Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Quality control of surgical and interventional procedures: a review of the CUSUM

Background: The report of the CUSUM across surgical and interventional procedures has spawned a fair confusion in the literature. Aim: To assess the use of the CUSUM and to clarify its utilisation in the perspective of future studies. Nature of the study: Retrospective review. Methods: A systematic literature search of Medline was carried out. From each article, data regarding the design of the study, the specialty, the performance criterion, the unit under control, the methodology and the model of the CUSUM used, the use of a graph, the use of a test and the type of test applied were retrieved. Results: 31 studies were found relevant. The design was mainly retrospective for the analysis of the learning curve. The main performance criteria under control were morbidity, mortality and success of the procedure. A graph was plotted in all studies as a CUSUM plot or as cumulative sums of non-negative values. A test was used in 17 studies. Mislabelling of the plot and the test, and misuse of control limits were the most commonly reported mistakes. Conclusion: The CUSUM tool is not yet properly reported in the surgical literature. Therefore, reporting of the CUSUM should be clarified and standardised before its use widens.
Ectopic eruption of the maxillary second molar: Predictive factors.

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was to investigate the diagnostic aspects, contributing conditions, and predictive key factors associated with ectopic eruption of maxillary second molars. MATERIAL AND METHODS This retrospective study evaluated the study models, lateral cephalographs, and panoramic radiographs of 40 adult subjects (20 men, 20 women) with bilateral ectopic eruption and 40 subjects (20 men, 20 women) with normal eruption of the maxillary second molars. Studied variables were analyzed statistically by independent t-tests, univariate and multivariate logistic regression analysis, followed by receiver-operating characteristic analysis. RESULTS Tooth widths of bilateral lateral incisors, canines, and premolars were wider in the ectopic group, which resulted in greater arch lengths. The ANB angle and maxillary tuberosity distance (PTV-M1, PTV-M2) were smaller in the ectopic group. The long axes of the maxillary molars showed significant distal inclination in the ectopic group. The multivariate logistic regression analysis showed that three key factors-arch length, ANB angle, and PTV-M1 distance-were significantly associated with ectopic eruption of the second molars. The area under the curve (AUC) was the largest for the combination of the three key factors with an AUC greater than 0.75. PTV-M1 alone was the single factor that showed the strongest association with ectopic eruption (AUC = 0.7363). CONCLUSIONS An increase in arch length, decrease in ANB angle, and decrease in maxillary tuberosity distance to the distal aspect of the maxillary first molar (PTV-M1) were the most predictive factors associated with ectopic eruption of maxillary second molars.
IMPACTO PSICOSOCIAL DE LA TECNOLOGÍA DE INFORMACIÓN Y COMUNICACIÓN (TIC): TECNOESTRÉS, DAÑOS FÍSICOS Y SATISFACCIÓN LABORAL

The introduction of information and communication technologies (ICT) in the organizations produced and still produces substantial changes in these structures at the modus operandi level and also with respect to the physical and psychological health of the workers using them. This phenomenon conditions the organizations’ operational skills, because it depends on the abilities, skills and capacities of the individuals who use these tools. Due to this relationship, the user might be at risk of a number of damages, such as anxiety, stress, depression and other psychosocial and physical disorders. Techno-stress is the concept that defines such illnesses. This study fits the concept. The research focused on a group of intensive users of a computer software manufacturing company in the area of security and defence, located in Portugal. It intends to acknowledge the psychosocial impact that ICT produce in these individuals. It also aims to verify to what extent the socio-demographic variables (gender, age, marital status, household composition, chores, and experience with computers) influence the levels of the existing techno-stress. The relationship between the level of techno-stress and professional satisfaction, as well as the factors which influence this relationship are also subject of this research. Key-words: techno-stress; psychosocial impact; ICT; professional satisfaction
Beyond Risk-Taking

In addition to risk-taking behavior, we propose that psychological safety also promotes prosocial behavior through cooperative goal interdependence. To differentiate these two types of effects, we contrasted the moderating effects of two interpersonal harmony motives. A survey in China supported the indirect effect of psychological safety on helping behavior through cooperative goal interdependence. This mediated relationship was moderated by harmony enhancement such that the mediated effect of psychological safety was weaker when harmony enhancement was high. Psychological safety was positively related to innovative behavior, and this relationship was moderated by disintegration avoidance such that it was weaker when disintegration avoidance was high. These results shed light on the different effects of psychological safety and their underlying mechanisms.
Measuring Outcomes in People Who Have Had a Stroke and Their Carers: Can the Telephone Be Used?

Abstract Purpose: Telephone interviews may be a cost-effective alternative to administering stroke outcome measures for people who are living in the community following a stroke, but there is a lack of research that has compared the different modes of administering outcome measures. The aim of this study was to determine whether telephone administration of selected stroke outcome measures resulted in significantly different results to face-to-face administration of the same outcome measures. Method: Nineteen participants who were taking part in a randomised controlled trial (RCT) evaluating the effectiveness of a postdischarge education and support package for stroke patients and their carers were recruited for this study. Participants had the RCT follow-up outcome measures, at 3 months post discharge, administered by both telephone and face-to-face. Participants were randomised to receive either the telephone or face-to-face administration first and a period of 2 weeks separated the two administrations. Outcome measures were the Knowledge of Stroke Questionnaire, a stroke self-efficacy questionnaire, Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale, Stroke and Aphasia Quality of Life Scale, and the Caregiver Strain Index. Results: There were no significant differences between scores obtained on any of the outcome measures that were administered by telephone and face-to-face (P > .05). Conclusion: The telephone can be used to administer the outcome measures that were evaluated in this study to stroke patients and carers. These findings may be of benefit to stroke researchers and clinicians who wish to incorporate the use of telephone measures into the follow-up care of stroke patients and their carers.
Can a social networking site support afterschool group learning of Mandarin?

Schools are often encouraged to facilitate extra-curricular learning within their own premises. This study addresses the potential of social networking sites (SNS) for supporting such out-of-class study. Given concerns that learning on these sites may happen at a surface level, we adopted self-determination theory for designing a social networking experience that aspired to offer a ‘community of inquiry’. A case study of a Mandarin class is reported, in which seven children voluntarily attended afterschool lessons and used a SNS for 12 weeks. Pedagogical strategies to create a sense of relatedness and competence and to offer autonomy support were used in order to steer their informal communication and exploration towards deep and meaningful learning. Our findings show that the online social networking activities are not used simply to extend formal lessons to informal online environment, instead they open up opportunities for students to benefit from informal exploration and thus enrich their experience of learning about the subject.
Dynamic model based ball trajectory prediction for a robot ping-pong player

In this paper, a novel ball trajectory prediction method is proposed for a robot ping-pong player. The method is based on the dynamic model in the sky and the bouncing dynamic model between the ball and the table. First, the ambiguity of the dynamic model in the sky is removed. Then, the bouncing model between the ball and the table is proposed to get the relationship of the emergence speed and the incidence speed. The corresponding coefficients of models are trained according to the 3D Cartesian coordinates of the ball calculated from a high speed stereo vision system. With known dynamic models, the trajectory can be predicted if several initial trajectory points of the ball from the vision system are given. Experiments show that the trajectory is able to be predicted accurately in several milliseconds. The result of our method is better than that by LWR based approach.
Methods for Conducting Sensitivity Analysis of Trials with Potentially Nonignorable Competing Causes of Censoring

Summary. We consider inference for the treatment‐arm mean difference of an outcome that would have been measured at the end of a randomized follow‐up study if, during the course of the study, patients had not initiated a nonrandomized therapy or dropped out. We argue that the treatment‐arm mean difference is not identified unless unverifiable assumptions are made. We describe identifying assumptions that are tantamount to postulating relationships between the components of a pattern‐mixture model but that can also be interpreted as imposing restrictions on the cause‐specific censoring probabilities of a selection model. We then argue that, although sufficient for identification, these assumptions are insufficient for inference due to the curse of dimensionality. We propose reducing dimensionality by specifying semiparametric cause‐specific selection models. These models are useful for conducting a sensitivity analysis to examine how inference for the treatment‐arm mean difference changes as one varies the magnitude of the cause‐specific selection bias over a plausible range. We provide methodology for conducting such sensitivity analysis and illustrate our methods with an analysis of data from the AIDS Clinical Trial Group (ACTG) study 002.
Alignment of the Intended, Planned, and Enacted Curriculum in General and Special Education and Its Relation to Student Achievement

In this initial study, the authors examined the content of the planned and enacted eighth-grade mathematics curriculum for 18 general and special education teachers and the curricula’s alignment to state standards via the Surveys of the Enacted Curriculum. The relation between alignment and student achievement was analyzed for three formative assessments and the corresponding state test within a school year. Results indicated that alignment for the planned and enacted curriculum to state standards was low with no significant differences between general and special education teachers. Significant correlations between student achievement averages for 238 students and teacher alignment indices were equal to or greater than . 48. When teacher groups were examined separately, the relation between alignment and achievement remained significant only for special education, with correlations equal to or greater than . 75. The study’s conceptual and methodological framework provides a model for subsequent research on alignment and opportunity to learn in general and special education.
Design and simulation of back-to-back converter for modern wind energy generation system using dSPACE

This paper presents the analysis, design and simulation of a back to back converter for a modern wind energy system. In the initial stage, the study of DFIG (Doubly Fed Induction Generator) is carried out in order to have a broader understanding of the functions of the back to back converter. Then the design of back to back converter and choice of components is elaborated. The control strategy for the back to back converter is described with equations and the snapshot of the theoretical scheme and scheme implemented in the real life situation are both shown. The control strategy for the grid-side and rotor-side converter is thoroughly elaborated. The implementation of control strategy is done with the help of dSPACE. Being a very new technology in present academic scenario, introduction regarding dSPACE has been made. The dSPACE even though offering some facilities, has some limitations. Hence, the implementation of the present scheme with dSPACE while keeping an eye on the limitation is explained. The necessary adaptation made while using the control strategy are also focused. Finally, pulses obtained from dSPACE for Grid Side Converter (GSC) and Rotor Side Converter (RSC) are shown.
3 D Saliency Based on Supervoxels Rarity in Point Clouds

Visual saliency is a computational process that seeks to identify the most attention-drawing regions from a visual point of view. Most methods of salience are based on characteristics such as color, texture and more recently tried to introduce the depth information, which is known to be an important cue in the human cognitive system. We present a new full 3D mechanism of computational attention for extracting salient information directly from a 3D point cloud which can be either on a single RGBD view or the fusion of multiple viewpoints. The proposed method reduces the point cloud complexity through over-segmentation in order not to process all voxels information, but only supervoxels, which are larger color an geometrically consistent 3D structures. A very interesting feature of our algorithm is that it provides a bottom-up saliency map which is viewpoint independent. This bottom-up saliency map can then be specialized by using topdown information for a given viewpoint by adding a centered Gaussian and the viewpoint-dependent depth information. Our approach was tested on a complex database of 80 color depth and picture pairs with associated pixel level ground truth segmentation masks. The use of 3D Point Clouds improves the results compared to depth maps extended models even if only the color feature is used.
The Changing Relations between Education Professionals, the State and Citizen Consumers in Europe: Re-Thinking Restructuring as Capitalisation

This article focuses on research about welfare state restructuring in education and its implications for the teaching profession. Several things are described and discussed. However, amongst the most important are pan-European developments in the social relations of production in education over the past 50 years with respect to the socialisation, habituation and commercialisation of education labour, and a suggested lowering of general standards of public education and increasing class differences in the amount and quality of education consumed by citizens. The idea expressed about this is that neo-liberal restructuring is leading to the creation of apparatuses through which education is objectified for economic accumulation through an outsourcing of functions that were formerly carried out within first domestic and voluntary, and then state arrangements to capitalist enterprises. This is part of a successive privatisation of education services for processes of capitalisation. It consists of an updating of the moral and legal determination of education services by the prevailing standards of market capitalism and an abdication of responsibility for the plight of negatively affected individuals, who, nevertheless, in some intriguing way still often support the system of transformation in question.
Radar contribution to highly automated driving

Over the last years, radar based driver assistance and active safety systems have found wide spread application in nearly all vehicle brands all over the world. With the market introduction of the 2014 Mercedes-Benz S-Class vehicle equipped with six radar sensors covering the vehicles environment 360° in the near and far range, autonomous driving has become a reality even in low speed highway scenarios. This paves the way for a fast evolution of highly automated driving that also will extend to rural and urban traffic situations. One big straight ahead was made in August 2013. A Mercedes-Benz S-Class vehicle - Mercedes-internally called “Bertha”- drove completely autonomously for about 100 km from Mannheim to Pforzheim, Germany. It followed the well-known historic Bertha Benz Memorial Route. This was done on the basis of one stereo vision system, eight serial radar sensors and a huge amount of radar based innovative perception algorithms. These new algorithms taking into account that urban scenarios are characterized by dramatic shorter reaction and observation times, shorter mean free distances, a 360° interaction zone and a large variety of object types to be considered. Automotive radar has been the backbone of driver assistance systems and the innovation driver in this field. The question which came up was, will it be able to meet the requirements of eruptive innovations like autonomous driving. The article describes the main challenges, which Daimler radar researches had to face and their solutions to make Bertha see. It will also outline the remaining challenges for radar research and product development.
Extending SQL for Computing Shortest Paths

Reachability and shortest paths are among two of the most common queries realized on graphs. While graph frameworks and property graph databases provide an extensive and convenient built-in support for these operations, it is still both clunky and inefficient to perform on standard SQL DBMSs. In this paper, we present an extension to the standard SQL language to compute both reachability predicates and many-to-many shortest path queries. We first describe a methodology to represent a directed graph starting from virtual table expressions. Second, we introduce a new type of operator to compute shortest paths on the given graph. Our semantic abides by the rules of operating with table expressions, ensuring that the property of the closure from the relational algebra is retained. Finally, we developed a prototype implementation of our extension on top of MonetDB, an existing open source relational DBMS. Our preliminary results still show that dynamically building our representation of the underlying graph overly dominates the query time. Currently, this cost can only be amortized when executing multiple shortest paths on the same graph.
Experimental study on mobile robot navigation using stereo vision

This paper presents the experimental study on the quantization error of stereo vision camera with the help of VICON motion capture system and its application to vision based navigation for a mobile robot. An experimental system is developed to obtain the quantization measurement error of stereo vision camera in different depth. The measurement error model is utilized to help to design the extended Kalman filter to fuse the information from stereo vision camera and optical encoder equipped on the mobile robot platform. The VICON motion capture system is also employed to justify the accuracy of vision based navigation algorithm. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of measurement error model in improving the navigation accuracy.
Detection of a large TBX5 deletion in a family with Holt-Oram syndrome

Editor—Although point mutations are responsible for many genetic disorders, it is increasingly being appreciated that many disorders can be caused by deletion or duplication of DNA sequences. Alterations in DNA copy number are responsible for several categories of disorders and can range in scale from a chromosome or chromosomal region to just one exon of a single gene. For instance, duplication and deletion of a 1.5 Mb DNA fragment on chromosome 17p11.2 containing the gene PMP22 is the common mechanism for Charcot-Marie-Tooth type 1A (CMT1A) and hereditary neuropathy with liability to pressure palsies (HNPP), respectively.1 At the level of individual exons, deletion of exon 172 or duplication of exon 133 of the BRCA1 gene can predispose to breast and ovarian cancer. Cytogenetic studies (including CGH and array based CGH) can screen the whole genome for copy number changes. However, for most cytogenetic methods, the main disadvantage is low resolution, as they can detect deletions and amplifications only when several megabases of DNA are involved.4 Array based CGH may detect more localised changes,5 6 but at present is technically challenging and expensive to implement. Gene dosage assessment at specific genetic loci is possible by using multiplex amplifiable probe hybridisation (MAPH),7 a simple, inexpensive, and non-microscopic approach to determining locus copy number in a complex genome. In this method, specific short probes flanked by the same primer pair are hybridised with a test genomic DNA sample. After stringent washing, these probes can be recovered and amplified quantitatively by PCR, and products resolved by polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis. The main advantages of this approach are high resolution (down to a few hundred base pairs) and the parallel processing of many DNA samples in a single experiment. We have applied this method to genomic DNA from Holt-Oram …
Crumbling land: the postmodernity debate and the analysis of environmental problems

The primary aim of this article is to clarify the contemporary tensions between postmodern and environmental thought and, in so doing, to facilitate a better understanding of environmental problems and of the inter-relationships between science, society and nature. I should state at the outset that I am concerned here primarily with academic discourses surrounding postmodernism and environmentalism, though the issues raised have wider significance for environmental policy and action. I suggest here that the linkage of postmodernism with environmentalism advanced in some of the literature is misplaced and is far more problematic than is widely acknowledged. I argue that there are difficulties in using poststructuralist epistemologies for the analysis of environmental problems which reveal important weaknesses in the conceptual strength and analytical clarity of contemporary postmodern thought. While postmodern and environmental ideas share certain concerns such as the ecological critique of modernity and the erosion of scientific authority, the postmodern environmentalist literature frequently draws on simplistic distinctions between modernism and postmodernism. At the epistemological level, I identify difficulties with the treatment of the agency of nature in poststructuralist thought, where the drift towards relativism may lead to an over-reliance on the role of language in environmental explanation. I conclude my discussion by showing how ideas drawn from critical realism can help us recognize where ontological and epistemological issues have become blurred, giving rise to the ’epistemic fallacy’, which undermines the possibilities for normative scientific discourse . 2