Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Instrumentation-Related Complications of Multilevel Fusions for Adult Spinal Deformity Patients Over Age 65: Surgical Considerations and Treatment Options in Patients With Poor Bone Quality

Study Design. Retrospective follow-up of patients over the age of 65 with a minimum of five-level fusions. Objective. To determine the effect on outcomes of long constructs in patients with poor bone stock, and to review surgical techniques used in patients with poor bone stock. Summary of Background Data. Scoliotic deformities in patients with poor bone stock require alterations in both the surgical technique and preoperative planning. To our knowledge, complications of long constructs in poor bone stock have not been specifically reported. Methods. Patients over the age of 65 that underwent a minimum of five-level fusion over a 5-year period were reviewed. We reviewed both operative reports and clinic notes and recorded both early and late complications. Results. Early complications included pedicle fractures and compression fractures with an overall rate of 13%. Late complications included pseudarthroses with instrumentation failure, adjacent level disc degeneration with herniation, compression fractures, and progressive kyphosis. Progressive junctional kyphosis occurred in 26% of patients. Conclusions. Spinal stabilization surgery in patients with poor bone stock is associated with high complication rates. Complications such as progressive kyphosis adjacent to the fusion are difficult to address with instrumentation alone.
NOT JUST BODIES

Health care professionals use strategies during the physical examination to stay in control of their feelings, the behaviors of their patients, and to avoid allegations of sexual misconduct. To investigate how health care practitioners desexualize physical exams, the authors conducted 70 in-depth interviews with physicians and nurses. Three desexualizing strategies were general ones, used by both male and female health care providers, and were employed regardless of the characteristics of the patients: engaging in conversation and nonsexual joking, meeting the patient clothed before the exam, and using medical rather than colloquial terms. Six strategies were used only in specific contexts or were used primarily by men or women. These gendered strategies include using a chaperone, objectifying the patient, empathizing with the patient, joking about sex, threatening the patient, and looking professional. The authors conclude that desexualizing the exam is gendered and, in some contexts, (hetero) sexualized. Using certain strategies bolsters stereotypes about gender and heterosexual relationships in the hospital.
Educational violin transcription by fusing multimedia streams

Computer-assisted violin tutoring requires accurate violin transcription. For pitched non-percussive (PNP) sounds such as from the violin, note segmentation is a much more difficult task than pitch detection. This issue is accentuated when the audio is recorded during an instrument practice session at home which is acoustically inferior to a professional recording studio. This paper presents a new approach to the problem by using the correlation between different media streams for e-learning applications. We design a capture mechanism to record one audio and two video streams simultaneously, and exploit the relationships among them for enhanced transcription. State-of-the-art audio methods for note segmentation and pitch estimation are implemented as the audio-only baseline. Two web-cameras are employed to track the right hand (bowing) and the left hand's four fingers (fingering) on the fingerboard, respectively. The audio and visual information is then fused in the feature space. Our new approach is evaluated with an audio-visual violin music database containing 16 complete music pieces of different styles with 2157 notes in total. Experimental results show that our multimodal approach achieves a 10% increase in true positives, and a 8% reduction in false positives of overall transcription performance in comparison with the audio-only baseline.
Managing quality in higher education: a Malaysian case study

With increasing competition amongst higher education institutions to attract students, “quality” has emerged as a theme to be adopted. This paper undertakes a case study of an institution, which has implemented a quality system and was the first private college in Malaysia to be awarded the ISO 9002 certification in total for all of its departments. The paper investigates the management system prior to adopting the quality system, reviews the implementation process and evaluates the effectiveness of the system on the academic departments. The paper reports findings of the study.
To be an Arab Jewish girl in a state religious school in Israel: Navigating gender, ethnicity and class in religious Zionist identity and culture

This paper examines the ways in which gender, religion, ethnicity and class intertwine in a state religious girl’s junior high school in Israel. It is based on ethnographic data collected from 1999–2002, including interviews with staff and students and observations of classes and other school events. The claim is made that in this school, hierarchies overlap, such that ethnic hierarchies mesh with academic hierarchies, and Ashkenazi religious rhetoric becomes a tool with which to keep certain girls perpetually marginalized. The paper brings in a particularly poignant observation of Noa, a student of Moroccan descent, arguing with her Ashkenazi religious studies teacher about social justice and moral goodness as they find expression in Genesis and in the hallways of the school.
Effect of relative humidity on the migration of benzophenone from paperboard into the food simulant Tenax® and modelling hereof

The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of relative humidity on the migration of benzophenone from paperboard into the food simulant Tenax®. Kinetic migration investigations were carried out with three relative humidities in the interval between 39% and >73%. All investigations were carried out at a constant temperature of 34°C. It was found that the migration of benzophenone after more than 30 days was 4.8 times higher at a relative humidity of 64%–71%, and 7.3 times higher at a relative humidity of >73%, compared with that at a relative humidity of 39%–49%. Diffusion and partition coefficients were derived from the results by using a software for modelling migration in multilayer materials. Both the diffusion coefficient and the partition coefficient, between paperboard and Tenax®, decrease with increasing relative humidity. The experimental results were correctly modelled only when the paperboard was regarded as a one-layer system as compared with a two-layer system: where the main part of the paperboard (B1) has a high diffusion rate and a thin part of the paperboard (B2) in contact with the foodstuff has a lower diffusion rate.
Analysing the Quality of IS Use and Management in the Organizational Context: Experiences from Two Cases

Information Systems IS have become an important part of organizational processes. IS use and management are daily issues in current business organizations, and in almost every work task and at every organizational level. The integration of work tasks and IS use has led to a situation where tasks and their management cannot be separated from the management and use of IS. We therefore need a conceptual framework for an holistic but systematic view of the complex nature of IS utilization. These assumptions have led to the development of the IS-related organizational maturity concept. The conceptual framework concentrates on the quality of IS utilization and its development in user-organizations from three perspectives: management, IS usage and Information Technology IT. In this paper, the conceptual framework is presented and tested in two longitudinal mini-cases. Experiences and research findings are reported and future research needs addressed.
Atypical Combinations and Scientific Impact

The radical S -adenosylmethionine (SAM) enzyme HydG lyses free L -tyrosine to produce CO and CN − for the assembly of the catalytic H cluster of FeFe hydrogenase. We used electron paramagnetic resonance spectroscopy to detect and characterize HydG reaction intermediates generated with a set of 2 H, 13 C, and 15 N nuclear spin-labeled tyrosine substrates. We propose a detailed reaction mechanism in which the radical SAM reaction, initiated at an N-terminal 4Fe-4S cluster, generates a tyrosine radical bound to a C-terminal 4Fe-4S cluster. Heterolytic cleavage of this tyrosine radical at the C a -C b bond forms a transient 4-oxidobenzyl (4OB (cid:127) ) radical and a dehydroglycine bound to the C-terminal 4Fe-4S cluster. Electron and proton transfer to this 4OB (cid:127) radical forms p -cresol, with the conversion of this dehydroglycine ligand to Fe-bound CO and CN − , a key intermediate in the assembly of the 2Fe subunit of the H cluster.
Workplace health and safety regulations: Impact of enforcement and consultation on workers' compensation claims rates in Washington State.

BACKGROUND There has been considerable debate in the public policy arena about the appropriate mix of regulatory enforcement and consultation in achieving desired health and safety behavior across industries. Recently there has been a shift in federal policy toward voluntary approaches and constraining the scope of enforcement programs, although there is little evidence that this might improve health and safety outcomes. To address this, we examined changes in lost time workers compensation claims rates for Washington State employers who had (1) no OSHA State Plan (WISHA) activity, (2) enforcement, (3) consultation, and (4) both types of visits. METHODS Compensable claims rates, hours, and WISHA activity were determined for each employer account with a single business location that had payroll hours reported for every quarter from 1997-2000 and more than 10 employees. We used a generalized estimating equations (GEE) approach to Poisson regression to model the association between WISHA activity and claims rate controlling for other external factors. RESULTS Controlling for previous claims rate and average size, claims rates for employers with WISHA enforcement activity declined 22.5% in fixed site industry SIC codes compared to 7% among employers with no WISHA activity (P < 0.05), and in non-fixed site SICs (e.g., construction) claims rates declined 12.8% for employers with enforcement activity compared to a 7.4% decline for those with no WISHA activity (P > 0.10). WISHA consultation activity was not associated with a greater decline in compensable claims rates (-2.3% for fixed sites and +3.5% for non-fixed sites). WISHA activity did not adversely affect worksite survivability through the study period. CONCLUSIONS Enforcement inspections are significantly associated with decreasing compensable workers compensation claims rates especially for fixed site employers. We were unable to identify an association between consultation activities and decreasing claims rates.
"Cloning Considered Harmful" Considered Harmful

Current literature on the topic of duplicated (cloned) code in software systems often considers duplication harmful to the system quality and the reasons commonly cited for duplicating code often have a negative connotation. While these positions are sometimes correct, during our case studies we have found that this is not universally true, and we have found several situations where code duplication seems to be a reasonable or even beneficial design option. For example, a method of introducing experimental changes to core subsystems is to duplicate the subsystem and introduce changes there in a kind of sandbox testbed. As features mature and become stable within the experimental subsystem, they can then be introduced gradually into the stable code base. In this way risk of introducing instabilities in the stable version is minimized. This paper describes several patterns of cloning that we have encountered in our case studies and discusses the advantages and disadvantages associated with using them
Toward Ubiquitous Networking: QoS-aware Residential Gateway with Embedded ZigBee-based Network

Society is trending toward ubiquitous networking. This study thus presents a prototype but fully functional system which, in theory, could be expanded worldwide, expediting development of the Internet of Things. Our earlier QoS-aware residential gateway (EmQRG) for real-time class-based queuing bandwidth management is reviewed and experimentally demonstrated in a novel embodiment which includes a FDIXP425-DevPlatform integrating the EmQRG with a wireless M2M ZigBee-based temperature/humidity monitoring network (FT-6250 + FT-6251's), which is treated experimentally as a fire alarm system. When any temperature/humidity module exceeds a preset value, the composite system activates a warning light bulb and sends warning messages to designated recipients. This emergency signal has top EmQRG transmis- sion priority. Tests in the context of streaming video and simulated background internet traffic under light to heavy network congestion and bottlenecking show consistently good QoS for both the alarm and the stream- ing media. The emergency alerts are received immediately under all conditions. The warning light bulb turns off when temperature falls below the threshold value. Discussion shows that the EmQRG network can con- tain other embedded EmQRG networks and be embedded within higher EmQRG-based networks. The pre- sented system is cost-effective, easy-to-use, easy-to-implement and completely implementable with available hardware and software.
Investigation on Holographic Interferometry Measurement of Liquid Mass Diffusion Coefficient of Digital Image Processing

An experimental optical system based on digital image holographic interferometry measurement of liquid mass diffusion coefficients was constructed by He-Ne laser, CCD, image acquisition system and other equipments, the system was tested and the interferograms of KCL aqueous solution were collected at 0.33 concentration and 298.15K. By employing such key techniques of digital image processing as the image enhancing, the interference fringes rebuilding and the phase unwrapping to process the interferograms, the phase difference was obtained, and therefore the mass diffusion coefficients of KCL aqueous solution was also gained by conversion. It can be concluded that the system can provide an effective method for measuring the mass diffusion coefficient of new refrigerants, which is urgently required in chemical engineering application.
Particle PHD filter based multi-target tracking using discriminative group-structured dictionary learning

Structured sparse representation has been recently found to achieve better efficiency and robustness in exploiting the target appearance model in tracking systems with both holistic and local information. Therefore, to better simultaneously discriminate multi-targets from their background, we propose a novel video-based multi-target tracking system that combines the particle probability hypothesis density (PHD) filter with discriminative group-structured dictionary learning. The discriminative dictionary with group structure learned by the hierarchical K-means clustering algorithm implicitly associates the dictionary atoms with the group labels, simultaneously enforcing the target candidates from the same group (class) to share the same structured sparsity pattern. Furthermore, we propose a new joint likelihood calculation by relating the discriminative sparse codes with the maximum voting technique to enhance the particle PHD updating step. Experimental results on two publicly available benchmark video sequences confirm the improved performance of our proposed method over other state-of-the-art techniques in video-based multi-target tracking.
Full auto-calibration of a smartphone on board a vehicle using IMU and GPS embedded sensors

Nowadays, smartphones are widely used in the world, and generally, they are equipped with many sensors. In this paper we study how powerful the low-cost embedded IMU and GPS could become for Intelligent Vehicles. The information given by accelerometer and gyroscope is useful if the relations between the smartphone reference system, the vehicle reference system and the world reference system are known. Commonly, the magnetometer sensor is used to determine the orientation of the smartphone, but its main drawback is the high influence of electromagnetic interference. In view of this, we propose a novel automatic method to calibrate a smartphone on board a vehicle using its embedded IMU and GPS, based on longitudinal vehicle acceleration. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to estimate the yaw angle of a smartphone relative to a vehicle in every case, even on non-zero slope roads. Furthermore, in order to decrease the impact of IMU noise, an algorithm based on Kalman Filter and fitting a mixture of Gaussians is introduced. The results show that the system achieves high accuracy, the typical error is 1%, and is immune to electromagnetic interference.
Does the association with psychosomatic health problems differ between cyberbullying and traditional bullying?

The association between mental health problems and traditional bullying is well known, whereas the strength of the association in cyberbullying is less known. This study aimed to compare the association between mutually exclusive groups of bullying involvement and psychosomatic problems as measured by the PsychoSomatic Problems scale. The sample comprised 3820 students (13–16 years old) in Sweden. The results indicate an association between bullying and psychosomatic problems, regardless of type of bullying involvement. No statistically significant differences in psychosomatic problems were found between cyberbullying and traditional bullying, either for victims or for bullies. The results do not confirm the hypothesis that the association between bullying and mental health is stronger for cyberbullying than for traditional bullying. Another important finding is that cyberbullies seem as likely as cybervictims to be at risk for mental health problems.
Moral Judgment and Volitional Incapacity

The central question of the branch of metaethics we may call philosophical moral psychology concerns the nature or essence of moral judgment: what is it to think that something is right or wrong, good or bad, obligatory or forbidden? One datum in this inquiry is that sincerely held moral views appear to influence conduct: on the whole, people do not engage in behaviors they genuinely consider base or evil, sometimes even when they would stand to benefit from it personally. Moral judgments thus appear to be motivationally effective, at least to an extent. This motivational success would be readily explained if they simply were motivationally effective psychological states, such as desires. This is what Hobbes seems to do when he claims that “whatsoever is the object of any man’s appetite or desire, that is it which he for his part calleth good; and the object of his hate and aversion, evil” (Hobbes 1651/1994, VI, 28). But this is far too quick. We know that moral judgments can also fail to lead to corresponding action. For example, since it is conceptually possible—not to mention all too common in the actual world—to think that something is wrong and yet want to do it, thinking that something is wrong cannot simply consist in aversion toward it, contrary to what Hobbes seems to have thought. In this way, reflection on the various conceivable failures of moral motivation rules out possible candidates for explaining successful moral motivation. This is not an empirical psychological inquiry. We want to find out what kind of psychological state moral judgment must be (and what it cannot be) in order to have just the right kind of motivational role. What I will suggest in this essay is that a close examination of the various possible Moral Judgment and Volitional Incapacity
Effectiveness study of a CBT-based adolescent coping with depression course

Even though the efficacy of group-based cognitive behavioural interventions is well established both for adolescents diagnosed with major depressive disorders as well as for adolescents with depressive symptoms, in order to prevent further development, there has been a call for effectiveness studies in real world settings. This study investigated the effectiveness of a group-based cognitive behavioural early intervention implemented among 16–20 years old adolescents with subclinical or mild to moderate depression. Data were collected from spring 2010 to summer 2011, and were analysed by use of a benchmarking procedure. Calculations of effect sizes indicated medium to large reductions in symptoms of depression. The reduction was found to be maintained or even increased at follow-up six months later. The effect sizes were of the same magnitude as those from efficacy studies of group-based cognitive behavioural interventions for adolescent depression. Implications and limitations are discussed.
Acidic cysteine endoproteinase cathepsin K in the degeneration of the superficial articular hyaline cartilage in osteoarthritis.

OBJECTIVE To measure cartilage pH in patients with osteoarthritis (OA) and to analyze the presence of cathepsin K, the recently discovered acidic endoproteinase, in phenotypically altered chondrocytes. METHODS Intraoperative measurements of the pH of clinically normal, fibrillated, superficially fissured, and deeply fissured cartilage surfaces (grades 0-3, respectively) in OA patients undergoing primary hip replacement surgery were performed with the use of a sting electrode sterilized with microbicidic plasma. Fluorescent pH probes were used for in situ assessment of cartilage matrix pH. Cathepsin K was assessed using quantitative reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction and immunohistochemistry methods. RESULTS The pH of grade 0 cartilage surfaces was 7.1 +/- 0.4 (mean +/- SD), compared with 6.2 +/- 0.9 (P < 0.05), 5.7 +/- 1.0 (P < 0.001), and 5.5 +/- 1.0 (P < 0.001) for grades 1-3 cartilage surfaces, respectively. Fluorescent pH probes and acid-dependent autocatalytic conversion of cathepsin K into its active, low molecular weight form in cartilage confirmed these findings. Cathepsin K messenger RNA levels increased in relation to the severity of OA, and the number of cathepsin K-containing chondrocytes increased from a mean +/- SD of 12 +/- 3 in grade 0 cartilage surfaces to 47 +/- 7, 50 +/- 6, and 100 +/- 12 in grades 1-3 cartilage surfaces, respectively (P < 0.001 for all comparisons). CONCLUSION Acid-activated, but pharmacologically inhibitable, cathepsin K is induced in phenotypically altered chondrocytes in OA. The findings suggest that cathepsin K, rather than neutral matrix metalloproteinases, degrades the superficial gliding surfaces of the articular hyaline cartilage in OA.
A review of Cyclidiinae from China (Lepidoptera, Drepanidae)

Abstract The subfamily Cyclidiinae from China is reviewed: two genera and seven species are reported from China. One new subspecies, Cyclidia fractifasciata indistincta subsp. n. , is described. Two new synonyms are established: Cyclidia substigmaria (Hübner, 1831) (= Cyclidia substigmaria brunna Chu & Wang, 1987, syn. n. = Cyclidia tetraspota Chu & Wang, 1987, syn. n.). One misidentification in Chu & Wang (1987) is corrected. Identification keys and diagnoses for all discussed Chinese species are provided. External features and genitalia are depicted. In addition, results of DNA barcoding for five taxa of Cyclidia are briefly discussed.