Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Retrospective Case-Series of Children With Bone and Joint Infection From Northern Australia

AbstractOur clinical workload as infectious diseases pediatricians in northern Australia is dominated by complicated bone and joint infections in indigenous children. We reviewed the clinical presentation, microbiology, management, and outcomes of children presenting to Royal Darwin Hospital with bone and joint infections between 2010 and 2013, and aimed to compare severity and incidence with other populations worldwide.A retrospective audit was performed on children aged 0 to 18 years who were admitted to Royal Darwin Hospital between 1 January 2010 and 31 December 2013 with a bone and joint infection.Seventy-nine patients were identified, of whom 57 (72%) had osteomyelitis ± associated septic arthritis and 22 (28%) had septic arthritis alone. Sixty (76%) were indigenous Australians. The incidence rate of osteomyelitis for indigenous children was 82 per 100,000 children. Staphylococcus aureus was the confirmed pathogen in 43/79 (54%), of which 17/43 (40%) were methicillin resistant. Median length of stay was 17 days (interquartile range: 10–31 days) and median length of IV antibiotics was 15 days (interquartile range: 6–24 days). Fifty-six (71%) required at least 1 surgical procedure. Relapse within 12 months was documented in 12 (15%) patients.We report 3 key findings: osteomyelitis incidence in indigenous children of northern Australia is amongst the highest reported in the world; methicillin-resistant S aureus accounts for 36% of osteomyelitis with a positive microbiological diagnosis; and the severity of disease requires extended antibiotic therapy. Despite this, 15% of the cohort relapsed within 12 months and required readmission.
A Trade-Based Analysis of Momentum

This article uses transactions data for all NYSE/AMEX stocks in the period 1983--2002 to study how investors trade in Jegadeesh and Titman's (1993) momentum portfolios. Among small trades, there is an extremely sluggish reaction to the past returns. For instance, an initial small-trade buying pressure exists for loser stocks, and it gradually converts into an intense selling pressure over the following year. The results are consistent with initial underreaction followed by delayed reaction among small traders. Moreover, small-trade imbalances during the formation period significantly affect momentum returns, suggesting that underreaction among small traders contributes to the momentum effect. Large traders, by contrast, show no evidence of underreaction, and large-trade imbalances have little impact on subsequent returns. Overall, the results suggest that momentum could partly be driven by the behavior of small traders. Copyright 2006, Oxford University Press.
A social network-based meta search engine

Social networks as an application of social web have attracted many users and have became one of the most important services of Internet. Interaction of users in a social network generates huge amount of data. In this paper, a novel meta-search engine is proposed to exploit social network data to improve web search results. The system modifies meta-search engine's multi-agent based architecture by adding new agents to gather interaction data of users and process them to create user profiles based on the previous researches. These profiles are used to re-rank top search results of a web search engine and increase effectiveness of retrieval. Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (NDCG) measure is used to evaluate our system. Experimental results show the potential usefulness of social network data for improvement of web search effectiveness.
Fixation strength of PMMA-augmented pedicle screws after depth adjustment in a synthetic bone model of osteoporosis.

The purpose of this study was to determine the change of fixation strength after adjusting the height of polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA)-augmented pedicle screws.Cement-augmented cannulated pedicle screws with or without PMMA augmentation with a radial hole in the distal third of the screw thread were inserted into synthetic bone blocks used to model osteoporosis. Screws were left unchanged (in situ), screwed in 3 threads, or screwed out 3 threads. The change in screw height was made 24 hours after cement placement. Radiographs of the samples were taken before and after screw adjustment, and pullout strength testing was performed. In the cement group, a radiolucent cavity was present after screwing in due to the screw-cement complex migrating downward, whereas no obvious change in the boneicement complex existed after screwing out. Mean pullout strength was significantly higher in the groups with cement as compared to those without cement. However, in the cement groups, the screw-in group had the lowest mean pullout strength among 3 groups, and the mean pullout strength in the screw-out group was also significantly lower than that in the in situ group (P<.05). Adjustment of pedicle screw height after cement augmentation in a severely osteoporotic spine can significantly reduce the pullout strength of the screw.
COARSEST QUANTIZER DENSITY FOR QUADRATIC STABILIZATION OF TWO-INPUT LINEAR SYSTEMS

In this paper, we compute a lower bound on the coarsest quantizer density for a given quadratic Control Lyapunov Function of a two-input unstable system. The lower bound depends on the product of the magnitude of the unstable eigenvalues of the system and the selected CLF. The search over CLF’s is transformed into a problem involving one parameter on a compact set, and it is performed by gridding. We use this approach to verify that the coarsest quantizer quadratically stabilizing a twoinput linear discrete-time system has a quantization density greater than or equal to the coarsest density needed to quadratically stabilize a single input system with the same set of unstable eigenvalues.
Adaptation to Parasites and Costs of Parasite Resistance in Mutator and Nonmutator Bacteria

Parasitism creates selection for resistance mechanisms in host populations and is hypothesized to promote increased host evolvability. However, the influence of these traits on host evolution when parasites are no longer present is unclear. We used experimental evolution and whole-genome sequencing of Escherichia coli to determine the effects of past and present exposure to parasitic viruses (phages) on the spread of mutator alleles, resistance, and bacterial competitive fitness. We found that mutator alleles spread rapidly during adaptation to any of four different phage species, and this pattern was even more pronounced with multiple phages present simultaneously. However, hypermutability did not detectably accelerate adaptation in the absence of phages and recovery of fitness costs associated with resistance. Several lineages evolved phage resistance through elevated mucoidy, and during subsequent evolution in phage-free conditions they rapidly reverted to nonmucoid, phage-susceptible phenotypes. Genome sequencing revealed that this phenotypic reversion was achieved by additional genetic changes rather than by genotypic reversion of the initial resistance mutations. Insertion sequence (IS) elements played a key role in both the acquisition of resistance and adaptation in the absence of parasites; unlike single nucleotide polymorphisms, IS insertions were not more frequent in mutator lineages. Our results provide a genetic explanation for rapid reversion of mucoidy, a phenotype observed in other bacterial species including human pathogens. Moreover, this demonstrates that the types of genetic change underlying adaptation to fitness costs, and consequently the impact of evolvability mechanisms such as increased point-mutation rates, depend critically on the mechanism of resistance.
Distraction Attenuates the Association between Trait Disinhibition and Reactive Physical Aggression

Research has implicated biased attention allocation as a proximal mechanism in the association between trait disinhibition and physical aggression. The current study tested a laboratory-based intervention manipulation that targets this putative cognitive mechanism by incentivizing a shift of attention from a provoking stimulus to a neutral stimulus during a laboratory aggression paradigm. Participants were 119 undergraduate men. The sum/difference method of hierarchical linear regression indicated that distraction from strong emotional stimuli attenuated the association between trait disinhibition and reactive physical aggression. This study is the first to provide experimental evidence of (a) the relation between trait disinhibition and reactive physical aggression, and (b) a potential method for attenuating this association.
An improved multiple minimum support based approach to mine rare association rules

In this paper we have proposed an improved approach to extract rare association rules. Rare association rules are the association rules containing rare items. Rare items are less frequent items. For extracting rare itemsets, the single minimum support (minsup) based approaches like Apriori approach suffer from “rare item problem” dilemma. At high minsup value, rare itemsets are missed, and at low minsup value, the number of frequent itemsets explodes. To extract rare itemsets, an effort has been made in the literature in which minsup of each item is fixed equal to the percentage of its support. Even though this approach improves the performance over single minsup based approaches, it still suffers from “rare item problem” dilemma. If minsup for the item is fixed by setting the percentage value high, the rare itemsets are missed as the minsup for the rare items becomes close to their support, and if minsup for the item is fixed by setting the percentage value low, the number of frequent itemsets explodes. In this paper, we propose an improved approach in which minsup is fixed for each item based on the notion of “support difference”. The proposed approach assigns appropriate minsup values for frequent as well as rare items based on their item supports and reduces both “rule missing” and “rule explosion” problems. Experimental results on both synthetic and real world datasets show that the proposed approach improves performance over existing approaches by minimizing the explosion of number of frequent itemsets involving frequent items and without missing the frequent itemsets involving rare items.
Characteristics and survival of patients with metachronous or synchronous double primary malignancies: breast and thyroid cancer

Background Clinical experiences suggest that breast cancer (BC) and thyroid cancer (TC) occur metachronously or synchronously in a patient more frequently than it would by chance. This study was conducted to investigate the clinicopathological characteristics and survival of these double primary malignancies. Methods 18732 patients with first primary BC and 12877 female patients with first primary TC were performed in this retrospective case-controlled study. The control groups were matched with both age at diagnosis and time of surgery (±2 years). The clinicopathological factors, Overall survival (OS), and HRs were evaluated by SPSS. Results There were 91(0.49%) BC patients developed metachronous second primary TC (B-T group), and 117 (0.91%) TC patients developed metachronous second primary BC (T-B group). The expression of estrogen and progesterone receptors, and the value of Ki-67, were significantly higher in the B-T group than control. The median value of thyroid globulin antibody (TGAb) and thyroid peroxidase antibody (TPOAb) were higher in T-B group than control (p <0.05). The duration before second primary cancer was shorter for the B-T group than the T-B group (4.09 years vs. 5.82 years, p<0.001). B-T group patients showed poorer survival than BC only patients (p=0.044). Conclusions In general, the overall risk of the occurrence of a second primary TC or BC elevated highly in patients with BC or TC. Detailed mechanisms need to be studied to explore the association between these two cancers. Early detection and effective prevention for the first primary BC or TC patients are necessities for reducing the incidence of the second primary cancer and improving the OS.
Spatio‐Temporal Modeling of Agricultural Yield Data with an Application to Pricing Crop Insurance Contracts

This article presents a statistical model of agricultural yield data based on a set of hierarchical Bayesian models that allows joint modeling of temporal and spatial autocorrelation. This method captures a comprehensive range of the various uncertainties involved in predicting crop insurance premium rates as opposed to the more traditional ad hoc, two-stage methods that are typically based on independent estimation and prediction. A panel data set of county-average yield data was analyzed for 290 counties in the State of Paraná (Brazil) for the period of 1990 through 2002. Posterior predictive criteria are used to evaluate different model specifications. This article provides substantial improvements in the statistical and actuarial methods often applied to the calculation of insurance premium rates. These improvements are especially relevant to situations where data are limited.
Selection of Copulas for Risk Management ∗

Department of Mathematics & Statistics, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, NC 28223, USA, E-mails: zcai@uncc.edu (Z. Cai) and xiwang@uncc.edu (X. Wang) The Wang Yanan Institute for Studies in Economics, Xiamen University, China Department of Economics, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520, USA, E-mail: xiaohong.chen@yale.edu Department of Economics, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN 37240, USA, E-mail: yanqin.fan@vanderbilt.edu
Unit Tests for Stochastic Optimization

Optimization by stochastic gradient descent is an important component of many large-scale machine learning algorithms. A wide variety of such optimization algorithms have been devised; however, it is unclear whether these algorithms are robust and widely applicable across many different optimization landscapes. In this paper we develop a collection of unit tests for stochastic optimization. Each unit test rapidly evaluates an optimization algorithm on a small-scale, isolated, and well-understood difficulty, rather than in real-world scenarios where many such issues are entangled. Passing these unit tests is not sufficient, but absolutely necessary for any algorithms with claims to generality or robustness. We give initial quantitative and qualitative results on numerous established algorithms. The testing framework is open-source, extensible, and easy to apply to new algorithms.
3D non-rigid registration by gradient descent on a Gaussian-windowed similarity measure using convolutions

Non-rigid registration of medical images is usually presented as a physical model driven by forces deriving from a measure of similarity of the images. These forces can be computed using a gradient-descent scheme for simple intensity-based similarity measures. However, for more complex similarity measures, using for instance local statistics, the forces are usually found using a block matching scheme. Here, the authors introduce a Gaussian window scheme, where the local statistics (here the sum of local correlation coefficients) are weighted with Gaussian kernels. The authors show that the criterion can be deducted easily to obtain forces to guide the registration. Moreover, these forces can be computed very efficiently by global convolutions inside the real image of the Gaussian window in a time independent of the size of the Gaussian window. The authors also present two minimization strategies by gradient descent to optimize the similarity measure: a linear search and a Gauss-Newton-like scheme. Experiments on synthetic and real 3D data show that the sum of local correlation coefficients optimized using a Gauss-Newton scheme is a fast and accurate method to register images corrupted by a non-uniform bias.
Can Self-Doubt Be Beneficial to Performance? Exploring the Concept of Preparatory Efficacy

Sport competition can be divided into a preparatory (practice) and performance (competition) process. Self- efficacy beliefs taken just prior (i.e., within 24 hr or after a final practice session) to the actual competition are referred to as performance efficacy beliefs; whereas, efficacy beliefs measured during the preparation or practice stage are referred to as preparatory efficacy beliefs. Consistent with the vast majority of efficacy research, Bandura (1) suggests that high performance efficacy perceptions are best for performance. In contrast, he suggests that preparatory efficacy perceptions should optimally reflect some sense of self-doubt because they serve as an impetus that motivates increased preparatory effort. Ultimately, greater preparatory effort should lead to stronger competitive performance. Despite Bandura's observa- tions of this process at work, no empirical studies have examined preparatory efficacy perceptions, preparatory effort, performance efficacy, and performance across a single preparation-competition process. This article examines the concept of preparatory efficacy, existing experiential and empirical support for the concept, and finally, suggestions, applications, and implications for future research.
Human–Human Reliance in the Context of Automation

Objective: The current study examined human–human reliance during a computer-based scenario where participants interacted with a human aid and an automated tool simultaneously. Background: Reliance on others is complex, and few studies have examined human–human reliance in the context of automation. Past research found that humans are biased in their perceived utility of automated tools such that they view them as more accurate than humans. Prior reviews have postulated differences in human–human versus human–machine reliance, yet few studies have examined such reliance when individuals are presented with divergent information from different sources. Method: Participants (N = 40) engaged in the Convoy Leader experiment. They selected a convoy route based on explicit guidance from a human aid and information from an automated map. Subjective and behavioral human–human reliance indices were assessed. Perceptions of risk were manipulated by creating three scenarios (low, moderate, and high) that varied in the amount of vulnerability (i.e., potential for attack) associated with the convoy routes. Results: Results indicated that participants reduced their behavioral reliance on the human aid when faced with higher risk decisions (suggesting increased reliance on the automation); however, there were no reported differences in intentions to rely on the human aid relative to the automation. Conclusion: The current study demonstrated that when individuals are provided information from both a human aid and automation, their reliance on the human aid decreased during high-risk decisions. Application: This study adds to a growing understanding of the biases and preferences that exist during complex human–human and human–machine interactions.
Working Paper / Document de travail 2009-36 Real and Nominal Frictions within the Firm : How Lumpy Investment Matters for Price Adjustment

Bank of Canada working papers are theoretical or empirical works-in-progress on subjects in economics and finance. The views expressed in this paper are those of the author. No responsibility for them should be attributed to the Bank of Canada. ii Acknowledgements This is a revision of the first chapter of my dissertation at Boston University. I am grateful to Robert King for guidance and support throughout this project. I have also benefited from conversations with Abstract Real rigidities are an important feature of modern sticky price models and are policy-relevant because of their welfare consequences, but cannot be structurally identified from time series. I evaluate the plausibility of capital specificity as a source of real rigidities using a two-dimensional generalized (s,S) model calibrated to micro evidence. Capital lumpiness reduces price stickiness as endogenous fluctuations in the marginal cost of output increase willingness to pay menu costs (an extensive effect), but increases price stickiness through complementarities (an intensive effect). The extensive effect warrants higher menu costs to match evidence on price changes, and the effects of complementarities prevail. Résumé Les rigidités réelles sont une caractéristique importante des modèles modernes à prix rigides et présentent un intérêt certain pour la conduite de la politique monétaire en raison de leur incidence sur le bien-être, mais elles ne peuvent être identifiées structurellement à partir de séries chronologiques. À l'aide d'un modèle (s,S) généralisé bidimensionnel étalonné en fonction de données microéconomiques, l'auteur évalue s'il est plausible de considérer le capital spécifique à une entreprise comme une source de rigidités réelles. La possibilité pour une firme de modifier temporairement et de façon importante son niveau d'investissement a un double effet sur la rigidité des prix : d'une part, elle la réduit, les variations endogènes du coût marginal de production rendant les entreprises plus enclines à assumer les coûts d'étiquetage (effet extensif); d'autre part, elle l'accroît en raison de la présence de complémentarités (effet intensif). Étant donné l'effet extensif, des coûts d'étiquetage plus élevés sont nécessaires afin de reproduire la fréquence de révision des prix observée, et l'effet intensif prédomine.
The Effect of Movement Activities in Synchronization With Music on Motor Proficiency of Children With Autism

Objectives: Although social deficits are the main features of autism, children in autism spectrum disorder often too display difficulties with posture, coordination and motor planning. As such, poor motor skills are believed to be associated with greater difficulties in social communication. Some recent studies show that music can improve the sensory processing and motor functions by affecting brain connectivity. The present study aims to examine the effect of movement activities in synchronization with music on motor proficiency of 7 to 14 years old children with low functioning autism. Materials & Methods: A double-blind randomized controlled trial design was used in this study. Twenty two subjects participated in the study and assigned into experimental and control groups randomly. The interventions consisted of movement activities with music for experimental group and without music for control group. Motor proficiency of subjects such as balance performance, bilateral coordination and upper limb coordination were assessed by trained independent evaluator before the treatment and also after 12th and 24th therapeutic sessions using 3 subtests of Bruininks- Oseretsky Test of Motor Proficiency (BOTMP). The effect of interventions in two groups were compared by repeated measures ANOVA. Results: The results indicated that both interventions improved motor performance in the participants but the effects of interventions on balance performance (P<0.001), bilateral coordination (P<0.05) and upper limb coordination (P<0.001) were significantly different between the two groups. Conclusion: Movement therapy is beneficial for children with autism, but movement activities in synchronization with music can accelerate improvements in motor proficiency of these children.