Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Assessment of the skeletal status by peripheral quantitative computed tomography of the forearm: Short‐term precision in vivo and comparison to dual X‐ray absorptiometry

In order to assess precision of peripheral quantitative computed tomography (pQCT), duplicate bone mineral density (BMD) measurements at the radius were performed in 20 healthy premenopausal, 20 healthy postmenopausal, and 20 osteoporotic postmenopausal women using a Stratec XCT‐960 system. The short‐term reproducibility in vivo for the total, trabecular, and cortical regions of interest (ROI) was expressed as the absolute precision error (standard deviation, SD) and as the relative precision error (SD/mean x 100, or coefficient of variation, CV, in %). Reproducibility in vivo was good in all volunteers but was influenced by the study group and the ROI. The precision error for trabecular BMD was 3 mg/cm3, or about 1.6%. This is large relative to the aging decrease of 0.22%/year, or to the difference (12 mg/cm3 or 7%) between osteoporotic women and postmenopausal controls. In order to compare pQCT to dual X‐ray absorptiometry (DXA) at the forearm and at the lumbar spine (L1–L4), 40 premenopausal healthy controls, 40 postmenopausal healthy controls, and 35 postmenopausal osteoporotic women were assessed. DXA measurements performed at the ultradistal, middistal, 1/3, and total ROI of the radius showed only moderate correlations between r = 0.38–0.75, r = 0.27–0.64, and r = 0.38–0.53 for the comparison versus pQCT total BMD, versus pQCT trabecular BMD, and versus pQCT cortical BMD, respectively. Correlations of DXA at the lumbar spine and pQCT were between r = 0.18 and 0.44. DXA at radius and spine was able to discriminate between postmenopausal controls and osteoporotic women (p = 0.001–0.004), but BMD measurements by pQCT did not show this ability (p = 0.15–0.52). However, two nonstandard pQCT parameters, namely the surface area of the cortical bone and the cortical BMC were factors that discriminated well between these two groups (p = 0.002, p = 0.005, respectively). These pQCT parameters also yielded the highest relative annual changes in pre‐ and postmenopausal control subjects. The measurement of cortical bone in the distal radius proved to be a good predictor of vertebral fracture status and was a good indicator of age‐related skeletal change. Our data emphasize the importance of cortical measurements when using pQCT of the radius to assess osteoporosis.
Applications of Robotics to Assessment and Physical Therapy of Upper Limbs of Stroke Patients

Cerebrovascular accident or stroke is one of the major causes of debilitation in the world. The major symptoms of stroke are loss of muscle power, spasticity and in-coordination of muscle activation. In the past, the assessment of above symptoms were quite subjective by using Medical Research Council scale, Brunnstrom’s stage and modified Ashworth scale and the rehabilitation of these patients was a labor intensive work. In the past decade, a series of researches was conducted at National Cheng Kung University (NCKU) for applying robotic technology to biomechanical assessments of spasticity and the neurorehabilitation of stroke patients in chronic stage. In particular, applications of robotics to the assessments of functional recovery, the individualized rehabilitation program and modeling of the motor learning of normal subjects and stroke patients treated by a de novo robot developed in Taiwan will be presented. The advantages and impact of utilizing robots to assist physicians on treating stroke patients will be discussed.
Using data mining for bank direct marketing: an application of the CRISP-DM methodology

The increasingly vast number of marketing campaigns over time has reduced its effect on the general public. Furthermore, economical pressures and competition has led marketing managers to invest on directed campaigns with a strict and rigorous selection of contacts. Such direct campaigns can be enhanced through the use of Business Intelligence (BI) and Data Mining (DM) techniques. This paper describes an implementation of a DM project based on the CRISP-DM methodology. Real-world data were collected from a Portuguese marketing campaign related with bank deposit subscription. The business goal is to find a model that can explain success of a contact, i.e. if the client subscribes the deposit. Such model can increase campaign efficiency by identifying the main characteristics that affect success, helping in a better management of the available resources (e.g. human effort, phone calls, time) and selection of a high quality and affordable set of potential buying customers.
Client Writing

Abstract The article presents the use of client writings done in outpatient therapy with adults and children. The writings were used as adjunct tools in individual and group therapy with adults, and group therapy with children victims of molestation. Included are, among other writing examples, workbook samples from children victims of molestation, a suicide note, and an ECG lifeline. These client contributions increased the effectiveness and efficiency of therapy, as well as aided in the accountability of therapy.
Fully anisotropic morlet transform for the study of the trabecular bone texture variations

This paper presents a new method for the characterization of trabecular bone texture variations for early detection of osteoporosis. It relies on the study of texture variations in the complex-anisotropic domain associated with the Fully Anisotropic Morlet transform (FAM). Unlike conventional oriented wavelet-based schemes, this not only allows analyzing the texture over a wider range of scales and directions but also enables to consider the texture anisotropy. More specifically, we propose a new directional-signature which is a function of the orientation and relative magnitudes to characterize the radiographic bone anisotropy. The investigation of the inter-scale dependencies within an complex- anisotropic neighboring of FAM coefficients allows to capture separately the local-statistical properties of each directional sub-band, which is of great interest for the analysis of the trabecular bone texture exhibiting complex-irregular behavior. Results show that the proposed feature vector enables to discriminate two populations composed of Osteoporotic Patients (OP) and Control Cases (CC) with an Area Under Curve (AUC) rate of 91.28%.
Learning person-object interactions for action recognition in still images

We investigate a discriminatively trained model of person-object interactions for recognizing common human actions in still images. We build on the locally order-less spatial pyramid bag-of-features model, which was shown to perform extremely well on a range of object, scene and human action recognition tasks. We introduce three principal contributions. First, we replace the standard quantized local HOG/SIFT features with stronger discriminatively trained body part and object detectors. Second, we introduce new person-object interaction features based on spatial co-occurrences of individual body parts and objects. Third, we address the combinatorial problem of a large number of possible interaction pairs and propose a discriminative selection procedure using a linear support vector machine (SVM) with a sparsity inducing regularizer. Learning of action-specific body part and object interactions bypasses the difficult problem of estimating the complete human body pose configuration. Benefits of the proposed model are shown on human action recognition in consumer photographs, outperforming the strong bag-of-features baseline.
The personality of young artists: an empirical and theoretical exploration.

Despite venerable stereotypes and even some recent empirical observations regarding the personality of artists, the following questions remain unanswered in any objective way: (1) Do personality factors differentiate art students from other students of the same age and sex? (2) Is there a relationship between the personality of art students and the values they hold? (3) Are there differences in the personality factors of art students in the several fields of specialization, e.g. commercial art v. fine art? (4) Is there a relationship between the personality factors of art students and their performance in art school? (5) Finally, what is the relationship between the personality factors of successful young artists and eminent scientists, both groups presumably engaged in creative endeavour? The present investigation of a sample of 205 advanced art students applied Cattell’s 16 Personality Factor Questionnaire supplemented by the Allport–Vernon–Lindzey Study of Values in an attempt to answer these questions. The findings are placed in a tentative theoretical framework regarding the personality of artists and the expectations of their professional role.
Bounding worst-case instruction cache performance

The use of caches poses a difficult tradeoff for architects of real-time systems. While caches provide significant performance advantages, they have also been viewed as inherently unpredictable, since the behavior of a cache reference depends upon the history of the previous references. The use of caches is only suitable for real-time systems if a reasonably tight bound on the performance of programs using cache memory can be predicted. This paper describes an approach for bounding the worst-case instruction cache performance of large code segments. First, a new method called static cache simulation is used to analyze a program's control flow to statically categorize the caching behavior of each instruction. A timing analyzer, which uses the categorization information, then estimates the worst-case instruction cache performance for each loop and function in the program. <<ETX>>
Book Review: Anonymous agencies, backstreet businesses and covert collectives

writing about the Kantian qualities of global corporations. For Bowie (1999), the global, crossborder reach of multinationals promotes equality of treatment for women, discourages corruption and even advances world peace. When the American journalist Thomas Friedman made similar assertions about the qualities of global capitalism, the cultural commentator and philosopher, Slavoj Žižek, polemically dubbed him a liberal communist—a figure who is a critical apologist of global capitalism for the sake of saving capitalism itself. Could the same pejorative moniker be applied to Bowie? In fact the book does lack something of a more radical perspective on Bowie’s work, with most of the contributors hailing from North American management schools. There is nothing wrong with this, per se, but it means the writing style and political positioning of the contributors vary only marginally. The collection closes with Bowie replying to his critics—a generous offer by the editors of this collection. However, it is the penultimate chapter by Reynolds and Dang, which offers a highly positive assessment of his work. The said authors test Bowie’s bottom-line dictum: that every business leader and manager should adopt Kant for the simple reason that it not only benefits the individuals involved but also their organizations. However, this is a utilitarian argument dressed up in a Kantian suit. The point for Kant is that high ethical principles of good will, moral consistency and a respect for others should be pursued independent of their outcomes. And yes, Reynolds and Dang found that being Kantian is ultimately beneficial for business. But ultimately that should not matter for any self-respecting Kantian, unless you are a Kantian capitalist, of course.
Progressive inter-scale and intra-scale non-blind image deconvolution

Ringing is the most disturbing artifact in the image deconvolution. In this paper, we present a progressive inter-scale and intra-scale non-blind image deconvolution approach that significantly reduces ringing. Our approach is built on a novel edge-preserving deconvolution algorithm called bilateral Richardson-Lucy (BRL) which uses a large spatial support to handle large blur. We progressively recover the image from a coarse scale to a fine scale (inter-scale), and progressively restore image details within every scale (intra-scale). To perform the inter-scale deconvolution, we propose a joint bilateral Richardson-Lucy (JBRL) algorithm so that the recovered image in one scale can guide the deconvolution in the next scale. In each scale, we propose an iterative residual deconvolution to progressively recover image details. The experimental results show that our progressive deconvolution can produce images with very little ringing for large blur kernels.
GRB 060505: A Possible Short-Duration Gamma-Ray Burst in a Star-forming Region at a Redshift of 0.09

On 2006 May 5, a 4 s duration, low-energy, ~1049 erg, gamma-ray burst (GRB) was observed, spatially associated with a z = 0.0894 galaxy. Here we report the discovery of the GRB optical afterglow and observations of its environment using Gemini South, the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), Chandra, Swift, and the Very Large Array. The optical afterglow of this GRB is spatially associated with a prominent star-forming region in the Sc-type galaxy 2dFGRS S173Z112. Its proximity to a star-forming region suggests that the progenitor delay time, from birth to explosion, is smaller than ~10 Myr. Our HST deep imaging rules out the presence of a supernova brighter than an absolute magnitude of about -11 (or -12.6 in the case of maximal extinction) at about 2 weeks after the burst and limits the ejected mass of radioactive 56Ni to be less than about 2 × 10-4 M☉ (assuming no extinction). Although it was suggested that GRB 060505 may belong to a new class of long-duration GRBs with no supernova, we argue that the simplest interpretation is that the physical mechanism responsible for this burst is the same as that for short-duration GRBs.
Toward the Deconstruction of Dyninst

There are two problems that hinder the development of binary tools: a lack of code sharing and a lack of portability. Binary tools, whether static or dynamic, depend on similar analysis and apply similar modiﬁcation techniques. However, implementations of these techniques are not shared between tools, forcing a developer to reinvent the wheel rather than leverage existing functionality. Tools are often limited to a small range of platforms, preventing users from using existing tools on new platforms. This research describes the deconstruction of the Dyninst dynamic instrumentation library. Dyninst possesses powerful analysis and modiﬁcation techniques, but these capabilities are hidden underneath the instrumentation-focused API. We are creating a suite of component libraries that will provide a plat-form-independent interface to a core piece of Dyninst functionality. These libraries will allow other tool developers to access the capabilities of Dyninst. In addition to a programmatic interface, we are also creating representations for interchange of data between tools. The deconstruction of Dyninst poses several interesting challenges, including the design of general interfaces between components that are also abstract and portable. This paper lays out our approach to the deconstruction of Dyninst and also describes the ﬁrst of these components, the SymtabAPI, a multi-platform library for parsing, modifying, and exporting symbol tables in object ﬁles. We also present a case study of the tool unstrip that regenerates missing or incorrect symbol tables in binaries. Unstrip allows other analysis, reverse engineering, and debugging tools, which require symbol information, to operate successfully on stripped binaries.
The Relationship of Core Strength with Static and Dynamic Balance in Children with Autism

Autism represents a disorder of neural development characterized by 3 features including deficit in social communication, inflexibility of speech and behavior, and stereotyped movements. The prevalence of this disorder has been reported about 1.5 per 100 individuals in Iran. Individuals with ASDs are susceptible to weakness in balance and stability and also postural deformities. Thus, the purpose of this study was to determine the relationship between core strength and balance in children with autism. The subjects included 32 boys with ASDs aged 6-10 (mean and standard deviation of 8.16 ± 1.16 years, 124.81 ± 11.56 cm in height, 33.02± 7.72 kg weight and body mass index 21.12 ± 3.14 kg/m 2 ). They were selected according to available sampling method. In order to assess the maximum isometric strength of hip abduction and external rotation, manual muscle test dynamometer was used. Static and dynamic balance were also tested by modified stork standing test and walking heel to toe test, respectively. The results showed that there is no correlation between core strength and static balance in dominant and non-dominant leg, but there is a significant correlation between dynamic balance and core strength. According to the results, it is recommended that development of parameters related to the core body strength to be emphasized for improving balance in such children.
Host DNA Damage Response Factors Localize to Merkel Cell Polyomavirus DNA Replication Sites To Support Efficient Viral DNA Replication

ABSTRACT Accumulating evidence indicates a role for Merkel cell polyomavirus (MCPyV) in the development of Merkel cell carcinoma (MCC), making MCPyV the first polyomavirus to be clearly associated with human cancer. With the high prevalence of MCPyV infection and the increasing amount of MCC diagnosis, there is a need to better understand the virus and its oncogenic potential. In this study, we examined the relationship between the host DNA damage response (DDR) and MCPyV replication. We found that components of the ATM- and ATR-mediated DDR pathways accumulate in MCPyV large T antigen (LT)-positive nuclear foci in cells infected with native MCPyV virions. To further study MCPyV replication, we employed our previously established system, in which recombinant MCPyV episomal DNA is autonomously replicated in cultured cells. Similar to native MCPyV infection, where both MCPyV origin and LT are present, the host DDR machinery colocalized with LT in distinct nuclear foci. Immunofluorescence in situ hybridization and bromodeoxyuridine (BrdU) incorporation analysis showed that these DDR proteins and MCPyV LT in fact colocalized at the actively replicating MCPyV replication complexes, which were absent when a replication-defective LT mutant or an MCPyV-origin mutant was introduced in place of wild-type LT or wild-type viral origin. Inhibition of DDR kinases using chemical inhibitors and ATR/ATM small interfering RNA (siRNA) knockdown reduced MCPyV DNA replication without significantly affecting LT expression or the host cell cycle. This study demonstrates that these host DDR factors are important for MCPyV DNA replication, providing new insight into the host machinery involved in the MCPyV life cycle. IMPORTANCE MCPyV is the first polyomavirus to be clearly associated with human cancer. However, the MCPyV life cycle and its oncogenic mechanism remain poorly understood. In this report, we show that, in cells infected with native MCPyV virions, components of the ATM- and ATR-mediated DDR pathways accumulate in MCPyV LT-positive nuclear foci. Such a phenotype was recapitulated using our previously established system for visualizing MCPyV replication complexes in cells. By combining immunofluorescent staining, fluorescence in situ hybridization, and BrdU incorporation analysis, we demonstrate that DDR proteins are important for maintaining robust MCPyV DNA replication. This study not only provides the first look into the microscopic details of DDR factor/LT replication complexes at the MCPyV origin but also provides a platform for further studying the mechanistic role of host DDR factors in the MCPyV life cycle and virus-associated oncogenesis.
The Effect of Employees’ Perception of a Supervisor’s Servant Leadership on Employees’ Perceived Organization’s Support: The Mediating Effect of Employees’ Perceived Supervisor’s Supports*

Purpose - Leadership style is an important factor in determin-ing the attitude and behavior of employees and their satisfaction with an organization. Contributing the efficiency of an organization, Especially, servant leadership focusing on meeting employees’ hopes and desires positively affect success of the organization and performance of employees. In the airline service industry it is necessary to conduct studies for an internal marketing on servant leadership that emphasizes the trust in the dignity of humans and spirit of service to subordinates as a factor affecting the job satisfaction. Research design, data, and methodology Therefore, in this – research, it is empirically analyzed that employees’ perception of a supervisor’s support plays mediating role in the relationship between employees’ perception of servant leadership and perception of an organization’s support using multiple and hierarchal regression analysis targeting 243 employees working in D Airline. Result - As a result, Employees’ employees’ perceived supervisor’s support mediates the relationship between employees’ perceived servant leadership of a supervisor and employees’ perceived organizational support. Conclusions - This study suggests that the servant leadership of a supervisor perceived by employees constitutes an important preceding variable in enhancing the employees’ perception on organizational support.
The Central Mass and Phase-Space Densities of Dark Matter Halos: Cosmological Implications

Current data suggest that the central mass densities ρ0 and phase-space densities Q ≡ ρ0/σ of cosmological halos in the present universe are correlated with their velocity dispersions σV over a very wide range of σV from less than 10 to more than 1000 km s-1. Such correlations are an expected consequence of the statistical correlation of the formation epochs of virialized objects in the cold dark matter (CDM) model with their masses; the smaller mass halos typically form first and merge to form larger mass halos later. We have derived the Q-σV and ρ0-σV correlations for different CDM cosmologies and compared the predicted correlations with the observed properties of a sample of low-redshift halos ranging in size from dwarf spheroidal galaxies to galaxy clusters. Our predictions are generally consistent with the data, with preference for the currently favored, flat low-density CDM model with cosmological constant (ΛCDM). Such a comparison serves to test the basic CDM paradigm while constraining the background cosmology and the power spectrum of primordial density fluctuations, including larger wavenumbers than have previously been constrained.