Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Improvement of enamel bond strengths for conventional and resin-modified glass ionomers: acid-etching vs. conditioning

ObjectiveThis study deals with the effect of phosphoric acid etching and conditioning on enamel micro-tensile bond strengths (μTBSs) of conventional and resin-modified glass ionomer cements (GICs/RMGICs). MethodsForty-eight bovine incisors were prepared into rectangular blocks. Highly-polished labial enamel surfaces were either acid-etched, conditioned with liquids of cements, or not further treated (control). Subsequently, two matching pre-treated enamel surfaces were cemented together with one of four cements [two GICs: Fuji I (GC), Ketac Cem Easymix (3M ESPE); two RMGICs: Fuji Plus (GC), RelyX Luting (3M ESPE)] in preparation for μTBS tests. Pre-treated enamel surfaces and cement-enamel interfaces were analyzed by scanning electron microscopy (SEM). ResultsPhosphoric acid etching significantly increased the enamel μTBS of GICs/RMGICs. Conditioning with the liquids of the cements produced significantly weaker or equivalent enamel μTBS compared to the control. Regardless of etching, RMGICs yielded stronger enamel μTBS than GICs. A visible hybrid layer was found at certain enamelcement interfaces of the etched enamels.ConclusionsPhosphoric acid etching significantly increased the enamel μTBSs of GICs/RMGICs. Phosphoric acid etching should be recommended to etch the enamel margins before the cementation of the prostheses such as inlays and onlays, using GICs/RMGICs to improve the bond strengths. RMGICs provided stronger enamel bond strength than GICs and conditioning did not increase enamel bond strength.
Minimizing Error of Stochastic Computation through Linear Transformation

Stochastic computation is an unconventional computational paradigm that uses ordinary digital circuits to operate on stochastic bit streams, where signal value is encoded as the probability of ones in a stream. It is highly tolerant of soft errors and enables complex arithmetic operations to be implemented with simple circuitry. Prior research has proposed a method to synthesize stochastic computing circuits to implement arbitrary arithmetic functions by approximating them via Bernstein polynomials. However, for some functions, the method cannot find Bernstein polynomials that approximate them closely enough, thus causing a large computation error. In this work, we explore linear transformation on a target function to reduce the approximation error. We propose a method to find the optimal linear transformation parameters to minimize the overall error of the stochastic implementation. Experimental results demonstrated the effectiveness of our method in reducing the computation error and the circuit area.
The Influence of Demands and Resources on Emotional Exhaustion with the Information Systems Profession

Using the Job Demands-Resources Model of Burnout as an organizing framework, this study examines multiple models of the antecedents of emotional exhaustion with the profession among IS workers via a new structural equation modeling software, WarpPLS. Data were analyzed from 293 IS professionals representing various industries across the United States. This study provides empirical evidence regarding the mediating role of the demands of the profession and the considerable influence of affective connections to the profession (i.e., career-family conflict, psychological contract violation and connection to the profession) on emotional exhaustion with the IS profession. These findings highlight the importance of understanding how complex relationships influence emotional exhaustion with the profession. Researchers interested in the causes of burnout in IS professionals may want to focus on further exploring the affective connections to the profession as they were found to be key factors directly and indirectly influencing emotional exhaustion with the profession.
LINEAR PREDICTION-BASED DEREVERBERATION WITH ADVANCED SPEECH ENHANCEMENT AND RECOGNITION TECHNOLOGIES FOR THE REVERB CHALLENGE

This paper describes systems for the enhancement and recognition of distant speech recorded in reverberant rooms. Our speech enhancement (SE) system handles reverberation with blind deconvolution using linear filtering estimated by exploiting the temporal correlation of observed reverberant speech signals. Additional noise reduction is then performed using an MVDR beamformer and advanced model-based SE. We employ this SE system as a front-end for our advanced automatic speech recognition (ASR) back-end, which uses deep neural network (DNN) based acoustic models and recurrent neural network based language models. Moreover, we ensure good interconnection between the SE front-end and ASR back-end using unsupervised model adaptation to reduce the mismatch caused by, for example, front-end processing artifacts. Our SE front-end greatly improves speech quality and achieves up to a 60 % relative word error rate reduction for the real recordings of the REVERB challenge data, compared with a strong DNN-based ASR baseline.
The Drinking Effect of Hydrogen Water on Atopic Dermatitis Induced by Dermatophagoides farinae Allergen in NC/Nga Mice

Hydrogen water (HW) produced by electrolysis of water has characteristics of extremely low oxidation-reduction potential (ORP) value and high dissolved hydrogen (DH). It has been proved to have various beneficial effects including antioxidant and anti-inflammatory effects; however, HW effect on atopic dermatitis (AD), an inflammatory skin disorder, is poorly documented. In the present study, we examined the immunological effect of drinking HW on Dermatophagoides farinae-induced AD-like skin in NC/Nga mice. Mice were administered with HW and purified water (PW) for 25 days. We evaluated the serum concentration of pro-inflammatory (TNF-α), Th1 (IFN-γ, IL-2, and IL-12p70), Th2 (IL-4, IL-5, and IL-10), and cytokine expressed by both subsets (GM-CSF) to assess their possible relationship to the severity of AD. The serum levels of cytokines such as IL-10, TNF-α, IL-12p70, and GM-CSF of mice administered with HW was significantly reduced as compared to PW group. The results suggest that HW affects allergic contact dermatitis through modulation of Th1 and Th2 responses in NC/Nga mice. This is the first note on the drinking effect of HW on AD, clinically implying a promising potential remedy for treatment of AD.
Echocardiographic Assessment of Left Ventricular Systolic Dysfunction in Chronic Kidney Disease Patients of a Rural Tertiary Medical Care Centre in West Bengal

Objective: To evaluate the prevalence of LV systolic dysfunction in patients with CKD (Hemodialysis naive patients) & assess the severity of dysfunction in respect to stages of CKD. Methodology: This is a cross sectional study conducted at the Medicine Department, B.S. Medical College, West Bengal during the period of one year from 1st May 2012 to 30th April 2013. 50 patients of both sexes and ages above 18 years and below 65 years presenting with chronic kidney disease who did not underwent dialysis, were included in the study. A proforma was designed to collect data containing basic information, history & physical examination and the relevant hematological, biochemical and radiological investigations like Electrocardiography and Echocardiography (2D & M mode). Based on the eGFR value (by Cockroft-Gault equation), Patients were divided in two categories - mild/moderate Chronic Kidney Disease [those with eGFR >30ml/min/1.73m 2 = CKD stages 1-3] (N = 27) and severe Chronic Kidney Disease [those with eGFR <30ml/min/1.73m 2 =CKD stages 4 - 5] (N = 23). And echocardiographic LV systolic parameters were analysed and compared between the two groups. Result: 15% of mild/moderate CKD patients showed low EF & 48% of severe CKD had evidence of low EF. 22% patients with mild/moderate CKD, and 26% with severe CKD had impaired fractional shortening. LVH was 58% among total study population, & it was 33% and 87% among two groups. Among all LVH, 31% was concentric and 69% was eccentric type. Conclusion: Chronic Kidney Disease patients has higher prevalence of left ventricular hypertrophy (LVH) and higher prevalence of systolic dysfunction, which was more pronounced in CKD stage 4-5.
Food safety risk for restaurant management: use of restaurant health inspection report to predict consumers’ behavioral intention

Abstract This study investigated the impact of inspection reports on consumers’ restaurant selection behavior. This study used scenario approach questionnaires to generate protection motivation in participants. The protection motivation theory (PMT) was employed to measure positive relationships between PMT variables: vulnerability, severity, response efficacy, self-efficacy, and protection motivation. Results suggest respondents’ vulnerability, severity, response efficacy, and self-efficacy positively influence their protection motivation. Results also showed that protection motivation was positively related to behavioral intention to dine at a restaurant that has good food safety practices. Findings of this study contribute to the current literature by indicating PMT is useful in explaining the impact of health code violations on consumers’ choices of where to eat.
Dissecting the Dynamics of the US Trade Balance in an Estimated Equilibrium Model

In an estimated two-country DSGE model, we find that shocks to the marginal efficiency of investment account for more than half of the forecast variance of cyclical fluctuations in the US trade balance. Both domestic and foreign marginal efficiency shocks have a substantial impact on the variability of the imbalance. On the other hand, while traditional technology shocks can generate counter-cyclical trade balance dynamics, they matter very little for the overall forecast variance.
The Dark Triad: A Different Relationship between Personality and Empathy. A Review from an Educational Perspective

In the present article the concept of the Dark Triad is reviewed and the investigations about narcissism, neuroticism and psychopathy are analyzed in relation to other characteristics of the personality and their negative psychosocial consequences. Likewise, it is examined and verified several studies in which there are correlations and models of structural equations that show the relationships between the different components of the dark triad and empathy. These reviews highlight the importance that an appropriate diagnosis and intervention can have in the educational field to carry out an intervention aimed at promoting empathy and reducing the levels of the different components of the Dark Triad of the personality.
Learning to Generate Pseudo-Code from Source Code Using Statistical Machine Translation (T)

Pseudo-code written in natural language can aid the comprehension of source code in unfamiliar programming languages. However, the great majority of source code has no corresponding pseudo-code, because pseudo-code is redundant and laborious to create. If pseudo-code could be generated automatically and instantly from given source code, we could allow for on-demand production of pseudo-code without human effort. In this paper, we propose a method to automatically generate pseudo-code from source code, specifically adopting the statistical machine translation (SMT) framework. SMT, which was originally designed to translate between two natural languages, allows us to automatically learn the relationship between source code/pseudo-code pairs, making it possible to create a pseudo-code generator with less human effort. In experiments, we generated English or Japanese pseudo-code from Python statements using SMT, and find that the generated pseudo-code is largely accurate, and aids code understanding.
Effective approaches in human action recognition

Recognising and understanding the activities performed by people is a fundamental research topic in developing a wide range of applications that would be societally beneficial. In this article, we present and discuss two research projects on human action recognition based on computer vision techniques. We also report an ongoing research project that focuses on learning human activities through low cost, unobtrusive radio frequency identification (RFID) technology.
Mineralogical and Geochemical Characteristics of Late Permian Coals from the Mahe Mine, Zhaotong Coalfield, Northeastern Yunnan, China

This paper reports the mineralogical and geochemical compositions of the Late Permian C2, C5a, C5b, C6a, and C6b semianthracite coals from the Mahe mine, northeastern Yunnan, China. Minerals in the coals are mainly made up of quartz, chamosite, kaolinite, mixed-layer illite/smectite (I/S), pyrite, and calcite; followed by anatase, dolomite, siderite, illite and marcasite. Similar to the Late Permian coals from eastern Yunnan, the authigenic quartz and chamosite were precipitated from the weathering solution of Emeishan basalt, while kaolinite and mixed-layer I/S occurring as lenses or thin beds were related to the weathering residual detrital of Emeishan basalt. However, the euhedral quartz and apatite particles in the Mahe coals were attributed to silicic-rock detrital input. It further indicates that there has been silicic igneous eruption in the northeastern Yunnan. Due to the silicic rock detrital input, the Eu/Eu* value of the Mahe coals is lower than that of the Late Permian coals from eastern Yunnan, where the detrital particles were mainly derived from the basalt. The high contents of Sc, V, Cr, Co, Ni, Cu, Ga, and Sn in the Mahe coals were mainly derived from the Kangdian Upland.
Operation Cost Minimization of Droop-Controlled AC Microgrids Using Multiagent-Based Distributed Control

Recently, microgrids are attracting increasing research interest as promising technologies to integrate renewable energy resources into the distribution system. Although many works have been done on droop control applied to microgrids, they mainly focus on achieving proportional power sharing based on the power rating of the power converters. With various primary source for the distributed generator (DG), factors that are closely related to the operation cost, such as fuel cost of the generators and losses should be taken into account in order to improve the efficiency of the whole system. In this paper, a multiagent-based distributed method is proposed to minimize the operation cost in AC microgrids. In the microgrid, each DG is acting as an agent which regulates the power individually using a novel power regulation method based on frequency scheduling. An optimal power command is obtained through carefully designed consensus algorithm by using sparse communication links only among neighbouring agents. Experimental results for different cases verified that the proposed control strategy can effectively reduce the operation cost.
Role of insulin-like growth factor-1 in skin tags: a clinical, genetic and immunohistochemical study in a sample of Egyptian patients

Background: Skin tags (STs) are benign connective tissue neoplasms, in which insulin-like growth factor −1 (IGF-1) has a mitogenic and antiapoptotic activity. Purpose: We aimed to study for the first time, the possible role of IGF-1 (CA) 19 and rs6214 gene polymorphisms, and its tissue immunoreactivity in the pathogenesis of STs. Patients and methods: This case–control study included 40 ST patients and 20 controls. We searched for (CA) 19 single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) using conversional PCR and for rs6214 gene polymorphism using real-time PCR. IGF-1 tissue immunoreactivity was investigated using polyclonal IGF-1 antibody. Results: IGF-1 immunoreactivity showed significantly strong upregulation in epidermis (p=0.002) and dermal components (endothelial cells [p=0.038] and fibroblasts [p=0.004]) of excised STs than control skin. TT and CT rs6214 genotypes and its T allele were significantly associated with STs (p=0.006 and P=0.002, respectively). Also (<192 bp) and 192–194 bp (CA) 19 genotypes were significantly predominant in ST patients than controls (p=0.013). These 4 genotypes were significantly associated with development of multiple STs and epidermal IGF-1 tissue immunoreactivity in studied patients. Conclusions: IGF-1 (CA) 19 and rs6214 gene polymorphisms may contribute to a predisposition of STs in Egyptian patients, the role of which could be mediated through local upregulation of IGF-1 in cutaneous tissues.
Adoption of b 2 b e-commerce by the SMEs in Bangladesh : An empirical analysis

Like many other countries around the world Bangladesh’s SMEs play strong role in employment generation as well as ensuring country’s economic development. Although SMEs have the potentials, at the rapidly increasing age of internet, to utilise the newly emerged technology dependent communication and transaction medium, e-commerce, in acquiring their competitiveness, the slow rate of adoption is evident. The paper looks at the adoption of B2B electronic commerce by the SMEs exploring diversified factors and measures the effects of those factors in explaining the adoption rate. A descriptive research study was designed with the data collected from 222 SMEs through a self administered structured questionnaire. A multiple regression model was estimated to asses the factors influencing the adoption of e-commerce and estimate their effects, where adoption intention is considered as explained variable and business experience, internet usage, number of computer literate officer and revenue of company have been added with six attributes of innovation, relative advantage, compatibility, complexity, trialability, observability, and uncertainty are considered as explanatory variables. The study reports the effects of perceived compatibility, complexity, observability and uncertainty, company internet usage and number of computer literate officer appear as significant with the overall regression explaining 34.2% of willingness to adopt e-commerce. The paper concludes with some policy implications.
Stabilization of a 3D Axially Symmetric Rigid Pendulum

Models for a 3D pendulum, consisting of a rigid body that is supported at a frictionless pivot, were introduced in a recent 2004 CDC paper [1]. Control problems were posed based on these models. A subsequent paper, in the 2005 ACC [2], developed stabilizing controllers for a 3D rigid pendulum assuming three independent control inputs. In the present paper, stabilizing controllers are developed for a 3D rigid pendulum assuming that the pendulum has a single axis of symmetry that is uncontrollable. This assumption allows development of a reduced model that forms the basis for controller design and closed loop analysis; this reduced model is parameterized by the constant angular velocity component of the 3D pendulum about its axis of symmetry. Several different controllers are proposed. The first controller, based on angular velocity feedback only, asymptotically stabilizes the hanging equilibrium. Then controllers are introduced, based on angular velocity and reduced attitude feedback, that asymptotically stabilize either the hanging equilibrium or the inverted equilibrium. These problems can be viewed as stabilization of a Lagrange top. Finally, if the angular velocity about the axis of symmetry is assumed to be zero, controllers are introduced, based on angular velocity and reduced attitude feedback, that asymptotically stabilize either the hanging equilibrium or the inverted equilibrium. This problem can be viewed as stabilization of a spherical pendulum.
A hybrid machine-crowdsourcing system for matching web tables

The Web is teeming with rich structured information in the form of HTML tables, which provides us with the opportunity to build a knowledge repository by integrating these tables. An essential problem of web data integration is to discover semantic correspondences between web table columns, and schema matching is a popular means to determine the semantic correspondences. However, conventional schema matching techniques are not always effective for web table matching due to the incompleteness in web tables. In this paper, we propose a two-pronged approach for web table matching that effectively addresses the above difficulties. First, we propose a concept-based approach that maps each column of a web table to the best concept, in a well-developed knowledge base, that represents it. This approach overcomes the problem that sometimes values of two web table columns may be disjoint, even though the columns are related, due to incompleteness in the column values. Second, we develop a hybrid machine-crowdsourcing framework that leverages human intelligence to discern the concepts for “difficult” columns. Our overall framework assigns the most “beneficial” column-to-concept matching tasks to the crowd under a given budget and utilizes the crowdsourcing result to help our algorithm infer the best matches for the rest of the columns. We validate the effectiveness of our framework through an extensive experimental study over two real-world web table data sets. The results show that our two-pronged approach outperforms existing schema matching techniques at only a low cost for crowdsourcing.
I know what is missing here: electrophysiological prediction error signals elicited by omissions of predicted ”what” but not ”when”

In the present study we investigated the neural code of sensory predictions. Grounded on a variety of empirical findings, we set out from the proposal that sensory predictions are coded via the top-down modulation of the sensory units whose response properties match the specific characteristics of the predicted stimulus (Albright, 2012; Arnal and Giraud, 2012). From this proposal, we derive the hypothesis that when the specific physical characteristics of the predicted stimulus cannot be advanced, the sensory system should not be able to formulate such predictions, as it would lack the means to represent them. In different conditions, participant's self-paced button presses predicted either only the precise time when a random sound would be presented (random sound condition) or both the timing and the identity of the sound (single sound condition). To isolate prediction-related activity, we inspected the event-related potential (ERP) elicited by rare omissions of the sounds following the button press (see SanMiguel et al., 2013). As expected, in the single sound condition, omissions elicited a complex response in the ERP, reflecting the presence of sound prediction and the violation of this prediction. In contrast, in the random sound condition, sound omissions were not followed by any significant responses in the ERP. These results confirmed our hypothesis, and provide support to current proposals advocating that sensory systems rely on the top-down modulation of stimulus-specific sensory representations as the neural code for prediction. In light of these findings, we discuss the significance of the omission ERP as an electrophysiological marker of predictive processing and we address the paradox that no indicators of violations of temporal prediction alone were found in the present paradigm.