Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Outcome of Posterior Lumbar Interbody Fusion Versus Posterolateral Fusion for Spondylolytic Spondylolisthesis

Study Design. This retrospective study analyzed the outcome of 44 patients who had decompression, pedicle screw-rod fixation, and fusion for Grades 1 and 2 spondylolytic spondylolisthesis. Objective. To evaluate the outcome of two methods for stabilization and fusion: posterolateral fusion and circumferential fusion involving posterior lumbar interbody fusion and posterolateral fusion for low grades of isthmic spondylolisthesis. Summary of Background Data. It has been suggested that stabilization with instrumented fusion is somewhat unpredictable due to lack of anterior support. Does circumferential fusion using posterior lumbar interbody fusion circumvent all the problems, and is it better than posterolateral fusion clinically? Methods. A single surgeon treated 21 patients with instrumented posterolateral fusion and 23 patients with instrumented circumferential fusion, (i.e., posterior lumbar interbody fusion, and posterolateral fusion. These two groups were compared for clinical outcome, fusion rate, and correction of slippage. Results. The minimum follow-up period for the patients was 2.1 years. The clinical satisfactory outcome on the Oswestry index was 81% for posterolateral fusion and 69% for posterior lumbar interbody fusion. The subjective outcome was 86% and 65%, respectively, for the two groups (P > 0.05). However, a consideration of subjective scores showed that three patients (14.3%) in posterolateral fusion group and eight patients (34.8%) in posterior lumbar interbody fusion group had an unsatisfactory outcome (P = 0.0135), which was very significant. There were two nonunions in the posterolateral fusion group and none in the posterior lumbar interbody fusion group (P > 0.05). The correction of slippage and the loss of correction at the last follow-up assessment was better in the posterior lumbar interbody fusion group, although this was not statistically significant (P > 0.05). Radicular symptoms and neurologic improvement were statistically similar between the two groups. Conclusions. Posterolateral fusion has a better clinical outcome in low grades of isthmic spondylolisthesis, although posterior lumbar interbody fusion is more predictable in maintaining correction and achieving union. Careful patient selection is needed for each operation, and adjacent level disc degeneration may influence the procedure offered to the patient.
A Non-Parametric Bayesian Approach to Spike Sorting

In this work we present and apply infinite Gaussian mixture modeling, a non-parametric Bayesian method, to the problem of spike sorting. As this approach is Bayesian, it allows us to integrate prior knowledge about the problem in a principled way. Because it is non-parametric we are able to avoid model selection, a difficult problem that most current spike sorting methods do not address. We compare this approach to using penalized log likelihood to select the best from multiple finite mixture models trained by expectation maximization. We show favorable offline sorting results on real data and discuss ways to extend our model to online applications
Object-Oriented Software Engineering: Measuring and Controlling the Development Process

Although the benefits of Object-Orientation are manifold and it is, for certain, one of the mainstays for software production in the future, it will only achieve widespread practical acceptance when the management aspects of the software development process using this technology are carefully addressed. Here, software metrics play an important role allowing, among other things, better planning, the assessment of improvements, the reduction of unpredictability, early identification of potential problems and productivity evaluation. This paper proposes a set of metrics suitable for evaluating the use of the main abstractions of the Object-Oriented paradigm such as inheritance, encapsulation, information hiding or polymorphism and the consequent emphasis on reuse that, together, are believed to be responsible for the increase in software quality and development productivity. Those metrics are aimed at helping to establish comparisons throughout the practitioners’ community and setting design recommendations that may eventually become organization standards. Some desirable properties for such a metrics set are also presented. Future lines of research are envisaged.
The slow floor: increasing creative agency while walking on an interactive surface

Walking is a physical activity that most people do on a daily basis. It is often characterized as a utilitarian means of locomotion; our basic, habitual mode of getting around from place to place. Walking can also be considered a creative and expressive act, with the potential for inspiring the design of interactive surfaces to support and mediate these aesthetic aspects. We draw on understandings of walking from a range of perspectives including biomechanics, ecological perception, anthropology and dance to inform the design and evaluation of an interactive surface. This surface, the Slow Floor, is intended to encourage a reflective engagement with the act of walking. We present the design and initial user evaluation of the Slow Floor, a pressure sensitive sound-generating surface, with a group of Butoh dancers performing a slow walk. The evaluation reveals a unique creative agency when walking on the Slow Floor compared to the internal focus on awareness when slow walking without the interactive surface. This creative agency provides new knowledge on the role interactive surfaces can play in developing awareness of movement and internal felt experience contributing to the discussion around somatics and HCI.
SP2 System Architecture

Scalable parallel systems are increasingly being used today to address existing and emerging application areas that require performance levels significantly beyond what symmetric multiprocessors are capable of providing. These areas include traditional technical computing applications, commercial computing applications such as decision support and transaction processing, and emerging areas such as “grand challenge” applications, digital libraries, and video production and distribution. The IBM SP2™ is a general-purpose scalable parallel system designed to address a wide range of these applications. This paper gives an overview of the architecture and structure of SP2, discusses the rationale for the significant system design decisions that were made, indicates the extent to which key objectives were met, and identifies future system challenges and advanced technology development areas.
Statistical Analysis and Enhancement of Random Testing Methods also under Constrained Resources

Adaptive Random Testing (ART) denotes a family of random testing methods that are designed to be more effective than Random Testing (RT). Mostly, these methods have been investigated using the mean F-measure, which denotes the random number of test cases necessary to detect the first failure. The two most important ART methods, namely Distance-Based ART (DART) and Restricted Random Testing (RRT), perform worse for higher failure rates than for lower failure rates. Furthermore, all previous publications on ART analyzed these methods for testing with unlimited resources. The present paper investigates, why DART and RRT behave better for lower failure rates. Therefore, the F-measure distribution and the spatial distribution of single test cases are analyzed. Thereby, shortcomings of D-ART and RRT are revealed. Improved ART methods are presented based on our findings. Furthermore, the usefulness of the F-measure distribution of testing with unlimited resources for resourceconstrained testing is explained. Finally, the ART methods are compared to RT for both cases, i. e. with and without resource limitations.
Detection of temporal gaps in noise as a measure of the decay of auditory sensation.

The masking of silent intervals, or gaps, by surrounding noise bursts was investigated. The durations and the spectrum levels of the two noises were varied and the just detectable gap ΔT determined. The first experiment demonstrated the conditions in which duration judgments may have provided a cue. The remaining experiments were therefore designed so that this duration cue was not available. The second experiment indicated that changing the second noise duration from 200 to 2 msec did not greatly affect ΔT, suggesting a close relationship between forward masking and gap detection. Finally, Plomp [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 36, 277–282 (1964)] has argued that a graph of the level of the second noise in decibels as a function of log ΔT traces the time course of decay of the first noise. If so, the data from the third experiment indicate that this decay rate depends on the spectrum level of the noise but not on its duration.
PER Analysis and Performance Evaluation of DS-SS UWB Networks

The low cost of devices and the possibility or achieving higher data rates without increasing transmitter power make ultra-wide band (UWB) radio a viable candidate for short-range multiple access communications in dense multipath environments. This paper analyses the efficiency of the direct sequence-spread spectrum (DS-SS) physical layer standard proposal in an indoor environment with fixed transmitters and receiver positions. The modelling and the performance evaluation of a new channel model, where impulse response is also distance-dependent, are outlined. Packet error rate (PER) analysis has been carried out by using a polynomial regression technique, through the Matlab tool, on simulation results obtaining an expression for the PER as function of distance and packet length. Simulation results are evaluated in terms of PER vs transmitter-receiver distance
Using Traceability Links to Recommend Adaptive Changes for Documentation Evolution

Developer documentation helps developers learn frameworks and libraries, yet developing and maintaining accurate documentation requires considerable effort and resources. Contributors who work on developer documentation often need to manually track all changes in the code, determine which changes are significant enough to document, and then, adapt the documentation. We propose AdDoc, a technique that automatically discovers documentation patterns, i.e., coherent sets of code elements that are documented together, and that reports violations of these patterns as the code and the documentation evolves. We evaluated our approach in a retrospective analysis of four Java open source projects and found that at least 50 percent of all the changes in the documentation were related to existing documentation patterns. Our technique allows contributors to quickly adapt existing documentation, so that they can focus their documentation effort on the new features.
Studies of the Routine Grounds of Everyday Activities

In this article, which comprises the second chapter of Studies in Ethnomethodology, Harold Garfinkel offers conceptual and methodological tools to reveal taken-for-granted, obvious, routine grounds of everyday social activities. According to Garfinkel, the most effective and easiest way to explore how ordinary members of the society produce and recognize the commonly known world of daily affairs is a deliberate breaching of background expectancies we rely on in everyday life. It is background expectancies that provides for the recognizability of routine situations as natural, unproblematic, taken-for-granted. These expectancies constitute what is known as “common sense,” and offer to what is happening its character of reality “known in common with others”. If these expectations are not met (as a result of a special procedure), people begin to make efforts to normalize what is happening, which suggest the sociologist how the daily life in society is organized. Through such breaching experiments Garfinkel shows what are the structural grounds of persons’ common understandings in communication and of systematic manifestations of social affects. Analysis of the results of these experiments allows Garfinkel to argue that ordinary member of the society is not a “cultural dope,” i.e. a puppet that dutifully follows social prescriptions and rules, as traditional sociology tends to picture him or her.
Describing Children's Linguistic Development at Home and at School

Abstract A theory of language is outlined which emphasises the interactive nature of linguistic communication, and it is hypothesised that such interaction forms the basis for the child's acquisition of control of the language system. It is further suggested that differences in quality and quantity of interaction, in which meaning is negotiated in the shared construction of social reality, may be largely responsible for the ‘linguistic disadvantage’ which is the putative cause of the educational under‐achievement of many children. The paper describes the way in which these questions are being investigated in a longitudinal study of the language development of a representative sample of children, based on regular observations of the children's spontaneous linguistic interaction at home and at school.
Technology leadership or technology somnambulism? Exploring the discourse of integration amongst information and communication technology coordinators

This research aimed to explore information and communication technology (ICT) coordinators' discourse in relation to ICT integration in a sample of Irish post-primary schools. As ICT leaders in their schools, how they conceptualise ICT significantly influences school-based policy and use. The research involved semi-structured interviews with a sample of nine ICT coordinators in the Mid-west region of Ireland. The study found that the coordinators drew heavily on the prevailing policy discourse when justifying the use of ICT in schools. However, they tended to see the evolution of ICT as something beyond their control and perceived ‘progress’ only in relation to hardware acquisition. The findings suggest that the shift from ‘electronic janitor’ to pedagogical leader is in its infancy in Irish schools. Policy-makers may need to take greater cognisance of the importance of pedagogical leadership within a context dominated by a focus on acquiring hardware and resources. At a broader level, educators need to define their collective vision for ICT, rather than placing sole responsibility on a single agent of change.
Mental Symptoms in Temporal Lobe Epilepsy and Temporal Lobe Gliomas.

A great deal has been written on the temporal lobe in recent years; but because of a confused nomenclature, it has been hard to understand the exact meaning of many of the authors. Dr. Bingley is to be congratulated on having written a clear and well-thought-out monograph. He gives an excellent historical background of our knowledge of the temporal lobe, paying due respect to Hughlings Jackson and the other great figures in early English neurology. He describes temporal lobe epilepsy extremely well and gives a good classification of the various types of seizure that are found in this disorder. He divides them into Jacksonian fits; perceptual seizures of smell, taste, hearing, and vision; visceral motor and sensory seizures; aphasias; automatisms, and complex mental seizures. His material consists of 90 cases of temporal lobe epilepsy seen in the neurological clinic, all personally studied by careful methods. In addition, there were 253
Self-encrypting Code to Protect Against Analysis and Tampering

Confidentiality and data authenticity are two basic concepts in security. The first guarantees secrecy of a message, while the latter protects its integrity. This paper examines the use of encryption to secure software static analysis and tampering attacks. We present the concept of code encryption, which offers confidentiality, and a method to create code dependencies that implicitly protect integrity. For the latter we propose several dependency schemes based on a static call graph which allow runtime code decryption simultaneous with code verification. If code is modified statically or dynamically, it will result in incorrect decryption of other code, producing a corrupted executable.
Social media and nurse education: an integrative review of the literature.

INTRODUCTION The exponential advance of social media has touched all areas of society, no exception for the professional and personal lives of healthcare people. The issue to be considered is not whether or not social media are being used, but how they are used. The line between proper and improper use, and even abuse, of social media is a subtle one. Thus, the key issue is to be aware of the tool that is being used and this should be supported with suitable training for healthcare professionals and, at an even earlier stage, for students at healthcare training institutions during their studies. OBJECTIVE To describe, through an integrative review of the literature, the use of social media by teachers and students during teaching activity and practical training courses. MATERIALS AND METHODS An integrative review of the literature was conducted in October 2014. The literature search was performed by consulting the main biomedical databases: PubMed, CINAHL and Embase. RESULTS The literature search brought up a total of 854 citations. 804 abstracts were excluded as they were not relevant. Of the remaining 50, 31 were excluded for not meeting the general criteria and, hence, only 19 articles were included. Two aspects emerged from the works selected: the use and potential of social media in nursing education and the ethical and professional implications of their use. CONCLUSIONS The analysis of the literature reveals two areas for further investigation: evaluating the level of moral awareness in nursing education with regards to the use of Web 2.0 communication tools and implementing teaching methods to promote the construction and development of moral reasoning in professionals.
Grid approaches to data-driven scientific and engineering workflows

Enabling the full life cycle of scientific and engineering workflows requires robust middleware and services that support near-realtime data movement, high-performance processing and effective data management. In this context, we consider two related technology areas: Grid computing which is fast emerging as an accepted way forward for the large-scale, distributed and multi-institutional resource sharing and Database systems whose capabilities are undergoing continuous change providing new possibilities for scientific data management in Grid. In this thesis, we look into the challenging requirements while integrating data-driven scientific and engineering experiment workflows onto Grid. We consider wind tunnels that house multiple experiments with differing characteristics, as an application exemplar. This thesis contributes two approaches while attempting to tackle some of the following questions: How to allow domain-specific workflow activity development by hiding the underlying complexity? Can new experiments be added to the system easily? How can the overall turnaround time be reduced by an end-to-end experimental workflow support? In the first approach, we show how experiment-specific workflows can help accelerate application development using Grid services. This has been realized with the development of MyCoG, the first Commodity Grid toolkit for . NET supporting multi-language programmability. In the second , we present an alternative approach based on federated database services to realize an end-to-end experimental workflow. We show with the help of a real-world example, how database services can be building blocks for scientific and engineering workflows.
On Being Influenced While Trying to Persuade

In two studies, a persuader attempted to influence multiple targets (confederates) to take his or her position on an important social issue. As the persuader advocated his or her position, targets initially provided positive (negative) feedback that placed the persuader in the majority (minority). Subsequent feedback on the persuader’s continuing advocacy either kept initially established status stable or reversed it (majority ↔ minority). Initial status and its stability interacted to affect persuaders' certainty, which in turn affected persuaders' efficacy assessed by coding persuaders' videotaped nonverbal behavior and strength of advocacy, respectively (Study 1). Coding and an independent audience’s reactions to persuasive “blogs” created by persuaders whose initial status was kept (un)stable replicated the persuasive efficacy findings (Study 2). Thus, persuaders' ability to produce cogent messages is affected by the social context in which they operate.
Building a Hospital Incident Reporting Ontology (HIRO) in the Web Ontology Language (OWL) using the JCAHO Patient Safety Event Taxonomy (PSET)

A Hospital Incident Reporting Ontology (HIRO) is being developed in Protégé-OWL to demonstrate feasibility and clinical value of using an ontology to combine, compare, and analyze data from across many public and private reporting systems collecting adverse events and near misses for patient safety. The HIRO is based on the JCAHO Patient Safety Event Taxonomy (PSET) and de-identified hospital incident reports.
Defining the Effects of Transformational Leadership on Organisational Learning: A Cross-Cultural Comparison

The present study attempts to address three specific problems. First, amidst a large volume of literature on transformational leadership and its role on school operations in diverse domains, it hopes to identify its contribution to organisational learning. Second, as the intricate relationships that exist among leadership, structure and culture of the school are widely documented in the current literature, there is a need to determine the precise contribution transformational leadership makes to the collective search for adaptation strategies. Third, there is also a need to know whether the overt roles of transformational leadership in the context of organisational change is universal or culturally specific. Findings from schools in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Western Australia and Central Canada provided interesting generalised as well as specific patterns of leadership behaviours that shed light on the last question raised.
Live VM Migration Under Time-Constraints in Share-Nothing IaaS-Clouds

Live VM migration helps attain both cloud-wide load balancing and operational consolidation while the migrating VMs remain accessible to users. To avoid periods of high-load for the involved resources, IaaS-cloud operators assign specific time windows for such migrations to occur in an orderly manner. Moreover, providers typically rely on share-nothing architectures to attain scalability. In this paper, we focus on the real-time scheduling of live VM migrations in large share-nothing IaaS clouds, such that migrations are completed on time and without adversely affecting agreed-upon SLAs. We propose a scalable, distributed network of brokers that oversees the progress of all on-going migration operations within the context of a provider. Brokers make use of an underlying special purpose file system, termed MigrateFS, that is capable of both replicating and keeping in sync virtual disks while the hypervisor live-migrates VMs (i.e., RAM and CPU state). By limiting the resources consumed during migration, brokers implement policies to reduce SLA violations while seeking to complete all migration tasks on time. We evaluate two such policies, one based on task prioritization and a second that considers the financial implications set by migration deadline requirements. Using our MigrateFS prototype operating on a real cloud, we demonstrate the feasibility of performing migrations within time windows. By simulating large clouds, we assess the effectiveness of our proposed broker policies in a share-nothing configuration; we also demonstrate that our approach stresses 24 percent less an already saturated network if compared to an unsupervised set up.