Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Caudal septoplasty: efficacy of a surgical technique-preliminnary report

Although not being the most frequent nasal septal deviations, those of the caudal septum account for many complaints. The correction of such defects has always been the subject of much controversy, and several different operative techniques have been described. Aim To assess the efficacy of a surgical technique for correcting caudal septal deviations. Materials and Methods Prospective study with preliminary reports of 10 patients who answered a standardized, specific questionnaire (the Nasal Obstruction Symptom Evaluation, or NOSE), underwent acoustic rhinometry and had their noses photographed. Caudal deviations were then corrected through a surgical technique whereby the entire deviated portion is removed and a straight cartilage segment is placed between the medial crura of the alar cartilages, through a retrograde approach, to support the nasal tip. Sixty days after all patients were reassessed. Results As for the NOSE questionnaire, mean pre-operative and post-operative scores were 82.39 and 7.39 respectively (p<0.001). Pre-operative acoustic rhinometry showed mean minimum crosssectional area (MCA) values of 0.352 and 0.431 cm2, whereas mean post-operative values were 0.657 and 0.711 cm2(p<0.0001). Conclusions The study results prove, both subjectively (patient satisfaction as measured with a standardized questionnaire) and objectively (acoustic rhinometry findings), that the proposed technique for correction of caudal septal deviation is safe and effective.
Perceptions of disadvantage, ethnicity and psychosis

Background People from Black ethnic groups (African-Caribbean and Black African) are more prone to develop psychosis in Western countries. This excess might be explained by perceptions of disadvantage. Aims To investigate whether the higher incidence of psychosis in Black people is mediated by perceptions of disadvantage. Method A population-based incidence and case-control study of first-episode psychosis (Aetiology and Ethnicity in Schizophrenia and Other Psychoses (ÆSOP)). A total of 482 participants answered questions about perceived disadvantage. Results Black ethnic groups had a higher incidence of psychosis (OR=4.7, 95% CI 3.1–7.2). After controlling for religious affiliation, social class and unemployment, the association of ethnicity with psychosis was attenuated (OR=3.0, 95% CI 1.6–5.4) by perceptions of disadvantage. Participants in the Black non-psychosis group often attributed their disadvantage to racism, whereas Black people in the psychosis group attributed it to their own situation. Conclusions Perceived disadvantage is partly associated with the excess of psychosis among Black people living in the UK. This may have implications for primary prevention.
A New Storage Scheme for Approximate Location Queries in Object-Tracking Sensor Networks

Energy efficiency is one of the most critical issues in the design of wireless sensor networks. Observing that many sensor applications for object tracking can tolerate a certain degree of imprecision in the location data of tracked objects, this paper studies precision-constrained approximate queries that trade answer precision for energy efficiency. We develop an energy-conserving approximate storage (EASE) scheme to efficiently answer approximate location queries by keeping error-bounded imprecise location data at some designated storage node. The data impreciseness is captured by a system parameter called the approximation radius. We derive the optimal setting of the approximation radius for our storage scheme based on the mobility pattern and devise an adaptive algorithm to adjust the setting when the mobility pattern is not available a priori or is dynamically changing. Simulation experiments are conducted to validate our theoretical analysis of the optimal approximation setting. The simulation results show that the proposed EASE scheme reduces the network traffic from a conventional approach by up to 96 percent and, in most cases, prolongs the network lifetime by a factor of 2-5.
Role of antioxidants in generalised anxiety disorder and depression

Background: Anxiety and depression form commonest stress-induced psychiatric disorders. To combat the biochemical changes which occur as a result of stress, there is antioxidant defence in the biological system. Secondary defence is by the nonenzymatic antioxidants like vitamins E (alphatocopherol), C (ascorbic acid), and β-carotene. Therefore, the authors interest was aroused to examine the status of these antioxidants in the biological system of patients suffering from stress-induced psychiatric disorders. Aims: This study was carried out to find out whether patients with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) and depression have any difference in blood serum levels of vitamins A (β-carotene), C, and E in comparison to the normal healthy control group and whether supplementation of adequate doses of vitamins A (β-carotene), C, and E leads to improvement in anxiety and depression and reduction in scores of the patients. Materials and Methods: Eighty subjects in the age group of 20–60 years, who attended a psychiatric clinic of a private hospital and who met inclusion and exclusion criteria of the study and consented for psychological evaluation and blood screening to find out the serum levels of vitamins A, C, and E, were included in the study. Approval was sought from the institutional ethics committee for collecting the blood sample of these subjects before and after vitamins A, C, and E supplements given for a period of 6 weeks. Statistics Analysis: It was observed that patients with GAD and depression had significantly lower levels of vitamins A, C, and E in comparison to healthy controls. After dietary supplementation of these vitamins for a period of 6 weeks, a significant reduction in anxiety and depression scores of patients was observed (P<0.001). A significant increase in the blood levels of antioxidants was observed in patients (P<0.05) except that of vitamin E in the group of depressed patients. Results and Conclusion: The findings suggest that antioxidant supplement therapy as an adjuvant therapy is useful in patients with stress-induced psychiatric disorders and the results have been discussed.
Social Media, Collaboration, and Scientific Organizations

The use of social media by collaborative organizations has been studied in a variety of contexts, including virtual teams, enterprise organizations, and social movements. However, social media are not often examined within the context of scientific organizations. This article explores how an organization of 122 life scientists and science-related professionals—anonymized as Science City Network (SciCity)—combine monthly symposia with social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and blogs. Using an online survey, we found that younger SciCity members are more interested in using social media to support a collaborative community, whereas older members are more interested in social applications. Social media use was not found to significantly differ by gender. Using social network analysis, we found several individuals who act as hubs of information who keep the SciCity Twitter network alive. However, the hierarchical structure of the network reveals that it is better suited for information dissemination than innovation and collaboration. Our examination of this scientific organization ultimately offers insight into how a coalition of multiple social media technologies is used differentially by organizational members and that there is ultimately no general consensus of the utility of social media to scientific collaboration. This finding tempers some claims of the utility of social media for scientific collaboration.
Predicting Violence: A Cross-National Study of United States and Mexican Young Adults

In this study, young adults from the United States (n = 198) and Mexico (n = 223) were surveyed regarding their violent behaviors over the past year, as well as variables related to trait aggression, empathy, individualist/collectivist views, and interest in viewing and consumption of violent media. Mexican participants reported having committed a modestly higher number of violent acts in the past 12 months than U.S. participants. Somewhat consistent with the catalyst model of antisocial behavior (Ferguson et al., 2008), for both U.S. and Mexican participants, male gender and trait aggression were the two primary predictors of violent behavior, with one exception. For Mexican participants, empathy significantly predicted (less) violent behavior. Curiously, higher levels of empathy were not associated with a reduction in violent acts among U.S. participants. Moreover, for both groups of participants, interest and pleasure in viewing violent media contributed to the prediction of violence, but exposure to (.
Formation of runoff at the hillslope scale during intense precipitation

Abstract. On 60 m2 hillslope plots, at 18 mainly grassland locations in Switzerland rain was applied at rates of 50–100 mm/h for between 3 and 6 h. The generated flows were measured, including overland flow, near surface and subsurface flow 0.5–1.3 m below the surface. At some locations less than 2% of the rain flowed down the slope either on or below the surface, whereas at some others more than 90% of the rain ran off. At the majority of sites most runoff was overland flow, though at a few sites subsurface flow, usually via macropores was dominant. Data collected during each of 48 high intensity sprinkling experiments were used to distinguish, which processes were dominant in each experiment. Which dominant and subsidiary processes occurred depended on interactions between infiltration rate, change in soil water storage and drainage of the soil water. These attributes were often not directly linked to parameters usually considered important like vegetation, slope, soil clay content and antecedent soil moisture. Considering the structure of the soil in combination with these attributes, process determination was in many cases fairly straightforward, indicating the possibility of reliably predicting runoff processes at a site. However, at some sites, effects occurred that were not easily recognizable and led to surprising results.
The Effects of Maltreatment in Childhood on Working Memory Capacity in Adulthood

The aim of this study was to research the relation between exposure to maltreatment in childhood and working memory capacity in adulthood. A survey among 376 females in the age between 16 and 67 was administered. Exposure to maltreatment in childhood (sexual, physical and psychological abuse, neglect and witnessing family violence) was assessed retrospectively using the Child Maltreatment Questionnaire (Karlović, Buljan-Flander, & Vranić, 2001), whilst the Working Memory Questionnaire (Vallat-Azouvi, Pradat-Diehl, & Azouvi, 2012) was used to assess working memory capacity (recalling verbal information, numerical information, attention ability and executive functioning). The results suggest a significantly greater prevalence of physical abuse and witnessing family violence in comparison to other forms of maltreatment in childhood. Psychological abuse and witnessing family violence have shown themselves to be statistically significant predictors for deficits in total working memory capacity, verbal recall and attention ability. The results suggest that traumatic experiences during childhood, such as abuse, may trigger particular cognitive changes which may be reflected in adulthood. It is, therefore, exceedingly important to conduct further research in order to contribute to the understanding of the correlation between cognitive difficulties and maltreatment in childhood.
Statistical based Neural Network in Human Activity Recognition

This research proposed an efficient method in classification of Human Activity Recognition tasks. The evaluated tuned models show higher than 99 percent mean accuracy and gain more training and testing accuracy in comparison to previous studies. Dimensionally reduction have been introduced based on P-value evaluation in feature space. Finally a hybrid model that compressed statistically in feature space alongside with Neural Network architecture have been proposed. The final model could be used as best architecture of hardware implementation in gesture recognition applications.
CHINESE PRESCHOOLERS' FALSE BELIEF UNDERSTANDING: IS SOCIAL KNOWLEDGE UNDERPINNED BY PARENTAL STYLES, SOCIAL INTERACTIONS OR EXECUTIVE FUNCTIONS?

The ontogenesis of social understanding has been linked with a range of cognitive skills involving executive functions and social factors like the child’s social interactions. This research was conducted in China in order to test recent claims that members of the child’s social network and parenting styles are instrumental in facilitating this development and that oriental children show advanced skills in executive functions and relatively slow ‘theory of mind’ development. Sixty-seven preschoolers performed executive and false tests and 64 of their parents returned questionnaires about the child’s social network and their disciplinary strategies. Individual social and cognitive factors predicted false belief but in regression analyses inhibitory control remained significant and one social predictor, interaction with cousins, was negatively related to social awareness. The data suggest the importance of analyses of the origins of social knowledge in diverse cultural settings and exploring the cognitive and social factors that underlie this development.
The Danger of Unrandomized Code

7 security You might not be aware of it, but your operating system is defending you from software attacks: Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux all include operating system (OS)–level defenses. In this article, I focus on two modern defenses: address space layout randomization (ASLR) and data execution prevention (DEP). The beauty of these defenses is that they have little runtime overhead and can provide some protection for all programs—even ones with serious vulnerabilities— without requiring access to the program's source code. This flexibility comes with a tradeoff, however: the deployed defenses are not perfect. In this article, I shed some light on how these defenses work, when they work, and how the presence of unrandomized code can allow attackers to bypass them. To understand the motivation behind ASLR and DEP, we need to understand the exploits they were designed to protect against. Specifically, when we say exploit in this article, we are referring to a control flow hijack exploit. Control flow hijack exploits allow an attacker to take control of a program and force it to execute arbitrary code. At a high level, all control flow exploits have two components: a computation and a control hijack. The computation specifies what the attacker wants the exploit to do. For example, the computation might create a shell for the attacker or create a back-door account. A typical computation is to spawn a shell by including execut-able machine code called shellcode. The control hijack component of an exploit stops the program from executing its intended control flow and directs (hijacks) execution to attacker-selected code instead. In a traditional stack-based buffer overflow vulnerability, the attacker overflows a buffer and overwrites control structures such as function pointers or saved return addresses. As long as the attacker knows the address of his shellcode in memory, the attacker can hijack control of the program by overwriting one of these structures with the shellcode's address. In this article, I will call such exploits that use shellcode and a pointer to the shellcode traditional exploits. Such an exploit is illustrated in Figure 1. E d w a r d J. s C h w a r t z Ed is currently working on his Phd in computer security at Carnegie Mellon University. His current research interests include operating system defenses and automatic discovery and exploitation of security bugs.
Development plans, lesson-drawing and model policies in Scotland

Abstract This article considers the potential for model policies to be drawn up to tackle the perceived inefficiencies in the preparation and implementation of development planning in Scotland. Specific concerns relate to the delays in the preparation of development plans, keeping the plans up to date, and sensitive to changing conditions, and, in particular, the cumbersome procedures involved in drawing up development plan policies that “work”. Model policies are presented as a mechanism for sharing policies and as a way to minimize local planning authorities “reinventing the wheel” when drafting individual and commonplace planning policies. Drawing on the wider literature with respect to the policy cycle and lesson-drawing, the paper argues that the focus on the drafting of model policies may adversely affect the critical components of an effective public policy making discipline, and underplay the contingencies of lesson-drawing. Ultimately, therefore, model policies may undermine the solving of the “development plan puzzle”.
Gradient-based collision avoidance algorithm for second-order multi-agent formation control

This paper investigates the collision avoidance problem in formation control. First, a collision avoidance algorithm is proposed by using the gradient-based method. Then, a collision-free consensus based formation protocol is developed for a group of second-order systems with the aid of graph theory. In particular, the formation protocol is designed only based on the relative information obtained via the network connection, without the global information of the agents. Finally, simulation results with different topologies verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.
Liberalism, Education and the Common School

Au sein des societes democratiques pluralistes, la cohesion sociale est assuree par l'association standardisation et diversite. Celle-ci se retrouve en tant que mission pour le systeme scolaire. Du cote de la standardisation, l'ecole transmet les valeurs, les principes et les procedures communes a la societe. Du cote de la diversification, elle developpe la comprehension, l'ouverture d'esprit et la tolerance des eleves
Activation of autonomic thermoeffectors preceding the decision to behaviourally thermoregulate in resting humans

What is the central question of this study? Do increases in metabolic heat production and sweat rate precede the initiation of thermoregulatory behaviour in resting humans exposed to cool and warm environments? What is the main finding and its importance? Thermoregulatory behaviour at rest in cool and warm environments is preceded by changes in vasomotor tone in glabrous and non‐glabrous skin, but not by acute increases in metabolic heat production or sweat rate. These findings suggest that sweating and shivering are not obligatory for thermal behaviour to be initiated in humans.
The formation of a school subject and the nature of curriculum content: an analysis of liberal studies in Hong Kong

This essay explores the nature of the curriculum content of liberal studies—a core school subject in the new senior secondary curriculum in Hong Kong—with reference to the curriculum‐making processes entailed in the formation of that subject. The central thesis is that a school subject is introduced to schools and classrooms as a distinct representation of content embodied in curriculum materials, entailing a theory of content—a special way of selecting, organizing, and framing the content for social, cultural, educational, curricular, and pedagogical purposes. Knowing the content of a school subject thus entails knowing more than the content per se; it entails an understanding of the underlying theory of content, which is necessary for disclosing and realizing the educational potential embodied in the content.
Diagnosing the Poor Performance of Self‐worth Protective Students: A product of future outcome uncertainty, evaluative threat, or both?

Self‐worth protective students characteristically perform well on some occasions yet on other occasions they perform poorly. In this study, two accounts of the poor performance of self‐worth protective students are assessed. The first is that their poor performance is an outcome of evaluative threat. The second is that their poor performance is an outcome of future outcome uncertainty: a product of their uncertain global self‐esteem and uncertainty about the causes of achievement outcomes. Students high or low in self‐worth protection were exposed to either noncontingent success (creating future outcome uncertainty), noncontingent failure (evoking evaluative threat), or contingent success. Their ability to solve two tasks that involved a high degree of uncertainty was then assessed. Students high in self‐worth protection performed poorly following both noncontingent failure and noncontingent success, supporting the roles of both evaluative threat and future outcome uncertainty. The implications in terms of enhancing the achievement of students high in self‐worth protection are discussed.
A Comparative Investigation on Different P2P Search Systems in Dynamic Environments

Recently, peer-to-peer (P2P) search technique has become popular in the Web as an alternative to centralized search due to its high scalability and low deployment-cost. Various P2P search systems have been proposed to support full-text search. However, P2P search systems are known to suffer from the problem of peer dynamics, such as frequent peer churn and content evolution, which cause serious performance degradation. Up to date, no prior research has been conducted on investigating the impact of peer dynamics in P2P full-text search systems. In this paper, we compare four existing representative P2P search systems, each of which relies on a distinctive architecture. During our experiments, we mainly focus on evaluating the cost and search effectiveness of all systems in a dynamic environment. The comparison results demonstrate that HAPS, proposed on our previous work, outperforms the other three systems in the environment with peer dynamics.
Reversible Watermarking Surviving JPEG Compression

This paper will discuss the properties of watermarking medical images. We will also discuss the possibility of such images being compressed by JPEG and give an overview of JPEG compression. We will then propose a watermarking scheme that is reversible and robust to JPEG compression. The purpose is to verify the integrity and authenticity of medical images. We used 800times600times8 bits ultrasound (US) images in our experiment. SHA-256 of the image is then embedded in the least significant bits (LSB) of an 8times8 block in the region of non interest (RONI). The image is then compressed using JPEG and decompressed using Photoshop 6.0. If the image has not been altered, the watermark extracted will match the hash (SHA256) of the original image. The result shown that the embedded watermark is robust to JPEG compression up to image quality 60 (~91% compressed)
Emotional Experience of older adults with Digital Games for Smartphones - a case study of the Brazilian game Viajando pelo Mundo

The current paper assessed the emotional experience of older adults while playing digital games on smartphones. A group of 39 people, aged 60 and above, were chosen in order to test the game "Viajando pelo Mundo", which consists of four minigames: "Memória", "Cinco Erros", Adivinhe" and "Quebra Cuca". The positive and negative feelings of the older adults towards each minigame were assessed in an attempt to relate these two groups of feelings, and better understand the special needs of the older adults. After analyzing the results, it is possible to state that the positive feelings of the older adults while playing the games were higher than the negative ones.