Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Guideline Compliance in Chronic Heart Failure Patients with Multiple Comorbid Diseases: Evaluation of an Individualised Multidisciplinary Model of Care

Objective To assess the impact of individualised, reconciled evidence-based recommendations (IRERs) and multidisciplinary care in patients with chronic heart failure (CHF) on clinical guideline compliance for CHF and common comorbid conditions. Design and setting A retrospective hospital clinical audit conducted between 1st July 2006 and February 2011. Participants A total of 255 patients with a diagnosis of CHF who attended the Multidisciplinary Ambulatory Consulting Services (MACS) clinics, at the Royal Adelaide Hospital, were included. Main outcome measures Compliance with Australian clinical guideline recommendations for CHF, atrial fibrillation, diabetes mellitus and ischaemic heart disease. Results Study participants had a median of eight medical conditions (IQR 6–10) and were on an average of 10 (±4) unique medications. Compliance with clinical guideline recommendations for pharmacological therapy for CHF, comorbid atrial fibrillation, diabetes or ischaemic heart disease was high, ranging from 86% for lipid lowering therapy to 98% anti-platelet agents. For all conditions, compliance with lifestyle recommendations was lower than pharmacological therapy, ranging from no podiatry reviews for CHF patients with comorbid diabetes to 75% for heart failure education. Concordance with many guideline recommendations was significantly associated if the patient had IRERs determined, a greater number of recommendations, more clinic visits or if patients participated in a heart failure program. Conclusions Despite the high number of comorbid conditions and resulting complexity of the management, high compliance to clinical guideline recommendations was associated with IRER determination in older patients with CHF. Importantly these recommendations need to be communicated to the patient’s general practitioner, regularly monitored and adjusted at clinic visits.
The politics of fifteenth-century England : John Vale's book

Included here are some of the most valuable documents of 15th-century history, as well as various transcribed documents, which are printed for the first time. It represents an unrivalled collection of letters, manifestos and other material from the early 15th century to the 1480s, with the aim of placing the manuscript, its maker and its contents in their political and social context.
Spectral estimation of ARMA processes using ARMA-cepstrum recursion

In this letter, the spectral estimation problem of a stationary autoregressive moving average (ARMA) process is considered, and a new method for the estimation of the MA part is proposed. A simple recursion relating the ARMA parameters and the cepstral coefficients of an ARMA process is derived and utilized for the estimation of the MA parameters. The method requires neither any initial estimates nor fitting of a large order AR model, both of which require further a priori knowledge of the signal and increase the computational complexity. Simulation results illustrating the performance of the new method are also given.
A novel chemosynthetic peptide with β-sheet motif efficiently kills Klebsiella pneumoniae in a mouse model

Klebsiella pneumoniae (Kp) is one of the most common pathogens in nosocomial infections and is increasingly becoming multiple drug resistant. However, the molecular pathogenesis of Kp in causing tissue injury and dysregulated host defense remains elusive, further dampening the development of novel therapeutic measures. We have previously screened a series of synthetic antimicrobial beta-sheet forming peptides and identified a peptide (IRIKIRIK; ie, IK8L) with a broad range of bactericidal activity and low cytotoxicity in vitro. Here, employing an animal model, we investigated the antibacterial effects of IK8L in acute infection and demonstrated that peritoneal injection of IK8L to mice down-regulated inflammatory cytokines, alleviated lung injury, and importantly, decreased mortality compared to sham-injected controls. In addition, a math model was used to evaluate in vivo imaging data and predict infection progression in infected live animals. Mechanistically, IK8L can kill Kp by inhibiting biofilm formation and modulating production of inflammatory cytokines through the STAT3/JAK signaling both in vitro and in vivo. Collectively, these findings reveal that IK8L may have potential for preventing or treating Kp infection.
The effects of iron deficiency on red blood cell transfusion requirements in non-bleeding critically ill patients.

Introduction: Critically ill patients often need blood transfusion, but no reliable predictors of transfusion requirements are available at Intensive Care Unit (ICU) admission. We hypothesized that ICU patients admitted with Iron Deficiency (ID) may be at higher risk for developing anemia, requiring blood transfusion. The aims of this study were to determine the frequency of ID in ICU patients admission and to investigate its relationship with transfusion requirements in ICU patients. Methods: Two hundred ninety-six patients admitted to the general ICU were enrolled in the prospective observational study. We studied 268 patients, after excluding those transfused on or before ICU admission. The patients recorded age, gender, diagnosis, severity scores, presence of sepsis, ICU complications, ICU treatments, and transfusion-free interval. ID was assessed on the basis of several parameters, including hemoglobin, hematocrit, levels of serum iron, transferrin saturation, levels of ferritin, soluble transferrin receptor, C-reactive protein. Results: The mean age was 48 years. Of 268 patients (138 male/ 130 female), 114 (42.8%) had ID with outcomes of blood samples were used at ICU admission. The overall transfusion rate was 38.8%, being higher in ID patients than in normal iron profile patients (40.3 vs. 18.9%, P=0.001). After adjusting for severity of illness and hemoglobin level, ID patients remained significantly associated with transfusion, with a hazard ratio of 5.3 (95% CI, 1.8-14.8; P=0.001). Conclusion: ID is common at ICU admission and is associated with higher transfusion requirements. These findings have important implications for transfusion practices for in ICU patients.
Beyond double transitivity: Capacity-achieving cyclic codes on erasure channels

Recently, sequences of error-correcting codes with doubly-transitive permutation groups were shown to achieve capacity on erasure channels under symbol-wise maximum a posteriori (MAP) decoding. From this, it follows that Reed-Muller and primitive narrow-sense BCH codes achieve capacity in the same setting. In this article, we extend this result to a large family of cyclic codes by considering codes whose permutation groups satisfy a condition weaker than double transitivity. The article combines two simple technical contributions. First, we show that the transition width of a monotone boolean function is O(1/log k), where k is the size of the smallest orbit induced by its symmetry group. The proof is based on Talagrand's lower bound on influences for monotone boolean functions. Second, we consider the extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) function of an Fq-linear cyclic code whose blocklength N divides qt - 1 and is coprime with q - 1. We show that this EXIT function is a monotone boolean function whose symmetry group contains no orbits of size smaller than the smallest prime divisor of t. Combining these, we show that sequences of cyclic codes, whose blocklengths satisfy the above conditions, achieve capacity on the q-ary erasure channel if all prime divisors of t tend to infinity.
S/T/A: Meta-Modeling Run-Time Adaptation in Component-Based System Architectures

Modern virtualized system environments usually host diverse applications of different parties and aim at utilizing resources efficiently while ensuring that quality-of-service requirements are continuously satisfied. In such scenarios, complex adaptations to changes in the system environment are still largely performed manually by humans. Over the past decade, autonomic self-adaptation techniques aiming to minimize human intervention have become increasingly popular. However, given that adaptation processes are usually highly system specific, it is a challenge to abstract from system details enabling the reuse of adaptation strategies. In this paper, we propose a novel modeling language (meta-model) providing means to describe system adaptation processes at the system architecture level in a generic, human-understandable and reusable way. We apply our approach to three different realistic contexts (dynamic resource allocation, software architecture optimization, and run-time adaptation planning) showing how the gap between complex manual adaptations and their autonomous execution can be closed by using a holistic model-based approach.
User interface design for crowdsourcing systems

Harnessing human computation through crowdsourcing offers an alternative approach to solving complex problems, especially those that are relatively easy for humans but difficult for computers. Micro-tasking platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk have attracted large, on-demand work force of millions of workers as well as hundreds of thousands of job requesters. Achieving high quality results by putting humans in the loop is one of the main goals of these crowdsourcing systems. We study the effects of different user interface designs on the performance of crowdsourcing systems. Our results indicate that user interface design choices have a significant effect on crowdsourced worker performance.
Thinking about Attention in Games: Backward and Forward Induction

Behavioral economics improves economic analysis by using psychological regularity to suggest limits on rationality and self-interest (e.g. Camerer and Loewenstein 2003). Expressing these regularities in formal terms permits productive theorizing, suggests new experiments, can contribute to psychology, and can be used to shape economic policies which make normal people better off.
Biocompatibility of Nitinol Stapes Prosthesis

Objective: Use of the SMart piston, a nitinol-based, self-crimping prosthesis in stapes surgery may allow improved functional results because of better sound transmission properties at the incus-prosthesis interface because of the elimination of manual crimping. Possible disadvantages include thermal damage or strangulation of the incus and its mucoperiosteum or nickel intolerance. The goal of this study was to morphologically assess the fixation of this prosthesis to the incus, investigate the reaction of the middle ear mucosa to the prosthesis, identify alterations to the incudal bone, and detect deposits of nickel in the tissue around the prosthesis. Study Design: Prospective consecutive case analysis. Setting: Tertiary referral center. Patients: Four patients with an unfavorable functional result after primary SMart-piston stapedotomy. Intervention: Revision malleostapedotomy with explantation of the incus and prosthesis for further analysis. Main Outcome Measures: Analysis of intraoperative findings and postoperative examination of the explants using light- and scanning-electron microscopy, energy dispersive x-ray analysis, and atom absorption spectrometry. Results: The intraoperative, macroscopic, and scanning electron microscopic investigation showed tight circular fixation of the prostheses, whereas a gap between the prosthesis and the lateral incus was found in 1 case. All prostheses were overgrown by mucosa. Superficial localized erosion of the incudal bone was found in 2 cases. There was no elevation in nickel content in the removed tissue samples. Conclusion: The lateral gap between prosthesis and incus did not affect fixation of the prosthesis, neither did covering by a mucosal layer. Bone erosion was most likely caused by laser in one and by the prosthesis in another explant. No signs of increased nickel deposits could be found on energy dispersive x-ray analysis or atom absorption spectrometry. We conclude that a nitinol stapes prosthesis is safe for treatment of stapedial fixation.
A Multi-Microphone Speech Enhancement Algorithm Tested Using Acoustic Vector Sensors

—In this paper, we present a speech enhancement algo-rithm for multi-microphone systems that enhances a target signal in noisy multi-talker situations. We apply the general multichannel Wiener ﬁltering framework, for which we have developed a new technique to directly estimate the auto-correlation of the target signal assuming its direction is known. The advantage of our approach compared to traditional multichannel Wiener ﬁltering is that it effectively works with both non-stationary, speech-like noise interference and also stationary background noise. The estimation of the auto-correlation of the target signal is derived by minimizing the target signal power across pairs of microphones. For this reason, we refer to our algorithm as MWF-minPESP (Multichannel Wiener Filtering based on minimum Pair-wise Estimated Signal Power). In a sense, MWF-minPESP is a beamforming algorithm that minimizes the output signal power. We present an experiment that compares the performance of MWF-minPESP with traditional multichannel Wiener ﬁltering and frequency-domain minimum variance distortionless response (FMV) beamforming using two acoustic vector sensors (AVS), comprising six microphone signals, in an ofﬁce space. The results indicate that MWF-minPESP outperforms the other two state-of-the-art speech enhancement techniques.
Discriminant features for metamorphic malware detection

To unfold a solution for the detection of metamorphic viruses (obfuscated malware), we propose a non signature based approach using feature selection techniques such as Categorical Proportional Difference (CPD), Weight of Evidence of Text (WET), Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) and Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency-Class Frequency (TF-IDF-CF). Feature selection methods are employed to rank and prune bi-gram features obtained from malware and benign files. Synthesized features are further evaluated for their prominence in either of the classes. Using our proposed methodology 100% accuracy is obtained with test samples. Hence, we argue that the statistical scanner proposed by us can identify future metamorphic variants and can assist antiviruses with high accuracy.
On the determination and macroeconomic consequences of public financial policy

﻿ This study develops a theoretical framework for the analysis of regular patterns in public financial behaviour, and applies that framework in an empirical assessment of budgetary policies in the United States and in the Netherlands. Its purpose and scope are threefold. First, it sheds theoretical light on economic considerations guiding public financial behaviour in a dynamic model of optimal taxation. The resulting idea, that it may be sensible to smooth taxation over time,is subsequently extended to a more general model of the public finances, which involves spending, taxation, debt and money creation in an effort to control the government budget. Second, using modern econometric methods the practical relevance of this model is illustrated with estimations for the United States and the Netherlands. Third, the model is sufficiently flexible to allow for a number of more institutional insights. In this respect the emphasis is placed on the Dutch economy and public finances. The thesis thus engages economic theory, econometric technique and institutional and macroeconomic background in a combined effort to understand and evaluate regular patterns in public financial behaviour. Its findings have implications for each of these three areas of economic interest.
DERVISH - An Office-Navigating Robot

DERVISH won the Office Delivery event of the 1994 Robot Competition and Exhibition, held as part of the Thirteenth National Conferennce on Artificial Intelligence. Although the contest required dervish to navigate in an artificial office environment, the official goal of the contest was to push the technology of robot navigation in real office buildings with minimal domain information. dervish navigates reliably using retractable assumptions that simplify the planning problem. In this article, we present a short description of Dervish's hardware and low-level motion modules. We then discuss this assumptive system in more detail.
A new algorithm of image denoising based on stationary wavelet multi-scale adaptive threshold

In order to denoise while preserve image details better leading to a satisfactory result, so that it can be analyzed and applied subsequently, in view of advantages of well time-frequency characteristic, multi-resolution and decorrelation of stationary wavelet transform, this paper proposed a new algorithm of image denoising based on multi-scale and adaptive thresholding. In this algorithm: Firstly, use stationary wavelet to transform image. Then determine adaptive threshold of every decomposition progression according to the ratio of noise variance and wavelet coefficient variance. Secondly, process the wavelet coefficient matrice with threshold neighborhood sliding window and adaptively optimization wavelet coefficient processing window. Lastly, obtain resumed image through inverse transform. The experimental results show that, the algorithm can not only obtain clearer image edges but also denoise effectively compared to existing methods.
Eph Regulates Dorsoventral Asymmetry of the Notochord Plate and Convergent Extension-Mediated Notochord Formation

Background The notochord is a signaling center required for the patterning of the vertebrate embryic midline, however, the molecular and cellular mechanisms involved in the formation of this essential embryonic tissue remain unclear. The urochordate Ciona intestinalis develops a simple notochord from 40 specific postmitotic mesodermal cells. The precursors intercalate mediolaterally and establish a single array of disk-shaped notochord cells along the midline. However, the role that notochord precursor polarization, particularly along the dorsoventral axis, plays in this morphogenetic process remains poorly understood. Methodology/Principal Findings Here we show that the notochord preferentially accumulates an apical cell polarity marker, aPKC, ventrally and a basement membrane marker, laminin, dorsally. This asymmetric accumulation of apicobasal cell polarity markers along the embryonic dorsoventral axis was sustained in notochord precursors during convergence and extension. Further, of several members of the Eph gene family implicated in cellular and tissue morphogenesis, only Ci-Eph4 was predominantly expressed in the notochord throughout cell intercalation. Introduction of a dominant-negative Ci-Eph4 to notochord precursors diminished asymmetric accumulation of apicobasal cell polarity markers, leading to defective intercalation. In contrast, misexpression of a dominant-negative mutant of a planar cell polarity gene Dishevelled preserved asymmetric accumulation of aPKC and laminin in notochord precursors, although their intercalation was incomplete. Conclusions/Significance Our data support a model in which in ascidian embryos Eph-dependent dorsoventral polarity of notochord precursors plays a crucial role in mediolateral cell intercalation and is required for proper notochord morphogenesis.
Nation building at play : sport as a tool for social integration in post-apartheid South Africa

Archbishop Desmond Tutu states that this work shows us another road to a future of equality and democracy for all South Africans, a road not filled with the hurt of our long discussions that carry us into the night, but equally important in its capacity to heal. It maintains that through properly organized sport we can learn to play together with respect and with laughter, we can learn to be all on the same team, and in the process, we can contribute to building a new South Africa that is a just nation for all. Its conclusion - and its commitment - is as clear as it is strong. Sport does have a meaningful and powerful role to play in the social transformation of South African society if care is taken to provide the necessary conditions for success. It offers us those conditions and at the conclusion some carefully thought out recommendations for providing a level playing field for all our futures. [. ]
A Machine Learning-based Intrinsic Method for Cross-topic and Cross-genre Authorship Verification

This paper presents our approach for the Author Identification task in the PAN CLEF Challenge 2015. We identified the challenges of this year’s are the limited amount of training data and the problems in the sub-corpora are independent in terms of topic and genre. We adopted a machine learning based intrinsic method to verify whether a pair of documents have been written by same or different authors. Several content-independent features, such as function words and stylometric features, were used to capture the difference between documents. Evaluation results on the test corpora show our approach works best on the Spanish data set with 0.7238 and 0.67 for the AUC and C@1 scores respectively.
Global Demographic Change, Labour Force Growth and Economic Performance

The fertility declines associated with the final phase of the global demographic transition have led to accelerated ageing of populations in developed countries and in several advanced developing countries. This paper introduces a global demographic sub-model, from which emerge the global implications of these changes for population sizes, age distributions and gender compositions. Corresponding changes are inferred in labour force size, and in patterns of consumption and saving and these are then analysed by incorporating the demographic sub-model into a correspondingly global economic model, based originally on GTAP-Dynamic, in which regional households are disaggregated by age group and gender. As an application of the combined model the effects of increased longevity are explored on a global scale. Growth in real per capita incomes is slowed by this change, average saving rates fall and the distribution of global economic activity alters to favour those regions with high aged labour force participation.