Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Using patients’ experiences of adverse events to improve health service delivery and practice: protocol of a data linkage study of Australian adults age 45 and above

Introduction Evidence of patients’ experiences is fundamental to creating effective health policy and service responses, yet is missing from our knowledge of adverse events. This protocol describes explorative research redressing this significant deficit; investigating the experiences of a large cohort of recently hospitalised patients aged 45 years and above in hospitals in New South Wales (NSW), Australia. Methods and analysis The 45 and Up Study is a cohort of 265 000 adults aged 45 years and above in NSW. Patients who were hospitalised between 1 January and 30 June 2014 will be identified from this cohort using data linkage and a random sample of 20 000 invited to participate. A cross-sectional survey (including qualitative and quantitative components) will capture patients’ experiences in hospital and specifically of adverse events. Approximately 25% of respondents are likely to report experiencing an adverse event. Quantitative components will capture the nature and type of events as well as common features of patients’ experiences. Qualitative data provide contextual knowledge of their condition and care and the impact of the event on individuals. Respondents who do not report an adverse event will report their experience in hospital and be the control group. Statistical and thematic analysis will be used to present a patient perspective of their experiences in hospital; the characteristics of patients experiencing an adverse event; experiences of information sharing after an event (open disclosure) and the other avenues of redress pursued. Interviews with key policymakers and a document analysis will be used to create a map of the current practice. Ethics and dissemination Dissemination via a one-day workshop, peer-reviewed publications and conference presentations will enable effective clinical responses and service provision and policy responses to adverse events to be developed.
Temperature-independent Inhibition of L-Type Calcium Currents by Halothane and Sevoflurane in Human Atrial Cardiomyocytes

Background:Cardiac L-type calcium currents (ICa,L) are affected by volatile anesthetics, possibly contributing to their side effects. Actions of anesthetics on ion channels are usually studied in vitro at room temperature. However, the solubility of anesthetic gases as well as ICa,L are markedly sensitive to the study temperature. Therefore, temperature-dependent effects of halothane and sevoflurane on cardiac ICa,L were analyzed. Methods:ICa,L were studied at 21°C and 36°C with the patch clamp technique in isolated human atrial cardiomyocytes. Concentrations of anesthetics brought into solution by gassing at both temperatures were determined with gas chromatography. Results:The aqueous concentrations of halothane and sevoflurane were linearly related to their concentration in the gas phase (1 to 3 minimum alveolar concentration [MAC]). At 21°C, the slope of this relation was 0.52 and 0.12 mm/vol % for halothane and sevoflurane, respectively, and decreased at 36°C to 0.29 and 0.09 mm/vol %, respectively. ICa,L displayed significantly higher current amplitudes at 36°C than at 21°C and significantly accelerated time-dependent inactivation. Halothane (1–2 MAC) and sevoflurane (1–3 MAC) evoked stronger inhibitions of ICa,L at 21°C than at 36°C. In spite of different temperature-dependent current amplitudes, the fractional (percent) inhibition of ICa,L showed the same linear relationship to the concentrations of halothane and sevoflurane in the bath medium at both temperatures, as revealed from present and previous experiments. Conclusions:Inhibition of ICa,L by halothane and sevoflurane is determined by the aqueous concentration of the anesthetics, independently of the temperature. Increased solubility may explain the stronger effects of the anesthetics at lower temperatures.
Analysis of Techniques of Sentiment and Topic Detection

User generated media like blogs, discussion forums is used as a tool by people to communicate their experiences with others. Presence of such huge data on Internet demands proper means to generate processed information from the unstructured data. What users need is more than mere sentiments. They need to know public opinion or experience of various aspects of a product like how is camera quality of the phone or energy efficiency of electronic products. For meeting the high demands of users, various techniques have been proposed till date. In this paper we are evaluating, all these techniques that discover topic along with sentiment associated with it. Many models were proposed to incorporate sentiment analysis with topic model to find aspects of a product and users sentiment about the aspect. Results of these models can be beneficial for various industries as well as users.
Antitumor Activity and Possible Mechanism of Crude Polysaccharides from Discorea bulbifera L. on the Mice Bearing U14 Cervical Carcinoma

To explore the antitumor activity of crude polysaccharides of Dioscorea bulbifera L. (DBLP) and its possible mechanism, the effects of DBLP on the tumor growth in vivo, thymus and spleen weight were examined. Apoptosis of thymus, spleen and tumor tissue in tumor-bearing mice was detected by the flow cytometry. The number of CD4+ and CD8+ T-lymphocyte subsets of peripheral blood was also determined by means of FACScan flow cytometer. Our results showed that U14 cervical carcinoma growth could be inhibited, thymus weight be increased, apoptosis of thymus and spleen be decreased, and apoptosis of tumor be increased by DBLP in tumor-bearing mice. Furthermore, DBLP had the abilities to reduce the ratio of CD4+/CD8+ T-lymphocyte according to CTX group. These results indicated that DBLP could suppress the cervical carcinoma through modulating immune response of the tumor-bearing mice and inducing apoptosis of tumor tissue.
i-GSEA4GWAS: a web server for identification of pathways/gene sets associated with traits by applying an improved gene set enrichment analysis to genome-wide association study

Genome-wide association study (GWAS) is nowadays widely used to identify genes involved in human complex disease. The standard GWAS analysis examines SNPs/genes independently and identifies only a number of the most significant SNPs. It ignores the combined effect of weaker SNPs/genes, which leads to difficulties to explore biological function and mechanism from a systems point of view. Although gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA) has been introduced to GWAS to overcome these limitations by identifying the correlation between pathways/gene sets and traits, the heavy dependence on genotype data, which is not easily available for most published GWAS investigations, has led to limited application of it. In order to perform GSEA on a simple list of GWAS SNP P-values, we implemented GSEA by using SNP label permutation. We further improved GSEA (i-GSEA) by focusing on pathways/gene sets with high proportion of significant genes. To provide researchers an open platform to analyze GWAS data, we developed the i-GSEA4GWAS (improved GSEA for GWAS) web server. i-GSEA4GWAS implements the i-GSEA approach and aims to provide new insights in complex disease studies. i-GSEA4GWAS is freely available at http://gsea4gwas.psych.ac.cn/.
Thin Film WSe 2 for Use as a Photovoltaic Absorber Material

An excellent candidate for an earth abundant absorber material is WSe 2 which can be directly grown as a p-type semiconductor with a band gap near 1.4 eV. In this work we present the structural, optical, and electrical properties of thin film WSe 2 grown via the selenization of sputter deposited tungsten films. We will show that highly textured films with an optical band gap in range of 1.4 eV, and absorption coefficients greater than 10 5 /cm across the visible spectrum can be easily achieved. In addition we will present Hall Effect and carrier density measurements as well, where will show densities in the 10 17 cm -3 range and p-type Hall mobilities greater than 10 cm 2 /V-s range can be obtained. We employ these results to numerically simulate solar cells based on this material, where we will show efficiencies greater than 20% are possible.
Improving performance of NEM relay logic circuits using integrated charge-boosting flip flop

The zero leakage operation of Nano-electromechanical (NEM) relays has generated a lot of interest in low power logic design. Mechanical delay of the switches is orders of magnitude larger than the electrical delay and hence limits the speed of operation of NEM based digital logic circuits. The mechanical delay is inversely proportional to the gate-base voltage (Vgb). This paper presents an integrated voltage doubler based flip flop that improves the performance by 2X by overdriving Vgb. The parallel plate capacitance between the gate and base of the relay is used to realize the storage capacitor for the doubler. It has been shown that for a flop fanout of 1, 2X performance boost could be achieved with 2X increase in area and 0.5X increase in power. For larger fanouts, the doubler is shared across multiple flops minimizing the area overhead. This approach can be extended as long as the overdrive does not create any reliability issues in the device. Accurate Verilog-A models were developed based on published fabrication results of scaled NEM relays [1] operating at 1V with a nominal air gap of 5 – 10nm. The area, power and performance trade-off for a sequential logic circuit with and without charge boosting is presented.
Feature map pooling for cross-view gait recognition based on silhouette sequence images

In this paper, we develop a novel convolutional neural network based approach to extract and aggregate useful information from gait silhouette sequence images instead of simply representing the gait process by averaging silhouette images. The network takes a pair of arbitrary length sequence images as inputs and extracts features for each silhouette independently. Then a feature map pooling strategy is adopted to aggregate sequence features. Subsequently, a network which is similar to Siamese network is designed to perform recognition. The proposed network is simple and easy to implement and can be trained in an end-to-end manner Cross-view gait recognition experiments are conducted on OU-ISIR large population dataset. The results demonstrate that our network can extract and aggregate features from silhouette sequence effectively. It also achieves significant equal error rates and comparable identification rates when compared with the state of the art.
Efficient Archiving and Content-Based Retrieval of Video Information on the Web

This paper summarizes an ongoing work in multimedia processing aimed at the automated archiving and selective retrieval of textual, pictorial and auditory information contained in video programs. Video processing performs the task representing the visual information using a small subset of the video frames. Linguistic processing refines the closed caption text, generates table of contents, and creates links to relevant multimedia documents. Audio and video information are compressed, and indexed based on their temporal association with the selected video frames and processed text. The derived information is used to automatically generate a hypermedia rendition of the program contents. This provides a compact representation of the information contained in the video program. It also serves as a textual and pictorial index for selective retrieval of the full-motion video program. A fully automatic system has been set up that generates HyperText Markup Language (HTML) renditions of television programs, and makes them available for access over the Internet within seconds of their broadcast.
Security Analysis of a Cryptographically-Enabled RFID Device

We describe our success in defeating the security of an RFID device known as a Digital Signature Transponder (DST). Manufactured by Texas Instruments, DST (and variant) devices help secure millions of SpeedPassTM payment transponders and automobile ignition keys. Our analysis of the DST involved three phases: 1. Reverse engineering: Starting from a rough published schematic, we determined the complete functional details of the cipher underpinning the challenge-response protocol in the DST. We accomplished this with only "oracle" or "black-box" access to an ordinary DST, that is, by experimental observation of responses output by the device. 2. Key cracking: The key length for the DST is only 40 bits. With an array of of sixteen FPGAs operating in parallel, we can recover a DST key in under an hour using two responses to arbitrary challenges. 3. Simulation: Given the key (and serial number) of a DST, we are able to simulate its RF output so as to spoof a reader. As validation of our results, we purchased gasoline at a service station and started an automobile using simulated DST devices. We accomplished all of these steps using inexpensive off-the-shelf equipment, and with minimal RF expertise. This suggests that an attacker with modest resources can emulate a target DST after brief short-range scanning or long-range eavesdropping across several authentication sessions. We conclude that the cryptographic protection afforded by the DST device is relatively weak.
Target Recognition in Radar Images Using Weighted Statistical Dictionary-Based Sparse Representation

In this letter, we present a novel generic approach for radar automatic target recognition in either inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) or synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. For this purpose, the radar image is described by a statistical modeling in the complex wavelet domain. Thus, the radar image is transformed into a complex wavelet domain using the dual-tree complex wavelet transform. Afterward, the magnitudes of the complex sub-bands are modeled by Weibull or Gamma distributions. The estimated parameters of these models are stacked together to create a statistical dictionary in training step. For the recognition task, we use the weighted sparse representation-based classification method that captures the linearity and locality information of image features. In this context, we propose to use the Kullback–Leibler divergence between the parametric statistical models of training and test sets in order to assign a weight for each training sample. Experiments conducted on both ISAR and SAR images’ databases demonstrate that the proposed approach leads to an improvement in the recognition rate.
Context-Aware Automated Analysis and Annotation of Social Human--Agent Interactions

The outcome of interpersonal interactions depends not only on the contents that we communicate verbally, but also on nonverbal social signals. Because a lack of social skills is a common problem for a significant number of people, serious games and other training environments have recently become the focus of research. In this work, we present NovA (Nonverbal behavior Analyzer), a system that analyzes and facilitates the interpretation of social signals automatically in a bidirectional interaction with a conversational agent. It records data of interactions, detects relevant social cues, and creates descriptive statistics for the recorded data with respect to the agent's behavior and the context of the situation. This enhances the possibilities for researchers to automatically label corpora of human--agent interactions and to give users feedback on strengths and weaknesses of their social behavior.
Carbon Molecules on a Copper Substrate

Semiconductor and metal carbon nanotubes were studied by scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) and spectral ellipsometry. STM measurements with spatial resolution up to 0.15 nm reveal spatially complicated structure of semiconductor nanotube-substrate interface layer. The measurements also registered graphene nanoclusters with hexagonal rings structure on copper. Quantum mechanical numerical calculations of electron density were performed on a carbon nanotube containing 40 atoms.
An inverse vibration-based approach towards modelling and damage identification in nonlinearly vibrating structures. Application for delamination detection in a composite beam

This study explores the possibilities for inverse analysis and modelling from data of a nonlinearly vibrating structure. We are suggesting a statistical approach based on singular spectrum analysis (SSA). The method is based on a free decay response, when the structure is given an initial disturbance and is left to vibrate on its own. The measured vibration response is decomposed into new variables, the principal components, which are used to uncover oscillatory patterns in the structural response. In this study an application of the methodology for the purposes of delamination detection in a composite beam is explored.
CEACAM1-4L Promotes Anchorage-Independent Growth in Melanoma

Widespread metastasis is the leading course of death in many types of cancer, including malignant melanoma. The process of metastasis can be divided into a number of complex cell biological events, collectively termed the “invasion-metastasis cascade. ” Previous reports have characterized the capability of anchorage-independent growth of cancer cells in vitro as a key characteristic of highly aggressive tumor cells, particularly with respect to metastatic potential. Biological heterogeneity as well as drastic alterations in cell adhesion of disseminated cancer cells support escape mechanisms for metastases to overcome conventional therapies. Here, we show that exclusively the carcinoembryonic antigen-related cell adhesion molecule 1 (CEACAM1) splice variant CEACAM1-4L supports an anchorage-independent signature in malignant melanoma. These results highlight important variant-specific modulatory functions of CEACAM1 for metastatic spread in patients suffering malignant melanoma.
Studying the Value of Library and Information Services. Part I. Establishing a Theoretical Framework

omy itself, and the results of testing the Taxonomy. We Of everything which we posses there are two uses. Both believe that the Taxonomy covers most dimensions of belong to the thing as such, but not in the same manner value related to use of library and information services. For example, a shoe is used for wear, and is used In the second part we also present suggestions for pragfor exchange; both are uses of a shoe. matic applications of the Taxonomy. Aristotle. Politics. Book I. Ch.9
Quality of integrated chronic disease care in rural South Africa: user and provider perspectives

The integrated chronic disease management (ICDM) model was introduced as a response to the dual burden of HIV/AIDS and non-communicable diseases (NCDs) in South Africa, one of the first of such efforts by an African Ministry of Health. The aim of the ICDM model is to leverage HIV programme innovations to improve the quality of chronic disease care. There is a dearth of literature on the perspectives of healthcare providers and users on the quality of care in the novel ICDM model. This paper describes the viewpoints of operational managers and patients regarding quality of care in the ICDM model. In 2013, we conducted a case study of the seven PHC facilities in the rural Agincourt sub-district in northeast South Africa. Focus group discussions (n = 8) were used to obtain data from 56 purposively selected patients ≥18 years. In-depth interviews were conducted with operational managers of each facility and the sub-district health manager. Donabedian’s structure, process and outcome theory for service quality evaluation underpinned the conceptual framework in this study. Qualitative data were analysed, with MAXQDA 2 software, to identify 17 a priori dimensions of care and unanticipated themes that emerged during the analysis. The manager and patient narratives showed the inadequacies in structure (malfunctioning blood pressure machines and staff shortage); process (irregular prepacking of drugs); and outcome (long waiting times). There was discordance between managers and patients regarding reasons for long patient waiting time which managers attributed to staff shortage and missed appointments, while patients ascribed it to late arrival of managers to the clinics. Patients reported anti-hypertension drug stock-outs (structure); sub-optimal defaulter-tracing (process); rigid clinic appointment system (process). Emerging themes showed that patients reported HIV stigmatisation in the community due to defaulter-tracing activities of home-based carers, while managers reported treatment of chronic diseases by traditional healers and reduced facility-related HIV stigma because HIV and NCD patients attended the same clinic. Leveraging elements of HIV programmes for NCDs, specifically hypertension management, is yet to be achieved in the study setting in part because of malfunctioning blood pressure machines and anti-hypertension drug stock-outs. This has implications for the nationwide scale up of the ICDM model in South Africa and planning of an integrated chronic disease care in other low- and middle-income countries.
Macrophage Stimulation by Bacterial Lipopolysaccharides Ii. Evidence for Differentiation Signals Delivered by Lipid a and by a Protein Rich Fraction of Lipopolysaccharides*

Bacterial lipopolysaccharides (LPS) I stimulate mouse peritoneal macro-phages to lyse tumor target cells in vitro (1-3). The mechanisms involved in the differentiation of macrophages into killer cells can now be explored by using the model described in the accompanying paper (3). In that study, purified LPS extracted from a rough mutant of Salmonella minnesota (R595) added to confluent monolayers of elicited macrophages stimulated the macrophages to lyse tumor target cells. The purpose of this paper is to show that macrophage stimulation is a generalized property of LPS and to probe the biochemical nature of the differentiation signal(s) delivered by LPS extracted from the cell walls of gram-negative bacteria. The biological activities of LPS have been localized to either the lipid A moiety or to the polysaccharide portions (Fig. 1) (4). The lipid A moiety activates the classical complement cascade (5-7) and significantly enhances the kallikrein-initiated cleavage of Hageman factor thereby initiating the intrinsic clotting sequence (8). Lipid A also stimulates mitogenesis in B lymphocytes (9, 10). The polysaccharide component is responsible for activation of the properdin pathway of complement (7, 11) and bears the molecule's major antigenic determinants (4). Localization of the site of the stimulation signal on LPS may, therefore, provide important insights into the mechanism of macrophage stimulation. LPS is well characterized biochemically and can be prepared in highly purified form (4). Moreover, considerable structural variation can be obtained
Effect of Two Kinds of Rare Earth Oxides on Zirconia Restoration

Objective: To evaluate the colouration of zirconia ceramic by adding two kinds of rare earth oxides. Methods: Added different concentrations of Fe2O3 and CeO2 in tetragonal zirconia poly crystals stabilized with 3Y-TZP powder compacted at 200MPa using cold isostatic pressure, and fully sinter. The chromaticity of sintered bodies was measured with spectrophotometer. Results: self-colored zirconia by two kinds of rare earth oxides: The lightness of zirconia by adding cerium oxides was about 85 and a* decreased slightly. The color shifted to more yellow-green color. The chroma of the ceramics became more intensity, the lightness decreased with the increasing of the content of ferrum oxides and the color change to red-yellow direction. Conclusion: Zirconia ceramic could be colorized by Fe2O3 and CeO2.