Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Seven Q-Tracks monitors of laboratory quality drive general performance improvement: experience from the College of American Pathologists Q-Tracks program 1999-2011.

CONTEXT Many production systems employ standardized statistical monitors that measure defect rates and cycle times, as indices of performance quality. Clinical laboratory testing, a system that produces test results, is amenable to such monitoring. OBJECTIVE To demonstrate patterns in clinical laboratory testing defect rates and cycle time using 7 College of American Pathologists Q-Tracks program monitors. DESIGN Subscribers measured monthly rates of outpatient order-entry errors, identification band defects, and specimen rejections; median troponin order-to-report cycle times and rates of STAT test receipt-to-report turnaround time outliers; and critical values reporting event defects, and corrected reports. From these submissions Q-Tracks program staff produced quarterly and annual reports. These charted each subscriber's performance relative to other participating laboratories and aggregate and subgroup performance over time, dividing participants into best and median performers and performers with the most room to improve. Each monitor's patterns of change present percentile distributions of subscribers' performance in relation to monitoring durations and numbers of participating subscribers. Changes over time in defect frequencies and the cycle duration quantify effects on performance of monitor participation. RESULTS All monitors showed significant decreases in defect rates as the 7 monitors ran variously for 6, 6, 7, 11, 12, 13, and 13 years. The most striking decreases occurred among performers who initially had the most room to improve and among subscribers who participated the longest. All 7 monitors registered significant improvement. Participation effects improved between 0.85% and 5.1% per quarter of participation. CONCLUSIONS Using statistical quality measures, collecting data monthly, and receiving reports quarterly and yearly, subscribers to a comparative monitoring program documented significant decreases in defect rates and shortening of a cycle time for 6 to 13 years in all 7 ongoing clinical laboratory quality monitors.
An integrated current flattening module for embedded cryptosystems

In embedded cryptosystems, the variation of current or power consumption might be the point of attack on confidentiality because of the dependency of power consumption on the data and algorithms. This paper presents a real-time current flattening module that controls dynamically the power consumption of a cryptosystem. The module together with specialized cryptographic hardware can be integrated on the same chip. In this way, the output current of the cryptographic system has little discernable information for a side-channel attack. The real-time current flattening module is designed in this paper using 0.18 /spl mu/m CMOS technology and operates at 1.8 V power supply.
European priorities for research to support legislation in the area of food contact materials and articles

A strong science base is required to underpin the planning and decision-making process involved in determining future European community legislation on materials and articles in contact with food. Significant progress has been made in the past 5 years in European funded work in this area, with many developments contributing to a much better understanding of the migration process, and better and simpler approaches to food control. In this paper this progress is reviewed against previously identified work-areas (identified in 1994) and conclusions are reached about future requirements for R&D to support legislation on food contact materials and articles over the next 5 or so years.
Heteroresistance to Fluconazole in Cryptococcus neoformans Is Intrinsic and Associated with Virulence

ABSTRACT In 1999, heteroresistance to triazoles was reported in Cryptococcus neoformans strains isolated from an azole therapy failure case of cryptococcosis in an AIDS patient and in a diagnostic strain from a non-AIDS patient. In this study, we analyzed 130 strains of C. neoformans isolated from clinical and environmental sources before 1979, prior to the advent of triazoles, and 16 fluconazole (FLC)-resistant strains isolated from AIDS patients undergoing FLC maintenance therapy during 1990 to 2000. All strains isolated prior to 1979 manifested heteroresistance (subset of a population that grows in the presence of FLC) at concentrations between 4 and 64 μg/ml, and all 16 FLC-resistant AIDS isolates manifested heteroresistance at concentrations between 16 and 128 μg/ml. Upon exposure to stepwise increases in the concentration of FLC, subpopulations that could grow at higher concentrations emerged. Repeated transfer on drug-free media caused the highly resistant subpopulations to revert to the original level of heteroresistance. The reversion pattern fell into four categories based on the number of transfers required. The strains heteroresistant at ≥32 μg/ml were significantly more resistant to other xenobiotics and were also more virulent in mice than were those heteroresistant at ≤8 μg/ml. During FLC treatment of mice infected by strains with low levels of heteroresistance, subpopulations exhibiting higher levels of heteroresistance emerged after a certain period of time. The ABC transporter AFR1, known to efflux FLC, was unrelated to the heteroresistance mechanism. Our study showed that heteroresistance to azole is universal and suggests that heteroresistance contributes to relapse of cryptococcosis during azole maintenance therapy.
Effect of Metalloproteinase Inhibitors on the Microtensile Bond Strength of Composite Resin to Er:YAG Laser-Irradiated Dentin.

This study evaluated the effect of matrix metalloproteinase (MMP) inhibitors - 2% (CHX) and sodium fluoride (NaF) (5000 ppm) - on microtensile bond strength (μTBS) of composite resin to Er:YAG laser-irradiated dentin after chemical degradation of the bond interface. The occlusal surface of forty sound human molars was removed exposing the dentin surface (n=10), which was polished, irradiated with Er:YAG laser, acid etched and dried. Twenty specimens were rewetted with 2% CHX (control group) and 20 were rewetted with NaF (5000 ppm). The adhesive system was applied and a 4-mm-high plateau of light-cured composite resin was built up. Resin-dentin sticks were obtained with a rectangular cross-sectional area (0.8-1 mm2) and were either stored in water at 37 ? #61616;C for 24 h or submitted to chemical degradation. For chemical degradation, they were immersed in 10% NaOCl aqueous solution for 5 h and rinsed in water for 1 h. The sticks were submitted to microtensile test in a mechanical testing machine at 0.5 mm/min until failure. Fracture pattern was analyzed using SEM. μTBS values were calculated in MPa and submitted to analysis of variance ANOVA (α=0.05). The variance analysis showed that the 'MMP inhibitor' and 'degradation' factors (p=0.214 and p=0.093, respectively) and interaction between the factors were not statistically significant (p=0.143). Mixed failure predominated in all groups. In conclusion, the 2% CHX and NaF 5000 ppm presented similar μTBS of composite resin to laser-irradiated dentin before and after chemical degradation.
PAM clustering based taxi hotspot detection for informed driving

A huge amount of spatio-temporal data is generated by millions of cabs in metro cities all around the world. This data, if analyzed correctly, can provide a better understanding of the taxi demand. With the increasing preference of customers to have a hassle-free experience, cabs are becoming the ultimate choice for all due to its point to point service. The inability of the taxi companies to meet ever increasing demand of cabs leads to high unavailability of cabs during peak hours and low usage during non peak hours. This taxi imbalance problem can be resolved by analyzing the spatial data and predicting the demand hotspots to identify areas with potential passengers. This paper aims at filtering the data based on the day of the week and the time of the day to segregate the data for further analysis. Clustering techniques are used on the filtered dataset to provide the popularity of regions in the city at different timings. K-means, k-medians and CLARA clustering techniques are used and the results from these clustering techniques are compared. The clustering technique providing the best results for spatial data is chosen for hotspot detection based on the day and time. This date and time based hotspot detection helps the taxi companies to dispatch the cabs at locations predicted to have higher number of passengers in future resulting in better service for customers and increased revenue for the shareholders.
The human development index: a portrait of the 75 districts in Nepal.

A Human Development Index (HDI) is computed for Nepal's 75 districts based on minimum and maximum values. Life expectancy and literacy data are based on the 1991 census. Real per capita Gross Domestic Product is in purchasing power parity (PPP) in US dollars in 1994. Resource access per capita uses data on bank deposits and credits in mid-1991. Results show a range in life expectancy from a low of 37 years in Mugu district to a high of 74 years in Kathmandu district. National literacy averages about 40% of total population. District averages range from 21% in Humla district to 71% in Kathmandu. Resource access ranges from Rupees 147 in Kalilot district to Rupees 47,000 in Kathmandu district. The national average is Rupees 2590 (Rupees 37.2 = 1 US dollar in 1991). Correlations between the 3 HDI indicators show a stronger correlation between life expectancy and literacy. Each indicator appears to represent some unique aspect. District level correlation among the 3 indicators is weaker. The highest HDI ranks are in Kathmandu, followed by Lalitpur, which has a substantially lower rank. The 5th highest rank is in the industrial city of Biratnagar, and the 8th highest rank is in Chitwan. The traditional garments and brassware district of Palpa ranks 17th. Modern Gorkha district ranks 32nd. The Mount Everest district of Solukhumbu ranks 43rd. Kapilbastu, the birth place of Buddha, ranks 56th. Districts north of Kathmandu rank 51st and 54th. Only 5 districts have a rank of over 5. 14 districts have HDI values ranging between 0.4 and 0.5. 30 districts have values between 0.3 and 0.4. 15 districts have values between 0.2 and 0.3. The worst 11 districts have values under 0.2. The UN Development Programme considers a value below 0.5 a low level of human development, which means 70 of Nepal districts. Only Kathmandu has a high level. Lalitpur, Kaski, Bhaktapur, and Morang have a medium level of human development. Correlation of HDI with other development indicators indicates close correspondence.
Prognostics by interacting multiple model estimator

In prognostics, the modeling of the failure models is complicated even for a single component, such as fatigue crack growth. For a complex system, there are a large number of components, and hence the failing models can be even more complicated due to diverse sub-systems and their components. The remaining useful life (RUL) of the system, as a whole, depends on many factors and there are often sudden changes in its progression pattern. The interacting multiple model (IMM) estimator is a filtering technique that tracks multiple models and reports the probability of each model. The information fusion ability of IMM with a built-in probabilistic metric is highly desirable in failure model tracking and higher level fusion. A general framework is proposed to describe the system health by a health index, then the RUL can be evaluated as the current health value divided by the degradation rate of the health index at that moment. Within the general framework of a health index, an IMM estimator is proposed to identify the failure models and evaluate both the values and the confidence interval of the RUL. Simulations on various health degradation models are carried out to illustrate the effectiveness of the IMM based RUL estimation. Specifically, the RUL sub-models can be with nearly constant degradation rate, with accelerated growing degradation rate, or some drastic break-down due to environmental changes such as a hard failure. In simulations, the truth is known, and hence the performance of the RUL estimator can be precisely assessed. This paper has not only proposed a fusion scheme to handle various failure models, but also presented the data generation procedure of health index in various situations. Such data sets can be used as benchmarks to compare various prognostics techniques.
EMBIRA: An Accelerator for Model-Based Iterative Reconstruction

Tomographic reconstruction, which involves computing a 3-D volume from its 2-D projections, is an important problem in imaging with wide-ranging applications, including medical scanners, electron microscopy, nondestructive testing, and transportation security. Model-based iterative reconstruction (MBIR) is a popular approach to 3-D reconstruction that has demonstrated the state-of-the-art reconstruction quality on several applications, and has been deployed in commercial healthcare systems. However, software implementations of MBIR on commodity general-purpose processors demonstrate poor performance due to its high compute and data requirements and cache unfriendly data access patterns. In this paper, we develop an efficient MBIR accelerator (EMBIRA) that achieves significant performance and energy improvement over software implementations. EMBIRA utilizes arrays of three types of specialized processing elements that match MBIR's computation patterns, and is further operated as a two-level nested pipeline to fully exploit the parallelism present in the algorithm. Another important source from which EMBIRA derives its efficiency is by constraining the sequence in which voxels1 in the 3-D volume are reconstructed. This enables better data reuse within the accelerator, thereby significantly reducing the number of off-chip memory accesses. To demonstrate the benefits of EMBIRA, we implemented a prototype on an Altera DE5 field-programmable gate array (FPGA) platform that includes an Altera Stratix V GX FPGA and DDR3 memory. Our implementation of EMBIRA, operating at 165 MHz, achieved 51.8× (5.8×) improvement in performance, and 355× (199×) improvement in energy, compared with optimized sequential (multithreaded) software implementations on a 48-core 2.3-GHz AMD Opteron-based server.
Association of CD14 Promoter Polymorphism with Otitis Media and Pneumococcal Vaccine Responses

Innate immunity is of particular importance for protection against infection during early life, when adaptive immune responses are immature. CD14 plays key roles in innate immunity, including in defense against pathogens associated with otitis media, a major pediatric health care issue. The T allele of the CD14 C-159T polymorphism has been associated with increased serum CD14 levels. Our objective was to investigate the hypothesis that the CD14 C-159T allele is protective against recurrent acute otitis media in children. The association between the CD14 promoter genotype and the number of acute otitis media episodes was evaluated both retrospectively and prospectively in a cohort of 300 children. Serotype-specific immunoglobulin G (IgG) antibody responses after pneumococcal vaccinations were examined according to CD14 genotype to compare immune responsiveness across genotypes. An age-dependent association was found: compared with that for CC homozygotes aged between 12 to 24 months, TT homozygotes had fewer episodes of acute otitis media (79 versus 41%, respectively; P = 0.004); this relationship was absent in older children. Additionally, TT homozygotes showed higher serotype-specific anti-pneumococcal IgG antibody levels. Our data suggest that genetic variation in CD14, a molecule at the interface of innate and adaptive immune responses, plays a key role in the defense against middle ear disease in childhood and in pneumococcal vaccine responsiveness. These findings are likely to be important to these and other immune-mediated outcomes in early life.
Miniature Wilkinson Divider and Hybrid, Coupler with Harmonic Suppression, Using T-Shaped Transmission Line

This paper presents two microwave power splitters, utilizing equivalent T-shaped transmission line (TL) model. The advantages of the proposed over the conventional splitters are not only superior miniaturized size but also suppress harmonic response due to its' periodic structures. Both the proposed Wilkinson divider and Hybrid coupler based on the T-shaped TL are designed and fabricated on an FR-4 substrate at 1 GHz and 2 GHz, respectively. The measured results of the proposed structures are compared and show good agreement with the simulated results.
The effect of cardiac resynchronization therapy on left ventricular diastolic function assessed with speckle‐tracking echocardiography

Changes in left ventricular (LV) diastolic function after cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT) in relation to LV reverse remodelling and heart failure aetiology have not been extensively characterized. The aims of the study were to evaluate changes in LV diastolic function with speckle‐tracking echocardiography in relation to: (i) cardiac resynchronization therapy response (LV remodelling) and (ii) heart failure aetiology.
On the link between human capital, innovation and performance: evidence from a resource-based economy

The study measured the relationship between human capital, innovation and performance in the mining industry in Nigeria. The sample size was 150 purposively selected companies. The response rate was 70.6%. Knowledge-capital theory was explored in this study. Primary and secondary data sources were used for the study. Econometrics technique was used to determine the relationship among the variables. From the study, it is observed that all the indicators of human capital in the mining industry are important in determining the outcome of innovations in the industry. It was also observed that all the indicators of human capital are important in determining the productivity in the industry as well. A new knowledge advanced in this study is that there is just a thin line between process innovation and organisational innovation. In conclusion, the study identified a linear relationship between human capital, innovation prevalence and performance in the mining industry in Nigeria.
Microbial and endotoxin contamination of water-soluble metalworking fluids.

UNLABELLED The present study is a part of a larger project on assessment of exposure to biological agents and respiratory health effects among metal workers. OBJECTIVES The aim of this study was to evaluate the level of microbial contamination of metalworking coolants as a potential source of harmful biological agents in three different metal industry plants in Poland. MATERIAL AND METHODS Ten samples of coolants with a different state of wear, including four fresh fluids, were analyzed. Qualitative and quantitative analysis of bacteria and mould content was performed using standard analytical methods. Bacterial endotoxin concentration was determined by the kinetic, chromogenic version of the LAL test. RESULTS The analysis showed the total bacterial counts ranging from 1.0x10(1) CFU/ml to 3.2x10(7) CFU/ml, 60% to 100% of which were Gram-negative bacteria capable of producing endotoxins. Among the highly contaminated coolants, one unused concentrate was also found. The predominant species of bacteria was Shewanella putrefaciens present in 60% of the samples. As for moulds, the predominant species was Acremonium butyri. The average concentration of bacterial endotoxins was 773 EU/ml in the old coolants, and much lower in the fresh fluids 285 EU/ml. A correlation (r=0.66) was found between endotoxin concentration and the number of Gram-negative bacteria detected in the coolants. CONCLUSION Procedures should be developed for cleaning tanks during fluid replacement to minimize the risk of bacterial growth in the coolants and limit bioaerosol emission in workplace. Due to the affinity of microflora for the water phase, it is advisable to use effective biocides with appropriate partition coefficient between the water phase and oil phase.
Finite-Time Consensus of Switched Multiagent Systems

This paper focuses on the finite-time consensus (FTC) problem of switched multiagent system (MAS) which is composed of continuous-time and discrete-time subsystems. Different from the existing results, each agent of this system is controlled by switching control method. To achieve consensus in finite time for the switched MAS, two types of consensus protocols (the FTC protocol and the fixed-time consensus (FdTC) protocol) are proposed. By using algebraic graph theory, Lyapunov theory and matrix theory, it is proved that the FTC problem in strongly connected network and leader-following network can be solved, respectively. When the initial states of agents are not available, the FdTC protocol is applied to solve the FTC problem. Simulations are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of our theoretical results.
MRAS Sensorless Vector Control of an Induction Motor Using New Sliding-Mode and Fuzzy-Logic Adaptation Mechanisms

In this paper, two novel adaptation schemes are proposed to replace the classical PI controller used in model reference adaptive speed-estimation schemes that are based on rotor flux. The first proposed adaptation scheme is based on sliding-mode theory. A new speed-estimation adaptation law is derived using Lyapunov theory to ensure estimation stability, as well as fast error dynamics. The other adaptation mechanism is based on fuzzy-logic strategy. A detailed experimental comparison between the new and conventional schemes is carried out in both open- and closed-loop sensorless modes of operation when a vector control drive is working at very low speed. Superior performance has been obtained using the new sliding-mode and fuzzy-logic adaptation mechanisms in both modes of operations.