Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Weak persistency semantics from the ground up: formalising the persistency semantics of ARMv8 and transactional models

Emerging non-volatile memory (NVM) technologies promise the durability of disks with the performance of volatile memory (RAM). To describe the persistency guarantees of NVM, several memory persistency models have been proposed in the literature. However, the formal persistency semantics of mainstream hardware is unexplored to date. To close this gap, we present a formal declarative framework for describing concurrency models in the NVM context, and then develop the PARMv8 persistency model as an instance of our framework, formalising the persistency semantics of the ARMv8 architecture for the first time. To facilitate correct persistent programming, we study transactions as a simple abstraction for concurrency and persistency control. We thus develop the PSER (persistent serialisability) persistency model, formalising transactional semantics in the NVM context for the first time, and demonstrate that PSER correctly compiles to PARMv8. This then enables programmers to write correct, concurrent and persistent programs, without having to understand the low-level architecture-specific persistency semantics of the underlying hardware.
Number of screening rounds and risk of prostate cancer : a systematic review and meta-analysis

Purpose: To clarify the least number of prostate specific antigen (PSA) based screening rounds which is efficient in reducing the prostate cancer (PC) risk. Materials and methods: A systematic search was performed in Pubmed, Embase, Cochrane database of systematic review, web of science, CNKI and VIP databases to identify related articles (last search: August, 2016). The risk ratios (RRs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) of different numbers of screening rounds to reduce the prevalence of PC were calculated to assess the efficacy. Subgroup analysis was conducted according to different follow-up times. Results: A total of 9 randomized controlled trials were included in our analysis. Synthesized data showed that one or two rounds of PSA screening were not helpful in reducing the prevalence of PC (one round: RR = 1.11, 95% CI: 0.88-1.40, P = 0.37; two rounds: RR = 1.35, 95% CI: 0.90-2.02, P = 0.14). The PC prevalence was significantly reduced after three rounds of screening (RR = 0.63, 95% CI: 0.53-0.76, P < 0.00001), including advanced (RR = 0.18, 95% CI: 0.07-0.45, P = 0.0003) and high-grade PC (RR = 0.55, 95% CI = 0.45-0.66, P < 0.00001). Conclusions: At least three rounds of PSA screening are efficient and helpful in reducing PC risk. Thus, repeated screening cycles are necessary when PSA screening is applied on populations.
Factors Influencing Minority Students' Choice of Physical Therapist Education Programs

Background and Purpose. The physical therapy profession does not reflect the racial and cultural diversity of the United States. It is necessary for education programs to focus on improving recruitment of minority applicants to address the shortage of minority physical therapists and to reap the educational benefits of a diverse student population. The purpose of this study was to analyze factors influencing minority student choice of professional (entry‐level) physical therapist education programs. Subjects. The participants included students enrolled in the first professional year of an accredited physical therapist education program. Methods. A survey instrument was developed based on literature and interviews with physical therapist students and faculty members. Face and content validity were acceptable. Using a 5‐point Likert scale, subjects rated the influence of 51 items on their selection of a specific physical therapist education program. Stratified random cluster sampling was applied to select 66 professional physical therapy programs from a population of 150. Results. The return rate was 66%. Results indicated subjects identifying themselves as minority ranked 3 categories higher than nonminority students when selecting a physical therapist education program: (a) cost of the program; (b) ethnic, cultural, and gender considerations; and (c) physical therapist education program faculty. Discussion and Conclusion. Factors influencing minority student program choice differ from those influencing nonminority students. Physical therapist education program administrators may use the results of the study to develop recruitment programs focusing on minority applicants.
globalizaTIOn AFTER THE FINANCIAL CRISIS

General Director of the IESE (University of Navarra), Professor of Economics and Business Administration at the IESE, and Doctor of Economic Sciences and Business Administration (University of Barcelona), Jordi Canals has received Honorary Masters and Doctoral Prizes. He was a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at Harvard University, Visiting Scholar at the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, and Guest Scholar at The Brookings Institution (Washington, D.C.). As well as a Fulbright Scholar and founding member of the European Shadow Financial Regulatory Committee, member of the Commission to Foster Market Transparency and Security (Aldama Commission), and board member of the European Institute for Advanced Studies in Management (Brussels), the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC), the European Corporate Governance Institute, and EQUIS (European accreditation agency). He has published a variety of texts on economics, finance, corporate government, and business administration, including: En busca del equilibrio. Consejos de Administración y alta dirección en el gobierno de la empresa (Pearson, 2008), Managing Corporate Growth (Oxford University Press, 2000), Universal Banking: Theoretical Perspectives and International Comparisons (Oxford University Press, 1997), La internacionalización de la empresa (McGraw-Hill, 1994), and Competitive Strategies in European Banking (Oxford University Press, 1993).
Machine Learning Approaches for Predicting the Severity Level of Software Bug Reports in Closed Source Projects

In Software Development Life Cycle, fixing defect bugs is one of the essential activities of the software maintenance phase. Bug severity indicates how major or minor the bug impacts on the execution of the system and how rapidly the developer should fix it. Triaging a vast amount of new bugs submitted to the software bug repositories is a cumbersome and time-consuming process. Manual triage might lead to a mistake in assigning the appropriate severity level for each bug. As a consequence, a delay for fixing severe software bugs will take place. However, the whole process of assigning the severity level for bug reports should be automated. In this paper, we aim to build prediction models that will be utilized to determine the class of the severity (severe or non-severe) of the reported bug. To validate our approach, we have constructed a dataset from historical bug reports stored in JIRA bug tracking system. These bug reports are related to different closed-source projects developed by INTIX Company located in Amman, Jordan. We compare eight popular machine learning algorithms, namely Naive Bayes, Naive Bayes Multinomial, Support Vector Machine, Decision Tree (J48), Random Forest, Logistic Model Trees, Decision Rules (JRip) and K-Nearest Neighbor in terms of accuracy, F-measure and Area Under the Curve (AUC). According to the experimental results, a Decision Tree algorithm called Logistic Model Trees achieved better performance compared to other machine learning algorithms in terms of Accuracy, AUC and F-measure with values of 86.31, 0.90 and 0.91, respectively.
Diagnostic accuracy of ultrasonography to distinguish between benign and malignant solid breast masses

Patients and methods: This is a Cross sectional study , conducted in Rizgary Teaching Hospital / Radiology Department and Maternity Teaching Hospital /Breast Center in Erbil from April 2014 to March 2015 . Ultrasonographic evaluation of 100 patients with breast lumps was done . Diagnosis was made considering four features of the lumps i.e. shape, margins, width, A/P ratio and echogenicity. Diagnosis was confirmed by fine needle aspiration cytology or histopathology.
AGE AND L1 USE EFFECTS ON DEGREE OF FOREIGN ACCENT IN ENGLISH

This study assessed the relation between nonnative subjects’ age of learning English, self-reported amount of L1 (Italian) use, and overall degree of perceived foreign accent in the L2 (English). Native English listeners evaluated English sentences spoken by English monolinguals and Italian/English bilinguals. The native Italian subjects were assigned to one of two groups of early bilinguals who differed according to their percentage use of Italian, or to one of two groups of late bilinguals differing in the same way. Both early and late bilinguals who spoke Italian frequently had significantly stronger accents in English than agematched bilinguals who spoke Italian infrequently. This suggests that the degree of activation of the L1 affects L2 production accuracy regardless of a bilingual’s age of L2 acquisition.
Therapy-resistant enuresis In search of new therapies and prognostic markers

Lundmark, E. 2019. Therapy-resistant enuresis. In search of new therapies and prognostic markers. Digital Comprehensive Summaries of Uppsala Dissertations from the Faculty of Medicine 1584. 60 pp. Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis. ISBN 978-91-513-0701-5. A large minority of children with enuresis do not respond to treatment with either desmopressin or the enuresis alarm. Anticholinergics have not proven as successful as expected. The fourth evidence-based treatment of enuresis, the tricyclic antidepressant imipramine, is cardiotoxic when overdosed, which has led to diminished use. Since the long-term consequences of enuresis are potentially grave it is important that effective treatments of therapy-resistant enuresis are found. When investigating the enuretic child a full voiding-chart in addition to the case history is the method of choice. However, there is no robust evidence that daytime voiding chart data actually do predict nocturnal detrusor function. The aim of this thesis was to determine whether there is a role for the noradrenergic antidepressant reboxetine in the treatment of therapy-resistant enuresis, and whether anamnestic data and the voiding chart provides prognostic information regarding response to treatment with anticholinergics and antidepressants respectively in therapy-resistant patients. In a retrospective evaluation of 61 children who for humanitarian purposes had been treated with reboxetine 32(52%) responded to this treatment, 21 of them after desmopressin had been added. We then proceeded with a randomized placebo-controlled study with 18 patients, in which the reduction of wet nights was much better with either reboxetine in monotherapy or in combination with desmopressin than during the placebo period (p=0.002). However, no patient achieved complete dryness. No prognostic markers for therapy-response were found in either of these studies. In the randomized study we also sought to investigate whether reboxetine had any statistically significant effect on voiding-chart data. No such effect was found, but in respect to this secondary aim the sample size was too small. Nonetheless , this led to the speculation whether reboxetine exerts its antienuretic effect via modulation of arousal mechanisms. Prognostic markers were sought in a retrospective evaluation of 154 patients treated with anticholinergics or antidepressants, but few and inconsistent differences were found between the groups responding or not responding to the various treatment regimens, and this was true both for anamnestic and voiding chart data. In conclusion reboxetine seems to be an alternative in the treatment of enuretic children who have not responded to standard treatment, but further trials with higher doses and larger study populations are needed. The internationally recommended assessment of children with therapyresistant enuresis does not seem to give the prognostic information intended.
PC-Fairness: A Unified Framework for Measuring Causality-based Fairness

A recent trend of fair machine learning is to define fairness as causality-based notions which concern the causal connection between protected attributes and decisions. However, one common challenge of all causality-based fairness notions is identifiability, i.e., whether they can be uniquely measured from observational data, which is a critical barrier to applying these notions to real-world situations. In this paper, we develop a framework for measuring different causality-based fairness. We propose a unified definition that covers most of previous causality-based fairness notions, namely the path-specific counterfactual fairness (PC fairness). Based on that, we propose a general method in the form of a constrained optimization problem for bounding the path-specific counterfactual fairness under all unidentifiable situations. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets show the correctness and effectiveness of our method.
Efficacy of biocontrol agents on Myrothecium roridum , the stem necrosis and leaf spot pathogen of coffee seedlings

Myrothecium roridum, pathogen of coffee seedlings causing stem necrosis and leaf spot particularly during the continuous rains results in seedling loss up to 33%. The present study was taken up to know the efficacy of the native bioagents isolated from coffee rhizosphere soil for the control of M. roridum under in vitro conditions. Efficacy of two Trichoderma and six bacteria was tested in the laboratory conditions. The results of the experiment indicated that both the Trichoderma isolates: Trichoderma harzianum (CRF1) and Trichoderma viride (CRF-2) effectively inhibited the mycelial growth of the pathogen, M. roridum up to 100% and 85% respectively whereas among the six bacterial isolates evaluated, two bacteria viz., Bacillus subtilis (CRB-2) and Pseudomonas fluorescens (CRB-5) were more effective in inhibiting the mycelial growth of the pathogen M. roridum up to 55.50% and 50.60% respectively. The effective bioagents identified from this study could be utilized for in vivo studies to assess their efficacy and to device better control measures for stem necrosis and leaf spot disease of coffee seedlings.
Growth Effects of Environmental Policy , when Production and Pollution Abatement Technologies are Embodied in Separate Intermediates

A Schumpeterian growth model is developed to investigate how environmental policy affects economic growth. In contrast to previous models, production and pollution abatement technologies are embodied in separate intermediate good types. In this setting, I show analytically that a tightening of the environmental policy unambiguously dampens economic growth. Simulation results indicate that the growth rate of pollution emission is more sensitive to changes in the environmental policy than the growth rate of output. In addition, old and new stylized facts concerning economic growth and pollution emission are presented, and the model is shown to match these stylized facts.
Comparison of articulatory strategies for a bilingual speaker : Preliminary data and models

This study serves the goal of comparing the articulatory strategies used by bilinguals, to better understand both bilingualism and the differences between languages. We have therefore obtained mid-sagittal MRI scans of a bilingual talker producing all the phonemes in both his native American English (AE) and in French (FR), a second language in which he is highly fluent. We compared his articulatory contours in the two languages through: 1) direct comparison of the contours of analogous phonemes, 2) comparison of articulatory nomograms, and 3) crossed reconstructions of one language’s articulations by a model based on the other language. Various interesting observations were made, including that labial protrusion in vowels is greater in FR than in AE, and that tongue body movements were greater and more oriented toward fronting in AE than in FR.
Family-Centered Early Intervention

The term family-centered early intervention refers to both a philosophy of care and a set of practices. Both have been used to guide research, training, and service delivery for well over a decade. Unfortunately, though, the universal adoption of family-centered values and practice in early intervention is problematic for a number of reasons. This article will discuss these reasons in the context of the current state of early intervention and provide recommendations for the new millennium.
Organization based cross-subsidization : Who must pay to incentivize managers ?

We study a competitive model in which firms’ organization structure is determined jointly with production and contractual decisions. Firm shareholders can either delegate production to a selfinterested manager, or run the business on their own. Because of labor specialization, managers are more efficient than shareholders: the bright side of delegation. But, due to moral hazard, they can divert part of the firm revenues in order to enjoy private benefits at the shareholders’ expense: the dark side of delegation. We characterize the competitive equilibrium of the model and find necessary and sufficient conditions under which this outcome does not maximize social welfare. Considering alternative informational regimes, we then characterize the welfare maximizing budget-balancing fiscal policy. If it is possible to tax and subsidize firms based on their shareholders’ monitoring ability, the first best is implemented by a policy that taxes delegated firms and subsidizes self-managed ones. This cross-subsidization scheme may however fail to implement the first-best when demand is sufficiently inelastic to price. In this case, the planner is willing to tolerate an equilibrium with a (second best) optimal number of self-managed firms. Finally, when the planner does not observe shareholders’ monitoring ability, it is impossible to design a cross subsidization policy that screen shareholders. In this case, the (third-best) policy features pooling and yields an outcome worst than the second best one. JEL Classification: L2 D2 H21
Effects of Flexible Knowledge Inflow Structures and Environmental Analysis on Strategic Planning Performance

Recently uncertainty and risk along aside with the close competition that has been increasing are what limits the companies operations, their strategic planning, and their performance. This motivates firms to look for sustainable solutions to fight the shortening in their life expectancy. Right decisions regarding the suitable strategy at a certain time are taken by accumulating adequate information on environmental changes and terms of competition. Strategic planning’s main goal is to find the best strategy available by integrating as many relevant factors as possible to have the best robust results. The aim of this study is to construct a model that demonstrate the relevance of the mediator impact of environmental analysis on the relationship between the information inflow structure of companies and the scope of strategic planning. The results accumulated shows that companies, which include the information from their sub-units along with accurate analysis of surrounding circumstances, are able to prepare better comprehensive strategic plans.
Place Shift as an Autonomous Process: Evidence from Japanese Listeners

A perception experiment with Japanese listeners is conducted to investigate the nature of place shift phenomenon that was previously found with French and English listeners. Hallé et al. [1] showed that unattested consonant sequences /tl, dl/ are perceptually repaired to form grammatically acceptable consonant clusters /kl, gl/ in the listeners’ native language. In this study, a similar experiment with Japanese listeners, whose mother tongue lacks the onset clusters altogether, is conducted. The result explicitly shows that the place shift phenomenon ought not to be interpreted in relation to the topdown phonotactic feedback. Rather, I will argue that both labial and velar shift reflect an autonomous, signal-driven process. As such, language specificity in speech perception must reside in the listeners’ cue weighting, rather than encoded linguistic knowledge.
Physical Activity among Preschool Children

The physical activity habits of children are established as early as the first year of life and have been suggested to follow many children through their school years into adulthood. We know that obesity and risks of cardiovascular diseases, for instance, are developed as early as the first few years of childhood. Studies show that blood vessel changes and other factors, which are the initial signs of incipient cardiovascular disease, are detected as early as in 3-year-olds, who have several risk factors, such as elevated body mass index (BMI), high blood pressure and elevated blood fat and cholesterol counts (1). A correlation between these risk factors and the amount of physical activity in 9year-olds and 15-year-olds has been established in European Youth Heart Studies (EYHS) (2, 3). Very few studies, however, have examined how physical activity measures aimed at preschool children would affect various health parameters. Accordingly, only limited knowledge exists of whether insufficient physical exercise in early childhood is deleterious. Yet based on existing knowledge about the beneficial effect of physical activity among schoolchildren, our hypothesis is that a certain amount of physical activity as early as preschool age is important to the health of these preschoolers now and later on in life. Statistics Denmark has noted that 95 per cent of all children aged 3 to 5 attend a kindergarten school or similar age-integrated institution. This means that almost all the children in this age group are involved in some sort of childcare scheme every day. Much of their day is spent at a kindergarten which, accordingly, should also provide an environment that promotes a substantial physical activity among the children. Our knowledge of children’s patterns of physical activity at kindergarten is limited, as only a few valid studies have been carried out (primarily in the US), and few research groups have focused on this topic. Thus, a study of the extent of physical activity among children during the time spent at kindergarten that identifies the determinants of their activity patterns would be most relevant. For quite some time, we have wanted to study the effects of physical activity on the health of preschool children. Prior to embarking on this type of study, however, we needed a more extensive insight into the determinants of physical activity among children at kindergartens and, for this reason we recently carried out a pilot study.
Surgeries for Snoring, Obstructive Sleep Apnea Syndrome, and Upper Airway Resistance Syndrome

PLEASE NOTE: Contracts exclude from coverage, among other things, services or procedures that are considered investigational or cosmetic. Providers may bill members for services or procedures that are considered investigational or cosmetic. Providers are encouraged to inform members before rendering such services that the members are likely to be financially responsible for the cost of these services.
Identification Robust Testing of Risk Premia in Finite Samples

The reliability of tests on the risk premia in linear factor models is threatened by limited sample sizes and weak identification of risk premia frequently encountered in applied work. We propose novel tests on the risk premia that are robust to both limited sample sizes and the identification strength of the risk premia as reflected by the quality of the risk factors. These tests are appealing for empirically relevant settings, and lead to confidence sets of risk premia that can substantially differ from conventional ones. To show the latter, we revisit two high-profile empirical applications. JEL Classification: G12