Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Interactive Music as a Treatment for Pain and Stress in Children During Venipuncture: A Randomized Prospective Study

Objective: The experience of venipuncture is seen by children as one of the most fearful experiences during hospitalization. Children experience anxiety both before and during the procedure. Therefore, any intervention aiming to prevent or reduce distress should focus on the entire experience of the procedure, including waiting, actual preparation, and conclusion. This study was designed to determine whether the presence of musicians, who had attended specific training to work in medical settings, could reduce distress and pain in children undergoing blood tests. Methods: Our sample population was composed of 108 unpremedicated children (4–13 years of age) undergoing blood tests. They were randomly assigned to a music group (n = 54), in which the child underwent the procedure while interacting with the musicians in the presence of a parent or to a control group (n = 54), in which only the parent provided support to the child during the procedure. The distress experienced by the child before, during and after the blood test was assessed with the Amended Form of the Observation Scale of Behavioral Distress, and pain experience with FACES scale (Wong Baker Scale) only after the venipuncture. Results: Our results show that distress and pain intensity was significantly lower (p < .001; p < .05) in the music group compared with the control group before, during, and after blood sampling. Conclusions: This controlled study demonstrates that songs and music, performed by “professional” musicians, have a beneficial effect in reducing distress before, during, and after blood tests. This study shows, moreover, that the presence of musicians has a minor, but yet significant, effect on pain due to needle insertion.
An error-sensitive Q-learning approach for robot navigation

Reinforcement learning can capture notions of optimal behavior occurring in natural systems. In the context of reinforcement learning, the learning rate controls how fast we modify our estimates. Generally Q-learning approach leverages the temporal-difference (TD) error to regulate Q-value, while utilizing a constant or decreasing learning rate, e.g., linear or polynomial learning rate, throughout the agent's life. Learning algorithm with polynomial learning rate learns faster at the cost of inferior trade-off between exploration and exploitation. None of them is evaluated based on the TD error. Whereas that cannot psychologically reflect the agent's true learning progress with unnecessary extra training episodes and exploration. This paper proposes an error-sensitive learning rate mechanism for Q-learning algorithm termed as (ESQL) to achieve better mitigation and faster learning. The agent is endowed sensibility to the TD error summed over the episodes. The derived method is implemented with indoor robot navigation task simulation in a stationary grid world environment. Experimental results are presented showing that ESQL approach achieves faster learning and latent better trade-off between exploration and exploitation compared with both constant and decreasing learning rate Q-learning approaches.
Magec: An Image Searching Tool for Detecting Forged Images in Forensic Investigation

Manipulation of digital images for the purpose of forgery is a rapidly growing phenomenon that poses a challenge for cyber-crime investigators. Distinguishing original images from duplicates and the number of original copies within the same media are some examples of challenges presented by duplicate digital images. In this paper, we present a new image-searching tool called, Magec, to detect duplicate image(s) on digital media, using the original image modification attributes as a signature. First, we describe the tool and the methods used to detect duplicate images, then we evaluate the tool's performance based on the number of folders it searches and the number of files it searches for. Later, we present the analysis of the tool using different operating system attributes. The goal is to find copies of the same object that is hidden; compressed images, or images saved with different attributes and demonstrates which one is the original image and thereby deduce which ones are copies. This research helps in better utilization of small/limited capacity devices, where limited storage capacity may be a problem. The experimental results prove that the presented search tool provides faster and accurate results. Finally, the conducted tests on the Magec tool analyzed, and verified, and the results are presented alongside with challenges identified.
Efficient and Secure Elliptic Curve Cryptography Implementation of Curve P-256

Public key cryptography has become the de facto standard for secure communications over the Internet and other communications media such as cellular and Wi-Fi. Elliptic curves offer both better performance and higher security than first generation public key techniques and are gaining acceptance as the foundation for future Internet security such as the security-enhanced Border Gateway Protocol (BGPSEC). In this paper, we present a performance optimized and side-channel-attack resistant implementation of the NIST Curve P-256 which provides 128-bits of security. We also discuss operation time vs. storage trade-offs for various approaches.
Association of Step Width with Accelerated Sprinting Performance and Ground Reaction Force

Abstract This study aimed to describe changes in step width (SW) during accelerated sprinting, and to clarify the relationship of SW with sprinting performance and ground reaction forces. 17 male athletes performed maximal-effort 60 m sprints. The SW and other spatiotemporal variables, as well as ground reaction impulses, over a 52 m distance were calculated. Average values for each 4 steps during acceleration were calculated to examine relationships among variables in different sections. The SW rapidly decreased up to the 13th step and slightly afterward during accelerated sprinting, showing a bilinear phase profile. The ratio of SW to the stature was significantly correlated with running speed based on average values over the 52 m distance and in the 9th–12th step section during accelerated sprinting. The SW ratio positively correlated with medial, lateral and mediolateral impulses in all step sections, except for medial impulse in the 17th–20th step section. These results indicate the importance of wider SW for better sprinting performance, especially in the 9th–12th step section. Moreover, the wider SW was associated with larger medial impulse and smaller lateral impulse, suggesting that a wide SW contributes to the production of greater mediolateral body velocity during accelerated sprinting.
Sub-linear distributed algorithms for sparse certificates and biconnected components

A liquid volumetric flow measuring apparatus is disclosed wherein a turbine or vane, flow straighteners therefor, and a rotating shaft mounted therewith, and a magnetic sender are all mounted as an integral unit in a U-shaped pipe trap, and a volumetric calculator is mounted in conjunction therewith. By a specific mounting of the turbine in the trap there is a dampening action causing the calculator to cease recording the flow immediately upon this stopping of the motion of the liquid through the trap. This construction provides a guard against any air which is pumped through the pipe being recorded as liquid in contradistinction to a gaseous fluid. The magnetic sender has a reed switch and a magnet which are specifically mounted so as to provide low angular momentum and reliability, at both high and low flow rates. The present invention is particularly useful in fuel delivery, wherein the liquid volumetric flowmeter is mounted within the system of the party to whom the fuel is delivered, and permits the party to accurately record the liquid fuel actually delivered, and to guard against being charged for air flow from the fuel supplier's pump.
JPET #163493 1 Role of Basic Residues Within or Near the Predicted Transmembrane Helix 2 of the Human Breast Cancer Resistance Protein (BCRP/ABCG2) in Drug Transport

Department of Pharmaceutics, School of Pharmacy, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195-7610 (X. C., Z. B., Z. N., E.-W. L., H. W., Q. M.); Virtua Drug, Ltd., H-1015 Budapest, Hungary (Z. B.); Department of Life Science and Biotechnology, College of Natural Science, Dongeui University, Busan 614-714, Korea (E.-W. L.); Manchester Interdisciplinary Biocentre, 131 Princess Street, University of Manchester, Manchester, M1 7DN, UK (M. F. R.) JPET Fast Forward. Published on March 4, 2010 as DOI:10.1124/jpet.109. 163493
Intrinsic biochemical and functional differences in bronchial epithelial cells of children with asthma.

RATIONALE Convincing evidence of epithelial damage and aberrant repair exists in adult asthmatic airways, even in the absence of inflammation. However, comparable studies in children have been limited by access and availability of clinical samples. OBJECTIVES To determine whether bronchial epithelial cells from children with asthma are inherently distinct from those obtained from children without asthma. METHODS Epithelial cells were obtained by nonbronchoscopic bronchial brushing of children with mild asthma (n = 7), atopic children without asthma (n = 9), and healthy children (n = 12). Cells were subject to morphologic, biochemical, molecular, and functional assessment. Responses were also compared with commercially available epithelial cultures and the transformed cell line 16HBE140. RESULTS All epithelial cells exhibited a "cobblestone" morphology, which was maintained throughout culture and repeated passage. Expression of cytokeratin 19 varied, with disease phenotype being greatest in healthy nonatopics and lowest in asthmatics. In contrast, expression of cytokeratin 5/14 was greatest in asthmatic samples and least in healthy nonatopic samples. Asthmatic epithelial cells also spontaneously produced significantly greater amounts of interleukin (IL)-6, prostaglandin E2, and epidermal growth factor, and equivalent amounts of IL-1beta and soluble intracellular adhesion molecule-1, but significantly lower amounts of transforming growth factor beta1. This profile was maintained through successive passages. Asthmatic epithelial cells also exhibited greater rates of proliferation than nonasthmatic cells. CONCLUSIONS This study has shown that epithelial cells from children with mild asthma are intrinsically different both biochemically and functionally compared with epithelial cells from children without asthma. Importantly, these differences are maintained over successive passages, suggesting that they are not dependent on an in vivo environment.
Assessment Options for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

Abstract The diagnosis of PTSD is frequently encountered in forensic contexts, especially in civil proceedings. The psychologist functioning as a consulting or expert witness must be familiar with convergent sources of data that will support the diagnosis or suggest alternative categories. The authors review a variety of assessment instruments including those that are broad-based and semi-structured, brief structured interviews for PTSD, self-report questionnaires, general psychological inventories, and projective markers. Consideration of pre-existing and co-morbid conditions is suggested for direct and cross-examination purposes along with deliberation about etiology.
Key techniques of High Efficiency Video Coding standard and its extension

High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is the newest video coding standard, which is developed by the Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding (JCT-VC) consisting of ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) and ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG). To improve the coding efficiency, HEVC adopts many new key techniques, such as coding tree unit, prediction unit, transform unit, multi-angle intra prediction, variable PU motion estimation, sample adaptive offset, and so on. Compared with its predecessor-H.264/AVC, HEVC is able to save about 50% bit rate while maintaining almost the same perceptual video quality. This paper aims to illustrate the key techniques of the HEVC standard and preview its extension in the near future.
NFS/M: an open platform mobile file system

With the advancement of wireless networks and mobile computing, there is an increasing need to build a mobile file system that can perform efficiently and correctly for accessing online information. Previous system research on mobile file systems is based on some experimental platforms. We describe the design and implementation of a mobile file system on an open platform, the Linux kernel, and at the same time, our mobile file system is compatible with the popular NFS 2.0 protocol. We formally define the file semantics of our mobile file system, which we called NFS/M. We also specify the conditions of object conflict as well as our conflict resolution algorithms. NFS/M supports client side caching, data prefetching, file system service during the disconnected mode, data reintegration and conflict resolution on various file system objects. Since the NFS/M is based on an open platform, it serves as a basic building block for developing future mobile computing applications.
Maximising objective speech intelligibility by local f0 modulation

We investigated the effect on objective speech intelligibility of scaling the fundamental frequency ( f 0 ) of voiced regions in a set of utterances. The frequency scaling was driven by maximising the glimpse proportion in voiced epochs, inspired by musical consonance maximisation techniques. Results show that depending on the energetic masker and the signal to noise ratio, f 0 modiﬁcations increased the mean glimpse proportion by up to 15 %. On average, lower mean f 0 changes resulted in greater glimpse proportions. It was also found that the glimpse proportion could be a good predictor of music consonance.
Changes in serum IGF‐I and IGFBP‐3 concen_trations during the IGF‐I generation test performed prospectively in children with short stature

Genotype and phenotype heterogeneity in patients with GH insensitivity syndrome suggests that partial defects exist in the GH receptor. Children with partial GH resistance would be expected to have short stature, elevated GH levels and relatively low levels of IGF‐I and IGFBP‐3. Provocation tests of the GH–IGF‐I axis may help to identify such children. The IGF‐I generation test in particular may demonstrate impaired secretion of IGF‐I and IGFBP‐3. This prospective study assesses the usefulness of the IGF‐I generation test in the identification of short children with possible GH insensitivity.
Identifying the Average Treatment Effect in a Two Threshold Model-Supplemental Appendix

Assume individuals are treated if a latent variable, containing a continuous instrument, lies between two thresholds. We place no functional form restrictions on the latent errors. Here unconfoundedness does not hold and identification at infinity is not possible. Yet we still show nonparametric point identification of the average treatment effect. We provide an associated root-n consistent estimator. We apply our model to reinvestigate the inverted-U relationship between competition and innovation, estimating the impact of moderate competitiveness on innovation without the distributional assumptions required by previous analyses. We find no evidence of an inverted-U in US data.
Exploring teachers' knowledge of children's literature

In the context of the current debate about teaching reading, research to ascertain primary teachers' personal and professional reading practices was undertaken. The study explored teachers' reading habits and preferences, investigated their knowledge of children's literature, and documented their reported use of such texts and involvement with library services. Questionnaire responses were gathered from 1200 teachers. The data were analysed and connections made between the teachers' own reading habits and preferences, their knowledge of children's literature, their accessing practices and pedagogic use of literature in school. This paper reports on part of the dataset and focuses on teachers' knowledge of children's literature; it reveals that primary professionals lean on a narrow repertoire of authors, poets and picture fiction creators. It also discusses teachers' personal reading preferences and considers divergences and connections between these as well as the implications of the teachers' limited repertoires on the reading development of young learners.
Core Cannibalization Architecture: Improving lifetime chip performance for multicore processors in the presence of hard faults

To improve the lifetime performance of a multicore chip with simple cores, we propose the Core Cannibalization Architecture (CCA). A chip with CCA provisions a fraction of the cores as cannibalizable cores (CCs). In the absence of hard faults, the CCs function just like normal cores. In the presence of hard faults, the CCs can be cannibalized for spare parts at the granularity of pipeline stages. We have designed and laid out CCA chips composed of multiple OpenRISC 1200 cores. Our results show that CCA improves the chips' lifetime performances, compared to chips without CCA.
The Washington University Broadband Terminal

The requirements of broadband asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) audio/video (A/V) transmission systems and the approach used to implement the Washington University broadband terminal (BBT) are discussed. The goal of the project was the development of a system with real-time audio and video capability that fully utilized the capability of the Washington University ATM network. The BBT transmits standard NTSC color video and audio over the local ATM network, using a novel approach. A composite analog A/V signal is digitized at three times the video color burst frequency at the transmitter; at the receiver, a unique frame buffer scheme is used to regenerate the transmitted audio and video signals. >
Heart-ID: human identity recognition using heart sounds based on modifying mel-frequency cepstral features

This study presents a new framework for human identity recognition using heart sound signals. The proposed framework is based on extracting cepstral features from heart sound signals, which are known as phono-cardio-gram (PCG). Two well-known cepstral features have been adopted in most of the previously implemented PCG biometric authentication systems; namely, mel-frequency and linear frequency cepstral features. In this study, two more cepstral features are proposed based on modifying the mel-frequency cepstral features. The first one is based on modifying the mel-frequency equation to increase the non-linearity of the triangular filters in the frequency range of the PCG signal. The other is based on replacing mel-scaled triangular filters with wavelet packet filters where a non-linear filter bank structure is designed using wavelet packet decomposition to select the appropriate bases for extracting discriminant features. The proposed system uses wavelet de-noising for pre-processing and linear discriminant analysis for classification. The proposed system is evaluated on two databases; one consists of 21 users (BioSec. database) and the other consists of 206 users (HSCT-11 database). Moreover, the proposed system is compared with previous systems that used the same databases. On the basis of the achieved results over the two databases, the two proposed cepstral features achieved higher correct recognition rates and lower error rates in identification and verification modes, respectively.
Classifying Protein Structural Dynamics via Residual Dipolar Couplings

Recent advances in Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy present new opportunities for investigating the conformational dynamics of proteins in solution. In particular, tensors for motions relevant to biological function can be obtained via experimental measurement of residual dipolar couplings (RDCs) between nuclei. These motion tensors have been used by others to characterize the magnitude and anisotropy of the dynamics of individual bond vectors. Here, we extend these results and demonstrate that RDCs can also be used to characterize the global nature of the protein’s motion (e.g., hinge motions, shear motions, etc.). In particular, we introduce the first method for classifying protein motions from RDC data. Our classifier consists of a discriminative model trained on 2,454 different molecular dynamics trajectories spanning seven categories of motion. The classifier achieves precision and recall accuracy of 90.6% and 90.9%, respectively, using 10-fold cross-validation over these seven categories.
Anterior Mitral Leaflet Curvature During the Cardiac Cycle in the Normal Ovine Heart

Background— The dynamic changes of anterior mitral leaflet (AML) curvature are of primary importance for optimal left ventricular filling and emptying but are incompletely characterized. Methods and Results— Sixteen radiopaque markers were sutured to the AML in 11 sheep, and 4-dimensional marker coordinates were acquired with biplane videofluoroscopy. A surface subdivision algorithm was applied to compute the curvature across the AML at midsystole and at maximal valve opening. Septal-lateral (SL) and commissure-commissure (CC) curvature profiles were calculated along the SL AML meridian (MSL)and CC AML meridian (MCC), respectively, with positive curvature being concave toward the left atrium. At midsystole, the MSL was concave near the mitral annulus, turned from concave to convex across the belly, and was convex along the free edge. At maximal valve opening, the MSL was flat near the annulus, turned from slightly concave to convex across the belly, and flattened toward the free edge. In contrast, the MCC was concave near both commissures and convex at the belly at midsystole but convex near both commissures and concave at the belly at maximal valve opening. Conclusions— While the SL curvature of the AML along the MSL is similar across the belly region at midsystole and early diastole, the CC curvature of the AML along the MCC flips, with the belly being convex to the left atrium at midsystole and concave at maximal valve opening. These curvature orientations suggest optimal left ventricular inflow and outflow shapes of the AML and should be preserved during catheter or surgical interventions.
Adolescent gambling: Temperament, sense of coherence and exposure to advertising

This study examines the relationships between gambling behaviour and temperament, sense of coherence (SOC) and exposure to advertising among adolescents, and the interactions between these three independent variables in relation to problem gambling (PG). One thousand and sixty-nine Israeli adolescents (males = 539, females = 530), aged 16–19, were sampled from 19 high schools. The following instruments were used: a gambling behaviour scale; a PG scale; an advertising exposure scale; Buss and Plomin's emotionality, activity and sociability (EAS) questionnaire measuring temperament; and a short version of Antonovsky's SOC scale. The findings indicated a relationship between recall of exposure to advertising and gambling behaviour and PG among adolescents. No correlations were found between SOC and gambling behaviour and PG, and no correlation was found between temperament and gambling behaviour. However, the effect of temperament on PG was significant for girls only. In addition, no interaction was found between the three independent variables relating to PG. The findings of this study underline the social role of advertisements in the process of developing gambling behaviour among adolescents and its effect on problem gambling.