Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Continuous positive airway pressure with modified helmet for treatment of hypoxemic acute respiratory failure in infants and a preschool population: A feasibility study*

Objective: To analyze the feasibility of using continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) delivered via a modified helmet to treat children with hypoxemic acute respiratory failure. Design: A single-center, prospective, clinical study. Setting: Pediatric intensive care unit in a university hospital. Patients: Fifteen consecutive children (from 1 month to 5 yrs of age) with hypoxemic acute respiratory failure (defined as Pao2/Fio2 <300). Interventions: CPAP was delivered via a modified helmet (CaStar, Starmed, Italy) of reduced size, fastened by a device we call a “baby-body. ” The feasibility of CPAP with the helmet was the primary end point. The improvement of gas exchange was the secondary one. Measurements and Main Results: Ten of 15 children had multiple organ failure. Nine of 15 children were ≤1 yr old. The helmet was well tolerated by all the children. Additional sedation was provided to four patients. No children developed significant complications (skin lesion, gastric distension, conjunctivitis, epistaxis, or loss of invasive devices) or lethal, helmet-related events. Oxygenation improved above baseline after 2 hrs of CPAP with the helmet; no significant variation of hemodynamic variables was detected. Conclusions: The helmet is a suitable device for delivery of CPAP to infants and preschool children with hypoxemic acute respiratory failure. It was well tolerated and improved oxygenation.
Institutional Stakeholdings and Better-Informed Traders at Earnings Announcements

Utama and Cready [Utama, S. , Cready, W.M. , 1997. Institutional ownership, differential predisclosure precision and trading volume at announcement dates. Journal of Accounting and Economics 24, 129-150] use total institutional ownership to proxy for the proportion of better-informed traders, an important determinant of trading around earnings announcements. We argue that institutions holding small stakes cannot justify the fixed cost of developing private predisclosure information. Also, institutions with large stakes generally do not trade around earnings announcements since they are dedicated investors or face regulations that make informed trading difficult. However, institutions holding medium stakes have incentives to develop private predisclosure information and trade on it; we show that their ownership is a finer proxy for the proportion of better-informed traders at earnings announcements.
Has the Food Stamp program become more accessible? Impacts of recent changes in reporting requirements and asset eligibility limits

This paper uses data from the 1996 and 2001 panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation to assess the impact of recent policy initiatives intended to increase access to Food Stamps. It finds that reductions in state certification requirements increased Food Stamp participation rates of income-eligible families with children by one to two percentage points from 2001 to 2003, a change that is comparable to the impact of changes in economic conditions over this period. It did not find consistent evidence of an impact of relaxing vehicle asset limits, or of offering continuous eligibility through the Semi-Annual|Simplified Reporting option. © 2006 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management
The Null Space of the Delsarte-Goethals Frame

In compressed sensing (CS) [1–3], we wish to sense a signal f ∈ RC by taking its product with a matrix Φ ∈ RN×C to obtain a measurement vector y ∈ R . We refer to the rows of Φ as the projection vectors, as measurements y correspond to projections, or inner products, of the signal f onto the rows of the matrix Φ. When N C, this acquisition scheme effectively compresses the signal f . Since in this case the signal recover problem is ill posed, one must exploit prior information on the signal such as sparsity or compressibility. For example, we say a signal is K-sparse if only K out of the C entries of f are nonzero. CS relies on the use of sparse approximation algorithms, as well as specially tailored signal recovery algorithms based on sparsity, to recover the signal f from the measurements y and the CS matrix Φ. Most work in CS relies on random constructions on the matrix Φ; that is, the entries of the matrix are drawn independently from a suitable probability distribution such as Gaussian or Rademacher. Such matrices have been shown to provide enough information about a K-sparse signal f through the measurements y when N = O(K log C).
Towards a practitioner-centric paradigm of MIS developmentand organisational knowledge creation in social careorganisations

This study explores the Management Information Systems’ (MIS) implementation and utilisation in social care organisations. The aim of this thesis is to study the level of social work practitioners’ involvement in MIS selection and implementation and to determine the links between the utilisation of MIS in social care organisations and the creation of organisational knowledge. Thus, the thesis endeavours to increase understanding of the importance of MIS implementation for personnel and organisations, to capture its meaning and any implications this may have for organisational knowledge and social work practice. To further this aim, a two case-study design was developed and carried out in two social care organisations in England. Semi-structured interviews and direct observation were used as data collection tools. Interviews with open-ended questions were carried out with practitioners, team managers, senior managers and staff responsible for Information Technology applications and programmes. Data analysis was carried out utilising two key methods, within-case and cross-case analysis. The purpose of the analysis was to illustrate the participants’ experiences within five main themes: Practitioners’ and Team Managers’ Feelings about the new MIS’ Implementation, Participation, Management Information System, Social Work Practice, and Organisation and Organisational Knowledge. The research findings highlighted that social care organisations need radical shifts in organisational philosophy in order to achieve functioning MIS, and more importantly, to become ‘learning organizations’ that capture and disseminate social work practice knowledge and skills. For example, practitioners’ participation in MIS implementation was recognised as a key factor, which determined both MIS implementation and organisational knowledge creation in a social care organisation. The qualitative data gathered also revealed that there were constraints in engaging practitioners with organisational procedures and in make them feel valued. The thesis, based on the research findings, concludes with the proposal of two models for MIS implementation and organisational knowledge creation.
A novel pixel value space statistics map of the pulmonary nodule for classification in computerized tomography images

Accurate assessment of pulmonary nodules can help to diagnose the serious degree of lung cancer. In most computed aided diagnosis (CADx) systems, the feature extraction module plays quite an important role in classifying pulmonary nodules based on different attributes of them. To precisely evaluate the malignancy of an unknown pulmonary nodule, this paper first proposes a novel pixel value space statistics map (PVSSM) for pulmonary nodules classification. By means of PVSSM this study can transform an original two-dimensional (2D) or three-dimensional (3D) pulmonary nodule into a 2D feature matrix, which contributes to better classifying a pulmonary nodule. To validate the proposed method, this study assembled 5385 valid 3D nodules from 1006 cases in LIDC-IDRI database. This study extracts sets of features from the created feature matrixes by singular value decomposition (SVD) method. Using several popular classifiers including KNN, random forest and SVM, we acquire the classification accuracies of 77.29%, 80.07% and 84.21%, respectively. Moreover, this study also utilizes the convolutional neural network (CNN) to assess the malignancy of nodules and the sensitivity, specificity and area under the curve (AUC) reach up to 86.0%, 88.5% and 0.913, respectively. Experiments demonstrate that the PVSSM has a benefit for nodules classification.
A bandwidth-improved slotted circular microstrip antenna (CMSA) for High Altitude Platform Stations (HAPS)

An investigative design of a circular microstrip antenna (CMSA) and its related geometry intended for 5850–7075 MHz Malaysia HAPS operating band is presented. The structure consists of three layers, with the radiator at the top (layer three), a feed on the middle layer (layer two) and finally a grounding copper plate at the bottom (layer one). A commercial microwave laminate with permittivity ∊r = 2.2 was used to fabricate layer one, and this was fed via a smaller circular copper sheet, via capacitive coupling. The layer 1 and layer 2 height variation was investigated, as well as its x-y feeding location. Apart from normal circular form, slots resembling complementary circular split ring resonators (CCSRR) were placed in each circular structure for bandwidth and gain improvement. The dimension suitability was also investigated. From this work, it was found that the application of a lower dielectric permittivity value for the microwave laminate and a larger thickness was proven to be favourable. A HAPS antenna with bandwidth of more than 2.0 GHz (VSWR < 2), centred at 5850 MHz was successfully designed, when implementing CCSRR slots. In addition, backlobes were also significantly suppressed.
Mimicking Behavior in Repurchase Decisions

Behavioral biases associated with base rate neglect, anchoring, ambiguity aversion, and robust control may foster an environment in which mimicking may influence decision-making. This study tests for the presence of mimicking behavior in security repurchase decisions. After controlling for variables reflecting financial operating motives and mispricing associated with limits to arbitrage, results show that debt-equity choices in repurchase events are significantly enhanced by the occurrence of recent similar choices made by the firm's competitors. Specifically, the probability of opting to repurchase equity (debt) is positively associated with the size of the firm conducting the largest percentage equity (debt) repurchase in the same industry in the prior year. Moreover, the mimicking activity is observed for smaller-sized firms, but not for larger firms. The findings are consistent with the premise that managers of smaller firms are generally less skilled and experienced, and more prone to be influenced by decision shortcuts such as mimicking the actions of peers.
The Changing Structure of British Higher Education: How diverse is it?

With the passage of the 1992 Further and Higher Education Act the British system of higher education formally moved from a binary to a unitary structure. However, ever since successive governments have argued for a diversified model of higher education within which institutions should pursue contrasting goals. This article offers an interpretation of the key ingredients of institutional diversification and constructs alternative structural models of higher education. It proceeds by exploring the changing structure of British higher education since the creation of the unitary model. The argument is that there has been a steady emergence of flexible sectors, which both converge and diversify. However, there is a danger that the 2011 White Paper, rather than sustaining flexible sectors, could intensify the nascent shift in the direction of stratification marked by increasing differentiation between sectors as they converge internally.
Corruption, Rule of Law, and Economic Efficiency: Virginia vs. Chicago Public Choice Theories

Can corruption improve economic efficiency? Classical political economists argue that corruption undermines the rule of law (Smith 2001, chap 5). The modern Public Choice proponents argue that corruption and lobbying might influence the efficiency of the rule of law. While Chicago Public Choice scholars model how legal lobbying, which is corruption in Virginia Public Choice perspective, improves efficiency of the rule of law and thus the overall economic efficiency, the Virginia Public Choice models explain how corruption reduces efficiency of the rule of law and thus the overall economic efficiency. In this short paper, we present a brief survey distinguishing between arguments of the Chicago Public Choice and Virginia Public Choice schools on how corruption influences economic efficiency. We argue that the Virginia Public Choice explanation is more realistic because it includes the influence of bureaucratic rent-seeking.
A review: Region of interest based image retrieval

Region of interest means area of image that is to be selected or considered as important part of an image. Region of interest is selected in two different ways; first region is selected by user and second is system dependent selection. Instead of using system selection, user selection will be more effective because system selection can create difficulties while considering regions whereas user will select particular region in user selection. Query images when provided by user its global features are extracted but the problem will be with the local features, which are not considered during image retrieval. In order to solve the problem of local features extraction, region of interest within particular image is introduced and instead of retrieving whole image desired region of the images are focused for image retrieval. This paper gives the idea of region of interest based image retrieval concept and is expected to be helpful to the researchers who are working in region based image retrieval systems.
A lip reading method based on 3-D DCT and 3-D HMM

Lip reading aims at recognizing what human says by analyzing visual speech information, such as lip movement. This technique is used to improve the recognition rate under the noise environment. Now, more lip feature extracting methods are developed, most of which are sensitive to lip positioning. To extract the features using Hidden Markov Model can be avoided such defect. Lip movement videos have 3-D structure. Therefore, we extend Hidden Markov Models to 3-dimensional space, construct a lip movement model using it. In order to consider lip dynamic features, we extract the feature vectors using 3-D Discrete Cosine Transform. 3-D DCT and 3-D HMM based lip reading method has following advantages: It can consider dynamic features of the lip movement. It can be robust on rotation, parallel shift and variant scaling. We tested its performance on VidTIMIT database compared with Pseudo 3-D HMM based method. Our method can increase the recognition rate about 2∼3% against P3-D HMM based method.
Alcohol Use and Mental Health in Middle-aged Women. Women´s Health in Lund Area, a Swedish Population-based Study.

Alcohol use and mental health of the general population is of public health concern. Few population-based studies have focused on middle-aged women. The aim of this thesis was to increase knowledge about middle-aged women’s alcohol consumption, drinking patterns, mental symptoms and use of psychotropic drugs. A separate analysis focuses on immigrant women. All women aged 50-59 (n=10,766), born between 1935 and 1945, and living in the Lund area of southern Sweden, were invited to participate in a health survey (WHILA). A total of 6,917 women (64.2%) answered a questionnaire and underwent a physical examination that was carried out between 1995 and 2000. This thesis is based on material from the questionnaire. Three out of four middle-aged women drank alcohol weekly. Wine was the dominant beverage. For most women consumption was low, while binge drinking (i.e. heavy occasional drinking) was common. Several differences regarding social situation and physical health were found between those who did not drink alcohol weekly compared to weekly drinkers, all implying a more unfavourable situation for the former. This was more pronounced among abstainers than those who drank alcohol less than weekly. Most associations to poorer health vanished in the multivariate logistic regression analysis, while most associations to poorer social situation remained. Immigrants from Eastern Europe and outside Europe were more often non-drinkers, in particular those who immigrated later in life. This study illustrates poor subjective health among middle-aged women. Mental symptoms were common, and severe (i.e. many) mental symptoms were strongly associated with severe physical symptoms. In women with severe mental symptoms, 15.4% used psychotropic drugs regularly and 4.1% had medical control for mental reasons. Immigrants were not more often troubled by severe mental symptoms than Swedish-born women. Neither level of alcohol consumption nor binge drinking was associated with severity of mental symptoms, use of psychotropic drugs, treatment for a mental disorder, lifelong or previous year suicidal behaviour. However, drinking alcohol to relieve tension, affirmed by 7.2% of the women, was associated with severe mental symptoms as well as binge drinking. In health care, attention should be paid to middle-aged women’s drinking patterns and mental health problems.
Preliminary Study on Planar Electromagnetic Microfluidics Based a Microsensor by Finite Element Analysis

To improve the performance of conventional magnetohydrodynamics (MHDs) micropump used in microfluidic sensing systems, this paper presents a novel MHD flow model with planar electromagnets, demonstrates the basic theoretical analysis of an ac MHD micropump and compares it with other MHD flow models by finite element analysis. Since little attention has been devoted to the application of planar electromagnet in MHD micropump, preliminary study was proposed in this paper. Based on the numerical models developed, flow velocity, magnetic flux density distribution in different channel sizes, and comparison of different coil materials and magnetic yoke materials used in the MHD micropump were investigated by the proposed 3-D models. Microchannel with aspect ratio of 1:1 was used in our simulation as the flow velocity decreased with the aspect ratio decreased. Flow velocity of 0.94 ml/min was observed with the proposed new designed MHD micropump, which provides an alternative to traditional MHD micropump with complex 3-D electromagnet construction, especially potential applications in drug delivery system, chemical analysis, and biological detection areas when integrating with sensing elements.
MMID: Multimodal Multi-view Integrated Database for human behavior understanding

The paper introduces the Multimodal Multi-view Integrated Database (MMID), which holds human activities in presentation situations. MMID contains audio, video, human body motions, and transcripts, which are related to each other by their occurrence time. MMID accepts basic queries for the stored data. One can examine, by referring the retrieved data, how the different modalities are cooperatively and complementarily used in real situations. This examination over different situations is essential for understanding human behaviors, since they are heavily dependent on their contexts and personal characteristics. In this sense, MMID can serve as a basis for systematic or statistical analysis of those modalities, and it can be a good tool when one designs an intelligent user interface system or a multimedia contents handling system. The authors present the database design and its possible applications.
Portfolio Allocation and the Vote of No Confidence

There is a contradiction between theory and empirics with respect to portfolio allocation in parliamentary democracies. While the canonical model of legislative bargaining predicts the existence of a â€˜formateur bonusâ€™, empirical studies show that portfolios are allocated in a manner that favours smaller parties. This article argues that the difference between the empirical pattern and the theoretical predictions can be explained by the vote of no confidence, which provides an incentive for large formateur parties to overcompensate smaller coalition partners in exchange for their sustained support over time. This argument is tested by exploiting variations in the presence of no confidence votes across national and regional levels in France. As predicted, we find that larger formateur parties receive a greater share of portfolios if the vote of no confidence is absent than if it is present.
The Effectiveness of an Acceptance and Commitment Therapy Self-help Intervention for Chronic Pain

ObjectiveTo evaluate the effectiveness of an Acceptance Commitment Therapy based self-help book for people with chronic pain. MethodThis was a randomized 2 group study design. Over a 6-week period, 6 participants read the self-help book and completed exercises from it with weekly telephone support whereas 8 others formed a wait-list control group. Subsequently, 5 of the wait-list participants completed the intervention. Participants completed preintervention and postintervention questionnaires for acceptance, values illness, quality of life, satisfaction with life, depression, anxiety, and pain. Initial outcome data were collected for 8 control participants and 6 intervention participants. Including the wait-list controls, a total of 11 participants completed preintervention and postintervention measures. Whilst completing the self-help intervention, each week participants' rated the content of the book according to reading level and usefulness, and their comprehension of the content was also assessed. ResultsCompared with controls, participants who completed the book showed improved quality of life and decreased anxiety. When data from all the treatment participants were pooled, those who completed the intervention showed statistically significant improvements (with large effect sizes) for acceptance, quality of life, satisfaction with life, and values illness. Medium effect sizes were found for improvements in pain ratings. ConclusionsThese findings support the hypothesis that using the self-help book, with minimal therapist contact adds value to the lives of people who experience chronic pain.
Theory of Mind in Children with Cerebral Palsy and Severe Speech Impairment

Falkman, K. W. , Dahlgren Sandberg, A. , & Hjelmquist, E. , Theory of Mind in Children with Cerebral Palsy and Severe Speech Impairment, Göteborg Psychological Reports, 2004, 34, No. 2. A theory of mind (ToM) refers to the ability to impute mental states to oneself and others. It has been argued that defic its in this ability are specific to individuals with autism. Recent studies on children with other communicative impairments, however, cast doubt on this suggested specific relationship. A study that investigated understanding of a range of mental states within a single group of normally developed participants suggested a three-stage model of development of ToM. Using this model a group of seven children with cerebral palsy and severe speech impairment were tested on a range of tasks requiring ToM. The findings suggest that the children in this group follow a normal pattern of development, but with a considerable delay compared with children without disability. The findings also cast further doubt on the suggested specific relationship between deficits in ToM and autism, showing that children with other disabilities also experience problems within this area, albeit be it not for the same reasons.