Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Leg Heat Content Continues to Decrease during the Core Temperature Plateau in Humans Anesthetized with Isoflurane

Background:Sufficient hypothermia during anesthesia provokes thermoregulatory responses, but the clinical significance of these responses remains unknown. Nonshivering thermogenesis does not increase metabolic heat production in anesthetized adults. Vasoconstriction reduces cutaneous heat loss, but the initial decrease appears insufficient to cause a thermal steady state (heat production equaling heat loss). Accordingly, the authors tested the hypotheses that: 1) thermoregulatory vasoconstriction prevents further core hypothermia; and 2) the resulting stable core temperature is not a thermal steady state, but, instead, is accompanied for several hours by a continued reduction in body heat content. Methods:Six healthy volunteers were anesthetized with isoflurane (0.8%) and paralyzed with vecuronium. Core hypothermia was induced by fan cooling, and continued for 3 h after vasoconstriction in the legs was detected. Leg heat content was calculated from six needle thermocouples and skin temperature, by integrating the resulting parabolic regression over volume Results:Core temperature decreased 1.0 ± 0.2°C in the 1 h before vasoconstriction, but only 0.4 ± 0.3° C in the subsequent 3 h. This temperature decrease, evenly distributed throughout the body, would reduce leg heat content 10 kcal. However, measured leg heat content decreased 49 ± 18 kcal in the 3 h after vasoconstriction Conclusions:These data thus indicate that thermoregulatory vasoconstriction produces a clinically important reduction in the rate of core cooling. This core temperature plateau resulted, at least in part, from sequestration of metabolic heat to the core which allowed core temperature to remain nearly constant, despite a continually decreasing body heat content.
Two-ray models in mmWave communications

The two-ray model has been used for modelling of wireless channels already for decades. However, since researchers and industry are pushing forward to unlock the millimeter wave bands, we revisited this model. We re-derive the break point distance based on a generalized first Fresnel zone. The simplified approximation formula — four times the product of antenna heights scaled by wavelength — is especially accurate for millimeter waves, but difficult to verify. We then demonstrate that the two-ray ground-reflection model can be observed within many vehicular scenarios and fit ray-tracing data with the two-ray model. Finally we devise a measurement strategy as well as the usage of an ℓ1 algorithm for piecewise linear fitting slopes to the model data. Thereby we are able to show that the break point distance is indeed a valid modelling parameter and can be determined accurately.
Views From a Small Pacific Island

Background and aims. Tobacco smoking is a significant public health issue in Niue, a small Western Pacific nation where 31% of males and 16% of females smoke, and smoking initiation is still occurring at high levels among young people. There is evidence of political support for stronger tobacco control measures in Niue with ratification of the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control in 2005 and the Niue Tobacco Control Bill 2007 currently in discussion. However, more information is needed about how best to implement tobacco control measures in Niue. The aim of this research was to identify key contextual factors for progressing effective tobacco control in Niue. Methods. Twelve in-depth interviews were conducted with health, tobacco control, and public health professionals selected purposively from both Niue and New Zealand. A semistructured interview format was used and a qualitative thematic analysis undertaken to explore common and divergent viewpoints. Results. Significant progress in tobacco control is feasible in Niue, but outside technical assistance will be needed as there is very limited capacity to undertake all that needs to be done. Key steps will include developing a comprehensive tobacco control plan that will adopt a health promotion paradigm. This will include the building of strong cross-sectoral political support and community engagement to ensure local contextual knowledge guides the development of interventions. Capacity building throughout will be vital. Conclusion. A comprehensive health promotion approach that draws on outside technical assistance for support and capacity when needed is recommended to advance tobacco control in Niue.
Natural Ventilation for the Prevention of Airborne Contagion

Background Institutional transmission of airborne infections such as tuberculosis (TB) is an important public health problem, especially in resource-limited settings where protective measures such as negative-pressure isolation rooms are difficult to implement. Natural ventilation may offer a low-cost alternative. Our objective was to investigate the rates, determinants, and effects of natural ventilation in health care settings. Methods and Findings The study was carried out in eight hospitals in Lima, Peru; five were hospitals of “old-fashioned” design built pre-1950, and three of “modern” design, built 1970–1990. In these hospitals 70 naturally ventilated clinical rooms where infectious patients are likely to be encountered were studied. These included respiratory isolation rooms, TB wards, respiratory wards, general medical wards, outpatient consulting rooms, waiting rooms, and emergency departments. These rooms were compared with 12 mechanically ventilated negative-pressure respiratory isolation rooms built post-2000. Ventilation was measured using a carbon dioxide tracer gas technique in 368 experiments. Architectural and environmental variables were measured. For each experiment, infection risk was estimated for TB exposure using the Wells-Riley model of airborne infection. We found that opening windows and doors provided median ventilation of 28 air changes/hour (ACH), more than double that of mechanically ventilated negative-pressure rooms ventilated at the 12 ACH recommended for high-risk areas, and 18 times that with windows and doors closed (p < 0.001). Facilities built more than 50 years ago, characterised by large windows and high ceilings, had greater ventilation than modern naturally ventilated rooms (40 versus 17 ACH; p < 0.001). Even within the lowest quartile of wind speeds, natural ventilation exceeded mechanical (p < 0.001). The Wells-Riley airborne infection model predicted that in mechanically ventilated rooms 39% of susceptible individuals would become infected following 24 h of exposure to untreated TB patients of infectiousness characterised in a well-documented outbreak. This infection rate compared with 33% in modern and 11% in pre-1950 naturally ventilated facilities with windows and doors open. Conclusions Opening windows and doors maximises natural ventilation so that the risk of airborne contagion is much lower than with costly, maintenance-requiring mechanical ventilation systems. Old-fashioned clinical areas with high ceilings and large windows provide greatest protection. Natural ventilation costs little and is maintenance free, and is particularly suited to limited-resource settings and tropical climates, where the burden of TB and institutional TB transmission is highest. In settings where respiratory isolation is difficult and climate permits, windows and doors should be opened to reduce the risk of airborne contagion.
Exploiting Statistical Dependencies in Sparse Representations for Signal Recovery

Signal modeling lies at the core of numerous signal and image processing applications. A recent approach that has drawn considerable attention is sparse representation modeling, in which the signal is assumed to be generated as a combination of a few atoms from a given dictionary. In this work we consider a Bayesian setting and go beyond the classic assumption of independence between the atoms. The main goal of this paper is to introduce a statistical model that takes such dependencies into account and show how this model can be used for sparse signal recovery. We follow the suggestion of two recent works and assume that the sparsity pattern is modeled by a Boltzmann machine, a commonly used graphical model. For general dependency models, exact MAP and MMSE estimation of the sparse representation becomes computationally complex. To simplify the computations, we propose greedy approximations of the MAP and MMSE estimators. We then consider a special case in which exact MAP is feasible, by assuming that the dictionary is unitary and the dependency model corresponds to a certain sparse graph. Exploiting this structure, we develop an efficient message passing algorithm that recovers the underlying signal. When the model parameters defining the underlying graph are unknown, we suggest an algorithm that learns these parameters directly from the data, leading to an iterative scheme for adaptive sparse signal recovery. The effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated on real-life signals-patches of natural images-where we compare the denoising performance to that of previous recovery methods that do not exploit the statistical dependencies.
2DAM-WAVE: An Evaluation Method for the WAVE Capability Model

The purpose of this paper is to present the 2DAM-WAVE, an evaluation method that enables organizations to assess their capability in global software development and to discover improvement opportunities. Organizations can be evaluated in two ways, using questionnaires on a web tool, that gives a fast but undetailed result and a more resourceful way, that uses interviews and artifacts analysis for more detailed and extensive results. This evaluation method uses as reference the WAVE capability model, which documents patterns of evolution in the practice of the internal offshoring of software. This evaluation method has been used in a Brazilian unit of a large company and is already scheduled to be applied to an Indian unit of another big company.
The origin of white matter lesions: a further piece to the puzzle.

See related article, p 1037. Incidental areas of high signal intensity on T2-weighted MRI of older individuals termed white matter hyperintensities or white matter lesions (WML) have sparked scientific and clinical interest over the past 25 years. Extensive research has provided compelling evidence that at least more extensive forms of WMLs are a consequence of and indicative for small vessel disease,1 and thus are associated with a higher risk for stroke, dementia, and mortality.2 Furthermore, the longitudinal Leukoaraiosis And Disability (LADIS) study confirmed that severe WML strongly predict global functional decline in general beyond individual associations of WML extent with cognitive functioning as well as gait, balance, and mood disorders.3 Similar data come from several other cohorts. The exact mechanism(s) of WML formation, however, are still much less clear. In this issue of the Journal, de Groot et al4 report on a very elegant study which provides convincing evidence for the gradual development of WMLs both regarding the formation of new WMLs and also their expansion and growth over time. Using diffusion tensor imaging and the fluid-attenuated inversion recovery sequence, they searched for subtle changes that might have …
Rotor-Shape Optimization of Interior-Permanent-Magnet Motors to Reduce Harmonic Iron Losses

In this paper, we develop novel rotor designs of interior-permanent-magnet motors in order to reduce harmonic iron losses at high rotational speeds under field-weakening control. First, an optimization method, combined with an adaptive finite-element method, is applied to automatically determine the shapes of the magnets and rotor core. The optimized motor is manufactured to confirm the validity of the calculation. It is clarified that the iron loss of the optimized motor is reduced to nearly half of that of the conventional motor, without a significant decrease in maximum torque. Next, the contribution of each part of the rotor to the iron-loss reduction is analyzed by the experimental design method. Finally, several designs of the rotors are proposed from the viewpoints of manufacturing cost and performance.
Evaluation of a digoxigenin‐labelled probe for detection of Aeromonas spp.

An outer membrane protein‐based Digoxigenin (DIG)‐labelled DNA probe was developed for the specific detection of Aeromonas sp. from food/environmental/clinical samples. Dot blot reaction answered for all the Aeromonas isolates and was negative for Escherichia coli, Pseudomonas sp. , Klebsiella sp. , Vibrio parahaemolyticus, V. harveyi, V. alginolyticus, V. vulnificus. Edwardsiella tarda and Staphylococcus sp. As this protein is highly conserved in various Aeromonas species, the probe has the potential for use as a rapid and reliable diagnostic tool.
Scattering from coated random rough surfaces characterized by the Mueller matrix

The Mueller matrix completely characterizes scattered electromagnetic waves. It relates the incident to the scattered Stokes vectors. The Mueller matrix which contains intensity and relative phase data is very useful for remote sensing. The Mueller matrix , characterizing scattering from uniformly coated 2D random rough surfaces are assumed to be homogeneous, and isotropic with a Gaussian surface height joint probability density function. The diffuse, incoherent and coherent contributions to the Mueller matrix elements are evaluated. The Mueller matrix elements are more sensitive to the changes in the rms slope than to changes in the rms height. The element M34 equals M43 is most sensitive to variations in the thickness of the coating layer. This result could be used to estimate the thickness of the coating material. The magnitudes of the Mueller matrix elements are considerably more sensitive to changes in dissipation in the coating material than to changes in dissipation of the substrate.
Singing in the Brain: Independence of Lyrics and Tunes

Why is vocal music the oldest and still the most popular form of music? Very possibly because vocal music involves an intimate combination of speech and music, two of the most specific, high-level skills of human beings. The issue we address is whether people listening to a song treat the linguistic and musical components separately or integrate them within a single percept. Event-related potentials were recorded while musicians listened to excerpts from operas sung a capella. Excerpts were ended by semantically congruous or incongruous words sung either in or out of key. Results clearly demonstrated the independence of lyrics and tunes, so that an additive model of semantic- and harmonic-violations processing predicted the data extremely well. These results are consistent with a modular organization of the human cognitive system and open new perspectives in the search for the similarities and differences between language and music processing.
FPGA Hardware with Target-Reconfigurable Object Detector

SUMMARY Much effort has been applied to research on object detection by statistical learning methods in recent years, and the results of that work are expected to find use in fields such as ITS and security. Up to now, the research has included optimization of computational algorithms for real-time processing on hardware such as GPU’s and FPGAs. Such optimization most often works only with particular parameters, which often forfeits the flexibility that comes with dynamic changing of the target object. We propose a hardware architecture for faster detection and flexible target reconfiguration while maintaining detection accuracy. Tests confirm
An Automatic Query Augmentation Model for Answering Well-Defined Questions in Top-1 Search Result

Short query terms often result in irrelevant search results due to the lack of appropriate contexts to disambiguate real user intention and thus introduce search errors. Without high precision raw search results, post re-ranking modules may not really help since garbage input only results in garbage output. Automatic query formulation, which supplies appropriate left and right contexts to the query terms, is therefore an important pre-processing technique for acquiring highly relevant documents and submitting them for post re-ranking. A systematic approach for augmenting short query terms with the best contextual text patterns is proposed in this paper for matching answers of some well-defined questions such as“ the birthday of Bill Gates”(and most factoid questions). The augmentation patterns are learned to directly maximize the top-1 accuracy rate for searching relevant documents. In comparison with the basic two-term query form, which submits a key entity query term (‘ Bill Gates’ ) plus an intended attribute (‘ birthday’ ) to be answered, the augmented patterns achieve 31% top-1 accuracy rate, in contrast to the extremely low, 4%, accuracy achieved by two-term query; the top-10 performance, which is about 54%, is also significantly better than the 21% accuracy with two-term query. This also implies that about 57% of the top-10 results have their correct answer given at the first place. By using appropriate augmented query terms, the correct search results can thus often be ranked at the first few places, and very likely at rank-1. Experiments show that the augmented query patterns significantly boost the top-1 performance for answering well-defined questions. By applying such techniques to queries, it is likely to improve the search precision significantly, sometimes even without the help of post re-ranking.
Convective instability and transient growth in steady and pulsatile stenotic flows

We show that suitable initial disturbances to steady or long-period pulsatile flows in a straight tube with an axisymmetric 75%-occlusion stenosis can produce very large transient energy growths. The global optimal disturbances to an initially axisymmetric state found by linear analyses are three-dimensional wave packets that produce localized sinuous convective instability in extended shear layers. In pulsatile flow, initial conditions that trigger the largest disturbances are either initiated at, or advect to, the separating shear layer at the stenosis in phase with peak systolic flow. Movies are available with the online version of the paper.
Estimating Income Inequality in China Using Grouped Data and the Generalized Beta Distribution

There are two main types of data sources of income distributions in China: household survey data and grouped data. Household survey data are typically available for isolated years and individual provinces. In comparison, aggregate or grouped data are typically available more frequently and usually have national coverage. In principle, grouped data allow investigation of the change of inequality over longer, continuous periods of time, and the identification of patterns of inequality across broader regions. Nevertheless, a major limitation of grouped data is that only mean (average) income and income shares of quintile or decile groups of the population are reported. Directly using grouped data reported in this format is equivalent to assuming that all individuals in a quintile or decile group have the same income. This potentially distorts the estimate of inequality within each region. The aim of this paper is to apply an improved econometric method designed to use grouped data to study income inequality in China. A generalized beta distribution is employed to model income inequality in China at various levels and periods of time. The generalized beta distribution is more general and flexible than the lognormal distribution that has been used in past research, and also relaxes the assumption of a uniform distribution of income within quintile and decile groups of populations. The paper studies the nature and extent of inequality in rural and urban China over the period 1978 to 2002. Income inequality in the whole of China is then modeled using a mixture of province-specific distributions. The estimated results are used to study the trends in national inequality, and to discuss the empirical findings in the light of economic reforms, regional policies, and globalization of the Chinese economy.
Identification of a Spontaneous Frame Shift Mutation in a Nonreference Arabidopsis Accession Using Whole Genome Sequencing1

Short-read sequencing technologies support the facile de novo identification of spontaneous and chemically induced mutations in the Arabidopsis ( Arabidopsis thaliana ) reference genome ([Schneeberger et al., 2009b][1]; [Ossowski et al., 2010][2]). Here, we show that short-read sequencing is also
Ann and Peng – Optimality and Opposed Handshapes in TSL

This paper provides a linguistic account of opposed handshapes in Taiwan Sign Language (TSL). Examination of TSL opposed handshapes reveals that not all of the 29 logically possible opposed handshape types are attested. Of the ones that are attested, they differ (often drastically) in frequency of occurrence. We provide an analysis of the statistical data using Optimality Theory, showing that the various attested frequencies of opposed handshapes are systematic. The implications of this study for language change and acquisition are explored.
Gate-delay fault diagnosis using the inject-and-evaluate paradigm

We propose an algorithm for gate-delay fault diagnosis. It is based on the inject-and-evaluate paradigm given by Huang (see Proc. of VLSI Test Symposium p.34-39, April 2001), in which the fault site(s) are predicted through a series of injections and evaluations. Unlike the backtrace algorithm that predicts the fault site by tracing the syndrome at a faulty output back into the circuit, this approach mainly relies on the six-valued simulation. In such a forward approach, the accuracy is much higher because all the composite syndromes at all faulty outputs are considered simultaneously. We also analyze the effects of glitches and take them into account in our algorithm. As a result, the proposed approach is robust and applicable even when there are glitching outputs or when the delay size is relatively small. Experimental results show that the number of fault candidates produced by this approach is only 4.8 within 10 seconds of CPU time.
OM Practice - Choice-Based Revenue Management: An Empirical Study of Estimation and Optimization

Discrete choice models are appealing for airline revenue management (RM) because they offer a means to profitably exploit preferences for attributes such as time of day, routing, brand, and price. They are also good at modeling demand for unrestricted fare class structures, which are widespread throughout the industry. However, there is little empirical research on the practicality and effectiveness of choice-based RM models. Toward this end, we report the results of a study of choice-based RM conducted with a major U.S. airline. Our study had two main objectives: (1) to assess the extent to which choice models can be estimated well using readily available airline data, and (2) to gauge the potential impact that choice-based RM could have on a sample of test markets. We developed a maximum likelihood estimation algorithm that uses a variation of the expectation-maximization method to account for unobservable data. The procedure was applied to data for a test market from New York City to a destination in Florida. The outputs are promising in terms of the quality of the computed estimates, although a large number of departure instances may be necessary to achieve highly accurate results. These choice model estimates were then used in a simulation study to assess the revenue performance of the EMSR-b (expected marginal seat revenue, version b) capacity control policies and the current controls used by the airline relative to controls optimized to account for choice behavior. Our simulation results show 1%--5% average revenue improvements using choice-based RM. Although such simulated results must be taken with caution, overall our study suggests that choice-based revenue management is both feasible to execute and economically significant in real-world airline environments.