Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The use of the mini-mental state examination and the clock-drawing test for dementia in a tertiary hospital.

INTRODUCTION An early and a quick identification of dementia is desirable to improve the overall care to the affected persons in the developing countries. The aim of this study was to evaluate the discriminative abilities of the Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE) and the Clock Drawing Test (CDT) in differentiating the demented patients from the controls and also the differentiation between the different types of dementia. PATIENTS AND METHODS This study was designed to evaluate the patients with varied types and severities of dementia, who were diagnosed by using the Clinical Dementia Rating (CDR) scale. All the patients completed the MMSE and the simplified CDT. RESULTS This study included 197 patients with an age range of 43-79 years. Fifty-one patients (25.9%) were diagnosed with Alzheimer Dementia (AD), 37 patients (18.8%) with Vascular Dementia (VD), 23 patients (11.7%) with Parkinson's Disease Dementia (PDD) and 86 patients (43.6%) with other variants of dementia. The total MMSE score of the enrolled patients was significantly lower as compared to that of the control subjects, with a non-significant difference between the varied diagnoses. The total CDT scores were significantly lower in the patients as compared to those in the controls, with significantly lower scores in the PDD group as compared to those in the AD group. The patients who had AD showed non-significantly higher CDT scores as compared to the patients who had vascular and other types of dementia. CONCLUSION A combined application of both MMSE and CDT can identify the persons with a cognitive affection and this may be a useful tool for the diagnosis of the non Alzheimer's type of dementia.
Philosophical Thoughts on Evidence-based Practice in Psychotherapy

Evidence-based practice in psychotherapy refers to the psychological therapy practice that the therapist,based on his clinical expertise and experiences and taking such factors as the patient's characteristics,culture,and preference into consideration,make use of the best research evidence to treat the patient.To illustrate the two stages in the development of evidence-based practice and study its philosophical basis and existing problems,study its developing tendency and its philosophical significance to the development of psychology.
ASSESSMENT OF COMPUTER SELF-EFFICACY: INTEGRATING LAPTOPS ACROSS THE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS CURRICULUM

Many universities now require students to use laptop computers in their curriculum. It is important that these institutions evaluate and measure their progress in achieving purported goals. One approach is the assessment of computer self-efficacy at various educational phases. Our study focuses on the initial data analysis gathered from business majors at varying stages of education. Our analysis reflects that while the experience levels of specific software packages have significantly improved, there has not been a significant increase in student levels of computer self-efficacy.
Changes in Histone Methylation and Acetylation during Microspore Reprogramming to Embryogenesis Occur Concomitantly with BnHKMT and BnHAT Expression and Are Associated with Cell Totipotency, Proliferation, and Differentiation in Brassica napus

In response to stress treatments, microspores can be reprogrammed to become totipotent cells that follow an embryogenic pathway producing haploid and double-haploid embryos which are important biotechnological tools in plant breeding. Recent studies have revealed the involvement of DNA methylation in regulating this process, but no information is available on the role of histone modifications in microspore embryogenesis. Histone modifications are major epigenetic marks controlling gene expression during plant development and in response to environmental changes. Lysine methylation of histones, accomplished by histone lysine methyltransferases (HKMTs), can occur on different lysine residues, with histone H3K9 methylation being mainly associated with transcriptionally silenced regions. In contrast, histone H3 and H4 acetylation is carried out by histone acetyltransferases (HATs) and is associated with actively transcribed genes. In this work, we analyzed 3 different histone epigenetic marks: dimethylation of H3K9 (H3K9me2) and acetylation of H3 and H4 (H3Ac and H4Ac) during microspore embryogenesis in Brassica napus by Western blot and immunofluorescence assays. The expression patterns of histone methyltransferase BnHKMT and histone acetyltransferase BnHAT genes have also been analyzed by qPCR. Our results revealed different spatial and temporal distribution patterns for methylated and acetylated histone variants during microspore embryogenesis and their similarity with the expression profiles of BnHKMT and BnHAT, respectively. The data presented suggest the participation of H3K9me2 and HKMT in embryo cell differentiation and heterochromatinization events, whereas H3Ac, H4Ac, and HAT would be involved in transcriptional activation, totipotency, and proliferation events during cell reprogramming and embryo development.
Genetic Analysis of a Chromosomal Region ContainingvanA and vanB, Genes Required for Conversion of Either Ferulate or Vanillate to Protocatechuate inAcinetobacter

ABSTRACT VanA and VanB form an oxygenative demethylase that converts vanillate to protocatechuate in microorganisms. Ferulate, an abundant phytochemical, had been shown to be metabolized through a vanillate intermediate in several Pseudomonas isolates, and biochemical evidence had indicated that vanillate also is an intermediate in ferulate catabolism by Acinetobacter. Genetic evidence supporting this conclusion was obtained by characterization of mutant Acinetobacter strains blocked in catabolism of both ferulate and vanillate. Cloned Acinetobacter vanA and vanB were shown to be members of a chromosomal segment remote from a supraoperonic cluster containing other genes required for completion of the catabolism of ferulate and its structural analogs, caffeate and coumarate, through protocatechuate. The nucleotide sequence of DNA containingvanA and vanB demonstrated the presence of genes that, on the basis of nucleotide sequence similarity, appeared to be associated with transport of aromatic compounds, metabolism of such compounds, or iron scavenging. Spontaneous deletion of 100 kb of DNA containing this segment does not impede the growth of cells with simple carbon sources other than vanillate or ferulate. Additional spontaneous mutations blocking vanA and vanB expression were shown to be mediated by IS1236, including insertion of the newly discovered composite transposon Tn5613. On the whole, vanA and vanB appear to be located within a nonessential genetic region that exhibits considerable genetic malleability in Acinetobacter. The overall organization of genes neighboring Acinetobacter vanA and vanB, including a putative transcriptional regulatory gene that is convergently transcribed and overlaps vanB, is conserved inPseudomonas aeruginosa but has undergone radical rearrangement in other Pseudomonas species.
Tube Model Reference Adaptive Control for a cylindrical tank system

Modeling and controlling of level process is one of the most common problems in the process industry. Non linear process control is a difficult task in process industries. As the process is v employed. The objective of the project is to control the water level of a cylindrical tank using a adaptive control technique. A tube MRAC scheme is employed in this project. In this work, we develop a new paradigm of performance shaping in MRAC is developed. The general concept is to replace the classical adaptive goal setting in the form of the reference model with a single predetermined trajectory by a Tube reference model. In addition to stability, robustness and asymptotical tracking it also diminishes the control cost with respect to some criterion. An additional optimization is used within the MRAC framework in order to find the value of the correction control term at each instant of time. The performance of tube MRAC is compared with conventional MRAC. The results show that the tube MRAC gives better performance than other controllers and it reduces rise time, settling time and dead time.
Multi-Query Optimization in MapReduce Framework

MapReduce has recently emerged as a new paradigm for large-scale data analysis due to its high scalability, fine-grained fault tolerance and easy programming model. Since different jobs often share similar work (e.g., several jobs scan the same input file or produce the same map output), there are many opportunities to optimize the performance for a batch of jobs. In this paper, we propose two new techniques for multi-job optimization in the MapReduce framework. The first is a generalized grouping technique (which generalizes the recently proposed MRShare technique) that merges multiple jobs into a single job thereby enabling the merged jobs to share both the scan of the input file as well as the communication of the common map output. The second is a materialization technique that enables multiple jobs to share both the scan of the input file as well as the communication of the common map output via partial materialization of the map output of some jobs (in the map and/or reduce phase). Our second contribution is the proposal of a new optimization algorithm that given an input batch of jobs, produces an optimal plan by a judicious partitioning of the jobs into groups and an optimal assignment of the processing technique to each group. Our experimental results on Hadoop demonstrate that our new approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art technique, MRShare, by up to 107%.
DISSECTING THE GRAVITATIONAL LENS B1608+656. II. PRECISION MEASUREMENTS OF THE HUBBLE CONSTANT, SPATIAL CURVATURE, AND THE DARK ENERGY EQUATION OF STATE

Strong gravitational lens systems with measured time delays between the multiple images provide a method for measuring the “time-delay distance” to the lens, and thus the Hubble constant. We present a Bayesian analysis of the strong gravitational lens system B1608+656, incorporating (1) new, deep Hubble Space Telescope (HST) observations, (2) a new velocity-dispersion measurement of 260 ± 15 km s−1 for the primary lens galaxy, and (3) an updated study of the lens’ environment. Our analysis of the HST images takes into account the extended source surface brightness, and the dust extinction and optical emission by the interacting lens galaxies. When modeling the stellar dynamics of the primary lens galaxy, the lensing effect, and the environment of the lens, we explicitly include the total mass distribution profile logarithmic slope γ′ and the external convergence κext; we marginalize over these parameters, assigning well-motivated priors for them, and so turn the major systematic errors into statistical ones. The HST images provide one such prior, constraining the lens mass density profile logarithmic slope to be γ′ = 2.08 ± 0.03; a combination of numerical simulations and photometric observations of the B1608+656 field provides an estimate of the prior for κext: 0.10+0.08−0.05. This latter distribution dominates the final uncertainty on H0. Fixing the cosmological parameters at Ωm = 0.3, ΩΛ = 0.7, and w = −1 in order to compare with previous work on this system, we find H0 = 70.6+3.1−3.1 km s−1 Mpc−1. The new data provide an increase in precision of more than a factor of 2, even including the marginalization over κext. Relaxing the prior probability density function for the cosmological parameters to that derived from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) five-year data set, we find that the B1608+656 data set breaks the degeneracy between Ωm and ΩΛ at w = −1 and constrains the curvature parameter to be −0.031 < Ωk < 0.009 (95% CL), a level of precision comparable to that afforded by the current Type Ia SNe sample. Asserting a flat spatial geometry, we find that, in combination with WMAP, H0 = 69.7+4.9−5.0 km s−1 Mpc−1 and w = −0.94+0.17−0.19 (68% CL), suggesting that the observations of B1608+656 constrain w as tightly as the current Baryon Acoustic Oscillation data do.
Cluster-based collection selection in uncooperative distributed information retrieval

Background The focus of this research is collection selection for distributed information retrieval. The collection descriptions that are necessary for selecting the most relevant collections are often created from information gathered by random sampling. Collection selection based on an incomplete index constructed by using random sampling instead of a full index leads to inferior results. Contributions In this research we propose to use collection clustering to compensate for the incompleteness of the indexes. When collection clustering is used we do not only select the collections that are considered relevant based on their collection descriptions, but also collections that have similar content in their indexes. Most existing cluster algorithms require the speci cation of the number of clusters prior to execution. We describe a new clustering algorithm that allows us to specify the sizes of the produced clusters instead of the number of clusters. Conclusions Our experiments show that that collection clustering can indeed improve the performance of distributed information retrieval systems that use random sampling. There is not much di erence in retrieval performance between our clustering algorithm and the well-known k-means algorithm. We suggest to use the algorithm we proposed because it is more scalable.
Rotor Flux-Barrier Geometry Design to Reduce Stator Iron Losses in Synchronous IPM Motors Under FW Operations

The interior permanent-magnet (IPM) synchronous motor is characterized by a high rotor anisotropy. Such an anisotropy is the cause of a high harmonic content of the air-gap flux density distribution, almost independent of the main flux. As a consequence, there are fluctuations of the flux density in the stator iron and, consequently, eddy-current iron losses. This aspect is prominently evident during flux-weakening operations, when the armature current weakens the permanent magnet flux and the motor runs above the base speed. This paper presents a complete study of such a phenomenon, including an analytical model and a finite element validation, as well as an experimental confirmation of the predicted stator tooth flux waveforms. Finally, some suggestions are given in order to design an IPM motor exhibiting reduced iron losses during all operating conditions.
Functional object descriptors for human activity modeling

The ability to learn from human demonstration is essential for robots in human environments. The activity models that the robot builds from observation must take both the human motion and the objects involved into account. Object models designed for this purpose should reflect the role of the object in the activity - its function, or affordances. The main contribution of this paper is to represent object directly in terms of their interaction with human hands, rather than in terms of appearance. This enables the direct representation of object affordances/function, while being robust to intra-class differences in appearance. Object hypotheses are first extracted from a video sequence as tracks of associated image segments. The object hypotheses are encoded as strings, where the vocabulary corresponds to different types of interaction with human hands. The similarity between two such object descriptors can be measured using a string kernel. Experiments show these functional descriptors to capture differences and similarities in object affordances/function that are not represented by appearance.
Privacy-Preserving Social Network with Multigrained and Multilevel Access Control

I study two privacy-preserving social network graphs to dis- close the types of relationships of connecting edges and provide flexible multigrained access control. To create such graphs, my schemes employ the concept of secretaries and types of relationships. It is significantly more efficient than those that using expensive cryptographic primitives. I also show how these schemes can be used for multigrained access control with various options. In addition, I describe how much these schemes are resilient to infer the types of connecting edges.
Diastolic dysfunction precedes hypoxia-induced mortality in dystrophic mice

Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) is a progressive striated muscle disease that is characterized by skeletal muscle weakness with progressive respiratory and cardiac failure. Together respiratory and cardiac disease account for the majority of mortality in the DMD patient population. However, little is known regarding the effects of respiratory dysfunction on the dystrophic heart. The studies described here examine the effects of acute hypoxia on cardiac function. These studies demonstrate, for the first time, that a mouse model of DMD displays significant mortality following acute exposure to hypoxia. This mortality is characterized by a steady decline in systolic function. Retrospective analysis reveals that significant decreases in diastolic dysfunction, especially in the right ventricle, precede the decline in systolic pressure. The initial hemodynamic response to acute hypoxia in the mouse is similar to that observed in larger species, with significant increases in right ventricular afterload and decreases in left ventricular preload being observed. Significant increases in heart rate and contractility suggest hypoxia‐induced activation of the sympathetic nervous system. These studies provide evidence that while hypoxia presents significant hemodynamic challenges to the dystrophic right ventricle, global cardiac dysfunction precedes hypoxia‐induced mortality in the dystrophic heart. These findings are clinically relevant as the respiratory insufficiency evident in patients with DMD results in significant bouts of hypoxia. The results of these studies indicate that hypoxia may contribute to the acceleration of the heart disease in DMD patients. Importantly, hypoxia can be avoided through the use of ventilatory support.
Incremental diagnostic accuracy of hybrid SPECT/CT coronary angiography in a population with an intermediate to high pre-test likelihood of coronary artery disease.

AIMS Hybrid myocardial perfusion imaging with single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) and CT coronary angiography (CCTA) has the potential to play a major role in patients with non-conclusive SPECT or CCTA results. We evaluated the performance of hybrid SPECT/CCTA vs. standalone SPECT and CCTA for the diagnosis of significant coronary artery disease (CAD) in patients with an intermediate to high pre-test likelihood of CAD. METHODS AND RESULTS In total, 98 patients (mean age 62.5 ± 10.1 years, 68.4% male) with stable anginal complaints and a median pre-test likelihood of 87% (range 22-95%) were prospectively included in this study. Hybrid SPECT/CCTA was performed prior to conventional coronary angiography (CA) including fractional flow reserve (FFR) measurements. Hybrid analysis was performed by combined interpretation of SPECT and CCTA images. The sensitivity, specificity, positive (PPV), and negative (NPV) predictive values were calculated for standalone SPECT, CCTA, and hybrid SPECT/CCTA on per patient level, using an FFR <0.80 as a reference for significant CAD. Significant CAD was demonstrated in 56 patients (57.9%). Non-conclusive SPECT or CCTA results were found in 32 (32.7%) patients. SPECT had a sensitivity of 93%, specificity 79%, PPV 85%, and NPV 89%. CCTA had a sensitivity of 98%, specificity 62%, PPV 77%, and NPV 96%. Hybrid analysis of SPECT and CCTA improved the overall performance: sensitivity, specificity, PPV, and NPV for the presence of significant CAD to 96, 95, 96, and 95%, respectively. CONCLUSIONS In > 40% of the patients with a high pre-test likelihood no significant CAD was demonstrated, emphasizing the value of accurate pre-treatment cardiovascular imaging. Hybrid SPECT/CCTA was able to accurately diagnose and exclude significant CAD surpassing standalone myocardial SPECT and CCTA, vs. a reference standard of FFR measurements.
Split Miner: Discovering Accurate and Simple Business Process Models from Event Logs

The problem of automated discovery of process models from event logs has been intensively researched in the past two decades. Despite a rich field of proposals, state-of-the-art automated process discovery methods suffer from two recurrent deficiencies when applied to real-life logs: (i) they produce large and spaghetti-like models; and (ii) they produce models that either poorly fit the event log (low fitness) or highly generalize it (low precision). Striking a tradeoff between these quality dimensions in a robust and scalable manner has proved elusive. This paper presents an automated process discovery method that produces simple process models with low branching complexity and consistently high and balanced fitness, precision and generalization, while achieving execution times 2-6 times faster than state-of-the-art methods on a set of 12 real-life logs. Further, our approach guarantees deadlock-freedom for cyclic process models and soundness for acyclic. Our proposal combines a novel approach to filter the directly-follows graph induced by an event log, with an approach to identify combinations of split gateways that accurately capture the concurrency, conflict and causal relations between neighbors in the directly-follows graph.
Laboratory Evaluation of Corn Grain and Silage Digestibility

Abstract The primary objective of this trial was to compare commercially available laboratory assays for assessing starch digestibility of dry (DC) and high-moisture (HMC) corn and corn silage (WPCS) using samples from 22 dairy farms. In addition, in vitro NDF digestibility (IVNDFD) in WPCS was measured at 2 incubation times (24 and 48 h). Dry matter contents of HMC and WPCS were 73.7 ± 3.7% and 35.8 ± 4.7%, respectively. The r-value from multiple regression of degree of starch access (DSA) on DM content and mean particle size for HMC was 0.78 (P 0.10) to mean particle size for either HMC or dry corn. For WPCS, DSA was positively but not highly (r = 0.43) correlated (P
Study on State Transition Method Applied to Motion Planning for a Humanoid Robot

This paper presents an approach of motion planning for a humanoid robot using a state transition method. In this method, motion planning is simplified by introducing a state-space to describe the whole motion series. And each state in the state-space corresponds to a contact state specified during the motion. The continuous motion is represented by a sequence of discrete states. The concept of the transition between two neighboring states, that is the state transition, can be realized by using some traditional path planning methods. Considering the dynamical stability of the robot, a state transition method based on search strategy is proposed. Different sets of trajectories are generated by using a variable 5th-order polynomial interpolation method. After quantifying the stabilities of these trajectories, the trajectories with the largest stability margin are selected as the final state transition trajectories. Rising motion process is exemplified to validate the method and the simulation results show the proposed method to be feasible and effective.