Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Japanese version of the Dizziness Handicap Inventory as an index of treatment success: Exploratory factor analysis

Abstract Conclusion: The Japanese version of the Dizziness Handicap Inventory (DHI) is a reliable, comprehensively validated, and clinically useful tool to measure self-perceived handicap associated with dizziness. Objectives: The DHI is a useful instrument to document the consequences of vestibular and/or balance impairment. A Japanese version of this self-assessment inventory is needed to evaluate the handicapping effects imposed by vestibular system disease in Japanese patients. The purpose of this study was to determine the internal consistency of the reliability of the Japanese version of the DHI. Methods: We recruited 176 patients between January and September 2008 from the outpatients of the Department of Otolaryngology, Hino Municipal Hospital, Japan. The DHI was translated into Japanese, and the test was independently completed by each subject. We used principal component analysis to evaluate the different dimensions of the DHI. The internal consistency of the retained factors was investigated by estimating Cronbach's alpha coefficients and corrected item-total correlations. Results: Cronbach's coefficients for internal consistency were high for the total scale (0.93) and good for the subscales: functional subscale (0.87), physical subscale (0.82), and emotional subscale (0.85). The correlation matrix demonstrated that the variables were suited for factor analysis. The determinant was 1.26E–6, which is slightly under the recommended value. Bartlett's test was highly significant (p < 0.0001), and the Kaiser–Meyer–Olkin measure of sampling adequacy was 0.91.
SUPPRESSION OF CELL-MEDIATED IMMUNITY TO INFECTION BY AN ANTIMITOTIC DRUG

The development of acquired cell-mediated immunity to infection with Listeria monocytogenes can be blocked by a 15 hr pulse of the antimitotic drug, vinblastine (Vb). The drug has no effect on the host-parasite relationship after 72 hr of infection when a high level of immunity is being expressed, i.e., when infective foci are populated by activated macrophages. Infective foci in mice treated early during infection with Vb do not acquire migrant macrophages, but they become acellular after 48 hr of infection. The results indicate that Vb destroys the dividing precursors of migrant macrophages. The possibility that Vb prevents the activation of these cells by destroying dividing lymphoid cells engaged in the specific immunological phase of the host response is also considered.
Unsupervised segmentation of words into morphemes - Challenge 2005, An Introduction and Evaluation Report

The objective of the challenge for the unsupervised segmentation of words into morphemes, or shorter the Morpho Challenge, was to design a statistical machine learning algorithm that segments words into the smallest meaning-bearing units of language, morphemes. Ideally, these are basic vocabulary units suitable for different tasks, such as speech and text understanding, machine translation, information retrieval, and statistical language modeling. The segmentations were evaluated in two complementary ways: Competition 1: The proposed morpheme segmentation were compared to a linguistic morpheme segmentation gold standard. Competition 2: Speech recognition experiments were performed, where statistical n-gram language models utilized the proposed word segments instead of entire words. Data sets were provided for three languages: Finnish, English, and Turkish. Participants were encouraged to apply their algorithm to all of these test languages.
A novel approach to model TCP traffic

In this paper, a state-based modelling of TCP traffic is presented. During a connection, TCP stays in one of the following states: slow start, congestion avoidance, loss recovery (fast recovery and/or fast retransmit) and time out. We consider the states of a TCP connection as the phases of a stochastic process. We propose the use of the discrete-time batch Markovian arrival process (D-BMAP) to model the traffic generated by a TCP connection. The main contributions of the paper are the following. Firstly, we provide a simple unified model for some well-known versions of TCP based on the D-BMAP process. Secondly, we introduce a new concept, namely the TCP characterization matrix for a TCP connection that characterizes the transition probabilities between the states of TCP. This matrix is crucial in our state-based analysis. Thirdly, we present a technique to detect the states of TCP. We have developed our technique into a tool called TCP-ASD that automates state detection of a TCP connection. Our tool can automatically detect the beginning and the end of the states of TCP and thus the sojourn time distributions as well as other statistics that we use in our analysis. We also discuss the tradeoffs between simplicity and accuracy in the state-based approach. Finally, we use simulation and numerical analysis to validate our proposed model.
NewsClipping: An automatic multimedia news clipping application

NewsClipping is an indexing and aggregation application for the news domain that manages multimedia information (text, audio and audiovisual documents) without any manual annotation. The joint analysis of the text and audio from electronic newspapers, radio and TV channels provides automatic extracted information to create a multimedia news clipping. The web based interface of NewsClipping has been designed to fulfill the casual browsing paradigm.
In Vitro Effect of Modified Polyetheretherketone (PEEK) Implant Abutments on Human Gingival Epithelial Keratinocytes Migration and Proliferation

Improving soft tissue attachment to implant abutments is a crucial factor for enduring health and maintenance of soft peri-implant tissue health. In this in vitro study we aimed to compare the biocompatibility of three different abutment surfaces: titanium, zirconia and modified polyetheretherketone (PEEK). Surface topography, roughness and wettability were investigated with scanning electron microscopy, profilometer and contact angle meter, respectively. Human gingival epithelial keratinocytes were examined for viability, morphology, proliferation and migration by using tetrazolium salt colorimetric assay, scanning electron microscopy imaging, immunofluorescence bromodeoxyuridine analysis and scratch wound healing assays. Roughness measurements revealed differences between the investigated surfaces. Keratinocytes cultured on all examined surfaces indicated adhesion and attachment by means of scanning electron microscopy imaging. Cell viability assays showed no significant differences between the groups (p > 0.05). The modified PEEK surface similarly improved surface roughness in comparison to titanium and zirconia, which resulted in greater and equivalent cell proliferation and migration. The study methodology showed here may emphasize the importance of cell interactions with different abutment materials, which in part increases the changes of implant success. PEEK, titanium and zirconia surface types used in this study showed mostly similar epithelial biological responses.
Investment in the Future: A 3-Level Approach for Developing the Healthcare Leaders of Tomorrow

Among the numerous challenges facing healthcare leaders is the paucity of well-prepared, effective managers. Cuts in recent years have reduced "bench strength," and the demands of managing in a complex industry are significant. The authors describe a 3-level leadership development program created at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center to meet this challenge. Leadership gaps, content for each level, and outcomes are discussed.
Readiness for school: A relational construct

THE NOTION OF READINESS and what it means to be ready for school dominates much of the popular discussion, as well as the research base, about transition to school. Readiness means different things for different people, yet almost always there is a perception that readiness for school involves some assessment of the characteristics of individual children against some set of standard expectations or desirable attributes. The article explores three aspects of readiness: notions of children's readiness; schools' readiness for children; and family and community supports that underpin readiness. Recognition of the importance of each of these aspects supports the conclusion that a focus only on the characteristics of individual children provides, at best, a narrow and limited conceptualisation of readiness and one that can act against children's best interests.
Scalp Metastasis as a Presenting Symptom of Cervical Squamous Cell Carcinoma.

C ervical cancer spreads via local extension and lymphatic invasion. Hematogenous spread is rare and is usually to the abdominal or thoracic viscera or to bone. Cervical cancer metastatic to the scalp is extremely rarewith only 7 cases reported. We report what we believe is the first case of a patient with scalp metastasis as one of the initial presenting symptoms of a cervical squamous carcinoma. Only consent for treatment was obtained, and therefore, the description has been deidentified to protect privacy.
Recent Research Findings on Stress and Electronic Performance Monitoring

The use of electronic methods to monitor employee work performance has increased substantially in the last decade. One reason is improvements in information technology which make monitoring quick and easy. A second is a growing concern on the part of employers that computer automation has not produced the substantial increases in employee production that they expected. Monitoring provides information which can be used by the employer to manage technological and human resources, enhancing the potential for greater control over the production process. With monitoring it is possible to pinpoint bottlenecks, production delays and below average (or below standard) performers. Because monitoring can increase management control over the production system, it may produce organizational approaches that use the monitored data to direct employee behavior. The application of modern electronic technologies to monitor individual performance raises important issues about the accuracy of the surveillance system and how well it represents worker contributions to the employer's success, the invasion of worker privacy, worker versus technology control over job tasks, and the health and motivation implications of management styles that use monitored information to direct worker behavior on the job. Amick (1986), Smith and Carayon (1989), Smith, Carayon and Miezio (1986) and Smith, Cohen and Stammerjohn (1981) have proposed mechanisms by which changes in technology can affect the design of jobs and produce psychological distress. Underlying these models is the assumption that certain stress-producing approaches to job design invest control of the work process in the technology, allowing it to define the tasks. This 'directive' approach takes away employee discretionary control and decision making. Alternative and
International Journal of Nanomedicine Dovepress Reversible Exposure of Hydrophobic Residues on Albumin as a Novel Strategy for Formulation of Nanodelivery Vehicles for Taxanes

Background: We report herein a novel strategy for the preparation of protein-based nanode-livery vehicles for hydrophobic active pharmaceutical ingredients. Methods: The procedure consisted of three steps, ie, exposure of hydrophobic residues of a protein to a pH-induced partial unfolding: interaction between hydrophobic residues on the protein and the hydrophobic active pharmaceutical ingredient, and a final step where the structure of the protein was reversed to a native-like state by returning to neutral pH. As proof of concept, the interaction of paclitaxel with partially unfolded states of human serum albumin was evaluated as a potential method for the preparation of water-soluble complexes of the taxane with albumin. Results: We found that paclitaxel readily binds to pH-induced partially unfolded albumin, leading to the formation of optically clear water-soluble complexes. The complexes thus formed were more stable in solution when the albumin native state was at least partially restored by neutral-ization of the solution to a pH around 7. It was also observed that the hydrodynamic radius of human serum albumin was only slightly increased after the cycle of pH changes, remaining in a monomeric state with a size according to paclitaxel binding. Furthermore, paclitaxel binding did not affect the overall exposure of charged groups of human serum albumin, as evaluated by its interaction with an ionic exchange resin. Conclusion: The in vitro biological activity of the complexes formed was qualitatively equivalent to that of a Cremophor ®-based formulation.
GENERALIZED INTERPOLATION IN H ∞ WITH A COMPLEXITY CONSTRAINT

In a seminal paper, Sarason generalized some classical interpolation problems for H ∞ functions on the unit disc to problems concerning lifting onto H 2 of an operator T that is deﬁned on K = H 2 (cid:1) φH 2 ( φ is an inner function) and commutes with the (compressed) shift S . In particular, he showed that interpolants (i.e., f ∈ H ∞ such that f ( S ) = T ) having norm equal to (cid:3) T (cid:3) exist, and that in certain cases such an f is unique and can be expressed as a fraction f = b/a with a,b ∈ K . In this paper, we study interpolants that are such fractions of K functions and are bounded in norm by 1 (assuming that (cid:3) T (cid:3) < 1, in which case they always exist). We parameterize the collection of all such pairs ( a,b ) ∈ K × K and show that each interpolant of this type can be determined as the unique minimum of a convex functional. Our motivation stems from the relevance of classical interpolation to circuit theory, systems theory, and signal processing, where φ is typically a ﬁnite Blaschke product, and where the quotient representation is a physically meaningful complexity constraint.
Rapid and non-destructive determination of rancidity levels in butter cookies by multi-spectral imaging.

BACKGROUND Rancidity is an important attribute for quality assessment of butter cookies, while traditional methods for rancidity measurement are usually laborious, destructive and prone to operational error. In the present paper, the potential of applying multi-spectral imaging (MSI) technology with 19 wavelengths in the range of 405-970 nm to evaluate the rancidity in butter cookies was investigated. RESULTS Moisture content, acid value and peroxide value were determined by traditional methods and then related with the spectral information by partial least squares regression (PLSR) and back-propagation artificial neural network (BP-ANN). The optimal models for predicting moisture content, acid value and peroxide value were obtained by PLSR. The correlation coefficient (r) obtained by PLSR models revealed that MSI had a perfect ability to predict moisture content (r = 0.909), acid value (r = 0.944) and peroxide value (r = 0.971). CONCLUSION The study demonstrated that the rancidity level of butter cookies can be continuously monitored and evaluated in real-time by the multi-spectral imaging, which is of great significance for developing online food safety monitoring solutions.
Salient object detection using a fuzzy theoretic approach

Color is the most dominant feature used by the human brain to perceive an image region to be salient. Since size, shape, location and colors of salient objects vary widely, a fuzzy rule based system is proposed in this paper which uses color proximity, color spread, connected components and presence of a face as linguistic variables. These rules are learned using a genetic algorithm. The colorspace used is the CIELab colorspace which closely conforms with human perception of colors. A publicly available image dataset is used for training and testing the system. Comparisons with existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of precision, recall and F-Measure have been presented.
An approximate message passing approach for compressive hyperspectral imaging using a simultaneous low-rank and joint-sparsity prior

This paper considers a compressive sensing (CS) approach for hyperspectral data acquisition, which results in a practical compression ratio substantially higher than the state-of-the-art. Applying simultaneous low-rank and joint-sparse (L&S) model to the hyperspectral data, we propose a novel algorithm to joint reconstruction of hyperspectral data based on loopy belief propagation that enables the exploitation of both structured sparsity and amplitude correlations in the data. Experimental results with real hyperspectral datasets demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art CS-based solutions with substantial reductions in reconstruction error.
Millimeter-Wave Radar and Machine Vision-Based Lane Recognition

Camera can sensor the environment on the lane by extracting the lane lines, but such detection is limited to a short distance with effect of illumination and other factors; radar can detect objects a long distance away but cannot detect the lane conditions. This paper combined machine vision with millimeter-wave radar and extracted the nearby distinct lane line through images; at the same time, the radar obtained the motion trajectory information of distant vehicles, then the least-square method was used to make curve fitting on those motion trajectory information in order to reconstruct the lane line information. Finally, in the stage of fusing two segments of lane lines, the goodness of fit was applied to complete the matching of corresponding lane lines. While, for areas between two segments of lane lines that neither camera or radar can detect, we established a lane model, utilized probabilistic neural network to select the corresponding lane model for matching, and then used approximate mathematics expression according to the selected lane model, thus obtaining the final front road information of current vehicle.
Carbon Materials as Additives to WO3 for an Enhanced Conversion of Simulated Solar Light

We have explored the impact of the incorporation of nanoporous carbons as additives to tungsten oxide on the photocatalytic degradation of two recalcitrant pollutants: rhodamine B and phenol, under simulated solar light. For this purpose, WO3/carbon mixtures were prepared using three carbon materials with different properties (in terms of porosity, structural order and surface chemistry). Despite the low carbon content used (2 wt. %), a significant increase in the photocatalytic performance of the semiconductor was observed for all the catalysts. Moreover, the influence of the carbon additive on the performance of the photocatalysts was found to be very different for the two pollutants. Carbon additives of hydrophobic nature increased the photodegradation yield of phenol compared to bare WO3, likely due to the higher affinity and stronger interactions of phenol molecules towards basic nanoporous carbons. Oppositely, the use of acidic carbon additives led to higher rhodamine B conversions due to increased acidity of the WO3/carbon mixtures and the stronger affinity of the pollutant for acidic catalyst’s surfaces. As a result, the photooxidation of rhodamine B is favored by means of a coupled (photosensitized and photocatalytic) degradation mechanism. All these results highlight the importance of favoring the interactions of the pollutant with the catalyst’s surface through a detailed design of the features of the photocatalyst.
Matching users and items across domains to improve the recommendation quality

Given two homogeneous rating matrices with some overlapped users/items whose mappings are unknown, this paper aims at answering two questions. First, can we identify the unknown mapping between the users and/or items? Second, can we further utilize the identified mappings to improve the quality of recommendation in either domain? Our solution integrates a latent space matching procedure and a refining process based on the optimization of prediction to identify the matching. Then, we further design a transfer-based method to improve the recommendation performance. Using both synthetic and real data, we have done extensive experiments given different real life scenarios to verify the effectiveness of our models. The code and other materials are available at http://www.csie. ntu.edu. tw/~r00922051/matching/
Towards a Meta Aspect for Traceability

Crosscutting concerns are represented in different ways using different artefacts throughout the life cycle. The evolution of crosscutting concerns must be controlled to guarantee the consistency of requirements and to avoid costly rework. This control capability is, in essence, traceability. This paper describes an initial general vision of how traceability of crosscutting concerns can be supported and controlled by means of a Meta Aspect for Traceability. This permits us to explore semantic consistency and completeness as basic characteristics to trace crosscutting concerns. Currently, each existing approach provides a set of elements with which we can conform a general semantics with formal validation properties that support and control the traceability of crosscutting concerns at the early stages of the software development process.
Optimization of lead-free wave soldering process using taguchi orthogonal arrays

Process of lead-free soldering is deeply monitored starting from July 2006, when RoHS directive was activated. The goal of the work was to analyze influence of 4 control parameters of a process of lead-free soldering on bridging and filling of through holes on a test board. Following control parameters (factors) were taken into account: the solder temperature, the time of a contact between the soldered area and solder, the preheating temperature and flux wettability. Every factor was used in 3 levels. Taguchi orthogonal array of the type L9 was used for process analysis. The analysis showed that bridging is influenced with the preheating temperature and with the time of a contact between solder and a pad dominantly, influence of the solder temperature is minimal. The filling of the through hole depends above all on the preheating temperature; influence of other control parameters is low. It has been also confirmed effectiveness of the use of Taguchi orthogonal array in comparison with full factorial experiments.
Dynamics of a ring-laser gyroscope with backscattering.

We analyze the standard third-order model describing a laser gyroscope with backscattering in the two limiting cases of dissipative and conservative coupling. In both cases wediscuss the steady-state and periodic solutions, determine their stability, and construct the locking diagram. In particular, in the dissipative coupling case, an exact priodic solution is found analytically. It isalso proved that the concepts developed in the passive-cavity problem are useful tools to understand thedynamics of the laser gyroscope
Modeling and Simulation of Junctionless Double Gate Radiation Sensitive FET (RADFET) Dosimeter

A junctionless double gate radiation sensitive FET (RADFET) has been proposed to improve the radiation sensitivity and its application as CMOS-based dosimeter is discussed. Analytical model has been developed from 2D Poisson equation using variable separation technique and electrical performance of the proposed architecture has been compared with the conventional double gate (DG) RADFET. The comparison of device characteristics shows that the JL DG RADFET exhibits better electrical performance and sensitivity as compare to conventional DG RADFET. The model is verified using ATLAS 3D device simulation software.