Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Minimal Detectable Change of the Timed “Up & Go” Test and the Dynamic Gait Index in People With Parkinson Disease

Background The minimal detectable change (MDC) is the smallest amount of difference in individual scores that represents true change (beyond random measurement error). The MDCs of the Timed “Up & Go” Test (TUG) and the Dynamic Gait Index (DGI) in people with Parkinson disease (PD) are largely unknown, limiting the interpretability of the change scores of both measures. Objective The purpose of this study was to estimate the MDCs of the TUG and the DGI in people with PD. Design This investigation was a prospective cohort study. Methods Seventy-two participants were recruited from special clinics for movement disorders at a university hospital. Their mean age was 67.5 years, and 61% were men. All participants completed the TUG and the DGI assessments twice, about 14 days apart. The MDC was calculated from the standard error of measurement. The percentage MDC (MDC%) was calculated as the MDC divided by the mean of all scores for the sample. Furthermore, the intraclass correlation coefficient was used to examine the reproducibility between testing sessions (test-retest reliability). Results The respective MDC and MDC% of the TUG were 3.5 seconds and 29.8, and those of the DGI were 2.9 points and 13.3. The test-retest reliability values for the TUG and the DGI were high; the intraclass correlation coefficients were . 80 and . 84, respectively. Limitations The study sample was a convenience sample, and the participants had mild to moderately severe PD. Conclusions The results showed that the TUG and the DGI have generally acceptable random measurement error and test-retest reliability. These findings should help clinicians and researchers determine whether a change in an individual patient with PD is a true change.
Encouraging User Interaction of Social Network through Tweet Recommendation Using Community Structure

In this paper, we propose a tweet recommendation method that encourages people to communicate with each other on the microblogging site, "Twitter". To achieve this, we have developed a novel recommendation technique that does not only use the Bag of Words included in a tweet something written on Twitter but also human relations, i.e. followings, followers, and mentions. We also use latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) to extract latent topics of human relations and tweets topics. Our proposal incorporates human topics in tweet topics. We present experimental results that show that the proposed method outperforms a simple tweet recommendation technique that does not use human relation information.
Accurate Estimation of Viral Abundance by Epifluorescence Microscopy

ABSTRACT Virus enumeration by epifluorescence microscopy (EFM) is routinely done on preserved, refrigerated samples. Concerns about obtaining accurate and reproducible estimates led us to examine procedures for counting viruses by EFM. Our results indicate that aldehyde fixation results in rapid decreases in viral abundance. By 1 h postfixation, the abundance dropped by 16.4% ± 5.2% (n = 6), and by 4 h, the abundance was 20 to 35% lower. The average loss rates for glutaraldehyde- and formaldehyde-fixed samples over the first 2 h were 0.12 and 0.13 h−1, respectively. By 16 days, viral abundance had decreased by 72% (standard deviation, 6%; n = 6). Aldehyde fixation of samples followed by storage at 4°C, for even a few hours, resulted in large underestimates of viral abundance. The viral loss rates were not constant, and in glutaraldehyde- and formaldehyde-fixed samples they decreased from 0.13 and 0.17 h−1 during the first hour to 0.01 h−1 between 24 and 48 h. Although decay rates changed over time, the abundance was predicted by using separate models to describe decay over the first 8 h and decay beyond 8 h. Accurate estimates of abundance were easily made with unfixed samples stained with Yo-Pro-1, SYBR Green I, or SYBR Gold, and slides could be stored at −20°C for at least 2 weeks or, for Yo-Pro-1, at least 1 year. If essential, samples can be fixed and flash frozen in liquid nitrogen upon collection and stored at −86°C. Determinations performed with fixed samples result in large underestimates of abundance unless slides are made immediately or samples are flash frozen. If protocols outlined in this paper are followed, EFM yields accurate estimates of viral abundance.
Boundary layer heuristic for search-based nonholonomic path planning in maze-like environments

Automatic valet parking is widely viewed as a milestone towards fully autonomous driving. One of the key problems is nonholonomic path planning in maze-like environments (e.g. parking lots). To balance efficiency and passenger comfort, the planner needs to minimize the length of the path as well as the number of gear shifts. Lattice A∗ search is widely adopted for optimal path planning. However, existing heuristics do not evaluate the nonholonomic dynamic constraint and the collision avoidance constraint simultaneously, which may mislead the search. To efficiently search the environment, the boundary layer heuristic is proposed which puts large cost in the area that the vehicle must shift gear to escape. Such area is called the boundary layer. A simple and efficient geometric method to compute the boundary layer is proposed. The admissibility and consistency of the additive combination of the boundary layer heuristic and existing heuristics are proved in the paper. The simulation results verify that the introduction of the boundary layer heuristic improves the search performance by reducing the computation time by 56.1%.
A secure key establishment protocol for zigbee wireless sensor networks

ZigBee is a wireless sensor network standard that defines network and application layers on top of IEEE 802.15. 4's physical and medium access control layers. In the latest version of ZigBee, enhancements are prescribed for the security sublayer but we show in this paper that problems persist. In particular we show that the End-to-End Application Key Establishment Protocol is flawed and we propose a secure protocol instead. We do so by using formal verification techniques based on static program analysis and process algebras. We present a way of using formal methods in wireless network security, and propose a secure key establishment protocol for ZigBee networks.
[11C]Methionine Positron Emission Tomography and Survival in Patients with Bone and Soft Tissue Sarcomas Treated by Carbon Ion Radiotherapy

Purpose: The development of the novel carbon ion radiotherapy (CIRT) in the treatment of refractory cancers has resulted in the need for a way to accurately evaluate patient prognosis. We evaluated whether l-[methyl-11C]-methionine (MET) uptake and its change after CIRT were the early survival predictors in patients with unresectable bone and soft tissue sarcomas. Experimental Design: MET positron emission tomography was prospectively performed in 62 patients with unresectable bone and soft tissue sarcomas before and within 1 month after CIRT. Tumor MET uptake was measured with the semiquantitative tumor:nontumor ratio (T/N ratio). The MET uptake in the tumor and relevant clinical parameters were entered into univariate and multivariate survival analysis. Results: The overall median survival time was 20 months. Patients with a baseline T/N ratio of ≤6 had a significant better survival than patients with a baseline T/N ratio >6 (2-year survival rate: 69.4% versus 32.3%; P = 0.01). Patients with a post-CIRT ratio of ≤4.4 had a better survival than that with a post-CIRT ratio >4.4 (2-year survival rate: 63.7% versus 41.3%; P = 0.01). A significant higher survival rate was observed in patients with post-therapeutic MET uptake change of >30% than patients in lower change group (2-year survival rate: 74.6% versus 41.6%; P = 0.049). The multivariate analysis showed that both baseline and post-CIRT T/N ratio were statistically significant independent predictors of patient survival. Tumors with larger T/N ratio had a significantly poorer prognosis. Conclusions: MET uptake as measured by either baseline or post-CIRT T/N ratio was an independent predictor of survival in patients with bone and soft tissue sarcomas treated by carbon ion radiotherapy, whereas post-therapeutic MET uptake change might have potential value for the same purpose.
Prediction of various degrees of vocational secondary school absenteeism: Importance of the organization of the educational system

The aim of this research was to study different types of absenteeism in vocational secondary school taking into account the specificity of the school context. Participants were 523 students. First, three school absenteeism groups were established: Students with no absenteeism (nearly 64% of the sample), students with absenteeism (26%), and students with problematic absenteeism (10%). These groups were then compared according to four dimensions directly linked to the school context in order to identify the characteristics most associated with each type of absenteeism. Dimensions considered in this study were: 1) students’ characteristics and their status in vocational secondary school; 2) personal variables of school involvement; 3) relational variables (with parents, teachers, and school climate); and 4) belief variable in school system (belief in school justice). Multinomial logistic regression analyses showed that beyond the impact of the personal variables, the organization of the educational system seems to be a major predictor in the explanation of various forms of absenteeism. Implications from the research for psychological providers practice were suggested in order to encourage school attendance by vocational secondary school students.
Balancing the vocational and academic dimensions of accounting education: the case for a core curriculum

Knowledge is a defining characteristic of professions but, given the ever‐increasing knowledge base, curricula in professional disciplines are becoming overcrowded. This paper discusses propositional/declarative knowledge in relation to the accounting knowledge base. Historically, professional areas such as medicine, law and accountancy have expanded their curriculum to encompass new areas. However, core curricula have been introduced recently in medicine and law to provide space for the development of wider skills, to equip students for lifelong learning and to enable them to tailor their study in line with interests, aptitudes and career intentions. These core curricula are examined in order to assess the arguments for and against a core curriculum for accounting. The paper concludes that the introduction of core curricula in undergraduate accounting education could address the problem of the increasing knowledge base while providing breadth, opportunities for developing interpersonal skills and allowing students to tailor their degrees. In this way, the vocational and academic aspects of undergraduate accounting education could be balanced more effectively.
When Pipelines Meet Fountain: Fast Data Dissemination in Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper presents Pando, a completely contention-free data dissemination protocol for wireless sensor networks. Pando encodes data by Fountain codes and disseminates the rateless stream of encoded packets along the fast and parallel pipelines built on constructive interference and channel diversity. Since every encoded packet contains innovative information to the original data object, Pando avoids duplicate retransmissions and fully exploits the wireless broadcast effect in data dissemination. To transform Pando into a practical system, we devise several techniques, including the integration of Fountain coding with the timing-critical operations of constructive interference and pipelining, a silence based feedback scheme for the one-way pipelined dissemination, and packet-level adaptation of network density and channel diversity. Based on these techniques, Pando can accomplish the data dissemination process entirely over the fast and parallel pipelines. We implement Pando in Contiki and for TelosB sensor motes. We evaluate Pando's performance with various settings on two large-scale open testbeds, Indriya and Flocklab. Our experimental results show that Pando can provide 100% reliability and reduce the dissemination time of the state-of-the-art by 3.5.
Phytopathogen type III effectors as probes of biological systems

Bacterial phytopathogens utilize a myriad of virulence factors to modulate their plant hosts in order to promote successful pathogenesis. One potent virulence strategy is to inject these virulence proteins into plant cells via the type III secretion system. Characterizing the host targets and the molecular mechanisms of type III secreted proteins, known as effectors, has illuminated our understanding of eukaryotic cell biology. As a result, these effectors can serve as molecular probes to aid in our understanding of plant cellular processes, such as immune signalling, vesicle trafficking, cytoskeleton stability and transcriptional regulation. Furthermore, given that effectors directly and specifically interact with their targets within plant cells, these virulence proteins have enormous biotechnological potential for manipulating eukaryotic systems.
A Model of Query Performance in Dynamic Distributed Federated Databases Taking Account of Network Topology

We examine the problem of distributed join query optimization in a Dynamic Distributed Federated Database (DDFD) and the role that network topology, specifically an engineered hypercube, could play in the cost estimation. Considering that many nodes in a DDFD may rely on batteries and wireless radios, we should like to minimize network information transfer to maximize network availability and lifetime. While in any topology it may be assumed a querying node can estimate distance to data sources, in an unknown topology, the querying node has no direct knowledge of inter-site distances. In a hypercube, these distances can be easily calculated at the querying node based on the sites’ labels. What is more, query optimization in the past has not fully taken account of the topology of networks as a cost factor in executing joins. Due to the unavailability of open-source implementations, we have developed and implemented a distributed join query optimizer for comparative performance studies. Our preliminary experiments show that incorporating inter-node distances into the cost model often produces much better plans, regardless of the search algorithm (greedy or dynamic programming). We confirm a significant advantage of semijoin adoption and quantify the performance of the greedy algorithm in relation to dynamic programming, but acknowledge that a dynamic programming approach may often be infeasible in a DDFD for large-scale distribution. Based on our findings, we will present some practical considerations for improvement.
A Partition-of-Unity Based Algorithm for Implicit Surface Reconstruction Using Belief Propagation

In this paper, we propose a new algorithm for the fundamental problem of reconstructing surfaces from a large set of unorganized 3D data points. The local shapes of the surface are recovered by variational implicit surface represented as a weighted combination of radial basis functions. The variational implicit patches are then combined together to form the overall surface via a set of blending functions, which is also referred to as the partition-of-unity method. The reconstruction algorithm first partitions the input point set by octree subdivision and surface normal estimation is performed so as to orientate the local variational implicit patches. A new graph optimization scheme based on the belief propagation framework is proposed to determine the global consistent orientation for the entire set of data points. To achieve multi-scale reconstruction, we propose a novel progressive reconstruction algorithm which utilizes the Schur complement formula to reduce the computational cost of iteratively updating the radial basis function coefficients. Finally, we demonstrate the performance of the proposed algorithm by showing experimental results on some real-world 3D data sets.
Streaming Algorithms for k-core Decomposition

A k-core of a graph is a maximal connected subgraph in which every vertex is connected to at least k vertices in the subgraph. k-core decomposition is often used in large-scale network analysis, such as community detection, protein function prediction, visualization, and solving NP-Hard problems on real networks efficiently, like maximal clique finding. In many real-world applications, networks change over time. As a result, it is essential to develop efficient incremental algorithms for streaming graph data. In this paper, we propose the first incremental k-core decomposition algorithms for streaming graph data. These algorithms locate a small subgraph that is guaranteed to contain the list of vertices whose maximum k-core values have to be updated, and efficiently process this subgraph to update the k-core decomposition. Our results show a significant reduction in run-time compared to non-incremental alternatives. We show the efficiency of our algorithms on different types of real and synthetic graphs, at different scales. For a graph of 16 million vertices, we observe speedups reaching a million times, relative to the non-incremental algorithms.
Role of Confocal Endomicroscopy in the Diagnosis of Celiac Disease

Background and Aims: Confocal laser endomicroscopy (CLE) is a recent development that enables surface and subsurface imaging of living cells in vivo at 1000× magnification. The aims of the present study were to define confocal features of celiac disease (CD) and to evaluate the usefulness of the CLE in the diagnosis of CD in children in comparison to histology. Patients and Methods: Nine patients (8 girls) with a median age of 8.35 years (range 2–12.66 years) and a median weight of 28.3 kg (range 11–71 kg) were suspected with CD and 10 matched controls underwent oesophagogastroduodenoscopy using the confocal laser endomicroscope (EC3870CILK; Pentax, Tokyo, Japan). Histologic sections were compared with the confocal images of the same site by 2 experienced paediatric histopathologists and endoscopists, all of whom were blinded to the diagnosis. Results: The median procedure time was 17 minutes (range 8–25 minutes). Confocal features of CD were defined and a score was developed. A total of 1384 confocal images were collected from 9 patients and 10 controls. Five images from each patient and control were selected and compared with the biopsy specimen of the same site. The sensitivity, specificity, and positive predictive value for the confocal images in comparison to the histology were 100%, 80%, and 81%. The kappa inter-observer agreement between the 2 endoscopists was 0.769 (P = 0.018) and between the 2 histopathologists was 0.571 (P = 0.05). Conclusions: Confocal endomicroscopy offers the prospect of diagnosis of CD during ongoing endoscopy. It also enables targeting biopsies to abnormal mucosa and thereby increasing the diagnostic yield, especially when villous atrophy is patchy in the duodenum.
BIOMEDICAL STIGMA REDUCTION PROGRAMS PRODUCE NEGATIVE BUT TRANSIENT EFFECTS ON A DEPRESSED LOW-INCOME COMMUNITY SAMPLE

One out of six individuals will experience depression during their lifetimes, yet the majority of these individuals will not seek treatment, and this problem is even larger for African Americans, for whom multiple barriers to mental health treatment seeking exist. One widely recognized factor that negatively impacts treatment seeking is stigma. Efforts to develop and disseminate depression anti-stigma programs have been dominated by a biomedical model that presents depression as a medical disease. Alternately, a contextual model emphasizes the role of environmental influences. This study compared a biomedical model and a contextual model within depression anti-stigma programs with 115 community members (mostly African American) with elevated depressive symptoms. The main hypothesis was that the contextual model would be more effective at decreasing stigma. Results indicated that the biomedical model had negative effects immediately following the programs, but that neither depression anti-stigma program ha.
Jitter of the stimulated motor axon

Electrical microstimulation of motor axons in conjunction with single fiber EMG (SFEMG) is increasingly used to measure the jitter of the motor endplates. This study examines the jitter of the stimulation site on the axon when stimulus strength is at threshold. In the absence of spurious blocking, this was found to be 5 µs on the average. With intermittent blocking, however, a mean additional jitter of 40 µs was obtained. The latter is considered to result from changing propagation velocity in the muscle fiber due to irregularity of activation rate. In clinical jitter studies, inadvertent threshold stimulation can result in significant error when associated with intermittent blocking.
Semantic Organizations and Memory for Related Sentences.

Two experiments investigated the effect, on recall, of various organizations of related sentences, organizations based on meaningful relationships between the sentence parts. Learning was highest when the organizational sequence of sentences was both thematic and temporal, lowest when it was temporal, and intermediate when it was based on the logical subjects of the sentences. The different parts of the sentences were differently recalled depending on the organization.
How Micro Lecture Videos Trigger the Motivation of Learners of Coursera: A Comparative Study Based on ARCS Mode

The relatively low retention rates of learners have an implication that learners might disengage in a MOOC course. Engagement and motivation always go hand in hand. The elaborate design of strategies to trigger and retain learners' motivation is helpful to increase the rates of course completion. To address this, we applied content analysis method to analyze the micro lecture videos of six courses in Coursera according to ARCS model of motivation suggested by Keller. This study reports the categories of the strategies to motivate learner that used in these videos and the differences between Chinese produced and other countries produced video courses. These results inform some suggestions of future design suggestions for Micro instructional videos.
A Chinese Chan-Based Mind-Body Intervention Improves Sleep on Patients with Depression: A Randomized Controlled Trial

Sleep disturbance is a common problem associated with depression, and cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) is a more common behavioral intervention for sleep problems. The present study compares the effect of a newly developed Chinese Chan-based intervention, namely Dejian mind-body intervention (DMBI), with the CBT on improving sleep problems of patients with depression. Seventy-five participants diagnosed with major depressive disorder were randomly assigned to receive 10 weekly sessions of CBT or DMBI, or placed on a waitlist. Measurements included ratings by psychiatrists who were blinded to the experimental design, and a standardized questionnaire on sleep quantity and quality was obtained before and after the 10-week intervention. Results indicated that both the CBT and DMBI groups demonstrated significantly reduced sleep onset latency and wake time after sleep onset (effect size range = 0.46–1.0, P ≤ 0.05) as compared to nonsignificant changes in the waitlist group (P > 0.1). Furthermore, the DMBI group, but not the CBT or waitlist groups, demonstrated significantly reduced psychiatrist ratings on overall sleep problems (effect size = 1.0, P = 0.00) and improved total sleep time (effect size = 0.8, P = 0.05) after treatment. The present findings suggest that a Chinese Chan-based mind-body intervention has positive effects on improving sleep in individuals with depression.