Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A multicentre, retrospective study of resource utilization and costs associated with glaucoma management in France and Sweden.

PURPOSE To assess resource utilization and costs associated with glaucoma management in France and Sweden. METHODS A total of 267 patient records (121 in France, 146 in Sweden) with diagnoses of primary open-angle glaucoma (POAG) and ocular hypertension (OH), treated medically, were reviewed for a 2-year period (beginning during 1997-99) for relevant clinical and resource utilization data. Economic data were applied to estimate treatment costs. RESULTS The annual cost of treating glaucoma was estimated at SEK5305 (531 euro )/patient in Sweden and 390 euro/patient in France. In both countries, medication costs comprised about half of the total costs. Surgical procedures and hospitalizations represented greater proportions of total cost in France (7.0% and 9.6%, respectively) than in Sweden (3.7% and 0.6%, respectively). CONCLUSION Medication costs represent a high proportion of total treatment costs. These findings highlight the relative importance of medical therapy and of assessing the cost-effectiveness of medications in glaucoma.
X-Ray Afterglow Light Curves: Toward A Standard Candle?

We investigate the clustering of afterglow light curves observed at X-ray and optical wavelengths. We have constructed a sample of 61 bursts with known distance and X-ray afterglow. This sample includes bursts observed by BeppoSAX, XMM-Newton, Chandra, and Swift. We correct the light curves for cosmological effects and compare the observed X-ray fluxes 1 day after the burst. We check for correlations between the observed flux and the burst spectral and temporal properties. We confirm the previous result of Boër & Gendre that X-ray afterglow light curves cluster in luminosity, even when we consider the last Swift data. We observe this clustering only for the afterglow light curves; the inclusion of prompt-related data broadens the distribution. A similar clustering is observed for the optical light curves; gamma-ray burst (GRB) sources can be divided into three classes, namely, optically and X-ray bright afterglows, optically and X-ray dim ones, and optically bright but X-ray dim ones. We argue that this clustering is related to the fireball total energy, the external medium density, and the fraction of fireball energy going into relativistic electrons and magnetic fields. These parameters can be either fixed to a standard value or correlated. We finally propose a method for the estimation of the GRB source redshift based on the observed X-ray flux 1 day after the burst and optical properties. Using this method, we compute a redshift of 1.4 ± 0.2 for GRB 980519 and of 1.9 ± 0.3 for GRB 040827. We tested this method on three recently detected Swift GRBs with known redshift, and found it in good agreement with the reported distance from optical spectroscopy.
Education, the Formation of Self and the World of Web 2.0.

Education has long been considered as playing a part in the construction or formation of self and identity. The processes of education and formation, being historically and culturally shaped, display the concerns and features of time and place. One of the distinguishing and influential features of contemporary western societies is communication technologies. Some features of the role of these technologies in self-formation and the construction of identity is discussed in this paper together with a reflection on the role that traditional forms of schooling might continue to play in rooting self and identity in a real, embodied world.
A History of Canadian Literature

"A History of Canadian Literature" looks at the work of individual writers and also at the social and cultural contexts that helped shape their preoccupations and helped direct their choice of literary form. W.H. New explains how - from early records of oral tales to the writing strategies of the 1980s - writer, reader, literature, and society are interrelated. New discusses both Aboriginal and European mythologies, looking at pre-Contact narratives and also at the way Contact experience altered hierarchies of literary value. He then considers representations of the "real," whether in documentary, fantasy, or satire; the precedence of historical romance and the social construction of Nature and State; ironic subversions of power, the politics of cultural form, and the relevance of the media to a representation of community standard and individual voice. New suggests some ways in which writers of the later twentieth century codified such issues as history, gender, ethnicity, and literary technique itself. All genres are represented, with examples chosen primarily, but not exclusively, from anglophone and francophone texts. A chronology, plates, and a series of tables supplement the commentary.
Fast Analytical Reconstruction of Gated Cardiac SPECT with Non-Uniform Attenuation Compensation

Conventionally, the inverse problem of gated cardiac SPECT is solved by reconstructing the images frame-by-frame, ignoring the inter-frame correlation along the time dimension. To compensate for the non-uniform attenuation for quantitative cardiac imaging, iterative image reconstruction has been a choice which could utilize an a priori constraint on the inter-frame correlation for a penalized maximum likelihood (ML) solution. However, iterative image reconstruction in the 4D space involves intensive computations. In this paper, an efficient method for 4D gated SPECT reconstruction is developed based on Karhune-Loève (KL) transform and Novikov's inverse formula. The temporal KL transform is first applied on the data sequence to de-correlate the inter-frame correlation and then the 3D principal components in the KL domain are reconstructed frame-by-frame using Novikov's inverse formula with non-uniform attenuation compensation. Finally an inverse KL transform is performed to obtain quantitatively-reconstructed 4D images in the original space. With the proposed method, 4D reconstruction can be achieved at a reasonable computational cost. The results from computer simulations are very encouraging as compared to conventional frame-by-frame filtered back-projection and iterative ordered-subsets ML reconstructions. By discarding high-order KL components for further noise reduction, the computation time could be further reduced.
Students without voices: the unheard accounts of secondary school students with social, emotional and behaviour difficulties

The student voice is growing rapidly in education, driving many educational initiatives and policies as well as research. The voice of students with social, emotional and behaviour difficulties, however, is one of the least heard, with relatively few studies that sought to capture the voice of these students in an authentic and emancipatory way. This paper reviews a number of small‐scale qualitative studies that sought the views of secondary school students with social, emotional and behaviour difficulties in Malta. Five main themes were identified, namely poor relationships with teachers, victimisation, a sense of oppression and powerlessness, unconnected learning experiences, and exclusion and stigmatisation. The paper concludes with various suggestions on how the voice of these students may become more powerful and authentic and serve as an emancipatory experience.
The effect of meteorological factors on adolescent hand, foot, and mouth disease and associated effect modifiers

Background Hand, foot, and mouth disease (HFMD) is a contagious viral illness that commonly affects infants and children. This infection is an emerging infectious disease in Rizhao in recent years. The present study examined the short-term effects of meteorological factors on adolescent HFMD in Rizhao. Design A generalized additive Poisson model was applied to estimate the effects of meteorological factors on adolescent HFMD occurrence in 2010–2012. Subgroup analyses were also conducted to examine the potential effect modifiers of the association in terms of age, sex, and occupation. Results A positive effect of temperature was observed (ER [excess risk]=1.93%, 95% CI: 1.05 to 2.82% for 1°C increase on lag 5 day). A negative effect of relative humidity at lag 1 day and positive effects were found on lag 5–7 days, and an adverse effect was observed for sunshine at lag days 3–4 (ER=−0.71%, 95% CI: −1.25 to −0.17% on lag day 4). We also found that age, sex, and occupation might be important effect modifiers of the effects of weather variables on HFMD. Conclusions This study suggests that meteorological factors might be an important predictor of adolescent HFMD occurrence in Rizhao. Age, sex, and occupation might be important effect modifiers of the effects.
Oceanic ventilation and biogeochemical cycling: Understanding the physical mechanisms that produce realistic distributions of tracers and productivity

Differing models of the ocean circulation support different rates of ventilation, which in turn produce different distributions of radiocarbon, oxygen, and export production. We examine these fields within a suite of general circulation models run to examine the sensitivity of the circulation to the parameterization of subgridscale mixing and surface forcing. We find that different models can explain relatively high fractions of the spatial variance in some fields such as radiocarbon, and that newer estimates of the rate of biological cycling are in better agreement with the models than previously published estimates. We consider how different models achieve such agreement and show that they can accomplish this in different ways. For example, models with high vertical diffusion move young surface waters into the Southern Ocean, while models with high winds move more young North Atlantic water into this region. The dependence on parameter values is not simple. Changes in the vertical diffusion coefficient, for example, can produce major changes in advective fluxes. In the coarse‐resolution models studied here, lateral diffusion plays a major role in the tracer budget of the deep ocean, a somewhat worrisome fact as it is poorly constrained both observationally and theoretically.
Flexible solar-energy harvesting system on plastic with thin-film LC oscillators operating above ft for inductively-coupled power delivery

This paper presents an energy-harvesting system consisting of amorphous-silicon (a-Si) solar cells and thin-film-transistor (TFT) power circuits on plastic. Along with patterned planar inductors, the TFTs realize an LC-oscillator that provides power inversion of the DC solar-module output, enabling a low-cost sheet for inductively-coupled wireless charging of devices. Despite the low performance of the TFTs (ft=1.3MHz at a voltage of 15V), the oscillator can operate above 2MHz by incorporating the device parasitics into the resonant tank. This enables increased quality factor for the planar inductors, improving the power-transfer efficiency and the power delivered. With 3cm-radius single- and double-layer inductors, the system achieves 22.6% and 31% power-transfer efficiency (approaching the analytically-predicted bound), while the power delivered is 20mW and 22mW.
An Optimal Domains Theory of Harmony

In this paper we propose an alternative to the autosegmental view of assimilation as spreading Adopting the non derivational constraint based grammars of OT we model harmony in terms of harmony domains structures which are de ned by universal constraints and which are explicitly encoded in phonological representation Transparency and opacity develop from the interaction between constraints that align harmony domains and constraints on the occurrence of the harmony feature within the domain The proposed analysis assumes privative features and avoids the stipulatory use of feature underspeci cation or feature geometry which characterizes many autosegmental accounts of opacity and transparency
High-Performance Transactions for Persistent Memories

Emerging non-volatile memory (NVRAM) technologies offer the durability of disk with the byte-addressability of DRAM. These devices will allow software to access persistent data structures directly in NVRAM using processor loads and stores, however, ensuring consistency of persistent data across power failures and crashes is difficult. Atomic, durable transactions are a widely used abstraction to enforce such consistency. Implementing transactions on NVRAM requires the ability to constrain the order of NVRAM writes, for example, to ensure that a transaction's log record is complete before it is marked committed. Since NVRAM write latencies are expected to be high, minimizing these ordering constraints is critical for achieving high performance. Recent work has proposed programming interfaces to express NVRAM write ordering constraints to hardware so that NVRAM writes may be coalesced and reordered while preserving necessary constraints. Unfortunately, a straightforward implementation of transactions under these interfaces imposes unnecessary constraints. We show how to remove these dependencies through a variety of techniques, notably, deferring commit until after locks are released. We present a comprehensive analysis contrasting two transaction designs across three NVRAM programming interfaces, demonstrating up to 2.5x speedup.
Elastin and collagen fibre microstructure of the human aorta in ageing and disease: a review

Aortic disease is a significant cause of death in developed countries. The most common forms of aortic disease are aneurysm, dissection, atherosclerotic occlusion and ageing-induced stiffening. The microstructure of the aortic tissue has been studied with great interest, because alteration of the quantity and/or architecture of the connective fibres (elastin and collagen) within the aortic wall, which directly imparts elasticity and strength, can lead to the mechanical and functional changes associated with these conditions. This review article summarizes the state of the art with respect to characterization of connective fibre microstructure in the wall of the human aorta in ageing and disease, with emphasis on the ascending thoracic aorta and abdominal aorta where the most common forms of aortic disease tend to occur.
Phase separation and dynamical arrest for particles interacting with mixed potentials—the case of globular proteins revisited

We examine the applicability of the extended law of corresponding states (ELCS) to equilibrium and non equilibrium features of the state diagram of the globular protein lysozyme. We provide compelling evidence that the ELCS correctly reproduces the location of the binodal for different ionic strengths, but fails in describing the location of the arrest line. We subsequently use Mode Coupling Theory (MCT) to gain additional insight into the origin of these observations. We demonstrate that while the critical point and the connected binodal and spinodal are governed by the integral features of the interaction potential described by the normalized second virial coefficient, the arrest line is mainly determined by the attractive well depth or bond strength.
Cooperation Issues and Distributed Sensing for Multirobot Systems

This paper considers the properties a multirobot system should exhibit to perform an assigned task cooperatively. Our experiments regard specifically the domain of RoboCup middle-size league (MSL) competitions. But the illustrated techniques can be usefully applied also to other service robotics fields like, for example, videosurveillance. Two issues are addressed in the paper. The former refers to the problem of dynamic role assignment in a team of robots. The latter concerns the problem of sharing the sensory information to cooperatively track moving objects. Both these problems have been extensively investigated over the past years by the MSL robot teams. In our paper, each individual robot has been designed to become reactively aware of the environment configuration. In addition, a dynamic role assignment policy among teammates is activated, based on the knowledge about the best behavior that the team is able to acquire through the shared sensorial information. We present the successful performance of the Artisti Veneti robot team at the MSL Challenge competitions of RoboCup-2003 to show the effectiveness of our proposed hybrid architecture, as well as some tests run in laboratory to validate the omnidirectional distributed vision system which allows us to share the information gathered by the omnidirectional cameras of our robots
Does Cooperative Learning Improve Student Learning Outcomes?

What is the effect of small-group learning on student learning outcomes in economic instruction? In spring 2002 and fall 2004, the author applied cooperative learning to one section of intermediate macroeconomics and taught another section using a traditional lecture format. He identified and then tracked measures of student learning outcomes. Using multivariate regression analysis, he found that students taught by cooperative learning achieved greater academic performance in the form of higher exam scores.
Teachers' Professional Knowledge Landscapes: Teacher Stories––Stories of Teachers––School Stories––Stories of Schools1

G ary Fenstermacher, in The Knower and the Known: The Nature of Knowledge in Research on Teaching (1994), reviewed conceptions of knowledge in the literature of research on teaching. His philosophical interest was an epistemological one, an interest in how "notions of knowledge are used and analyzed in a number of research programs that study teachers and their teaching" (p. 3). Fenstermacher structured his review around four questions that he assumed facilitated his epistemological scrutiny: • What is known about effective teaching? • What do teachers know? • What knowledge is essential for teaching? • Who produces knowledge about teaching? The review is informative on the four questions and raises important epistemological issues. We have no quarrel with the way various bodies of work were classified by his use of the questions. We wish to point out that the success of the use of the questions in facilitating his inquiry rests on the acceptability of the questions in the literature of research on teaching. One way or another, these are the questions that govern this literature. It is those four questions that are in question for us in this paper. Though not stated as such, the review, and the work surveyed, implies that valid, reliable, knowledge on the four questions will make possible better educated teachers. This, of course, was not Fenstermacher's concern. However, it might seem that one could hardly deny this implication. Having reliable answers to these questions would surely do that. What alternative social justifications, after all, might be offered in defense of such research? But we think that answers to these questions are only partially capable of creating understandings that might justify the implication in its full-blown sense. We think the narrative context for the ongoing development and expression of teacher knowledge in schools is also of importance. In response to Fenstermacher's review, we would, therefore, like to raise a fifth question that might be worded, "How is teacher knowledge shaped by the professional knowledge context in which teachers work? " We want to make the case that it is not only an understanding of teacher knowledge and the education of teachers that will make a difference but attention to the professional knowledge context in which teachers live and work. We believe that the professional knowledge context shapes the answers that may be given to Fenstermacher's four questions. The professional knowledge context shapes effective teaching, what teachers know, what knowledge is seen as essential for teaching, and who is warranted to produce knowledge about teaching. To demonstrate this, we draw on an earlier argument for understanding the context for teacher knowledge in terms of the idea of a professional knowledge landscape (Clandinin & Connelly, 1995). Following a brief description of the idea of a professional knowledge landscape, we recount three sets of stories and interpret each in terms of that landscape.
Psychology as Politics.

The adjusting rod of a lip adjusting mechanism is provided with an indicator which overlies a scale means on which a curved line representative of the lip motion is disposed. Movement of the lip from one position to another is indicated by movement of the indicator along the curved line. A scale is also used with the curved line to measure the displacement of the lip and, thus, the size of the gap defined in part by the lip.
‘Religious-lite’: a phenomenon and its relevance to the debate on identity development and emerging adulthood

This article presents a qualitative study of Israeli Jewish youth who self-identify as ‘religious-lite’ – intended to uncover the reasons youth choose to define themselves using a non-institutionalized, somewhat dissonant identity label. Eighteen participants aged 22–29 were administered in-depth interviews regarding their deliberations as to preferred identity. Analysis reveals that participants rejected major aspects of the modern identity project yet paradoxically adopt an identity label they view as enabling them to benefit from aspects of relational and intra-psychic coherence that it nevertheless provides. Furthermore, ‘religious-lite’ was seen as a temporary identity fitting their specific life-stage of emerging adulthood, though not inferior to consonant identities they envisioned they would adopt in adulthood. We discuss this phenomenon in the context of recent debates on identity's psychological structural change during the now extended transition to adulthood, and the debate on emerging adulthood as a developmental stage.
Long-distance plant dispersal to North Atlantic islands: colonization routes and founder effect

Our study provides new knowledge of two processes that are important for plant adaptation in a changing environment: 1) long-distance dispersal patterns, and 2) genetic founder effect on islands. Although the theoretical framework for the genetic founder effect on islands was proposed in 1973, we are the first to quantify it in relation to island size, dispersal distance, and plant traits. In addition, our genetic results are mainly coherent with post-glacial colonisation rather than in situ glacial survival, and should therefore bring a final end to the 140-year-long glacial survival-tabula rasa debate among northern biologists.