Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Impact of a multifaceted intervention on cholesterol management in primary care practices: guideline adherence for heart health randomized trial.

BACKGROUND Physician adherence to National Cholesterol Education Program clinical practice guidelines has been poor. METHODS We recruited 68 primary care family and internal medicine practices; 66 were randomly allocated to a study arm; 5 practices withdrew, resulting in 29 receiving the Third Adult Treatment Panel (ATP III) intervention and 32 receiving an alternative intervention focused on the Seventh Report of the Joint National Committee on the Prevention, Detection, Evaluation, and Treatment of High Blood Pressure (JNC-7). The ATP III providers received a personal digital assistant providing the Framingham risk scores and ATP III-recommended treatment. All practices received copies of each clinical practice guideline, an introductory lecture, 1 performance feedback report, and 4 visits for intervention-specific academic detailing. Data were abstracted at 61 practices from random samples of medical records of patients treated from June 1, 2001, through May 31, 2003 (baseline), and from May 1, 2004, through April 30, 2006 (follow-up). The proportion screened with subsequent appropriate decision making (primary outcome) was calculated. Generalized estimating equations were used to compare results by arm, accounting for clustering of patients within practices. RESULTS We examined 5057 baseline and 3821 follow-up medical records. The screening rate for lipid levels increased from 43.6% to 49.0% (ATP III practices) and from 40.1% to 50.8% (control practices) (net difference, -5.3% [P = .22]). Appropriate management of lipid levels decreased slightly (73.4% to 72.3%) in ATP III practices and more markedly (79.7% to 68.9%) in control practices. The net change in appropriate management favored the intervention (+9.7%; 95% confidence interval [CI], 2.8%-16.6% [P < .01]). Appropriate drug prescription within 4 months decreased in both arms (38.8% to 24.8% in ATP III practices and 45.3% to 24.1% in control practices; net change, +7.2% [P = .37]) Overtreatment declined from 6.6% to 3.9% in ATP III and rose from 4.2% to 6.4% in control practices (net change, -4.9% [P = .01]). CONCLUSIONS A multifactor intervention including personal digital assistant-based decision support may improve primary care physician adherence to the ATP III guidelines. Trial Registration clinicaltrials.gov Identifier: NCT00224848.
Learning a blind measure of perceptual image quality

It is often desirable to evaluate an image based on its quality. For many computer vision applications, a perceptually meaningful measure is the most relevant for evaluation; however, most commonly used measure do not map well to human judgements of image quality. A further complication of many existing image measure is that they require a reference image, which is often not available in practice. In this paper, we present a “blind” image quality measure, where potentially neither the groundtruth image nor the degradation process are known. Our method uses a set of novel low-level image features in a machine learning framework to learn a mapping from these features to subjective image quality scores. The image quality features stem from natural image measure and texture statistics. Experiments on a standard image quality benchmark dataset shows that our method outperforms the current state of art.
Academic Careers and Lifestyle Characteristics of 171 Transplant Surgeons in the ASTS ★

This manuscript reports the demographics, education and training, professional activities and lifestyle characteristics of 171 members of the American Society of Transplant Surgeons (ASTS). ASTS members were sent a comprehensive survey by electronic mail. There were 171 respondents who were 49 ± 8 years of age and predominantly Caucasian males. Female transplant surgeons comprised 10% of respondents. ASTS respondents underwent 15.6 ± 1.0 years of education and training (including college, medical school, residency and transplantation fellowship) and had practiced for 14.7 ± 9.2 years. Clinical practice included kidney, pancreas and liver organ transplantation, living donor surgery, organ procurement, vascular access procedures and general surgery. Transplant surgeons also devote a significant amount of time to nonsurgical patient care, research, education and administration. Transplant surgeons, both male and female, reported working approximately 70 h/week and a median of 195 operative cases per year. The anticipated retirement age for men was 64.6 ± 8.6 and for women was 62.2 ± 4.2 years. This is the largest study to date assessing professional and lifestyle characteristics of abdominal transplant surgeons.
Graduated Compression Sleeves: Effects on Metabolic Removal and Neuromuscular Performance

Abstract Martorelli, SS, Martorelli, AS, Pereira, MC, Rocha-Junior, VA, Tan, JG, Alvarenga, JG, Brown, LE, and Bottaro, M. Graduated compression sleeves: Effects on metabolic removal and neuromuscular performance. J Strength Cond Res 29(5): 1273–1278, 2015—The aim of this study was to examine the effects of upper-body graduated compression sleeves (CS) on neuromuscular and metabolic responses during a power training. Fifteen resistance trained men (age: 23.07 ± 3.92 years; body mass: 76.13 ± 7.62 kg; height: 177 ± 6 cm) performed 2 separate power training protocols, either wearing CS or placebo sleeves (PS), in a counterbalanced fashion. Participants first performed a familiarization session and a bench press 1 repetition maximum (1RM) test. The training protocol consisted of 6 sets of 6 repetitions of bench press with a load of 50% 1RM. Statistical analysis compared mean power, peak power, blood lactate, muscle activation, isometric strength, and repetitions to failure. Mean and peak power significantly (p ⩽ 0.05) decreased with increasing sets. However, there was no significant difference (p > 0.05) on mean and peak power between protocols. Blood lactate clearance was also not significantly different (p > 0.05) between CS and PS. Muscle activation was not different between PRE and POST (p > 0.05) for any of the muscles analyzed. Isometric strength decreased from PRE to POST (p ⩽ 0.05) and was not different between CS and PS. Repetitions to failure were not different between protocols (p > 0.05). These results demonstrate no positive performance effects when wearing graduated CS during power exercise in young trained men.
Repairing Reed-Solomon Codes

We study the performance of Reed–Solomon (RS) codes for the <italic>exact repair problem</italic> in distributed storage. Our main result is that, in some parameter regimes, Reed–Solomon codes are optimal regenerating codes, among maximum distance separable (MDS) codes with linear repair schemes. Moreover, we give a characterization of MDS codes with linear repair schemes, which holds in any parameter regime, and which can be used to give non-trivial repair schemes for RS codes in other settings. More precisely, we show that for <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$k$ </tex-math></inline-formula>-dimensional RS codes whose evaluation points are a finite field of size <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$n$ </tex-math></inline-formula>, there are exact repair schemes with bandwidth <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$(n-1)\log ((n-1)/(n-k))$ </tex-math></inline-formula> bits, and that this is optimal for any MDS code with a linear repair scheme. In contrast, the naive (commonly implemented) repair algorithm for this RS code has bandwidth <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$k\log (n)$ </tex-math></inline-formula> bits. When the entire field is used as evaluation points, the number of nodes <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$n$ </tex-math></inline-formula> is much larger than the number of bits per node (which is <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$O(\log (n))$ </tex-math></inline-formula>), and so this result holds only when the degree of sub-packetization is small. However, our method applies in any parameter regime, and to illustrate this for high levels of sub-packetization, we give an improved repair scheme for a specific (14,10)-RS code used in the facebook hadoop analytics cluster.
Imaging Polarimetric Observations of a New Circumstellar Disk System

Few circumstellar disks have been observed directly. Here we use sensitive differential polarimetric techniques to overcome atmospheric speckle noise in order to image the circumstellar material around HD 169142. The detected envelope or disk is considerably smaller than expectations based on the measured strength of the far-IR excess from this system.
Formation of the extracellular matrix during the epimorphic anterior regeneration of Owenia fusiformis: autoradiographical and in situ hybridization studies.

During post-traumatic regeneration of the polychaete annelid Owenia fusiformis, the extracellular matrix (ECM) formation was studied by light and electron microscopy and by histoautoradiography after incorporation of tritiated proline as marker for collagenic proteins. Three days after amputation, a new basement membrane was reformed in the blastema between the ectoderm and the mesoderm. At the same time, the cytoskeleton and the anchoring structures (hemidesmosomes) were differentiated in the basal part of the ectodermal cells. Four days after amputation, collagen fibers appeared in the extracellular matrix newly reformed between the ectodermal and mesodermal layers. The existence of a proximo-distal gradient in the organization of the new extracellular matrix and the accumulation of molecules labeled by 3H-proline was shown. This accumulation started at the level of the injured segment of the stump. Differences in labeling intensity were seen in the regenerate. Within specific organogenetic zones, i.e. the epidermal gland analagen, the branchial buds and the stomodeal invagination, the labeling between the ectodermal and mesodermal layers was less intense than in other parts of the regenerate. In the mesodermal connective septa (dissepiments), located between consecutive segments, the labeling and the accumulation of extracellular material occurred later than the formation of the ectodermal basement membrane. In situ hybridization of a DNA molecular probe corresponding partially to the coding region of the collagen-like gene Ocg8, showed a spatio-temporal expression of this gene. Northern blot analysis showed a single transcript of 6.6 kb. Four days after amputation the accumulation of this transcript was exclusively localized at the level of the ectodermal layer during differentiation of the regenerate. The ectoderm was thus shown to play a dynamic role during the first stages of traumatic regeneration, although it did not seem to be directly involved in the early events of the metameric process.
Effect of yogic exercises on physical and mental health of young fellowship course trainees.

A study was undertaken to observe any beneficial effect of yogic practices during training period on the young trainees. 54 trainees of 20-25 years age group were divided randomly in two groups i.e. yoga and control group. Yoga group (23 males and 5 females) was administered yogic practices for the first five months of the course while control group (21 males and 5 females) did not perform yogic exercises during this period. From the 6th to 10th month of training both the groups performed the yogic practices. Physiological parameters like heart rate, blood pressure, oral temperature, skin temperature in resting condition, responses to maximal and submaximal exercise, body flexibility were recorded. Psychological parameters like personality, learning, arithmetic and psychomotor ability, mental well being were also recorded. Various parameters were taken before and during the 5th and 10th month of training period. Initially there was relatively higher sympathetic activity in both the groups due to the new work/training environment but gradually it subsided. Later on at the 5th and 10th month, yoga group had relatively lower sympathetic activity than the control group. There was improvement in performance at submaximal level of exercise and in anaerobic threshold in the yoga group. Shoulder, hip, trunk and neck flexibility improved in the yoga group. There was improvement in various psychological parameters like reduction in anxiety and depression and a better mental function after yogic practices.
A case study of program comprehension effort and technical debt estimations

This paper describes a case study of using developer activity logs as indicators of a program comprehension effort by analyzing temporal sequences of developer actions (e.g., navigation and edit actions). We analyze developer activity data spanning 109,065 events and 69 hours of work on a medium-sized industrial application. We examine potential correlations between different measures of developer activity, code change metrics and code smells to gain insight into questions that could direct future technical debt interest estimation. To gain more insights into the data, we follow our analysis with commit message analysis and a developer interview. Our results indicate that developer activity as an estimate of program comprehension effort is correlated with both change proneness and static metrics for code smells.
NON-CENTRAL GENERALIZED F DISTRIBUTIONS

The quotient of two linear combinations of independent chi-squares will have a generalized F distribution. Exact expressions for these distributions when the chi-square are central and those in the numerator or in the denominator have even degrees of freedom were given in Fonseca et al. (2002). These expressions are now extended for non-central chi-squares. The case of random non-centrality parameters is also considered.
Adaptive Multiband Spectrum Sensing

An adaptive multiband spectrum sensing procedure is developed for fast and reliably locating multiple idle ones among a large number of channels. Through an iterative exploration process to reduce the number of candidate channels, the limited sampling budget can be focused on the more promising locations of the spectrum, resulting in significant performance improvement over the non-adaptive sensing approach. Two adaptive multi-channel sensing schemes are developed based on the energy detection and the non-parametric Komogorov-Smirnov (K-S) test, respectively. Simulation results are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed adaptive procedure.
Allometric scaling of dry weight and leaf area for Spartina Foliosa in Punta Banda Estuary, Baja California, Mexico

Height-biomass regressions were used to produce non-destructive aboveground biomass assessments for Spartina foliosa. We performed a statistical analysis of these regression models using data collected in Punta Banda Estuary, Baja California, Mexico. We found these models to be inconsistent with available data, on the basis of lack of homoscedasticity and randomness of residuals. The allometric scaling of aboveground plant biomass and corresponding leaf area was tested as a basis for alternative biomass assessment. We show that regression models using leaf area result in simpler, more reliable non-destructive estimations of Spartina foliosa biomass.
An Excursion into the Statistical Properties of Hedge Fund Returns

This paper provides an overview of the most important statistical properties of individual hedge fund returns. We find that the net-of-fees monthly returns of the average individual hedge fund exhibit significant degrees of negative skewness, excess kurtosis, as well as positive first-order serial correlation. The correlations between hedge funds in the same strategy group are of the same order of magnitude as the correlations between funds in different strategy groups and relatively low. Only 10-20% of the variation in the average individual hedge fund's returns can be explained by what happens in the US equity and bond markets. Compared to individual funds, portfolios of hedge funds tend to exhibit lower skewness, higher serial correlation and higher correlation with stocks and bonds. Movements in the US equity and bond markets still only explain 20-40% of the variation in hedge fund portfolios returns though. Finally, an equally-weighted portfolio of all funds in our sample offers a 2.76% higher mean return than the average fund of funds. This strongly suggests that the timing and fund picking activities of the average fund of funds are not rewarded by a higher return.
Willingness to communicate, interest, motives to communicate with the instructor, and L2 speaking: a focus on the role of age and gender

ABSTRACT This study investigated how well interest and motives to communicate with the instructor (MCI) predict L2 willingness to communicate (WTC) and L2 speaking among English as a foreign language (EFL) learners, and tested whether these variables predict L2 WTC and speaking differently across different age and sex groups. It also examined whether there are meaningful differences between EFL learners who have a higher level and those who have a lower level of L2 speaking in terms of L2 WTC, interest, and MCI and between male and female learners in their motives to communicate with their English instructors. Some 612 pre-intermediate EFL learners participated in the study. A quantitative method using questionnaires was used to collect the data. The results revealed that (1) interest and MCI made significant contributions to the participants’ L2 WTC and speaking; (2) the variables predicted L2 WTC and speaking differently across different age and sex groups; (3) there were significant differences between the learners in the high L2 speaking group and those in the low L2 speaking group in terms of WTC, interest, and MCI; and (4) male participants reported communicating with their teachers more for the participatory and sycophantic motives than female learners.
Cortical areas within the lateral sulcus connected to cutaneous representations in areas 3b and 1: A revised interpretation of the second somatosensory area in macaque monkeys

Cortical connections between various body representations in areas 3b and 1 and lateral parietal cortex were examined in 18 macaque monkeys. We injected tracers (Fast Blue, Diamidino Yellow, Horseradish Peroxidase, and Rhodamine Dextran), alone or in combination, into closely related cutaneous responsive sites, e. g. , adjacent digits. Separated patches of labeling were found across the parietal operculum and insula for all injected locations. On the basis of cytoarchitectural criteria, the labeled regions include the second somatosensory area (SH), retroinsular area (Ri) and granular insula (Ig). Assuming the connections are homotopical from physiologically identified body representations in primary somatosensory cortex, the labeling patterns in SII include complete anterior and posterior body maps. The orientation of the body is erect in the posterior and supine in the anterior SII region. Area 3b has greater density of connections with anterior SIL The maps are mirror images aligned along the distal extremities. The anterior‐posterior (A‐P) length of the “SII region” exceeds 7 mm; it extends in the coronal plane from the fundus of the lateral sulcus to surface cortex near the anterior tip of the intraparietal sulcus. Two additional topographically organized maps are likely in Ri. These are “worm‐like” body maps oriented along the A‐P axis and joined at the head representation. Connections with the center of Ig are not somatotopically organized.
Cross-fertilization between Proteomics and Computational Synthesis

The problem of designing basic building blocks that self-reproduce, self-assemble, and self-organize into increasingly complex functionalities has already been solved by nature. Proteins are the basic building blocks of biological functionality. The genome, proteome, transcriptome and metabolome interact via regulatory networks, protein interaction networks, and metabolic webs, to build functional modules and ultimately achieve large-scale functional biological organization. Since proteomics seeks to understand the functions of the proteins as well as their complex interaction, the fundamental question that we post is: does the science of proteomics have something to teach us about the design competent functional building blocks and about the procedures for combining them to achieve high-level complex functionality? We believe that, as in many other cases, cross-fertilization among computational synthesis and proteomics would be productive. In particular, we provide a brief discussion on a relatively new and surprising proteomic result that may provide some insights on how to effectively organize building blocks: biochemical interaction networks share large-scale topology and properties. These networks are scale-free, modular, hierarchical, error and attack tolerant, their elementary building blocks selforganize into small recurrent patterns (i.e., motifs in gene regulatory networks, and pathways in metabolic networks), and they follow a simple self-organization premise: new nodes, if possible, prefer to connect to highly connected existing nodes. These results suggest that along the road from basic building blocks to high level functionality, we may find it useful to make a stop in the town of proteomics.
Serum carotenoids, vitamins A and E, and 8 year lung function decline in a general population

Background: Oxidative stress is thought to have a major role in the pathogenesis of airway obstruction. A study was undertaken to determine whether subjects with low levels of antioxidants (serum β-carotene, α-carotene, vitamins A and E) would be at a higher risk of accelerated decline in forced expiratory volume in 1 second (FEV1) as their lungs would be less protected against oxidative stress. Methods: 1194 French subjects aged 20–44 years were examined in 1992 as part of the European Community Respiratory Health Survey (ECRHS); 864 were followed up in 2000 and 535 (50% men, 40% lifelong non-smokers) had complete data for analysis. Results: During the 8 year study period the mean annual decrease in FEV1 (adjusted for sex, centre, baseline FEV1, age, smoking, body mass index and low density lipoprotein cholesterol) was 29.8 ml/year. The rate of decrease was lower for the subjects in tertile I of β-carotene at baseline than for those in the two other tertiles (−36.5 v −27.6 ml/year; p = 0.004). An increase in β-carotene between the two surveys was associated with a slower decline in FEV1. No association was observed between α-carotene, vitamin A, or vitamin E and FEV1 decline. However, being a heavy smoker (⩾20 cigarettes/day) in combination with a low level of β-carotene or vitamin E was associated with the steepest decline in FEV1 (−52.5 ml/year, p = 0.0002 and −50.1 ml/year, p = 0.010, respectively). Conclusions: These results strongly suggest that β-carotene protects against the decline in FEV1 over an 8 year period in the general population, and that β-carotene and vitamin E are protective in heavy smokers.
Plasma TGF‐β1 in pediatric cystic fibrosis: Potential biomarker of lung disease and response to therapy

Transforming growth factor beta‐1 (TGF‐β1) is an important genetic modifier of lung disease severity in cystic fibrosis (CF), yet the mechanism behind this disease association remains unknown. Initial steps in the investigation of the relationship between TGF‐β1 and CF lung disease include determining the most appropriate available biospecimen for TGF‐β1 protein measurement.