Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Patterns of use of flexible sigmoidoscopy, colonoscopy and gastroscopy: a population-based study in a Canadian province.

BACKGROUND & AIMS Flexible sigmoidoscopy, colonoscopy and gastroscopy are important in the diagnosis and treatment of gastrointestinal (GI) diseases. Pressure on endoscopy resources is expected due to increased screening for GI cancers. The present study examined patterns of use of GI endoscopy in a Canadian province, Alberta, with universal health care insurance. METHODS Data on physician payments from January 1, 1994 to March 31, 2002 were used to calculate age-sex adjusted rates and patterns of use. RESULTS The gastroscopy rate increased by 17%, from 9.7 (95% CI 9.6 to 9.9) to 10.3 (95% CI 10.1 to 10.5). The colonoscopy rate increased by 105%, from 4.8 (95% CI 4.6 to 5.0) to 9.8 (95% CI 9.6 to 10.1). Flexible sigmoidoscopy rates declined by 10%, from 4.68 (95% CI 4.56 to 4.80) to 4.21 (95% CI 4.11 to 4.32). The increase in colonoscopy rates occurred in all age groups, whereas gastroscopy rates increased only in the older age groups. Regional variation in procedure rates was evident, but rural health regions did not have consistently lower rates than the large urban regions. A polypectomy was performed on 23.7% of male patients and 15.4% of female patients at time of colonoscopy. Rates of polypectomy for individual endoscopists ranged from 0% to 60%. CONCLUSIONS There has been a marked increase in gastroscopy and colonoscopy rates, likely due to a broadening of indications rather than just increased use for cancer screening. Modest regional variation in rates exists, but there is no direct evidence of limited rural access to endoscopy. Reasonable polypectomy rates were seen but important variations between endoscopists exist.
Blind signal extraction based joint suppression of diffuse background noise and late reverberation

The performance of automatic speech recognition for signals acquired through a hands-free speech interface is limited by the adverse effect of the noise and the reverberation. Frequency domain blind signal processing techniques, like blind signal separation, have been used with success for suppressing the noise in real situation but they usually do not take into account the reverberation. In this paper, we present a method based on frequency domain blind signal extraction that is aimed at suppressing both the adverse effect of the noise and the reverberation.
The Escrow transactional method

A method is presented for permitting record updates by long-lived transactions without forbidding simultaneous access by other users to records modified. Earlier methods presented separately by Gawlick and Reuter are comparable but concentrate on “hot-spot” situations, where even short transactions cannot lock frequently accessed fields without causing bottlenecks. The Escrow Method offered here is designed to support nonblocking record updates by transactions that are “long lived” and thus require long periods to complete. Recoverability of intermediate results prior to commit thus becomes a design goal, so that updates as of a given time can be guaranteed against memory or media failure while still retaining the prerogative to abort. This guarantee basically completes phase one of a two-phase commit, and several advantages result: (1) As with Gawlick's and Reuter's methods, high-concurrency items in the database will not act as a bottleneck; (2) transaction commit of different updates can be performed asynchronously, allowing natural distributed transactions; indeed, distributed transactions in the presence of delayed messages or occasional line disconnection become feasible in a way that we argue will tie up minimal resources for the purpose intended; and (3) it becomes natural to allow for human interaction in the middle of a transaction without loss of concurrent access or any special difficulty for the application programmer. The Escrow Method, like Gawlick's Fast Path and Reuter's Method, requires the database system to be an “expert” about the type of transactional updates performed, most commonly updates involving incremental changes to aggregate quantities. However, the Escrow Method is extendable to other types of updates.
Sport and the sexually abused male child1

Through feminist research in the study of sport, the issue of child sexual abuse has been driven onto the agenda of sports organisations, resulting in considerable practical reform (Brackenridge, 2001). However, the flip-side to this development is that the experience of sexually abused males has been largely ignored. In 1990, Struve claimed, ‘a growing number of clinicians who work with sexual abuse are discovering that males probably are sexually victimized just as frequently as females’ (p. 3). Despite research on the ‘sexually victimized’ male reaching back over the last 15 to 20 years, researchers in sport have, so far, largely ignored the issue of the sexual abuse of males. Certainly, there has been no in-depth treatment of the abuse of males and sport researchers, to date, have been driven by the ‘male perpetrator–female victim’ paradigm. This focus has influenced the type of research that has been conducted and has inadvertently contributed to the further silencing of the sexually abused male. This paper focuses upon the absence of sexually abused male children in empirical research and theoretical analyses of sport. It notes issues, previously ignored within sport, surrounding the sexual abuse of males, particularly the under-identification of this group, as well as recognition of female perpetrators. Through reviewing literature from social work and therapeutic disciplines, this paper brings the sexually abused male into focus and facilitates a discussion of issues, distinct from the sexual abuse of females that have much relevance for sport. It concludes that if sport is to attempt to safeguard all children from sexual abuse, research in, and analyses of, sport, must reflect the highly complex nature of child sexual abuse, including the experience of male children.
Summarizing video using non-negative similarity matrix factorization

We present a novel approach to automatically extracting summary excerpts from audio video and video. Our approach is to maximize the average similarity between the excerpt and the source. We first calculate a similarity matrix by comparing each pair of time samples using a quantitative similarity measure. To determine the segment with highest average similarity, we maximize the summation of the self-similarity matrix over the support of the segment. To select multiple excerpts while avoiding redundancy, we compute the non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) of the similarity matrix into its essential structural components. We then build a summary comprised of excerpts from the main components, selecting the excerpts for maximum average similarity within each component. Variations integrating segmentation and other information are also discussed, and experimental results are presented.
The theory and construction of the personality inventory

Resume LA THEORIE ET LA CONSTRUCTION DE L'INVENTAIRE DE PERSONNALITE On a developpe l'Inventaire de Personnalite pour tester la theorie qu'un seul de example de comportement, soit dans une situation sociale immediate soit comme reponse a une question sur le comportement usuelle, peut etre symptomatique de plus d'un trait de personnalite. Le succes de l'Inventaire de Personnalite, juge par sa coherence et sa validite, montre le solidite de cette theorie. L'Inventaire se compose de 125 questions. On a evalue les reponses a ces questions selon quatre methodes differentes au moyen de quatre echelles differentes d'evaluation construites selon la methode de “l'evaluation differentielle. ” On s'est servi de la formule Kelley-Strong pour determiner les poids de l'evaluation. Les traits consideres sont la tendance nevrosique, la suffisance, l'introversion-extroversion, et la dominance-soumission. La coherence moyenne “split-half” des echelles varie de 0,83 a 0,88 quand on la compute pour les groupes d'etudiants sec.
Hope More, Worry Less: Hope as a Potential Resilience Factor in Mothers of Very Young Children With Type 1 Diabetes

Little research has explored potential resilience factors in parenting a child with a chronic illness—or factors that help protect against the experience of psychological distress. This study explored the relation between hope (a resilience factor) and anxiety (a distress factor) in mothers of very young children with type 1 diabetes. Seventy-five mothers of children aged 2 through 5 years diagnosed with type 1 diabetes completed a self-report assessment battery, including well-standardized measures of hope and anxiety. As expected, analyses indicated an inverse relation between mothers' hope and anxiety. In addition, after controlling for significant medical and demographic covariates, hope remained a negative contributor to maternal anxiety (p < .001). This suggests that having an individual disposition that includes high hope may serve as a protective factor against psychological distress in mothers of very young children with diabetes. Examining levels of hope in this population may identify parents least and most at risk for distress, facilitating the provision of targeted and tailored intervention.
Orbital stabilization of a VToL UAV for landing on oscillating platforms

This paper presents preliminary theoretical results about asymptotic orbital stabilization of an aerial vehicle for landing on a periodic oscillating platform. A feedback controller firstly stabilizes a chosen set of virtual geometric constraints. This pushes the dynamics of the aerial vehicle to reach a limit cycle, that is in turn the periodic motion of the landing platform to track. Then, a linear periodic system is considered around the vicinity of the orbit, and it is stabilized through a modified LQR design. Mathematical and theoretical frameworks are presented along with case studies that are critically discussed.
Routing and grooming of scheduled lightpath demands in a multi-granularity switching network: a mathematical model

Technological improvements allow advanced optical cross-connect architectures to be developed. Multi-granularity switching optical cross-connects (MG-OXCs) are equipments able to switch wavelengths, to aggregate (disaggregate) wavelengths into (from) groups of wavelengths called wavebands and to switch wavebands. In previous studies, we described a new traffic model based on Scheduled Lightpath Demands (SLDs) that make it possible to take into account the time and space distribution of traffic in the planning of all-optical WDM mesh networks. We proposed a mathematical model to optimize the routing of a set of SLDs in a WDM with standard wavelength-switching optical Cross-Connects (WXCs). In order to compare the cost of provisioning a set of SLDs in a network of WXCs against the cost of instantiating the same set in a network of MG-OXCs, it is necessary to extend the model used for the standard case. In this paper, we present a generalization of the model that permits to solve the problem of optimally instantiating SLDs in a network equipped with MG-OXCs.
Bounding and Minimizing Counterfactual Error

There is intense interest in applying machine learning methods to problems of causal inference which arise in applications such as healthcare, economic policy, and education. In this paper we use the counterfactual inference approach to causal inference, and propose new theoretical results and new algorithms for performing counterfactual inference. Building on an idea recently proposed by Johansson et al., our results and methods rely on learning so-called "balanced" representations: representations that are similar between the factual and counterfactual distributions. We give a novel, simple and intuitive bound, showing that the expected counterfactual error of a representation is bounded by a sum of the factual error of that representation and the distance between the factual and counterfactual distributions induced by the representation. We use Integral Probability Metrics to measure distances between distributions, and focus on two special cases: the Wasserstein distance and the Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) distance. Our bound leads directly to new algorithms, which are simpler and easier to employ compared to those suggested in Johansson et al. Experiments on real and simulated data show the new algorithms match or outperform state-of-the-art methods.
Kink-free deformations of polygons

We consider a discrete version of the Whitney-Graustein theorem concerning regular equivalence of closed curves. Two regular polygons <italic>P</italic> and <italic>P'</italic>, i.e. polygons without overlapping adjacent edges, are called regularly equivalent if there is a continuous one-parameter family <italic>P</italic><subscrpt>s</subscrpt>, O ≥ s ≤ 1 of regular polygons with <italic>P</italic><subscrpt>o</subscrpt> = <italic>P</italic> and <italic>P</italic><subscrpt>1</subscrpt> = <italic>P'</italic>. Geometrically the one-parameter family is a kink-free deformation transforming <italic>P</italic> into <italic>P'</italic>. The winding number of a polygon is a complete invariant of its regular equivalence class. We develop a linear algorithm that determines a linear number of elementary steps to deform a regular polygon into any other regular polygon with the same winding number.
Development of the California school climate and safety survey-short form

Planning is essential to creating safe schools and it is required by the Federal No Child Left Behind legislation (U.S. Department of Education, 2004) and implemented via district local education action plans. The implementation of these plans involves continuous monitoring and reevaluation of information pertinent to each campus. As such, this process is facilitated by the availability of measures that are simple to administer, inexpensive, and whose psychometric properties have been evaluated. The California School Climate and Safety Survey (CSCSS), originally developed by M.J. Furlong, R. Morrison, and S. Boles (1991), was specifically developed for these purposes. The CSCSS is a student self-report questionnaire created to measure general school climate and personal safety-related experiences. In this article, we present the results of an evaluation of the CSCSS including exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. These analyses reduced the original CSCSS research version from 102 items to 54 items. The psychometric properties of this CSCSS-SF (Short Form) are presented. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Psychol Schs 42: 137–149, 2005.
Multi-Resolution Cascades for Multiclass Object Detection

An algorithm for learning fast multiclass object detection cascades is introduced. It produces multi-resolution (MRes) cascades, whose early stages are binary target vs. non-target detectors that eliminate false positives, late stages multiclass classifiers that finely discriminate target classes, and middle stages have intermediate numbers of classes, determined in a data-driven manner. This MRes structure is achieved with a new structurally biased boosting algorithm (SBBoost). SBBost extends previous multiclass boosting approaches, whose boosting mechanisms are shown to implement two complementary data-driven biases: 1) the standard bias towards examples difficult to classify, and 2) a bias towards difficult classes. It is shown that structural biases can be implemented by generalizing this class-based bias, so as to encourage the desired MRes structure. This is accomplished through a generalized definition of multiclass margin, which includes a set of bias parameters. SBBoost is a boosting algorithm for maximization of this margin. It can also be interpreted as standard multiclass boosting algorithm augmented with margin thresholds or a cost-sensitive boosting algorithm with costs defined by the bias parameters. A stage adaptive bias policy is then introduced to determine bias parameters in a data driven manner. This is shown to produce MRes cascades that have high detection rate and are computationally efficient. Experiments on multiclass object detection show improved performance over previous solutions.
A novel broadband co-planar waveguide (CPW) zeroth order resonant antenna

In this paper, a novel broadband zeroth-order resonant (ZOR) antenna is proposed. The proposed ZOR antenna is based on a CRLH coplanar-waveguide (CPW) transmission line (TL). For a compact size, two unit cells of the CRLH TL are chosen and each unit cell determines the resonant frequency. The unit cell is composed of the metallic patch and the meander line. This antenna shows the measured 10 dB return loss bandwidth of 120 MHz, which corresponds to approximately 5.9 %. The peak gain and the overall efficiency are −4.4 dBi and 66 % at 2.03 GHz, respectively. The physical size and the electrical size of the proposed CPW type small antenna are 21.4mm × 25.4mm and 0. 18λg × 0. 22λg, respectively. The configuration simplifies fabrication because it does not require a via process.
Evolution of Long-Term Industrial Meta-Models -- An Automotive Case Study of AUTOSAR

Meta-models in software engineering are used to define properties of models. Therefore the evolution of the meta-models influences the evolution of the models and the software instantiated from them. The evolution of the meta-models is particularly problematic if the software has to instantiate two versions of the same meta-model - a situation common for long-term software development projects such as car development projects. In this paper, we present a case study of the evolution of the standardized meta-model used in the development of the automotive software systems - the AUTOSAR meta-model - at Volvo Car Corporation. The objective of this study is to assist automotive software designers in planning long term development projects based on multiple AUTOSAR meta-model versions. We achieve this by performing quantitative analysis of the AUTOSAR meta-model evolution in order to visualize the size and the complexity change between different meta-model versions and calculate the number of changes which need to be implemented to adopt a newer version. The analysis is done for each major role in the automotive development process affected by the changes.
Overlapping effects: Path dependence and path generation in management and organization in Russia

An important contribution to our understanding of management transformation in post-socialist societies has been made by new institutionalism. The strength of this approach derives from its critique of normative models based on neo-classical economics, which has tended towards institutional and management voluntarism. It has been able to grasp complexity in societies undergoing structural change, stressing that path dependence in property, political and social structures helps to define business organization. The limitation of new institutionalism lies in its tendency to overstate institutional stasis, failing to treat (national) institutions as contradictory and transient (localized) expressions of global processes. Based on extensive qualitative data, our article extends the understanding of path-dependence. Rather than dispensing with key insights of new institutionalism, we bridge the notion of path dependence with the contradictory processes of institutional reshaping and adaptation. Using an adapted version of the `system, society and dominance' (SSD) model, we demonstrate that the nature of Russia's insertion into the global market has had a substantial impact on firm ownership and strategies, while simultaneously limiting reforms to management structures and work organization.
Serial Changes of Circulating Platelet Activation Markers After Carotid Artery Stenting

We investigated serial changes of circulation platelet activation markers in 40 patients undergoing carotid artery stenting under the protection of dual antiplatelet therapy and filter devices. Monocyte-platelet aggregates and PAC-1 (a marker specific for activated glycoprotein IIb/IIIa) analyzed by flow cytometry were determined in patients with symptomatic stenosis undergoing elective carotid artery stenting. Blood samples were obtained immediately before stent implantation and 0.5 hours, 18 hours, and 6 days after the procedure, respectively. All patients were already on dual antiplatelet therapy of aspirin and clopidogrel before carotid artery stenting, and all were stented with embolic protection devices. Both circulation monocyte-platelet aggregates and PAC-1 did not change significantly at the various time points after the procedure. Serial changes of monocyte-platelet aggregates and PAC-1 analyzed by flow cytometry fail to indicate the occurrence of platelet activation after carotid artery stenting under the treatment with dual antiplatelet therapy before carotid artery stenting and the application of embolic protection devices during the procedure.
Hierarchical trend modeling of preferences on welfare needs

Novel quantitative methods are proposed for analyzing trends in preferences in the area of welfare needs. The methods of structural analysis are used to analyze the trends revealed by the third poll on preferences in national life in Japan, which is a nationwide survey on welfare needs conducted in 1978. Two kinds of structural models are constructed: one is a hierarchical model that ranks welfare needs according to levels of preference; the other presents the trend of people's interests toward higher needs when basic needs are satisfied.
Statistical Analyses of Single-Case Designs

Single-case-design researchers rarely used statistics in the past, but that is changing. In this article, I review the rapidly developing state of statistical analyses for single-case designs, including effect sizes, multilevel models, and Bayesian analyses. No analysis meets all the desiderata for an optimal single-case-design analysis, but this may be remedied in the near future. Single-case-design researchers will have incentives to use these analyses as they become more user-friendly and beneficial.
Components of a Psychology of Instruction: Toward a Science of Design

It is a well-known historical fact that two major areas of scientific psychology, psychometrics and general experimental psychology, came out of different traditions and have developed in different ways. Psychometrics has become a major technological application of psychology, with primary effort being devoted to practical techniques and less effort to theoretical concerns. In contrast, the experimental psychology of learning and cognition has been almost exclusively a theoretical endeavor, with little effort devoted to application and the design of practical techniques for assisting in the conduct of human affairs. Although practical work has been carried out in educational
Comparing Satisfaction, Life-Stress, Coping and Academic Performance of Counselling Students in On-Campus and Distance Education Learning Environments

Distance education students are confronted with a range of additional challenges as part of their tertiary study experience. A quantitative approach was used to identify the challenges they face, their relative levels of satisfaction, coping strategies, and academic performance. Two hundred and ninety-five students (64 male and 231 female) participated by completing a survey that included measures of satisfaction, stress, coping, and academic performance. All were enrolled in an Australian university and studied either on campus or in one of two distance education (DE) modes, off-campus and offshore. While there were some differences in satisfaction expressed between DE and on-campus students, there were no significant differences between the groups on measures of stress or academic performance. The differences between the three groups’ use of coping strategies was less clear. Possible explanations for the differences between the groups are discussed.