Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
EULAR report on the use of ultrasonography in painful knee osteoarthritis. Part 2: Exploring decision rules for clinical utility

Background: Synovial inflammation (as defined by hypertrophy and effusion) is common in osteoarthritis (OA) and may be important in both pain and structural progression. Objective: To determine if decision rules can be devised from clinical findings and ultrasonography (US) to allow recognition of synovial inflammation in patients with painful knee OA. Methods: A EULAR-ESCISIT cross sectional, multicentre study enrolled subjects with painful OA knee who had clinical, radiographic, and US evaluations. A classification and regression tree (CART) analysis was performed to find combinations of predictor variables that would provide high sensitivity and specificity for clinically detecting synovitis and effusion in individual subjects. A range of definitions for the two key US variables, synovitis and effusion (using different combinations of synovial thickness, depth, and appearance), were also included in exploratory analyses. Results: 600 patients with knee OA were included in the analysis. For both knee synovitis and joint effusion, the sensitivity and specificity were poor, yielding unsatisfactory likelihood ratios (75% sensitivity, 45% specificity, and positive LR of 1.36 for knee synovitis; 71.6% sensitivity, 43.2% specificity, and positive LR of 1.26 for joint effusion). The exploratory analyses did not improve the sensitivity and specificity (demonstrating positive LRs of between 1.26 and 1.57). Conclusion: Although it is possible to determine clinical and radiological predictors of OA inflammation in populations, CART analysis could not be used to devise useful clinical decision rules for an individual subject. Thus sensitive imaging techniques such as US remain the most useful tool for demonstrating synovial inflammation of the knee at the individual level.
Association of Structural Global Brain Network Properties with Intelligence in Normal Aging

Higher general intelligence attenuates age-associated cognitive decline and the risk of dementia. Thus, intelligence has been associated with cognitive reserve or resilience in normal aging. Neurophysiologically, intelligence is considered as a complex capacity that is dependent on a global cognitive network rather than isolated brain areas. An association of structural as well as functional brain network characteristics with intelligence has already been reported in young adults. We investigated the relationship between global structural brain network properties, general intelligence and age in a group of 43 cognitively healthy elderly, age 60–85 years. Individuals were assessed cross-sectionally using Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Revised (WAIS-R) and diffusion-tensor imaging. Structural brain networks were reconstructed individually using deterministic tractography, global network properties (global efficiency, mean shortest path length, and clustering coefficient) were determined by graph theory and correlated to intelligence scores within both age groups. Network properties were significantly correlated to age, whereas no significant correlation to WAIS-R was observed. However, in a subgroup of 15 individuals aged 75 and above, the network properties were significantly correlated to WAIS-R. Our findings suggest that general intelligence and global properties of structural brain networks may not be generally associated in cognitively healthy elderly. However, we provide first evidence of an association between global structural brain network properties and general intelligence in advanced elderly. Intelligence might be affected by age-associated network deterioration only if a certain threshold of structural degeneration is exceeded. Thus, age-associated brain structural changes seem to be partially compensated by the network and the range of this compensation might be a surrogate of cognitive reserve or brain resilience.
Quad‐Mesh Generation and Processing: A Survey

Triangle meshes have been nearly ubiquitous in computer graphics, and a large body of data structures and geometry processing algorithms based on them has been developed in the literature. At the same time, quadrilateral meshes, especially semi‐regular ones, have advantages for many applications, and significant progress was made in quadrilateral mesh generation and processing during the last several years. In this survey we discuss the advantages and problems of techniques operating on quadrilateral meshes, including surface analysis and mesh quality, simplification, adaptive refinement, alignment with features, parametrisation and remeshing.
2016 Energy-Efﬁcient Resource Allocation for Multi-User Mobile Edge Computing

— To increase mobile batteries’ lifetime and improve quality of experience for computation-intensive and latency-sensitive applications, mobile edge computing has received signiﬁcant interest. Designing energy-efﬁcient mobile edge computing systems requires joint optimization of communication and computation resources. In this paper, we consider energy-efﬁcient resource allocation for a multi-user mobile edge computing system. First, we establish on two computation-efﬁcient models with negligible and non-negligible base station (BS) executing durations, respectively. Then, under each model, we formulate the overall weighted sum energy consumption minimization problem by optimally allocating communication and computation resources. The optimization problem for negligible BS executing duration is convex, and we obtain the optimal solution in closed-form to this problem. The optimization problem for non-negligible BS executing duration is NP-hard in general, and we obtain a sub-optimal solution with low-complexity to this problem, by connecting it to a three-stage ﬂow-shop scheduling problem and wisely utilizing Johnson’s algorithm. Finally, numerical results show that the proposed solutions outperform some baseline schemes.
Training Beam Sequence Design for Millimeter-Wave MIMO Systems: A POMDP Framework

In this paper, adaptive training beam sequence design for efficient channel estimation in large millimeter-wave (mmWave) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channels is considered. By exploiting the sparsity in large mmWave MIMO channels and imposing a Markovian random walk assumption on the movement of the receiver and reflection clusters, the adaptive training beam sequence design and channel estimation problem is formulated as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) problem that finds non-zero bins in a two-dimensional grid. Under the proposed POMDP framework, optimal and suboptimal adaptive training beam sequence design policies are derived. Furthermore, a very fast suboptimal greedy algorithm is developed based on a newly proposed reduced sufficient statistic to make the computational complexity of the proposed algorithm low to a level for practical implementation. Numerical results are provided to evaluate the performance of the proposed training beam design method. Numerical results show that the proposed training beam sequence design algorithms yield good performance.
Person–job fit matters in parastatal institutions: Testing the mediating effect of person–job fit in the relationship between talent management and employee outcomes

This article responds to recent calls for research examining the mechanisms through which talent management affects talented employee outcomes. Drawing insights from attraction–selection–attrition and ability, motivation and opportunity theories, the article examines one such mechanism, person–job fit, through which talent management influences talented employees’ affective commitment and quit intentions in parastatal institutions in Ghana. A sample of 232 talent pool members was used to test a partial mediation model using structural equation modelling. Our findings suggest that talent management has not only a direct effect, but also an indirect effect, on talented employee outcomes of affective commitment and quit intention via person–job fit. Implications of these finding are discussed. Points for practitioners Human resource practitioners can attempt to increase affective commitment and reduce quit intentions by seeking to match job tasks with talented employees’ knowledge, skills and abilities while, at the same time, addressing their needs by the supplies that emanate from their jobs using talent management practices. Human resource professionals can choose to assess the person–job fit of talented employees during the pre-selection phase to their talent pool. Human resource practitioners can achieve the person–job fit of current talent pool members by using job design and career planning, as well as career progression. For human resource professionals concerned with the retention of talented employees and increasing their commitment, attention to creating person–job fit through talent management practices may be useful in reducing employee intentions to leave and maintaining high commitment.
Western Silver from the East

In my previous thesis I wrote about what features that characterize the Hiberno-Norse identity in Ireland during the Viking Age/Early Medieval period and the origin of these features. I also discussed whether they are to be viewed as a creolized Scandinavian society or as a hybrid culture with focus on said features. In this thesis I will attempt to shift the focus towards 9 and 10 century Gotland. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate if there were some connections between the Hiberno-Norse world and Gotland. I will focus on one particular hypothesis regarding the early import of Islamic dirhams, particularly Samanid silver to Ireland. The idea is to examine if a trading network might have existed and, in essence, to establish that there were connections between the Hiberno-Norse world and Gotland. I min tidigare uppsats skrev jag om vad som kännetecknar den Iro-Skandinaviska identiteten i Irland under vikingatiden/tidiga medeltiden, samt ursprunget av dessa särdrag. Jag diskuterade även om dessa skall ses som ett kreoliserat Skandinaviskt samhälle eller en hybridkultur med utgångspunkt i dessa särdrag. I denna uppsats tänker jag skifta fokusen mot 800/900-talets Gotland. Syftet med uppsatsen är att undersöka ifall det kan ha funnits några kopplingar mellan den Iro-Skandinaviska världen och den Skandinaviska, i detta fall Gotland. Jag kommer att fokusera på en särskild hypotes angående importen av Islamiska dirhemer, mer specifikt Samanidiskt silver till Irland. Tanken är att undersöka ifall ett handelsnätverk kan ha existerat och, i grund och botten, etablera att det fanns kopplingar mellan den Iro-Skandinaviska världen och Gotland.
Working Class Hero? Interrogating the Social Bases of the Rise of Donald Trump

Abstract We present a political sociological analysis of the social bases of support for Donald Trump during the critical phase of his victory in the Republican nominating contest. In particular, we test the widely voiced hypothesis that a critical source of Trump’s support in the GOP primaries came from his appeal to working class and/or downwardly mobile and insecure middle class voters responding to a “populist” message. Drawing on both the ANES January 2016 pilot survey and exit poll data, we argue that Trump’s rise to the GOP nomination was facilitated by a broad-based appeal that centered on voters who have levels of education and income that are well above national and primary state averages.
Age-Related Frontal Hyperactivation Observed across Different Working Memory Tasks: An fMRI Study

Purpose: To evaluate patterns of activation, convergence and divergence of three functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) Working Memory (WM) tasks in two different age groups. We want to understand potential impact of task and subjects’ age on WM activations as well as most important areas with regard to WM functions. Materials and methods: Thirty-five healthy volunteers completed visual, verbal, and novel auditory WM tasks. The subjects were selected from age extremes to depict possible impact of normal aging. The General Linear Model was used to report significant activations and the effect of age group. Contrasts revealed differences in activation between tasks, and Combined Task Analysis was performed to determine common regions of activation across tasks. Results: Most of the observed differences between the tasks were seen in areas that were responsible for feature processing. Frontal regions were mainstay activation areas, regardless of the utilized stimulus. We found an age-related reduction in activity of visual (in visually-presented tasks) and auditory (in auditory task) cortices but an age-related increase in prefrontal cortex for all tasks. Conclusion: Regardless of the type of the task stimuli, frontal regions are the most important activation areas in WM processing. These areas are also main targets of age-related changes with regard to activation patterns. Our results also indicate that prefrontal overactivity in working memory might be a compensatory effort to mask age-related decline in sensory processing.
MovieBase: a movie database for event detection and behavioral analysis

The overwhelming amount of multimedia entities shared over the web has given rise to the need for semantic identification and classification of these entities. Numerous research efforts have tackled this problem by developing advanced content analysis techniques as well as leveraging on readily available tags, scripts, and blogs related to these multimedia entities. However, in many cases, especially for event detection and action recognition, the research efforts were hampered by the lack of large scale publicly available benchmarks. To address this problem, this paper presents a large-scale movie corpus named MovieBase that covers full length feature movies as well as huge volume of movie-related video clips downloaded from YouTube. The corpus is designed for research in event detection and action recognition. It offers over 71 hours of videos with a total of 69,129 shots. The corpus has been hand-labeled according to 7 audio and 11 visual concept tags to semantically define 11 event categories under the romantic and violence scenes. The corpus comes with a set of pre-extracted low-level visual, motion, audio as well as high-level features. Related results are furnished as a baseline for the movie event detection task.
Low-achieving students’ attitudes towards learning chemistry and chemistry teaching methods

The aims of this study were to determine low-achieving students’ attitudes towards chemistry and how the attitudes differ within a low achieving group. The most preferred teaching methods were also defined. Empirical data (n = 2949) were collected by stratified sampling from fifteen-year-old Finnish lower-secondary school students as part of a Finnish National Board of Education assessment. The students were divided into five groups according to their achievement in the chemistry-exam. 159 of the students who had deficient exam results were defined as low-achieving (LA) students, and within that group non-native speakers, students with special needs and gender were selected as the background variables. Boys, non-native speakers and those who had special support had more positive attitudes towards chemistry within the LA group. The most preferred teaching methods in the low-achieving group were (i) visiting companies, institutes, museums and exhibitions; (ii) using the internet, videos, magazines and books for studying and (iii) small group working. According to the LA students their teachers should take more into account their wishes for teaching methods. This study suggests that more positive attitudes could lead to a better achievement when the teaching methods are preferred by most of the students. This paper proposes some ideas for both teachers and teacher training.
Effect of tracheal tube cuff shape on fluid leakage across the cuff: an in vitro study.

BACKGROUND This study compared the fluid leakage in the new 'tapered' shaped against the classic 'cylindrical' shaped tracheal tube cuffs when placed in different sized tracheas. METHODS The 7.5 mm internal diameter (ID) tracheal tube cuffs-Tapered Seal Guard (TSG), Standard Seal Guard (SSG), Hi-Lo, Microcuff, Ruesch, and Portex Profile-were compared in an in vitro apparatus. Vertical artificial tracheas with 16, 20, and 22 mm ID were intubated, 5 ml clear water was applied above the unlubricated tube cuffs, and fluid leakage was measured up to 60 min. Data of tapered vs non-tapered tube cuffs (16 observations) were compared for each tracheal diameter using the Mann-Whitney test. RESULTS Median (range) fluid leakage (ml) at 60 min was 2.14 (0.05-4.88), 1.14 (0.00-4.84), and 0.13 (0.00-1.32), respectively, for 16, 20, and 22 mm tracheas in the TSG tube studies when compared with 4.58 (0.44-4.88), 2.21 (0.00-4.81), and 0.00 (0.00-4.81) in the SSG tube and 4.54 (1.54-4.82), 0.90 (0.00-4.49), and 4.85 (4.40-4.99) in the Microcuff tube studies. Leakage in all polyvinylchloride (PVC) tube cuffs was almost complete (5 ml) within 5 min (P<0.001). CONCLUSIONS The tapered PU tube cuff was as effective as the cylindrical PU cuffs in smaller tracheal diameters and was more efficient than the cylindrical Microcuff PU tube cuff in larger tracheal diameter in preventing subglottic fluid leakage across the tube cuff tested in this in vitro study. PVC tube cuffs leaked much more and faster than PU cuffs.
A reliability-centered asset maintenance method for assessing the impact of maintenance in power distribution systems

This paper proposes a method for comparing the effect of different maintenance strategies on system reliability and cost. This method relates reliability theory with the experience gained from statistics and practical knowledge of component failures and maintenance measures. The approach has been applied to rural and urban distribution systems. In particular, a functional relationship between failure rate and maintenance measures has been developed for a cable component. The results show the value of using a systematic quantitative approach for investigating the effect of different maintenance strategies.
On the Reliability of Initial Conditions for Dissipationless Cosmological Simulations

Abstract We present the study of ten random realisations of a density field characterised by a cosmological power spectrum P(k) at redshift z = 50. The reliability of such initial conditions for N-body simulations is tested with respect to their correlation properties. The power spectrum P(k) and the mass variance σM(r) do not show detectable deviations from the desired behaviour in the intermediate range of scales between the mean interparticle distance and the simulation volume. The estimator for ξ(r) is too noisy to detect any reliable signal at the initial redshift z = 50. The particle distributions are then evolved forward until z = 0. This allows us to explore the cosmic variance stemming from the random nature of the initial conditions. With cosmic variance we mean the fact that a simulation represents a single realisation of the stochastic initial conditions whereas the real Universe contains many realisations of regions of the size of the box; this problem affects most importantly the scales at about the fundamental mode. We study morphological descriptors of the matter distribution such as the genus, as well as the internal properties of the largest object(s) forming in the box. We find that the scatter is at least comparable to the scatter in the fundamental mode.
Eyes Wide Apart: Overestimating Interpupillary Distance

Our ability to perceive many aspects of the human face is so acute that some would propose that we possess specialised face-processing mechanisms. One example of this exquisite performance is our ability to discriminate differences in the lateral separation of the eyes in pairs of otherwise identical faces—see Kemp et al (1990, Perception 19 531–543). However, we have found that our ability to estimate our own interpupillary distance (IPD) shows no such accuracy. Subjects were asked to indicate, without undue rumination, their own IPD and, by way of control, the distance from the bridge to the tip of their own nose. Compared to the true distances, IPD was overestimated by more than 30% while nose length was underestimated by 11%. Although a plausible reason for the nose length underestimation is foreshortening of the image, the reason for the overestimation of eye separation remains obscure.
MOLECULAR ENVIRONMENT AND THERMAL X-RAY SPECTROSCOPY OF THE SEMICIRCULAR YOUNG COMPOSITE SUPERNOVA REMNANT 3C 396

We have investigated the molecular environment of the semicircular composite supernova remnant (SNR) 3C 396 and performed a Chandra spatially resolved thermal X-ray spectroscopic study of this young SNR. With our CO millimeter observations, we find that the molecular clouds (MCs) at VLSR∼ 84 km s−1 can better explain the multiwavelength properties of the remnant than the VLSR = 67–72 km s−1 MCs that are suggested by Lee et al. At around 84 km s−1, the western boundary of the SNR is perfectly confined by the western molecular wall. The CO emission fades out from west to east, indicating that the eastern region is of low gas density. In particular, an intruding finger/pillar-like MC, which may be shocked at the tip, can well explain the X-ray and radio enhancement in the southwest and some infrared filaments there. The SNR–MC interaction is also favored by the relatively elevated 12CO J = 2–1/J = 1–0 line ratios in the southwestern “pillar tip” and the molecular patch on the northwestern boundary. The redshifted 12CO (J = 1–0 and J = 2–1) wings (86–90 km s−1) of an eastern 81 km s−1 molecular patch may be the kinematic evidence for shock–MC interaction. We suggest that the 69 km s−1 MCs are in the foreground based on H i self-absorption while the 84 km s−1 MCs at a distance of 6.2 kpc (the tangent point) are in physical contact with SNR 3C 396. The X-ray spectral analysis suggests an SNR age of ∼3 kyr. The metal enrichment of the X-ray emitting gas in the north and south implies a 13–15 M☉ B1–B2 progenitor star.