Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Implementing a Comprehensive Relative‐value—Based Incentive Plan in an Academic Family Medicine Department

The authors describe the implementation and first three years (1997–1999) of a department-wide incentive plan of the Department of Family Medicine at the State University of New York at Buffalo School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences. By using a consensus approach, a representative elected committee designed a clinical relative value unit (explained in detail) that could be translated to equally value and reward faculty efforts in patient care, education, and research and which allowed the department to avoid the imposition of a model that could have undervalued scholarship and teaching. By 1999, the plan's goal of eight patient-care-equivalent points per four-hour session had been exceeded for pure clinical care. Clearly, only a small financial incentive was necessary (in 1999, an incentive pool of 4% of providers' gross salary) to motivate the faculty to be more productive and to self-report their efforts. Long-term productivity for pure clinical care rose from 9.8 points per session in 1997 to 10.4 in 1999. Of the mean total of 3,980 points for the year 1999, the contribution from teaching was 1,146, or 29%, compared with 25% in 1997. For scholarship, the number of points was 775, or 20%, in 1999, compared with 11% in 1997. The authors describe modifications to the original plan (e.g., integration of quality measures) that the department's experience has fostered. Problems encountered included the lack of accurate and timely billing information from the associated teaching hospitals, the inherent problems of self-reported information, difficulties of gaining buy-in from the faculty, and inherent risks of a pay-for-performance approach. But the authors conclude that the plan is fulfilling its goal of effectively and fairly quantifying all areas of faculty effort, and is also helping the department to more effectively demonstrate clinical productivity in negotiations with teaching hospitals.
DC Voltage Compensation Strategy for Parallel Hybrid Multilevel Voltage-Source Converter

The hybrid multilevel voltage-source converter, combining semiconductor switches and power module cells, is a new family for VSC-HVDC applications. The hybrid multilevel converter in parallel arrangement (PHMC), in terms of converter investment, is very adaptable for cable transmission systems. However, the dc voltage of the converter, synthesized by the output voltage of three-phase cell stacks, is strongly coupled with ac voltage variations, which influences the stability of converter operation. This paper proposes a dc voltage compensation strategy for the parallel hybrid multilevel converter. This strategy, implemented by introducing an isolation period, can effectively cope with the dc voltage deviation, especially under ac network faults. Simulation results in PSCAD/EMTDC verify the effectiveness of the proposed strategy under various circumstances.
L651582: a novel antiproliferative and antimetastasis agent.

L651582 (Merck Institute for Therapeutic Research, Rahway, NJ) is a novel carboxyamide-amino-imidazole compound originally developed as a coccidiostat (U.S. patent No. 4,590,201). We studied the inhibitory effects of this compound on cancer proliferation, adhesion, and motility in vitro and in vivo in a model of ovarian cancer progression. L651582 reversibly inhibited up to 60% of the autocrine motility factor-stimulated tumor cell motility and tumor cell adhesion to tissue culture plastic. Autocrine motility factor-stimulated phosphoinositide metabolism was reduced significantly by treatment of the cells with 3 microM L651582 (P = .022). Thymidine incorporation and clonogenic growth of A2058 human melanoma, MDA-MB-231 human breast cancer, OVCAR-3 human ovarian cancer, and 5R-transformed rat embryo fibroblast cell lines were inhibited 60%-80% by 1-10 microM L651582. Intraperitoneal injection of OVCAR-3 cells causes malignant ascites, peritoneal carcinomatosis, and serosal and visceral seeding that, if left untreated, are lethal to nude mice. Intraperitoneal L651582 markedly prolonged survival of nude mice heavily laden with ovarian cancer [mean survival time of treated group divided by mean survival time of control group = 220% (P less than .03)]. The apparent mechanism of action of L651582 is via inhibition of the receptor-mediated stimulation of effector enzymes utilizing guanine nucleotide-binding protein signal transduction, which thus makes L651582 a novel anticancer agent. L651582 should be considered for further clinical development.
Multi-Invariance ESPRIT-Based Blind DOA Estimation for MC-CDMA With an Antenna Array

In this paper, we address the problem of direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation for a multicarrier code-division multiple-access (MC-CDMA) system with an antenna array. We reconstruct the received signal to form a data model with a multi-invariance property, and then, a multi-invariance estimation of signal parameters via rotational invariance technique (ESPRIT) algorithm for DOA estimation is proposed. This algorithm has improved DOA estimation performance and identified more DOAs compared with an ESPRIT algorithm. Moreover, our algorithm enables DOA estimation of a large number of impinging waves. Simulation results illustrate the performance of this algorithm.
Teachers of Students With Emotional and Behavioral Disorders Reported Professional Development Needs: Differences Between Fully Licensed and Emergency-Licensed Teachers

A major provision of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Education Act of 2001 is the guarantee that all students in America's schools will be taught by teachers who are "highly qualified. " At the same time, a large percentage of teachers of students with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD) are not fully licensed teachers, and this has implications in multiple areas, including quality of academic instruction and teacher attrition. The purposes of this study were to examine (a) teacher-reported professional development needs and (b) differences in reported needs between fully licensed and emergency-licensed teachers of students with EBD. Licensed teachers reported greater feelings of competence than did emergencylicensed teachers for each of 6 factors, and 2 of these factor means (Instructional Planning and Classroom Management) were significantly different. Limitations of the current study, as well as implications of the findings, are discussed.
Cross-Packaging of a Single Adeno-Associated Virus (AAV) Type 2 Vector Genome into Multiple AAV Serotypes Enables Transduction with Broad Specificity

ABSTRACT The serotypes of adeno-associated virus (AAV) have the potential to become important resources for clinical gene therapy. In an effort to compare the role of serotype-specific virion shells on vector transduction, we cloned each of the serotype capsid coding domains into a common vector backbone containing AAV type 2 replication genes. This strategy allowed the packaging of AAV2 inverted terminal repeat vectors into each serotype-specific virions. Each of these helper plasmids (pXR1 through pXR5) efficiently replicated the transgene DNA and expressed helper proteins at nearly equivalent levels. In this study, we observed a correlation between the amount of transgene replication and packaging efficiency. The physical titer of these hybrid vectors ranged between 1.3 × 1011 and 9.8 × 1012/ml (types 1 and 2, respectively). Of the five serotype vectors, only types 2 and 3 were efficiently purified by heparin-Sepharose column chromatography, illustrating the high degree of similarity between these virions. We analyzed vector transduction in reference and mutant Chinese hamster ovary cells deficient in heparan sulfate proteoglycan and saw a correlation between transduction and heparan sulfate binding data. In this analysis, types 1 and 5 were most consistent in transduction efficiency across all cell lines tested. In vivo each serotype was ranked after comparison of transgene levels by using different routes of injection and strains of rodents. Overall, in this analysis, type 1 was superior for efficient transduction of liver and muscle, followed in order by types 5, 3, 2, and 4. Surprisingly, this order changed when vector was introduced into rat retina. Types 5 and 4 were most efficient, followed by type 1. These data established a hierarchy for efficient serotype-specific vector transduction depending on the target tissue. These data also strongly support the need for extending these analyses to additional animal models and human tissue. The development of these helper plasmids should facilitate direct comparisons of serotypes, as well as begin the standardization of production for further clinical development.
A Multi-Armed Bandit Approach for Online Expert Selection in Markov Decision Processes

We formulate a multi-armed bandit (MAB) approach to choosing expert policies online in Markov decision processes (MDPs). Given a set of expert policies trained on a state and action space, the goal is to maximize the cumulative reward of our agent. The hope is to quickly find the best expert in our set. The MAB formulation allows us to quantify the performance of an algorithm in terms of the regret incurred from not choosing the best expert from the beginning. We first develop the theoretical framework for MABs in MDPs, and then present a basic regret decomposition identity. We then adapt the classical Upper Confidence Bounds algorithm to the problem of choosing experts in MDPs and prove that the expected regret grows at worst at a logarithmic rate. Lastly, we validate the theory on a small MDP.
A study on an Inter-Vehicle Communication Experiments using Wireless LAN

This paper describes some results of inter-vehicle communication experiments using wireless-LAN. At first, we report bit rate performance of inter-vehicle communications with an oncoming vehicle. Next, we discuss the influence of a size of a shadowing vehicle within inter-vehicle communication vehicles. As shadowing vehicles, we used a motor bike, a mini-sized vehicle, an ordinary-sized vehicle, and a truck.
COUPON: Cooperatively Building Sensing Maps in Mobile Opportunistic Networks

With the popularity and advancements of smartphones, mobile users can sense the city using variety of sensors opportunistically, and forward the sensory data to the monitoring center for building sensing maps through intermittent connections with short-range communications. In order to build sensing maps satisfying specific sensing quality with low delay and energy consumption, we design COUPON, a novel cooperative sensing and data forwarding framework. We first notice that cooperative sensing scheme can eliminate sampling redundancy and hence save energy. Then we design two cooperative forwarding schemes by leveraging data fusion: Epidemic Routing with Fusion (ERF) and Binary Spray-and-Wait with Fusion (BSWF). Different from previous work assuming that all packets are propagated individually, we consider that packets are spatial-temporal correlated in the forwarding process, and derive the dissemination law of correlated packets. We theoretically prove that our cooperative forwarding schemes can achieve better tradeoff between delivery delay and transmission overhead. We evaluate our proposed framework and schemes with real mobile traces. Extensive simulations demonstrate that the cooperative sensing scheme can reduce the number of samplings by 93% compared with the non-cooperative scheme, ERF can reduce the transmission overhead by 78% compared with Epidemic Routing (ER), BSWF can increase the delivery ratio by 16%, and reduce the delivery delay and transmission overhead by 5% and 32% respectively, compared with Binary Spray-and-Wait (BSW).
Comparing Women's Roles in Two Faith-Based Communities with Implications for Value-Based Practice

Abstract This qualitative study compares Evangelical Christian (EC) and ultra Orthodox Jewish (OJ) women, both from conservative, faith-based communities. The findings are clustered around three primary themes-complementary (traditional) gender roles, distrust of outsiders, and the authority of religious leaders. Nine EC women and thirteen ultra OJ women were interviewed for this study, using a modified grounded-theory method. Based on the findings, guidelines for value-based practice with women from these communities are discussed.
Folklore confirmed: reducible flow graphs are exponentially larger

Many program analysis techniques used by compilers are applicable only to programs whose control flow graphs are reducible. Node-splitting is a technique that can be used to convert any control flow graph to a reducible one. However, as has been observed for various node-splitting algorithms, there can be an exponential blowup in the size of the graph.We prove that exponential blowup is unavoidable. In particular, we show that any reducible graph that is equivalent to the complete graph on n nodes (or to related bounded-degree control flow graphs) must have at least 2n-1 nodes. While this result is not a surprise, it may be relevant to the quest for finding methods of obfuscation for software protection.
Estimating single-channel source separation masks: relevance vector machine classifiers vs. pitch-based masking

Audio sources frequently concentrate much of their energy into a relatively small proportion of the available time-frequency cells in a short-time Fourier transform (STFT). This sparsity makes it possible to separate sources, to some degree, simply by selecting STFT cells dominated by the desired source, setting all others to zero (or to an estimate of the obscured target value), and inverting the STFT to a waveform. The problem of source separation then becomes identifying the cells containing good target information. We treat this as a classification problem, and train a Relevance Vector Machine (a probabilistic relative of the Support Vector Machine) to perform this task. We compare the performance of this classifier both against SVMs (it has similar accuracy but is not as efficient as RVMs), and against a traditional Computational Auditory Scene Analysis (CASA) technique based on a noise-robust pitch tracker, which the RVM outperforms significantly. Differences between the RVM- and pitch-tracker-based mask estimation suggest benefits to be obtained by combining both.
Feature Based Dense Stereo Matching using Dynamic Programming and Color

— This paper presents a new feature based dense stereo matching algorithm to obtain the dense disparity map via dynamic programming. After extraction of some proper features, we use some matching constraints such as epipolar line, disparity limit, ordering and limit of directional derivative of disparity as well . Also, a coarse-to-fine multiresolution strategy is used to decrease the search space and therefore increase the accuracy and processing speed. The proposed method links the detected feature points into the chains and compares some of the feature points from different chains, to increase the matching speed. We also employ color stereo matching to increase the accuracy of the algorithm. Then after feature matching, we use the dynamic programming to obtain the dense disparity map. It differs from the classical DP methods in the stereo vision, since it employs sparse disparity map obtained from the feature based matching stage. The DP is also performed further on a scan line, between any matched two feature points on that scan line. Thus our algorithm is truly an optimization method. Our algorithm offers a good trade off in terms of accuracy and computational efficiency. Regarding the results of our experiments, the proposed algorithm increases the accuracy from 20 to 70%, and reduces the running time of the algorithm almost 70%.
Student interests — the German and Austrian ROSE survey

ROSE (the Relevance of Science Education) is an international comparative study on the factors which influence learning in science. For this study, the interests, opinions and attitudes of young people were polled by using a standardised questionnaire. Initial data, empirically gathered from 1247 students at the end of lower secondary level in Germany and Austria, are presented in this study. The findings make it possible to identify typical adolescent topics and give information about the change of adolescent interests in the past 10 years. They verify that above all, contexts connected with health, fitness, mysticism and spectacular events are interesting for today's young generation. Curriculum development can be informed by a better knowledge of girls' and boys' interests in science topics.
Optimal Transmit Spectra for Hdsl2 Optimal Transmit Spectra for Hdsl2

We present a general framework for designing optimal transmit spectra for the HDSL2 service. Using the channel and interference transfer functions and SNR estimates, we set up and solve an optimization problem to maximize the capacity. Sizable gains in performance margins (or bit rates) result. Furthermore, by design, the spectra are spectrally compatible with other services. While the framework is quite general | it does not depend on the exact choice of modulation scheme, for example | it is also extremely simple and of low computational complexity. Our results can be used either for dynamically adapting the signaling spectra to account for changing noise or interference conditions or for the design of new xed transmit spectral masks using worst-case analysis. NOTICE This contribution has been prepared to assist standards Committee T1-Telecommunications. This document is ooered to the Committee as a basis for discussion and is not a binding proposal on Rice University or on any company. The contents are subject to change in form or content after further study. Rice University speciically reserves the right to add to, amend, or withdraw the statements contained herein.
Finite element approximation for the dynamics of asymmetric fluidic biomembranes

We present a parametric finite element approximation of a fluidic membrane, whose evolution is governed by a surface Navier–Stokes equation coupled to bulk Navier–Stokes equations. The elastic properties of the membrane are modelled with the help of curvature energies of Willmore and Helfrich type. Forces stemming from these energies act on the surface fluid, together with a forcing from the bulk fluid. Using ideas from PDE constrained optimization, a weak formulation is derived, which allows for a stable semi-discretization. An important new feature of the present work is that we are able to also deal with spontaneous curvature and an area-difference elasticity contribution in the curvature energy. This allows for the modelling of asymmetric membranes, which compared to the symmetric case lead to quite different shapes. This is demonstrated in the numerical computations presented.
Demonstration of Automatic Data Partitioning Techniques for Parallelizing Compilers on Multicomputers

An approach to the problem of automatic data partitioning is introduced. The notion of constraints on data distribution is presented, and it is shown how, based on performance considerations, a compiler identifies constraints to be imposed on the distribution of various data structures. These constraints are then combined by the compiler to obtain a complete and consistent picture of the data distribution scheme, one that offers good performance in terms of the overall execution time. Results of a study performed on Fortran programs taken from the Linpack and Eispack libraries and the Perfect Benchmarks to determine the applicability of the approach to real programs are presented. The results are very encouraging, and demonstrate the feasibility of automatic data partitioning for programs with regular computations that may be statically analyzed, which covers an extremely significant class of scientific application programs. >
Was Planet 9 captured in the Sun’s natal star-forming region?

The presence of an unseen ‘Planet 9’ on the outskirts of the Solar system has been invoked to explain the unexpected clustering of the orbits of several Edgeworth–Kuiper Belt Objects. We use N-body simulations to investigate the probability that Planet 9 was a free-floating planet (FFLOP) that was captured by the Sun in its birth star formation environment. We find that only 1–6 per cent of FFLOPs are ensnared by stars, even with the most optimal initial conditions for capture in star-forming regions (one FFLOP per star, and highly correlated stellar velocities to facilitate capture). Depending on the initial conditions of the star-forming regions, only 5–10 of 10 000 planets are captured on to orbits that lie within the constraints for Planet 9. When we apply an additional environmental constraint for Solar system formation – namely the injection of short-lived radioisotopes into the Sun’s protoplanetary disc from supernovae – we find the probability for the capture of Planet 9 to be almost zero.
An Ongoing Professional Development Program and Its Impact on Teacher Effectiveness

Professional development (PD) has been identified as a critical mechanism that helps teachers increase students' achievement. However, the content and form of this mechanism varies widely. This study examines an ongoing PD for school teachers, which has been explicitly founded on a set of guiding principles associated with quality professional development. The effects of participation in this program on three domains of teacher effectiveness, measured through classroom observations, are tested in a sample of 153 teachers. The domains of teacher effectiveness are planning and preparation, classroom environment, and instruction. Regression results indicate that participation in this program is significantly related to teachers' scores on instruction only. The implications of this finding indicate that high-quality professional development does not always address all domains of teaching. Other implications derived from the findings point to the need for professional development opportunities to be ongoing and highly focused on improving inquiry-based instruction.
Eliciting Expectations to Develop Trust in Systems

A schema is a mental structure that represents some aspect of the world. Schemata are used to organize current knowledge of the world and to provide a framework for future understanding. When a new situation or capability is encountered, a schema is brought up for comparison and then the schema is altered as necessary. Expectations are part of the mental schema and can determine the fate of a relationship, be the relationship human-human or human-other. As complex socio-technical systems become more ubiquitous and as events become more dynamic, the ‘human-other’ relationship is often human-automation and the automation is a decision support system. Understanding the expectations of the intended user of a capability helps the system designer and developer address those expectations which helps instill trust in the developed capability. While much has been written on trust, understanding expectations that underlie trust has been neglected. This paper will discuss three methods explored to directly elicit expectations thereby enhancing initial trust in human-decision support systems.