Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Validation of a Medicare Claims-based Algorithm for Identifying Freestanding Ambulatory Surgery Centers

Background and Objective:With visits to ambulatory surgery centers (ASCs) on the rise, accountability in the care provided by these facilities and the surgeons who staff them is required. This requires the ability to measure and monitor ASC-based care over time. For this reason, we developed and validated a claims-based algorithm to identify ASCs. Research Design:Using a 20% sample of Medicare claims (2002–2008), we developed 3 ASC definitions. Definition 1 identified unique facilities with tax identification numbers and appropriate Place of Service and Type of Service codes. Definition 2 had the same conditions but also required specific Specialty codes. Definition 3 involved a multistep cleansing stage, in which facilities with indeterminate information in the fields of interest were eliminated. We assessed agreement between these definitions and findings from alternative data sources. Results:Placing additional requirements on how a freestanding ASC was defined within Medicare claims helped in the refinement of our algorithm. Agreement on the number of unique ASCs in Florida over the study interval was greatest between Definition 3 and the State Ambulatory Surgery Databases (concordance correlation coefficient=0.984; 95%, confidence interval, 0.967–0.992). With the Provider of Services Extract serving as the reference standard, our algorithm (based on Definition 3) had a positive predictive value of 99.0% (95% confidence interval, 98.6%–99.4%) for determining health care markets that experienced the opening of an ASC. Conclusions:The consequent inference is that our algorithm represents an accurate tool for distinguishing and tracking ASCs in Medicare data.
Both Worst-Case and Chance-Constrained Robust Secure SWIPT in MISO Interference Channels

This paper addresses robust designs of secure simultaneous wireless information and power transfer for multiple-input single-output (MISO) multiuser systems. By using a bounded uncertainty model for the channel state information (CSI) from transmitters to legitimate receivers and under the assumption of only available statistic knowledge of the CSI to eavesdroppers, we consider the robust designs with both worst-case and chance-constrained optimizations. To jointly optimize transmit beamforming vectors and power splitting factors, we formulate three problems aiming at minimizing the system power, maximizing the sum secrecy rate, and maximizing the minimal secrecy rate, respectively, subject to both energy harvesting and secrecy outage constraints. These problems are intractable in their original forms due to the CSI models and their non-convexity. To reach computationally efficient solutions, we first rewrite the original problems by semi-definite relaxation, then transform the CSI uncertainty related constraints by S-procedure, and finally approximate the non-convex constraints by the first-order Taylor expansion. By the reformulations, we present iterative successive convex approximation algorithm for approaching the optimized solutions. Simulation results under various setups of system parameters are provided to examine the system performance and validate the effectiveness of the proposed schemes.
ν-Anomica: A Fast Support Vector Based Novelty Detection Technique

In this paper we propose ν-Anomica, a novel anomaly detection technique that can be trained on huge data sets with much reduced running time compared to the benchmark one-class Support Vector Machines algorithm. In ν-Anomica, the idea is to train the machine such that it can provide a close approximation to the exact decision plane using fewer training points and without losing much of the generalization performance of the classical approach. We have tested the proposed algorithm on a variety of continuous data sets under different conditions. We show that under all test conditions the developed procedure closely preserves the accuracy of standard one- class Support Vector Machines while reducing both the training time and the test time by 5 − 20 times.
Spiritual issues of family members in a pancreatic cancer chat room.

PURPOSE/OBJECTIVES To describe spiritual issues addressed by users of a pancreatic cancer informational Web site. DESIGN Qualitative, descriptive. SETTING The patient and family chat room of Johns Hopkins Hospital's pancreatic cancer Web site. SAMPLE 600 postings on the pancreatic cancer Web site. METHODS Identification of categories and themes in Web postings using the constant comparison method of content analysis. MAIN RESEARCH VARIABLES Spirituality, relationship of the person posting a message (poster) to the person with cancer. FINDINGS Relationship of the poster to the person with pancreatic cancer was explicit in 68% (n = 410) of the 600 postings, and 83% of those 410 postings indicated that the poster was a family member. Issues of spirituality appeared in 19% (n = 114) of the 600 postings and addressed four themes: spiritual convergence, reframing suffering, hope, and acceptance of the power of God and eternal life. Six percent of postings were by family members reporting on the death of their loved ones, suggesting that the site also served a bereavement function. CONCLUSIONS Family members of patients with pancreatic cancer sought and received spiritual comfort in a variety of forms in an Internet-based cancer chat room. IMPLICATIONS FOR NURSING Nurse developers of cancer information Web sites should periodically assess how the sites are being used and apply the information to the refinement of the sites to better meet user needs. Further study is needed to develop and evaluate cancer Web sites as an evolving medium for providing spiritual support to family members of patients with life-threatening forms of cancer.
Inhibitory effects of Zinc on hyperglycaemia and metabolic disorders in the liver of alloxan-induced diabetic rats

Background: Zinc may participate as a component of the antioxidant defense system. Its deficiency induces oxidative damage to cell components and alterations in antioxidants enzymes in both animal and cells models. There are few studies to provide evidence of the action of zinc in diabetic animal models. Objective: To evaluate the action of oral administration of zinc (Zn) in hyperglycemia and metabolic disorders induced in the liver of alloxan-induced diabetic rats. Materials and method: Wistar rats (age: two months) were used for this study. Inducing diabetes in rats using alloxan, we obtained the diabetic rats after four weeks. The rats were divided into five groups (each n=8): normal (control) rat, diabetic rats before the beginning of treatment (Diab-ref), diabetic rats at the end of the treatment (Diab-Con), diabetic rats treated with zinc gluconate (Diab+Zn), and diabetic rats treated with insulin (Diab+Ins). Zinc was orally administrated in drinking water at dose 150mg/L, and insulin was administrated at 0.5IU/rat/day. Thiobarbituric acid-reactive substances (TBARS) superoxide dismutase (SOD), glutathione peroxidise (GPX), catalase (CAT), transaminase glutanic pyruvic (TGP), transaminase glutanic oxaloacetic (TGO), total bilirubin, total cholesterol (TCh), triglyeerides (TG), high density lipid-cholesterol (HDL-Ch), plasmatic, and liver glucose were determined in blood and liver samples. Results: Zn administration significantly decreased glucose level and glycogen content. Activities of SOD, CAT and GPO were significantly increased by Zn-treatment. In addition, the liver toxicity was prevented by significantly lowering in total bilirubin, TARSs, TGP, and TPO. Conclusion: Zinc supplements may be beneficial for correcting hyperglycemia leading to diabetic complications in the liver.
Firmly Tilting the Balance of Clinical Transplant Immunity Toward Tolerance

Outstanding clinical outcomes in renal transplantation have been achieved by using regimens utilizing infusion of donor hematopoietic progenitor cells at the Massachusetts General Hospital (1–3), Northwestern (4,5) and Stanford (6–8). In this issue, outcomes of 38 renal transplant recipients infused with donor hematopoietic progenitor cells at Stanford are analyzed (9). None has suffered graft loss or graft-versus-host-disease (GVHD). Treatment-related complications have been mercifully rare. Of 22 HLA matched recipients, 17 patients achieved at least 6 months of chimerism and were successfully withdrawn from therapy despite eventual loss of chimerism in nine recipients. Only one patient with a lupus flare, not rejection, required resumption of maintenance immunosuppressive therapy. In the most recent cohort of HLA haplotype matched renal transplant recipients, a dose escalation study of infused donor T cells and CD34 progenitors was undertaken (9). Exceptionally robust chimerism was noted in patients infused with the highest doses of donor hematopoietic progenitors and T cells. In fact, 50-fold more donor T cells were used than in previous regimens applied to HLA matched recipients. Nonetheless, GVHD was not noted in this cohort.
Wearable technology and ECG processing for fall risk assessment, prevention and detection

Falls represent one of the most common causes of injury-related morbidity and mortality in later life. Subjects with cardiovascular disorders (e.g., related to autonomic dysfunctions and postural hypotension) are at higher risk of falling. Autonomic dysfunctions increasing the risk of falling in the short and mid-term could be assessed by Heart Rate Variability (HRV) extracted by electrocardiograph (ECG). We developed three trials for assessing the usefulness of ECG monitoring using wearable devices for: risk assessment of falling in the next few weeks; prevention of imminent falls due to standing hypotension; and fall detection. Statistical and data-mining methods are adopted to develop classification and regression models, validated with the cross-validation approach. The first classifier based on HRV features enabled to identify future fallers among hypertensive patients with an accuracy of 72% (sensitivity: 51.1%, specificity: 80.2%). The regression model to predict falls due to orthostatic dropdown from HRV recorded before standing achieved an overall accuracy of 80% (sensitivity: 92%, specificity: 90%). Finally, the classifier to detect simulated falls using ECG achieved an accuracy of 77.3% (sensitivity: 81.8%, specificity: 72.7%). The evidence from these three studies showed that ECG monitoring and processing could achieve satisfactory performances compared to other system for risk assessment, fall prevention and detection. This is interesting as differently from other technologies actually employed to prevent falls, ECG is recommended for many other pathologies of later life and is more accepted by senior citizens.
Self-esteem as an outcome measure in studies of vocational rehabilitation for adults with severe mental illness.

OBJECTIVE Self-esteem is widely used as an outcome variable in studies of psychiatric rehabilitation, based on the assumption that improved functional status leads to higher self-esteem. Little is known, however, about the determinants of self-esteem among adults with severe mental illness. The utility of a popular measure of global self-esteem-the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale-as an outcome measure was examined in this population. METHODS A total of 143 participants enrolled in a study of vocational rehabilitation were assessed at baseline and six, 12, and 18 months later using measures of self-esteem, symptoms, life satisfaction, work status, housing status, and total income. RESULTS Scores on the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale did not vary with work status or other functional outcomes but instead were strongly related to measures of life satisfaction and affective symptoms. CONCLUSIONS The hypothesis that working leads to improved self-esteem for people with severe mental illness was not supported. For this population, self-esteem, as measured by the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale, appears to be a relatively stable trait that reflects general life satisfaction and affective symptoms rather than objective functional status.
On the Performance of Lossy Compression Schemes for Energy Constrained Sensor Networking

Lossy temporal compression is key for energy-constrained wireless sensor networks (WSNs), where the imperfect reconstruction of the signal is often acceptable at the data collector, subject to some maximum error tolerance. In this article, we evaluate a number of selected lossy compression methods from the literature and extensively analyze their performance in terms of compression efficiency, computational complexity, and energy consumption. Specifically, we first carry out a performance evaluation of existing and new compression schemes, considering linear, autoregressive, FFT-/DCT- and wavelet-based models , by looking at their performance as a function of relevant signal statistics. Second, we obtain formulas through numerical fittings to gauge their overall energy consumption and signal representation accuracy. Third, we evaluate the benefits that lossy compression methods bring about in interference-limited multihop networks, where the channel access is a source of inefficiency due to collisions and transmission scheduling. Our results reveal that the DCT-based schemes are the best option in terms of compression efficiency but are inefficient in terms of energy consumption. Instead, linear methods lead to substantial savings in terms of energy expenditure by, at the same time, leading to satisfactory compression ratios, reduced network delay, and increased reliability performance.
A Hybrid alldifferent-Tabu Search Algorithm for Solving Sudoku Puzzles

The Sudoku problem is a well-known logic-based puzzle of combinatorial number-placement. It consists in filling a n 2 × n 2 grid, composed of n columns, n rows, and n subgrids, each one containing distinct integers from 1 to n 2. Such a puzzle belongs to the NP-complete collection of problems, to which there exist diverse exact and approximate methods able to solve it. In this paper, we propose a new hybrid algorithm that smartly combines a classic tabu search procedure with the alldifferent global constraint from the constraint programming world. The alldifferent constraint is known to be efficient for domain filtering in the presence of constraints that must be pairwise different, which are exactly the kind of constraints that Sudokus own. This ability clearly alleviates the work of the tabu search, resulting in a faster and more robust approach for solving Sudokus. We illustrate interesting experimental results where our proposed algorithm outperforms the best results previously reported by hybrids and approximate methods.
The miRNA and mRNA Signatures of Peripheral Blood Cells in Humans Infected with Trypanosoma brucei gambiense

Simple, reliable tools for diagnosis of human African Trypanosomiases could ease field surveillance and enhance patient care. In particular, current methods to distinguish patients with (stage II) and without (stage I) brain involvement require samples of cerebrospinal fluid. We describe here an exploratory study to find out whether miRNAs from peripheral blood leukocytes might be useful in diagnosis of human trypanosomiasis, or for determining the stage of the disease. Using microarrays, we measured miRNAs in samples from Trypanosoma brucei gambiense-infected patients (9 stage I, 10 stage II), 8 seronegative parasite-negative controls and 12 seropositive, but parasite-negative subjects. 8 miRNAs (out of 1205 tested) showed significantly lower expression in patients than in seronegative, parasite-negative controls, and 1 showed increased expression. There were no clear differences in miRNAs between patients in different disease stages. The miRNA profiles could not distinguish seropositive, but parasitologically negative samples from controls and results within this group did not correlate with those from the trypanolysis test. Some of the regulated miRNAs, or their predicted mRNA targets, were previously reported changed during other infectious diseases or cancer. We conclude that the changes in miRNA profiles of peripheral blood lymphocytes in human African trypanosomiasis are related to immune activation or inflammation, are probably disease-non-specific, and cannot be used to determine the disease stage. The approach has little promise for diagnostics but might yield information about disease pathology.
DDIT4/REDD1/RTP801 Is a Novel Negative Regulator of Schwann Cell Myelination

Signals that promote myelination must be tightly modulated to adjust myelin thickness to the axonal diameter. In the peripheral nervous system, axonal neuregulin 1 type III promotes myelination by activating erbB2/B3 receptors and the PI3K/AKT/mTOR pathway in Schwann cells. Conversely, PTEN (phosphatase and tensin homolog on chromosome 10) dephosphorylates PtdIns(3,4,5)P3 and negatively regulates the AKT pathway and myelination. Recently, the DLG1/SAP97 scaffolding protein was described to interact with PTEN to enhance PIP3 dephosphorylation. Here we now report that nerves from mice with conditional inactivation of Dlg1 in Schwann cells display only a transient increase in myelin thickness during development, suggesting that DLG1 is a transient negative regulator of myelination. Instead, we identified DDIT4/RTP801/REDD1 as a sustained negative modulator of myelination. We show that DDIT4 is expressed in Schwann cells and its maximum expression level precedes the peak of AKT activation and of DLG1 activity in peripheral nerves. Moreover, loss of DDIT4 expression both in vitro and in vivo in Ddit4-null mice provokes sustained hypermyelination and enhanced mTORC1 activation, thus suggesting that this molecule is a novel negative regulator of PNS myelination.
Sociology Noir: Studies at the University of Chicago in Loneliness, Marginality and Deviance, 1915-1935

Between 1915 and 1935 the University of Chicago was the center for the production of innovative sociological research that resonated with the lives of urban Americans. Referred to as the Chicago school monographs by both historians and scholars, these works brought acclaim to the sociology graduate program. Mostly conducted on the social margins of urban life, these studies focused on delinquents, prostitutes, gangsters, and homeless men. This work offers a survey of some of these key monographs such as "The Unadjusted Girl", "The Jack Roller", and "The Taxi Dancer".
Combining Statistical Machine Translation and Translation Memories with Domain Adaptation

Since the emergence of translation memory software, translation companies and freelance translators have been accumulating translated text for various languages and domains. This data has the potential of being used for training domain-specific machine translation systems for corporate or even personal use. But while the resulting systems usually perform well in translating domain-specific language, their out-of-domain vocabulary coverage is often insufficient due to the limited size of the translation memories. In this paper, we demonstrate that small in-domain translation memories can be successfully complemented with freely available general-domain parallel corpora such that (a) the number of out-of-vocabulary words (OOV) is reduced while (b) the in-domain terminology is preserved. In our experiments, a German–French and a German–Italian statistical machine translation system geared to marketing texts of the automobile industry has been significantly improved using Europarl and OpenSubtitles data, both in terms of automatic evaluation metrics and human judgement.
Teacher Self-Efficacy, Professional Commitment, and High-Stakes Teacher Evaluation Policy in Louisiana

Currently, a significant number of states are in the process of implementing a high-stakes teacher evaluation (HSTE) system. In many ways, Louisiana’s teacher evaluation system, Compass, is typical of the models that many states have adopted. This article reports the experiences of 37 elementary teachers from five districts across Louisiana after their first 2 years under this system. It is through the multiple lenses of teacher support, autonomy, self-efficacy, and satisfaction that we sought to understand how Compass has shaped teachers’ motivation for improvement as well as their continued commitment to the teaching profession. Analysis of longitudinal interview data reveals a widespread lack of support for change in the form of self-efficacy building experiences—particularly vicarious experiences—for teachers. As a result, many teachers experienced, by the second year, significant negative arousal events and profound losses of satisfaction and commitment to the profession—this despite most being rated as “highly effective. ”
User-Driven Abstraction for Model Checking

Model checking has found a role in the engineering of reactive systems. However, model checkers are still strongly limited by the size of the system description they can check. Here we present a technique in which a system is simplified prior to model checking by the application of abstraction rules. The rules can greatly reduce the state space of a system description and help in understanding why a system satisfies a property. We illustrate the use of the technique on examples, including Dekker's mutual exclusion algorithm.
The Complexity of Choosing an H-Coloring (Nearly) Uniformly at Random

Cooper, Dyer, and Frieze [J. Algorithms, 39 (2001), pp. 117--134] studied the problem of sampling H-colorings (nearly) uniformly at random. Special cases of this problem include sampling colorings and independent sets and sampling from statistical physics models such as the Widom--Rowlinson model, the Beach model, the Potts model and the hard-core lattice gas model. Cooper et al. considered the family of "cautious" ergodic Markov chains with uniform stationary distribution and showed that, for every fixed connected "nontrivial " graph H, every such chain mixes slowly. In this paper, we give a complexity result for the problem. Namely, we show that for any fixed graph H with no trivial components, there is unlikely to be any polynomial almost uniform sampler (PAUS) for H-colorings. We show that if there were a PAUS for the H-coloring problem, there would also be a PAUS for sampling independent sets in bipartite graphs, and, by the self-reducibility of the latter problem, there would be a fully polynomial randomized approximation scheme (FPRAS) for #BIS---the problem of counting independent sets in bipartite graphs. Dyer, Goldberg, Greenhill, and Jerrum have shown that #BIS is complete in a certain logically defined complexity class. Thus, a PAUS for sampling H-colorings would give an FPRAS for the entire complexity class. In order to achieve our result we introduce the new notion of sampling-preserving reduction which seems to be more useful in certain settings than approximation-preserving reduction.
Cross Document Co-Reference Resolution Applications for People in the Legal Domain

By combining information extraction and record linkage techniques, we have created a re-pository of references to attorneys, judges, and expert witnesses across a broad range of text sources. These text sources include news, caselaw, law reviews, Medline abstracts, and legal briefs among others. We briefly describe our cross document co-reference resolution al-gorithm and discuss applications these resolved references enable. Among these applications is one that shows summaries of relationships chains between individuals based on their document co-occurrence and cross document co-references.