Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis on the Effects of Lactulose and Rifaximin on Patient-Reported Outcomes in Hepatic Encephalopathy

INTRODUCTION: Patients with hepatic encephalopathy (HE) suffer from significant symptoms and impaired quality of life. Improved understanding on the potential benefits of first-line HE therapies may aid patient-provider discussions regarding expected benefits of HE treatments. We aimed to perform a systematic review to assess the effects of lactulose and rifaximin on patient-reported outcomes (PROs). METHODS: We searched MEDLINE, EMBASE, and Cochrane Library databases for randomized trials or prospective cohort studies using lactulose and/or rifaximin for the management of HE and assessing changes in PRO using PRO instruments. Physician reviewers independently reviewed titles, abstracts, and full texts and extracted data independently. We performed random-effects meta-analyses to examine the effects of lactulose and rifaximin on PROs. RESULTS: We identified 16 studies representing 1,376 patients that met inclusion criteria. Most studies assessed treatment of covert HE. In patients with covert HE, lactulose significantly improved overall patient-reported health-related quality of life measured by the Sickness Impact Profile with an estimated pooled mean difference of 6.92 (95% confidence interval: 6.66–7.18) and showed improvements in several subscales. Conversely, rifaximin demonstrated a nonstatistically significant mean difference in the total Sickness Impact Profile of 4.76 (95% confidence interval: −4.23 to 13.76), with strong evidence of heterogeneity between these studies. Studies examining other PRO instruments showed improvements in overall health-related quality of life, social functioning, and sleep from both lactulose and rifaximin. DISCUSSION: Patients with HE treated with lactulose or rifaximin reported improvements in important PROs. These results may inform provider-patient communication and help manage patient expectations regarding the potential benefits of HE therapies.
Lewis-number effects on edge-flame propagation

Activation-energy asymptotics is employed to explore effects of the Lewis number, the ratio of thermal to fuel diffusivity, in a one-dimensional model of steady motion of edges of reaction sheets. The propagation velocity of the edge is obtained as a function of the relevant Damköhler number, the ratio of the diffusion time to the chemical time. The results show how Lewis numbers different from unity can increase or decrease propagation velocities. Increasing the Lewis number increases the propagation velocity at large Damköhler numbers and decreases it at small Damköhler numbers. Advancing-edge and retreating-edge solutions are shown to exist simultaneously, at the same Damköhler number, if the Lewis number is sufficiently large. This multiplicity of solutions has a bearing on potential edge-flame configurations in non-uniform flows.
Time‐Transformed Unit Root Tests for Models with Non‐Stationary Volatility

Abstract. Conventional unit root tests are known to be unreliable in the presence of permanent volatility shifts. In this paper, we propose a new approach to unit root testing which is valid in the presence of a quite general class of permanent variance changes which includes single and multiple (abrupt and smooth transition) volatility change processes as special cases. The new tests are based on a time transformation of the series of interest which automatically corrects their form for the presence of non‐stationary volatility without the need to specify any parametric model for the volatility process. Despite their generality, the new tests perform well even in small samples. We also propose a class of tests for the null hypothesis of stationary volatility in (near‐) integrated time‐series processes.
Cirrus Clouds. Part I: A Cirrus Cloud Model

Abstract A two-dimensional (x, z), time-dependent, numerical cloud model is developed for the purpose of investigating the role of various physical processes involved in the maintenance of cirriform clouds. In addition to accounting for dynamic and thermodynamic processes including phase changes of water, effects due to microphysical composition and radiative processes are also explicitly incorporated into the model. Diagnostic parameterizations for the local radiative properties of cloudy volumes and the gravity induced relative fall speed of the contained ice water are presented. Results of a simulation of a thin cirrostratus cloud are given. Features of the simulated cloud structure are quite realistic. Quantitative agreement is found between the simulated ice water contents and vertical motions and comparable observations. It is shown that radiative effect may be very significant in the maintenance of cirrus. The effects of the gravity-induced relative fall speed of ice crystals are found to be of cri.
Observational analysis of criteria for a difficult airway alert

Introduction: Difficult airway alerts are a tool used to document difficulties encountered with the patient’s airway and assist with future management. There is no universally accepted criterion as to who should get a difficult airway alert and the indication for these alerts may be changing with the proliferation of videolaryngoscopes. The purpose of this study was to characterize the airway events that were encountered in patients who had been assigned a difficult airway alert by staff anesthesiologists. Methods: This retrospective study analyzed the airway details of patients who were assigned a difficult airway letter at an academic teaching institution between November 2011 and January 2016. Electronic records of intraoperative airway management and difficult airway letters were reviewed for the methods used, difficulties encountered, and what recommendations were provided for future airway management. Results: A cohort of 107 adult patients (62 males and 45 females) issued difficult airway letters identified for analysis. The mean age (SD) of the cohort was 57 (±13) years, and the mean body mass index was 31 (±7) kg/m2. Direct laryngoscopy failed in 68 of 89 cases, with 77 reported grade III views and 9 grade IV views. Videolaryngoscopy (VL) was used successfully in 63 cases, with 8 documented VL failures. Ten patients were intubated awake with a flexible bronchoscope (FB), and 6 cases were managed using an asleep FB technique. The most common methods suggested for future airway management were VL (57 cases) or either awake or asleep FB (31 cases). Conclusions: Patients with difficult direct laryngoscopy were predominant in this cohort who were assigned a difficult airway alert. Many of the difficult airways were successfully managed using VL, however, FB was required in some cases. Staff preferentially recommended VL over flexible bronchoscopy for future management of the known difficult airway.
SATELLITE PICTURES OF MESOSCALE EDDIES

Abstract Satellite photographs of horizontal eddy patterns are presented and the conditions associated with their formation are discussed. It is shown that some map be purely mechnnical eddies produced by an obstacle (islands) in the flow, others may be the result of inertial oscillation, and others may be produced by inertial instability. Gravity waves on a low inversion are suggested to be the key mechanism producing instability.
An algorithm for the construction of 3-manifolds from 2-complexes

In order to study 3-manifolds with some particular group as fundamental group, one likes to have examples. There is an absence in the literature of means of constructing such examples. In this paper, theorems are proved which give necessary and sufficient conditions for the canonical 2-complex which corresponds to a group presentation to be a spine (2-dimensional skeleton in a cell decomposition with one 3-cell) of a connected closed† orientable 3-manifold. By enumerating all presentations of a group given by a particular presentation, two of the theorems provide an effective algorithm which permits one to attempt in a systematic way to construct 3-manifolds with a given group as fundamental group. Since every closed 3-manifold has a spine which corresponds to a group presentation, if the group is the fundamental group of an orientable 3-manifold, then the algorithm will eventually yield a 3-manifold, if not, then one is out of luck. There is no way out of this since Stallings has shown (1) that no algorithm exists which can, for every finitely presented group G, answer the question: Is G the fundamental group of a 3-manifold?
Asymptotics via Empirical Processes

This paper offers a glimpse into the theory of empirical processes. Two asymptotic problems are sketched as motivation for the study of maximal inequalities for stochastic processes made up of properly standard- ized sums of random variables-empirical processes. The exposition devel- ops the technique of Gaussian symmetrization, which is the least technical of the techniques to have evolved during the last decade of empirical process research. The resulting maximal inequalities are useful because they depend on quantities that can be bounded using simple methods. These methods, which extend the concept of a Vapnik-Cervonenkis class of sets, are demonstrated by use of the two motivating asymptotic problems. The paper is not intended as a complete survey of the state of empirical process theory; it certainly does not present the whole range of available techniques. It is written as an attempt to convey the look and feel of a very powerful, very useful, and tractable tool of contemporary mathematical statistics.
Optical identification of the X-ray source GS 2023+338 as V404 Cygni

On 1989 May 22 the Japanese Ginga Team reported the discovery of a bright new X-ray transient and cataloged the source as GS 2023+338. We have identified this X-ray source with V404 Cygni, an optical nova whose last reported major outburst was in 1938.
On the filtering paradigm for LES of flows with discontinuities

In this paper we have considered, from a theoretical point of view, the large eddy simulation (LES) of turbulent flows embedded with discontinuities like shocks flames, or interfaces. We have identified as main problems the occurence of parasitic contributions when the usual filtering procedure is applied and the disappearance of the jump conditions that are physically related to the discontinuity and must be preserved by the filtering smoothing. Generalized pseudo-jump relations that assume the form of consistency constraints for any possible subgrid model are derived and a particular dynamic approach based on left and right non-centred test filters, which should dynamically eliminate the spurious contributions, is proposed.
Knowledge and Collective Preferences

This article compares estimates of “informed” public opinion derived from the regression-based approach of Bartels, Delli Carpini and Keeter, and Althaus with those from the deliberative polling method of Fishkin on the same sample of respondents. Contrary to low-information rationality perspectives, both methods indicate that across a range of prominent policy domains, level of political awareness has a strong impact on the expressed preferences of individuals. And while self-canceling across respondents tends to translate these individual-level influences into only rather modest effects in the aggregate, on a significant minority of issues, substantial shifts in collective opinion remain. The broad similarity of the estimates produced by these two very different methods, in addition to their convergence with previous studies of information effects, lends some simultaneous support to the validity and reliability of both approaches.
Turbulent mass transfer through a flat shear-free surface

Mass transfer through the flat shear-free surface of a turbulent open-channel flow is investigated over a wide range of Schmidt number (1 $ \le $ Sc $ \le $ 200) by means of large-eddy simulations using a dynamic subgrid-scale model. In contrast with situations previously analysed using direct numerical simulation, the turbulent Reynolds number Re is high enough for the near-surface turbulence to be fairly close to isotropy and almost independent of the structure of the flow in the bottom region (the statistics of the velocity field are identical to those described by I. Calmet & J. Magnaudet J. Fluid Mech. vol. 474, 2003, p. 355). The main statistical features of the concentration field are analysed in connection with the structure of the turbulent motion below the free surface, characterized by a velocity macroscale $u$ and an integral length scale $L$. All near-surface statistical profiles are found to be Sc-independent when plotted vs. the dimensionless coordinate Sc$^{1 / 2}yu$/$\nu $ ($y$ is the distance to the surface and $\nu $ is the kinematic viscosity). Mean concentration profiles are observed to be linear throughout an inner diffusive sublayer whose thickness is about one Batchelor microscale, i.e. LSc$^{ - 1 / 2 }$Re$^{ - 3 / 4}$. In contrast, the concentration fluctuations are found to reach their maximum near the edge of the outer diffusive layer which scales as LSc$^{ - 1 / 2}$Re$^{ - 1 / 2}$. Instantaneous views of the near-surface isovalues of the concentration and vertical velocity are used to reveal the influence of the Schmidt number. In particular, it is observed that at high Schmidt number, the tiny concentration fluctuations that subsist in the diffusive sublayer just mirror the divergence of the two-component surface velocity field. Co-spectra of concentration and vertical velocity fluctuations indicate that the main contribution to the turbulent mass flux is provided by eddies whose horizontal size is close to $L$, which strongly supports the view that the mass transfer is governed by large-scale structures. The dimensionless mass transfer rate is observed to be proportional to Sc$^{ - 1 / 2}$ over the whole range of Schmidt number. Based on a frequency analysis of the concentration equation and on the Sc$^{ - 1 / 2}$Re$^{ - 3 / 4 }$scaling of the diffusive sublayer, it is shown that the mass transfer rate at a given Sc is proportional to $\langle {\beta ^2}\rangle ^{1 / 4}$, $\langle {\beta ^2}\rangle $ being the variance of the divergence of the surface velocity field. This yields dimensionless mass transfer rates of the form $\alpha$Sc$^{ - 1 / 2}$Re$^{ - 1 / 4}$, where the value of $\alpha$ is shown to result from both the kinematic blocking of the vertical velocity and the viscous damping of the horizontal vorticity components induced by the free surface.
Room-temperature emission at telecom wavelengths from silicon photonic crystal nanocavities

Strongly enhanced light emission at wavelengths between 1.3 and 1.6 μm is reported at room temperature in silicon photonic crystal (PhC) nanocavities with optimized out-coupling efficiency. Sharp peaks corresponding to the resonant modes of PhC nanocavities dominate the broad sub-bandgap emission from optically active defects in the crystalline Si membrane. We measure a 300-fold enhancement of the emission from the PhC nanocavity due to a combination of far-field enhancement and the Purcell effect. The cavity enhanced emission has a very weak temperature dependence, namely less than a factor of 2 reduction between 10 K and room temperature, which makes this approach suitable for the realization of efficient light sources as well as providing a quick and easy tool for the broadband optical characterization of silicon-on-insulator nanostructures.
A SIMPLE MODIFICATION OF THE BOX AND COX TRANSFORMATION TO SCALE STABILITY AND INVARIANCE

We consider power-transformations to obtain stability and invariance of measurement scale. The transformation discussed here is the normalized form of the power-transformation originally suggested by Schlesselman (1971). The original suggestion is a simple modiﬁcation of the Box and Cox transformation to scale invariance for measurement units. In addition to discussion on the scale invariance, we study (i) the behaviors of Jacobian of the transformation and (ii) the eﬀect of the modiﬁcation on the estimates. Then, we show that the modiﬁcation of the scale invariance improves the performance of estimates, especially the mean estimate. A simulation study is per-formed to evaluate numerically performances of the modiﬁed transformation, compared with the normalized Box and Cox transformation.
Commutativity of D-dimensional decimation and expansion matrices, and application to rational decimation systems

Multidimensional (MD) multirate systems, which find applications in the coding and compression of image and video data, have attracted much attention. The basic building blocks in a MD multirate system are the decimation matrix M, the expansion matrix L, and MD digital filters. With D denoting the number of dimensions, M and L are D*D nonsingular integer matrices. When these matrices are diagonal, most of the one-dimensional multirate results can be extended automatically. However, for the nondiagonal case, these extensions are nontrivial. One example of this nature is the commutativity of MD decimation and expansion matrices. Using the concepts of coprimeness and least common right/left multiples of integer matrices, a set of necessary and sufficient conditions is derived for a decimation matrix and an expansion matrix to commute. This commutativity is also used to derive an efficient polyphase implementation of an MD decimation system with rational decimation matrix. <<ETX>>
Geometric convergence and central limit theorems for multidimensional Hastings and Metropolis algorithms

We develop results on geometric ergodicity of Markov chains and apply these and other recent results in Markov chain theory to multidimensional Hastings and Metropolis algorithms. For those based on random walk candidate distributions, we find sufficient conditions for moments and moment generating functions to converge at a geometric rate to a prescribed distribution π. By phrasing the conditions in terms of the curvature of the densities we show that the results apply to all distributions with positive densities in a large class which encompasses many commonly-used statistical forms. From these results we develop central limit theorems for the Metropolis algorithm. Converse results, showing non-geometric convergence rates for chains where the rejection rate is not bounded away from unity, are also given ; these show that the negative-definiteness property is not redundant.
Kinetic simulation of a plasma collision experiment

The ionic Fokker–Planck code which was written for describing plasma shock wave fronts [M. Casanova et al. Phys. Rev. Lett. 67, 2143 (1991)] is applied to model the collision of two plasmas in plane geometry. Improvements brought to the code for that purpose are described. The initial phase of the experiment during which the plasmas interpenetrate is accounted for by a simple fluid model, which yields qualitative insight into the phenomena at play as well as an initial condition to start the kinetic simulation. The kinetic results obtained in the stagnation and thermalization phases are discussed with respect to a specific laser‐produced plasma collision experiment, as well as to existing fluid and kinetic (‘‘particle‐in‐cell’’) simulations.
Weakly nonlinear shear waves

Alongshore propagating low-frequency O(0.01 Hz) waves related to the direction and intensity of the alongshore current were first observed in the surf zone by Oltman-Shay, Howd & Birkemeier (1989). Based on a linear stability analysis, Bowen & Holman (1989) demonstrated that a shear instability of the alongshore current gives rise to alongshore propagating shear (vorticity) waves. The fully nonlinear dynamics of finite-amplitude shear waves, investigated numerically by Allen, Newberger & Holman (1996), depend on α, the non-dimensional ratio of frictional to nonlinear terms, essentially an inverse Reynolds number. A wide range of shear wave environments are reported as a function of α, from equilibrated waves at larger α to fully turbulent flow at smaller α. When α is above the critical level αc, the system is stable. In this paper, a weakly nonlinear theory, applicable to α just below αc, is developed. The amplitude of the instability is governed by a complex Ginzburg–Landau equation. For the same beach slope and base-state alongshore current used in Allen et al. (1996), an equilibrated shear wave is found analytically. The finite-amplitude behaviour of the analytic shear wave, including a forced second-harmonic correction to the mean alongshore current, and amplitude dispersion, agree well with the numerical results of Allen et al. (1996). Limitations in their numerical model prevent the development of a side-band instability. The stability of the equilibrated shear wave is demonstrated analytically. The analytical results confirm that the Allen et al. (1996) model correctly reproduces many important features of weakly nonlinear shear waves.
The Nature of the Subsurface of Mercury from Microwave Observations at Several Wavelengths

Interferometric observations of Mercury at 3.71 cm are used to determine the dielectric constant of the subsurface material at a depth of 50 cm to be 2.4 plus or minus 0.3. The surface emissivity in the radio range is determined by the value of the dielectric constant which is thus necessary in order to interpret the thermal properties of the regolith. New integrated-disk data at 6- and 18-cm wavelengths are found to be consistent with a regolith of particulate geological material in which radiative transfer of heat is important. The results are very similar to the lunar case where regolith density, dielectric constant, and loss tangent are observed to increase smoothly with depth in the subsurface.
Are models predicting a realistic picture of vertical total electron content?

The present work analyzes results coming from global maps of ionospheric total electron content (TEC) obtained from observations and from different empirical models like the International Reference Ionosphere (IRI), the model family developed at Trieste and Graz (NeQuick, COSTprof, and NeUoG‐plas), and the GPS operational model (formulation by J. A. Klobuchar). Since they still appear in the context of assessment studies we have also included “old” models like the Bent model. The attention is focused on situations which occurred in the present period of high solar activity, pointing out features like the equatorial anomaly and polar regions, which are crucial test regions for ionospheric TEC models. Experimental estimates of slant TEC from International GPS Service (IGS) stations have been compared particularly with the predictions of the NeQuick and GPS models. A very simple picture of the ionosphere like the one given by the GPS operational model appears to be insufficient to reproduce the global complex behavior of the ionosphere, as it is needed for assessment studies or for modern operational real‐time corrections of transionospheric propagation errors. The IRI estimates of TEC still present serious problems, essentially owing to the topside under high solar activity conditions, and the model cannot be integrated to heights above 2000 km. With processing resources suitable for real‐time operation, it seems that the NeQuick model can give a more widely reliable picture of the TEC estimated from GPS measurements. Computing times for this model are considerably smaller than for more complex models like NeUoG‐plas.