Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Elderly patients with cognitive impairment have a high risk for functional decline during hospitalization: The GIFA Study.

BACKGROUND We tested the hypothesis that cognitive impairment upon admission (CIA) and cognitive decline (CD) during hospitalization are associated with an increased risk for functional decline (FD) in older inpatients. METHODS The Italian Group of Pharmacoepidemiology in the Elderly (Gruppo Italiano di Farmacoepidemiologia nell'Anziano, GIFA) project was a multicenter survey of 9061 older patients admitted to Italian hospitals between 1991 and 1997. CIA was defined as a Hodkinson Abbreviated Mental Test score <7 on admission. The percentage of participants who developed FD, defined as loss of the ability to perform without help one or more activities of daily living between admission and discharge, was compared in patients who did and did not have CIA, and between those who lost at least one point in Hodkinson Abbreviated Mental Test score (CD) and those who did not. RESULTS Mean age was 77.4 years, and women represented 52.3% of the sample. CIA was present in 21.0% of the patients. During hospitalization, 176 patients (1.9%) experienced FD (4% of those with CIA vs 1.3% of those without CIA). In multivariate analysis, CIA was an important risk factor for FD (odds ratio 2.4; 95% confidence interval, 1.7-3.5; p <.001), independent of age, gender, comorbidity, polypharmacy, and disability on admission. CD occurred in 3.7% of the sample and was strongly associated with an increased risk for FD (odds ratio 16.0; 95% confidence interval, 10.8-23.6; p <.001). CONCLUSIONS Elderly patients with CIA have a higher risk for FD. New strategies should be implemented to prevent FD in patients with cognitive impairment, who account for a high percentage of older persons who are admitted to hospitals.
CALAPPA: a toolchain for mining Android applications

Software engineering researchers and practitioners working on the Android ecosystem frequently have to do the same tasks over and over: retrieve data from the Google Play store to analyze it, decompile the Dalvik bytecode to understand the behavior of the app, and analyze applications metadata and user reviews. In this paper we present CALAPPA, a highly reusable and customizable toolchain that allows researchers to easily run common analysis tasks on large Android application datasets. CALAPPA includes components to retrieve the data from different Android stores, and comes with a predefined, but extensible, set of modules that can analyze apps metadata and code.
Real-time 3D light field transmission

Although capturing and displaying stereo 3D content is now commonplace, information-rich light-field video content capture, transmission and display are much more challenging, resulting in at least one order of magnitude increase in complexity even in the simplest cases. We present an end-to-end system capable of capturing and real-time displaying of high-quality light-field video content on various HoloVizio light-field displays, providing very high 3D image quality and continuous motion parallax. The system is compact in terms of number of computers, and provides superior image quality, resolution and frame rate compared to other published systems. To generate light-field content, we have built a camera system with a large number of cameras and connected them to PC computers. The cameras were in an evenly spaced linear arrangement. The capture PC was directly connected through a single gigabit Ethernet connection to the demonstration 3D display, supported by a PC computation cluster. For the task of dense light field displaying massively parallel reordering and filtering of the original camera images is required. We were utilizing both CPU and GPU threads for this task. On the GPU we do the light-field conversion and reordering, filtering and the YUV-RGB conversion. We use OpenGL 3.0 shaders and 2D texture arrays to have easy access to individual camera images. A network-based synchronization scheme is used to present the final rendered images.
BLINK TO VISUAL THREAT DOES NOT HERALD CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE VEGETATIVE STATE

The blink response to visual threat is a standard bedside method for testing visual processing. In response to a sudden gesture directed toward the eyes, a person with a normal blink response will promptly contract both orbicularis oculi muscles to close the eyelids momentarily. There is no consensus as to whether blinking to visual threat (BVT) is purely reflex1 or a cognitively mediated behavior that heralds consciousness; i.e., is incompatible with the diagnosis of the vegetative state (VS). 2,3 Some authors stated that “one should be extremely cautious in making the diagnosis of the VS when there is … response to threatening gestures. ”4 Others stated that “react(ion) to visual threat” is a “compatible but atypical feature” of VS.5 Similarly, other guidelines stated that the “threat response is usually absent” in VS.6 Finally, BVT was not mentioned in some workgroup criteria on the minimally conscious state.7 The aim of the study was to determine the incidence of BVT in patients whose clinical features are in all other respects typical of the VS, as assessed by means of validated testing.7 We also investigated whether the presence of BVT in patients considered vegetative is predictive of recovery of consciousness. ### Methods. The BVT was assessed (four …
Functionally Dissociating Aspects of Event Memory: the Effects of Combined Perirhinal and Postrhinal Cortex Lesions on Object and Place Memory in the Rat

Reciprocal interactions between the hippocampus and the perirhinal and parahippocampal cortices form core components of a proposed temporal lobe memory system. For this reason, the involvement of the hippocampus in event memory is thought to depend on its connections with these cortical areas. Contrary to these predictions, we found that NMDA-induced lesions of the putative rat homologs of these cortical areas (perirhinal plus postrhinal cortices) did not impair performance on two allocentric spatial tasks highly sensitive to hippocampal dysfunction. Remarkably, for one of the tasks there was evidence of a facilitation of performance. The same cortical lesions did, however, disrupt spontaneous object recognition and object discrimination reversal learning but spared initial acquisition of the discrimination. This pattern of results reveals important dissociations between different aspects of memory within the temporal lobe. Furthermore, it shows that the perirhinal–postrhinal cortex is not a necessary route for spatial information reaching the hippocampus and that object familiarity–novelty detection depends on different neural substrates than do other aspects of event memory.
Positive Psychology and Brain Injury Rehabilitation

Abstract Positive psychology (PP) is the scientific study of positive emotion and wellbeing. In recent years, there has been a shift in the focus of PP from understanding the factors that contribute to wellbeing to developing and evaluating interventions to improve wellbeing. This article addresses the question of whether the principles and practice of PP are relevant to brain injury rehabilitation. It is concluded that PP is indeed relevant to brain injury rehabilitation; that much of our current (best) practice is consistent with the principles of PP, but there remain areas where brain injury rehabilitation practice could draw further on the specific methods of PP.
Online optimization and regret guarantees for non-additive long-term constraints

We consider online optimization in the 1-lookahead setting, where the objective does not decompose additively over the rounds of the online game. The resulting formulation enables us to deal with non-stationary and/or long-term constraints , which arise, for example, in online display advertising problems. We propose an on-line primal-dual algorithm for which we obtain dynamic cumulative regret guarantees. They depend on the convexity and the smoothness of the non-additive penalty, as well as terms capturing the smoothness with which the residuals of the non-stationary and long-term constraints vary over the rounds. We conduct experiments on synthetic data to illustrate the benefits of the non-additive penalty and show vanishing regret convergence on live traffic data collected by a display advertising platform in production.
Rapid screening test for primary hyperaldosteronism: ratio of plasma aldosterone to renin concentration determined by fully automated chemiluminescence immunoassays.

BACKGROUND The ratio of plasma aldosterone concentration to plasma renin activity (PAC/PRA) is the most common screening test for primary hyperaldosteronism (PHA), but it is not standardized among laboratories. We evaluated new automated assays for the simultaneous measurement of PAC and plasma renin concentration (PRC). METHODS We studied 76 healthy normotensive volunteers and 28 patients with confirmed PHA. PAC and PRC were measured immunochemically in EDTA plasma on the Nichols Advantage chemiluminescence analyzer, and PRA was determined by an activity assay. RESULTS In volunteers, PAC varied from 33.3 to 1930 pmol/L, PRA from 1.13 to 19.7 ng.mL(-1). h(-1) (0.215 ng.mL(-1). h(-1) = 1 pmol.L(-1). s(-1)), and PRC from 5.70 to 116 mU/L. PAC/PRA ratios ranged from 4.35 to 494 (pmol/L)/(ng.mL(-1). h(-1)) and PAC/PRC ratios from 0.69 to 71.0 pmol/mU. In PHA patients, PAC ranged from 158 to 5012 pmol/L, PRA from 0.40 to 1.70 ng.mL(-1). h(-1), and PRC from 0.80 to 11.7 mU/L. PAC/PRA ratios were between 298 and 6756 (pmol/L)/(ng.mL(-1). h(-1)) and PAC/PRC ratios between 105 and 2328 pmol/mU. Whereas PAC or PRC showed broad overlap between PHA patients and volunteers, the PAC/PRC ratio indicated distinct discrimination of these two groups at a cutoff of 71 pmol/mU. CONCLUSION The PAC/PRC ratio offers several practical advantages compared with the PAC/PRA screening method. The present study offers preliminary evidence that it may be a useful screening test for PHA. Further studies are required to validate these results, especially in hypertensive cohorts.
Abnormal Cortical Processing of the Syllable Rate of Speech in Poor Readers

Children with reading impairments have long been associated with impaired perception for rapidly presented acoustic stimuli and recently have shown deficits for slower features. It is not known whether impairments for low-frequency acoustic features negatively impact processing of speech in reading-impaired individuals. Here we provide neurophysiological evidence that poor readers have impaired representation of the speech envelope, the acoustical cue that provides syllable pattern information in speech. We measured cortical-evoked potentials in response to sentence stimuli and found that good readers indicated consistent right-hemisphere dominance in auditory cortex for all measures of speech envelope representation, including the precision, timing, and magnitude of cortical responses. Poor readers showed abnormal patterns of cerebral asymmetry for all measures of speech envelope representation. Moreover, cortical measures of speech envelope representation predicted up to 41% of the variability in standardized reading scores and 50% in measures of phonological processing across a wide range of abilities. Our findings strongly support a relationship between acoustic-level processing and higher-level language abilities, and are the first to link reading ability with cortical processing of low-frequency acoustic features in the speech signal. Our results also support the hypothesis that asymmetric routing between cerebral hemispheres represents an important mechanism for temporal encoding in the human auditory system, and the need for an expansion of the temporal processing hypothesis for reading disabilities to encompass impairments for a wider range of speech features than previously acknowledged.
Automated metamorphic testing

Usual techniques for automatic test data generation are based on the assumption that a complete oracle will be available during the testing process. However, there are programs for which this assumption is unreasonable. Recently, Chen et al. (1998, 2001) proposed to overcome this obstacle by using known relations over the input data and their unknown expected outputs to seek a subclass of faults inside the program. In this paper, we introduce an automatic testing framework able to check these so-called metamorphic relations. The framework makes use of constraint logic programming techniques to find test data that violate a given metamorphic-relation. Circumstances where it can also prove that the program satisfies this relation are presented. The first experimental results we got with a prototype tool build on the top of the test data generator INKA, show that this methodology can be completely automated.
Forecasting COPD hospitalization in the clinic: optimizing the chronic respiratory questionnaire

Purpose Forecasting hospitalization in patients with COPD has gained significant interest in the field of COPD care. There is a need to find simple tools that can help clinicians to stratify the risk of hospitalization in these patients at the time of care. The perception of quality of life has been reported to be independently associated with hospitalizations, but questionnaires are impractical for daily clinical use. Individual questions from valid questionnaires can have robust predictive abilities, as has been suggested in previous reports, as a way to use patient-reported outcomes to forecast important events like hospitalizations in COPD. Our primary aim was to assess the predictive value of individual questions from the Chronic Respiratory Questionnaire Self-Assessment Survey (CRQ-SAS) on the risk of hospitalization and to develop a clinically relevant and simple algorithm that clinicians can use in routine practice to identify patients with an increased risk of hospitalization. Patients and methods A total of 493 patients with COPD prospectively recruited from an outpatient pulmonary clinic completed the CRQ-SAS, demographic information, pulmonary function testing, and clinical outcomes. The cohort had a mean age of 70 years, was 54% male, with forced expiratory volume in 1 second percentage predicted 42.8±16.7, and modified Medical Research Council dyspnea scale score of 2±1.13. Results Our analysis validated the original CRQ-SAS domains. Importantly, recursive partitioning analysis identified three CRQ-SAS items regarding fear or panic of breathlessness, dyspnea with basic activities of daily living, and depressive symptoms that were highly predictive of hospitalization. We propose a robust (area under the curve =0.70) but short and easy algorithm for daily clinical care to forecast hospitalizations in patients with COPD. Conclusion We identified three themes – fear of breathlessness, dyspnea with basic activities of daily living, and depressive symptoms – as important patient-reported outcomes to predict hospitalizations, and propose a short and easy algorithm to forecast hospitalizations in patients with COPD.
Central projections of auditory nerve fibers of differing spontaneous rate, II: Posteroventral and dorsal cochlear nuclei

Response properties of auditory nerve fibers (ANFs), including threshold sensitivity, vary systematically with spontaneous discharge rate (SR) (Liberman, M.C.: J. Acoust. Soc Amer. 63:442–455, 1978). Thus, an understanding of the mechanisms underlying signal transformation in the cochlear nucleus (CN) must include a description of any SR‐based difference in ANF projections. This study is the second of a pair describing the CN projections of intracellularly labeled ANFs of known SR, the first of which summarized projection to the anteroventral CN (Liberman, M.C.: J. Comp. Neurol. 313:240–258, (1991). For each swelling from each labeled fiber, the position (within CN subdivisions), the size, and the type of cell contacted (if determinable) was noted: roughly one in four labeled swellings appeared in intimate contact with the soma or proximal dendrites of a CN cell. In all such cases, cell size and swelling size were measured. As reported for auteroventral cochlear nucleus, the ANF innervation of the small‐cell regions of posteroventral CN (PVCN) was almost exclusively by low‐and medium‐SR fibers. Other significant SR‐based trends in ANF projections included (1) a tendency for high‐SR fibers to contact larger cells in PVCN, (2) a meager projection of low‐ and medium‐SR fibers to octopus cells, and 3) a tendency in the dorsal CN (DCN) for low‐SR terminals to end closer to the fusiform cell layer than high‐SR terminals. There were no significant SR‐based difference in ANF swelling sizes in any subdivision. A consideration of the average cell sizes, ANF swelling sizes and estimated numbers of ANFs of different CF and SR converging on each CN cell help explain some of the differences in response transformation associated with different cell types in the CN. © 1993 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Mentoring trainee music teachers: beyond apprenticeship or reflection

This article explores the theoretical concepts of ‘apprenticeship’ and ‘reflection’ in Initial Teacher Education music mentoring. It presents two case studies of Secondary music mentoring and relates these to the theoretical concepts. The article argues that a more integrated view of music mentoring might be provided with reference to Kolb's (1984) theory of experiential learning.
ANTICANCER-LOADED SOLID LIPID NANOPARTICLES: HIGH POTENTIAL ADVANCEMENT IN CHEMOTHERAPY

The enhancement in cancer chemotherapy through incorporation into solid lipid nanoparticles (SLN) drug delivery system carries a lot of potential. Improving tumor diffusivity, improvement of body distribution, enhancing cellular uptake and inhibiting multidrug resistance mechanism are the main attributes. The availability of variety of methods of preparation with scale up possibility and the higher biocompatibility of elements used may accelerate their arrival to the pharmaceutical market. Nanostructured lipid carriers (NLC) and lipid hybrid nanoparticles provide options to overcome some of SLN limitations. This review provides a thorough update on the development in SLN optimization toward chemotherapy improvement.
Artistic Training and Interest in Visual Art: Applying the Appraisal Model of Aesthetic Emotions

Art experts find art more interesting, particularly when it is abstract or complex. These findings are explored in light of a model of aesthetic emotions rooted in appraisal theories (Silvia, 2005b, 2005d). This model attributes emotional responses to art to cognitive appraisal processes (as opposed to collative motivation, prototypicality, or processing fluency). Two experiments examined whether art experts and novices differed in the appraisals that make art interesting. In Experiment 1, people with art training found complex pictures more interesting, and they appraised them as easier to understand. Using multilevel modeling, Experiment 2 explored whether art training involved a qualitative shift in the appraisals that cause interest. Within-person effects of appraisals on emotions were essentially independent of between-person differences in training. People high and low in training make the same emotional appraisals of art, but they reach different answers to the appraisal questions.
Hip and Knee Osteoarthritis Affects Younger People, Too.

Synopsis Although osteoarthritis (OA) has traditionally been considered a disease of older age, hip and knee OA can and does affect younger adults, with a profound impact on psychosocial well-being and work capacity. Obesity and a history of traumatic knee injury (eg, anterior cruciate ligament rupture and/or meniscal tear) are key risk factors for the accelerated development of knee OA, while structural hip deformities (including those contributing to femoroacetabular impingement syndrome) are strong predictors of early-onset hip OA. In view of these associations, rising rates of obesity and sports injuries are concerning, and may signal a future surge in OA incidence among younger people. Assessment of hip and knee OA in younger people should focus on a patient-centered history, comprehensive physical examination, performance-based measures, and patient-reported outcome measures to enable monitoring of symptoms and function over time. Referral for imaging should be reserved for people presenting with atypical signs or symptoms that may indicate diagnoses other than OA. Nonpharmacological approaches are core strategies for the management of hip and knee OA in younger people, and these include appropriate disease-related education, activity modification (including for work-related tasks), physical therapist- prescribed exercise programs to address identified physical impairments, and weight control or weight loss. High-quality evidence has shown no benefit of arthroscopy for knee OA, and there are no published clinical trials to support the use of hip arthroscopy for OA. Referral for joint-conserving or joint replacement surgery should be considered when nonpharmacological and pharmacological management strategies are no longer effective. J Orthop Sports Phys Ther 2017;47(2):67-79. doi:10.2519/jospt.2017. 7286.
Comparative Perspectives on Kinship and Cultural Identity in Negeri Sembilan

The central contention of this paper is that important contrasts in the kinship systems of the Malays of Negeri Sembilan and the Malays of other parts of the Malay Peninsula (Malaya)1 have been overemphasized in the literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and that striking similarities in kinship and other areas of culture have been either glossed over or altogether ignored. This situation reflects both the normative, jurai emphases of the colonial-era (1874-1957) ethnographic literature on Negeri Sembilan and Malaya more generally, and the descent bias of the literature, particularly the material on Negeri Sembilan. These emphases and biases have obscured our understanding of Negeri Sembilan and have hindered our awareness of social and cultural commonalities in the Malay world; no less significant, as we will see, is that they have also had a profound impact on the ways in which Malays in Negeri Sembilan view themselves and their traditions as well as Malays in other regions of the Peninsula. Background The state of Negeri Sembilan covers an area of 2,566 square miles and has a (1980) population of about 573,500 people (Government of Malaysia, 1983). The census divides the population into four major ethnic categories: "Malays",2 who make up 46.2 per cent of the total; "Chinese", who comprise 36.6 per cent; "Indians", who amount to about 16.9 per cent; and "Others", who account for the remaining 0.3 per cent. The Malays, who are the focus of this paper, reside mostly in ethnically homogenous rural areas. Their economic activities include the subsistence cultivation of wet-rice, the collection and sale of forest products, the production of rubber for the world market, and, in the case
Children's rights and educational policy in Europe: the implementation of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child

This article aims to shed light on the impact of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) on education policy in Europe. The findings are based on a documentary analysis of the published reports of the Committee on the Rights of the Child (the Committee) on the implementation of the education rights in the CRC in every EU state. This included: a review of the state of children's rights to education in Europe as perceived by the Committee; a summary of the Committee's key recommendations for governments; and an assessment of whether the CRC can be considered to have influenced domestic education law and policies. The findings suggest that the CRC is having an impact on domestic education policy and that the child rights framework could be harnessed further by those seeking to influence government. The article concludes by reflecting on the factors which affect the processes of translating the CRC into policy and practice and explores the role that educationalists, both academic and practitioners, might play in its implementation.