Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Current-Mode Circuit With a Linearized Input V/I Conversion Scheme and the Realization of a 2-V/2.5-V Operational, 100-MS/s, MOS SHA

This paper proposes a circuit to linearize the signal current and improve the distortion characteristics at the input of a current-mode circuit. Input voltage-to-current (V/I) conversion is carried out by a resistor that connects the signal source and the current input terminal of the current-mode circuit. The signal current flowing into the current-mode circuit through this resistor is distorted because of the signal-dependent voltage change at the current input terminal, and it is linearized by injecting a current that is proportional to the signal-dependent voltage change at the current input terminal, into the same current input terminal of the current-mode circuit. A current-mode sample-and-hold amplifier (SHA) that adopts the proposed scheme was fabricated and a 0.35-mum CMOS process was used to verify the effectiveness of the scheme. It operated from a 2-V supply voltage in the analog part and a 2.5 V in the digital part with a 100-MHz clock and realized a 77- and a 86-dB spurious-free dynamic range values for 0 and -10 dB of full-scale signal current level (plusmn100 muA), respectively, of the 1-MHz signal input. More than a 13-bit equivalent SFDR for -14 to -4 dB of full-scale input was obtained, proving the effectiveness of the proposed scheme at realizing distortionless signal current processing.
Impact of the Interactive Learning Environments in Children’s Prosocial Behavior

: Prosocial behavior consists of a set of behaviors that are beneﬁcial to others in the form of sharing and helping. It includes aspects such as solidarity and friendship, and it fosters development and positive psychological functioning; it also improves classroom and school climate. Interactive learning environments may play a crucial role in creating affordances for students to develop prosocial behavior. This study analyzes the impact of two educational interventions based on egalitarian dialogue (Dialogic Literary Gathering and Interactive Groups) on prosocial behavior among fourth grade elementary students. A quasi-experimental design has been carried out, in which measurements have been taken before and after the intervention. Results show that students involved in the Dialogic Literary Gatherings increased signiﬁcantly their level of prosocial behavior more than those in the control groups. However, no signiﬁcant differences have been found between students in the experimental and control condition, when considering Interactive Groups. These results have important educational implications for creating conducive learning environments for the development of prosocial behavior.
The off-pump technique in redo coronary artery bypass grafting reduces mortality and major morbidities: propensity score analysis of data from the Japan Cardiovascular Surgery Database†.

OBJECTIVES The benefits of off-pump coronary artery grafting (OPCAB) have been demonstrated. Especially in patients with a high number of comorbidities, redo coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) remains a difficult entity of CABG, because patients are likely to have multiple risk factors and often have diseased patent grafts with adhesions. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the effects of the OPCAB technique in redo CABG on mortality and morbidity using data from the Japan Cardiovascular Surgery Database (JCVSD). METHODS We analysed 34 980 patients who underwent isolated CABG between 2008 and 2011, as reported in the JCVSD. Of these, 1.8% of patients (n = 617/34980) had undergone redo CABG, including those who underwent OPCAB (n = 364; 69%) and on-pump CABG (n = 253; 41%). We used propensity score (PS) matching with 13 preoperative risk factors to adjust for differences in baseline characteristics between the redo OPCAB and on-pump redo CABG groups. By one-to-one PS matching, we selected 200 pairs from each group. RESULTS There were no significant differences in patient background between the redo OPCAB and on-pump redo CABG groups after PS matching. There was no significant difference in the mean number of distal anastomoses after matching (2.41 ± 1.00 vs 2.21 ± 1.04, P = 0.074); nevertheless, the mean operation time was significantly shorter in the redo OPCAB than the on-pump redo CABG group (353.7 vs 441.3 min, P < 0.00010). Patients in the redo OPCAB group had a lower 30-day mortality rate (3.5 vs 7.0%, P = 0.18), a significantly lower rate of composite mortality or major morbidities (11.0 vs 21.5%, P = 0.0060), a significantly lower rate of prolonged ventilation (>24 h) (7.0 vs 15.0%, P = 0.016), a significantly shorter duration of intensive care unit (ICU) stay (ICU stay ≥ 8 days) (7.0 vs 14.5%, P = 0.023) and a significantly decreased need for blood transfusions (71.5 vs 94.0%, P < 0.00010) than patients in the on-pump redo CABG group. CONCLUSION The off-pump technique reduced early operative mortality and the incidences of major complications in redo CABG.
Young Adolescent EFL Students’ Writing Skill Development: Insights From Assessment Data

ABSTRACT The purpose of this study is to investigate the developmental writing patterns of English as a foreign language (EFL) students across different score levels through a TOEFL Junior® writing task. The sample of this study comprised 2,016 young adolescent EFL students, ranging from 10 to 15 years old, who took the TOEFL Junior test. We performed a detailed analysis of student essays to identify possible patterns in the development of young adolescent EFL students’ academic writing ability. Linguistic characteristics, such as lexical, syntactic, and discourse features, as well as organizational and content features specific to the argumentative writing genre, were examined by using automated writing evaluation tools and human ratings. The results of descriptive statistics, significance testing, and regression analyses yielded notable patterns for linguistic accuracy and complexity variables. Certain linguistic and content-related features also were found to be highly associated with the writing quality of the young EFL students in the sample. Implications for the instruction and assessment of young adolescent EFL students’ academic writing ability are discussed.
Evaluating Regulatory Impact Assessments in Education Policy

Benefit–cost analysis is an important part of regulatory decision-making, yet there are questions as to how often and how well it is performed. Here we examine 28 Regulatory Impact Assessments performed by the federal government on education regulations since 2006. We find many Regulatory Impact Assessments estimated costs, albeit using informal methods, but most failed to adequately report benefits. Also, most studies did not estimate net present value or clearly report methodological assumptions. In reviewing the relatively high quality studies we identified a number of discrepancies from best practice. Most importantly, few Regulatory Impact Assessments attempted a social benefit–cost analysis: Most examined “administrative burdens” from compliance with legislation. This alternative focus on administrative burdens has significant implications for economic evaluation in practice.
Introspective classification for robot perception and decision making

In robotics, a classifier is often a core component of the decision-making framework. Precision and recall have been widely adopted as canonical metrics to quantify the performance of a classifier, but for applications involving mission-critical decision making, good performance in relation to these metrics is insufficient. The use of a classification framework which produces scores with inappropriate confidences will ultimately lead to the robot making bad decisions, thereby compromising robot or user safety. In order to select a classifier which will make decisions reflecting the nature of the costs, we should pay careful attention to the ways in which it generates scores. We introduce and motivate the importance of a classifier's introspective capacity: the ability to give an appropriate assessment of confidence with any test case. Classification made confidently must be correct, and mistakes should be made with high uncertainty. A classifier's capacity to do so must remain consistent despite unusual or surprising test cases. We propose that a key ingredient for introspection is a classifier's potential to increase its uncertainty with the distance between a test datum and its training data. We define the ideal introspective behaviour, and derive idealised classifiers which serve to benchmark a number of commonly used classification frameworks in a variety of decision-making tasks. We show that classifiers that offer predictive variance at test-time are more cautious and less over-confident than those which consider a single hypothesis or discriminant. However, in high-cost (or high-risk) decision making, none of the classifiers evaluated in this thesis are sufficiently introspective to prevent all potential catastrophic mistakes. We show that in sequential decision-making, when the mapping from score to class is explicitly stated, a classifier's ability to behave consistently despite non-stationary test data is of primary importance.
Improved quality and efficiency after the introduction of physician-led team triage in an emergency department

Abstract Background: Overcrowding in the emergency department (ED) may negatively affect patient outcomes, so different triage models have been introduced to improve performance. Physician-led team triage obtains better results than other triage models. We compared efficiency and quality measures before and after reorganization of the triage model in the ED at our county hospital. Materials and methods: We retrospectively compared two study periods with different triage models: nurse triage in 2008 (baseline) and physician-led team triage in 2012 (follow-up). Physician-led team triage was in use during day-time and early evenings on weekdays. Data were collected from electronic medical charts and the National Mortality Register. Results: We included 20,073 attendances in 2008 and 23,765 in 2012. The time from registration to physician presentation decreased from 80 to 33 min (P < 0.001), and the length of stay decreased from 219 to 185 min (P < 0.001) from 2008 to 2012, respectively. All of the quality variables differed significantly between the two periods, with better results in 2012. The odds ratio for patients who left before being seen or before treatment was completed was 0.62 (95% confidence interval 0.54–0.72). The corresponding result for unscheduled returns was 0.36 (0.32–0.40), and for the mortality rates within 7 and 30 days 0.72 (0.59–0.88) and 0.84 (0.73–0.97), respectively. The admission rate was 37% at baseline and 32% at follow-up (P < 0.001). Conclusion: Physician-led team triage improved the efficiency and quality in EDs.
Is the International Border Effect Larger than the Domestic Border Effect? Evidence from U.S. Trade

Many studies have found that international borders represent large barriers to trade. But how do international borders compare to domestic border barriers? We investigate international and domestic border barriers in a unified framework. We consider a data set of exports from individual U.S. states to foreign countries and combine it with trade flows between and within U.S. states. After controlling for distance and country size, we estimate that relative to state-to-state trade, crossing an individual U.S. state’s domestic border appears to entail a larger trade barrier than crossing the international U.S. border. Due to the absence of governmental impediments to trade within the United States, this result is surprising. We interpret it as highlighting the concentration of economic activity and trade flows at the local level.
Cooperative Storage-Level De-duplication for I/O Reduction in Virtualized Data Centers

Data centers are increasingly being re-designed for workload consolidation in order to reap the benefits of better resource utilization, power savings, and physical space savings. Among the forces driving savings are server and storage virtualization technologies. As more consolidated workloads are concentrated on physical machines -- e.g., the virtual density is already very high in virtual desktop environments, and will be driven to unprecedented levels with the fast growing highcore counts of physical servers -- the shared storage layer must respond with virtualization innovations of its own such as de-duplication and thin provisioning. A key insight of this paper is that there is a greater synergy between the two layers of storage and server virtualization to exploit block sharing information than was previously thought possible. We reveal this via developing a systematic framework to explore the storage and virtualization servers interactions. We also quantitatively evaluate the I/O bandwidth and latency reduction that is possible between virtual machine hosts and storage servers using real-world trace driven simulation. Moreover, we present a proof of concept NFS implementation that incorporates our techniques to quantify their I/O latency benefits.
Circumstellar interaction in type Ibn supernovae and SN 2006jc

I analyse peculiar properties of light curve and continua of enigmatic Ibn supernovae, including SN 2006jc, and argue in favour of the early strong circumstellar interaction. This interaction explains the high luminosity and fast flux rise of SN 1999cq, while the cool dense shell (CDS) formed in shocked ejecta can explain the smooth early continuum of SN 2000er and unusual blue continuum of SN 2006jc. The dust is shown to condense in the CDS at about day 50. Monte Carlo modelling of the He 1 7065 A line profile affected by the dust occultation supports a picture, in which the dust resides in the fragmented CDS, whereas He I lines originate from circumstellar clouds shocked and fragmented in the forward shock wave.
Comparison the Efficacy of Fluconazole and Terbinafine in Patients with Moderate to Severe Seborrheic Dermatitis

Background. Topical agents can be unpleasant due to long-term therapies in patients with moderate to severe seborrheic dermatitis. Systemic antifungal therapy is another alternative in treatment. Aim. This study was conducted to compare the efficacy of oral fluconazole and terbinafine in the treatment of moderate to severe seborrheic dermatitis. Methods. 64 patients with moderate to severe seborrheic dermatitis (SD) were enrolled in a randomized, parallel-group study. One study group took terbinafine 250 mg daily (n = 32) and the other one fluconazole 300 mg (n = 32) weekly for four weeks. Seborrheic dermatitis area severity index (SDASI) and the intensity of itching were calculated before, at the end of treatment, and two weeks after treatment. Results. Both drugs significantly reduced the severity of seborrheic dermatitis (P < 0.001). Multivariate linear regression revealed that efficacy of terbinafine is more than fluconazole (P < 0.01, 95% CI (0.63–4.7)). Moreover, each index of SD severity reduced 0.9 times after treatment. (P < 0.002, 95% CI (0.8–1.02)). The itching rate significantly diminished (P < 0.001); however, there was no difference between these two drugs statistically. Conclusions. Both systemic antifungal therapies may reduce the severity index of SD. However, terbinafine showed more reduction in the intensity of the disease. In other words, the more the primary intensity of the disease is, the more its reduction will be. This trial is resgistered with 201102205871N1.
A Computational Approach to Etiquette: Operationalizing Brown and Levinson's Politeness Model

A central source of cultural differences is the communication of politeness, which can powerfully affect perception and behavior. Our computational adaptation of a universal theory of human politeness (from Brown and Levinson, 1987) combines culture-specific aspects of social context to generate expectations, score, interpret and recommend polite and impolite behaviors. Tests show this approach could reduce software development costs and increase an intelligent agent's behavior repertoire through the incorporation of modular, cross-cultural etiquette libraries.
European Conference on Information Systems ( ECIS ) 5-15-2012 THE EFQM EXCELLENCE MODEL AS ENABLER OF E-PROCUREMENT ADOPTION AND THE EFFECT ON PERFORMANCE

The objective of this paper is to examine the EFQM Excellence Model as an enabler of E-procurement adoption and the effect on purchasing performance. The study utilized a cross-sectional telephone survey of a sample of Spanish manufacturing companies using multiple informants. A total of 200 firms responded making a total of 800 responses. Data was analyzed using structural equations modelling. The results indicate that the Business Excellence Enablers (Leadership, Strategy, People, Resources, and Processes) act as enablers of E-procurement and help to realize gains in purchasing performance.
The Impact of Transformational Leadership Style, Organizational Citizenship Behavior, and Work Satisfaction on A Galuh Protank Logistics Group’s Employees’ Performance

This research is aimed to study the influence of transformational leadership and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) implementation on employee performance and aimed to study the influence of transformational leadership and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) implementation on job satisfaction and the subsequent effect of job satisfaction on employee performance. Employee performance is the primary factor in the achievement of company goals. This research will answer these problems: (1) Does transformational leadership affect employee performance? (2) Does job satisfaction affect employee performance? (3) Does transformational leadership affect employee performance as mediated by employee job satisfaction? (4) Does the OCB affect employee performance? (5) Does the OCB affect employee performance as mediated by employee job satisfaction? This research follows a quantitative approach using data that was gathered through questionnaires. The population of this research are Galuh Protank Logistics Group employees. Forty-eight employees were respondents. SEM-PLS Warps test was used to analyze the data. The research results indicate that the influence of transformational leadership and OCB on employee performance is significant, but the influence of job satisfaction on employee performance is not significant. The research results indicate that the influence of transformational leadership and OCB on employee job satisfaction is significant. Keywords: Employee performance, Job satisfaction, Organization Citizenship Behavior, Transformational leadership style
New VMD2 gene mutations identified in patients affected by Best vitelliform macular dystrophy

Purpose: The mutations responsible for Best vitelliform macular dystrophy (BVMD) are found in a gene called VMD2. The VMD2 gene encodes a transmembrane protein named bestrophin-1 (hBest1) which is a Ca2+-sensitive chloride channel. This study was performed to identify disease-specific mutations in 27 patients with BVMD. Because this disease is characterised by an alteration in Cl− channel function, patch clamp analysis was used to test the hypothesis that one of the VMD2 mutated variants causes the disease. Methods: Direct sequencing analysis of the 11 VMD2 exons was performed to detect new abnormal sequences. The mutant of hBest1 was expressed in HEK-293 cells and the associated Cl− current was examined using whole-cell patch clamp analysis. Results: Six new VMD2 mutations were identified, located exclusively in exons four, six and eight. One of these mutations (Q293H) was particularly severe. Patch clamp analysis of human embryonic kidney cells expressing the Q293H mutant showed that this mutant channel is non-functional. Furthermore, the Q293H mutant inhibited the function of wild-type bestrophin-1 channels in a dominant negative manner. Conclusions: This study provides further support for the idea that mutations in VMD2 are a necessary factor for Best disease. However, because variable expressivity of VMD2 was observed in a family with the Q293H mutation, it is also clear that a disease-linked mutation in VMD2 is not sufficient to produce BVMD. The finding that the Q293H mutant does not form functional channels in the membrane could be explained either by disruption of channel conductance or gating mechanisms or by improper trafficking of the protein to the plasma membrane.
Sources of self-efficacy of English language learners with individual differences

Introduction. Since self-efficacy is a belief about one’s capability in doing something suc-cessfully or unsuccessfully and it relates to academic achievements directly and indirectly. The understanding the sources of one’s self-efficacy could assist that person to achieve a better result in learning or doing something, or, at least, to minimize a reflection from negative sources that could decrease his/her self-efficacy. This study investigated the sources of self-efficacy of English language learners with different genders, nationalities, types of study program, and fields of study. Method . This study used stratified random sampling to draw 480 first-year students at a university to complete a questionnaire. Then, the data was analyzed by descriptive statistics, t-test, and One-Way ANOVA. Results. The result showed slight differences in sources of self-efficacy between learners with different nationality and types of program. Findings revealed that vicarious experience became the highest ranked source for positive self-efficacy while mastery experience was the highest for the negative self-efficacy. Social persuasion was the least influential source regardless of their differences. Discussion and Conclusion. The implications are that teachers and administrators could use the results of this study to develop the strategies to implant positive self-efficacy that results greatly in students’ learning process, and to lead their students with those individual differences to be autonomous learners.
Continuous-time batch estimation using temporal basis functions

Roboticists often formulate estimation problems in discrete time for the practical reason of keeping the state size tractable. However, the discrete-time approach does not scale well for use with high-rate sensors, such as inertial measurement units or sweeping laser imaging sensors. The difficulty lies in the fact that a pose variable is typically included for every time at which a measurement is acquired, rendering the dimension of the state impractically large for large numbers of measurements. This issue is exacerbated for the simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) problem, which further augments the state to include landmark variables. To address this tractability issue, we propose to move the full maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) problem into continuous time and use temporal basis functions to keep the state size manageable. We present a full probabilistic derivation of the continuous-time estimation problem, derive an estimator based on the assumption that the densities and processes involved are Gaussian, and show how coefficients of a relatively small number of basis functions can form the state to be estimated, making the solution efficient. Our derivation is presented in steps of increasingly specific assumptions, opening the door to the development of other novel continuous-time estimation algorithms through the application of different assumptions at any point. We use the SLAM problem as our motivation throughout the paper, although the approach is not specific to this application. Results from a self-calibration experiment involving a camera and a high-rate inertial measurement unit are provided to validate the approach.