Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Identification of position and orientation of hand bones from MR images by bone model registration

This paper proposes a system that identifies the position and orientation of hand bones from magnetic resonance (MR) volume images by registration of a bone model. Investigation of the link structure of a human hand requires the measurement of the relative movement of the bones by identifying each bone configuration among a large number of hand poses of the same subject. To save total time in acquiring bone configurations, a three-step process implemented: (1) a bone polygonal mesh is generated for a bone model by manually segmenting the bone region from one of the MR scanning data; (2) the initial configuration of the bone model is set manually; and (3) the bone model is aligned in MR voxel data to maximize the performance indices. Experimental results show the validity of the identified configurations of the bones by the proposed system when compared with manually generated bone mesh configurations.
OFDM versus Single Carrier with Cyclic Prefix: a system-based comparison

In recent years, wireless indoor networks have received a lot of scientific and industrial attention. Most systems rely on the use of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) because of its capability to elegantly cope with multipath interference. However, while OFDM provides a nice solution for the digital modem, its front-end requirements should be investigated as well. To that goal, we have set up a simulation environment which comprises both the digital modem and the most important front-end nonidealities. We show that for the same data rate, bandwidth and transmit power constraints, Single-Carrier with Cyclic Prefix (SC-CP) allows the design of a more power-efficient modem than OFDM and is therefore a better candidate for portable wireless terminals.
Secondary Hematoma Expansion and Perihemorrhagic Edema after Intracerebral Hemorrhage: From Bench Work to Practical Aspects

Intracerebral hemorrhages (ICH) represent about 10–15% of all strokes per year in the United States alone. Key variables influencing the long-term outcome after ICH are hematoma size and growth. Although death may occur at the time of the hemorrhage, delayed neurologic deterioration frequently occurs with hematoma growth and neuronal injury of the surrounding tissue. Perihematoma edema has also been implicated as a contributing factor for delayed neurologic deterioration after ICH. Cerebral edema results from both blood–brain barrier disruption and local generation of osmotically active substances. Inflammatory cellular mediators, activation of the complement, by-products of coagulation and hemolysis such as thrombin and fibrin, and hemoglobin enter the brain and induce a local and systemic inflammatory reaction. These complex cascades lead to apoptosis or neuronal injury. By identifying the major modulators of cerebral edema after ICH, a therapeutic target to counter degenerative events may be forthcoming.
Countable groups of isometries on Banach spaces

A group G is representable in a Banach space X if G is isomorphic to the group of isometries on X in some equivalent norm. We prove that a countable group G is representable in a separable real Banach space X in several general cases, including when G ≃ {-1,1} × H, H finite and dim X > |H|, or when G contains a normal subgroup with two elements and X is of the form co(Y) or l p (Y), 1 ≤ p < +∞. This is a consequence of a result inspired by methods of S. Bellenot (1986) and stating that under rather general conditions on a separable real Banach space X and a countable bounded group G of isomorphisms on X containing - Id, there exists an equivalent norm on X for which G is equal to the group of isometries on X. We also extend methods of K. Jarosz (1988) to prove that any complex Banach space of dimension at least 2 may be renormed with an equivalent complex norm to admit only trivial real isometries, and that any complexification of a Banach space may be renormed with an equivalent complex norm to admit only trivial and conjugation real isometries. It follows that every real Banach space of dimension at least 4 and with a complex structure may be renormed to admit exactly two complex structures up to isometry, and that every real Cartesian square may be renormed to admit a unique complex structure up to isometry.
Fire as a physical factor in wildland management

WE USE FIRE to accomplish many goals. Most of our use is based on long years of experience-experience that enables us to predict the results we should obtain from the "feel" of the situation. Research is being conducted, to assist less experienced land managers to understand fire more completely and to provide means for them to predict its effects in given situations. We must better learn to understand and predict all the effects of fire if we are to use fire effectively, or, for that matter, to use fire at all. Recent pressures by various organizations and individuals are directed at air pollution caused by fire. Unless we can effectively demonstrate the reasons we need to use fire as well as its effects on the atmosphere we will find more laws enacted against use of fire. The purpose of this paper is to present a mental model of some physical aspects of fire. Perhaps these can be of use in planning some prescribed fires as well as understanding some effects observed in others. Each fire and therefore its effects are the products of many factors. The basic fuel material, quantity, fuel bed geometry, and moisture content are of elementary importance. Compounding the
Evidence of an increased incidence of day 3 parasitaemia in Suriname: an indicator of the emerging resistance of Plasmodium falciparum to artemether

The emerging resistance to artemisinin derivatives that has been reported in South-East Asia led us to assess the efficacy of artemether-lumefantrine as the first line therapy for uncomplicated Plasmodium falciparum infections in Suriname. This drug assessment was performed according to the recommendations of the World Health Organization in 2011. The decreasing number of malaria cases in Suriname, which are currently limited to migrating populations and gold miners, precludes any conclusions on artemether efficacy because adequate numbers of patients with 28-day follow-up data are difficult to obtain. Therefore, a comparison of day 3 parasitaemia in a 2011 study and in a 2005/2006 study was used to detect the emergence of resistance to artemether. The prevalence of day 3 parasitaemia was assessed in a study in 2011 and was compared to that in a study in 2005/2006. The same protocol was used in both studies and artemether-lumefantrine was the study drug. Of 48 evaluable patients in 2011, 15 (31%) still had parasitaemia on day 3 compared to one (2%) out of 45 evaluable patients in 2005/2006. Overall, 11 evaluable patients in the 2011 study who were followed up until day 28 had negative slides and similar findings were obtained in all 38 evaluable patients in the 2005/2006 study. The significantly increased incidence of parasite persistence on day 3 may be an indication of emerging resistance to artemether.
Human Platelets Utilize Cycloxygenase-1 to Generate Dioxolane A3, a Neutrophil-activating Eicosanoid

Eicosanoids are important mediators of fever, pain, and inflammation that modulate cell signaling during acute and chronic disease. We show by using lipidomics that thrombin-activated human platelets generate a new type of eicosanoid that both stimulates and primes human neutrophil integrin (Mac-1) expression, in response to formylmethionylleucylphenylalanine. Detailed characterization proposes a dioxolane structure, 8-hydroxy-9,11-dioxolane eicosatetraenoic acid (dioxolane A3, DXA3). The lipid is generated in nanogram amounts by platelets from endogenous arachidonate during physiological activation, with inhibition by aspirin in vitro or in vivo, implicating cyclooxygenase-1 (COX). Pharmacological and genetic studies on human/murine platelets revealed that DXA3 formation requires protease-activated receptors 1 and 4, cytosolic phospholipase A2 (cPLA2), Src tyrosine kinases, p38 MAPK, phospholipase C, and intracellular calcium. From data generated by purified COX isoforms and chemical oxidation, we propose that DXA3 is generated by release of an intermediate from the active site followed by oxygenation at C8. In summary, a new neutrophil-activating platelet-derived lipid generated by COX-1 is presented that can activate or prime human neutrophils, suggesting a role in innate immunity and acute inflammation.
M ar 2 00 0 Special Properties of Five Dimensional BPS Rotating Black Holes

Supersymmetric, rotating, asymptotically flat black holes with a regular horizon are rare configurations in String Theory. One example is known in five spacetime dimensions, within the toroidal compactification of type IIB string theory. Such special solution is allowed by the existence of a Chern-Simons coupling in the Supergravity theory and by the possibility of imposing a self duality condition on the 'rotation 2-form'. We further exemplify the use of such duality condition by finding a new Brinkmann wave solution in D = 6 simple gravity, possessing Killing spinors. We then explore three peculiar features of the aforementioned black holes: 1) Oxidising to D = 10 the five dimensional configuration may be interpreted as a system of D1 − D5 branes with a Brinkmann wave propagating along their worldvolume. Unlike its five dimensional Kaluza-Klein compactification, the universal covering space of this manifold has no causality violations. In other words, causal anomalies can be solved in higher dimensions. From the dual SCFT viewpoint, the causality bound for the compactified spacetime arises as the unitarity bound; 2) The vanishing of the scattering cross section for uncharged scalars and sufficiently high angular momentum of the background is shown still to hold at the level of charged interactions. The same is verified when a non-minimal coupling to the geometry is used. Therefore, the 'repulson' behaviour previously found is universal for non accelerated observers; 3) The solutions are shown to have a non-standard gyromagnetic ratio of g = 3. In contrast, the superpartners of a static, BPS, five dimensional black hole have g = 1. At the semi-classical level, we find that a Dirac fermion propagating in the rotating hole background has g = 2 ± 1, depending on the spinor direction of the fermion being parallel to Killing or 'anti-Killing' spinors. *
Data-driven feature word selection for clustering online news comments

Popular news articles attract thousands of online comments, making it tedious and time-consuming for a manual review. Automatically clustering similar comments can help reduce the burden of manual analyses, but appropriate feature words must be selected for successful clustering. In this paper, we present a data-driven feature word selection method which realizes structurally superior clustering of online comments. The top 1,000 most frequent nouns appearing across the entire 7.44 million Korean online comments are selected to construct an overall noun set. Frequent nouns in the online comments of each news article are selected to construct the local noun set. The intersection between the local and overall noun set is taken to construct the global noun set. The global noun set is removed from the corresponding local noun set to construct the distinct noun set. The top 250 most frequent nouns are selected for each of the local, global, and distinct noun sets for K-means clustering. The clustered results are evaluated using three internal cluster validation indices, Dunn, PBM, and Silhouette. As a result, online comments clustered using distinct nouns produced structurally superior clusters when compared to the other types of nouns, local and global.
Impact of electronic chemotherapy order forms on prescribing errors at an urban medical center: results from an interrupted time-series analysis.

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the impact of electronic standardized chemotherapy templates on incidence and types of prescribing errors. DESIGN A quasi-experimental interrupted time series with segmented regression. SETTING A 700-bed multidisciplinary tertiary care hospital with an ambulatory cancer center. PARTICIPANTS A multidisciplinary team including oncology physicians, nurses, pharmacists and information technologists. INTERVENTION(S) Standardized, regimen-specific, chemotherapy prescribing forms were developed and implemented over a 32-month period. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE(S) Trend of monthly prevented prescribing errors per 1000 chemotherapy doses during the pre-implementation phase (30 months), immediate change in the error rate from pre-implementation to implementation and trend of errors during the implementation phase. Errors were analyzed according to their types: errors in communication or transcription, errors in dosing calculation and errors in regimen frequency or treatment duration. Relative risk (RR) of errors in the post-implementation phase (28 months) compared with the pre-implementation phase was computed with 95% confidence interval (CI). RESULTS Baseline monthly error rate was stable with 16.7 prevented errors per 1000 chemotherapy doses. A 30% reduction in prescribing errors was observed with initiating the intervention. With implementation, a negative change in the slope of prescribing errors was observed (coefficient = -0.338; 95% CI: -0.612 to -0.064). The estimated RR of transcription errors was 0.74; 95% CI (0.59-0.92). The estimated RR of dosing calculation errors was 0.06; 95% CI (0.03-0.10). The estimated RR of chemotherapy frequency/duration errors was 0.51; 95% CI (0.42-0.62). CONCLUSIONS Implementing standardized chemotherapy-prescribing templates significantly reduced all types of prescribing errors and improved chemotherapy safety.
Perfect secrecy, perfect omniscience and steiner tree packing

We investigate perfect secret key generation for a “pairwise independent network” model in which every pair of terminals observes correlated sources that are independent of sources observed by all other pairs of terminals. The terminals are then allowed to communicate interactively in multiple rounds over a public noiseless channel of unlimited capacity. This communication is observed by all the terminals as well as by an eavesdropper. The objective is to generate a perfect secret key shared by a given set of terminals at the largest rate possible. All the terminals cooperate in generating the secret key, with perfect secrecy being required from the eavesdropper. For this model, we introduce the concept of communication for perfect omniscience using which we first obtain a single-letter characterization of the perfect secret key capacity. Moreover, this perfect secret key capacity is shown to be achieved by linear noninteractive communication, and coincides with the (standard) secret key capacity. Our second contribution, exploiting the notion of communication for perfect omniscience, is a new nonasymptotic and computable upper bound for the combinatorial problem of maximal Steiner tree packing in a multigraph. Thus, our work establishes certain connections among perfect secrecy generation and communication for perfect omniscience for the pairwise independent network model, and Steiner tree packing.
Environmental economics and the Murray-Darling river system

Much concern about the negative environmental consequences of agricultural development in Australia, including salinisation, waterlogging and algal blooms, has focused on the problems of the Murray–Darling Basin. The aim of this article is to provide an overview of the environmental problems of the Murray–Darling Basin from an economic perspective, and a selective survey of the relevant economic literature, including theoretical analysis, modelling and contributions to the development of water policy. In attempting to understand the complex problems of the Murray–Darling Basin, an eclectic approach drawing on externality, sustainability and property rights perspectives seems most appropriate.
Information, Competition, and the Quality of Charities

Drawing upon the all-pay auction literature, we propose a model of charity competition in which informed giving alone can account for the significant quality heterogeneity across similar charities. Our analysis identifies a negative effect of competition and a positive effect of informed giving on the equilibrium quality of charity. In particular, we show that as the number of charities grows, so does the percentage of charity scams, approaching one in the limit. In light of this and other results, we discuss the need for regulating nonprofit entry and conduct as well as promoting informed giving.
Intraperitoneal Immunotherapy for Metastatic Ovarian Carcinoma: Resistance of Intratumoral Collagen to Antibody Penetration

Purpose: Convective transport of macromolecules from the peritoneal cavity into tumor is determined by its hydraulic permeability and the pressure gradient. Previous studies showed that establishing a pressure gradient into the tumor failed to result in significant penetration. This study addresses the hypothesis that the extracellular matrix is the major resistance to the penetration of an i.p. injected antibody. Experimental Design: Human ovarian tumors (SKOV-3 and OVCAR-3) were established in the abdominal wall of athymic rats. After anesthesia, the tumor serosal surface was treated for 2 hours with Krebs solution (control), collagenase (37.5 unit/mL), or hyaluronidase (10 unit/mL) followed by 3 hours of convective delivery of radiolabeled IgG. Transport of antibody into the tumor was measured with quantitative autoradiography along with the tumor interstitial pressure, concentration of collagen and hyaluronic acid, and IgG volume of distribution. Results: Antibody was excluded from 42% to 53% of tumor extracellular volume. Exposure of tumors to hyaluronidase did not enhance IgG transport despite removal of 90% of the hyaluronan from the exposed tumor. In contrast, collagenase reduced collagen content, lowered tumor interstitial pressure, and markedly enhanced antibody penetration. Conclusions: Reduction of collagen, but not hyaluronan, in the matrix of ovarian xenografts enhanced the transport of i.p. injected antibody. Although high interstitial pressure is a deterrent to convective transport of macromolecules into the tumor parenchyma, the structure of the interstitial matrix provides an inherent resistance, which must be overcome before effective delivery of an antibody.
Staggered Wage Setting in a Macro Model

Few economists now question the validity of the Friedman-Phelps accelerationist hypothesis that the Phillips curve is vertical in the long run-at least as a first-order approximation. Indeed. the once controversial hv-pothesis is now embodied in basic textboik macro models (see Rudiger Dornbusch and Stanlev Fischer. and Robert J. Gordon. for exampie). This new accelerationist consensus, however, has done little to settle the ongoing debate over aggregate demand policy, where the crucial issues appear to depend on the short-run Phillips curve and its dynamic properties. The accelerationist theory provided an elegant and concise representation of the inflationary process for the long run. However. it has proved distressingly unspe-cific as a framework for the development of short-run dynamics. Two sources of this incomplete specification have stimulated extensive research in recent years. The first-about which little will be said here-is that the accelerationist theory was not specific about the process of expectation formation. According to the theory , the expected inflation rate A* should be added to the right-hand side of the Phillips equation. Hence the expectation process determining a* matters greatly for short-run dynamics. For example, if expectations are formed rationally, then as Thomas Sargent and Neil Wallace have shown (using the Robert Lucas supply model), the Phillips curve will be vertical in the short run as well as the long run from the point of view of aggregate demand policy. On the other hand, if expectations are adaptive-either by assumption or by derivation from a learning model-then the short-run slope might be Edmund Phelps for useful comments. very flat. But, if this were the only source of ambiguity in the accelerationist model, then it is likely that the controversy over the short-run properties would have been settled quickly: the attractiveness of rational expectations again as a first-order approximation-has become increasingly evident in theoretical and em~irical work. The second source of imprecision is more troublesome and is unlikely to be resolved quickly. It involves the micro-economic details of wage and price adjustment which are just as much a part of the famous macro "expectations" adjustment, as the expectation formation mechanism itself. While an extremely literal reading of the acceleration-ist theories would interpret x* as a pure forecast of inflation inde~endent of the dynamics of wage and price contracts, a more practical reading would suggest that T * represents the persistence of inflation due to the gradual adjustments of outstanding wage and price …
Peer Bullying in Schools: A Cognitive Behavioral Intervention Program

Students face few problems in schools. Some of these conflicts may be defined with the bullying concept. The concept of bullying is defined as “to repetitively expose a student/ students to negative effects of another student or students. ” “Negative effects” includes students getting disturbed as well as getting hurt from the same kind of negative behavior; it also may be done by attempting to hurt someone, deliberately harming someone verbally or physically. Bullying behavior should include an “inequivalent power” between opponents and this needs to be “permanent” and “intentional. ” Bullying at school affects lots of students around the schools who witness bullying behavior in different dimensions; thus, it is an important problem that needs to be prevented. While some of the studies encompass interventions toward the whole school system, some studies were conducted by determining separate groups and working on those. In this paper, first, some whole school approach–based prevention programs and the effectiveness of these programs and then intervention programs for groups, which are provided to reduce and intervene bullying, will be explained. Second, cognitive behavioral therapy and its use in preventing bullying will be briefly explained. Finally, the context of a cognitive‐behavioral based peer bullying intervention program.
Improved Cholinergic Transmission is Detrimental to Behavioural Plasticity in Honeybees (Apis mellifera)

Unravelling the role of neuromessenger processes in learning and memory has long interested researchers. We investigated the effects of an acetylcholinesterase blocker, Methyl Parathion (MeP), on honeybee learning. We used visual and olfactory tasks to test whether MeP had a detrimental effect on the acquisition of new knowledge when this new knowledge contradicts previously acquired one. Our results indicate that treatment with MeP prior to conditioning was significantly detrimental to the acquisition of incongruous (but not irrelevant or congruous) new knowledge due to improved recall. The neurobiological and ecotoxicological consequences of these results are discussed.