Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Prevalence of Falls and Its Associated Factors among Elderly Diabetes in a Tertiary Center, Malaysia

The purpose of this study is to determine the prevalence of falls and its associated factors among elderly diabetes type 2 patients attending a tertiary center in Malaysia. We conducted a cross-sectional study among 288 elderly diabetes type 2. The data collected includes data on sociodemographic, diabetes history, comorbid diseases, drug use, and activity of daily living (Barthel's index). The patient also was examined physically, and balance and gait assessment was carried out. Prevalence of falls among elderly diabetes was 18.8%. Female gender (OR: 2.54, P < 0.05), age group more than 75 (OR: 2.97, P < 0.05), retinopathy (OR: 2.19, P < 0.05), and orthostatic hypotension (OR: 2.87, P < 0.05) were associated with higher risk for falls. High balance and gait score was associated with reduced risk of fall in elderly diabetes (OR: 0.89, P < 0.05). In conclusion, the factors that are associated with higher risk for falls among elderly diabetes were female sex, age group more than 75, presence of retinopathy, and orthostatic hypotension. Those who had higher balance and gait score were found to be less likely to fall compared with those with lower score.
Comparison of Supine Bending, Push-Prone, and Traction Under General Anesthesia Radiographs in Predicting Curve Flexibility and Postoperative Correction in Adolescent Idiopathic Scoliosis

Study Design. A prospective study comparing supine bending, push-prone, and traction under general anesthesia (UGA) radiographs in adolescent idiopathic scoliosis. Objective. To compare the effectiveness of 3 different flexibility methods on structural and nonstructural main thoracic (MT) and thoracolumbar/lumbar (TL/L) curves. Summary of Background Data. Supine side bending radiographs are the major method for determining curve reducibility. Push-prone radiographs show structural and compensatory curves on the same radiograph, but have not shown comparative reducibility in recent studies. Traction UGA is a relatively new modality which may offer similar or improved flexibility, while also showing structural and compensatory curves on the same radiograph. Methods. Fifty-eight patients with adolescent idiopathic scoliosis were prospectively studied with standing PA and lateral, supine bending and push-prone radiographs before surgery; traction UGA radiographs intraoperatively; and standing PA and lateral radiographs after surgery. Results. Traction UGA demonstrated equal flexibility to supine bending in structural MT and TL/L curves, with a trend towards more flexibility in severe MT curves ≥60°, while push-prone demonstrated significantly less flexibility. Each of the methods showed significantly less flexibility than postoperative correction in MT curves, while traction UGA and supine bending were not significantly different than postoperative correction in TL/L curves. Analysis of nonstructural TL/L curves showed that traction UGA and push-prone were not significantly different than postoperative correction, while supine bending overestimated postoperative correction. Conclusion. Traction UGA offers flexibility equivalent to supine bending for structural MT and TL/L curves, and flexibility comparable with push-prone for nonstructural TL/L curves. Traction UGA also shows both structural and compensatory curves on the same radiograph, and ultimately may provide a better estimate of spinal balance.
An Optimal Weighted Aggregated Association Test for Identification of Rare Variants Involved in Common Diseases

The advent of next generation sequencing technologies allows one to discover nearly all rare variants in a genomic region of interest. This technological development increases the need for an effective statistical method for testing the aggregated effect of rare variants in a gene on disease susceptibility. The idea behind this approach is that if a certain gene is involved in a disease, many rare variants within the gene will disrupt the function of the gene and are associated with the disease. In this article, we present the rare variant weighted aggregate statistic (RWAS), a method that groups rare variants and computes a weighted sum of differences between case and control mutation counts. We show that our method outperforms the groupwise association test of Madsen and Browning in the disease-risk model that assumes that each variant makes an equally small contribution to disease risk. In addition, we can incorporate prior information into our method of which variants are likely causal. By using simulated data and real mutation screening data of the susceptibility gene for ataxia telangiectasia, we demonstrate that prior information has a substantial influence on the statistical power of association studies. Our method is publicly available at http://genetics.cs. ucla.edu/rarevariants.
Spatially Varying Color Distributions for Interactive Multilabel Segmentation

We propose a method for interactive multilabel segmentation which explicitly takes into account the spatial variation of color distributions. To this end, we estimate a joint distribution over color and spatial location using a generalized Parzen density estimator applied to each user scribble. In this way, we obtain a likelihood for observing certain color values at a spatial coordinate. This likelihood is then incorporated in a Bayesian MAP estimation approach to multiregion segmentation which in turn is optimized using recently developed convex relaxation techniques. These guarantee global optimality for the two-region case (foreground/background) and solutions of bounded optimality for the multiregion case. We show results on the GrabCut benchmark, the recently published Graz benchmark, and on the Berkeley segmentation database which exceed previous approaches such as GrabCut [32], the Random Walker [15], Santner's approach [35], TV-Seg [39], and interactive graph cuts [4] in accuracy. Our results demonstrate that taking into account the spatial variation of color models leads to drastic improvements for interactive image segmentation.
A Brief Survey on De-anonymization Attacks in Online Social Networks

Nowadays, online social network data are increasingly made publicly available to third parties. Several anonymization techniques have been studied and adopted to preserve privacy in the publishing of data. However, recent works have shown that de-anonymization of the released data is not only possible but also practical. In this paper, we present a brief yet systematic review of the existing deanonymization attacks in online social networks. We unify the models of de-anonymization, centering around the concept of feature matching. We survey the de-anonymization methods in two categories: mapping-based approaches and guessing-based approaches. We discuss three techniques that would potentially improve the surveyed attacks.
Divergent Perspectives on Water Security: Bridging the Policy Debate

Environmental policy discussion is replete with references to water security, food security, ecosystem health, community resilience, sustainable development, and sustainable urbanism. These terms are, by their very nature, ambiguous and difficult to define; they allow room, however, for a variety of actors to conceptualize water, food, ecological, economic, and urban problems in ways that allow them to move forward on contentious issues. This article focuses on the idea of water security and asks how it is conceptualized and used for regional policy debate in western Canada. We asked fifty-eight water stakeholders from the Saskatchewan River Basin to define water security, identify major barriers to security, and prioritize water problems. Responses showed there are myriad ways to think about water security, ranging from narrow conceptualizations, such as reliability, quality, and quantity, to broader sustainability perspectives about the nature of resource development and its social and economic consequences. The human dimensions of water security (governance, land use, and competing demands) were assigned higher priority than its biophysical aspects (flooding, droughts, and climate change). Framing water security to emphasize the human capacity to manage uncertain and rapid biophysical and societal change offers the opportunity to unite actors who otherwise would be separated by core environmental values, definitions of water security, provincial context (Alberta vs. Saskatchewan), and occupation.
Experiments with Language Models for Known-Item Finding of E-mail Messages

We present experiments using language models to rank e-mail messages for the Known-Item Finding task of the Enterprise track. We combine evidence from the text of the message, its subject, the text of the thread the in which the message occurs, and the text of messages that are in reply to the message. We find that the only statistically significant differences suggest that in addition to the text of the message, the subject is a very important piece of evidence. We also explore the use of a depth based prior, where emphasis is place on messages near the root of the thread structure, which has mixed results.
Goal-directed robot manipulation through axiomatic scene estimation

Performing robust goal-directed manipulation tasks remains a crucial challenge for autonomous robots. In an ideal case, shared autonomous control of manipulators would allow human users to specify their intent as a goal state and have the robot reason over the actions and motions to achieve this goal. However, realizing this goal remains elusive due to the problem of perceiving the robot’s environment. We address and describe the problem of axiomatic scene estimation for robot manipulation in cluttered scenes which is the estimation of a tree-structured scene graph describing the configuration of objects observed from robot sensing. We propose generative approaches to scene inference (as the axiomatic particle filter, and the axiomatic scene estimation by Markov chain Monte Carlo based sampler) of the robot’s environment as a scene graph. The result from AxScEs estimation are axioms amenable to goal-directed manipulation through symbolic inference for task planning and collision-free motion planning and execution. We demonstrate the results for goal-directed manipulation of multi-object scenes by a PR2 robot.
Hippo Pathway Phylogenetics Predicts Monoubiquitylation of Salvador and Merlin/Nf2

Recently we employed phylogenetics to predict that the cellular interpretation of TGF-β signals is modulated by monoubiquitylation cycles affecting the Smad4 signal transducer/tumor suppressor. This prediction was subsequently validated by experiments in flies, frogs and mammalian cells. Here we apply a phylogenetic approach to the Hippo pathway and predict that two of its signal transducers, Salvador and Merlin/Nf2 (also a tumor suppressor) are regulated by monoubiquitylation. This regulatory mechanism does not lead to protein degradation but instead serves as a highly efficient “off/on” switch when the protein is subsequently deubiquitylated. Overall, our study shows that the creative application of phylogenetics can predict new roles for pathway components and new mechanisms for regulating intercellular signaling pathways.
Semi-Definite positive Programming Relaxations for Graph Kn-Coloring in Frequency Assignment

Dans cet article, nous decrivons une nouvelle classe de problemes de coloration rencontres en Allocation de Frequences militaire: nous voulons minimiser le nombre de n-uplets distincts utilises pour colorier un ensemble done de n-cliques d'un graphe. Pour approcher ces problemes generalement NP-difficiles, nous proposons deux relaxations basees sur les modelisations semi-definies de la coloration de graphes et d'hypergraphes, ainsi qu'une generalisation des travaux de Karger et al. a la coloration d'hypergraphes, pour trouver de bonnes solutions faisables par une approche probabiliste.
Crowding as a Descriptive Indicator and an Evaluative Standard: Results from 30 Years of Research

This paper examined perceived crowding using 615 evaluation contexts obtained from 181 studies that used a 9-point scale. Four methods for summarizing the crowding scale were highly correlated (r ≥ .90) across all evaluation contexts. Four independent variables (year study was conducted, region of United States, country, specific activity) affected perceived crowding for both the collapsed scale and the mean of the scale. One factor, specific location of the encounter, only affected perceived crowding for the percentages, not the mean. Consumptive versus nonconsumptive activities had no effect on perceived crowding. Using capacity judgment standards, 40% of the 615 evaluation contexts were in the suppressed crowding category, 16% were over capacity and 9% were greatly over capacity.
Consensus Development Conference on Insulin Resistance: 5–6 November 1997

The possibility that there can be defects in the sensitivity of tissues to insulin action in people with diabetes was first reported nearly 50 years ago (1). Since then many investigators have described, with increasing detail, the pathogenesis and consequences of what has become known as "insulin resistance. " As our understanding of the biology of glucose homeostasis has grown, insulin resistance has clearly emerged as an important cause of glucose intolerance leading to type 2 diabetes, and may even play a role in other pathological conditions. Type 2 diabetes is a heterogeneous disorder, requiring impairment of both insulin secretion and insulin action (insulin resistance). Medical nutrition therapy (MNT) and exercise therapy, as well as a number of pharmacological interventions, have demonstrated that reducing insulin resistance will improve glucose homeostasis. Despite the wealth of knowledge that characterizes the nature of insulin resistance (namely, its impact on health role in disease, its biochemical basis, and its measurement) many fundamental questions remain. To assess our present knowledge and understanding and to provide guidance to practitioners, the American Diabetes Association convened a Consensus Development Conference 5-6 November 1997, on the subject of insulin resistance. A six-member panel heard presentations from 19 experts, complemented by audience participation, on three broad topics related to insulin resistance: its definition and measurement, its cause(s), and its clinical implications and pathophysiological consequences. The panel then developed a consensus position on the following five questions: 1. What is the definition of insulin resistance and how should it be measured? 2. What is the mechanism(s) of insulin resistance? 3. Does insulin resistance predict diabetes? Is it a risk factor for cardiovascular disease? 4. Should insulin resistance be treated for the primary prevention of diabetes or other diseases? 5. Should insulin resistance be treated for the secondary prevention of the complications of diabetes or other diseases?
Moral/non‐moral domain shift in young adolescents in relation to delinquent behaviour

Because moral transgressions are considered more serious than non-moral (i.e. conventional or personal) transgressions, it is less threatening to self-esteem to interpret one's own delinquent act as a non-moral transgression rather than a moral transgression. This 'domain shift' couldbe a way of reducing cognitive dissonance. It was expected that adolescents who report a certain category of delinquent behaviour would evaluate hypothetical transgressions in the same category as more non-moral than would adolescents who did not report that category of delinquent behaviour.A group of 278 students from the first (M(age) = 13.1), second (M(age) = 14.3) and third (M(age)= 15.2) grade of intermediate secondary schools in the Netherlands participated in the research. The results showed a domain shift from the moral towards non-moraldomains in the evaluation of hypothetical situations about delinquent behaviour reported by the adolescent. At the same time, this domain shift did not occur in situations concerning delinquent behaviour not reported by the adolescent, even when delinquent behaviour occurred in the adolescent'speer group. This finding is consistent with the hypothesis that the domain shift takes place as a consequence of cognitive dissonance. The results also showed that the attitude towards delinquent behaviour and the prevalence of delinquent behaviour in the peer group both predicted a uniquepart of the variance in reported delinquent behaviour (RDB; 28% and 10%, respectively). The level of moral reasoning (measured by the Sociomoral Reflection Measure-Short Form [SRM-SF]) did not appear to be a significant predictor of RDB.
An intercultural study of HCI education experience and representation

The discipline of human-computer interaction has become a subject taught across universities around the world, outside of the cultures where it originated. However, the intercultural implication of its assimilation into the syllabus of courses offered by universities around the world remains under-researched. The purpose of this ongoing research project is to provide insights for these implications in terms of the student and teacher experience of HCI. How this subject is socially represented across the different universities studied is a key question. In order to develop intercultural awareness of these questions universities from UK, Denmark, Namibia, Mexico and China are collaborating in a multiple case study involving students and lecturers engaged in evaluation and design tasks. Findings will then be used to propose an international HCI curriculum more supportive of design for intercultural collaboration. This paper describes the initial steps of this study and some preliminary findings from Namibia.
Resisting the Catholic Church’s notion of the nun as self-sacrificing woman

Should we view nuns as oppressed or agentic? A woman’s identity is constructed on multiple sites, but the identity of the nun is primarily constructed by the patriarchal institution of the Catholic Church, which ascribes meaning to and regulates her life. This article examines the Catholic Church’s dominant discursive construction of the nun as self-sacrificing woman. It draws on a study that applied feminist and Foucauldian analysis, first, to key Church texts relating to nuns’lives and, second, to interview data of 43 Australian/New Zealand nuns, exploring ways in which nuns in this sample negotiate the Church’s dominant discursive constructions of the nun in their lived experience as nuns. Subject to male institutional authority, nuns are represented by the Church as living lives of self-sacrifice, devoting themselves wholeheartedly and single-mindedly to God and to the Church’s work. Nuns in this study’s sample actively resist such representations, exercising personal agency in making decisions about their own lives, and in living alone rather than communally. In doing so, they represent themselves as agentic rather than oppressed women.
Force and stiffness in glycerinated rabbit psoas fibers. Effects of calcium and elevated phosphate

Force (F) and stiffness (K) were measured in glycerinated psoas fibers at various calcium levels with 0, 10, 20, and 30 mM orthophosphate (Pi) added to the bathing solutions. The concentrations of bathing solution constituents were as follows: 110 mM potassium, 40 mM sodium, 4 mM MgATP, 10 mM total EGTA, and variable amounts of MOPS (pH buffer). The pH was 7.0, the ionic strength was 200 mM, and the temperature was 10 degrees C. Calcium levels were established by adding various amounts of CaCl2. All solutions contained 4% Dextran T-500. Fiber K was measured by imposing sinusoidal length changes (0.03-0.1%) at 1 kHz and by applying rapid steps in length and measuring the resulting F changes. At all [Pi] tested, K was more sensitive to calcium than F. Elevating bathing solution [Pi] caused a decrease in the calcium sensitivity of both F and K, while the slopes of F-calcium and K-calcium relations increased. In maximally activating calcium, raising [Pi] caused a continuous decrease in F over the range tested, while from very low to 10 mM Pi K remained constant. Above 10 mM Pi K declined, but to a lesser extent than did F. The results suggest that under our experimental conditions strongly attached crossbridges can exist in both force-producing and non-force-producing states, and that the relative population of these states may be calcium dependent.
Altering Perceptions Through Repositioning: An Exercise in Framing

This research was conducted to examine the efficacy of repositioning public parks and recreation services in the public mind. Respondents were recruited at various venues throughout a large Canadian city and randomly assigned to one of five groups. After reading hypothetical newspaper format articles, respondents completed questionnaires investigating their beliefs, attitudes, and behavioral intentions regarding a local recreation agency's efforts to reduce youth crime. Four treatment messages contained various combinations of real, psychological, and competitive repositioning messages, while a control group received no information. All types of repositioning messages were effective in improving beliefs and behavioral intentions, but not attitudes. There was no significant evidence that numerical treatment messages were more effective than non-numerical messages or that the cumulative effects of various repositioning messages were more effective than a single type of message. Discussion focuses on efficacy of various framing messages, on suggestions for future research related to repositioning, and on considerations related to social marketing efforts of this nature.
Rhyme and Reason: Emotional Capability and the Performance of Knowledge-Intensive Work Groups

Organizations greatly depend on the performance of small, autonomous, knowledge-intensive work groups. These groups can be perceived as bundles of knowledge-based resources that reside in the groups' individual members. In addition to developing individual skills and know-how, performance of knowledge-intensive work groups depends on the successful integration of diverse individual skills. In particular, the integration of highly specialized individual knowledge can occur only when groups foster an atmosphere that encourages cooperation and divergent thinking. In this article, we develop a general model on the role of emotions in knowledge-intensive work groups by integrating literatures in the areas of psychology, organizational behavior, organization theory, and strategic management. Intense social interactions within knowledge-intensive work groups, and the turbulence that characterize their environments, generate many events that elicit emotions among group members. Moreover, through social interaction, emotions transmit from member to member. Consequently, it is critical that knowledge-intensive work groups develop emotional capability, or the ability to recognize and regulate emotions of group members.
More harm than good? Multicultural initiatives in human service agencies

Abstract The social work code of ethics clearly articulates a commitment to social justice, which includes engaging in organizational practices that promote cultural diversity. This article reports findings from a qualitative study on multicultural initiatives in human service agencies. Particular attention is focused on whether efforts were compromised and, if so, what the consequences might be. Interviews with practitioners and consultants, and supporting agency documents, revealed four themes that compromise multicultural initiatives: an absence of vision, piecemeal activities, community neglect and client objectification, and lack of accountability. Implications include resource loss, staff reactivity, and working on borrowed time. Jeopardized multicultural initiatives present serious ethical dilemmas, as they impede the profession's ability to fulfill mandates regarding social justice and diversity. Recommendations are offered for agency personnel in order to engage in more successful multicultural efforts.