Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Ultrasound and magnetic resonance imaging assessmentof active bowel segments in Crohn's disease.

AIM Determining bowel disease activity in Crohn's patients can be difficult on clinical and laboratory assessment. Endoscopy is invasive and barium studies use ionising radiation. The aim of this study was to compare ultrasound and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in detecting Crohn's disease activity in the small or large bowel. MATERIALS AND METHODS Thirty patients, previously diagnosed with Crohn's disease, had bowel ultrasound and MR imaging, and were deemed active or inactive on each test. The 'gold standard' was based on clinical assessment and one or more of the following: endoscopy, barium studies or surgery. RESULTS For determining Crohn's disease activity, the sensitivities and specificities of bowel ultrasound and MRI were 87 percent and 100 percent, and 87 percent and 71 percent, respectively. Significant parameters that defined disease activity were bowel wall thickening on ultrasound and MRI, and contrast enhancement of the bowel wall and mesenteric vascularity/stranding on MRI. CONCLUSION Ultrasound and MRI were both sensitive for determining Crohn's disease activity in the bowel, but MRI with gadolinium enhancement was less specific.
PRE-COLUMBIAN POTTERY IN THE WEST INDIES: COMPOSITIONAL CHANGE IN CONTEXT

Pottery was of fundamental importance to pre-Columbian cultures in the Caribbean. Broad similarities in surface decorations, vessel morphologies, and technology within and across many islands of the archipelago hint at social networks, through which ideas and perhaps pots were exchanged. Dramatic social and political changes occurred from the early to late ceramic age in some parts of the Caribbean, documented archaeologically in site distributions; settlement organization; and such domains of material culture as ceramic styles, rock art, and iconography. The degree to which raw materials or finished products flowed through exchange networks and within and across settlement systems or
Estimation, validation et identification des modèles ARMA faibles multivariés

Dans cette these nous elargissons le champ d'application des modeles ARMA (AutoRegressive Moving-Average) vectoriels en considerant des termes d'erreur non correles mais qui peuvent contenir des dependances non lineaires. Ces modeles sont appeles des ARMA faibles vectoriels et permettent de traiter des processus qui peuvent avoir des dynamiques non lineaires tres generales. Par opposition, nous appelons ARMA forts les modeles utilises habituellement dans la litterature dans lesquels le terme d'erreur est suppose etre un bruit iid. Les modeles ARMA faibles etant en particulier denses dans l'ensemble des processus stationnaires reguliers, ils sont bien plus generaux que les modeles ARMA forts. Le probleme qui nous preoccupera sera l'analyse statistique des modeles ARMA faibles vectoriels. Plus precisement, nous etudions les problemes d'estimation et de validation. Dans un premier temps, nous etudions les proprietes asymptotiques de l'estimateur du quasi-maximum de vraisemblance et de l'estimateur des moindres carres. La matrice de variance asymptotique de ces estimateurs est d'une forme "sandwich", et peut etre tres differente de la variance asymptotique obtenue dans le cas fort. Ensuite, nous accordons une attention particuliere aux problemes de validation. Dans un premier temps, en proposant des versions modifiees des tests de Wald, du multiplicateur de Lagrange et du rapport de vraisemblance pour tester des restrictions lineaires sur les parametres de modeles ARMA faibles vectoriels. En second, nous nous interessons aux tests fondes sur les residus, qui ont pour objet de verifier que les residus des modeles estimes sont bien des estimations de bruits blancs. Plus particulierement, nous nous interessons aux tests portmanteau, aussi appeles tests d'autocorrelation. Nous montrons que la distribution asymptotique des autocorrelations residuelles est normalement distribuee avec une matrice de covariance differente du cas fort (c'est-a-dire sous les hypotheses iid sur le bruit). Nous en deduisons le comportement asymptotique des statistiques portmanteau. Dans le cadre standard d'un ARMA fort, il est connu que la distribution asymptotique des tests portmanteau est correctement approximee par un chi-deux. Dans le cas general, nous montrons que cette distribution asymptotique est celle d'une somme ponderee de chi-deux. Cette distribution peut etre tres differente de l'approximation chi-deux usuelle du cas fort. Nous proposons donc des tests portmanteau modifies pour tester l'adequation de modeles ARMA faibles vectoriels. Enfin, nous nous sommes interesses aux choix des modeles ARMA faibles vectoriels fonde sur la minimisation d'un critere d'information, notamment celui introduit par Akaike (AIC). Avec ce critere, on tente de donner une approximation de la distance (souvent appelee information de Kullback-Leibler) entre la vraie loi des observations (inconnue) et la loi du modele estime. Nous verrons que le critere corrige (AICc) dans le cadre des modeles ARMA faibles vectoriels peut, la aussi, etre tres different du cas fort.
Measurement of the mechanical properties of granular packs by wavelength-scanning interferometry

A wavelength-scanning interferometer has been constructed to observe both the normal and in-plane displacements particle by particle at the base of a model granular pack. The pack comprised 25 000 steel beads supported by a thick glass substrate and was subjected to local disturbing forces on its upper surface. The system allows measurement of normal displacements of the beads to a precision of ca 0.1 nm, thereby providing highly accurate determination of contact forces while minimizing artefacts due to substrate and grain compliance. The probability distribution of the normalized contact force was found to be approximately independent of the applied load on the upper surface of the granular pack and has an exponential tail. The probability distributions of the normalized response force and lateral displacement have similar power-law tails. The interactions between contact forces and lateral displacements suggest that significant internal rearrangement occurs in the granular pack as the load is increased, and particle displacement plays an important role in the mechanics of the granular material.
Energy and Climate in the Urban Built Environment

Part 1 * On the Built Environment the Urban Influences * Climate and Climate Change * Wind Patterns in Urban Environments * Wind Patterns in Urban Environments * Thermal Balance in the Urban Environment * Heat-island Effect * The Canyon Effect * The Energy Impact of the Urban Environment * Short-wave Radiation * Urban Pollution * The Role of Green Spaces * Appropriate Materials for the Urban Environment * Applied Lighting Technology for Urban Buildings * Active Solar Heating Systems for Urban Areas * Indoor Air Quality and Ventilation in the Urban Environment * Urban Settlements * Part 2 * Guidelines for Integrating Energy Conservation Techniques in Urban Buildings * Examples of Urban Buildings * Appendix * Index
Native Men Remade: Gender and Nation in Contemporary Hawai‘i

Many indigenous Hawaiian men have felt profoundly disempowered by the legacies of colonization and by the tourist industry, which, in addition to occupying a great deal of land, promotes a feminized image of Native Hawaiians (evident in the ubiquitous figure of the dancing hula girl). In the 1990s a group of Native men on the island of Maui responded by refashioning and reasserting their masculine identities in a group called the Hale Mua (the “Men’s House”). As a member and an ethnographer, Ty P. Kāwika Tengan analyzes how the group’s mostly middle-aged, middle-class, and mixed-race members assert a warrior masculinity through practices including martial arts, woodcarving, and cultural ceremonies. Some of their practices are heavily influenced by or borrowed from other indigenous Polynesian traditions, including those of the Māori. The men of the Hale Mua enact their refashioned identities as they participate in temple rites, protest marches, public lectures, and cultural fairs. The sharing of personal stories is an integral part of Hale Mua fellowship, and Tengan’s account is filled with members’ first-person narratives. At the same time, Tengan explains how Hale Mua rituals and practices connect to broader projects of cultural revitalization and Hawaiian nationalism. He brings to light the tensions that mark the group’s efforts to reclaim indigenous masculinity as they arise in debates over nineteenth-century historical source materials and during political and cultural gatherings held in spaces designated as tourist sites. He explores class status anxieties expressed through the sharing of individual life stories, critiques of the Hale Mua registered by Hawaiian women, and challenges the group received in dialogues with other indigenous Polynesians. Native Men Remade is the fascinating story of how gender, culture, class, and personality intersect as a group of indigenous Hawaiian men work to overcome the dislocations of colonial history.
Multidrug-Resistant Salmonella Typhimurium, Pacific Northwest, United States

We compared human and bovine isolates of Salmonella enterica using antimicrobial-drug resistance profiles and pulsed-field gel electrophoresis. From 2000 through 2006, we observed an increase in a novel multidrug-resistant clone of S. Typhimurium with no recognized phage type. This clone may represent an emerging epidemic strain in the Pacific Northwest.
Boundary singularities of solutions of sublinear elliptic equations.

Let W be a domain of RN, N³3, such that 0I¶W. In this paper we study the behavior near 0 of any nonnegative solution uIC2(W)CC(W- \{0}) of equation of the type -Du +a(x)uq=0 where 0<q<1 and function a behaves like a power of |x|.
Automatic Sentence Segmentation of Speech for Automatic Summarization

This paper presents an automatic sentence segmentation method for an automatic speech summarization system. The segmentation method is based on combining word- and class-based statistical language models to predict sentence and non-sentence boundaries. We study both the performance of the sentence segmentation system itself and the effect of the segmentation on the summarization accuracy. The sentence segmentation is done by modelling the probability of a sentence boundary given a certain word history with language models trained on transcriptions and texts from several sources. The resulting segmented data is used as the input to an existing automatic summarization system to determine the effect it has on the summarization process. We conduct all our experiments with two types of evaluation data: broadcast news and lecture transcriptions. The automatic summarizations are created with different sentence segmentations and different summarization ratios (30% and 40%) and evaluated by comparing them to human-made summaries. We show that a proper sentence segmentation is essential to achieve good performance with an automatic summarization system
Active labor market programs: a review of the evidence from evaluations

The study reports evidence based on recent evaluation of active labor market programs, in developed countries, as well as on developing, and transition economies. While a number of unresolved technical issues, and a variety of data problems in specific surveys, and administrative information, tend to affect reliability for guiding public policy, some generalizations about active labor programs can be made. These programs reveal that public works programs can help disadvantaged groups, providing poverty/safety nets, but are ineffective instruments, in the pursue of permanent employment, whereas, job search assistance has positive impacts, and is cost-effective, although this assistance does not seem to improve employment, nor wages. In addition, training for long-term unemployed, may be helpful under an improving economy, but cost-effectiveness is usually disappointing, and, retraining has proven to be more expensive, and ineffective than job search assistance. Likewise, youth training provides no positive impact on employment prospects, and cannot be a substitute to education systems failures. Micro-enterprise development, and wage subsidy programs are usually associated with displacement effects, unlikely to have positive impacts. Modest programs, sound impact evaluation techniques, and cost-effectiveness are strongly recommended.
What is the future for undergraduate dissertations

This article argues that the changing nature of the dissertation experience, and its associated supervision, calls for more detailed attention to the development of dissertation supervisors. Dissertations have always played a major role in student learning. The following themes constitute the kernel of the article: the role of the dissertation in the student's learning experience, managing the link between theory and practice, digitization of information resources, research methodologies and design, and finally, the implications for the role of the supervisor. It is suggested that without an awareness of the changing nature of the dissertation experience, and a more proactive approach to supervisor development, there may be serious degradation of the dissertation experience and outcomes.
Gene selection using support vector machines with non-convex penalty

MOTIVATION With the development of DNA microarray technology, scientists can now measure the expression levels of thousands of genes simultaneously in one single experiment. One current difficulty in interpreting microarray data comes from their innate nature of 'high-dimensional low sample size'. Therefore, robust and accurate gene selection methods are required to identify differentially expressed group of genes across different samples, e.g. between cancerous and normal cells. Successful gene selection will help to classify different cancer types, lead to a better understanding of genetic signatures in cancers and improve treatment strategies. Although gene selection and cancer classification are two closely related problems, most existing approaches handle them separately by selecting genes prior to classification. We provide a unified procedure for simultaneous gene selection and cancer classification, achieving high accuracy in both aspects. RESULTS In this paper we develop a novel type of regularization in support vector machines (SVMs) to identify important genes for cancer classification. A special nonconvex penalty, called the smoothly clipped absolute deviation penalty, is imposed on the hinge loss function in the SVM. By systematically thresholding small estimates to zeros, the new procedure eliminates redundant genes automatically and yields a compact and accurate classifier. A successive quadratic algorithm is proposed to convert the non-differentiable and non-convex optimization problem into easily solved linear equation systems. The method is applied to two real datasets and has produced very promising results. AVAILABILITY MATLAB codes are available upon request from the authors.
An analysis of costs in institutions of higher education in England

Cost functions are estimated, using random effects and stochastic frontier methods, for English higher education institutions. The article advances on existing literature by employing finer disaggregation by subject, institution type and location, and by introducing consideration of quality effects. Estimates are provided of average incremental costs attached to each output type, and of returns to scale and scope. Implications for the policy of expansion of higher education are discussed.
Hmgb1-IL-23-IL-17-IL-6-Stat3 Axis Promotes Tumor Growth in Murine Models of Melanoma

In order to understand how tumor cells can escape immune surveillance mechanisms and thus develop antitumor therapies, it is critically important to investigate the mechanisms by which the immune system interacts with the tumor microenvironment. In our current study, IL-17 deficiency results in reduced melanoma tumor size, diminished numbers of proliferating cells and blood vessels, and decreased percentage of CD11b+Gr-1+ MDSCs in tumor tissues. IL-17 promotes IL-6 induction and Stat3 activation. Treatment of Stat3 inhibitor WP1066 in B16-F10 tumor cells inoculated wild-type mice inhibits tumor growth. Additional administration of recombinant IL-6 into B16-F10 tumor-bearing IL-17−/− mice results in markedly increased tumor size and p-Stat3 expression, whereas additional recombinant IL-17 administration into B16-F10 tumor-bearing wild-type mice treated with anti-IL-6 mAb does not significantly alter the tumor growth and p-Stat3 expression. In our further study, blockade of Hmgb1-RAGE pathway inhibits melanoma tumor growth and reduces production of IL-23 and IL-17. All these data suggest that Hmgb1-IL-23-IL-17-IL-6-Stat3 axis plays a pivotal role in tumor development in murine models of melanoma, and blocking any portion of this axis will attenuate melanoma tumor growth.
Neural meshes: surface reconstruction with a learning algorithm

In this paper we propose a Learning algorithm for surface reconstruction. Our algorithm simulates an incrementally expanding neural network which learns a point cloud through a competitive learning process. The topology is learned through statistics based operators which create boundaries and merge them to create handles. We study the algorithm theoretically, analyzing statistically its main components, and experimentally, using an extensive range of input data sets.
Tourism Object Valuation Determined Based on Environmental Services Using Travel Cost Method at Tegal City Alam Indah Beach

Alam Indah Beach is located in a strategic urban coastal area so it has a very high potential to be used as a tourist attraction. This study aims to determine descriptively the analysis of the socio-economic characteristics of visitors and to know quantitatively the economic value of the Alam Indah Beach Tourism Object and the relationship between several variables that affect the number of visits from the object. This research is a quantitative study with primary and secondary data collection through library research and field studies using interviews, observation, and questionnaires. The results of the study reveal that the total cost variable has the most significant influence on the number of tourist visits, reaching 80.27% and resulting in a total consumer surplus of IDR. 130.355. 024, willingness to pay of IDR. 136,497, and an economic valuation of IDR. 35,508,314,810. Major economic benefits from tourism activities in Alam Indah beach brings socio economic improvement of the local community. The result of economic value of beach tourism object could be a reference for managers and local governments to balance between beach as a preservation with additional income for local governments and societies.
PARADE: A cycle-accurate full-system simulation Platform for Accelerator-Rich Architectural Design and Exploration

The power wall and utilization wall in today's processors have led to a focus on accelerator-rich architecture, which will include a sea of accelerators that can achieve orders-of-magnitude performance and energy gains. The emerging accelerator-rich architecture is still in its early stage, and many design issues, such as the efficient accelerator resource management and communication between accelerators and CPU cores, remain unclear. Therefore, a research platform that can enable those design explorations will be extremely useful. This paper presents the first cycle-accurate full-system simulation Platform for Accelerator-Rich Architectural Design and Exploration (PARADE). PARADE can automatically generate dedicated or composable accelerator simulation modules, simulate the global accelerator management, a coherent cache/scratchpad with shared memory, and a customizable network-on-chip-all at cycle-level. In addition, PARADE provides visualization support to assist architects with design space exploration. Finally, a few case studies are conducted to confirm that PARADE can enable various system-level design space explorations in the accelerator-rich architecture.
The LMC cluster NGC 1466 - Photometry of the RR Lyraes, and a color-magnitude diagram

Photometry for the RR Lyrae variables and a color-magnitude diagram are presented for the old LMC cluster NGC 1466. Forty-two RR Lyrae, ten of which are new, are identified. The cluster abundance is [Fe/H] = −1.85 ± 0.1 and the reddening is E(B−V) = 0.09 ± 0.02. The RR Lyrae have = 19.33, fainter by 0.2-0.5 mag than previous studies, but similar to values found by recent CCD photometry of RR Lyraes in other LMC clusters. The color-magnitude diagram reaches to the main sequence turn-off and demonstrates that NGC 1466 is as old (± 2 Gyr) as halo Galactic globular clusters
Non-Cooperative Scheduling of Multiple Bag-of-Task Applications

Multiple applications that execute concurrently on heterogeneous platforms compete for CPU and network resources. In this paper we analyze the behavior of K non-cooperative schedulers using the optimal strategy that maximize their efficiency while fairness is ensured at a system level ignoring applications characteristics. We limit our study to simple single-level master-worker platforms and to the case where each scheduler is in charge of a single application consisting of a large number of independent tasks. The tasks of a given application all have the same computation and communication requirements, but these requirements can vary from one application to another. In this context, we assume that each scheduler aims at maximizing its throughput. We give closed-form formula of the equilibrium reached by such a system and study its performance. We characterize the situations where this Nash equilibrium is optimal (in the Pareto sense) and show that even though no catastrophic situation (Braess-like paradox) can occur, such an equilibrium can be arbitrarily bad for any classical performance measure.
Mellan erfarenhet och förväntan : Betydelser av att bli vuxen i ungdomars livsberättelser

Avhandlingen undersoker hur 21 unga manniskor inom ramen for langre intervjuer berattar om och reflekterar over sina liv. Ungdomarna har intervjuats som 15-, 17-, 22- och 25-aringar. Intervjuerna a .