Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Role of Laparoscopic Splenectomy in Elderly Immune Thrombocytopenia

Abstract The management of older patients with chronic primary immune thrombocytopenia (ITP) is still very challenging because of the fragility of older patients who frequently have severe comorbidities and/or disabilities. Corticosteroid-based first-line therapies fail in most of the cases and patients require a second-line treatment, choosing between rituximab, thrombopoietin-receptor agonists and splenectomy. The choice of the best treatment in elderly patients is a compromise between effectiveness and safety and laparoscopic splenectomy may be a good option with a complete remission rate of 67% at 60 months. But relapse and complication rates remain higher than in younger splenectomized ITP patients because elderly patients undergo splenectomy with unfavorable conditions (age >60 year-old, presence of comorbidities, or multiple previous treatments) which negatively influence the outcome, regardless the hematological response. For these reasons, a good management of concomitant diseases and the option to not use the splenectomy as the last possible treatment could improve the outcome of old splenectomized patients.
Version française du M.I.A. (Metamemory in Adulthood)

Cet article propose une version francaise du questionnaire de metamemoire M.I. A. (Metamemory in Adulthood de Dixon et Hultsch 1983) et sa validation. L'instrument a ete administre a 341 sujets de 19 a 87 ans. La consistance interne de l'instrument mesuree avec les coefficients alpha de Cronbach est satisfaisante, l'analyse en composantes principales permet de retrouver 6 dimensions sur les sept attendues. Les analyses de la variance permettent la mise en evidence de l'influence de l'âge dans six des sept echelles. La partition de l'echelle mesurant l'utilisation des strategies en deux sous-echelles de strategies externes et internes est proposee. L'abreviation du questionnaire est suggeree.
“I says to myself, says I”: : Charles sanders peirce on the components of dialogue

Peirce famously defined the process of thinking as what a person is “‘saying to himself,’ that is, is saying to that other self that is just coming into life in the flow of time. ” For Peirce, this meant the essence of thinking is dialogue. This essay proposes a conception of dialogue grounded in Peirce's normative ideal of inquiry that challenges contemporary thinking about dialogue yet supports the same moral and ethical aims. Using a scene from Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice that Peirce used as an exemplar of dialogue, we propose a conception that begins in doubt and passes through phases of reasoning and ethical and esthetic judgment before coming to a resolution which expands horizons of thought, emotion, and action.
Dissemination in opportunistic social networks: the role of temporal communities

Epidemic content dissemination in opportunistic social networks (OSN) has been analyzed in depth, theoretically and empirically. Most related works have studied the pairwise contact history among nodes in conference or campus environments. We claim that given the nature of these networks, this approach leads to a biased understanding of the content dissemination process. We design a methodology to break OSN traces down into 'temporal communities', i.e., groups of people who meet periodically during an experiment. We show that these communities correlate with people's social communities. As in previous works, we observe that efficient content dissemination is mostly due to high contact rate nodes. However, we show that high contact rate nodes that are more frequently involved in temporal communities contribute less to the dissemination process, leading us to conjecture that social communities tend to limit dissemination in OSNs.
DID THE MILKY WAY DWARF SATELLITES ENTER THE HALO AS A GROUP?

The dwarf satellite galaxies in the Local Group are generally considered to be hosted in dark matter subhalos that survived the disruptive processes during infall onto their host halos. It has recently been argued that if the majority of satellites entered the Milky Way (MW) halo in a group rather than individually, this could explain the spatial and dynamical peculiarities of its satellite distribution. Such groups were identified as dwarf galaxy associations that are found in the nearby universe. In this paper, we address the question whether galaxies in such associations can be the progenitors of the MW satellite galaxies. We find that the dwarf associations are much more extended than would be required to explain the disklike distribution of the MW and Andromeda satellite galaxies. We further identify a possible minor filamentary structure, perpendicular to the supergalactic plane, in which the dwarf associations are located, that might be related to the direction of infall of a progenitor galaxy of the MW satellites, if they are of tidal origin.
Experimental evaluation of a motor integrated permanent magnet gear

This paper presents test results of a new motor integrated permanent magnet gear and clarifies a path for future optimizations. The prototype, which fabrication also is described, is initially targeting electrical traction for vehicles. Basic measured parameters in form of back-emf, stall torque and inductances are all in line with finite element calculations. However very high rotational losses are present in the prototype and these losses are higher than the calculations. Some of the losses are present due to poor aspects in the fabrication of the prototype, while others are identified to be caused by a non optimal diameter/length aspect ratio. The torque density is superior, the copper losses is only a fraction of the copper losses in other traction motors. With the proposed aspects to reduce the rotational losses is it believed that the unit has a great potential.
Information Compression, Multiple Alignment, and the Representation and Processing of Knowledge in the Brain

The SP theory of intelligence, with its realization in the SP computer model, aims to simplify and integrate observations and concepts across artificial intelligence, mainstream computing, mathematics, and human perception and cognition, with information compression as a unifying theme. This paper describes how abstract structures and processes in the theory may be realized in terms of neurons, their interconnections, and the transmission of signals between neurons. This part of the SP theory—SP-neural—is a tentative and partial model for the representation and processing of knowledge in the brain. Empirical support for the SP theory—outlined in the paper—provides indirect support for SP-neural. In the abstract part of the SP theory (SP-abstract), all kinds of knowledge are represented with patterns, where a pattern is an array of atomic symbols in one or two dimensions. In SP-neural, the concept of a “pattern” is realized as an array of neurons called a pattern assembly, similar to Hebb's concept of a “cell assembly” but with important differences. Central to the processing of information in SP-abstract is information compression via the matching and unification of patterns (ICMUP) and, more specifically, information compression via the powerful concept of multiple alignment, borrowed and adapted from bioinformatics. Processes such as pattern recognition, reasoning and problem solving are achieved via the building of multiple alignments, while unsupervised learning is achieved by creating patterns from sensory information and also by creating patterns from multiple alignments in which there is a partial match between one pattern and another. It is envisaged that, in SP-neural, short-lived neural structures equivalent to multiple alignments will be created via an inter-play of excitatory and inhibitory neural signals. It is also envisaged that unsupervised learning will be achieved by the creation of pattern assemblies from sensory information and from the neural equivalents of multiple alignments, much as in the non-neural SP theory—and significantly different from the “Hebbian” kinds of learning which are widely used in the kinds of artificial neural network that are popular in computer science. The paper discusses several associated issues, with relevant empirical evidence.
High-fidelity Modelling of Self-regulating Pneumatic Valves

In conventional aircraft energy systems, self-regulating pneumatic valves (SRPVs) are used to control the pressure and mass flow of the bleed air. The dynamic behavior of these valves is complex and dependent on several physical phenomena. In some cases, limit cycles can occur, deteriorating performance. This paper presents a complex multiphysical model of SRPVs implemented in Modelica. First, the working-principle is explained, and common challenges in control-system design-problems related to these valves are illustrated. Then, a Modelica-model is presented in detail, taking into account several physical domains. It is shown, how limit cycle oscillations occurring in aircraft energy systems can be represented with this model. Finally, some multi-domain interactive effects are described.
Neuron tracing in perspective

The study of the structure and function of neuronal cells and networks is of crucial importance in the endeavor to understand how the brain works. A key component in this process is the extraction of neuronal morphology from microscopic imaging data. In the past four decades, many computational methods and tools have been developed for digital reconstruction of neurons from images, with limited success. As witnessed by the growing body of literature on the subject, as well as the organization of challenging competitions in the field, the quest for a robust and fully automated system of more general applicability still continues. The aim of this work, is to contribute by surveying recent developments in the field for anyone interested in taking up the challenge. Relevant aspects discussed in the article include proposed image segmentation methods, quantitative measures of neuronal morphology, currently available software tools for various related purposes, and morphology databases. © 2010 International Society for Advancement of Cytometry
Ultrasonographic findings in primary umbilical endometriosis*

Primary cutaneous endometriosis is a rare condition. It appears without a prior history of surgical procedure and the umbilicus is the most frequently involved area. Primary umbilical endometriosis, or Villar's nodule, usually presents as a painful nodule. Its differential diagnosis may be challenging. Although histopathological assessment represents the gold standard for diagnosis, cutaneous ultrasonography may be useful in guiding the surgical treatment. Ultrasonographic features of cutaneous endometriosis have not yet been fully explored in the literature. Hence, we report peculiar ultrasonographic findings of primary umbilical endometriosis
A case study in programming for parallel-processors

An affirmative partial answer is provided to the question of whether it is possible to program parallel-processor computing systems to efficiently decrease execution time for useful problems. Parallel-processor systems are multiprocessor systems in which several of the processors can simultaneously execute separate tasks of a single job, thus cooperating to decrease the solution time of a computational problem. The processors have independent instruction counters, meaning that each processor executes its own task program relatively independently of the other processors. Communication between cooperating processors is by means of data in storage shared by all processors. A program for the determination of the distribution of current in an electrical network was written for a parallel-processor computing system, and execution of this program was simulated. The data gathered from simulation runs demonstrate the efficient solution of this problem, typical of a large class of important problems. It is shown that, with proper programming, solution time when NP processors are applied approaches 1/NP times the solution time for a single processor, while improper programming can actually lead to an increase of solution time with the number of processors. Storage interference and other measures of performance are discussed. Stability of the method of solution was also investigated.
On the Two Types of Steady Hard X-Ray States of GRS 1915+105

Using data from five years of Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer observations, we investigate the X-ray spectral and timing properties of GRS 1915+105 during the hard steady states. The broadband energy spectrum of the source during these periods is dominated by an extended hard component with a characteristic cutoff or break at ~10-120 keV. The power density spectrum of the source's rapid aperiodic variability shows a dominant band-limited white-noise component breaking at a few hertz, accompanied by a group of strong quasi-periodic oscillation peaks and in some cases an additional high-frequency noise component with a characteristic cutoff at ~60-80 Hz. According to the results of our simultaneous X-ray spectral and timing analysis, the behavior of the source during the hard steady states can be reduced to two major, distinct types. (1) Type I states: The dominant hard component of the energy spectrum has characteristic quasi-exponential cutoff at 60-120 keV. The broadband power density spectrum of the source shows a significant high-frequency noise component with a cutoff at ~60-80 Hz. (2) Type II states: The hard spectral component has a break in its slope at ~12-20 keV. The high-frequency part of the power density spectrum fades quickly, lacking significant variability at frequencies higher than ~30 Hz. These two types of X-ray hard states are also clearly distinguished by their properties in the radio band: while during the type I observations the source tends to be "radio quiet," the type II observations are characterized by a high level of radio flux ("plateau" radio states). In this work we demonstrate the aforementioned differences using data from 12 representative hard steady state observations. We conclude that the difference between these two types can probably be explained in terms of a difference in accretion flow structure in the immediate vicinity of the compact object due to the presence of relativistic outflow of matter.
International Conference on Information Systems ( ICIS ) 1-1-2009 The Study on The Relationship Between Privacy Concerns and Information Systems Effectiveness

We examined the impact of users’ information privacy concerns on information systems (IS) effectiveness in organizations. Specifically, we investigated system users’ psychological mechanisms that may involve in the relationship between privacy concerns and IS effectiveness (i.e., perceived usefulness and IS satisfaction) via information systems reactance (ISR) on systems and procedural justice (PJ) toward their Information systems. The results supported our hypotheses in that: (1) Privacy concerns were negatively related to system users’ perceived usefulness and IS satisfaction, (2) Both ISR and PJ of the system users mediated the relationships between privacy concerns and IS effectiveness. We discuss the implications of the findings for theory and practice, and their limitations and the directions that future research in this area might explore.
Sperm Chromatin Integrity: Etiologies and Mechanisms of Abnormality, Assays, Clinical Importance, Preventing and Repairing Damage

The standard semen analysis is the first line and the most popular laboratory test in the diagnosis of male fertility. It evaluates sperm concentration, motility, morphology and their vitality. However, it is well-known that normal results of semen analysis can not exclude men from the causes of couples′ infertility. One of the most important parameters of sperm in its fertilizing potential is “Sperm chromatin integrity” that has direct positive correlation with Assisted Reproductive Techniques (ART) outcomes including; fertilization rate, embryo quality, pregnancy and successful delivery rate. It seems that sperm DNA chromatin integrity provides better diagnostic and prognostic approaches than standard semen parameters. For these reasons under-standing the sperm chromatin structure, etiology of sperm chromatin abnormality, identification factors that disturbs sperm chromatin integrity and the mechanism of their action can help in recognizing the causes of couples′ infertility. Various methods of its evaluation, its importance in male fertility, clinical relevance in the outcomes of ART and application of laboratory and medical protocols to improve this integrity have valuable position in diagnosis and treatment of male infertility. There has recently been interest in the subject and its application in the field of andrology. Therefore, with regard to the above mentioned importance of sperm chromatin integrity, this review article describes details of the useful information pertaining to sperm DNA damage including the origins, assessments, etiologies, clinical aspects, and prevention of it.
Understanding the process of writing fake online reviews

Although the prevalence of fake online reviews for products and services is deemed to have become an epidemic, little is known about the strategies used to write such bogus entries. Hence, this paper conducts an exploratory study to understand the process by which fake reviews are written. Participants were invited to write fake reviews for hotels in a research setting. Thereafter, they were asked to answer a questionnaire which solicited qualitative responses about their strategies. Results indicate that the process of writing fake reviews commences with extensive information gathering via common review websites such as TripAdvisor as well as search engines such as Google. The gathered information is then used as cues to write short, catchy and succinct fake review titles, as well as informative and subjective fake review descriptions. Adequate efforts are generally invested to blur the lines between fake reviews and authentic entries.
Diversity – Multiplexing Tradeoff in MIMO Channels with partial CSIT

In this project, I have studied the performance gain of MIMO systems. There are two types of gain provided by the MIMO channels: one measures the increase of the capacity by the number of degrees of freedom of the channel (spatial multiplexing gain), and the other improvement of the reliability by the diversity gain. Most of previous works focus on either one of these two types of gain by designing schemes to extract either maximal diversity gain or maximal spatial multiplexing gain. However, maximizing one type of gains may not necessarily maximize the other. This make it difficult to compare diversity-based schemes and multiplexing-based schemes. Recently, Zheng and Tse [1] proposed a new point of view that unifies these two types of gains: given a MIMO channel, both gains can be simultaneously obtained, but there is a tradeoff between how much of each type of gain any coding scheme can extract. The optimal diversitymultiplexing tradeoff is a fundamental performance limit of a MIMO channel.
Q-Prop: Sample-Efficient Policy Gradient with An Off-Policy Critic

© ICLR 2019 - Conference Track Proceedings. All rights reserved. Model-free deep reinforcement learning (RL) methods have been successful in a wide variety of simulated domains. However, a major obstacle facing deep RL in the real world is their high sample complexity. Batch policy gradient methods offer stable learning, but at the cost of high variance, which often requires large batches. TD-style methods, such as off-policy actor-critic and Q-learning, are more sample-efficient but biased, and often require costly hyperparameter sweeps to stabilize. In this work, we aim to develop methods that combine the stability of policy gradients with the efficiency of off-policy RL. We present Q-Prop, a policy gradient method that uses a Taylor expansion of the off-policy critic as a control variate. Q-Prop is both sample efficient and stable, and effectively combines the benefits of on-policy and off-policy methods. We analyze the connection between Q-Prop and existing model-free algorithms, and use control variate theory to derive two variants of Q-Prop with conservative and aggressive adaptation. We show that conservative Q-Prop provides substantial gains in sample efficiency over trust region policy optimization (TRPO) with generalized advantage estimation (GAE), and improves stability over deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG), the state-of-the-art on-policy and off-policy methods, on OpenAI Gym's MuJoCo continuous control environments.
A review of empirical evidence on different uncanny valley hypotheses: support for perceptual mismatch as one road to the valley of eeriness

The uncanny valley hypothesis, proposed already in the 1970s, suggests that almost but not fully humanlike artificial characters will trigger a profound sense of unease. This hypothesis has become widely acknowledged both in the popular media and scientific research. Surprisingly, empirical evidence for the hypothesis has remained inconsistent. In the present article, we reinterpret the original uncanny valley hypothesis and review empirical evidence for different theoretically motivated uncanny valley hypotheses. The uncanny valley could be understood as the naïve claim that any kind of human-likeness manipulation will lead to experienced negative affinity at close-to-realistic levels. More recent hypotheses have suggested that the uncanny valley would be caused by artificial–human categorization difficulty or by a perceptual mismatch between artificial and human features. Original formulation also suggested that movement would modulate the uncanny valley. The reviewed empirical literature failed to provide consistent support for the naïve uncanny valley hypothesis or the modulatory effects of movement. Results on the categorization difficulty hypothesis were still too scarce to allow drawing firm conclusions. In contrast, good support was found for the perceptual mismatch hypothesis. Taken together, the present review findings suggest that the uncanny valley exists only under specific conditions. More research is still needed to pinpoint the exact conditions under which the uncanny valley phenomenon manifests itself.
Thinking, Walking, Talking: Integratory Motor and Cognitive Brain Function

In this article, we argue that motor and cognitive processes are functionally related and most likely share a similar evolutionary history. This is supported by clinical and neural data showing that some brain regions integrate both motor and cognitive functions. In addition, we also argue that cognitive processes coincide with complex motor output. Further, we also review data that support the converse notion that motor processes can contribute to cognitive function, as found by many rehabilitation and aerobic exercise training programs. Support is provided for motor and cognitive processes possessing dynamic bidirectional influences on each other.
Chapter 2 Group entrepreneurial behavior in established organizations: the role of middle managers's emotion regulation and group diversity

The purpose of this study was to extend current work on corporate entrepreneurship by investigating factors that motivate group entrepreneurial behavior. Specifically, we proposed and tested a theoretical model that examined managers' regulation of emotion (ROE) influences on group entrepreneurial behavior. Data were based on middle managers and their immediate subordinates from traditional organizations. Results using Bayesian path analysis indicated that middle managers' ROE has a significant indirect effect on group entrepreneurial behavior via group-perceived manager's ROE and group job satisfaction. Additionally, evidence was found for the moderating effect of group diversity so that manager's perceived emotion regulation had a greater effect on job satisfaction and entrepreneurship in more diverse teams. We interpreted this as evidence in support of theoretical models that consider creativity at a group level and ultimately affect-laden processes (Zhou & George, 2003). Recommendations for further research are discussed.