Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Patient-focused Education Program for Respiratory Care Professionals Humidification During Mechanical Ventilation : Current Trends and Controversies

To aid respiratory care professionals in determining the most appropriate humidification device for mechanically ventilated patients, this article reviews humidification principles, standards regarding humidification devices, currently available humidification options, indications and contraindications for their use, and controversies related to optimum humidification. Heated pass-over and wick humidifiers, active heat and moisture exchangers (HMEs), and conventional heat and moisture exchangers (HMEs) are addressed. While the controversy regarding optimum humidity for the mechanically ventilated patient remains unresolved, a review of existing studies indicates that both heated humidifiers (HHs) and active HMEs can deliver fully saturated gas at body temperature, eliminating the humidity deficit. When used correctly and in the absence of contraindications, conventional HMEs may be used without complications and have been shown to result in cost savings and decreased personnel time. It is suggested that some HMEs may be used for up to seven days without changing, but in-vivo hygrometric testing is recommended before prolonged use. Neither active humidifiers nor HMEs are blamed for the incidence of ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP). In some patient populations, such as patients being ventilated with permissive hypercapnia and patients with chronic ventilatory failure that are difficult to wean, a heated humidifier may be preferred. Roundtable: Selecting the Optimal Humidity for your Patients Moderator: Neil MacIntyre MD, FAARC Panelists: Richard Branson MS, RRT, FAARC • Ray Ritz BA, RRT, FAARC • Richard Kallet MSc, RRT, FAARC
Elastic properties of hydrogels and decellularized tissue sections used in mechanobiology studies probed by atomic force microscopy

The increasing recognition that tissue elasticity is an important regulator of cell behavior in normal and pathologic conditions such as fibrosis and cancer has driven the development of cell culture substrata with tunable elasticity. Such development has urged the need to quantify the elastic properties of these cell culture substrata particularly at the nanometer scale, since this is the relevant length scale involved in cell‐extracellular matrix (ECM) mechanical interactions. To address this need, we have exploited the versatility of atomic force microscopy to quantify the elastic properties of a variety of cell culture substrata used in mechanobiology studies, including floating collagen gels, ECM‐coated polyacrylamide gels, and decellularized tissue sections. In this review we summarize major findings in this field from our group within the context of the state‐of‐the‐art in the field, and provide a critical discussion on the applicability and complementarity of currently available cell culture assays with tunable elasticity. In addition, we briefly describe how the limitations of these assays provide opportunities for future research, which is expected to continue expanding our understanding of the mechanobiological aspects that support both normal and diseased conditions. Microsc. Res. Tech. 80:85–96, 2017. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
On asymptotic accuracy in queueing theory - the tale of the misleading tail

Recently results have shown that a single server queue Poisson Pareto Burst Process input has a tail which is bounded by hyperbolic functions. We show that the hyperbolic upper and lower bounds for this system can be very misleading, that this hyperbolic tail result is relevant only from a certain threshold onwards, and the magnitude of this threshold may be very large. We also show that any hyperbolic upper and lower bounds for a tail of the stationary waiting time complementary distribution necessarily become further apart as the rate of the process increases.
Histochemical detection of steroid synthesizing cells in the testes of goldfish, Carassius auratus, during the annual reproductive cycle

Abstract We investigated the sites of Δ5-3β-hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase (3 β-HSD) and glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase (G-6-PD) synthesis in the testes of goldfish, Carassius auratus, during the annual reproductive cycle. The histochemistry of fish gonads has been investigated previously in many species other than goldfish. The reproductive cycle of goldfish, is divided into five stages and the steroid synthesizing cells of the testes were studied during these stages, using histochemical techniques. We found that interstitial cells and seminiferous tubules are the main steroid synthesizing sites in testes of goldfish, and that enzyme activity was more intense in the interstitial cells than in the seminiferous tubules. During the pre-spawning months, 3 β-HSD and G-6-PD activities were weak compared to the spawning months.
Replica Threshold Signature ( RTS ) Scheme for Reconfigurable Byzantine Fault Tolerant in P 2 P Systems

Byzantine-fault-tolerant replication enhances availability and reliability of Internet services to store critical state and preserve even on attacks or software errors. Conventional Byzantine-fault-tolerant storage systems assumed static set of replicas, limitations in handling reconfigurations become issue in long-lived large-scale systems and membership likely to change during system lifetime. Existing presented set of services run automatically to tracks system membership periodically notifies other system nodes of membership changes Byzantine fault-tolerant and reconfigurable. It provides applications with a sequence of consistent views of system membership. It presented distributed hash table for provided atomic semantics even across changes in replica sets. The storage algorithms extend existing Byzantine quorum protocols to handle changes in the replica set. However, replica data was invalid and inconsistent cache across the sub system servants. The presented Replica Threshold Signature (RTS) scheme is used for Reconfigurable Byzantine Fault Tolerant in p2p Systems. It provides communication in terms of replica validity and cache consistency. It prevent smaller group from generating a signature and incorporation of RTS scheme allows for any member in the system to verify data object’s content is valid for assumed that primary replicas are not faulty.
Report on residential real estate and financial stability in the EU, Section 1. on Structural features of residential real estate markets

The report investigates how structural features of, and cyclical developments in, residential real estate (RRE) markets in the EU may affect financial stability and how related risks can be addressed. The report is structured in four main sections covering: (i) an analysis of the structural features of RRE markets in Europe, (ii) the historical experience in Europe as regards financial stability risks emerging from the real estate sector, (iii) an investigation into the possible role of structural features of RRE markets in such risks, and (iv) the policy instruments that can be used to address the risks stemming from residential property markets.
Information extraction for on-line job advertisements

The Web has widely been used as a low-cost and yet effective way to disseminate various kind of information, where job advertisements (ads) is one of the typical examples. Its rapid growth has quickly resulted in the need for some efficient ways to locate and analyze relevant information from heterogeneous data sources. The commonly used keyword search engines often return more information than needed. In order to support more precise information search using semantics, information extraction systems have been proposed for extracting some specific target items from on-line documents as their semantic tags. On-line job ads normally contain grammatical, telegraphic as well as ungrammatical text. Also, their writing styles and layout structures are relatively informal. These characteristics make the pattern matching approach become one of the suitable candidates for extracting job ads related information. In the first part of this thesis, we propose a rule-based system for information extraction by matching patterns featured by lexical and typesetting information. The extraction rules were derived automatically via induction. The experimental results show that the proposed system can choose the correct rule representation via the proposed induction process and successfully extract company names from on-line job ads up to an accuracy of 92.13%. Within a job ad, fields other than “company name” normally do not carry typesetting attributes and extracting them has to be solely based on words. Modeling a large set of word sequences via generalization from a small set of training data has been known to be
A strategic approach to enhancing sustainable practices in public building projects : a case study of Indonesian Local Authorities

Copyright © and Moral Rights are retained by the author. A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge. This item cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the copyright holder(s). The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.
Real-time Control of Bipedal Movement based on Basal ganglia and Brainstem systems

During the bipedal locomotion in the real world, the body will receive unpredictable forces depending on various factors. Because the biological system has an ability to change various dynamical properties of its own body, an appropriate control of those properties is important for the system to maintain the locomotion in the real world. Muscle-tone is one of important parameters to determine the properties of the body, such as the stiffness and the viscosity. To adapt unpredictable changes of the environment, controlling the muscle-tone seems to be one of useful ways. We show results of model simulations, indicating that flexible and robust bipedal locomotion can emerge from appropriate control of the muscle-tone depending on the ground reaction force. Thus, by determining the properties of body dynamics with adapting unpredictable environments using ground reaction forces, model could be adapted to various loads without needing an explicit posture control
A 0.75 to 2.2GHz continuously-tunable quadrature VCO

The /spl plusmn/20% tuning range of a fully integrated quadrature LC-VCO is extended to /spl plusmn/50%. The quadrature VCO is inserted in a loop with an SSB mixer and two frequency dividers that add 100/spl times/100 /spl mu/m/sup 2/ area in a 0.13 /spl mu/m CMOS process and draw 10mA from a 1.2V supply. Quadrature error is <2/spl deg/ and phase noise <-120dBc/Hz at 1 MHz offset.
Is personality a key element of Six Sigma project success

Many quality improvement techniques, including Six Sigma, rely on teamwork. Little of the research on personality and teams has been incorporated into quality management theory and practice. This paper summarises the pertinent personality literature with Six Sigma research and describes the results of a multiple-case study. Two new personality variables relating to openness to new experiences and conscientiousness were found to have a potentially strong impact on project success. Also, a new variable that can be described as the overall level of creativity in the project team was determined to have significant potential. Finally, this work further confirms the critical nature of project complexity, project uncertainty, and team leadership to project success.
DSAL = library+notation: Program Transformation for Domain-Specific Aspect Languages

Domain-specific languages (DSLs) can greatly ease program development compared to general-purpose languages, but the cost of implementing a domain-specific language can be prohibitively high compared to the perceived benefit. This is more pronounced for narrower domains, and perhaps most acute for domain-specific aspect languages (DSALs). A common technique for implementing a DSL is writing a software library in an existing programming language. Although this does not have the same syntactic appeal and possibilitiesasafullimplementation,itisatechniquefamiliar to most programmers, and it can be done cheaply compared to developing a full DSL compiler. Subsequently, the desired notation may be implemented as a simple syntactic preprocessor. The cross-cutting nature of DSALs, however, makes it di cult to encapsulate these in libraries. In this paper, we show a technique for implementing a DSAL as a library+notation. We realize this by implementing the library in a program transformation system and the notation as a syntactic extension of the subject language. We discuss our experience with applying this technique to multiple kinds of DSALs.
Construction and psychometric properties of the Belgian Rheumatoid Arthritis Disability Assessment (BRADA) questionnaire: a new tool for the evaluation of activity limitations in patients with rheumatoid arthritis.

OBJECTIVES To describe the construction and psychometric properties of the Belgian Rheumatoid Arthritis Disability Assessment (BRADA) questionnaire, a self-report tool to evaluate chronic activity limitations in patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA). The BRADA was developed to assess the eligibility of patients with RA for financial and social support measures. METHODS The BRADA questionnaire evaluates functioning in 6 functional domains (mobility, nutrition, self care, household tasks, awareness of danger and communication) over the past week and the past 3 months. To assess the psychometric properties of the BRADA, patients with moderate to severe RA filled out the BRADA, HAQ-DI and SF-36 questionnaires twice, with a four-week interval. At each visit, the total number of swollen and tender joints, and global disease activity were recorded. DAS 28 was measured at the first visit. Internal consistency of items per domain was evaluated with Cronbach's alpha method. Intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) analysis was used to assess test-retest reliability. BRADA scores were compared to HAQ, SF-36 scores and disease activity parameters with Spearman's Rho correlation coefficients to assess construct validity. RESULTS Experts considered the content and face validity of BRADA to be adequate. Internal consistency was satisfactory for all functional domains (alpha >0.75), as was the test-retest reliability (ICC 0.78). BRADA scores showed excellent correlation with other validated questionnaires in RA (HAQ-DI, SF-36) and with measures of disease activity (VAS, DAS28)(p<0.001). CONCLUSIONS Its psychometric properties indicate that the BRADA questionnaire is a suitable instrument to evaluate disease-specific activity limitations in patients with RA.
Aggregate Insider Trading and Market Returns: The Role of Transparency

Using a sample of countries that require timely disclosures of insider trades, I investigate the effect of country‐level institutions that promote transparency on the extent to which aggregate insider trades predict market returns. I find that financial information transparency mitigates the predictive content of aggregate insider trades when markets are more likely to deviate from fundamentals (i.e., during market fads), and when there is greater co‐movement in stock prices. In contrast, there is some evidence that governance and investor protection mitigate the association between aggregate insider trades and future earnings surprises. Hence, holding constant the timely disclosures of insider trades, other capital market institutions play complementary roles in mitigating the informational frictions that give rise to the predictive content of aggregate insider trades.
Multi-subject atlas built from structural tongue magnetic resonance images

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a widely used technology for non-invasive tongue imaging. MRI can detail tongue and muscle shapes and their variability in both healthy and diseased populations. Such detail can aid significantly in the interpretation of muscle interactions in the tongue for both normal and disordered speech production. However, the size or shape of the tongue and muscles may vary from one subject to another. In addition, there exists no comprehensive and systematic framework to assess the difference and variability of tongue and muscles in a normalized space. In the present work, we built a multi-subject atlas from 20 normal subjects that are acquired using structural MRI to offer a normalized space on which all subjects from a target population can be mapped and compared. In order to find accurate one-to-one correspondences, we bounded the tongue so that each volume had the same vocal tract features. For registration, we used symmetric diffeomorphic image registration with a cross-cor.
Segmentation and Classification of Indian Domestic Tourists : A Tourism Stakeholder Perspective

The rapid growth of the domestic tourism sector has open immense opportunity that has not been marketed properly so far by the Indian government. In this regard, tourism stakeholders are the primary responsible for the implementation of successful destination marketing. Till date, Tourism research has been focused on stakeholder involvement and their complex relationship in destination marketing, but never appreciates their view point and direct involvement in the market segmentation process. In this paper, the concept of stakeholder theory has been successfully utilized the problem of market segmentation and classification of the Indian domestic tourism sector. The research approach followed in this work in qualitative and quantitative in nature where in-depth interviews of three key stakeholders are conducted for assessment of variable selection and in the consecutive step, analysis was performed on 459 complete primary data collected through a self-administered survey of potential tourist to the study area using factor-cluster segmentation approach. The result suggests three, five and six cluster solution possible for accommodation service provider, tour operator, and tourism policy maker respectively. The result of the segmentation was then further used to train and develop various efficient classifier models, namely, Recursive Partitioning Trees, Pruning Recursive Partitioning Tree, Conditional Inference Tree, K-Nearest Neighbor Classifier, Naive Bayes Classifier, Neural Network (Radial basis function network and Multilayer Perceptron), Support Vector Machine, Linear Discriminant Analysis and Random Forest. The study indicated that the SVM classifier model achieved the highest accuracy of 90.71%, 86.43 % and 89.29 % for accommodation service providers, tour operators and tourism policy makers respectively compared to those given by the above mentioned methods. The results hold substantial implications to the stakeholders’ perspective of successful destination marketing and positively contributed to formulating useful policy, planning and strategy buildup.
Passion: Optimized I/O for Parallel Applications

We have implemented Passion on Intel's Paragon, Touchstone Delta, and iPSC/860 systems, and on the IBM SP system. We have also made it publicly available through the World Wide Web (http://www.cat.syr.edu/passion.html). We are in the process of porting the library to other machines and extending its functionality.
The Effect of Leader Attitude on Traditional vs. Social Entrepreneurial Nonprofit Business Models

The research proposed will examine the differences and similarities between the mindsets of people who lead nonprofit Social Entrepreneurial Enterprises (SEEs) and those who manage traditional non-for-profit organizations (NFPs) in Mexico. In particular, the study will seek to identify the extent to which risk orientation, opportunity recognition, self- efficacy, innovativeness, and social capital influence social entrepreneurial behavior. By comparing these two types of leadership roles, we can further our understanding of how some social leaders in Mexico, despite diminishing traditional revenue streams, are able to scale up and sustain their nonprofit organizations.
A humanoid neck using parallel manipulators

This paper presents a detailed review on humanoid robotic neck mechanism using a parallel manipulator. As the human neck is central to head and torso, the neck dictates the position and movement of the head. Mimicking the movement of a human head can be achieved in the robot by using parallel manipulators. In general, the parallel manipulators are referred as the Stewart Platform. As the neck in the human body plays a prominent role in interacting with the human world, the neck region carries a heavy load of the head which incorporates the system like Vision, Speech and Speech Recognition to provide a more humanly nature environment. Reason for using parallel manipulators in neck, is to balance the head while achieving rotation, flexion motions practically which is highly impossible. This is the area where the researches are concentrating to achieve results closer to the human neck motion. Based on this, the active studies in this field are examined to determine different trends of research and to identify the unexplained problems. Stewart Platforms current trends and the required analysis and designs of the platform are also listed.
Facebook and Branding of Small to Medium-Sized Enterprises

The purpose of this multiple phenomenological case study was to explore the relationship between Facebook and Small to Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs). With the use of social media (SM) rapidly growing in popularity with both SMEs and larger organizations, Facebook proved to be a vital marketing tool for the participants. The study selected two SMEs located in Tennessee who shared their lived experiences with the researcher through a combination of data sourcesThe data revealed that the usage of Facebook is an effective marketing tool for SMEs. Fans are able to connect with the brand emotionally, and build a level of trust. Trust is an important factor in an online environment due to the perceived high risk of purchasing products and services online. Although the two SMEs used other traditional forms of marketing, such as radio and newspaper, both participants confirmed Facebook to be their number one marketing tool.
DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMICS, MANAGEMENT AND STATISTICS UNIVERSITY OF MILAN – BICOCCA

Using a macro panel of 31 European countries, this paper shows that the application of a QR procedure to the estimation of poverty risk offers a picture of poverty determinants and cross-country poverty differences more reliable than that emerging from conditional mean estimations. The extent and s ignificance of interquartile differences of estimated coefficients suggest that economic growth, income distribution, public expenditure, and investment, a s well as education and the labour share of social product—a proxy for class struggle —have strong but differentiated effects on poverty reduction. However, technical de velopment does not have a similar effect. Low institutional quality exemplified by hi gh public sector corruption has a significant concomitant adverse effect and interact s with economic cofactors in determining interquartile differences of estimated coefficients. Hence, definition and implementation of any European policy against pover ty should consider cross-country interquartile differences and avoid a one size fits all uniform philosophy.
Tutorial: Practical verification of network programs

In this tutorial, we will show participants how to program software defined networks (SDN) in a modular way, using Frenetic's abstractions. We will build several realistic network applications from the ground up, and also learn to use more sophisticated modules, such as NAT and MAC-learning, which are part of the Frenetic standard library. We will also look under the hood to see how the Frenetic compiler and runtime system work.