Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Discrepancy between Visual Acuity and Microperimetry in AMD Patients: Visual Acuity Appears as an Inadequate Parameter to Test Macular Function

Abstract Background: Best corrected visual acuity (BCVA) of 0.8 or above in AMD patients can sometimes correspond to poor macular function inducing a serious visual handicap. Microperimetry can be used to objectivize this difference. Patients and Methods: A retrospective study was undertaken on 233 files of AMD patients of whom 82 had had a microperimetry. BCVA was compared with microperimetry performance. All examinations were performed in an identical setting by the same team of 3 persons. Results: Among the 82 patients included, 32 (39.0 %) had a BCVA equal to or above 0.8 even though their microperimetry performance was lower than 200/560 db. 10 of them (12.2 % of total) had an even poorer microperimetry below 120/560 db indicating poor macular function. Conclusions: More than a third of the AMD patients had a bad or very bad microperimetry performance in parallel with a good visual acuity. Microperimetry is a valuable tool to assess and follow real macular function in AMD patients when visual acuity alone can be misleading.
Sedation with “non-sedating” antihistamines: four prescription-event monitoring studies in general practice

# Sedation with “non-sedating” antihistamines: four prescription-event monitoring studies in general practice {#article-title-2} Objectives: To investigate the frequency with which sedation was reported in post-marketing surveillance studies of four second generation antihistamines: loratadine, cetirizine, fexofenadine, and acrivastine. Design: Prescription-event monitoring studies. Setting: Prescriptions were obtained for each cohort in the immediate post-marketing period. Subjects: Event data were obtained for a total of 43 363 patients. Main outcome measure: Reporting of sedation or drowsiness. Results: The odds ratios (adjusted for age and sex) for the incidence of sedation were 0.63 (95% confidence interval 0.36 to 1.11; P=0.1) for fexofenadine; 2.79 (1.69 to 4.58; P<0.0001) for acrivastine, and 3.53 (2.07 to 5.42; P<0.0001) for cetirizine compared with loratadine. No increased risk of accident or injury was evident with any of the four drugs. Conclusions: Although the risk of sedation was low with all four drugs, fexofenadine and loratadine may be more appropriate for people working in safety critical jobs. # Commentary: Reporting of adverse events is worth the effort {#article-title-11}
The Historic 2 April 2017 Louisiana Tornado Outbreak

On 2 April 2017 Louisiana saw one of its largest tornado outbreaks since 1950. The day saw a total of 21 tornadoes, six of which were classified as significant (EF2+). This extreme event resulted in an estimated 4.2 million dollars in damage and two fatalities. A climatology of Louisiana individual tornado days dating back to 1950 ranked this event second for total number of tornadoes (21) in a day and second for number of significant (EF2+) tornadoes (6) in a day. To assess the overall impact of this outbreak, the Destruction Potential Index (DPI) was used to compare both the overall number and strength of tornadoes to previous events. The 2 April 2017 event had the highest DPI for the state of Louisiana since 1950. Comparisons made to tornado days in nearby states in the region also highlight the significance of this event. The synoptic conditions of 2 April 2017 were compared to a 25-member synoptic scale composite of past Louisiana tornado days with six or more tornadoes. The composite highlighted anomalies in synoptic ingredients that contribute to tornado outbreak environments. Most notably, the synoptic structure consisted of a more meridional flow pattern, which allowed for stronger moisture transport, low level shear, deep layer shear, and increased thermal advection. This produced an optimal mesoscale environment with high instability and storm-relative environmental helicity. The meteorological significance of this event with respect to Louisiana stems from the uncommon combination of a high shear/high CAPE near-storm environment in a southern tornado outbreak. The high shear/high CAPE environment largely responsible for the 2 April 2017 Louisiana tornado outbreak is more commonly observed in Great Plains tornado outbreaks.
Robot catching with high manipulability grasp configuration using vision

The present paper proposes the strategy for a robotic hand to catch a free-flying object with a high manipulability grasp configuration. Several researchers have succeeded in catching the free-frying object by the robotic hand. However, these researches focus on only the catching and do not discuss the grasp configuration after the catching. It is important to consider not only the stable catching but also the following manipulation after the catching as seen in a juggling and a baton twirling. We propose the strategy that enables the robotic hand to catch the object with a high manipulability grasp configuration and verify the proposed strategy experimentally by using the newly developed three-fingered hand.
Parallel nesting in a lock-free multi-version Software Transactional Memory ∗

Many applications contain large operations that must be performed atomically, which typically leads to many conflicts in optimistic concurrency control mechanisms such as those used by most Transactional Memory (TM) systems. Yet, sometimes these operations could be executed faster if their latent parallelism was used efficiently, but unfortunately few TM systems allow a transaction to be split in several parts that execute concurrently. In this paper we extend the JVSTM to add support for closed parallel nesting, resulting in the first lock-free, multi-version, and efficient implementation of closed parallel nesting. Moreover, we show how the new implementation with parallel nesting outperforms the original version by up to 10 times in the Vacation benchmark, by exploring the latent parallelism within top-level transactions of a highly-contending, write-dominated workload.
Subspace blind MIMO channel equalization with quadratic complexity

An SOS-based blind equalization algorithm for the SIMO channel has recently been proposed that has an unprecedented quadratic complexity in the channel memory, compared to all existing SOS-based techniques whose complexity is cubic in this regard. In this paper, we show that this technique can be adapted to the MIMO channel and we prove that its complexity is maintained independently from the number of input/output channels. Simulation tests are reported that sustain the feasibility of this technique in practical observation conditions.
RC3E: Reconfigurable Accelerators in Data Centres and Their Provision by Adapted Service Models

Computing performance and scalability are essential ingredients in modern data centres offering cloud services. Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) provide a promising opportunity to improve performance, security and energy efficiency because their hardware architecture can be adapted directly to the application. In this paper we present the development of our FPGA cloud architecture, beginning with realistic use cases and adapted service models for the use of reconfigurable hardware accelerators in a cloud context. Our architecture supports both applications where FPGAs are tightly coupled to host processors and applications using the FPGA for a secured cloud access in an overall homogeneous system. In contrast to other approaches, we model the system as a whole with a more flexible FPGA provision. The application service provider has the opportunity to offer a service with an individual FPGA design or customized secure interfaces to the cloud. For an abstraction from the real hardware and to achieve high device utilization, the FPGAs and the interfaces are fully virtualized. Because of the uncommon reconfigurable hardware integration and our adapted service models, we developed a special resource management system (RC3E) which serves as a hypervisor for the virtualized hardware. The demonstration of an intelligent load balancing as well as the system's performance and flexibility conclude our approach of FPGA services in a cloud.
Ileal digestibility and endogenous flow of minerals and amino acids: responses to dietary phytic acid in piglets

Effects of phytic acid (PA) on ileal mineral and amino acid (AA) digestibilities and ileal endogenous AA flow in piglets were investigated. Seven ileal-cannulated weanling pigs were fed a casein–maize starch-based diet with PA (as sodium phytate) at 0, 5, 10 or 20 g/kg in 4 × 4 Latin square design with three added columns to give seven observations per treatment. The basal diet was formulated to meet National Research Council energy and AA requirements for piglets. The respective digestibility and endogenous lysine loss were determined by indicator and homoarginine methods. The apparent ileal digestibility (AID) of Na, K and P was linearly and quadratically reduced (P < 0·05) by increased dietary PA concentration, whereas that of Ca and Mg was only linearly reduced (P < 0·05) by the dietary PA. The AID values for Mg and Na were negative ( − 0·03 and − 0·18, respectively) when PA was supplemented at 20 g/kg. The AID of isoleucine, leucine and valine responded quadratically to dietary PA concentration, though the differences between the AID values of the AA due to change in dietary PA concentration were marginal (at most by 1·8 percentage units). Furthermore, dietary PA did not affect (P>0·05) endogenous AA losses. The results suggest that PA has limited effect on the digestibility and endogenous losses of AA in piglets, but can reduce AID of Mg and Na partly by increasing endogenous losses of these minerals as evidenced by their negative AID values.
Does intramuscular botulinum toxin A injection improve upper‐limb function in children with hemiplegic cerebral palsy?

1. Cruess SR, Cruess RL. Professionalism: a contract between medicine and society. CMAJ 2000; 162: 668-669. 2. Wynia MK, Latham SR, Kao AC, et al. Medical professionalism in society. N Engl J Med 1999; 341: 16121616. 3. Rothman DJ. Medical professionalism — focusing in on the real issues. N Engl J Med 2000; 342: 1284-1286. 4. Irvine D. Doctors in the UK: their new professionalism and its regulatory framework. Lancet 2001; 358: 1807-1810. ❏
A congestion control algorithm for tree-based reliable multicast protocols

This paper contains a detailed description of the congestion control algorithm of TRAM, a tree-based reliable multicast protocol. This algorithm takes advantage of regular acknowledgements from the receivers that propagate back to the sender via the repair tree. This scalable feedback mechanism is used to collect receiver credits. Complementing the windowing mechanism, packet transmission is smoothed by using a data rate commensurate with the window size. Additional details, such as how to prune slow receivers, and how to implement the rate scheduler on non-real-time systems are also discussed. The performance of the congestion control algorithm is then evaluated in extended LANs, and wide area networks. The fairness of bandwidth-sharing with other (TCP) traffic is also evaluated.
Chromosome 19p13.3 deletion in a patient with macrocephaly, obesity, mental retardation, and behavior problems

Chromosome 19p13.3 Deletion in a Patient With Macrocephaly, Obesity, Mental Retardation, and Behavior Problems Adam J. de Smith, Mieke M. van Haelst, Richard J. Ellis, Susan E. Holder, Stewart J. Payne, Sugera K. Hashim, Philippe Froguel, and Alexandra I.F. Blakemore* Department of Genomics of Common Disease, Imperial College London, Hammersmith Hospital Campus, London, UK Department of Medical Genetics, University Medical Centre, Utrecht, The Netherlands North West Thames Regional Genetics Service, NWLH NHS Trust, Harrow, UK CNRS 8199–University of Lille Nord de France, Pasteur Institute, Lille, France
Single image super-resolution via projective dictionary learning with anchored neighborhood regression

We propose a novel single image super-resolution (SR) algorithm based on the projective dictionary pair learning with anchored neighborhood regression. Different from previous dictionary learning methods that aim to learn only a synthesis or an analysis dictionary, our method would learn both types of dictionaries jointly for regression to achieve image SR. We first cluster the training features into K clusters in order to learn synthesis and analysis dictionaries. Moreover, we learn the regressions with the training samples at training phase and use them on reconstruction stage. As shown in our experimental results, the proposed method obtains high-quality SR results quantitatively and visually against state-of-the-art methods.
Sentencing Under Uncertainty: Anchoring Effects in the Courtroom1

Research on juridical decision making has demonstrated that largely disparate sentences are often given for identical crimes. This may be the case because judges' sentencing decisions are influenced by a recommended or demanded sentence. Building on research on judgmental anchoring (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974), the present investigation examines whether a sentencing demand has a direct influence on a given sentence. Using criminal trial judges as participants, Study 1 demonstrates that such a direct influence does, in fact, exist. Sentencing decisions are assimilated to the sentence demanded by the prosecutor. Study 2 further reveals that this influence is independent of the perceived relevance of the sentencing demand. Study 3 demonstrates that this influence is also independent of judges' experience.
Sleep quality and psychobiological aspects of Brazilian Paralympic athletes in the London 2012 pre-Paralympics period

O objetivo do estudo foi avaliar os aspectos psicobiologicos de atletas da modalidade de atletismo Paralimpico, antes dos Jogos Paralimpicos de Londres de 2012. Foram avaliados 40 atletas, sem 31 homens e 9 mulheres que foram convocados pelo Comite Paralimpico Brasileiro para fazer parte da Delegacao Brasileira. Para a avaliacao dos aspectos psicobiologicos nos utilizamos os questionarios: Inventario de Ansiedade Traco-Estado, POMS, Inventario de Depressao de Beck, questionario de Pittsburgh Escala de Epworth para avaliar, respectivamente, a ansiedade, o humor, a depressao, o sono e a sonolencia. Para ansiedade-traco e ansiedade-estado os atletas apresentaram nivel medio de ansiedade, em relacao ao perfil dos estados de humor, a dimensao vigor apresentou valores mais altos do que as outras dimensoes. O tempo total de sono foi menor em atletas com o sono ruim, a eficiencia de sono foi menor em atletas com sono ruim e o tempo total de sono foi menor para quem teve eficiencia < 85%. Todas as variaveis psicobiologicas avaliadas no periodo pre-competitivo estavam dentro da normalidade para os atletas da equipe Paralimpica Brasileira de atletismo que participaram dos Jogos Paralimpicos de Londres 2012.
Privacy-Preserving Personalized Recommendation: An Instance-Based Approach via Differential Privacy

Recommender systems become increasingly popular and widely applied nowadays. The release of users' private data is required to provide users accurate recommendations, yet this has been shown to put users at risk. Unfortunately, existing privacy-preserving methods are either developed under trusted server settings with impractical private recommender systems or lack of strong privacy guarantees. In this paper, we develop the first lightweight and provably private solution for personalized recommendation, under untrusted server settings. In this novel setting, users' private data is obfuscated before leaving their private devices, giving users greater control on their data and service providers less responsibility on privacy protections. More importantly, our approach enables the existing recommender systems (with no changes needed) to directly use perturbed data, rendering our solution very desirable in practice. We develop our data perturbation approach on differential privacy, the state-of-the-art privacy model with lightweight computation and strong but provable privacy guarantees. In order to achieve useful and feasible perturbations, we first design a novel relaxed admissible mechanism enabling the injection of flexible instance-based noises. Using this novel mechanism, our data perturbation approach, incorporating the noise calibration and learning techniques, obtains perturbed user data with both theoretical privacy and utility guarantees. Our empirical evaluation on large-scale real-world datasets not only shows its high recommendation accuracy but also illustrates the negligible computational overhead on both personal computers and smart phones. As such, we are able to meet two contradictory goals, privacy preservation and recommendation accuracy. This practical technology helps to gain user adoption with strong privacy protection and benefit companies with high-quality personalized services on perturbed user data.
Evidence for the Bauman variant in Kallmann’s syndrome

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE Idiopathic hypogonadotrophic hypogonadism (IHH) is a condition of gonadotrophin releasing hormone (GnRH) deficiency. IHH associated with anosmia is Kallmann’s syndrome. A variant has been described by Bauman where a patient with Kallmann's syndrome apparently regained normal hypothalamo‐pituitary function 2 years after the initial diagnosis. GnRH secretory activity can be assesed by measuring LH pulsatility. Our objective was to define the pattern of LH pulsatility in men with IHH and Kallmann’s syndrome compared with those of normal controls, and to determine whether there is evidence for a Bauman variant of Kallmann's syndrome.
Lossy Data Aggregation in Multihop Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks, in-network data aggregation is an efficient way to reduce energy consumption in network. However, most of the existing data aggregation scheduling methods try to aggregate the data from all the nodes at all time-instances. It is neither energy efficient nor practical because of the link unreliability and spatial and temporal data correlations. In this paper, we propose anew data aggregation paradigm which allows estimated aggregation at the sink node. In our scheme, we will selectively let some nodes sample data and aggregate them to the sink node. Two different cases will be studied. Firstly, we assume that the links are reliable and the error between the value obtained from the data of all nodes and that from the data of sampled nodes is bounded. We give detailed analysis on the error bound when the confidence is given a priori. Secondly, we assume that the links are unreliable with a given probability and obtain that the error is still bounded under a given confidence when the probability of link unreliability is not too high or the success probability of retransmission is high enough. We also study how to assign the confidence level among the root nodes such that each root node can calculate the minimum number of sampling leaf nodes based on corresponding confidence level. Through analyzing, we show that it can surely save energy to adopt our method when the link is reliable. When the link is not reliable, the energy still can be saved if the success probability of retransmission is high enough.
READING DIFFICULTIES, READING-RELATED SELF-PERCEPTIONS, AND STRATEGIES FOR OVERCOMING NEGATIVE SELF-BELIEFS

In this article, we review a number of studies on thedevelopmentofachievement-related self-system factors in relation to young children's reading acquisition. Reading self-concept, academic self-concept, and reading self-efficacy appear to develop in response to initial experiences in learning to read. For children who experience initial and ongoing success or difficulty in reading, development of relations between reading performance and self-system factors occurs within the first year of schooling. Our studies also show that phonological processing ability and letter-name knowledge at the outset of schooling not only predict subsequent reading performance but also academic self-concept and reading self-efficacy. Children who are deficient in phonological processing or state a preference for using text-level cues for identifying unfamiliar words in text rather than word-level information tend to develop difficulties in reading as well as negative reading-related self-perceptions. To overcome both skill deficiencies in reading and the negative reading- and achievement-related self-beliefsthat develop in response to reading difficulties, we maintain that attention to the development of word-level skills and strategies is essential. Inaddition, we advocate the use of attribution retraining methods, combined with appropriate skills training, for overcoming children's negative self-beliefs.
Hospital bed planning in Canada: a survey analysis.

The need to plan health and especially hospital care delivery systems is becoming more critical in this period of severe financial constraints and even cutbacks of services. This article reports on a survey of hospital planning norms and bed requirements methodologies in Canada conducted in 1977 and 1980. The comparison and assessment of approaches to bed need determination in the Canadian provinces, together with some recommendations, are preceded by a review of basic hospital planning methods and their use in a number of selected countries. The literature review and the analysis conducted reveal that the "formula method" (beds per 1000 population) is the most common approach used to define and to allocate the "optimum" number of beds in the countries reviewed and in Canada. Despite its shortcomings, this method appears to have many advantages (e.g., simplicity, equity, flexibility). In general, provincial authorities use similar factors in the calculation of the number of beds to be provided, the most important ones being the size of the projected geographic population or population served by age groups. The acute care bed guidelines in Canada range from 3.5 per 1000 population in southern Ontario to 5.0 in Saskatchewan and Alberta. Extended care bed guidelines are much more spread between provinces. The analysis underlines the difficulties faced by the planner and the researcher in comparing bed guidelines due to significant definition and content differences between provinces. It finally leads to the observation that hospital planning remains arbitrary and appears to be more designed to ration the supply of services and to contain overall expenditures than to really try to meet the "need" of the population for hospital services.
Problematizing Classed Identities in Fatherhood: Development of Integrative Case Studies for Analysis and Praxis

This article analyzes the discourse and practices of two men from different life circumstances punctuated by race, class, education, occupation, number of children, relational history, and familial background. The authors create a new data analytic technique, the integrative case study, that juxtaposes excerpts and analyses of these fathers’ interview data in imagined conversational space through poststructuralist feminist lenses. The authors foreground identity struggles that emerge in their discussions of their home and work lives, enactments of fatherhood, and strategies for managing work—life balance. Although the authors do not claim that these men are representative of the groups for which they report membership, they note the ways in which their language and embodied identity performances influence and are influenced by their portrayals.