Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Impact of Rapid Influenza Testing at Triage on Management of Febrile Infants and Young Children

Objective: To determine the impact of an emergency department (ED) triage protocol for rapid influenza testing of febrile infants and children on additional diagnostic testing, ED charges and patient time in the ED. Methods: A trial of triage-based rapid influenza A and B testing of febrile infants and children 3 to 36 months of age presenting to an urban ED during December 2002 to March 2003 was performed. Children with a temperature of 39°C or higher or history of fever 102°F or higher at home were included. Those with obvious focal infection, potential immunodeficiency, and indwelling medical devices were excluded. The intervention group, tested for influenza at triage (TT) was compared with a nonintervention group consisting of those receiving usual care (SP). A subanalysis comparing influenza-positive children was performed. Results: Of 1007 eligible subjects a total of 719 (71%) patients were in the SP group and 288 in the TT group. There were significant differences in respiratory syncytial virus rapid test (RSV; 18%-7%) and chest radiographs (CXRs; 26%-20%) tests in the TT group. In addition, significant increases in obtaining a complete blood count (relative risk [RR] 12.0; 95% confidence interval [CI] 2.9-49), blood culture (RR, 12.0; 95% CI, 3.0-51.0), RSV testing (RR, 0.9.2; 95% CI, 3.4-25.0), urinalysis (RR, 5.7; 95% CI, 2.0-16.0), CXR (RR, 2.2; 95% CI, 1.04-4.5), time in the ED (195 vs 156 minutes; 95% CI, of the difference 19-60), and medical charges ($666 vs $393; 95% CI, of the difference 153-392) were seen among those testing positive for influenza in the SP group. Conclusions: A triage protocol for rapid influenza testing for febrile infants and children appears to significantly decrease additional testing, time in the ED, and charges in children testing positive for influenza.
Limited-preparation CT colonography in frail elderly patients: a feasibility study.

OBJECTIVE Full colonic preparation can be onerous and may be poorly tolerated in frail elderly patients. The purpose of this study was to prospectively assess the image quality and diagnostic yield of limited-preparation CT colonography (CTC) in elderly patients with suspected colorectal cancer who were deemed medically unfit or unsuitable for colonoscopy. SUBJECTS AND METHODS A prospective study was performed of 67 elderly patients with reduced functional status referred for CTC. Participants were prescribed a limited bowel preparation consisting of a low-residue diet for 3 days, 1 L of 2% oral diatrizoate meglumine (Gastrografin) 24 hours before CTC, and 1 L of 2% oral Gastrografin over the 2 hours immediately before CTC. No cathartic preparation was administered. All colonic segments were graded from 1 to 5 for image quality (1, unreadable; 2, poor; 3, equivocal; 4, good; 5, excellent) and reader confidence. Clinical and conventional colonoscopy follow-up findings were documented, and all colonic and extracolonic pathologic findings were documented. RESULTS Overall image quality and reader confidence in the evaluation of the colon was rated good or excellent in 84% of the colonic segments. Colonic abnormalities were identified in 12 patients (18%), including four colonic tumors, two polyps, and seven colonic strictures. Incidental extraintestinal findings were detected in 43 patients (64%), including nine patients with lesions radiologically consistent with malignancy. CONCLUSION Limited-preparation low-dose CTC is a feasible and useful minimally invasive technique with which to evaluate the colon and exclude gross pathology (mass lesions and polyps > 1 cm) in elderly patients with diminished performance status, yielding good to excellent image quality.
The Cross-Cultural Generalizability of Zuckerman's Alternative Five-Factor Model of Personality

The aim of this study was to analyze the cross-cultural generalizability of the Alternative five-factor model (AFFM; Zuckerman, Kuhlman, & Camac, 1988). The total sample was made up of 9,152 subjects from six countries: China, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States. The internal consistencies for all countries were generally similar to those found for the normative American sample. Factor analyses within cultures showed that the normative American structure was replicated in all cultures; however, the congruence coefficients were slightly lower in China and Italy. A similar analysis at the facet level confirmed the high cross-cultural replicability of the AFFM. Mean-level comparisons did not always show the hypothesized effects. The mean score differences across countries were very small.
Managerial Perception of Competition: Evidence from Poland

Understanding competitors’ decisions is essential for businesses in competitive markets. However, managerial perception of competition has been largely neglected in the management literature and totally ignored as it relates to transition economies. Based on qualitative data from in-depth interviews, we explore how senior-level marketing managers in Poland perceive and respond to competition. We find that decision makers accurately identify competitors but give little attention to competitors’ activities that may affect their own performance. Results suggest that there are areas in which companies can undertake marketing initiatives without risking competitors’ immediate market reaction.
Portfolio Strategies based on Fundamental Weighting: An Empirical Study of the Swedish Stock Market

Purpose: The aim of this study is to investigate if portfolios whose composition is based on fundamental values (FVs) outperform a market value (MV)-weighted benchmark portfolio in terms of mean-variance efficiency on the Swedish stock market. We also seek to answer if an investment strategy, which focuses on the difference in composition between these two weighting methods, can further enhance the assumed benefits by the use of active extension. Methodology: A quantitative study with a deductive approach has been performed. Data from non-financial firms listed on the Swedish stock market 1980 to 2009, have been studied in order to compose portfolios based on FVs. A MV-weighted portfolio has been constructed as a benchmark. Theoretical perspectives: Our thesis is based on studies which argue that the market often fails to price stocks at their true value. Hence, a MV-weighted index will not be mean-variance efficient and consequently an inappropriate proxy for the theoretical market portfolio of the CAPM. Our theoretical perspectives are further based on studies which imply that historical FVs may indicate a firm’s ability to generate future value. The benefits of active extension are also discussed. Empirical foundation: FV‐weighted portfolios outperformed the MV‐weighted portfolio on the Swedish stock market during the period 1983‐2008. Portfolios only including stocks that are the most overweighted in the FV‐weighted portfolios relative to their weight in the MV‐weighted portfolio, have performed even better. Our statistical evidence is relatively weak however, in particular for the latter claim. In some cases it may have been possible to further improve the return to risk ratio through shorting and taking additional long positions, but we have found little to no statistical evidence to prove this. Conclusions: Our results indicate that the market has made systematic errors in the valuation of stocks, putting too little emphasis on fundamental values. This is evident during the TMT‐bubble in particular, but to a lesser extent also during the other time periods of the study.
Maturation of the 5′ end of Bacillus subtilis 16S rRNA by the essential ribonuclease YkqC/RNase J1

Functional ribosomal RNAs are generated from longer precursor species in every organism known. Maturation of the 5′ side of 16S rRNA in Escherichia coli is catalysed in a two‐step process by the cooperative action of RNase E and RNase G. However, many bacteria lack RNase E and RNase G orthologues, raising the question as to how 16S rRNA processing occurs in these organisms. Here we show that the maturation of Bacillus subtilis 16S rRNA is also a two‐step process and that the enzyme responsible for the generation of the mature 5′ end is the widely distributed essential ribonuclease YkqC/RNase J1. Depletion of B. subtilis of RNase J1 results in an accumulation of 16S rRNA precursors in vivo. The precursor species are found in polysomes suggesting that they can function in translation. Mutation of the predicted catalytic site of RNase J1 abolishes both 16S rRNA processing and cell viability. Finally, purified RNase J1 can correctly mature precursor 16S rRNA assembled in 70S ribosomes, showing that its role is direct.
Assessing the effect of industry clockspeed on the supply chain management practice‐performance relationship

Purpose – The purpose of this research is to examine the effect of industry clockspeed on the relationship between supply chain management (SCM) practices, from both upstream and downstream sides of the supply chain, and SCM performance.Design/methodology/approach – The study is based on a questionnaire sent to manufacturing companies in the Republic of Ireland. The relationships between the constructs are analysed through regression analysis.Findings – The results suggest that the relationship between SCM practices and SCM performance is not monotonic across varying levels of industry clockspeed. Although mixed support was found for the hypothesized relationships, this research contributes considerably to the theoretical development of the contingency view in the SCM literature.Practical implications – Managers should be aware that the rate of change in their industries can affect the way SCM practices across the supply chain impact on SCM performance.Originality/value – The literature review has shown t.
Achieving cooperative detection against Sybil attack in wireless ad hoc networks: A game theoretic approach

Sybil Attack means one node counterfeits multiple identities. It poses great threats to the routing of wireless ad hoc networks. Many existing solutions employ local detection method to capture misbehavior and then enhance the detection accuracy by information exchange. However, they ignore the rationality of member nodes. To save resource, rational nodes are reluctant to share information, therefore, how to guarantee reliable information exchange becomes a challenge issue. This paper presents a cooperative detection method against Sybil attack. Our method adopts the reputation mechanism which relies on the observation exchange to differentiate Sybil identities from legitimate ones. To promote the observation exchange, we present a cooperative detection game with initial condition, which helps nodes be aware that with which to share the observations can bring the maximum utilities. The theoretical and numerical analysis indicate that only benign and unselfish nodes can be accepted by their rational neighbors while Sybil nodes are excluded from the information exchange.
Editor's Comments: Taking Ethics Seriously—A Mission Now More Possible

The article discusses the growing recognition of ethics in business practices and education, highlighting opportunities for new research on the subject. The author states that research studies published by the Academy of Management are inadequate and that researchers may not be aware of the increased interest in the subject of ethics. The article discusses business ethics, including public perception of publicized scandals and the larger role it plays in business education.
Information Technology: Retail users versus Nonusers

Marketing researchers show increasing interest in the impact of information technologies on how firms conduct their business operations. Unfortunately there is a dearth of empirical research that examines the actual influence of information technologies on such fundamental marketing activities as buying and selling. This article reports the results of exploratory research into the impact of information technology on the structure of buyer-seller relationships. Research hypotheses were tested with survey data from the retail jewelry industry. The data suggest that for some dimensions of the relationship, buyers who are high-volume information technologies users evidence quite different attitudes than do nonusers or low-volume users of a type of information technology.
Human Risk Assessment of the Airport Runway Incursion Based on the Grey Clustering

With the sustainable growing of flight flow and runway frequency, runway incursions have become more frequent, and human risk is the main cause. The thresholds of the runway incursion human risk assessment indexes are calculated with the fluctuations method and experts consulted method. The triangle whiten function of airport runway incursion's human risk assessment indexes based on grey cluster theory is constructed. Expert assessment scoring results and the evaluation coefficients of four different levels, normal warning, mild warning, moderate warning and severe warning are analyzed. Comprehensive clustering coefficient of each index is obtained. And the risk level is determined according to the principle of membership. The result is conducive for airports to avoid risk sources of employees' operational errors and misjudgment, prevent and remit the human risk of airport runway incursion, and improve airport security capabilities.
EM Modeling of Microstrip Conductor Losses Including Surface Roughness Effect

This letter presents a method to model conductor losses in transmission lines utilizing a commercial full wave solver. The lines consist of multilayered metallization with inherent surface roughness. Metal thickness is assumed to be larger than skin depth. To validate accuracy of the modeling, the measurements of a 50-Omega microstrip line and edge-coupled microstrip filter are provided, with random errors taken into account. Good correlation between the modeled results and measurements has been demonstrated from this comparison
T-Cell-Line-Tropic Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1 That Is Made Resistant to Stromal Cell-Derived Factor 1α Contains Mutations in the Envelope gp120 but Does Not Show a Switch in Coreceptor Use

ABSTRACT The NL4.3 T-cell-line-tropic human immunodeficiency virus type 1 strain is sensitive to the CXC chemokine stromal cell-derived factor 1α (SDF-1α), the natural ligand for CXC chemokine receptor 4 (CXCR4); the 50% inhibitory concentration (IC50) in MT-4 cells is 130 ng/ml. We generated resistant virus through passaging of the virus in the presence of increasing concentrations of SDF-1α. After 24 passages, the virus was no longer sensitive to SDF-1α (SDF-1αres virus) (IC50, >2 μg/ml) and became resistant to SDF-1β (IC50, >2 μg/ml) and to a specific CXCR4 monoclonal antibody (IC50, >20 μg/ml). The SDF-1αres virus was about 10-fold less sensitive than the wild-type virus to the bicyclam AMD3100, a specific CXCR4 antagonist. The SDF-1αres virus contained the following mutations in the gp120 molecule: N106K in the V1 loop; S134N and F145L in the V2 loop; F245I in the C2 loop; K269E, Q278H, I288V, and N293D in the V3 loop; a deletion of 5 amino acids (FNSTW) at positions 364 to 368 in the V4 loop; and R378T in the CD4 binding domain. Replication of the NL4.3 wild-type virus and the SDF-1αres virus was demonstrated in U87 cells that coexpressed CD4 and CXCR4 (U87.CD4.CXCR4) but not in U87.CD4. CCR5 cells. Thus, the resistant virus was not able to switch to the CC chemokine receptor 5 (CCR5) coreceptor (the main coreceptor for macrophage-tropic viruses). The SDF-1αres virus replicated in HOS.CD4 cells expressing CCR1, CCR2b, CCR3, CCR4, CCR5, and CXCR4 but also in HOS.CD4. pBABE cells. However, all HOS transfectant cells expressed a low level of CXCR4. Neither of the two virus strains was able to infect HOS.CXCR4 or HOS.CCR5 transfectants, demonstrating the necessity of the CD4 receptor. The T-cell-line-tropic SDF-1αres virus was thus able to overcome the inhibitory effect of SDF-1α through mutations in gp120 but still needed CXCR4 to enter the cells.
Learning semantic maps from natural language

As robots move into human-occupied environments, the need for effective mechanisms to enable interactions with humans becomes vital. Natural language is a flexible, intuitive medium that can enable such interactions, but language understanding requires robots to learn representations of their environments that are compatible with the conceptual models used by people. Current approaches to constructing such spatial-semantic representations rely solely on traditional sensors to acquire knowledge of the environment, which restricts robots to learning limited knowledge of their local surround. Furthermore, they can only reason over the limited portion of the environment that is in the robot's field-of-view. Natural language, on the other hand, allows people to share rich properties of their environment with their robotic partners in a flexible, efficient manner. The ability to integrate such descriptions can allow the robot to learn semantic properties such as colloquial names that are difficult to infer using existing methods, and learn about the world outside its perception range. The spatial and temporal disconnect between language descriptions and the robot's onboard sensors makes fusing the two sources of information challenging. This thesis addresses the problem of fusing information contained in natural language descriptions with the robot's onboard sensors to construct spatial-semantic representations useful for interacting with humans. The novelty lies in treating natural language descriptions as another sensor observation that informs the robot about its environment. Towards this end, we introduce the semantic graph, a spatial-semantic representation that provides a common framework in which we integrate information that the user communicates (e.g., labels and spatial relations) with observations from the robot's sensors. Our algorithm efficiently maintains a factored distribution over semantic graphs based upon the stream of natural language and low-level sensor information. We detail the means by which the framework incorporates knowledge conveyed by the user's descriptions, including the ability to reason over expressions that reference yet unknown regions in the environment. We evaluate the algorithm's ability to learn human-centric maps of several different environments and analyze the knowledge inferred from language and the utility of the learned maps. The results demonstrate that the incorporation of information from free-form descriptions increases the metric, topological and semantic accuracy of the recovered environment model. Next, we outline an algorithm that enables robots to improve their spatial-semantic representation of an environment by engaging users in dialog. The algorithm reasons over the ambiguity of language descriptions provided by the user given the current map, and selects information-gathering actions in the form of targeted questions about its local surroundings and areas distant from the robot. Our algorithm balances the information-theoretic value of candidate questions with a…
Modeling and simulation of spider robot with an eccentric cylindrical cam mechanism

Spider robot is an eight legged mechanical vehicle that walks in space. Three or more legs of spider robot can be used for making the robot statically stable. The rest of the legs can be used to reach a new position or to operate a payload. The robot may move even if one or two legs become disabled. The objective of this paper is to model and simulate eight legged walking spider robot. This robot uses an eccentric cylindrical cam mechanism. The specialty of this mechanism is that it uses only two actuators to make the robot walk and even turn. Pro ENGINEER software is used for modeling of the spider robot and ADAMS software is used for simulation of the mechanism.
Survey timing and consumer perceptions of service quality: an overview of empirical evidence

Reports on a program of research to learn more about the effects of survey timing on customers’ perceptions of service quality. Argues that an individual’s perceptions of service quality may not be stable over time and that suppliers should be particularly interested in consumers’ perceptions at the time that the next re‐purchase decision is made, rather than the period immediately following consumption. Reports empirical evidence on a number of studies from the hospitality, tourism and higher education sectors in Western Australia. States that results to date cast doubt on the wisdom of the traditional exit survey approach to service quality assessment. Warns that the information derived from the traditional exit survey may not necessarily bear any relation to the chances of converting one time customers into lifetime customers. It follows that the major pre‐occupation of many organisations with measuring perceptions during or immediately following service consumption may have little relevance to service quality perceptions which are important in subsequently forming future re‐purchase intentions.
A parallel evolutionary extreme learning machine scheme for electrical load prediction

Application of cloud computing technologies in power system has made a great contribution to the establishment of smart grid. Among applications of smart grid, electrical load prediction plays an important role in efficient use of power resource. However, the exponential growth of data has posed a great challenge to the existing algorithms. In this paper, we firstly propose a novel parallel hybrid algorithm, combining the Improved Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) with ELM, named PIPSO-ELM. Here a modified particle swarm optimization is presented to find the optimal number of hidden neurons as well as the corresponding input weights and hidden biases. Furthermore, in the iterative search process of PSO, an update strategy employs the mutation operator of evolutionary algorithms is introduced for further improving the global search capability and convergence speed of PSO. After that, to handle the large-scale dataset efficiently, the parallel implementation of PIPSO-ELM is achieved using Spark. Finally, extensive experiments on real-life electrical load data and comprehensive evaluation are conducted to verify the performance of PIPSO-ELM in electrical load prediction. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that PIPSO-ELM outperforms the compared algorithms in terms of stability, efficiency and scalability simultaneously.
3 D + t / 2 D + t CTA-XA registration using population-based motion estimates

Success rates of minimally invasive coronary interventions for chronic total occlusions may increase if the pre-operative cardiac CT angiography (CTA) could be overlayed on the intra-operative X-ray coronary angiography images. It was previously shown that incorporating patient specific coronary motion extracted from 4D CTA in the CTAXA registration increases the robustness of the alignment. However, preoperative CTA is often acquired with gating at end-diastole, in which case patient specific motion is not available. Therefore, we investigate the possibility of using population based coronary motion estimates rather than the CTA based motion for the 3D+t/2D+t registration. We propose a methodology for building population based average and predicted motion from 4D CTA datasets, and use these models to perform 3D+t/2D+t registration on one cardiac cycle of 12 monoplane XA sequences. The registration performance of the population based motion estimates was better than the static no motion case, but not as good as the patient-specific 4D CTA based motion.
NET Institute*

We present a model of industry standard setting with two-sided asymmetric information about the existence of intellectual property. We provide an equilibrium analysis of (a) firms’ incentives to communicate ideas for improvements of an industry standard, and (b) firms’ decisions to disclose the existence of intellctual property to other participants of the standardization process. JEL classification: D71, L15, O34