Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Electrical field characteristics for rectangular patch antenna with perturbation slot at THz range

Terahertz, THz, antennas have received much attention due to their capability to concentrate field energy and ability to support a wide range of applications such as energy collector and magnetic storage. In this paper, a rectangular patch antenna with perturbation slot is presented. The design is based on the Transmission-Line model. The dominant resonance shows good agreement at THz band with small inaccuracy of ~15 %. A single perturbation slot is introduced at the half-patch length. By having a perturbed slot, the dominant resonance moves to a higher mode. The design approach has successfully proved that the electrical field strength is highly concentrated at the perturbed slot. The studies have shown that the proposed antenna can effectively concentrate the THz field when the perturbation slot is small. Further work is focused on embedding two or three identical slots into the radiating structure in order to create more potential space to trap the electrical field.
Effective service delivery and group management in integrated terrestrial-HAP systems for multicast communications

Multicast service delivery can be easily guaranteed to users in disadvantaged areas by effectively integrating HAPs (High Altitude Platforms) into the terrestrial cellular system. HAPs are meant to be as unmanned aerial vehicles, airships or aircrafts, which remain relatively stationary in the stratosphere at short distance from Earth compared to satellites. In the scientific literature, there is evidence of the effectiveness of a UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications Systems) system augmented by the presence of HAPs, which are equipped with UMTS payloads and play the role of additional base stations. This integrated terrestrial-space platform intrinsically fits the exigencies of rural and emergency scenarios, which are characterized by network resource scarcity, due to either geographical reasons (such as in rural areas) or to temporary resource over-utilization-reduction (due to emergency status). In this paper, the focus is on the delivery of Multimedia Broadcast-Multicast Services (MBMS) in the reference integrated architecture. Main objectives are designing resource allocation policies to manage multicast groups between space and terrestrial coverages, and analysing their feasibility and performances in terms of offered grade of service. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
IMPROVING TRANSPARENCY

The confidence-building measures (CBMs) under the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) have been only moderately successful in enhancing transparency because of the limited participation of state parties and the poor quality of the data provided. In the absence of a verification protocol for the treaty, the CBMs constitute the primary means by which most treaty members can gain information useful for evaluating whether states are abiding by their treaty obligations. Given their importance, the CBMs need to be refashioned: in some areas the measures should be expanded to cover additional categories of life sciences activities directly relevant to treaty compliance and in other areas trimmed back to allow other organizations to handle activities closely related to their core missions and capabilities. This article explains the importance and function of transparency in the context of dual-use activities, reviews the evolution and the current status of the CBMs, identifies gaps and redundancies in the coverage of CBMs, and introduces proposals to transform the CBMs over time into stronger proto-declarations that can truly serve as source of information helpful in making judgments about compliance with the BWC's prohibitions.
Spreading human factors expertise in healthcare: untangling the knots in people and systems

Human factors (HF) is a term many involved in healthcare delivery are now familiar with, even though a decade ago most had never heard of the concept. The majority of clinicians and healthcare improvement specialists have learned of HF through a particular branch of practice that derived from aviation and arose from the need to address error, teamwork and communication issues. This behavioural safety approach, while entirely legitimate and increasingly well evidenced, is limited. Yet, it has dominated perceptions of what constitutes HF and shaped the application of HF principles in healthcare. Frequently espoused by well meaning clinicians and aviators, rather than academically qualified HF professionals, it has led to misunderstandings about the range of approaches, knowledge, science and techniques that can be applied from the field of HF to address patient safety and quality of care problems. In this issue, Russ et al 1 seek to redress some of the consequences of this misappropriation. They articulate the problems succinctly and expand on earlier calls2 ,3 for greater integration of HF expertise in healthcare. Repeatedly encountering recurrent misunderstandings and misuse of HF undoubtedly concerns academic experts. However, rather than feeling frustration over the ‘fictions’ discussed by Russ et al ,1 HF professionals should be encouraged by the tremendous progress made in recent years—from a state in which clinicians had little exposure to HF work, and even fewer saw its value, to widespread acknowledgement of the value of human-centred systems thinking in healthcare. Yet, the origins of the misunderstandings of HF discussed by Russ et al 1 warrant reflection, as they may signal deeper problems in healthcare and the ways in which HF experts have worked in healthcare. One simple reason for misunderstandings about HF arising so commonly in healthcare may be that the spread of HF principles …
Displaying shapes with various types of surfaces using visuo-haptic interaction

In this paper, we proposed a visuo-haptic system for displaying various shapes which have curve, edge, and inclined surfaces, using a simple transmutative physical device and the effect of visuo-haptic interaction. We aim to construct a perception-based shape display system to provide users with the sensation of touching virtual objects of varying shapes using only a simple mechanism. We have confirmed that the perception of each primitive shape such as curvature and angle could be modified by displacing a user's hand image on the monitor as if s/he were touching the visual shape while actually touching another shape. In this study, we constructed the method to merge these findings for displaying more various shapes, including angular ones. We built a transmutative device, which the user touches. The device does not undergo significant transformation, but its surface can be slightly bumped in and out, and displayed various shapes with various angles, length and curvature. The results of experimental trials confirmed that our method for displaying each primitive shape can also worked as designed when we combine these findings to display more complex objects using this device which transforms slightly.
Recombinant human activated protein C in sepsis: Inconsistent trial results, an unclear mechanism of action, and safety concerns resulted in labeling restrictions and the need for phase IV trials

I n March 2001, investigators reported the results of a phase III trial enrolling 1,690 patients with severe sepsis showing that drotrecogin alfa (activated) (i.e., recombinant human activated protein C, rhAPC) significantly reduced the relative and absolute risks of death (19.4% and 6.1%, respectively) (1). The prevalence of bleeding as a serious adverse event during the 28-day follow-up period was greater with rhAPC (3.5%) than placebo (2.0%), but this did not reach statistical significance (p .06). In light of the high mortality with sepsis and lack of alternative therapies, these encouraging results were welcomed by many healthcare professionals who expected APC to be quickly available for clinical use (2, 3). In general, when there are no alternative therapies for a lethal disease like sepsis, a new drug should receive rapid approval and clinical acceptance if the original trial results are very consistent and the agent’s mechanism of action is well understood and its safety profile strong. Further review of rhAPC after the initial report of the phase III trial raised concerns on each of these points. These concerns were sufficient for half of the 20 members of the Anti-infective Drugs Advisory Committee working with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) during the evaluation of rhAPC to vote that the agent undergo additional phase III testing before a final decision about its use clinically (4). The FDA did approve rhAPC for treatment of severely septic patients, but because of concerns, it restricted its use to those with a high risk of death (5). In addition, the FDA requested that the manufacturer conduct additional phase IV studies to address its effects in several specific subgroups. Understanding the basis for the questions and concerns raised during the FDA evaluation of rhAPC may assist clinicians now responsible for determining when and in what patients rhAPC should be applied.
Laser-Driven Very High Energy Electron/Photon Beam Radiation Therapy in Conjunction with a Robotic System

We present a new external-beam radiation therapy system using very-high-energy (VHE) electron/photon beams generated by a centimeter-scale laser plasma accelerator built in a robotic system. Most types of external-beam radiation therapy are delivered using a machine called a medical linear accelerator driven by radio frequency (RF) power amplifiers, producing electron beams with an energy range of 6–20 MeV, in conjunction with modern radiation therapy technologies for effective shaping of three-dimensional dose distributions and spatially accurate dose delivery with imaging verification. However, the limited penetration depth and low quality of the transverse penumbra at such electron beams delivered from the present RF linear accelerators prevent the implementation of advanced modalities in current cancer treatments. These drawbacks can be overcome if the electron energy is increased to above 50 MeV. To overcome the disadvantages of the present RF-based medical accelerators, harnessing recent advancement of laser-driven plasma accelerators capable of producing 1-GeV electron beams in a 1-cm gas cell, we propose a new embodiment of the external-beam radiation therapy robotic system delivering very high-energy electron/photon beams with an energy of 50–250 MeV; it is more compact, less expensive, and has a simpler operation and higher performance in comparison with the current radiation therapy system.
Dental Attrition- Aetiology, Diagnosis and Treatment Planning: A Review

Tooth wear and its rehabilitation is a much discussed and studied subject in dentistry. The increased life expectancy may be one of the factors that it has become more ubiquitous. Often patients with tooth wear report to the dental clinic requiring extensive restorative treatment. Wear can be the result of attrition, abrasion, erosion or abfraction. The clinical presentation may vary and can be quite confusing. A proper diagnosis of the aetiology is essential for management of worn dentition as these factors must be eliminated before initiating restorative treatment. Attrition is the result of tooth-tooth grinding due to functional and parafunctional habits. It appears as wear facets on the occlusal surfaces of teeth which in due course can lead to considerable loss of tooth structure and loss of vertical dimension. This review article focuses on dental attrition as the aetiology of tooth wear, the signs and symptoms which help in diagnosis of attrition and the guidelines for treatment planning. A literature search was done using PubMed and Google Scholar with the key words: 'dental attrition', 'tooth loss', ' occlusal wear'. The articles excluded were reviews, case reports and references in which wear had meaning other than loss of tooth tissue. Observer agreements were analysed and
Once found, what then? A study of "keeping" behaviors in the personal use of Web information

This observational study investigates the methods people use in their workplace to organize web information for re-use. In addition to the bookmarking and history list tools provided by web browsers, people observed in our study used a variety of other methods and associated tools. For example, several participants emailed web addresses (URLs) along with comments to themselves and to others. Other methods observed included printing out web pages, saving web pages to the hard drive, pasting the address for a web page into a document and pasting the address into a personal web site. Differences emerged between people according to their workplace role and their relationship to the information they were gathering. Managers, for example, depended heavily on email to gather and disseminate information and did relatively little direct exploration of the Web. A functional analysis helps to explain differences in “keeping” behavior between people and to explain the overall diversity of methods observed. People differ in the functions they require according to their workplace role and the tasks they must perform; methods vary widely in the functions they provide. The functional analysis can also help to assess the likely success of various tools, current and proposed.
An inventory of shedding data from clinical gene therapy trials

Viruses are the most commonly used vectors for clinical gene therapy. The risk of dissemination of a viral vector into the environment via excreta from the treated patient, a phenomenon called shedding, is a major safety concern for the environment. Despite the significant number of clinical gene therapy trials that have been conducted worldwide, there is currently no overview of actual shedding data available. In this article, an inventory of shedding data obtained from a total of 100 publications on clinical gene therapy trials using retroviral, adenoviral, adeno‐associated viral and pox viral vectors is presented. In addition, the experimental set‐up for shedding analysis including the assays used and biological materials tested is summarized. The collected data based on the analysis of 1619 patients in total demonstrate that shedding of these vectors occurs in practice, mainly determined by the type of vector and the route of vector administration. Due to the use of non‐quantitative assays, the lack of information on assay sensitivity in most publications, and the fact that assay sensitivity is expressed in various ways, general conclusions cannot be made as to the level of vector shedding. The evaluation of the potential impact and consequences of the observations is complicated by the high degree of variety in the experimental design of shedding analysis between trials. This inventory can be supportive to clinical gene therapy investigators for the establishment of an evidence‐based risk assessment to be included in a clinical protocol application, as well as to national regulatory authorities for the ongoing development of regulatory guidelines regarding gene therapy. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Rainbow - multiway semantic analysis of Web sites

The Rainbow project aims at the development of a reusable, modular architecture for web (particularly, website) analysis. Individual knowledge-based modules separately analyse different types of web data and communicate the results via web-service interface. The output of analysis has the form of classes (of web resources) predefined in an ontology, extracted text, and/or addresses of retrieved web resources. Within the project, several original methods of analysis as well as (analytic) knowledge acquisition have been developed. The current domains of investigation are sites of small organisations offering products or services, and pornography sites. The paper is the first systematic overview of diverse methods developed or envisaged in Rainbow.
A Unified Framework for Optimizing Linear Nonregenerative Multicarrier MIMO Relay Communication Systems

In this paper, we develop a unified framework for linear nonregenerative multicarrier multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) relay communications in the absence of the direct source-destination link. This unified framework classifies most commonly used design objectives such as the minimal mean-square error and the maximal mutual information into two categories: Schur-concave and Schur-convex functions. We prove that for Schur-concave objective functions, the optimal source precoding matrix and relay amplifying matrix jointly diagonalize the source-relay-destination channel matrix and convert the multicarrier MIMO relay channel into parallel single-input single-output (SISO) relay channels. While for Schur-convex objectives, such joint diagonalization occurs after a specific rotation of the source precoding matrix. After the optimal structure of the source and relay matrices is determined, the linear nonregenerative relay design problem boils down to the issue of power loading among the resulting SISO relay channels. We show that this power loading problem can be efficiently solved by an alternating technique. Numerical examples demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.
Overview of the IWSLT 2008 evaluation campaign.

This paper gives an overview of the evaluation campaign results of the International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT) 20081. In this workshop, we focused on the translation of spontaneous speech recorded in a real situation and the feasability of pivot-language-based translation approaches. The translation directions were English into Chinese and vice versa for the Challenge Task, Chinese into English and English into Spanish for the Pivot Task, and Arabic, Chinese, Spanish into English for the standard BTEC Task. In total, 19 research groups building 58 MT engines participated in this year’s event. Automatic and subjective evaluations were carried out in order to investigate the impact of spontaneity aspects of field data experiments on automatic speech recognition (ASR) and machine translation (MT) system performance as well as the robustness of stateof-the-art MT systems towards speech-to-speech translation in real environments.
Global Iron-dependent Gene Regulation in Escherichia coli

Organisms generally respond to iron deficiency by increasing their capacity to take up iron and by consuming intracellular iron stores. Escherichia coli, in which iron metabolism is particularly well understood, contains at least 7 iron-acquisition systems encoded by 35 iron-repressed genes. This Fe-dependent repression is mediated by a transcriptional repressor, Fur (ferric uptake regulation), which also controls genes involved in other processes such as iron storage, the Tricarboxylic Acid Cycle, pathogenicity, and redox-stress resistance. Our macroarray-based global analysis of iron- and Fur-dependent gene expression in E. coli has revealed several novel Fur-repressed genes likely to specify at least three additional iron-transport pathways. Interestingly, a large group of energy metabolism genes was found to be iron and Fur induced. Many of these genes encode iron-rich respiratory complexes. This iron- and Fur-dependent regulation appears to represent a novel iron-homeostatic mechanism whereby the synthesis of many iron-containing proteins is repressed under iron-restricted conditions. This mechanism thus accounts for the low iron contents of fur mutants and explains how E. coli can modulate its iron requirements. Analysis of 55Fe-labeled E. coli proteins revealed a marked decrease in iron-protein composition for the fur mutant, and visible and EPR spectroscopy showed major reductions in cytochrome b and d levels, and in iron-sulfur cluster contents for the chelator-treated wild-type and/or fur mutant, correlating well with the array and quantitative RT-PCR data. In combination, the results provide compelling evidence for the regulation of intracellular iron consumption by the Fe2+-Fur complex.
Issues in Information Systems HEALTHCARE KNOWLEDGE COLLECTION FOR CLINICAL DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEMS

This article presents several examples of how clinical decision support systems (CDSS) connected to knowledge bases help physicians and improves patient’s care. Results of a research in progress are presented, where the development of a data warehouse aims to get accurate assessments of a highly impairing mental condition. We argue that a data warehouse connected to a CDSS in the office of pediatricians will be beneficial for: physicians, patients, families, and researchers. A data warehouse was designed after careful analysis of information requirements found in literature, specific characteristics of the condition, and information available from health professionals. The theoretical framework includes the integration of a top-down with bottom up approaches to evaluate information packages and to create logical schemas. Implementation of a data warehouse is done and validation reports are designed applying a set of rules to dummy data. This system might improve children’s assessments and contributes to clinical research.
Failure of HA coating on a gritblasted acetabular cup: 155 patients followed for 7-10 years

We report the outcome of 191 acetabular gritblasted titanium cups with a hemispherical design for press-fit insertion and coated with hydroxyapatite. The prosthesis was made of gritblasted titanium entirely coated with hydroxyapatite. 155 patients aged 15-78 years were operated on during the years 1991-1993 and followed for 7-10 years. During this period, 39 cups were revised because of mechanical loosening, a further 9 had radiolucent lines and 2 focal osteolysis. None of these 11 patients had clinical symptoms. Failure was associated with age, wear and radiolucency/osteolysis. At revision, we found that the soft tissues were discolored, and that most of the coating had disappeared. This design of hydroxyapatite-coated cups has a high rate of debonding and failure.
Patterns of Recombination Activity on Mouse Chromosome 11 Revealed by High Resolution Mapping

The success of high resolution genetic mapping of disease predisposition and quantitative trait loci in humans and experimental animals depends on the positions of key crossover events around the gene of interest. In mammals, the majority of recombination occurs at highly delimited 1–2 kb long sites known as recombination hotspots, whose locations and activities are distributed unevenly along the chromosomes and are tightly regulated in a sex specific manner. The factors determining the location of hotspots started to emerge with the finding of PRDM9 as a major hotspot regulator in mammals, however, additional factors modulating hotspot activity and sex specificity are yet to be defined. To address this limitation, we have collected and mapped the locations of 4829 crossover events occurring on mouse chromosome 11 in 5858 meioses of male and female reciprocal F1 hybrids of C57BL/6J and CAST/EiJ mice. This chromosome was chosen for its medium size and high gene density and provided a comparison with our previous analysis of recombination on the longest mouse chromosome 1. Crossovers were mapped to an average resolution of 127 kb, and thirteen hotspots were mapped to <8 kb. Most crossovers occurred in a small number of the most active hotspots. Females had higher recombination rate than males as a consequence of differences in crossover interference and regional variation of sex specific rates along the chromosome. Comparison with chromosome 1 showed that recombination events tend to be positioned in similar fashion along the centromere-telomere axis but independently of the local gene density. It appears that mammalian recombination is regulated on at least three levels, chromosome-wide, regional, and at individual hotspots, and these regulation levels are influenced by sex and genetic background but not by gene content.