Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Squibs and Discussions: The Kappa Statistic: A Second Look

In recent years, the kappa coefficient of agreement has become the de facto standard for evaluating intercoder agreement for tagging tasks. In this squib, we highlight issues that affect and that the community has largely neglected. First, we discuss the assumptions underlying different computations of the expected agreement component of . Second, we discuss how prevalence and bias affect the measure.
Gaseous air pollutants emissions from ota industrial estate in Ogun state, Nigeria

The interest in monitoring air quality status of Ota industrial estate was aroused by undesirable rapid corrosion of residential roofing sheets in the vicinity of the estate. This study aimed at assessing the air pollution status around Ota industrial estate situated in Nigeria by determining the levels of NOx, CO, and SO 2 weekly for a period of one month. The assessment was done during the daytime at one hourly basis using standard methods of analysis. The concentrations of NOx, CO and SO 2 were determined by colorimetric method. Traffic density data reported in this study was obtained by manual count. Average levels of 33.3±4.7 μg m -3 , 246±32 μg m -3 and 15.6±5.3 μg m -3 were obtained for NOx, SO 2 and CO, respectively. Level of NOx in the area was below the national guidelines stipulated by the National Ambient Air Quality Standard (NAAQS) and that of US National Ambient Air Quality guidelines. Carbon monoxide level was not above the air quality limit of 11400 μg/m 3 , while that of SO 2 was above the limit set by FEPA. Thus, the atmospheric air at the industrial estate is potent to have deleterious effect on human health on account of SO 2 concentration. A strong positive correlations (p= 0.05) were observed among NOx, CO and traffic density. In addition to diesel powered vehicles and fuel combustion in the industries, vehicles plying the estate roads contributed to the emission of NOx and CO. Keywords : Nitrogen oxides; Sulphur dioxides; Carbon monoxide; Respiratory health; Automotive exhaust.
Strategic effects in word naming: examining the route-emphasis versus time-criterion accounts.

K. Rastle and M. Coltheart (1999) demonstrated that both nonwords and low-frequency regular words are named more slowly when mixed with first-phoneme irregular word fillers (e.g., CHEF) than when mixed with third-phoneme irregular word fillers (e.g., GLOW). Those authors suggested that their effects were due to a strategic de-emphasis of the nonlexical route when first-phoneme irregular fillers were used. An alternative explanation is that these results simply reflect a more lax position of a time criterion (S. J. Lupker, P. Brown, & L. Colombo, 1997) in the first-phoneme irregular filler condition. We contrasted these 2 accounts in 4 experiments. In all experiments, target naming latencies were longer when the fillers were harder to name, regardless of whether the fillers were nonwords or exception words. These results strongly favor a time-criterion account of K. Rastle and M. Coltheart's effects.
Abundance Analysis of HE 2148–1247, A Star with Extremely Enhanced Neutron Capture Elements

Abundances for 27 elements in the very metal-poor dwarf star HE 2148-1247 are presented, including many of the neutron capture elements. We establish that HE 2148-1247 is a very highly s-process-enhanced star with anomalously high Eu as well, Eu/H ~ half-solar, demonstrating the large addition of heavy nuclei at [Fe/H] = -2.3 dex. Ba and La are enhanced by a somewhat larger factor and reach the solar abundance, while Pb significantly exceeds it, thus demonstrating the addition of substantial s-process material. Ba/Eu is 10 times the solar r-process ratio but much less than that of the s-process, indicating a substantial r-process addition as well. C and N are also very highly enhanced. We have found that HE 2148-1247 is a radial velocity variable; it is probably a small-amplitude long-period binary. The C, N, and the s-process element enhancements were thus presumably produced through mass transfer from a former asymptotic giant branch (AGB) binary companion. The large enhancement of heavy r-nuclides also requires an additional source as this is far above any inventory in the interstellar medium at such low [Fe/H]. We consider that the s-process material was added by mass transfer of a more massive companion during its thermally pulsating AGB phase and ending up as a white dwarf. We further hypothesize that accretion onto the white dwarf from the envelope of the star caused accretion-induced collapse of the white dwarf, forming a neutron star, which then produced heavy r-nuclides and again contaminated its companion. This mechanism in a binary system can thus enhance the envelope of the lower mass star in s- and r-process material sequentially. Through analysis of the neutron capture element abundances taken from the literature for a large sample of very metal-poor stars, we demonstrate, as exemplified by HE 2148-1247, that mass transfer in a suitable binary can be very efficient in enhancing the heavy elements in a star; it appears to be capable of enhancing the s-process elements in very metal-poor stars to near the solar abundance but not substantially above it. The yield of Pb relative to Ba appears to vary among very metal-poor stars.
The effect of high- and low-intensity warm-up on the physiological responses to a standardized swim and tethered swimming performance.

This investigation was conducted to determine the effect of high- and low-intensity warm-ups on physiological responses, lactate accumulation, and high-intensity freestyle and tethered swimming performance. Ten male collegiate swimmers were tested for maximal oxygen uptake (VO2 max) followed by two series of three warm-up protocols performed in a randomized order at least 2 days apart. The warm-up protocols were: (1) no warm-up (NWU), (2) a 366-m swim at 70% VO2 max (LWU) and (3) four 46-m swims at 1-min intervals at a speed corresponding to 110% VO2 max (HWU). Five minutes after each warm-up in the first series, the swimmers swam a 183-m standardized freestyle swim at a velocity corresponding to 110% VO2 max, and 5 min after each warm-up in the second series the swimmers completed a tethered swim to exhaustion with a weight attached to the tether to elicit fatigue at about 2 min. Three minutes after each warm-up and 3 min after each standardized and tethered swim, a finger-prick blood sample for lactate measurement was obtained. Heart rate and VO2 were also measured during the warm-up and the standardized and tethered swims. The performance times in the tethered swim were not significantly different between the three conditions (116.8 +/- 46.8, 137 +/- 53.3 and 122.94 +/- 37.2 s for the NWU, LWU and HWU, respectively). (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Change of patients' perceptions of telemedicine after brief use.

OBJECTIVE This study aims to investigate whether patients' perceptions regarding a Web-based telemedicine service, for instruction and monitoring of an exercise program, change after brief use. MATERIALS AND METHODS Thirty patients were allocated, matched on gender and age, to a control group (10) or an experimental group (20). After basic training, the experimental group was given a 15 min opportunity to use a Web-based telemedicine service. Patients' perceptions regarding the telemedicine service were measured using a questionnaire, based on the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). This questionnaire was administered to both the control and experimental group before and after the experimental group's intervention. Both groups were compared with respect to any change in perceptions related to the Web-based telemedicine service. RESULTS The experimental group showed a significantly greater change on the TAM constructs perceived usefulness [F(1,27)=3.40, p =0.08] and perceived ease of use [F(1,27)=5.37, p=0.03] than the control group, who showed no statistically significant change of perceptions. Patients within the experimental group became significantly more positive about the usefulness and ease-of-use of the Web-based telemedicine program after a brief period of use. CONCLUSIONS These findings show that brief use of a Web-based telemedicine service has a significant positive effect on patients' perceptions of this service. Therefore, as patients do not have prior experience with innovative telemedicine services, offering patients a risk-free way to explore and experiment with the service can increase the development of accurate perceptions and user needs. Ultimately, this will increase patients' acceptance of telemedicine. Future studies should investigate the effect of continued usage on patients' perceptions of telemedicine.
Correlation between magnetic resonance imaging of posterior pituitary and neurohypophyseal function in children with diabetes insipidus.

The posterior pituitary lobe and stalk were studied by magnetic resonance imaging in 20 children with diabetes insipidus of different origins: primary familial autosomal dominant (n = 2) or idiopathic (n = 2), and secondary to craniopharyngioma (n = 6, resected in 5), to Langerhans cell histiocytosis (n = 5), to excessive water intake (dipsogenic; n = 3), to renal vasopressin insensitivity (n = 1), and to osmoreceptor dysfunction (n = 1). Of the four children with primary diabetes insipidus, the posterior bright signal was recognizable in two with the familial autosomal dominant form and one with the idiopathic form; in the latter, the pituitary stalk was thin, while it was normal in the first two patients; no posterior hyperintense signal with enlarged and gadolinium-enhanced pituitary stalk was observed in the fourth. The posterior hyperintense signal was absent without evidence of ectopic posterior pituitary tissue regeneration in five children with surgically removed craniopharyngioma and was doubtful in the child with unresected craniopharyngioma; the stalk was unrecognizable in all patients. In the five children with Langherans cell histiocytosis, the posterior bright signal was absent, while the stalk was normal in two and unexpectedly enlarged in three (uniformly in two and mainly at the level of median eminence and hypothalamus in one). All five patients with dipsogenic or nephrogenic diabetes insipidus or osmoreceptor dysfunction had normal images of posterior pituitary lobe and stalk. Normal posterior pituitary bright signal and stalk were found in all 25 healthy control children. Plasma vasopressin was undetectable in all patients except in nephrogenic one, in the child with osmoreceptor dysfunction, and in two of three dipsogenic children, the third mimicking partial neurogenic diabetes insipidus. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)
Satisfiability allows no nontrivial sparsification unless the polynomial-time hierarchy collapses

Consider the following two-player communication process to decide a language L: The first player holds the entire input x but is polynomially bounded; the second player is computationally unbounded but does not know any part of x; their goal is to cooperatively decide whether x belongs to L at small cost, where the cost measure is the number of bits of communication from the first player to the second player. For any integer d ≥ 3 and positive real ε we show that if satisfiability for n-variable d-CNF formulas has a protocol of cost O(nd-ε) then coNP is in NP/poly, which implies that the polynomial-time hierarchy collapses to its third level. The result even holds when the first player is conondeterministic, and is tight as there exists a trivial protocol for ε = 0. Under the hypothesis that coNP is not in NP/poly, our result implies tight lower bounds for parameters of interest in several areas, namely sparsification, kernelization in parameterized complexity, lossy compression, and probabilistically checkable proofs. By reduction, similar results hold for other NP-complete problems. For the vertex cover problem on n-vertex d-uniform hypergraphs, the above statement holds for any integer d ≥ 2. The case d=2 implies that no NP-hard vertex deletion problem based on a graph property that is inherited by subgraphs can have kernels consisting of O(k2-ε) edges unless coNP is in NP/poly, where k denotes the size of the deletion set. Kernels consisting of O(k^2) edges are known for several problems in the class, including vertex cover, feedback vertex set, and bounded-degree deletion.
Evaluating hypertension control in a managed care setting.

BACKGROUND We conducted a retrospective cohort study on a random sample of adult patients with hypertension in a large health maintenance organization to assess the feasibility of documenting blood pressure (BP) control and to compare different measures for defining BP control. METHODS Three criteria for BP control were assessed: systolic BP less than 140 mm Hg; diastolic BP less than 90 mm Hg; and combined BP control, with systolic BP less than 140 mm Hg and diastolic BP less than 90 mm Hg. Four methods of assessing hypertension control by the above criteria were examined: proportion of patients with BP under control at 75% and 50% or more of their office visits; the mean of all pressures during the study period; and the BP from the last visit during the study period. RESULTS The proportion of patients meeting each criterion for control was similar whether we used the mean BP for all visits, the last recorded BP, or control at 50% or more of visits. Control rates were substantially lower when the more stringent assessment, 75% of visits, was used. The proportion of patients with combined BP control at 75% or more of their visits was half that of the other methods. CONCLUSIONS In this health maintenance organization population, results with the use of the simplest approach, the last BP measurement recorded, were similar to results with the mean BP. Our findings indicate that evaluation of BP control in a large health maintenance organization will find substantial room for improvement, and clinicians should be encouraged to be more aggressive in their management of hypertension, especially with regard to the systolic BP, which until recent years has been underemphasized.
An Improved Algorithm for Calculation of the Third-order Orthogonal Tensor Product Expansion by Using Singular Value Decomposition

— As a method of expanding a higher-order tensor data to tensor products of vectors we have proposed the Third-order Orthogonal Tensor Product Expansion (3OTPE) that did similar expansion as Higher-Order Singular Value Decomposition (HOSVD). In this paper we provide a computation algorithm to improve our previous method, in which SVD is applied to the matrix that constituted by the contraction of original tensor data and one of the expansion vector obtained. The residual of the improved method is smaller than the previous method, truncating the expanding tensor products to the same number of terms. Moreover, the residual is smaller than HOSVD when applying to color image data. It is able to be confirmed that the computing time of improved method is the same as the previous method and considerably better than HOSVD.
Alaska marine mammal stock assessments, 2010

STOCK DEFINITION AND GEOGRAPHIC RANGE The humpback whale is distributed worldwide in all ocean basins. In winter, most humpback whales occur in the subtropical and tropical waters of the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. Humpback whales in the high latitudes of the North Pacific are seasonal migrants that feed on euphausiids and small schooling fishes (Nemoto 1957; 1959, Clapham and Mead 1999). The humpback whale population was considerably reduced as a result of intensive commercial exploitation during the 20 century. A large-scale study of humpback whales throughout the North Pacific was conducted in 2004-06 (the Structure of Populations, Levels of Abundance, and Status of Humpbacks, or SPLASH, project). Initial results from this project (Calambokidis et al. 2008), including abundance estimates and movement information, are used in this report. Genetic results, which may provide a more comprehensive understanding of humpback whale population structure in the North Pacific, should be available in the near future. Figure 38. Approximate distribution of humpback whales in the western North Pacific (shaded area). Feeding and wintering grounds are presented above (see text). Area within the hash lines is a probable distribution area based on sightings in the Beaufort Sea (Hashagen et al. 2009). See Figure 39 for humpback whale distribution in the eastern North Pacific.
Performance analysis of audio streaming over lightning-interfered MIMO channels

This paper evaluates the interference from lightning flashes on the quality of audio streaming transmission over MIMO wireless system operating at 2.4 GHz. A consecutive lost datagram (CLD) measurement method was used to evaluate the transmission quality during 3 heavy thunderstorms on January 25, March 17, and March 20, 2011. In addition, CLD measurements also were done on January 21 and March 30, 2011 under fair weather (FW) conditions providing a baseline for comparison. We infer that lightning interfered with the transmitted digital pulses which resulted in a higher recorded number of lost packets per burst. We found the audio streaming quality is degraded significantly during all thunderstorms.
Electrical Pulse Stimulation of Cultured Human Skeletal Muscle Cells as an In Vitro Model of Exercise

Background and Aims Physical exercise leads to substantial adaptive responses in skeletal muscles and plays a central role in a healthy life style. Since exercise induces major systemic responses, underlying cellular mechanisms are difficult to study in vivo. It was therefore desirable to develop an in vitro model that would resemble training in cultured human myotubes. Methods Electrical pulse stimulation (EPS) was applied to adherent human myotubes. Cellular contents of ATP, phosphocreatine (PCr) and lactate were determined. Glucose and oleic acid metabolism were studied using radio-labeled substrates, and gene expression was analyzed using real-time RT-PCR. Mitochondrial content and function were measured by live imaging and determination of citrate synthase activity, respectively. Protein expression was assessed by electrophoresis and immunoblotting. Results High-frequency, acute EPS increased deoxyglucose uptake and lactate production, while cell contents of both ATP and PCr decreased. Chronic, low-frequency EPS increased oxidative capacity of cultured myotubes by increasing glucose metabolism (uptake and oxidation) and complete fatty acid oxidation. mRNA expression level of pyruvate dehydrogenase complex 4 (PDK4) was significantly increased in EPS-treated cells, while mRNA expressions of interleukin 6 (IL-6), cytochrome C and carnitin palmitoyl transferase b (CPT1b) also tended to increase. Intensity of MitoTracker®Red FM was doubled after 48 h of chronic, low-frequency EPS. Protein expression of a slow fiber type marker (MHCI) was increased in EPS-treated cells. Conclusions Our results imply that in vitro EPS (acute, high-frequent as well as chronic, low-frequent) of human myotubes may be used to study effects of exercise.
Serious games as a malleable learning medium: The effects of narrative, gameplay, and making on students' performance and attitudes

Research into educational technology has evaluated new computer-based systems as tools for improving students' academic performance and engagement. Serious games should also be considered as an alternative pedagogical medium for attracting students with different needs and expectations. In this field study, we empirically examined different forms of serious-game use for learning on learning performance and attitudes of eighty 13-year-old students in the first grade of middle school. Divided into four groups of 20 students, each group practiced with a maths video game in three ways. The first group played the storytelling maths game, the second played the same game but with no story and the third played and modified the video game. Finally, a control group practised in a paper-based (traditional) way by solving exercises. Although only minor differences in learning performance were identified, we found significant differences in the attitudes of the students toward learning through the video game. Students who are not motivated by conventional paper-based assignments might be engaged better with the use of a video game. Our findings suggest that video game pedagogy could provide malleable learning for different groups of students using methods that move beyond the conventional tool-based approach. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
Stereoselective Block of Cardiac Sodium Channels by RAC109 in Single Guinea Pig Ventricular Myocytes

The effects of the optical stereoisomers of the local anesthetic RAC109 (RAC109-I and RAC109-II) on sodium current in isolated guinea pig ventricular myocytes were investigated by use of the whole-cell variation of the patch-clamp technique. RAC109-I and RAC109-1I produced similar levels of tonic block, but RAC109-I produced a significantly larger usedependent block on repetitive pulsing to potentials positive to -60 mV. Definition of the time courses of block development at -20 mV and recovery at -140 and -160 mV indicated that RAC109-I had a higher affinity for activated and inactivated channels and dissociated more slowly at hyperpolarized potentials compared with RAC109-II. Removal of fast inactivation by a-chymotrypsln intensified tonic block but did not reduce use-dependent block by RAC109-I; this finding suggests that channel inactivation is not necessary for use-dependent block. The guarded-receptor model was used to calculate apparent rate constants of drug binding and unbinding. According to the model, RAC109-I and RAC109-II have significantly different unbinding rate constants for channels when they exist predominantly in rested, activated, or inactivated states, as well as significantly different binding rate constants when channels are activated. However, the apparent rates of drug binding to closed (rested and inactivated) channels are not significantly different for the two isomers; this finding indicates that drug binding to dosed channels is not markedly stereospecific, in contrast to unbinding. The effects of RAC109 stereoisomers on cardiac sodium channels were also qualitatively similar to those previously reported in nerve; these findings suggest that the binding sites for local anesthetics in both tissue types have a similar structural topography.
Prolactin variations during risperidone therapy in a sample of drug-naive children and adolescents

The aim of this prospective observational study was to investigate the variations of serum prolactin hormone (PRL) in a sample of 34 drug-naive patients (mean age 13 years) who started risperidone therapy assuming that several factors may favor the increase in serum PRL. Serum PRL and hyperprolactinemia clinical signs were examined at baseline (T0) and after almost 3 months of treatment (T1). We considered sex, pubertal status, risperidone dosage, psychiatric diagnosis, and any personal/family history of autoimmune diseases. The mean serum PRL value increased between T0 and T1 (P=0.004). The mean serum PRL was higher in females in the pubertal/postpubertal stage and for risperidone dosage up 1 mg/day. Hyperprolactinemia was found in 20% of patients at T0 and in 38% of patients at T1 (P=0.03). The mean serum PRL increase was greater in early-onset schizophrenia spectrum psychosis patients compared with no-early-onset schizophrenia spectrum psychosis patients (P=0.04). The increase in PRL was higher in patients with a personal and a family history of autoimmune diseases. This study suggests that the increase in serum PRL in patients treated with risperidone may be linked not only to the drug and its dosage but also to several risk factors such as sex, pubertal stage, psychiatric disease, and autoimmune disorders.