Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
NT-proBNP and Its Correlation with In-Hospital Mortality in the Very Elderly without an Admission Diagnosis of Heart Failure

Background The diagnosis of heart failure (HF) is often difficult and underestimated in very elderly comorbid patients, especially when an echocardiographic evaluation is not available or feasible. Aim: to evaluate NT-proBNP values and their correlation with in-hospital mortality in a population of very elderly hospitalized for medical conditions other than HF. Methods We performed a prospective observational study on 403 very elderly admitted to an Internal Medicine and Geriatrics Department. Exclusion criterion was an admission diagnosis of HF. Patients with at least one symptom or sign compatible with HF were tested for NT-proBNP. NT-proBNP values < 300 pg/ml were considered as an age-independent exclusion criterion for HF (high negative predictive value), while NT-proBNP values ≥ 1800 pg/ml were considered as a diagnostic criterion. Main comorbidities and laboratory parameters were considered to adjust regression analyses between NT-proBNP and in-hospital mortality. Results NT-proBNP values ≥ 1800 pg/ml were present in 61.0% of patients and 32.8% of patients laid between 300 ≤ NT-proBNP < 1800 pg/ml values. NT-proBNP values were associated with the main indices of disease severity/organ failure considered such as reduced eGFR, reduced albumin and elevated CRP. NT-proBNP values ≥ 1800 pg/ml and ln(NT-proBNP) values were significantly associated with in-hospital mortality independently from the main comorbidities and lab parameters considered. The patients, who were already taking ACE inhibitors/Angiotensin Receptor Blockers before admission, showed lower in-hospital mortality. Conclusions Testing for NT-proBNP should be strongly recommended in the hospitalized very elderly, because of the very high prevalence of underlying HF and its impact on in-hospital mortality, to identify an underlying cardiac involvement that requires appropriate treatment.
COMSOL assistance for the modeling of cellular microsystems

The developments of microsystems for biotechnology have been fast in the last few years, and no sign of slowing down is observed. It has begun with lab-on-chip for genomics, especially for the recognition of DNA sequences, followed by protein reactors and immunoassays, and today the emphasis is on cellomics. Cell-chips are design to monitor the behavior of cells, individually or as a group, and to estimate parameters such as cell signals, cell response to drugs, and cellular differentiation. In this paper, we present some examples of cell manipulation in chips—which is often called cellular biomicrofluidics [1]—and cell-chips, and show how their functioning and numerical simulation and COMSOL in particular can contribute to their design.
An 0.9 x 1.2", Low Power, Energy-Harvesting System with Custom Multi-Channel Communication Interface

Presented is a self-powered computing system, sunflower, that uses a novel combination of a PIN photodiode array, switching regulators, and a supercapacitor, to provide a small footprint renewable energy source. The design provides software-controlled power-adaptation facilities, for both the main processor and its peripherals. The system's power consumption is characterized, and its energy-scavenging efficiency is quantified with field measurements under a variety of weather conditions
The influence of coordination on program structure

We examine the inherent properties of some of the most popular coordination models of today and show how they contribute to the difficulty of systematic construction of coordination protocols for the cooperation of concurrent processes, as explicit, tangible pieces of software. They include the object oriented models of communication and the generative tuple space paradigm of models such as Linda. We then describe a new generic model: Idealized Worker Idealized Manager (IWIM) and discuss its advantages for coordination of concurrent activities, especially in control oriented applications. We demonstrate its "completeness" by showing that it can trivially emulate other well known communication and coordination models. Separation of computation and coordination code into different program modules is one of the important properties of this model, which is fully exploited in the pure coordination language MANIFOLD.
PROTECTION OF CHILDREN RIGHTS AGAINST DETRIMENTAL EFFECT OF PUBLIC INFORMATION: CONTENT ANALYSIS OF MAGAZINES FOR CHILDREN

The article interprets qualitative and quantitative research data disclosing the detrimental effect of public information in the context of children rights’ protection. The empirical research is based on Social Acquisition Theory, presents the main statement – an individual learns social behaviour through observation. This theory especially emphasises the impact of environment, behaviour and personality’s factors and their general effect. It is dislosed that magazines for children play an important role in the process of child’s becoming a member of society and perceiving the surrounding reality. Referring to Social Constructivism Theory, media creates social meanings and presents them to the people who are creating their own social reality considering or not the symbolic media constructions. Therefore, media performs the function of social reality construction. The results of empirical research have revealed that negative public information is presented in the magazines for children: violent, erotic, detrimental to health and other negative information. The majority of information is erotic or contains obscene words, curses, gestures. KEYWORDS: childhood education, children rights, public information, qualitative, quantitative research methods. DOI: http://dx.doi. org/ 10.15181/atee.v1i0. 680
Cooperative Network Coding With MIMO Transmission in Wireless Decode-and-Forward Relay Networks

This paper proposes a cooperative network-coding (CNC) scheme for a dual-hop decode-and-forward (DF) multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) system, which consists of multiple source stations (SSs), one relay station (RS), and one base station (BS). Both the RS and the BS use multiple antennas, whereas the SS has only one antenna. Through a MIMO configuration between the RS and the BS, a cooperative network coded DF (CNC-DF) relay protocol is proposed to transmit the composite data flows from multiple SSs via the RS to the BS simultaneously to reduce delay and to provide network-coded cooperation gain. To demonstrate its effectiveness, CNC-DF is compared with time-division multiple-access (TDMA) DF and orthogonal space-time coded (OSTC) DF protocols. The ergodic capacity and outage probability for these three protocols are explicitly derived, showing that the proposed CNC-DF scheme can significantly improve the performance, which is closely related to the minimum of the numbers of SSs and the numbers of antennas used by the RS and the BS.
Globular Clusters in the Galactic Bulge

Abstract A view of the Galactic bulge by means of their globular clusters is fundamental for a deep understanding of its formation and evolution. Connections between the globular cluster and field star properties in terms of kinematics, orbits, chemical abundances, and ages should shed light on different stellar population components. Based on spatial distribution and metallicity, we define a probable best list of bulge clusters, containing 43 entries. Future work on newly discovered objects, mostly from the VVV survey, is suggested. These candidates might alleviate the issue of missing clusters on the far side of the bulge. We discuss the reddening law affecting the cluster distances towards the centre of the Galaxy, and conclude that the most suitable total-to-selective absorption value appears to be R V=3.2, in agreement with recent analyses. An update of elemental abundances for bulge clusters is provided.
Computer Aided Minimization Procedure for Boolean Functions

The paper describes CAMP, a Computer Aided Minimization Procedure for Boolean functions. The procedure is based on theorems of switching theory and fully exploits the power of degree of adjacency. The program does not generate any superfluous prime implicant and all the essential and selective prime implicants are chosen with no or minimum iteration. For shallow functions consisting mainly of essential prime implicants (EPIs) and a few selective prime implicants (SPIs), CAMP produces the exact minimal sum of product form. For dense functions consisting of a large number of inter-connected cyclic SPI chains, the solution may not be exactly minimal, but near minimal.
Location and Scatter Matching for Dataset Shift in Text Mining

Dataset shift from the training data in a source domain to the data in a target domain poses a great challenge for many statistical learning methods. Most algorithms can be viewed as exploiting only the first-order statistics, namely, the empirical mean discrepancy to evaluate the distribution gap. Intuitively, considering only the empirical mean may not be statistically efficient. In this paper, we propose a non-parametric distance metric with a good property which jointly considers the empirical mean (Location) and sample covariance (Scatter) difference. More specifically, we propose an improved symmetric Stein's loss function which combines the mean and covariance discrepancy into a unified Bregman matrix divergence of which Jensen-Shannon divergence between normal distributions is a particular case. Our target is to find a good feature representation which can reduce the distribution gap between different domains, at the same time, ensure that the new derived representation can encode most discriminative components with respect to the label information. We have conducted extensive experiments on several document classification datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.
Around the circular law

These expository notes are centered around the circular law theorem, which states that the empirical spectral distribution of a nxn random matrix with i.i. d. entries of variance 1/n tends to the uniform law on the unit disc of the complex plane as the dimension $n$ tends to infinity. This phenomenon is the non-Hermitian counterpart of the semi circular limit for Wigner random Hermitian matrices, and the quarter circular limit for Marchenko-Pastur random covariance matrices. We present a proof in a Gaussian case, due to Silverstein, based on a formula by Ginibre, and a proof of the universal case by revisiting the approach of Tao and Vu, based on the Hermitization of Girko, the logarithmic potential, and the control of the small singular values. Beyond the finite variance model, we also consider the case where the entries have heavy tails, by using the objective method of Aldous and Steele borrowed from randomized combinatorial optimization. The limiting law is then no longer the circular law and is related to the Poisson weighted infinite tree. We provide a weak control of the smallest singular value under weak assumptions, using asymptotic geometric analysis tools. We also develop a quaternionic Cauchy-Stieltjes transform borrowed from the Physics literature.
Femoral nerve block for patient undergoing total knee arthroplasty

Background:The existence of peripheral opioid receptors and its effectiveness in peripheral nerve block remain controversial. The aim of this prospective, randomized, double-blinded study was to examine the analgesic effects of adding fentanyl to ropivacaine for continuous femoral nerve block (CFNB) using patient-controlled analgesia after total knee arthroplasty (TKA). Methods:The patients were divided into 2 groups, each with n = 40 in ropivacaine (R) group and n = 42 in R with fentanyl (R + F) group. After operation, the patients in each group received R + F and R alone via a femoral nerve catheter, respectively. We assessed the visual analog scale (VAS) pain immediately before administration (baseline) and at 15, 30, and 60 minutes on postanesthesia care unit (PACU), and resting and ambulatory VAS score up to 24 hours. Results:Overall, the average VAS scores in the R + F group were slightly lower than those of the R group. However, the VAS score differences between groups were not statistically significant, except for 30 minutes (P = 0.009) in PACU. R group showed higher supplemental analgesics consumption in average compared with R + F group, but not significant. Conclusion:Additional fentanyl did not show prominent enhancement of analgesic effect in the field of CFNB after TKA.
Specific primer sets used to amplify by PCR the hepatitis B virus overlapping S/Pol region select different viral variants

Summary. PCR detection of viral genomes has provided new insights into viral diagnosis. Nowadays, it is the most frequently used nucleic acid testing (qualitative and quantitative) technique. The aim of this study was to analyse the major circulating hepatitis B virus (HBV) variants PCR‐amplified by three sets of primers in a patient infected with genotype E. The HBV S/Pol overlapping genomic region was amplified from the serum of an infected child using three primer sets previously described. Sequence analysis corresponding to the HBV S/Pol region revealed the presence of different viral populations depending on the set of primers used. D144A S‐escape mutant was detected with two of the primer sets, while the rtL217R mutant within the Pol – conferring resistance to Adefovir – could be picked up with a different pair of primer sets. This study undoubtedly implies that the description of viral polymorphisms should be stated together with the sequence of the primers used for PCR amplification when studies of escape and/or antiviral‐resistant HBV mutants are carried out.
Going green for self or for others? Gender and identity salience effects on sustainable consumption

The aim of this study is to explore the effects of gender and salient identity on sustainable consumption. In particular, this research investigates how gender effects on sustainable consumption may be contingent to the identity that is salient to the consumer during the evaluation process (personal vs. social). According to identity-based motivation theory, the salience of personal identity means that people temporarily think about themselves as individuals, whereas social identity salience means that people see themselves as part of a group. The results from an experimental study indicated that when personal identity was salient, female participants declared higher levels of sustainable consumption compared with male participants. However, when social identity was salient, male participants increased their sustainable consumption intentions to the same level as female participants. Finally, this research discusses the theoretical and managerial implications on identities, gender and sustainable consumption.
A QoS-aware Computation Model for Dynamic Web Service Selection

Dynamic services selection is an important and challenging work, especially, when a set of services have similar functionality and are available to the requesters' demands. Therefore, it is necessary to distinguish among these reliable services by computing the QoS value. Crucially, an optimal service can be selected depending on a combined evaluation of qualities of service (QoS). At the same time, these web services that meet the users' requirements should support rapid and dynamic composition of services. In this paper, we presented a QoS-based computation model for web service selection through improving the previous normalization algorithm by which the same QoS value may be gained for different services. In addition, it should have minimal time overhead and more precise service location.
Metrics for Traffic Analysis Prevention

This paper considers systems for Traffic Analysis Prevention (TAP) in a theoretical model. It considers TAP based on padding and rerouting of messages and describes the effects each has on the difference between the actual and the observed traffic matrix (TM). The paper introduces an entropy-based approach to the amount of uncertainty a global passive adversary has in determining the actual TM, or alternatively, the probability that the actual TM has a property of interest. Unlike previous work, the focus is on determining the overall amount of anonymity a TAP system can provide, or the amount it can provide for a given cost in padding and rerouting, rather than on the amount of protection afforded particular communications.
Cross-Layer Design for the MIMO System with Zero-Forcing Receiver in the Presence of Channel Estimation Error

Multiple input multiple output (MIMO) system has been recognized as a promising candidate for future wireless communication. The adaptive modulation which adjusts the transmitter parameters, such as modulation order, transmit power or coding rate, to time-varying channel conditions has been applied to MIMO system and shown a good average spectral efficiency performance. In this paper, the channel estimation error (CEE)'s effect on the effective spectral efficiency of the MIMO system with zero-forcing receiver is investigated, when the transmitter adopts adaptive modulation. To reduce CEE's negative effect, a dynamic adaptive modulation scheme is proposed. This scheme can dynamically adjust the signal to noise ratio (SNR) thresholds for the different modulation orders according to the feedbacks from the receiver. The numerical results show that the system performance of the proposed scheme is near optimal with acceptable implementation complexity.
Talking About Genetically Modified (GM) Foods in South Korea: The Role of the Internet in the Spiral of Silence Process

Using the issue of genetically modified foods, this study examines how the Internet may affect the spiral of silence phenomenon in South Korea. More specifically, we explore whether the Internet has created a social environment, where people can exchange opinions more freely without being fearful of social isolation. Analyzing data from an online survey, we first examine whether the Internet can play a role as a source of information, from which people assess the climates of public opinion. Also examined is whether the opinions of netizens can comprise another form of opinion climate, exerting pressure on one's willingness to speak out. Finally, we explore whether expressing an opinion on the Internet is subject to the pressure of opinion climates. Findings suggest that the Internet may play an important role in shaping people's perceptions of opinion climates. Perceived opinion congruence with other people were significantly associated with one's willingness to participate in an online forum, indicating that expressing an opinion on the Internet may be subject to the spiral of silence effect. We conclude that the Internet in South Korea may not have helped to diminish the social pressure that keeps citizens from expressing a minority view.
A Comparative Framework for the Analysis of International Student Movements

Recent theory and research on revolution indicate that leadership and ideology play crucial roles. Much of the leadership and ideology for contemporary revolutions developed within the context of student movements. But previous research on student movements has often been limited to developed Western societies and has yielded typologies of student activism that have little application to revolutionary movements worldwide. Based on an analysis of student movements in many societies during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, a new typology of student movements is formulated. The typology, which allows differentiation among reform student movements, identity radicalism student movements, structural revolutionary student movements, and social revolutionary student movements, appears capable of identifying the essential contrasts as well as key similarities among a wide range of student movements in many societies. Conditions fostering each type of movement are described. The paper concludes with a discussion of case studies in several countries and how these student movements are categorized in the new typology.
An authentication model for IoT clouds

Nowadays, the combination between Cloud computing and Internet of Things (IoT) is pursuing new levels of efficiency in delivering services, representing a tempting business opportunity for IT operators of increasing their revenues. However, security is considered as one of the major factors that slows down the rapid and large scale adoption and deployment of both IoT and Cloud computing. In this paper, considering such an IoT Cloud scenario, we present an architectural model and several use cases that allow different types of users to access IoT devices.
Practical Compute Capacity Management for Virtualized Datacenters

We present CCM (Cloud Capacity Manager) - a prototype system and its methods for dynamically multiplexing the compute capacity of virtualized datacenters at scales of thousands of machines, for diverse workloads with variable demands. Extending prior studies primarily concerned with accurate capacity allocation and ensuring acceptable application performance, CCM also sheds light on the tradeoffs due to two unavoidable issues in large scale commodity datacenters: (i) maintaining low operational overhead given variable cost of performing management operations necessary to allocate resources, and (ii) coping with the increased incidences of these operations' failures. CCM is implemented in an industry-strength cloud infrastructure built on top of the VMware vSphere virtualization platform and is currently deployed in a 700 physical host datacenter. Its experimental evaluation uses production workload traces and a suite of representative cloud applications to generate dynamic scenarios. Results indicate that the pragmatic cloud-wide nature of CCM provides up to 25% more resources for workloads and improves datacenter utilization by up to 20%, compared to the common alternative approach of multiplexing capacity within multiple independent smaller datacenter partitions.
Inferring the Differential Student Model in a Probabilistic Domain Using Abduction inference in Bayesian networks

In this paper we aim to estimate the differential student knowledge model in a probabilistic domain within an intelligent tutoring system. The suggested algorithm aims to estimate the actual student model through the student answers to questions requiring diagnosing skills. Updating and verification of the model are conducted based on the matching between the student and model answers. Two different approaches to updating namely coarse and refined model are suggested. Results suggest that the refined model, although takes more computational resources, provides a slightly better approximation of the student model.
Polarization imaging applied to 3D reconstruction of specular metallic surfaces

This paper presents a new application of "Shape from Polarization" method to specular metallic surfaces. It demonstrates how to extend the commonly used method for dielectric to metallic surfaces. Studying the state of polarization of the reflected light is very useful to get information on the normals of the surface. After computing the surface normals, the 3D surface is reconstructed thanks to a relaxation algorithm. Applications on shape defects detection are discussed, and the efficiency of the system to discriminate defects on metallic objects made by stamping and polishing is presented.