Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
MarkeTrak VIII : The Prevalence of Tinnitus in the United States and the Self-reported Efficacy of Various Treatments

A number of estimates have been provided on the prevalence of tinnitus in the United States. Davis and El Refiae estimated that 10% to 15% of the US population experiences chronic or persistent tinnitus (eg, ringing in the ears or internal head noises). About half of the people with tinnitus are bothered by it, and it is reported that about 1% indicate that tinnitus substantially affects their lives. A recent self-report survey using the 1999-2004 National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys (NHANES) database on more than 14,000 subjects estimated that 50 million US adults reported having any tinnitus and 16 million reported frequent tinnitus in the past year. Tinnitus was shown to increase with age, peaking at 14.3% of people ages 60 to 69 years. In addition, it was most prevalent among people with low-to-mid or high frequency hearing loss. Other authors indicate that chronic tinnitus affects 42 million Americans and is considered “clinically significant” in 10 million adults. It should be acknowledged that differences in the specific questions asked in these surveys likely account for much of the variability in numbers. Tinnitus has been shown to have a direct impact on a person’s emotional well-being, hearing, and ability to sleep and to concentrate—in turn influencing basic life functions, such as socialization and relaxation. In severe cases, it can interfere with the individual’s ability to perform adequately on the job or contribute to psychological disorders, such as depression, suicide ideation, posttraumatic stress disorder, anxiety, and anger. The constancy of tinnitus and the perceived lack of control can provoke fear, which exacerbates the problem leading to an ever-increasing cycle of distress in the person suffering from tinnitus. Only a small number of people contact their physicians or hearing care professionals for help with their tinnitus. The reason perhaps lies in the widespread belief that tinnitus is incurable or untreatable. Yet, there are several methods for treating tinnitus that can alleviate the impact it has on the patient’s quality of life. In a large-scale study by the Better Hearing Institute (BHI), it was shown that 39% of people (more than 9 million adult Americans) indicated they had not sought help for their hearing loss specifically because they concurrently had tinnitus. It is likely their belief that tinnitus could not be treated influenced their decision not to seek treatment for either. Thus, those with both untreated tinnitus and untreated hearing loss would be expected to suffer an even greater diminished quality of life than individuals with just tinnitus or just hearing loss. The size of the tinnitus population
Spatial and Temporal Variation of Summer Precipitation over the Eastern Tibetan Plateau and the North Atlantic Oscillation

Abstract The interannual variability of summer precipitation over the eastern Tibetan Plateau (ETP) was examined in relation to the Northern Hemisphere macroscale circulation patterns during the period 1961–90. Summer precipitation data for 66 stations located above 2000 m MSL are used in the analysis. Using principal component analysis, it is found that the dominant spatial pattern of interannual variability of the summer precipitation is a seesaw structure between the southern and northern parts of ETP. Correlation analysis shows that this pattern of precipitation anomalies is closely associated with the North Atlantic oscillation (NAO). Further analysis based on midtropospheric geopotential height and wind data suggests the upstream zonal flow variation associated with the NAO pattern as the major mechanism linking the regional precipitation fluctuation to macroscale circulation conditions. During the summers of low NAO index values, the westerly winds between 40° and 50°N from the eastern Atlantic to .
Elliptical instability in rotating cylinders: liquid metal experiments under imposed magnetic field

In this paper, we present new theoretical and experimental results on the elliptical instability in a liquid metal contained in a rotating deformable cylinder in the presence of an imposed magnetic field. The imposed field, which is aligned with the rotating axis, has a double interest. On the one hand, it permits an analysis of the inertial waves excited by the elliptical instability by measuring their induced magnetic fields. On the other hand, it permits the control of the instability by acting on the Joule damping. In this paper, firstly an analytical calculation of the magnetic field induced by the flow and its associated Joule damping is presented. Also, the linear and weakly nonlinear theories of the elliptical instability are extended to include magnetic field effects. Then, the description of the experiments starts by the presentation of the effect of the imposed magnetic field strength. Close to the instability threshold, both super- and subcritical bifurcations are identified. When the imposed field is decreased, we observe a transition towards complex nonlinear evolutions that we describe with the help of two-dimensional phase diagrams. In a second set of experiments, we vary the eccentricity of the elliptic deformation over a large range in order to demonstrate that far from the instability threshold, the mean inertial wave amplitude is uncorrelated to the eccentricity. We show that, for a given eccentricity, this mean amplitude decreases when the rotation rate increases. In a last series of experiments, we focus on the description of the nonlinear evolution of an oscillatory eigenmode which is different from the principal stationary mode.
Identification of behaviour of weaner pigs in the early phase of aggressive interaction for the development of an automatic monitoring system of pig aggression

Aggressive behaviour among pigs results in negative consequences, reducing health and welfare of animals as well as production output of a farm. In order to develop an automatic monitoring system that monitors and controls pig aggression, an experiment was carried out. The aim of the experiment was to analyze sequences in pig aggressive behaviour. 52 aggressive sequences were observed during the experiment in on farm observations. Behaviour that started the aggressive sequences the most often was nose to nose interaction. 22 out of 52 aggressive sequences started with this behaviour. Head to head knocking was classified as a second most frequent starting behaviour with 13 head to head knocks starting aggressive interactions. Nose to nose interaction and head to head knocking behaviours in most cases started aggressive interactions between animals. Automatic detection of these behaviours might allow early detection of aggression among pigs.
Preliminary geodetic constraints on plate boundary deformation on the western edge of the Indian plate from TriGGnet ( Tri-University GPS Geodesy Network )

Shortly after the 2005 Kashmir earthquake, scientists from three Pakistan Universities collaborated with US, and through them, Indian scientists to monitor seismotectonic deformation and crustal velocities on the western edge of the Indian plate. Twelve GPS receivers were installed at key locations in Pakistan, with some sites monitored continuously and others for a week once each year. More than 80 points have been measured with various periods of longevity. We report here the initial results of these surveys using the Indian pate as a fixed frame of reference. Following are the main results of our study: 1) Sindh province and the southern Punjab are deforming insignificantly (linear strain rates 0.01 μstrain per year) 2) the Makran coast is moving rapidly (18 mm yr) southward indicating a locked offshore region; 3) post-seismic effects of 2005 Kashmir earthquake are largely ceased by 2009; 4) interseismic convergence of the Karakorum ranges (>16 mm yr) is reduced to 5-8 mm about a line from Peshawar through Islamabad to Srinagar indicating significant strain to have focused in the ranges to the north; 5) the Potwar plateau is moving at less than 3 mm SSE, a factor of four slower than to its geologically estimated rate of 13±2 mm yr; and 6) the geodetic rupture parameters of the 2005 Kashmir, and the October 2008 Pishin Baluchistan earthquakes.
The frequency of disseminated intravascular coagulopathy in newly diagnosed adult patients with haematological malignancies attending Nanakaly Hospital in Erbil

immune complexes. 2,5,6 Background and objective: Disseminated intravascular coagulation significantly contributes to the bleeding and thrombotic complications in patients with haematologic malignancies. This study was conducted to find out the incidence of disseminated intravascular coagulopathy in haematological malignancies before introduction of chemotherapy. Methods: A prospective case series study was performed at Nanakaly Hospital for Blood Diseases from April 30, 2011 to April 1, 2012. Seventy patients with different haematological malignancies were enrolled; they were assessed with clinical importance of global haemostatic laboratory tests. Results: Eighteen percent of studied patients had overt disseminated intravascular coagulopathy. The haemostatic measures were higher in overt disseminated intravascular coagulopathy cases than those with no evidence of disseminated intravascular coagulopathy cases (P < 0.001); and the highest incidence of disseminated intravascular coagulopathy cases was in acute promyelocytic leukemia's patients (77%, P = 039). Most of disseminated intravascular coagulopathy cases were clinically manifested with anemia, bleeding and rarely with thrombosis (100%, 69% and 7%, respectively). Conclusion: Disseminated intravascular coagulopathy is not uncommon in haematological malignancies before starting chemotherapy. Global haemostatic tests are helpful for diagnosis of disseminated intravascular coagulopathy side by side with clinical manifestations and medical history.
Pooling is neither necessary nor sufficient for appropriate deformation stability in CNNs

Many of our core assumptions about how neural networks operate remain empirically untested. One common assumption is that convolutional neural networks need to be stable to small translations and deformations to solve image recognition tasks. For many years, this stability was baked into CNN architectures by incorporating interleaved pooling layers. Recently, however, interleaved pooling has largely been abandoned. This raises a number of questions: Are our intuitions about deformation stability right at all? Is it important? Is pooling necessary for deformation invariance? If not, how is deformation invariance achieved in its absence? In this work, we rigorously test these questions, and find that deformation stability in convolutional networks is more nuanced than it first appears: (1) Deformation invariance is not a binary property, but rather that different tasks require different degrees of deformation stability at different layers. (2) Deformation stability is not a fixed property of a network and is heavily adjusted over the course of training, largely through the smoothness of the convolutional filters. (3) Interleaved pooling layers are neither necessary nor sufficient for achieving the optimal form of deformation stability for natural image classification. (4) Pooling confers too much deformation stability for image classification at initialization, and during training, networks have to learn to counteract this inductive bias. Together, these findings provide new insights into the role of interleaved pooling and deformation invariance in CNNs, and demonstrate the importance of rigorous empirical testing of even our most basic assumptions about the working of neural networks.
A resolved analysis of cold dust and gas in the nearby edge-on spiral NGC 891

We investigate the connection between dust and gas in the nearby edge-on spiral galaxy NGC 891, a target of the Very Nearby Galaxies Survey. High resolution Herschel PACS and SPIRE 70, 100, 160, 250, 350, and 500 μm images are combined with JCMT SCUBA 850 μm observations to trace the far-infrared/submillimetre spectral energy distribution (SED). Maps of the Hi 21 cm line and CO(J = 3−2) emission trace the atomic and molecular hydrogen gas, respectively. We fit one-component modified blackbody models to the integrated SED, finding a global dust mass of (8.5 ± 2.0) × 107M⊙ and an average temperature of 23 ± 2 K, consistent with results from previous far-infrared experiments. We also fit one-component modified blackbody models to pixel-by-pixel SEDs to produce maps of the dust mass and temperature. The dust mass distribution correlates with the total stellar population as traced by the 3.6 μm emission. The derived dust temperature, which ranges from approximately 17 to 24 K, is found to correlate with the 24 μm emission. Allowing the dust emissivity index to vary, we find an average value of β = 1.9 ± 0.3. We confirm an inverse relation between the dust emissivity spectral index and dust temperature, but do not observe any variation of this relationship with vertical height from the mid-plane of the disc. A comparison of the dust properties with the gaseous components of the ISM reveals strong spatial correlations between the surface mass densities of dust (Σdust) and the molecular hydrogen (ΣH2) and total gas surface densities (Σgas). These observations reveal the presence of regions of dense, cold dust that are coincident with peaks in the gas distribution and are associated with a molecular ring. Furthermore, the observed asymmetries in the dust temperature, the H2-to-dust ratio and the total gas-to-dust ratio hint that an enhancement in the star formation rate may be the result of larger quantities of molecular gas available to fuel star formation in the NE compared to the SW. Whilst the asymmetry likely arises from dust obscuration due to the geometry of the line-of-sight projection of the spiral arms, we cannot exclude that there is also an enhancement in the star formation rate in the NE part of the disc.
Weakly turbulent laws of wind-wave growth

The theory of weak turbulence developed for wind-driven waves in theoretical works and in recent extensive numerical studies concludes that non-dimensional features of self-similar wave growth (i.e. wave energy and characteristic frequency) have to be scaled by internal wave-field properties (fluxes of energy, momentum or wave action) rather than by external attributes (e.g. wind speed) which have been widely adopted since the 1960s. Based on the hypothesis of dominant nonlinear transfer, an asymptotic weakly turbulent relation for the total energy ϵ and a characteristic wave frequency ω* was derived \[ \label{our_spectrum0} \frac{ \varepsilon \, \omega_*^4}{g^2} = \alpha_{\it ss} \left(\frac{\omega_*^3\, {\rm d} \varepsilon /{\rm d} t }{g^2}\right)^{1/3}. \] The self-similarity parameter αss was found in the numerical duration-limited experiments and was shown to be naturally varying in a relatively narrow range, being dependent on the energy growth rate only. In this work, the analytical and numerical conclusions are further verified by means of known field dependencies for wave energy growth and peak frequency downshift. A comprehensive set of more than 20 such dependencies, obtained over almost 50 years of field observations, is analysed. The estimates give αss very close to the numerical values. They demonstrate that the weakly turbulent law has a general value and describes the wave evolution well, apart from the earliest and full wave development stages when nonlinear transfer competes with wave input and dissipation.
Teacher trainees’ attitudes and motivations towards learning te reo Māori

A discussion about the decreasing proficiency levels of one of the official languages in New Zealand, te reo Mäori, would not be complete without understanding teacher trainees’ attitudes and motivations towards taking an optional Mäori language course. This is because teacher trainees can provide significant opportunities within the classroom to promote learning of te reo and understanding their perspectives on learning the language to inform future revitalisation efforts. Therefore, the aim of the research reported here was to investigate trainees’ attitudes about and motivations for enrolling in an optional Mäori language course in order to provide a thematic overview and guide future research on te reo revitalisation efforts. The attitude and motivations of language learners have been shown to be significant determinants in identifying whether a minority language can succeed in a bilingual environment. The data collected from an online survey and a focus group were analysed to identify five distinct but also related themes that were commonly found across participants: (a) importance of engaging in culture alongside the language, (b) consistent learning throughout school and college, (c) motivation can be enhanced through everyday use of the language with friends and whänau, (d) large expenditure of time and effort is required to access Mäori speaking communities and (e) mismatch between attitudes towards Mäori language and behaviours. The results show how important understanding learners’ attitudes and motivations are when considering the effectiveness of developing revitalisation interventions for te reo. * Independent researcher, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand. Email: russell.pine@education.govt. nz DOI: 10.20507/MAIJournal.2018. 7.2. 4
Monitoring the Monitor: Distracted Institutional Investors and Board Governance

Boards are crucial to shareholder wealth. Yet little is known about how shareholder oversight affects director incentives. Using exogenous shocks to institutional investor portfolios, we find that institutional investor distraction weakens board oversight. Distracted institutions are less likely to discipline ineffective directors with negative votes. Consequently, independent directors face weaker monitoring incentives and exhibit poor board performance; ineffective independent directors are also more frequently appointed. Moreover, we find that the adverse effects of investor distraction on various corporate governance outcomes are stronger among firms with problematic directors. Our findings suggest that institutional investor monitoring creates important director incentives to monitor.
HOMOGENIZATION OF TWO-PHASE FLOW IN FRACTURED MEDIA

In a fractured medium, there is an interconnected system of fracture planes dividing the porous rock into a collection of matrix blocks. The fracture planes, while very thin, form paths of high permeability. Most of the fluids reside in matrix blocks, where they move very slow. Let e denote the size ratio of the matrix blocks to the whole medium and let the width of the fracture planes and the porous block diameter be in the same order. If permeability ratio of matrix blocks to fracture planes is of order e2, microscopic models for two-phase, incompressible, immiscible flow in fractured media converge to a dual-porosity model as e goes to 0. If the ratio is smaller than order e2, the microscopic models approach a single-porosity model for fracture flow. If the ratio is greater than order e2, then microscopic models tend to another type of single-porosity model. In this work, these results will be proved by a two-scale method.
Assessment of Midwives’ Communication Skills at the Maternity Wards of Teaching Hospitals in Mashhad in 2014

Background & aim:The quality of communication between midwives and parturient women is a determinant of maternal satisfaction with midwifery care. Therefore, this study was conducted to determine the communication skills of midwives at maternity wards of Mashhad teaching hospitals in 2014. Methods:In this descriptive study, 49 midwives, working at Mashhad teaching hospitals, were randomly selected. All midwives worked rotating shifts at the wards. The midwives’ communication skills were assessed by the researcher, using the self-structured observation checklist of communicative performance. Results: The mean age of midwives was 39.11±9.66 years and their mean work experience was 15.9±8.77 years. In total, 68.3% of the participants experienced childbirth themselves. 66.7% of midwives were moderately keen on midwifery as a profession. The mean score of the checklist obtained by midwives was 67.9±10.7. There was no relationship between midwives’ communication skills and work experience, childbirth experience, age or interest in midwifery. Conclusion:Considering the inadequacy of midwives’ communication skills, which could be the major cause of maternal dissatisfaction with delivery care, it is recommended that in-service training courses be held by applying new teaching methods. Moreover, the educational needs of midwives, including communication skills, should be considered in these training programs .
Understanding the Size Selectivity of Redfish (Sebastes spp.) in North Atlantic Trawl Codends

The majority of trawl selectivity studies for the three redfish species of particular commercial importance in North Atlantic fisheries: Sebastes marinus, Sebastes mentella and Sebastes fasciatus, are based on data collected from diamond mesh codends with mesh sizes ranging from 88 mm to 147 mm. We demonstrate how results from these studies can be understood by morphological characteristics of the species. We predict codend size selection based on morphological data collected from golden redfish (S. marinus) individuals. Further, consistent with previously reported morphological similarities between the three redfish species, we show the predictions for S. marinus may successfully be extrapolated to understand experimental codend size selectivity results reported for S. mentella and S. fasciatus. In addition to the comparison with previously reported data, we present new experimental results for a codend applied in Northeast Atlantic redfish trawl fishery.
Skulls, Financial Turbulence, and Risk Management

Based on a methodology introduced in 1927 to analyze human skulls and later applied to turbulence in financial markets, this study shows how to use a statistically derived measure of financial turbulence to measure and manage risk and to improve investment performance. View a webinar based on this article. We extended the research of those who have been analyzing the creation of optimal portfolios during times of financial turbulence. That research produced a mathematical measure of financial turbulence that captured the statistical unusualness of a set of asset returns given their historical pattern of behavior, including extreme price moves, decoupling of correlated assets, and convergence of uncorrelated assets. We showed that this measure of financial turbulence is nearly identical to the Mahalanobis distance, which was derived decades ago to analyze human skulls. Then, we provided evidence that this mathematical measure coincides with well-known episodes of financial turbulence, such as the stagflation of the late 1970s and early 1980s, the 1987 stock market crash, the Gulf War, Russia’s default on its sovereign debt, the technology bubble, 9/11, and the recent global financial crisis. We next discussed two intriguing features of financial turbulence. First, returns to risk are substantially lower during turbulent periods than during nonturbulent periods, and second, turbulence is persistent. It may arrive unexpectedly, but it does not immediately subside. It typically continues for weeks as market participants digest and react to its cause. Finally, we explored a variety of useful ways to apply this measure of financial turbulence. We showed how to stress-test portfolios by estimating value at risk from the covariances that prevailed during the turbulent subsample. We showed how to construct portfolios that are relatively resistant to turbulence by conditioning inputs to the portfolio construction on the performance of assets during periods of turbulence. In addition, we showed how to enhance the performance of certain risky strategies by using turbulence as a filter for scaling exposure to risk.