Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Factors affecting the trajectory of health-related quality of life in COPD patients.

BACKGROUND Health-related quality of life (HR-QoL) is an important issue in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), as in other chronic illness groups. However, there is limited information on longitudinal changes in HR-QoL over time with the illness trajectory model. OBJECTIVE To identify different patterns of HR-QoL changes in longitudinal data, and reveal potential predictors affecting these trajectories. METHODS Subjects with COPD (n = 249) were drawn from the Korean Obstructive Lung Disease cohort, which was conducted from 2005 to 2012. Longitudinal data were drawn from the St George's Respiratory Questionnaire and clinical measures. Growth mixture modelling was used to estimate distinct patterns, and binary and ordinal logistic regression were used to determine factors affecting different trajectory HR-QoL patterns using STATA 12.0. RESULTS Five distinct HR-QoL patterns were identified. Results show that the level of baseline HR-QoL was significantly associated with age, the BODE (Body mass index, airflow Obstruction, Dyspnea, and Exercise capacity) index at baseline, sleep disturbance, experience of exacerbation in previous year and level of depression. Distinct patterns in HR-QoL that improved vs. worsened were significantly associated with BODE index, number of respiratory symptoms and depression level. CONCLUSIONS These findings suggest that comprehensive assessment and individualised management programmes are needed to improve HR-QoL in COPD patients.
Bio-Energy during Finals: Stress Reduction for a University Community

ABSTRACT To re-examine the effectiveness of a bio-energy intervention on self-reported stress for a convenience sample of university students during dead week, a quasi-experimental, single-group pretest-posttest design was used. Thirty-three students participated, serving as their own controls. After participants had consented, a 15-min Healing Touch intervention followed enrollment. Self-reported stress was significantly reduced after the bio-energy (Healing Touch) intervention. Bio-energy therapy has shown to be beneficial in reducing stress for students during dead week, the week before final examinations. Further research is needed.
The “New Public” and the “Good Ol’ Press”: Evaluating Online News Sources During the 2013 Polio Outbreak in Israel

ABSTRACT The current research focuses on the 2013 polio outbreak in Israel as a case study to analyze the sources of information used in new media platforms, examining whether the new media have changed the ways in which we communicate about health issues. Specifically, we tracked and coded polio-related references on Hebrew news websites, blogs, forums, and Facebook posts. Overall, 24,388 polio-related references constituted our sampling frame. The findings suggest that there is a moderate-level correlation between the platform and the type of sources chosen by users. Beyond the differences between various platforms, we found that online information platforms rely not only on popular or pseudoscientific sources, but also on high-quality information. In fact, the analysis indicates that online news websites, forums, blogs, and Facebook posts create a unique blend of information, including scientific literature, medical professionals, and government representatives, as well as pseudoscientific research. These findings suggest a more optimistic view of the Internet as a source for health-related information in times of crises. Although the fact that members of the public are exposed to scientific sources does not indicate to what degree this affects their actual decision making. Exposure to a wider variety of sources may enhance health literacy, resulting in a better understanding of information needed to make informed decisions.
Neural correlates of Pavlovian‐to‐instrumental transfer in the nucleus accumbens shell are selectively potentiated following cocaine self‐administration

During Pavlovian‐to‐instrumental transfer (PIT), learned Pavlovian cues significantly modulate ongoing instrumental actions. This phenomenon is suggested as a mechanism under which conditioned stimuli may lead to relapse in addicted populations. Following discriminative Pavlovian learning and instrumental conditioning with sucrose, one group of rats (naive) underwent electrophysiological recordings in the nucleus accumbens core and shell during a single PIT session. Other groups, following Pavlovian and instrumental conditioning, were subsequently trained to self‐administer cocaine with nosepoke responses, or received yoked saline infusions and nosepoked for water rewards, and then performed PIT while electrophysiological recordings were taken in the nucleus accumbens. Behaviorally, although both naive and saline‐treated groups showed increases in lever pressing during the conditioned stimulus cue, this effect was significantly enhanced in the cocaine‐treated group. Neurons in the core and shell tracked these behavioral changes. In control animals, core neurons were significantly more likely to encode general information about cues, rewards and responses than those in the shell, and positively correlated with behavioral PIT performance, whereas PIT‐specific encoding in the shell, but not core, tracked PIT performance. In contrast, following cocaine exposure, there was a significant increase in neural encoding of all task‐relevant events that was selective to the shell. Given that cocaine exposure enhanced both behavior and shell‐specific task encoding, these findings suggest that, whereas the core is important for acquiring the information about cues and response contingencies, the shell is important for using this information to guide and modulate behavior and is specifically affected following a history of cocaine self‐administration.
Nonlinear motion and force control of shape memory alloy actuators

Among the numerous studies published in the field of shape memory alloys (SMA), an important part is devoted to the thermomechanical properties of these materials. Few studies have been done in order to develop control laws of SMA actuators for temperature, position and force control with guaranteed stability and performances. The reason is that these materials have a highly nonlinear dynamic behavior (including hysteresis) because of the physical principle of motions which is a solid-solid phase transition (between an austenitic and a martensitic phase). It is then difficult to guaranty stable control and to predict the dynamic behavior in closed-loop (trajectory and effort). For this purpose, this paper is focused on control of such actuators. To obtain a control law for the closed-loop motion or force control, we use a nonlinear dynamic model performed in a previous work. With this dynamic model, we use nonlinear control techniques based on the Lie algebra to obtain the control laws for the position or the force closed-loop. Experimentation show that the proposed method is very useful for the control of SMA actuators.
Erosion Corrosion in Copper Water Tubing

Abstract A laboratory investigation into erosion corrosion in copper water tubing has been carried out. For aerated water at pH 8 and continuous flow, the maximum flow velocity not causing erosion corrosion was 3 m/s at 65°c and 6 m/s at 30°c in small diameter (6/4 mm) tubes; at pH 6·5 the maximum velocity must be reduced. With intermittent flow (<25% of the time), or with water poor in oxygen (as in central heatingsystems) higher flow velocities are acceptable. Small diameter tubes admit higher flow velocity than larger ones.No differences in erosion corrosion resistance between annealed and hard-drawn copper tubes have been observed. Flared joints are much more liable to cause erosion corrosion at high water flow velocities than are joints withcapillary fittings.The limits quoted were obtained in well-defined laboratory conditions; in practice a proper safety margin should be allowed.
An Integrated Approach for Selecting a Vendor Using Grey Relational Analysis

This paper develops a new model for evaluating and selecting the vendor using an integrated approach of Grey Relational Analysis (GRA) along with an Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) in a Forward Supply Chain Model (FSCM). The paper aims to demonstrate how the model can help in solving such decisions in practice. It also examines the structure of the decision hierarchy, whether it can represent vendor selection decisions in reality and whether it covers all key factors affecting vendor selection choices. The effectiveness of the GRA model is illustrated with an Original Equipment Manufacturing (OEM) industry in southern part of India and the results of GRA were validated using the result obtained from AHP. The proposed model helps the industry to effectively select the vendor.
Influence of alumina coating on transport and recombination in DSSCs with 1-methylbenzidazole as electrolyte additives

Nanocrystalline TiO2 electrodes have been coated with alumina by being immersed into the solutions of aluminum isopropoxide and aluminum acetylacetonate respectively. The current-voltage characteristics of the TiO2 and TiO2/Al2O3 electrodes with 1-methylbenzimidazole (MBI) as additives in the electrolytes have been detected. It is found that the TiO2/Al2O3 electrodes immersed in the solutions of aluminum isopropoxide (acetylacetone as coordinate ligands) for 1 hour have obtained great increase of Jsc, and owned the improved cells efficiency by 17%. To discover the origins of this improved photovoltaic performance and investigate the electron properties of the cells, the electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) has been used both in the dark and under illumination at different applied potentials. It is proposed that with the coating of Al2O3, the adsorption of MBI cations at the surface of TiO2 electrodes decreased with the decrease of the applied potentials, which resulted in the downwards shift of the conduction band position of the TiO2/Al2O3 electrodes at the lower potentials. As a result, the charge transfer resistance Rct decreased, and chemical capacitance Cfilms increased. Under illumination, the decrease of Rct became smaller and the conductivities became larger, which was attributed to the recombination inhibition effect of Al2O3 coating to the photoinjected electrons. As a consequence, the electron lifetime and the effective diffusion length for the TiO2/Al2O3 electrodes increased, leading to the great increase of Jsc. It is indicated that with the coating of Al2O3, the decrease of Jsc could be overcome when MBI is used as the additives of the electrolyte.
Sliding window filter based unknown object pose estimation

This paper proposes a novel framework for unknown object pose estimation. There are no sensors or prior information about the object. In order to explore the full current information and to achieve the online performance, smoothing technique is adopted by using sliding window filter (SWF) to estimate the structure and pose on SE(3) simultaneously. In addition, Gauss-Newton (GN) method is implemented for each window with an initial guess generated by OPnP algorithm. Unlike the existed smoothing algorithm, the proposed one is free of large estimation error and singular coefficient matrix. The experiment shows that the proposed framework is capable of estimating the pose of any arbitrary unknown object with any complex motion trajectory accurately even when the measured feature points are insufficient during object motion.
Phase-field model for solidification of a eutectic alloy

In this paper we discuss two phase-field models for solidification of a eutectic alloy, a situation in which a liquid may transform into two distinct solid phases. The first is based on a regular solution model for the solid with a chemical miscibility gap. This model suffers from the deficiency that, in the sharp interface limit, it approximates a free-boundary problem in which the surface energy of the solid-solid interface is zero and consequently mechanical equilibrium at a trijunction requires that the solidsolid interface has zero dihedral angle (locally planar). We propose a second model which uses two order parameters to distinguish the liquid phase and the two solid phases. We provide a thermodynamically consistent derivation of this phase-field model which ensures that the local entropy production is positive. We conduct a sharp interface asymptotic analysis of the liquid-solid phase transition and show it is governed by a free-boundary problem in which both surface energy and interface kinetics are present. Finally, we consider a sharp interface asymptotic analysis of a stationary trijunction between the two solid phases and the liquid phase, from which we recover the condition that the interfacial surface tensions are in mechanical equilibrium (Young’s equation). This sharp interface analysis compares favourably with numerical solutions of the phase-field model appropriate to a trijunction.
ANISOTROPIC NONLINEAR PIEZO-ELECTRO-CHEMO- THERMO-VISCOELASTICITY: CHARACTERIZATION, SIMULATIONS AND PROBABILISTIC STRUCTURAL INTEGRITY1

The generalized nonlinear three dimensional large deformation theory of anisotropic piezo-electro-chemo-thermo-viscoelasticity is formulated and represents the confluence of Portions of this paper were presented at the Eleventh International Conference on Composite Materials (ICCM–11). Gold Coast, Australia, July 1997, and at the ONR US Pacific Rim Workshop on Composite Materials, Honolulu, April 1998. Professor Emeritus of Aeronautical & Astronautical Engineering and Senior Academic Lead, Computational Structural Mechanics, NCSA. Corresponding author. Voice: 217-333-2653 FAX: 217-244-0720 Email: h-hilton @ uiuc,edu H. Fletcher Brown Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and the Center for Composite Materials. Voice: 302-831-2338 FAX: 302-831-3619 Email: vinson @ me.udel. edu Senior Lecturer in Mechanical and Production Engineering and Director, Electronic Packaging Strategic Research Program. Voice: 65-799-6239 FAX: 65-792-4062 Email: msyi @ ntu.edu. sg Bachelor of Science in Aeronautical & Astronautical Engineering Candidate, UIUC. Now Master of Science in Aeronautics & Astronautics Candidate, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Hurst Exponent Analysis of Resting-State fMRI Signal Complexity across the Adult Lifespan

Exploring functional information among various brain regions across time enables understanding of healthy aging process and holds great promise for age-related brain disease diagnosis. This paper proposed a method to explore fractal complexity of the resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) signal in the human brain across the adult lifespan using Hurst exponent (HE). We took advantage of the examined rs-fMRI data from 116 adults 19 to 85 years of age (44.3 ± 19.4 years, 49 females) from NKI/Rockland sample. Region-wise and voxel-wise analyses were performed to investigate the effects of age, gender, and their interaction on complexity. In region-wise analysis, we found that the healthy aging is accompanied by a loss of complexity in frontal and parietal lobe and increased complexity in insula, limbic, and temporal lobe. Meanwhile, differences in HE between genders were found to be significant in parietal lobe (p = 0.04, corrected). However, there was no interaction between gender and age. In voxel-wise analysis, the significant complexity decrease with aging was found in frontal and parietal lobe, and complexity increase was found in insula, limbic lobe, occipital lobe, and temporal lobe with aging. Meanwhile, differences in HE between genders were found to be significant in frontal, parietal, and limbic lobe. Furthermore, we found age and sex interaction in right parahippocampal gyrus (p = 0.04, corrected). Our findings reveal HE variations of the rs-fMRI signal across the human adult lifespan and show that HE may serve as a new parameter to assess healthy aging process.
CombinedPWD: A New Password Authentication Mechanism Using Separators Between Keystrokes

The password security has been paid much attention to by many scholars. The conventional password cracking methods are based on probabilistic models leveraging the leaked password datasets. In order to reduce this risk, our study proposes a new online password authentication mechanism, combinedPWD, through inserting separators (e.g. blanks) into the passwords to strengthen the existing password authentication system. This scheme utilizes the custom of users' input. In our research, website users can insert spaces in their password where they want to pause when they register an account and the website back-end records the number of spaces in every gap. Only input the correct password and the corresponding number of separators matching accounts to be admitted into the system. Any trials with wrong password or correct password but with a wrong number of spaces will be rejected by the system. Through the experiments verification, the proposed mechanism can resist brute force attack and dictionary attack effectively. To avoid keyloggers, we further propose to use two-dimensional code to store the encrypted password. And this scheme has better operability and security.
Roughness Estimation of Polycrystalline Iron Surface under High Temperature by Small Glancing Angle X-ray Scattering

Characterization of polycrystalline iron surfaces before and after baking at 500°C for 20 h in a vacuum of 10 - 6 Pa is performed by small glancing angle X-ray scattering with use of a compact ultrahigh vacuum (UHV) X-raydiffractometer. A broadening of the scattered X-ray intensity profiles at a small glancing angle incidence of the X-ray appears on the baked specimen. The experimental results are compared with calculated simulation with some surface structure models, and show that the roughness of the surface after the baking is estimated to be about ten times of that before baking. This result is consistent with the result of AFM observation, and shows that glancing angle X-ray scattering with the use of a compact UHV X-ray diffractometer is a useful technique for non-destructive inspection of industrial material surfaces.
A Multistep Framework for Vision Based Vehicle Detection

Vision based vehicle detection is a critical technology that plays an important role in not only vehicle active safety but also road video surveillance application. In this work, a multistep framework for vision based vehicle detection is proposed. In the first step, for vehicle candidate generation, a novel geometrical and coarse depth information based method is proposed. In the second step, for candidate verification, a deep architecture of deep belief network (DBN) for vehicle classification is trained. In the last step, a temporal analysis method based on the complexity and spatial information is used to further reduce miss and false detection. Experiments demonstrate that this framework is with high true positive (TP) rate as well as low false positive (FP) rate. On road experimental results demonstrate that the algorithm performs better than state-of-the-art vehicle detection algorithm in testing data sets.
Histopathologic Changes of Human Vestibular Epithelia in Intralabyrinthine Hemorrhage

Objective: To determine whether intralabyrinthine hemorrhage affects vestibular hair cells, dark cells, and transitional cells in human temporal bones. Methods: We examined 9 temporal bone specimens from 9 deceased donors with unilateral intralabyrinthine hemorrhage (the hemorrhage group) along with their 9 contralateral temporal bone specimens without hemorrhage (the control group). We estimated the density of type I and type II hair cells in all peripheral sensorial organs (including the cristae of the superior, lateral, and posterior semicircular canals, as well as the maculae of the saccule and utricle). We also estimated the density of dark and transitional cells in the lateral and posterior semicircular canals. Results: The loss of type I hair cells in the cristae of the superior, lateral, and posterior semicircular canals and in the maculae of the saccule and utricle was significantly higher in the hemorrhage group, as compared with the control group (P < .05). The density of type II hair cells in the cristae of the superior and posterior canals and in the macula of the saccule significantly differed between the hemorrhage group and the control group (P < .05). Conclusion: The loss of vestibular hair cells might be the cause of vestibular symptoms in patients with intralabyrinthine hemorrhage.
Potent and Selective Human Neutrophil Elastase Inhibitors with Novel Equatorial Ring Topology: in vivo Efficacy of the Polar Pyrimidopyridazine BAY‐8040 in a Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension Rat Model

Human neutrophil elastase (HNE) is a key driver of inflammation in many cardiopulmonary and systemic inflammatory and autoimmune conditions. Overshooting high HNE activity is the consequence of a disrupted protease–antiprotease balance. Accordingly, there has been an intensive search for potent and selective HNE inhibitors with suitable pharmacokinetics that would allowing oral administration in patients. Based on the chemical probe BAY‐678 and the clinical candidate BAY 85‐8501 we explored further ring topologies along the equator of the parent pyrimidinone lead series. Novel ring systems were annulated in the east, yielding imidazolo‐, triazolo‐, and tetrazolopyrimidines in order to ensure additional inhibitor–HNE contacts beyond the S1 and the S2 pocket of HNE. The western annulation of pyridazines led to the polar pyrimidopyridazine BAY‐8040, which combines excellent potency and selectivity with a promising pharmacokinetic profile. In vivo efficacy with regard to decreasing cardiac remodeling and amelioration of cardiac function was shown in a monocrotaline‐induced rat model for pulmonary arterial hypertension. This demonstrated in vivo proof of concept in animals.
Progressive hybrid greyfield wireless access virtualization with leveraged combining of cloud, fog, and legacy RANs

In this paper, we develop a new dynamic utility for wireless access virtualization (WAV) optimization embodying highly-dimensional time-varying multi-criteria metrics (i.e., CaPeX and OPEX costs, QoS or QoE, multitier and/or multi-RAT HetNets, etc.) that gauge the best deployment and viability scenarios of cloud (C)- and fog (F)-RANs within legacy networks. Exploiting the powerful tool of graph theory, we devise a progressive greyfield WAV strategy that optimizes our dynamic utility through an efficient combination of C- and F-RANs. This strategy is able to readjust very quickly to any changes in existing or new constraints as they evolve or occur in time, respectively. The resulting optimized hybrid RAN deployment outperforms both the greenfield and the pre-planed greyfield ”turnkey” WAV strategies.
Improving Action Recognition Using Collaborative Representation of Local Depth Map Feature

Based on depth information, this letter introduces a new local depth map feature describing local spatiotemporal details of human motion and a collaborative representation for classification with regularized least squares. By extracting a multilayered depth motion feature and then applying a multiscale Histograms of Oriented Gradient (HOG) descriptor to it, the proposed feature characterizes the local temporal change of human motion and the local spatial structure (appearance) of an action. Instead of class-specific dictionary, the test action sample is represented collaboratively by the common shared dictionary. Moreover, we present an analytical solution of collaborative representation, which is independent of the query and can be precalculated as a projection matrix, leading to low computational cost in recognition. The evaluations on MSRAction3D and MSRGesture3D datasets demonstrate its effectiveness.