Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Risk Factors, Causes, and Costs of Hospital Readmission After Head and Neck Cancer Surgery Reconstruction

Importance Thirty-day hospital readmissions have substantial direct costs and are increasingly used as a measure of quality care. However, data regarding the risk factors and reasons for readmissions in head and neck cancer surgery reconstruction are lacking. Objective To describe the rate, risk factors, and causes of 30-day readmission in patients with head and neck cancer following free or pedicled flap reconstruction. Design, Setting, and Participants This retrospective, population-based cohort study analyzed medical records from the Nationwide Readmissions Database of 9487 patients undergoing pedicled or free flap reconstruction of head and neck oncologic defects between January 1, 2010, and December 31, 2014. Data analysis was performed in October 2017. Exposures Pedicled or free flap reconstruction of an oncologic head and neck defect. Main Outcomes and Measures The primary outcome was 30-day all-cause readmissions. Secondary outcomes included risk factors, causes, and costs of readmission. Multivariate regression analyses were conducted to determine factors independently associated with 30-day readmissions. Results Among 9487 patients included in the study (6798 male; 71.7%), the median age was 63 years (interquartile range, 55-71 years), and the 30-day readmission rate was 19.4% (n = 1839), with a mean cost per readmission of $15 916 (standard error of the mean, $785). The most common indication for readmission was wound complication (26.5%, n = 487). On multivariate regression, significant risk factors for 30-day readmission were median household income in the lowest quartile (vs highest quartile: odds ratio [OR], 1.58; 95% CI, 1.18-2.11), congestive heart failure (OR, 1.68; 95% CI, 1.14-2.47), liver disease (OR, 2.02; 95% CI, 1.22- 3.33), total laryngectomy (OR, 1.40; 95% CI, 1.12-1.75), pharyngectomy (OR, 1.47; 95% CI, 1.08-2.01), blood transfusion (OR, 1.30; 95% CI, 1.04-1.64), discharge to home with home health care (vs routine: OR, 1.32; 95% CI, 1.04-1.67), and discharge to a nursing facility (vs routine: OR, 1.77; 95% CI, 1.30-2.40). Conclusions and Relevance Using the Nationwide Readmissions Database, we demonstrate that approximately 1 in 5 patients undergoing head and neck cancer surgery reconstruction is readmitted within 30 days of surgery. Readmissions are most commonly associated with wound complications. Socioeconomic status, complex ablative procedures, and patient comorbidities are independent risk factors for readmission. These findings may be useful to clinicians in developing perioperative interventions aimed to reduce hospital readmissions and improve quality of patient care.
An Electrohydraulic Actuation Scheme Using Novel Piezoelectrically-Actuated Nozzle Flapper Valve

This paper proposes a new electro hydraulic proportional actuation scheme, in which a piezoelectric ring bender actuating a nozzle flapper valve is adopted to directly control a single-ended actuator. The piezoelectric ring bender is a less complex, lighter and more reliable alternative to a conventional torque motor. The nozzle flapper valve is used as the only hydraulic control component, rather than a first stage amplifier in traditional servovalves, which allows the whole actuation system to response faster. Due to the lack of flapper displacement feedback, the valve used here is a proportional valve instead of a servovalve in this actuation system. In order to evaluate the performance of the actuator, a system-level mathematical model was built, where the piezoelectric hysteresis effect and the position of the ring bender on the flapper are considered. An analytical solution was implemented by using Matlab/Simulink. Results show that the actuation system proposed in this paper exhibits fast response, good controllability and linearity. A virtual prototype of the actuator is designed to analyze the arrangement. This has potential for use in situations where min load, fast response and high reliability actuation are required.
“Is This Class Hard?” Defining and Analyzing Academic Rigor from a Learner’s Perspective

Despite its value in higher education, academic rigor is a challenging construct to define for instructor and students alike. How do students perceive academic rigor in their biology course work? Using qualitative surveys, we asked students to identify “easy” or “hard” courses and define which aspects of these learning experiences contributed to their perceptions of academic rigor. The 100-level students defined hard courses primarily in affective terms, responding to stressors such as fast pacing, high workload, unclear relevance to their life or careers, and low faculty support. In contrast, 300-level students identified cognitive complexity as a contributor to course rigor, but course design elements—alignment between instruction and assessments, faculty support, active pedagogy—contributed to the ease of the learning process. Overwhelmingly, all students identified high faculty support, learner-centered course design, adequate prior knowledge, and active, well-scaffolded pedagogy as significant contributors to a course feeling easy. Active-learning courses in this study were identified as both easy and hard for the very reasons they are effective: they simultaneously challenge and support student learning. Implications for the design and instruction of rigorous active-learning college biology experiences are discussed.
Social Networks of Children With Developmental Language Disorder in Inclusive Preschool Programs.

This study takes an ecological approach to examine how children with developmental language disorder (DLD) interact with their classmates within early childhood special education (ECSE) inclusive classrooms. Participants were 124 children with DLD, 56 children with other disabilities, and 247 typically developing children (Mage = 52.42 months, SD = 6.27) from 56 ECSE inclusive classrooms. Results of social network analysis showed that children with DLD had significantly smaller peer social networks and were more likely to be isolated. Children tended to interact with peers with the same DLD status. These effects of children's DLD status were above and beyond the effects of children's social pragmatics skills.
Regulation by Dietary Carbohydrates of Intermediary Metabolism in Liver and Muscle of Two Isogenic Lines of Rainbow Trout

Rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) is recognized as a typical “glucose-intolerant” fish, and the limits of dietary carbohydrate utilization have been investigated for many years. In this study, the objective was to test the molecular effects of dietary carbohydrates on intermediary metabolism in two major metabolic tissues, liver and muscle. Another objective was also to study if the response to carbohydrate intake depended on the genetic background. We fed two isogenic lines of rainbow trout (named A22h and N38h) with high carbohydrate diet (carbohydrate, 22.9%) or low carbohydrate diet (carbohydrate, 3.6%) for 12 weeks. Carbohydrates were associated with higher feed utilization owned by the well-known protein-sparing effect, with better fish growth performance. However, atypical regulation of glycolysis and gluconeogenesis in liver and absence of hk and glut4 induction in muscle, were also observed. Regarding the effects of carbohydrates on other metabolism, we observed an increased, at a molecular level, of hepatic cholesterol biosynthesis, fatty acid oxidation and mitochondrial energy metabolism. Genetic variability (revealed by the differences between the two isogenic lines) was observed for some metabolic genes especially for those involved in the EPA and DHA biosynthetic capacity. Finally, our study demonstrates that dietary carbohydrate not only affect glucose metabolism but also strongly impact the lipid and energy metabolism in liver and muscle of trout.
Cognitive Deficit of Deep Learning in Numerosity

Subitizing, or the sense of small natural numbers, is an innate cognitive function of humans and primates; it responds to visual stimuli prior to the development of any symbolic skills, language or arithmetic. Given successes of deep learning (DL) in tasks of visual intelligence and given the primitivity of number sense, a tantalizing question is whether DL can comprehend numbers and perform subitizing. But somewhat disappointingly, extensive experiments of the type of cognitive psychology demonstrate that the examples-driven black box DL cannot see through superficial variations in visual representations and distill the abstract notion of natural number, a task that children perform with high accuracy and confidence. The failure is apparently due to the learning method not the CNN computational machinery itself. A recurrent neural network capable of subitizing does exist, which we construct by encoding a mechanism of mathematical morphology into the CNN convolutional kernels. Also, we investigate, using subitizing as a test bed, the ways to aid the black box DL by cognitive priors derived from human insight. Our findings are mixed and interesting, pointing to both cognitive deficit of pure DL, and some measured successes of boosting DL by predetermined cognitive implements. This case study of DL in cognitive computing is meaningful for visual numerosity represents a minimum level of human intelligence.
Predicting Dropout in Higher Education Based on Secondary School Performance

Predicting student performance, preventing failure and identifying the factors influencing student dropout are issues that have attracted a great deal of research interest recently. In this study, we employ and evaluate several machine learning algorithms to identify students at-risk and predict student dropout of university programs based on the data available at the time of enrollment (secondary school performance, personal details). We also present a data-driven decision support platform for education directorate and stakeholders. The models are built on data of 15,825 undergraduate students from Budapest University of Technology and Economics enrolled between 2010 and 2017 and finished their undergraduate studies either by graduation or dropping out. We handle the problem of missing data by imputation. After performing feature extraction and feature selection, a wide range of classifiers have been trained including Decision Tree-based algorithms, Naive Bayes, k-NN, Linear Models and Deep Learning with different input settings. The methods were tested using 10-fold cross-validation and the AUC of the best models, Gradient Boosted Trees and Deep Learning, were 0.808 and 0.811 respectively.
Association of eosinophil-to-monocyte ratio with 1-month and long-term all-cause mortality in patients with ST-elevation myocardial infarction undergoing primary percutaneous coronary intervention.

Background To determine the relationship between eosinophil-to-monocyte ratio (EMR) on admission and one-month and long-term all-cause mortality in patients with ST-elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI) undergoing primary percutaneous coronary intervention (P-PCI). Methods A total of 426 consecutive STEMI patients treated with P-PCI were enrolled and categorized in terms of tertiles of EMR on admission between September 2015 and October 2017. Final follow-up for long-term outcomes was January 2017. Results As EMR decreased, all-cause mortality at 1 month (mean, 29.5±3.5 days) and at mean 14.1±7.8 months follow-up increased (P=0.012, P=0.003, respectively). Kaplan-Meier survival curve analysis showed EMR was associated with 1-month and long-term all-cause mortality (P=0.048, P=0.015, respectively). In multivariate Cox proportional hazards analysis, EMR was independently associated with one-month and long-term mortality (hazard ratio =0.097; 95% CI, 0.010-0.899; P=0.04; hazard ration =0.176; 95% CI, 0.045-0.694; P=0.013). The area under the curve of EMR for the prediction of 1-month and long-term total mortality in receiver operating characteristic analysis was 0.789 (95% CI, 0.658-0.921; P=0.003) and 0.752 (95% CI, 0.619-0.884; P=0.001), respectively. Conclusions EMR on admission was independently correlated with 1-month and long-term all-cause mortality in STEMI patients undergoing P-PCI, suggesting EMR as a potential simple, useful, and inexpensive index for risk stratification of STEMI patients.
Diskriminierung im Auswahlprozess: Überschneidungen von ethnischer Herkunft und Geschlecht

Bibliographie: Baldsch, Sebastian/Heinisch, Christoph A. /Sieben, Barbara: Diskriminierung im Auswahlprozess: Uberschneidungen von ethnischer Herkunft und Geschlecht, ZDfm, 1-2018, S. 68-73. https://doi.org/10.3224/zdfm.v3i1. 07
Analyzing The Benefit of ERP Implementation in Developing Country: A State Owned Company Case Study

The purpose of this article is to provide further insights into the adoption of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and the benefits of ERP implementation in Indonesia state-owned companies: PT. Garuda Indonesia and PT. Semen Indonesia. A qualitative study was conducted to collect data on several benefit categories that company may achieve through ERP implementation. Research data obtained by conducting interviews to 9 people which represents four main business units: financial and accounting, operational and logistic, marketing and sales, and human resources. The interviewee has varied position from operational to strategical position. The results of this study are the list of business benefits obtained by companies from ERP implementation and can be used as a reference of similar companies who want to implement ERP or as a framework to measure the success of ERP implementation in the company.
Effects of feed form and particle size, and pellet binder on performance, digestive tract parameters, intestinal morphology, and cecal microflora populations in broilers

ABSTRACT This study was conducted to assess the effects of feed form (FF), particle size (PS), and pellet binder (PB) on performance, digestive tract parameters, intestinal morphology, and cecal microflora populations in broiler chicks. Two FF (mash and pellet), two feed PS (fine and coarse), and two levels of PB (0 and 3%) were evaluated in a completely randomized design with a 2 × 2 × 2 factorial arrangement of treatments. A total of 256 one‐day‐old male Ross 308 chicks were allocated into 8 treatments consisting of 8 replicates (4 birds/cage) with equal weight from 25 to 42 d of age. The results showed a three‐way interaction among FF, PS, and PB for growth performance in broilers. The growth performance parameters were significantly improved by feeding the pellet‐coarse PS‐3% PB diet in comparison to the other treatments (P < 0.05). Birds fed pelleted diets had lower relative weight of the gizzard and pancreas, goblet cell (GC) number of the duodenum, crypt depth (CD) of the jejunum, higher villus height (VH) of the duodenum, and cecal spore‐forming bacteria population (P < 0.05). Coarse PS resulted in lower jejunum CD and higher cecal count of lactic acid bacteria (LAB) and spore‐forming bacteria (P < 0.05). Adding PB significantly improved pellet durability index (PDI) (P < 0.05). In addition, coarse PS‐3% PB diets had higher pellet hardness. Also, adding PB to diets significantly (P < 0.05) decreased cecal spore‐forming bacteria population. Pellet‐coarse PS‐3% PB diets fed broilers had a lower (P < 0.05) cecal Clostridium spp. bacterial population. The main factors had no significant effect (P > 0.05) on cecal Coliform spp. levels. Birds fed pellet‐3% PB diets had higher VH:CD ratio both in the duodenum and jejunum, and those fed mash‐3% PB diets had significantly (P < 0.05) lower VH in the jejunum than other treatments. Overall, pellet‐coarse PS‐3% PB diets improved growth performance through the positive changes on intestinal morphology of broilers under short‐term conditioning (STC).
Big Data Security Approach in Cloud: Review

In big data era, data may be in the form of structured, unstructured and semi-structured. They become an asset for companies that contain important insights and support in decision-making processes. Big data is one of technologies that used by many organizations for managing store data and data analysis. Therefore, storage management is one of important processes in big data management to ensure that data are stored correctly, safely and easily to be accessed. Despite having many advantages, big data technology still has several issues on storage management, especially if we relate between big data and cloud computing, such as data security which is very important. In this paper, we reviewed the previous works for data security in storage management in big data technology and provide a suggestion to answer the challenge of data security.
To Access the Effects of Salivary Factors on Dental Caries among Diabetic Patients and Non Diabetic Patients in Jodhpur City

Introduction: Dental caries has been more prevalent and even severe in diabetic patients than non diabetics. Salivary factors have been studied for their effects on the process of dental caries in patients of diabetes mellitus type 2. The objective of this study is to access the effect of salivary calcium, salivary fl ow rate, salivary PH , on dental caries among type -2 diabetes patient and non diabetic patients. Martials and Methods: The samples of saliva were collected from 30 patients of diabetes mellitus type 2 and 30 age and sex matched controls after getting informed consent. Clinical data was collected by using modifi ed WHO oral health survey basic method 1997 dentition status index was taken for dental caries. The salivary sample was collected to analyse salivary pH, salivary fl ow rate and salivary calcium. Results: The salivary pH, fl ow rate, and calcium levels were found to be low in patients as compared to controls. The glycemic factors were signifi cantly correlated with salivary factors indicating their infl uence on progression of caries in diabetes. Conclusion: On the basis of fi ndings, it is concluded that the suitable salivary pH and fl ow rate may be regarded as main protective factors against dental caries in diabetes. Optimum level of salivary calcium may be responsible for continuous supply of calcium to arrest the demineralization and help reduce the occurrence of dental caries
The distribution and pattern of neurological disease in a neurology clinic in Ile-Ife, Nigeria

Background: Neurological disorders are common and contribute significantly to disease burden, disability-adjusted life years and death. Objective: To assess the distribution of neurological disease in patients presenting to our hospital. Methods: The records of the Adult Neurology Clinic in Obafemi Awolowo University Teaching Hospitals Complex, Ile-Ife, Osun state, Nigeria were reviewed retrospectively for the years 2003-2005 and 2010-2014, and diagnoses as made by the Consultant were obtained and analyzed. Results: The total number of complaints was 1,524 and 86.4% of these were neurological in nature. Episodic and paroxysmal disorders (ICD-10) accounted for 54.1% of the diagnoses, and epilepsy and stroke were the most common of these. Of the 1,226 patients seen during the period, 91.4% had neurological disorders. The peak occurrence of these disorders was within the first three decades of life. Conclusion: Epilepsy and stroke are the commonest neurological disorders in the outpatient setting and there should be more studies in the community on their prevalence and impact.
Knowledge and Attitude of Parents Towards the First Seizure Episode in Children in Yaounde, Cameroon

Aim: Seizures are common in the pediatric age group and occur in approximately 10% of children. Parents often experience anxiety and fear if seizures in the child occur in their presence at home. Parental response is mostly determined by their knowledge on seizures. The aim of this study was to assess the knowledge and attitudes of mothers towards the first seizure of their children in the Cameroonian context. Material and Methods: A cross sectional and descriptive study was conducted in Yaounde in Cameroon, over a period of six months. Included in the study, were mothers whose children were hospitalized for seizures. The seizure had to be the very first in the child, and had never occurred in the other siblings. Results: A total of 100 mothers were interviewed. Most mothers (88%) had heard of convulsions, and the main source of information was mothers and/or relatives in 89.8% of the mothers. Upward eye deviation was the most common description in 35.1% of the mothers. According to the mothers, the main causes of seizures were high fever (47%) and malaria. However, 20.9% had no idea whatsoever of the cause. The main consequences according to the mothers were, death (32.1%), and mental disorders (22.9%). Besides some mothers admitted they had no idea (20.2%). As to their knowledge on the management of seizures only, 20.9% admitted they will rush the child to a hospital for urgent treatment. Almost all (98%) were frightened during the seizures, and the main reason for this fear was that the child might die (91%). Conclusion: Parental knowledge on seizures was insufficient which explains their inappropriate attitudes. Parents should therefore be well educated on seizures with emphasis on the importance of appropriate home responses.
Functional Connectivity During Handgrip Motor Fatigue in Older Adults Is Obesity and Sex-Specific

The prevalence of obesity in older adults, particularly in females, is increasing rapidly and is associated with declines in both the brain and physical health. Both the obese and the female populations have shown greater motor fatigue than their counterparts, however, the central neural mechanisms for fatigue are unclear. The present study measured fatigue-related functional connectivity across frontal and sensorimotor areas using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). Fifty-nine older adults (30 non-obese and 29 obese) performed submaximal handgrip motor fatigue until voluntary exhaustion. Functional connectivity and cerebral hemodynamics were compared across eight cortical areas during motor fatigue and across obesity and sex groups along with neuromuscular fatigue outcomes (i.e., endurance time, strength loss, and force steadiness). Both obesity- and sex-specific functional architecture and mean activation differences during motor fatigue in older adults were observed, which were accompanied by fatigue-related changes in variability of force steadiness that differed between groups. While primary indicators of fatigue, i.e., endurance and strength loss, did not differ between groups, the motor steadiness changes indicated different neural adaptation strategies between the groups. These findings indicate that obesity and sex differences exist in brain function in older adults, which may affect performance during motor fatigue.