Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Disentangling quality and safety indicator data: a longitudinal, comparative study of hand hygiene compliance and accreditation outcomes in 96 Australian hospitals

Objectives The study aims are twofold. First, to investigate the suitability of hand hygiene as an indicator of accreditation outcomes and, second, to test the hypothesis that hospitals with better accreditation outcomes achieve higher hand hygiene compliance rates. Design A retrospective, longitudinal, multisite comparative survey. Setting Acute public hospitals in New South Wales, Australia. Participants 96 acute hospitals with accreditation survey results from two surveys during 2009–2012 and submitted data for more than four hand hygiene audits between 2010 and 2013. Outcomes Our primary outcome comprised observational hand hygiene compliance data from eight audits during 2010–2013. The explanatory variables in our multilevel regression model included: accreditation outcomes and scores for the infection control standard; timing of the surveys; and hospital size and activity. Results Average hand hygiene compliance rates increased from 67.7% to 80.3% during the study period (2010–2013), with 46.7% of hospitals achieving target compliance rates of 70% in audit 1, versus 92.3% in audit 8. Average hand hygiene rates at small hospitals were 7.8 percentage points (pp) higher than those at the largest hospitals (p<0.05). The association between hand hygiene rates, accreditation outcomes and infection control scores is less clear. Conclusions Our results indicate that accreditation outcomes and hand hygiene audit data are measuring different parts of the quality and safety spectrum. Understanding what is being measured when selecting indicators to assess the impact of accreditation is critical as focusing on accreditation results would discount successful hand hygiene implementation by smaller hospitals. Conversely, relying on hand hygiene results would discount the infection control related research and leadership investment by larger hospitals. Our hypothesis appears to be confounded by an accreditation programme that makes it more difficult for smaller hospitals to achieve high infection control scores.
The Impact of the Newly Licensed Dengue Vaccine in Endemic Countries

Background: With approximately 3 billion people at risk of acquiring the infection, dengue fever is now considered the most important mosquito-borne viral disease in the world, with 390 million dengue infections occurring every year, of which 96 million manifest symptoms with any level of disease severity. Treatment of uncomplicated dengue cases is only supportive and severe dengue cases require hospital intensive care. A vaccine now licensed in several countries and developed by Sanofi Pasteur (CYD-TDV, named Dengvaxia), is able to protect, in the first 25 months of the two Phase III, 66% of a subset of 9 − 16 year old participants. However, a significantly lower efficacy (including negative vaccine efficacy) was noted for children younger than 9 years of age. Methodology/Principal Findings: Analysis of year 3 results of phase III trials of Dengvaxia suggest high rates of protection of vaccinated partial dengue immunes but high rates of hospitalizations during breakthrough dengue infections of persons who were vaccinated when seronegative, with vaccine appearing to induce enhancing antibodies (ADE). An age structured model was developed based on Sanofi’s recommendation to vaccinate persons age 945 years in dengue endemic countries. The model was used to explore the clinical burden of two vaccination strategies: 1) Vaccinate 4 or 20% of individuals, ages 9 − 45 years, seropositives and seronegatives, and 2) vaccinate 4 or 20% of individuals, ages 9 − 45 years, who are dengue immune only. Conclusions/Significance: Our results show that vaccinating dengue monotypic immune individuals prevents dengue hospitalizations, but at the same time dengue infections of vaccine-sensitized persons increases hospitalizations. When the vaccine is given only to partial immune individuals, after immuno-logical screening of the population, disease burden decreases considerably. Author Summary Caused by four antigenically related but distinct serotypes a tetravalent vaccine is needed to protect against the huge burden of dengue disease. Dengvaxia is a vaccine candidate now licensed in several countries for individuals 9 − 45 years of age living in endemic countries with least 70% of seroprevalence. Modelers from Sanofi Pasteur have predicted that this vaccine has the potential to reduce by about 50% the disease burden within 5 years when 20% of an endemic country population is vaccinated, thus achieving a World Health Organization dengue prevention goal. In this paper, mathematical modeling is used to investigate the impact of the newly licensed dengue vaccine using different scenarios. Our results show that to achieve significant reduction in disease bur-den, the vaccination program is most effective if it includes only individuals that have been already exposed to at least one dengue virus. Immunological screening of the population prior to vaccination is advised and vaccination strategies must be planned based on epidemiological disease dynamics for each specific endemic region.
A new SAT-based ATPG for generating highly compacted test sets

The test set size is a highly important factor in the post-production test of circuits. A high pattern count in the test set leads to long test application time and exorbitant test costs. We propose a new test generation approach which has the ability to reduce the test set size significantly. In contrast to previous SAT-based ATPG techniques which were focused on dealing with hard single faults, the proposed approach employs the robustness of SAT-solvers to primarily push test compaction. Furthermore, a concept is introduced how the novel technique can be flexibly integrated into an existing industrial flow to reduce the pattern count. Experimental results on large industrial circuits show that the approach is able to reduce the pattern count of up to 63% compared to state-of-the-art dynamic compaction techniques.
PERSULFATE ACTIVATION BY MAJOR SOIL MINERALS

by MUSHTAQUE AHMAD, M.S. Washington State University December 2008 Chair: Richard J. Watts Oxidant interaction with subsurface materials is a major factor influencing the effective application of in situ chemical oxidation (ISCO) for contaminant destruction. The newest and least explored ISCO oxidant source is persulfate. Persulfate interaction with subsurface minerals was investigated as a basis for understanding persulfate activation in the subsurface. The mineral-mediated decomposition of persulfate and generation of oxidants and reductants was investigated with four iron and manganese oxides and two clay minerals at both low pH (<7) and high pH (>12). At both low and high pH, persulfate decomposition was minimal in the presence of all six minerals. The manganese oxide birnessite was the most effective catalyst for degrading the hydroxyl radical probe nitrobenzene, indicating hydroxyl radical generation at both low and high pH regimes. The iron oxide goethite was the most effective catalyst for degrading the reductant probe hexachloroethane. Several fractions of a natural soil were used to confirm the catalytic behavior of synthetic minerals. Natural soil fractions did not effectively catalyze the generation of hydroxyl radicals or reductants. However, soil organic matter was found to promote reductant generation at high pH. The results of this research demonstrate that synthetic iron and manganese oxides can activate persulfate to generate reductants and oxidants, however, iron and manganese oxides
TAPHONOMY OF THE MOTHER'S DAY QUARRY: IMPLICATIONS FOR GREGARIOUS BEHAVIOR IN SAUROPOD DINOSAURS

ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS . iv LIST OF FIGURES . 3 LIST OF TABLES. 5 LIST OF EQUATIONS. 6 CHAPTER 1. Taphonomy of the Mother’s Day Quarry INTRODUCTION. 7 PREVIOUS WORK. 9 REGIONAL GEOLOGY. 10 STRATIGRAPHY . 11 REGIONAL PALEOCLIMATIC SETTING. 17 METHODOLOGY. 19 Field Methods . 19 Lab Methods. 24 TAPHONOMY . 27 GEOLOGICAL EVIDENCE. 27 Sedimentology. 27 BIOLOGICAL EVIDENCE . 45 Element Location. 45 Element Orientation. 48 Voorhies Groups. 54 Bone Modification . 56 Preservation Pattern. 61 Taxonomic Diversity . 68 Number of Individuals. 71 Age Profile . 72 DISCUSSION. 76 CONCLUSIONS. 82
Estimating Remaining Useful Life With Three-Source Variability in Degradation Modeling

The use of the observed degradation data of a system can help to estimate its remaining useful life (RUL). However, the degradation progression of the system is typically stochastic, and thus the RUL is also a random variable, resulting in the difficulty to estimate the RUL with certainty. In general, there are three sources of variability contributing to the uncertainty of the estimated RUL: 1) temporal variability, 2) unit-to-unit variability, and 3) measurement variability. In this paper, we present a relatively general degradation model based on a Wiener process. In the presented model, the above three-source variability is simultaneously characterized to incorporate the effect of three-source variability into RUL estimation. By constructing a state-space model, the posterior distributions of the underlying degradation state and random effect parameter, which are correlated, are estimated by employing the Kalman filtering technique. Further, the analytical forms of not only the probability distribution but also the mean and variance of the estimated RUL are derived, and can be real-time updated in line with the arrivals of new degradation observations. We also investigate the issues regarding the identifiability problem in parameter estimation of the presented model, and establish the according results. For verifying the presented approach, a case study for gyros in an inertial platform is provided, and the results indicate that considering three-source variability can improve the modeling fitting and the accuracy of the estimated RUL.
Efficient Privacy-Preserving Authentication for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

In this paper, we present an efficient privacy-preserving authentication scheme based on group signature for vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). Although group signature is widely used in VANETs to realize anonymous authentication, the existing schemes based on group signatures suffer from long computation delay in the certificate revocation list (CRL) checking and in the signature verification process, leading to high message loss. As a result, they cannot meet the requirement of verifying hundreds of messages per second in VANETs. In our scheme, we first divide the precinct into several domains, in which roadside units (RSUs) are responsible for distributing group private keys and managing vehicles in a localized manner. Then, we use a hash message authentication code (HMAC) to avoid time-consuming CRL checking and to ensure the integrity of messages before batch group authentication. Finally, we adopt cooperative message authentication among entities, in which each vehicle only needs to verify a small number of messages, thus greatly alleviating the authentication burden. The security and performance analysis show that our scheme is more efficient in terms of authentication speed, while keeping conditional privacy in VANETs.
How the Experts Algorithm Can Help Solve LPs Online

We consider the problem of solving packing/covering LPs online, when the columns of the constraint matrix are presented in random order. This problem has received much attention, and the main focus is to figure out how large the right-hand sides of the LPs have to be (compared to the entries on the left-hand side of the constraints) to allow (1 + ɛ )-approximations online. It is known that the right-hand sides have to be Ω( ɛ −2 log m ) times the left-hand sides, where m is the number of constraints.In this paper, we give a primal-dual algorithm that achieves this bound for mixed packing/covering LPs. Our algorithms construct dual solutions using a regret-minimizing online learning algorithm in a black-box fashion, and use them to construct primal solutions. The adversarial guarantee that holds for the constructed duals helps us to take care of most of the correlations that arise in the algorithm; the remaining correlations are handled via martingale concentration and maximal inequalities. These ideas lead to conceptually simple and modular algorithms, which we hope will be useful in other contexts.
Search for supersymmetry with a light gravitino at the Fermilab Tevatron and CERN LEP colliders.

We analyze the prospects for discovering supersymmetry at the Fermilab Tevatron and CERN LEP colliders in the scenario that the lightest supersymmetric particle is a gravitino of mass {approx_lt}1 keV. We consider in particular the case that the lightest neutralino has a nearly 100{percent} branching fraction into gravitino+photon within the detector. This implies that supersymmetric events should contain both missing (transverse) energy and two energetic photons. Therefore, one can search for supersymmetry simply through inclusive production of superpartners. We consider the exclusion and reach capabilities of the Tevatron in exploring the supersymmetric parameter space, and study the efficiencies which can be achieved in this search. We also consider the discovery reach and backgrounds at LEP with {radical}{ital s}=160, 175, and 190 GeV. {copyright} {ital 1996 The American Physical Society. }
New lipid‐producing, cold‐tolerant yellow‐green alga isolated from the rocky mountains of colorado

A new strain of yellow‐green algae (Xanthophyceae, Heterokonta), tentatively named Heterococcus sp. DN1 (UTEX accession number UTEX ZZ885), was discovered among snow fields in the Rocky Mountains. Axenic cultures of H. sp. DN1 were isolated and their cellular morphology, growth, and composition of lipids were characterized. H. sp. DN1 was found to grow at temperatures approaching freezing to accumulate large intracellular stores of lipids. H. sp. DN1 produces the highest quantity of lipids when grown undisturbed with high light in low temperatures. Of particular interest was the accumulation of eicosapentaenoic acid, known to be important for human nutrition, and palmitoleic acid, known to improve biodiesel feedstock properties. © 2013 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Biotechnol. Prog. , 29:853–861, 2013
Training a Support Vector Classifier using a Cauchy- Laplace Product Kernel

The importance of the support vector machine and its applicability to a wide range of problems is well known. The strength of the support vector machine lies in its kernel. In our recent paper, we have shown how the Laplacian kernel overcomes some of the drawbacks of the Gaussian kernel. However this was not a total remedy for the shortcomings of the Gaussian kernel. In this paper, we design a CauchyLaplace product kernel to further improve the performance of the Laplacian kernel. The new kernel alleviates the deficiencies more effectively. During the experimentation with three data sets, it is found that the product kernel not only enhances the performance of the support vector machine in terms of classification accuracy but it results in obtaining higher classification accuracy for smaller values of the kernel parameter . Therefore the support vector machine gives smoother decision boundary and the results obtained by the product kernel are more reliable as it overcomes the problems of over fitting.
Arterial wave reflection decreases gradually from supine to upright

Abstract Background. An increase in total peripheral resistance (TPR) usually increases arterial wave reflection. During passive head-up tilt (HUT), however, arterial wave reflection decreases with increasing TPR. This study addressed whether arterial wave reflection gradually decreases during HUT. Methods. In 10 healthy volunteers (22–39 years, nine males), we recorded finger arterial pressures in supine position (0°), and 30° and 70° degrees HUT and active standing (90°). Aortic pressure was constructed from the finger pressure signal and hemodynamics were calculated. Arterial wave reflection was quantified as the augmentation index (AIx) and the reflection magnitude (RM). Results. During HUT, heart rate increased (p < 0.001), stroke volume and cardiac output decreased (p < 0.001 and p < 0.01), diastolic blood pressure increased (p < 0.001), whereas systolic blood pressure did not change. TPR increased from 0.9 dyn s/cm5 at 0° to 1.2, 1.4 and 1.4 dyn s/cm5 at 30°, 70° and 90° (p < 0.001). AIx fell gradually from 25% at 0° to 16%, −1% and −10% at 30°, 70° and 90° (p < 0.001). The RM decreased from 0.572 at 0° to 0.456 at 90° (p < 0.001). Conclusion. From supine to upright, arterial wave reflection represented as AIx and RM gradually decreases in the presence of increasing TPR.
Potential influence of nutrient availability along a hillslope: Peatland gradient on aspen recovery following fire

The Boreal Plains (BP) of Western Canada have been exposed to increasing disturbance by wildfire and host a mixture of upland‐wetland‐pond complexes with substantial quantities of trembling aspen (Populus tremuloides Michx.) throughout the terrestrial areas. The ability of these tree species to regenerate within both upland and wetland areas of the BP following wildfire is unclear. The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of fire on nutrient dynamics in soil and water in peatlands and forested landscapes in the BP and relate this to aspen regeneration. Nutrient concentrations, nutrient supply rates, and net nutrient mineralization rates were determined in burned and unburned sections of a peatland and forest and compared with the regeneration of aspen. NO3−, NH4+, and P varied spatially throughout the landscape, and differences were observed between peatland and upland areas. In general, differences in nutrient dynamics were not observed between burned and unburned areas, with the exception of P. Nutrient and growth data suggest that aspen do not require nutrient‐rich conditions for regeneration and instead relied on forest litter to satisfy nutrient demands. Although the peatlands contained high nutrients, aspen did not flourish in the combination of anoxic and aerobic organic‐rich soils present in this area. Although aspen may use peat water and nutrients through their rooting zones, peatlands are unsuitable for aspen re‐establishment in the long‐term. However, the combination of abundant nutrients in surface mineral soils in peat margins may indicate the vulnerability of margins to upland transformations in later successional stages.
Verified bidirectional transformations by construction

Bidirectional transformations (bx) are of increasing signiﬁ-cance in model-based engineering. Currently bx are deﬁned using a number of specialised transformation languages. In this paper we show how standard UML elements such as use cases and OCL constraints can be used to deﬁne bx, thus taking advantage of the wide industrial and educational adoption and support for UML. We deﬁne patterns and techniques for specifying bx so that they are correct by construction
Exploring hardware overprovisioning in power-constrained, high performance computing

Most recent research in power-aware supercomputing has focused on making individual nodes more efficient and measuring the results in terms of flops per watt. While this work is vital in order to reach exascale computing at 20 megawatts, there has been a dearth of work that explores efficiency at the whole system level. Traditional approaches in supercomputer design use worst-case power provisioning: the total power allocated to the system is determined by the maximum power draw possible per node. In a world where power is plentiful and nodes are scarce, this solution is optimal. However, as power becomes the limiting factor in supercomputer design, worst-case provisioning becomes a drag on performance. In this paper we demonstrate how a policy of overprovisioning hardware with respect to power combined with intelligent, hardware-enforced power bounds consistently leads to greater performance across a range of standard benchmarks. In particular, leveraging overprovisioning requires that applications use effective configurations; the best configuration depends on application scalability and memory contention. We show that using overprovisioning leads to an average speedup of more than 50% over worst-case provisioning.
COMPARISON BETWEEN CBOS (COLORED BACKGROUND ORIENTED SCHLIEREN) AND CGBOS (COLORED-GRID BACKGROUND ORIENTED SCHLIEREN) FOR SUPERSONIC FLOW

The Background Oriented schlieren (BOS) technique is one of the novel visualization techniques that enable the quantitative measurement of density information in the flow field with very simple experimental setup (1). The principle of BOS is similar to conventional Schlieren technique and both techniques are sensible to density gradient. In recent years, CBOS (Colored Background Oriented Schlieren) technique using colored random dot pattern for background is developed to improve the performance of conventional BOS technique using monochromatic random dot pattern, and it is applied to various measurements of flow (2). On the other hand, Colored- Grid Background Oriented Schlieren (CGBOS) technique using colored-grid pattern for background is developed and applied to measurement of supersonic flow field and reconstruction of 3D density field (3). CGBOS is based on the image processing technique developed for the analysis of finite-fringe interferogram and using color information is based on the ideas of CBOS technique. In this report comparison of the measurement result between CBOS and CGBOS will be reported. Measurements of Mach 3.0 flow around a blunt body with a spike were performed for both CBOS and CGBOS at supersonic wind tunnel at ISL with same optical arrangements. The difference is only background and image processing procedure. Figure 1 shows pseudo-color images of vertical displacement obtained from CBOS (left) and CGBOS (center), and plots of calculated displacement on x-axis (y = 2100 pixel) in pseudo-color image. Resultant displacement from both techniques agrees very well. Detailed analysis between two techniques will be very important for the future development of BOS technique.
Role of SUMO modification of human PCNA at stalled replication fork

DNA double-strand breaks (DSBs) can be generated not only by reactive agents but also as a result of replication fork collapse at unrepaired DNA lesions. Whereas ubiquitylation of proliferating cell nuclear antigen (PCNA) facilitates damage bypass, modification of yeast PCNA by small ubiquitin-like modifier (SUMO) controls recombination by providing access for the Srs2 helicase to disrupt Rad51 nucleoprotein filaments. However, in human cells, the roles of PCNA SUMOylation have not been explored. Here, we characterize the modification of human PCNA by SUMO in vivo as well as in vitro. We establish that human PCNA can be SUMOylated at multiple sites including its highly conserved K164 residue and that SUMO modification is facilitated by replication factor C (RFC). We also show that expression of SUMOylation site PCNA mutants leads to increased DSB formation in the Rad18−/− cell line where the effect of Rad18-dependent K164 PCNA ubiquitylation can be ruled out. Moreover, expression of PCNA-SUMO1 fusion prevents DSB formation as well as inhibits recombination if replication stalls at DNA lesions. These findings suggest the importance of SUMO modification of human PCNA in preventing replication fork collapse to DSB and providing genome stability.