Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Perceived Health Literacy and Health Information Seeking Behavior among University Students in Pakistan

Objective: In this era, the internet becomes a common source of health information worldwide. In this study, we understand the influence of the internet on health-seeking behavior among university students in Pakistan. Methodology: A cross-sectional survey was conducted during this study. A random sample of university students (n=300, mean=28.97 and SD= 4.580) participated in this survey. Results: This study had good internal consistency reliability (Cronbach's alpha = 0.8). In addition, eHealth is found to be associated with the Healthcare provider’s degree program, semester and age, as well as they, are important in health information seeking behavior. Conclusion: This study supports that students’ health seeking behavior using the internet is an important part of making
Information System Development: A Categorical Analysis of  User Participation Approaches

User participation is generally considered an important aspect of information systems development and a leading factor in systems success. However, results from earlier studies are inconsistent as to the significance of user involvement to system success, and suggest that perhaps new avenues need to be explored [6,12,15]. In this study, we extend the line of inquiry on user participation by extending the descriptive model of Cavaye [6] and including ideas from the complementary but separate social process model of Newman and Robey [21]. The result is a user participation approach (UPA) framework encompassing four worldviews that emerge from the four paradigms proposed by Hirschheim and Klein [10]. Thus, the UPA framework uses meta- theoretical assumptions to describe and explain the user participation process from a new angle. This framework can be adapted and customized to fit the needs of specific organizations and thereby facilitate more successful systems development.
Lynx: a learning linux prefetching mechanism for SSD performance model

Traditional Linux prefetching algorithms were based on spatial locality of I/O workloads and performance model of hard disk drives. From the applicative point of view, current data-intensive applications I/O workloads are turning towards more random patterns while from the storage device perspective, flash based storage devices present a different performance model than HDDs. In this work, we present a new prefetching mechanism named Lynx. Lynx aims to adapt and/or complement the Linux read-ahead prefetching system for both SSD performance model and new applications needs. Lynx uses a simple machine learning system based on Markov chains. The learning phase detects I/O workload patterns and computes the transition probabilities between file pages. The prediction phase prefetchs predicted file pages with the resulting Markov statemachine. We have implemented our solution and integrated it into the Linux kernel. We experimented our solution using the TPCH benchmark. The results show that Lynx divides the number of page cache misses (major page faults) by 2 on average and thus reduces TPC-H queries execution time by 50% as compared to traditional Linux read-ahead.
Effects of stretching before and after exercising on muscle soreness and risk of injury: systematic review

Abstract Objective: To determine the effects of stretching before and after exercising on muscle soreness after exercise, risk of injury, and athletic performance. Method: Systematic review. Data sources: Randomised or quasi-randomised studies identified by searching Medline, Embase, CINAHL, SPORTDiscus, and PEDro, and by recursive checking of bibliographies. Main outcome measures: Muscle soreness, incidence of injury, athletic performance. Results: Five studies, all of moderate quality, reported sufficient data on the effects of stretching on muscle soreness to be included in the analysis. Outcomes seemed homogeneous. Stretching produced small and statistically non-significant reductions in muscle soreness. The pooled estimate of reduction in muscle soreness 24 hours after exercising was only 0.9 mm on a 100 mm scale (95% confidence interval −2.6 mm to 4.4 mm). Data from two studies on army recruits in military training show that muscle stretching before exercising does not produce useful reductions in injury risk (pooled hazard ratio 0.95, 0.78 to 1.16). Conclusions: Stretching before or after exercising does not confer protection from muscle soreness. Stretching before exercising does not seem to confer a practically useful reduction in the risk of injury, but the generality of this finding needs testing. Insufficient research has been done with which to determine the effects of stretching on sporting performance.
Stimulus-Specific Adaptation in Auditory Cortex Is an NMDA-Independent Process Distinct from the Sensory Novelty Encoded by the Mismatch Negativity

The significance of the mismatch negativity (MMN), an event-related potential measured in humans which indexes novelty in the auditory environment, has motivated a search for a cellular correlate of this process. A leading candidate is stimulus-specific adaptation (SSA) in auditory cortex units, which shares several characteristics with the MMN. Whether auditory cortex responses encode sensory novelty, a defining property of the MMN, however, has not been resolved. To evaluate this key issue, we used several variations of the auditory oddball paradigm from the human literature and examined psychophysical and pharmacological properties of multiunit activity in the auditory cortex of awake rodents. We found converging evidence dissociating SSA from sensory novelty and the MMN. First, during an oddball paradigm with frequency deviants, neuronal responses showed clear SSA but failed to encode novelty in a manner analogous to the human MMN. Second, oddball paradigms using intensity or duration deviants revealed a pattern of unit responses that showed sensory adaptation, but again without any measurable novelty correlates aligning to the human MMN. Finally NMDA antagonists, which are known to disrupt the MMN, suppressed the magnitude of multiunit responses in a nonspecific manner, leaving the process of SSA intact. Together, our results suggest that auditory novelty detection as indexed by the MMN is dissociable from SSA at the level of activity encoded by auditory cortex neurons. Further, the NMDA sensitivity reported for the MMN, which models the disruption of MMN observed in schizophrenia, may occur at a mechanistic locus outside of SSA.
Broadcasting Algorithm Via Shortest Paths

In this paper, we present a new heuristic that generates broadcast schemes in arbitrary networks. The heuristic gives optimal broadcast time for ring, tree and grid if the originator is on the corner. Extensive simulations show that our new heuristic outperforms the best known broadcast algorithms for two different network models representing Internet and ATM networks. It also allows to generate broadcast time of networks of bigger size because its time complexity, O(|E|), is lower compared to the complexities of the other algorithms. The last advantage of the heuristic is that every node is informed via a shortest path from the originator.
A Tribute to the Visionaries, Prime Movers and Pioneers of Vocational Education, 1892 to 1917

As the 19th century drew to its close, the U.S. was behind the Europeans so far as training programs that would give adequate under girding to the advances taking place in the industrial world. Manual training and apprenticeship programs were inadequate. A new concept and approaches were needed to meet the demands of manufacturing. The concept of vocational education then emerged. The visionaries of vocational education sensed that the American public school was the place to develop this new approach. This manuscript recalls the early history of how vocational education became a link in America's education and pays tribute to the pioneers whose vision and work led to the phenomenon that buttress the American economy. Hopefully, this recall will encourage its readers to honor these pioneers as significant contributors of the 20th century as the close of the millennium is celebrated. It is not the intention of this paper to minimize in any way the great industrial and technical advances this nation made and was making as the 19th century drew to its close. However, the rapid changes into an industrial-type society called for a different approach for use in training more of the population in a setting corresponding to these advances. Manual training brought the nation as far as the beginning of vocational education in the United States, but it did not sufficiently under gird the factory system so that it could stem the tide of the industrial advances. The Depression of 1892-93 revealed that the factory system needed a more functional approach for preparing workers for the developing technological society. It is to pay tribute to the people who caught the vision of what vocational education was to contribute to this nation that this paper is dedicated. As the 20th century draws to its close, educators and students of vocational education are encouraged to pay tribute to those individuals, groups, organizations, and institutions whose efforts contributed in laying the foundation on which future vocational education/technology can advance into the 21st century. It would do us well to honor them for their efforts as we celebrate the close of the millennium. The material presented here is intended to serve as a recall for educators and students of vocational education, but it will also serve to inform other readers of the place vocational education and the pioneers, who made it possible, hold in American education. A recall of how vocational education became a part of the curriculum of the public secondary schools reveals how these visionaries of the 19th and early 20th centuries rightly viewed the impact vocational education was to have on the economic development of this nation. Credit is given to the pioneers for the initial efforts, which developed into what is now vocational education in the United States. The work of John D. Runkle and Calvin M. Woodward, with their development of the Della Vos' method as a manual training program, has been documented by Bennett (1926) and Lannie (1967) .
Case Report: Thymic Carcinoma Metastatic to Small Bowel

Thymomas are the most common primary anterior mediastinal tumor and account for 15% to 20% of all mediastinal masses. (1, 3, 4) Although the majority of thymomas appear histologically benign, some may behave like invasive epithelial malignancies, invading local structures or metastasizing to distant organs. (2) However, extrathoracic direct invasion or distant metastasis are extremely rare and only a few cases have been reported previously. Even fewer cases of gastrointestinal tract invasion of thymomas have been documented in the English literature. (5, 6) This is the first clinical report of mediastinal thymic carcinoma metastatic to proximal small bowel.
Aided image understanding system

Tools for automatic image understanding for damage assessment for environmental catastrophes or military operations are essential for managing operator workloads. The paper proposes a tool which integrates image segmentation and classification with the goal of providing accurate and timely information about the areas of study. Traditional methods involving image segmentation followed by classification have not lived up to their potential due to the inherent semantic gap between these two functions. Segmentation algorithms have been limited in their success in extracting objects of interest which in turn limits classification performance since the segmentation algorithm has no a priori knowledge of the objects in the image. Segmentation algorithms fail in one of two directions: (i) over-segmentation where the object of interest is divided into many smaller regions or (ii) under-segmentation where the object of interest is merged with irrelevant background information. Both problems can confound the classification process. The approach is demonstrated on aerial images from the Katrina disaster to be able to detect buildings that may have been damaged or displaced from their original positions.
Spatial price analysis

Agricultural commodities are typically produced over an extensive spatial area and are costly to transport relative to their total value. These characteristics yield a complex set of spatial price linkages which are often studied to gain insights into the performance of markets. An extensive literature has addressed a wide range of issues relating to spatial price linkages. Issues relate to market conduct and performance, regional and international trade relationships, efficiency, and developing economy market performance. This chapter reviews issues related to economic and empirical models of spatial price linkages. The relative weaknesses and merits of each approach are identified.
Learning to Control a Low-Cost Manipulator using Data-Efficient Reinforcement Learning

Over the last years, there has been substantial progress in robust manipulation in unstructured environments. The long-term goal of our work is to get away from precise, but very expensive robotic systems and to develop affordable, potentially imprecise, self-adaptive manipulator systems that can interactively perform tasks such as playing with children. In this paper, we demonstrate how a low-cost off-the-shelf robotic system can learn closed-loop policies for a stacking task in only a handful of trials-from scratch. Our manipulator is inaccurate and provides no pose feedback. For learning a controller in the work space of a Kinect-style depth camera, we use a model-based reinforcement learning technique. Our learning method is data efficient, reduces model bias, and deals with several noise sources in a principled way during long-term planning. We present a way of incorporating state-space constraints into the learning process and analyze the learning gain by exploiting the sequential structure of the stacking task.
Interaction between Coastal and Oceanic Ecosystems of the Western and Central Pacific Ocean through Predator-Prey Relationship Studies

The Western and Central Pacific Ocean sustains the highest tuna production in the world. This province is also characterized by many islands and a complex bathymetry that induces specific current circulation patterns with the potential to create a high degree of interaction between coastal and oceanic ecosystems. Based on a large dataset of oceanic predator stomach contents, our study used generalized linear models to explore the coastal-oceanic system interaction by analyzing predator-prey relationship. We show that reef organisms are a frequent prey of oceanic predators. Predator species such as albacore (Thunnus alalunga) and yellowfin tuna (Thunnus albacares) frequently consume reef prey with higher probability of consumption closer to land and in the western part of the Pacific Ocean. For surface-caught-predators consuming reef prey, this prey type represents about one third of the diet of predators smaller than 50 cm. The proportion decreases with increasing fish size. For predators caught at depth and consuming reef prey, the proportion varies with predator species but generally represents less than 10%. The annual consumption of reef prey by the yellowfin tuna population was estimated at 0.8±0.40CV million tonnes or 2.17×1012±0.40CV individuals. This represents 6.1%±0.17CV in weight of their diet. Our analyses identify some of the patterns of coastal-oceanic ecosystem interactions at a large scale and provides an estimate of annual consumption of reef prey by oceanic predators.
SHORE – A Hypertext Repository in the XML World

Large software projects using several programming languages, modeling and documentation methods make high demands on their repository. The sd&m Hypertext Object Repository (SHORE) stores information extracted from XML documents. These documents are generated by parsers that convert project documents of any type into XML. SHORE uses its own model architecture. The submission shows how SHORE’s model architecture is mapped to the four level model architecture of the XML Metadata Interchange (XMI) described with the Meta Object Facility (MOF). Using this mapping, SHORE can be complemented by other XMI capable tools. This approach proves especially valuable in multi-language environments and for reengineering purposes. The mapping is only one example of how the repository benefits from the integration of XML-based technologies. The paper closes with a discussion on our experience with XML up to now and how its use strengthens the extensibility of the repository for the future.
Local Labor Market Scale, Search Duration, and Re-Employment Match Quality for U.S. Displaced Workers

LOCAL LABOR MARKET SCALE, SEARCH DURATION, AND RE-EMPLOYMENT MATCH QUALITY FOR U.S. DISPLACED WORKERS BY KELLY RAY WILKIN December 2012 Committee Chair: Dr. Barry T. Hirsch Major Department: Economics Geographic space is an important friction preventing the instantaneous matching of unemployed workers to job vacancies. Cities reduce spatial frictions by decreasing the average distance between potential match partners. Owing to these search efficiencies, or economies of scale, theories of agglomeration predict that unemployed workers in larger labor markets find employment more quickly than observationally similar workers in smaller markets. Existing studies typically rely on cross-sectional variation in aggregate unemployment rates across spatially distinct labor markets to test for scale effects in job search. A major difficulty with these studies is that the unemployment rate is, at any given time, simultaneously determined by net flows into (incidence) and out of (duration) unemployment. Therefore, conclusions about unemployment exits using the unemployment rate are confounded by transitions into unemployment. This dissertation examines the relationship between market scale and the duration of unemployment for permanently laid off workers in the U.S. Using a large sample of individual unemployment spells in 259 MSAs, Cox proportional hazard model estimates predict a strong negative relationship between local market scale and the hazard of exiting unemployment. This effect is strengthened when space is explicitly controlled for and measured with greater precision. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that unemployed workers react to search efficiencies by raising increasing their reservation wages.
Ultraproducts and the Foundations of Higher Order Fourier Analysis

I hereby declare that this thesis represents my own work in accordance with University regulations. Contents 1. Introduction 1 1.1. Higher order Fourier analysis 1 1.2. Ultraproduct analysis 1 1.3. Overview of the paper 2 2. Preliminaries and a motivating example 4 2.
Dual-arm robot modular joint design and error analysis

This paper studies the multi-purpose redundant degrees of freedom (DOF) dual-arm robot modular joint design and error analysis. Dual-arm robot manipulator is composed of seven modular joints and the precision of each modular joint design is the basis of the mechanical arm function. The performance of the robot need joint lightweight design, good flexibility, high precision, to meet the needs of high precision assembly and micro operation is applied occasions. In this study, modular design method can realize high precision motion, small volume, light weight, high performance by integrating the motor, harmonic reducer, control module, driver module and the error control and feedback module. By analyzing mathematical model of error transfer, reduce the error in the design process.
Fractal space and time — Sources of nonlinearity in drug elimination

This paper is concerned with a ne w idea in the area of pharmacokinetics, namely the concept of fractality in both spatial and temporal domains. Physiological fractality is due to both the architecture of organs of drug elimination such as the vasculature of the liver and the time-depende nt processess that exhibit self-similarity. Both diffusion on branched and porous media and chemical kinetics in such media result in new types of invasion and elimination characteristics. We illustrate the general features of pharmacokinetic fractality with two vastly different examples of data sets: one obtained for the heart medication called mibefradil and the other for the chemotherapeutic agent paclitaxel. While the sources of fractality in these two cases are quite different, one is due to spatial distribution and the other is due to protein binding, the results in both cases show power law time dependence which is a hallmark of fractality.
Static Analysis of C for Hybrid Type Checking

Hybrid type checking[5] is an approach to enforcing the welltypedness of programs that, where possible, uses static analysis to determine the types of expressions, and run-time checking when the precision of static analysis is insufficeint. This approach is useful for dependent type systems in which types are parameterized by run-time values of expressions. Deputy is a dependent type system for C that allows the user to describe bounded pointers, tagged unions, and null-terminated strings. Deputy runs in two phases. In the first phase, simple typing rules are applied. The typing rules prescribe the insertion of run-time checks for certain operations. In the second phase, static analysis is used to identify checks that must either always succeed or always fail. The former may safely be removed, and the latter signify typing errors. This report describes the second phase of Deputy.
Stereo Matching Using Global and Local Segmentation

In this paper, we present a new stereo matching algorithm using global and local color segmentation. After we perform a quad-tree decomposition to generate global and local color segments, we determine meaningful depth information between global and local disparities based on the disparity space distribution. Unlike the previous segment-based stereo matching methods, we consider globality and locality at the same time to handle textureless regions. Expereimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme generates high-quality disparity maps.
A machine independent interface for lightweight threads

Recently, lightweight thread libraries have become a common entity to support concurrent programming on shared memory multiprocessors. However, the disparity between primitives offered by operating systems creates a challenge for those who wish to create portable lightweight thread packages. What should be the interface between the machine-independent and machine-dependent parts of the thread library? We have implemented a portable lightweight thread library on top of Unix on a KSR-1 supercomputer, BBN Butterfly multiprocessor, SGI multiprocessor, Sequent multiprocessor and Sun 3/4 family of uniprocessors. This paper first compares the nature and performance of the OS primitives offered by these machines. We then present procedure-level abstraction that is efficiently implementable on all the architectures and is a sufficient base upon which a user-level thread package can be built.