a few seconds on real room recordings. We attribute this speed to the normalization and recursive estimates of the coherence functions.
Why Does It Feel Good To Act Like an Extravert

Research into enacted personality provides a novel perspective on the tendency for extraverted individuals to experience high levels of positive affect. Several studies now show that behaving in an extraverted way – thereby enacting an extraverted ‘personality state’ – is sufficient for elevating levels of positive affect. A question that remains, however, is why extraverted behavior has this robust impact on affective experience. In this paper, I consider several potential explanatory mechanisms for this phenomenon, including reward- and goal-related processes, as well as physical/bodily processes underpinning affective experience. Future research addressing these explanations may facilitate greater understanding of this intriguing phenomenon, along with its potential theoretical and practical implications.
Association of cord blood cytokine production with wheezy infants in the first year of life

BACKGROUND The atopic march hypothesis suggests that infants with eczema are at increased risk of asthma. Others argue that eczema is not a risk factor for asthma unless there is also sensitization or early wheezing. OBJECTIVE To examine the role of infantile eczema as a predictor of risk of childhood asthma, while allowing for the effects of early wheeze, sensitization, and sex, both as independent effects and possible effect modifiers. METHODS A total of 620 infants with a family history of allergic disease was recruited. Eczema and wheeze was prospectively documented to 2 years of age. Sensitization was determined by skin prick tests at 6, 12, and 24 months to 6 common food and inhalant allergens. Interviews were conducted at 6 and 7 years to ascertain current asthma. RESULTS Sufficiently complete data were available for 403 children. Eczema within the first 2 years of life was clearly associated with an increased risk of childhood asthma in boys (adjusted odds ratio, 2.45; 95% CI, 1.31-4.46) but not in girls (odds ratio, 0.88; 95% CI, 0.43-1.77; P for interaction = .031) even with adjustment for the effects of early allergic sensitization and wheeze. If these relationships are causal, an intervention to prevent eczema in boys might reduce the incidence of childhood asthma by as much as 28%. CONCLUSION Eczema in the first 2 years of life is associated with an increased risk of childhood asthma in boys, but there is no evidence of this in girls.
HSP70 Expression in Human Trophoblast Cells Exposed to Different 1.8 GHz Mobile Phone Signals

Abstract Franzellitti, S. , Valbonesi, P., Contin, A. , Biondi, C. and Fabbri, E. HSP70 Expression in Human Trophoblast Cells Exposed to Different 1.8 GHz Mobile Phone Signals. Radiat. Res. 170, 488–497 (2008). The heat-shock proteins (HSPs) are important cellular stress markers and have been proposed as candidates to infer biological effects of high-frequency electromagnetic fields (EMFs). In the current study, HSP70 gene and protein expression were evaluated in cells of the human trophoblast cell line HTR-8/SVneo after prolonged exposure (4 to 24 h) to 1.8 GHz continuous-wave (CW) and different GSM signals (GSM-217Hz and GSM-Talk) to assess the possible effects of time and modulation schemes on cell responses. Inducible HSP70 protein expression was not modified by high-frequency EMFs under any condition tested. The inducible HSP70A, HSP70B and the constitutive HSC70 transcripts did not change in cells exposed to high-frequency EMFs with the different modulation schemes. Instead, levels of the inducible HSP70C transcript were significantly enhanced after 24 h exposure to GSM-217Hz signals and reduced after 4 and 16 h exposure to GSM-Talk signals. As in other cell systems, in HTR-8/SVneo cells the response to high-frequency EMFs was detected at the mRNA level after exposure to amplitude-modulated GSM signals. The present results suggest that the expression analysis for multiple transcripts, though encoding the same or similar protein products, can be highly informative and may account for subtle changes not detected at the protein level.
Adaptive Hierarchical Voltage Control of a DFIG-Based Wind Power Plant for a Grid Fault

This paper proposes an adaptive hierarchical voltage control scheme of a doubly-fed induction generator (DFIG)-based wind power plant (WPP) that can secure more reserve of reactive power (Q) in the WPP against a grid fault. To achieve this, each DFIG controller employs an adaptive reactive power to voltage (Q-V) characteristic. The proposed adaptive Q-V characteristic is temporally modified depending on the available Q capability of a DFIG; it is dependent on the distance from a DFIG to the point of common coupling (PCC). The proposed characteristic secures more Q reserve in the WPP than the fixed one. Furthermore, it allows DFIGs to promptly inject up to the Q limit, thereby improving the PCC voltage support. To avert an overvoltage after the fault clearance, washout filters are implemented in the WPP and DFIG controllers; they can prevent a surplus Q injection after the fault clearance by eliminating the accumulated values in the proportional-integral controllers of both controllers during the fault. Test results demonstrate that the scheme can improve the voltage support capability during the fault and suppress transient overvoltage after the fault clearance under scenarios of various system and fault conditions; therefore, it helps ensure grid resilience by supporting the voltage stability.
Comprehensive health care: dilemmas and challenges in nursing.

OBJECTIVE this article discusses comprehensive care as a guiding tenet of the Brazilian Unified Health System (SUS), outlining health care practices, especially nursing, and the relationships built by subjects in action by means of different knowledge. METHODS this is a theoretical reflection that aims to propose dimensions of analysis (access to services, reception, links, lines of care, accountability, and responsiveness), with an emphasis on the dilemmas and challenges of nursing. The proposed dimensions analyze the production of care and its political and technical aspects. CONCLUSION care should be the focus of all health care work, bearing in mind that intervention for technological action of each profession goes beyond the core of isolated knowledge, as is the case of nursing, which is connected to other professional practices, and can peruse other territories that operate through relational technologies, entering into the world of the needs of users and families.
Solid-Phase Contact Assay That Uses a lux-Marked Nitrosomonas europaea Reporter Strain To Estimate Toxicity of Bioavailable Linear Alkylbenzene Sulfonate in Soil

ABSTRACT Information about in situ toxicity of the bioavailable pools of adsorptive soil pollutants is a prerequisite for proper ecological risk assessment in contaminated soils. Such toxicity data may be obtained by assays allowing for direct exposure of introduced test microorganisms to the toxicants, as they appear in solid solution equilibria in the natural soil. We describe a novel sensitive solid-phase contact assay for in situ toxicity testing of soil pollutants based on a recombinant bioluminescent reporter strain of Nitrosomonas europaea. A slurry of the reporter strain and soil sample was shaken for 1 h, after which bioluminescence was measured either directly (soil slurry protocol) or in the supernatant obtained after centrifugation (soil extract protocol). The assay was validated for both protocols by using linear alkylbenzene sulfonate (LAS) as a toxic and adsorptive model compound in the soil samples. Interestingly, LAS showed the same toxicity to the reporter strain with either soil incubation (both protocols) or pure culture, suggesting that adsorbed LAS pools contributed to the observed toxicity. The solid-phase contact assay that used the reporter strain of lux-marked N. europaea was slightly more sensitive for the detection of LAS toxicity in soil than activity-based assays targeting indigenous nitrifiers and much more sensitive than assays targeting indigenous heterotrophic microbes. We conclude that the new solid-phase contact assay, which is based on direct interaction of the test microorganisms with bioavailable pools of the toxicants in soil, provides a most sensitive and relevant method for evaluating the in situ toxicity and assessing the risks of soil contaminants.
Goal generation from beliefs based on trust and distrust

We propose three alternative belief change operators to be used in a goal generation and adoption framework. The originality of these operators is that the trustworthiness of a source depends not only on the degree of trust but also on an independent degree of distrust. Explicitly taking distrust into account allows us to mark a clear difference between the distinct notions of negative trust and insufficient trust. More precisely, it is possible, unlike in approaches where only trust is accounted for, to "weigh" differently information from helpful, malicious, unknown, or neutral sources.
Can education contribute to coexistence and reconciliation? Religious and national ceremonies in bilingual Palestinian-Jewish schools in Israel.

This article considers the potential of educational efforts, specifically school commemorative ceremonies, to help overcome long-standing inter-ethnic conflict. We examine ethnographic data from commemorative ceremonies in 2 newly created bilingual Jewish-Palestinian schools in Israel. We focus in particular on the role of 2 different ritual ceremonial events which articulate both the struggle and attempts at reconciliation between Jewish and Palestinian Israelis. The first is the Hanukkah-Idel Fiter-Christmas ceremony, which addresses mostly cultural religious issues, and the second is the events which correspond in the Jewish Israeli calendar to Memorial Day, which is strongly connected to national issues. The analysis shows how both the macro sociopolitical context as well as micro aspects in the development of working relations within the two communities in conflict, seriously influence the potential of school ceremonies to serve coexistence and reconciliation efforts.
Integrating Management Systems and Occupational Health and Safety Regulation

‘Best practice’ in occupational health and safety (OHS) performance needs to recognize the declining emphasis that is being placed on the capacity of the regulatory state. This article argues that there are more appropriate forms of OHS regulation than direct command and control. The development of a systems-based approach acknowledges the importance of continuous improvement, benchmarking, and internal self-regulation. In order to encourage a systems-based approach, it is suggested that some form of persuasion by coercion by means of law remains a necessary condition for the establishment of an incentive-based ‘voluntary’ regime.
Two Methods to Improve Confidence Scores for Lexicon-Free Word Spotting in Handwritten Text

Two methods are presented to improve word confidence scores for Line-Level Query-by-String Lexicon-Free Keyword Spotting (KWS) in handwritten text images. The first one approaches true relevance probabilities by means of computations directly carried out on character lattices obtained from the lines images considered. The second method uses the same character lattices, but it obtains relevance scores by first computing frame-level character sequence scores which resemble the word posteriorgrams used in previous approaches for lexicon-based KWS. The first method results from a formal probabilistic derivation, which allow us to better understand and further develop the underlying ideas. The second one is less formal but, according with experiments presented in the paper, it obtains almost identical results with much lower computational cost. Moreover, in contrast with the first method, the second one allows to directly obtain accurate bounding boxes for the spotted words.
Efficacy and Safety of Dexmedetomidine for Postoperative Delirium in Adult Cardiac Surgery on Cardiopulmonary Bypass

Background Delirium after cardiac surgery is associated with serious long-term negative outcomes and high costs. The aim of this study is to evaluate neurobehavioral, hemodynamic, and sedative characteristics of dexmedetomidine, compared with the current postoperative sedative protocol (remifentanil) in patients undergoing open heart surgery with cardiopulmonary bypass (CPB). Methods One hundred and forty two eligible patients who underwent cardiac surgery on CPB between April 2012 and March 2013 were randomly divided into two groups. Patients received either dexmedetomidine (range, 0.2 to 0.8 μg/kg/hr; n=67) or remifentanil (range, 1,000 to 2,500 μg/hr, n=75). The primary end point was the prevalence of delirium estimated daily via the confusion assessment method for intensive care. Results When the delirium incidence was compared with the dexmedetomidine group (6 of 67 patients, 8.96%) and the remifentanil group (17 of 75 patients, 22.67%) it was found to be significantly less in the dexmedetomidine group (p<0.05). There were no statistically significant differences between two groups in the extubation time, ICU stay, total hospital stay, and other postoperative complications including hemodynamic side effects. Conclusion This preliminary study suggests that dexmedetomidine as a postoperative sedative agent is as sociated with significantly lower rates of delirium after cardiac surgery.
Mean cell volume and gamma‐glutamyl transferase are superior to carbohydrate‐deficient transferrin and hemoglobin‐acetaldehyde adducts in the follow‐up of pregnant women with alcohol abuse

Background and Objective. To compare the usefulness of carbohydrate‐deficient transferrin (CDT), the ratio of CDT to total transferrin, and hemoglobin‐acetaldehyde adducts with mean cell volume (MCV) and gamma‐glutamyl transferase (GGT) in the follow‐up of alcohol abuse during pregnancy.
Covering the Dead

This paper explores the meeting point of photojournalism and death and maps the tensions involved. Most of the literature on news-media and death explores the problematics of covering death during wartime. Less attention has been given to violent death in civic settings (as opposed to war zones) and to mundane deaths. The civic death scenes are not subject to military or governmental censorship, and the moral and professional burden to report such events falls on the journalists' shoulders. This paper aims to fill this gap by studying the representation of death in Israeli news-media. Findings from interviews and a quantitative content analysis shed light on journalistic practices, and show how the news-media self-regulate their working practices. Lastly, the paper identifies breakdowns of this self-regulated mechanism as it points at two different approaches to presenting death images according to the national affiliation of the dead. The paper argues that these practices delineate and maintain the distinction between Israelis and “the Other”.
An Algorithm for Replicated Objects with Efficient Reads

The problem. We consider the problem of implementing a consistent replicated object in a partially synchronous message passing distributed system susceptible to process and communication failures. The object is a generic shared resource, such as a data structure, a file, or a lock. The processes implementing the replicated object access it by applying operations to it at unpredictable times and potentially concurrently.1 The object should be linearizable: it should behave as if each operation applied to it takes effect at a distinct instant in time during the interval between its invocation and its response. The main reason for replicating an object is fault tolerance; if a copy of the object becomes inaccessible, the object can still be accessed through the other copies. Another reason for replicating an object is performance; a process that requires the object can access its local copy. The benefit of accessing a local copy, however, must be weighed against the cost of keeping the copies consistent.
Matched Subspace Detectors for Stochastic Signals

Our aim in this paper is to extend the matched subspace detectors (MSDs) of [1–3] to the detection of stochastic signals. In [1–3] the signal to be detected was assumed to be placed deterministically at an unknown location in a known signal subspace. The basis for the subspace was irrelevant. In this paper the signal is assumed to be placed randomly at an unknown location in a known subspace. If nothing is known a priori about the second-order moments of the placement, then the generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT) for a stochastic signal turns out to be identical to the GLRT for a deterministic signal. Consequently, the MSDs are more general than originally thought, applying to the detection of a signal whose mean value or covariance matrix is modulated by a subspace signal. Moreover, the invariance sets for stochastic MSDs are identical to those of the corresponding deterministic MSD. The results of this paper extend the theory of MSDs to radar and sonar problems where random target effects may be modeled, and to data communication problems where symbols are coded by subspaces, rather than coordinates of subspaces. ∗This work supported by John Tague of ONR under contract N00014-00-C-0145. †This work supported by John Tague of ONR under contract N00014-01-1-1019-P0001.
Multiple phase transitions in an agent-based evolutionary model with neutral fitness

Null models are crucial for understanding evolutionary processes such as speciation and adaptive radiation. We analyse an agent-based null model, considering a case without selection—neutral evolution—in which organisms are defined only by phenotype. Universal dynamics has previously been demonstrated in a related model on a neutral fitness landscape, showing that this system belongs to the directed percolation (DP) universality class. The traditional null condition of neutral fitness (where fitness is defined as the number of offspring each organism produces) is extended here to include equal probability of death among organisms. We identify two types of phase transition: (i) a non-equilibrium DP transition through generational time (i.e. survival), and (ii) an equilibrium ordinary percolation transition through the phenotype space (based on links between mating organisms). Owing to the dynamical rules of the DP reaction–diffusion process, organisms can only sparsely fill the phenotype space, resulting in significant phenotypic diversity within a cluster of mating organisms. This highlights the necessity of understanding hierarchical evolutionary relationships, rather than merely developing taxonomies based on phenotypic similarity, in order to develop models that can explain phylogenetic patterns found in the fossil record or to make hypotheses for the incomplete fossil record of deep time.