Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Finite element analysis of heat transfer in nanowires (NWs)

Energy transport in nanostructures differs significantly from macrostructures because of classical and quantum size effects on energy carriers. Thermal conductivity of nanostructures is significantly lower than that of their bulk constituent materials. Based on the concept of thermal conductivity, a simulation study is used to demonstrate the nature of heat transfer in Si nanowires (NWs) in this paper.
Guidelines on Perioperative Cardiovascular Evaluation

TO THE EDITOR: Chopra and colleagues (1) discuss a need to limit preoperative stress testing, preoperative coronary revascularization, and perioperative -blockade. They use the phrase “time to throttle back,” because a growing body of research—much of it published in the past decade—has shown that these interventions do not improve outcomes in most patients. The authors promote the 2007 American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association (ACC/AHA) guideline on perioperative cardiovascular care for noncardiac surgery as a cost-effective and evidence-based approach. What Chopra and colleagues do not mention is that several of them were authors of the 1996 and 2002 versions of the same ACC/ AHA guideline. Those versions promoted stress testing for large subgroups of patients despite minimal evidence that stress testing, and the coronary revascularization it sometimes spawned, was beneficial. In other words, several authors of the current article were themselves responsible for the “throttling forward” that now makes it necessary to “throttle back. ” As I have argued elsewhere (2), the 2007 ACC/AHA guideline is an improvement over the 2002 version, but it repeats the mistake of suggesting interventions for which no supporting evidence exists. For example, limited functional capacity (as indicated by the inability to perform activities requiring 4 metabolic equivalents) is a decision point for stress testing in certain patients, despite the lack of compelling evidence that stress testing improves perioperative outcomes in these patients. Moreover, algorithms for several patient subgroups end with a recommendation to “consider noninvasive testing . if it will change management” (3). But without evidence to justify stress testing in these subgroups, how should clinicians determine when testing will change management? An analysis (4) showed that, all too frequently, ACC/AHA practice guidelines make recommendations for which there is no conclusive evidence. The sequence of guidelines on perioperative evaluation exemplifies this problem.
Communicating with Citizens on the Ground: A Practical Study

Availability and access to information is critical for a highly effective response to an ongoing event however, information reported by citizens is based on their context, bias and subjective interpretation, and the channel of communication may be too narrow to provide clear, accurate reporting. This can often lead to inadequate response to an emergency, which can in turn result in loss of property or even lives. Excessive response to an emergency can also result in a waste of highly resources. The authors' solution to address this problem is to make the citizen act as a camera for the control room by exploiting the user's mobile camera. The system is designed to provide a live view of the citizen's immediate surroundings, while control room personnel can provide instructions. In this paper, the authors introduce their approach and share initial insights from a focus group validation session and then four evaluations with users within a separate but closely related domain. They discuss their observations, evaluation results and provide a set of recommendations for the Emergency Response domain.
A Fractional Slot Axial Flux PM Direct Drive

The paper deals with an axial-flux PM synchronous motor (AFPMSM) for a direct wheel drive. Its main feature is the armature winding of the fractional slots type. The choice of a concentrated non-overlapping winding allows a large number of pole pairs to be designed. The paper is aimed at emphasizing the special features of the whole motor drive. Therefore, both machine and control design aspects are targeted. Encoder-less operation of the drive is particularly critical. A vector control scheme is illustrated. A sliding-mode rotor flux estimation scheme is investigated. Its performances are experimentally compared to the encoder operation
Efficient Pricing of European-Style Options Under Heston's Stochastic Volatility Model

Heston’s stochastic volatility model is frequently employed by finance researchers and practitioners. Fast pricing of European-style options in this setting has considerable practical significance. This paper derives a computationally efficient formula for the value of a European-style put under Heston’s dynamics, by utilizing a transform approach based on inverting the characteristic function of the underlying stock’s log-price and by exploiting the characteristic function’s symmetry. The value of a European-style call is computed using a parity relationship. The required characteristic function is obtained as a special case of a more general solution derived in prior research. Computational advantage of the option value formula is illustrated numerically. The method can help to mitigate the time cost of algorithms that require repeated evaluation of European-style options under Heston’s dynamics.
Peer ratings an assessment tool whose time has come

Peer ratings—ratings of physicians' clinical skills, communication skills, and professionalism completed by peer physicians or other professional colleagues—are coming into their own in many health care settings. For example, the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) recently established professional associate ratings as a component of its future recertification programs.1 Peer ratings are also being used or considered for evaluation of physicians in other settings, including academic departments, hospitals, HMOs, and large group practices. Although peer ratings are somewhat cumbersome when completed on paper because multiple ratings are required to achieve reliability, they remain one of the easiest and most comprehensive methods available to assess the skills of an individual physician. No other existing methodology provides practice-based information about physician performance in cognitive and interpersonal areas as well as professionalism. In upcoming years, use of computer and telephone technologies should reduce the time and expense required for collecting peer ratings and facilitate analysis of the information obtained. For example, the ABIM will use interactive voice response technology to obtain ratings by telephone rather than by mail.
Links between plant and fungal diversity in habitat fragments of coastal shrubland

Habitat fragmentation is widespread across ecosystems, detrimentally affecting biodiversity. Although most habitat fragmentation studies have been conducted on macroscopic organisms, microbial communities and fungal processes may also be threatened by fragmentation. This study investigated whether fragmentation, and the effects of fragmentation on plants, altered fungal diversity and function within a fragmented shrubland in southern California. Using fluorimetric techniques, we assayed enzymes from plant litter collected from fragments of varying sizes to investigate enzymatic responses to fragmentation. To isolate the effects of plant richness from those of fragment size on fungi, we deployed litter bags containing different levels of plant litter diversity into the largest fragment and incubated in the field for one year. Following field incubation, we determined litter mass loss and conducted molecular analyses of fungal communities. We found that leaf-litter enzyme activity declined in smaller habitat fragments with less diverse vegetation. Moreover, we detected greater litter mass loss in litter bags containing more diverse plant litter. Additionally, bags with greater plant litter diversity harbored greater numbers of fungal taxa. These findings suggest that both plant litter resources and fungal function may be affected by habitat fragmentation’s constraints on plants, possibly because plant species differ chemically, and may thus decompose at different rates. Diverse plant assemblages may produce a greater variety of litter resources and provide more ecological niche space, which may support greater numbers of fungal taxa. Thus, reduced plant diversity may constrain both fungal taxa richness and decomposition in fragmented coastal shrublands. Altogether, our findings provide evidence that even fungi may be affected by human-driven habitat fragmentation via direct effects of fragmentation on plants. Our findings underscore the importance of restoring diverse vegetation communities within larger coastal sage scrub fragments and suggest that this may be an effective way to improve the functional capacity of degraded sites.
A new tracking loop for direct sequence spread spectrum systems on frequency-selective fading channels

A new tracking loop is proposed for direct-sequence spread-spectrum signaling on a frequency-selective fading channel. By exploiting the inherent multipath diversity of the channel, the new tracking loop overwhelmingly outperforms the traditional noncoherent delay-locked loop (DLL) for all cases under consideration. Linear and nonlinear methods are employed to analyze the new tracking loop with perfect channel estimation. The performance degradation caused by imperfect channel estimation is determined by computer simulations. Over a range of signal-to-noise-ratios (SNRs) of practical interest, the simulation results show that the degradation is less than 2 dB.
EEG Controlled Ni Lego Robot: Feasibility Study of Sensorimotor Alpha Rhythm Neurofeedback in Children

We present a feasibility study of the novel system for EEG based neurofeedback. The proposed system can provide both continuous visual feedback on the computer screen and discrete reinforcement (movement of the NI LEGO Mindstorms robot) when the task is executed. We have tested the NF system on 31 children subjects (6-15 years). The subjects' task was to increase their alpha band power by using the continuous feedback. When the power level reached the predefined threshold, the command was sent to the robot to make a step which was considered a successful task execution. The preliminary results showed an overall increase of robot-activations during the course of the trials.
Audiovisual Policies and International Trade: The Case of Italy

This paper reviews Italian audiovisual policies, in order to assess their impact on the international position of domestic cinema and television producers. Italian audiovisual policies are characterised by a rich set of institutions, regulations and support tools, whose complexity sometimes causes problems of overlapping jurisdictions among different authorities and agencies. Their degree of market access restrictiveness appears to be relatively high, especially considering the discrimination between European and non-European producers. The economic performance of the Italian audiovisual sector has been relatively weak in the nineties, particularly for what concerns the competition with foreign producers. On the other hand, the econometric exercise presented in section 5 seems to show that, at least in the cinema sector, public subsidies have a positive impact on the domestic market share of Italian producers. This preliminary conclusion is however not enough to justify a positive assessment of Italian audiovisual policies. Many important issues require further investigations. The problems and the data presented in this paper seem to confirm the need to reform the strategy and the tools of public intervention in the audiovisual sector.
Predicting Future Cash Flow from Operations: Australian Evidence

This paper investigates which accounting variable has superior predictive ability for future cash flow: current cash flow from operations, or current earnings. The question is examined in an Australian context for the years 1995 to 2005, on a sample of 350 firms. The question is also examined by industry for the same firms. In most U.S. studies, superior predictions are obtained using current earnings. However, the same result is not expected in Australia, due to the different industrial composition of the economy, and the superiority of cash flow data prepared under Australian accounting standards. Consistent with our expectation, the results indicate that current cash flow from operations has superior predictive ability over current earnings for future cash flow from operations, and also that cash flow from operations has higher incremental information content than current earnings.
An Analysis of the Performance of Manufacturing Industries in Karnataka State ∗

Karnataka's manufacturing sector has grown steadily in terms of number of factories, employment, fixed capital investment, gross value added and value of output, over a period of time. However, the manufacturing industry has registered a more impressive growth in the period of economic liberalisation during 1993-2003 compared to the period of protection of 1980-1990. The question examined in this paper is what has contributed to this improved manufacturing sector growth in Karnataka in the post-liberalisation period? Is the manufacturing sector performance input-driven or total factor productivity growth-driven? The analysis in this paper indicates that higher industrial growth need not be accompanied with higher industrial efficiency.
Business to business branding: external and internal satisfiers and the role of training quality

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to consider whether the affective components of brand association influence the key stakeholders of business‐to‐business (B2B) brands. The aim is to demonstrate the importance of branding to organisations involved only in B2B markets by testing three hypotheses: that the customer's affective brand associations predict satisfaction with the company; that customer and employee affective brand associations correlate, and; that the better the training employees believe they receive, the stronger their affective brand associations and the higher their satisfaction with the organisation.Design/methodology/approach – The paper uses a survey of the customers (280) and employees (367) of two construction companies involved only in B2B markets using a multidimensional measure of corporate brand personality. Structural equation modelling and regression are used to test the hypotheses.Findings – Customer satisfaction is predicted by corporate brand personality. The customer view.
Heterogeneous Expression and Release of CD14 by Human Gingival Fibroblasts: Characterization and CD14-Mediated Interleukin-8 Secretion in Response to Lipopolysaccharide

ABSTRACT To identify the role in periodontal inflammatory diseases of human gingival fibroblasts (HGF), the major constituents of gingival tissue, the expression of CD14, a possible lipopolysaccharide (LPS) receptor, and the release of soluble CD14 (sCD14) by HGF were examined. Among the HGF samples from the nine donors tested, more than 50% of the HGF from five donors expressed CD14 but less than 20% of HGF from the other four donors did so, as determined by flow cytometric analysis. The CD14 expression on the cell surface was correlated with the expression of CD14 mRNA. The HGF and skin and lung fibroblasts tested expressed no CD18, which indicates that fibroblasts do not possess other LPS receptors, such as CD11b/CD18 and CD11c/CD18. The CD14 expression by the HGF was decreased after subculturing and was highest at the confluent stage of culture. The treatment of high-CD14-expressing (CD14high) HGF with phosphatidylinositol-phospholipase C reduced CD14 expression; this result and the increase in a 55-kDa CD14 indicate that the membrane CD14 (mCD14) on the HGF may be a 55-kDa glycosylphosphatidylinositol-anchored protein. CD14high HGF spontaneously released 48- and 57-kDa sCD14. The total release of sCD14 by the HGF was augmented by gamma interferon and Escherichia coli LPS in accordance with the increased expression of mCD14. The CD14high HGF secreted interleukin-8 in response to LPS, and the secretion was completely inhibited by anti-CD14 antibody. These results suggest that (i) HGF consist of populations that are heterogeneous on the basis of different levels of expression of CD14 and (ii) CD14high HGF secrete inflammatory cytokines in response to LPS via CD14.
The health care quality improvement initiative. A new approach to quality assurance in Medicare.

THIS ARTICLE describes how the Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA) is reshaping its approach to improving care for Medicare beneficiaries. The goal of the Health Care Quality Improvement Initiative (HCQII) is to move from dealing with individual clinical errors to helping providers to improve the mainstream of care. Such a reform implies profound changes. First, the processes and criteria for review change: instead of having clinicians use essentially intuitive local criteria to find problems in individual cases, peer review organizations (PROs) will use explicit, more nationally uniform criteria to For editorial comment see p 917. examine patterns of care and patterns of outcomes. Second, the immediate objective changes: PROs will focus primarily on persistent differences between the observed and the achievable in both care and outcomes and less on occasional, unusual deficiencies in care. Third, the ultimate method changes: PROs will help providers identify problems and their solutions by monitoring
TRARESA: a tissue microarray‐based hospital system for biomarker validation and discovery

&NA; Formalin fixed and paraffin embedded tissue (FFPE) collections in pathology departments are the largest resource for retrospective biomedical research studies. Based on the literature analysis of FFPE related research, as well as our own technical validation, we present the Translational Research Arrays (TRARESA), a tissue microarray centred, hospital based, translational research conceptual framework for both validation and/or discovery of novel biomarkers. TRARESA incorporates the analysis of protein, DNA and RNA in the same samples, correlating with clinical and pathological parameters from each case, and allowing (a) the confirmation of new biomarkers, disease hypotheses and drug targets, and (b) the postulation of novel hypotheses on disease mechanisms and drug targets based on known biomarkers. While presenting TRARESA, we illustrate the use of such a comprehensive approach. The conceptualisation of the role of FFPE‐based studies in translational research allows the utilisation of this commodity, and adds to the hypothesis‐generating armamentarium of existing high‐throughput technologies.
Benchmark to escape from Lake Wobegon

Purpose – This paper aims to investigate whether an employee reports an accurate view of the relative performance level of the organisation for which they work.Design/methodology/approach – Utilizes a survey of 2,517 senior managers, managers and team leaders from 120 different organisations in nine different countries.Findings – There is significant and consistent overestimation of performance with 75 percent of the management team reporting that their organisation is above average, and only 5 percent rating their organisation as below average compared to its competitors. A very significant finding is that where there is likely to be a greater degree of knowledge of competitor's performance estimation improves.Practical implications – The implication of this misrepresentation of the true position is to make it less likely that an improvement initiative will succeed as managers will not be sufficiently motivated to improve an apparently satisfactory status quo. The paper calls for greater focus both on th.
A Study of Recent Contributions on Simulation Tools for Network-on-Chip(NoC)

The growth in the number of Intellectual Properties(IPs) or the number of cores on the same chip becomes a critical issue in System-on-Chip (SoC) due to the intra-communication problem between the chip elements. As a result, Network-on-Chip (NoC) has emerged as a new system architecture to overcome intra-communication issues. New approaches and methodologies have been developed by many researchers to improve NoC. Also, many NoC simulation tools have been proposed and adopted by both academia and industry. This paper presents a study of recent contributions on simulation tools for NoC. Furthermore, an overview of NoC is covered as well as a comparison between some NoC simulators to help facilitate research in on-chip communication.
Automated vessel shadow segmentation of fovea-centered spectral-domain images from multiple OCT devices

Spectral-domain Optical Coherence Tomography (SD-OCT) is a non-invasive modality for acquiring high reso- lution, three-dimensional (3D) cross sectional volumetric images of the retina and the subretinal layers. SD-OCT also allows the detailed imaging of retinal pathology, aiding clinicians in the diagnosis of sight degrading diseases such as age-related macular degeneration (AMD) and glaucoma.1 Disease diagnosis, assessment, and treatment requires a patient to undergo multiple OCT scans, possibly using different scanning devices, to accurately and precisely gauge disease activity, progression and treatment success. However, the use of OCT imaging devices from different vendors, combined with patient movement may result in poor scan spatial correlation, potentially leading to incorrect patient diagnosis or treatment analysis. Image registration can be used to precisely compare disease states by registering differing 3D scans to one another. In order to align 3D scans from different time- points and vendors using registration, landmarks are required, the most obvious being the retinal vasculature. Presented here is a fully automated cross-vendor method to acquire retina vessel locations for OCT registration from fovea centred 3D SD-OCT scans based on vessel shadows. Noise filtered OCT scans are flattened based on vendor retinal layer segmentation, to extract the retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) layer of the retina. Voxel based layer profile analysis and k-means clustering is used to extract candidate vessel shadow regions from the RPE layer. In conjunction, the extracted RPE layers are combined to generate a projection image featuring all candidate vessel shadows. Image processing methods for vessel segmentation of the OCT constructed projection image are then applied to optimize the accuracy of OCT vessel shadow segmentation through the removal of false positive shadow regions such as those caused by exudates and cysts. Validation of segmented vessel shadows uses ground truth vessel shadow regions identified by expert graders at the Vienna Reading Center (VRC). The results presented here are intended to show the feasibility of this method for the accurate and precise extraction of suitable retinal vessel shadows from multiple vendor 3D SD-OCT scans for use in intra-vendor and cross-vendor 3D OCT registration, 2D fundus registration and actual retinal vessel segmentation. The resulting percentage of true vessel shadow segments to false positive segments identified by the proposed system compared to mean grader ground truth is 95%.