Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Dynamic predictions with time‐dependent covariates in survival analysis using joint modeling and landmarking

A key question in clinical practice is accurate prediction of patient prognosis. To this end, nowadays, physicians have at their disposal a variety of tests and biomarkers to aid them in optimizing medical care. These tests are often performed on a regular basis in order to closely follow the progression of the disease. In this setting, it is of interest to optimally utilize the recorded information and provide medically relevant summary measures, such as survival probabilities, which will aid in decision making. In this work, we present and compare two statistical techniques that provide dynamically updated estimates of survival probabilities, namely landmark analysis and joint models for longitudinal and time‐to‐event data. Special attention is given to the functional form linking the longitudinal and event time processes, and to measures of discrimination and calibration in the context of dynamic prediction.
The Effect of Toddlers' Negative Emotionality and Mothers' Reactions to their Child's Negative Emotions of Social-emotional Behaviors

본 연구의 목적은 부정적 정서가 드러나는 걸음마기 영아를 대상으로 부정적 정서성과 부정적 정 서에 대한 어머니의 반응이 영아의 사회정서 행동과 어떠한 관계가 있는지 살펴보는데 있다. 연구 대상은 18-36개월 걸음마기 영아와 어머니 141명이었으며 상관관계, 위계적 회귀분석, 매개효과 분석을 실시하였다. 연구결과 영아의 부정적 정서성과 부정적 정서에 대한 어머니의 반응, 영아의 사회정서 행동은 서로 유의미하게 관련되어 있었다. 또 영아의 정서성과 어머니의 반응이 영아의 사회정서 행동에 영향을 주는 것으로 나타났으며, 같은 정도의 부정적 정서를 가진 영아라도 환경 적 특성인 어머니의 반응에 따라 사회정서 행동의 정도가 다르게 나타났다. 마지막으로 영아의 부 정적 정서에 대한 어머니의 반응은 영아의 정서성과 사회정서 행동 관계를 매개하는 것으로 나타 났다. 이러한 결과는 영아의 사회정서 행동은 영아가 생득적으로 갖고 태어나는 기질적 특성 뿐 아니라 어머니의 변인에 의해 조절이 가능하며, 어머니의 반응이 영아의 부정적 정서성을 완화시 켜줄 수 있는 완충적 역할을 할 수 있음을 의미한다.
Exploiting weak connectivity for mobile file access

Weak connectivity, in the form of intermittent, low-bandwidth, or expensive networks is a fact of life in mobile computing. In this paper, we describe how the Coda File System has evolved to exploit such networks. The underlying theme of this evolution has been the systematic introduction of adaptivity to eliminate hidden assumptions about strong connectivity. Many aspects of the system, including communication, cache validation, update propagation and cache miss handling have been modified. As a result, Coda is able to provide good performance even when network bandwidth varies over four orders of magnitude - from modem speeds to LAN speeds.
Teaching About Heterogeneous Response Models

Individuals vary in their responses to incentives and opportunities. For example, additional education will affect one person differently than another. In recent years, econometricians have given increased attention to such heterogeneous responses and to the consequences of such responses for interpreting regression estimates, especially regression estimates based on instrumental variables. In this article, the author offers illustrative cases with which to introduce masters-level and advanced undergraduate students to the interpretive challenges posed by heterogeneous responses in econometric models.
Changed gene expression in brains of mice exposed to traffic in a highway tunnel

Context: Air pollution has been suggested to have an impact on the brain. Objective: The objective was to assess the expression of inflammation-related genes in the brains of mice that had been exposed for 5 days to a well-characterized traffic-polluted environment, i.e. a highway tunnel. Materials and methods: Twenty C57BL6 mice were randomly allocated to four groups of five animals. Two groups were placed in the tunnel for 5 days (mean PM 2.5, 55.1 μg/m3, mean elemental carbon, EC 13.9 μg/m3) in cages with or without filter, two control groups were housed outside the tunnel. Animals were assessed within 24 hours after the last exposure day. Lung injury and inflammation were assessed by bronchoalveolar lavage (BAL) and histology. Blood leukocytosis and coagulation parameters were determined in peripheral blood. The olfactory bulb and hippocampus were analyzed for changes in expression of inflammatory genes and brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF). Results and discussion: Although carbon particles were abundant in alveolar macrophages of exposed mice and absent in non-exposed mice, there was no evidence of pulmonary or systemic inflammation. There was an increased expression of genes involved in inflammatory response (COX2, NOS2, NOS3, and NFE2L2) in the hippocampus of the exposed mice. In the olfactory bulb, a downregulation was found for IL1α, COX2, NFE2L2, IL6, and BDNF. Conclusion: Although this short-term exposure to traffic-related pollution did not induce pulmonary or systemic inflammation, the expression of inflammatory genes was affected in different brain areas. The decreased BDNF expression in the olfactory bulb suggests lower brain neurotrophic support in response to traffic-related air pollution.
Quantification of Hepatitis C Virus (HCV) RNA in a Multicenter Study: Implications for Management of HCV Genotype 1-Infected Patients

ABSTRACT Assessment of the viral load in hepatitis C virus (HCV) genotype 1-infected patients is critical before, during, and after antiviral therapy. In patients achieving a rapid virological response at week 4 of treatment, the viral load at the baseline is considered a predictive criterion of a sustained virological response 24 weeks after the discontinuation of treatment. A ≥2-log10 drop in the viral load at week 12 of treatment (early virological response) triggers the continuation of therapy. We organized a multicenter study (MS) for diagnostic laboratories involved in the quantification of HCV RNA. Commercial assays, including two based on real-time reverse transcription-PCR (TaqMan system), and in-house methods, were used by the 61 participants. The overall reproducibility of the commercial quantitative nucleic acid amplification techniques (qNAT) was acceptable. As the intermethod variability among commercial qNAT for HCV RNA was still present, the manufacturers of these test kits should join efforts to harmonize the means of quantification of HCV RNA. This study also shows that caution should be exercised when the baseline viral load is evaluated and when the 2-log10 reduction after 12 weeks of therapy is interpreted. Finally, this MS confirms the higher sensitivity of the commercial qNAT based on the TaqMan system, making them the elective assays for the monitoring of therapy.
Generalised Adaptive Fuzzy Rule Interpolation

—As a substantial extension to fuzzy rule interpo- lation that works based on two neighbouring rules ﬂanking an observation, adaptive fuzzy rule interpolation is able to restore system consistency when contradictory results are reached during interpolation. The approach ﬁrst identiﬁes the exhaustive sets of candidates, with each candidate consisting of a set of interpolation procedures which may jointly be responsible for the system inconsistency. Then, individual candidates are modiﬁed such that all contradictions are removed and thus interpolation consistency is restored. It has been developed on the assumption that contradictions may only be resulted from the underlying interpolation mechanism, and that all the identiﬁed candidates are not distinguishable in terms of their likelihood to be the real culprit. However, this assumption may not hold for real world situations. This paper therefore further develops the adaptive method by taking into account observations, rules and interpolation procedures, all as diagnosable and modiﬁable system components. Also, given the common practice in fuzzy systems that observations and rules are often associated with certainty degrees, the identiﬁed candidates are ranked by examining the certainty degrees of its components and their derivatives. From this, the candidate modiﬁcation is carried out based on such ranking. This work signiﬁcantly improves the efﬁcacy of the existing adaptive system by exploiting more information during both the diagnosis and modiﬁcation processes.
A naive mid-level concept-based fusion approach to violence detection in Hollywood movies

In this paper we approach the issue of violence detection in typical Hollywood productions. Given the high variability in appearance of violent scenes in movies, training a classifier to predict violent frames directly from visual or/and auditory features seems rather difficult. Instead, we propose a different perspective that relies on fusing mid-level concept predictions that are inferred from low-level features. This is achieved by employing a bank of multi-layer perceptron classifiers featuring a dropout training scheme. Experimental validation conducted in the context of the Violent Scenes Detection task of the MediaEval 2012 Multimedia Benchmark Evaluation show the potential of this approach that ranked first among 34 other submissions in terms of precision and F1-score.
Seriousness of Social Dilemmas and the Provision of a Sanctioning System

Two types of cooperation can be distinguished in social dilemmas. Elementary cooperation occurs when members cooperate for the benefit of the collectivity. Instrumental cooperation occurs when members cooperate to introduce a change in the incentive structure (such as the provision of a sanctioning system) so as to eliminate the dilemma from the original situation. The results of a social dilemma experiment, using 48 same-sex four-person groups, indicate that (a) in the absence of a sanctioning system, greater temptation to defect makes the subjects cooperate less fully, whereas (b) when opportunities to cooperate in a sanctioning system exist, greater temptation to defect in the original dilemma makes the subjects cooperate more fully for the provision or maintenance of the sanctioning system when the gain for cooperation is large. The implication of these findings is that as the social dilemma becomes more serious, people become more willing to cooperate in providing a change in the system which addresses the dilemma problem.
Die Soziale-Erwünschtheits-Skala-17 (SES-17): Entwicklung und erste Befunde zu Reliabilität und Validität

Zusammenfassung. Die “Social Desirability Scale” von Crowne und Marlowe (1960), SDS-CM, erfreut sich nach wie vor groser Beliebtheit. Dasselbe gilt fur die deutsche Fassung (Luck & Timaeus, 1969). Nach 40 Jahren ist es jedoch fraglich, ob die SDS-CM noch zeitgemas ist bzw. ob sich nicht neue Items finden lassen, die einen hoheren Grad an sozialer Erwunschtheit aufweisen. Vier Studien werden beschrieben, in denen eine neue Skala im Stil der Crowne-Marlowe-Skala entwickelt und uberpruft wird. Das Ergebnis ist die Soziale-Erwunschtheits-Skala-17 (SES-17). Diese umfast 17 Items. Reliabilitat und konvergente Validitat sind zufriedenstellend: Die interne Konsistenz liegt bei . 72 bis . 75, die Retest-Stabilitat uber vier Wochen bei . 82 und die Korrelation mit der SDS-CM bei . 67 bis . 74. Damit ist die SES-17 ein der SDS-CM vergleichbares Verfahren, ist jedoch okonomischer (17 statt 23 Items) und zeigt hohere Augenscheinvaliditat: Eine Stichprobe von 49 Beurteilern schatzte die Items beider Skalen bezuglich soziale.
Gas Sensitivity and Sensing Mechanism Studies on Au-Doped TiO2 Nanotube Arrays for Detecting SF6 Decomposed Components

The analysis to SF6 decomposed component gases is an efficient diagnostic approach to detect the partial discharge in gas-insulated switchgear (GIS) for the purpose of accessing the operating state of power equipment. This paper applied the Au-doped TiO2 nanotube array sensor (Au-TiO2 NTAs) to detect SF6 decomposed components. The electrochemical constant potential method was adopted in the Au-TiO2 NTAs' fabrication, and a series of experiments were conducted to test the characteristic SF6 decomposed gases for a thorough investigation of sensing performances. The sensing characteristic curves of intrinsic and Au-doped TiO2 NTAs were compared to study the mechanism of the gas sensing response. The results indicated that the doped Au could change the TiO2 nanotube arrays' performances of gas sensing selectivity in SF6 decomposed components, as well as reducing the working temperature of TiO2 NTAs.
The Transparent and Family Closets: Gay Men and Lesbians and Their Families of Origin

This article builds on data collected in research on the everyday lives of gay men and lesbians in Slovenia, focusing on the families of origin and family relations. It pays special attention to the process of coming out and its consequences for further relationships among family members. It concentrates on the process of negotiating new family relations after coming out. The authors introduce the concepts of “transparent closet” and “family closet” to describe a situation in which family members are informed about a child's homosexuality but refuse to accept the consequences of their child's coming out. All of this holds important consequences for gay men and lesbians and their family members.
The acquisition of semantics-syntax correspondences and verb frequencies in ESL materials

This article provides an analysis of the frequency of verbs and their syntactic requirements in Interchange (Richards et al., 1991), a popular series of textbooks for English as a second language (ESL). Current theoretical approaches to verb classes permit a fine-grained crosslinguistic description of differences in semantics-syntax correspondences for verbs; in this article, transitive verbs are split into five subcategories and intransitives are split into two categories. A corpus analysis of Interchange suggests that ESL materials may under-represent some of the verb classes that are known to cause learners difficulty. These findings suggest that weak contrastive analysis and a more careful consideration of syntactic properties of verbs could be useful to teachers and materials writers.
Gene Expression Analysis Reveals the Cell Cycle and Kinetochore Genes Participating in Ischemia Reperfusion Injury and Early Development in Kidney

Background The molecular mechanisms that mediate the ischemia-reperfusion (I/R) injury in kidney are not completely understood. It is also largely unknown whether such mechanisms overlap with those governing the early development of kidney. Methodology/Principal Findings We performed gene expression analysis to investigate the transcriptome changes during regeneration after I/R injury in the rat (0 hr, 6 hr, 24 hr, and 120 hr after reperfusion) and early development of mouse kidney (embryonic day 16 p.c. and postnatal 1 and 7 day). Pathway analysis revealed a wide spectrum of molecular functions that may participate in the regeneration and developmental processes of kidney as well as the functional association between them. While the genes associated with cell cycle, immunity, inflammation, and apoptosis were globally activated during the regeneration after I/R injury, the genes encoding various transporters and metabolic enzymes were down-regulated. We also observed that these injury-associated molecular functions largely overlap with those of early kidney development. In particular, the up-regulation of kinases and kinesins with roles in cell division was common during regeneration and early developmental kidney as validated by real-time PCR and immunohistochemistry. Conclusions In addition to the candidate genes whose up-regulation constitutes an overlapping expression signature between kidney regeneration and development, this study lays a foundation for studying the functional relationship between two biological processes.
Likelihood Ratio Test for Excess Homozygosity at Marker Loci on X Chromosome

The assumption of Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium (HWE) is generally required for association analysis using case-control design on autosomes; otherwise, the size may be inflated. There has been an increasing interest of exploring the association between diseases and markers on X chromosome and the effect of the departure from HWE on association analysis on X chromosome. Note that there are two hypotheses of interest regarding the X chromosome: (i) the frequencies of the same allele at a locus in males and females are equal and (ii) the inbreeding coefficient in females is zero (without excess homozygosity). Thus, excess homozygosity and significantly different minor allele frequencies between males and females are used to filter X-linked variants. There are two existing methods to test for (i) and (ii), respectively. However, their size and powers have not been studied yet. Further, there is no existing method to simultaneously detect both hypotheses till now. Therefore, in this article, we propose a novel likelihood ratio test for both (i) and (ii) on X chromosome. To further investigate the underlying reason why the null hypothesis is statistically rejected, we also develop two likelihood ratio tests for detecting (i) and (ii), respectively. Moreover, we explore the effect of population stratification on the proposed tests. From our simulation study, the size of the test for (i) is close to the nominal significance level. However, the size of the excess homozygosity test and the test for both (i) and (ii) is conservative. So, we propose parametric bootstrap techniques to evaluate their validity and performance. Simulation results show that the proposed methods with bootstrap techniques control the size well under the respective null hypothesis. Power comparison demonstrates that the methods with bootstrap techniques are more powerful than those without bootstrap procedure and the existing methods. The application of the proposed methods to a rheumatoid arthritis dataset indicates their utility.
Variability in the terminations of GABAergic chandelier cell axons on initial segments of pyramidal cell axons in the monkey sensory‐motor cortex

Chandelier cell axons were studied in the sensory‐motor cortex of adult monkeys. The axonal fields of Golgi‐impregnated chandelier cells in layer II in motor cortex are flattened sagittally. The vertical terminal portions of the axons varied both in length and in the numbers converging to form terminations of‐greater or lesser complexity. Golgi‐impregnated plexuses were embedded in plastic and resectioned serially at 2.5–3.0 μm. A single axonal field could have as many as 400 terminal rows. All lie 3–13 μm beneath pyramidal cell somata. These terminations are not randomly distributed but, instead, form clusters. Further resectioning the plastic sections for electron microscopy revealed that all the terminations are on the initial axon segments of pyramidal cells and all form symmetric synaptic contacts.
A critical review on participation in mobile interaction design research

This paper presents a review on participation in mobile interaction design research, analyzing 158 publications regarding user involvement and design method. Results show that user involvement in general is applied when evaluating interaction artifacts. In the typical mobile interaction design study a prototype is developed and 14 students are recruited for user testing. They have to fill out a questionnaire and are asked about their opinion in a concluding interview. Additional user participation during the design process could lead to new insights for mobile interaction design and provide new knowledge to the research community. Here I discuss three opportunities for further participation in mobile interaction design research.
Rewriting of rules containing set terms in a logic data language LDL

We propose compilation methods for supporting set terms in Horn clause programs, without using general-purpose set matching algorithms, which tend to run in times exponential in the size of the participating sets Instead, we take the approach of formulating specialized computation plans that, by taking advantage of information available in the given rules, limit the number of alternatives explored. Our strategy is to employ compile time rewriting techniques and to transform the problem into an “ordinary” Horn clause compilation problem, with minimal additional overhead. The execution cost of the rewritten rules is substantially lower than that of the original rules and the additional cost of compilation can thus be amortized over many executions
r-shrink: a heuristic for improving minimum power broadcast trees in wireless networks

Broadcasting in wireless networks, unlike wired networks, inherently reaches several nodes with a single transmission. For omni-directional wireless broadcast to a node, all nodes closer will also be reached. This property can be used to compute routing trees which minimize the sum of the transmitter powers. It has been shown that this problem is NP-complete. In this paper, we present the r-shrink procedure, a heuristic for improving the solutions obtained using fast sub-optimal algorithms. Specifically, we focus on the low-complexity BIP algorithm and Prim's minimum spanning tree algorithm and show through extensive simulations that better solutions are obtained almost always, with considerably lower tree power, if the proposed procedure is used to improve the trees generated using these algorithms.
How the cholera epidemic of 1831 resulted in a new technique for fluid resuscitation

Cholera was a much feared disease as it spread across Europe in 1829–1830. The Lancet on the 19 November 1831 charted its progress and even published a fold out map of Europe to allow its readers to monitor its approach.1 The epidemic reached Sunderland in October 1831. On the 3 December 1831 a Dr W B O’Shaughnessy delivered a lecture to the Westminster Medical Society on the “Blue epidemic cholera”, as it was then known. As there was still no known “remote” cause of the disease, he considered it legitimate to look at the effects of the disease and to treat these instead. He had observed that, “universal stagnation of the venous system, and rapid cessation of the arterialisation of the blood, are the earliest, as well as the most characteristic effects. ”2 He then posed the question, “What is the best mode by which this artificial arterialisation can be effected . ” At the time most physicians favoured venesection. Others, “Recommend the inhalation of oxygen gas, or of a mixture of oxygen and atmospheric air, or of the protoxide of azote, . “laughing gas”. ”2 He went on, “Now it might rationally be imagined that the success or failure of these methods should afford us a touchstone of some authority, in deciding on the rationality of the principles on which they are practised . ”2 and concluded that there was some evidence in favour of venesection, if done in time and no other problems were encountered. He found no evidence in favour of oxygenation and conceded that venesection might also fail. In vitro physiology studies had shown that venous blood could be arterialised by agitation in atmospheric air, or contact with highly oxygenised solids or fluids. This led him to suggest the idea of intravenous injection of nitrate or …
A hybrid approach to NER by MEMM and manual rules

This paper describes a framework for defining domain specific Feature Functions in a user friendly form to be used in a Maximum Entropy Markov Model (MEMM) for the Named Entity Recognition (NER) task. Our system called MERGE allows defining general Feature Function Templates, as well as Linguistic Rules incorporated into the classifier. The simple way of translating these rules into specific feature functions are shown. We show that MERGE can perform better from both purely machine learning based systems and purely-knowledge based approaches by some small expert interaction of rule-tuning.