Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A preoperative mathematic model for computed tomographic guided microwave ablation treatment of hepatic dome tumors

Purpose This study sought to prospectively evaluate the feasibility and safety of a preoperative mathematic model for computed tomographic(CT) guided microwave(MW) ablation treatment of hepatic dome tumors. Methods This mathematic model was a regular cylinder quantifying appropriate puncture routes from the bottom up. A total of 103 patients with hepatic dome tumors were enrolled and randomly divided into 2 groups based on whether this model was used or not: Group A (using the model; n = 43) versus Group B (not using the model; n = 60). All tumors were treated by CT-guided MW ablation and follow-up contrast CT were reviewed. Results The average number of times for successful puncture, average ablation time, and incidence of right shoulder pain were less in Group A than Group B (1.4 vs. 2.5, P = 0.001; 8.8 vs. 11.1 minutes, P = 0.003; and 4.7% vs. 20%, P = 0.039). The technical success rate was higher in Group A than Group B (97.7% vs. 85.0%, P = 0.032). There were no significant differences between the two groups in primary and secondary technique efficacy rates (97.7% vs. 88.3%, P = 0.081; 90.0% vs. 72.7%, P = 0.314). No major complications occurred in both groups. Conclusion The mathematic model of regular cylinder is feasible and safe for CT-guided MW ablation in treating hepatic dome tumors.
Barriers and Facilitators to Inclusive Education

To examine how inclusive our schools are after 25 years of educational reform, students with disabilities and their parents were asked to identify current barriers and provide suggestions for removing those barriers. Based on a series of focus group meetings, 15 students with mobility limitations (9–15 years) and 12 parents identified four categories of barriers at their schools: (a) the physical environment (e.g., narrow doorways, ramps); (b) intentional attitudinal barriers (e.g., isolation, bullying); (c) unintentional attitudinal barriers (e.g., lack of knowledge, understanding, or awareness); and (d) physical limitations (e.g., difficulty with manual dexterity). Recommendations for promoting accessibility and full participation are provided and discussed in relation to inclusive education efforts.
The extreme-value dependence between the Chinese and other international stock markets

Extreme Value Theory (EVT) measures the behaviour of extreme observations on a random variable. EVT in risk management, an approach to modelling and measuring risks under rare events, has taken on a prominent role in recent years. This article contributes to the literature in two respects by analysing an interesting international financial data set. First, we apply conditional EVT to examine the Value at Risk (VaR) and the Expected Shortfall (ES) for the Chinese and several representative international stock market indices: Hang Seng (Hong Kong), TSEC (Taiwan), Nikkei 225 (Japan), Kospi (Korea), BSE (India), STI (Singapore), S&P 500 (US), SPTSE (Canada), IPC (Mexico), CAC 40 (France), DAX 30 (Germany), FTSE100 (UK) index. We find that China has the highest VaR and ES for negative daily stock returns. Second, we examine the extreme dependence between these stock markets, and we find that the Chinese market is asymptotically independent of the other stock markets considered.
Does Long-Term Use of Silver Nanoparticles Have Persistent Inhibitory Effect on H. pylori Based on Mongolian Gerbil's Model?

Background. It is urgent to find alternative agents due to increasing failure rate of Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori) eradication. The study surveyed the long-term effect of silver nanoparticles (AgNP) on H. pylori based on Mongolian gerbil's model. Materials and Methods. Fifty gerbils were randomly allocated to six groups (A–F). Group (Gr) A: the gerbils were fed with broth; Gr B and D: the gerbils were fed with AgNP/clay complex (0.1% of weight); Gr C and E: the gerbils were fed with AgNP/clay complex(1% of weight); and Gr D, E, and F: the gerbils were inoculated with H. pylori. At the 20th experimental week, the gerbils were sacrificed. Histology was evaluated according to the classification of the Sydney system. P < 0.05 was considered to be statistically significant. Results. The AgNP/clay has more obvious inhibitory effect on H. pylori in vitro. There was a trend of higher concentrations of AgNP with stronger inhibitory effect on H. pylori growth (P = 0.071). There were no significant differences of inflammation among groups D, E, and F (P = 0.688). Conclusion. AgNP/clay would be a potential and safe agent for inhibiting H. pylori. It should be helpful for eradication of H. pylori infection.
Epstein-Barr Virus That Lacks Glycoprotein gN Is Impaired in Assembly and Infection

ABSTRACT The Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) glycoproteins N and M (gN and gM) are encoded by the BLRF1 and BBRF3 genes. To examine the function of the EBV gN-gM complex, recombinant virus was constructed in which the BLRF1 gene was interrupted with a neomycin resistance cassette. Recombinant virus lacked not only gN but also detectable gM. A significant proportion of the recombinant virus capsids remained associated with condensed chromatin in the nucleus of virus-producing cells, and cytoplasmic vesicles containing enveloped virus were scarce. Virus egress was impaired, and sedimentation analysis revealed that the majority of the virus that was released lacked a complete envelope. The small amount of virus that could bind to cells was also impaired in infectivity at a step following fusion. These data are consistent with the hypothesis that the predicted 78-amino-acid cytoplasmic tail of gM, which is highly charged and rich in prolines, interacts with the virion tegument. It is proposed that this interaction is important both for association of capsids with cell membrane to assemble and release enveloped particles and for dissociation of the capsid from the membrane of the newly infected cell on its way to the cell nucleus. The phenotype of EBV lacking the gN-gM complex is more striking than that of most alphaherpesviruses lacking the same complex but resembles in many respects the phenotype of pseudorabies virus lacking glycoproteins gM, gE, and gI. Since EBV does not encode homologs for gE and gI, this suggests that functions that may have some redundancy in alphaherpesviruses have been concentrated in fewer proteins in EBV.
Connectivity based parcellation and brain atlas generation - extracting connectome information for Schizophrenia research

Title of thesis: CONNECTIVITY BASED PARCELLATION AND BRAIN ATLAS GENERATION – EXTRACTING CONNECTOME INFORMATION FOR SCHIZOPHRENIA RESEARCH Qi Wang, Master of Science, 2014 Thesis directed by: Professor Joseph JaJa Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Traditional brain atlases are mainly based on hand-crafted anatomical structures, not taking into consideration useful connectivity pattern information. In our work, we use diffusion weighted imaging data to incorporate connectivity information into atlas generation. We use the software package FSL to process data to extract the connectivity matrix. The brain parcellation problem is formulated as a min-cut problem on a large, sparse graph. Spectral clustering and an original multi-class Hopfield network (MHN) method are applied to solve the problem, each working with a different analytical framework: MHN works in the diffusion space to generate individual parcellations, while spectral clustering works on standard space averaged connectome to generate group level atlases. Group study of brain images with schizophrenia is conducted, showing significant improvement in accuracy for disease diagnosis using features extracted with the proposed parcellation scheme. Hypothesis tests are performed on local structures to explore possible structural causes of the disease. CONNECTIVITY BASED PARCELLATION AND BRAIN ATLAS GENERATION – EXTRACTING CONNECTOME INFORMATION FOR SCHIZOPHRENIA RESEARCH
THE SCOPE OF AGGREGATIVE GAMES

Noncooperative games in which each players payo¤ function depends on an additively separable function of every players choice variable may be transformed into an aggregative game, which may be analysed using the concept of share functions. The resulting approach avoids the proliferation of dimensions as the number of players is increased. We show how this approach may be exploited to analyze several common models that arise in analyses of monopolistic competition, public goods, and rent-seeking contests. Acknowledgement : Much of the rst authors work on an early version of this paper was undertaken while he was a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Economic Studies, University of Munich. The support of the Center is gratefully acknowledged. We are also grateful to Martin Jensen for helpful comments on this material.
Strategic Communication: Defining the Field and its Contribution to Research and Practice

ABSTRACT This article draws on a decade of research in strategic communication and especially on the contributions in this special issue to propose a new and more comprehensive definition of strategic communication. We argue that strategic communication encompasses all communication that is substantial for the survival and sustained success of an entity. Specifically, strategic communication is the purposeful use of communication by an entity to engage in conversations of strategic significance to its goals. Entity includes all kind of organizations (e.g., corporations, governments, or nonprofits), as well as social movements and known individuals in the public sphere. Communication can play a distinctive role for the formulation, revision, presentation, execution, implementation, and operationalization of strategies. While there are many ways to investigate these research objects, strategic communication as a discipline takes the perspective of the focal organization/entity and its calculus to achieve specific goals by means of communication under conditions of limited resources and uncertainty. The article takes a critical look at the current state of the field and outlines several requirements that will help scholars and practitioners alike to build a unique body of knowledge in strategic communication.
Synchronization and leadership in string quartet performance: a case study of auditory and visual cues

Temporal coordination between members of a string quartet was investigated across repeated performances of an excerpt of Haydn’s string quartet in G Major, Op. 77 No. 1. Cross-correlations between interbeat intervals of performances at different lags showed a unidirectional dependence of Viola on Violin I, and of Violin I on Cello. Bidirectional dependence was observed for the relationships between Violin II and Cello and Violin II and Viola. Own-reported dependencies after the performances reflected these measured dependencies more closely than dependencies of players reported by the other players, which instead showed more typical leader–follower patterns in which Violin I leads. On the other hand, primary leadership from Violin I was observed in an analysis of the bow speed characteristics preceding the first tone onset. The anticipatory movement of Violin I set the tempo of the excerpt. Taken together the results show a more complex and differentiated pattern of dependencies than expected from a traditional role division of leadership suggesting several avenues for further research.
The paradox of the expected time until the next earthquake

We show analytically that the answer to the question, (can it be that) “The longer it has been since the last earthquake, the longer the expected time till the next? ” depends crucially on the statistics of the fluctuations in the interval times between earthquakes. The periodic, uniform, semi-Gaussian, Rayleigh, and truncated statistical distributions of interval times, as well as the Weibull distributions with exponent greater than 1, all have decreasing expected time to the next earthquake with increasing time since the last one, for long times since the last earthquake; the lognormal and power-law distributions and the Weibull distributions with exponents smaller than 1 have increasing times to the next earthquake as the elapsed time since the last increases, for long elapsed times. There is an identifiable crossover between these models, which is gauged by the rate of fall-off of the long-term tail of the distribution in comparison with an exponential fall-off. The response to the question for short elapsed times is also evaluated. The lognormal and power-law distributions give one response for short elapsed times and the opposite for long elapsed times. Even the sampling of a finite number of intervals from a Poisson distribution will lead to an increasing estimate of time to the next earthquake for increasing elapsed time since the last one.
Charge order in the pseudogap phase of cuprate superconductors

Charge ordering instabilities are studied in amultiorbitalmodel of cuprate superconductors. A known, key feature of thismodel is that the large local Coulomb interaction in theCu − dx y 2 2 orbitals generates localmoments with short range antiferromagnetic (AF) correlations. The strong simplifying ansatz that thesemoments are static and ordered allows us to explore a regime not generally accessible toweak-coupling approaches. TheAF correlations lead to a pseudogap-like reconstruction of the Fermi surface.Wefind that the leading charge instability within this pseudogap-like state is to a phase with a spatiallymodulated transfer of charge between neighbouring oxygen px and py orbitals accompanied byweakmodulations of the charge density on theCu − dx y 2 2 orbitals. As a prime result of theAF Fermi-surface reconstruction, thewavevectors of the chargemodulations are oriented along the crystalline axes with a periodicity that agrees quantitatively with experiments. This suggests a resolution to a discrepancy between experiments, whichfind axial order, and previous theoretical calculations, whichfindmodulationwavevectors along the Brillouin zone diagonal. The axial order is stabilized by hopping processes via the Cu4s orbital, which is commonly not included inmodel analyses of cuprate superconductors. Themain implication of our results is that charge order emerges from the pseudogap state, and is not the primary source of the pseudogap.
Computational Barriers in Minimax Submatrix Detection

This paper studies the minimax detection of a small submatrix of elevated mean in a large matrix contaminated by additive Gaussian noise. To investigate the tradeoff between statistical performance and computational cost from a complexity-theoretic perspective, we consider a sequence of discretized models which are asymptotically equivalent to the Gaussian model. Under the hypothesis that the planted clique detection problem cannot be solved in randomized polynomial time when the clique size is of smaller order than the square root of the graph size, the following phase transition phenomenon is established: when the size of the large matrix $p\to\infty$, if the submatrix size $k=\Theta(p^{\alpha})$ for any $\alpha\in(0,{2}/{3})$, computational complexity constraints can incur a severe penalty on the statistical performance in the sense that any randomized polynomial-time test is minimax suboptimal by a polynomial factor in $p$; if $k=\Theta(p^{\alpha})$ for any $\alpha\in({2}/{3},1)$, minimax optimal detection can be attained within constant factors in linear time. Using Schatten norm loss as a representative example, we show that the hardness of attaining the minimax estimation rate can crucially depend on the loss function. Implications on the hardness of support recovery are also obtained.
Radical Innovation in Firms Across Nations

Radical innovation is an important driver of the growth, success, and wealth of firms and nations. Because of its importance, authors in a variety of disciplines have proposed many theories about the drivers of innovation. These drivers include government policy and labor, capital, and culture at the country level. The authors contrast these theories with a firm-level theory of innovation. Their culture-centric theory of innovation suggests that in the current economic environment in major nations across the world, the internal culture of firms may be the most important driver of innovation. They test their theory on survey and archival data from 759 firms across 17 major economies of the world. Results suggest that: 1) among the factors studied, the internal culture of a firm is the strongest driver of radical innovation across nations, and 2) the commercialization of radical innovations translates into a firm’s financial performance; it is a stronger predictor of financial performance than other popular measures such as patents. The authors discuss the implications of these findings for research and practice.
Evaluating a Nationwide Recreational Football Intervention: Recruitment, Attendance, Adherence, Exercise Intensity, and Health Effects

The present study evaluated a nationwide exercise intervention with Football Fitness in a small-scale society. In all, 741 adult participants (20–72 yrs) were successfully recruited for Football Fitness training in local football clubs, corresponding to 2.1% of the adult population. A preintervention test battery including resting heart rate (RHR), blood pressure, and body mass measurements along with performance tests (Yo-Yo Intermittent Endurance level 1 (Yo-Yo IE1), the Arrowhead Agility Test, and the Flamingo Balance Test) were performed (n = 502). Training attendance (n = 310) was 1.6 ± 0.2 sessions per week (range: 0.6–2.9), corresponding to 28.8 ± 1.0 sessions during the 18 wk intervention period. After 18 wks mean arterial pressure (MAP) was −2.7 ± 0.7 mmHg lower (P < 0.05; n = 151) with even greater (P < 0.05) reductions for those with baseline MAP values >99 mmHg (−5.6 ± 1.5 mmHg; n = 50). RHR was lowered (P < 0.05) by 6 bpm after intervention (77 ± 1 to 71 ± 1 bpm). Yo-Yo IE1 performance increased by 41% (540 ± 27 to 752 ± 45 m), while agility and postural balance were improved (P < 0.05) by ~6 and ~45%, respectively. In conclusion, Football Fitness was shown to be a successful health-promoting nationwide training intervention for adult participants with an extraordinary recruitment, a high attendance rate, moderate adherence, high exercise intensity, and marked benefits in cardiovascular health profile and fitness.
A Basic Language Resource Kit for Persian

Persian with its about 100,000,000 speakers in the world belongs to the group of languages with less developed linguistically annotated resources and tools. The few existing resources and tools are neither open source nor freely available. Thus, our goal is to develop open source resources such as corpora and treebanks, and tools for data-driven linguistic analysis of Persian. We do this by exploring the reusability of existing resources and adapting state-of-the-art methods for the linguistic annotation. We present fully functional tools for text normalization, sentence segmentation, tokenization, part-of-speech tagging, and parsing. As for resources, we describe the Uppsala PErsian Corpus (UPEC) which is a modified version of the Bijankhan corpus with additional sentence segmentation and consistent tokenization modified for more appropriate syntactic annotation. The corpus consists of 2,782,109 tokens and is annotated with parts of speech and morphological features. A treebank is derived from UPEC with an annotation scheme based on Stanford Typed Dependencies and is planned to consist of 10,000 sentences of which 215 have already been annotated. Keywords: BLARK for Persian, PoS tagged corpus, Persian treebank
Span-Based Constituency Parsing with a Structure-Label System and Provably Optimal Dynamic Oracles

Parsing accuracy using efficient greedy transition systems has improved dramatically in recent years thanks to neural networks. Despite striking results in dependency parsing, however, neural models have not surpassed state-of-the-art approaches in constituency parsing. To remedy this, we introduce a new shift-reduce system whose stack contains merely sentence spans, represented by a bare minimum of LSTM features. We also design the first provably optimal dynamic oracle for constituency parsing, which runs in amortized O(1) time, compared to O(n^3) oracles for standard dependency parsing. Training with this oracle, we achieve the best F1 scores on both English and French of any parser that does not use reranking or external data.
Gender Differences in Different Dimensions of Common Burnout Symptoms in a Group of Clinical Burnout Patients

Objective The current study investigated gender differences with a focus on mood, personality characteristics, sleepiness/alertness and cognitive measures in a group of 103 clinically diagnosed burnout patients, who were enrolled in a five week rehabilitation program in specialized centers in Austria. Methods Patients completed a series of questionnaires measuring mood, burnout symptoms, sleep complaints and personality characteristics such as work-related coping. Additionally, all subjects were assessed with a cognitive test battery measuring specific components of executive functions and selective visual attention. Furthermore, to evaluate if gender differences generalize across potential burnout subgroups we performed a cluster analysis with the depression score and burnout-index as clustering variables. Results Our results revealed, that men and women did not differ in their depression scores, but women showed higher levels in emotional exhaustion and reduced vitality as well as reduced vigilance compared to men. Moreover, women showed higher levels of sleepiness and tiredness that also affected cognitive performance of more demanding executive control tasks. Finally, we found gender differences in personality characteristics and workrelated coping strategies. Men and women were equally distributed across all three burnout subgroups identified with cluster analysis, and gender differences were the same in all burnout subgroups. Discussion The observed gender differences in clinical burnout patients may have implications for the development of gender-specific rehabilitation programs.
Financial Stress and Drinking During the Transition to Adulthood: The Role of Parental Financial Support

We investigated the concurrent and prospective associations between financial stress and drinking during the transition to adulthood in the United States, drawing from two distinct stress and coping perspectives as competing explanations for the direction of associations: the Transactional Model of Stress and the Conservation of Resources (CoR) model. Because many emerging adults rely on continuing financial support from parents, we examined the role of parental support on these associations. We tested these associations using longitudinal structural equation modeling with data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (N = 9,026) collected at two time points: early emerging adulthood (ages 18–26) and 5 years later. Consistent with CoR, financial stress reduced concurrent drinking. Furthermore, parental financial support reduced adult children’s financial stress but increased drinking in early emerging adulthood. We discuss the findings in regard to facilitating the transition to adulthood.