Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Experiences of Caregivers with Spouses Receiving Chemotherapy for Colorectal Cancer and their Expectations from Nursing Services

Objective: The purpose of this study was to reveal experiences of caregivers whose spouses were receiving chemotherapy for colorectal cancer and their expectations from nursing services. Methods: This is a qualitative study. The caregivers were interviewed at their home. Sampling criteria were volunteering to participate in the study, being able to understand Turkish, not having speech or hearing problems and offering care to spouses with primary colorectal cancer. The interviews continued until concepts likely to be responses to research questions repeatedly appeared. Fourteen caregivers with spouses receiving chemotherapy for colorectal cancer comprised the study sample. Data were collected with a descriptive characteristics form and a semi-structured interview at in-depth interviews after making appointments with the caregivers on the phone. The steps followed in the content analysis were coding data, an organization of codes and themes, description of findings and evaluation of findings. Results: Experiences of the caregivers whose spouses were receiving chemotherapy for colorectal cancer and their expectations from nursing services were found to comprise the following themes “Facing the Disease,” “Difficulties Encountered,” “Continuing to Live,” and “Provision of Health Care Services. ” Conclusions: The results of the study revealed that cancer and its treatment affected not only cancer patients but also their spouses offering care. Nurses giving care at oncology clinics, public health centers, and home can make care plans based on the four themes emerging in this study and can detect problems earlier and create appropriate solutions to them. They will contribute to the literature revealing needs of people offering care to oncology patients as well.
Real Time Robust Human Detection and Tracking System

In this paper, we present a real time robust human detection and tracking system for video surveillance which can be used in varying environments. This system consists of human detection, human tracking and false object detection. The human detection utilizes the background subtraction to segment the blob and use codebook to classify human being from other objects. The optimal design algorithm of the codebook is proposed. The tracking is performed at two levels: human classification and individual tracking . The color histogram of human body is used as the appearance model to track individuals. In order to reduce the false alarm, the algorithms of the false object detection are also provided.
Kinetics of the C 2 H 5 O 2 + NO x Reactions: Temperature Dependence of the Overall Rate Constant and the C 2 H 5 ONO 2 Branching Channel of C 2 H 5 O 2 + NO

The temperature dependence of the overall rate constant for the C 2H5O2 + NO reaction and the rate constant for the minor branching channel resulting in the production of C 2H5ONO2 have been measured using the turbulent flow technique with high-pressure chemical ionization mass spectrometry for the detection of reactants and products. The temperature dependence of the overall rate constant for the C 2H5O2 + NO reaction was investigated between 299 and 213 K at 100 Torr pressure, and the data was fit to the following Arrhenius expression (with 2 standard deviation error limits indicated): 3.8 -1.3 +2.1 × 10-12exp[(290 ( 110)/T] cm3 molecule-1 s-1. The temperature dependence of the overall rate constant agrees well with the current recommendation for atmospheric modeling. The minor reaction channel C 2H5O2 + NO f C2H5ONO2 was directly observed for the first time, and the temperature dependence of the rate constant for this channel was investigated between 298 and 213 K at 100 Torr pressure. The following Arrhenius expression was determined for the minor channel: 1.6 -1.2 +4.0 × 10-15exp[(1160( 310)/T] cm3 molecule-1 s-1. The Arrhenius expressions for the overall rate and the C 2H5ONO2 producing channel indicate a branching ratio of about 0.006 at 298 K and 0.02 at 213 K at 100 Torr pressure. The temperature dependence of the overall rate constant for the C2H5O2 + NO2 reaction was also investigated between 299 and 213 K at 100 Torr pressure, and the data was fit to the following Arrhenius expression: 4.7 -1.4 +2.0 × 10-13exp[(620( 89)/T] cm3 molecule-1 s-1.
Sleep-Dependent Oscillatory Synchronization: A Role in Fear Memory Consolidation

Sleep plays an important role in memory consolidation through the facilitation of neuronal plasticity; however, how sleep accomplishes this remains to be completely understood. It has previously been demonstrated that neural oscillations are an intrinsic mechanism by which the brain precisely controls neural ensembles. Inter-regional synchronization of these oscillations is also known to facilitate long-range communication and long-term potentiation (LTP). In the present study, we investigated how the characteristic rhythms found in local field potentials (LFPs) during non-REM and REM sleep play a role in emotional memory consolidation. Chronically implanted bipolar electrodes in the lateral amygdala (LA), dorsal and ventral hippocampus (DH, VH), and the infra-limbic (IL), and pre-limbic (PL) prefrontal cortex were used to record LFPs across sleep-wake activity following each day of a Pavlovian cued fear conditioning paradigm. This resulted in three principle findings: (1) theta rhythms during REM sleep are highly synchronized between regions; (2) the extent of inter-regional synchronization during REM and non-REM sleep is altered by FC and EX; (3) the mean phase difference of synchronization between the LA and VH during REM sleep predicts changes in freezing after cued fear extinction. These results both oppose a currently proposed model of sleep-dependent memory consolidation and provide a novel finding which suggests that the role of REM sleep theta rhythms in memory consolidation may rely more on the relative phase-shift between neural oscillations, rather than the extent of phase synchronization.
A Vocal Tract Visualisation Tool for a Computer-Based Speech Training Aid for Hearing-Impaired Individuals

This paper describes a computer-based software prototype tool for visualisation of the vocal-tract, during speech articulation, by means of a mid-sagittal view of the human head. The vocal tract graphics are generated by estimating both the area functions and the formant frequencies from the acoustic speech signal. First, it is assumed that the speech production process is an autoregressive model. Using a linear prediction analysis, the vocal tract area functions and the first three formants are estimated. The estimated area functions are then mapped to corresponding mid-sagittal distances and displayed as 2D vocal tract lateral graphics. The mapping process is based on a simple numerical algorithm and an accurate reference grid derived from x-rays for the pronunciation of a number English vowels uttered by different speakers. To compensate for possible errors in the estimated area functions due to variation in vocal tract length between speakers, the first two sectional distances are determined by the three formants. Experimental results show high correlation with x-ray data and the PARAFAC analysis. The tool also displays other speech parameters that are closely related to the production of intelligible speech and hence would be useful as a visual feedback aid for speech training of hearing–impaired individuals.
Oseltamivir- and Amantadine-Resistant Influenza Virus A (H1N1)

A high rate of oseltamivir resistance in seasonal influenza virus A (H1N1) infection was reported in Europe in the winter of 2007–08 (1). Of subtype H1N1 isolates tested in 18 European countries, 59 (13.5%) of 437 were resistant to oseltamivir and carried the substitution of histidine by tyrosine at residue 274 (H274Y) of the neuraminidase (NA) gene. Genetic analysis showed that all oseltamivirresistant strains of subtype H1N1 virus remained susceptible to amantadine. In Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, People’s Republic of China, amantadine and oseltamivir are not commonly used to treat patients with influenza. Surveillance of amantadine and oseltamivir resistance among influenza viruses was begun in 2006 after a high rate of amantadine resistance was reported among subtype H3N2 viruses (2) and a stockpile of oseltamivir was purchased for pandemic preparedness. Oseltamivir resistance was first detected in January 2008. We report detection of subtype H1N1 virus isolates that became resistant to amantadine and oseltamivir because of genetic reassortment and spontaneous mutation.
Ground, Proximal, and Satellite Remote Sensing of Soil Moisture

Soil moisture (SM) is a key hydrologic state variable that is of significant importance for numerous Earth and environmental science applications that directly impact the global environment and human society. Potential applications include, but are not limited to, forecasting of weather and climate variability; prediction and monitoring of drought conditions; management and allocation of water resources; agricultural plant production and alleviation of famine; prevention of natural disasters such as wild fires, landslides, floods, and dust storms; or monitoring of ecosystem response to climate change. Because of the importance and wide‐ranging applicability of highly variable spatial and temporal SM information that links the water, energy, and carbon cycles, significant efforts and resources have been devoted in recent years to advance SM measurement and monitoring capabilities from the point to the global scales. This review encompasses recent advances and the state‐of‐the‐art of ground, proximal, and novel SM remote sensing techniques at various spatial and temporal scales and identifies critical future research needs and directions to further advance and optimize technology, analysis and retrieval methods, and the application of SM information to improve the understanding of critical zone moisture dynamics. Despite the impressive progress over the last decade, there are still many opportunities and needs to, for example, improve SM retrieval from remotely sensed optical, thermal, and microwave data and opportunities for novel applications of SM information for water resources management, sustainable environmental development, and food security.
A Mutation in the G-Protein Gene GNB2 Causes Familial Sinus Node and Atrioventricular Conduction Dysfunction

Rationale: Familial sinus node and atrioventricular conduction dysfunction is a rare disorder that leads to paroxysmal dizziness, fatigue, and syncope because of a temporarily or permanently reduced heart rate. To date, only a few genes for familial sinus and atrioventricular conduction dysfunction are known, and the majority of cases remain pathogenically unresolved. Objective: We aim to identify the disease gene in a large 3-generation family (n=25) with autosomal dominant sinus node dysfunction (SND) and atrioventricular block (AVB) and to characterize the mutation-related pathomechanisms in familial SND+AVB. Methods and Results: Genome-wide linkage analysis mapped the SND+AVB disease locus to chromosome 7q21.1-q31.1 (2-point logarithm of the odds score: 4.64; &thgr;=0); in this region, targeted exome sequencing identified a novel heterozygous mutation (p.Arg52Leu) in the GNB2 gene that strictly cosegregated with the SND+AVB phenotype. GNB2 encodes the &bgr;2 subunit (G&bgr;2) of the heterotrimeric G-protein complex that is being released from G-protein–coupled receptors on vagal stimulation. In 2 heterologous expression systems (HEK-293T cells and Xenopus laevis oocytes), an enhanced activation of the G-protein–activated K+ channel (GIRK; Kir3.1/Kir3.4) was shown when mutant G&bgr;2 was coexpressed with G&ggr;2; this was in contrast to coexpression of mutant G&bgr;2-G&ggr;2 with other cardiac ion channels (HCN4, HCN2, and Cav1.2). Molecular dynamics simulations suggested a reduced binding property of mutant G&bgr;2 to cardiac GIRK channels when compared with native G&bgr;2. Conclusions: A GNB2 gene mutation is associated with familial SND+AVB and leads to a sustained activation of cardiac GIRK channels, which is likely to hyperpolarize the myocellular membrane potential and thus reduces their spontaneous activity. Our findings describe for the first time a role of a mutant G-protein in the nonsyndromic pacemaker disease because of GIRK channel activation.
Creating a live broadcast from a virtual environment

“Inhabited Television” combines multiuser virtual environments with television, so that online audience-members can participate in TV shows staged in a virtual world. It is presented simultaneously both to conventional passive viewers and to online participants. In many cases it benefits from being broadcast live. This paper is based on our fourth major experiment with Inhabited TV, a live virtual game show called “Out Of This World”. For this event we adopted non-automated approaches to camera control and mixing to allow an exploration of appropriate forms of presentation for inhabited television. We describe the techniques which were used to create and enhance the live video output which was produced during the show: appropriate world design; dynamic constraints on participant movements; and a performance-oriented virtual camera control interface. This camera control interface includes explicit support for a range of spatial and temporal control styles. We also give evaluative feedback on the camera control interface and the event’s (television-based) approach to mixing and directing, drawing on a social scientific field study conducted on-site during the preparation for, and performances of, the show. CR
Jamming in fading Multiple Access Channels

A fading Multiple Access Channel with a jammer is considered and a non-cooperative game between the two users and the jammer is formulated. Here, both the user-receiver links as well as the jammer-receiver link are time-varying fading links. The decoder employed is a successive cancellation decoder. To begin with, the decoder announces a scheme where it shares with the users and the jammer their decoding order as a function of the combined channel state observed. Equivalently, this scheme is a partition of the space of all channel states into two sets. For the observed channel states belonging to the first set, the first user is decoded followed by the second, while for the states belonging to the other set, the decoding order is reversed. Each user aims to maximize its own rate whilst treating the other user as noisy interference. The adversarial jammer chooses its channel input so as to minimize overall throughput. We show that for every decoding scheme announced by the decoder, the resulting game has a unique Pareto-dominated Nash equilibrium. Also, connections with relevant existing results on fading Multiple Access Channels with a jamming adversary, specifically w.r. t the equilibrium sum-rate operating point, are discussed.
Taily: shard selection using the tail of score distributions

Search engines can improve their efficiency by selecting only few promising shards for each query. State-of-the-art shard selection algorithms first query a central index of sampled documents, and their effectiveness is similar to searching all shards. However, the search in the central index also hurts efficiency. Additionally, we show that the effectiveness of these approaches varies substantially with the sampled documents. This paper proposes Taily, a novel shard selection algorithm that models a query's score distribution in each shard as a Gamma distribution and selects shards with highly scored documents in the tail of the distribution. Taily estimates the parameters of score distributions based on the mean and variance of the score function's features in the collections and shards. Because Taily operates on term statistics instead of document samples, it is efficient and has deterministic effectiveness. Experiments on large web collections (Gov2, CluewebA and CluewebB) show that Taily achieves similar effectiveness to sample-based approaches, and improves upon their efficiency by roughly 20% in terms of used resources and response time.
Dietary Patterns and Clinical Outcomes in Hemodialysis Patients in Japan: A Cohort Study

Background & Objectives Little is known about actual dietary patterns and their associations with clinical outcomes in hemodialysis patients. We identified dietary patterns in hemodialysis patients in Japan and examined associations between dietary patterns and clinical outcomes. Design, setting, participants, measurements We used data from 3,080 general-population participants in the Hisayama study (year 2007), and data from 1,355 hemodialysis patients in the Japan Dialysis Outcomes and Practice Patterns Study (JDOPPS: years 2005–2007). Food intake was measured using a brief self-administered diet-history questionnaire (BDHQ). To identify food groups with the Hisayama population data, we used principal components analysis with Promax rotation. We adjusted the resulting food groups for total daily energy intake, and then we used those adjusted food-group scores to identify dietary patterns in the JDOPPS patients by cluster analysis (Ward’s method). We then used Cox regression to examine the association between dietary patterns and a composite of adverse clinical outcomes: hospitalization due to cardiovascular disease or death due to any cause. Results We identified three food groups: meat, fish, and vegetables. Using those groups we then identified three dietary patterns: well-balanced, unbalanced, and other. After adjusting for potential confounders, we found an association between an unbalanced diet and important clinical events (hazard ratio 1.90, 95% C.I. 1.19–3.04). Conclusions Hemodialysis patients whose diet was unbalanced were more likely to have adverse clinical outcomes. Thus hemodialysis patients might benefit not only from portion control, but also from a diet that is well-balanced diet with regard to the food groups identified here as meat, fish, and vegetables.
Intensity-driven adaptive-neighborhood technique for polarimetric and interferometric SAR parameters estimation

In this paper, a new method to filter coherency matrices of polarimetric or interferometric data is presented. For each pixel, an adaptive neighborhood (AN) is determined by a region growing technique driven exclusively by the intensity image information. All the available intensity images of the polarimetric and interferometric terms are fused in the region growing process to ensure the validity of the stationarity assumption. Afterward, all the pixels within the obtained AN are used to yield the filtered values of the polarimetric and interferometric coherency matrices, which can be derived either by direct complex multilooking or from the locally linear minimum mean-squared error (LLMMSE) estimator. The entropy/alpha/anisotropy decomposition is then applied to the estimated polarimetric coherency matrices, and coherence optimization is performed on the estimated polarimetric and interferometric coherency matrices. Using this decomposition, unsupervised classification for land applications by an iterative algorithm based on a complex Wishart density function is also applied. The method has been tested on airborne high-resolution polarimetric interferometric synthetic aperture radar (POL-InSAR) images (Oberpfaffenhofen area-German Space Agency). For comparison purposes, the two estimation techniques (complex multilooking and LLMMSE) were tested using three different spatial supports: a fix-sized symmetric neighborhood (boxcar filter), directional nonsymmetric windows, and the proposed AN. Subjective and objective performance analysis, including coherence edge detection, receiver operating characteristics plots, and bias reduction tables, recommends the proposed algorithm as an effective POL-InSAR postprocessing technique.
Cuprizone demyelination of the corpus callosum in mice correlates with altered social interaction and impaired bilateral sensorimotor coordination

For studies of remyelination in demyelinating diseases, the cuprizone model of CC (corpus callosum) demyelination has experimental advantages that include overall size, proximity to neural stem cells of the subventricular zone, and correlation with a lesion predilection site in multiple sclerosis. In addition, cuprizone treatment can be ended to allow more direct analysis of remyelination than with viral or autoimmune models. However, CC demyelination lacks a useful functional correlate in rodents for longitudinal analysis throughout the course of demyelination and remyelination. In the present study, we tested two distinct behavioural measurements in mice fed 0.2% cuprizone. Running on a ‘complex' wheel with varied rung intervals requires integration between cerebral hemispheres for rapid bilateral sensorimotor coordination. Maximum running velocity on the ‘complex' wheel decreased during acute (6 week) and chronic (12 week) cuprizone demyelination. Running velocity on the complex wheel distinguished treated (for 6 weeks) from non-treated mice, even after a 6-week recovery period for spontaneous remyelination. A second behavioural assessment was a resident–intruder test of social interaction. The frequency of interactive behaviours increased among resident mice after acute or chronic demyelination. Differences in both sensorimotor coordination and social interaction correlated with demonstrated CC demyelination. The wheel assay is applicable for longitudinal studies. The resident–intruder assay provides a complementary assessment of a distinct modality at a specific time point. These behavioural measurements are sufficiently robust for small cohorts as a non-invasive assessment of demyelination to facilitate analysis of subsequent remyelination. These measurements may also identify CC involvement in other mouse models of central nervous system injuries and disorders.
Buffer Management Scheme for IP Differentiated Services

The demanding quality of service needs of research, education and commercial network service providers require new services in current “best-effort” Internet architecture. The Internet must enable applications that demand specific services to profit from a set of differentiated traffic classes, which support either relative or absolute types of quality of service, or both. This diploma thesis focuses on the design of scalable buffer management and queueing strategies in a quality of service enabled Internet. A threshold-based buffer management to be used mainly in core routers is proposed, implemented and tested in the ns network simulator. A new buffer management scheme, the differentiated random drop scheme, is introduced. Combined with simple first come first served FCFS scheduling the scheme can support IP differentiated services. The behavior of the new buffer management is illustrated and compared with other schemes by means of extensive simulations. La demande de qualité de service dans le domaine de la recherche, les réseaux d’éducation et commerciaux et la tendance forte d’utiliser IP comme protocol de base pour presque tous les applications du transfer des fichier à la distribution de son et de télévision y compris la radiodiffusion nécessite de nouveaux types de services autre que le “best effort” d’aujourd’hui. Internet devra mettre à disposition des classes de services pour differentier le traffic et fournir de la qualité de service soit relative ou absolue ou les deux. Cette thèse professionnelle introduit une gestion de tampon à deux seuil et montre un nouveau schéma d’administration de tampon nommé “differentiated random drop”. Combiné avec un simple FCFS ordonnancement ce schéma permet de soutenir des services IP différentiés (differentiated services). Une implémentation dans le simulateur de réseaux ns en utilisant differents algorithmes d’ ordonnancement a été réalisé et des simulations comparant les divers schémas en utilisant cette implementation ont été effectué.