Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Designing automation for human use: empirical studies and quantitative models

An emerging knowledge base of human performance research can provide guidelines for designing automation that can be used effectively by human operators of complex systems. Which functions should be automated and to what extent in a given system? A model for types and levels of automation that provides a framework and an objective basis for making such choices is described. The human performance consequences of particular types and levels of automation constitute primary evaluative criteria for automation design when using the model. Four human performance areas are considered—mental workload, situation awareness, complacency and skill degradation. Secondary evaluative criteria include such factors as automation reliability, the risks of decision/action consequences and the ease of systems integration. In addition to this qualitative approach, quantitative models can inform design. Several computational and formal models of human interaction with automation that have been proposed by various researchers are reviewed. An important future research need is the integration of qualitative and quantitative approaches. Application of these models provides an objective basis for designing automation for effective human use.
Corruption and Firm Financial Performance: New Evidence from Vietnam

Using a nationwide survey of provincial institutional quality and a sample of private manufacturing small and medium scale enterprises (the SMEs), this paper is the first to examine the effects of corruption on financial performance of the Vietnamese private SMEs. Interestingly, contrary to previous findings, the study finds that corruption as measured by a dummy variable does not affect firms’ financial performance after controlling for heterogeneity, simultaneity and dynamic endogeneity. However, we find that the intensity of bribe and many types of corruption have negative impacts on firms’ financial performance. Thus, a typical approach using only a dummy variable of bribe might not adequately evaluate the impact of bribe intensity or even ignored negative impacts of some types of bribe on firms’ financial performance. Our findings imply that anti-corruption measures are necessary to the development of the Vietnamese private SMEs.
Effect of Marketing Communications on Consumer Purchase Behavior of Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) In Kenya

iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENT . vi DEDICATION . vii LIST OF TABLES . xi LIST OF FIGURES . xii CHAPTER ONE . 1 1.0. INTRODUCTION . 1 1.1. Background of the Study . 1 1.2. Statement of the Problem . 5 1.3. General Objective . 6 1.4. Specific Objectives . 6 1.5. Rationale of the Study . 6 1.6. The Scope of the Study . 8 1.7. Defining of Key Terms . 9 1.8. Chapter Summary . 10 CHAPTER TWO . 11 2.0. LITERATURE REVIEW . 11 2.
A low-power smart temperature sensor for passive UHF RFID tags and Sensor nets

A low-power wide-range CMOS temperature sensor architecture is proposed for RFID and Sensor Networks based on temperature-to-frequency conversion using supply voltage controlled sub-threshold ring oscillator. The principles of operation are investigated and proved via simulation results. Most errors are canceled out by this ratio-metric design. An inaccuracy of −0.84°C to +0.34°C occurs over a range of −40°C to 80°C after using a novel in-field digital two-point calibration. The entire sensor consumes less than 93nW to 305nW over the temperature range and can be digitally reconfigured for setting sample rate and resolution in a tradeoff.
Two phase randomised controlled clinical trial of postoperative oral dietary supplements in surgical patients.

BACKGROUND: Previous work has shown that the administration of oral dietary supplements to patients who have undergone gastrointestinal surgery results in clinically significant short term benefits. AIMS: This study aimed firstly to re-evaluate these short term effects, and secondly to establish whether there are any long term benefits. SUBJECTS: One hundred patients admitted for elective moderate or major gastrointestinal surgery. METHODS: In the inpatient phase, patients were randomised to receive a normal ward diet postoperatively, or the same diet supplemented with an oral dietary supplement. In the outpatient phase, patients were further randomised to receive their home diet, or their home diet supplemented with the oral dietary supplement for four months. RESULTS: During the inpatient phase, patients treated with oral supplements had a significantly improved nutritional intake and lost less weight (2.2, 95% confidence interval (95% CI) 0.9 kg) compared with control patients (4.2 (0.78) kg, p < 0.001). Supplemented patients maintained their hand grip strength whereas control patients showed a significant reduction in grip strength (p < 0.01). Subjective levels of fatigue increased significantly above preoperative levels in control patients (p < 0.01) but not in the supplemented group. Twelve patients in the control group developed complications compared with four in the supplemented group (p < 0.05). In the outpatient phase, supplemented patients had improved nutrient intakes but there were no significant differences in indices of nutritional status or wellbeing between the groups. CONCLUSIONS: The prescription of oral dietary supplements to patients who have undergone gastrointestinal surgery results in clinically significant benefits. These benefits, however, are restricted to the inpatient phase.
The Efficacy and the Safety of Prophylactic N-Butyl-2-Cyanoacrylate Injection for Gastric Varices Using a Modified Injection Technique

Background: Primary prophylactic N-butyl-2-cyanoacrylate (NBC) injection for nonbleeding gastric varices (GVs) remains controversial. In addition, there is still no consensus concerning the technique, its safety, and long-term results. Aim: To analyze the safety and the efficacy of NBC for primary prophylaxis of GVs using a modified injection technique. Methods: Between February 2004 and June 2014, a total of 72 patients with GVs with a high risk of bleeding, who received undiluted NBC injection using a modified “sandwich” method for primary prophylaxis in General Hospital of Chengdu Military Command, were enrolled in this retrospective study. All patients were followed up at 1 to 2 weeks, 3 months, 6 months, and thereafter every 6 months or whenever required, using endoscope detection. The rate of obliteration, bleeding, recurrence, and complications was evaluated. Results: According to the standard Sarin classification, 28 patients were IGV1 and 44 patients were GEV2. Hepatitis B virus infection was the major cause of portal hypertension. The mean number of sessions were 1.4 (1 to 3) and the mean volume of NBC per session was 3.5 mL (1 to 6 mL). One injection per session was used in 41 patients (56.9%) and 2 or more injections were used in the remaining 31 patients (43.1%). During the follow-up (27 mo; range, 12 to 67 mo), complete obliteration of GVs was achieved in 93.1% of the patients (67/72). One session of NBC injection was enough to obliterate GVs in 49 patients (68.1%), and 2 or more sessions were needed in 23 patients (31.9%). In addition, the bleeding and the recurrence rate were 11.1% (8/72) and 15.3% (11/72), respectively, during the follow-up. The cumulative bleeding-free rate at 1, 3, and 5 years was 95.8%, 91.7%, and 88.9%, respectively. Worsening of esophageal varices was observed in 13 patients (9 in GEV2 and 4 in IGV1). No serious complications, such as distal embolism, were observed in all patients. Conclusions: Prophylactic endoscopic NBC injection using a modified injection technique may be a safe and effective treatment for gastric fundal varices with a high risk of bleeding.
Phytochemical and acute toxicity studies on the ethanol roots extract of Gardenia sokotensis.

Phytochemical study on the crude extract of the roots Gardenia sokotensis revealed the presence of alkaloids, glycosides, saponins and steroids and very little or no tannin, and flavonoid, content. The acute toxicity study carried out revealed complete absence of any clinical or beahavioural changes that could be suggestive of toxicity in any of the animals in groups A, B and C following treatment with the crude extract of the roots of the plant. However, depression, weakness and loss of appetite as evidences of toxicity in the first 5hrs were observed in groups D and E animals that were treated with higher doses of the extract. All the animals (Groups D and E) treated with the higher doses of the crude extract of the roots of the plant eventually died 40 – 96 hours post-administration. The LD50 of the Gardenia sokotensis root extract was found to be 2400mg/kg body weight when orally administered in rabbits.
Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Drug Companies, and the Internet

The public increasingly acquires information about the causes of, and treatments for, mental health problems from the Internet. This study investigated the top 54 websites about posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in Google and Yahoo! to assess differences in the content of websites funded and not funded by drug companies. In all, 42% of the websites received drug company funding. There was no relationship found between the causes stated and whether the website was drug company funded. Drug company–funded websites, however, gave significantly more emphasis to medication in the treatment of PTSD. This study confirms an earlier study indicating that the pervasive influence of the pharmaceutical industry in the mental health field, designed to maximize product sales, now includes information available to the public via the Internet.
Determination of parameters considering magnetic nonlinearity in an interior permanent magnet synchronous motor

This paper presents a method to calculate motor parameters considering magnetic nonlinearity in interior permanent magnet synchronous motors (IPMSM). To analyze motor characteristics by using equivalent circuits, inductance and iron loss resistance, which are affected critically magnetic saturation, are obtained by using static finite-element analysis. For a fabricated IPMSM, input current and motor characteristics such as torque and efficiency are calculated, and the proposed method is verified by the comparison of calculated and experimental results
How long until we get there? A survival analysis of the Investors in People initiative 1991-2001

This paper evaluates the UK's Investors in People (IiP) policy initiative through an analysis of adoption and retention rates during its first 11 years of life. Established in 1991, the IiP Standard publicly credits organisations that "invest in their people" through training, development and worker involvement in decision making. Over time it has become one of the headline government policies and licenses to use it are being sold internationally. Our take on the accomplishments of IiP as a policy is to characterise involvement and life expectancy within the initiative. To this end we fit a duration model of participation in Investors in People. Once committed to the Standard, firms can exit to either becoming fully recognised Investors in People or else they can disengage from the programme without reaching full accreditation. We are therefore in a position of studying adoption and retention within a competing risk framework where we can assess the impact of organisational characteristics and the length of pre-recognition spells on success and failure rates. In accordance with the few previous findings, we find that large and public sector organisations present higher success rates. New findings we obtain include a strong interaction between employment changes and IiP accreditation and the fact that the Standard has become significantly easier to obtain over time. Hazard rates for later cohorts are three times as high as for those committed in 1991. Finally, we also present the first attempt to gain insight into the process of disengaging from the standard or ceasing participation.
Recent advances in the treatment of erectile dysfunction in patients with diabetes mellitus.

OBJECTIVE To present current information on the pathogenesis of and available therapeutic options for erectile dysfunction (ED) in patients with diabetes. METHODS We provide a detailed review of the following topics: (1) peripheral and central neurotransmitter pathways involved in the penile erectile process (for example, nitric oxide, acetylcholine, vasoactive intestinal polypeptide, and prostaglandin E(1)), (2) pathogenesis of ED in patients with diabetes (vascular insufficiency, endothelial dysfunction, and autonomic neuropathy), (3) currently available treatment options for ED and their advantages and disadvantages, (4) potential new avenues for future research, and (5) the possibility of preventive treatment. RESULTS Clearly a need exists for effective treatment options for ED in patients with diabetes. Because the development of ED in patients with diabetes is often caused by several interrelated mechanisms, including vascular disease, endothelial dysfunction, autonomic neuropathy, hormone imbalance, and certain medications, a thorough understanding of the various pathways involved in penile erection and their modulation in diabetes is essential for physicians to design an effective treatment plan. Interventions that modulate the erectile pathway at different points include therapies that enhance the erectile mechanism (amplification of the nitric oxide pathway), inhibit the detumescence mechanism, or affect the final common pathway by augmenting smooth muscle relaxation. Oral therapy, intracavernosal injections, transurethral pellets, combination therapy, and surgical procedures are available treatment strategies. CONCLUSION Despite the availability of many treatment options for ED, early intervention and prevention (by such measures as improved glycemic control and general reduction of associated risk factors) should be emphasized because many of the diabetes-related complications leading to ED are irreversible.
What Clinical Practice Strategies Can Be Utilized to Help Reduce the Incidence of Heroin Abuse in Rehabilitation Patients on Chronic Opioid Therapy?

Justin Smith, a 26-year-old Caucasian male, presents to the clinic for a follow-up visit related to medical management of his chronic low back pain. For the past 4 months, he has been receiving biweekly physiotherapy including stretching and back strengthening exercises, low-impact aerobic conditioning, and spinal manipulation. Along with these treatment methods, he has been receiving Oxycodone for pain relief. The physical rehabilitation team is in the process of weaning the patient off this medication since he has been progressing as expected. The patient’s Kentucky All Schedule Prescription Electronic Reporting (KASPER) report (Kentucky Cabinet for Health & Family Services, 2013) demonstrates he has only received scheduled prescriptions including Oxycodone from this office. At today’s visit, his wife expresses concern that Justin has recently begun exhibiting impulsivity in his decision-making.
Current and efficiency optimization for LCL type inverter with model predictive control

For LCL type grid-tied three-phase inverters, a model predictive controller is proposed. Through the controller, system performance indexes, i.e., current tracking, inductor loss, switching loss can be combined and then optimized. Since the controller is a constrained nonlinear problem, an on-line algorithm is presented which is based on branching and bounding method. Finally, through Matlab simulation and physical platform experiments, the effectiveness of the controller is shown.
A discriminative approach to filter out noisy sentence pairs from bilingual corpora

Parallel corpora are essential for training statistical machine translation models. Since parallel sentence-aligned corpora are usually noisy due to inexact automatic methods when generated from parallel or comparable documents, we need to clean parallel corpora. In this paper, new features are introduced to assess the correctness of a sentence pair. Also, the impact of new features in combination with state-of-the-art features introduced in the literature is systematically evaluated. Statistical methods have been used for feature extraction and therefore this approach is independent to language. In order to better understand the problem characteristics, four supervised classification algorithms are used to classify sentence pairs as noise or parallel. Evaluating the models by taking accuracy and f-measure into account shows that using the system for cleaning a noisy parallel Farsi-English corpus, the maximum entropy model performs better than the main filtering techniques used in this paper and shows a significant improvement over two other systems.
Empirical social network analysis in sustainable supply chain in Vietnam

Acclimatisation of sustainable practices is becoming widespread in the supply chain network due to the expanding global awareness of ethical responsibilities to the economy, society and the environment. Existent literature discloses that there is a strong research highlighting information sharing and transparency between companies and negligible practices within supply chain networks. Research to date has focused predominantly on large companies in developed countries, while ignoring developing countries including Vietnam. To explore the implications of information sharing and transparency on sustainable supply chain proficiencies, this paper exploits social network analysis (SNA) to investigate information sharing flows between staff in Vietnamese industry. The proposed research will motivate academic researchers, managers, and have implications for enterprises who are cultivating sustainable supply chain practices.
Bcis That Use P 300 Event-related Potentials

27 of visual evoked potentials (i.e., VEPs) have been used as signal 28 features for BCIs. The design and operation of BCIs that use 29 endogenous ERP components differ both in principle and 30 practice from those of BCIs that use exogenous ERP compo­ 31 nents. This chapter focuses on BCIs that use P300, an endoge­ 32 nous ERP component. Chapter 14 discusses BCIs that use 33 exogenous VEP components.
Thyroid status, disability and cognitive function, and survival in old age.

CONTEXT Despite the equivocal outcomes of randomized controlled trials, general clinical opinion favors screening and treatment of elderly individuals with subclinical thyroid disorders. OBJECTIVES To determine whether subclinical thyroid dysfunction should be treated in old age and the long-term impact of thyroid dysfunction on performance and survival in old age. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS A prospective, observational, population-based follow-up study within the Leiden 85-Plus Study of 87% of a 2-year birth cohort (1912-1914) in the municipality of Leiden, the Netherlands. A total of 599 participants were followed up from age 85 years through age 89 years (mean [SD] follow-up, 3.7 [1.4] years). MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Complete thyroid status at baseline; disability in daily life, depressive symptoms, cognitive function, and mortality from age 85 years through 89 years. RESULTS Plasma levels of thyrotropin and free thyroxine were not associated with disability in daily life, depressive symptoms, and cognitive impairment at baseline or during follow-up. Increasing levels of thyrotropin were associated with a lower mortality rate that remained after adjustments were made for baseline disability and health status. The hazard ratio (HR) for mortality per SD increase of 2.71 mIU/L of thyrotropin was 0.77 (95% confidence interval [CI], 0.63-0.94; P = .009). The HR for mortality per SD increase of 0.21 ng/dL (2.67 pmol/L) of free thyroxine increased 1.16-fold (95% CI, 1.04-1.30; P = .009). CONCLUSIONS In the general population of the oldest old, elderly individuals with abnormally high levels of thyrotropin do not experience adverse effects and may have a prolonged life span. However, evidence for not treating elderly individuals can only come from a well-designed, randomized placebo-controlled clinical trial.
A hardware security module for quadrotor communication

This paper presents a hardware architecture for secure quadrotor communication. Both, the control data sent by the ground station and the information data sent by the quadrotor are encrypted and authenticated. The system is implemented on an FPGA and integrated on an extension board. The board is embedded into a self-constructed quadrotor based on the project Next-Generation Universal Aerial Video Platform.
PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS OF MLP AND SVM BASED CLASSIFIERS FOR HUMAN ACTIVITY RECOGNITION USING SMARTPHONE SENSORS DATA

Days have gone when Mobile Phone used to be matter luxury, it has become a significant need for rapidly evolving fast track world. Intelligent aspects of the computing device enhance the importance of the interface development since; efficient collaboration always relies on the good communication between man and machine. The information about mobile device and user activity, environment, other devices, location and time can be utilized in different situations to enhance the interaction between the user and the device. Here, we presented our work in which certain types of human physical activities using accelerometer and gyroscope data generated by a mobile device. The benchmark Human Activity Recognition dataset is considered for this work is acquired from UCI Machine Learning Repository which is available in public domain. MLP and SVM Classifiers were tested using various time domain and frequency domain features. We found the using Multi Layer Perceptron with Processing Element 6, Learning rate 0.05, Momentum 0.1 reach an overall accuracy of 98.11%. Keywords— Context; Framework; Adaptive User Interfaces; Classifier, Multilayer Perceptron, Support Vector
A V-BLAST Based Virtual MIMO Transmission Scheme for Sensor Network Lifetime Maximization

As Wireless Sensor Networks find more and more application in daily life, energy efficiency of these networks, which require unattended operations, is of paramount concern. In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient virtual MIMO transmission scheme based on V-BLAST technique. The proposed scheme does not require transmitter-side cooperation (joint STBC encoding), which is more suitable for the energy-constrained wireless sensor networks compared with the Alamouti-based virtual MIMO scheme. Simulation results show significant energy savings and network lifetime extension can be achieved by using our scheme.
Requirements for Surface Expression and Function of Adhesin P1 from Streptococcus mutans

ABSTRACT In this report, we define requirements for the successful translocation and functional maturation of the adhesin P1 of Streptococcus mutans. Conformational epitopes recognized by anti-P1 monoclonal antibodies (MAbs) were further characterized, thus facilitating the use of particular MAbs as tools to monitor the locations of various forms of the protein. We show that correct localization of P1 is dependent on structural features of the molecule itself, including a requisite A region-P region intramolecular interaction that occurs within the cell prior to secretion. P1 also was shown to be affected by several members of the protein-folding-secretion-turnover apparatus. It does not achieve a fully functional form in the absence of the trigger factor PPIase homolog RopA, and its translocation is delayed when DnaK levels are limited. In addition, dnaK message levels are differentially altered in the presence of P1 lacking the alanine-rich compared to the proline-rich repeat domains. Lastly, nonsecreted P1 lacking the P region accumulates within the cell in the absence of htrA, implying an intracellular HtrA protease function in the degradation and turnover of this particular internal-deletion polypeptide. However, the opposite effect is seen for full-length P1, suggesting a sensing mechanism and substrate-dependent alteration in HtrA's function and effect that is consistent with its known ability to switch between chaperone and protease, depending on environmental perturbations.