Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Blind Self-Calibration Technique for I/Q Imbalances and DC-Offsets

The gain/phase imbalances and DC-offsets in the in-phase and quadrature branches in direct conversion transmitters (DCTs) are main sources of errors, especially at microwave frequencies and above. These impairments distort the spectrum of the transmitted signal and degrade the communications performance. In this paper, a blind technique based on higher order statistics is proposed to estimate the calibration parameters in order to compensate for these impairments. By minimizing a cost function composed of second and fourth moments of the modulator output signal, the DC-offsets, gain imbalance, and phase imbalance can be successively calibrated. The convergence of the proposed technique is also analyzed. This technique is blind in the sense that it does not require any prior knowledge about the DCT input signal, and is applicable to many communications systems including QAM, OFDM, and SC-FDMA. Computer simulations and experiments at 20 GHz demonstrate that the proposed technique can significantly improve the DCT performance in terms of local oscillator leakage and image suppressions.
Catechin Hydrate Augments the Antibacterial Action of Selected Antibiotics against Staphylococcus aureus Clinical Strains

Synergistic effects between commonly used antibiotics and natural substances may be an alternative to conventional antibacterial therapies. The objective of the presented study was to assess the in vitro antibacterial activity of catechin hydrate (CH) and evaluate the interactions of CH with selected antibiotics using Staphylococcus aureus clinical and reference strains. CH displayed diverse activity towards examined S. aureus strains, with minimal inhibitory concentrations (MICs) ranging from 256 to 2048 µg/mL. The interaction between CH and antibiotics was assessed by an E-test. The most significant synergistic effects were noticed for CH in combination with clindamycin and erythromycin. For cefoxitin and vancomycin a decrease of MIC values in the presence of CH was also observed, but it did not reach statistical significance. The obtained results demonstrate that CH shows antimicrobial activity against Staphylococcus aureus clinical strains. What is more, we proved a synergistic effect of CH with erythromycin and clindamycin.
The Position Effects of the Phonological and Orthographic in Chinese Word Production

Researchers have conducted lots of studies on the masked onset priming(MOP) effect in different languages such as French,Dutch and English.However,there are rare studies on this phenomenon in the field of Chinese at present.Two theories have been proposed to explain this phenomenon including a response competition hypothesis within a dual route framework and the speech-planning account.One of the main discrepancies of the two theories is the locus of the MOP effect:whether it arises during grapheme-to-phoneme conversion or at the level of phonological encoding of the speech response.Once pure phonological and orthographic effect can be separated from MOP effect,the locus where the effect arises would be clear:if only phonology was involved in MOP effect,MOP effect may arise at the level of phonological encoding;by contrast,MOP effect may arise during grapheme-to-phoneme conversion,if there was a orthographic effect,as well.In experiment 1,types of the primes(phonemic,syllabled,or unrelated primes) and position of the(Shengmu or Yunmu) were used to test the pure phonological effect.The picture naming was facilitated by Shengmu much more than Yunmu,which indicated a pure phonological effect in MOP effect.What's more,the different priming effects between different positions indicated that(1) phoneme instead of syllable is the least unit in phonological encoding;(2) a serial process was involved during phonological encoding;(3) the syllable is provisionally formed just before the speech production.In experiment 2,the pure orthographic effect was tested by using left-component prime and right-component prime.It showed that right-component has more facilitation effect than left-component prime which is just contradict to the prediction of MOP effect,which indicated there was no orthographic factor in this effect.Experiment 3 adopted picture-word interference paradigm to prove the finding of orthographic position effect in experiment 2.Result showed that right-components of interference words produced stronger prime effect than left-components.The superiority of right-component priming could be attributed to the fluency Chinese readers' knowledge that left-components of Chinese characters indicate the meaning of while right-components indicate the pronunciation.In short,MOP effect is a pure phonological effect.Thus the effect arises at the level of phonological encoding and the final results support the speech-planning account for MOP effect.
Compressive Sensing of Foot Gait Signals and Its Application for the Estimation of Clinically Relevant Time Series

A new signal reconstruction algorithm for compressive sensing based on the minimization of a pseudonorm which promotes block-sparse structure on the first-order difference of the signal is proposed. Involved optimization is carried out by using a sequential version of Fletcher-Reeves' conjugate-gradient algorithm, and the line search is based on Banach's fixed-point theorem. The algorithm is suitable for the reconstruction of foot gait signals which admit block-sparse structure on the first-order difference. An additional algorithm for the estimation of stride-interval, swing-interval, and stance-interval time series from the reconstructed foot gait signals is also proposed. This algorithm is based on finding zero crossing indices of the foot gait signal and using the resulting indices for the computation of time series. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that the proposed signal reconstruction algorithm yields improved signal-to-noise ratio and requires significantly reduced computational effort relative to several competing algorithms over a wide range of compression ratio. For a compression ratio in the range from 88% to 94%, the proposed algorithm is found to offer improved accuracy for the estimation of clinically relevant time-series parameters, namely, the mean value, variance, and spectral index of stride-interval, stance-interval, and swing-interval time series, relative to its nearest competitor algorithm. The improvement in performance for compression ratio as high as 94% indicates that the proposed algorithms would be useful for designing compressive sensing-based systems for long-term telemonitoring of human gait signals.
Outcome of Veno-Arterial Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation for Patients Undergoing Valvular Surgery

Background We evaluated retrospectively the early and midterm results of using veno-arterial extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (VA-ECMO) support in patients undergoing valvular surgery. Methods A total of 87 patients undergoing valvular surgery received VA-ECMO due to refractory postcardiotomy cardiogenic shock (PCS), who were eligible for inclusion were enrolled in this study. Preoperative, perioperative, and postoperative variables were assessed and analyzed for possible associations with mortality in hospital and after discharge. Results The mean age, additive EuroSCORE, and left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF) for all patients was 65±7 years, 6.1±1.9 points, and 46% ±12%, respectively. The mean duration of VA-ECMO support was 61±37 hours. Intra-aortic balloon pumps (IABP) were implanted in 47.1% of patients. Weaning from VA-ECMO was successful in 59% of patients, and 49% were discharged. Multivariate analysis revealed that being >65 years old (odds ratio [OR], 2.75), receiving postoperative renal replacement treatment (OR, 2.47), having a peak lactate level ≥12 mmol L–1 (OR, 2.18), and receiving VA-ECMO for >60 hours (OR, 3.2) were independent predictors of in-hospital mortality. IABP support (OR, 0.46) was protective. In addition, persistent heart failure with an LVEF <40% was an independent predictor of mortality after discharge. Conclusions VA-ECMO is an acceptable technique for the treatment of PCS in patients undergoing valvular surgery, who would otherwise die. It is justified by the good long-term outcomes of hospital survivors, but the use of VA-ECMO must be decided on an individual risk profile basis because of high morbidity and mortality rates.
Risk Factors for Exercise-associated Hyponatremia in Non-elite Marathon Runners

Objective:Describe risk factors for lower post-race [Na+] and exercise-associated hyponatremia (EAH) (serum [Na+] <135 mmol/L) during marathon running. Design:Prospective observational study. Setting:Houston Marathon 2000-2004. Patients:Ninety-six runners from EAH research projects. Interventions:Observational. Main Outcome Measurements:Pre-race and post-race measurements: serum [Na+], weight, and fluid ingestion. Results:Twenty-one runners (22%) met criteria for EAH, and 87% of subjects had lower post-race [Na+] compared to pre-race [Na+]. Lower post-race [Na+] and larger [Na+] decrease were related to lower pre-race [Na+], less weight loss during the race, and more fluid cups consumed. Increased fluid consumed correlated with slower finish time, male gender, and warmer temperature. Less weight loss correlated with lower pre-race weight, more fluid consumed, and slower finish time. Losing less than 0.75 kg increased the risk of becoming hyponatremic 7 fold (RR = 7.0; CI 1.8 to 26.6) compared to those who lost more than 0.75 kg. Women consumed fluid at a significantly lower rate than men (P = 0.04). Estimated mean fluid balance for women was positive and significantly higher than men's negative fluid balance (P < 0.0001). Fluid balance became more positive as finish time increased and pre-race weight decreased. Conclusions:Lighter and slower runners have more positive fluid balance. Losing >0.75 kg of body weight during a marathon is advisable in order to decrease the risk of EAH. Runners should measure their sweat rate and monitor weight changes as part of their fluid consumption plan.
Morphological Tagging: Data vs. Dictionaries

Part of Speech tagging for English seems to have reached the the human levels of error, but full morphological tagging for inflectionally rich languages, such as Romanian, Czech, or Hungarian, is still an open problem, and the results are far from being satisfactory. This paper presents results obtained by using a universalized exponential feature-based model for five such languages. It focuses on the data sparseness issue, which is especially severe for such languages (the more so that there are no extensive annotated data for those languages). In conclusion, we argue strongly that the use of an independent morphological dictionary is the preferred choice to more annotated data under such circumstances.
General Electric-Magnetic decomposition of fields, positivity and Rainich-like conditions

We show how to generalize the classical electric-magnetic decomposition of the Maxwell or the Weyl tensors to arbitrary fields described by tensors of any rank in general $n$-dimensional spacetimes of Lorentzian signature. The properties and applications of this decomposition are reviewed. In particular, the definition of tensors quadratic in the original fields and with important positivity properties is given. These tensors are usually called "super-energy" (s-e) tensors, they include the traditional energy-momentum, Bel and Bel-Robinson tensors, and satisfy the so-called Dominant Property, which is a straightforward generalization of the classical dominant energy condition satisfied by well-behaved energy-momentum tensors. We prove that, in fact, any tensor satisfying the dominant property can be decomposed as a finite sum of the s-e tensors. Some remarks about the conservation laws derivable from s-e tensors, with some explicit examples, are presented. Finally, we will show how our results can be used to provide adequate generalizations of the Rainich conditions in general dimension and for any physical field.
HATE CRIMES AGAINST GAY MALES: AN OVERVIEW

As the United States has become more multicultural and diverse, there has been an increase in violence motivated by hate. Hate crimes against gay males are the most prevalent of the hate crimes based on sexual orientation. Hate crimes have their roots in normative, individual, and societal attitudes and ideologies that lead to intimidation, bullying, teasing, physical assault, rape, and murder. This paper provides an overview of the issues specific to hate crime assaults against gay males. Mental health nurses may find this knowledge useful in developing further nursing inquiry, education, and clinical practice related to hate crime and violence prevention.
3 Development of Expertise in Face Recognition

The ability to recognize individual faces is a highly specialized skill that emerges during infancy, continues to develop throughout childhood, and becomes adult-like in late adolescence. In this chapter we explore the devel­ opmental progression of face recognition and consider possible mechanisms that underlie it. Specifically, we evaluate the role of visual experience in driving the developmental changes and consider other potential factors that could account for the slow development of adult-like expertise. To begin, we describe the properties of the fully developed adult system for face processing. Adults are experts at face processing. They have the remarkable ability to detect faces, even in the absence of normal facial features. They readily detect faces in paintings in which faces are composed ofobjects such as an arrange­ ment of fruit, vegetables, or rocks (Bruce & Young, 1986), or when presented with a two-tone Mooney face (Kanwisher, Tong, & Nakayama, 1998), at least when the stimuli are upright. Face detection is f~cilitated by the fact that all faces share the same first"order relations: two eyes aligned horizontally above a nose and mouth. As a result, face images can be superimposed, or averaged, and the resulting stimulus remains recognizably face-like (Diamond & Carey, 1986). While adults are proficient at face detection, they recognize faces less often at this basic level (i.e., "that's a face") and more often at the subordinate level (e.g., "that's Wayne Gretzky") and can do so rapidly and accurately (Tanaka, 200 1). This tendency to identify faces more often at the subordinate level is considered a marker of perceptual expertise (Tanaka & Gauthier, 1997). In fact, adults can recognize thousands of individual faces, even when the person is at a distance, in poor lighting, has a new hairdo, or is a former schoolmate who has not been seen for over 20 years (Bahrick, Bahrick, & Wittlinger, 1975). How do newborn infants, who have never before perceived faces, even­ tually acquire the expert ability to recognize thousands of individual faces in adulthood? Here we outline the developmental pattern of face recognition during infancy and childhood, and examine the role of experience in driving the development of this expert system.
Towards Adaptive Pathways: Reference Architecture for Personalized Dynamic Pathways

The usage of clinical pathways to describe and organize the treatment of patients in inter-sectoral care has been established through the last decade. In particular, engaging the patient in the treatment process has become more important. Adequate tools and concepts are needed to improve the integration of patients into inter-sectorial care processes. Personalized dynamic pathways form patient-specific extensions for clinical pathways as a flexible instrument that goes beyond traditional application of pathways. They support customizing care for patient-specific requirements as well as adding patient interaction to the care process. This paper adapts the concept of personalized dynamic pathways and proposes a reference architecture for integrating personalized dynamic pathways into existing inter-organizational healthcare information systems.
Risk Cluster Associated with Social Drinking in Adolescence

Summary Recent scientific evidence has shown that risk behaviors tend to form a risk cluster, but less attention is paid to clustering ability of light forms of risky behavior like social drinking. The objective of the study was to analyze the risk clustering potential of social drinking. We conducted a survey using a self-completed questionnaire. Of 903 students (aged 15-19), 279 (30.9%) were found to be abstainers (NDA), and 455 (50.39%) were social drinkers (SDA). These two groups were compared statistically, concerning smoking and drugs use among them and their significant others. SDAs were more likely to smoke (OR=3.29; 95% Cl 2.35-4.59) than NDAs but not more likely to use soft drugs. Their fathers (OR=1.4; 95% Cl 1.04-1.89), friends (OR=1.78; 95% Cl 1.31-2.42) and lovers (OR=2.01; 95% Cl 1.39-2.89) were also significantly more likely to smoke, but only friends were more likely to use soft drugs (OR=1.75; 95% Cl 1.19- 2.58). SDAs were also more likely to start smoking in order to be closer to their peers (OR=l .84; 95% Cl 1.01- 3.37) and to smoke when communicate with peers (OR=2.12; 95% Cl 1.40-3.21). Risk clustering in social drinking adolescents is limited to smoking and does not expand to drug use, irrespective of provocation by friends. Heavy smoking among SDAs’ significant others might contribute for SDA smoking. So SDAs seem to be resistant to the psycho-social mechanisms adding drug use to drinking but sensitive to psycho-social mechanisms adding smoking to drinking.
Capillary Pressure in Patients With NIDDM

The hemodynamic hypothesis suggests that raised capillary pressure may play a role in the pathogenesis of diabetic microangiopathy. Although patients with non-insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus (NIDDM) and insulin-dependent diabetes NIDDM) develop a similar range of microvascular complications, differences in their expression and prevalence suggest that different pathogenic mechanisms may be operational. Capillary pressure is elevated in IDDM; the aim of this study was to assess whether capillary pressure was also elevated in NIDDM. Twenty-one patients with NIDDM (15 men) and 21 healthy control subjects matched for age, sex, and skin temperature were investigated supine with the hand at heart level. Finger nailfold capillary pressure was measured after direct cannulation at the summit of the capillary loops using glass micropipettes. The groups were matched for skin temperature (30.4 [24.2–33.8]°C, median [95% confidence interval], NIDDM patients vs. 30.0 [23.4–33.6] degrees C control subjects), age (62.0 [39.4–72.7] years NIDDM patients vs. 62.0 [39.4–72.0] years control subjects), and both systolic (sBP) and diastolic (dBP) blood pressures (133.0 [111.0–167.3]/78.0 [57.0–89.5] mmHg NIDDM patients vs. 133.0 [114.1–158.9]/80.0 [68.2–88.9] mmHg control subjects). Capillary pressure did not differ in the two groups (17.6 [13.1–21.2] mmHg NIDDM patients vs. 19.1 [14.1–23.6] mmHg control subjects [NS]). There was no correlation of capillary pressure with either HbA1c or glucose; however, there was a negative association between capillary pressure and diabetes duration (Rs = −0.50, P = 0.020). Although these data provide no evidence of capillary hypertension in patients with NIDDM, at least under resting conditions, they raise the possibility that diabetes of long duration might modify the normal mechanisms controlling capillary pressure.
Beating the Perils of Non-Convexity: Guaranteed Training of Neural Networks using Tensor Methods

Author(s): Janzamin, Majid; Sedghi, Hanie; Anandkumar, Anima | Abstract: Training neural networks is a challenging non-convex optimization problem, and backpropagation or gradient descent can get stuck in spurious local optima. We propose a novel algorithm based on tensor decomposition for guaranteed training of two-layer neural networks. We provide risk bounds for our proposed method, with a polynomial sample complexity in the relevant parameters, such as input dimension and number of neurons. While learning arbitrary target functions is NP-hard, we provide transparent conditions on the function and the input for learnability. Our training method is based on tensor decomposition, which provably converges to the global optimum, under a set of mild non-degeneracy conditions. It consists of simple embarrassingly parallel linear and multi-linear operations, and is competitive with standard stochastic gradient descent (SGD), in terms of computational complexity. Thus, we propose a computationally efficient method with guaranteed risk bounds for training neural networks with one hidden layer.
Three sides of a triangle: gender disadvantage, resilience and psychological distress in a sample of adolescent girls from India

ABSTRACT Gender disadvantage is a known risk factor for common mental disorders, especially in low- and middle-income countries. Gender disadvantage and its associations with perceived psychological distress and resilience was examined in a sample of adolescent girls from a low-income urban city in India. A sample of 452 young women (M = 17.64; SD = 1.15) were administered the CAGED for gender disadvantage, the K-10 for psychological distress and CD-RISC to assess resilience. The three gender disadvantage items endorsed the most were: financial difficulties being a hindrance to opportunities (297/452; 65.7%); being criticized and ridiculed for gender-related issues (267/452; 59%); and emotional distress related to gender disadvantage (322/452; 71.3%). Of the sample, 66% (298/452) endorsed at least five gender disadvantage items. The least endorsed item in the checklist was an experience of sexual abuse 36 (7.9%). Findings from one-way ANOVA indicated higher scores on the CAGED domains and the total score were positively associated with severity of psychological distress and negatively with resilience (p < 0.01). Women with moderate-to-severe psychological distress were found to have significantly lower resilience scores compared to those with no distress or mild distress. Findings have important implications for gender-based mental health literacy and empowerment programmes for vulnerable groups.