Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Pitfalls of clinical trials on pharmacological treatment for obstructive sleep apnoea: future directions

The standard treatment for obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA) is continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP). Depending on selection criteria and quality of care, up to 50% of patients with OSA do not tolerate CPAP. For patients who cannot tolerate CPAP despite good quality care, pharmacological treatment would be a desirable alternative. The mechanisms by which pharmacological treatment is supposed to improve OSA include, amongst others, an augmentation in pharyngeal dilator muscle tone, an increase in ventilatory drive, a reduction in airway resistance and alterations in pharyngeal surface tension forces. In humans, most recent pharmacological approaches to the treatment of OSA in clinical trials have focused on modulating serotoninergic and cholinergic activities, as both have been shown to augment pharyngeal dilator muscle tone. However, currently there is not enough evidence to recommend any particular drug treatment for OSA. Methodological issues of published clinical trials on pharmacological OSA treatment make it difficult to draw definitive conclusions and inform further drug developments in this area. In this article, the pitfalls of clinical trials on pharmacological OSA therapy are summarised and potential solutions and directions for future studies are given.
Innovations in Aged Care: What are the first quality reports from the Transition Care Program in Australia telling us?

Transition Care is a new program in Australia, jointly funded by the Commonwealth and State/Territory Governments. Implementation is undertaken by state health departments, in some cases through aged care organisations, against a set of key requirements. This paper examines reports from providers to reveal enablers and barriers to compliance with the requirements and to highlight emerging patterns of practice. The first 23 self‐reports were content analysed. Person‐centred and goal‐orientated care was evidenced. General practitioner, pharmacist and geriatrician involvement in care planning and review was low. While service agreements between Transition Care services, referring hospitals and community providers improved the efficiency of information transfer and discharge arrangements, these were rare, hindering entry and discharge from the program. Transition Care offers older people a flexible model of care. While the flexibility of the model is a strength, service providers are struggling to achieve integration with existing services.
Is Thrombocytopenia an Early Prognostic Marker in Septic Shock?

Objectives:To assess whether early thrombocytopenia during septic shock is associated with an increased risk of death at day 28 and to identify risk factors associated with a low platelet count. Design:Prospective, multicenter, observational cohort study. Setting:Fourteen ICUs from 10 French university teaching and nonacademic hospitals. Patients:Consecutive adult patients with septic shock admitted between November 2009 and September 2011 were eligible. Intervention:None. Measurements and Main Results:Of the 1,495 eligible patients, 1,486 (99.4%) were included. Simplified Acute Physiology Score II score of greater than or equal to 56, immunosuppression, age of more than 65 years, cirrhosis, bacteremia (p ⩽ 0.001 for each), and urinary sepsis (p = 0.005) were globally associated with an increased risk of thrombocytopenia within the first 24 hours following the onset of septic shock. Survival at day 28 estimated by the Kaplan-Meier method was lower in patients with thrombocytopenia and decreased with thrombocytopenia severity. By multivariate Cox regression, a platelet count of less than or equal to 100,000/mm3 was independently associated with a significantly increased risk of death within the 28 days following septic shock onset. The risk of death increased with the severity of thrombocytopenia (hazard ratio, 1.65; 95% CI, 1.31–2.08 for a platelet count below 50,000/mm3 vs > 150,000/mm3; p < 0.0001). Conclusions:This is the first study to investigate thrombocytopenia within the first 24 hours of septic shock onset as a prognostic marker of survival at day 28 in a large cohort of ICU patients. Measuring platelet count is inexpensive and easily feasible for the physician in routine practice, and thus, it could represent an easy “alert system” among patients in septic shock.
La standardisation d'une pratique technique : la dactylographie (1883-1930)

Dans un dialogue avec les theories produites par les economistes sur les «standards», cet article resolument historien s'interesse a la facon dont les machines a ecrire se sont progressivement standardisees en meme temps que les pratiques de la dactylographie se sont uniformisees. Les premiers temps de l'histoire de la dactylographie sont marques par l'extreme variete des objets et configurations techniques et la rudesse de la concurrence entre marques de machines et dactylographes. Dans ce contexte, la standardisation de la disposition des lettres et signes sur le clavier n'est qu'un des aspects d'une competition humaine et technique qui se joue sur de nombreux autres facteurs. L'uniformisation progressive de la pratique dactylographique s'organise autour de la technique des « dix doigts », de la rememoration du clavier, de nouvelles postures corporelles. Elle temoigne de nouvelles exigences et conditionne la constitution de la profession.
Extraction de mots clefs dans des vidéos Web par Analyse Latente de Dirichlet (LDA-based tagging of Web videos) [in French]

RESUME Cet article presente une methode d'etiquetage de videos collectees sur une plate-forme de par-tage de videos. Cette methode combine un systeme de reconnaissance de la parole, qui extrait les contenus parles des videos, et un module d'extraction de mots-clefs operant sur les transcriptions automatiques. La difficulte majeure, dans cette caracterisation de videos par un ensemble de mots-clefs, est liee aux performances du SRAP qui sont souvent tres faibles sur des videos ge-nerees par les utilisateurs.Dans cet article, une methode d'extraction de mots-clefs robuste aux erreurs de reconnaissance est proposee. Cette methode repose sur la projection des contenus parles dans un espace thematique obtenue par Analyse Latente de Dirichlet. Nos experiences sont realisees sur un ensemble de videos collectees sur une plate-forme de partage communau-taire. Elles montrent l'interet du modele propose, en particulier dans les situations d'echec du systeme de transcription automatique. ABSTRACT LDA-based tagging of Web videos This article presents a method for the automatic tagging of youtube videos. The proposed method combines an automatic speech recognition system, that extracts the spoken contents, and a keyword extraction system that aims at finding a small set of tags representing the video. In order to improve the robustness of the tagging system to the recognition errors, a video transcription is represented in a semantic space obtained by Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), in which each dimension is automatically characterized by a list of weighted terms and chuncks. Our experiments demonstrate the interest of such a model to improve the robustness of the tagging system, especially when speech recognition (ASR) system produce highly errorneous transcript of spoken contents. MOTS-CLES : Reconnaissance de la parole, analyse des contenus, categorisation audio, multi-media.
Reflecting on your own language: A case study of an advanced Japanese course at the Australian National University

This reports on a student research project carried out in an advanced Japanese language course at the Australian National University in 2012. The aim of the project was for the students to present an academic analysis of a particular social or cultural issue confronting contemporary Japan. The task discussed in this study is one part of the staged preparation in the research project, where students were required to prepare and conduct interviews with a Japanese native speaker as a means of gathering data. The aim was to promote students’ awareness of the gap between the target Japanese and their own current stage of Japanese. They transcribed their interaction with the native speaker interviewee, and then analysed the linguistic and socio-pragmatic features of their own Japanese language usage. The pedagogical framework for the project draws on the second language acquisition research of Swain’s (1993) ‘comprehensible output hypothesis’ and Long’s (1996) ‘interaction hypothesis’. Swain and Long both argue that input alone is not enough, and that output, especially when it promotes the negotiation of meaning, is important to language acquisition. The student evaluation revealed that 85% of the students felt that the task helped their learning of Japanese, and 81% thought that critical analysis of their own linguistic errors helped their learning of Japanese.
Continuous CRF with Multi-scale Quantization Feature Functions Application to Structure Extraction in Old Newspaper

We introduce quantization feature functions to represent continuous or large range discrete data into the symbolic CRF data representation. We show that doing this convertion in a simple way allows the CRF to automaticaly select discriminative features to achieve best performance. This system is evaluated on a segmentation task of degraded newspapers archives. The results obtained show the ability of the CRF model to deal with numerical features similarly as for symbolic representation thanks to the use of quantization feature functions. The segmentation task is achieved by the definition of a horizontal CRF model dedicated to pixel labelling.
Cardiac output measurement in children: comparison of Aesculon cardiac output monitor and thermodilution.

BACKGROUND We compared cardiac output (CO) measurements by the non-invasive electrical velocimetry (Aesculon) monitor with the pulmonary artery catheter (PAC) thermodilution method in children. METHODS CO values using the Aesculon monitor and PAC thermodilution were simultaneously recorded during cardiac catheterization in children. Measurements were performed under general anaesthesia. To compare, three consecutive measurements for each patient within 3 min were obtained. The means of the three values were compared using simple regression and Bland-Altman analysis. Data were presented as mean (sd). A mean percentage of <30% was defined to indicate clinical useful reliability of the Aesculon monitor. RESULTS A total of 50 patients with a median (range) age of 7.5 (0.5-16.5) yr were enrolled in the study. Mean CO values were 3.7 (1.5) litre min(-1) (PAC thermodilution) and 3.1 (1.7) litre min(-1) (Aesculon) monitor). Analysis for CO measurement showed a good correlation between the two methods (r=0.894; P<0.0001). The bias between the two methods was 0.66 litre min(-1) with a precision of 1.49 litre min(-1). The mean percentage error for CO measurements was 48.9% for the Aesculon monitor when compared with PAC thermodilution. CONCLUSIONS Electrical velocimetry using the Aesculon monitor did not provide reliable CO values when compared with PAC thermodilution. Whether the Aesculon monitor can be used as a CO trend monitor has to be assessed by further investigations in patients with changing haemodynamics.
Topsis method for hybrid multiple attribute decision making with 2-tuple linguistic information and its application to computer network security evaluation

With respect to the hybrid MADM problems for evaluating the computer network security, in which the attribute weights take the form of real numbers, and the attribute preference values take the form of real number, interval number, triangular fuzzy number and trapezoidal fuzzy number and linguistic variables, a new decision making analysis method for evaluating the computer network security is proposed. Firstly, real number, interval number, triangular fuzzy number and trapezoidal fuzzy number and linguistic variables are all transformed into 2-tuple linguistic variables. Then, according to the traditional ideas of technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution TOPSIS, the optimal alternatives is determined by calculating the shortest distance from the 2-tuple linguistic positive ideal solution TLPIS and on the other side the farthest distance of the 2-tuple linguistic negative ideal solution TLNIS. The method has exact characteristic in linguistic information processing. It avoided information distortion and losing which occur formerly in the linguistic information processing. Finally, a numerical example for evaluating the computer network security is used to illustrate the use of the proposed method. The result shows the approach is simple, effective and easy to calculate.
A critique of the dragonfly delusion hypothesis: why sampling exuviae does not avoid bias

Abstract. 1. A recent study comparing adult and exuvial odonate richness concluded that adult surveys overestimate the number of species reproducing successfully. The authors called this phenomenon the “dragonfly delusion” and recommended that only exuviae be used for biomonitoring and habitat quality assessment. However, they drew this conclusion from limited surveys and detection‐naïve analysis and failed to acknowledge that exuvial richness is typically biased low.
Exploring the factors that affecting intention to use mobile learning

This study presents an extended technology acceptance model to explore the factors that affect intention to mobile learning (M-learning). This study aims to explore the utilisation of mobile phones in the educational environment and investigate students' expectations and intentions towards M-learning in Jordan. The proposed model was empirically tested using data collected from a survey containing 21 questions. Out of the 380 questionnaires that were distributed randomly, 361 were returned (95%). The partial least squares structural equation analysis was used to evaluate the causal model. The researcher finds that all variables significantly affected users' behavioural intention except trust. Among them, the perceived ease of use had the most significant influence. This study gives quantified indicators about M-learning and a model that might help in understanding the M-learning environment in Jordan.
End-of-life issues in genetic disorders: Literature and research directions

Part I of this report summarizes findings from a literature search on end of life in people with genetic disorders. There is a paucity of research on this topic; thus this article includes descriptive studies, clinical reviews, and case presentations. Part II describes the proceedings of a workshop to discuss end-of-life issues in people with genetic disorders. The workshop brought together clinicians, researchers, and people living with genetic disorders to discuss this topic. The purpose of this article is to summarize the literature and workshop proceedings to provide directions for future investigation in this important area.
Molecular zoogeography of freshwater fishes in the southeastern United States.

Restriction fragment length polymorphisms in mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) were used to reconstruct evolutionary relationships of conspecific populations in four species of freshwater fish-Amia calva, Lepomis punctatus, L. gulosus, and L. microlophus. A suite of 14-17 endonucleases was employed to assay mtDNAs from 305 specimens collected from 14 river drainages extending from South Carolina to Louisiana. Extensive mtDNA polymorphism was observed within each assayed species. In both phenograms and Wagner parsimony networks, mtDNA clones that were closely related genetically were usually geographically contiguous. Within each species, major mtDNA phylogenetic breaks also distinguished populations from separate geographic regions, demonstrating that dispersal and gene flow have not been sufficient to override geographic influences on population subdivision. -Importantly, there were strong patterns of congruence across species in the geographic placements of the mtDNA phylogenetic breaks. Three major boundary regions were characterized by concentrations of phylogenetic discontinuities, and these zones agree well with previously described zoogeographic boundaries identified by a different kind of data base-distributional limits of species-suggesting that a common set of historical factors may account for both phenomena. Repeated episodes of eustatic sea level change along a relatively static continental morphology are the likely causes of several patterns of drainage isolation and coalescence, and these are discussed in relation to the genetic data. -Overall, results exemplify the positive role that intraspecific genetic analyses may play in historical zoogeographic reconstruction. They also point out the potential inadequacies of any interpretations of population genetic structure that fail to consider the influences of history in shaping that structure.
Cross-Bundling and ( Anti ) Competitive Behavior : Evidence from the Pharmaceutical Industry

There is a substantial literature in economics on intra-firm product combinations such as bundling and tying. Little is known, however, about the economic implications of inter-firm product combinations. We propose and estimate a model to study pricing strategies and the welfare effects of this practice, focusing on the pharmaceutical industry. We find that firms increase their profits by participating in inter-firm product combinations. A less competitive equilibrium arises in this situation as the firms are able to partially internalize the externality their pricing decisions impose on their competitors. We also find that profit increases from the inter-firm product combinations could be as large as profit increases from mergers. Our results should help policy-makers evaluate the antitrust implications of mergers in the pharmaceutical industry. Department of Policy Analysis and Management, Cornell University, 105 MVR Hall, Ithaca NY 14853. E-mail: Claudio.Lucarelli@cornell.edu Department of Policy Analysis and Management, Cornell University, 123 MVR Hall, Ithaca NY 14853. E-mail: sn243@cornell.edu Simon Graduate School of Business, University of Rochester, Rochester NY 14627. E-mail: minjae.song@simon.rochester. edu. We have benefited from discussions with Michael Waldman and comments by seminar participants at the Federal Trade Commission, the 2009 IIOC and the University of Rochester. All errors are ours.
Binary k-nearest neighbor for text categorization

Purpose – With the ever‐increasing volume of text data via the internet, it is important that documents are classified as manageable and easy to understand categories. This paper proposes the use of binary k‐nearest neighbour (BKNN) for text categorization.Design/methodology/approach – The paper describes the traditional k‐nearest neighbor (KNN) classifier, introduces BKNN and outlines experiemental results.Findings – The experimental results indicate that BKNN requires much less CPU time than KNN, without loss of classification performance.Originality/value – The paper demonstrates how BKNN can be an efficient and effective algorithm for text categorization. Proposes the use of binary k‐nearest neighbor (BKNN ) for text categorization.
The Effect of Fatigue and Fibromyalgia on Sexual Dysfunction in Women With Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

Sexual dysfunction in patients with chronic fatigue syndrome is attracting growing interest but, to date, few studies have analyzed it. For this reason, the authors evaluated sexual dysfunction in women with chronic fatigue syndrome (using the Golombok Rust Inventory of Sexual Satisfaction) and explore correlations with fatigue and other symptoms. Sexual dysfunction was greater in patients with chronic fatigue syndrome (n = 615) with a higher number of cognitive, neurological, and neurovegetative symptoms, concomitant fibromyalgia, Sjögren's syndrome, or myofascial pain syndrome, and more intense fatigue (p <.05).
Layered sensor modalities for improved human-robot interaction

In robotic systems developed for urban search and rescue, information overload can cause operator disorientation and missed detection of victims. In most systems, multiple sensor modalities are present on the robot, and the operator is presented with multiple displays of information requiring attention refocus. We propose a method where multiple sensor inputs are layered into a single, integrated visual display. Such a display might eliminate missed detections and alleviate operator disorientation by allowing the operator to naturally focus on a single display with visual cues added to aid in the use of sound and other non-visual sensor modalities. We have conducted initial trials with multiple sensors in the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) reference test arena for mobile robots to validate the concept and aid in the construction of appropriate display modes and operations.
Maintenance of connected components in quadtree-based image representation

In this paper, we have considered the problem of maintaining connected components in quadtree representation of binary images when a small portion of the image undergoes change. The batch approach to re-compute the connected components information is very expensive. Our algorithms update the quadtree as well as the connected components' labeling when a homogeneous region in the quadtree is changing. The updating algorithms visit less nodes compared to the batch approach.
Detecting anomalies in symbolic sequence dataset

This paper presents an anomaly detection technique for symbolic sequences based on support vector data description (SVDD). It introduces the longest common subsequence (LCS) distance metric to compute pairwise similarity between sequences. We extend the kernel method to the analysis of variable-length sequences by embedding the LCS distance into the form of Gaussian function to develop a novel Gaussian LCS kernel. By using this kernel, SVDD can directly handle input sequences of variable length, and make good use of the sequential information of sequences. The performance of the proposed technique was compared with SVDD with Gaussian RBF kernel and spectrum kernel. Experimental results show that this technique is better than other techniques in achieving higher detection rate and lower false positive rate.
The dexamethasone suppression test and negative symptoms of schizophrenia

ABSTRACT— The dexamethasone suppression test (DST) was administered to 28 subjects who met DSM‐III criteria for chronic schizophrenia and shared similar environments. Samples were assayed for both plasma cortisol and dexamethasone levels. After controlling for other factors, the mean postdexamethasone cortisol level (MPDC) was correlated with the patients’ score on the Scale for the Assessment of Negative Symptoms (SANS). A significant relationship emerged between these 2 parameters, suggesting that the social deterioration seen in chronic schizophrenia is at least partly related to a biological disease process as reflected by the DST. The importance of quantifying the level of dexamethasone in the DST is discussed.