Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Maximal Oxygen Consumption, Respiratory Volume and Some Related Factors in Fire-fighting Personnel

Background: Firefighters for difficult activities and rescue of damaged people must be in appropriate physical ability. Maximal oxygen capacity is an indicator for diagnosis of physical ability of workers. This study aimed to assess the cardiorespiratory system and its related factors in firefighters. Methods: This study was conducted on 110 firefighters from various stations. An self-administered questionnaire (respiratory disorders questionnaire, Tuxworth-Shahnavaz step test, and pulmonary function test) was used to collection of required data. Average of humidity and temperature was 52% and 17°C, respectively. Background average noise levels were between 55 and 65 dB. Data were analyzed using SPSS software (version 19). Results: The mean age of the study participants was 32 ± 6.2 years. The means of forced vital capacity (FVC), forced expiratory volume in 1 s (FEV1), and FEV1/FVC were 92% ±9.4%, 87% ±9.2%, and 80% ±6.1%, respectively. The participants’ mean VO2-max was 2.79 ± 0.29 L/min or 37.34 ± 4.27 ml/kg body weight per minute. The results revealed that weight has a direct association with vital capacity (VC), FVC, and peak expiratory flow. In addition, height was directly associated with VC, FVC, and VO2-max (P < 0.05). However, there was an inverse and significant association between height and FEV1/FVC (r = −0.23, P < 0.05). Height, weight, body mass index, and waist circumference were directly associated with VO2-max. Conclusions: The findings of this study showed that the amount of maximum oxygen consumption is close with the proposed range of this parameter among firefighters in other studies. Furthermore, the results of the study revealed that individuals had normal amounts of lung volume index. This issue can be attributed to the appropriate usage of respiratory masks.
Shear Bond Strength Comparison of Different Adhesive Systems to Calcium Silicate-based Materials

The aim of this study was to measure the shear bond strength (SBS) of different adhesive systems to calcium silicatebased materials (Biodentine and RetroMTA). Eighty cylindrical acrylic blocks, with a hole (5.0 mm diameter, 2.0 mm height) in each, were prepared. The holes were filled with Biodentine (BD) and RetroMTA (RMTA), and the specimens were divided into 2 groups. Each group was classified into 4 subgroups: Clearfil SE (CSE) ; AQ bond (AQ) ; All bond universal Self-etch (ABU-SE) ; and All bond universal Total-etch (ABU-TE). After the application of different adhesive systems, composite resin (Z350) was applied over BD and RMTA. The SBS was measured using a universal testing machine, and the data were compared using the Kruskal-Wallis test and the Mann-Whitney test. The highest and lowest values of SBS were observed for BD-ABU-SE and RMTA-AQ, respectively. No significant differences were found in the SBS between ABU-TE and ABU-SE and between ABU-TE and CSE to BD and RMTA. According to the data, BD showed a higher SBS than did RMTA when BD and RMTA are compared in the same adhesive agents. Further, among all groups, composite resin with ABU-SE showed better bond strength to BD and RMTA.
Perceptual weighting and phonemic awareness in pre-reading and early-reading children.

While metalinguistic awareness and speech perception have been found to each be related to numerous other linguistic processes, e.g. reading acquisition, phonological development, phonological disorders, it is only recently that the relationship between awareness and perception has been considered. Recent studies have demonstrated correlations between changes in perceptual weighting of acoustic cues and the development of metalinguistic skills at the phonemic level. This finding raises questions as to the exact nature of the correlation between the two processes. Is the relationship strictly linear, or could one of the two processes have a causal influence on the development of the other? This paper discusses the results of a longitudinal study of beginning–reading children, and a cross–sectional study of older pre–reading children, both of which aim to address the issue of causality in the relationship between perceptual weighting and phonemic awareness.
Spanish version of the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT). Version 2.0: reliabilities, age and gender differences.

This study examined the reliability of the Spanish version of the MSCEIT, with a sample of 946 college and high school students (426 males, 520 females) ranging from 16 to 58 years old. After the translation and back-translation process, the objectives of this study were: 1) to examine the reliability of the Spanish version of the MSCEIT v.2. 0 at the total scale, area, branch and subscale levels; 2) to analyze the correlations between the methods of scoring in the Spanish version of the MSCEIT v.2. 0 at the total scale, area, branch and subscale levels; 3) to examine possible gender differences on MSCEIT scores; and 4) to examine the relationship between age and MSCEIT scores. These analyses revealed good reliability and internal consistency for the Spanish version of the MSCEIT; a high level of convergence between scoring methods; and higher scores obtained by women on overall scale and branches scores than scores obtained by men. A positive correlation between the scores on MSCEIT and age was found. Finally, these results are discussed in light of the limitations of the present study, the implications of the use of this new instrument, and the need for future research on emotional intelligence.
Pre- and Postnatal Risk Factors in Relation to Allergic Rhinitis in School-Aged Children in China

Objective The objective of this study was to investigate the relationship between prenatal and postnatal risk factors and the prevalence of allergic rhinitis (AR) in Chinese children of specific ages. Study Design This study was a cross-sectional survey. Students from 8 metropolitan cities in China were studied in November and December, 2005. There were 20,803 elementary-school Chinese children (49.6% boys, mean age, 9.19 years) enrolled. Questions from the standard questionnaire of the International Study of Asthma and Allergies in Children were completed to enable us to examine the pattern of current AR. The potential confounders and pre-and postnatal risk factors were analyzed using logistic regression. Results The overall prevalence of AR was found in this study to be 9.8%. After adjusting for several likely confounders, there was a higher likelihood of AR in school-aged children who were not exclusively breastfed in the first 4 months of their lives (odds ratio [OR]: 1.28; 95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.16–1.41), children who were born post-term (OR: 1.34; 95% CI: 1.12–1.60), children delivered by cesarean section (OR: 1.07; 95% CI: 1.00–1.19), or children born to mothers who experienced depressive symptoms during the pre- and postnatal periods (OR: 1.28; 95% CI: 1.15–1.42). Conclusions AR in school-aged children was found to be associated with pre- and postnatal events. These findings indicate that strategies to reduce exposure to risk factors during pre- and postnatal periods for childhood allergies might be warranted.
Risk Factors for Tuberculin Skin Test Positivity in an Industrial Workforce Results of a Contact Investigation

Objective:The objective of this study was to determine the prevalence of and risk factors for tuberculin skin test (TST) positivity among an industrial workforce employing many foreign-born workers after one employee was hospitalized for active tuberculosis (TB). Methods:A contact investigation was performed. We used crude odds ratios and a multivariate model to assess risk factors for TST positivity. Results:The rate of TST positivity was 37.1% (N = 97). Twenty-nine of 36 (80.6%) workers from higher TB prevalence countries versus seven of 61 (11.5%) workers born in low-prevalence countries were positive. Workplace risk factors included using the lunchroom, carpooling with the case, or working on the same or subsequent shift. A total of 66.7% of immigrant workers denied previous screening. Conclusion:TB contact investigations should probe into workplace transmission. Workplaces with workers from higher TB prevalence countries should consider preplacement TB screening.
Recognition of Arabic phonetic features using neural networks and knowledge-based system: a comparative study

This paper deals with a new indicative features recognition system for Arabic which uses a set of a simplified version of sub-neural-networks (SNN). For the analysis of speech, the perceptual linear predictive technique is used. The ability of the system has been tested in experiments using stimuli uttered by 6 native Algerian speakers. The identification results have been confronted to those obtained by the SARPH knowledge based system. Our interest goes to the particularities of Arabic such as geminate and emphatic consonants and the duration. The results show that SNN achieved well in pure identification while in the case of phonologic duration the knowledge-based system performs better.
NUMERICAL SIMULATION OF BUBBLY CAVITATING FLOW IN SHOCK WAVE LITHOTRIPSY

The bubbly cavitating flow generated by a lithotriptor is computed using an ensemble averaged two-phase flow model. The time-dependent, compressible flow computation is divided into two separate calculations: the refocusing of a spherical pulse by an ellipsoidal reflector, and the evolution of the steepening wave including the cavitating bubble cloud it generates. The first computation is single phase and is done in prolate spheroidal coordinates in order to have the surface of the ellipsoidal reflector aligned with the computation grid. The output of this simulation is then fed to the two-phase cylindrical coordinates domain. Preliminary results and qualitative comparison to experimental observation are presented.
Dynamic capability for trustworthy software development

Software development organizations are increasingly recognizing the need for flexibility in almost every project they execute. At the same time, development teams are under ever‐increasing pressure to deliver software products in shorter cycles and with higher levels of quality. The current software development projects face conflicting demands: improving process predictability to deliver trustworthy software products, and improving process flexibility to adapt to the dynamic context. Although the importance of process tailoring is well recognized, the current literature and industry standards fail to provide theoretically and empirically grounded guidelines on how to tailor the development process to suit the needs of developing trustworthy software in the current dynamic environment. This paper examines how software development teams achieve dynamic capabilities to pursue conflicting demands on trustworthiness and flexibility through a case study of a large military software development project. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Leader-Follower Formation Control of Multiple Non-holonomic Mobile Robots Incorporating a Receding-horizon Scheme

In this paper we present a receding-horizon leader—follower (RH-LF) control framework to solve the formation problem of multiple non-holonomic mobile robots with a rapid error convergence rate. To maintain the desired leader—follower relationship, we propose a separation—bearing—orientation scheme (SBOS) for two-robot formations and separation—separation—orientation scheme (SSOS) for three-robot formations in deriving the desired postures of the followers. Unlike the other leader—follower approaches in the existing literature, the orientation deviations between the leaders and followers are explicitly controlled in our framework, which enables us to successfully solve formation controls when robots move backwards, which is termed as a formation backwards problem in this paper. Further, we propose to incorporate the receding-horizon scheme into our leader—follower controller to yield a fast convergence rate of the formation tracking errors. Experiments are finally performed on a group of mobile robots to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed formation control framework.
Spatial Competition in Variety and Number of Stores

We propose location-then-variety competition for a multiproduct and multi-store oligopoly, in which the number of firms, the number of stores and their location, and the number of varieties are endogenously determined. We show that as compared to price-then-variety and quantity-then-variety competition, location-then-variety competition with multistores yields a much richer set of equilibrium outcomes, such as market segmentation, interlacing, sandwich, and enclosure.
Neurotransmitter deficits in a non‐multi‐infarct category of vascular dementia

ABSTRACT— Brain tissue from 9 severely demented patients cared for in psychiatric long‐term wards and with records of stroke episodes, macroscopic signs of brain infarcts and with no clinical evidence of senile dementia of the Alzheimer type was investigated and compared with control material. The mean volume of the brain infarcts in this vascular dementia group was only 6.8 ml. Pronounced disturbances of the serotoninergic and cholingergic systems were found in subcortical and cortical grey matter. These widespread neurotransmitter changes can hardly be explained by the localized brain infarcts per se, but suggest the existence of another category of vascular dementia. Since the neurotransmitter disturbances were found to be similar to those of Alzheimer's disease and senile dementia of the Alzheimer type, it seems more likely that they indicate a common pathway for dementia disorders than that they serve as markers of different dementia categories.
Secondary Substrate-binding Exosite in the Serine Protease Domain of Activated Protein C Important for Cleavage at Arg-506 but Not at Arg-306 in Factor Va*

Proteolytic inactivation of activated factor V (FVa) by activated protein C (APC) is a key reaction in the regulation of hemostasis. We now demonstrate the importance of a positive cluster in loop 37 of the serine protease (SP) domain of APC for the degradation of FVa. Lysine residues in APC at positions 37, 38, and 39 form a secondary binding site for FVa, which is important for cleavage of FVa at Arg-506 while having no effect on Arg-306 cleavage. In contrast, topological neighbors Lys-62, Lys-63, and Arg-74 in APC appear of minor importance in FVa degradation. This demonstrates that secondary binding exosites of APC specifically guide the proteolytic action of APC, resulting in a more favorable degradation of the 506–507 peptide bond as compared with the 306–307 bond.
Chronic Recurrent Vogt–Koyanagi–Harada Disease and Development of ‘Sunset Glow Fundus’ Predict Worse Retinal Sensitivity

ABSTRACT Purpose: To investigate prognostic factors for retinal sensitivity assessed by microperimetry in patients with Vogt–Koyanagi–Harada (VKH) disease. Methods: In total, 34 patients with initial-onset acute disease and 19 patients with chronic recurrent disease were retrospectively evaluated. Results: The mean follow-up period was 40.4 ± 40.5 months. Sensitivity was significantly worse in eyes with more severe anterior segment inflammation at presentation, as indicated by the presence of mutton-fat keratic precipitates, anterior chamber reaction ≥2+, and posterior synechiae. Chronic recurrent presentation, development of complications, and ‘sunset glow fundus’ were significantly associated with worse sensitivity. Using logistic regression analysis, better sensitivity was significantly associated with initial-onset acute presentation (odds ratio, OR = 6.9; 95% confidence interval, CI = 1.53–9.66). Conclusions: Chronic recurrent presentation and development of complications and ‘sunset glow fundus’ are associated with a worse sensitivity outcome.
Minimizing slowdown in heterogeneous size-aware dispatching systems

We consider a system of parallel queues where tasks are assigned (dispatched) to one of the available servers upon arrival. The dispatching decision is based on the full state information, i.e., on the sizes of the new and existing jobs. We are interested in minimizing the so-called mean slowdown criterion corresponding to the mean of the sojourn time divided by the processing time. Assuming no new jobs arrive, the shortest-processing-time-product (SPTP) schedule is known to minimize the slowdown of the existing jobs. The main contribution of this paper is three-fold: 1) To show the optimality of SPTP with respect to slowdown in a single server queue under Poisson arrivals; 2) to derive the so-called size-aware value functions for M/G/1-FIFO/LIFO/SPTP with general holding costs of which the slowdown criterion is a special case; and 3) to utilize the value functions to derive efficient dispatching policies so as to minimize the mean slowdown in a heterogeneous server system. The derived policies offer a significantly better performance than e.g., the size-aware-task-assignment with equal load (SITA-E) and least-work-left (LWL) policies.
Facial biometry of Amazon indigenous people of the Xingu River - Perspectives on genetic and environmental contributions to variation in human facial morphology.

OBJECTIVE To evaluate facial morphology of non-mixed indigenous people living in the Xingu region. Studies on these populations report that the total genetic diversity is as high as that observed for other continental populations. On the other hand, eating habits are different between indigenous and urban population, as indigenous people still have traditional habits. SETTING AND SAMPLE POPULATION The sample consisted of 106 indigenous subjects, in permanent dentition stage, belonging to four groups: Arara-Laranjal (n = 35), Arara-Iriri (n = 20), Xikrin-Kaiapó (n = 24), and Assurini (n = 27). MATERIAL AND METHODS Standardized facial photographs were obtained, and fourteen measurements were analyzed. Intra- and intergroup homogeneities were examined by discriminant analysis, followed by anova and Kruskal-Wallis tests. Sexual dimorphism to each village was analyzed by Student's t-test or Mann-Whitney test, at p < 0.05. RESULTS Significant facial differences were found between male and female, indicating that sex data should not be grouped for intergroup comparison. Discriminant analysis showed a large intergroup heterogeneity, while an intragroup homogeneity was found, especially for females. It was also observed that some morphological features of the face are specific to some villages, regardless of ethnicity. CONCLUSIONS Facial morphological characteristics were strongly different among groups, even comparing villages from the same ethnicity. Furthermore, a low diversity within groups was observed. Our findings, supported by previous reports on genetics and eating habits in these populations, reinforce the role of the genetic determination on craniofacial morphology.
Low serum cholesterol level and increased ischemic stroke mortality.

for important intellectual content: Xue, Fried, and Beamer. Statistical analysis: Xue. Obtained funding: Walston, Fried, and Beamer. Administrative, technical, and material support: Fried and Beamer. Study supervision: Walston and Beamer. Financial Disclosure: None reported. Funding/Support: The project described was supported byAwardsR01AG023701,P30AG02133,andR01AG11703 from the National Institute on Aging. Role of the Sponsor: The funding agency played no role in the design and conduct of the study; collection, management, analysis, and interpretation of the data; and preparation, review, or approval of the manuscript. Disclaimer: The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institute on Aging or the National Institutes of Health. Previous Presentation: Preliminary results of this study were presented at the Gerontological Society of America 62nd Annual Scientific Meeting; November 19, 2009; Atlanta, Georgia.
Learning from Conditional Distributions via Dual Embeddings

Many machine learning tasks, such as learning with invariance and policy evaluation in reinforcement learning, can be characterized as problems of learning from conditional distributions. In such problems, each sample $x$ itself is associated with a conditional distribution $p(z|x)$ represented by samples $\{z_i\}_{i=1}^M$, and the goal is to learn a function $f$ that links these conditional distributions to target values $y$. These learning problems become very challenging when we only have limited samples or in the extreme case only one sample from each conditional distribution. Commonly used approaches either assume that $z$ is independent of $x$, or require an overwhelmingly large samples from each conditional distribution. To address these challenges, we propose a novel approach which employs a new min-max reformulation of the learning from conditional distribution problem. With such new reformulation, we only need to deal with the joint distribution $p(z,x)$. We also design an efficient learning algorithm, Embedding-SGD, and establish theoretical sample complexity for such problems. Finally, our numerical experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets show that the proposed approach can significantly improve over the existing algorithms.
Fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva.

Fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva (FOP) is a rare disorder. The striking features of the disorder are the replacement of muscles, tendons, and aponeuroses by masses of bone, and the presence of certain skeletal abnormalities. In this report, we describe a woman who has literally grown up in bed since the age of three years. Case Report A 38-year-old female, product of a non-consanguineous marriage, developed progressive weakness, generalized pains, and stiffness of muscles around the third year of her life. This steadily worsened and she became bedridden within a year, and has grown up in bed for the last threeand-a-half decades. She had normal pubertal development and was menstruating regularly. During this period, she had multiple admissions in various hospitals, with excision of hard masses from her legs performed on many occasions. Clinical examination revealed a young female with pulse rate of 80 beats per minute and BP of 120/70 mm Hg. She was 140 cm tall, weighed 39 kg, and had mild hirsutism. She could not sit up in bed and moved like a log of wood with help. She had a short neck, thick broad hands, small feet with bilateral hallux valgus, and short digits. She had multiple scars (from previous surgeries) and multiple areas of induration. She also had flexion contractures of both elbows, and hard bony swellings in multiple places. Examination of chest, cardiovascular system, abdomen and nervous system was normal. Tuning fork tests revealed a normal hearing pattern. Investigations revealed mild hypochromic microcytic anemia, but normal kidney and liver functions. Her serum calcium, phosphorus, alkaline phosphatase and albumin were normal on three occasions. Chest x-ray, 12-lead electrocardiogram, and ultrasonography of abdomen were normal. Radiological screening revealed diffuse muscular calcification in pelvis (Figure 1), thighs, and legs and feet (Figure 2). Histopathology of the muscle biopsy specimen from one