Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Calculation of intratracheal airway pressure in ventilated neonatal piglets with endotracheal tube leaks

Objective:In ventilated neonates, only the applied pressure of the ventilator is adjusted and monitored. When an endotracheal tube leaks, intratracheal pressure decreases depending on the size of the endotracheal tube and of the leak. Furthermore, an increase in resistance and/or compliance might delay the increase of intratracheal pressure during inspiration and its decline during expiration. Short inspiratory time can cause insufficient ventilation, because intratracheal pressure peak might not be reached. Short expiratory time may lead to air trapping, because intratracheal pressure could not return to baseline. The aim of this study was to develop a mathematical algorithm to calculate intratracheal pressure continuously during ventilation and to evaluate the accuracy of this method. Design:Prospective, animal study. Setting:University research laboratory. Subjects:To verify the mathematical algorithm, eight neonatal piglets (1600–2600 g) were studied under different endotracheal tube leak conditions (45% to 98%). The median compliance and resistance were 1.06 mL/cm H2O/kg and 123 cm H2O/L/sec, respectively. Interventions:Pressure decreases caused by the different endotracheal tubes were measured in a model while air flow was increased stepwise. Based on these results, a mathematical method was developed to calculate intratracheal pressure under leak conditions continuously in relation to the flow through the endotracheal tube as well as to calculate the values of resistance, compliance, and applied pressure of the ventilator. Measurements and Main Results:The intratracheal pressure calculated was compared with the measured intratracheal pressure over time. The differences between measured and calculated intratracheal pressure related to peak applied pressure of the ventilator did not exceed 10%. The medians of absolute amounts of differences between measured and calculated intratracheal pressure were <1 cm H2O. Conclusions:The accuracy of the calculation of intratracheal pressure ensures adequate monitoring of artificial ventilation, even in the presence of endotracheal tube leaks. This might decrease the risk of barotrauma and improve the effectiveness of ventilation.
Fiscal impacts of immigrant and native households: a New Jersey case study.

This case study examined the impact of immigration on state and local government finances in New Jersey in 1989-90. Data were obtained from the 1990 Census Micro-Data Sample (PUMS) for New Jersey among 145000 randomly selected households and state records. The data did not distinguish between noncitizen households as legal residents temporary residents refugees or illegal migrants. Findings suggest that in New Jersey native or foreign born households use more state and local government services than paid for in taxes. Among nonelderly households heads immigrant households exceed native households by 46% in negative fiscal impact at the state level and by 60% for county and municipal government. The state spent about $3700 more on nonelderly households and over $2300 more on elderly households. Immigrant households with younger heads received about $400 more in benefits than natives in 1989-90. Immigrant elderly households received $200 more in benefits. European foreign born households commanded less benefits at the state and local level. Regression analysis revealed that immigrants household characteristics influenced their net fiscal impacts on state government. At the local level immigrant nonelderly households received more than $1700 in benefits than recovered in taxes. Elderly immigrants except for elderly Latino households incurred no deficit. The immigrant household deficit exceeded the native deficit by almost $1000/household. Total deficits at the state and local level were each about $3.83 billion in 1989-90. Female-headed households incurred greater deficits.
In vitro evaluation of prebiotic properties derived from rice bran obtained by debranning technology

Abstract The prebiotic ability of several rice bran fractions obtained by debranning (RBD) using human microbiota was studied in anaerobic batch cultures with agitation and pH-controlled. Fraction C (3.8–5% w/w pearling) from RBD increased the number of bifidobacteria and lactobacteria compared with the positive control, raftilose P95. RBD fermentation induced changes in the short-chain fatty acid (SCFA) profile. In addition, Fraction C revealed the highest growth of positive lactobacteria than commercial control. The present work illustrates the prebiotic capacity of RBD to modulate human microbiota and highlights that fraction C could be an economical source for use in human food as well as an interesting alternative to valorise a by-product of cereal industry.
Cortical Spike Synchrony as a Measure of Input Familiarity

Spike synchrony, which occurs in various cortical areas in response to specific perception, action, and memory tasks, has sparked a long-standing debate on the nature of temporal organization in cortex. One prominent view is that this type of synchrony facilitates the binding or grouping of separate stimulus components. We argue instead for a more general function: a measure of the prior probability of incoming stimuli, implemented by long-range, horizontal, intracortical connections. We show that networks of this kind—pulse-coupled excitatory spiking networks in a noisy environment—can provide a sufficient substrate for stimulus-dependent spike synchrony. This allows for a quick (few spikes) estimate of the match between inputs and the input history as encoded in the network structure. Given the ubiquity of small, strongly excitatory subnetworks in cortex, we thus propose that many experimental observations of spike synchrony can be viewed as signs of input patterns that resemble long-term experience—that is, of patterns with high prior probability.
Estimating Bias of Technical Progress with a Small Data Set

Economic historians frequently face the challenge of estimation and inference when only a small sample of the relevant data is available. We illustrate solutions to the challenges through a case study analysis of the Uselding and Juba (1973) data. They have only seven observations available to estimate of the bias of technical progress in United States manufacturing in the nineteenth century. They are able to offer estimates of the bias only by assuming that production technology is not Cobb-Douglas, technical progress is non-neutral and that elasticity of substitution between labour and capital is less than 0.9. These assumptions could not be tested owing to the paucity of the required historical data. This case study illustrates the use of both additional theoretical information and appropriate statistical techniques to alleviate problems of estimation and inference with small samples.
Nexus between Public Health Expenditure and Income: Empirical Evidence from Indian States

Using the public (government) health expenditure data of sixteen states in India from 1980 to 2013, the paper examines the long-run relationship between an increase in public health expenditure and income. We use real GSDP and real per capita GSDP as proxy for income. We apply Westerlund (2007) error correction based cointegration test for estimating the long-run relationship and panel dynamic OLS (DOLS) method for estimating the long-run coefficient of health expenditure. The empirical result shows that public health expenditure and income is cointegrated in the long-run. There is a positive and significant impact of income on growth of public health expenditure whereas the elasticity of public health expenditure is less than one in the long- run. It has also been found that there is a bidirectional causality between income and public health expenditure in the short-run while being unidirectional in the long-run. These research findings would serve as effective policy instruments aiming at achieving universal health coverage by generating more additional resources for health sector and minimizing the state level disparity in the growth of public health expenditure in India.
The Role of Consumer Confidence as a Leading Indicator on Stock Returns: A Markov Switching Approach

Investor’s psychological and emotional factors lead to irrationality in financial decision making and anomalies in prices. Investor sentiment and psychology help to elucidate phenomena in financial markets that cannot be explained by traditional theory. The aim of this study is two-fold: it investigates whether mutual regime switching behavior exists between the consumer indices and equity index, and examines their dynamics in response to each other in different regimes. This study applies the Markov Regime Switching model to monthly data from the BIST100 Return Index, Bloomberg Confidence Index, TUIK Confidence Index, Real Sector Confidence Index for the period between 2007:01 and 2016:06. The results indicate if consumer indices point out negative signals, capital market still gains in normal periods of economy. If they only in a recession or an expansion regime do, each of the indices moves in the same direction.
Construction and analysis of social-affective interaction corpus in English and Indonesian

Social-affective aspects of interaction play a vital role in making human communication a rich and dynamic experience. Observation of complex emotional phenomena requires rich sets of labeled data of natural interaction. Although there has been an increase of interest in constructing corpora containing social interactions, there is still a lack of spontaneous and emotionally rich corpora. This paper presents a corpus of social-affective interactions in English and Indonesian, constructed from various television talk shows, containing natural conversations and real emotion occurrences. We carefully annotate the corpus in terms of emotion and discourse structure to allow for the aforementioned observation. The corpus is still in its early stage of development, yielding wide-ranging possibilities for future work.
State-dependent routing for telephone traffic: Theory and results

In the modern telephone network, it has become feasible to consider sophisticated call-routing schemes in order to minimize network blocking --- in particular, routing schemes which select a route for a call on the basis of the network 'state' at the time of call-arrival. In this paper, we construct an analytical model for such state-dependent routing in the framework of Markov decision processes, and derive a simple state-dependent routing scheme called 'separable' routing. The performance of this routing scheme in two network designs for a metropolitan network model is compared over a range of loads, by means of call-by-call simulations of traffic flow, with that of two other schemes: the 'sequential' routing used in the Dynamic Non-Hierarchical Routing (DNHR) network, and the 'Least-Loaded Routing' (LLR) proposed for the Trunk Status Map. In one case, separable routing achieves lower network blocking than the other schemes at normal load and overloads, while, in the other case, the improvement occurs only above a certain level of overload. However, a modified version of separable routing (to be presented in a future paper) achieves better performance than the other schemes in both networks over the entire range of loads.
Intrusion detection system for RPL from routing choice intrusion

RPL is specifically designed for Low power and Lossy Networks (LLNs). With the expansion of LLNs applications, security of RPL becomes one of the major concerns. This paper mainly addresses the security aspect of RPL. We first analyze the vulnerability of RPL self-organising properties, and identify a new RPL internal intrusion, named routing choice (RC) intrusion. We specially analyze the harm of a type RC intrusion in RPL using ETX metric, which further validates the effectiveness of our work. Second, we design IDSs for RPL to defense intrusions. Our design discusses detection methodologies, system architectures, detection data and intrusion respose with some promotions. To satisfy the energy efficiency requirements, we propose three type Monitor Nodes (MNs) devices for different RPL applications. To explicitly show the design of IDSs, we apply our IDS to defense the type of RC intrusion in RPL using ETX metric on Contiki OS, and the results verify the effectiveness of our IDSs. Finally, we theoretically analyzed the applicability of IDSs for RPL.
Adolescents' privacy on social network sites: an investigation of predictors of privacy protection behavior

A widespread assumption is that all young people in contemporary society tend to ‘overshare’ sensitive personal information on Social Network Sites (SNS). Although many studies are investigating drivers for personal information disclosure, research that is paying attention to privacy protection behavior remains relatively scarce. To fill this gap this study investigates what factors predict the types of personal information adolescents disclose and how they apply privacy settings on their SNS profile. We conducted a large-scale survey with a sample of 1118 adolescents from Flanders (Belgium’s northern Dutch-speaking region), ranging in age from 11 to 18 years. Based on an exploratory factor analysis we are able to make a distinction between two types of personal information that young people disclose on a SNS, namely profile data (e.g. demographic or lifestyle data) and contact data (e.g. home address or phone number). Adolescents are more willing to disclose profile than contact data and are applying more lenient privacy settings to these profile data. Furthermore, regression analysis results show that privacy concerns as well as parental mediation styles appear to be the most important predictors.
Financial Development and Output: A Synthesis of Time Series Cointegration and Causality Tests for Bangladesh

Since the 1980s, financial liberalization in developing countries has been an important policy prescription of many international organizations including the World Bank (WB) and International Monetary Fund (IMF). It is argued that the liberalization of the financial sector would allocate productive resources in the most efficient way and increase economic growth. However, the relationship between financial liberalization and output is not clear in the existing empirical literature. Applying the cointegration and Granger causality tests within the vector error correction model (VECM) to a data set from 1974 to 2013, our results suggest that output per capita Granger causes financial development, and vice versa. Hence, we find the evidence of bidirectional causality between financial development and GDP in Bangladesh. These results will help policymakers design financial policies in Bangladesh and other developing countries, which face the dilemma of financial liberalization while maintaining a high and stable output growth. JEL Classification: E44, O40, C22
The Enduring Association between Education and Mortality

This article examines how educational disparities in mortality emerge, grow, decline, and disappear across causes of death in the United States, and how these changes contribute to the enduring association between education and mortality over time. Focusing on adults age 40 to 64 years, we first examine the extent to which educational disparities in mortality persisted from 1989 to 2007. We then test the fundamental cause prediction that educational disparities in mortality persist, in part, by shifting to new health outcomes over time. We focus on the period from 1999 to 2007, when all causes of death were coded to the same classification system. Results indicate (1) substantial widening and narrowing of educational disparities in mortality across causes of death, (2) almost all causes of death with increasing mortality rates also had widening educational disparities, and (3) the total educational disparity in mortality would be about 25 percent smaller today if not for newly emergent and growing educational disparities since 1999. These results point to the theoretical and policy importance of identifying social forces that cause health disparities to widen over time.
Inequalities Regimes in Policing: Examining the Connection Between Social Exclusion and Order Maintenance Strategies

The purpose of this article is to evaluate how the intersection of race, class, and gender within law enforcement influences the utilization of public safety strategies grounded in the broken windows policing philosophy. Drawing from Acker’s inequality regime framework, we hypothesize that greater workplace inequalities produce institutionalized systems of social processes that increase the likelihood that organizations will implement aggressive enforcement of order maintenance offenses as a strategy for sustaining public safety. Using data collected from 1,218 U.S. police departments, the results suggest that stronger inequality regimes are associated with higher arrest rates for disorder offenses, marijuana possession, and liquor law violations. Further, the results suggest that stronger inequality regimes are related to higher arrest rates for Black community members. As many law enforcement agencies across the nation face a legitimacy crisis, prompted by concerns about how police interact with people of color, the results from this study suggest that increasing representation and reducing inequality in law enforcement should result in agencies becoming less reliant on large-scale arrest-driven order maintenance strategies by including more diverse perspectives in the decision-making process and developing alternative models for maintaining public safety.
Modification of Level Dependent ASE-Signal Beat Noise by Optical and Electrical Filtering in Optically Preamplified Direct Detection Receivers

We derive compact equations describing the modification of amplified spontaneous emission signal beat noise arising from optical and electrical filtering in optically preamplified direct detection receivers. In particular, we show that this modification typically results in a further decrease of the signal quality factor. This is particularly pronounced in the presence of electrical filters with steep transfer functions such as, e.g., occurring when feeding the signal through an antialiasing filter prior to analog-to-digital conversion or in a real-time oscilloscope, in the latter case leading to counter-intuitive dependencies of the measured signal quality on the characteristics of the test setup. Predictions are exemplified in concrete system models and verified with experiments. While the modeling assumptions and the accuracy of the predictions are in line with models previously reported in the literature, derived expressions allow straightforwardly tying the modification of the level dependent noise to signal levels, baud rate, signal spectrum, and filter transfer functions.
Did Investors Herd During the Financial Crisis? Evidence from the US Financial Industry

We examine the herding behavior of investors in the US financial industry, especially commercial banks, S&Ls, investment and insurance firms during global financial crisis of 2008 towards own subâ€ sector and market consensus using augmented cross sectional absolute deviation of returns (CSAD) model. After distinguishing between fundamental and nonâ€ fundamental information, we find a greater influence of global financial crisis on spurious herding for commercial and investment banks, and such herding increases in the down market and with conditional volatility of returns, but adverse herding is prevalent among investors during normal period in response to fundamental information. We also find that herding intensity on fundamental information is relatively high with market consensus for all financial institutions except insurance firms in high volatility regime, and intentional herding is only significant and limited to S&Ls and investment banks in high volatility regime. Our findings suggest limited spillover effects of herding when investors face nonâ€ fundamental information.
ABO Incompatible Living Renal Transplantation With a Steroid Sparing Protocol

Background. ABO incompatible (ABOi) live-donor renal transplantation is a successful and accepted form of treatment for patients with renal failure. Although there is significant controversy as to how antiblood group antibodies should be removed and their resynthesis prevented, subsequent immunosuppressive regimes have all involved steroids. We and other groups have successfully used steroid sparing regimes for conventional ABO compatible transplantation and this study describes the use of our steroid sparing protocol in ABOi transplantation. Methods. We have transplanted 10 ABOi patients using 1 week of steroids (prednisolone 1 mg/kg for 4 days, 0.5 mg/kg for 3 days and then stopped), tacrolimus and mycophenolate mofetil. Steroids were reintroduced in the event of rejection. Results. Patient- and allograft-survival 1 year posttransplantation is 100%. Three patients experienced antibody-mediated rejection within 2 weeks of transplantation, which was successfully reversed. There has been no late rejection. Allograft function was similar to our live-donor ABO compatible transplant patients receiving a similar steroid sparing regime (12-month mean creatinine 131±15 &mgr;mol/L vs. 138±48 &mgr;mol/L; mean CrCl 63.2±22 mL/min vs. 56.7±20 mL/min). Conclusions. This study shows that ABOi live-donor transplantation can be successfully accomplished using a steroid-sparing protocol.
Rapid image stitching and computer-aided detection for multipass automated breast ultrasound.

PURPOSE Breast ultrasound (US) is recently becoming more and more popular for detecting breast lesions. However, screening results in hundreds of US images for each subject. This magnitude of images can lead to fatigue in radiologist, causing failure in the detection of lesions of a subtle nature. In this study, an image stitching technique is proposed for combining multipass images of the whole breast into a series of full-view images, and a fully automatic screening system that works off these images is also presented. METHODS Using the registration technique based on the simple sum of absolute block-mean difference (SBMD) measure, three-pass images were merged into full-view US images. An automatic screening system was then developed for detecting tumors from these full-view images. The preprocessing step was used to reduce the tumor detection time of the system and to improve image quality. The gray-level slicing method was then used to divide images into numerous regions. Finally, seven computerized features--darkness, uniformity, width-height ratio, area size, nonpersistence, coronal area size, and region continuity--were defined and used to determine whether or not each region was a part of a tumor. RESULTS In the experiment, there was a total of 25 experimental cases with 26 lesions, and each case was composed of 252 images (three passes, 84 images/pass). The processing time of the proposed stitching procedure for each case was within 30 s with a Pentium IV 2.0 processor, and the detection sensitivity of the proposed CAD system was 92.3% with 1.76 false positives per case. CONCLUSIONS The proposed automatic screening system can be applied to the whole breast images stitched together via SBMD-based registration in order to detect tumors.