Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Designing Study Nurses' Training to Enhance Research Integrity: A MacroergonomicApproach

Successful field evaluation of informatics initiatives designed to create technology-enhanced professional practice relies on adequate training of experimental participants. However, such training presents design, implementation and evaluation challenges. A macroergonomic approach, focusing on an organizational view of people, technology, task and environment interactions in work systems, provides a framework for training that allows anticipation and compensation for challenges. In the HeartCare II project, we developed a multi-level training program for nurses and patients enrolled in a field trial of an innovative technology-enhanced professional practice model. Using a macroergonomic approach, we designed three waves of training centered on a train-the-trainer model. Evaluation tools for each training wave provided improvement feedback. Despite planning, a drop-off occurred between training waves, affecting both recruitment and patient training. Troubleshooting identified people, task, technology, and organizational concerns. Strategies to increase nurse buy-in and improve technical performance are making a difference. Organizational challenges remain the most intractable.
Annotating genericity: a survey, a scheme, and a corpus

Generics are linguistic expressions that make statements about or refer to kinds, or that report regularities of events. Non-generic expressions make statements about particular individuals or specific episodes. Generics are treated extensively in semantic theory (Krifka et al., 1995). In practice, it is often hard to decide whether a referring expression is generic or non-generic, and to date there is no data set which is both large and satisfactorily annotated. Such a data set would be valuable for creating automatic systems for identifying generic expressions, in turn facilitating knowledge extraction from natural language text. In this paper we provide the next steps for such an annotation endeavor. Our contributions are: (1) we survey the most important previous projects annotating genericity, focusing on resources for English; (2) with a new agreement study we identify problems in the annotation scheme of the largest currentlyavailable resource (ACE-2005); and (3) we introduce a linguistically-motivated annotation scheme for marking both clauses and their subjects with regard to their genericity. (4) We present a corpus of MASC (Ide et al., 2010) and Wikipedia texts annotated according to our scheme, achieving substantial agreement.
Movement Time and Brake Pedal Placement

Optimum relocation of the brake relative to the accelerator can reduce stopping distance and may mean the difference between an accident and a near-accident. A driving simulator was used to examine efficiency of braking movement time. Movement times were measured for 60 participants (30 male, 30 female) in six different depth/lateral-separation conditions. Movement times were shown to improve as a result of moving the brake pedal from its typical heights above the accelerator to positions equal with and below the accelerator.
SORS: a scalable online ridesharing system

In this paper, we design and evaluate SORS- a scalable online ridesharing system, where drivers and passengers send their requests for a ride in advance, possibly on a short notice. SORS is modular and consists of two main, loosely coupled, components: the Constraint Satisfier and the Matching Module. The Constraint Satisfier takes as input information about the desired trajectories and spatio-temporal constraints of drivers and passengers and it returns a list of feasible (driver, passenger) pairs. We use a road networks data structure, optimized for the specific spatio-temporal queries in the context of ridesharing, and we show that our Constraint Satisfier has a 4.65x more scalable query time than a general-purpose database. We represent the feasible pairs of drivers and passengers as a weighted bipartite graph with edge weight being the length of the shared trip of the pair, which captures the revenue in real-world ridesharing systems, such as Lyft Carpool. The Matching Module then takes as input this weighted bipartite graph and returns the maximum weighted matching (MWM), using an algorithm that solves the problem online and efficiently, by incrementally updating the matching solution in real-time. We show that our algorithm achieves 51% larger weight (i.e., total revenue) compared to greedy heuristics used by many real systems today. We also evaluate the SORS system as a whole, using mobile datasets to extract driver trajectories and passenger locations in urban environments. We show that SORS can provide a ridesharing recommendation to individual users within a sub-second query response time, even at high workloads.
Computer Analysis of Sentiment Interpretation in Musical Conducting

This paper presents a unique dataset consisting of 20 recordings of the same musical piece, conducted with 4 different musical intentions in mind. The upper body and baton motion of a professional conductor was recorded, as well as the sound of each instrument in a professional string quartet following the conductor. The dataset is made available for benchmarking of motion recognition algorithms. An HMM-based emotion intent classification method is trained with subsets of the data, and classification of other subsets of the data show firstly that the motion of the baton communicates energetic intention to a high degree, secondly, that the conductor’s torso, head and other arm conveys calm intention to a high degree, and thirdly, that positive vs negative sentiments are communicated to a high degree through other channels than the body and baton motion – most probably, through facial expression and muscle tension conveyed through articulated hand and finger motion. The long-term goal of this work is to develop a computer model of the entire conductor-orchestra communication process; the studies presented here indicate that computer modeling of the conductor-orchestra communication is feasible.
A Survey On Coding Algorithms In Medical Image Compression

In medical imaging, lossy compression schemes are not used due to possible loss of useful clinical information and as operations like enhancement may lead to further degradations in the lossy compression. Hence there is a need for efficient lossless schemes for medical image data. Several lossless schemes based on linear prediction and interpolations have been proposed. Currently, context based approach has gained popularity since it can enhance the performance of above schemes due to the exploitation of correlation within the frame. Since the conception of Mesh based Compression from early 1990's many algorithms has been proposed and the research literature on this topic has experienced a rapid growth which is hard to keep track of. This paper gives a brief description about the various coding algorithms and advancements in this field.
Comparison of Biclustering Methods : A Systematic Comparison and Evaluation of Biclustering Methods for Gene Expression Data

Motivation: In recent years, there have been various efforts to overcome the limitations of standard clustering approaches for the analysis of gene expression data by grouping genes and samples simultaneously. The underlying concept, which is often referred to as biclustering, allows to identify sets of genes sharing compatible expression patterns across subsets of samples, and its usefulness has been demonstrated for different organisms and data sets. Several biclustering methods have been proposed in the literature; however, it is not clear how the different techniques compare to each other with respect to the biological relevance of the clusters as well as to other characteristics such as robustness and sensitivity to noise. Accordingly, no guidelines concerning the choice of the biclustering method are currently available.
Nanoparticles Engineered with Rituximab and Loaded with Nutlin-3 Show Promising Therapeutic Activity in B-Leukemic Xenografts

Purpose: Because the nongenotoxic inhibitor of the p53/MDM2 interactions Nutlin-3 has shown promising in vitro therapeutic activity against a variety of p53wild-type cancer cells, in this study we evaluated an innovative strategy able to specifically target Nutlin-3 toward CD20+ malignant cells. Experimental Design: The cytotoxic effects of Nutlin-3 encapsulated into poly(lactide-co-glycolide) nanoparticles (NP-Nut) and into rituximab (anti-CD20 antibody)-engineered NP (NP-Rt-Nut) as well as of NPs engineered with rituximab alone (NP-Rt) were initially analyzed in vitro in JVM-2 B-leukemic cells, by assessing both the functional activation of the p53 pathway (by Nutlin-3) and/or the activation of the complement cascade (by rituximab). Moreover, the potential therapeutic efficacy of NP-Nut, NP-Rt, and NP-Rt-Nut were comparatively assessed in vivo in CD20+ JVM-2 leukemic xenograft SCID mice. Results: Functional in vitro assays showed that NP-Nut and NP-Rt-Nut exhibited a comparable ability to activate the p53 pathway in the p53wild-type JVM-2 leukemic cells. On the other hand, NP-Rt and NP-Rt-Nut, but not NP nor NP-Nut, were able to promote activation of the complement cascade. Of note, the in vivo intratumoral injection in JVM-2 B-leukemic/xenograft mice showed that NP-Rt-Nut displayed the maximal therapeutic activity promoting a survival rate significantly higher not only with respect to control animals, treated either with vehicle or with empty NP, but also with respect to animals treated with NP-Nut or NP-Rt. Conclusions: Our data show for the first time the potential antileukemic activity of rituximab-engineered Nutlin-3–loaded NPs in xenograft SCID mice. Clin Cancer Res; 19(14); 3871–80. ©2013 AACR.
Effectiveness of massage therapy on the range of motion of the shoulder: a systematic review and meta-analysis

[Purpose] This study was conducted to identify and analyze the degree of effect of massage therapy on the range of motion of the shoulder. [Subjects and Methods] The database search was conducted using PubMed, CINAHL, Embase, PsycINFO, RISS, NDSL, NANET, DBpia, and KoreaMed. The meta-analysis was based on 7 studies, covered a total of 237 participants, and used a random-effects model. [Results] The effect size estimate showed that massage therapy significantly improved the shoulder range of motion, especially the flexion (SMD: 18.21, 95% CI 1.57–34.85) and abduction (SMD: 22.07, 95% CI 5.84–38.30). [Conclusion] The review findings suggest that massage therapy is effective in improving the shoulder flexion and abduction.
CONSORT 2010 explanation and elaboration: Updated guidelines for reporting parallel group randomised trialsqqq

Overwhelming evidence shows the quality of reporting of randomised controlled trials (RCTs) is not optimal. Without transparent reporting, readers cannot judge the reliability and validity of trial findings nor extract information for systematic reviews. Recent methodological analyses indicate that inadequate reporting and design are associated with biased estimates of treatment effects. Such systematic error is seriously damaging to RCTs, which are considered the gold standard for evaluating interventions because of their ability to minimise or avoid bias. A group of scientists and editors developed the CONSORT (Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials) statement to improve the quality of reporting of RCTs. It was first published in 1996 and updated in 2001. The statement consists of a checklist and flow diagram that authors can use for reporting an RCT. Many leading medical journals and major international editorial groups have endorsed the CONSORT statement. The statement facilitates critical appraisal and interpretation of RCTs. During the 2001 CONSORT revision, it became clear that explanation and elaboration of the principles underlying the CONSORT statement would help investigators and others to write or appraise trial reports. A CONSORT explanation and elaboration article was published in 2001 alongside the 2001 version of the
Ventilatory, hemodynamic, sympathetic nervous system, and vascular reactivity changes after recurrent nocturnal sustained hypoxia in humans.

Recurrent and intermittent nocturnal hypoxia is characteristic of several diseases including chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, congestive heart failure, obesity-hypoventilation syndrome, and obstructive sleep apnea. The contribution of hypoxia to cardiovascular morbidity and mortality in these disease states is unclear, however. To investigate the impact of recurrent nocturnal hypoxia on hemodynamics, sympathetic activity, and vascular tone we evaluated 10 normal volunteers before and after 14 nights of nocturnal sustained hypoxia (mean oxygen saturation 84.2%, 9 h/night). Over the exposure, subjects exhibited ventilatory acclimatization to hypoxia as evidenced by an increase in resting ventilation (arterial Pco(2) 41.8 +/- 1.5 vs. 37.5 +/- 1.3 mmHg, mean +/- SD; P < 0.05) and in the isocapnic hypoxic ventilatory response (slope 0.49 +/- 0.1 vs. 1.32 +/- 0.2 l/min per 1% fall in saturation; P < 0.05). Subjects exhibited a significant increase in mean arterial pressure (86.7 +/- 6.1 vs. 90.5 +/- 7.6 mmHg; P < 0.001), muscle sympathetic nerve activity (20.8 +/- 2.8 vs. 28.2 +/- 3.3 bursts/min; P < 0.01), and forearm vascular resistance (39.6 +/- 3.5 vs. 47.5 +/- 4.8 mmHg.ml(-1). 100 g tissue.min; P < 0.05). Forearm blood flow during acute isocapnic hypoxia was increased after exposure but during selective brachial intra-arterial vascular infusion of the alpha-blocker phentolamine it was unchanged after exposure. Finally, there was a decrease in reactive hyperemia to 15 min of forearm ischemia after the hypoxic exposure. Recurrent nocturnal hypoxia thus increases sympathetic activity and alters peripheral vascular tone. These changes may contribute to the increased cardiovascular and cerebrovascular risk associated with clinical diseases that are associated with chronic recurrent hypoxia.
Phase variation of a Type IIG restriction-modification enzyme alters site-specific methylation patterns and gene expression in Campylobacter jejuni strain NCTC11168

Abstract Phase-variable restriction-modification systems are a feature of a diverse range of bacterial species. Stochastic, reversible switches in expression of the methyltransferase produces variation in methylation of specific sequences. Phase-variable methylation by both Type I and Type III methyltransferases is associated with altered gene expression and phenotypic variation. One phase-variable gene of Campylobacter jejuni encodes a homologue of an unusual Type IIG restriction-modification system in which the endonuclease and methyltransferase are encoded by a single gene. Using both inhibition of restriction and PacBio-derived methylome analyses of mutants and phase-variants, the cj0031c allele in C. jejuni strain NCTC11168 was demonstrated to specifically methylate adenine in 5΄CCCGA and 5΄CCTGA sequences. Alterations in the levels of specific transcripts were detected using RNA-Seq in phase-variants and mutants of cj0031c but these changes did not correlate with observed differences in phenotypic behaviour. Alterations in restriction of phage growth were also associated with phase variation (PV) of cj0031c and correlated with presence of sites in the genomes of these phages. We conclude that PV of a Type IIG restriction-modification system causes changes in site-specific methylation patterns and gene expression patterns that may indirectly change adaptive traits.
Retardation of the development of hypertension in DOCA-salt rats by renal denervation.

To determine the importance of the renal nerves in DOCA-salt hypertension, either renal denervation or a sham-operation was carried out on both DOCA-salt-treated and non-DOCA-treated rats. The systolic blood pressure of the non-DOCA rats remained within normotensive levels, in which the difference in blood pressure levels between the renal denervated and the sham-operated groups was not significant. On the other hand, the blood pressure of the rats treated with DOCA, and having intact renal nerves, began to rise by the end of the first week and rose consistently thereafter, whereas, in the renal denervated DOCA-salt rats, the blood pressure started to rise by the second week and then proceeded to increase gradually. The differences between the sham and the denervated rat groups were significant throughout the four weeks. The mean arterial pressure, directly measured from the caudal artery of conscious rats during the fourth week of this study, was 166 +/- 7 mmHg in the sham-operated and 129 +/- 4 mmHg in the renal-denervated rats (the data having an 1% significant difference). To test the effects of renal denervation on the natriuresis, pentobarbital-anesthetized rats were infused intravenously with physiological saline. The renal denervated rats which had received DOCA excreted more sodium than did the sham-operated rats. When the rats were later anesthetized with urethane to allow intracisternal injections of hypertonic saline, the mean blood pressure in renal denervated rat groups was again lower than that of the sham-denervated rat groups. However, subsequent intracisternal injections of 5% saline produced similar pressor responses as well as tachycardia in both DOCA groups. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Comorbidity in Irritable Bowel Syndrome

BACKGROUND:Comorbid nongastrointestinal symptoms account for two-thirds of excess health-care costs in irritable bowel syndrome (IBS). OBJECTIVES:To determine whether IBS patients are at greater risk for specific comorbid disorders versus showing a general tendency to overreport symptoms; whether patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) show patterns of comorbidity similar to IBS; whether comorbidity is explained by psychiatric disease; and whether excess comorbidity occurs in all IBS patients.METHODS:All 3,153 patients in a health maintenance organization with a diagnosis of IBS in 1994–1995 were compared to 3,153 age- and gender-matched controls, and to 571 IBD patients. All diagnoses in a 4-yr period beginning 1 yr before their index visit were categorized as gastrointestinal, psychiatric, or nongastrointestinal somatic. Nongastrointestinal somatic diagnoses were further divided into symptom-based versus biological marker-based diagnoses.RESULTS:Forty-eight of 51 symptom-based and 16 of 25 biomarker-based diagnoses were significantly more common in IBS versus controls. However, there were no unique associations. Bacterial, viral, and fungal infections and stroke were among diagnoses made more frequently in IBS. IBD patients were similar to controls. Greater somatic comorbidity was associated with concurrent psychiatric diagnosis. Only 16% of IBS patients had abnormally high numbers of comorbid diagnoses.CONCLUSIONS:Comorbidity in IBS is due to a general amplification of symptom reporting and physician consultation rather than a few unique associations; this suggests biased symptom perception rather than shared pathophysiology. Comorbidity is influenced by, but is not explained by, psychiatric illness. Excess comorbidity is present in only a subset of IBS patients.
Interactive image-based rendering using feature globalization

Image-based rendering (IBR) systems enable virtual walkthroughs of photorealistic environments by warping and combining reference images to novel viewpoints under interactive user control. A significant challenge in such systems is to automatically compute image correspondences that enable accurate image warping.In this paper, we describe a new algorithm for computing a globally consistent set of image feature correspondences across a wide range of viewpoints suitable for IBR walkthroughs. We first detect point features in a dense set of omnidirectional images captured on an eye-height plane. Then, we track these features from image to image, identifying potential correspondences when two features track to the same position in the same image. Among the potential correspondences, we select the maximal consistent set using a greedy graph-labeling algorithm.A key feature of our approach is that it exploits the multiple paths that can be followed between images in order to increase the number of feature correspondences between distant images. We demonstrate the benefits of this approach in a real-time IBR walkthrough system where novel images are reconstructed as the user moves interactively.
Institutions, Politics, and Mental Health Parity

Mental health parity laws require insurers to extend comparable benefits for mental and physical health care. Proponents argue that by placing mental health services alongside physical health services, such laws can help ensure needed treatment and destigmatize mental illness. Opponents counter that such mandates are costly or unnecessary. The authors offer a sociological account of the diffusion and spatial distribution of state mental health parity laws. An event history analysis identifies four factors as especially important: diffusion of law, political ideology, the stability of mental health advocacy organizations and the relative health of state economies. Mental health parity is least likely to be established during times of high state unemployment and under the leadership of conservative state legislatures.
Large-Scale Customized Models for Advertisers

Performance advertisers want to maximize the return on their advertising spend. In the online advertising world, this means showing the ad only to those users most likely to convert i.e. buy a product or service. Existing ad targeting solutions such as context targeting and rule-based segment targeting primarily leverage marketing intuition to identify audience segments that would be likely to convert. Even the more sophisticated model-based approaches such as behavioral targeting identify audience segments interested in certain coarse-grained categories defined by the publisher. Advertisers are now able, through beaconing, to tell us exactly who their preferred customers are. Advertisers want to augment their existing advertising campaign with custom models that learn from the campaign and focus on attracting new users. Motivated by our experience with advertisers, we pose this problem within the context of ensemble learning. Building custom models for an existing ad campaign can be viewed as operations on an ensemble classifier: add, modify, or complement a classifier. An ideal new classifier should incrementally improve the ensemble and minimize overlap with any existing classifiers already in the ensemble–it should learn something new. With the proposed approach we are able to augment the advertising campaigns of several large advertisers at a large online advertising company.
Supramolecular self-assembly codes for functional structures

Small-molecule self-assembly has proven to be a rich field for the controlled synthesis of supramolecular objects with the size scale of polymers and interesting properties. Using several recent examples from our laboratory, we discuss the development of chemical structure codes for supramolecular self-assembly objects with defined shapes. The resulting materials formed by these objects are promising for electronic functions and biological functions for regenerative medicine.