Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effect of Hospital Characteristics on the Quality of Laparoscopic Gastrectomy in Japan

Background Laparoscopic gastrectomy (LG) is becoming more widely indicated, although its application has not been investigated sufficiently in community-based gastrointestinal research because the small number of gastric cancers in western countries might have limited its use. However, concerns have been raised regarding variations in the quality of care with LG. To contribute to improving the efficient utilization of costly surgical innovations, we determined the impact of hospital characteristics on LG care. Methods Among 3,914 LG patients in 58 academic and 200 community hospitals between 2006 and 2008, we examined patient demographics, comorbidity, complications, partial or total gastrectomy, care process, hospital patient volume, hospital ownership and teaching status, and fiscal year. Hospital LG volume was divided into three quintile categories (lower volume, LV; intermediate volume, IV; or higher volume, HV) that consisted of an approximately equal number of patients. Dependent variables were operating time (OT), length of stay (LOS) and total charge (TC). The impact of hospital characteristics on these variables was assessed using multivariate analysis. Results Twenty-seven academic hospitals out of 193 LV hospitals treated 271 (21%) LG patients, 20 of 44 IV hospitals treated 596 (47%), and 11 of 21 HV hospitals treated 748 (55%). Although mortality or complications did not vary significantly between LV, IV and HV hospitals, the latter were associated with longer OT or LOS and more TC. More blood transfusions were required in HV hospitals once indicated. Hospital ownership or teaching status did not explain the variation in complications. Teaching and national hospitals consumed more resources, and municipal and private hospitals reduced OT more than national hospitals. Conclusions A volume-quality relationship was recognized. As intraoperative transfusion prolongs OT and results in more complications, clinical societies or policy makers should introduce this new technique concurrently with quality improvement initiatives that aim to reduce unnecessary OT at targeted institutions. Hospitals varied in terms of LOS and TC, therefore, policy makers should also monitor resource utilization to enhance the efficiency of LG care under restrictive fiscal policies.
Domain Adaptation For Mobile Robot Navigation

An important challenge in outdoor mobile robotic perception is maintaining terrain classification performance throughout the extremely variable conditions that we may wish a robot to operate under. Outdoor robots operate in a series of “environments” that consist of diverse terrain, vegetation, weather, and lighting conditions. A physical robot does not randomly jump between environments; typically it will operate for long stretches of time in one particular environment, making it advantageous to adapt the robot’s performance to its current environment.
An Efficient Weighted-Round-Robin Algorithm for Multiprocessor Architectures

Complex System-on-Chip (SoC) architectures comprise multiple master and slave modules. Master modules such as processors and hardware accelerators send requests or data to slave modules, e. g. memories and register banks. Efficient communication among master and slave modules requires adequate on-chip interconnect architectures with arbitration that features contention resolution, prioritization, and fairness. In this paper we present a new arbitration method with a parameterizable algorithm, such that the arbitration for each shared resource can be optimized to the traffic patterns, target characteristics, and quality-of-service requirements. We use a weighted-round-robin algorithm that takes these properties into account. As our simulations show we can improve the overall system performance of a multiprocessor SoC by up to 41%.
Hydrogen bonded nicotinic acid-water complexes studied by ab-initio and density functional theory

Molecular structure and Vibrational spectra of Nico tinic Acid (NA)–Water (W) complexes with stoichiome tric ratios ranging from 2:1 (NA2W) to 1:3 (NAW3) Complexes have been studied by means of quantum c he ical calculations using HF and B3LYP methodology and the 6-311++G(d, p) basis set. It was found that the strength of hydrogen bond between the hydrogen and the nitrogen increase s with increasing the number of water molecules. St ructural parameters of the optimized geometries, total energies and dipole moment have been calculated. We show that increasing the number of water molecules strength o f the binding energy as well as bond length between N and H decreases i.e. stability increases. The ring-breathing mode frequency ʋ1 of the reference system NA has been chosen as a marker band to the strengths of hydrogen bondi ng. IR intensity and Raman activity corresponding to t he ringbreathing mode frequency ʋ1 have been calculated for three numbers of hydrated complexes of Nicotinic Acid.
A monolithic preamplifier-shaper for measurement of energy loss and transition radiation

A custom monolithic circuit has been developed for the Time Expansion Chamber (TEC) of the PHENIX detector at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). This detector identifies particles by sampling their ionization energy loss (dE/dx) over a 3 cm drift space and by detecting associated transition radiation (TR) photons. To be simultaneously sensitive to dE/dx and TR events requires a dual-gain system. We have developed a compact solution featuring an octal preamplifier/shaper (P/S) IC with a split gain stage. The circuit, fabricated in 1.2 /spl mu/m CMOS, incorporates a trans-impedance preamplifier and a 70 ns unipolar CR-RC shaper with ion tail compensation and active DC offset cancellation. Digitally selectable gain, peaking time, and tail cancellation as well as channel-by-channel charge injection and disable can be configured in the system via a 3-wire interface. The 3.5/spl times/5 mm/sup 2/ die is packaged in a fine-pitch 64-pin PQFP. Equivalent input noise is less than 1500 rms electrons at a power dissipation of 30 mW per channel. On a sample of 2400 chips, the DC offset was 2.3/spl plusmn/3 mV rms without trimming. A chamber-mounted board houses four P/S chips, on-board calibration circuit, and 64 analog differential line drivers which convey the shaped pulses 7 m to crate-mounted flash ADCs. An RS-422 link provides digital configuration downloading and read back, and supplies the calibration strobe. The 9.7"/spl times/3.75" board dissipates 8.5 Watts.
Environmental information factors that influence the development of a business idea into a business model : a case study of a winter sports outlet in Eastern Holland

Developing a business idea into a successful business can be quite a challenge. A good idea does not automatically mean that it will grow into a viable business. An entrepreneur with a business idea will need to deal with all kinds of challenges and pitfalls when developing his business idea into an proper business. An entrepreneur will not deal with these challenges and pitfalls all by himself. The entrepreneur will seek for knowledge and information in his environment that can help tackle the problems during business idea development. Accepting and understanding these environmental sources of information might help the entrepreneur in developing a proper business. This study will try to give insight in these environmental information factors, which can than be used for further research in order to help future entrepreneurs use their environment to further develop their business ideas. This study gives a view of environmental factors that can influence an entrepreneur while developing a business idea. To get this view a case study was conducted, in which an entrepreneur develops his business idea into a business model. For a period of six months this entrepreneur recorded every environmental influence that changed his business idea, in a dairy. The diary data was analyzed doing a content analysis. The data showed that an entrepreneur developing a business idea into a business model is indeed influenced by environmental information factors. The analysis showed that of all forces influencing the entrepreneur, those forces from his social network had the most influence. Although this study analyzed only one single case and therefore generalizing is difficult, the propositions made at the end of this study will contribute a lot to further research on this subject, by making entrepreneurs aware of the available information in their environment. Which can eventually help entrepreneurs with business ideas to develop these ideas into successful businesses.
Antifragility as a design criterion for modelling dynamic systems

Highly improbable events can have a substantial impact on complex socio‐economic systems and are frequently difficult to predict beforehand but easy to explain afterwards. Antifragile systems can withstand and benefit from this kind of outlier events, whereas merely robust systems cannot in any case. Yet the aim to design robust systems is almost as old as the system dynamics field itself. This research therefore aims to investigate the extent to which an antifragile system design criterion is more valuable than a robust one. By means of an extensive literature review, a simulation model was constructed, which is demonstrated to be antifragile. Comparing the antifragile and robust versions of the model shows that the former—as theorized—yields more favourable results in an environment with impactful outlier events. Implementing antifragility in systems involves the difficult task of changing policies (and, eventually, the mental models) of decision‐makers. Consequently, this research concludes that antifragility should not and cannot always be attained; its feasibility is to be assessed at the start of a system dynamics modelling project.
Dynamic partitioning‐based JPEG decompression on heterogeneous multicore architectures

With the emergence of social networks and improvements in computational photography, billions of JPEG images are shared and viewed on a daily basis. Desktops, tablets, and smartphones constitute the vast majority of hardware platforms used for displaying JPEG images. Despite the fact that these platforms are heterogeneous multicores, no approach exists yet that is capable of joining forces of a system's CPU and graphics processing unit (GPU) for JPEG decoding. In this paper, we introduce a novel JPEG decoding scheme for heterogeneous architectures consisting of a CPU and a general‐purpose GPU. We employ an offline profiling step to determine the performance of a system's CPU and GPU with respect to JPEG decoding. For a given JPEG image, our performance model uses: (1) the CPU and GPU performance characteristics, (2) the image entropy, and (3) the width and height of the image to balance the JPEG decoding workload on the underlying hardware. Our run‐time partitioning and scheduling scheme exploits task, data, and pipeline parallelism by scheduling the non‐parallelizable entropy‐decoding task on the CPU, whereas inverse discrete cosine transformations, color conversions, and upsampling are conducted on both the CPU and the GPU. We have implemented the proposed method in the context of the libjpeg‐turbo library, which is an industrial‐strength JPEG encoding and decoding engine. Libjpeg‐turbo's hand‐optimized SIMD routines for ARM and x86 architectures constitute a competitive yardstick for the comparison with the proposed approach. We have evaluated our approach for a total of 7194 JPEG images across four high‐end and middle‐end CPU–GPU combinations including a mobile GPU. We achieve speedups of up to 5.2× over the SIMD version of libjpeg‐turbo, and speedups of up to 10.5× over its sequential code. Taking into account the non‐parallelizable JPEG entropy‐decoding part, our approach achieves up to 97% of the theoretically attainable maximal speedup, with an average of 94%. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Methods for improving oxygenation in infants mechanically ventilated for severe hyaline membrane disease.

Herman, S. , and Reynolds, E. 0. R. (1973). Archives of Disease in Childhood, 48, 612. Methods for improving oxygenation in infants mechanicaily ventilated for severe hyaline membrane disease. The effect on arterial blood gas tensions, aortic blood pressure, and intra-oesophageal pressure of altering inspiration: expiration ratio and pressure during expiration was investigated in 9 infants being treated by mechanical ventilation for very severe hyaline membrane disease. The results showed that the use of a long inspiratory phase and a positive expiratory pressure acted synergistically to reduce alveolar-arterial oxygen difference and estimated right-to-left shunt: this reduction was proportional to mean airway pressure. The usefulness of a positive expiratory pressure in raising arterial oxygen tension was limited by its effect in causing alveolar hypoventilation. No adverse effects on the circulation due to the application of high mean airway pressures were detected.
Robust performance and adaptation using receding horizon H/sub /spl infin// control of time varying systems

Constructs suboptimal H/sub /spl infin// controllers which satisfy a new robust performance condition, using the receding horizon technique. A method is described for the synthesis of H/sub /spl infin// controllers online, making use of the exact plant model only on a finite interval extending into the future. Inequalities based on the two Riccati differential equation solution to the finite horizon H/sub /spl infin// problem are derived, and the resulting freedom is exploited to construct H/sub /spl infin// controllers which have a closed loop induced norm less than a prespecified value for all plants within a set, which is described in terms of the future variation of the plant. Dual results, with a possible adaptive interpretation, are also constructed.
On-Demand Server Synchronization Protocols of Session Guarantees

Session guarantees define required properties of a distributed system regarding consistency from the point of view of a single mobile client. Consistency protocols of session guarantees are composed of two elements: the first is aimed at providing safety (the guarantees), the second is aimed at providing liveness (data synchronization). This paper presents correctness proofs of two new data server synchronization protocols, which solve main problems of earlier proposals.
Preventing Zombie Lending

Because of limited liability, insolvent banks have an incentive to continue lending to insolvent borrowers, in order to hide losses and gamble for resurrection, even though this is socially inefficient. We suggest a scheme that regulators could use to solve this problem. The scheme would induce banks to reveal their bad loans, which can then be dealt with. Bank participation in the scheme would be voluntary. Even though banks have private information on the quantity of bad loans on their balance sheets, the scheme avoids creating windfall gains for bank equity holders. In addition, some losses can be imposed on debt holders.
Coupled Quantum Dots as Two-Level Systems: A Variational Monte Carlo Approach

The electronic properties of two-dimensional double-quantum dots in the presence of external magnetic fields are investigated by a variational Monte Carlo method with s and s-p trial wavefunctions. We compute the exchange en- ergy between two electrons as well as the two-electron total Coulomb energy for the singlet and triplet states in both strongly and weakly coupled quantum dots, and compare our data with the results of the numerically exact diagonalization of the Schrodinger Equation. In both systems, the singlet Coulomb energy decreases in magnetic fields as a consequence of magnetic localization, whereas the triplet Coulomb energy reaches a maximum value at intermediate magnetic fields before decreasing. Overall, good agreement between the two methods is obtained with s-p orbital trial wavefunction in strongly and weakly coupled quantum dots.
Phenotypic Characterization, DNA Similarities, and Protein Profiles of Twenty Sulfur-Metabolizing Hyperthermophilic Anaerobic Archaea Isolated from Hydrothermal Vents in the Southwestern Pacific Ocean

We performed phenotypic and physiological studies with 20 hyperthermophilic microorganisms isolated from hydrothermal vents located in the North Fiji Basin (southwestern Pacific Ocean) at a depth of 2,000 m. These isolates were strict anaerobes that were regular to irregular coccoids and used elemental sulfur in their metabolism. Growth was observed at temperatures ranging from 50 to 101°C. The DNA base compositions varied from 43 to 60 mol%. All of these organisms were heterotrophs and fermented peptides to acetate, isovalerate, isobutyrate, and propionate. They contained both diether and tetraether lipids in their membranes, which indicates that they belong to the domain Archaea. DNA-DNA hybridization experiments revealed that there were two distinct homology groups, which correlated well with results obtained from sodium dodecyl sulfate-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis of soluble whole-cell proteins, and these groups corresponded to the genera Pyrococcus and Thermococcus. Five isolates exhibited levels of DNA-DNA relatedness with Pyrococcus abyssi ranging from 71 to 100% and produced almost identical protein patterns. The remaining isolates formed a weakly homogeneous group based on DNA-DNA similarity data and protein patterns; the results of unweighted pair group cluster analyses suggested that these isolates were members of five new species of the genus Thermococcus.
Unsupervised Event Coreference Resolution

The task of event coreference resolution plays a critical role in many natural language processing applications such as information extraction, question answering, and topic detection and tracking. In this article, we describe a new class of unsupervised, nonparametric Bayesian models with the purpose of probabilistically inferring coreference clusters of event mentions from a collection of unlabeled documents. In order to infer these clusters, we automatically extract various lexical, syntactic, and semantic features for each event mention from the document collection. Extracting a rich set of features for each event mention allows us to cast event coreference resolution as the task of grouping together the mentions that share the same features (they have the same participating entities, share the same location, happen at the same time, etc.). Some of the most important challenges posed by the resolution of event coreference in an unsupervised way stem from (a) the choice of representing event mentions through a rich set of features and (b) the ability of modeling events described both within the same document and across multiple documents. Our first unsupervised model that addresses these challenges is a generalization of the hierarchical Dirichlet process. This new extension presents the hierarchical Dirichlet process's ability to capture the uncertainty regarding the number of clustering components and, additionally, takes into account any finite number of features associated with each event mention. Furthermore, to overcome some of the limitations of this extension, we devised a new hybrid model, which combines an infinite latent class model with a discrete time series model. The main advantage of this hybrid model stands in its capability to automatically infer the number of features associated with each event mention from data and, at the same time, to perform an automatic selection of the most informative features for the task of event coreference. The evaluation performed for solving both within- and cross-document event coreference shows significant improvements of these models when compared against two baselines for this task.
Predicting User Preference Based on Matrix Factorization by Exploiting Music Attributes

With the emergence of online Music Streaming Services (MSS) such as Pandora and Spotify, listening to music online became very popular. Despite the availability of these services, users face the problem of finding among millions of music tracks the ones that match their music taste. MSS platforms generate interaction data such as users' defined playlists enriched with relevant metadata. These metadata can be used to predict users' preferences and facilitate personalized music recommendation. In this work, we aim to infer music tastes of users by using personal playlist information. Characterizing users' taste is important to generate trustable recommendations when the amount of usage data is limited. Here, we propose to predict the users' preferred music feature's value (e.g. Genre as a feature has different values like Pop, Rock, etc.) by modeling, not only usage information, but also music description features. Music attribute information and usage data are typically dealt with separately. Our method FPMF (Feature Prediction based on Matrix Factorization) treats music feature values as virtual users and retrieves the preferred feature values for real target users. Experimental results indicate that our proposal is able to handle the item cold start problem and can retrieve preferred music feature values with limited usage data. Furthermore, our proposal can be useful in recommendation explanation scenarios.
On the quest for changing knowledge

For centuries, science (in German "Wissenschaft") has aimed to create ("schaffen") new knowledge ("Wissen") from the observation of physical phenomena, their modeling and empirical validation. With this vision paper, we propose to do so by observing not the physical, but the virtual world, namely the Web with its ever growing stream of data materialized in the form of social network chattering, content produced on demand by crowds of people, messages exchanged among interlinked devices in the Internet of Things, and similar. The knowledge we may find there can be dispersed, informal, contradicting and ephemeral today, while already tomorrow it may be commonly accepted. The challenge is capturing knowledge that is new, has not been formalized yet (e.g., in existing knowledge bases), and is buried inside a big, moving target (the stream of online data). The purpose is to provide data-driven innovation scenarios with the necessary food (up-to-date knowledge) and to do so timely.
The static quark potential for dynamical domain wall fermion simulations

We present preliminary results for the static quark potenti al computed on some of the DWF lattice configurations generated by the RBC-UKQCD collaborati ns. Most of these results were obtained using Wilson lines joining spatial planes fixed int o the Coulomb gauge. We compare the results from this method with the earlier ones on 16 3× 32 lattices using Bresenham spatial paths with APE smeared link variables. Some preliminary res ults on 243× 64 lattices are also presented.