Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Patients' perceptions of participation in nursing care on medical wards.

BACKGROUND Patient participation benefits the patient and is a core concept of patient-centred care. Patients believe in their ability to prevent errors; thus, they may play a vital role in combating adverse event rates in hospitals. AIMS AND OBJECTIVES To explore hospitalised medical patients' perceptions of participating in nursing care, including the barriers and facilitators for this activity. RESEARCH METHODS This interpretive study was conducted on four medical wards, in two hospitals. Purposeful maximum variation sampling was operationalised to recruit patients that differed in areas such as age, gender and mobility status. In-depth semi-structured audiotaped interviews were undertaken and analysed using inductive content analysis. RESULTS Twenty patients participated in the study. Four categories were uncovered in the data. First, valuing participation showed patients' willingness to participate, viewing it as a worthwhile task. Second, exchanging intelligence was a way of participating where patients' knowledge was built and shared with health professionals. Third, on the lookout was a type of participation where patients monitored their care, showing an attentive approach towards their own safety. Fourth, power imbalance was characterised by patients feeling their opportunities for participation were restricted. CONCLUSIONS Patients were motivated to participate and valued participation. Cultivating this motivation may be crucial to patient empowerment and practices of safety monitoring, a fundamental strategy to addressing patient safety issues in hospitals. Engaging nurse-patient relationships, inclusive of knowledge sharing, is required in practice to empower patients to participate. Educating patients on the consequences of non-participation may motivate them, while nurses may benefit from training on patient-centred approaches. Future research should address ways to increase patient motivation and opportunities to participate.
Q Theory Without Adjustment Costs & Cash Flow Effects Without Financing Constraints

Tobin's Q exceeds one, even without any adjustment costs, for a firm that earns rents as a result of monopoly power or of decreasing returns to scale in production. Even when there are no adjustment costs and marginal Q is always equal to one, Tobin's Q is informative about the firm's growth prospects. We show that investment is positively related to Tobin's Q (which is observable average Q). This effect can be quantitatively small, which has been taken as evidence of very high adjustment costs in the empirical literature, but here is consistent with no adjustment costs at all. In addition, cash flow has a positive effect on investment, and this effect is larger for smaller, faster growing and more volatile firms, even though capital markets are perfect. These results provide a new theoretical foundation for Q theory and also cast doubt on evidence of financing constraints based on cash flow effects on investment
Computer Vision Face Tracking For Use in a Perceptual User Interface

As a first step towards a perceptual user interface, a computer vision color tracking algorithm is developed and applied towards tracking human faces. Computer vision algorithms that are intended to form part of a perceptual user interface must be fast and efficient. They must be able to track in real time yet not absorb a major share of computational resources: other tasks must be able to run while the visual interface is being used. The new algorithm developed here is based on a robust non-parametric technique for climbing density gradients to find the mode (peak) of probability distributions called the mean shift algorithm. In our case, we want to find the mode of a color distribution within a video scene. Therefore, the mean shift algorithm is modified to deal with dynamically changing color probability distributions derived from video frame sequences. The modified algorithm is called the Continuously Adaptive Mean Shift (CAMSHIFT) algorithm. CAMSHIFT’s tracking accuracy is compared against a Polhemus tracker. Tolerance to noise, distractors and performance is studied. CAMSHIFT is then used as a computer interface for controlling commercial computer games and for exploring immersive 3D graphic worlds. 3D structure 3D graphics; pattern recognition; perception and self-organization.
Optimal source imaging in elastic media

S U M M A R Y Time-reversal modelling provides a simple and robust solution to source-imaging problems. However, for recovering a well-resolved image of the source, time-reversal requires a balanced illumination of the target from all angles. When acquisition is incomplete and a balanced illumination is not possible, the time-reversal solution may not be adequate. We present an inversion algorithm for computing the signals to be back propagated by an array of receivers with a given configuration in order to optimally image an unknown source in an elastic medium. This approach is based on minimizing the difference between the back-propagated wavefield and the time-reversed displacement field of the source in the near source region. The proposed method requires knowledge of the propagation medium and an estimate of the source location. Other information related to the source (e.g. source mechanism) is encoded within the data and not explicitly required by the method. The method is applicable in both elastic and acoustic media. We use synthetic examples to test the performance of our method, to analyse its sensitivities, potentials and limitations and to demonstrate its potential advantages over the time-reversal source-imaging technique.
Applying particle swarm optimization to software testing

Evolutionary structural testing is an approach to automatically generating test cases that achieve high structural code coverage. It typically uses genetic algorithms (GAs) to search for relevant test cases. In recent investigations particle swarm optimization (PSO), an alternative search technique, often outperformed GAs when applied to various problems. This raises the question of how PSO competes with GAs in the context of evolutionary structural testing.In order to contribute to an answer to this question, we performed experiments with 25 small artificial test objects and 13 more complex industrial test objects taken from various development projects. The results show that PSO outperforms GAs for most code elements to be covered in terms of effectiveness and efficiency.
Implementation and Comparison of M2M Protocols for Internet of Things

The backbone of Internet of Things (IoT) is the communication protocols which seamlessly integrate thousands of nodes and enable a light weight data transfer process. This research is to analyze the efficiency and applicability of different M2M protocols that are available for IoT communication. For the purpose of evaluating the protocols a Raspberry-Pi with Raspbian OS and a temperature sensor are used. Every environment of IoT need a protocol with different capabilities, which makes it really specific of what protocol has to be used for a given number of nodes, communication range, power requirements and reliability. Upon research on today's IoT development, the major protocols that fit every IoT environment are MQTT and CoAP. These protocols are light weight in terms of operation and data transfer hence make into the markets of IoT. This research will highlight the outcomes, anomalies and benefits of each of these protocols. Previously the existence of advanced protocols did not exist and that made huge IoT networks very difficult to maintain as the communication costs were very high. This analysis will help it make better understand the need of a lightweight protocol. There are many protocols that can be used in IoT such as XMPP, DDS, AMQP, HTTP, REST etc. The deeper understanding of these protocols and application requirements is necessary to properly select which protocol is most suitable for the application at hand. This research paper is to discuss and analyze the efficiency, usage and requirements of the two major protocols namely MQTT, CoAP.
The Electrical Conductivity of Composite Media

A general theory is given of the gross electrical conductivity (or thermal conductivity, dielectric constant or magnetic permeability) of a composite medium having its isotropic granular components distributed spatially in a disordered way. It is shown that the gross conductivity is a weighted superposition of the component conductivities with weights containing the volume fractions of the components and an intensity factor depending on the average electric field for the whole medium and for each component. By introducing a suitably defined `average electrostatic problem', the case of grains spherical in the mean and suspended in a uniform medium is examined in detail, and the gross conductivity explicitly found. The limiting case in which the suspending fluid is withdrawn and the grains coalesce is shown to give rise to a discontinuity in the gross conductivity. Coated grains, e.g. oxide-coated metallic grains, are also treated.
Annotation: childhood-onset schizophrenia: clinical and treatment issues.

BACKGROUND In the past 10 years, there has been increased research on childhood-onset schizophrenia and clear advances have been achieved. METHOD This annotation reviews the recent clinical and treatment literature on childhood-onset schizophrenia. RESULTS There is now strong evidence that the syndrome of childhood-onset schizophrenia exists and there are several similarities between childhood- and later-onset schizophrenia. Schizophrenia in youth can be reliably diagnosed using the same criteria employed with adults, and childhood-onset schizophrenia is predictive of schizophrenia or schizophrenia spectrum disorders in adulthood. Data is accumulating to guide pharmacological treatment strategies, and practice parameters have been developed to guide clinical care. CONCLUSIONS Despite significant advances, there remains an urgent need for additional research on treatment and service delivery strategies. Promising work with adults highlights the importance of attending to psychosocial as well as pharmacologic treatment strategies, and the potential value of preventive interventions.
Bridging the gulf between correlated random walks and Lévy walks: autocorrelation as a source of Lévy walk movement patterns

For many years, the dominant conceptual framework for describing non-oriented animal movement patterns has been the correlated random walk (CRW) model in which an individual's trajectory through space is represented by a sequence of distinct, independent randomly oriented ‘moves’. It has long been recognized that the transformation of an animal's continuous movement path into a broken line is necessarily arbitrary and that probability distributions of move lengths and turning angles are model artefacts. Continuous-time analogues of CRWs that overcome this inherent shortcoming have appeared in the literature and are gaining prominence. In these models, velocities evolve as a Markovian process and have exponential autocorrelation. Integration of the velocity process gives the position process. Here, through a simple scaling argument and through an exact analytical analysis, it is shown that autocorrelation inevitably leads to Lévy walk (LW) movement patterns on timescales less than the autocorrelation timescale. This is significant because over recent years there has been an accumulation of evidence from a variety of experimental and theoretical studies that many organisms have movement patterns that can be approximated by LWs, and there is now intense debate about the relative merits of CRWs and LWs as representations of non-orientated animal movement patterns.
Pharmacological Review on Centella asiatica: A Potential Herbal Cure-all

In recent times, focus on plant research has increased all over the world. Centella asiatica is an important medicinal herb that is widely used in the orient and is becoming popular in the West. Triterpenoid, saponins, the primary constituents of Centella asiatica are manly believed to be responsible for its wide therapeutic actions. Apart from wound healing, the herb is recommended for the treatment of various skin conditions such as leprosy, lupus, varicose ulcers, eczema, psoriasis, diarrhoea, fever, amenorrhea, diseases of the female genitourinary tract and also for relieving anxiety and improving cognition. The present review attempts to provide comprehensive information on pharmacology, mechanisms of action, various preclinical and clinical studies, safety precautions and current research prospects of the herb. At the same time, studies to evaluate the likelihood of interactions with drugs and herbs on simultaneous use, which is imperative for optimal and safe utilization of the herb, are discussed.
Perfusion Imaging with SPECT in the Era of Pathophysiology-Based Biomarkers for Alzheimer's Disease

SPECT allows registration of regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) which is altered in a characteristic temporoparietal pattern in Alzheimer's Dementia. Numerous studies have shown the diagnostic value of reduced cerebral blood flow and metabolic changes using perfusion SPECT and FDG-PEPT in AD diagnosis as well as in differential diagnosis against frontotemporal dementia, dementia with Lewy bodies and vascular disease. Recently more pathophysiology-based biomarkers in CSF and Amyloid-PET tracers have been developed that probably have a higher diagnostic accuracy than the more indirect rCBF changes seen in perfusion SPECT. In the paper review, we describe recent advances in AD biomarkers as well as improvements in the SPECT technique.
Identification of Associations between Bacterioplankton and Photosynthetic Picoeukaryotes in Coastal Waters

Photosynthetic picoeukaryotes are significant contributors to marine primary productivity. Associations between marine bacterioplankton and picoeukaryotes frequently occur and can have large biogeochemical impacts. We used flow cytometry to sort cells from seawater to identify non-eukaryotic phylotypes that are associated with photosynthetic picoeukaryotes. Samples were collected at the Santa Cruz wharf on Monterey Bay, CA, USA during summer and fall, 2014. The phylogeny of associated microbes was assessed through 16S rRNA gene amplicon clone and Illumina MiSeq libraries. The most frequently detected bacterioplankton phyla within the photosynthetic picoeukaryote sorts were Proteobacteria (Alphaproteobacteria and Gammaproteobacteria) and Bacteroidetes. Intriguingly, the presence of free-living bacterial genera in the photosynthetic picoeukaryote sorts could suggest that some of the photosynthetic picoeukaryotes were mixotrophs. However, the occurrence of bacterial sequences, which were not prevalent in the corresponding bulk seawater samples, indicates that there was also a selection for specific OTUs in association with photosynthetic picoeukaryotes suggesting specific functional associations. The results show that diverse bacterial phylotypes are found in association with photosynthetic picoeukaryotes. Taxonomic identification of these associations is a prerequisite for further characterizing and to elucidate their metabolic pathways and ecological functions.
Speckle Patch Similarity for Echogenicity-Based Multiorgan Segmentation in Ultrasound Images of the Thyroid Gland

Ultrasound (US) imaging deals with forming a brightness image from the amplified backscatter echo when an ultrasound wave is triggered at the region of interest. Imaging artifacts and speckles occur in the image as a consequence of backscattering and subsequent amplification. We demonstrate the usefulness of speckle-related pixels and imaging artifacts as sources of information to perform multiorgan segmentation in US images of the thyroid gland. The speckle-related pixels are clustered based on a similarity constraint to quantize the image. The quantization results are used to locate useful anatomical landmarks that aid the detection of multiple organs in the image, which are the thyroid gland, the carotid artery, the muscles, and the trachea. The spatial locations of the carotid artery and the trachea are used to estimate the boundaries of the thyroid gland in transverse US scans. Experiments performed on a multivendor dataset yield good quality segmentation results with probabilistic Rand index $ > $ 0.83 and boundary error $ < $ 1 mm, and an average accuracy greater than 94%. Analysis of the results using the Dice coefficient as the metric shows that the proposed method performs better than the state-of-the-art methods. Further, experiments conducted on 971 images of a publicly available dataset prove the effectiveness of the algorithm to track the carotid artery for guided interventions. In addition to US-guided interventions, the algorithm can be used as a general framework in applications pertaining to volumetric analysis and computer-aided diagnosis.
Effects of modified tall oil and vitamin E on growth performance, carcass characteristics, and meat quality of growing-finishing pigs.

Crossbred barrows (n = 72) were used to evaluate effects of diet supplementation with modified tall oil (MTO; 0.0 or 0.50%) and vitamin E (0, 22, or 110 IU/kg) on growth performance, carcass traits, and longissimus muscle (LM) quality traits of finishing pigs. Pigs were blocked by ancestry and initial BW and allotted randomly to treatments in a 2 x 3 factorial. Corn-soybean meal-based diets were fed in two phases: 45.5 to 81.6 (1.00% lysine) and 81.6 to 114.6 (0.75% lysine) kg BW with no added fat. From 45.5 to 81.6 kg, pigs fed MTO had greater ADG (P = 0.03) regardless of added vitamin E; otherwise, treatment did not affect growth performance. Carcasses from pigs fed MTO had reduced (P < 0.05) average backfat (2.76 vs 2.92 cm) and firmer bellies compared to those fed no MTO. Boneless loins were cut into 2.54-cm chops at 7 d postmortem and evaluated for display color, thiobarbituric acid-reactive substance (TBARS), Warner-Bratzler shear force (WBSF), and sensory panel ratings. Visual color was similar (P > 0.05) among treatments at 0 and 1 d of display. At 4 and 6 d of display chops from pigs fed MTO with 110 IU vitamin E/kg had less deterioration (P < 0.05) than chops from pigs fed MTO with 0 IU vitamin E/kg and 0.0% MTO with 22 or 110 IU vitamin E/kg. The CIE L*, a*, b* and spectral values also suggested a delay in color deterioration for chops from pigs fed MTO with 110 IU vitamin E/kg. At 6 and 8 d of display, chops from pigs fed 110 IU vitamin E/kg had lower (P < 0.05) L* values than those from pigs fed 0 or 22 IU vitamin E/kg, and higher (P < 0.05) a* values than those from pigs fed 0 IU vitamin E/kg feed. A higher (P < 0.05) %R630/%R580 (indicator of more oxymyoglobin) was observed for chops from pigs fed MTO with 110 IU vitamin E/kg than those from pigs fed 0.0% MTO with 22 or 110 IU vitamin E/kg and MTO with 0 IU vitamin E/kg. Chops from pigs fed MTO with 110 IU vitamin E/kg had lower (P < 0.05) TBARS values than those from pigs fed MTO with 0 IU vitamin E/kg. No differences (P > 0.05) were detected among treatments for WBSF or sensory evaluations. The addition of MTO in swine diets improved belly firmness and reduced backfat, and feeding MTO with high levels of vitamin E extended display life without affecting palatability of LM chops.
MATRIX METALLOPROTEINASE-8 GENE EXPRESSION IN GINGIVAL CREVICULAR FLUID OF PATIENTS TREATED WITH REMOVABLE ORTHODONTIC APPLIANCES

Abstract Orthodontic treatment with removable appliance produces structural and biochemical changes and breaking the balance between the synthesis and breakdown of the periodontium collagen. MMP-8 plays an important role in the remodeling of periodontal ligament during orthodontic movement. The purpose of this study was to observe the MMP-8 gene in the gingival crevicular fluid (GCF) of patients with removable orthodontic appliance. It is expexted that the result can be used as a reference to decide the proper time for finger spring to be reactivated . A sample of 8 patients wearing removable orthodontic appliances was obtained. The finger springs were activated with 75 grams of force to produce canine distalization. GCF samples were collected from the distal side of upper canines before force application, 1, 2, 3, and 4 weeks after application consecutively. The sample was analyzed by using RT-PCR. Statistical analyses used were univariate analysis and Mann-Whitney U test . The result showed that the expression of MMP-8 in the GCF at t 0 was 28.1% but the force application elevated its expression to 62.5 % at t 1 , and then decreased continously at t 2 (37.5%), t 3 (34.4%), and to t 4 (31,3%) . There was no statistical significant difference of MMP-8 gene expression between and to t 2 . In conclusion, the highest level of MMP-8 gene expression due to orthodontic forces of removable appliance was happenend in the first week, but it declined continously in the following weeks. The proper time to reactivate the finger spring was 2 weeks after application. Key words: matrix metalloproteinase-8, removable orthodontic appliance, gingival crevicular fluid
Effects of five days of bed rest with and without exercise countermeasure on postural stability and gait.

OBJECTIVES We tested whether intermittent standing or a combination of heel raising, squatting and hopping exercises was sufficient to prevent alteration in balance and gait following a 5-day bed rest. METHODS This cross-over design study was performed with 10 male subjects during 6° head down tilt: (a) with no countermeasure; (b) while standing 25 min per day; (c) during locomotion-like activities 25 min per day. Gait was evaluated by grading subjects' performance during various locomotion tasks. Equilibrium scores were derived from peak-to-peak anterior-posterior sway while standing on a foam pad with the eyes open or closed or while making pitch head movements. RESULTS When no countermeasure was used, head movements led to decreased postural stability and increased incidence of falls immediately after bed rest compared to before. When upright standing or locomotion-like exercises were used, postural stability and the incidence of falls were not significantly different after the bed rest from the baseline. CONCLUSION These results indicate that daily 25-min of standing or locomotion-like exercise proves useful against postural instability following a 5-day bed rest. The efficacy of these countermeasures on locomotion could not be evaluated, however, because gait was not found to be altered after a 5-day bed rest.