Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Novel Representation of Clinical Information in the ICU

Summary The introduction of electronic medical records (EMR) and computerized physician order entry (CPOE) into the intensive care unit (ICU) is transforming the way health care providers currently work. The challenge facing developers of EMR’s is to create products which add value to systems of health care delivery. As EMR’s become more prevalent, the potential impact they have on the quality and safety, both negative and positive, will be amplified. In this paper we outline the key barriers to effective use of EMR and describe the methodology, using a worked example of the output. AWARE (Ambient Warning and Response Evaluation), is a physician led, electronic-environment enhancement program in an academic, tertiary care institution’s ICU. The development process is focused on reducing information overload, improving efficiency and eliminating medical error in the ICU. Citation: Pickering BW, Herasevich V, Ahmed A, Gajic O. Novel representation of clinical information in the ICU – developing user interfaces which reduce information overload. Appl Clin Inf 2010; 1: 116–131 http://dx.doi. org/10.4338/ACI-2009-12-CR-0027
Experimental Results on the Crossover Point inSatis ability

Determining whether a propositional theory is satissable is a prototypical example of an NP-complete problem. Further, a large number of problems that occur in knowledge representation, learning, planning, and other areas of AI are essentially satissability problems. This paper reports on a series of experiments to determine the location of the crossover point | the point at which half the randomly generated propositional theories with a given number of variables and given number of clauses are satissable | and to assess the relationship of the crossover point to the dii-culty of determining satissability. We have found empirically that, for 3-sat, the number of clauses at the crossover point is a linear function of the number of variables. This result is of theoretical interest since it is not clear why such a linear relationship should exist, but it is also of practical interest since recent experiments Mitchell et al. 92; Cheeseman et al. 91] indicate that the most com-putationally diicult problems tend to be found near the crossover point. We have also found that for random 3-SAT problems below the crossover point, the average time complexity of satissability problems seems empirically to grow linearly with problem size. At and above the crossover point the complexity seems to grow exponentially, but the rate of growth seems to be greatest near the crossover point.
The indirect costs of agency nurses in South Africa: a case study in two public sector hospitals

Background Globally, flexible work arrangements – through the use of temporary nursing staff – are an important strategy for dealing with nursing shortages in hospitals. Objective The objective of the study was to determine the direct and indirect costs of agency nurses, as well as the advantages and the problems associated with agency nurse utilisation in two public sector hospitals in South Africa. Methods Following ethical approval, two South African public sector hospitals were selected purposively. Direct costs were determined through an analysis of hospital expenditure information for a 5-year period from 2005 until 2010, obtained from the national transversal Basic Accounting System database. At each hospital, semi-structured interviews were conducted with the chief executive officer, executive nursing services manager, the maternity or critical care unit nursing manager, the human resource manager, and the finance manager. Indirect costs measured were the time spent on pre-employment checks, and nurse recruitment, orientation, and supervision. All expenditure is expressed in South African Rands (R: 1 USD=R7, 2010 prices). Results In the 2009/10 financial year, Hospital 1 spent R38.86 million (US$5.55 million) on nursing agencies, whereas Hospital 2 spent R10.40 million (US$1.49 million). The total estimated time spent per week on indirect cost activities at Hospital 1 was 51.5 hours, and 60 hours at Hospital 2. The estimated monetary value of this time at Hospital 1 was R962,267 (US$137,467) and at Hospital 2 the value was R300,121 (US$42,874), thus exceeding the weekly direct costs of nursing agencies. Agency nurses assisted the selected hospitals in dealing with problems of nurse recruitment, absenteeism, shortages, and skills gaps in specialised clinical areas. The problems experienced with agency nurses included their perceived lack of commitment, unreliability, and providing sub-optimal quality of patient care. Conclusion Hospital managers and policy-makers need to address the effective utilisation of agency nurses and quality of patient care in tandem.
Interventions for Alleviating Loneliness among Older Persons: A Critical Review

Objectives. Loneliness is common among older persons and has been associated with health and mental health risks. This systematic review examines the utility of loneliness interventions among older persons. Data Source. Thirty-four intervention studies were used. Study Inclusion Criteria. The study was conducted between 1996 and 2011, included a sample of older adults, implemented an intervention affecting loneliness or identified a situation that directly affected loneliness, included in its outcome measures the effects of the intervention or situation on loneliness levels or on loneliness-related measures (e.g., social interaction), and included in its analysis pretest-posttest comparisons. Data Extraction. Studies were accessed using the databases PsycINFO, MEDLINE, ScienceDirect, AgeLine, PsycBOOKS, and Google Scholar for the years 1996–2011. Data Synthesis. Interventions were classified based on population, format, and content and were evaluated for quality of design and efficacy. Results. Twelve studies were effective in reducing loneliness according to the review criteria, and 15 were evaluated as potentially effective. The findings suggest that it is possible to reduce loneliness by using educational interventions focused on social networks maintenance and enhancement. Conclusions. Multiple approaches show promise, although flawed design often prevents proper evaluation of efficacy. The value of specific therapy techniques in reducing loneliness is highlighted and warrants a wider investigation. Studies of special populations, such as the cognitively impaired, are also needed.
The Villain Team-Up or how Trichomonas vaginalis and bacterial vaginosis alter innate immunity in concert

Objectives Complex interactions of vaginal microorganisms with the genital tract epithelium shape mucosal innate immunity, which holds the key to sexual and reproductive health. Bacterial vaginosis (BV), a microbiome-disturbance syndrome prevalent in reproductive-age women, occurs commonly in concert with trichomoniasis, and both are associated with increased risk of adverse reproductive outcomes and viral infections, largely attributable to inflammation. To investigate the causative relationships among inflammation, BV and trichomoniasis, we established a model of human cervicovaginal epithelial cells colonised by vaginal Lactobacillus isolates, dominant in healthy women, and common BV species (Atopobium vaginae, Gardnerella vaginalis and Prevotella bivia). Methods Colonised epithelia were infected with Trichomonas vaginalis (TV) or exposed to purified TV virulence factors (membrane lipophosphoglycan (LPG), its ceramide-phosphoinositol-glycan core (CPI-GC) or the endosymbiont Trichomonas vaginalis virus (TVV)), followed by assessment of bacterial colony-forming units, the mucosal anti-inflammatory microbicide secretory leucocyte protease inhibitor (SLPI), and chemokines that drive pro-inflammatory, antigen-presenting and T cells. Results TV reduced colonisation by Lactobacillus but not by BV species, which were found inside epithelial cells. TV increased interleukin (IL)-8 and suppressed SLPI, likely via LPG/CPI-GC, and upregulated IL-8 and RANTES, likely via TVV as suggested by use of purified pathogenic determinants. BV species A vaginae and G vaginalis induced IL-8 and RANTES, and also amplified the pro-inflammatory responses to both LPG/CPI-GC and TVV, whereas P bivia suppressed the TV/TVV-induced chemokines. Conclusions These molecular host–parasite–endosymbiont–bacteria interactions explain epidemiological associations and suggest a revised paradigm for restoring vaginal immunity and preventing BV/TV-attributable inflammatory sequelae in women.
Drop Impact on Textile Material: Effect of Fabric Properties

Abstract This paper presents an experimental study of impact of water drop on a surface in a spreading regime with no splashing. Three surfaces were studied: virgin glass, coating film and woven cotton fabric at different construction parameters. All experiments were carried out using water drop with the same free fall high. Digidrop with high-resolution camera is used to measure the different parameters characterising this phenomenon. Results show an important effect of the height of the free fall on the drop profile and the spreading behaviour. An important drop deformation at the surface impact was observed. Then, fabric construction as the weft count deeply affects the drop impact. For plain weave, an increase of weft count causes a decrease in penetration and increase in the spreading rate. The same result was obtained for coated fabric. Therefore, the impact energy was modified and the drop shape was affected, which directly influenced the spreading rate.
Half Transductive Ranking

We study the standard retrieval task of ranking a fixed set of items given a previously unseen query and pose it as the half transductive ranking problem. The task is transductive as the set of items is fixed. Transductive representations (where the vector representation of each example is learned) allow the generation of highly nonlinear embeddings that capture object relationships without relying on a specific choice of features, and require only relatively simple optimization. Unfortunately, they have no direct outof-sample extension. Inductive approaches on the other hand allow for the representation of unknown queries. We describe algorithms for this setting which have the advantages of both transductive and inductive approaches, and can be applied in unsupervised (either reconstruction-based or graph-based) and supervised ranking setups. We show empirically that our methods give strong performance on all three tasks.
ANALYSIS OF THE COMPRESSIVE STRENGTH OF MASONRY GIVEN BY THE EQUATION FK = K(FB) A (FM) B

The aim of the study reported here is to critically examine the equation in the title of the paper in order to investigate which mechanical parameters describing both masonry units and mortar influence the compressive strength of structural masonry. Here, masonry is treated as a composite material, with masonry units and mortar joints forming its constituents. Each constituent is assumed to behave as an isotropic linear elastic-brittle material. No attempt is made to capture the postpeak behaviour, and it is assumed that microcracks progress rapidly. A two-stage homogenisation technique is introduced to obtain the average mechanical response of masonry. Based on this, numerical tests with idealised boundary conditions are carried out, and these indicate that the compressive strength of masonry is not directly influenced either by the compressive strength of the masonry units or by that of the mortar. A new equation is proposed.
A linear programming approach to the optimal design of spline-based motion system inputs

For motion systems such as cam-follower mechanisms and loads driven by servo motors, this paper considers the design of system inputs that are continuous up to their M -th derivative and minimize some design criterion subject to user-defined constraints. This problem is tackled by optimizing a piecewise-linear, continuous parametrization (based on a large number of second-order B-splines) of the M -th derivative of the trajectory, which guarantees the continuity up to derivative M . As an application, the system input of a linear dynamic system is optimized to reduce the residual vibrations. Both non-robust and robust solutions of the resulting linear optimization problem are presented. For high-speed applications a trade-off in the degree of continuity at the boundaries is shown: for robustness against small plant perturbations this degree needs to be low, while for robustness against unmodeled higher dynamics this degree needs to be large. The numerical optimization results furthermore confirm and outperform earlier results for the considered benchmark.
Graphical models-based track association algorithm

In the condition of sensor network (SN), to associate local tracks front multiple sensors is a complex task, due to the combination explosion caused by the increasing number of sensors and targets. A new graphical models-based technique for track association is proposed in this paper to deal with the problem. Firstly, by means of the sparse structure inherent in multisensor multitarget tracking scenario, the graphical structure for track association is established; Secondly, the compatibility function of nodes and edges in graph is properly defined to describe the objective function with constrains about track association problem; finally, max-product message passing scheme is employed to obtain the optimal association result. Simulation results demonstrate the efficiency of the presented method.
A Validated Whole-Genome Association Study of Efficient Food Conversion in Cattle

The genetic factors that contribute to efficient food conversion are largely unknown. Several physiological systems are likely to be important, including basal metabolic rate, the generation of ATP, the regulation of growth and development, and the homeostatic control of body mass. Using whole-genome association, we found that DNA variants in or near proteins contributing to the background use of energy of the cell were 10 times as common as those affecting appetite and body-mass homeostasis. In addition, there was a genic contribution from the extracellular matrix and tissue structure, suggesting a trade-off between efficiency and tissue construction. Nevertheless, the largest group consisted of those involved in gene regulation or control of the phenotype. We found that the distribution of micro-RNA motifs was significantly different for the genetic variants associated with residual feed intake than for the genetic variants in total, although the distribution of promoter sequence motifs was not different. This suggests that certain subsets of micro-RNA are more important for the regulation of this trait. Successful validation depended on the sign of the allelic association in different populations rather than on the strength of the initial association or its size of effect.
Semi-supervised marginal discriminant analysis based on QR decomposition

In this paper, a novel subspace learning method, semi-supervised marginal discriminant analysis (SMDA), is proposed for classification. SMDA aims at maintaining the intrinsic neighborhood relations between the data points from the same class, while maximizing the margin between the neighboring data points with different class labels. Different from traditional dimensionality reduction algorithms like linear discriminant analysis (LDA) and maximum margin criterion (MMC) which seeks only the global Euclidean structure, SMDA takes local structure of the data into account. Moreover, it is designed for semi-supervised learning which incorporates both labeled and unlabeled data points and avoids suffering the small sample size (SSS) problem. QR decomposition is then employed to find the optimal transformation which makes the algorithm scalable and more efficient. Experiments on face recognition are presented to show the effectiveness of the method.
Let caches decay: reducing leakage energy via exploitation of cache generational behavior

Power dissipation is increasingly important in CPUs ranging from those intended for mobile use, all the way up to high-performance processors for highend servers. Although the bulk of the power dissipated is dynamic switching power, leakage power is also beginning to be a concern. Chipmakers expect that in future chip generations, leakage's proportion of total chip power will increase significantly. This article examines methods for reducing leakage power within the cache memories of the CPU. Because caches comprise much of a CPU chip's area and transistor counts, they are reasonable targets for attacking leakage. We discuss policies and implementations for reducing cache leakage by invalidating and "turning off" cache lines when they hold data not likely to be reused. In particular, our approach is targeted at the generational nature of cache line usage. That is, cache lines typically have a flurry of frequent use when first brought into the cache, and then have a period of "dead time" before they are evicted. By devising effective, low-power ways of deducing dead time, our results show that in many cases we can reduce L1 cache leakage energy by 4x in SPEC2000 applications without having an impact on performance. Because our decay-based techniques have notions of competitive online algorithms at their roots, their energy usage can be theoretically bounded at within a factor of two of the optimal oracle-based policy. We also examine adaptive decay-based policies that make energy-minimizing policy choices on a per-application basis by choosing appropriate decay intervals individually for each cache line. Our proposed adaptive policies effectively reduce L1 cache leakage energy by 5x for the SPEC2000 with only negligible degradations in performance.
Morphological and Rheological Properties of Poly(Trimethylene Terephthalate)/Maleic Anhydride Grafted Poly (Ethylene-Octene)/Organoclay Ternary Nanocomposite

Poly(trimethylene terephthalate) (PTT)/poly(ethylene-octene) POE-g-MA/organoclay ternary nanocomposites were prepared using melt blending in order to simultaneously improve the toughness and stiffness of PTT. The phase morphology and dispersion of organoclay were characterized by scanning electron microscope (SEM), X-ray diffractometer (XRD), and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). The melt rheological behavior of the ternary nanocomposites was determined by plate/plate rheological measurements. XRD and TEM analysis indicated that the ternary nanocomposites contained exfoliated nanoparticle when a small amount of organoclay (1 part per hundred) was added. The high aspect ratio of the organoclay platelets induced the average size of the dispersed domain to become smaller. Melt rheological studies revealed that the ternary nanocomposites exhibited strong shear thinning behavior and showed good processability.
A comprehensive systematic review of evidence on the structure, process, characteristics and composition of a nursing team that fosters a healthy work environment

Objectives The overall aim of this comprehensive systematic review was to identify the best available evidence on the effect of team characteristics, processes, structure and composition within the context of collaborative practice among nursing teams that create a healthy work environment. Search strategy The search strategy sought to find both published and unpublished studies and papers written in the English language. An initial limited search of Medline and CINAHL databases was undertaken to identify optimal search terms. A second extensive search using all identified keywords and index terms was then undertaken. Methodological quality Two independent reviewers assessed the methodological quality of retrieved papers using the corresponding checklist from the System for the Unified Management, Assessment and Review of Information (SUMARI) package. Results The papers included in the review included nine experimental or quasi‐experimental studies, 11 descriptive studies and four qualitative studies. A variety of different team structures such as interdisciplinary teams, primary nursing, team nursing, multidisciplinary models of care delivery and the use of a Partner in Patient Care model were investigated. Team characteristics should include accountability, commitment, enthusiasm and motivation. Social support within a team from a supervisor or colleague increased satisfaction levels of staff. Conclusion The results of the review lead to the development of a number of recommendations for practice that could assist with creating a health work environment.
A novel educational module to teach neural circuits for college and high school students: NGSS-neurons, genetics, and selective stimulations

This report introduces various approaches to target defined neural pathways for stimulation and to address the effect of particular neural circuits on behavior in a model animal, the fruit fly ( Drosophila melanogaster ). The objective of this novel educational module described can be used to explain and address principle concepts in neurobiology for high school and college level students. A goal of neurobiology is to show how neural circuit activity controls corresponding behavior in animals. The fruit fly model system provides powerful genetic tools, such as the UAS-Gal4 system, to manipulate expression of non-native proteins in various populations of defined neurons: glutamergic, serotonergic, GABAergic, and cholinergic. The exhibited behaviors in the examples we provide allows teachers and students to address questions from behaviors to details at a cellular level. We provided example sets of data, obtained in a research lab, as well as ideas on ways to present data for participants and instructors. The optogenetic tool, channelrhodpsin 2 (ChR2), is employed to increase the activity of each population of neurons in a spatiotemporal controlled manner in behaving larvae and adult flies. Various behavioral assays are used to observe the effect of a specific neuron population activation on crawling behavior in larvae and climbing behavior in adult flies. Participants using this module become acquainted with the actions of different neurotransmitters in the nervous system. A pre- and post- assessment survey on the content is provided for teachers, as templates, to address learning of content and concepts.
Infrared thermographic evaluation of marine composite structures

Glass fiber composite materials have been used for many years in the construction of pleasure, cruising, and racing marine vessels. These vessels have demonstrated excellent performance characteristics and have been reliable in service. Even so, as with all material systems, they are subject to damage from accident, neglect, and abuse. Traditional nondestructive inspection approaches are not always fully effective for examining composite marine structures. Infrared imaging offers a particularly attractive approach for the inspection of composite material structures. Glass fiber composites frequently possess a combination of thermal properties that make them good candidates for infrared thermographic evaluation while other nondestructive evaluation approaches provide limited success. Infrared thermography combines the advantages of being nondestructive with the capability of rapidly inspecting wide surface areas.