Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
High Level of Endotoxemia Following Out-of-Hospital Cardiac Arrest Is Associated With Severity and Duration of Postcardiac Arrest Shock*

Objective:To investigate the contribution of endotoxemia to the severity of postcardiac arrest shock. Design:A prospective monocentric study. Setting:A tertiary hospital in Paris, France. Patients:Patients admitted in our ICU after a successfully resuscitated out-of-hospital cardiac arrest. Interventions:None. Measurements and Main Results:Endotoxin measurement was performed in the 12 hours following return of spontaneous circulation using the endotoxin activity assay. Endotoxin level was classified as low (< 0.4 endotoxin activity), intermediate (0.4 to < 0.6 endotoxin activity), or high (≥ 0.6 endotoxin activity) according to manufacture guidelines. Severity of shock was assessed by the vasopressor-free days and by the mean daily dose of vasopressor to insure a mean arterial pressure of 65–75 mm Hg. Among 92 patients included in the study, 60 presented a postcardiac arrest shock. Endotoxemia level was higher in patients with postcardiac arrest shock. Among these patients, by multivariate linear regression, high endotoxin class (adjusted estimate –2.0; 95% CI, –3.90 to –0.11), public place of cardiac arrest (adjusted estimate, 1.47; 95% CI, 0.007 to 2.93), and time to return of spontaneous circulation (adjusted estimate –0.08; 95% CI, –0.13 to –0.03) were independently associated with the number of vasopressor-free days. Furthermore, high endotoxin class (adjusted estimate, 97.95; 95% CI, 20.5 to 175.4) and a nonshockable rhythm (adjusted estimate, 59.9; 95% CI, 6.2 to 113.7) were the sole factors independently associated with the mean daily dose of vasopressors. Conclusions:In patients successfully resuscitated from cardiac arrest with a postcardiac arrest shock, high level of endotoxemia is independently associated with duration of postcardiac arrest shock and the amount of vasopressive drugs. Whether treatment targeting endotoxemia could be beneficial in the management of postcardiac arrest shock needs to be studied in further randomized controlled studies.
The improved KICA method based on wavelet transform for industrial process monitoring

With the continuous development of large-scale, continuous and complex industries process, the reliability and safety requirements are getting higher and higher of the industrial equipment and control system. Process monitoring has become one of the most important research directions in process automation. In this paper, the ICA-based continuous industrial process system monitoring methods were studied in depth; furthermore, the problem of sorting the independent components in the ICA method is described in detail; at last, make full use of the advantages of independent component analysis, proposed improved fault diagnosis method. The simulation application shows the advantages of the proposed method.
Cultural Differences in Perception of Family Obligation and Request Compliance in China and the US

This study attempts to investigate whether obligation is seen as aversive or benevolent among participants in China (n = 205) and in the U.S. (n = 164). It is found that compared to Chinese, Americans showed a greater benevolent and less aversive perception as the level of obligation increased. Benevolent obligation perception mediated the impact of gratitude, reciprocity and the degree of obligation on compliance, and gratitude negatively predicted the aversive perception of obligation. Both cultural groups complied with the request in the high obligation condition, but Chinese showed more compliance in the low obligation condition compared to Americans. The results suggest that obligation is not seen as universally aversive. More testing of obligation perception and request compliance across cultures needs to be conducted to see whether results of this study find replication and support.
Firm life cycle and advisory directors

This article investigates whether the presence of advisory directors and monitoring directors varies across firm life cycle stages. We follow a parsimonious life cycle proxy based on the predicted behaviour of operating, investing and financing cash flows across the different life cycle stages that result from firm performance and the allocation of resources. Using an Australian sample, this study shows that compared to mature-stage firms, firms in the introduction, shake-out and decline stages have more advisory directors. With respect to the demand for monitoring directors, we find that compared to mature-stage firms, firms in the introduction, shake-out and decline stages have fewer monitoring directors on the board. We contribute to the literature on boards of directors by documenting that firms choose an optimal board structure based on their economic characteristics. JEL Classification: D22, G38, M14
Ovahimba community in Namibia ventures into crowdsourcing design

Mobile crowdsourcing presents a new avenue for remote communities to participate in socio-economic activities. We are co-designing a mobile crowdsourcing platform to support rural indigenous communities in formulating their own tasks to be crowdsourced rather than completing tasks for others. We present one full simulated cycle of task formulation and evaluation by a pilot indigenous community in Northern Namibia. Observations and interactions led to a set of requirements and design implications to support the inclusion of the OvaHimba tribe communities into crowdsourcing activities.
Improving Opinion-based Entity Ranking

We examine the problem of entity ranking using opinions expressed in users' reviews. There is a massive development of opinions and reviews on the web, which includes reviews of products and services, and opinions about events and persons. For products especially, there are thousands of users' reviews, that consumers usually consult before proceeding in a purchase. In this study we are following the idea of turning the entity ranking problem into a matching preferences problem. This allows us to approach its solution using any standard information retrieval model. Building on this framework, we examine techniques which use sentiment and clustering information, and we suggest the naive consumer model. We describe the results of two sets of experiments and we show that the proposed techniques deliver interesting
Selective sharpness enhancement of corrupted old film sequences by coupled nonlinear reaction-diffusion time-evolution

In old movie film, most of sharp brightness transitions have been blurred, and film materials are often corrupted by several distortions such as blotches. To restore original edge sharpness without augmenting visibility of such distortions, first we characterize such distortion areas, repair them and then sharpen only blurred edges selectively. This paper presents a locally-adaptive sharpening method based on the coupled nonlinear reaction-diffusion time-evolution equipped with a second-order nonlinear smoothing term, a reaction term and an overshooting term. The overshooting term adds an overshoot only to the blurred edges. The coupled nonlinear reaction-diffusion method utilizes information about local image contents and the characterized film distortions, to control the degree of the second-order smoothing and the magnitude of the overshoot to be added. Our method sharpens blurred edges selectively much better than our previously presented adaptive peaking method. Our method, of course, is applicable to sharpness enhancement of general blurred images.
Effectiveness of a quality improvement intervention for adolescent depression in primary care clinics: a randomized controlled trial.

CONTEXT Depression is a common condition associated with significant morbidity in adolescents. Few depressed adolescents receive effective treatment for depression in primary care settings. OBJECTIVE To evaluate the effectiveness of a quality improvement intervention aimed at increasing access to evidence-based treatments for depression (particularly cognitive-behavior therapy and antidepressant medication), relative to usual care, among adolescents in primary care practices. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS Randomized controlled trial conducted between 1999 and 2003 enrolling 418 primary care patients with current depressive symptoms, aged 13 through 21 years, from 5 health care organizations purposively selected to include managed care, public sector, and academic medical center clinics in the United States. INTERVENTION Usual care (n = 207) or 6-month quality improvement intervention (n = 211) including expert leader teams at each site, care managers who supported primary care clinicians in evaluating and managing patients' depression, training for care managers in manualized cognitive-behavior therapy for depression, and patient and clinician choice regarding treatment modality. Participating clinicians also received education regarding depression evaluation, management, and pharmacological and psychosocial treatment. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Depressive symptoms assessed by Center for Epidemiological Studies-Depression Scale (CES-D) score. Secondary outcomes were mental health-related quality of life assessed by Mental Health Summary Score (MCS-12) and satisfaction with mental health care assessed using a 5-point scale. RESULTS Six months after baseline assessments, intervention patients, compared with usual care patients, reported significantly fewer depressive symptoms (mean [SD] CES-D scores, 19.0 [11.9] vs 21.4 [13.1]; P = .02), higher mental health-related quality of life (mean [SD] MCS-12 scores, 44.6 [11.3] vs 42.8 [12.9]; P = .03), and greater satisfaction with mental health care (mean [SD] scores, 3.8 [0.9] vs 3.5 [1.0]; P = .004). Intervention patients also reported significantly higher rates of mental health care (32.1% vs 17.2%, P<.001) and psychotherapy or counseling (32.0% vs 21.2%, P = .007). CONCLUSIONS A 6-month quality improvement intervention aimed at improving access to evidence-based depression treatments through primary care was significantly more effective than usual care for depressed adolescents from diverse primary care practices. The greater uptake of counseling vs medication under the intervention reinforces the importance of practice interventions that include resources to enable evidence-based psychotherapy for depressed adolescents.
Experiences Using Cooperative Work Assignments for Outcomes Assessment

At the authors’ institution, all engineering students are required to complete three semesters of full-time cooperative work experience. For each co-op assignment, three different metrics are used to evaluate the experience, and each metric has been designed to gather program assessment data. Metric 1: Approximately mid semester, a faculty member visits each student at their employment site, meeting with both the student and their supervisor(s). At the site visit, the faculty member collects assessment data on the student’s performance, how well the institution has prepared the student, and educational areas that the employer feels can be improved. Feedback gathered during the faculty member’s visit is recorded using a common report template. Metric 2: At the end of the co-op assignment, the students complete an online, selfevaluation of their experience. A significant portion of the student self-evaluation is focused on assessment of the ABET outcomes. For each program outcome, the students are asked to rate how important the outcome was to their job assignment, how prepared they were to apply the outcome, and how much their co-op experience contributed to development of the skills in the outcome. Metric 3: Also at the completion of the co-op assignment, the students’ supervisors complete an online survey. The employer survey focuses exclusively on collecting data related to the ABET program outcomes. Analogous to the student self-evaluations, the employers are asked to state the importance of each program outcome, how prepared the students were to apply the outcome, and the extent to which they observed further development of the skill. At the close of each semester, numerical data along with written comments from all three metrics are compiled in summary reports for use in program assessment and continuous improvement. Such data have been collected over the past 9 years and serve as the cornerstone for assessing the institution’s engineering programs. The paper includes the following: an overview of the institution’s co-op process; details on the forms and methods used to collect the data; illustrative data collected over the past 10 years; insights and lessons learned; illustrative examples of how the data have been used for continuous improvement; and summary feedback from ABET program evaluators.
Performance and Competitiveness of Small and Medium Sized Manufacturing Enterprises in Botswana

For SMEs to realise their full potential as an engine of growth, it is important to create a favourable environment that allows them to expand and prosper. Despite the Government of Botswana’s past and present notable initiatives to make the environment conducive for SMEs and other businesses th rough such schemes as the Financial Assistance Policy (FAP) and the Citizen E n t re p re n e u rial Development Agency (CEDA), re c e n t studes seem to bemoan the existence of a business environment that still needs a lot of improvement. This study is an expedition to find out, using a more inquisitive approach, the state of affairs for doing business vis-avis the performance and competitiveness of the SMEs. As a firm-level survey, the study investigates the SME firms in an attempt to answer questions pertaining to their performance and competitiveness.
Pitfalls in the pursuit of objectivity: issues of validity, efficiency and acceptability

Summary. In a previous article the distinction is made between objectivity and objectification. Objectivity is considered a generic goal of measurement, marked by freedom of subjective influences in general, whereas the latter term is used to describe strategies to reduce measurement error. A survey of several studies indicated that objectified methods are not intrinsically more reliable than subjective measures.
Does Creation of a Grantor Retained Annuity Trust Provide Information to the Market?

This study uses publicly-available information to examine the information content of executive-created Grantor Retained Annuity Trusts (GRATs) using executive corporate stock. GRATs have the potential to transfer excess returns tax-free to beneficiaries and hence many GRATs may be funded with executives’ shares when the executives have inside knowledge regarding future company performance. We find that executives securities placed in a GRAT earn mean returns that significantly outperform the market over one and two year holding periods. Our findings are more pronounced for executive securities for smaller firms placed in a GRAT, consistent with more information being available to the market for larger firms. Consistent with our expectations, the highest returns are earned in industries with greater business opportunities or investment in research and development. These results are of interest to finance and accounting academics as it demonstrates that information regarding future stock returns can be learned from the estate planning of a firm's executives. In addition, these results are of interest to policy-makers as they consider how GRATS should be regulated in the future.
Environmental, social and governance (esg) disclosure and its effect on firm's performance: A comparative study

The purpose of this paper is to identify the level of disclosure based on different regulatory requirements on Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) information while exploring its effect on the firm’s performance comparatively between Malaysia an emerging economy and Denmark as a benchmark of good practice. Top 100 largest companies listed each in Bursa Malaysia and Nasdaq OMX Copenhagen are selected. Content analysis on companies’ annual report and stand-alone reports produced in 2013 is carried out using a modified ESG disclosure index based on prior studies and established global standards. A one year lag consideration is used on firm’s performance. A significant difference was found on the ESG disclosure level between countries and different ESG element is being emphasized by each countries. However, the finding was not as expected, even though legislative pressure does exist in Denmark, it fail to prove that disclosure in Denmark is higher or more comprehensive than Malaysia, a country without any specific requisite on ESG. No association was found between ESG disclosure level and firm’s financial performance. This study provides the evidence that there is significant influence of the country’s regulatory background on the firm’s ESG disclosure level. This has an important implication for Bursa Malaysia’s policy with the recent introduction of FTSE4Good ESG Index in Dec 2014 by the stock exchange that would be an advantage for Malaysian market to attract the social responsible investors around the world. JEL Classification: A13, M14, P23 Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) Disclosure and Its Effect on Firm’s Performance: A Comparative Study International Journal of Economics and Management
Measuring the Efficiency of Digital Communities: A Case Study

A new type of citizen participation has recently emerged in the Islamic Middle East countries through discourse on social media Websites, which opened up opportunities for citizens’ participation in socio-political movements. Despite Internet restrictions in the form of heavy imposed state filtering and censorship, the Internet and its various applications provide effective communication channels for acquiring free information and disseminating thoughts, ideas, opinions, reflections and information sharing about socio-cultural, political, environmental and economic matters. The results of this empirical study show that there is a linkage between information usage and citizens’ organized social actions, in the form of waves of street demonstrations, as we have seen across the region, as citizens demand a more open society, freedom and democracy. By applying the theory of new media communication, this study has found that Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has not only played an important role in building digital communities across the region, but also citizens’ who use effectively and efficiently ICT communication channels are more likely to participate in political discourse and mobilization.
Dependable communication using multiple network paths on fast long-distance networks

For mission critical jobs in distributed computing, a network with a low packet loss rate and no failures is required. The multiple paths method has been studied as a means to achieve dependable communication with tolerable failures. It recovers from failures on a network using the same packet on another path. Since the speed of a long-distance network becomes faster, dependable communication that tolerates network latency becomes more important. We built a prototype system of a multiple paths method supporting Gigabit Ethernet speed using GtrcNET1, a gigabit network testbed. We evaluated it and confirmed that it can continuously communicate even if a path fails, and it achieved a packet loss rate as low as the product of packet loss rates on both paths. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Comp Jpn, 38(12): 46–54, 2007; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/scj.20807
Infocarve: A Framework for Volume Visualization on Commodity Augmented Reality Displays

We present a framework for interactive real-time visualization of three-dimensional volume data on commodity augmented reality (AR) displays. In particular, we address the problem of seamlessly blending internal anatomy data sets with real-world objects. One key challenge, particularly relevant to this scenario, is conveying the correct sense of relative depths of virtual and real world objects. To address this issue, we exploit information captured by a depth sensor to build a mask which is used as a weighting parameter to correctly combine rendered volume images with real imagery in a depth-preserving manner. Results obtained on prototype AR hardware devices indicate improvements to relative depth perception. Furthermore, we address performance challenges and provide solutions to ensure that the framework is applicable to a range of different AR devices, many of whom have limited computational and graphical rendering capabilities.
Hyaluronan oligosaccharide-induced activation of transcription factors in bovine articular chondrocytes.

OBJECTIVE To document the activity profile of transcription factors following chondrocyte stimulation with hyaluronan (HA) hexasaccharides (HA(6)) and to determine the expression of genes whose transcriptional activation is tightly associated with the transcription factors. METHODS Nuclear extracts from bovine articular chondrocytes treated with HA(6) were subjected to transcription factor protein-DNA array analysis. Electrophoretic mobility shift assay (EMSA) analyses were performed to confirm the results of protein-DNA array. The gene expressions of matrix metalloproteinase 3 (MMP-3), type II collagen, and cartilage oligomeric matrix protein (COMP) were examined by quantitative real-time reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR), and protease activity was assessed by casein zymography. RESULTS In the protein-DNA array analysis, 12 transcription factors were up-regulated and 2 transcription factors were down-regulated in the chondrocytes treated with HA(6). The transcription factors retinoic acid receptor (RAR), retinoid X receptor (RXR), and Sp-1 exhibited >2-fold increased activity by HA(6) treatment, as confirmed by EMSA. RT-PCR analysis showed that the expression levels of MMP-3, type II collagen, and COMP messenger RNA, which are tightly associated with the activation of RAR, RXR, or Sp-1, were up-regulated by treatment with HA(6). Addition of high molecular mass HA after HA(6) treatment resulted in abrogation of the MMP-3 induction. CONCLUSION These results suggest that HA(6) increase the activity of multiple transcription factors in chondrocytes and signal the enhanced expression of key genes involved in cartilage-matrix remodeling and turnover. The data also demonstrate that high molecular mass HA has a potential to suppress the signaling activated by HA(6).