Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Emerging organisations: metateams in major IT projects

During the last decade, teams working on information technology (IT) development and implementation projects have experienced significant transformations. Nowadays, many members of project teams are working in new and complex organisational arrangements seeded with conflicts. Their firms, pushed by the competitive race and/or regulators, want to implement new IT solutions at frantic speeds while often maintaining old management practices without recognising the new paradigm’s unique needs and nature. This paper focuses in one of these new organisations, the metateam. Metateams are emergent temporal virtual organizations engaged in complex multimillion dollar IT projects. These confederations of networked teams can build IT solutions of high complexity by integrating and capitalizing on expertise from different fields across firms and national borders. However, achieving effective interteam collaboration presents significant challenges. The failure to make sense of the new paradigm results in cost and schedule overruns and has high destructive potential for interfirm relationships. Our theory-building study detected a costly pattern of constant conflict discovery, resolution and realignment. From the analysis of this pattern, this paper presents a theoretical model, grounded on rich empirical data, interrelating key concepts of cost, contract discrepancies, conflict, communication and trust.
Energy consumption breakdown of a modern mobile platform under various workloads

Advancements in today's mobile computing systems are mainly constrained by the high power dissipation of integrated circuits. Enhancing the energy efficiency of these systems has become a pressing challenge due to their dependency on batteries as the main power source. In this paper, we present a component-wise energy consumption breakdown of a modern platform under a variety of applications and benchmarks. This is an essential step in directing future research towards the power-hungry components and in providing a better understanding of the system behavior. Our results demonstrate a substantial variation in the energy contribution of various components as well as the total system energy depending on the nature of the workload.
An Updated Focused Review of Dexmedetomidine in Adults

Objective: To evaluate recent comparative studies regarding the safety and efficacy of dexmedetomidine in adults. Data Sources: Articles evaluating safety and efficacy of dexmedetomidine were identified from an English-language MEDLINE search (1996–July 2009), with a focus on data published since our previous review in 2007 to the present. MeSH terms included dexmedetomidine, medetomidine, α2:-agonist, and sedation. References from selected articles were also reviewed for additional material. Study Selection and Data Extraction: Experimental and observational English-language studies that focused on the efficacy, safety, and pharmacoeconomics of dexmedetomidine in humans were selected. Data Synthesis: Dexmedetomidine is an α2-agonist used for sedation during procedures and in critical illness. Compared with placebo, use of dexmedetomidine during procedures was associated with decreased use of rescue midazolam and a similar degree of sedation compared with various agents used during surgery or for procedures. Use of long-term (>24 h) dexmedetomidine sedation is comparable to sedation with benzodiazepines in critically ill patients. In a Phase 4 study, dexmedetomidine was safe in dosages up to 1.4 μg/kg/hour for greater than 24 hours and did not produce rebound tachycardia or hypertension when abruptly discontinued. One small randomized controlled trial demonstrated decreased incidence of delirium, the primary endpoint, with dexmedetomidine compared with midazolam or propofol for sedation after cardiac valve surgery. Many, but not all, studies suggest that dexmedetomidine has a promising role in prevention and treatment of delirium in critically ill patients when delirium was studied as a secondary endpoint. Conclusions: Dexmedetomidine is an alternative for procedural sedation and can be used long-term (>24 h) in critically ill patients, in dosages up to 1.5 μg/kg/hour. More studies are needed to better define the role of dexmedetomidine in preventing and treating delirium.
Efficient Event Delivery in Publish/Subscribe Systems for Wireless Mesh Networks

Publish/subscribe (pub/sub) systems have been widely used in distributed computing systems for event notification and delivery. However, there is no existing work on pub/sub systems for wireless mesh networks (WMNs) which are regarded as a promising infrastructure for providing wireless Internet services to a wide area. In this paper, we propose the design of a pub/sub system for WMNs. First, we describe a pub/sub system model for WMNs to support mobile clients. Then, based on geographical routing and mobility prediction, we propose an event delivery protocol with low transmission overhead and delay to support mobile clients in a WMN. Our theoretical analysis shows that the transmission overhead and delay per event of the proposed protocol are only affected by the area of the region where the clients move, but not the speeds of mobile clients and the arrival rates of events. The analysis has been validated by the simulation results which show that our protocol can significantly improve the performance of event transmission in pub/sub systems for WMNs compared with the previous solutions designed for other kinds of networks.
Fabrication of a miniaturized ionization gas sensor with polyimide spacer

Gas sensing can be achieved by fingerprinting the ionization characteristics of distinct species. In this study, the fabrication of a miniaturized gas ionization sensor using polyimide as sacrificial layer is reported. The sensor consists of two planar metallic electrodes with a gap spacing obtained by the polyimide under-etching. This known sacrificial layer has the advantage besides a high planarization factor, to be CMOS compatible. Furthermore, its chemical resistance up to high temperatures, high resistance to radiation from both electrons and neutrons, and low outgassing are of primary importance to avoid interferences with the ionization gas sensing. A suspended micro-bridge with dimensions 20 μm width and 220 μm length has been developed and released by using etching holes in the membrane. The ionization characteristics of air at controlled temperature, humidity and pressure (21°C, 40% humidity and 1 atm) have been obtained during non-destructive electrical characterizations, with a breakdown voltage of 350 V for a 6 μm gap. The growth of metallic nanowires templated in ion track-etched polyimide on the electrode is envisioned in order to enhance the ionization field and to reduce the required measurement power of the sensor.
Detection of Campylobacter spp. in ChickenFecal Samples by Real-TimePCR

ABSTRACT A real-time PCR assay for detecting thermophilic Campylobacter spp. directly in chicken feces has been developed. DNA was isolated from fecal material by using magnetic beads followed by PCR with a prealiquoted PCR mixture, which had been stored at− 18°C. Campylobacter could be detected in less than 4 h, with a detection limit of 100 to 150 CFU/ml, in a fecal suspension. A bacterial internal control was added before DNA extraction to control both DNA isolation and the presence of PCR inhibitors in the samples. The assay was performed on 111 swab samples from a Danish surveillance program and compared to conventional culturing using selective enrichment. There was no statistically significant difference in performance between real-time PCR and culture by selective enrichment, and the diagnostic specificity was 0.96 with an agreement of 0.92. Therefore, the assay should be useful for screening poultry flocks for the presence of Campylobacter.
Micro-patternable hybrid nanocomposites with tailorable mechanical and thermomechanical properties

A new type of cationically polymerizable organic-inorganic hybrid nanocomposite with micro-patternability and tailor able thermomechanical properties has been developed[1]. The material has been built by co-condensation of 3-glycidyloxypropyl-triethoxysilane and phenyltriethoxysilane followed by subsequent mixing with oligomeric cycloaliphatic epoxy resin as organic co-monomer. Nanocomposite mixtures have been formed by dispersing silica nanoparticles with 15 nm particle size into the performed matrix sol. To achieve an almost homogeneous distribution of the nanoparticles over the matrix different surface modifiers have been applied on the silica surface. The resulting transparent mixtures have been applied on silicon substrates and have been UV-polymerized using a cationic photoinitiator. The mechanical and thermomechanical properties as well as the resolution of photo patterns have been followed in dependence of the nanoparticulate filler content and the type of surface modification. Photo patterns could be created with high edge steepness even for highly filled systems. The universal hardness increased from 145 MPa for the unfilled hybrid resin to 244 MPa for the system containing 30 wt. -% silica. The same nanocomposite system showed an elastic modulus of about 5090 MPa compared to the unfilled hybrid resin of 3380 MPa which indicates the high potential of these materials forming mechanically stable patterns.
Modeling and Querying Possible Repairs in Duplicate Detection

One of the most prominent data quality problems is the existence of duplicate records. Current duplicate elimination procedures usually produce one clean instance (repair) of the input data, by carefully choosing the parameters of the duplicate detection algorithms. Finding the right parameter settings can be hard, and in many cases, perfect settings do not exist. Furthermore, replacing the input dirty data with one possible clean instance may result in unrecoverable errors, for example, identification and merging of possible duplicate records in health care systems. In this paper, we treat duplicate detection procedures as data processing tasks with uncertain outcomes. We concentrate on a family of duplicate detection algorithms that are based on parameterized clustering. We propose a novel uncertainty model that compactly encodes the space of possible repairs corresponding to different parameter settings. We show how to efficiently support relational queries under our model, and to allow new types of queries on the set of possible repairs. We give an experimental study illustrating the scalability and the efficiency of our techniques in different configurations.
Six steps in quality intervention development (6SQuID)

Improving the effectiveness of public health interventions relies as much on the attention paid to their design and feasibility as to their evaluation. Yet, compared to the vast literature on how to evaluate interventions, there is little to guide researchers or practitioners on how best to develop such interventions in practical, logical, evidence based ways to maximise likely effectiveness. Existing models for the development of public health interventions tend to have a strong social-psychological, individual behaviour change orientation and some take years to implement. This paper presents a pragmatic guide to six essential Steps for Quality Intervention Development (6SQuID). The focus is on public health interventions but the model should have wider applicability. Once a problem has been identified as needing intervention, the process of designing an intervention can be broken down into six crucial steps: (1) defining and understanding the problem and its causes; (2) identifying which causal or contextual factors are modifiable: which have the greatest scope for change and who would benefit most; (3) deciding on the mechanisms of change; (4) clarifying how these will be delivered; (5) testing and adapting the intervention; and (6) collecting sufficient evidence of effectiveness to proceed to a rigorous evaluation. If each of these steps is carefully addressed, better use will be made of scarce public resources by avoiding the costly evaluation, or implementation, of unpromising interventions.
Fluid interaction techniques for the control and annotation of digital video

We explore a variety of interaction and visualization techniques for fluid navigation, segmentation, linking, and annotation of digital videos. These techniques are developed within a concept prototype called LEAN that is designed for use with pressure-sensitive digitizer tablets. These techniques include a transient position+velocity widget that allows users not only to move around a point of interest on a video, but also to rewind or fast forward at a controlled variable speed. We also present a new variation of fish-eye views called twist-lens, and incorporate this into a position control slider designed for the effective navigation and viewing of large sequences of video frames. We also explore a new style of widgets that exploit the use of the pen's pressure-sensing capability, increasing the input vocabulary available to the user. Finally, we elaborate on how annotations referring to objects that are temporal in nature, such as video, may be thought of as links, and fluidly constructed, visualized and navigated.
Low socioeconomic status and disability in old age: evidence from the InChianti study for the mediating role of physiological impairments.

BACKGROUND Low socioeconomic status (SES) has been associated with increased risk of disability in later life. The purpose of this study was to determine if SES has an impact on mobility functioning and to explore which physiological impairments are also associated with SES and may explain its relationship with mobility. METHODS The study sample consisted of 1025 individuals aged 65 years or older residing in the Chianti area (Italy). Number of years of education was used as an indicator of SES. Mobility functioning was assessed using gait speed (400 m) and the Short Physical Performance Battery (SPPB). Mobility-related physiological impairments were assessed with tests of executive functioning, nerve conduction velocity, muscle power, hip-ankle range of motion, Ankle-Brachial Index, and visual acuity. Linear regression models were used to study the association between number of years of education and mobility and to estimate the contribution of each of the selected physiological impairments to this association. RESULTS Adjusting for age and sex, slower gait speed (1.16 vs 1.26 m/s, p <.0001) and lower SPPB scores (9.55 vs 10.11, p =.006) were seen in persons with < or =5 years of total education compared with those persons with >5 years of total education. Leg power and executive function decreased the strength of the association between educational level and gait speed by more than 15%. Controlling for all selected impairments (full model) decreased the education-gait speed association by 49%. Low education continued to be significantly associated with gait speed (p <.01). Adjusting for all physiological impairments substantially reduced the low education-SPPB score association by 100%, and this association was no longer significant. CONCLUSIONS Low SES is related to multiple physiological impairments, which explain a large amount of the association between education and gait limitations. Further work must be done to understand the mechanisms whereby low SES translates into the impairments that play an important role in mobility.
Superficial surgical landmarks for the transverse sinus and torcular herophili.

OBJECT The purpose of this anatomical study is to identify reliable external landmarks that can be used to determine accurately the lower border of the proximal segment of the transverse sinus (TS). METHODS The authors used 15 formalin-fixed cadaveric specimens for this project. Various anatomical structures were dissected and measurements of the distance between these structures and the proximal TS were obtained. The data collected in this study demonstrate that the inion is not always a reliable external landmark to use when determining the internal location of the very proximal TS and its drainage into the area of the torcular herophili. In addition, the authors found that the most accurate external landmark to use in reliably estimating the internal placement of the proximal TS is the point of insertion of the musculus semispinalis capitus and not the superior nuchal line. In the present study, this muscle never covered more than 5 mm of the inferior edge of the TS and was found to be a reliable anatomical structure for avoiding the medial segment of the TS. CONCLUSIONS These findings could aid the surgeon in localizing the TS with various midline approaches to the posterior fossa and the craniocervical junction.
Coordinate Descent Method for Large-scale L2-loss Linear Support Vector Machines

Linear support vector machines (SVM) are useful for classifying large-scale sparse data. Problems with sparse features are common in applications such as document classification and natural language processing. In this paper, we propose a novel coordinate descent algorithm for training linear SVM with the L2-loss function. At each step, the proposed method minimizes a one-variable sub-problem while fixing other variables. The sub-problem is solved by Newton steps with the line search technique. The procedure globally converges at the linear rate. As each sub-problem involves only values of a corresponding feature, the proposed approach is suitable when accessing a feature is more convenient than accessing an instance. Experiments show that our method is more efficient and stable than state of the art methods such as Pegasos and TRON.
Boxplot Variations in a Spatial Context : An Omernik Ecoregion and Weather Example

This article is closely related to papers by Carr et al (1998a, 1998b). The first paper provides a general description of linked micromap (LM) plots such as that in Figure 1b. The second paper puts LM plots to work in describing Omernik Level II ecoregions. It also promotes LM plots as useful methodology in the KDD pattern discover process and as overviews that provide an orienting context for drilling down to finer detail in extensive hierarchically organized summaries. This relatively brief article adapts graphics and text from the second paper while focusing attention on boxplots.
Hamilton Cycles in Random Graphs with a Fixed Degree Sequence

Let $\mathbf{d}=d_1\leq d_2\leq\dots\leq d_n$ be a nondecreasing sequence of $n$ positive integers whose sum is even. Let $\mathcal{G}_{n,\mathbf{d}}$ denote the set of graphs with vertex set $[n]=\{1,2,\dots,n\}$ in which the degree of vertex $i$ is $d_i$. Let $G_{n,\mathbf{d}}$ be chosen uniformly at random from $\mathcal{G}_{n,\mathbf{d}}$. It will be apparent from section 4.3 that all of the sequences we are considering will be graphic. We give a condition on $\mathbf{d}$ under which we can show that whp $\mathcal{G}_{n,\mathbf{d}}$ is Hamiltonian. This condition is satisfied by graphs with exponential tails as well those with power law tails.
Model-based and Model-free Reinforcement Learning for Visual Servoing

To address the difficulty of designing a controller for complex visual-servoing tasks, two learning-based uncalibrated approaches are introduced. The first method starts by building an estimated model for the visual-motor forward kinematic of the vision-robot system by a locally linear regression method. Afterwards, it uses a reinforcement learning method named Regularized Fitted Q-Iteration to find a controller (i.e. policy) for the system (model-based RL). The second method directly uses samples coming from the robot without building any intermediate model (model-free RL). The simulation results show that both methods perform comparably well despite not having any a priori knowledge about the robot.
Association of complement 5 genetic polymorphism with renal allograft outcomes in Korea.

BACKGROUND Complements play important roles in both rejection and ischemia-reperfusion injury after transplantation. Complement 5 (C5) is a pivotal complement, which initiates the assembly of the membrane attack complex, and mediates chemotaxis of various immune cells. We investigated the impacts of genetic variations in C5 and its receptor (C5aR) of both recipients and donors on renal allograft outcomes. METHODS Seven single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in C5 (rs12237774, rs2159776, rs17611, rs25681, rs2241004, rs10985126 and rs10818500) and one SNP (rs10404456) in the C5aR gene were genotyped in 191 recipient-donor pairs. The association of the polymorphisms with allograft outcomes was determined. RESULTS Three C5 SNPs (rs2159776, rs17611 and rs25681) in recipients had a tendency toward a reduced glomerular filtration rate at 1 year after transplantation. There were four haplotypes in the H2 linkage disequilibrium block, which was formed by four SNPs (rs2159776, rs17611, rs25681 and rs2241004). The GGCG haplotype in both recipients and donors was associated with lower glomerular filtration rate at 1 year (60.9 ± 15.9 versus 66.4 ± 15.5 mL/min/1.73 m(2), P = 0.020; 60.6 ± 15.3 versus 66.2 ± 15.8 mL/min/1.73 m(2), P = 0.017). The association was sustained over 7 years after transplantation (P = 0.015 in recipients; P = 0.039 in donors). The presence of the GGCG haplotype in recipients was associated with poorer graft survival (logrank test, P = 0.024). However, C5 polymorphisms were not correlated with serum C5 level. C5aR polymorphism had no significant impact on the allograft outcomes. CONCLUSIONS The GGCG haplotype of C5 in both recipients and donors was associated with lower renal allograft function.
SCHIP directors' perception of schools assisting students in obtaining public health insurance.

BACKGROUND Health insurance coverage increases access to health care. There has been an erosion of employer-based health insurance and a concomitant rise in children covered by public health insurance programs, yet more than 8 million children are still without health insurance coverage. METHODS This study was a national survey to assess the perceptions of State Child Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) directors (N = 51) regarding schools assisting students in obtaining public health insurance. This study examined the perceived benefits of and barriers to working with school systems and the perceived benefits to schools in assisting students to enroll in SCHIPs and what SCHIP activities were actually being conducted with school systems. RESULTS The majority (78%) of SCHIPs had been working with school systems for more than a year. Perceived benefits of working with schools were greater access to SCHIP-eligible children (75%), assistance with meeting mandates to cover all SCHIP-eligible children (65%), and greater ability of state agencies to identify SCHIP-eligible children (58%). A majority of the directors did not identify any of the potential barrier items. The directors cited the following benefits to schools in helping enroll students in public health insurance programs: reduces the number of students with untreated health problems (80%), reduces student absenteeism rates (68%), improves student attention and concentration during school (58%), and reduces the number of students being held back in school because of health problems (53%). DISCUSSION The perceived benefits derived from schools assisting in enrolling eligible students into SCHIPs are congruent with the mission of schools. Schools need to become proactive in helping to establish a healthy student body, which is more likely to be an academically successful body.