Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Discordance between CT and angiography in the PIOPED II study.

PURPOSE To retrospectively evaluate the causes of discordant computed tomographic (CT)-angiographic readings from the Prospective Investigation of Pulmonary Embolism Diagnosis, or PIOPED, II study. MATERIALS AND METHODS Institutional review board approval was obtained for this HIPAA-compliant study. Of 1036 patients suspected of having pulmonary embolism who were examined with CT, 226 underwent angiography; 206 patients had concordant results and 20 had discordant results according to two independent readers. Of these 20 patients, 10 were men and 10 were women (mean age, 49 years). Among the 20 studies with discordant results, central readers identified seven cases as negative and 13 as positive for pulmonary embolism at CT; these findings were reversed at angiography. Side-by-side comparisons of discordant studies were performed in consensus. The time between CT and angiography and all locations of pulmonary embolism vascular territory were recorded. The McNemar binomial test was used. RESULTS One patient had false-positive findings at angiography, 13 patients had false-negative findings at angiography, and two patients had false-negative findings at CT. Four patients had true-negative findings at CT; however, findings were positive for thrombus at angiography. The sensitivity for the detection of pulmonary embolism was 87% for CT and 32% for angiography (P=.007). The largest missed thrombus at angiography was subsegmental in eight patients, segmental in two patients, and lobar in three patients; at CT it was subsegmental in two patients. The mean time between CT and angiography was 40 hours+/-21 (standard deviation) (range, 10-97 hours). CONCLUSION In the interval between CT and angiography, thrombi can remain the same, resolve, develop, or result from angiography.
Low temperature plasma biomedicine: A tutorial reviewa)

Gas discharge plasmas formed at atmospheric pressure and near room temperature have recently been shown to be potentially useful for surface and wound sterilization, antisepsis, bleeding cessation, wound healing, and cancer treatment, among other biomedical applications. This tutorial review summarizes the field, stressing the likely role of reactive oxygen and nitrogen species created in these plasmas as the biologically and therapeutically active agents. Reactive species, including radicals and non-radical compounds, are generated naturally within the body and are now understood to be essential for normal biological functions. These species are known to be active agents in existing therapies for wound healing, infection control, and cancer treatment. But they are also observed at elevated levels in persons with many diseases and are associated with aging. The physical and chemical complexity of plasma medical devices and their associated biochemical effects makes the development of safe, effective plasm.
Word prediction and communication rate in AAC

Word prediction systems can reduce the number of keystrokes required to form a message in a letter-based AAC system. It has been questioned, however, whether such savings translate into an enhanced communication rate due to the additional overhead (e.g., shifting of focus and repeated scanning of a prediction list) required in using such a system. Our hypothesis is that word prediction has high potential for enhancing AAC communication rate, but the amount is dependent in a complex way on the accuracy of the predictions. Due to significant user interface variations in AAC systems and the potential bias of prior word prediction experience on existing devices, this hypothesis is difficult to verify. We present a study of two different word prediction methods compared against letter-by-letter entry at simulated AAC communication rates. We find that word prediction systems can in fact speed communication rate (an advanced system gave a 58.6% improvement), and that a more accurate word prediction system can raise communication rate higher than is explained by the additional accuracy of the system alone due to better utilization (93.6% utilization for advanced vs. 78.2% for basic).
Organization of the Curriculum

THE BEST and most efficient way to select and organize the experiences which the school provides to children is a perennial question, open to constant scrutiny and discussion. It should also be a question subject to research. This chapter reviews the research of the last few years. Inasmuch as the June 1957 issue of the REVIEW dealt with curriculum planning and development, an effort has been made to avoid duplication. Research workers and students of curriculums are urged to supplement this discussion by reference to that issue.
Assessment of Playfulness: Hermann Rorschach Meets D. W. Winnicott

This article discusses the importance of playfulness as an indicator of psychological health. The work of Winnicott (1971) and Schachtel (1966) is discussed, and some criteria are offered for scoring playfulness using the Rorschach. Case materials are presented to illustrate aspects of scoring and to illuminate the use of a procedure that asks the patient to provide playful responses after administering the Rorschach using the Comprehensive System.
Phylogenetics and Gene Structure Dynamics of Polygalacturonase Genes in Aspergillus and Neurospora crassa

Polygalacturonase (PG) gene is a typical gene family present in eukaryotes. Forty-nine PGs were mined from the genomes of Neurospora crassa and five Aspergillus species. The PGs were classified into 3 clades such as clade 1 for rhamno-PGs, clade 2 for exo-PGs and clade 3 for exo- and endo-PGs, which were further grouped into 13 sub-clades based on the polypeptide sequence similarity. In gene structure analysis, a total of 124 introns were present in 44 genes and five genes lacked introns to give an average of 2.5 introns per gene. Intron phase distribution was 64.5% for phase 0, 21.8% for phase 1, and 13.7% for phase 2, respectively. The introns varied in their sequences and their lengths ranged from 20 bp to 424 bp with an average of 65.9 bp, which is approximately half the size of introns in other fungal genes. There were 29 homologous intron blocks and 26 of those were sub-clade specific. Intron losses were counted in 18 introns in which no obvious phase preference for intron loss was observed. Eighteen introns were placed at novel positions, which is considerably higher than those of plant PGs. In an evolutionary sense both intron loss and gain must have taken place for shaping the current PGs in these fungi. Together with the small intron size, low conservation of homologous intron blocks and higher number of novel introns, PGs of fungal species seem to have recently undergone highly dynamic evolution.
The SOLINUT study: analysis of the interaction between nutrition and loneliness in persons aged over 70 years.

BACKGROUND Insufficient nutritional status is a frequent problem in the elderly, correlated with aging, diseases, but also environmental factors in this growing part of the population. Loneliness should be one of these factors. OBJECTIVE AND DESIGN the aim of the SOLINUT study was to determine the relationship between loneliness and nutritional status in persons aged over 70 years, in order to improve the detection and management of the isolated elderly at high risk of malnutrition. It was both an epidemiological and cross-sectional anthropological study, based on quantitative and qualitative nutritional and sociological investigation, carried out between March 2002 and May 2003 in 150 elderly persons (mean age 80.8 years, oldest subject 99 years) living alone at home. RESULTS a large number of subjects had a dietary intake which was inadequate to cover their nutritional needs--42.6% less than 25 kcal/kg/day, threshold for undernutrition in the elderly--21.3% had established undernutrition, ( average in epidemiological studies in non isolated elderly populations: 3-7%)--44% were not able to carry a shopping bag weighing 5 kg and so could not buy their own food. Lastly, 32% never shared a meal with family or friends, which reveals their degree of social isolation. CONCLUSION It has been demonstrated that greater coordination between the various service providers would prevent a large number of isolated persons from failing to obtain the various allocations and services available to them. We must stress the extreme importance of preemptive intervention, by an active screening policy which could simultaneously prevent undernutrition and encourage physical activity in isolated persons to avoid their becoming "excluded recluses".
Seamless Integration of Ethics

The ineffectiveness of business ethics education has received attention from the popular press and the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business after repeated ethics scandals. One possibility is that teaching ethics is different from other content areas because ethics is best learned when the student does not know it is being taught. This paper examines a teaching technique that could be used in any business class to incorporate ethics education with a significant advantage over current methods. Students learn to recognize ethical dilemmas without prompts and by making bad decisions and suffering the consequences (in class). The results of pre- and posttest measures are reported as well as several advantages of the technique.
Contextualizing the features of the psychological contract: the case of Malta

Purpose – The psychological contract is defined as a perceived exchange agreement of promissory obligations between employee and organization. Most approaches to this concept ignore the role of context in shaping its features. However, others have pointed out the need to evaluate the features of the construct within the context in which it is studied. Three salient features of the construct include the use of the term “promises” versus “obligations”, its implicit nature and reference to the “other” party, and the exchange content. Rousseau and Schalk suggest that these features are weighted and interpreted differently across different countries. The purpose of this paper is to test this proposition in the island state of Malta, a European Union micro‐state.Design/methodology/approach – Semi‐structured interviews are used. Three questions are addressed: do employment obligations vary from promises in this context? Are employment obligations in this context necessarily explicited? Who is considered the empl.
A Novel Biometric Cryptosystem using LDPC and SHA based Iris Recognition

We use Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) error correction code to solve fuzziness i.e., the variability and noise in iris code generated from Iris Recognition System (IRS) and Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA-512) to transform unique iris code into hash string to make them as a Cancellable Biometric. SHA-512 hash string is used as a key for 512 bits Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) encryption process. In the decryption process, Hash comparison is made between new hash generated by SHA-512 from error corrected iris code and hash stored in smart card. If authentic, 512 bits AES decryption is accomplished. Experiments indicate that, use of LDPC code results in better separation between genuine and impostor users which improves the performance of this novel cryptosystem. Security of this system is very high, which is 2 under birthday attack. AES algorithm is enhanced by using 512 bits key and increasing the number of rounds. General Terms Iris Pattern Recognition, Cryptography, Computer Security.
Residential Mobility in a Constrained Housing Market: Implications for Ethnic Populations in Germany

The rates of residential mobility in Germany are significantly lower than in the United States, and even lower than in some other European countries. The lower mobility rates can be viewed as outcomes of a ‘tight’ housing market. It can be hypothesized that, because ethnic minorities (‘foreigners’ in German terminology) have lower incomes and face discrimination, they are likely to be more constrained than the native-born German population, and so have even lower mobility rates. The authors use data from the German Socio-Economic Panel and a series of logistic regression models to examine the interaction of nationality and residential mobility. They show that in fact the foreign-born population is slightly more mobile than the native German population, and that the constrained housing market does not appear to affect the foreign-born population differentially. At the same time, the greater mobility of the foreign-born population can be explained by their attempts to overcome higher rates of crowding.
Occlusion-aware HMM-based tracking by learning

Recently, an emerging class of methods, namely tracking by detection, achieved quite promising results on challenging tracking data sets. These techniques train a classifier in an online manner to separate the object from its background. These methods only take input location of the object and a random feature pool; then, a classifier bootstraps itself by using the current tracker state and extracted positive and negative samples. Following these approaches, a novel tracking system is proposed. A feature selection method is introduced to increase the discriminative power of the classifier. During tracking, a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) is utilized to filter the features that improve the performance. Moreover, a state of the proposed HMM is allocated to handle occlusions. The proposed tracker is tested on publicly available challenging video sequences and superior tracking results are achieved in real-time.
Robust adaptive neural tracking control for a class of electrically driven robots with time delays

This article addresses the problem of designing the robust tracking control for a class of uncertain electrically driven robots with time delays. The unknown time-delay uncertainty is assumed to be bounded by a function of all the state variables. By suitably choosing the Lyapunov–Krasovskii functionals, a novel adaptive/robust neural tracking control scheme is developed for the first time such that all the states and signals of the closed-loop time-delay robot system are bounded and the tracking error is shown to be uniformly ultimately bounded. By suitably designing the embedded current signal, the effect of time-delay uncertainty in the mechanical dynamics does not require to be incorporated into the current tracking error dynamics, and so the Lyapunov–Krasovskii functionals can be easily constructed in the stability analysis. Compared with the previous investigations of controlling robots the control scheme developed here can be extended to handle a broader class of electrically driven robots perturbed simultaneously by plant uncertainties, time-varying perturbations, and time-delay uncertainties. Finally, simulation examples are made to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control algorithm.
Parallel data processing architectures for identification of structural modal properties using dense wireless sensor networks

With recent advances in wireless sensing and data acquisition technology, it has become feasible to instrument a large structure with a dense array of wireless sensors. Furthermore, the analog-to-digital conversion and data processing capabilities of current wireless sensing prototypes offer the ability to efficiently distribute data processing tasks across a large network of wireless sensing nodes. In this paper, three output-only system identification methods are modified for implementation in a distributed array of processors and embedded within the computational core of a network of wireless sensors. The embedded algorithms implemented include the peak peaking, random decrement and frequency domain decomposition methods for identification of structural modal parameters including modal frequencies, damping ratios and mode shapes. Emphasis is placed on parallel implementations of these typically centralized algorithms to ensure scalability of the approach to networks defined by high nodal densities. Using the balcony of a historic theatre as a testbed, a network of wireless sensors is installed and allowed to collect and process acceleration response data during a set of vibration tests so that modal parameters can be estimated by the network.
Coming of Age in Applied Linguistics

I argue that further progress in applied linguistics and second language acquisition (SLA) will be achieved through collaboration with researchers in other fields. I give 3 examples of research problems that would profit from collaboration with applied linguists: the definition of language proficiency, the neural basis of language functioning, and the relation between cognitive and language abilities, especially in education. These issues are being investigated by specialists in other fields who lack the necessary expertise in bilingualism, SLA, and representation of multiple languages. I identify specific areas of expertise that applied linguists could bring to these research programmes.
UNG-initiated base excision repair is the major repair route for 5-fluorouracil in DNA, but 5-fluorouracil cytotoxicity depends mainly on RNA incorporation

Cytotoxicity of 5-fluorouracil (FU) and 5-fluoro-2′-deoxyuridine (FdUrd) due to DNA fragmentation during DNA repair has been proposed as an alternative to effects from thymidylate synthase (TS) inhibition or RNA incorporation. The goal of the present study was to investigate the relative contribution of the proposed mechanisms for cytotoxicity of 5-fluoropyrimidines. We demonstrate that in human cancer cells, base excision repair (BER) initiated by the uracil–DNA glycosylase UNG is the major route for FU–DNA repair in vitro and in vivo. SMUG1, TDG and MBD4 contributed modestly in vitro and not detectably in vivo. Contribution from mismatch repair was limited to FU:G contexts at best. Surprisingly, knockdown of individual uracil–DNA glycosylases or MSH2 did not affect sensitivity to FU or FdUrd. Inhibitors of common steps of BER or DNA damage signalling affected sensitivity to FdUrd and HmdUrd, but not to FU. In support of predominantly RNA-mediated cytotoxicity, FU-treated cells accumulated ~3000- to 15 000-fold more FU in RNA than in DNA. Moreover, FU-cytotoxicity was partially reversed by ribonucleosides, but not deoxyribonucleosides and FU displayed modest TS-inhibition compared to FdUrd. In conclusion, UNG-initiated BER is the major route for FU–DNA repair, but cytotoxicity of FU is predominantly RNA-mediated, while DNA-mediated effects are limited to FdUrd.
Protective efficacy of antibodies to the Staphylococcus aureus type 5 capsular polysaccharide in a modified model of endocarditis in rats

The protective efficacy of antibodies to the Staphylococcus aureus type 5 capsular polysaccharide (CP5) was examined in a modified model of catheter-induced endocarditis. Rats were catheterized by surgically passing a polyethylene catheter through the right carotid artery and aortic valve into the left ventricle. The following day, the rats were injected by the intraperitoneal (i.p.) route with immunoglobulin G (IgG) purified from nonimmunized rabbits or from rabbits immunized with a conjugate vaccine composed of CP5 and CP8 linked covalently to recombinant Pseudomonas aeruginosa exotoxoid A. One day after passive immunization, the animals were challenged i.p. with one of three serotype 5 S. aureus isolates (strain Reynolds, Lowenstein, or VP) or nontypeable strain 521. Protection was evaluated by comparing quantitative cultures of blood, endocardial vegetations, and kidneys from control and immune animals. For experiments performed with S. aureus Reynolds and Lowenstein, rats given capsular antibodies (645 microg of CP5-specific IgG) showed a significantly (P < 0.05) lower prevalence of endocarditis than rats injected with nonimmune IgG. Similarly, quantitative cultures of the blood, kidneys, and aortic valve vegetations revealed that fewer S. aureus cells were recovered from rats given capsule-specific IgG than from rats administered nonimmune IgG. Rats challenged with strain VP were protected with 1.145 mg of CP5-specific IgG. Capsular antibodies did not protect against infection elicited by a nontypeable strain. These results demonstrate that capsular antibodies elicited by immunization with a polysaccharide-protein conjugate vaccine protect experimental animals against serotype 5 S. aureus infection in a modified model of endocarditis.
Knowledge management and the competitive strategy of the firm

Purpose – Knowledge management (KM) has emerged as a strategy to improve organizational competitiveness. Our purpose is to identify the relationship between KM and the firm's competitive advantage.Design/methodology/approach – We review the existing literature on KM and strategy formulation. We utilize the resource‐based view approach as a lens for fitting KM with strategic planning. The concept of strategy and KM integration is introduced.Findings – We relate KM strategies to business strategy through a thorough review of the literature.Research limitations/implications – Future research should investigate the circumstances under which KM can create a sustainable competitive advantage within the framework of the RBV. Another area involves the investigation of the degree of integration between the competitive strategy and KM strategy.Practical implications – A very useful source of information for practitioners to refine their thinking about KM and the firm strategic resources. It offers the practitioner .
CHARACTERIZATION OF A NEW GLUCOMANNAN FROM EREMURUS SPECTABILIS ROOTS

A novel glucomannan with molecular weight of 47.5 kDa was obtained from the roots of Eremurus spectabilis (serish) by warm-water extraction, ethanol precipitation, deproteinization and lyophilization. The crude polysaccharide was purified through DEAE-cellulose A52 and Sephadex G-100 columns to obtain a homogeneous polysaccharide. It was composed of Dmannose and Dglucose in 2.9:1 molar ratio. Chemical and spectroscopic analyses indicate that polysaccharide possessed a backbone of (1→4)-linked ß-D-glucopyranosyl and ß-D-mannopyranosyl, branched with ß-(1→ 4,6)-D-mannopyranose and terminate with ß-D-mannopyranose.
Experiential Jewish Education Has Arrived! Now What?

Experiential Jewish education has been experiencing a time of growth, during which theory development, research, and practice have established a strong voice for the construct. Much of the focus to this point has been on definitions (particularly the distinction between experiential and informal Jewish education) and on outcomes of settings often associated with an experiential Jewish education (EJE) approach. Along with increased understanding of EJE comes the potential to explore a more nuanced set of questions about the nature of educational experiences. This point of development of the field also raises question of the relationship of EJE and the broader field of Jewish education.
Discriminating gender on Chinese microblog: A study of online behaviour, writing style and preferred vocabulary

As user attributes are useful for applications such as personalized recommendation, adverting and so on, user attribute predication on Twitter has attracted intensive attentions in recent years. Although Chinese micro-blogging services are different from Twitter on various aspects such as language, user behaviours and so on, few efforts have been made on Chinese micro-blogging services. In this paper, we propose a gender prediction model for Chinese microblog which exploits features including online behaviour, writing style, and preferred vocabulary. Experimental results on Sina Weibo, which is one of the most popular micro-blogging services in China, show that our model achieves the state-of-the-art accuracy 94.3%. We also find significant distinctions between male and female microblog users on online behaviour, writing style and preferred vocabulary, which would be helpful for improving personalized applications.