Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Augmented-Reality-Based Indoor Navigation: A Comparative Analysis of Handheld Devices Versus Google Glass

Navigation systems have been widely used in outdoor environments, but indoor navigation systems are still in early development stages. In this paper, we introduced an augmented-reality-based indoor navigation application to assist people navigate in indoor environments. The application can be implemented on electronic devices such as a smartphone or a head-mounted device. In particular, we examined Google Glass as a wearable head-mounted device in comparison with handheld navigation aids including a smartphone and a paper map. We conducted both a technical assessment study and a human factors study. The technical assessment established the feasibility and reliability of the system. The human factors study evaluated human-machine system performance measures including perceived accuracy, navigation time, subjective comfort, subjective workload, and route memory retention. The results showed that the wearable device was perceived to be more accurate, but other performance and workload results indicated that the wearable device was not significantly different from the handheld smartphone. We also found that both digital navigation aids were better than the paper map in terms of shorter navigation time and lower workload, but digital navigation aids resulted in worse route retention. These results could provide empirical evidence supporting future designs of indoor navigation systems. Implications and future research were also discussed.
A qualitative analysis of Clinical Psychologists’ use of psychological formulation with clients who have had ‘psychotic’ experiences

Introduction; Formulation has been defined as a hypothesis, based on psychological theory and evidence, explaining a person’s difficulties (British Psychological Society, 2011; Johnstone & Dallos, 2006). It is a key part of psychological therapies. It is argued that sharing formulation with clients has a positive impact. However, past narrative reviews (Aston, 2009; Bieling & Kuyken, 2003) have suggested mixed evidence for this claim. The current paper provides a systematic review of the current evidence into the impact of sharing the formulation with clients. Method; A systematic literature search was carried out. Five databases were searched. Titles and abstracts were screened against the inclusion criteria. This procedure resulted in fourteen papers being included in the final review. Data was extracted from these papers and their quality appraised. Results; Fourteen articles were synthesised into four categories; the impact on the therapeutic alliance, the impact on outcome, the impact on client’s response in the session and perceived helpfulness. Evidence to support the claim that sharing formulation impacts on clients is limited and the picture is complex. There was some limited evidence that the type of interpretation, the quality of the formulation and the way it was shared, had a differential impact on outcome. The results also indicated that the quality of a person’s interpersonal functioning could moderate the impact. Findings with regard to the therapeutic alliance were mixed. There was no evidence that sharing the formulation impacted on perceived helpfulness. Discussion; There is some evidence that formulation has a different impact on different people, which suggests therapists would do well to use a level of clinical judgement when deciding what to share, based on their understanding of the client. There is also some indication that when it comes to formulation, more is not necessarily better.
Systematic preclinical study on the therapeutic properties of recombinant human interleukin 2 for the treatment of metastatic disease.

The availability of recombinant human interleukin 2 (rH IL 2) has resulted in its clinical utilization both as a single agent and in combination with lymphokine-activated killer cells. In this report, we discuss the effects of rH IL 2, administered by various routes, on effector cell function, pharmacokinetics and bioavailability, and therapeutic activity. Studies of the pharmacokinetics of in vitro natural killer (NK) cell augmentation by rH IL 2 revealed that a short exposure to high levels of rH IL 2 can augment NK cell activity; however, a prolonged exposure (greater than 12 h) was required to augment NK cell activity at lower doses of rH IL 2. These observations suggested that chronic administration of rH IL 2 might improve immunomodulatory and therapeutic activity. This hypothesis was supported by the results of studies in which we treated experimental and spontaneous metastasis, which revealed that the daily i.p. administration of rH IL 2 resulted in significantly greater therapeutic activity than administration three times/week. The therapeutic protocol for daily i.p. administration had a biphasic dosage optimum, such that low dose therapeutic activity was observed at approximately 100-1000 units/animal in the treatment of experimental metastases or 10 to 100 units/animal in the treatment of spontaneous metastases. There was a second dosage optimum at greater than or equal to 100,000 units/animal rH IL 2 delivered i.p. on a daily basis. Intermediate doses had no significant therapeutic activity. Additional studies revealed that low dose therapeutic activity was not observed in nude mice. In contrast, therapeutic activity was observed in nude mice at high doses of rH IL 2 suggesting that low dose activity was associated with a T-cell-mediated effect, whereas high dose activity may have been mediated by NK or lymphokine-activated killer-like cells. This observation was in agreement with the dose response for T-cell adjuvant activity supporting the hypothesis that low dose therapeutic activity was T-cell associated, because adjuvant activity was observed when rH IL 2 was given daily at approximately 100 units/animal for 3 days, and higher doses had no activity or had a suppressive effect. Because we were concerned about the pharmacological aspects of rH IL 2 treatment, we also examined its therapeutic properties after continuous administration i.p. by osmotic pumps. Under these conditions, therapeutic activity was observed after administration of 600 units/h, whereas lower or higher doses did not have significant therapeutic activity.
Prostate Cancer Imaging Trends After a Nationwide Effort to Discourage Inappropriate Prostate Cancer Imaging

Background Reducing inappropriate use of imaging to stage incident prostate cancer is a challenging problem highlighted recently as a Physician Quality Reporting System quality measure and by the American Society of Clinical Oncology and the American Urological Association in the Choosing Wisely campaign. Since 2000, the National Prostate Cancer Register (NPCR) of Sweden has led an effort to decrease national rates of inappropriate prostate cancer imaging by disseminating utilization data along with the latest imaging guidelines to urologists in Sweden. We sought to determine the temporal and regional effects of this effort on prostate cancer imaging rates. Methods We performed a retrospective cohort study among men diagnosed with prostate cancer from the NPCR from 1998 to 2009 (n = 99 879). We analyzed imaging use over time stratified by clinical risk category (low, intermediate, high) and geographic region. Generalized linear models with a logit link were used to test for time trend. Results Thirty-six percent of men underwent imaging within 6 months of prostate cancer diagnosis. Overall, imaging use decreased over time, particularly in the low-risk category, among whom the imaging rate decreased from 45% to 3% (P < .001), but also in the high-risk category, among whom the rate decreased from 63% to 47% (P < .001). Despite substantial regional variation, all regions experienced clinically and statistically (P < .001) significant decreases in prostate cancer imaging. Conclusions A Swedish effort to provide data on prostate cancer imaging use and imaging guidelines to clinicians was associated with a reduction in inappropriate imaging over a 10-year period, as well as slightly decreased appropriate imaging in high-risk patients. These results may inform current efforts to promote guideline-concordant imaging in the United States and internationally.
A robust assay to measure DNA topology-dependent protein binding affinity

DNA structure and topology pervasively influence aspects of DNA metabolism including replication, transcription and segregation. However, the effects of DNA topology on DNA-protein interactions have not been systematically explored due to limitations of standard affinity assays. We developed a method to measure protein binding affinity dependence on the topology (topological linking number) of supercoiled DNA. A defined range of DNA topoisomers at equilibrium with a DNA binding protein is separated into free and protein-bound DNA populations using standard nitrocellulose filter binding techniques. Electrophoretic separation and quantification of bound and free topoisomers combined with a simple normalization procedure provide the relative affinity of the protein for the DNA as a function of linking number. Employing this assay we measured topology-dependent DNA binding of a helicase, a type IB topoisomerase, a type IIA topoisomerase, a non-specific mitochondrial DNA binding protein and a type II restriction endonuclease. Most of the proteins preferentially bind negatively supercoiled DNA but the details of the topology-dependent affinity differ among proteins in ways that expose differences in their interactions with DNA. The topology-dependent binding assay provides a robust and easily implemented method to probe topological influences on DNA-protein interactions for a wide range of DNA binding proteins.
Cortical regions involved in proactive control of task-set

This thesis is about what happens in the brain when people switch between tasks. Each task requires a particular assembly of cognitive processes, an orientation of attention and set of rules relating action to input — a "task-set". The research reported used a task-cueing paradigm to study preparatory control of task-set. On each trial a stimulus (a coloured shape) was preceded by a verbal task-cue specifying which task to do (judge the shape or the colour of the stimulus). Reaction time and error rate increase on trials when the task changes relative to trials on which it does not. When the cue stimulus interval (CSI) is increased, this "switch cost" is reduced, indexing a process of task-set reconfiguration in which top-down control is employed to reconfigure the task-set parameters. Effective reconfiguration may also be indicated by a reduction in the "response congruence effect" — poorer performance on stimuli mapped to different responses for the two tasks than for stimuli mapped to the same response. I present six experiments using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), a technique for interfering briefly and harmlessly with neuronal activity in a small region of cortex, to address the question of which brain regions contribute to anticipatory control of task-set as indexed by these behavioural measures. To help guide the selection of candidate brain regions, I first present a review and meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies of task-switching in the literature. Many fMRI studies, comparing brain activation on task-switch and -repeat trials have been published. Some have also tried to isolate activations related specifically to pro-active control of taskset. The activations reported are quite inconsistent over studies. I used a quantitative metaanalysis technique to identify which brain regions are most consistently found by studies reporting switch minus repeat contrasts and which may be specifically important for preparation on switch trials. The experiments examined the effect of stimulating several regions during the long cue-stimulus interval of a task-cueing paradigm, relative to control conditions. A first pair of experiments suggests an important role in proactive task-set control for two regions in dorsal medial frontal cortex, the supplementary motor area (SMA) and an area known as pre-SMA, though the former region appeared to contribute to reducing the switch cost while the latter appeared to reduce the effects of response congruence. In a further three experiments, I examined the role of the right intra-parietal sulcus (rIPS); this appears to
Self-regulated learning and academic achievement

Se presentan los resultados de una experiencia de intervencion para promover el aprendizaje auto-regulado en alumnos de nivel medio. En una muestra compuesta por 120 alumnos se observo que las medias mas bajas se registran en la auto-regulacion meta-cognitiva, la regulacion del esfuerzo, el manejo del tiempo y del ambiente de estudio y las estrategias profundas de elaboracion y de pensamiento critico. Estas variables correlacionan significativa y positivamente con el rendimiento academico, teniendo mas peso la regulacion del esfuerzo. Los resultados se interpretan en relacion con los estilos de aprendizaje y con el tipo de evaluacion usada por los docentes. Se hacen sugerencias pedagogicas que relacionan el aprendizaje auto-regulado con criterios de educacion integral
Obstructive Sleep Apnea and Cardiovascular Disease

Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is a sleep-disordered breathing condition, which is increasingly being recognized as having wide-ranging pathophysiological effects on multiple organ systems. Although multiple factors affect the incidence and severity of OSA, male sex and obesity seem to play an influential role. The apnea-ventilation cycle, characterized by abnormalities in gas exchange, exaggerated respiratory effort and frequent arousals, has been shown to have deleterious effects on circulatory hemodynamics, the autonomic milieu, hormonal balance, inflammatory and coagulation cascades, endothelial function, and the redox state, with potential cardiovascular significance. Consequently, OSA is being increasingly implicated in a multitude of cardiovascular diseases (CVD) such as hypertension, congestive heart failure, atrial fibrillation, stroke, coronary artery disease, pulmonary hypertension, and metabolic syndrome. The strength of association for individual CVD is varied, and outcomes of clinical studies are conflicting. In addition, obesity, which is closely linked to both OSA and CVD, makes it harder to ascertain the independent role of OSA on CVD. Although available evidence is inconclusive, there is an increasing recognition of the direct role for OSA in CVD. Similarly, although several studies have demonstrated the cardiovascular benefits of OSA treatment, further studies are needed to confirm this.
Antagonistic Effects of Theophylline and Adenosine on Adrenergic Neuroeffector Transmission in the Rabbit Kidney

The actions of adenosine and theophylline on adrenergic neuroeffector transmission were studied in the rabbit kidney perfused with Tyrode's solution in which the norepinephrine stores had been labeled with (-)-norepinephrine[3H] {(-)-NE[3H]}. We found that adenosine inhibited (-)-NE[3H] release induced by nerve stimulation, increased basal perfusion pressure, and enhanced the vasoconstrictor response to nerve stimulation and norepinephrine in a dose-dependent manner. Theophylline per se had effects on neuroeffector transmission opposite to those of adenosine. All effects of adenosine were antagonized effectively or annulled by theophylline in concentrations having little or no effect on rabbit kidney phosphodiesterase activities. Two other compounds, Ro 20-1724 and ZK 62.711, being equally potent or more potent than theophylline as phosphodiesterase inhibitors, failed to antagonize adenosine-mediated inhibition of (-)-NE[3H] release by nerve stimulation. Ro 20-1724 in high concentration (10∼4 M) inhibited the vasoconstrictor response to nerve stimulation, but it had little additional effect on the enhancement by adenosine. These findings suggest that theophylline specifically antagonizes the effects of adenosine on pre- and postjunctional transmission in the kidney. The results also are consistent with the view that endogenous adenosine may play a role as modulator of adrenergic neuroeffector transmission.
Contact between children in out‐of‐home placements and their family and friends networks: a research review

This paper provides a detailed narrative review of the current knowledge base regarding family contact for children in out-of-home foster, kinship and residential placements. The review considers the research base around the familiar topics of the relationship between contact and outcomes for children, the perspectives of children, parents and carers in respect of contact and contact between siblings. It also discusses research evidence around emerging, and less well-recognized themes which include the impact of intensive contact on infants, re-establishing contact between children and birth parents when it has been lost, contact between children, their extended family and ‘significant others’, and the role of technology in family contact. In providing an overview of key research, the review concludes that good quality contact with family members in conjunction with other positive professional interventions, will likely promote positive outcomes for children regarding successful family reunification and/or placement stability. Social workers' central role in influencing the pattern and quality of contact for children is underlined. However, the review cautions against making broad prescriptions for all children, given that poorly planned, poor quality and unsupported contact may be harmful. Finally, key areas of learning for practice and priority directions for future research are summarized.
Geographical Topics Learning of Geo-Tagged Social Images

With the availability of cheap location sensors, geotagging of images in online social media is very popular. With a large amount of geo-tagged social images, it is interesting to study how these images are shared across geographical regions and how the geographical language characteristics and vision patterns are distributed across different regions. Unlike textual document, geo-tagged social image contains multiple types of content, i.e., textual description, visual content, and geographical information. Existing approaches usually mine geographical characteristics using a subset of multiple types of image contents or combining those contents linearly, which ignore correlations between different types of contents, and their geographical distributions. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel method to discover geographical characteristics of geo-tagged social images using a geographical topic model called geographical topic model of social images (GTMSIs). GTMSI integrates multiple types of social image contents as well as the geographical distributions, in which image topics are modeled based on both vocabulary and visual features. In GTMSI, each region of the image would have its own topic distribution, and hence have its own language model and vision pattern. Experimental results show that our GTMSI could identify interesting topics and vision patterns, as well as provide location prediction and image tagging.
Detuning Effect Between the Cavity Resonance and Atomic Transition Frequencies on Noise Flux Profiles of Class-C Lasers

The class-C lasers are well recognized to have very narrow atomic transition bandwidths. Therefore, a minor mismatch between the cavity resonance and atomic transition frequencies (CAF) is normally led to the large modifications in the gain and noise profiles. The motion of class-C lasers is described by the three variables of cavity electric field, atomic population inversion, and dipole moment of atoms that are coupled to each other by the optical Maxwell-Bloch equations. The fluctuating features of these three variables are completely elaborated by solving their equations of motion in the presence of the cavity Langevin force. The results peculiarly indicate that the noise profile of the cavity electric field exactly mimics the amplification profile of an input signal by the laser in both below and above threshold states. The both gain and noise profiles simultaneously tend to infinity at the normalized pumping rates and CAF mismatches determined by the laser stability theory. The noise flux profiles are finally confirmed by illustrating the flux conservation.
Role of Dietary Antioxidants in the Preservation of Vascular Function and the Modulation of Health and Disease

In vascular diseases, including hypertension and atherosclerosis, vascular endothelial dysfunction (VED) occurs secondary to altered function of endothelial nitric oxide synthase (eNOS). A novel redox regulated pathway was identified through which eNOS is uncoupled due to S-glutathionylation of critical cysteine residues, resulting in superoxide free radical formation instead of the vasodilator molecule, nitric oxide. In addition, the redox sensitive cofactor tetrahydrobiopterin, BH4, is also essential for eNOS coupling. Antioxidants, either individually or combined, can modulate eNOS uncoupling by scavenging free radicals or impairing specific radical generating pathways, thus preventing oxidative stress and ameliorating VED. Epidemiological evidence and dietary guidelines suggest that diets high in antioxidants, or antioxidant supplementation, could preserve vascular health and prevent cardiovascular diseases (CVDs). Therefore, the purpose of this review is to highlight the possible role of dietary antioxidants in regulating eNOS function and uncoupling which is critical for maintenance of vascular health with normal blood flow/circulation and prevention of VED. We hypothesize that a conditioned dietary approach with suitable antioxidants may limit systemic oxidation, maintain a beneficial ratio of reduced to oxidized glutathione, and other redox markers, and minimize eNOS uncoupling serving to prevent CVD and possibly other chronic diseases.
Modernity as Experience and Interpretation: A New Sociology of Modernity

* Preface * Chapter 1 * Ways of understanding modernity * Part I * Interpretations of political modernity: liberty and its discontents * Overture * Multiple interpretations of political modernity * Chapter 2 * Modernity and the question of freedom * Chapter 3 * The political forms of modernity * Chapter 4 * Modernity as a project of emancipation and the possibility of politics * Part II * Interpretations of economic modernity: the endgame and after * Overture * Capitalism and modernity as social formations and as imaginary significations * Chapter 5 * The critique of capitalism and its impasse * Chapter 6 * Towards a comparative-historical sociology of capitalism * Chapter 7 * The exit from organized economic modernity * Part III * Interpretations of epistemic modernity: distance and involvement * Overture * The quest for knowledge beyond experience and interpretation * Chapter 8 * The critique of science and its prospects * Chapter 9 * Varieties of socio-political interpretations of modernity * Part IV * The European experience and interpretation of modernity * Overture * European integration as an interpretation of modernity * Chapter 10 * Logics of European history * Chapter 11 * Regionalizing European modernity * Part V * The analysis of modernity and the need for a new sociology * Overture * When the light of the cultural problems has moved on * Chapter 12 * The social theory and political philosophy of modernity * Chapter 13 * The conceptual history and historical sociology of modernity * References