Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Telestroke Ambulances in Prehospital Stroke Management: Concept and Pilot Feasibility Study

Background and Purpose— Pre- and intrahospital time delays are major concerns in acute stroke care. Telemedicine-equipped ambulances may improve time management and identify patients with stroke eligible for thrombolysis by an early prehospital stroke diagnosis. The aims of this study were (1) to develop a telestroke ambulance prototype; (2) to test the reliability of stroke severity assessment; and (3) to evaluate its feasibility in the prehospital emergency setting. Methods— Mobil, real-time audio–video streaming telemedicine devices were implemented into advanced life support ambulances. Feasibility of telestroke ambulances and reliability of the National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale assessment were tested using current wireless cellular communication technology (third generation) in a prehospital stroke scenario. Two stroke actors were trained in simulation of differing right and left middle cerebral artery stroke syndromes. National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale assessment was performed by a hospital-based stroke physician by telemedicine, by an emergency physician guided by telemedicine, and “a posteriori” on the basis of video documentation. Results— In 18 of 30 scenarios, National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale assessment could not be performed due to absence or loss of audio–video signal. In the remaining 12 completed scenarios, interrater agreement of National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale examination between ambulance and hospital and ambulance and “a posteriori” video evaluation was moderate to good with weighted &kgr; values of 0.69 (95% CI, 0.51–0.87) and 0.79 (95% CI, 0.59–0.98), respectively. Conclusion— Prehospital telestroke examination was not at an acceptable level for clinical use, at least on the basis of the used technology. Further technical development is needed before telestroke is applicable for prehospital stroke management during patient transport.
Excess risk of renal allograft loss and early mortality among elderly recipients is associated with poor exercise capacity.

BACKGROUND Successful renal transplantation in the elderly offers substantial benefits in quality and life expectancy. However, in this group of patients there is an early increased risk of death compared with those remaining on dialysis. MATERIALS AND METHODS Graft and patient outcomes in 64 older transplant recipients were compared with 338 patients aged 18 - 59 years. We identified potential risk factors that may predict clinical outcomes in older transplant recipients. A log-rank test and Cox regression analyses were performed to assess the impact of various patient characteristics on graft and patient survival. RESULTS Among older patients, graft survival was 76.6% and 67% at 1 and 3 years, respectively. When graft survival was censored for death with functioning graft, the 1- and 3-year graft survival was 83% and 82%, respectively. Patient survival was 78% and 71% at 1 and 3 years, respectively. These survival rates were significantly lower than those of younger recipients. Pretransplant inactivity, delayed graft function, smoking history and longer waiting time predicted poor graft and patient survival. A history of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and peripheral vascular disease also predicted a higher mortality among older recipients. CONCLUSION Older kidney transplant recipients are at high risk for allograft failure and early death. Poor functional capacity predicts a poor outcome for older patients undergoing renal transplantation. Therefore, careful patient selection is paramount, and every effort should be made to initiate timely interventions aimed at increasing physical activity in those with low fitness level.
Autoregulatory factors and communication in actinomycetes.

The ability to produce a wide variety of secondary metabolites and a mycelial form of growth that develops into spores are two biological aspects characteristic of the gram-positive bacterial genus Streptomyces. Secondary metabolism and cell differentiation are controlled by diffusible low-molecular-weight chemical substances called autoregulators. A-factor, the representative of the autoregulators, triggers streptomycin production and aerial-mycelium formation in Streptomyces griseus. A-factor exerts its regulatory function with the aid of a receptor protein that itself acts as a repressor-type regulator. The A-factor signal via the A-factor-receptor protein is transferred to downstream genes, such as streptomycin-production genes and sporulation genes, through multiple regulatory genes in a complex regulatory cascade. Thus, A-factor can be termed a "microbial hormone. " This review deals with the A-factor-regulatory cascade as a model system for other autoregulators. The biosynthesis of A-factor, the structures and characteristics of other autoregulators, and the importance of these autoregulators in the ecosystem are also included.
n-Channel Symmetric Motion-Compensated Multiple Description Coding for Video Communications over OFDM Networks

We propose an n-channel symmetric motion-compensated multiple description (MD) coding and transmission scheme for the delivery of fine granular scalable (FGS) video over multicarrier orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems, utilizing the concepts of partial and leaky predictions. We investigate the proposed MD coding and transmission scheme using a cross-layer design perspective. In particular, we construct the symmetric motion compensated MD codes based on the diversity order of the channel, defined as the ratio of the overall bandwidth of the system to the coherence bandwidth of the channel. We show that knowing the diversity order of a physical channel can assist an FGS video coder in selecting the motion compensation prediction point, as well as on the use of leaky prediction. More importantly, we illustrate how the side information can reduce the drift management problem associated with the construction of symmetric motion-compensated MD codes
A feature extraction technique based on character geometry for character recognition

This paper describes a geometry based technique for feature extraction applicable to segmentation-based word recognition systems. The proposed system extracts the geometric features of the character contour. This features are based on the basic line types that forms the character skeleton. The system gives a feature vector as its output. The feature vectors so generated from a training set, were then used to train a pattern recognition engine based on Neural Networks so that the system can be benchmarked.
Increased autophagy and apoptosis contribute to muscle atrophy in a myotonic dystrophy type 1 Drosophila model

ABSTRACT Muscle mass wasting is one of the most debilitating symptoms of myotonic dystrophy type 1 (DM1) disease, ultimately leading to immobility, respiratory defects, dysarthria, dysphagia and death in advanced stages of the disease. In order to study the molecular mechanisms leading to the degenerative loss of adult muscle tissue in DM1, we generated an inducible Drosophila model of expanded CTG trinucleotide repeat toxicity that resembles an adult-onset form of the disease. Heat-shock induced expression of 480 CUG repeats in adult flies resulted in a reduction in the area of the indirect flight muscles. In these model flies, reduction of muscle area was concomitant with increased apoptosis and autophagy. Inhibition of apoptosis or autophagy mediated by the overexpression of DIAP1, mTOR (also known as Tor) or muscleblind, or by RNA interference (RNAi)-mediated silencing of autophagy regulatory genes, achieved a rescue of the muscle-loss phenotype. In fact, mTOR overexpression rescued muscle size to a size comparable to that in control flies. These results were validated in skeletal muscle biopsies from DM1 patients in which we found downregulated autophagy and apoptosis repressor genes, and also in DM1 myoblasts where we found increased autophagy. These findings provide new insights into the signaling pathways involved in DM1 disease pathogenesis. Summary: Increased apoptosis and autophagy are processes that lead to muscle mass wasting in DM1, which is one of the most debilitating symptoms of the disease.
The Efficacy and Tolerability of Combined Antidepressant Treatment in Different Depressive Subgroups

Eighty patients admitted to hospital with major depression were randomly allocated to six weeks of treatment with tranylcypromine, amitriptyline, or tranylcypromine and amitriptyline in combination, in a double-blind study. Scores on the HRSD improved significantly in all three groups, but there were no differences between the three groups. Patients on tranylcypromine and amitriptyline combined improved more according to their self-ratings after six weeks, and response was earlier as measured by a clinical global improvement scale. Those with endogenous depression improved more than those with neurotic depression, irrespective of treatment group. Combined treatment was less well tolerated than single treatments and gave rise to more side-effects, although there was no serious toxicity. Orthostatic hypotension was observed more frequently in patients on combined treatment. This group also experienced a significant increase in weight and prolongation of the P-R interval on ECG.
Reinforcement Learning in Tic-Tac-Toe Game and Its Similar Variations

Perhaps, “minimax search” is seemingly the most successful one among many for it and its effective variations balance the searching efficiency and computational complexity, not to mention the glory of “Deep Blue” playing against Chess Master Kasparov. However, in common sense, minimax search is nothing but an enforced version of brute force search while it has a weak ability of automatically evaluating the board situation (or we call “state”). This makes it trivial by hand coding initially and also, sometimes, impossible to be applied.
Influence of Service Temperature On the Resistance of Wrought Aluminum-Magnesium Alloys to Corrosion★

Abstract The wrought aluminum-magnesium alloys are being used in many welded structural applications; however, the alloys of higher magnesium content are not recommended for service where the operating temperature exceeds about 150 F. The reason for this limitation is that prolonged heating in the temperature range of 150 to 350 F causes selective precipitation of an anodic phase resulting in susceptibility to intergranular corrosion, and in the presence of a high enduring tensile stress, causes stress-corrosion cracking. This paper presents extensive data on the effect of continuous heating on the metallurgical structure and resistance of these alloys to stress-corrosion cracking. It further describes a new alloy, 5454, which is shown to be free from the temperature limitation placed on the higher magnesium alloys. 6.4. 2
Applying the Grid to 3D capture technology

The PGPGrid project aims to parallelize the process of extracting range data from an experimental 3D scanner using the Grid as a vehicle for accessing necessary resources. The application is potentially highly parallel but has some unusual features such as rapid spawning of processes in real time and a dynamic inter‐process network topology. These characteristics are such as to require enhancement of the usual task migration capabilities of the Globus toolkit. The present paper initially discusses attempts to estimate the real parallelizability of the scanner application. It then describes a new Java application programming interface, based on Milner's $\pi$‐calculus, which could be used to extend Globus in a manner capable of supporting systems with this kind of dynamic parallel structure. The location of processing resources for the $\pi$‐calculus is done using a Web‐services‐based resource locator. The article also describes the pipeline of processing from initial stereo photogrametry to the final production of animation models. A key step in this is the conformation of animators models to the data obtained by the real‐time scanner. Algorithmic innovations in this process are described. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Convective Instability in Ice I with Non-Newtonian Rheology: Application to the Galilean Satellites

At the temperatures and stresses associated with the onset of convection in an ice I shell of the Galilean satellites, ice behaves as a non-Newtonian fluid with a viscosity that depends on both temperature and strain rate. The convective stability of a non-Newtonian ice shell can be judged by comparing the Rayleigh number of the shell to a critical value. Previous studies suggest that the critical Rayleigh number for a non-Newtonian fluid depends on the initial conditions in the fluid layer, in addition to the thermal, rheological, and physical properties of the fluid. We seek to extend the existing definition of the critical Rayleigh number for a non-Newtonian, basally heated fluid by quantifying the conditions required to initiate convection in an ice I layer initially in conductive equilibrium. We find that the critical Rayleigh number for the onset of convection in ice I varies as a power (-0.6 to -0.5) of the amplitude of the initial temperature perturbation issued to the layer, when the amplitude of perturbation is less than the rheological temperature scale. For larger-amplitude perturbations, the critical Rayleigh number achieves a constant value. We characterize the critical Rayleigh number as a function of surface temperature of the satellite, melting temperature of ice, and rheological parameters so that our results may be extrapolated for use with other rheologies and for a generic large icy satellite. The values of critical Rayleigh number imply that triggering convection from a conductive equilibrium in a pure ice shell less than 100 km thick in Europa, Ganymede, or Callisto requires a large, localized temperature perturbation of a few kelvins to tens of kelvins to soften the ice and therefore may require tidal dissipation in the ice shell.
A Performance Model for Network-on-Chip Wormhole Routers

A generic analytical performance model of single-channel wormhole routers is presented using the M/D/1/B queuing theory. Compared with previous work, the flow-control feedback mechanism is studied in detail, and a computing method bases on Markov chain for the flow-control feedback probability is proposed. Compared with BookSim, a well-known cycle-accurate Network-on-Chip (NoC) simulator, this model presents accurate results on key metrics: the average relative error of flow-control feedback probability is about 7.87%. In addition, based on the model of single-channel routers, the asymmetric multi-channel and symmetric multi-channel structured routers are both modeled respectively.
Discovering Fuzzy Functional Dependencies as Semantic Knowledge in Large Databases

Fuzzy functional dependency (FFD) is a kind of semantic knowledge and can be discovered from a large volume of business data. Sectional FFD and Attribute FFD are discussed so as to reflect semantics of the business world and express useful information that is natural for people to comprehend. The experimental results on an insurance data set show that the proposed method can extract knowledge efficiently and effectively.
Improved Estimation of the Number of Independent Components for Functional Magnetic Resonance Data by a Whitening Filter

Independent component analysis (ICA) has been widely applied to the analysis of fMRI data. Accurate estimation of the number of independent components (ICs) in fMRI data is critical to reduce over/underfitting. Various methods based on information theoretic criteria (ITC) have been used to estimate the intrinsic dimension of fMRI data. An important assumption of ITC is that the noise is purely white. However, this assumption is often violated by the existence of temporally correlated noise in fMRI data. In this study, we introduced a filtering method into the order selection to remove the autocorrelation from the colored noise by using the whitening filter proposed by Prudon and Weisskoff. Results of the simulated data show that the filtering method has strong robustness to noise and significantly improves the accuracy of order selection from data with colored noise. Moreover, the multifiltering method proposed by us was applied to real fMRI data to improve the performance of ITC. Results of the real fMRI data show that the proposed method can alleviate the overestimation due to the autocorrelation of colored noise. We further compared the stability of IC estimates of real fMRI data at order estimated by minimum description length criterion based on the filtered and unfiltered data by using the software package ICASSO. Results show that ICA yields more stable IC estimates using the reduced order by filtering.
Mixture Regression for Covariate Shift

In supervised learning there is a typical presumption that the training and test points are taken from the same distribution. In practice this assumption is commonly violated. The situations where the training and test data are from different distributions is called covariate shift. Recent work has examined techniques for dealing with covariate shift in terms of minimisation of generalisation error. As yet the literature lacks a Bayesian generative perspective on this problem. This paper tackles this issue for regression models. Recent work on covariate shift can be understood in terms of mixture regression. Using this view, we obtain a general approach to regression under covariate shift, which reproduces previous work as a special case. The main advantages of this new formulation over previous models for covariate shift are that we no longer need to presume the test and training densities are known, the regression and density estimation are combined into a single procedure, and previous methods are reproduced as special cases of this procedure, shedding light on the implicit assumptions the methods are making.
Scheduling Earth Observing Satellites with Evolutionary Algorithms

We hypothesize that evolutionary algorithms can effectively schedule coordinated fleets of Earth observing satellites. The constraints are complex and the bottlenecks are not well understood, a condition where evolutionary algorithms are often effective. This is, in part, because evolutionary algorithms require only that one can represent solutions, modify solutions, and evaluate solution fitness. To test the hypothesis we have developed a representative set of problems, produced optimization software (in Java) to solve them, and run experiments comparing techniques. This paper presents initial results of a comparison of several evolutionary and other optimization techniques; namely the genetic algorithm, simulated annealing, squeaky wheel optimization, and stochastic hill climbing. We also compare separate satellite vs. integrated scheduling of a two satellite constellation. While the results are not definitive, tests to date suggest that simulated annealing is the best search technique and integrated scheduling is superior.
A smart home resource management system for multiple inhabitants by agent conceding negotiation

This paper proposes a home resource management system for a smart home with multiple inhabitants. The system uses home ontology to covers the characteristics of available resources in smart homes. The ontology provides information of living space partition, energy consumption, and network bandwidth to detect resource usage conflict. Case-base reasoning is used to predict inhabitant resource requirement of smart homes. The system then uses BDI agent, blackboard systems, and conceding negotiation to find a common consensus plan of home resources for inhabitants. The BDI agent unfolds the inhabitants' information by belief, desire, and intension model. Blackboard system provides a platform for agent communication and resource usage conflict detection. Finally, conceding negotiation uses utility computation and conceder selection to find a common consensus resource allocation plan. The system is simulated in the sample smart home. It can provide an intelligent mechanism for efficient resource allocation.
Teleassistance outdoor system for the elderly based on Android devices

This article presents a work in progress system for helping people who are suffering from disorientation episodes outside their houses, such as with their family. This is a WIP (Work In Progress). The system is based on modern smartphones and their capacity, using GPS, to locate the user on a map, as well as featuring computing power and Internet connection via 3G. The caregivers also have a web-based application to monitor and configure the alarms that are triggered. The web application contains maps in order to define secure zones, send instant messages to the mobile application, and set events in a calendar and a log with all events that have occurred in the system. Piloting is being undertaken by Osatek and BetiOn, the Basque country teleassistance service.
Sampling Extreme Groups Invalidates Research on the Paraphilias: Implications for DSM-5 and Sex Offender Risk Assessments.

Psychiatrist and Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th edition (DSM-IV) text editor Michael First has criticized the addition of victim counts to criteria proposed by the Paraphilia Sub-Workgroup for inclusion in DSM-5 because they will increase false-positive diagnoses. Psychologist and Chair of the DSM-5 Paraphilia Sub-Workgroup, Ray Blanchard, responded by publishing a study of pedohebephiles and teleiophiles which seemed to show that victim counts could accurately identify pedohebephiles who were selected per self-report and phallometric testing. His analysis was flawed because it did not conform to conventional clinical practice and because he sampled groups at opposite ends of the clinical spectrum. In an analysis of his full sample, we found the false-positive rate for pedohebephilia at the recommended victim count selection points was indeed very large. Why? Because data analyses that eliminate intermediate data points will generate inflated estimates of correlation coefficients, base rates, and the discriminative capacity of predictor variables. This principle is also relevant for understanding the flaws in previous research that led Hanson and Bussiere to conclude that sexual recidivism was correlated with "sexual interest in children as measured by phallometric assessment. " The credibility of mental health professionals rests on the reliability of their research. Conducting, publishing, and citing research that reflects