Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Antithrombotic therapy and outcomes of patients with atrial fibrillation following primary percutaneous coronary intervention: results from the APEX-AMI trial.

AIMS To assess the incidence and timing of atrial fibrillation (AF), describe antithrombotic therapy use, and evaluate the association of AF with 90 day mortality and other secondary clinical outcomes. METHODS AND RESULTS We studied 5745 ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction patients treated with primary percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) in APEX-AMI. Approximately 11% had AF during hospitalization. Atrial fibrillation prevalence at baseline and at discharge was 4.8% [confidence interval (CI) 4.3-5.4%] and 2.5% (CI 2.1-2.9%), respectively. The proportion of 5466 patients without AF at baseline who developed new onset AF was 6.3% (CI 5.6-6.9%). This corresponded to 9.3 cases of new onset AF/1000 patient days at risk. New onset AF was independently associated with 90 day mortality [adjusted hazard ratio (HR) 1.81; 95% CI 1.06-3.09; P = 0.029] after accounting for baseline covariates and in-hospital procedures and complications. New onset AF was associated with shock (adjusted HR 3.81; 95% CI 1.88-7.70; P = 0.0002), congestive heart failure (adjusted HR 2.66; 95% CI 1.74-4.06; P < 0.0001), and stroke (adjusted HR 2.98; 95% CI 1.47-6.04; P = 0.0024) in models accounting for baseline covariates. Of AF patients, 55% did not receive oral anticoagulation therapy at discharge. Among patients with coronary stents, 5.1% were discharged on triple therapy. Patients at highest risk of stroke (CHADS(2) score > or =2) were least likely to receive oral anticoagulation at discharge (39%). Warfarin use in patients with AF at discharge (43.4%) was associated with lower rates of 90 day mortality and stroke. CONCLUSION Atrial fibrillation prevalence at baseline and at discharge was 4.8 and 2.5%, respectively. The proportion of patients who developed new onset AF was 6.3%. New onset AF was independently associated with 90 day mortality and was a marker of adverse outcomes in patients undergoing primary PCI.
Serum lactate level has prognostic significance after pediatric cardiac surgery.

OBJECTIVE The determination of postoperative course after cardiac surgery has always been a challenging issue. It is more sophisticated in the pediatric age group. The aim of this investigation was to identify whether increased concentrations of lactate in arterial blood has a predictive value for postoperative morbidity and mortality after heart surgery. METHODS From May 2002 to June 2003, 60 infants operated on at the authors' institution were included in this prospective study. The patients were divided into 2 groups according to their respective postoperative serum lactate values. After the stabilization period in the intensive care unit (first 3 hours postoperatively), samples for serum lactate were obtained from arterial blood at 3 (t1), 6 (t2), and 12 hours (t3) postoperatively. The patients were subdivided into 2 groups according to their respective mean serum lactate values. A value of 4.8 mmol/L (3 times the normal upper limit) was chosen as a threshold for serum lactate. The patients with a mean value of greater than 4.8 mmol/L (group 1) were compared with the remaining group of patients (group 2). The relationship between serum mean lactate level and intraoperative and postoperative clinical variables was evaluated. RESULTS Among the patients in this study, 26 (43.3%) had a serum mean lactate level more than 4.8 mmol/L and 34 (56.7%) had a level of 4.8 mmol/L or less. Age, aortic cross-clamping time, cardiopulmonary bypass time, and the lowest hematocrit during cardiopulmonary bypass were significant variables that influenced the postoperative serum mean lactate level. Six patients died in the postoperative period and 54 infants survived. The hospital mortality was significantly higher in group 1 than in group 2 (19.0% v 2.9%; p = 0.037, kappa = 0.179). Multivariate analysis revealed that serum mean lactate level correlated significantly with inotrope score, intubation time, and intensive care unit stay. CONCLUSIONS Blood lactate concentration of 4.8 mmol/L or higher during the early postoperative hours identifies a group of patients with increased risk of postoperative morbidity and mortality.
Object recognition using depth information of a consumer depth camera

Many computer vision applications adopting consumer depth cameras have recently received much attention due to the availability at low prices and the potential benefits to provide more useful information, which can result in a higher accuracy (e.g., for object recognition). In this work, to address the problem of drinking activity recognition in vision-based Ambient Assisted Living by using depth information, we propose a novel pre-processing scheme on extracting useful depth information of a target object, such as a mug, from a histogram of a depth image. By analyzing the histogram, the specific area or shape of an object can be localized. Then, the extracted depth information that is mostly related to the object is used for the object recognition. In the experiments, we demonstrated that the proposed approach can achieve a higher accuracy than the existing methods in recognizing an object.
Metric Diophantine approximation on the middle-third Cantor set

Let $\mu\geq 2$ be a real number and let $\Mcal(\mu)$ denote the set of real numbers approximable at order at least $\mu$ by rational numbers. More than eighty years ago, Jarn\'i k and, independently, Besicovitch established that the Hausdorff dimension of $\Mcal(\mu)$ is equal to $2/\mu$. We investigate the size of the intersection of $\Mcal(\mu)$ with Ahlfors regular compact subsets of the interval $[0, 1]$. In particular, we propose a conjecture for the exact value of the dimension of $\Mcal(\mu)$ intersected with the middle-third Cantor set and give several results supporting this conjecture. We especially show that the conjecture holds for a natural probabilistic model that is intended to mimic the distribution of the rationals. The core of our study relies heavily on dimension estimates concerning the set of points lying in an Ahlfors regular set and approximated at a given rate by a system of random points.
Effect of a 10-week yoga programme on the quality of life of women after breast cancer surgery

Aim of the study The following research is aimed at determining the effect of yoga on the quality of life of women after breast cancer surgery. Material and methods A 10-week yoga programme included 90-minute yoga lessons once a week. To estimate the quality of life, questionnaires developed by the European Organisation for Research and Treatment of Cancer (QLQ-C30 and QLQ-BR23) were used. An experimental group consisted of 12 women who practised yoga, a control group – of 16 women who did not. Between groups there were no differences in age, time from operation and characteristics associated with disease, treatment and participation in rehabilitation. Results Our results revealed an improvement of general health and quality of life, physical and social functioning as well as a reduction of difficulties in daily activities among exercising women. Also their future prospects enhanced – they worried less about their health than they used to before participating in the programme. As compared to baseline, among exercising women, fatigue, dyspnoea and discomfort (pain, swelling, sensitivity) in the arm and breast on the operated side decreased. Conclusions Participation in the exercising programme resulted in an improvement of physical functioning, reduction of fatigue, dyspnoea, and discomfort in the area of the breast and arm on the operated side. Based on our results and those obtained in foreign studies, we conclude that rehabilitation with the use of yoga practice improves the quality of life of the patients after breast cancer surgery. However, we recommend further research on this issue in Poland.
Automatic Segmentation of Mandibles in Low-Dose CT-Data

H. Lamecker, S. Zachow, A. Wittmers, B. Weber H. -C. Hege, B. Elsholtz, M. Stiller Zuse Institute Berlin, Germany University Hospital Berlin, Charité, Germany . Abstract. Computer assisted planning in cranio-maxillofacial surgery often requires the segmentation and reconstruction of the mandibular bone from CT data. A common imaging modality is cone-beam volumetric tomography, which requires only low doses of radiation yet suffers from small signal to noise ratio and strong artefacts in the presence of metal. This work explores the ability of model-based segmentation using a 3D statistical mandible model for automatic segmentation in such data. Apart from the statistical model, a key ingredient for this method is the deformation strategy for detecting the mandibular bone. Quantitative results support the feasibility of the proposed approach.
The Corporate Governance Behavior and Market Value of Russian Firms

I examine the relationship between corporate governance behavior and market value for a sample of 21 Russian firms. I use (1) fall 1999 corporate governance rankings for these firms, developed by a Russian investment bank, and (2) the "value ratio" of actual market capitalization to potential Western market capitalization for these firms, determined independently by a second Russian investment bank. The correlation between ln(value ratio) and governance ranking is striking and statistically strong: Pearson r = 0.90 (t = 8.97). A worst (51 ranking) to best (7 ranking) governance improvement predicts a 700-fold increase in firm value. These results are tentative because of the small sample. But they suggest that corporate governance behavior has a powerful effect on market value in a country where legal and cultural constraints on corporate behavior are weak. The Russian version of this paper is available below. The English version is available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract_id=263014
A region-based filter for video segmentation

This thesis addresses the problem of extracting object masks from video sequences. It presents an online, dynamic system for creating appearance masks of an arbitrary object of interest contained in a video sequence, while making minimal assumptions about the appearance and motion of the objects and scene being imaged. It examines a region-based approach, in contrast to more recently popular pixel-wise approaches to segmentation to illustrate the advantages in the reduction of the complexity of the labeling problem. The redundancy of information typically present in a pixel-wise approach is exploited by an initial oversegmentation of the current video frame. The oversegmentation procedure is based upon a modified version of the classic watershed segmentation algorithm. This oversegmentation produces a set of appearance/motion-consistent regions upon which a conditional random field is constructed. Observations at each region are collected based upon the colour statistics within a region and the motion statistics as determined by the optical flow over the region. An unparameterized model for both the object of interest and the remainder of the scene are constructed on a frame by frame basis. The conditional random field model is used in conjunction with a first order hidden markov model over the frames of the sequence. Mean field approximations for variational inference in this model produce a region-based filter framework which incorporates both spatial and temporal constraints. This framework is used to determine an appropriate labeling for each region in each frame. The reduction in the complexity of the field model produced by the regions (as opposed to pixels) results directly in a reduced cost for the labeling problem with minor effects on accuracy.
NuSTAR Results and Future Plans for Magnetar and Rotation-Powered Pulsar Observations

The Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) is the first focusing hard X-ray mission in orbit and operates in the 3–79 keV range. NuSTAR's sensitivity is roughly two orders of magnitude better than previous missions in this energy band thanks to its superb angular resolution. Since its launch in 2012 June, NuSTAR has performed excellently and observed many interesting sources including four magnetars, two rotation-powered pulsars and the cataclysmic variable AE Aquarii. NuSTAR also discovered 3.76-s pulsations from the transient source SGR J1745–29 recently found by Swift very close to the Galactic center, clearly identifying the source as a transient magnetar. For magnetar 1E 1841–045, we show that the spectrum is well fit by an absorbed blackbody plus broken power-law model with a hard power-law photon index of ∼ 1.3. This is consistent with previous results by INTEGRAL and RXTE. We also find an interesting double-peaked pulse profile in the 25–35 keV band. For AE Aquarii, we show that the spectrum can be described by a multi-temperature thermal model or a thermal plus non-thermal model; a multi-temperature thermal model without a non-thermal component cannot be ruled out. Furthermore, we do not see a spiky pulse profile in the hard X-ray band, as previously reported based on Suzaku observations. For other magnetars and rotation-powered pulsars observed with NuSTAR, data analysis results will be soon available.
User Centred Design of a Smartphone-based Cognitive Fatigue Assessment Application

This paper presents the user experience design approach taken for a mobile cognitive assessment tool. Taking a multidisciplinary approach with user centred assessment and feedback, the design of this tool was tailored to provide a usable and intuitive user experience. Key to user participation is ease of use and minimal time on task for participant engagement. To address this selected measures were carefully considered as to make the testing process simple and easy to engage with. Following a pre-validated, iterative design approach, an acceptable and engaging user experience was designed while retaining the ability to measure multiple aspects of a user's condition and environment. Accurate assessment of cognitive fatigue requires a wide range of environmental user data in order to understand the participant's current cognitive fatigue levels, therefore measures of physical, cognitive, social and emotional aspects were included within the application.
The complex interactions of Chs5p, the ChAPs, and the cargo Chs3p

The exomer complex, consisting of ChAPs and Chs5p, exports specialized cargoes from the TGN. ChAPs bind to Chs5p through TPR repeats, whereas cargo specificity of the ChAPs is outside these interaction modules. Chs3p and Chs6p may require a complex interaction to form a complex.
Multiple Streaming and the Probability Distribution of Density in Redshift Space

We examine several aspects of redshift distortions by expressing the redshift-space density in terms of the eigenvalues and orientation of the local Lagrangian deformation tensor. We explore the importance of multiple streaming using the Zeldovich approximation (ZA), and compute the average number of streams in both real and redshift space. We find that multiple streaming can be significant in redshift space but negligible in real space, even at moderate values of the linear fluctuation amplitude (σl ≲ 1). Moreover, unlike their real-space counterparts, redshift-space multiple streams can flow past each other with minimal interactions. Such nonlinear redshift-space effects, which are physically distinct from the fingers-of-God due to small-scale virialized motions, might in part explain the well-known departure of redshift distortions from the classic linear prediction by Kaiser, even at relatively large scales where the corresponding density field in real space is well described by linear perturbation theory. We also compute, using the ZA, the probability distribution function (PDF) of the density, as well as S3, in real and redshift space, and compare it with the PDF measured from N-body simulations. The role of caustics in defining the character of the high-density tail is examined. We find that (non-Lagrangian) smoothing, due to both finite resolution or discreteness and small-scale velocity dispersions, is very effective in erasing caustic structures, unless the initial power spectrum is sufficiently truncated.
Empirical study on the effect of crossover in genetic software architecture synthesis

In our previous work, we have presented a method for genetically synthesizing software architecture design. Synthesis begins with a responsibility dependency graph and domain model for a system, and results in a full architecture proposal through the application of design patterns and architectural styles. In this paper, we study the method of reproduction in the genetic algorithm. More specifically, we try to find out whether sexual or asexual method of reproduction should be used. We hypothesize that although sexual reproduction method is so favored among various species of animals and plants, asexual reproduction is more natural in the case of genetic synthesis of software architecture. We search for empirical confirmation to our hypothesis by performing tests on two sample systems.
Please Scroll down for Article Journal of Peasant Studies Rethinking Public Policy in Agriculture: Lessons from History, Distant and Recent Rethinking Public Policy in Agriculture: Lessons from History, Distant and Recent

This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution , reselling , loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. This article reviews the histories of agricultural policy in 11 of today's developed countries between the late-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth century and in 10 developing and transition economies since the mid-twentieth century. After discussing the theoretical limitations of the prevailing orthodoxy, the article discusses the history of a wide range of agricultural policies concerning issues like ends by discussing the policy lessons that may be learned from these historical experiences. Introduction During the last quarter of a century, a large number (although definitely not all) of the policy and institutional frameworks adopted by developing countries have followed the so-called 'Washington Consensus', which emphasises the role of market forces in the economy as the main mechanism for resource allocation and proposes to reduce the role of the public sector. However, the application of the Washington Consensus policies to countries where markets are often yet to emerge, are underdeveloped even when they exist, and frequently fail, has produced mixed social and economic results. Compared to the policies that were applied during the immediate post-colonial period in developing
Design and simulation of continuous scintillator with pixellated photodetector

Presents results of simulations performed as part of the development of a gamma-ray detector module comprising a non-pixellated scintillator and pixellated photodiode detector. The simulations have been carried out to determine the effect of surface treatment and dimensions of the scintillator on the ability to determine to 2-D position of interaction. A set of 32 different combinations of surface treatments have been considered for each crystal size. Scintillator dimensions considered have been 25 mm/spl times/25 mm/spl times/(3-6 mm). For scintillator thicknesses at the low end of this range, an average accuracy of 0.5 to 0.6 mm is achievable for many different surface treatments. At the higher end of the thickness range, 6 mm, the average accuracy reduces to around 0.8 mm, and is more dependent on the surface treatment.
Online load balancing for Network Functions Virtualization

Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) aims to support service providers to deploy various services in a more agile and cost-effective way. However, the softwarization and cloudification of network functions can result in severe congestion and low network performance. In this paper, we propose a solution to address this issue. We analyze and solve the online load balancing problem using multipath routing in NFV to optimize network performance in response to the dynamic changes of user demands. In particular, we first formulate the optimization problem of load balancing as a mixed integer linear program for achieving the optimal solution. We then develop the ORBIT algorithm that solves the online load balancing problem. The performance guarantee of ORBIT is analytically proved in comparison with the optimal offline solution. The experiment results on real-world datasets show that ORBIT performs very well for distributing traffic of each service demand across multipaths without knowledge of future demands, especially under high-load conditions.
Economic Integration and Agglomeration in a Middle Product Economy

The paper examines the interactions between economic integration and population agglomeration in a middle product economy displaying neoclassical growth. There are two vertically integrated economies. Each consists of a large number of final good competitive firms operating plants in both regions, and a large number of intermediate goods monopolistically competitive firms operating each in only one region. While immobile workers are employed with intermediate goods to produce the final good, mobile workers are used to design the line of differentiated intermediategood inputs. Capital is immobile, the final good is non-traded, whereas the intermediate goods are traded. We find that employment agglomeration and output growth need not be positively related. Furthermore, trade is not necessarily beneficial to regional growth, whereas trade between the two regions need not be associated with a widened skilled-unskilled wage gap.
Topology of symplectomorphism groups of rational ruled surfaces

Let M be either S 2 S 2 or the one point blow-up CP 2 # CP 2 of CP 2 . In both cases M carries a family of symplectic forms ! , where > 1 determines the cohomology class [! ]. This paper calculates the rational (co)homology of the group G of symplectomorphisms of (M; ! ) as well as the rational homotopy type of its classifying space BG . It turns out that each group G contains a nite collection Kk; k = 0; : : : ; ‘ = ‘( ), of nite dimensional Lie subgroups that generate its homotopy. We show that these subgroups \asymptotically commute", i.e. all the higher Whitehead products that they generate vanish as ! 1. However, for each xed there is essentially one nonvanishing product that gives rise to a \jumping generator" w in H (G ) and to a single relation in the rational cohomology ring H (BG ). An analog of this generator w was also seen by Kronheimer in his study of families of symplectic forms on 4-manifolds using Seiberg{Witten theory. Our methods involve a close study of the space of ! -compatible almost complex structures on M.