Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Age-dependent organ and effective dose coefficients for external photons: a comparison of stylized and voxel-based paediatric phantoms

This present study investigates the anatomical realism of conventional stylized models of children by comparing organ dose conversion coefficients for the ORNL paediatric phantom series with those determined in the UF (University of Florida) voxel paediatric phantoms. The latter includes whole-body models of a 9 month male, 4 year female, 8 year female, 11 year male and a 14 year male. Of these phantoms, the 1 year, 5 year and 10 year ORNL phantoms, and 9 month male, 4 year female and 11 year male UF voxel phantoms were selected for side-by-side comparisons under idealized external photon irradiation. Organ absorbed dose per unit air kerma (Gy/Gy) for various radiosensitive organs and tissues were calculated for monoenergetic photons over the energy range of 15 keV to 10 MeV and for six irradiation geometries: anterior–posterior (AP), posterior–anterior (PA), right lateral (RLAT), left lateral (LLAT), rotational (ROT) and isotropic (ISO). Differences in organ dose conversion coefficients for the gonads, bone marrow, colon, lung and stomach, to which prominent tissue weighting factors are assigned, were depicted and analysed. Two major causes of observed differences were suggested: differences in organ shape and position and the differences in tissue shielding by overlying tissue regions within the phantoms. Significant discrepancies caused by anatomical differences between the two types of phantoms are also reported for several organs, and in particular, the thyroid and urinary bladder. The results of this study suggest that the paediatric series of ORNL phantoms also have less realistic internal organ and body anatomy and that dose conversion coefficients from these stylized phantoms should be re-evaluated using paediatric voxel phantoms.
Prevention Approaches to Enhance Resilience among High‐Risk Youth

Abstract: This article synthesizes research on resilience theory and its implications for prevention interventions to increase resilience in high‐risk children and adolescents. In addition, this response to both the articles by Drs. Greenberg and Dishion summarizes their key points. Their papers discuss the neuroscience substrate behind two major mediators of antisocial behaviors, namely lack of self‐regulation and executive function problems. In addition, we present an overall Resilience Framework that will help the reader organize the aspects of resilience discussed by these two researchers into a transactional process model. This article extends prior researchers' suggestion that resilience is the product of the interaction of genetic, biological, and environmental precursors to a further consideration of higher‐level cognitive precursors, such as purpose in life and existential meaning. The relevance of resilience to the prevention of negative outcomes in high‐risk children of alcoholics (COAs) and substance abusers is covered. Within this third wave of resilience research on prevention interventions, we present data suggesting that family strengthening approaches have the greatest impact on increasing resilience.
Performance prediction in uncertain networked control systems using ℒ1-adaptation-based distributed event-triggering

This paper studies networked control systems in the presence of communication constraints and uncertainties. We propose an ℒ1-adaption-based distributed event-triggering broadcast scheme, where ℒ1 adaptive controller is embedded in each subsystem. In this scheme, a subsystem broadcasts its state information to its neighbors when its local error exceeds a constant. We compare the resulting system with an ideal model that has perfect communication and no uncertainties. Performance bounds on these two system are derived. A trade-off is established among the performance bounds, the event thresholds, the adaptation rates, and the bandwidths of the low-pass filters in the ℒ1 adaptation structure. With this scheme, the prediction of the performance of the networked control systems in the presence of uncertainties can be significantly improved. This is important for safety-critical applications.
Predicting Quality of Well-being Scores from the SF-36

Background. The SF-36 and the Quality of Well-being index (QWB) both quantify health status, yet have very different methodologic etiologies. The authors sought to develop an empirical equation allowing prediction of the QWB from the SF-36. Data. They used empirical observations of SF-36 profiles and QWB scores collected in in terviews of 1,430 persons during the Beaver Dam Health Outcomes Study, a com munity-based population study of health status, and 57 persons from a renal dialysis clinic. Method. The eight scales of the SF-36, their squares, and all pairwise cross- products, were used as candidate variables in stepwise and best-subsets regressions to predict QWB scores using 1,356 interviews reported in a previous paper. The re sulting equation was cross-validated on the remaining 74 cases and using the renal dialysis patients. Results. A six-variable regression equation drawing on five of the SF- 36 components predicted 56.9% of the observed QWB variance. The equation achieved an R2 of 49.5% on cross-validation using Beaver Dam participants and an R2 of 58.7% with the renal dialysis patients. An approximation for computing confidence intervals for predicted QWB mean scores is given. Conclusion. SF-36 data may be used to predict mean QWB scores for groups of patients, and thus may be useful to modelers who are secondary users of health status profile data. The equation may also be used to provide an overall health utility summary score to represent SF-36 profile data so long as the profiles are not severely limited by floor or ceiling effects of the SF-36 scales. The results of this study provide a quantitative link between two important measures of health status. Key words: health status; SF-36; Quality of Well- being index; quality of life; health-state utility; population study. (Med Decis Making 1997;17:1-9
The Myth of Mediterranean Familism

ABSTRACT This article seeks to re-open the consensus concerning the interrelationship between family values and public support for government versus private family provision. We offer new results from analyses of 2001 data from the International Social Survey Programme for a wide range of countries and world regions. Refining conventional scholarly wisdom, Southern European publics' have high levels of traditional family values, but mainly in contrast to other European countries; familism is also notably strong in Eastern Europe and several of the English-speaking democracies. Even more surprising, family values support is strongly and positively associated with support for public child care provision. We discuss implications of results for understanding the nature of public attitudes and familism in cross-national perspective, and the limits of theorizing identifying family values as the primary cause of welfare state development in Southern Europe.
Location based query routing for distributed spatial data in mobile ad hoc network

Location based service (LBS) is getting more and more popular by the growth of network technology, localization techniques and web-based map services. Not only administrators of web servers but also every user may be able to create and provide any spatial data for LBS in the near future. We may exchange them locally through wireless and peer to peer methods like mobile ad hoc networks. In such an environment, using local spatial data, we can create context-aware LBS at low cost without any central servers. However, to realize such a distributed system, we need a new routing algorithm to forward queries to proper terminals which have proper spatial data about the locations of userspsila interests. We propose a query routing method for mobile ad hoc networks, which uses location and structure information of spatial data. Compared to other methods, ours can find proper data about nearer locations to userspsila interests with lower traffic load and smaller memory consumption.
Simple Semi-Supervised Learning for Prepositional Phrase Attachment

Prepositional phrase attachment is an important subproblem of parsing, performance on which suffers from limited availability of labelled data. We present a semi-supervised approach. We show that a discriminative lexical model trained from labelled data, and a generative lexical model learned via Expectation Maximization from unlabelled data can be combined in a product model to yield a PP-attachment model which is better than either is alone, and which outperforms the modern parser of Petrov and Klein (2007) by a significant margin. We show that, when learning from unlabelled data, it can be beneficial to model the generation of modifiers of a head collectively, rather than individually. Finally, we suggest that our pair of models will be interesting to combine using new techniques for discriminatively constraining EM.
Combining SGMM speaker vectors and KL-HMM approach for speaker diarization

In this paper, a method to use SGMM speaker vectors for speaker diarization is introduced. The architecture of the Information Bottleneck (IB) based speaker diarization is utilized for this purpose. The audio for speaker diarization is split into short uniform segments. Speaker vectors are obtained from a Subspace Gaussian Mixture Model (SGMM) system trained on meeting data. The speaker vectors are clustered using the K-means algorithm. Two types of distance measures are explored in the clustering step: cosine distance of the speaker vectors and that of the vectors in a space projected by Probabilistic Linear Discriminant Analysis (PLDA). The clustering output is used as an initialization step for the Kullback Leibler-Hidden Markov Model (KL-HMM) based speech segmentation approach commonly used in the IB system for diarization. The proposed method is compared to clustering the segments using the IB based approach. A relative improvement of approximately 14% is obtained on the diarization performance for the proposed approach using SGMM speaker vectors with PLDA on the NIST RT 09 dataset.
Traffic Information Publication with Privacy Preservation

We are experiencing the expanding use of location-based services such as AT&T’’s TeleNav GPS Navigator and Intel’s Thing Finder. Existing location-based services have collected a large amount of location data, which has great potential for statistical usage in applications like traffic flow analysis, infrastructure planning, and advertisement dissemination. The key challenge is how to wisely use the data without violating each user’s location privacy concerns. In this article, we first identify a new privacy problem, namely, the inference-route problem, and then present our anonymization algorithms for privacy-preserving trajectory publishing. The experimental results have demonstrated that our approach outperforms the latest related work in terms of both efficiency and effectiveness.
Effector Proteins Exert an Important Influence on the Signaling-active State of the Small GTPase Cdc42*

GTP-binding (G) proteins regulate the flow of information in cellular signaling pathways by alternating between a GTP-bound “active” state and a GDP-bound “inactive” state. Cdc42, a member of the Rho family of Ras-related small G-proteins, plays key roles in the regulation of cell shape, motility, and growth. Here we describe the high resolution x-ray crystal structure for Cdc42 bound to the GTP analog guanylyl β,γ-methylene-diphosphonate (GMP-PCP) (i.e. the presumed signaling-active state) and show that it is virtually identical to the structures for the signaling-inactive, GDP-bound form of the protein, contrary to what has been reported for Ras and other G-proteins. Especially surprising was that the GMP-PCP- and GDP-bound forms of Cdc42 did not show detectable differences in their Switch I and Switch II loops. Fluorescence studies using a Cdc42 mutant in which a tryptophan residue was introduced at position 32 of Switch I also showed that there was little difference in the Switch I conformation between the GDP- and GMP-PCP-bound states (i.e. <10%), which again differed from Ras where much larger changes in Trp-32 fluorescence were observed when comparing these two nucleotide-bound states (>30%). However, the binding of an effector protein induced significant changes in the Trp-32 emission specifically from GMP-PCP-bound Cdc42, as well as in the phosphate resonances for GTP bound to this G-protein as indicated in NMR studies. An examination of the available structures for Cdc42 complexed to different effector proteins, versus the x-ray crystal structure for GMP-PCP-bound Cdc42, provides a possible explanation for how effectors can distinguish between the GTP- and GDP-bound forms of this G-protein and ensure that the necessary conformational changes for signal propagation occur.
The water footprint of humanity

This study quantifies and maps the water footprint (WF) of humanity at a high spatial resolution. It reports on consumptive use of rainwater (green WF) and ground and surface water (blue WF) and volumes of water polluted (gray WF). Water footprints are estimated per nation from both a production and consumption perspective. International virtual water flows are estimated based on trade in agricultural and industrial commodities. The global annual average WF in the period 1996–2005 was 9,087 Gm3/y (74% green, 11% blue, 15% gray). Agricultural production contributes 92%. About one-fifth of the global WF relates to production for export. The total volume of international virtual water flows related to trade in agricultural and industrial products was 2,320 Gm3/y (68% green, 13% blue, 19% gray). The WF of the global average consumer was 1,385 m3/y. The average consumer in the United States has a WF of 2,842 m3/y, whereas the average citizens in China and India have WFs of 1,071 and 1,089 m3/y, respectively. Consumption of cereal products gives the largest contribution to the WF of the average consumer (27%), followed by meat (22%) and milk products (7%). The volume and pattern of consumption and the WF per ton of product of the products consumed are the main factors determining the WF of a consumer. The study illustrates the global dimension of water consumption and pollution by showing that several countries heavily rely on foreign water resources and that many countries have significant impacts on water consumption and pollution elsewhere.
Theorising under-theorisation in research on the HRM - performance link

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to identify the conceptual underpinnings of the theoretical weaknesses of extant research investigating the HRM‐Organizational Performance Link (hereafter HRM‐P Link). Design/methodology/approach – The paper reviews a number of different empirical approaches to the HRM‐P Link and reflects upon, and defines, theory, focusing upon two important dimensions: prediction and explanation. The paper also discusses why the field in its current guise cannot sustain a commitment to explanation, so that under‐theorisation and lack of explanatory power go hand‐in‐hand. It then tackles the possibility that theoretical underpinnings for empirical research on the HRM‐P Link might come from other disciplines such as economics. The paper also begins to set out a meta‐theoretical alternative.Findings – The paper finds that: theoretical underpinnings will not emerge and develop simply by doing more, and/or better, empirical work; meta‐theoretical problems besetting the paradigm are actua.
Word Clustering using Long Distance Bigram Language Models

Two novel word clustering techniques employing language models of long distance bigrams are proposed. The first technique is built on a hierarchical clustering algorithm and minimizes the sum of Mahalanobis distances of all words after cluster merger from the centroid of the resulting class. The second technique resorts to the probabilistic latent semantic analysis (PLSA). Interpolated versions of the long distance bigrams are considered as well. Experiments conducted on the English Gigaword corpus (Second Edition) validate that 1) long distance bigrams create more meaningful clusters including less outliers than the baseline bigrams; 2) interpolated long distance bigrams outperform long distance bigrams in the same respect; 3) long distance bigrams perform better than bigrams incorporating trigger-pairs for various histories; 4) PLSA-based interpolated long distance bigrams yield the most efficient language model in the context of this study. To assess objectively the quality of the formed clusters, cluster validity indices as well as mutual information-based measures have been estimated and box plots for the intra-cluster dispersion are demonstrated.
Community Analysis of Chronic Wound Bacteria Using 16S rRNA Gene-Based Pyrosequencing: Impact of Diabetes and Antibiotics on Chronic Wound Microbiota

Background Bacterial colonization is hypothesized to play a pathogenic role in the non-healing state of chronic wounds. We characterized wound bacteria from a cohort of chronic wound patients using a 16S rRNA gene-based pyrosequencing approach and assessed the impact of diabetes and antibiotics on chronic wound microbiota. Methodology/Principal Findings We prospectively enrolled 24 patients at a referral wound center in Baltimore, MD; sampled patients' wounds by curette; cultured samples under aerobic and anaerobic conditions; and pyrosequenced the 16S rRNA V3 hypervariable region. The 16S rRNA gene-based analyses revealed an average of 10 different bacterial families in wounds—approximately 4 times more than estimated by culture-based analyses. Fastidious anaerobic bacteria belonging to the Clostridiales family XI were among the most prevalent bacteria identified exclusively by 16S rRNA gene-based analyses. Community-scale analyses showed that wound microbiota from antibiotic treated patients were significantly different from untreated patients (p = 0.007) and were characterized by increased Pseudomonadaceae abundance. These analyses also revealed that antibiotic use was associated with decreased Streptococcaceae among diabetics and that Streptococcaceae was more abundant among diabetics as compared to non-diabetics. Conclusions/Significance The 16S rRNA gene-based analyses revealed complex bacterial communities including anaerobic bacteria that may play causative roles in the non-healing state of some chronic wounds. Our data suggest that antimicrobial therapy alters community structure—reducing some bacteria while selecting for others.
An epipolar-constrained prior for efficient search in multi-view scenarios

In this paper we propose a novel framework for fast exploitation of multi-view cues with applicability in different image processing problems. In order to bring our proposed framework into practice, an epipolar-constrained prior is presented, onto which a random search algorithm is proposed to find good matches among the different views of the same scene. This algorithm includes a generalization of the local coherency in 2D images for multi-view wide-baseline cases. Experimental results show that the geometrical constraint allows a faster initial convergence when finding good matches. We present some applications of the proposed framework on classical image processing problems.
Maximizing Relationship Possibilities: Relational Maximization in Romantic Relationships

ABSTRACT Using Rusbult's (1980) investment model and Schwartz's (2000) conceptualization of decision maximization, we sought to understand how an individual's propensity to maximize his or her decisions factored into investment, satisfaction, and awareness of alternatives in romantic relationships. In study one, 275 participants currently involved in romantic relationships completed measures of maximization, satisfaction, investment size, quality of alternatives, and commitment. In study two, 343 participants were surveyed as part of the creation of a scale of relational maximization. Results from both studies revealed that the tendency to maximize (in general and in relationships specifically) was negatively correlated with satisfaction, investment, and commitment, and positively correlated with quality of alternatives. Furthermore, we found that satisfaction and investments mediated the relationship between maximization and relationship commitment.
The learning combination lock – an experiential approach to learning design

This article investigates the meaning of experiential learning and relates this to the nature of cognition through the development of an experiential learning model based on information processing. This experiential learning model is then used as the basis for the design of a meta‐model – the learning combination lock (LCL). The LCL model provides for the first time, to our knowledge, a systematic process for the trainer, educator or developer to consider and select from some of the main ingredients of the learning process. It is not intended to be used mechanistically but rather as an aide‐memoire which may also be added to and developed according to the considerations of the programme designer, the trainer or educator, and the needs of the learner.
Design of a DC power supply with power factor corrector by Taguchi method

The aim of this paper is to develop a study of Taguchi optimization method for a switching mode DC power supply with power factor corrector (PFC). Power factor and efficiency are the basic indicators for both of power quality and power saving. To attain these two factors in switching mode power supply design is the goal for power engineers. The most effects are the setting of initial parameters. Orthogonal arrays of Taguchi and the signal-to-noise (S/N) ratio are employed to find the optimal levels and to analyze the effect of the parameters for DC-DC converter with PFC. Confirmation tests with optimal levels are carried out in order to illustrate the effectiveness of Taguchi optimization method.
Procedural Justice and Conflict Management at School

In this research, we explored the contributions of perceived procedural justice (PPJ) to the conflict management behaviors of adolescents when they experience conflict with their teachers. We tested an extensive model to determine how PPJ contributes to conflict management. We also extended research on PPJ to examine its impact on adolescents. Our results, acquired from a large and diverse sample of 256 high school students, indicate that PPJ had an impact on adolescents' approach to managing conflicts with their teachers. Students who perceived that their teachers' decision processes were just were less dominating and more avoiding, obliging, and compromising. In addition, we found that students' perceptions about the legitimacy of their teachers' authority mediated the relationships between PPJ and conflict management style. This study contributes to the rather scarce research on PPJ's role in conflict management and should be useful for educators searching for constructive, relationship-based tools for conflict management.
Changes in muscle activation patterns following robot-assisted training of hand function after stroke

Robot-assisted rehabilitation has only recently begun to be applied to improvement of hand function after stroke. In a preliminary study, involving 4 post-stroke subjects, more than 2 years following the stroke, we have been able to show that 8 weeks of robot-assisted training leads to changes in patterns of arm and finger muscle activation. The patterns were quantified in terms of synchronous muscle synergies which allowed for comparison with muscle activation patterns of healthy age-matched subjects. We found that the muscle synergies of the post-stroke subjects became more similar to those of the healthy subject group following training.