Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Interobserver agreement in the diagnosis of canine hip dysplasia using the standard ventrodorsal hip-extended radiographic method.

OBJECTIVES To determine the agreement between observers and to investigate the effect of observer experience in diagnosing canine hip dysplasia and providing final scoring of hips using the standard ventrodorsal hip-extended radiographic method. The agreement of the final scoring, with a presumed correct assessment based on the Norberg angle, is also investigated. METHODS Thirty observers were requested to read 50 ventrodorsal hip-extended radiographs of 25 dogs according to Federation Cynologique International criteria. Groups of experienced (nine members) and inexperienced (21 members) observers were used. RESULTS For providing the distinction between dysplastic versus non-dysplastic dogs, the average interobserver agreement was 72 per cent and was significantly higher (P<0.0001) than the score that could be expected by chance without any agreement between observers. For providing the final score (A, B, C, D or E), an average interobserver agreement of 43.6 per cent was found. In the experienced group, an agreement score of 76 per cent was found for the distinction between AB versus non-AB and an agreement score of 81 per cent was found for the distinction between C versus non-C. The agreement score was significantly higher (P<0.0001) for the experienced group than for the inexperienced group in all cases. Agreement between the presumed correct assessment based on the Norberg angle and the observer's evaluation was low (P=0.35), irrespective of whether the observers were experienced (71.8 per cent correct assessments) or inexperienced (69 per cent correct assessments). CLINICAL SIGNIFICANCE Although interobserver agreement is low, observer experience increases agreement.
Blech Effect and Lifetime Projection for Cu/Low-K Interconnects

Electromigration in short Cu interconnects was studied under a number of conditions in Cu/Low-K technologies. Observed failure distributions displayed increasing dispersion of the failure times, characterized by the lognormal ¿, as the Blech critical threshold, (jL)c, was approached. Simulations show that the apparent increase in ¿ can be correlated to variations in current density which arise from variation in the interconnect cross section inherent to any manufacturing process. As a consequence, the median time to failure, t50, for a short line at a given current may be immortal, but failures may still occur at lower percentiles. Because of the significant ¿ variation (or deviation from lognormal distribution), the choice of failure time percentile results in different calculated (jL)c, which in turn will have significant impact on lifetime projections and circuit design applications. In addition, the (jL)c calculated from L/tinc vs jL is essentially independent of temperature, and the slope can be used to derive the activation energy. The derived activation energy for short interconnects agrees well with that calculated from Black's law using 200um long lines with jL ≫≫ (jL)c.
Stereotypes and attitudes about child sexual abusers: A comparison of experienced and inexperienced professionals in sex offender treatment

Purpose. The danger of stereotyping child sex offenders is that such stereotypes allow suspected abusers to avoid detection. The current study investigated whether professionals involved in the treatment of sex offenders endorsed less stereotypes of sex offenders than an ‘inexperienced’ group of teachers. Method. Sixty professionals involved with sex offenders and 71 school teachers completed three questionnaires: the Stereotypes of Sex Offenders Questionnaire; Attitudes Towards Sex Offenders Scale (Hogue, 1993) and Knowledge of Child Abuse Questionnaire (created for the present study). Mediation analyses were then conducted on the relationships between the scores. Results. Experienced professionals endorsed negative stereotypes less, had more positive attitudes towards sex offenders and expressed more knowledge of child abuse than the inexperienced group. Further, attitudes towards child sexual offenders were significantly mediated by the effect of knowledge of child abuse on group (experienced, inexperienced). However, there was no significant mediation for the effect of knowledge on child abuse on the relationship between group (experienced, inexperienced) and stereotype consistent scores. Conclusions. The less knowledge of child abuse, the more stereotypical one may be about potential child sex offenders. Thus, it may be useful to increase knowledge on child abuse in inexperienced groups to counter stereotyping and allow greater detection of offenders.
Linear growing minimum distance of ultra-sparse non-binary cluster-LDPC codes

In this paper, we study the asymptotic minimum distance of non-binary cluster-LDPC codes whose subjacent binary parity-check matrix is composed of localized density of ones, concentrated in clusters of bits. A particular attention is given to cluster codes represented by ultra-sparse bipartite graphs, in the sense that each symbol-node is connected to exactly dv = 2 constraint-nodes. We derive a lower bound on the minimum distance of non-binary cluster-LDPC codes and we show that there exist ensembles of ultra-sparse codes whose minimum distance grows linearly with the code length (with probability going to 1 as the code length goes to infinity). This result is in contrast with “classical” non-binary LDPC codes based on graphs with strictly regular dv = 2 symbol-nodes, whose minimum distance grows at most logarithmically with the code length. We also show that one can build practical non-binary cluster-LDPC codes with various finite codeword lengths, whose minimum distance is close to the Gilbert-Varshamov bound.
Prevention of stroke and systemic embolism with rivaroxaban compared with warfarin in patients with non-valvular atrial fibrillation and moderate renal impairment.

AIMS Patients with non-valvular atrial fibrillation (AF) and renal insufficiency are at increased risk for ischaemic stroke and bleeding during anticoagulation. Rivaroxaban, an oral, direct factor Xa inhibitor metabolized predominantly by the liver, preserves the benefit of warfarin for stroke prevention while causing fewer intracranial and fatal haemorrhages. METHODS AND RESULTS We randomized 14 264 patients with AF in a double-blind trial to rivaroxaban 20 mg/day [15 mg/day if creatinine clearance (CrCl) 30-49 mL/min] or dose-adjusted warfarin (target international normalized ratio 2.0-3.0). Compared with patients with CrCl >50 mL/min (mean age 73 years), the 2950 (20.7%) patients with CrCl 30-49 mL/min were older (79 years) and had higher event rates irrespective of study treatment. Among those with CrCl 30-49 mL/min, the primary endpoint of stroke or systemic embolism occurred in 2.32 per 100 patient-years with rivaroxaban 15 mg/day vs. 2.77 per 100 patient-years with warfarin [hazard ratio (HR) 0.84; 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.57-1.23] in the per-protocol population. Intention-to-treat analysis yielded similar results (HR 0.86; 95% CI 0.63-1.17) to the per-protocol results. Rates of the principal safety endpoint (major and clinically relevant non-major bleeding: 17.82 vs. 18.28 per 100 patient-years; P = 0.76) and intracranial bleeding (0.71 vs. 0.88 per 100 patient-years; P = 0.54) were similar with rivaroxaban or warfarin. Fatal bleeding (0.28 vs. 0.74% per 100 patient-years; P = 0.047) occurred less often with rivaroxaban. CONCLUSION Patients with AF and moderate renal insufficiency have higher rates of stroke and bleeding than those with normal renal function. There was no evidence of heterogeneity in treatment effect across dosing groups. Dose adjustment in ROCKET-AF yielded results consistent with the overall trial in comparison with dose-adjusted warfarin.
Emotion regulation and trader expertise: Heart rate variability on the trading floor

We describe a psychophysiological study of the emotion regulation of investment bank traders. Building on work on the role of emotions in financial decision-making, we examine the relationship between market conditions, trader experience and emotion regulation whilst trading, as indexed by high frequency heart rate variability (HF HRV). We find a significant inverse relationship between HF HRV and market volatility and a positive relationship between HF HRV and trader experience. We argue that this suggests that emotion regulation may be an important facet of trader expertise and that learning effects demonstrated in financial markets may include improved emotion regulation as an important component of that learning. Our results also suggest the value of investigating the role of effective emotion regulation in a broader range of financial decision-making contexts. Keywords: Emotion Regulation, Financial Decision-Making, Market Volatility, Trading, Heart Rate Variability
Competencies for Work Domains in Business Computer Science

In order to relate expertise in business computer science to multiple criteria, the importance of competencies, as elements of expertise, for the performance of tasks and roles were investigated. Seventy-five information technology professionals (nine women and sixty-six men) from twenty-one organizations rated the importance of thirty-four competencies for the performance of eighty-six tasks and seven roles. In accordance with previous studies, knowledge of information technology, working methodically, and analytic ability were rated as important competencies for most types of tasks, and social skills were especially important for tasks related to interaction with the environment and leadership roles. By means of cluster analysis, four work domains were discerned: technique-oriented, organization-oriented, leadership-oriented, and user-support-oriented domains. It is argued that relating competencies to work domains has theoretical and practical relevance.
Analyzing conversational data in GTVH terms: A new approach to the issue of identity construction via humor

Abstract The central aim of this paper is to apply the General Theory of Verbal Humor (henceforth GTVH; Attardo 2001) to conversational narratives and to integrate it with sociopragmatic approaches. We consider script opposition as a necessary prerequisite for humor and its perlocutionary effect (i.e. eliciting laughter) as a secondary criterion for the characterization of a narrative as humorous. Despite the fact that one of the most common social functions of humor is the construction of solidarity and in-group identity, there is relatively little sociolinguistic research on this issue. Thus, a more particular aim of this paper is to illustrate how humor can be a flexible discourse strategy to construct particular aspects of social identities by focusing on a particular aspect of humor encoded in GTVH terms as the knowledge resource of “target”. It will be shown that, in our conversational data coming from a cohesive group of young Greek males, interlocutors select targets either outside or inside their group and that, while in the first case humor criticizes the “other” behavior, in the latter case it serves as a correction mechanism of in-group behavior in a rather covert manner. In both cases, the target of humor reinforces the already existing bonds among group members, while bringing the evaluative dimension of humor to the surface. It is therefore suggested that the target of humor is an important heuristic tool for describing its social function, revealing how it is exploited by conversationalists to project their shared beliefs and values, i.e. their social identity.
Jointly Learning Word Embeddings and Latent Topics

Word embedding models such as Skip-gram learn a vector-space representation for each word, based on the local word collocation patterns that are observed in a text corpus. Latent topic models, on the other hand, take a more global view, looking at the word distributions across the corpus to assign a topic to each word occurrence. These two paradigms are complementary in how they represent the meaning of word occurrences. While some previous works have already looked at using word embeddings for improving the quality of latent topics, and conversely, at using latent topics for improving word embeddings, such "two-step'' methods cannot capture the mutual interaction between the two paradigms. In this paper, we propose STE, a framework which can learn word embeddings and latent topics in a unified manner. STE naturally obtains topic-specific word embeddings, and thus addresses the issue of polysemy. At the same time, it also learns the term distributions of the topics, and the topic distributions of the documents. Our experimental results demonstrate that the STE model can indeed generate useful topic-specific word embeddings and coherent latent topics in an effective and efficient way.
The Use of Revenue Disclosures to Inform and Influence the Market April 2017

This study addresses whether firms use revenue disclosures to inform and/or influence the market. We find that when firms provide a more thorough discussion of revenues in their 10K filings, (1) analysts are more likely to issue revenue forecasts, (2) the revenue forecasts tend to be more accurate, and (3) investors place a greater weight on revenues in valuation. These findings are consistent with revenue disclosures providing useful information to the market about reported revenues. However, we also address the possibility that some firms use revenue disclosures to influence or mislead stakeholders. We find that although revenue disclosure is associated with a greater weight on revenues in valuation, it is not associated with more persistent revenues, suggesting the greater weight on revenues may be unwarranted. We also find that firms tend to discuss revenues less when they are managing revenues to meet reporting targets, consistent with an effort to misdirect investors and regulators.
A clinical study of alveolar bone quality using the fractal dimension and the implant stability quotient

Purpose It has been suggested that primary implant stability plays an essential role in successful osseointegration. Resonance frequency analysis (RFA) is widely used to measure the initial stability of implants because it provides superior reproducibility and non-invasiveness. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether the fractal dimension from the panoramic radiograph is related to the primary stability of the implant as represented by RFA. Methods This study included 22 patients who underwent dental implant installation at the Department of Periodontology of Seoul National University Dental Hospital. Morphometric analysis and fractal analysis of the bone trabecular pattern were performed using panoramic radiographs, and the implant stability quotient (ISQ) values were measured after implant installation using RFA. The radiographs of 52 implant sites were analyzed, and the ISQ values were compared with the results from the morphometric analysis and fractal analysis. Results The Pearson correlation showed a linear correlation between the ISQ values of RFA and the parameters of morphometric analysis but not of statistical significance. The fractal dimension had a linear correlation that was statistically significant. The correlation was more pronounced in the mandible. Conclusions In conclusion, we suggest that the fractal dimension acquired from the panoramic radiograph may be a useful predictor of the initial stability of dental implants.
Simpler Sequential and Parallel Biconnectivity Augmentation

For a connected graph, a vertex separator is a set of vertices whose removal creates at least two components and a minimum vertex separator is a vertex separator of least cardinality. The vertex connectivity refers to the size of a minimum vertex separator. For a connected graph $G$ with vertex connectivity $k (k \geq 1)$, the connectivity augmentation refers to a set $S$ of edges whose augmentation to $G$ increases its vertex connectivity by one. A minimum connectivity augmentation of $G$ is the one in which $S$ is minimum. In this paper, we focus our attention on connectivity augmentation of trees. Towards this end, we present a new sequential algorithm for biconnectivity augmentation in trees by simplifying the algorithm reported in \cite{nsn}. The simplicity is achieved with the help of edge contraction tool. This tool helps us in getting a recursive subproblem preserving all connectivity information. Subsequently, we present a parallel algorithm to obtain a minimum connectivity augmentation set in trees. Our parallel algorithm essentially follows the overall structure of sequential algorithm. Our implementation is based on CREW PRAM model with $O(\Delta)$ processors, where $\Delta$ refers to the maximum degree of a tree. We also show that our parallel algorithm is optimal whose processor-time product is O(n) where $n$ is the number of vertices of a tree, which is an improvement over the parallel algorithm reported in \cite{hsu}.
Advanced GPU Raycasting

Modern GPUs offer a degree of programmability that opens up a wide ﬁeld of applications far beyond processing millions of triangles at ever increasing speed. Raycasting is one of these applications that can make heavy use of the built-in features of todays graphics cards. With the possibilities offered by this technology, there is a lot of room for new techniques that do not simply convert existing algorithms to the GPU, but use the very strengths of this architecture to create more realistic images at interactive frame rates. This paper presents an approach to hardware based ray-casting in the fragment shader of a shader model 3 compatible graphics card that not only allows for both orthogonal and perspective projection, but enables the user to move the viewpoint into the dataset for ﬂy-through applications like virtual endoscopy. This hardware-based approach can also be used to correctly intersect the rendered dataset with normal OpenGL geometry, allowing arbitrary 3D-meshes, pointers or grids to be rendered in the same scene. The last section deals with the biggest problem of GPU-based raycasting - the limited amount of available video RAM - and how it can be circumvented by applying a cached blocking scheme that loads only blocks of interest into the memory.
Behavioral Indicators of Transformational Leadership in the College Classroom

The purpose of this study was to identify which instructor communication behaviors students believe promote transformational leadership (i.e., charisma, individualized consideration, and intellectual stimulation) in the college classroom. Participants were 166 undergraduate students who wrote three narratives describing behaviors their instructors engaged in that created perceptions of transformational leadership according to Bass's (1985) operationalization. Results of a content analysis (in rank order for each dimension) revealed that (a) charisma was communicated through teacher confirmation, nonverbal immediacy, humor, caring, availability, content relevance, verbal immediacy, attitude homophily, equality, and self-disclosure; (b) individualized consideration was communicated through teacher availability, individualized feedback, verbal immediacy, personalized content, conveying interest, special considerations, student history, and encouraging participation; and (c) intellectual stimulation was communicated through teaching style, challenging students, independent thought, classroom participation, humor, and content relevance.
Stress Biomarkers in Medical Students Participating in a Mind Body Medicine Skills Program

Georgetown University School of Medicine offers an elective Mind-Body Medicine Skills (MBMS) course to medical students to promote self-care and self-awareness. Participating medical students reported better management of academic stress and well-being than non-participants. In this study, we sought to assess the stress-reducing effects of MBMS by measuring physiological changes in first-year medical students. Saliva samples were collected before (January, time 1 (T1)-pre-intervention) and upon completion of the course (May, time 2 (T2p)-post-intervention), as well as from non-participating medical students (May, time 2 (T2c)-control). The T2p and T2c collections coincided with the period of final examinations. Cortisol, dehydroepiandrosterone-sulfate (DHEA-S), testosterone and secretory immunoglobulin A (sIgA) were measured. The mean morning salivary cortisol at T2p was 97% of the mean at baseline T1 which was significantly lower than for T2c (2.4) (95% confidence interval (CI) 0.57–1.60, P = . 001); DHEA-S showed similar pattern as cortisol where the T2p levels were significantly lower than T2c (P < .001) in both morning and evening collections. Testosterone ratio at T2p (0.85) was also lower than T2c (1.6) (95% CI 0.53–1.3, P = .01). sIgA levels were not statistically different. On direct comparison, the T2c and T2p means were significantly different for all cortisol, DHEA-S and testosterone values. Participants maintained their hormonal balance within the normal range throughout the academic semester while the control group showed significantly increased levels, probably exacerbated by the end of the semester exam stress. To our knowledge, this is the first study to assess the physiologic benefits of a MBMS program in medical students.
Relationship between glycocalyx and povidone-iodine resistance in Pseudomonas aeruginosa (ATCC 27853) biofilms

Biofilm-embedded bacteria are generally more resistant to antimicrobial agents than are planktonic bacteria. Two possible mechanisms for biofilm resistance are that the glycocalyx matrix secreted by cells in a biofilm reacts with and neutralizes the antimicrobial agent and that the matrix creates a diffusion barrier to the antimicrobial agent. This study was therefore conducted to examine the relationship between glycocalyx and enhanced povidone-iodine resistance in biofilms of Pseudomonas aeruginosa (ATCC 27853). Biofilms were generated by inoculation of polycarbonate membranes with broth-grown cells and incubation of them on the surfaces of nutrient agar plates. The quantities of glycocalyx material per cell were found not to be significantly different between biofilm and planktonic samples. Transmission electron microscopy showed that the distributions of glycocalyx material around cells differed in biofilm and in planktonic samples. Addition of alginic acid to planktonic cell suspensions resulted in a slight increase in resistance to povidone-iodine, suggesting some neutralizing interaction. However, the iodine demands created by biofilm and planktonic samples of equivalent biomass were not significantly different and, therefore, do not explain the contrast in resistance observed between biofilm and planktonic samples. Examination of the relationship between cell death and biomass detachment from the glycocalyx matrix revealed that most cell death occurred in the fraction of biomass that detached from a biofilm during treatment. The overall rate of iodine diffusion through biofilms was not different from that of planktonic cells collected on a polycarbonate membrane. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)