Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The reliability and validity of the informant AD8 by comparison with a series of cognitive assessment tools in primary healthcare

ABSTRACT Background: The validity and reliability of the informant AD8 in primary healthcare has not been established. Therefore, the present study examined the validity and reliability of the informant AD8 in government subsidized primary healthcare centers in Singapore. Methods: Eligible patients (≥60 years old) were recruited from primary healthcare centers and their informants received the AD8. Patient-informant dyads who agreed for further cognitive assessments received the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE), Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA), Clinical Dementia Rating (CDR), and a locally validated formal neuropsychological battery at a research center in a tertiary hospital. Results: 1,082 informants completed AD8 assessment at two primary healthcare centers. Of these, 309 patients-informant dyads were further assessed, of whom 243 (78.6%) were CDR = 0; 22 (7.1%) were CDR = 0.5; and 44 (14.2%) were CDR≥1. The mean administration time of the informant AD8 was 2.3 ± 1.0 minutes. The informant AD8 demonstrated good internal consistency (Cronbach's α = 0.85); inter-rater reliability (Intraclass Correlation Coefficient (ICC) = 0.85); and test–retest reliability (weighted κ = 0.80). Concurrent validity, as measured by the correlation between total AD8 scores and CDR global (R = 0.65, p < 0.001), CDR sum of boxes (R = 0.60, p < 0.001), MMSE (R = −0.39, p < 0.001), MoCA (R = −0.41, p < 0.001), as well as the formal neuropsychological battery (R = −0.46, p < 0.001), was good and consistent with previous studies. Construct validity, as measured by convergent validity (R ≥ 0.4) between individual items of AD8 with CDR and neuropsychological domains was acceptable. Conclusions: The informant AD8 demonstrated good concurrent and construct validity and is a reliable measure to detect cognitive dysfunction in primary healthcare.
MANAGERIAL IMPLICATIONS OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CUSTOMER CARE AND PURCHASE INTENTION IN ONLINE SHOPPING

This paper studies customer care as an important factor that affects the performance of B2C e-commerce websites. A survey was conducted to 464 Turkish B2C website customers. Analysis method of this study is partial least square structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). Specifically, customer care in B2C e-commerce web sites is found to have direct effect on perceived value and indirect effect on purchase intention via perceived value and brand loyalty. Besides relationship between customer care and purchase intention was found as insignificant. The most important contribution of this research is the unveiling of the indirect relationship between customer care and purchase intention. This study also offers some important manageral suggestions for B2C web sites.
Virulence of Staphylococcus aureus Small Colony Variants in the Caenorhabditis elegans Infection Model

ABSTRACT Small colony variants (SCVs) of Staphylococcus aureus are slow-growing morphological variants that have been implicated in persistent, relapsing, and antibiotic-resistant infections. The altered phenotype of SCVs in most strains has been attributed to defects in electron transport due to mutations in hemin or menadione biosynthesis. The pathogenic capacity of SCVs compared to phenotypically normal strains is variable depending on the attribute examined, with some studies showing reduced virulence of SCVs and others demonstrating normal or heightened virulence. Recently, the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans has been successfully employed as an alternative host to investigate virulence mechanisms of a variety of bacterial pathogens, including S. aureus. In this study, we show that clinical SCVs as well as hemB- and menD-deficient mutants of S. aureus are greatly reduced in virulence in the C. elegans infection model.
Social Attribute-Aware Force Model: Exploiting Richness of Interaction for Abnormal Crowd Detection

Interactions among pedestrians usually play an important role in understanding crowd behavior. However, there are great challenges, such as occlusions, motion, and appearance variance, on accurate analysis of pedestrian interactions. In this paper, we introduce a novel social attribute-aware force model (SAFM) for detection of abnormal crowd events. The proposed model incorporates social characteristics of crowd behaviors to improve the description of interactive behaviors. To this end, we first efficiently estimate the scene scale in an unsupervised manner. Then, we introduce the concepts of social disorder and congestion attributes to characterize the interaction of social behaviors, and construct our crowd interaction model on the basis of social force by an online fusion strategy. These attributes encode social interaction characteristics and offer robustness against motion pattern variance. Abnormal event detection is finally performed based on the proposed SAFM. In addition, the attribute-aware interaction force indicates the possible locations of anomalous interactions. We validate our method on the publicly available data sets for abnormal detection, and the experimental results show promising performance compared with alternative and state-of-the-art methods.
Formulation and in vitro evaluation of ethyl cellulose microspheres containing zidovudine

The aim of this study was to formulate and evaluate microencapsulated controlled release preparations of zidovudine using ethyl cellulose as the retardant material with high entrapment efficiency and extended release. Microspheres were prepared by water-in-oil-in-oil (w/o/o) double emulsion solvent diffusion method. A mixed solvent system (MSS) consisting of acetonitrile and dichloromethane in a 1:1 ratio and light liquid paraffin were chosen as primary and secondary oil phases, respectively. Span 80 was used as the surfactant for stabilizing the secondary oil phase. The prepared microspheres were white, free flowing and spherical in shape and characterized by drug loading, infrared spectroscopy (IR), differential scanning colorimetry (DSC) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The in vitro release studies were performed using PH 7.4 phosphate buffer. The drug loaded microspheres showed 41–55% of entrapment and release was extended up to 18–20 h. The infrared spectra and DSC and DTA thermograms showed stable character of zidovudine in the drug loaded microspheres and revealed the absence of drug-polymer interactions. SEM studies showed that the microspheres are spherical and porous in nature. Data obtained from in vitro release were fitted to various kinetic models and high correlation was obtained in the Higuchi model. The drug release was found to be diffusion controlled.
Cardiac Troponin I and Amino‐Terminal Pro B‐Type Natriuretic Peptide in Dogs With Stable Chronic Kidney Disease

Background Increased concentrations of N‐terminal pro B‐type natriuretic peptide (NT‐proBNP) and cardiac troponin I (cTnI) in dogs with azotemia have been documented. Knowledge of mechanisms behind increased concentrations of cardiac biomarkers in dogs with azotemia is warranted for correct interpretation of test results. Objectives The aim of the article was to investigate possible associations between plasma concentrations of cTnI and NT‐proBNP, respectively, and patient characteristics, glomerular filtration rate (GFR), a plasma volume factor (PVF) derived from scintigraphic examination (PVf), systolic blood pressure (SBP), selected hematologic and biochemical variables, and echocardiographic measurements in dogs with stable chronic kidney disease (CKD) and in healthy dogs. Animals Fifty student‐, staff‐, and client‐owned dogs were included. Twenty‐three of the dogs were healthy and 27 were diagnosed with CKD. Methods In this cross‐sectional observational study, dogs with a previous diagnosis of CKD and healthy control dogs were included. At inclusion, all dogs were characterized by physical examination, repeated blood pressure measurements, complete urinalysis, hematology and biochemistry panel, echocardiography, abdominal ultrasound examination of the entire urinary tract, and scintigraphic examination for measurement of GFR. Results Plasma volume factor and PCV were independently associated with NT‐proBNP (Radj2 = 0.42; P < .0001). Age, body weight (BW), and SBP were independently associated with cTnI (Radj2 = 0.50; P < .0001). Conclusions and Clinical Importance Neither NT‐proBNP nor cTnI concentrations were independently associated with measured GFR. Thus, findings were not suggestive of passive accumulation of either marker, suggesting that increased circulating concentrations of cTnI and NT‐proBNP can be interpreted similarly in dogs with stable CKD as in dogs without CKD.
The relationship between of spiritual intelligence and happiness with the life quality of addict womens who deserting in Rasht

The present research has been carried out to study the relationship of spiritual intelligence and happiness with addicted deserting women’s life quality in Rasht. Statistical population of this research includes all opiumaddicted deserting women in Rasht addiction desertion centers in the last three months at the end of 2012. By accessible sampling method, 100 people were selected among all of the opiumaddicted deserting women in Rasht addiction desertion centers. The instruments used in this research are questionnaires of spiritual intelligence, Oxford happiness and spf36 life quality. The analysis of the data has been done by means of correlation test and multi-variable regression. The statistical analysis result showed that there is a meaningful relation of spiritual intelligence and happiness to addicted deserting women’s life quality. (p<0.01) in relationship with (beta= 0.48) has the most share in the prediction of life quality criterion variable.
A view on NIST randomness tests (In)Dependence

In this paper we address three open questions regarding randomness test: the probability of false acceptance, the number of minimum sample size to achieve a given probability error and tests independence. We shall point out statistical testing assumptions, source of errors, sample constructions and a computational method for determining the probability of false acceptance and estimating the correlation between the statistical tests specified by NIST SP 800-22.
Chloroplast DNA polymorphism reveals little geographical structure in Castanea sativa Mill. (Fagaceae) throughout southern European countries

The distribution of haplotypic diversity of 38 European chestnut (Castanea sativa Mill.) populations was investigated by PCR/RFLP analysis of regions of the chloroplast and mitochondrial genomes in order to shed light on the history of this heavily managed species. The rapid expansion of chestnut starting from 3000 years ago is strongly related to human activities such as agricultural practice. This demonstrates the importance of human impact, which lasted some thousands of years, on the present‐day distribution of the species. No polymorphism was detected for the single mitochondrial analysed region, while a total of 11 different chloroplast (cp) haplotypes were scored. The distribution of the cpDNA haplotypes revealed low geographical structure of the genetic diversity. The value of population subdivision, as measured by GSTc, is strikingly lower than in the other species of the family Fagaceae investigated. The actual distribution of haplotypic diversity may be explained by the strong human impact on this species, particularly during the Roman civilization of the continent, and to the long period of cultivation experienced during the last thousand years.
Reducing scheduling overheads in multi-processors real-time systems

In real-time systems, it is required to complete all work on a timely basis. There are mainly two types of real time systems: hard real-time systems (HRT) and soft-real time (SRT) systems. In hard real-time systems, a missed deadline is considered a system failure; in soft real-time systems some deadlines may be missed. The aim of real-time scheduling analysis is to ensure a sequence of jobs meets their deadlines. Many real-time systems allow jobs to interrupt, or preempt, one another. In multiprocessor systems a preemption may result in a job migrating from one processor to another. Both preemptions and migrations cause scheduling overheads. In this dissertation, we present two approaches for reducing scheduling overheads. One approach reduces the number of preemptions and migrations by adjusting job priorities. Another approach incorporates genetic algorithms to classify HRT task sets, and uses heuristics to reduce the number of preemptions and migrations. Another type of overhead that this dissertation addresses is energy consumption. This dissertation presents an algorithm to use Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) processors for conserving energy. The proposed algorithm drastically reduces the power consumption of the systems by slowing down the processors as much as possible. INDEX WORDS: Real-Time System, Reducing scheduling overhead, Multiprocessor real-time scheduling, DVFS
La sémantique du "Parfait". Étude des "temps composés" dans un choix de langues germaniques et romanes

Cette these propose une analyse des temps composes (ou "parfaits") en allemand, anglais, espagnol et francais. La modelisation du systeme temporo-aspectuel mise en place applique l'idee qu'aussi bien le "temps" que l'"aspect" sont des categories obligatoires, et insiste sur la necessite d'une troisieme categorie, "temps relatif", pour rendre compte des parfaits. Specifiquement, ces derniers disposent d'un trait de temps relatif PARFAIT, caracterise par une relation d'anteriorite stricte. Cette semantique du PARFAIT est mise a l'epreuve dans une etude des adverbes de type "depuis", et des temps surcomposes. Les interactions du PARFAIT avec les differentes valeurs de la categorie ASPECT menent a une analyse de l'aspect non-marque et de la relation scalaire entre aspects perfectif et imperfectif. L'etude de deux adverbes, "gerade" en allemand et "tocmai" en roumain, montre qu'il existe des items lexicaux qui interagissent avec ces echelles temporelles.
Actual Dove versus ideal L’Oréal: Impact of self-related brand image on advertising persuasiveness

ABSTRACT This study examines how self-related brand images impact the effectiveness of advertising messages framed by different construal levels. In Study 1 (cosmetics/beauty brands: Dove and L’Oréal), data from undergraduate students demonstrated that for an actual image brand (Dove), participants responded positively toward the ad framed with low-level construal terms, whereas they did not react differently to either the high- or low-level construal ads of an ideal brand (L’Oréal). Study 2 that replicated Study 1 to confirm the findings with a different product category (apparel: Gap vs. Gucci) among the general population sample also found consistent findings with Study 1.
The influence of Perceived Service Quality towards Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty in Airasia Self Check-in System

The urgent needs for Airlines around the world, especially low-cost carrier to optimize earnings and reduce their operational costs accentuate the use of self-service technologies (SSTs) in their operating system, including their check-in process. The self-check-in system (online, mobile and at kiosk) is mainly offered to reduce costs, speed and enhance the customer’s experience. Using adapted questionnaire from self-service technology quality (SSTQUAL) scale, this research aims to examine the service quality of airline self-check-in system and its impact on customer satisfaction and loyalty in an emerging market for a low-cost carrier, namely Airasia. Data for the study are collected from 123 passengers who have used the Airasia’s self-check-in service and are analyzed using Pearson’s correlation and Smart partial least square (SmartPLS). The result indicates that self-check-in service quality exhibits significant impact on customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. It also found that customer satisfaction fully mediates the relationship between perceived service quality and customer loyalty.
Computational chemistry comparison of stable/nonstable protein mutants classification models based on 3D and topological indices

In principle, there are different protein structural parameters that can be used in computational chemistry studies to classify protein mutants according to thermal stability including: sequence, connectivity, and 3D descriptors. Connectivity parameters (called topological indices, TIs) are simpler than 3D parameters being then less computationally expensive. However, TIs ignore important aspects of protein structure and hence are expected to be inaccurate. In any case, a comparison of 3D and TIs has not been reported with respect to the power of discrimination of proteins according to stability. In this study, we compare both classes of indices in this sense by the first time. The best model found, based on 3D spectral moments correctly classified 507 out of 525 (96.6%) proteins while TIs model correctly classified 404 out of 525 (77.0%) proteins. We have shown that, in fact, 3D descriptor models gave more accurate results than TIs but interestingly, TIs give acceptable results in a timely way in spite of their simplicity. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Comput Chem, 2007
Resistance To Medical Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing healthcare, but little is known about consumer receptivity to AI in medicine. Consumers are reluctant to utilize healthcare provided by AI in real and hypothetical choices, separate and joint evaluations. Consumers are less likely to utilize healthcare (study 1), exhibit lower reservation prices for healthcare (study 2), are less sensitive to differences in provider performance (studies 3A–3C), and derive negative utility if a provider is automated rather than human (study 4). Uniqueness neglect, a concern that AI providers are less able than human providers to account for consumers’ unique characteristics and circumstances, drives consumer resistance to medical AI. Indeed, resistance to medical AI is stronger for consumers who perceive themselves to be more unique (study 5). Uniqueness neglect mediates resistance to medical AI (study 6), and is eliminated when AI provides care (a) that is framed as personalized (study 7), (b) to consumers other than the self (study 8), or (c) that only supports, rather than replaces, a decision made by a human healthcare provider (study 9). These findings make contributions to the psychology of automation and medical decision making, and suggest interventions to increase consumer acceptance of AI in medicine.
Determinants of Bank profitability: The case of commercial Banks listed on the Vietnam’s stock exchange

Using panel data collected from 9 Vietnamese commercial banks listed in the HNX and HOSE in period 2007-2013 data, this paper found out that: (1) profitability level of these banks is higher than minimum requirements of CAMELS, that is, when compared to the average levels of international standards although some banks got low profitability in certain years; (2) the profitability of these banks are determined by several internal and external factors. The key significant internal factors are: bank size the smaller banks have higher profit; total assets – a total assets growth rate – the higher the profit; interest rates – higher interest rate level bring better benefit to banks than deposit customers. To improve the bank profitability, management should consider carefully the appropriate bank size, manage the cost structure well, implement the rational interest rate policy, and manage the credit risks and other risks prudentially. Bank returns are also strongly affected by macroeconomic variables, suggesting that macroeconomic policies to promote low inflation and high GDP growth rate to have good impacts on bank profitability and development.
Variable-energy positron-beam studies of Ni implanted with He.

Variable-energy positron-beam studies have been made on well-annealed polycrystalline Ni samples implanted with 30-, 90-, and 180-keV /sup 4/He ions. The positron-annihilation characteristics were measured with a solid-state Ge detector at a number of different incident-positron energies and after isochronal annealing at various temperatures. The Doppler broadening of the annihilation photons was found to be strongly influenced by the /sup 4/He implantations. The data indicate that trapping of the positrons occurred predominantly at small He bubbles. The variation of the broadening with incident-positron energy was sensitive to the depth distribution of the traps. A diffusion model assuming a square concentration-defect profile was developed and analytically fitted to the parametrized momentum data. These fitted results were compared to Monte Carlo range calculations for /sup 4/He in Ni, and fairly good agreement was found. This investigation demonstrates the capabilities of positron annihilation for nondestructive depth profiling in ion-implanted systems. In addition, it establishes parallels between the trapping behavior of positrons and that reported elsewhere for hydrogen, thereby augmenting the present level of understanding of the technologically important trapping of hydrogen by the bubbles.
A family of constitutive C/EBP‐like DNA binding proteins attenuate the IL‐1 alpha induced, NF kappa B mediated trans‐activation of the angiotensinogen gene acute‐phase response element.

The gene encoding angiotensinogen, the glycoprotein precursor of the potent vasopressor peptide angiotensin II, is transcriptionally activated in hepatocytes during the acute‐phase response through interactions of mutually cooperative glucocorticoid receptors and proteins that bind to an acute‐phase response element (APRE) 5′‐AGTTGGGATTTCCCAACC‐3′. The APRE binds a family of constitutive proteins (BPcs) and a cytokine inducible protein (BPi) that is indistinguishable from nuclear factor kappa B (NF kappa B). The interactions of purified proteins with the APRE were studied by in vitro binding and in vivo transcriptional trans‐activation assays. BPc is a family of heat‐stable DNA binding proteins, the different sized members of which are capable of forming heterodimers. BPcs are recognized by anti‐C/EBP antiserum and produce a footprint similar to bacterially expressed C/EBP on the APRE. BPi has a 4‐ to 5‐fold greater affinity for the APRE than the BPcs, and contacts guanosine residues distinct from those contacted by the BPcs, demonstrating that these two classes of proteins contain functionally distinct DNA binding domains. Assays of APRE‐luciferase reporter plasmids transfected into HepG2 cells show that a mutated APRE that binds only BPi functions as an IL‐1 alpha inducible enhancer, whereas a mutated APRE that binds only BPc does not. The APRE mutant that binds the C/EBP‐like BPcs to the exclusion of BPi functions as an uninducible basal enhancer both in the native context of the angiotensinogen gene and when multimerized and placed upstream of a minimal angiotensinogen promoter. The wild‐type APRE that binds both BPi and BPc is less inducible by IL‐1 alpha than the mutated APRE that binds only BPi. Gel shift competition assays demonstrate in vitro that the mechanism of transcriptional regulation by the APRE involves a competition between BPc and the inducible BPi for binding to the APRE. IL‐1 alpha stimulation of hepatocytes leads to nuclear translocation of the NF kappa B‐like BPi which competes with the constitutive C/EBP‐like BPcs for overlapping binding sites on the APRE and thereby replaces weak transcriptional activators with a stronger one.