Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An ensemble approach for ordinal threshold models applied to liver transplantation

This paper proposes a novel algorithm for ordinal classification based on combining ensemble techniques and discriminant analysis. The proposal is applied to a real application of liver transplantation, where the objective is to predict survival rates of the graft. Ordinal classification is used for this problem because the classes are defined by the following temporal order: 1) failure of the graft before the first 15 days after transplantation, 2) failure between 15 days and 3 months, 3) failure between 3 months and one year, and 4) no failure presented (taking into account that the patient follow-up is up to one year after the transplantation). When compared to other state-of-the-art classifiers like AdaBoost, EBC(SVM) or KDLOR, the proposed algorithm is shown to be competitive. The models obtained could allow medical experts to predict survival rates without knowing exactly the number of days the transplanted organ survived.
Practical Implementation of Spatial Modulation

In this paper, we seek to characterize the performance of spatial modulation (SM) and spatial multiplexing (SMX) with an experimental testbed. Two National Instruments (NI) PXIe devices are used for the system testing: one for the transmitter and one for the receiver. The digital signal processing (DSP) that formats the information data in preparation for transmission is described, along with the DSP that recovers the information data. In addition, the hardware limitations of the system are also analyzed. The average bit-error ratio (ABER) of the system is validated through both theoretical analysis and simulation results for SM and SMX under the line-of-sight (LoS) channel conditions.
Characteristics of the Specific Fuel Consumption for Jet Engines

Background The Specific Fuel Consumption (SFC) of a jet engine c is defined per thrust and called more precisely also Thrust-specific Fuel Consumption (TSFC). This common definition comes from the fact that thrust (and not power) is measured on jet engine test stands. Engine efficiency is however related to power. It follows from first principles that c must depend on the speed of the aircraft V (or Mach number). The most simple representation of this is a linear function c = ca . V + cb. Other operating conditions that have an influence on TSFC are thrust (equal to aircraft drag in unaccelerated horizontal cruise flight) as well as all parameters that depend on flight altitude (air temperature, pressure, density, speed of sound). Some of these parameters are included in a model by HERRMANN, which unfortunately does not account for thrust.
An Adiabatic Approximation to the Tissue Homogeneity Model for Water Exchange in the Brain: I. Theoretical Derivation

Using the adiabatic approximation, which assumes that the tracer concentration in parenchymal tissue changes slowly relative to that in capillaries, we derived a time-domain, closed-form solution of the tissue homogeneity model. This solution, which is called the adiabatic solution, is similar in form to those of two-compartment models, Owing to its simplicity, the adiabatic solution can be used in CBF experiments in which kinetic data with only limited time resolution or signal-to-noise ratio, or both, are obtained. Using computer simulations, we investigated the accuracy and the precision of the parameters in the adiabatic solution for values that reflect 2H-labeled water (D2O) clearance from the brain (see Part II). It was determined that of the three model parameters, (1) the vascular volume (Vi), (2) the product of extraction fraction and blood flow (EF), and (3) the clearance rate constant (kadb), only the last one could be determined accurately, and therefore CBF must be determined from this parameter only. From the error analysis of the adiabatic solution, it was concluded that for the D2O clearance experiments described in Part II, the coefficient of variation of CBF was approximately 7% in gray matter and 22% in white matter.
The development of an instrument for assessing information security in organizations: Examining the content validity using quantitative methods

Content validity, the extent to which a measurement reflects the specific intended domain of content, is a basic type of validity for a valid measurement. It has usually been examined using qualitative methods and has not been given as much attention as the other psychometric properties such as internal consistency reliability, indicator reliability and construct validity in the IS field. In this paper, a quantitative approach including the proportion of substantive agreement (PSA), and substantive validity (CSV) was used to examine content validity for 80 items covering eighth domains related to organizational and individual perspectives of information security. The content validity for the organizational perspective was examined using data from a total of 56 content domain experts. Data from 51 experts were further used to examine content validity for the individual perspective of information security. 31 items did not have an adequate content validity, leaving the instrument with 49 items that have been evaluated for their content validity and can be used in future empirically tests of hypotheses in the information security field. To the knowledge of the authors this quantitative method to assess content validity of items in the process of developing instruments hasn’t yet been applied in the field information security.
Developing a Web site in primary care.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES While content, navigability, and usability are essential qualities of effective Web sites, the health care literature contains limited discussion of these issues. This article describes how knowledge gained through focus groups, Web site searches, and individual interviews were used to develop and improve a health-related Web site. METHODS We conducted 10 focus groups and searches of existing Web sites in preparation for developing a Web site about colorectal cancer (CRC) screening. We conducted 30 in-depth interviews to assess content, navigation, and usability of a new CRC Web site, using participants recruited from Michigan communities with a low incidence of CRC testing. Targeted participants were 50-70 years of age, had no prior experience with CRC testing, and had variable comfort levels with Internet use. RESULTS Existing CRC screening Web sites uniformly use user-directed navigation and have little variation in content. Our study participants stimulated revisions in content, navigation, and usability. Revised content factors included comprehension, utility, and appeal. Navigation changes focused on logical transition between sections. Usability changes included user focus and clarity of graphics/ text. CONCLUSIONS We found focus groups, Web site searches, and individual interviews useful in developing and testing content, navigation, and usability of a CRC screening Web site. These steps provide methodological procedures for developing and revising health-related Web sites.
Surgical management of hepatic hemangiomas: a multi-institutional experience.

BACKGROUND The management of hepatic hemangiomas remains ill defined. This study sought to investigate the indications, surgical management and outcomes of patients who underwent a resection for hepatic hemangiomas. METHODS A retrospective review from six major liver centres in the United States identifying patients who underwent surgery for hepatic hemangiomas was performed. Clinico-pathological, treatment and peri-operative data were evaluated. RESULTS Of the 241patients who underwent a resection, the median age was 46 years [interquartile range (IQR): 39-53] and 85.5% were female. The median hemangioma size was 8.5 cm (IQR: 6-12.1). Surgery was performed for abdominal symptoms (85%), increasing hemangioma size (11.3%) and patient anxiety (3.7%). Life-threatening complications necessitating a hemangioma resection occurred in three patients (1.2%). Clavien Grade 3 or higher complications occurred in 14 patients (5.7%). The 30- and 90-day mortality was 0.8% (n = 2). Of patients with abdominal symptoms, 63.2% reported improvement of symptoms post-operatively. CONCLUSION A hemangioma resection can be safely performed at high-volume institutions. The primary indication for surgery remains for intractable symptoms. The development of severe complications associated with non-operative management remains a rare event, ultimately challenging the necessity of additional surgical indications for a hemangioma resection.
CoupleVIBE: mobile implicit communication to improve awareness for (long-distance) couples

Long-distance couples face considerable communication challenges in their relationships. Unlike collocated couples, long-distance couples lack awareness cues associated with physical proximity and must use technologies such as SMS or telephony to stay in sync. We posit that long-distance couples have needs that are not met by prevailing communication technologies, which require explicit action from the sender as well as the receiver. We built CoupleVIBE to explore the properties of an implicit messaging channel and observe how couples would use such a technology. CoupleVIBE is a mobile application that automatically pushes a user's location-information to her partner's mobile phone via vibrotactile cues. We present qualitative results of a four-week user study, studying how seven couples used CoupleVIBE. A key result is that CoupleVIBE's implicit communication modality operated as a foundation that helps keep couples in sync, with other modalities being brought into play when further interaction was needed.
Fossil quality and naming dinosaurs

The intense interest in dinosaurs through the past 30 years might have led to an increase in poor practice in naming new species. A review of the data shows that the reverse is the case. For 130 years, from the 1820s to the 1950s, most new species of dinosaurs were based on scrappy and incomplete material. After 1960, the majority of new species have been based on complete skulls or skeletons, and sometimes on materials from several individuals. This switch in the quality of type specimens corresponds to the recent explosive renaissance of interest in dinosaurs, during which the number of new species named per year has risen, from three or four in the 1950s, to thirty or more today. The pattern of specimen quality varies by continent, with the highest proportion of new species based on good material in North America, then Asia, then South America, then Africa and finally Europe. This ranking reflects a complex pattern of perhaps overstudy in Europe, immensely rich reserves of new dinosaur materials in North America and Asia, and a relative paucity in South America and Africa.
An Empirical Study on the Adequacy of Testing in Open Source Projects

During software maintenance, testing is a crucial activity to ensure the quality of code as it evolves over time. With the increasing size and complexity of software, adequate software testing has become increasingly important. Code coverage is an important metric to gauge the effectiveness of test cases and the adequacy of testing. However, what is the coverage level exhibited by large-scale open-source projects? What is the correlation between software metrics and the code coverage of the software? In this study, we investigate the state-of-the-practice of testing by measuring code coverage in open-source software projects. We examine over 300 large open-source projects written in Java, to measure the code coverage of their associated test cases. We analyse correlations between code coverage and relevant software metrics such as lines of code, cyclomatic complexity, and number of developers. Our results show that the coverage level decreases with the increase in size and complexity of the software, whereas the number of developers has an insignificant correlation with the code coverage. However, considering individual files, coverage increases with the size and complexity, whereas the number of developers has no correlation with the code coverage. Our results highlight the strengths and weaknesses of testing in open-source projects and make recommendations for future research.
Named Entity Recognition Using the Web Audun Rømcke

Entity Cruncher (EC) is an experimental Webas-corpus approach to NER (Named Entity Recognition). The task is to identify and classify names of persons, locations, and organisations, and possibly even more detailed classes. EC looks for frequencies of names in prespecified lexical contexts (thought to be excellent determiners of the class and identity of the candidate word) on the web, using the MSN Live API (msdn2.microsoft.com). The document frequencies of the candidate words in the prespecified contexts are the basis for deciding the classification of each Named Entity candidate. The system was tested on the evaluation data used for Dutch in the CoNLL (Conference for Computational Natural Language Learning) 2002 competition. Among other things, Dutch has a significant number of surnames that are names of places. Similarly, many organizations are named after persons (such as Heineken). This makes the task slightly different from using English, where the common names for places are more separated from names of people. EC got an F-score of 63.20 using little more than 30 lexical context patterns and a tiny selection of less than 400 finite state lexical phrase patterns. The results obtained with this rather simplistic, small scale, approach give grounds for optimism regarding both the use of corpus lookup for categorisation of names and words, and for the use of the web as a high coverage backdown alternative.
Dynamic maintenance of molecular surfaces under conformational changes

We present an efficient algorithm for maintaining the boundary and surface area of protein molecules as they undergo conformational changes. We also describe a robust implementation of the algorithm and report on experimental results with our implementation on proteins with hundreds of residues. Our work extends and combines two previous results: (i) controlled perturbation for static molecular surfaces [18], and (ii) data structures for self-collision testing and energy maintenance of proteins that change conformation [26]. As our method keeps a highly accurate representation of the boundary surface and of the voids in the molecule, it can be useful in various applications such as Monte Carlo Simulation or Molecular Dynamics Simulation. In addition we propose and analyze an alternative method for efficiently recalculating the surface area under conformational (and hence topological) changes based on techniques for efficient dynamic maintenance of graph connectivity; initial results of the implementation of this method show great promise.
Clinical and biochemical predictors of increased carotid intima-media thickness in overweight and obese adolescents with type 2 diabetes

Objective: To identify the clinical parameters associated with increased carotid intima-media thickness (CIMT) in overweight and obese adolescents with type 2 diabetes. Methods: We studied 27 patients (11 males) with type 2 diabetes. Criteria for selection were age (12–19 years), body mass index above the 95th percentile for age and gender, a positive family history of diabetes, normal or high C-peptide, and negative studies for islet cell antibodies. Age- and gender-matched healthy subjects were selected as the control group. Measurements of CIMT, lipid profile, hypersensitive C-reactive protein, hemoglobin A1C (HbA1C), and insulin resistance by homeostasis model of assessment (HOMA) were obtained for all participants. Results: CIMT was higher in diabetic patients than in healthy subjects (0.68 ± 0.16 vs. 0.58 ± 0.1, p < 0.01). The range of HbA1C in the 15 patients with uncontrolled diabetes was 7.6–10.4 (mean: 8.9 ± 0.9). CIMT, HbA1C, systolic blood pressure, triglycerides, HOMA, and C-reactive protein were significantly higher in patients with uncontrolled than with controlled diabetes. In diabetic patients, CIMT correlated positively with body mass index (p < 0.001), duration of diabetes (p < 0.001), systolic (p < 0.001) and diastolic blood pressure (p < 0.01), HbA1C (p < 0.001), HOMA (p < 0.01), and C-reactive protein (p < 0.01). Conclusions: CIMT is increased in adolescents with type 2 diabetes. Poor glycemic control, HOMA, increased C-reactive protein, body mass index, duration of diabetes, and elevated blood pressure are associated with early atherosclerosis in these patients.
Online Kernel Canonical Correlation Analysis for Supervised Equalization of Wiener Systems

We consider the application of kernel canonical correlation analysis (K-CCA) to the supervised equalization of Wiener systems. Although a considerable amount of research has been carried out on identification/equalization of Wiener models, in this paper we show that K-CCA is a particularly suitable technique for the inversion of these nonlinear dynamic systems. Another contribution of this paper is the development of an online K-CCA algorithm which combines a sliding-window approach with a recently proposed reformulation of CCA as an iterative regression problem. This online algorithm permits fast equalization of time-varying Wiener systems. Simulation examples are added to illustrate the performance of the proposed method.
Models for calculating ice cover thickness on selected endorheic lakes of the upper Radunia (Kashubian Lakeland, northern Poland)

Abstract The paper is an attempt to analyse whether there is or is not a relation between the thickness of ice covers that form on flow-through lakes under constant hydrometric supervision and on endorheic lakes not under constant hydrometric supervision. In order to do so, two benchmark lakes were selected – Raduńskie Górne and Ostrzyckie and six endorheic lakes: Kamionko, Kniewo, Stare Czaple, Zamkowisko, and Żuromino, including one seasonal outflow lake – Boruckie. Additionally, data on air temperature was also taken into consideration so as to determine the thermal characteristics of the analysed period. The data was obtained from the Limnological Station of Gdansk University, collected during patrol research carried out in the winter seasons of 2003–2008. In order to evaluate the formulas, additional measurements were made in 2016. The analysed lakes are located within the water catchment area of the upper Radunia in the central part of the Kashubian Lakeland. The benchmark lakes are located in the Radunia-Ostrzyce tunnel valley while the endorheic ones are located on the postglacial upland. The data analysis has revealed a strong relationship between the ice cover thickness on the benchmark lakes and the endorheic ones. Based on the analysis, models were developed for calculating ice thickness on the small endorheic lakes.
Resistance to mammalian target of rapamycin inhibitor therapy in perivascular epithelioid cell tumors.

that described three patients who responded totherapy inhibiting the mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR). We present a case of a 58-year-old woman with metastatic perivascu-lar epithelioid cell tumor (PEComa) who did not respond to anmTOR inhibitor. She presented to her primary physician with a 17 13.5 9.5cmmassinherlateralrightupperquadrant. Sheunderwentsurgicalresectionofthemass,whichappearedtoariseintheretroperi-toneum above the right kidney. The pathology was reviewed by pa-thologists at The University of Nebraska Medical Center and atBrigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School (by one ofthe coauthors of the study
REDUCTION OF EFFECT OF TIMING JITTER ON HIGH SPEED OFDM SYSTEM USING OVER SAMPLING TECHNIQUE

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is used in many wireless broadband communication systems because it is a simple and scalable solution to int ersymbol interference caused by a multipath channel . Very recently the use of OFDM in optical systems has attracted increasing interest. Data rates in optical fiber systems are typically much higher than in RF wireless systems.The impairments caused by timing jitter are a significant limiting factor in the performance of very high data rate OFDM systems. In this letter we show that oversampling can reduce t he noise caused by timing jitter. Both fractional oversampling achi eved by leaving some band-edge OFDMsubcarriers unused and integral oversampling are considered. The theoretical results are compared with simulation results for the case of white timing jitter showing very close agreement. Oversampling results in a 3 dB reduction in jitter noise p ower for every doubling of the sampling rate.OFDM is a multicarrier modulation scheme that provides strong robustness against intersymbol interference (ISI) by dividing the broa dband channel into many narrowband sub- channels in such a way that attenuation across each sub channel stays flat. Orthogonalization of sub channels is performed with low complexity by using the fast Fourier transform (FFT). The seri al high-rate data stream is converted into multiple parallel low-rate streams, each modulated on a different subcarrier.
Polynomial curve-based longitudinal motion planning for safe deceleration

This paper proposes a longitudinal motion planning method to reduce the velocity of an unmanned ground vehicle safely when it encounters stopped vehicles or obstacles on the road. The proposed method can generate the smooth velocity and acceleration profiles using the quintic polynomial curve. The optimal quintic polynomial curve can be determined by a numerical optimization approach. The performance of the proposed method is verified by simulations.
A Suggested New Bacteriophage Genus, “Kp34likevirus”, within the Autographivirinae Subfamily of Podoviridae

Klebsiella pneumoniae phages vB_KpnP_SU503 (SU503) and vB_KpnP_SU552A (SU552A) are virulent viruses belonging to the Autographivirinae subfamily of Podoviridae that infect and kill multi-resistant K. pneumoniae isolates. Phages SU503 and SU552A show high pairwise nucleotide identity to Klebsiella phages KP34 (NC_013649), F19 (NC_023567) and NTUH-K2044-K1-1 (NC_025418). Bioinformatic analysis of these phage genomes show high conservation of gene arrangement and gene content, conserved catalytically active residues of their RNA polymerase, a common and specific lysis cassette, and form a joint cluster in phylogenetic analysis of their conserved genes. Also, we have performed biological characterization of the burst size, latent period, host specificity (together with KP34 and NTUH-K2044-K1-1), morphology, and structural genes as well as sensitivity testing to various conditions. Based on the analyses of these phages, the creation of a new phage genus is suggested within the Autographivirinae, called “Kp34likevirus” after their type phage, KP34. This genus should encompass the recently genome sequenced Klebsiella phages KP34, SU503, SU552A, F19 and NTUH-K2044-K1-1.
Strategies for Environmental Education for Youths and Adults, Chumbe Island Coral Park, Zanzibar

Chumbe Island Coral Park (CHICOP) is a privately-owned business that strives to follow the best principles of ecotourism, conservation, and environmental education. Their environmental education initiative is award-winning and has affected thousands of students and community members in Zanzibar. This study looked at the environmental education techniques that CHICOP already has in place by observing two pre-visits, three island-visits and one-post visit, and determined where there was a need for enhanced and new techniques for teaching about the environment. Evidence of climate change on Chumbe Island was also recorded to aid in the educational tools and to create a database of climate change evidence on Chumbe. After compiling the observations of each of the visits, twenty new environmental educational tools and activities were created, under eleven category types. It is hoped that these tools and activities will enhance environmental education based on Chumbe’s needs.