Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Does the impact of osteoarthritis vary by age, gender and social deprivation? A community study using the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health

Abstract Purpose: The aim of the study was to explore if the impact of osteoarthritis varies with respect to age, gender and social deprivation. Impact was defined as impairment, activity limitations and participation restriction (International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF)). Investigating the functioning of the ICF model for subgroups is important both practically and theoretically. Method: The sample comprised a community sample of 763 people diagnosed with osteoarthritis. Uncontaminated measures of the ICF constructs were developed using discriminant content validity from a pool of 134 items, including the WOMAC and SF-36. Multigroup Structural Equation Modelling was used to explore if the same pathways exist for subgroups of gender, age and social deprivation. Results: Different significant paths were found for gender and social deprivation: impairment did not predict participation restriction for women and those most deprived, whereas these paths were significant for men and those less deprived. No difference in the paths was found for age. Conclusions: The impact of osteoarthritis appears to vary with respect to gender and social deprivation but not age. This suggests both that osteoarthritis per se does not adequately explain the health outcomes observed and that different clinical approaches may be appropriate for people of different gender and levels of deprivation. Implications of Rehabilitation The ICF model appears to vary with respect to gender and social deprivation for people with osteoarthritis. The ICF model did not appear to vary with respect to age for people with osteoarthritis. Different treatments and interventions for osteoarthritis may need to be targeted for specific gender and social deprivation groups.
Methods for Recovering Microorganisms from Solid Surfaces Used in the Food Industry: A Review of the Literature

Various types of surfaces are used today in the food industry, such as plastic, stainless steel, glass, and wood. These surfaces are subject to contamination by microorganisms responsible for the cross-contamination of food by contact with working surfaces. The HACCP-based processes are now widely used for the control of microbial hazards to prevent food safety issues. This preventive approach has resulted in the use of microbiological analyses of surfaces as one of the tools to control the hygiene of products. A method of recovering microorganisms from different solid surfaces is necessary as a means of health prevention. No regulation exists for surface microbial contamination, but food companies tend to establish technical specifications to add value to their products and limit contamination risks. The aim of this review is to present the most frequently used methods: swabbing, friction or scrubbing, printing, rinsing or immersion, sonication and scraping or grinding and describe their advantages and drawbacks. The choice of the recovery method has to be suitable for the type and size of the surface tested for microbiological analysis. Today, quick and cheap methods have to be standardized and especially easy to perform in the field.
Space-time foam in 2D and the sum over topologies

It is well-known that the sum over topologies in quantum gravity is ill- defined, due to a super-exponential growth of the number of geometries as a function of the space-time volume, leading to a badly divergent gravita- tional path integral. Not even in dimension 2, where a non-perturbative quantum gravity theory can be constructed explicitly from a (regular- ized) path integral, has this problem found a satisfactory solution. – In the present work, we extend a previous 2d Lorentzian path integral, regu- lated in terms of Lorentzian random triangulations, to include space-times with an arbitrary number of handles. We show that after the imposition of physically motivated causality constraints, the combined sum over ge- ometries and topologies is well-defined and possesses a continuum limit which yields a concrete model of space-time foam in two dimensions.
A Research Model of Relationship Quality in E-Commerce: Connecting IS Factors with Marketing Profitability

Customer relationship, commitment and retention are critical for e-commerce success. Existing IS research has studied e-commerce customers more from a system user perspective. We argue in this study that we should also take a customer perspective, which has significant research and practical implications in that it connects to business profitability directly. As our first attempt, this study, referring to both IS and marketing literature, examines how customer commitment and retention can be achieved to some degrees by high quality relationships with customers, which, from an information systems perspective, are influenced by the information, system and service qualities of e-commerce service providers (e.g., eBay.com). Using a sample of 140 online auction sellers at uBid.com, we empirically confirm that relationship quality is an important factor that mediates the impacts of IS factors (i.e., information, system and service qualities) on business profitability factors (i.e., customer commitment and retention).
Interregional nonlinear height-diameter model with random coefficients for stone pine in Spain

An individual-tree heightdiameter model was developed for stone pine (Pinus pinea L.) in Spain. Five biparametric nonlinear equations were fitted and evaluated based on a data set consisting of 8614 trees from 455 plots located in the four most important regions where the species occurs in Spain. Because of the problem of high correlation among observations taken from the same sampling unit, a mixed-model approach, including random coefficients, is proposed. Several stand variables, such as density, dominant height, or diametric distribution percentiles, were included in the model as covariates to explain among plot variability. To determine interregional variability among the regions studied, regional effects were included in the model using fixed dummy variables. Two models, one for inland regions and one for coastal regions, were found to be sufficient to explain regional variability in the heightdiameter relationship for the species in Spain. Mixed models allow predictive role in two ways: a typical.
Enhancing the Quality of Teacher Satisfaction.

A review of literature and interviews with 57 teachers were conducted to determine general measures and specific strategies to improve teacher satisfaction and reduce teacher dissatisfaction. The 57 interviewees were teachers who had resigned from the New South Wales (Australia) Department of School Education in 1991. The interviews revealed that the teachers' greatest source of satisfaction was clearly pupil achievement. Other sources of satisfaction were changing pupil behavior and attitudes; recognition from others; self-growth and the mastery of subject content and teaching skills; and good relationships with students, parents, and other teachers. Sources of dissatisfaction included changes in educational policy and procedures instituted in the late 1980s and early 1990s, relationships with superiors and the Department of School Education, large class sizes, lack of resources, and lack of respect from children and society. These findings indicate that dissatisfaction tended to be school and system centered and related more to school structure or administration, while sources of satisfaction were more human and affective in nature. The factors responsible for teacher satisfaction and dissatisfaction varied with gender, experience, and position held. Factors were largely mutually exclusive and, thus, separate measures need to be implemented to address each. Fourteen strategies for enhancing teacher satisfaction and reducing dissatisfaction are proposed. (Contains 18 references.)
Towards Green Transportation: Fast Vehicle Velocity Optimization for Fuel Efficiency

To minimize the fuel consumption for driving, several methods have been proposed to calculate vehicles' optimal velocity profiles on a remote cloud. Considering the traffic dynamism, each vehicle needs to keep updating the velocity profile, which requires low latency for information uploading and profile calculation. However, these proposed methods cannot satisfy this requirement due to (1) high queuing delay for information uploading caused by a large number of vehicles, and (2) the neglect of the traffic light and high computation delay for velocity profile. For (1), considering the driving features of close vehicles on a road, e.g., similar velocity and interdistances, we propose to group vehicles within a certain range and let the leader vehicle in each group to upload the group information to the cloud, which then derives the velocity of each vehicle in the group. For (2), we propose spatial-temporal DP (ST-DP) that additionally considers the traffic lights. We innovatively find that the DP process makes it well suited to run on Spark (a fast parallel cluster computing framework) and then present how to run ST-DP on Spark. Finally, we demonstrate the superiority of our method using both trace-driven simulation (NS-2.33 simulator and MATLAB) and real-world experiments.
Face Recognition Using Line Edge Map

The automatic recognition of human faces presents a significant challenge to the pattern recognition research community. Typically, human faces are very similar in structure with minor differences from person to person. They are actually within one class of "human face". Furthermore, lighting conditions change, while facial expressions and pose variations further complicate the face recognition task as one of the difficult problems in pattern analysis. This paper proposes a novel concept: namely, that faces can be recognized using a line edge map (LEM). The LEM, a compact face feature, is generated for face coding and recognition. A thorough investigation of the proposed concept is conducted which covers all aspects of human face recognition, i.e. face recognition under (1) controlled/ideal conditions and size variations, (2) varying lighting conditions, (3) varying facial expressions, and (4) varying pose. The system performance is also compared with the eigenface method, one of the best face recognition techniques, and with reported experimental results of other methods. A face pre-filtering technique is proposed to speed up the search process. It is a very encouraging to find that the proposed face recognition technique has performed better than the eigenface method in most of the comparison experiments. This research demonstrates that the LEM, together with the proposed generic line-segment Hausdorff distance measure, provides a new method for face coding and recognition.
Intergenerational Support and Family Composition of Elderly Households in Cuba

As a consequence of both political and economic isolation, Western researchers have had only limited opportunities to study demographic trends in Cuba. Even less work has been done on family composition, particularly regarding care giving and other intergenerational exchanges among the elderly households. Using data recently collected as part of the broader PAHO and NIA initiative to examine the lives of the elderly in Latin America, this paper presents the first thorough review of intergenerational support patterns among the elderly in Cuba. Looking at both economic and in-kind exchange patterns this paper presents analysis on how the composition of elderly households impacts giving patterns and levels of support, and how the health of the elderly and their ability to contribute to household economies impacts both the intensity of support they receive and their power or status within the household itself.
Healthy dietary habits in relation to social determinants and lifestyle factors

The aim of the present study was to evaluate the importance of social status and lifestyle for dietary habits, since these factors may influence life expectancy. We studied the association of four indicators for healthy dietary habits (fruits and vegetables, fibre, fat and Hegsted score) with sex, age, socio-economic status, education, physical leisure exercise, smoking and personal attention paid to keeping a healthy diet. Data were gathered with a self-administered quantitative food-frequency questionnaire distributed to a representative sample of Norwegian men and women aged 16–79 years in a national dietary survey, of whom 3144 subjects (63%) responded. Age and female sex were positively associated with indicators for healthy dietary habits. By separate evaluation length of education, regular physical leisure exercise and degree of attention paid to keeping a healthy diet were positively associated with all four indicators for healthy dietary habits in both sexes. Socio-economic status, location of residence and smoking habits were associated with from one to three indicators for healthy dietary habits. In a multiple regression model, age, education and location of residence together explained from 1 to 9% of the variation (R2) in the four dietary indicators. Length of education was significantly associated with three of four dietary indicators both among men and women. By including the variable ‘attention paid to keeping a healthy diet’ in the model, R2 increased to between 4 and 15% for the four dietary indicators. Length of education remained correlated to three dietary indicators among women, and one indicator among men, after adjusting for attention to healthy diet, age and location of residence. Residence in cities remained correlated to two indicators among men, but none among women, after adjusting for age, education and attention to healthy diet. In conclusion, education was associated with indicators of a healthy diet. Attention to healthy diet showed the strongest and most consistent association with all four indicators for healthy dietary habits in both sexes. This suggests that personal preferences may be just as important for having a healthy diet as social status determinants.
Activation Pathway of Complement and MAp19, components of the Lectin The Rat and Mouse Homologues of MASP-2

Recently, we described two novel constituents of the multimolecular initiation complex of the mannan-binding lectin (MBL) pathway of complement activation, a serine protease of 76 kDa, termed MASP-2, and a MASP-2 related plasma protein of 19 kDa, termed MAp19. Upon activation of the MBL/MASPs/MAp19 complex, MASP-2 cleaves the fourth complement component C4, while the role of MAp19 within the MBL/MASP-1/MASP-2/MAp19 complex remains to be clariﬁed. In humans, the mRNA species encoding MASP-2 (2.6 kb) and MAp19 (1.0 kb) arise by an alternative polyadenylation/splicing mechanism from a single structural MASP-2 gene. Here, we report the complete primary structures of the rat homologue of MASP-2 and of rat and mouse MAp19. We show that both MASP-2 and MAp19 are part of the rat MBL pathway activation complex and demonstrate their exclusively hepatic biosynthesis. Southern blot and PCR analyses of rat genomic DNA indicate that as in humans, rat MASP-2 and MAp19 are encoded by a single structural gene. The Journal of Immunology, 1999, 163: 6848–6859. (UT) CAC portion II one CGC-3 447–464). using coding portion domain clone GAG position
The localized phase of disordered copolymers with adsorption

We analyze the localized phase of a general model of a directed poly- mer in the proximity of an interface that separates two solvents. Each monomer unit carries a charge, ! n, that determines the type (attractive or repulsive) and the strength of its interaction with the solvents. In addition, there is a polymer{ interface interaction and we want to model the case in which there are impurities en, called again charges, at the interface. The charges are distributed in an inho- mogeneous fashion along the chain and at the interface: more precisely the model we consider is of quenched disorder type. It is well known that such a model undergoes a localization/delocalization transi- tion. We focus on the localized phase, where the polymer sticks to the interface. Our new results include estimates on the exponential decay of correlations, the proof that the free energy is innitely dieren tiable away from the transition and estimates on nite{size corrections to the thermodynamic limit of the free energy per unit site. Other results we prove, instead, generalize earlier works that typically deal either with the case of copolymers near an homogeneous interface (e ! 0) or with the case of disordered pinning, where the only polymer{environment interac- tion is at the interface (! 0). Moreover, with respect to most of the previous literature, we work with rather general distributions of charges (we will assume only a suitable concentration inequality) and we allow more freedom on the law of the underlying random walk. 2000 Mathematics Subject Classic ation: 60K35, 82B41, 82B44
Examining the Role of Workplace Spirituality and Teacher Self-efficacy on Organizational Citizenship Behaviour of Secondary School Teachers: An Indian Scenario

Research on workplace spirituality is on the rise primarily because of the win-win situation it creates for both employees and organizations. Spirituality at work has been associated with many individual-level work behaviour and attitudes. Also, self-efficacy is another significant construct which considerably affects individual work experiences. The current study focuses on the relationship between workplace spirituality, self-efficacy and organizational citizenship behaviour (OCB) in secondary school teachers. It examines whether spirituality and teacher efficacy could predict citizenship behaviour of teachers. Additionally, the influence of spirituality on self-efficacy is also looked at. Data were collected from 353 teachers working in state-run schools in one of the southern states in India. Using structural equation modeling, the study finds that positive relationships exist between different dimensions of workplace spirituality, teacher efficacy and two categories of OCBs. The study contributes to the growing empirical research on workplace spirituality and the underexplored area of teacher OCB.
On Testing the Random Walk Hypothesis: A Model-Comparison Approach

The main intention of this paper is to investigate, with new daily data, whether prices in the two Chinese stock exchanges (Shanghai and Shenzhen) follow a random-walk process as required by market efficiency. We use two different approaches, the standard variance-ratio test of Lo and MacKinlay (1988) and a model-comparison test that compares the ex post forecasts from a NAIVE model with those obtained from several alternative models: ARIMA, GARCH and the Artificial Neural Network (ANN). To evaluate ex post forecasts, we utilize several procedures including RMSE, MAE, Theil's U, and encompassing tests. In contrast to the variance-ratio test, results from the model-comparison approach are quite decisive in rejecting the random-walk hypothesis in both Chinese stock markets. Moreover, our results provide strong support for the ANN as a potentially useful device for predicting stock prices in emerging markets.
RF heating due to conductive wires during MRI depends on the phase distribution of the transmit field

In many studies concerning wire heating during MR imaging, a “resonant wire length” that maximizes RF heating is determined. This may lead to the nonintuitive conclusion that adding more wire, so as to avoid this resonant length, will actually improve heating safety. Through a theoretical analysis using the method of moments, we show that this behavior depends on the phase distribution of the RF transmit field. If the RF transmit field has linear phase, with slope equal to the real part of the wavenumber in the tissue, long wires always heat more than short wires. In order to characterize the intrinsic safety of a device without reference to a specific body coil design, this maximum‐tip heating phase distribution must be considered. Finally, adjusting the phase distribution of the electric field generated by an RF transmit coil may lead to an “implant‐friendly” coil design. Magn Reson Med 48:1096–1098, 2002. © 2002 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Synthesizing transformations on hierarchically structured data

This paper presents a new approach for synthesizing transformations on tree-structured data, such as Unix directories and XML documents. We consider a general abstraction for such data, called hierarchical data trees (HDTs) and present a novel example-driven synthesis algorithm for HDT transformations. Our central insight is to reduce the problem of synthesizing tree transformers to the synthesis of list transformations that are applied to the paths of the tree. The synthesis problem over lists is solved using a new algorithm that combines SMT solving and decision tree learning. We have implemented our technique in a system called HADES and show that HADES can automatically synthesize a variety of interesting transformations collected from online forums.
Efficient Bandwidth allocation approach for P 2 P IPTV System for Heterogeneous Networks

With the deployment of broadband networking technology, many clients are enabled to receive various IPTV services. To support many clients, the network should be designed by considering the following factors: viewer's waiting time, buffer requirement at each client, number of channel required for video delivery Our comparative study shows that it is more conservative and stable. In addition, our approach shows better robustness than other schemes. Also, we optimized the bandwidth efficiency to configure the system adaptively by simply adjusting the bandwidth used by each transmitter. Last but not least, our proposed scheme shows better complexity. Therefore, our scheme can be a viable solution for implementing P2P IPTV services that supports a large number of clients.
Species Adaptation Genetic Algorithms: A Basis for a Continuing SAGA

For Arti(cid:12)cial Life applications it is useful to extend Genetic Algorithms from a (cid:12)nite search space with (cid:12)xed-length genotypes to open-ended evolution with variable-length genotypes. A new theoretical analysis is required, as Holland's Schema Theorem only applies to (cid:12)xed lengths. It will be argued, using concepts of epistasis and (cid:12)t-ness landscapes drawn from theoretical biology, that in the long run a populationmust have genotypes of nearly equal length, and this length can only increase slowly. As the length increases, the population will be nearly converged, and hence evolving as a species.
Minimum jerk motion planning for a prosthetic finger

In this paper we propose a method, based on both physiologic and engineering considerations, for the motion planning of a prosthetic finger. In particular, we exploit a minimum jerk approach to define the trajectory in the Cartesian space. Then, cubic splines are adopted in the joint space. The redundancy problem arising from the presence of three links is solved by assuming that there is a constant ratio between the second and the third joint motion. The value of the proportional constant is determined by minimizing the maximum jerk in the joint space. It is found that this constant value can be suboptimally but effectively set to one for all the movements. This approach guarantees a natural movement of the finger as well as reduced vibrations in the mechanical structure and increased control performances. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.