Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Is Service Quality As A Multi-Dimensional Formative Construct

This study is motivated by, and proceeds from, a central interest in the importance of evaluating IS service quality and adopts the IS ZOT SERVQUAL instrument (Kettinger & Lee, 2005) as its core theory base. This study conceptualises IS service quality as a multidimensional formative construct and seeks to answer the main research questions: “Is the IS service quality construct valid as a 1st-order formative, 2nd-order formative multidimensional construct? ” Additionally, with the aim of validating the IS service quality construct within its nomological net, as in prior service marketing work, Satisfaction was hypothesised as its immediate consequence. With the goal of testing the above research question, IS service quality and Satisfaction were operationalised in a quantitative survey instrument. Partial least squares (PLS), employing 219 valid responses, largely evidenced the validity of IS service quality as a multidimensional formative construct. The nomological validity of the IS service quality construct was also evidenced by demonstrating that 55% of Satisfaction was explained by the multidimensional formative IS service quality construct.
The Importance of Serum Procalcitonin in Diagnosis and Treatment of Serious Bacterial Infections and Sepsis

The clinical utility of serum procalcitonin (PCT) levels continues to evolve. PCT is regarded as a promising candidate marker for making a diagnosis and antibiotic stewardship in patients with systemic infections. The aim of this review is to summarize the current evidence for PCT in different infections and clinical settings, and to discuss the reliability of this marker when used with validated diagnostic algorithms.
Interplay between Kelvin-Helmholtz and Current-driven Instabilities in Jets

We investigate, by means of three-dimensional compressible magnetohydrodynamic numerical simulations, the interaction of Kelvin-Helmholtz (KH) and current-driven (CD) instabilities in a magnetized cylindrical jet configuration. The jet has a supersonic axial flow, sheared in the radial direction, and is embedded in a helical magnetic field. The strength of the axial magnetic field component is chosen to be weak, in accord with the "weak field regime" previously defined by Ryu, Jones, & Frank for uniformly magnetized configurations. We follow the time evolution of a periodic section where the jet surface is perturbed at m = ±1 azimuthal mode numbers. A m = -1 KH surface mode linearly develops dominating the m = +1 KH one, in agreement with results obtained using an independent ideal stability code. This lifted degeneracy, because of the presence of the helical field, leads nonlinearly to clear morphological differences in the jet deformation as compared to uniformly magnetized configurations. As predicted by stability results, a m = -1 CD instability also develops linearly inside the jet core for configurations having a small enough magnetic pitch length. As time proceeds, this magnetic mode interacts with the KH vortical structures and significantly affects the further nonlinear evolution. The magnetic field deformation induced by the CD instability provides a stabilizing effect through its azimuthal component Bθ. This helps to saturate the KH vortices in the vicinity of the jet surface. Beyond saturation, the subsequent disruptive effect on the flow is weaker than in cases having similar uniform and helical magnetic field configurations without the CD mode. We discuss the implications of this stabilizing mechanism for the stability of astrophysical jets.
Untangling the Conceptual Issues Raised in Reydon and Scholz’s Critique of Organizational Ecology and Darwinian Populations

Reydon and Scholz raise doubts about the Darwinian status of organizational ecology by arguing that Darwinian principles are not applicable to organizational populations. Although their critique of organizational ecology’s typological essentialism is correct, they go on to reject the Darwinian status of organizational populations. This paper claims that the replicator-interactor distinction raised in modern philosophy of biology but overlooked for discussion by Reydon and Scholz provides a way forward. It is possible to conceptualize evolving Darwinian populations providing that the inheritance mechanism is appropriately specified. By this approach, adaptation and selection are no longer dichotomized, and the evolutionary significance of knowledge transmission is highlighted.
Physico-chemical modifications of the interactions between hemp fibres and a lime mineral matrix: impacts on mechanical properties of mortars

In order to understand the physico-chemical mechanisms governing interactions between hemp fibres and a lime-based mineral matrix, the consequences of various chemical treatments onto hemp fibres characteristics were measured using scanning electron microscopy, thermal analysis, X-ray diffraction and FTIR spectroscopy. Secondly, effects of these treatments on the mechanical properties of lime mortars incorporating the chemically modified fibres were evaluated using 3 point bending tests. NaOH and EDTA treatments increase the crystallinity index of hemp fibres and increase the experimental rigidity of lime/natural fibres mortars. Treatments with polyethylene imine and a saturated lime solution do not induce any significant changes onto the mechanical properties. These results show that some specific chemical treatments have an impact onto the hemp/lime interfaces quality. The elaborated composite materials exhibit a higher rigidity and an improvement of the matrix /fibre charge transfer. However, the rupture stress is only slightly modified due to a relatively low fibre volumic content (10 %).
Experiences of Slovene ICU Physicians with End-of-Life Decision Making: A Nation-Wide Survey

Background Advances in intensive care medicine have enormously improved ability to successfully treat seriously ill patients. However, intensive treatment and prolongation of life is not always in the patient’s best interest, and many ethical dilemmas arise in end-of-life (EOL) situations. We aimed to assess intensive care unit (ICU) physicians’ experiences with EOL decision making and to compare the responses according to ICU type. Material/Methods A cross-sectional survey was performed in all 35 Slovene ICUs, using a questionnaire designed to assess ICU physician experiences with EOL decision making, focusing on limitations of life-sustaining treatments (LST). Results We distributed 370 questionnaires (approximating the number of Slovene ICU physicians) and 267 were returned (72% response rate). The great majority of ICU physicians reported using do-not-resuscitate (DNR) orders (97%), withholding LST (94%), and withdrawing antibiotics (86%) or inotropes (95%). Fewer ICU physicians reported withdrawing mechanical ventilation (52%) or extubating patients (27%). Hydration was reported to be only rarely terminated (76% of participants reported never terminating it). In addition, 63% of participants had never encountered advance directives, and 39% reported to “never” or “rarely” participating in decision making with relatives of patients. Nurses were reported to be “never” or “rarely” involved in the EOL decision making process by 84% of participants. Conclusions Limitation of LST was regularly used by Slovene ICU physicians. DNR orders and withholding of LST were the most commonly used measures. Hydration was only rarely terminated. In addition, use of advance directives was almost non-existent in practice, and the patients’ relatives and nurses only infrequently participated in the decision making.
Automated Assessment of Diabetic Retinal Image Quality Based on Blood Vessel Detection

This paper investigates methods of assessing retinal image quality. This is the first step of a larger research programme for computer assisted screening of diabetic retinopathy images. It is based on automatic detection of blood vessels using two techniques: blood vessel detection and K-means cluster. The algorithms are explained and the results obtained from a sample of 80 images. It was found that both of the techniques did not produce satisfactory results.
Neuroradiology, Anesthesia, Bioengineering, and Hardware Programming in the Clinical Applications of Deep Brain Stimulation

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is an interventional surgical procedure used to treat an array of sensorimotor, cognitive, and psychiatric diseases originating in distinct brain regions. Although the Food and Drug Adminstration has approved DBS for the treatment of essential tremor and Parkinson disease, this technique is currently being used to treat major depression, dystonia, and obsessive compulsive disorder. Pathophysiological brain areas responsible for abnormal functions are targeted with implanted electrodes that are subsequently attached to battery packs to provide targeted electrical stimulation within the necessary parameters of stimulation required to decrease the phenotypic expressions of these debilitating diseases. DBS regularly targets the stimulation of the ventral thalamic nuclei, subthalamic nucleus, globus pallidus and the basal ganglion in an attempt to diminish symptoms of tremor, Parkinson disease, Tourette syndrome, and pain. Herein, we aim to address the bioengineering that dictates the limitations of current DBS treatments, as well as the history, current use, and potential of DBS as it relates to a variety of motor and neuropsychiatric diseases. This will serve as an insightful analysis about the current landscape of DBS and its potential for more widespread applications in the clinical arena.
Comparing Automatic Load Balancing Using VMware DRS with a Human Expert

In recent years, there has been a rapid growth of interest in dynamic management of resources in virtualized systems. Virtualization provides great flexibility in terms of resource sharing but at the same time it also brings new challenges for load balancing using automatic migrations of virtual machines. In this paper, we have evaluated VMware's Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) in a number of realistic scenarios using multiple instances of a large industrial telecommunication application. We have measured the performance on the hosts before and after the migration in terms of CPU utilization, and compared DRS migrations with human expert migrations. According to our results, DRS with the most aggressive threshold gave us the best results. It could balance the load in 40% of cases while in other cases it could not balance the load properly. DRS did completely unnecessary migrations back and forth in some cases.
Combining speed and accuracy in cognitive psychology: Is the inverse efficiency score (IES) a better dependent variable than the mean reaction time (RT) and the percentage of errors (PE)?

Experiments in cognitive psychology usually return two dependent variables: the percentage of errors and the reaction time of the correct responses. Townsend and Ashby (1978, 1983) proposed the inverse efficiency score (IES) as a way to combine both measures and, hence, to provide a better summary of the findings. In this article we examine the usefulness of IES by applying it to existing datasets. Although IES does give a better summary of the findings in some cases, mostly the variance of the measure is increased to such an extent that it becomes less interesting. Against our initial hopes, we have to conclude that it is not a good idea to limit the statistical analyses to IES without further checking the data.
Role of presynaptic calcium ions and channels in synaptic facilitation and depression at the squid giant synapse.

1. The roles of presynaptic calcium influx and calcium accumulation in synaptic facilitation and depression were explored at the giant synapse in the stellate ganglion of the squid. 2. Calcium currents were recorded in the presynaptic terminal, using a three‐electrode voltage clamp and blocking sodium and potassium currents pharmacologically. The calcium influx was constant during pairs or trains of brief depolarizing pulses that elicited facilitating or depressing excitatory post‐synaptic potentials (e.p.s.p.s). 3. The relationship between calcium influx and transmitter release during brief depolarizing pulses of varying amplitude resembled a power function with exponent of about 2. 4. Presynaptic calcium concentration transients were measured by injecting the dye arsenazo III and detecting absorbance changes microspectrophotometrically. Increments in intracellular free calcium accompanying single action potentials appeared constant for repeated action potentials that elicited facilitating e.p.s.p.s. 5. The presynaptic calcium concentration remains elevated for several seconds following action potentials. 6. Presynaptic injection of calcium ions by interbarrel ionophoresis evokes a postsynaptic depolarization, apparently reflecting a large increase in miniature e.p.s.p. frequency. Presynaptic action potentials remain unaffected by this treatment, but e.p.s.p.s triggered by them are facilitated for several seconds, and then depressed. 7. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that synaptic facilitation is due to the action of residual calcium or a calcium complex remaining in the presynaptic terminal after electrical activity. The late depression of release during calcium injection may be a result of the continual release of transmitter and consequent depletion of a presynaptic store.
Detection of depression in speech

Depression is a common mental disorder and one of the main causes of disability worldwide. Lacking objective depressive disorder assessment methods is the key reason that many depressive patients can't be treated properly. Developments in affective sensing technology with a focus on acoustic features will potentially bring a change due to depressed patient's slow, hesitating, monotonous voice as remarkable characteristics. Our motivation is to find out a speech feature set to detect, evaluate and even predict depression. For these goals, we investigate a large sample of 300 subjects (100 depressed patients, 100 healthy controls and 100 high-risk people) through comparative analysis and follow-up study. For examining the correlation between depression and speech, we extract features as many as possible according to previous research to create a large voice feature set. Then we employ some feature selection methods to eliminate irrelevant, redundant and noisy features to form a compact subset. To measure effectiveness of this new subset, we test it on our dataset with 300 subjects using several common classifiers and 10-fold cross-validation. Since we are collecting data currently, we have no result to report yet.
Impact of Code Refactoring Using Object-Oriented Methodology on a Scientific Computing Application

Methods and tools for refactoring of software have been extensively studied during the last decades, and we argue that there is now a need for additional studies of the effects of refactoring on code quality and external code attributes such as computational performance. To study these effects, we have refactored the central parts of a code base developed in academia for a class of computationally demanding scientific computing problems. We made design choices on the basis of the SOLID principles and we used object-oriented techniques, such as the Gang of Four patterns, in the implementation. In this paper, we discuss the effect on maintainability qualitatively and also analyze it quantitatively using a set of software metrics extending the Chidamber-Kemerer suite. Not surprisingly, we find that maintainability has increased as an effect of the refactoring. We also study performance and find that dynamic binding, which inhibits in lining by the compiler, in the most frequently executed parts of the code makes the execution times increase by over 700%. By exploiting static polymorphism, we have been able able to reduce the relative increase in execution times to less than 100%. We argue that the code version implementing static polymorphism is less maintainable than the one using dynamic polymorphism, although both versions are considerably more maintainable than the original code.
Estimating the Relative Probability of Direct Transmission between Infectious Disease Patients

Background Estimating infectious disease parameters such as the serial interval (time between symptom onset in primary and secondary cases) and reproductive number (average number of secondary cases produced by a primary case) are important to understand infectious disease dynamics. Many estimation methods require linking cases by direct transmission, a difficult task for most diseases. Methods Using a subset of cases with detailed genetic or contact investigation data to develop a training set of probable transmission events, we build a model to estimate the relative transmission probability for all case-pairs from demographic, spatial and clinical data. Our method is based on naive Bayes, a machine learning classification algorithm which uses the observed frequencies in the training dataset to estimate the probability that a pair is linked given a set of covariates. Results In simulations we find that the probabilities estimated using genetic distance between cases to define training transmission events are able to distinguish between truly linked and unlinked pairs with high accuracy (area under the receiver operating curve value of 95%). Additionally only a subset of the cases, 10-50% depending on sample size, need to have detailed genetic data for our method to perform well. We show how these probabilities can be used to estimate the average effective reproductive number and apply our method to a tuberculosis outbreak in Hamburg, Germany. Conclusions Our method is a novel way to infer transmission dynamics in any dataset when only a subset of cases has rich contact investigation and/or genetic data. KEY MESSAGES This method provides a way to calculate the relative probability that two infectious disease patients are connected by direct transmission using clinical, demographic, geographic, and genetic characteristics. We use a naïve Bayes, a machine learning technique to estimate these probabilities using a training set of probable links defined by contact investigation or pathogen WGS data on a subset of cases. These probabilities can be used to explore possible transmission chains, rule out transmission events, and estimate the reproductive number.
Unexpected High Response Rate to Traditional Therapy after Dendritic Cell-Based Vaccine in Advanced Melanoma: Update of Clinical Outcome and Subgroup Analysis

We reviewed the clinical results of a dendritic cell-based phase II clinical vaccine trial in stage IV melanoma and analyzed a patient subgroup treated with standard therapies after stopping vaccination. From 2003 to 2009, 24 metastatic melanoma patients were treated with mature dendritic cells pulsed with autologous tumor lysate and keyhole limpet hemocyanin and low-dose interleukin-2. Overall response (OR) to vaccination was 37.5% with a clinical benefit of 54.1%. All 14 responders showed delayed type hypersensitivity positivity. Median overall survival (OS) was 15 months (95% CI, 8–33). Eleven patients underwent other treatments (3 surgery, 2 biotherapy, 2 radiotherapy, 2 chemotherapy, and 4 biochemotherapy) after stopping vaccination. Of these, 2 patients had a complete response and 5 a partial response, with an OR of 63.6%. Median OS was 34 months (range 16–61). Our results suggest that therapeutic DC vaccination could favor clinical response in patients after more than one line of therapy.
Neuroticism and introversion mediates the relationship between probable ADHD and symptoms of Internet gaming disorder: results of an online survey

ABSTRACT OBJECTIVES: The aim of the present study was to evaluate relationship of probable attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) with severity of the Internet gaming disorder (IGD), neuroticism and extraversion. METHODS: The study was conducted with online survey among 457 volunteered university students in Ankara and people who play games on the Internet and who are in the e-mail database of a company located in Istanbul that organizes e-sports tournaments. Participants were evaluated by applying the Adult ADHD Self-Report Scale (ASRS-v1.1), the 9-item Internet Gaming Disorder Scale (IGDS) and the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire Revised-Abbreviated Form (EPQR-A). RESULTS: Age was lower among those with the probable ADHD (n = 102, 22.3%) and those without (n = 355, 77.7%). Gender, educational status, and type of the participants did not differ between the groups. Severity of IGD symptoms and neuroticism were higher among those with the probable ADHD, whereas extraversion was lower. In logistic regression analysis, severity of IGD symptoms predicted the probable ADHD in the first Step, whereas when extraversion and neuroticism were included in the analysis as independent variables, low extraversion (introversion) and high neuroticism predicted the probable ADHD and severity of IGD symptoms was no longer a predictor. CONCLUSION: These findings suggest that the severity of IGD symptoms is related with the probable ADHD and low extraversion (introversion) and high neuroticism may have mediator effect on this relationship.
On the Construction of 64-QAM Golay Complementary Sequences

The construction of 64-QAM Golay sequences is discussed based on extensions of Lee and Golomb's construction. On length n = 2m sequences, Lee and Golomb reported 496, 808, and 976 first order offset pairs for m=2, 3, 4. We found 724, 972, and 1224 offset pairs from computer search over all first order offset pairs. Some additional pairs can be obtained by adding w = 1 to Case III in Lee and Golomb's offset pair descriptions, others are new and only exist for w>3. The descriptions of new offset pairs and the enumeration of all first order offset pairs are proposed as conjectures. The number of first order offset pairs, [240(m + 1) + 4 + 2(m - 2)(m + 1)], agrees with computer results for ;m=2~6. The peak envelope power upper bound is shown to remain as 4.6667n. An example shows that other 64-QAM Golay sequences not within this construction can be generated using QPSK Golay sequences with third order algebraic normal form.
Regulation of the Cerebral Circulation Cerebral hemodynamics during orthostatic stress assessed by nonlinear modeling

[PDF] [Full Text] [Abstract] , March 1, 2007; 102 (3): 870-877. J Appl Physiol J. A. H. R. Claassen, R. Zhang, Q. Fu, S. Witkowski and B. D. Levine during modified rebreathing Transcranial Doppler estimation of cerebral blood flow and cerebrovascular conductance [PDF] [Full Text] [Abstract] , July 1, 2007; 103 (1): 369-375. J Appl Physiol Panerai E. L. Sammons, N. J. Samani, S. M. Smith, W. E. Rathbone, S. Bentley, J. F. Potter and R. B. dynamic cerebral autoregulation Influence of noninvasive peripheral arterial blood pressure measurements on assessment of [PDF] [Full Text] [Abstract] , October 1, 2008; 105 (4): 1069-1075. J Appl Physiol R. D. Thijs, J. G. van den Aardweg, R. H. A. M. Reijntjes, J. G. van Dijk and J. J. van Lieshout control Contrasting effects of isocapnic and hypocapnic hyperventilation on orthostatic circulatory [PDF] [Full Text] [Abstract] , April 13, 2009; 367 (1892): 1319-1336. Phil Trans R Soc A R. B Panerai Complexity of the human cerebral circulation