Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Outcomes of Total Anomalous Pulmonary Venous Connection in Neonates−10-Year Experience at a Single Center

Background: Recent developments in surgical techniques and hospital care have led to improved outcomes following repair of total anomalous pulmonary venous connection (TAPVC). However, surgical repair of neonatal TAPVC remains associated with a high risk of postoperative mortality and pulmonary venous obstruction (PVO). We conducted this retrospective study to identify risk factors associated with surgical outcomes in the neonatal population. Methods: A retrospective review was conducted for all 127 neonates who underwent operations for isolated TAPVC from January 2009 to January 2019. Results: Preoperative PVO occurred in 33 (26.0%) of the 127 patients. Fifty patients (39.4%) required tracheal intubation before the operation. Twenty-three patients (18.1%) underwent emergency surgery. There were 11 (8.7%) early deaths. Significant risk factors were prolonged cardiopulmonary bypass (CPB) time (p = 0.013) and increased postoperative central venous pressure (CVP, p = 0.036). There were 5 (4.3%) late deaths within 1 year of repair. The risk factors for overall death were preoperative acidosis (p = 0.001), prolonged CPB time (p < 0.001) and increased postoperative CVP (p = 0.007). In particular, mortality was significantly higher (p = 0.007) with a postoperative CVP > 8 mmHg. With an increase in use of sutureless techniques (p = 0.001) and decrease in deep hypothermic circulatory arrest (p = 0.009) over the past 5 years, postoperative mortality greatly decreased (21.2%: 6.7%, p = 0.016). Postoperative PVO occurred in 15 patients (11.8%). Risk factors were mixed TAPVC (p = 0.037), preoperative acidosis (p = 0.001) and prolonged CPB time (p = 0.006). Conclusion: Although postoperative mortality of neonatal TAPVC has dropped to 6.7% over the past 5 years, it is still relatively high. Risk factors for postoperative death include preoperative acidosis, prolonged CPB time and increased postoperative CVP. Mortality was significantly higher for neonates with an average CVP > 8 mmHg 24 h after surgery.
Automatic Adjustment of the Inspiratory Trigger and Cycling-Off Criteria Improved Patient-Ventilator Asynchrony During Pressure Support Ventilation

Background: Patient-ventilator asynchrony is common during pressure support ventilation (PSV) because of the constant cycling-off criteria and variation of respiratory system mechanical properties in individual patients. Automatic adjustment of inspiratory triggers and cycling-off criteria based on waveforms might be a useful tool to improve patient-ventilator asynchrony during PSV. Method: Twenty-four patients were enrolled and were ventilated using PSV with different cycling-off criteria of 10% (PS10), 30% (PS30), 50% (PS50), and automatic adjustment PSV (PSAUTO). Patient-ventilator interactions were measured. Results: The total asynchrony index (AI) and NeuroSync index were consistently lower in PSAUTO when compared with PS10, PS30, and PS50, (P < 0.05). The benefit of PSAUTO in reducing the total AI was mainly because of the reduction of the micro-AI but not the macro-AI. PSAUTO significantly improved the relative cycling-off error when compared with prefixed controlled PSV (P < 0.05). PSAUTO significantly reduced the trigger error and inspiratory effort for the trigger when compared with a prefixed trigger. However, total inspiratory effort, breathing patterns, and respiratory drive were not different among modes. Conclusions: When compared with fixed cycling-off criteria, an automatic adjustment system improved patient-ventilator asynchrony without changes in breathing patterns during PSV. The automatic adjustment system could be a useful tool to titrate more personalized mechanical ventilation.
Properties of soundless chemical demolition agents

The traditional approach to demolish concrete structures or to reduce the sizes of large rocks or boulders has typically included the use of explosives. The resulting explosions are associated with the obvious risks posed by shock waves and fly rock. These, along with other detrimental side effects of using explosives, have increased an interest in the use of alternative methods to demolish rock and concrete structures. Soundless chemical demolition agents (SCDAs) have proven to be viable substitutes for the use of explosives. SCDAs are powdery materials that will expand considerably when mixed with water. This expansion, when occurring under confinement, generates significant expansive pressures. These pressures are sufficient to break up rock and concrete when the SCDA is confined in a borehole or a series of boreholes. Experiments have been conducted with SCDAs to learn more about those variables that tend to hamper or enhance SCDA performance. Results show that the amount of mixing water and the ambient temperature are the most important variables in influencing the generation of SCDA expansive pressures.
Adverse Effects and Toxicity of Immune Checkpoint Inhibitors For Patients With Urothelial Carcinoma

Urothelial carcinoma (UC) occupies a high incidence among all the genitourinary malignancies. Immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs), as alternative treatments of metastatic urothelial carcinoma (mUC), have been applied in the treatment of mUC after chemotherapy failure, with comparable efficacy and safety. ICIs can enhance anti-tumor T cell reactivity and promote immune control over the cancerous cells by blocking cytotoxic T-lymphocyte antigen 4 (CTLA-4) or the combination of PD-1 and PD-L1. In the treatment of urothelial carcinoma, ICIs show obvious advantage and can enhance survival rates. However, their adverse effects are gradually manifested with increasing clinical applications. Therefore, we review the adverse effects and toxicity of ICIs in patients with UC, aiming to provide sound theoretical references and therapeutic strategies for their clinical application.
ECT in an Adolescent With Schizophrenia and Seizures: Case Report

Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) has been recognized as an effective treatment option in catatonia, and for prolonged or severe affective episodes and schizophrenia. Response rates vary from 40 to 80% in adolescents. The procedure is safe if the required precautions are undertaken. Nonetheless, ECT remains a serious clinical challenge in patients with comorbid seizures. We present a case study of a 17-year-old female student suffering from schizophrenia who was scheduled for ECT due to prior treatment inefficacy. Seizures had occurred a few days before the first ECT session. Nevertheless, the patient received the ECT course, combined with clozapine at 125 mg/day, after neurological diagnosis and treatment modification because the illness became life-threatening. The patient's clinical outcome was satisfactory without any seriously adverse events and further improvements were observed in the mental state following long-term psychosocial treatment at our inpatient unit. A few months later, epilepsy was however diagnosed with probably coexistence of partial seizures and seizure-like events without EEG correlate. Administering ECT in patients with seizure comorbidity was also investigated based on previous research. Data on this is, however, extremely scarce and to the best of our knowledge, the safety and efficacy of using ECT in adolescents with schizophrenia and seizures has yet not to any great extent been discussed in the literature.
The Document Chain: a Delta CRDT framework for arbitrary JSON data

In this paper we present a generic δ-CRDT framework for arbitrary JSON data called the Document Chain. In contrast to similar approaches based on explicit update operations, the proposed solution is able to automatically determine changesets for nested data structures. Data can be stored on different backends, and replication can be performed without locking and with non-destructive conflict resolution. The Document Chain is meant to support the development of collaborative applications by exploiting existing communication and storage solutions, such as shared folders or file sharing platforms in the cloud. An evaluation of the performance in terms of storage overhead, replication cost and computation time indicates that the proposed framework compares favorably with other solutions, and is therefore suitable for implementing collaboration features into existing applications.
Hitting sets for regular branching programs

We construct improved hitting set generators (HSGs) for ordered (read-once) regular branching programs in two parameter regimes. First, we construct an explicit ε-HSG for unbounded-width regular branching programs with a single accept state with seed length [EQUATION] where n is the length of the program. Second, we construct an explicit ε-HSG for width-w length-n regular branching programs with seed length [EQUATION] For context, the "baseline" in this area is the pseudorandom generator (PRG) by Nisan (Combinatorica 1992), which fools ordered (possibly non-regular) branching programs with seed length O(log(wn/ε) · log n). For regular programs, the state-of-the-art PRG, by Braverman, Rao, Raz, and Yehudayoff (FOCS 2010, SICOMP 2014), has seed length Õ(log(w/ε) · log n), which beats Nisan's seed length when log(w/ε) = o(log n). Taken together, our two new constructions beat Nisan's seed length in all parameter regimes except when log w and log (1/ε) are both Ω(log n) (for the construction of HSGs for regular branching programs with a single accept vertex). Extending work by Reingold, Trevisan, and Vadhan (STOC 2006), we furthermore show that an explicit HSG for regular branching programs with a single accept vertex with seed length o(log2 n) in the regime log w = Θ(log(1/ε)) = Θ(log n) would imply improved HSGs for general ordered branching programs, which would be a major breakthrough in derandomization. Pyne and Vadhan (CCC 2021) recently obtained such parameters for the special case of permutation branching programs.
Trail Search with CRHS Equations

Evaluating a block cipher’s strength against diﬀerential or linear cryptanalysis can be a diﬃcult task. Several approaches for ﬁnding the best diﬀerential or linear trails in a cipher have been proposed, such as using mixed integer linear programming or SAT solvers. Recently a diﬀerent approach was suggested, modelling the problem as a staged, acyclic graph and exploiting the large number of paths the graph contains. This paper follows up on the graph-based approach and models the problem via compressed right-hand side equations. The graph we build contains paths which represent diﬀerential or linear trails in a cipher with few active S-boxes. Our method incorporates control over the memory usage, and the time complexity scales linearly with the number of rounds of the cipher being analysed. The proposed method is made available as a tool, and using it we are able to ﬁnd diﬀerential trails for the Klein and Prince ciphers with higher probabilities than previously published.
Overview of the development and implementation of the mandatory building inspection scheme (MBIS) in Hong Kong

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide a concise overview of the problem of building decay in Hong Kong, the current government measures concerning dilapidated buildings and the latest development and implementation of the mandatory building inspection scheme (MBIS). A comparison of various MBISs from other jurisdictions of the world is also given. Design/methodology/approach – A desktop study of building inspection procedures, repair and maintenance policies was carried out, followed by an industry-wide opinion survey conducted by means of self-administered questionnaires. Target respondents are within the construction community of Hong Kong. The perceived benefits, potential difficulties and insightful recommendations or good practices are investigated. A comparison of the relative ranking of individual mean scores from various groups of respondents is presented in this paper. Findings – The execution of MBIS was found to be effective in enhancing public awareness of the importance of buildin.
Efficient Functional Commitments: How to Commit to Private Functions

We construct efficient functional commitments for all bounded size arithmetic circuits. A (function hiding) functional commitment scheme allows a committer to commit to a secret function f and later prove that y = f(x) for public x and y—without revealing any other information about f . Thus, functional commitments allow the operator of a secret process to prove that the process is being applied uniformly to everyone. Possible applications include bail decisions, credit scores, online ranking algorithms, and proprietary software-as-a-service. To build functional commitments, we introduce a new type of protocol: a proof of function relation (PFR) to show that a committed relation is a function. We show that combining a suitable preprocessing zk-SNARK with a PFR yields a secure functional commitment scheme. We then construct efficient PFRs for two popular preprocessing zk-SNARKs, and obtain two functional commitment schemes for arithmetic circuits. These constructions build on polynomial commitments (a special case of functional commitments), so our work shows that polynomial commitments are “complete” for functional commitments.
Themis: Fast, Strong Order-Fairness in Byzantine Consensus

We introduce Themis, a scheme for introducing fair ordering of transactions into (permissioned) Byzantine consensus protocols with at most ƒ faulty nodes among n ≥ 4ƒ + 1. Themis enforces the strongest notion of fair ordering proposed to date. It also achieves standard liveness, rather than the weaker notion of previous work with the same fair ordering property. We show experimentally that Themis can be integrated into state-of-the-art consensus protocols with minimal modification or performance overhead. Additionally, we introduce a suite of experiments of general interest for evaluating the practical strength of various notions of fair ordering and the resilience of fair-ordering protocols to adversarial manipulation. We use this suite of experiments to show that the notion of fair ordering enforced by Themis is stronger in practice than those of competing systems. We believe Themis offers strong practical protection against many types of transaction-ordering attacks-such as front-running and back-running-that are currently impacting commonly used smart contract systems.
Twin BERT Contextualized Sentence Embedding Space Learning and Gradient-Boosted Decision Tree Ensembles for Scene Segmentation in German Literature

This paper documents a submission to the shared task on scene segmentation hosted at KONVENS 2021 (Zehe et al., 2021b). The aim of this shared task was to ﬁnd methods for segmenting narrative texts into different scenes – segments of text where location, time and the constellation of characters stay more or less coherent. This task is formulated as a sentence classiﬁcation task where sentences bordering the scenes have to be distinguished from in-scene sentences. The approach presented in this paper is based on two steps. In the ﬁrst one, a twin BERT training setup is used to learn a sentence embedding space in which sentences functioning as scene borders are well-separated from ones that are in-scene. In the second one, the sentence embeddings generated by this model are used as feature vectors to feed a gradient-boosted decision tree ensemble which conducts ﬁnal predictions. In the shared task leaderboard, the system ranked second in track 1 and ﬁrst in track 2.
eMoflon: : Neo - Consistency and Model Management with Graph Databases

Maintaining the consistency of interrelated models is an important task in the context of Model-Driven Engineering (MDE). Appropriate tool support is crucial to achieve an adequate level of automation required for successful model management in general, and consistency maintenance in particular. Numerous MDE tools, including the tools in the eMoflon toolsuite, build upon the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF), a de-facto MDE standard. While EMF is a great framework, it has some drawbacks regarding scalability and flexibility with respect to metamodel conformance. As our focus in recent years has turned to concurrent synchronisation and conflict resolution as an optimisation problem, we have decided to explore graph databases as an alternative infrastructure for handling our runtime model operations. In this paper we present the consistency management tool eMoflon::Neo as the latest addition to the eMoflon toolsuite, based on EMF for specification models , and the graph database Neo4j for all runtime models .
Quantifying the reliability level of system integrity protection schemes

System integrity protection schemes (SIPS) are a widely used solution to the challenges in operating electrical power transmission systems during the last few decades. Since these protection schemes have become an integral part of the system, it must be ensured that their performance satisfies the reliability requirements of electrical utilities, when expressed in terms of dependability and security. This study proposes a method based on Markov modelling and fault tree analysis for assessing the reliability of a generic SIPS, but it is illustrated using the Dinorwig intertrip scheme, located in North Wales and operated by National Grid (Great Britain system operator). In addition, two reliability indices, widely used in the process control industry, are suggested for quantifying the reliability level of SIPS: (i) safety integrity level and (ii) spurious trip level. Many operators tend to have SIPS permanently in service; this reduces the probability of a `failure to operate' because of a problem in the arming software or an error by a human operator that prevented the scheme being armed when required. Therefore, the impact of having SIPS always armed on SIPS reliability is compared with the impact of switching IN the scheme only when the arming conditions are fulfilled.
Adoption and Use of Interorganizational ICT in a Construction Project

The objective of this research is to explain why actors are not using interorganizational information and communication technology (ICT) in construction projects in the intended way, by determining the mechanisms that influence the way actors use this ICT over time during a construction project. This explorative research results in a theoretical model that contains four key categories that explains the way actors use ICT in construction projects: (1) personal motivation; (2) external motivation; (3) knowledge and skills; and (4) acting opportunities. The model is compared with three existing influential models about the adoption and use of ICT: the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology, the theory of planned behavior, and the technology acceptance model. In these models missing elements are found. In addition, it is found that fundamental characteristics of construction projects, such as the fragmented and temporarily nature of construction projects, and the different working practices, resources, and objectives of the organizations involved cause most of the barriers to the intended use of interorganizational ICT.
Characteristics of dynamic monitoring data and observed behaviour of the Confederation Bridge due to operational load variations1

A dynamic monitoring system has been installed on the Confederation Bridge to capture ambient and triggered vibration responses of the bridge due to wind, traffic, ice, and earthquake loads. The field monitoring data and observed behaviour of the bridge provide useful information and insights for practical application of vibration based structural health monitoring techniques in actual field operating conditions. In the present study, monitoring data collected under different loading scenarios have been analyzed to better understand the variability characteristics of the field measured data and extracted dynamic properties of the bridge. Calibration of computer bridge models using the monitoring data is presented. The field measured vibration modal frequencies differ only by 2% to 4% from the calibrated computer models. Field observed vibration mode shapes and damping ratios of the bridge are also presented. The frequency contents of the bridge responses and their variability under different loading scena.
OPTIMAL TOPOLOGIES FOR CASCADED SUB-MULTILEVEL CONVERTERS

The general function of a multilevel converter is to synthesize a desired output voltage from several levels of dc voltages as inputs. In order to increase the steps in the output voltage, a new topology is recommended in [1], which benefits from a series connection of sub-multilevel converters. In the procedure described in this reference, despite all the advantages, it is not possible to produce all the steps (odd and even) in the output. In addition, for producing an output voltage with a constant number of steps, there are different configurations with a different number of components. In this paper, the optimal structures for this topology are investigated for various objectives such as minimum number of switches and dc voltage sources and minimum standing voltage on the switches for producing the maximum output voltage steps. Two new algorithms for determining the dc voltage sources magnitudes have been proposed. Finally, in order to verify the theoretical issues, simulation and experimental results for a 49-level converter with a maximum output voltage of 200V are presented.
Study of Performance Evaluations in Electrical Construction Industry

This paper explores the topic of job performance evaluations in the electrical construction industry. It presents a survey of performance evaluation criteria necessary for accurately evaluating the job performance of a typical electrical field supervisor. The research study that this paper is based on had the following objectives: (1) Discover the traits of electrical contracting companies that conduct performance evaluations; (2) find out what types of evaluations are conducted (in terms of time length, frequency, etc.); (3) determine the job duties of a typical electrical field supervisor; (4) establish a list of criteria to use in evaluating a supervisor's performance; and (5) collect the industry's opinions concerning performance evaluations. The main methods of data collection consisted of literature searches, personal interviews, and a questionnaire survey. Members of the National Electrical Contractors Association (NECA) served as the main source of data for this study. Analyses of the data collect.
The Effective Removal of Congo Red Dye from Aqueous Solution Using Fly Ash/CeO2 Composite Material

Fly ash/CeO2 composite adsorbent (FA/CeO2) was prepared by HCl treatment and precipitation method using a low-cost waste fly ash (FA) as the raw material and used for the removal of Congo Red (CR) from aqueous solution. Effects of important parameters such as contact time, initial dye concentration, pH value and temperature were explored. Adsorption equilibrium and isotherms were investigated. The adsorption of CR onto FA/CeO2 is a fast process and to achieve a basic balance in 30 minutes. The removal of CR is strongly pH-dependent. FA/CeO2 is an effective adsorbent for the CR removal with removal rate of 98.8% when initial CR concentration is 1000 mg/L. The experimental isotherm data were analyzed using Langmuir and Freundlich isotherm models. The results revealed that the adsorption behavior of CR on FA/CeO2 fitted well with the Langmuir model at different temperatures. The maximum adsorption capacity obtained by Langmuir model is 232.56 mg/g which is nearly consistent with the actual adsorption value of 230.01 mg/g at 298K. The Adsorption amount decreases with increasing temperature, but the variation of the amplitude is very small.