Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Long-Term Effectiveness of a Smartphone App for Improving Healthy Lifestyles in General Population in Primary Care: Randomized Controlled Trial (Evident II Study)

Background Information and communication technologies are currently among the supporting elements that may contribute to improving health and changing lifestyles. Objective The aim of this study was to evaluate the long-term effectiveness of adding an app to standardized counseling in order to increase physical activity (PA) and adherence to the Mediterranean diet and to analyze the effects of app adherence in lifestyle changes. Methods A randomized, multicenter clinical trial with a 12 month-follow up was conducted, involving 833 participants recruited by random sampling in 6 primary Spanish care centers (415 vs 418). Counseling on PA and the Mediterranean diet was given to both groups by a research nurse; however, the counseling + app group (intervention group) received additional training in the use of an app that was designed to promote the Mediterranean diet and PA over a 3-month period. Main outcomes and measures included PA by accelerometer and the 7-day Physical Activity Recall (PAR) questionnaire and adherence to the Mediterranean diet by an adherence screener questionnaire. We considered adherence to the app to be high when it was used for more than 60 days. Results The mean age was 51 years (SD 12) in the intervention group and 52.3 years (SD 12.0) in the counseling-only group; females predominated in both groups (60.0%, 249/415 and 64.1%, 268/418, respectively). PA by accelerometer declined in both groups at 12 months (P value for tendency in moderate to vigorous PA, [MVPA]=.15). The intervention subgroup with high app adherence had better behavior than the low adherence subgroup (P value for tendency in MVPA=.001). PA analyzed by 7-day PAR did not show changes at 12 months in any of the groups (P value for tendency=.25). In the Mediterranean diet, an increase in adherence was observed in both groups at 12 months with no differences between them (P value for tendency=.46). In these two cases, the group with high app adherence also had better behavior, although without reaching significance for the tendency (P>.05). Conclusions The participants with strongest app adherence showed better outcomes in terms of maintenance of healthy lifestyles at 12 months than those with weaker adherence. Overall, however, we found no differences between intervention group and counseling-only group in PA increase and adherence to the Mediterranean diet in the long term. Trial Registration Clinicaltrials.gov NCT02016014; https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT02016014 (Archived by WebCite at http://www.webcitation.org/6ymEXH6W4)
Pivotal Politics and the ideological content of Landmark Laws

Abstract The Pivotal Politics model (Krehbiel) has significantly influenced the study of American politics, but its core empirical prediction – that the size of the gridlock interval is negatively related to legislative productivity – has not found strong empirical support. We argue that previous research featured a disconnect between the exclusively ideological theory and tests that relied on outcome variables that were not purely ideological. We remedy this by dividing landmark laws (Mayhew) into two counts – those that invoke ideological preferences and those that do not – and uncover results consistent with Pivotal Politics’ core prediction: the size of the gridlock interval is negatively related to the production of ideological legislation. We also find that the size of the gridlock zone is positively related to the production of nonideological legislation. These results hold up in the face of various sensitivity analyses and robustness checks. We further show that Pivotal Politics explains variation in ideological legislation better than alternative theories based on partisan agenda control.
Car Internet Dataset ( b ) Discovered Visual Subcategories and Learned Priors / Models Example Images Example Images Average Image Learned Prior Learned Detector Average Image Learned Prior Learned Detector

There have been some recent efforts to build visual knowledge bases from Internet images. But most of these approaches have focused on bounding box representation of objects. In this paper, we propose to enrich these knowledge bases by automatically discovering objects and their segmentations from noisy Internet images. Specifically, our approach combines the power of generative modeling for segmentation with the effectiveness of discriminative models for detection. The key idea behind our approach is to learn and exploit top-down segmentation priors based on visual subcategories. The strong priors learned from these visual subcategories are then combined with discriminatively trained detectors and bottom up cues to produce clean object segmentations. Our experimental results indicate state-of-the-art performance on the difficult dataset introduced by [29]. We have integrated our algorithm in NEIL for enriching its knowledge base [5]. As of 14 April 2014, NEIL has automatically generated approximately 500K segmentations using web data.
Transmission and Control of African Horse Sickness in The Netherlands: A Model Analysis

African horse sickness (AHS) is an equine viral disease that is spread by Culicoides spp. Since the closely related disease bluetongue established itself in The Netherlands in 2006, AHS is considered a potential threat for the Dutch horse population. A vector-host model that incorporates the current knowledge of the infection biology is used to explore the effect of different parameters on whether and how the disease will spread, and to assess the effect of control measures. The time of introduction is an important determinant whether and how the disease will spread, depending on temperature and vector season. Given an introduction in the most favourable and constant circumstances, our results identify the vector-to-host ratio as the most important factor, because of its high variability over the country. Furthermore, a higher temperature accelerates the epidemic, while a higher horse density increases the extent of the epidemic. Due to the short infectious period in horses, the obvious clinical signs and the presence of non-susceptible hosts, AHS is expected to invade and spread less easily than bluetongue. Moreover, detection is presumed to be earlier, which allows control measures to be targeted towards elimination of infection sources. We argue that recommended control measures are euthanasia of infected horses with severe clinical signs and vector control in infected herds, protecting horses from midge bites in neighbouring herds, and (prioritized) vaccination of herds farther away, provided that transport regulations are strictly applied. The largest lack of knowledge is the competence and host preference of the different Culicoides species present in temperate regions.
Sleep disturbances and serum vitamin D levels in children with autism spectrum disorder

Sleep problems are among the most prevalent comorbidities experienced by children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). There is a clinical and physiological basis for a link between 25(OH)D levels and sleep disorders. In this study we aimed to investigate the frequency of sleep disorders in ASD patients and its association with 25(OH) D levels, and whether or not these frequencies changed after 25(OH)D treatment. This prospective study included 60 consecutive patients diagnosed with ASD and matched healthy controls between the ages of 4 and 10. Patients then underwent 25(OH)D replacement therapy according to their deficiency levels. Preand post-therapy values were compared. Sleep disturbance was detected in 78.3% of ASD patients (n = 60) and 33.3% of the control group (n = 60). When we compared the pretreatment scores of sleep disturbance between ASD and control groups (n = 60), there were significant differences in bedtime resistance, sleep anxiety, parasomnias, daytime sleepiness, sleep duration, sleep-onset delay, night wakings subscales, and total scale score (p < 0.05); however there were no significant differences with respect to the sleep-disordered breathing subscales (p > 0.05). In ASD patients, there was a significant negative correlation between serum 25(OH)D levels and the night wakings subscale (r = -0.301, p = 0.019). In control patients, there was a significant negative correlation between serum 25(OH)D levels and daytime sleepiness subscales (r = -0.269, p = 0.038). The results indicate that it may be suitable to use 25(OH)D replacement therapy in ASD patients and healthy individuals with sleep disturbances.
Development of cholinergic retinal neurons from embryonic chicken in monolayer cultures: stimulation by glial cell-derived factors

In recent years evidence has indicated that, like the PNS, the development of the CNS is influenced by neuronotrophic polypeptide factors. In the present study, cultures of dissociated retinal neurons from 8-d-old chicken embryos were used to investigate the role of neuronotrophic factors (NTF) in the development of the neural retina. CAT, which in vivo is located in amacrine cells of the retina, served as a marker for studying the in vitro development of cholinergic retinal neurons. Differentiation of cholinergic cells under control conditions was indicated by a 10-fold increase of enzyme activity during a 7-d culture period. Addition of media conditioned by high- density retinal cultures resulted in a further stimulation of CAT activity by 100–400%. The CAT-stimulating activity was associated with a high-molecular-weight component of the retina conditioned medium (RCM) and was sensitive to protease treatment, but was not affected by other hydrolytic enzymes. The putative cholinergic factor was secreted by retinal cultures virtually free of neurons, suggesting that it is mainly produced by Muller cells. CAT-stimulating activity was also present in extracts from embryonic chicken retinae and medium conditioned by rat retinal cultures. NGF, anti-NGF antiserum, extracts from chicken brain tissues, and a number of other extracts and conditioned media, all known to contain neuronotrophic activities, were found to have no influence on cholinergic development in chicken retinal cultures. An extract from non-retinal eye tissue containing ciliary neuronotrophic factor (CNTF) stimulated CAT activity to the same extent as did RCM.
Client selection for coordinated IEEE 802.11ac multi-user MIMO-enabled access points

Although downlink multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO) technology is included in the IEEE 802.11ac Standard, multi-cell interference in IEEE 802.11ac MU-MIMO networks degrades expected performance gain from the technology due to unplanned deployment of access points. To this end, recent research efforts envision that a central controller coordinates a set of APs to alleviate the multi-cell interference. However, to fully exploit the benefits of the coordinated access points with MU-MIMO, it is essential that clients should be carefully selected to maximize aggregate throughput. While an exhaustive search gives the optimal solution, its computationally infeasibility in large size networks requires another solution. Therefore, in this paper, we formulate a client selection problem for coordinated access points and suggest a polynomial time algorithm. Evaluation results show that our algorithm achieves about 98 % of the optimal aggregate throughput with a moderate computational overhead.
Does survivorship bias really matter? An empirical investigation into its effects on the mean reversion of share returns on the JSE (1984–2007)

ABSTRACT This paper tests for the impact of survivorship bias by building on the work of Cubbin, Eidne, Firer and Gilbert (2006), and Bailey and Gilbert (2007). The former paper confirmed the existence of mean reversion of relative returns on the JSE, because portfolios of shares with high Price to Earnings (P/E) ratios (being those which had tended to outperform recently) underperformed significantly over five years against portfolios of shares with low P/E ratios. This definition of mean reversion is contentious, but the convention is followed. The latter paper confirmed the economic validity of this conclusion by applying liquidity constraints to portfolio formation. This tended to slightly dampen the observed effects, but confirmed the significant presence of mean reversion. In both cases, extensive efforts were made to include all delisted shares in the study to avoid the effects of survivorship bias. This paper updates both studies by extending the period for a further 21 months, and then quantifies the impact of survivorship bias by comparing the results against those of an equivalent study based on a data set of currently listed shares only. The results of our study confirm that, in general, the effects of survivorship bias are present and material. While similar patterns of mean reversion are detected on both data sets, the returns earned on portfolios selected from currently listed shares are significantly higher than the corresponding returns on portfolios selected from all shares. While survivorship bias does not necessarily affect the conclusion of the patterns of mean reversion revealed in the earlier studies, it is a potentially important issue in any empirical financial research, and effort ought to be made to avoid it.
Effects of the parameters of wavelets applied in denoising of room impulse responses

Wavelets have commonly been applied in de-noising of various signals, especially speech and audio signals. However, to the best of knowledge of the authors, de-noising of room impulse responses (RIRs) by wavelets can hardly be found in literature. This paper presents the use of various wavelet algorithms for RIR de-noising. For this purpose, two types of synthesized RIRs are used. In order to have RIRs with different SNRs, synthetic white noise of different levels is added. The analysis is based on applying various wavelets, Daubechies, Haar, Coiflets, Symlet, Biorthogonal, Reverse biorthogonal and Mayer, either on room response to excitation or directly to extracted RIRs. The effects of wavelets’ parameters, such as level and thresholding, are observed. RIRs obtained before and after the wavelets are mutually compared in both time and frequency domain, and they are compared to the corresponding noiseless RIRs. Special attention is paid to the decay curves generated by backward integration of these RIRs. The results show that a significant improvement in dynamic range of the decay curve of even more than 20 dB can be achieved by applying wavelets. However, the technique is rather sensitive to wavelets’ parameters so they should be optimally set.
Effelsberg Monitoring of a Sample of RadioAstron Blazars: Analysis of Intra-Day Variability

We present the first results of an ongoing intra-day variability (IDV) flux density monitoring program of 107 blazars, which were selected from a sample of RadioAstron space very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) targets. The IDV observations were performed with the Effelsberg 100-m radio telescope at 4.8 GHz, focusing on the statistical properties of IDV in a relatively large sample of compact active galactic nuclei (AGN). We investigated the dependence of rapid (<3 day) variability on various source properties through a likelihood approach. We found that the IDV amplitude depends on flux density and that fainter sources vary by about a factor of 3 more than their brighter counterparts. We also found a significant difference in the variability amplitude between inverted- and flat-spectrum radio sources, with the former exhibiting stronger variations. γ -ray loud sources were found to vary by up to a factor 4 more than γ -ray quiet ones, with 4 σ significance. However a galactic latitude dependence was barely observed, which suggests that it is predominantly the intrinsic properties (e.g., angular size, core-dominance) of the blazars that determine how they scintillate, rather than the directional dependence in the interstellar medium (ISM). We showed that the uncertainty in the VLBI brightness temperatures obtained from the space VLBI data of the RadioAstron satellite can be as high as ~70% due to the presence of the rapid flux density variations. Our statistical results support the view that IDV at centimeter wavelengths is predominantly caused by interstellar scintillation (ISS) of the emission from the most compact, core-dominant region in an AGN.
Systems development in information systems research

The authors critically review systems development in information systems (IS) research. Several classification schemes of research are described and systems development is identified as a developmental, engineering, and formulative type of research. A framework of research is proposed to explain the dual nature of systems development as a research methodology and a research domain in IS research. Progress in several disciplinary areas is reviewed to provide a basis to argue that systems development is a valid research methodology. A systems development research process is presented from a methodological perspective. Software engineering, the basic method is applying the systems development research methodology, is then discussed. A framework to classify IS research domain and various research methodologies in studying systems development is presented. It is suggested that systems development and empirical research methodologies are complementary to each other. It is further proposed that an integrated multidimensional and multimethodological approach will generate fruitful research results in IS research. <<ETX>>
An Approach for Estimating Kinematic Heat Flux Loss due to Air-parcel Expansion/Compression in the Surface Layer

heat flux (i.e., T w ′ ′ where w′ and T ′ are the fluctuations of vertical velocity and air temperature relative to their means, respectively). This loss is caused by air-parcel expansion/compression as the air parcels move between the surface and the level of eddy covariance measurements. The physical derivation in this paper involves the use of the first law of thermodynamics and air-parcel expansion/compression approach developed by H. P. Liu (Boundary-Layer Meteorol., 115, 151168). The equations are then applied to data collected over three boreal ecosystems. The results show that this lost kinematic heat flux can be up to 10-15% of the total kinematic heat flux that is sheded from the surfaces to the atmosphere. This loss may have significant implications for some situations that use the form of the kinematic heat flux.
Frequency domain identification of dynamic friction model parameters

This paper presents a frequency domain identification of dynamic model parameters for frictional presliding behavior. The identification procedure for the dynamic model parameters, i.e., (1) the stiffness and (2) the damping of the presliding phenomenon, is reduced from performing several dedicated experiments to one experiment where the system is excited with random noise and the frequency response function (FRF) of the phenomenon is measured. Time domain validation experiments on a servomechanism show accurate estimates of the dynamic model parameters for the linearized presliding behavior.
WWW'18 Workshop on Exploitation of Social Media for Emergency Relief and Preparedness: Chairs' Welcome & Organization

User-generated content on online social media (OSM) platforms has become an important source of real-time information during emergency events. The SMERP workshop series aims to provide a forum for researchers working on utilizing OSM for emergency preparedness and aiding post-emergency relief operations. The workshop aims to bring together researchers from diverse fields - Information Retrieval, Data Mining and Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Social Network Analysis, Computational Social Science, Human Computer Interaction - who can potentially contribute to utilizing social media for emergency relief and preparedness. The first SMERP workshop was held in April 2017 in conjunction with the ECIR 2017 conference. This 2nd SMERP Workshop with The Web Conference 2018 includes two keynote talks, a peer-reviewed research paper track, and a panel discussion.
4D motion modeling of the coronary arteries from CT images for robotic assisted minimally invasive surgery

In this paper, we present a novel approach for coronary artery motion modeling from cardiac Computed Tomography( CT) images. The aim of this work is to develop a 4D motion model of the coronaries for image guidance in robotic-assisted totally endoscopic coronary artery bypass (TECAB) surgery. To utilize the pre-operative cardiac images to guide the minimally invasive surgery, it is essential to have a 4D cardiac motion model to be registered with the stereo endoscopic images acquired intraoperatively using the da Vinci robotic system. In this paper, we are investigating the extraction of the coronary arteries and the modelling of their motion from a dynamic sequence of cardiac CT. We use a multi-scale vesselness filter to enhance vessels in the cardiac CT images. The centerlines of the arteries are extracted using a ridge traversal algorithm. Using this method the coronaries can be extracted in near real-time as only local information is used in vessel tracking. To compute the deformation of the coronaries due to cardiac motion, the motion is extracted from a dynamic sequence of cardiac CT. Each timeframe in this sequence is registered to the end-diastole timeframe of the sequence using a non-rigid registration algorithm based on free-form deformations. Once the images have been registered a dynamic motion model of the coronaries can be obtained by applying the computed free-form deformations to the extracted coronary arteries. To validate the accuracy of the motion model we compare the actual position of the coronaries in each time frame with the predicted position of the coronaries as estimated from the non-rigid registration. We expect that this motion model of coronaries can facilitate the planning of TECAB surgery, and through the registration with real-time endoscopic video images it can reduce the conversion rate from TECAB to conventional procedures.
de Broglie wave phase shifts induced by surfaces closer than 25 nm

Four atom optics experiments that each serve to measure atom-surface interactions near nanofabricated gratings are presented here. In these experiments atoms in a beam travel within 25 nm of a material grating bar, and the analysis incorporates phase shifts for the atomic de Broglie waves due to interactions betwen Na atoms and silicon nitride surfaces. One atom diffraction experiment determines the van der Waals coeficient C3 = 2.7 ± 0.8 meV nm3, and one atom interferometer experiment determines C3 = 4 ± 1 meV nm3. The results of all four experiments are consistent with the Lifshitz prediction that is explicitly calculated here for Nasilicon nitride to be C3 = 3.25 meV nm3. The four atom optics experiments and review of van der Waals theory are complemented by similar experiments using electron beams and analysis of image-charge effects.