Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Comparative Effectiveness of Adjunctive Bevacizumab for Advanced Lung Cancer: The Cancer Research Network Experience

Introduction: Bevacizumab plus carboplatin-paclitaxel (BCP) chemotherapy has Food and Drug Administration approval for advanced nonsquamous, non–small-cell lung cancer based upon improved survival in a clinical trial. However, subgroup analyses of this and other studies have suggested variable results by age and gender. Methods: Using data from four health maintenance organizations (HMOs) belonging to the Cancer Research Network, 1605 HMO nonsquamous, non-small-cell lung cancer patients aged younger than 21 years, diagnosed 2002-2010, who received carboplatin-paclitaxel (CP), with and without bevacizumab for first-line treatment of stage IIIB/IV disease were identified. Patients were categorized into three groups based on year of diagnosis and regimen during 120 days postdiagnosis: (1) diagnosed 2005–2010 and received BCP; (2) 2005–2010, CP (CP2005), and (3) 2002–2004, CP (CP2002). Survival differences between groups were estimated using Cox proportional hazard models with several propensity score adjustments for demographic, comorbidity, and tumor characteristics. Multivariable subanalyses were also estimated. Results: Median survival was 12.3 months (interquartile range [IQR], 6.0–29.1) for BCP patients versus 8.8 months (IQR, 3.7–21.3) for CP2005 patients and 7.5 months (IQR, 3.8–15.6) for CP2002 patients. In the propensity score–adjusted models, BCP demonstrated a significant survival benefit with a hazard ratio of BCP relative to CP2005 and CP2002 patients of 0.79 (95% confidence interval [CI], 0.66–0.94) and 0.63 (95% CI, 0.52–0.75), respectively. In the multivariable-adjusted subanalyses, relative to the CP2005 cohort, the BCP hazard ratios for patients age less than 65 years, age 65 years old or older, and females were 0.78 (95% CI, 0.62–1.00), 0.74 (95% CI, 0.54–1.00), and 0.77 (95% CI, 0.58–1.00). Conclusions: In this community-based, comparative effectiveness analysis, we found an overall survival benefit for adults receiving BCP compared with CP.
Runahead execution: an alternative to very large instruction windows for out-of-order processors

Today's high performance processors tolerate long latency operations by means of out-of-order execution. However, as latencies increase, the size of the instruction window must increase even faster if we are to continue to tolerate these latencies. We have already reached the point where the size of an instruction window that can handle these latencies is prohibitively large in terms of both design complexity and power consumption. And, the problem is getting worse. This paper proposes runahead execution as an effective way to increase memory latency tolerance in an out-of-order processor without requiring an unreasonably large instruction window. Runahead execution unblocks the instruction window blocked by long latency operations allowing the processor to execute far ahead in the program path. This results in data being prefetched into caches long before it is needed. On a machine model based on the Intel/spl reg/ Pentium/spl reg/ processor, having a 128-entry instruction window, adding runahead execution improves the IPC (instructions per cycle) by 22% across a wide range of memory intensive applications. Also, for the same machine model, runahead execution combined with a 128-entry window performs within 1% of a machine with no runahead execution and a 384-entry instruction window.
Migraine, depression, and brain volume

Objective: To examine the joint association of migraine headache and major depressive disorder on brain volume in older persons without dementia. Methods: Participants (n = 4,296, 58% women) from the population-based Age, Gene/Environment Susceptibility–Reykjavik Study were assessed for migraine headache in 1967–1991 (age 51 years [range 33–65]) according to modified International Classification of Headache Disorders–II criteria. In 2002–2006 (age 76 years [range 66–96]), lifetime history of major depressive disorder (depression) was diagnosed according to DSM-IV criteria, and full-brain MRI was acquired, which was computer postprocessed into total brain volume (TBV) (gray matter [GM], white matter [WM], white matter hyperintensities) and CSF volume for each study subject. We compared brain tissue volumes by headache categories with or without depression using linear regression, adjusting for intracranial volume and other factors. Results: Compared with the reference group (no headache, no depression) TBV and WM and GM volumes were smaller in those with both migraine and depression (TBV −19.2 mL, 95% confidence interval [CI] −35.3, −3.1, p = 0.02; WM −12.8 mL, CI −21.3, −4.3, p = 0.003; GM −13.0 mL, CI −26.0, 0.1, p = 0.05) but not for those with migraine alone (TBV 0.4 mL, WM 0.2 mL, GM 0.6 mL) or depression alone (TBV −3.9 mL, WM −0.9 mL, GM −2.9 mL). Conclusions: Reporting both migraine and major depressive disorder was associated with smaller brain tissue volumes than having one or neither of these conditions. Migraineurs with depression may represent a distinct clinical phenotype with different long-term sequelae. Nonetheless, the number of subjects in the current study is relatively small and these findings need to be confirmed in future studies.
On the nature of the NAA diffusion attenuated MR signal in the central nervous system

In the brain, on a macroscopic scale, diffusion of the intraneuronal constituent N‐acetyl‐L‐aspartate (NAA) appears to be isotropic. In contrast, on a microscopic scale, NAA diffusion is likely highly anisotropic, with displacements perpendicular to neuronal fibers being markedly hindered, and parallel displacements less so. In this report we first substantiate that local anisotropy influences NAA diffusion in vivo by observing differing diffusivities parallel and perpendicular to human corpus callosum axonal fibers. We then extend our measurements to large voxels within rat brains. As expected, the macroscopic apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) of NAA is practically isotropic due to averaging of the numerous and diverse fiber orientations. We demonstrate that the substantially non‐monoexponential diffusion‐mediated MR signal decay vs. b value can be quantitatively explained by a theoretical model of NAA confined to an ensemble of differently oriented neuronal fibers. On the microscopic scale, NAA diffusion is found to be strongly anisotropic, with displacements occurring almost exclusively parallel to the local fiber axis. This parallel diffusivity, ADC‖, is 0.36 ± 0.01 μm2/ms, and ADC⟂ is essentially zero. From ADC‖ the apparent viscosity of the neuron cytoplasm is estimated to be twice as large as that of a temperature‐matched dilute aqueous solution. Magn Reson Med 52:1052–1059, 2004. © 2004 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Calpastatin controls polymicrobial sepsis by limiting procoagulant microparticle release.

RATIONALE Sepsis, a leading cause of death worldwide, involves widespread activation of inflammation, massive activation of coagulation, and lymphocyte apoptosis. Calpains, calcium-activated cysteine proteases, have been shown to increase inflammatory reactions and lymphocyte apoptosis. Moreover, calpain plays an essential role in microparticle release. OBJECTIVES We investigated the contribution of calpain in eliciting tissue damage during sepsis. METHODS To test our hypothesis, we induced polymicrobial sepsis by cecal ligation and puncture in wild-type (WT) mice and transgenic mice expressing high levels of calpastatin, a calpain-specific inhibitor. MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS In WT mice, calpain activity increased transiently peaking at 6 hours after cecal ligation and puncture surgery. Calpastatin overexpression improved survival, organ dysfunction (including lung, kidney, and liver damage), and lymphocyte apoptosis. It decreased the sepsis-induced systemic proinflammatory response and disseminated intravascular coagulation, by reducing the number of procoagulant circulating microparticles and therefore delaying thrombin generation. The deleterious effect of microparticles in this model was confirmed by transferring microparticles from septic WT to septic transgenic mice, worsening their survival and coagulopathy. CONCLUSIONS These results demonstrate an important role of the calpain/calpastatin system in coagulation/inflammation pathways during sepsis, because calpain inhibition is associated with less severe disseminated intravascular coagulation and better overall outcomes in sepsis.
The relationship of social setting to major depression

ABSTRACT– Sixty middle‐aged women with a major depressive episode diagnosed in a community survey were compared with those 400 participants of the study who had no history of major depression. The husbands income and the family income were lower in the depressed group even when adjustment was made for age and marital status. The depressives were more often divorced or widowed than were controls. As a direct consequence of this, women with major depression lived in smaller residences and were more seldom owners of a summerhouse. The proportions of women working full‐time, part‐time or not working outside home were the same in those with major depression and the controls. The level of adversity (life events and long‐term major difficulties) during the year preceding the study was increased in the depressed group when adjustment was made for age, marital status and social class differences. A larger proportion of the depressed women reported marital and job dissatisfaction. Variables reflecting social isolation did not differ between groups. There were no differences between depressed and undepressed regarding churchgoing, but fewer of the former stated that they believed in God.
Using focus groups in medical education research: AMEE Guide No. 91

Abstract Qualitative research methodology has become an established part of the medical education research field. A very popular data-collection technique used in qualitative research is the “focus group”. Focus groups in this Guide are defined as “… group discussions organized to explore a specific set of issues … The group is focused in the sense that it involves some kind of collective activity … crucially, focus groups are distinguished from the broader category of group interview by the explicit use of the group interaction as research data” (Kitzinger 1994, p. 103). This Guide has been designed to provide people who are interested in using focus groups with the information and tools to organize, conduct, analyze and publish sound focus group research within a broader understanding of the background and theoretical grounding of the focus group method. The Guide is organized as follows: Firstly, to describe the evolution of the focus group in the social sciences research domain. Secondly, to describe the paradigmatic fit of focus groups within qualitative research approaches in the field of medical education. After defining, the nature of focus groups and when, and when not, to use them, the Guide takes on a more practical approach, taking the reader through the various steps that need to be taken in conducting effective focus group research. Finally, the Guide finishes with practical hints towards writing up a focus group study for publication.
“No level up!”: no effects of video game specialization and expertise on cognitive performance

Previous research into the effects of action video gaming on cognition has suggested that long term exposure to this type of game might lead to an enhancement of cognitive skills that transfer to non-gaming cognitive tasks. However, these results have been controversial. The aim of the current study was to test the presence of positive cognitive transfer from action video games to two cognitive tasks. More specifically, this study investigated the effects that participants' expertise and genre specialization have on cognitive improvements in one task unrelated to video gaming (a flanker task) and one related task (change detection task with both control and genre-specific images). This study was unique in three ways. Firstly, it analyzed a continuum of expertise levels, which has yet to be investigated in research into the cognitive benefits of video gaming. Secondly, it explored genre-specific skill developments on these tasks by comparing Action and Strategy video game players (VGPs). Thirdly, it used a very tight experiment design, including the experimenter being blind to expertise level and genre specialization of the participant. Ninety-two university students aged between 18 and 30 (M = 21.25) were recruited through opportunistic sampling and were grouped by video game specialization and expertise level. While the results of the flanker task were consistent with previous research (i.e., effect of congruence), there was no effect of expertise, and the action gamers failed to outperform the strategy gamers. Additionally, contrary to expectation, there was no interaction between genre specialization and image type in the change detection task, again demonstrating no expertise effect. The lack of effects for game specialization and expertise goes against previous research on the positive effects of action video gaming on other cognitive tasks.
Spatial kernel K-harmonic means clustering for multi-spectral image segmentation

The problem of image segmentation using intensity clustering approaches has been addressed in the literature. Grouping pixels of similar intensity to form clusters in an image have been tackled using a number of methods, such as the K-means (KM) algorithm. The K-harmonic means (KHM) was proposed to overcome the sensitivity of KM to centre initialisation. The use of a spatial kernel-based KHM (SKKHM) algorithm on the problem of image segmentation has been investigated. Instead of the original Euclidean intensity distance, a robust kernel-based KHM metric is employed to reduce the effect of outliers and noise. Spatial image information is also incorporated in the proposed clustering scheme, derived from Markov random field modelling. An extension of the proposed algorithm to multi-spectral imaging applications is also presented. Experimental results for both single-channel and multi-channel images demonstrate the robust performance of the proposed SKKHM algorithm.
Unified power engineering laboratory for electromechanical energy conversion, power electronics, and power systems

This paper introduces a unified power engineering laboratory capable of various experiments for power systems, power electronics, and electromechanical energy conversion. It presents a flexible hardware setup, data acquisition (DAQ), and virtual instrumentation (VI). Some features of virtual instrumentation are shown with real-time phasor diagrams, sequence component analysis, and spectral analysis of AC data. We describe the general design of a single laboratory setup, which can be used for power electronics and electromechanical energy conversion experiments independently. We also present an example of power system operations, which can be implemented by the interconnection of several laboratory stations.
Whole Blood Omega 3 Fatty Acid Levels of HIV Exposed and HIV Unexposed 7 - 10 Years Old Children from a Low Income Country with High Burden of Under-Nutrition

Long chain polyunsaturated fatty acids are essential macronutrients that have several benefits which have been described for children’s health. Omega 3 LCPUFA metabolism has been reported to be altered in under-nourished and in HIV infected children. Therefore, we describe Eicosapentaenoic acid, Docosapentaenoic acid and Docosahexaenoic acid levels of HIV infected, HIV exposed uninfected and HIV unexposed uninfected school aged children from a low income country with a high burden of HIV infection and under-nutrition. This cross-sectional study recruited children 7 to 10 years old. Capillary blood was collected on filter paper and whole blood fatty acid analysis done using automated gas liquid chromatography. Kruskal Wallis and Median tests were used to compare the distribution and medians of the Omega 3 LCPUFA among the children according to HIV status, gender, age and nutritional status. A total of 318 children were recruited with 21 (7%) being HIV infected and 116 (37%) being HIV exposed uninfected. Chronic malnutrition was present in 12% of the children. The omega 3 fatty acids were expressed as percent weight of total fatty acids. The medians (interquartile range) for EPA, DPA and DHA for all the children were 0.19 (0.09), 0.79 (0.19) and 2.14 (0.54) %wt/wt respectively. EPA, DPA and DHA levels were not associated with the HIV status of the children. EPA levels were much lower in the 7-year-age group compared with the 8 and 9 - 10-year-age groups. Further studies assessing LCPUFA levels that include larger sample size, children from both urban and rural areas are recommended as this may assist in clearly defining the association of LCPUFA with HIV status in children from low income countries with high burden of under-nutrition.
Social Participation of Children with Disabilities in Inclusive Preschool Programs: Program Typology and Ecological Features

The purpose of this study was to examine the social participation of young children with disabilities in inclusive preschool programs. One hundred forty-three preschool-aged children with disabilities were observed in classrooms representing four organizational contexts: community-based, Head Start, public school, and blended. Children's and adults' social behavior was positive across settings, and children in blended programs engaged in significantly more positive social behavior with adults. Peer social engagement did not differ across organizational contexts. Activity initiator was an ecological variable that affected children's social engagement in that children engaged in significantly more interaction with peers in child-initiated activities and significantly more interaction with adults in adult-initiated activities. ).
Predictive linear transforms for noise robust speech recognition

It is well known that the addition of background noise alters the correlations between the elements of, for example, the MFCC feature vector. However, standard model-based compensation techniques do not modify the feature-space in which the diagonal covariance matrix Gaussian mixture models are estimated. One solution to this problem, which yields good performance, is joint uncertainty decoding (JUD) with full transforms. Unfortunately, this results in a high computational cost during decoding. This paper contrasts two approaches to approximating full JUD while lowering the computational cost. Both use predictive linear transforms to modify the feature-space: adaptation-based linear transforms, where the model parameters are restricted to be the same as the original clean system; and precision matrix modelling approaches, in particular semi-tied covariance matrices. These predictive transforms are estimated using statistics derived from the full JUD transforms rather than noisy data. The schemes are evaluated on AURORA 2 and a noise-corrupted resource management task.
Cyber-bullying: An exploration of bystander behavior and motivation

While previous research has examined mainly self-reported bystander behavior during cyber-bullying, the current study explored if and how bystanders responded when presented with a cyber-bullying simulation. We hypothesized that individuals high in empathy would supportively intervene (defend the victim) most frequently. College age participants (M = 20.34, SD = 1.26, range 18-27; N = 149), viewed a simulated Facebook conversation in which negative comments were directed towards another student and were provided open-ended opportunities to be involved in the Facebook conversation (i.e., “comment” to the other fictitious characters) and explain their reasoning for their behavior (“motivators”) at two time points in the conversation (Time 1 and Time 2). Using a deductive-inductive process, we categorized participants’ comments and motivators, the frequency of these responses, and their reasons for them. While the majority of participants (91%) asserted that cyber-bullying occurred in the conversation, most participants did not comment (Time 1: 69%, Time 2: 52%). Among those who commented, the most frequently cited motivators were either to defend the victim or mediate the situation. Consistent with our hypothesis, individuals who identified with the victim had higher empathy scores than those who identified with the bullies, although this was true only for the second part of the conversation (Time 2). Empathy scores did not differ by type of response at either time period. Future studies could utilize the categories and motivators established in this study as a framework for more extensive quantitative research to more comprehensively understand the underlying reasons for low intervention rates in cyber-bullying.
A Simple Algorithm for Semi-supervised Learning with Improved Generalization Error Bound

In this work, we develop a simple algorithm for semi-supervised regression. The key idea is to use the top eigenfunctions of integral operator derived from both labeled and unlabeled examples as the basis functions and learn the prediction function by a simple linear regression. We show that under appropriate assumptions about the integral operator, this approach is able to achieve an improved regression error bound better than existing bounds of supervised learning. We also verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm by an empirical study.
Improving the performance of hypervisor-based fault tolerance

Hypervisor-based fault tolerance (HBFT), a checkpoint-recovery mechanism, is an emerging approach to sustaining mission-critical applications. Based on virtualization technology, HBFT provides an economic and transparent solution. However, the advantages currently come at the cost of substantial overhead during failure-free, especially for memory intensive applications. This paper presents an in-depth examination of HBFT and options to improve its performance. Based on the behavior of memory accesses among checkpointing epochs, we introduce two optimizations, read fault reduction and write fault prediction, for the memory tracking mechanism. These two optimizations improve the mechanism by 31.1% and 21.4% respectively for some application. Then, we present softwaresuperpage which efficiently maps large memory regions between virtual machines (VM). By the above optimizations, HBFT is improved by a factor of 1.4 to 2.2 and it achieves a performance which is about 60% of that of the native VM.
Health benefits of Nordic walking; a systematic review

▸ Tschentscher M, Niederseer D, Niederseer J Health benefits of Nordic Walking; a systematic review. Am J Prev Med , 2013;44:76–84. Physical activity is essential for good health. Physical inactivity is a leading risk factor for non-communicable diseases, accounting for more than three million preventable deaths.1 A recent physical activity trend is Nordic walking, which is a form of brisk walking utilising walking poles that actively engages the arms and upper body. It is promoted as a safe, efficient, biodynamic exercise with numerous health benefits, suitable for all ages. To examine the health benefits of Nordic walking. Database searches of Web of Knowledge, PubMed, CENTRAL, CINAHL and PEDro, from 1950 to the present (date not specified) were conducted to identify randomised controlled trials (RCTs) and observational studies, written in English and German, using the main search terms of ‘Nordic walking,’ ‘pole walking,’ ‘pole striding’ and ‘exerstriders’. Excluded studies included ‘improper’ Nordic walking technique or if Nordic walking poles were not used. Two independent reviewers performed …