Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Cross-Sectional and Longitudinal Comparison of Tau Imaging with ^18F-MK6240 and ^18F-Flortaucipir in Populations Matched for Age, MMSE and Brain Beta-Amyloid Burden

Objectives Longitudinal tau quantification may provide a useful marker of drug efficacy in clinical trials. Different tau PET tracers may have different sensitivity to longitudinal changes, but without a head-to-head dataset or a carefully designed case-matching procedure, comparing results in different cohorts can be biased. In this study, we compared the tau PET tracers, ^18F-MK6240 and ^18F-flortaucipir (FTP), both cross-sectionally and longitudinally by case-matching subjects in the AIBL and ADNI longitudinal cohort studies. Methods A subset of 113 participants from AIBL and 113 from ADNI imaged using ^18F-MK6240 and ^18F-FTP respectively, with baseline and follow-up, were matched based on baseline clinical diagnosis, MMSE, age and amyloid (Aβ) PET centiloid value. Subjects were grouped as 64 Aβ- cognitively unimpaired (CU), 22 Aβ+ CU, 14 Aβ+ mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and 13 Aβ+ Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Tracer retention was measured in the mesial, temporoparietal, rest of the cortex, and a meta-temporal region composed of entorhinal, inferior/ middle temporal, fusiform, parahippocampus and amygdala. T-tests were employed to assess group separation at baseline using SUVR Z-scores and longitudinally using SUVR%/Yr. Results Both tracers detected statistically significant differences at baseline in most regions between all clinical groups. Only ^18F-MK6240 showed statistically significant higher rate of SUVR increase in Aβ+ CU compared to Aβ- CU in the mesial, meta-temporal and temporoparietal regions. Conclusion ^18F-MK6240 appears to be a more sensitive tracer for change in tau level at the preclinical stage of AD.
Correcting overconfidence in online privacy: experimenting with an educational game

ABSTRACT Widespread use of the Internet means that online privacy, or how to protect one’s private information while engaging in online activity, has become a concern for many individuals. Research has investigated people’s online privacy experience, including online privacy attitudes, confidence, and behaviors. However, not much attention has been paid to how online privacy confidence could be misperceived and how educational tools can correct such overconfidence. Guided by the protection motivation theory, this research examines online privacy confidence and is composed of two studies: Study 1 reveals that online users misrepresent their online knowledge and may have overconfidence as a result. Inspired by this finding and previous research, Study 2 avoids self-reported measures of online knowledge and instead directly evaluates online privacy knowledge (using OPLIS) and its impact on online privacy confidence. Using a survey experiment, we find playing an online privacy educational game increases confidence overall and, importantly, corrects overconfidence. Despite this, we do not find any evidence that correction leads to increased information-seeking. The findings shed light on what online users themselves and organizations, such as universities, industry, and government agencies, can do to better educate individuals about online privacy while calling attention to the need for continued research regarding the underlying mechanisms and downstream behavioral consequences.
Removal of contaminated pixels from the desert target for AVHRR vicarious calibration

Desert-based vicarious calibration plays an important role in generating long-term reliable satellite radiances for the visible and near-infrared channels of Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR). Lacking an onboard calibration device, the AVHRR relies on reflected radiances from a target site, e.g., a large desert, to calibrate its solar reflective channels. While the radiometric characteristics of the desert may be assumed stable, the reflected radiances from the target can occasionally be affected by the presence of clouds, sand-storms, vegetation, and wet surface. These contaminated pixels must be properly identified and removed to ensure calibration performance. This paper describes an algorithm to remove the contaminated pixels from AVHRR measurements taken over the Libyan Desert based on the characteristics of consistent Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) land-cover stratification. We first apply a NDVI histogram-determined threshold to screen pixels contaminated with vegetation in each individual AVHRR observation. Our analyses show that the vegetation growth inside the desert target has negligibly small impact on the AVHRR operational calibration results. Two criteria based on the maximum NDVI compositing technique are then employed to remove pixels contaminated with clouds, severe sand-storms or wet sand surface. Compared to other cloud screening methods, this algorithm is capable of not only identifying high reflectance clouds, but also removing low reflectance of wet surface and nearly indifferent reflectance of severe dust storms. The use of clear pixels appears to improve AVHRR calibration accuracy in the first three-four years after satellite launch.
Effects of Titan on trapped particles in Saturn's magnetosphere

The close fly-by of the Voyager 1 spacecraft to the Saturnian satellite Titan provided an opportunity for the low energy charged particle (LECP) experiment to investigate the influences of Titan on the magnetosphere energetic particle distributions. Magnetic field data from the magnetometer (MAG) experiment are used with angular distribution data from LECP to study the changes in the pitch angle distributions of ions (40 < Ei < 220 keV), and electrons (26 < Ee < 61 ReV). Before and after the Titan encounter the ions are observed to exhibit a bulk motion in the direction expected of corotation of the particles with the planetary magnetic field. The magnetosphere corotation velocity outside the influence of Titan is deduced to be ∼100 to 150 km/s, less than the ∼200 km/s expected for rigid corotation. Titan appears to disrupt the corotation motion of the ions: the fluxes of ions in the corotation direction are appreciably diminished in intensity, while those observed in the equatorial plane perpendicular to this direction are relatively unaffected. The resulting distribution and trajectory modeling conclusions suggest that the convection electric field is effectively absent in the wake of Titan. Before and after the Titan encounter the electrons are observed to exhibit pitch angle distributions peaked at ∼90°, representative of trapped particles. The presence of Titan produces a reduction in the fluxes of the electrons and flatter distributions with pitch angle.
Evaluation of control charts under linear trend

The performance of several control charting schemes is studied when the process mean changes as a linear trend. The control charts considered include the Shewhart chart, the Shewhart chart supplemented with runs rules, the cumulative sum (CUSUM) chart, the exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA) chart, and a generalized control chart.
Maximum Likelihood Estimation for Stochastic Differential Equations with Random Effects

Abstract. We consider N independent stochastic processes (Xi (t), t ∈ [0,Ti]), i=1,…, N, defined by a stochastic differential equation with drift term depending on a random variable φi. The distribution of the random effect φi depends on unknown parameters which are to be estimated from the continuous observation of the processes Xi. We give the expression of the exact likelihood. When the drift term depends linearly on the random effect φi and φi has Gaussian distribution, an explicit formula for the likelihood is obtained. We prove that the maximum likelihood estimator is consistent and asymptotically Gaussian, when Ti=T for all i and N tends to infinity. We discuss the case of discrete observations. Estimators are computed on simulated data for several models and show good performances even when the length time interval of observations is not very large.
Factors associated with post traumatic hydrocephalus following decompressive craniectomy: A single-center experience

Background: A decompressive craniectomy (DC) is a surgical procedure sometimes utilized to manage refractory intracranial hypertension following severe traumatic brain injury (sTBI). The previous studies have established a relationship between DC and post traumatic hydrocephalus (PTH). This study aimed to identify the factors responsible for developing shunt-amenable PTH in patients who underwent DC following sTBI. Methods: A review of a prospectively collected database of all patients admitted with severe TBI in a tertiary neurosurgical center in North-west England between January 2012 and May 2022 was performed. PTH was defined as evidence of progressive ventricular dilatation, clinical deterioration, and/or the eventual need for cerebrospinal fluid diversion (i.e., a ventriculoperitoneal shunt). Statistical analysis was carried out using IBM SPSS versus 28.0. 1. Results: Sixty-five patients met the eligibility criteria and were included in the study. The mean age of the PTH group was 31.38 ± 14.67, while the mean age of the non-PTH group was slightly higher at 39.96 ± 14.85. No statistically significant difference was observed between the two groups’ mechanisms of traumatic injury (P = 0.945). Of the predictors investigated, cerebellar hematoma (and contusions) was significantly associated with PTH (P = 0.006). Conclusion: This study concludes that cerebellar hematoma (and contusions) are associated with developing PTH in patients undergoing DC.
A Phenomenology of First-Year Music Teaching During the COVID-19 Pandemic

The purpose of this phenomenology was to examine the lived experience of being a first-year music teacher during the COVID-19 pandemic. Across two data waves, the first in winter 2020 and the second in late spring 2021, we collected written reflections and conducted online interviews with 10 music teachers who began their careers in 2020 to 2021. We found that participants’ experiences were characterized by overwhelm, disconnection, a pervasive concern for well-being, and a sense of missing out. These experiences were shaped by contextual factors like being responsible for mixed instructional modalities, coping with inconsistent student attendance, and navigating safety protocols that presented barriers to learning. The essence of being a first-year music teacher during the pandemic was the feeling of being adrift amid a largely lost year, looking to the next year as another first year of teaching. We suggest that this cohort of novice music teachers is distinct from previous cohorts, having been shaped by an intensified teaching experience. Induction supports such as mentoring may need to be extended through the first 3 years of their careers, and researchers should continue to follow this cohort because their trajectory is unclear.
Late but Right on Time? School Start Times and Middle Grade Students’ Engagement and Achievement Outcomes in North Carolina

Purpose: We assess whether school start times predict the engagement and achievement outcomes of middle grades students. Our focus on middle grades is important because biological changes in sleep often begin when adolescents are in middle school and because middle school is a time when more students struggle academically. Research Methods/Approach: We use 6 years (2011–12 through 2016–17) of statewide administrative data from North Carolina to assess how school start times predict the school attendance, disciplinary records, and test scores of middle grades (6–8) students. We estimate a range of models—school fixed effect, student fixed effect, propensity score—and include a rich set of covariates to isolate the impact of start times. Findings: Our school engagement results are somewhat inconsistent but suggest that later start times predict a reduction in absences and suspensions. Later start times consistently predict higher test scores in mathematics and reading. Subgroup analyses return mixed results regarding which students benefit more from later middle school start times. Implications: Our results emphasize the broader connections between health and academic outcomes and indicate that policy makers should delay start times for middle grades students. States can instigate start time changes by incentivizing districts to delay or requiring that districts delay start times. Districts can independently delay their start times. In doing so, it is important that district officials take time to build support for the policy change and think comprehensively about the start times of all—elementary, middle, and high—district schools.
Computational and Structural Biotechnology Journal

Metaproteomics is a relatively young field that has only been studied for approximately 15 years. Nevertheless, it has the potential to play a key role in disease research by elucidating the mechanisms of communication between the human host and the microbiome. Although it has been useful in developing an understanding of various diseases, its analytical strategies remain limited to the extended application of proteomics. The sequence databases in metaproteomics must be large because of the presence of thousands of species in a typical sample, which causes problems unique to large databases. In this review, we demonstrate the usefulness of metaproteomics in disease research through examples from several studies. Additionally, we discuss the challenges of applying metaproteomics to conventional proteomics analysis methods and introduce studies that may provide clues to the solutions. We also discuss the need for a standard false discovery rate control method for metaproteomics to replace common target-decoy search approaches in proteomics and a method to ensure the reliability of peptide spectrum match.
Surface-Plasmon Resonances in Single Metallic Nanoparticles

Using a near-field optical antenna effect, we measure the homogeneous line shape of the surface-plasmon resonance in single gold nanoparticles. The surface-plasmon dephasing times extracted from the near-field spectra of the individual particles vary around 8 fs. This mean value agrees with calculations based on Mie theory, which neglect surface effects. Deviations of individual particles from this value are interpreted as being due to variations in the local nanoenvironment. We also observe double-peaked line shapes caused by electromagnetic coupling between close-lying particles.
Adaptive dimensional reduction numerical solution of monotone quasilinear boundary value problems

A feedback extension procedure is developed for the numerical solution of a class of nonlinear boundary value problems associated with antiplane shear, Hencky’s theory of plasticity, or Maxwell’s equations for the magnetic field potential in magnetic shielding. A posteriors error estimators are constructed and analyzed. Under additional smoothness assumptions on the exact and dimensionally reduced solutions the feedback method is proved adaptive, i.e., optimal with respect to convergence rate. This extends previous results in [S. Jensen and I. Babuska, SIAM J. Numer. Anal. , 25(1988), pp. 644–669 ] using dimensional reduction in energy-asymptotic format. Some computational results are given.
CONSTITUTIVE MODEL OF HIGH-DAMPING RUBBER MATERIALS

A mathematical model of high-damping rubber materials is developed. First the material experiments necessary for modeling are systematically conducted. Then, on the basis of the results of the material experiments, a constitutive model for rubber materials is proposed. The model is decomposed into two parts. The first part consists of an elastoplastic body with a strain-dependent isotropic hardening law and it represents the energy dissipation of the material, while the second part consists of a hyperelastic body with a damage model and it expresses the evolutional direction of the stress tensor. By comparing the experimental results with the simulation by the model, the model is found to well approximate the behaviors of high-damping rubber materials. Finally, a hybrid analysis method is proposed. In this method, the strain field of laminated rubber bearings measured by image processing is combined with the numerical analysis to confirm the applicability of the proposed model to the bearing. In addition, by this hybrid analysis method, the bulk modulus of rubber material is also computed.
Generalized Constituent Nodes for Simplified Successive-Cancellation Decoding of Multi-Kernel Polar Codes

The decoding latency of the successive-cancellation decoder for polar codes is of great importance in its practical applications, and it can be reduced by implementing multi-bit decision decoders in the constituent nodes of the decoding tree. In this letter, we develop a matrix analysis method to analyze the corresponding parity submatrix of the decoding tree’s internal node. Two generalized constituent nodes are presented for the fast simplified successive-cancellation (fast-SSC) decoding of linear kernels-mixed multi-kernel polar codes. Results show that the proposed method achieves latency reduction and preserves the error-correction performance.
Another Look at the Method of Y-Standardization in Logit and Probit Models

This article takes another look at the derivation of the method of Y-standardization used in sociological analyses involving comparisons of coefficients across nested logit or probit models. It shows that the method can be derived under less restrictive assumptions than hitherto suggested. Rather than assuming that the logit or probit fixes the variance of the latent error at a known constant, it suffices to assume that the variance of the error is unknown. A further result suggests that using Y-standardization for cross-model comparisons is likely to be biased by model differences in the fit of the latent error to the assumed logistic or normal distribution. Under correct specification Y-standardization recovers an effect size metric similar to Cohen's d.
Factors Affecting Customer Satisfaction in Purchasing Car

Globalization of the markets coupled with economic downturn had changes the pattern of customer behavior and consumption patterns. The customer buying behavior is a complex topic as many internal and external factors have impact on the level of satisfaction of the customer. From the past decade, previous researchers had attempted to understand how customers’ needs their responses and feedbacks. In 2017, the number of Honda Civic 2017 Model car owners has reached 109,511 units in Malaysia and the Malaysia’s southern region occupied 34% of Honda’s total sales compared to others car model (Honda, 2018; Lye, 2018). Seeing that the demand for this model is high, it is crucial to study the car owners’ satisfaction align with the automobile and organizational standards, especially through effective customer satisfaction measurement model. The objective of the research is to study the relevant factors that affecting customers’ satisfaction in purchasing Honda Civic car (model 2017). This research studied the factors (price, customers’ services, brand image and quality) in influencing the customers’ satisfaction. The results show that customers’ services and quality have significant relationship towards customers’ satisfaction. The findings would be useful for academicians to further study on factors related with this area or to find out whether similar to apply this to other industry as well.
Transient decrease in the depth of the negative T wave in apical hypertrophic cardiomyopathy is a sign of left anterior descending artery stenosis: a case series

Abstract Background In patients with apical hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM), electrocardiography (ECG) often shows left ventricular hypertrophy (LVH) and a negative T wave. A negative T wave often disappears over time due to degeneration of the apical myocardium. However, there are limited reports on the temporary change of a negative T wave in patients with HCM. Case summary We report three apical HCM patients with LVH and T wave inversion on their previous ECG who showed a temporary decrease in the depth of the negative T wave. All of them had significant stenosis of coronary arteries including the left anterior descending artery (LAD). After revascularization for the LAD lesion, their ECG returned to the previous depth of the negative T wave. Discussion The cases presented here suggested that a temporary decrease in the depth of the negative T wave in apical HCM patients may be one of the signs of ischaemia in the anterior-apical region caused by severe stenosis of the LAD.
Structured Input-Output Analysis of Compressible Plane Couette Flow

This paper extends the recently introduced structured input-output analysis method for incompressible flows to the compressible regime. The proposed method relies upon an exact quadratic representation of the compressible Navier-Stokes equations that allows for efficient modeling and analysis within the structured singular value framework. Specifically, the compressible plane Couette flow is investigated and the structure of the nonlinear forcing is used to formulate an input-output model suitable for the structured singular value analysis. We have outlined an efficient method to compute upper bounds on the structured singular value, which provide insight into flow instability. Numerical results of the proposed framework are included for subsonic, transonic, and supersonic Mach numbers. These results are compared with those obtained from resolvent gain and unstructured input-output analysis. Our findings show that accounting for the structure of the nonlinearity not only reduces the conservatism in the unstructured gains—thereby increasing the estimated stability margin—but also eliminates some of the instability mechanisms predicted by these other analysis tools. Moreover, the structured input-output results reveal instability mechanisms that are not captured by the resolvent analysis. These contradictory findings between the analysis techniques considered need to be substantiated through experimental and/or computational studies in the future.
Energy-Efficient Task Offloading for Three-Tier Wireless-Powered Mobile-Edge Computing

Mobile-edge computing (MEC) is envisioned to address the computation demands of Internet of Things (IoT) devices. However, it is crucial for the MEC to operate in coordination with the cloud tier to achieve a highly scalable IoT system. In addition, IoT devices require regular maintenance to either recharge or replace their batteries which may not always be feasible. Wireless energy transfer (WET) can provide IoT devices with a stable source of energy. Nonetheless, proper scheduling of energy harvesting and efficient allocation of computing resources are the key to the sustainable operation of these devices. In this article, we introduce a three-tier wireless-powered MEC (WPMEC) consisting of cloud, MEC servers, and IoT devices. We first formulate a combinatorial optimization problem that aims to minimize the wireless energy transmission. To tackle the complexity of the problem, we use bipartite graph matching and propose a harvest-then-offload mechanism for IoT devices. We also exploit parallel processing to increase the performance of the proposed algorithm. Through numerical experiments, we evaluate the performance of our proposed mechanism. Our results show that the proposed mechanism significantly reduces the required energy for the operation of IoT devices compared to different offloading policies. We further show that the proposed mechanism results in up to 34% less wireless energy transmission in comparison to an existing work in the literature.