Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Analysis of the Development of the Nasal Septum and Measurement of the Harvestable Septal Cartilage in Koreans Using Three-Dimensional Facial Bone Computed Tomography Scanning

Background The septal cartilage is the most useful donor site for autologous cartilage graft material in rhinoplasty. For successful nasal surgery, it is necessary to understand the developmental process of the nasal septum and to predict the amount of harvestable septal cartilage before surgery. Methods One hundred twenty-three Korean patients who underwent three-dimensional (3D) facial bone computed tomography (CT) were selected for evaluation of the midsagittal view of the nasal septum. Multiple parameters such as the area of each component of the nasal septum and the amount of harvestable septal cartilage were measured using Digimizer software. Results The area of the total nasal septum showed rapid growth until the teenage years, but thereafter no significant change throughout the lifetime. However, the development of the septal cartilage showed a gradual decline due to ossification changes with aging after puberty in spite of a lack of change in the total septal area. The area of harvestable septal cartilage in young adults was 549.84±151.26 mm2 and decreased thereafter with age. Conclusions A 3D facial bone CT scan can provide valuable information on the septal cartilage graft before rhinoplasty. Considering the developmental process of the septal cartilage identified in this study, septal surgery should not be performed until puberty due to the risk of nasal growth impairment. Furthermore, in elderly patients who show a decreased cartilage area due to ossification changes, septal cartilage harvesting should be performed carefully due to the risk of saddle nose deformity.
Catheter Associated Blood Stream Infections in Patients Receiving Parenteral Nutrition: A Prospective Study of 850 Patients

Background Data was prospectively collected on 850 consecutive patients undergoing central venous catheterisation (CVC) to receive total parenteral nutrition (TPN) in a major university teaching hospital over a 46 months period. Methods Data included information about CVC insertion and clinical outcomes, most notably, suspected catheter-related blood stream infections (CRBSI). Results The internal jugular vein was the most common site (n = 882, 68%), followed by the subclavian vein (n = 344, 24.6%) and femoral vein (n = 95, 6.5%). The CRBSI rate per 100 line feeding days was 0.93% in patients cared for in a non ICU setting versus 1.98% for ICU managed patients. The mean number of line days preceding a pyrexial spike was 13.1. CRBSI was commonest in patients with femoral lines (n = 21/95, 22.1%), especially those cared for in a non-ICU setting (29.6% versus 14.5% for those in the ICU group). Preference should be given to internal jugular or subclavian-sited CVCs in ICU and non-ICU patients to reduce the risk of CRBSI. If femoral catheterisation is unavoidable, strict attention to aseptic technique is mandatory. Conclusion The aim of this study was to investigate the rate and pattern of CRBSI and to recommend changes in protocol, technique and equipment as deemed necessary from these findings.
Human Resource Management Policies and Productivity: New Evidence from An Econometric Case Study

First we distinguish various approaches used by economists to assess the impact of human resource management practices on productivity and then we briefly review and illustrate studies that represent different approaches. In the main part of the paper we illustrate the econometric case study method, by using new data to analyse a case from retail trade and by emulating an approach used in an earlier study. Consistent with theory we find that when employees have opportunities to participate, and to receive appropriate information and pertinent rewards, a one standard deviation increase of the first principal component score would increase productivity by 1 per cent. Our findings imply that there are benefits to innovative work practices, even in settings where employees do simple tasks and employees are relatively low-skilled. Since our findings are similar to those contained in a previous study, our results also indicate the value of replication studies. Copyright 2006, Oxford University Press.
Dividend and Corporate Taxation in an Agency Model of the Firm

Recent evidence on the effect of dividend taxes on firm behavior is inconsistent with neoclassical theories of dividend and corporate taxation. We develop a simple agency model in which managers and shareholders have conflicting interests to explain the evidence. In this model, dividend taxation induces managers to undertake unproductive investments by retaining earnings, and creates a first-order deadweight cost. In contrast, corporate taxes do not distort the manager's payout decision and may only create second-order efficiency costs. Corporate income taxation may therefore be a more efficient way to generate revenue than dividend taxation, challenging existing intuitions based on neoclassical models. (JEL D21, G35, H25, H32)
Model selection in Bayesian segmentation of multiple DNA alignments

MOTIVATION The analysis of multiple sequence alignments is allowing researchers to glean valuable insights into evolution, as well as identify genomic regions that may be functional, or discover novel classes of functional elements. Understanding the distribution of conservation levels that constitutes the evolutionary landscape is crucial to distinguishing functional regions from non-functional. Recent evidence suggests that a binary classification of evolutionary rates is inappropriate for this purpose and finds only highly conserved functional elements. Given that the distribution of evolutionary rates is multi-modal, determining the number of modes is of paramount concern. Through simulation, we evaluate the performance of a number of information criterion approaches derived from MCMC simulations in determining the dimension of a model. RESULTS We utilize a deviance information criterion (DIC) approximation that is more robust than the approximations from other information criteria, and show our information criteria approximations do not produce superfluous modes when estimating conservation distributions under a variety of circumstances. We analyse the distribution of conservation for a multiple alignment comprising four primate species and mouse, and repeat this on two additional multiple alignments of similar species. We find evidence of six distinct classes of evolutionary rates that appear to be robust to the species used. AVAILABILITY Source code and data are available at http://dl.dropbox. com/u/477240/changept.zip.
[Associations between glucose response and dietary fiber intakes in patients with DM].

OBJECTIVE To study the association between dietary glucose response and dietary fiber through evaluating dietary glycemic index (DGI) and diet glycemic load (DGL). METHODS Dietary intakes of 105 subjects with diabetes mellitus were measured by means of two 3-day food records through weighting. DGI and DGL were calculated according to food glycemic index and carbohydrate intakes. The content of total, insoluble and soluble dietary fiber were determined by enzymatic-gravimetric method. RESULTS The values of DGI and DGL were 62.9 +/- 6.8 and 142.4 +/- 39.8 respectively. The intakes of TDF, IDF and SDF were (22.5 +/- 6.7), (16.1 +/- 5.5), (6.4 +/- 2.0) g/d respectively. The correlation coefficient between DGI and TDF were -0.407 (P < 0.01). When compared with the subjects with lowest DGI, the intakes of vegetable foods, TDF, IDF and SDF in subjects with highest DGI were decreased by 221.9 g, 6.5 g, 5.0 g, 1.4 g respectively (P < 0.01), and that of cereal foods were increased by 68.0 g (P < 0.01). Of the different sources of fiber, vegetable fiber was most strongly decreased. CONCLUSION DGI was negtively related to TDF intakes. The diet rich in vegetables and dietary fiber may decrease the dietary glucose response.
Long term functional and structural outcomes of laser therapy for retinopathy of prematurity

Aims: To assess the long term functional and structural outcomes of premature babies who received diode laser photocoagulation for threshold retinopathy of prematurity (ROP). Methods: 25 patients (43 eyes) treated with laser were recalled for assessment at a mean follow up of 11 years. A further seven patients (14 eyes) with subthreshold ROP, which had regressed spontaneously without laser treatment, were also examined. All children underwent distance acuity, near acuity, contrast sensitivity (CS), and colour vision assessments followed by a dilated fundal examination and cycloplegic autorefraction. Results: The laser treated eyes had a mean distance visual acuity of 0.37 logMAR, a mean near visual acuity of 0.39 logMAR, a mean contrast sensitivity of 1.49 log CS units, and a mean spherical equivalent of −2.10D. An unfavourable distance visual acuity outcome occurred in five eyes (13.5%). An unfavourable near visual acuity outcome was also noted in the five eyes (13.5%) with poor distance visual outcome. 7% had an unfavourable structural outcome. On comparison with the control group, there was no significant difference in near acuity, CS, refraction, or colour vision between the two groups. However, there was a statistically significant difference in terms of distance visual acuity (p = 0.03). Conclusions: Laser treated eyes with favourable structural outcome have a good visual outcome. The results show a long term benefit from diode laser photocoagulation in preserving distance and near vision in eyes with threshold ROP.
H ∞ control of a suspension with a magnetorheological damper

This research work presents an H ∞ controller based on a Takagi–Sugeno (T–S) fuzzy model for a two-degrees-of-freedom (2-DOF) one-quarter-vehicle semi-active suspension with a magnetorheological damper where the actuator dynamics are included in the control synthesis. These dynamics enclose nonlinear damper phenomena, avoided in many other studies, and that can improve the suspension system by means of a more accurate model. The objective is to obtain a semi-active suspension that considerably improves the passive suspension efficiency based on some frequency domain performance criteria. The advantage of having the T–S system as a reference is that each piecewise linear system can be exposed to the well-known control theory. Besides, the proposed solution is compared with the recent reported work to highlight its advantages. A case of study is included and simulation work supports the results. The methodology applied herein can be extended to a half-vehicle model, and to the four wheels to have a global chassis control in order to maximise passenger comfort and vehicle stability.
A Comparison of Two Structured Diagnostic Interviews: CIDI and SCAN

The relationship between and the inter-rater reliability of the Composite International Diagnostic Interview (CIDI) and the Schedules for Clinical Assessment in Neuropsychiatry (SCAN) for anxiety and depressive disorders were explored. The CIDI and the SCAN were administered by trained interviewers in counterbalanced order. A subsample of interviews was observed to determine the inter-rater reliability of the instruments. Subjects were 101 patients accepted for treatment at an Anxiety Disorders Clinic; 29 of the 101 patients participated in the inter-rater reliability study. Concordance between the instruments as measured by canonical correlation analysis was moderate for current (r=0.69, p=0.05) and for lifetime (r=0.66, p=0.05) diagnoses. Inter-rater reliability of the CIDI was perfect (overall intraclass kappa = 1.00), and of the SCAN was good (overall intraclass kappa = 0.67). It is concluded that although the two instruments made similar diagnostic distinctions, the clinical judgement involved in administering the SCAN resulted in the more moderate levels of agreement between the interviewer and observer than those found for the CIDI.
Rigidity of stationary black holes with small angular momentum on the horizon

We prove a black hole rigidity result for slowly rotating stationary solutions of the Einstein vacuum equations. More precisely, we prove that the domain of outer communications of a regular stationary vacuum is isometric to the domain of outer communications of a Kerr solution, provided that the stationary Killing vector-field $\T$ is small on the bifurcation sphere.
She Learned the Meaning of Life But Forgot It before She Could Say It: A Narrative Analysis of the Process of Tenure.

AUTHOR Pinnegar, Stefinee TITLE She Learned the Meaning of Life But Forgot It before She Could Say It: A Narrative Analysis of the Process of Tenure. PUB DATE 1998-04-00 NOTE 17p. ; Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association (San Diego, CA, April 13-17, 1998). PUB TYPE Opinion Papers (120) Speeches/Meeting Papers (150) EDRS PRICE MF01/PC01 Plus Postage. DESCRIPTORS *College Faculty; Discourse Analysis; *Educational Attitudes; Higher Education; *Narration; Personal Narratives; *Tenure IDENTIFIERS Polkinghorne (Donald)
Herpesvirus prevalence and viral load in healthy blood donors by quantitative real‐time polymerase chain reaction

BACKGROUND: After primary infection, human herpesviruses (HHVs) maintain long‐term latent persistence, often punctuated years later by sporadic episodes of symptomatic lytic activation. Also, blood‐borne herpesvirus from healthy persistently infected blood donors can lead to active primary infection of immunocompromised transfusion recipients.
Legal regulation of the production and trade of medical devices and medical equipment in the EU and US: experience for Ukraine.

INTRODUCTION The need for effective legal regulation of production and sale of medical products in Ukraine due to its social effect is obvious and requires a high level of clarity. The experience of more advanced countries in this area, given the way chosen by Ukraine to harmonize our laws with EU legislation, is certainly could be a useful source of information. The urgency of issues need further intensification of national legal reforms. Some key points on concept of legal regulation of abovementioned sphere is a base of this study. MATERIAL AND METHODS Legislation of Ukraine, European Union, United States of America, Guidelines, developed by European Commission & Food and Drug Administration's (FDA), recommendations represented by international voluntary group and scientific works. This article is based on dialectical, comparative, analytic, synthetic and comprehensive research methods. DISCUSSION This study provide a possibility to state that main difference of regulatory systems in EU and US is that the legal framework of the EU is more flexible. This flexibility is grounded on main principle that only basic quality requirements for medical devices is defined by legislative acts however more detailed requirements are defined in standards, technical regulations, specifications, which are discretionary in nature. Contractors are free to choose any technical solution that provides compliance with the essential requirements, they can choose among different conformity assessment procedures and between accredited conformity assessment bodies to which they want to apply. The contractors themselves is interested to pass the conformity assessment procedure and have the right to put a conformity mark on their medical device because it will give them a real competitive advantage. In contrast, US State regulatory system provides strict control over business entities and law act establishes the quality requirements of medical products. The only body that can authorize the introduction of medical products and perform post-market monitoring is Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which has almost unlimited competence in this sphere. CONCLUSION Taking into account further deepening of the European integration process of Ukraine, establishing of the regulatory system as much similar to that of the EU as possible is a main goal of legal reforms in abovementioned sphere. On the one hand, such system allows to implement effective control of contractors in the sphere of production and sale of medical products and provide safety of medical devices that are introduced, on the other hand, it does not afflict contractors with excessive and total control, allowing them to choose behavior that is most acceptable, understandable and user-specific. However, US's experience also has some positive characteristics, which could be taken into account. Therefore, such complex symbiosis of approaches from our point of view will balance controversial interest of manufacturers, sellers and consumers of medical devices.
Extracting Researcher Metadata with Labeled Features

Professional homepages of researchers contain metadata that provides crucial evidence in several digital library tasks such as academic network extraction, record linkage and expertise search. Due to inherent diversity in values for certain metadata fields (e.g., affiliation) supervised algorithms require a large number of labeled examples for accurately identifying values for these fields. We address this issue with feature labeling, a recent semi-supervised machine learning technique. We apply feature labeling to researcher metadata extraction from homepages by combining a small set of expert-provided feature distributions with few fully-labeled examples. We study two types of labeled features: (1) Dictionary features provide unigram hints related to specific metadata fields, whereas, (2) Proximity features capture the layout information between metadata fields on a homepage in a second stage. We experimentally show that this two-stage approach along with labeled features provides significant improvements in the tagging performance. In one experiment with only ten labeled homepages and 22 expert-specified labeled features, we obtained a 45% relative increase in the F1 value for the affiliation field, while the overall F1 improves by 9%.
Investigation of sporulation in the Desulfotomaculum genus: a genomic comparison with the genera Bacillus and Clostridium.

The genus Desulfotomaculum, belonging to the Firmicutes, comprises strictly anaerobic and endospore-forming bacteria capable of dissimilatory sulfate reduction. These microorganisms are metabolically versatile and are widely distributed in the environment. Spore formation allows them to survive prolonged environmental stress. Information on the mechanism of sporulation in Desulfotomaculum species is scarce. Herein, this process was probed from a genomic standpoint, using the Bacillus subtilis model system as a reference and clostridial sporulation for comparison. Desulfotomaculum falls somewhere in between the Bacillus and Clostridium in terms of conservation of sporulation proteins. Furthermore, it showcased the conservation of a core regulatory cascade throughout genera, while uncovering variability in the initiation of sporulation and the structural characteristics of spores from different genera. In particular, while in Clostridium species sporulation is not initiated by a phosphorelay, Desulfotomaculum species harbour homologues of the B. subtilis proteins involved in this process. Conversely, both Clostridium and Desulfotomaculum species conserve very few B. subtilis structural proteins, particularly those found in the outer layers of the spore. Desulfotomaculum species seem to share greater similarity to the outer layers of Clostridium difficile.
On the existence of multipliers for MIMO systems with repeated slope-restricted nonlinearities

This paper studies the absolute stability problem for closed-loop systems containing a known linear-time-invariant (LTI) part and a static nonlinear element with restricted slope. LMI-based conditions which can be used to guarantee the stability of the closed-loop system are derived, based on extensions of the Zames-Falb multiplier. The paper extends previous single-input-single-output results to multiple-input-multiple-output systems. The generality of the Zames-Falb mulitiplier ensures that it is no more conservative than the Circle and Popov criteria, and sometimes dramatically less so.
Fast Morphological Image Processing on GPU using CUDA

A mathematical morphology is used as a tool for extracting image components that are useful in the representation and description of region shape. The mathematical morphology operations of dilation, erosion, opening, and closing are important building blocks of many other image processing algorithms. The data parallel programming provides an opportunity for performance acceleration using highly parallel processors such as GPU. NVIDIA CUDA architecture offers relatively inexpensive and powerful framework for performing these operations. However the generic morphological erosion and dilation operation in CUDA NPP library is relatively naive, but it provides impressive speed ups only for a limited range of structuring element sizes. The vHGW algorithm is one of the fastest for computing morphological operations on a serial CPU. This algorithm is compute intensive and can be accelerated with the help of GPU. This project implements vHGW algorithm for erosion and dilation independent of structuring element size has been implemented for different types of structuring elements of an arbitrary length and along arbitrary angle on CUDA 5.0 programming environment with GPU hardware as GeForce GTX 480. The results show maximum performance gain of 20 times than the conventional serial implementation of algorithm in terms of execution time. Index Terms morphological image processing, erosion, dilation, vHGW, GPU and CUDA
Are Women More Empathetic than Men? A Longitudinal Study in Adolescence

Since the 1970s there has been a growing interest in analysing sex differences in psychological variables. Empirical studies and meta-analyses have contributed evidence on the differences between male and female individuals. More recently, the gender similarities hypothesis has supported the similarity of men and women in most psychological variables. This study contributes information on women's greater empathic disposition in comparison with men by means of a longitudinal design in an adolescent population. 505 male and female adolescents aged between 13 and 16 years were evaluated at two different moments (grade 2 and grade 3, lower secondary education). They completed the Index of Empathy for Children and Adolescents by Bryant and the Interpersonal Reactivity Index by Davis. The results confirm a greater empathic response in females than in males of the same age, differences growing with age. The sizes of the effect estimated in the second evaluation (average age 14 years) are large for emotional empathy and medium for cognitive empathy. Desde la década de los 70 se incrementa el interés por analizar las diferencias de género en las variables psicológicas y se publican estudios empíricos y trabajos de meta-análisis que aportan evidencia de las diferencias entre varones y mujeres. Más recientemente se ha planteado la hipótesis de la similitud de género que defiende la semejanza entre varones y mujeres en la mayoría de los constructos psicológicos. Este estudio aporta datos sobre la mayor disposición empática en la mujer respecto al varón a través de un diseño longitudinal en población adolescente. 505 adolescentes varones y mujeres, con un rango de edad entre 13 y 16 años fueron evaluados en dos momentos temporales (2⍛ y 3⍛ curso de ESO). Cumplimentaron el Índice de Empatía de Bryant y el Índice de Reactividad Interpersonal de Davis. Los resultados confirman mayor respuesta empática en las adolescentes respecto a los varones de su misma edad y constatan que dichas diferencias aumentan con la edad. Los tamaños del efecto estimados en el segundo momento (edad media 14 años) son grandes en la empatía emocional y medios en la cognitiva.