Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Surgical strategy for Apert syndrome: Retrospective study of developmental quotient and three‐dimensional computerized tomography

There are many surgical techniques for craniosynostosis. However, the indications for and timing of surgery still remain unclarified. Most of the skull growth in craniosynostosis is completed in the first year, and the bone is strong enough to undergo distraction osteogenesis. However, previous reports showed that patients operated on before 1 year of age had better IQ than those operated later in life. This report aims to consider the best timing for cranial expansion and surgical strategy for Apert syndrome. From January 2002 to December 2011, 13 patients with Apert syndrome were operated on and were followed up for more than 5 years. Nine patients underwent operations before 1 year of age (early surgery group) and three patients underwent operations later in life (late surgery group). They underwent fronto‐orbital advancement for primary surgery. We evaluated postoperative developmental quotient every year and cephalic index (CI) measured by three‐dimensional computerized tomography (3D–CT) at the age over 5 years retrospectively. Eleven of 13 patients improved their developmental quotient scores, with no significant intergroup differences. The CI evaluation showed cases with remnant brachycephalic deformity in both groups. Two patients with remnant plagiocephalic deformities tend to have primary surgery early in life compared to the others. Thus the delay in primary surgery had little influence on psychological development. We conclude that the primary surgery can be delayed unless the intracranial pressure needs to be controlled. In addition, fronto‐orbital advancement could not sufficiently improve the brachycephalic appearance, other procedures like posterior vault distraction might be better alternatives.
Destroying lignocellulosic matters for enhancing methane production from excess sludge

ABSTRACT A lot of lignocellulosic matters are usually present in excess sludge, which are hardly degraded in anaerobic digestion (AD) and thus remains mostly in digested sludge. This is a reason why the conversion rate of sludge organics into energy (CH4) is often low. Obviously, the hydrolysis of AD cannot destruct the structure of lignocellulosic matters. Structural destruction of lignocellulosic matters has to be performed in AD. In this study, pretreatments with the same principles as cell disintegration of sludge were applied to destruct lignocellulosic matters so that these materials could be converted to CH4 via AD. Acid, alkali, thermal treatment and ultrasonic were used in the experiments to observe the destructed/degraded efficiency of lignocellulosic matters. Thermal treatment was found to be the most effective pretreatment. Under optimized conditions (T = 150°C and t = 30 min), pretreated sludge had a degraded rate of 52.6% in AD, due to easy destruction and/or degradation of hemicelluloses and celluloses in pretreatment. The sludge pretreated by thermal treatment could enhance the CH4 yield (mL CH4 g−1 VSS) by 53.6% compared to raw sludge. Economically, the thermal treatment can balance the input energy with the produced energy (steam and electricity).
Exploiting salient semantic analysis for information retrieval

ABSTRACT Recently, many Wikipedia-based methods have been proposed to improve the performance of different natural language processing (NLP) tasks, such as semantic relatedness computation, text classification and information retrieval. Among these methods, salient semantic analysis (SSA) has been proven to be an effective way to generate conceptual representation for words or documents. However, its feasibility and effectiveness in information retrieval is mostly unknown. In this paper, we study how to efficiently use SSA to improve the information retrieval performance, and propose a SSA-based retrieval method under the language model framework. First, SSA model is adopted to build conceptual representations for documents and queries. Then, these conceptual representations and the bag-of-words (BOW) representations can be used in combination to estimate the language models of queries and documents. The proposed method is evaluated on several standard text retrieval conference (TREC) collections. Experiment results on standard TREC collections show the proposed models consistently outperform the existing Wikipedia-based retrieval methods.
Detecting and Editing Privacy Policy Pitfalls on the Web

Privacy policies are the locus where consequences concerning privacy and personal data are produced, but content features explain why they are largely ignored by its addressees. To abridge users with policies, we propose a policybased system that identifies potential pitfalls in the privacy policies of companies on the Web. It will then suggest clarification of terms by suggesting removal or replacement of defective terms, in order to foster accountable policymaking and compliance. The proposed methods are based on extracting knowledge from natural language texts of a small sample size, and on semantic representations of the policy expression.
Hacia una propuesta de Entorno Colaborativo para usuarios de Comunicación Aumentativa y Alternativa en el ámbito educativo

Este articulo presenta la segunda fase de un trabajo de aplicacion de las TIC en educacion, especificamente en el escenario de Educacion Especial, alumnos con Trastornos en el Lenguaje y la Comunicacion (TLC), usuarios de Sistemas de Comunicacion Aumentativa y Alternativa (SAAC). Nuestro objeto de estudio son los sistemas Computer Supported Colaborative Learning (CSCL), poniendo especial enfasis en su dimension comunicacional y las posibilidades que podrian ofrecer para el entrenamiento de practicas de comunicacion con SAAC de Alta Tecnologia (AT). Aqui describiremos el marco metodologico con el que abordamos el trabajo de campo y los primeros resultados del mismo. Luego, se expone una primera propuesta tecnicametodologica para el entrenamiento de practicas de CAA con SAAC de AT, las conclusiones obtenidas hasta el momento y trabajos futuros.
Vérification des politiques XACML avec le langage Event-B

Les politiques permettent de definir les regles de la securite et de la gestion des differents composants du systeme. Cela implique l'emploi d'un langage pour exprimer les regles d'affaires et les regles non fonctionnelles, et de donner aux utilisateurs la possibilite de tester et de corriger les politiques. Plusieurs langages tels que XACML, Rei ou PONDER, sont utilises pour exprimer les politiques par rapport aux objectifs du systeme d'information. Ces langages peuvent definir plusieurs regles et politiques, mais la plupart de ces langages ne donnent pas de mecanisme pour tester et verifier la presence des conflits et de l'incoherence entre les politiques du systeme. Ce memoire vise la verification des politiques de controle d'acces. Notre approche consiste a traduire les politiques XACML sous forme d'un ensemble de machines abstraites de la methode B. Nous exprimons aussi les proprietes a verifier par des formules logiques. L'approche offre aux utilisateurs des moyens pour verifier les politiques afin de s'assurer que les regles expriment bien les objectifs regissant le comportement et les interactions des systemes geres. Dans la premiere phase, les composantes des politiques XACML ont ete exprimees avec des expressions formelles basees sur la logique du premier ordre. Par la suite, les outils developpes pour la methode B, comme le langage Event-B sous la plate forme Rodin, ont ete utilises pour verifier les regles des politiques par rapport a un ensemble de proprietes que nous avons definies. Notre approche est plus flexible et permet aux utilisateurs de tester et de verifier les regles avant l'implementation de ces politiques. Une telle verification est fondee sur les preuves avec logique du premier ordre, ou des proprietes importantes de la politique peuvent etre enoncees et prouvees. ______________________________________________________________________________ MOTS-CLES DE L’AUTEUR : Politique, XACML, Methode formelle, Event-B, Verification.
Incidence of and risk factors for atrial fibrillation in older adults.

BACKGROUND This study aimed to describe the incidence of atrial fibrillation (AF) among older adults during 3 years of follow-up. METHODS AND RESULTS In this cohort study, 5201 adults > or = 65 years old were examined annually on four occasions between June 1989 and May 1993. At baseline, participants answered questionnaires and underwent a detailed examination that included carotid ultrasound, pulmonary function tests, ECG, and echocardiography. Subjects with a pacemaker or AF at baseline (n=357) were excluded. New cases of AF were identified from three sources: (1) annual self-reports, (2) annual ECGs, and (3) hospital discharge diagnoses. Cox proportional-hazards models were used to assess baseline risk factors as predictors of incident AF. Among 4844 participants, 304 developed a first episode of AF during an average follow-up of 3.28 years, for an incidence of 19.2 per 1000 person-years. The onset was strongly associated with age, male sex, and the presence of clinical cardiovascular disease. For men 65 to 74 and 75 to 84 years old, the incidences were 17.6 and 42.7, respectively, and for women, 10.1 and 21.6 events per 1000 person-years. In stepwise models, the use of diuretics, a history of valvular heart disease, coronary disease, advancing age, higher levels of systolic blood pressure, height, glucose, and left atrial size were all associated with an increased risk of AF. The use of beta-blockers and high levels of alcohol use, cholesterol, and forced expiratory volume in 1 second were associated with a reduced risk of AF. CONCLUSIONS The incidence of AF in older adults may be higher than estimated by previous population studies. Left atrial size appears to be an important risk factor, and the control of blood pressure and glucose may be important in preventing the development of AF.
Facial Expression and Experience of Emotions in Psychodynamic Interviews with Patients Suffering from a Pain Disorder

In clinical practice, it is often difficult to establish a positive relationship with patients suffering from psychogenic pain disorder. The present study addresses this maladaptive relationship pattern that is characterized by a mixture of disappointment and rejection. Facial expressions of emotions of 21 female patients in psychodynamic interviews were analyzed and compared to a control group of 11 healthy subjects. The assumption of a maladaptive relationship pattern is supported by an increase in negative facial expressions, especially contempt, on the side of the patients and the interviewer. These negative emotions indicate a disorder of self- and relationship regulation and are negatively correlated with the level of structural personality organization (as measured by the operationalized psychodynamic diagnostic). They also correlate with the emotional experience of shame and fear and are negatively correlated with the experience of joy. The results demonstrate how maladaptive relationship patterns are implemented at the level of involuntary emotional behavior. They can help to understand and improve the emotional quality of therapeutic relationships.
Examining Social Media Dimensions among a Cohort of Generation Y Consumers in South Africa

South Africa represents a microcosm of major global trends in social media among developing countries and this study presents various multi-dimensional constructs directed towards the intention to use social media tools among consumers. The purpose of this study is to explore the factors that affect the use of social media tools such as social networking sites, virtual worlds, microblogs and other Web 2.0 sharing applications. A quantitative study was followed using a structured questionnaire that incorporated existing scales. From the survey, 376 responses were returned, usable. Initially descriptive statistics such as frequencies were established with a view to understand the composition of the sample after which it was established that 58% (n=219) of the respondents were male while 42% (n= 157) were female. Thereafter, inferential statistics were employed through a factor analytical study which was applied using Principal Components Analysis with Varimax rotation. This analysis revealed four pertinent dimensions of social media usage. The reliability of the measuring instrument was assessed through Cronbach’s coefficient alpha and revealed high internal consistency among the four identified constructs, namely; enjoyment (0.855), usefulness (0.802), ease of use (0.847) and critical mass (0.810). The identified dimensions have important implications to marketing practitioners in terms of social media spending allocation and extension of the marketing communication strategy; with social media as a pivotal element. However, future studies that integrate more robust statistical applications such as structural equation modelling (SEM) may be useful in validating the efficacy of the factors that were identified in this study. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2013. v4n14p329
[What is outcome quality?].

Modern scientific surgery is outcome-oriented, i.e., the success of surgical therapy is quantified and assessed, generally in clinical studies, according to certain criteria such as survival time or complication rates. The public and health policy makers have recently started demanding not only greater transparency in outcome quality assessment, but also that the results obtained be made available for comparisons about medical performance as a whole. Outcome quality would thus cease to be concerned with a limited range of therapy options and to interest merely doctors and surgeons and a small number of selected patients; it would then affect a number of very different hospitals with heterogeneous patient populations and attract the attention of various lobbies in the health sector. What is problematical, however, is that there is no single interpretation of what outcome quality in medicine is supposed to be. Consequently, assessments and comparisons of quality and performance are difficult and often erroneous. Comparisons of performance in surgery should only be done with selected and evaluated parameters of outcome quality and with a critical examination of how they can be implemented and published.
An Indexing Method for Graphical Documents

In this paper, a method to browse symbols into graphical documents is presented. More precisely, we propose a combined filtering and indexing mechanism that retrieves in an efficient way the most similar symbols to a given input query. For a database of 200000 symbols the retrieval time has been divided by a factor of 4, 5 compared to a linear search.
Building a document genre corpus: a profile of the KRYS I corpus

This paper describes the KRYS I corpus, consisting of documents classified into 70 genre classes. It has been constructed as part of an effort to automate document genre classification as distinct from topic detection. Previously there has been very little work on building corpora of texts which have been classified using a non-topical genre palette. The reason for this is partly due to the fact that genre as a concept, is rooted in philosophy, rhetoric and literature, and highly complex and domain dependent in its interpretation ([11]). The usefulness of genre in everyday information search is only now starting to be recognised and there is no genre classification schema that has been consolidated to have applicable value in this direction. By presenting here our experiences in constructing the KRYS I corpus, we hope to shed light on the information gathering and seeking behaviour and the role of genre in these activities, as well as a way forward for creating a better corpus for testing automated genre classification tasks and the application of these tasks to other domains.
Semantic Systems and Visual Tools to Support Environmental Communication

Given the intense attention that environmental topics such as climate change attract in news and social media coverage, scientists and communication professionals want to know how different stakeholders perceive observable threats and policy options, how specific media channels react to new insights, and how journalists present scientific knowledge to the public. This paper investigates the potential of semantic technologies to address these questions. After summarizing methods to extract and disambiguate context information, we present visualization techniques to explore the lexical, geospatial, and relational context of topics and entities referenced in these repositories. The examples stem from the Media Watch on Climate Change, the Climate Resilience Toolkit and the NOAA Media Watch—three applications that aggregate environmental resources from a wide range of online sources. These systems not only show the value of providing comprehensive information to the public, but also have helped to develop a novel communication success metric that goes beyond bipolar assessments of sentiment.
The developmental control of size in insects

The mechanisms that control the sizes of a body and its many parts remain among the great puzzles in developmental biology. Why do animals grow to a species‐specific body size, and how is the relative growth of their body parts controlled to so they grow to the right size, and in the correct proportion with body size, giving an animal its species‐characteristic shape? Control of size must involve mechanisms that somehow assess some aspect of size and are upstream of mechanisms that regulate growth. These mechanisms are now beginning to be understood in the insects, in particular in Manduca sexta and Drosophila melanogaster. The control of size requires control of the rate of growth and control of the cessation of growth. Growth is controlled by genetic and environmental factors. Insulin and ecdysone, their receptors, and intracellular signaling pathways are the principal genetic regulators of growth. The secretion of these growth hormones, in turn, is controlled by complex interactions of other endocrine and molecular mechanisms, by environmental factors such as nutrition, and by the physiological mechanisms that sense body size. Although the general mechanisms of growth regulation appear to be widely shared, the mechanisms that regulate final size can be quite diverse. WIREs Dev Biol 2014, 3:113–134. doi: 10.1002/wdev.124
Semantic Classification of High-Resolution Remote-Sensing Images Based on Mid-level Features

With the resolution improvement of the remote-sensing images, more details are shown clearly. The challenge that comes along is how to boost the relatively low classification accuracy caused by using pixel-based image classification approaches and low-level visual structure. The low-level features (LLF) may not well describe the image due to the semantic gap between low-level visual features and high-level semantics of images. The bag-of-visual-words (BOV) model which generates mid-level features was proposed to bridge the two levels. However, it generally neglects the context information between local patches. In this paper, an object-oriented semantic classification algorithm that combines BOV with the optimal segmentation scale is presented. In this algorithm, BOV addresses the problem of the representation of mid-level for scenes, while the optimal segmentation scale intends to overcome the defect of conventional BOV in lacking of relationship between image patches and to give more thorough description. The object-based BOV is presented to construct mid-level representations for object description instead of LLF, and histogram intersection kernel (HIK) is introduced in support vector machine (SVM) for classification. The experiments conducted on three datasets testify the superiority of the proposed algorithm.
An efficient testing methodology for embedded flash memories

The market share of portable and loT (Internet of Things) devices has been rapidly growing over the last decade. In parallel the amount of non-volatile memories, especially flash memories, used in such devices has also increased significantly due to their low power consumption and capability of in-field programmability. Therefore, for achieving high production yield the reliability and testability of embedded flash memories is considered as a primary requirement. The conventional March tests that are used for random access memories (RAMs) are not appropriate for testing flash memories, since test operations and requirements in flash memories differ from that in RAMs. In this paper, a comprehensive set of flash memory faults are introduced and an efficient methodology is proposed for detection of those faults.
New results on H ∞ filter design for nonlinear systems with time-delay through a T-S fuzzy model approach

H ∞ filter design for nonlinear systems with time-delay via a T-S fuzzy model approach is investigated based on a piecewise analysis method. Two cases of time-varying delays are fully considered: one is the time-varying delay being continuous uniformly bounded while the other is the time-varying delay being differentiable uniformly bounded with delay-derivative bounded by a constant. Based on a piecewise analysis method, the variation interval of the time delay is first divided into several subintervals, then the convexity property of the matrix inequality and the free weighting matrix method are fully used in this article. Some novel delay-dependent H ∞ filtering criteria are expressed as a set of linear matrix inequalities, which can lead to much less conservative analysis results. Finally, a numerical example is given to illustrate that the results in this article are more effective and less conservative than some existing ones.
Audit et monitorage de la sécurité

Ce manuscrit synthetise les activites de recherche que nous avons menees, au cours des ces dernieres annees dans le domaine de la gestion de reseaux, et contient une presentation des enjeux pour la decenie a venir. Il contient egalement un projet de recherche ambitieux visant a repondre aux defis de la securite de l'Internet du futur. Nous presentons nos travaux sur l'audit de securite en abordant le probleme du "fingerprinting", c'est a dire la detection par prise d'empreintes d'une couche protocolaire et/ou d'un equipement. La prise d'empreintes d'un systeme est une action essentielle dans l'audit de securite d'un reseau. L'objectif de ce processus consiste dans la detection d'une version specifique d'un service/equipement par l'analyse du trafic vehicule sur le reseau. Nous avons elabore deux approches de "fingerprinting". La premiere s'appuie sur l'analyse des arbres d'analyse syntactique pour les messages d'un protocole. Nous abordons ensuite la problematique du "fingerprinting" pour le cas des protocoles dont nous ne disposons pas de specifications. L'approche que nous presentons est capable d'inferer les divers types de messages et de construire une (ou plusieurs) machine d'etats. Ces machines d'etats sont les fondements pour definir le comportement. Nous proposons a la suite une approche de fingerprinting qui permet la prise en compte du comportement d'une souche protocolaire. Nous developpons ensuite la problematique liee a la surveillance de securite d'un reseau. Celle-ci comprend deux parties principales: le monitoring pour la detection d'intrusions et un pot de miel pour la VoIP. La derniere contribution est une approche pro-active elevee pour la detection de failles de securite par un processus de type "fuzzing".