Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Death versus Data Science : Predicting End of Life

Death is an inevitable part of life and while it cannot be delayed indefinitely it is possible to predict with some certainty when the health of a person is going to deteriorate. In this paper, we predict risk of mortality for patients from two large hospital systems in the Pacific Northwest. Using medical claims and electronic medical records (EMR) data we greatly improve prediction for risk of mortality and explore machine learning models with explanations for end of life predictions. The insights that are derived from the predictions can then be used to improve the quality of patient care towards the end of life.
Thermal Condition and Losses in Ultra-High-Speed Generators

In this paper ultra-high-speed generators operated in intermittent periodic and short-term mode were considered. Experimental studies of losses depending on frequencies in the magnetic core of microelectromechanical energy converters made from amorphous steel were made. Dependence of the flux density from the temperature in the air gap of the experimental layout of high-coercivity permanent magnets was obtained. Computer modeling of the magnetic field distribution on the cross section of the stator magnetic core of microelectromechanical energy converters were made in the software package Ansoft Maxwell. Dependence of friction losses of the rotor around the air from the air temperature was obtained. Comparisons of losses and efficiency of microelectromechanical energy converters in a cold state and after 10 minutes of operation without cooling were made.
Cytokine and Eicosanoid Production by Cultured Human Monocytes Exposed to Titanium Particulate Debris

Phagocytosis of particulate wear debris from arthroplasties by macrophages induces an inflammatory response that has been linked to implant loosening and premature failure of artificial joints. Inflammatory mediators released by phagocytic macrophages such as tumor necrosis factor-a (TNF-α), interleukin-1β (IL-1β), interleukin-6 (IL-6), and prostaglandin E2 (PGE2) are believed to play a central role in the pathogenesis of aseptic loosening. The objective of this study was to characterize titanium alloy particulates that closely match wear debris found around joint arthroplasties and to study their effects on the biosynthesis of inflammatory mediators by cultured monocytes. Peripheral blood monocytes were isolated from healthy human volunteers. Monocytes were cultured in 96-well plates for 24 h, washed, and exposed to three concentrations of titanium particulates and controls from 18Ð24 h. Supernatants were assayed for TNF-α, IL-1β, IL-6, and PGE2 activity. Energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX) verified the titanium alloy to be Ti6A14V. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) analysis showed significant titanium particulate heterogeneity with approximately 95% of the particles <1 micrometer in diameter. SEM and EDX technology was useful in the characterization of the titanium particulates utilized for in vitro models of titanium-induced cytokine release by monocytes. Incubation of titanium particulates (in concentrations similar to those found around loosened prosthetic joints) with cultured monocytes significantly increased their production of TNF-α, IL-1β, and PGE2.
Microscope Volume Segmentation Improved through Non-Linear Restoration

An efficient segmentation technique based on the use of a modified k-Means algorithm and the Otsuâ€™s thresholding method is improved through a non-linear restoration of microscope volumes. An algorithm is proposed to automatically compute the k value for the clustering k-Means method. The unsupervised algorithm is used in the context of segmentation by considering regions as clusters. A comparison between the segmentation results before and after restoration is presented. The evaluation of the region segmentation included the root mean squared error and a normalized uniformity measure. Results showed significant improvement of segmentation when using the non-linear restoration method based on prior known information, such as the imaging system and the noise statistics.
Growth Hormone Response to Overnight Growth Hormone‐Releasing Hormone Infusion and Oral Pyridostigmine in Children with Short Stature

Ross, R.J.M. , Savage, M.O. , Kirk, J.M. W. and Besser, G.M. (Departments of Endocrinology and Child Health, St Bartholomew's Hospital, London, UK). Growth hormone response to overnight growth hormone‐releasing hormone infusion and oral pyridostigmine in children with short stature. Acta Paediatr Scand [Suppl] 349: 114, 1989.
Summarization Service Using Personal Intention Models

Nowadays, we live with a huge amount of data. By IDC report, the amount of data generated in 2011 is about 1.8 ZB (trillion GB). Ironically, there are small amount of useful information when you are looking at a number of papers, internet articles, movies, pictures, and social network posts. As a result, it is required that users extract useful information manually. However, this is tedious and hard task. To solve this problem, a lot of sophisticated techniques have been proposed to provide summarization service. Although each user has different desire on the summarization, the service uses much computational resource to produce standard summarization for all users. In this study, we propose to use machine learning to predict the intention of users on the summarization. It can reduce the computational cost to summarize all the documents and make available proactive summarization service. To validate our proposal, we run experiments with eight participants for two news portals on five topic areas.
Towards Communication Strategies for Platooning : Simulative and Experimental Evaluation

Platooning, the idea of cars autonomously following their leaders to form a road train, has huge potentials to improve traffic flow efficiency and, most importantly, road traffic safety. Wireless communication is a fundamental building block – it is needed to manage and to maintain the platoons. To keep the system stable, strict constraints in terms of update frequency and communication reliability must be met. We investigate different communication strategies by explicitly taking into account the requirements of the controller, exploiting synchronized communication slots as well as transmit power adaptation. As a baseline, we compared the proposed approaches to two state of the art adaptive beaconing protocols that have been designed for cooperative awareness applications, namely ETSI DCC and DynB. Our simulation models have been parameterized and validated by means of real-world experiments. Our results demonstrate that the combination of synchronized communication slots with transmit power adaptation is perfectly suited for cooperative driving applications, even in very crowded freeway scenarios.
A Comparative Analysis of Productivity Measurements for Five European Countries

The last century provided the stage for important changes in the productivity of all industries. The Industrial Revolution together with the several technological revolutions enhanced the growth rhythm of economies by introducing new and improved production means. This article analyses several indicators of productivity for five European countries, during the last decades of the 20th century and the first of the 21st century. The research is based on statistical data provided by EU KLEMS, OECD and The New Maddison Project and the reviewed period is 1970-2007. The countries that have been the focus of our research are Finland, France, Germany, Greece and Spain. The choice of countries is justified by the need to approach both countries that are well known for their productivity enhancing methods and countries that have entered the race at a later stage. Another reason motivating our selection is the fact that we wanted to include countries from Northern, Central and Southern Europe. The research is based on input-output indexes used to emphasise the productivity of labour and capital and its evolution over the time. The basic research question of the present paper is whether there are largely different methods for computing productivity or we can consider the existence of a single theoretical concept measured in many ways. Subsequently, we wanted to verify whether these measurements reflect different underlying realities or if they are just different representations of the same process.
Mortality among elderly hispanics in the United States: Past evidence and new results

We used vital records and census data and Medicare and NUMIDENT records to estimate age-and sex-specific death rates for elderly non-Hispanic whites and Hispanics, including five Hispanic subgroups: persons born in Cuba, Mexico, Puerto Rico, other foreign countries, and the United States. We found that corrections for data errors in vital and census records lead to substantial changes in death rates for Hispanics and that conventionally constructed Hispanic death rates are lower than rates based on Medicare-NUMIDENT records. Both sources revealed a Hispanic mortality advantage relative to non-Hispanic whites that holds for most Hispanic subgroups. We also present a new methodology for inferring Hispanic origin from a combination of surname, given name, and county of residence.
Fertility of Commercial Sexed Semen and the Economic Analyses of its Application in Holstein Heifers

| The aim of the current study was to evaluate the fertility of commercially available sexed semen and to economically analyse three assumed strategies for its application in Holstein heifers. In the first part of the study, a total of 426 heifers were inseminated with sexed semen from 7 bulls and 325 heifers were inseminated with unsexed semen from 5 bulls. The pregnancy at 40 and 90 days post insemination, the embryonic loss, the calving, the abortion and the heifer calves rates were calculated. Heifers inseminated with sexed semen had significantly lower (P<0.001) pregnancy-40, pregnancy90 and calving rates (34, 32.2 and 29.3%; respectively) than those inseminated with unsexed semen (62.5, 57.8 and 51.1%; respectively). The embryonic loss and abortion rates were similar in heifers inseminated with sexed and unsexed semen. There was a clear effect for bull on pregnancy, embryonic loss and abortion rates in sexed and unsexed semen. In the second part of the study, it was assumed that heifers will be inseminated with sexed semen once, twice or repeatedly till achieving 88% calving rate. The economic impact of the three sexed semen application strategies was compared to the unsexed strategy. The sexed once, the sexed twice and the sexed wide strategies achieved 8.7, 8.1 and 13.8% increase in the calf crop return; respectively. In conclusion, even with lower fertility, application of sexed semen could add numerous benefits to the dairy herds.
Early storage reclamation in a tracing garbage collector

This article presents a novel technique for allowing the early recovery of storage space occupied by garbage data. The idea is similar to that of generational garbage collection, except that heap is partitioned based on a static analysis of data type definitions rather than on the approximate age of allocated objects. A prototype implementation is presented, along with initial results and ideas for future work.
USING RANKS TO PERFORM EXACT AND ESTIMATED EXACT TESTS IN DESIGNED EXPERIMENTS

A procedure is studied that uses rank transformed data to perform exact and estimated exact tests which is an alternative to the commonly used F-ratio test procedure. First, a common parametric test statistic is computed using rank transformed data, where two methods of ranking ranks taken of the original observations, and ranks taken after aligning the observations are studied. Significance is then determined using either the exact permutation distribution of the statistic or an estimate of this distribution based on a random sample of all possible permutations. Simulation studies compare the performance of this method to both the normal theory parametric F-test and the traditional rank transform procedure. Power and nominal type-I error rates are compared under conditions when normal theory assumptions are satisfied as well as when these assumptions are violated. The method is studied for a two factor factorial arrangement of treatments in a completely randomized design and also for a split-unit experiment.
human capital ExtErnalitiEs and growth * carolina artEaga cabralEs

*Os comentários e sugestões de Hernando Zuleta são fundamentais para o desenvolvimento deste artigo. Da mesma forma, agradeçco a Daniel Mejía por seus comentários durante as etapas iniciais da redação do artigo, bem como a Luis Eduardo Arango, Marcela Eslava, Julián Parra, Carlos Esteban Posada, María Teresa Ramírez, Carlos Felipe Reyes e Hernando Vargas por suas sugestões. Qualquer erro é de responsabilidade da autora.
Patterns of odour emission, thermogenesis and pollinator activity in cones of an African cycad: what mechanisms apply?

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Ontogenetic patterns of odour emissions and heating associated with plant reproductive structures may have profound effects on insect behaviour, and consequently on pollination. In some cycads, notably Macrozamia, temporal changes in emission of specific odour compounds and temperature have been interpreted as a 'push-pull' interaction in which pollinators are either attracted or repelled according to the concentration of the emitted volatiles. To establish which mechanisms occur in the large Encephalartos cycad clade, the temporal patterns of volatile emissions, heating and pollinator activity of cones of Encephalartos villosus in the Eastern Cape (EC) and KwaZulu Natal (KZN) of South Africa were investigated. METHODS AND KEY RESULTS Gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) analyses of Encephalartos villosus cone volatiles showed that emissions, dominated by eucalyptol and 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine in EC populations and (3E)-1,3-octadiene and (3E,5Z)-1,3,5-octatriene in the KZN populations, varied across developmental stages but did not vary significantly on a daily cycle. Heating in male cones was higher at dehiscence than during pre- and post-dehiscence, and reached a maximum at about 1830 h when temperatures were between 7·0 and 12·0 °C above ambient. Daily heating of female cones was less pronounced and reached a maximum at about 1345 h when it was on average between 0·9 and 3·0 °C above ambient. Insect abundance on male cones was higher at dehiscence than at the other stages and significantly higher in the afternoon than in the morning and evening. CONCLUSIONS There are pronounced developmental changes in volatile emissions and heating in E. villosus cones, as well as strong daily changes in thermogenesis. Daily patterns of volatile emissions and pollinator abundance in E. villosus are different from those observed in some Macrozamia cycads and not consistent with the push-pull pattern as periods of peak odour emission do not coincide with mass exodus of insects from male cones.
Focused beam routing protocol for underwater acoustic networks

Multi-hop transmission is considered for large coverage areas in bandwidth-limited underwater acoustic networks. In this paper, we present a scalable routing technique based on location information, and optimized for minimum energy per bit consumption. The proposed Focused Beam Routing (FBR) protocol is suitable for networks containing both static and mobile nodes, which are not necessarily synchronized to a global clock. A source node must be aware of its own location and the location of its final destination, but not those of other nodes. The FBR protocol can be defined as a cross-layer approach, in which the routing protocol, the medium access control and the physical layer functionalities are tightly coupled by power control. It can be described as a distributed algorithm, in which a route is dynamically established as the data packet traverses the network towards its final destination. The selection of the next relay is made at each step of the path after suitable candidates have proposed themselves. The system performance is measured in terms of energy per bit consumption and average packet end-to-end delay. The results are compared to those obtained using pre-established routes, defined via Dijkstra's algorithm for minimal power consumption. It is shown that the protocol's performance is close to the ideal case, as the additional burden of dynamic route discovery is minimal.
On Online Engagement: Does the Leadership Style Matter?

The news industry is facing tremendous changes. Integrating digital technologies into news practices has become the key to survival. Social media engagement editors are one of such innovations to respond to the challenge. Engagement editors are required to facilitate the functions of marketing, editing, content production, and data analysis. They thus play the role of boundary-spanner within and beyond the organizational boundaries. However, there are few studies to explore issues associated with the management of social media engagement editors. This research examines whether and how the leadership style (i.e., transformational and passive leadership style) influences engagement editors’ job performance. We collected 122 valid responses, and used the SmartPLS 3 and SPSS 19.0 to analyze the data. Our findings indicate that performance of engagement editors is influenced by the leadership style; moreover, job autonomy mediates the positive effect of transformational leadership on engagement editors’ job performance. Implications for the management of social media engagement editors are discussed.
Person identification using behavioral features from lip motion

Traditionally lip features have been used in speech recognition, but lately they have also been found useful as a biometric identifier. Since this application of lip features is relatively recent, several limitations can be observed. Firstly, majority of the research has focused on using physical attributes of the lips, such as shape and appearance. Secondly they have experimented on comparatively short length, text dependent videos. We believe that visual speech, along with the physical attributes also contains certain behavioral attributes that can be better learned from a text independent, long duration database. Therefore in this paper we have analyzed a specifically designed database and extracted behavioral lip features, to study their utility for person recognition.
Data-driven Classification of Linguistic Styles in Spoken Dialogues

Language users have individual linguistic styles. A spoken dialogue system may benefit from adapting to the linguistic style of a user in input analysis and output generation. To investigate the possibility to automatically classify speakers according to their linguistic style three corpora of spoken dialogues were analyzed. Several numerical parameters were computed for every speaker. These parameters were reduced to linguistically interpretable components by means of a principal component analysis. Classes were established from these components by cluster analysis. Unseen input was classified by trained neural networks with varying error rates depending on corpus type. A first investigation in using special language models for speaker classes was carried out.
Gender Matters: College Students Using Internet Interactive Services

This study uses a sample of 368 senior undergraduate students to analyze whether there are gender differences in using 3 kinds of internet interactive services. Results show that female students tend to be more communicative than male, which is consistent with previous researches. At the meantime, college female showing stronger tendency in reaching out for information and net resources in BBS is new compared with other researches.
Wealth with green : lessons with exemplary green enterprise

The paper reports progress on the launch of a project to empower a multi-disciplinary faculty of students and teachers to implement practical actions towards improving environmental sustainability in their multiple contexts. The project focusses on drawing lessons FOR and WITH SMEs who have the ambition to achieve a zero or positive environmental impact as a by-product (or product) of their operations. The rationale for the project is that many efforts to pursue environmental sustainability are insufficient to address the true environmental challenges that face societies. The paper concludes by challenging educators to adopt Education for Sustainability enabling every graduate to think and act as a sustainable practitioner in their employment, their household, their communities, and their professional discipline.
Dual-pump frequency comb generation in normally dispersive optical fibers

We show that tunable frequency combs can be generated by launching two continuous-wave pumps at slightly different wavelengths into a normally dispersive optical fiber. The dual-pump configuration allows the tuning of comb spacing into the terahertz regime. Different pump powers and frequency separations are explored numerically to determine the effect of the input parameters on frequency comb generation. The relative power of the two pumps is found to be a critical factor through its crucial effect on optical wave breaking. The pump powers and fiber length are shown to have a significant effect on the comb width as well. Unlike in the case of supercontinuum generation, Raman scattering is found to have a negligible or even a slightly detrimental effect. Our findings also help bridge the gap between work done on the propagation of a single pulse and the evolution of dual-pump signals in normally dispersive highly nonlinear fibers.
PR ] 3 0 O ct 2 01 7 Random-field Solutions to Linear Hyperbolic Stochastic Partial Differential Equations with Variable Coefficients ∗

In this article we show the existence of a random-field solution to linear stochastic partial differential equations whose partial differential operator is hyperbolic and has variable coefficients that may depend on the temporal and spatial argument. The main tools for this, pseudo-differential and Fourier integral operators, come from microlocal analysis. The equations that we treat are second-order and higher-order strictly hyperbolic, and second-order weakly hyperbolic with uniformly bounded coefficients in space. For the latter one we show that a stronger assumption on the correlation measure of the random noise might be needed. Moreover, we show that the well-known case of the stochastic wave equation can be embedded into the theory presented in this article. 2010 Mathematics Subject Classification: Primary: 35L10, 60H15; Secondary: 35L40, 35S30
Inter-rater reliability of the `Merkmalprofile zur Eingliederung Leistungsgewandelter und Behinderter in Arbeit' (MELBA) in young disabled adults with psychosocial limitations.

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the inter-rater reliability of the Merkmalprofile zur Eingliederung Leistungsgewandelter und Behinderter in Arbeit (MELBA). PARTICIPANTS Twenty-five young adults with psychosocial limitations. METHODS The MELBA measures work ability in five themes: cognitive, social, work performance, psychomotor characteristics and cultural/technical communication, divided into 29 work-related items, which are assessed by work-related tasks and by observations during work performance. Two raters independently evaluated one participant during the same time/test and independently assigned scores on 19~items out of 29. For this observational study the inter-rater reliability, expressed as the Intraclass Correlation Coefficient (ICC), was calculated for every item. An ICC of at least 0.75 was considered as showing good reliability, below 0.75 was considered poor to moderate reliability. RESULTS The ICC for six items was good: comprehension (0.81), attentiveness (0.84), problem solving (0.79), imagination (0.88), independence (0.79) and speed of reaction (1.0) showed good reliability. CONCLUSION Especially the items of cognitive characteristics of the MELBA showed a good inter-rater reliability and can be used to measure work ability in people with psychosocial limitations.