Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Survival after CABG – better than predicted by EuroSCORE and equal to the general population

Objectives. Examine short- and intermediate-term survival after coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) and compare this to survival of the general population and to that predicted by EuroSCORE. Design. One thousand three hundred and fifty one consecutive patients undergoing CABG were prospectively included. Survival status was ascertained through the Norwegian National Registry. Results. Compared to the general population, no statistical significant difference in survival was seen in operated patients. Overall mortality rate was 0.8% after 30 days, 2.8%, 4.0% and 7.1% at one, two and three years, respectively. When patients were divided into four groups according to EuroSCORE, mortality increased significantly with increasing score, as expected. However, EuroSCORE overestimated mortality. Conclusion. Patients operated with CABG at our institution have similar survival as in the general Norwegian population. Although overestimating mortality by almost five-fold, we found a strong association between EuroSCORE and short-time survival, and an association between EuroSCORE and intermediate-term survival.
Mixed-Initiative Interface Personalization as a Case Study in Usable AI

Interface personalization aims to streamline the process of working in a feature-rich application by providing the user with an adapted interface tailored specifically to his/her needs. The MICA (Mixed-Initiative Customization Assistance) system explores a middle ground between two opposing approaches to personalization: (1) an adaptable approach, where personalization is fully user controlled and (2) and adaptive approach, where personalization is fully system controlled. We overview MICA’s strategy for providing user-adaptive recommendations to help users decide how to personalize their interfaces. In doing so, we focus primarily on how MICA handles threats to usability that are often found in adaptive interfaces including obtrusiveness and lack of understandability and control. We also describe how we evaluated MICA and highlight results from these evaluations.
A Model of Worker Investment in Safety and its Effects on Accidents and Wages

In this paper, we develop a theoretical model of worker investment in safety. Standard theory assumes that injury risk is exogenous. It predicts that riskier jobs are associated with higher wages. In contrast, in our model, workers make individual safety investments that reduce the risk of injury. This results in a negative association between individual injury risk and wages. We test the model's predictions using obesity as a proxy for worker disinvestments in human capital and safety. In line with our model predictions, we find a significant positive compensating wage differential (CWD) for nonfatal risk at the occupational level. At the same time, however, there exists an underlying significant negative association between individual accident risk and wages, but only in high risk occupations. The latter relationship may downward bias or mask CWD estimates.
Interactive modeling of the human musculature

In this paper, we extend our previous work (Proc. Computer Animation and Simulation, pp. 125-135, Aug. 2000) and propose a muscle model that is suitable for computer graphics based on physiological and anatomical considerations. Muscle motion and deformation is automatically derived from one or several action lines, each action line being deformed by a 1D mass-spring system. The resulting model is fast, can accommodate most superficial human muscles, and could easily be integrated into current modeling packages. Example animations can be found at .
Code generation for a DNA computer by integer linear programming

In this paper, we describe code generation using integer linear programming for a robot called ANP-96 which automatically performs DNA computing experiments. The robot consists of 8 tables for placing plates, a device called IMU to do various operations on a plate, etc., and can execute many experimental operations in parallel according to a given program. Since operations for DNA computing are executed under various constraints and may take a long time, executing many operations automatically and efficiently is essential. On the other hand, the current programming environment of ANP-96 is troublesome since it requires programmers to specify low level details which are not essential to experiments. In particular, programmers have to appropriately allocate a finite number of tables, and also efficiently schedule operations that take a long time. To automate such programming activities, we first designed a framework for specifying the problems of table allocation and operation scheduling, at an abstract level independent from ANP-96, and then implemented a code generator based on the framework. In the code generator, we employed the integer linear programming method developed in the field of compilers, which gives the optimal solution for the problems mentioned above.
Proportional Service Allocation in Distributed Storage Systems ∗

Fully distributed storage systems have gained popularity i n he past few years because of their ability to use cheap commodity hardware and their high scalability. While there are a number of algorithms for providing dif ferentiated quality of service to clients of a centralized storage system, the prob lem has not been solved for distributed storage systems. Providing performance gu arantees in distributed storage systems is more complex because clients may have dif ferent data layouts and access their data through different coordinators (acce ss nodes), yet the performance guarantees required are global. This paper presents a distributed scheduling framework. It is an adaptation of fair queuing algorithms for distributed servers. Specifica lly, upon scheduling each request, it enforces an extra delay (possibly zero) that cor responds to the amount of service the client gets on other servers. Different perfo rmance guarantees, e.g., per storage node proportional sharing, total service propo rtional sharing or mixed, can be met by different delay functions. The delay functions can be calculated at coordinators locally so excess communication is avoided. T he analysis and experimental results show that these new algorithms can enfor ce performance goals under different data layouts and workloads.
Efficient retrieval of life log based on context and content

In this paper, we present continuous capture of our life log with various sensors plus additional data and propose effective retrieval methods using this context and content. Our life log system contains video, audio, acceleration sensor, gyro, GPS, annotations, documents, web pages, and emails. In our previous studies, we showed our retrieval methodology [8], [9], which mainly depends on context information from sensor data. In this paper, we extend our methodology with additional functions. They are (1) spatio-temporal sampling for extraction of key frames for summarization; and (2) conversation scene detection. With the first of these, key frames for the summarization are extracted using time and location data (GPS). Because our life log captures dense location data, we can also make use of derivatives of location data, that is, speed and acceleration in the movement of the person. The summarizing key frames are made using them. We also introduce content analysis for conversation scene detection. In our previous work, we have investigated context-based retrieval, which differs from the majority of studies in image/video retrieval focusing on content-based retrieval. In this paper, we introduce visual and audio data content analysis for conversation scene detection. The detection of conversation scenes will be very important tags for our life log data retrieval. We describe our present system and additional functions, as well as preliminary results for the additional functions.
Age of drinking onset as a moderator of the efficacy of parent-based, brief motivational, and combined intervention approaches to reduce drinking and consequences among college students.

BACKGROUND The current study tested age of onset as a moderator of intervention efficacy on drinking and consequence outcomes among a high-risk population of college students (i.e., former high school athletes). METHODS Students were randomized to one of four conditions: assessment only control, combined parent-based intervention (PBI) and brief motivational intervention (BMI), PBI alone, and BMI alone. Participants (n = 1,275) completed web-administered measures at baseline (summer before starting college) and 10-month follow-up. RESULTS Overall, the combined intervention demonstrated the strongest and most consistent reductions across all outcomes, particularly with the youngest initiators. Participants who initiated drinking at the youngest ages had significantly lower peak drinking, typical weekly drinking, and reported consequences at follow-up when they received the combined intervention when compared to the control group. The BMI and PBI groups, when examined independently, demonstrated significant effects across outcomes but were inconsistent across the different age groups. CONCLUSION Results suggest the combination of a PBI and a peer-delivered BMI is an appropriate and efficacious way to reduce drinking and related consequences among individuals who initiated drinking earlier in adolescence and are at an increased risk of experiencing alcohol problems.
EXPERIMENTAL FOLIC ACID NEPHROPATHY

&NA; In rats, single intravenous doses of folic acid induce damage to renal tubular epithelium, deposition of folic acid in tubular lumens, increase in wet kidney weight, oliguria and interstitial connective tissue proliferation. Separation of the nephrotoxic and obstructive effects of folic acid was attempted by pretreatment with NH4Cl or NaHCO3. These effects of folic acid were unaltered by pretreatment with NH4Cl and there was, in addition, accumulation of eosinophilic droplets in papillary collecting duct epithelium. After pretreatment with NaHCO3, folic acid deposition is decreased or absent; there is a smaller increase in wet kidney weight; the rats are polyuric rather than oliguric; interstitial connective tissue proliferation is reduced; and no droplets form in papillary collecting ducts, but lesions are still present in proximal convoluted tubule epithelial cells. These findings indicate that folic acid has direct nephrotoxic effects independent of intraluminal folic acid deposition, and that damage to renal epithelium, unlike that induced by many nephrotoxins, occurs at several levels of the nephron.
Bayesian Non-Exhaustive Classification for Active Online Name Disambiguation

The name disambiguation task partitions a collection of records pertaining to a given name, such that there is a one-to-one correspondence between the partitions and a group of people, all sharing that given name. Most existing solutions for this task are proposed for static data. However, more realistic scenarios stipulate emergence of records in a streaming fashion where records may belong to known as well as unknown persons all sharing the same name. This requires a flexible name disambiguation algorithm that can not only classify records of known persons represented in the train- ing data by their existing records but can also identify records of new ambiguous persons with no existing records included in the initial training dataset. Toward achieving this objective, in this paper we propose a Bayesian non-exhaustive classification frame- work for solving online name disambiguation. In particular, we present a Dirichlet Process Gaussian Mixture Model (DPGMM) as a core engine for online name disambiguation task. Meanwhile, two online inference algorithms, namely one-pass Gibbs sampler and Sequential Importance Sampling with Resampling (also known as particle filtering), are proposed to simultaneously perform online classification and new class discovery. As a case study we consider bibliographic data in a temporal stream format and disambiguate authors by partitioning their papers into homogeneous groups.Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is significantly better than existing methods for performing online name disambiguation task. We also propose an interactive version of our online name disambiguation method designed to leverage user feedback to improve prediction accuracy.
Maternal smoking during pregnancy and offspring conduct problems: evidence from 3 independent genetically sensitive research designs.

IMPORTANCE Several studies report an association between maternal smoking during pregnancy and offspring conduct disorder. However, past research evidences difficulty in disaggregating prenatal environmental influences from genetic and postnatal environmental influences. OBJECTIVE To examine the relationship between maternal smoking during pregnancy and offspring conduct problems among children reared by genetically related mothers and genetically unrelated mothers. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS The following 3 studies using distinct but complementary research designs were used: The Christchurch Health and Development Study (a longitudinal cohort study that includes biological and adopted children), the Early Growth and Development Study (a longitudinal adoption-at-birth study), and the Cardiff IVF (In Vitro Fertilization) Study (an adoption-at-conception study among genetically related families and genetically unrelated families). Maternal smoking during pregnancy was measured as the mean number of cigarettes per day (0, 1-9, or 10) smoked during pregnancy. Possible covariates were controlled for in the analyses, including child sex, birth weight, race/ethnicity, placement age, and breastfeeding, as well as maternal education and maternal age at birth and family breakdown, parenting practices, and family socioeconomic status. MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURE Offspring conduct problems (age range, 4-10 years) reported by parents or teachers using the behavior rating scales by Rutter and Conners, the Child Behavior Checklist and the Children's Behavior Questionnaire Short Form, and the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire. RESULTS A significant association between maternal smoking during pregnancy and offspring conduct problems was observed among children reared by genetically related mothers and genetically unrelated mothers. Results from a meta-analysis affirmed this pattern of findings across pooled study samples. CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE Findings across 3 studies using a complement of genetically sensitive research designs suggest that smoking during pregnancy is a prenatal risk factor for offspring conduct problems when controlling for specific perinatal and postnatal confounding factors.
Study on double resonant performance of air-core spiral tesla transformer applied in repetitive pulsed operation

Air-core Tesla transformer combined with semiconductor devices can generate repetitive high-voltage pulses effectively. Air-core Tesla transformer of spiral type is suitable for repetitive operation since its primary voltage is relatively low. Based on the double resonance circuit of air-core Tesla transformer, the expressions of secondary voltage, primary current, and the maximum rise-rate of primary current are deduced. The effects of tuning characteristic on the output voltage and energy efficiency are simulated, and further verified by experiments. An air-core Tesla transformer prototype of spiral type is developed. To achieve repetitive operation, a resonant charging and discharging circuit based on air-core Tesla transformer is designed. The repetitive system based on this prototype can generate microsecond pulses with an average peak voltage of -140 kV at 300 Hz repetition rate. In repetitive mode, the tuning ratio is recommended to range in 1.0-2.0 to achieve high energy efficiency. The output voltage could be higher by increasing the charging voltage or tuning ratio.
Quantum Flows for Secret Key Distribution in the Presence of the Photon Number Splitting Attack

Physical implementations of quantum key distribution (QKD) protocols, like the Bennett-Brassard (BB84), are forced to use attenuated coherent quantum states, because the sources of single photon states are not functional yet for QKD applications. However, when using attenuated coherent states, the relatively high rate of multi-photonic pulses introduces vulnerabilities that can be exploited by the photon number splitting (PNS) attack to brake the quantum key. Some QKD protocols have been developed to be resistant to the PNS attack, like the decoy method, but those define a single photonic gain in the quantum channel. To overcome this limitation, we have developed a new QKD protocol, called ack-QKD, which is resistant to the PNS attack. Even more, it uses attenuated quantum states, but defines two interleaved photonic quantum flows to detect the eavesdropper activity by means of the quantum photonic error gain (QPEG) or the quantum bit error rate (QBER). The physical implementation of the ack-QKD is similar to the well-known BB84 protocol.
Reliability and Validity of the Decision-Making-Competency Inventory (DMCI) in Korean Adolescents

Purpose: This study was done to verify the reliability and validity of the Korean version of DMCI in Korean adolescents. Methods: A methodological study design was used with Cronbach’s α for reliability, and an exploratory factor analysis and contrasted groups approach for construct validity. DMCI was translated into Korean and tested with a sample of 406 adolescents in Korea. The data were analyzed using Cronbach’s α, item correlation with total, principal component factor analysis, and t-test. Results: The translated content of the DMCI was validated by nursing faculty members and translation equivalency was obtained. The Cronbach’s α of the DMCI simplified with 18 items was . 78. The factor analysis revealed three factors explaining 41.5% of total variance and the corresponding factors were self-observation (21.6%), self-judgement (11.4%), and self-confi dence (8.6%). The mean score for the DMCI in the aggression group was significantly lower than the non-aggression group. Conclusion: Results of this study suggest that the Korean version of DMCI can used as a reliable and valid measure to assess decision making competency in Korean adolescents.
Associations of ACE I/D and AGT M235T Gene Polymorphisms with the Gestational Hypertension and the Fetal Growth

Hypertensive disease during pregnancy is a crucial perinatal problem. Preeclampsia is associated with complications for pregnant women and fetuses, so it is important to find causative factors. All over the world multiple researches are held among others on the subject of genetic conditioning of preeclampsia and gestational hypertension. Genes encoding the elements of the renin– angiotensin system, which regulates blood pressure are the most commonly studied, especially the polymorphisms: ACE I/D and AGT M235T. In this case–control study 168 pregnant patients were randomly enrolled from the patients hospitalized in the Perinatology and Obstetrics Department of the University Hospital in Cracow (Poland). In the study there were 104 normotensive pregnant women, 29 patients with preeclampsia and 35 patients with gestational hypertension. Genomic DNA was extracted from peripheral blood leukocytes and polymorphisms of ACE I/D and AGT M235T were genotyped from all patients. The genotypes distribution and allele frequencies of polymorphisms and its association to perinatal outcome in all groups were analyzed. A p-value <0.05 was considered as significant. Clinical evaluation included the duration of the pregnancy, a method of the delivery, the birth weight, the birth length and the Apgar score. The risk of preeclampsia and gestational hypertension was evaluated. The CC genotype of AGT M235T polymorphism increases the risk of gestational hypertension. Genotype DD of the I/D polymorphism of the ACE gene is associated with the risk of lower birth weight percentile, but not with the increased risk of a fetal hypotrophy. The study shows the probable impact of ACE I/D and AGT M235T polymorphisms on pregnancy, but further studies on larger groups are needed.
Normative Climates of Parenthood across Europe: Judging Voluntary Childlessness and Working Parents

Past research on gender role attitudes has often focused on individual- rather than country-level explanations. Drawing on European Social Survey data from 21 countries, we examine the effect of societal normative climates (i.e., shared perceptions of others’ attitudes) on personal attitudes towards two non-traditional gender roles: Voluntary childlessness and working full-time while children are young. To detect potential gender differences, we analyse disapproval of men and women separately. Findings reveal that there are strong differences in normative climates across countries, and that people generally perceive more disapproval of women than of men for both behaviours. Most importantly, in countries where a higher share of respondents perceives disapproval of these behaviours, respondents themselves disapprove more strongly—even if they do not believe that others disapprove, and even after controlling for other relevant individual- and country-level characteristics. What is more, the independent effect of normative climate explains most of the differences between countries. This robust finding demonstrates the power of country-level normative climates in explaining individuals’ attitudes and between-country differences in attitudes toward gender roles.
Charging Scheduling of Electric Vehicles With Local Renewable Energy Under Uncertain Electric Vehicle Arrival and Grid Power Price

In this paper, we consider delay-optimal charging scheduling of the electric vehicles (EVs) at a charging station with multiple charge points. The charging station is equipped with renewable energy generation devices and can also buy energy from power grids. The uncertainty of the arrival of the EV, the intermittence of the renewable energy, and the variation of the grid power price are taken into account and described as independent Markov processes. Meanwhile, the required charging energy for each EV is random. The goal is to minimize the mean waiting time for EVs under the long-term constraint on the cost. We propose queue mapping to convert the EV queue to the charging demand queue, and we prove the equivalence between the minimization of the two queues' average length. Then, we focus on the minimization for the average length of the charging demand queue under the long-term cost constraint. We propose a framework of Markov decision process (MDP) to investigate this constrained stochastic optimization problem. The system state includes the charging demand queue length, the charging demand arrival, the energy level in the storage battery of the renewable energy, the renewable energy arrival, and the grid power price. Additionally, the number of charging demands and the allocated energy from the storage battery compose the 2-D policy. We derive two necessary conditions of the optimal policy. Moreover, we discuss the reduction of the 2-D policy to be the number of charging demands only. We give the sets of system states for which charging no demand and charging as many demands as possible are optimal, respectively. Finally, we investigate the proposed policies numerically.
The Effects of Environmental Enrichment on Stress-Induced Eating Disturbances in Rats

1 CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION 3 1.1 Eating Disorders 4 1.2 Risk Factors for Eating Disorders 7 1.2. 1 Stress and Coping in Humans 8 1.2. 2 Rationale for Using Animal Models 12 1.2. 3 Stressors Used in Animals 13 1.3 Environmental Enrichment 21