Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Strategies to Prevent Ventilator-Associated Pneumonia in Acute Care Hospitals

Previously published guidelines are available that provide comprehensive recommendations for detecting and preventing healthcare-associated infections. The intent of this document is to highlight practical recommendations in a concise format designed to assist acute care hospitals in implementing and prioritizing their ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP) prevention efforts. Refer to the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America/Infectious Diseases Society of America “Compendium of Strategies to Prevent Healthcare-Associated Infections” Executive Summary and Introduction and accompanying editorial for additional discussion. 1. Occurrence of VAP in acute care facilities. a. VAP is one of the most common infections acquired by adults and children in intensive care units (ICUs). i. In early studies, it was reported that 10%-20% of patients undergoing ventilation developed VAP. More-recent publications report rates of VAP that range from 1 to 4 cases per 1,000 ventilator-days, but rates may exceed 10 cases per 1,000 ventilator-days in some neonatal and surgical patient populations. The results of recent quality improvement initiatives, however, suggest that many cases of VAP might be prevented by careful attention to the process of care. 2. Outcomes associated with VAP a. VAP is a cause of significant patient morbidity and mortality, increased utilization of healthcare resources, and excess cost. i. The mortality attributable to VAP may exceed 10%. ii. Patients with VAP require prolonged periods of mechanical ventilation, extended hospitalizations, excess use of antimicrobial medications, and increased direct medical costs.
Stationary Light Pulses without Bragg Gratings

The underlying mechanism of the stationary light pulse (SLP) was identified as a band gap being created by a Bragg grating formed by two counter-propagating coupling fields of similar wavelength. Here we present a more general view of the formation of SLPs, namely several balanced four-wave mixing processes sharing the same ground-state coherence. Utilizing this new concept we report the first experimental observation of a bichromatic SLP at wavelengths for which no Bragg grating can be established. We also demonstrate the production of a SLP directly from a propagating light pulse without prior storage. Being easily controlled externally makes SLPs a very versatile tool for low-light-level nonlinear optics and quantum information manipulation.
Production , Manufacturing and Logistics Integrated capacity and inventory management with capacity acquisition lead times

We model a make-to-stock production system that utilizes permanent and contingent capacity to meet non-stationary stochastic demand, where a constant lead time is associated with the acquisition of contingent capacity. We determine the structure of the optimal solution concerning both the operational decisions of integrated inventory and flexible capacity management, and the tactical decision of determining the optimal permanent capacity level. Furthermore, we show that the inventory (either before or after production), the pipeline contingent capacity, the contingent capacity to be ordered, and the permanent capacity are economic substitutes. We also show that the stochastic demand variable and the optimal contingent capacity acquisition decisions are economic complements. Finally, we perform numerical experiments to evaluate the value of utilizing contingent capacity and to study the effects of capacity acquisition lead time, providing useful managerial insights. 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Physiological activation of Akt by PHLPP1 deletion protects against pathological hypertrophy.

AIMS To examine the role of physiological Akt signalling in pathological hypertrophy through analysis of PHLPP1 (PH domain leucine-rich repeat protein phosphatase) knock-out (KO) mice. METHODS AND RESULTS To investigate the in vivo requirement for 'physiological' control of Akt activation in cardiac growth, we examined the effect of deleting the Akt phosphatase, PHLPP, on the induction of cardiac hypertrophy. Basal Akt phosphorylation increased nearly two-fold in the cardiomyocytes from PHLPP1 KO mice and physiological hypertrophy induced by swimming exercise was accentuated as assessed by increased heart size and myocyte cell area. In contrast, the development of pathophysiological hypertrophy induced by pressure overload and assessed by increases in heart size, myocyte cell area, and hypertrophic gene expression was attenuated. This attenuation coincided with decreased fibrosis and cell death in the KO mice. Cast moulding revealed increased capillary density basally in the KO hearts, which was further elevated relative to wild-type mouse hearts in response to pressure overload. In vitro studies with isolated myocytes in co-culture also demonstrated that PHLPP1 deletion in cardiomyocytes can enhance endothelial tube formation. Expression of the pro-angiogenic factor VEGF was also elevated basally and accentuated in response to transverse aortic constriction in hearts from KO mice. CONCLUSION Our data suggest that enhancing Akt activity by inhibiting its PHLPP1-mediated dephosphorylation promotes processes associated with physiological hypertrophy that may be beneficial in attenuating the development of pathological hypertrophy.
An investigation of coils used in dynamic wireless charging for electric vehicles

The dynamic charging for electric vehicles (EVs), compared with stationary charging, has become an essential research direction for release users from long parking time. In this paper, the coupling theories of coils are analyzed in aspects of shapes, misalignment. The considerations of coils and ferrites when designing the dynamic wireless charging system for EVs are indicated by simulation results. A wireless charging platform based on inductive coupled power transmission is presented, and the analyses are proved in hardware. The power efficiency of the proposed system is up to 82.29% after improvement.
Oil-in-Water Self-Assembled Synthesis of Ag@AgCl Nano-Particles on Flower-like Bi2O2CO3 with Enhanced Visible-Light-Driven Photocatalytic Activity

In this work, a series of novel flower-like Ag@AgCl/Bi2O2CO3 were prepared by simple and feasible oil-in-water self-assembly processes. The phase structures of as-prepared samples were examined by X-ray diffraction (XRD), Scanning electron microscopy (SEM), Transmission electron microscopy (TEM), UV-vis diffuse reflectance spectroscopy (DRS), X-ray fluorescence spectrometer (XRF), etc. The characterization results indicated that the presence of Ag@AgCl did not affect the crystal structure, but exerted a great influence on the photocatalytic activity of Bi2O2CO3 and enhanced the absorption band of pure Bi2O2CO3. The photocatalytic activities of the Ag@AgCl/Bi2O2CO3 samples were determined by photocatalytic degradation of methylene blue (MB) under visible light irradiation. The Ag@AgCl (10 wt %)/Bi2O2CO3 composite showed the highest photocatalytic activity, degrading 97.9% MB after irradiation for 20 min, which is over 1.64 and 3.66 times faster than that of pure Ag@AgCl (calculated based on the equivalent Ag@AgCl content in Ag@AgCl (10 wt %)/Bi2O2CO3) and pure Bi2O2CO3, respectively. Bisphenol A (BPA) was also degraded to further prove the degradation ability of Ag@AgCl/Bi2O2CO3. Photocurrent studies indicated that the recombination of photo-generated electron–hole pairs was decreased effectively due to the formation of heterojunctions between flower-like Bi2O2CO3 and Ag@AgCl nanoparticles. Trapping experiments indicated that O2−, h+ and Cl° acted as the main reactive species for MB degradation in the present photocatalytic system. Furthermore, the cycling experiments revealed the good stability of Ag@AgCl/Bi2O2CO3 composites. Based on the above, a photocatalytic mechanism for the degradation of organic compounds over Ag@AgCl/Bi2O2CO3 was proposed.
High-level area and power-up current estimation considering rich cell library

Reducing the ever-growing leakage power is critical to power efficient designs. Leakage reduction techniques such as power-gating using sleep transistor insertion introduces large power-up current that may affect circuit reliability as well as introduce performance loss. We present an in-depth study of high-level power-up current modeling and estimation in the context of a full custom design environment with a rich cell library. We propose a methodology to estimate the circuit area in terms of gate count and maximum power-up current for any given logic function. We build novel estimation metrics based on logic synthesis and gate level analysis using only a small number of typical circuits, but no further logic synthesis and gate level analysis are needed during our estimation. Compared to time-consuming logic synthesis and gate level analysis, the average errors for circuits from a leading industrial design project are 23.59% for area and 21.44% for maximum power-up current. In contrast, estimation based on quick synthesis leads to llx area difference in gate count for an Bbit adder.
Cognitive Flexibility: A Default Network and Basal Ganglia Connectivity Perspective

The intra/extradimensional set-shifting task (IED) provides a reliable assessment of cognitive flexibility, the shifting of attention to select behaviorally relevant stimuli in a given context. Impairments in this domain were previously reported in patients with altered neurotransmitter systems such as schizophrenia and Parkinson's disease. Consequently, corticostriatal connections were implicated in the mediation of this function. In addition, parts of the default mode network (DMN), namely the medial prefrontal and posterior cingulate/precuneus cortices, are also being progressively described in association with set-shifting paradigms. Nevertheless, a definitive link between cognitive flexibility and DMN connectivity remains to be established. To this end, we related resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)-based functional connectivity of DMN with IED task performance in a healthy population, measured outside the scanner. The results demonstrated that greater posterior cingulate cortex/precuneus (DMN) connectivity with the ventromedial striatopallidum at rest correlated with fewer total adjusted errors on the IED task. This finding points to a relationship between DMN and basal ganglia connectivity for cognitive flexibility, further highlighting this network's potential role in adaptive human cognition.
Impaired Femoral Vascular Compliance and Endothelial Dysfunction in 30 Healthy Male Soccer Players

Background: Despite beneficial effects of physical activity on cardiovascular risk, discordant data on elite athletes (high atherosclerotic damage in activity comprising strenuous exertion) and retired sportsmen are reported in the literature. Hypothesis: We hypothesize that long-lasting daily physical activity could affect the morphology and function of the carotid and femoral vessel walls differently, as assessed in elite male athletes aged 20 to 30 years compared with age- and sex-matched healthy controls. Study Design: Retrospective case-control study. Level of Evidence: Level 3. Methods: Sixty male subjects (30 athletes and 30 controls) underwent medical examination for ankle brachial index, augmentation index (AIX) and AIX corrected for heart rate (AIXr), peripheral arterial tonometry (PAT), and intima media thickness and pulse wave velocity assay at common carotid (carotid–intima media thickness [c-IMT], carotid–pulse wave velocity [c-PWv]) and femoral arteries (femoral–intima media thickness [f-IMT], femoral–pulse wave velocity [f-PWv]) assessed by ultrasonography using Doppler ultrasound. Results: Athletes showed a significantly lower heart rate (HR) at rest and a better lipid profile than controls. In athletes, c-PWv (5.87 ± 0.80 vs 6.62 ± 1.02 m/s, P = 0.001) and f-PWv (8.96 ± 1.29 vs 7.89 ± 1.39, P = 0.002) were, respectively, significantly lower and higher than values found in controls; accordingly, carotid AIX (4.03 ± 6.21 vs 7.81 ± 5.21, P = 0.003) and femoral AIX (8.56 ± 10.21 vs 6.09 ± 7.95, P = 0.042) were lower and higher than control values, even after correction for heart rate (P = 0.03). On the other hand, IMT values were significantly higher in controls than in athletes (c-IMT, P < 0.0001; f-IMT, P < 0.0001). A positive significant correlation between HR and c-IMT and f-IMT (r = 0.527, P < 0.001 and r = 0.539, P < 0.0001, respectively) and between HR and c-PWv (r = 0.410, P = 0.01) was found when controls and athletes were considered as a whole group. Soccer players showed lower PAT values in comparison with controls (P = 0.002). Conclusion: Elite sports positively affect c-IMT, f-IMT, and carotid PWv and AIX but not femoral PWv, AIX, AIXr, or PAT. Clinical Relevance: Physical activity affects vascular beds in elite athletes differentially, depending on the rate of superior or inferior limb involvement in different sports. In soccer players, physical activity has a protective effect on carotid and femoral vessel walls but worsens femoral arterial and endothelial function. These findings highlight how different results can be shown on carotid and femoral districts, when these vascular districts are differently stressed during sport activity.
Phytoplankton Community, Nutrients and Chlorophyll a in Lake Mogan (Turkey); with Comparison Between Current and Old Data

Seasonal changes in phytoplankton community structure, chlorophyll a and some physico-chemical features of Lake Mogan were studied during one-year period, from October 2005 to October 2006. The collected data were compared with the data in previous and recent studies. The nutrient concentrations in the lake were observed to increase with inputs of domestic wastewaters in to the lake in the last years. Chlorophyta and Cyanobacteria in the phytoplankton community in the lake were identified to be dominant together. Merismopedia minima, Microcystis aeruginosa, Sphaerocystis schroeteri and Dictiyosphaerium pulchellum were dominant during the warm period (May - October). Cyanobacterial blooms in the lake were observed in May, which is characteristic for eutrophic lakes in northern temperate region. Changes in phytoplankton community structure, Chl a peak and nutrient concentrations indicated that the trophic level of the lake is still eutrophic.
Object recognition as ranking holistic figure-ground hypotheses

We present an approach to visual object-class recognition and segmentation based on a pipeline that combines multiple, holistic figure-ground hypotheses generated in a bottom-up, object independent process. Decisions are performed based on continuous estimates of the spatial overlap between image segment hypotheses and each putative class. We differ from existing approaches not only in our seemingly unreasonable assumption that good object-level segments can be obtained in a feed-forward fashion, but also in framing recognition as a regression problem. Instead of focusing on a one-vs-all winning margin that can scramble ordering inside the non-maximum (non-winning) set, learning produces a globally consistent ranking with close ties to segment quality, hence to the extent entire object or part hypotheses spatially overlap with the ground truth. We demonstrate results beyond the current state of the art for image classification, object detection and semantic segmentation, in a number of challenging datasets including Caltech-101, ETHZ-Shape and PASCAL VOC 2009.
Linguistic support for controlling protocol execution

Implementing efficient communication protocols is an important task in building distributed systems, but is complicated by the difficulties of dealing with complex multi-thread interactions and timing-related bugs. The paper describes Cicero, a set of language constructs designed to alleviate these difficulties. Cicero uses the notion of event patterns (C. V Ravishankar and R. Finkel, 1989) to help programmers build robust protocol implementations. Event patterns provide structure for controlling synchrony, asynchrony, and concurrency in protocol execution, and also allow implementers to exploit parallelism of varying grains. Event patterns can be translated into other formal models, so that existing verification techniques may be used. Our prototype implementation indicates that the total overhead imposed by event patterns accounts for less than 5% of the overall latency for protocols above the transport layer on single-processor implementations. <<ETX>>
Segmentation Based Multi-Cue Integration for Object Detection

This paper proposes a novel method for integrating multiple local cues, i.e. local region detectors as well as descriptors, in the context of object detection. Rather than to fuse the outputs of several distinct classifiers in a fixed setup, our approach implements a highly flexible combination scheme, where the contributions of all individual cues are flexibly recombined depending on their explanatory power for each new test image. The key idea behind our approach is to integrate the cues over an estimated top-down segmentation, which allows to quantify how much each of them contributed to the object hypothesis. By combining those contributions on a per-pixel level, our approach ensures that each cue only contributes to object regions for which it is confident and that potential correlations between cues are effectively factored out. Experimental results on several benchmark data sets show that the proposed multi-cue combination scheme significantly increases detection performance compared to any of its constituent cues alone. Moreover, it provides an interesting evaluation tool to analyze the complementarity of local feature detectors and descriptors.
HAMSI: A Parallel Incremental Optimization Algorithm Using Quadratic Approximations for Solving Partially Separable Problems

We propose HAMSI (Hessian Approximated Multiple Subsets Iteration), which is a provably convergent, second order incremental algorithm for solving large-scale partially separable optimization problems. The algorithm is based on a local quadratic approximation, and hence, allows incorporating curvature information to speed-up the convergence. HAMSI is inherently parallel and it scales nicely with the number of processors. Combined with techniques for effectively utilizing modern parallel computer architectures, we illustrate that the proposed method converges more rapidly than a parallel stochastic gradient descent when both methods are used to solve large-scale matrix factorization problems. This performance gain comes only at the expense of using memory that scales linearly with the total size of the optimization variables. We conclude that HAMSI may be considered as a viable alternative in many large scale problems, where first order methods based on variants of stochastic gradient descent are applicable.
Can Better Identifier Splitting Techniques Help Feature Location?

The paper presents an exploratory study of two feature location techniques utilizing three strategies for splitting identifiers: Camel Case, Samurai and manual splitting of identifiers. The main research question that we ask in this study is if we had a perfect technique for splitting identifiers, would it still help improve accuracy of feature location techniques applied in different scenarios and settings? In order to answer this research question we investigate two feature location techniques, one based on Information Retrieval and the other one based on the combination of Information Retrieval and dynamic analysis, for locating bugs and features using various configurations of preprocessing strategies on two open-source systems, Rhino and jEdit. The results of an extensive empirical evaluation reveal that feature location techniques using Information Retrieval can benefit from better preprocessing algorithms in some cases, and that their improvement in effectiveness while using manual splitting over state-of-the-art approaches is statistically significant in those cases. However, the results for feature location technique using the combination of Information Retrieval and dynamic analysis do not show any improvement while using manual splitting, indicating that any preprocessing technique will suffice if execution data is available. Overall, our findings outline potential benefits of putting additional research efforts into defining more sophisticated source code preprocessing techniques as they can still be useful in situations where execution information cannot be easily collected.
AN ASSAY FOR THE ANTITHROMBOTIC ACTIVITY OF ANTICOAGULANTS

Anticoagulants have been used for 20 years for the treatment of thrombosis. This practice has been based on the original experiments of Pupini (1932), Murray, Jaques, Perrett, and Best (1937), and Dale and Jaques (1942) which showed that anticoagulants could prevent the formation of experimental thrombi in dogs. There has been, however, no method reported by which it is possible to produce thrombosis in small animals for rapid assessment of the incidence of the lesion with different treatments. Such a method would be of value both to assess the relative activity of different anticoagulants in preventing thrombosis and also to make possible the quantitative experimental study of factors affecting thrombus formation in vivo. The present study was undertaken with this purpose and describes a simple method which appears to attain these objectives.
Individual vs. Global Radio Resource Management in a Hybrid Broadband Network

Nowadays, with the abundance of diverse air interfaces in the same operating area, advanced Radio Resource Management (RRM) is vital to take advantage of the available system resources. In such a scenario, a mobile user will be able to connect concurrently to different wireless access networks. In this paper, we consider the downlink of a hybrid network with two broadband Radio Access Technologies (RAT): WiMAX and WiFi. Two approaches are proposed to load balance the traffic of every user between the two available RATs: an individual approach where mobile users selfishly strive to improve their performance and a global approach where resource allocation is made in a way to satisfy all mobile users. We devise for the individual approach a fully distributed resource management scheme portrayed as a non-cooperative game. We characterize the Nash equilibriums of the proposed RRM game and put forward a decentralized algorithm based on replicator dynamics to achieve those equilibriums. In the global approach, resources are assigned by the system in order to enhance global performances. For the two approaches, we show that after convergence, each user is connected to a single RAT which avoids costly traffic splitting between available RATs.