Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Indirect scaling methods applied to the identification and quantification of auditory attributes

A selection procedure was devised in order to select listeners for experiments in which their main task will be to judge multichannel reproduced sound. Ninety-one participants filled in a web-based questionnaire. Seventy-eight of them took part in an assessment of their hearing thresholds, their spatial hearing, and their verbal produc- tion abilities. The listeners displayed large individual differences in their performance. Forty subjects were selected based on the test results. Self-assessed listening habits and experience as obtained from the web questionnaire did not predict the results of the selection procedure. Further, absolute hearing thresholds did not correlate with the spatial-hearing test. This leads to the conclusion that task-specific performance tests might be the preferable means of selecting a listening panel.
Wireless Data Center Networks: Advances, Challenges, and Opportunities

Data center networks (DCNs) are essential infrastructures to embrace the era of highly diversified massive amount of data generated by emerging technological applications. In order to store and process such a data deluge, today's DCNs have to deploy enormous length of wires to interconnect a plethora of servers and switches. Unfortunately, wired DCNs with uniform and inflexible link capacities expose several drawbacks such as high cabling cost and complexity, low space utilization, and lack of bandwidth efficiency. Wireless DCNs (WDCNs) have emerged as a promising solution to reduce the time, effort, and cost spent on deploying and maintaining the wires. Thanks to its reconfigurability and flexibility, WDCNs can deliver higher throughputs by efficiently utilizing the bandwidth and mitigate the chronic DCN problems of oversubscription and hotspots. Moreover, wireless links enhance the fault-tolerance and energy efficiency by eliminating the need for error-prone power-hungry switches. Accordingly, this paper first compares virtues and drawbacks of millimeter wave (mmWave), terahertz (THz), and optical wireless communications as potential candidates. Thereafter, an in-depth discussion on advances and challenges in WDCNs is provided including physical and virtual topology design, quality of service (QoS) provisioning, flow classification, data grooming, and load balancing. Finally, exciting research opportunities are presented to promote the prospects of WDCNs.
Incorporating driver preference in routing: a real life implementation and evaluation of the personalized adaptive routing algorithm

PREFACE This thesis represents a culmination of work and learning that has taken place over a period of over one year (May 2012 until July 2013). It marks the conclusion of my study Civil Engineering and Management at the University of Twente. During the master Traffic Engineering & Management, I received the opportunity to participate in a variety of courses in which several state of the art facets of traffic and transport were introduced and elaborated. The topics ranged from the policy perspective, the development of traffic models towards the application of intelligent transportation systems. During one of the final courses I was challenged in a project in which an indicator framework was to be developed that could be used to observe, assess and reward the traffic safety performance within the driving behavior of users by means of a flexible insurance premium. During the course of the project it became apparent that user acceptance and the attitude from the driver towards a measure is a pivotal factor determining the success and failure of a proposed measure. Especially when developing and implementing a system in which the insurance premium is based on the safety performance, that seeks the boundaries in terms of individual privacy, the discussion concerning user acceptance becomes even more delicate and complex. In my opinion the conjunction between the user and the traffic system is intriguing, in a world in which most traffic engineers tend to think in technical-physical solutions it is worthwhile to utilize a different viewpoint in which the user receives priority. During one of the last theoretical courses of the curriculum I came in contact with the Smart Mobility department of the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research (TNO). During the initial conversations it became apparent that TNO is developing a smartphone application which aims too " relieve " the driver by minimizing the discomfort and surprises while travelling. Within the near future the application aims to supply tailor-made travel information which is relevant for the individual user and his current trip. Currently TNO is investigating the behavioral implications, the user acceptance and the personal attitudes towards the application and invited me, as part of my final thesis, to participate in this interesting and challenging field of research. I would like to take this opportunity to thank all those who have contributed to this thesis. First and foremost I would like to thank my supervisors …
The “Magnet Effect” – A Powerful Source of L1 Dialect Interference in the Pronunciation of English as a Foreign Language

Wieden and Nemser (1991) carried out a study investigating the development of pronunciation of English as a foreign language in Austria. One of the main issues in this research was L1 dialect interference. Individual studies have proven that the pronunciation of a second (L2) or foreign language (FL) is not influenced only by the standard variety of the first language (L1), but also by the L1 dialect of the speaker’s place of origin (Karpf et al. 1980). Wieden and Nemser’s study wished to prove this on a larger scale. A similar study was carried out also for Slovenia (Jurancic Petek 2007). Contrastive analysis (CA) of the Slovene Standard pronunciation and English was performed as well as that of the sound systems of individual Slovene dialects and the English one. Error analysis (EA) of the obtained results showed that L1 dialect interference did not occur in the instances predicted by contrastive analysis; however the study in itself did prove the existence of such influence (“magnet effect” in vowels).
The use of unlicensed and off label drugs in Tygerberg Hospital neonatal intensive care unit

OBJECTIVE The aim of this study is to establish the frequency of unlicensed and off label drug use in infants admitted to the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) in Tygerberg Hospital. METHOD This was a prospective descriptive survey conducted over 3 consecutive months (September 2011-November 2011) of all medicine charts of neonates admitted during this time period to the NICU. Data collected included demography, diagnoses, medicines prescribed according to dose, frequency, route of administration and indication. Medicine use was defined as unlicensed, licensed or off label use according to the latest South African Medicines Formulary (2012) and the manufacturer’s package insert. Unlicensed drug use is per definition a drug not registered with South African Medicine Control Council (SA MCC) for children and off label drug use is where the use is outside of its authorized license with SA MCC. RESULTS There were 112 neonates enrolled in the study, of whom 51% were preterm and 49% term infants. The most common diagnoses on admission for the preterm babies were hyaline membrane disease (33%) and sepsis (21%), while it was hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy (42%) and post-operative care (22%) for term infants. There were 759 drug events of which 37% were licensed and followed all the licensing terms, 51% were prescribed in an off label manner and the remaining 12% were of unlicensed drugs. The most common reasons off label drug use were for weight (74%), followed by age (44%), frequency (44%), indication (21%), or a route not described in the licensing terms (13%). There was a lack of pediatric data for 9% of the drugs prescribed. In 203 drug events (27%) a drug was used in an off label manner for more than one reason. Sixty one percent of the drugs used had no information on the use of the drug in neonates. CONCLUSION This is the first study conducted in an African NICU, according to our knowledge and the results are similar to studies conducted in Europe and America. Neonates are exposed to a vi Stellenbosch University http://scholar.sun.ac.za
USABILITY OF NON-SPEECH SOUNDS IN USER INTERFACES

We review the literature on the integration of non-speech sounds to visual interfaces and applications from a usability perspective and subsequently recommend which auditory feedback types serve to enhance human interaction with computers by conveying useful and comprehensible information. We present an overview over varied tasks, functions and environments with a view to establishing the best practices for introducing non-speech sounds in order to improve the overall experience of users. 1
Gender and well-being among the elderly: evidence from Thailand.

Researchers and international organizations frequently suggest that elderly women are broadly disadvantaged in comparison to elderly men. This analysis of data from Thailand however indicates a far more complex association between gender and various aspects of aging. Using data from the 1% sample of the 2000 Thai census and two national surveys of the elderly in Thailand conducted in 1994 and 1995 we examine the association between gender and various demographic economic psychosocial and health variables. We find that elderly Thai women do face certain disadvantages in comparison to their male counterparts including lower education and literacy far greater chances of experiencing widowhood and living alone and lower likelihood of receiving formal retirement benefits. Elderly Thai men however face other disadvantages compared to women including worse survivorship a lower likelihood of receiving money from adult children and a greater probability of debt and other financial problems. Men are also less likely to feel satisfied with their financial situation. Many other demographic psychosocial and economic measures are not significantly associated with gender. Our analysis provides some support for a life course perspective that relates gender differences in old age to differences in earlier life experiences roles and reward structures particularly in terms of access to retirement pensions and the type of support elderly men and women provide to their coresident children. The analysis highlights the importance of marital status and age distinction which often mediate gender differences in elderly well-being. The study concludes with research and policy recommendations. (authors)
A class library approach to concurrent object-oriented programming with applications to VLSI CAD

Despite increasing availability, the use of parallel platforms in the solution of significant computing problems remains largely restricted to a set of well-structured, numeric applications. This is due in part to the difficulty of parallel application development, which is itself largely the result of a lack of high-level development environments applicable to the majority of extant parallel architectures. This thesis addresses the issue of facilitating the application of parallel platforms to unstructured problems through the use of object-oriented design techniques and the actor model of concurrent computation. We present a multilevel approach to expressing parallelism for unstructured applications: a high-level interface based on the actor and aggregate models of concurrent object-oriented programming, and a low-level interface which provides an object-oriented interface to system services across a wide range of diverse parallel architectures. The interfaces are manifested in the ProperCAD II library, a C++ object library supporting actor concurrency on microprocessor-based parallel architectures and appropriate for applications exhibiting medium-grain parallelism. The interface supports uniprocessors, shared memory multiprocessors, distributed memory multicomputers, and hybrid architectures comprising network-connected clusters of uni- and multiprocessors. The library currently supports workstations from Sun, shared memory multiprocessors from Sun and Encore, distributed memory multicomputers from Intel and Thinking Machines, and hybrid architectures comprising IP network-connected clusters of Sun uni- and multiprocessors. We demonstrate our approach through an examination of the parallelization process for two existing unstructured serial applications drawn from the field of VLSI computer-aided design. We compare and contrast the library-based actor approach to other methods for expressing parallelism in C++.
The endocrine and metabolic interface of genotype-nutrition interactions in broilers and broiler breeders

In chickens and in animals in general, growth is influenced by genotype as well as by environmental factors including nutrition. Hormonal changes form, in part, the causal link between these interacting factors and the physiological processes leading to growth. It is well established that growth-related hormones (GH, SS) play different roles in different tissues. Several studies have investigated the nutritional and/or genetic effects on growth in chickens, leading to the general conclusion that the improvement of growth in modern broiler chickens is largely influenced by the genotype. In addition, it has been shown that the nutrition-determined regulation of tissues is also genotype-specific. Besides growth, genotype-nutrition interactions also influence reproductive parameters (sexual maturation, egg production) and their endocrine control (hormone levels), apparently having long lasting (or epigenetic) effects for the entire lifespan. Especially for broiler breeders, these interactions are of importance in terms of a long-term solution for the broiler breeder paradox. Indeed, broiler breeders need the genetics for rapid growth and yet have to show a high rate of egg production, in spite of the long recognized negative relation between growth and reproductive fitness. Currently, restricted feeding is the only practical tool available to obtain an optimal equilibrium between growth and reproduction. This has the potential for the impairment of welfare (hunger, behaviour, health, viability). Recent studies suggest that modifying the timing of restriction programmes, the quantity/quality of the diet or the use of genotypes that tolerate ad libitum feeding may achieve a good balance between growth and reproductive performance on the one hand and breeder welfare on the other.
Improving ASR for Code-Switched Speech in Under-Resourced Languages Using Out-of-Domain Data

We explore the use of out-of-domain monolingual data for the improvement of automatic speech recognition (ASR) of code-switched speech. This is relevant because annotated code-switched speech data is both scarce and very hard to produce, especially when the languages concerned are under-resourced, while monolingual corpora are generally better-resourced. We perform experiments using a recently-introduced small ﬁve-language corpus of code-switched South African soap opera speech. We consider speciﬁcally whether ASR of English– isiZulu code-switched speech can be improved by incorporating monolingual data from unrelated but larger corpora. TDNN-BLSTM acoustic models are trained using various conﬁgura-tions of training data. The utility of artiﬁcially-generated bilingual English–isiZulu text to augment language model training data is also explored. We ﬁnd that English-isiZulu speech recognition accuracy can be improved by incorporating mono-lingual out-of-domain data despite the differences between the soap-opera and monolingual speech.
How to live until 90 ‐ Factors predicting survival in 75‐year‐olds from the general population

Background: The objective of the study was to explore potential predictors common in a clinical context, for survival to age 90 among 75‐year‐olds from Sweden's general population. We performed a prospective community‐based cohort study with 15‐year follow‐up among 75‐year‐olds from a defined geographical area. Methods: Of 1,100 inhabitants born in 1922 and living in Västerås in 1997, 618 were invited to participate in a cardiovascular health survey, and 432 individuals accepted participation. Among them, 380 subjects (61% of those originally invited; 191 men and 189 women) had complete records for all examined variables. Variables were categorized into 4 groups: 1) Previous or present disease; 2. Exercise test variables; 3. Conventional risk factors; 4. Other potential risk factors. Through Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic (AUROC) curves, strong predictors for survival until age 90 (AUROC≥0.60) in men and women were selected. Results: The strongest individual predictors for reaching the age of 90 were metabolic equivalents and systolic blood pressure (BP) rise during exercise test, QTc interval in resting electrocardiogram (ECG) and peak expiratory flow (PEF) in men, and, for women, white blood cell (WBC) counts and systolic blood pressure BP rise during exercise. The strongest independent predictor in multivariable models were metabolic equivalents in men and WBC counts in women (explained variability 22 and 6%). Conclusions: High exercise capacity in men and low WBC in women were the strongest independent predictors of reaching age 90 among the clinical predictors at 75. The strongest modifiable predictor was exercise capacity in men, which can be improved by physical training.
Understanding the End User Perspective: A Multiple-Case Study of Successful Health Information Technology Implementation.

The United States continues to lag behind other countries in its adoption of health information technology. A failure to increase adoption will jeopardize the nation’s ability to reduce medical errors, address the rapid growth of healthcare costs, and enact effective healthcare reform. Health information technology (HIT) implementation success factors as perceived by healthcare executives and industry experts are well documented in the literature. Few studies, however, have focused on the perceptions of HIT end users such as physicians and nurses. The purpose of this exploratory case study was to describe the strategies, actions, and other factors that contribute to the successful implementation of HIT as perceived by 29 HIT end users at a 613-bed adult hospital and 7 end users at a 272-bed children's hospital. Interview data, secondary sources, and investigator observations were analyzed in three phases consistent with the core elements of qualitative data analysis and led to the emergence of eight unique themes which suggest factors that allow or inhibit HIT implementation success. These factors include (a) the end users’ understanding of the implementation goals, (b) the appropriateness of the selected HIT system, (c) the usability of the system, (d) the adequacy of the supporting infrastructure, (e) the quality of the end user training, (f) the adequacy of the on-site support, (g) the resulting impact to nursing and physician workflows, and (h) the resulting quality of nursing and physician documentation. Conclusions drawn from the exploration include: (a) communication between the decision-makers and the end users was inadequate; (b) poor usability design, lack of supporting infrastructure, and lack of workflow optimization brought on serious side effects including a decrease in the quality of physician documentation, an emphasis on
Assessment of Eight Entrepreneurial Personality Dimensions: Validity Evidence of the BEPE Battery

Background: The study of entrepreneurial activity has undergone intense development in recent decades. Traditionally this topic has been addressed from three approaches: economic, sociological and psychological. In the study of enterprising personality, two fundamental perspectives stand out: the use of general personality traits, like the Big Five, and the use of more specific traits related to entrepreneurial spirit, such as self-efficacy, autonomy, innovation, optimism, and others. The objective of this study is to provide validity evidence for a new instrument for measuring eight specific dimensions of entrepreneurial personality (BEPE). Methods: The sample was composed of 1,170 adults from the general population (59.9% women). The average age was 42.34 years with a standard deviation of 12.96. Of the sample, 13% were self-employed. Internal factorial structure and reliability of BEPE were examined. The relationships with other variables and the discriminative capacity of the BEPE between different groups of workers were analyzed. Results: First order exploratory factor analyses show the essential unidimensionality of each of the eight proposed sub-scales, with factorial weights ranging between 0.341 and 0.825. In the Confirmatory Factor Analysis, the best fit was achieved with a Bifactor model. With regards to reliability, the eight BEPE sub-scales gave high alpha coefficient values, between 0.81 and 0.89, as did the total battery (0.97). BEPE sub-scales show a high canonical correlation with the Big Five personality factors (0.796) and with the sub-scales of the Measure of Entrepreneurial Talents and Abilities questionnaire (0.779). Conclusion: The BEPE questionnaire for the evaluation of the eight fundamental specific dimensions of the entrepreneurial personality presents adequate psychometric properties. Its relationships with other measures of personality traits are in line with what is expected. Therefore, the BEPE is a new measurement instrument that can be used with confidence both in the applied field and in research.
What do nurses do? An observational survey of the activities of nurses on acute surgical and rehabilitation wards

Aim The subject of the study described in this article is an activity analysis of nursing care given on an acute surgical ward at a District General Hospital as compared to that given on a rehabilitation ward at a Community Hospital. Methods Obtaining a global overview of nursing activities on the two study wards was a focal issue. The project consisted of undertaking in excess of 60 h of observation with 10 registered nurses (RNs) of various grades in the two settings. Findings It was found that both sets of nurses undertook similar types of activities. Overall more indirect care activities than direct care occurred on both wards. These findings are similar to the findings of other studies where the majority of RNs' activities are said to relate to the co-ordinating and management aspects of patient care. Conclusion It is concluded that the ‘glue function’ or maintaining a holistic overview of patient care given by all members of the health care team is an important part of nursing care delivery.
Over the counter ophthalmic drug misuse, are we aware?

Aim: To investigate the misuse of ‘over the counter’ ophthalmic medications in our city. Method: Responses of a structured questionnaire covering various aspects of over the counter drug use was obtained from pharmacy workers in and around our city. Results: Eighty nine pharmacy workers took part in this cross–sectional study. An average number of seven patients per day with ophthalmic complaints were seen by the pharmacy workers. Dispensing over the counter was practiced by 89.9% of the pharmacists. The most common complaint of the patients visiting the pharmacy, was redness and itching (86.5%). Antibiotics (96.6%) were the most common eye drops dispensed over the counter, followed by steroids (55.1%), decongestants (54.1%), antibiotic-steroid combination eye drops (29.2%) and lubricants (16.8%). Awareness regarding complications of steroid use was seen in 40.6% of pharmacists. 6.7% pharmacists had seen patients with complications following use of over the counter medications. In our study, majority of the eye drops dispensed were prescription drugs. Conclusion: Availability of prescription eye drops over the counter is an immense public threat. Educating the pharmacist and the population can decrease ocular morbidity. Research into methods to effectively deal with over-the-counter drug misuse is required and law can be enforced based on the findings.