Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Measurement of Fall Prevention Awareness and Behaviours among Older Adults at Home*

ABSTRACT This study surveyed awareness of, and adherence to, six national fall prevention recommendations among community-dwelling older adults (n = 1050) in Ottawa. Although 76 per cent of respondents agreed falling is a concern and preventable, fewer perceived susceptibility to falling (63%). Respondents had high awareness that home modifications and physical activity can prevent falls. Reported modifications included grab bars (50%), night lights (44%), and raised toilet seats (19%). Half met aerobic activity recommendations; 38 per cent met strength recommendations. Respondents had lower awareness that an annual medication review, annual eye and physical examination, and daily vitamin D supplementation could reduce fall risk. However, reported annual medication review (79%) and eye examination (75%) was high. Nearly half met recommendations for vitamin D intake. These findings suggest a gap in knowledge of awareness and adherence to national recommendations, highlighting the ones that may require attention from those who work to prevent falls. RÉSUMÉ L’étude visait à évaluer chez les résidents aînés d’Ottawa (n = 1 050) la connaissance et le respect de six recommandations nationales sur la prévention des chutes. D’abord, 76 % des répondants étaient d’avis que les chutes sont une préoccupation réelle et qu’il est possible de les éviter, mais ils étaient moins nombreux (63 %) à penser qu’ils étaient à risque de faire une chute. Ensuite, les répondants étaient très conscients que l’activité physique et l’adaptation du domicile permettent de prévenir les chutes. Parmi les adaptations mentionnées figuraient les barres d’appui (50 %), l’éclairage de nuit (44 %) et les sièges de toilette surélevés (19 %). En ce qui concerne l’activité physique, la moitié des répondants suivaient les recommandations visant à améliorer leur capacité cardiovasculaire, et 38 %, celles visant à améliorer leur force. Enfin, les répondants étaient moins sensibilisés à l’importance de la vérification annuelle des médicaments, de l’examen médical et de l’examen de la vue annuels et de la prise quotidienne de suppléments de vitamine D pour la réduction des risques de chute. Cependant, ils étaient nombreux à indiquer qu’ils faisaient vérifier leurs médicaments (79 %) et passaient un examen de la vue (75 %) tous les ans. De plus, près de la moitié respectaient les recommandations sur la prise de suppléments de vitamine D. Ces résultats font ressortir un certain écart entre la connaissance et le respect des recommandations nationales, mettant en évidence celles qui mériteraient l’attention des professionnels œuvrant dans la prévention des chutes.
Efficacy and adverse effects of atypical antipsychotics for dementia: meta-analysis of randomized, placebo-controlled trials.

OBJECTIVE Atypical antipsychotic medications are widely used to treat delusions, aggression, and agitation in people with Alzheimer disease (AD) and other dementia. Several clinical trials have not shown efficacy, and there have been concerns about adverse events. The objective of this study was to assess the evidence for efficacy and adverse events of atypicals for people with dementia. METHODS MEDLINE, the Cochrane Register of Controlled Trials, meetings, presentations, and information obtained from sponsors were used in this study. Published and unpublished randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind, parallel-group trials in patients with AD or dementia of atypical antipsychotics marketed in the United States were studied. Clinical and trials characteristics, outcomes, and adverse events were extracted. Data were checked by a second reviewer. Fifteen trials including 16 contrasts of atypical antipsychotics with placebo met selection criteria: aripiprazole (k = 3), olanzapine (k = 5), quetiapine (k = 3), and risperidone (k = 5). A total of 3,353 patients were randomized to drug and 1,757 to placebo. Standard meta-analysis methods were used to summarize outcomes. RESULTS Quality of the reporting of trials varied. Efficacy on rating scales was observed by meta-analysis for aripiprazole and risperidone, but not for olanzapine. Response rates were frequently not reported. There were smaller effects for less severe dementia, outpatients, and patients selected for psychosis. Approximately one-third dropped out without overall differences between drug and placebo. Adverse events were mainly somnolence and urinary tract infection or incontinence across drugs, and extrapyramidal symptoms or abnormal gait with risperidone or olanzapine. Cognitive test scores worsened with drugs. There was no evidence for increased injury, falls, or syncope. There was a significant risk for cerebrovascular events, especially with risperidone; increased risk for death overall was reported elsewhere. CONCLUSIONS Small statistical effect sizes on symptom rating scales support the evidence for the efficacy of aripiprazole and risperidone. Incomplete reporting restricts estimates of response rates and clinical significance. Dropouts and adverse events further limit effectiveness. Atypicals should be considered within the context of medical need and the efficacy and safety of alternatives. Individual patient meta-analyses are needed to better assess clinical significance and effectiveness.
Information pathways into dementia care services

This research described family carers' experiences in accessing dementia information and services in Southern Tasmania, Australia. Focus groups were conducted around three topics: (i) information available to family carers prior to a formal diagnosis of dementia, (ii) sources of information following diagnosis, and (iii) means of transfer of information. Data analysis identified themes reflecting participants' progressive care experiences: from hurtful and dismissive attitudes towards initial requests for information and early diagnosis, to futile searching for information within a seemingly disorganized healthcare system, to eventual resolution of a kind whereby dementia services were finally procured for family members to varying degrees — all of which created emotional turmoil and delayed receipt of services. This study strongly emphasises the value of health professionals seriously and empathically hearing and acting upon family carers' requests for information and prompt diagnosis of dementia. In addition, there is a significant need to improve access and organization of information and services for people with dementia and their family carers.
Speech motor control variables in the production of voicing contrasts and emphatic accent

This dissertation looks at motor control in speech production. Two specific questions emerging from the speechmotor control literature are studied: the question of articulatory versus acoustic motor control targets, and the question of whether prosodic linguistic variables are controlled in the sameway as segmental linguistic variables. In the first study, I test the utility of whispered speech as a tool for addressing the question of articulatory or acoustic motor control targets. Research has been done probing both sides of this question. The case for articulatory specifications is developed in depth in the Articulatory Phonology framework of Haskins researchers (eg Browman & Goldstein 2000), based on the task-dynamic model of control presented by Saltzman & Kelso (1987). The case for acoustic specifications is developed in the work of Perkell and others (eg Perkell, Matthies, Svirsky & Jordan 1993, Guenther, Espy-Wilson, Boyce, Matthies, Zandipour & Perkell 1999, Perkell, Guenther, Lane, Matthies, Perrier, Vick, Wilhelms-Tricarico & Zandipour 2000). It has also been suggested that some productions are governed by articulatory targets while others are governed by acoustic targets (Ladefoged 2005). This study involves two experiments. In the first, I make endoscopic video recordings of the larynx during the production of phonological voicing contrasts in normal and whispered speech. I discovered that the glottal aperture differences between voiced obstruents (ie, /d/) and voiceless obstruents (ie, /t/) in normal speechwas preserved in whispered speech. Of particular interest was the observation that phonologically voiced obstruents tended to exhibit a narrower glottal aperture in whisper than vowels, which are also phonologically voiced. This suggests that themotor control targets of voicing is different for vowels than for voiced obstruents. A perceptual experiment on the speech material elicited
Evaluation of Requirements Models

Requirements Engineering (RE) approaches, following paradigms such as goal-oriented [1] or scenario-based [2], provide expressive model elements for requirements elicitation and analysis. However, these approaches are still struggling when it comes to managing the quality of their models. Problems in quality can cause difficulties in anaging and understanding requirements, which in turn leads to increased development costs. The models' quality should then be a permanent concern. We propose a quantitative assessment of the goal-oriented and scenario-based models' quality, namely its complexity, completeness, appropriateness recognizability, understandability and learnability. To this end, we propose a combination of techniques to be applied to the RE models, the modelling process, and the models' notation. We are going to define metrics about the models, through the Goal-Question-Metric (GQM) approach, and incorporate them in a common evaluation framework that helps in the requirements modelling process. The quality of the RE models, the modelling process and the model's notation will be measured by collecting biometric data from stakeholders, by using eye-tracking devices, electroencephalography (EEG) scanners, and electro-dermal activity (EDA) scanners. Furthermore, we will collect metrics about the model during the modelling process, and the subjective opinion of stakeholders about the usage of these models, through questionnaires like NASA TLX [4] (which measures perceived effort while working on tasks). All metrics and biometrics are going to be theoretically and experimentally evaluated, through a set of case studies and experiments with different types of participants (including researchers, practitioners and students).
1 Image Information Mining : Perspectives seen by DLR

Based on our experience with existing image information mining (IIM) systems and their principal building blocks, we propose new implementation technologies for some of their typical functionalities. These new technologies are supposed to be more efficient than existing solutions and offer new performance perspectives. Motivated by potential new applications of TerraSAR-X data, we deal with feature extraction in transform domains, Kolmogorov complexity, hierarchical clustering, and Dirichlet modeling.
The Party Colonisation of the Media

Media scholars looking into the relationship between political and media systems in the former communist countries have mainly worked on the assumption that parties seek control over the media in order to suppress critical voices and to gain favourable coverage so that they can influence voting behaviour, but have barely explored political actors’ other possible motivations. Meanwhile, political scientists studying the region’s countries have often focused on parties’ relationship to the state and the resources that they extracted from state institutions such as ministries and municipalities but largely ignored the relationship between parties and the media. This article, written as part of the project Media and Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe, attempts to link these two traditions of research. Introducing the concept of the party colonisation of the media, it looks into what benefits other than suppressing criticism and gaining favourable coverage parties may gain from controlling the media. It uses the example of Hungary to illustrate how the party colonisation of the media works. It also intends to assess how different patterns of media colonisation affect media freedom.
A comparative study of mel cepstra and EIH for phone classification under adverse conditions

The performance of large-vocabulary automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems deteriorates severely in mismatched training and testing conditions. Signal processing techniques based on the human auditory system have been proposed to improve ASR performance, especially under adverse acoustic conditions. The paper compares one such scheme, the ensemble interval histogram (EIH), with the conventional mel cepstral analysis (MEL). These two spectral feature extraction methods were implemented as front ends to a state-of-the-art continuous speech recognizer and evaluated on the TIMIT database (male). To characterize the influence of signal distortion on the representation of different sounds, phone classification experiments were conducted for three acoustic conditions-clean speech, speech through a telephone channel and speech under room reverberations (the last two are simulations). Classification was performed for static features alone and for static and dynamic features, to observe the relative contribution of time derivatives. The performance is displayed as percentage of phones correctly classified. Confusion matrices were also derived from phone classification to provide diagnostic information.
Algebraic Multigrid for Markov Chains

An algebraic multigrid (AMG) method is presented for the calculation of the stationary probability vector of an irreducible Markov chain. The method is based on standard AMG for nonsingular linear systems, but in a multiplicative, adaptive setting. A modified AMG interpolation formula is proposed that produces a nonnegative interpolation operator with unit row sums. We show how the adoption of a previously described lumping technique maintains the irreducible singular M-matrix character of the coarse-level operators on all levels. Together, these properties are sufficient to guarantee the well-posedness of the algorithm. Numerical results show how it leads to nearly optimal multigrid efficiency for a representative set of test problems.
Wireless image transmission using multiple-description based concatenated codes

Summary form only given. This work introduces a multiple-description product code which aims at optimally generating multiple, equally-important wavelet image descriptions from an image encoded by the popular SPIHT image coder. Because the SPIHT image coder is highly sensitive to errors, forward error correction is used to protect the image against bit errors occurring in the channel. The error-correction code is a concatenated channel code including a row (outer) code based on RCPC codes with CRC error detection and a source-channel column (inner) code consisting of the scalable SPIHT image coder and an optimized array of unequal protection Reed-Solomon erasure-correction codes. By matching the unequal protection codes to the embedded source bitstream using our simple, fast optimizer, we maximize expected image quality and provide for graceful degradation of the received image during fades. To achieve unequal protection, each packet is split into many Reed-Solomon symbols. The i/sup th/ symbol in each packet forms an (n,k) Reed-Solomon code or "column". A fast, nearly-optimal optimizer, based on Lagrange multipliers and optimal to within convex hull and discretization approximations, chooses k for each Reed-Solomon "column" to minimize the expected mean-square error at the receiver. We validated our use of this structure by evaluating its performance in the context of transmitting images over a wireless fading channel. The performance of this scheme was evaluated by simulating the transmission of the Lena image over a Clarke flat-fading channel with an average SNR of 10 dB and a normalized Doppler frequency of 10/sup -5/ Hz.
Milton Friedman, the Demand for Money and the ECB’s Monetary-Policy Strategy

The European Central Bank (ECB) assigns a greater weight to the role of money in its monetary-policy strategy than most, if not all, other major central banks. Nevertheless, reflecting the view that the demand for money became unstable in the early-2000s, some commentators in the press have reported that the ECB has “downgraded” the role of money-demand functions in its strategy. This paper explains the ECB’s monetary-policy strategy and shows the considerable influence of Milton Friedman’s contributions on the formulation of that strategy. The paper also provides new evidence on the stability of euro-area money-demand. Following a conjecture made by Friedman (1956), we assign a role to uncertainty in the money-demand function. We find that, although uncertainty is mean–reverting, it is none-the-less non-stationary, subject to wide swings, and has substantial effects on the demand for money.
Sorbitol as a test substance for measurement of liver plasma flow in humans

The objective of this study was to evaluate whole‐body removal kinetics of sorbitol, the use of extrarenal sorbitol clearance to estimate hepatic plasma flow in humans, and to compare measurements of liver flow by Fick's principle using either indocyanine green (ICG) or sorbitol. A sorbitol bolus (5 mmol/kg) was given intravenously to 6 controls for determination of sorbitol elimination capacity (SEC)and distribution volume, Vdsorb. Sorbitol infusion (287 μmol/min) was given to 17 liver patients and 11 controls. Extrarenal sorbitol clearance (0Vxsorb) was calculated as infusion rate (corrected for renal excretion and accumulation in Vdsorb) divided by arterial concentration. Liver flow(QICG) was calculated from the ICG infusion and arterial and hepatic venous ICG concentrations by Fick's principle. Average SEC was 73 μmol/min/kg, Vdsorb was 0.16 L plasma per kilogram, and in vivo Vdsorb was 3 mmol/L. Renal sorbitol excretion rate was 0.03 to 0.31 of infusion rate. Extrahepatic extrarenal removal was not significantly different from zero but varied considerably. Hepatic extraction fraction of sorbitol,(Esorb), measured by liver vein catheterization, was 0.35 to 1.04(median, 0.86)in cirrhotic patients and 0.90 to 0.98 (0.86) in controls.The requirements for using Clxsorb as an estimate of QICG was not violated by the data in controls, Clxsorb/QICG 0.70 to 1.55 [median, 1.08]), whereas there was a systematic underestimation in cirrhotic patients (0.72‐1.08 [0.85]). Liver flow calculated by Fick's principle using either sorbitol or ICG agreed well. Esorb>EICG in each individual except one. Curvilinear relationship between Esorb and EICG was in agreement with different kinetic parameters for sorbitol and ICG, and did not require additional assumption of intrahepatic shunts.
A disconfirmation bias in the evaluation of arguments.

Two experiments provided evidence for a disconfirmation bias in argument evaluation such that arguments incompatible with prior beliefs are scrutinized longer, subjected to more extensive refutational analyses, and consequently are judged to be weaker than arguments compatible with prior beliefs. The idea that people are unable to evaluate evidence independently of prior beliefs has been documented elsewhere, including in the classic study by C. G. Lord, L. Ross, and M. R. Lepper (1979). The present findings contribute to this literature by specifying the processes by which prior beliefs affect the evaluation of evidence. The authors compare the disconflrmation model to several other models of how prior beliefs influence current judgments and present data that provide support for the disconfirmation model. Results indicate that whether a person's prior belief is accompanied by emotional conviction affects the magnitude and form of the disconfirmation bias. When evaluating an argument, can one assess its strength independently of one's prior belief in the conclusion? A good deal of evidence indicates the answer is an emphatic no (e.g., Batson, 1975; Chapman & Chapman, 1959; Darley & Gross, 1983; Geller & Pitz, 1968; Nisbett & Ross, 1980; Sherif & Hovland, 1961). This phenomenon, which we refer to as the prior belief effect, has important implications. Given two people, or groups, with opposing beliefs about a social, political, or scientific issue, the degree to which they will view relevant evidence as strong will differ. This difference, in turn, may result in a failure of the opposing parties to converge on any kind of meaningful agreement, and, under some circumstances, they may become more extreme in their beliefs. Perhaps the most renowned study documenting the prior belief effect is one conducted by Lord, Ross, and Lepper (1979); this study served as the starting point for our work. Lord et al. were concerned with people's evaluations of arguments about
Individual Differences in Integrating Information between and within Sentences.

Cette etude examine les differences individuelles dans la maniere dont les lecteurs integrent des mots successifs dans leur representation d'un texte. Elle met l'accent sur le role du travail mnemonique et sur son interaction avec les caracteristiques du texte a lire, etudiee par l'introduction de contradictions dans les elements du texte
Static vs. Dynamic Content Descriptors for Video Retrieval in Laparoscopy

The domain of minimally invasive surgery has recently attracted attention from the Multimedia community due to the fact that systematic video documentation is on the rise in this medical field. The vastly growing volumes of video archives demand for effective and efficient techniques to retrieve specific information from large video collections with visually very homogeneous content. One specific challenge in this context is to retrieve scenes showing similar surgical actions, i.e., similarity search. Although this task has a high and constantly growing relevance for surgeons and other health professionals, it has rarely been investigated in the literature so far for this particular domain. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a number of both static and dynamic content descriptors for this purpose. The former only take into account individual images, while the latter consider the motion within a scene. Our experimental results show that although static descriptors achieve the highest overall performance, dynamic descriptors are much more discriminative for certain classes of surgical actions. We conclude that the two approaches have complementary strengths and further research should investigate methods to combine them.
A Retrospective Chart Review of Dietary Diversity and Feeding Behavior of Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder Before and After Admission to a Day-Treatment Program

The nutritional status and mealtime performance among a group of children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) were examined before and after admission to an intensive feeding day-treatment program. Treatment involved escape extinction, reinforcement, and stimulus fading procedures. Outcomes focused on dietary diversity and mealtime performance, including acceptance, swallowing, and disruptive mealtime behaviors. Upon admission, participants exhibited severely restricted diets, low rates of acceptance and swallowing, and high rates of disruptive mealtime behavior. Following treatment, significant improvements regarding food variety, consumption, and appropriate mealtime behavior were demonstrated. Gains were maintained after caregiver training was conducted and caregivers were introduced as the primary feeders.