Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effectiveness of the “What’s Up!” Intervention to Reduce Stigma and Psychometric Properties of the Youth Program Questionnaire (YPQ): Results from a Cluster Non-randomized Controlled Trial Conducted in Catalan High Schools

Mental disorders are highly prevalent in the general population, and people who experience them are frequently stigmatized. Stigma has a very negative impact on social, academic/professional, and personal life. Considering the high rates of mental disorders among children and adolescents (13.4%) and how critical this age is in the formation of nuclear beliefs, many campaigns to combat stigma have been developed in the last decade, with mixed results. The OBERTAMENT initiative has produced various anti-stigma campaigns in Catalonia (Spain). In the present study, the main objective was to report on the effectiveness of the OBERTAMENT “What’s up! ” intervention, a curricular intervention including education and social contact conducted by the teachers in the classroom with teenagers aged between 14 and 18. Prior to this, we examined the psychometric properties of the Youth Program Questionnaire (YPQ), our main outcome measure, in terms of dimensionality, reliability, and validity. A cluster non-randomized controlled trial was conducted to assess this intervention, which was tested in nine high schools situated in the Barcelona region. A convenience sample of 261 students formed the intervention group and 132 the control group (52% women, mean age = 14, SD = 0.47). The assignment to study conditions was conducted by Departament d’Ensenyament (Department of Education), Generalitat de Catalunya (Catalan Government). Participants were evaluated at baseline, post-intervention, and 9-month follow-up. The main outcome measure of this study was the YPQ. The Reported and Intended Behavior Scale (RIBS) was used as secondary outcome measure. The statistical analysis indicated that the YPQ possesses a two-factor structure (stereotypical attitudes and intended behavior) and sound psychometric properties. The multilevel mixed-effects models revealed statistically significant interactions for both study measures and post hoc intragroup analyses revealed a significant but small improvement in the YPQ and RIBS scores in the intervention group. Overall, our results indicate that “What’s up! ” produced statistically significant, albeit small improvements in stereotypical attributions and intended behavior toward people with mental disorders. Some methodological limitations and the relatively low levels of stigma observed in our sample may undermine our results. The implications of our results are discussed in relation to stigma research.
Digital Payment Systems With Passive Anonymity-Revoking Trustees

Anonymity of the participants is an important requirement for some applications in electronic commerce, in particular for payment systems. Because anonymity could be in conflict with law enforcement, for instance in cases of blackmailing or money laundering, it has been proposed to design systems in which a trustee or a set of trustees can selectively revoke the anonymity of the participants involved in suspicious transactions. From an operational point of view, it can be an important requirement that such trustees are neither involved in payment transactions nor in the opening of an account, but only in case of a justified suspicion. In this paper we propose the first efficient anonymous digital payment systems satisfying this requirement. The described basic protocol for anonymity revocation can be used in on-line or off-line payment systems.
Va lue Construct towards Innovation

Th e aim of this paper is to review the concept of (holistic) "value". As different sciences and disciplines have evolved in modern economy, the concepts of value have gone through much theoretical transformation and adaptation to the existing contextual and systemic environments, without reaching a common view or consensus. Decision makers at the political and entrepreneurial levels, scholars and students, and professionals and practitioners have great difficulty using existing mismatching theories and concepts. The need to have a holistic perspective of the meaning of value and how value is created is the subject of this paper. I will present a concept that encompasses most known concepts and also provides a new paradigm for a better understanding of value. The proposed model also intends to bring a new understanding of how value connects to innovation.
Automated signal quality assessment of mobile phone-recorded heart sound signals

Abstract Mobile phones, due to their audio processing capabilities, have the potential to facilitate the diagnosis of heart disease through automated auscultation. However, such a platform is likely to be used by non-experts, and hence, it is essential that such a device is able to automatically differentiate poor quality from diagnostically useful recordings since non-experts are more likely to make poor-quality recordings. This paper investigates the automated signal quality assessment of heart sound recordings performed using both mobile phone-based and commercial medical-grade electronic stethoscopes. The recordings, each 60 s long, were taken from 151 random adult individuals with varying diagnoses referred to a cardiac clinic and were professionally annotated by five experts. A mean voting procedure was used to compute a final quality label for each recording. Nine signal quality indices were defined and calculated for each recording. A logistic regression model for classifying binary quality was then trained and tested. The inter-rater agreement level for the stethoscope and mobile phone recordings was measured using Conger’s kappa for multiclass sets and found to be 0.24 and 0.54, respectively. One-third of all the mobile phone-recorded phonocardiogram (PCG) signals were found to be of sufficient quality for analysis. The classifier was able to distinguish good- and poor-quality mobile phone recordings with 82.2% accuracy, and those made with the electronic stethoscope with an accuracy of 86.5%. We conclude that our classification approach provides a mechanism for substantially improving auscultation recordings by non-experts. This work is the first systematic evaluation of a PCG signal quality classification algorithm (using a separate test dataset) and assessment of the quality of PCG recordings captured by non-experts, using both a medical-grade digital stethoscope and a mobile phone.
A symbolic approach to the design of nonlinear networked control systems

Networked control systems (NCS) are spatially distributed systems where communication among plants, sensors, actuators and controllers occurs in a shared communication network. NCS have been studied for the last ten years and important research results have been obtained. These results are in the area of stability and stabilizability. However, while important, these results must be complemented in different areas to be able to design effective NCS. In this paper we approach the control design of NCS using symbolic (finite) models. Symbolic models are abstract descriptions of continuous systems where one symbol corresponds to an "aggregate" of continuous states. We consider a fairly general multiple-loop network architecture where plants communicate with digital controllers through a shared, non-ideal, communication network characterized by variable sampling and transmission intervals, variable communication delays, quantization errors, packet losses and limited bandwidth. We first derive a procedure to obtain symbolic models that are proven to approximate NCS in the sense of alternating approximate bisimulation. We then use these symbolic models to design symbolic controllers that realize specifications expressed in terms of automata on infinite strings. An example is provided where we address the control design of a pair of nonlinear control systems sharing a common communication network. The closed--loop NCS obtained is validated through the OMNeT++ network simulation framework.
Can the 'Assessment Drives Learning' effect be detected in clinical skills training? - Implications for curriculum design and resource planning

Purpose: The acquisition of clinical-technical skills is of particular importance for the doctors of tomorrow. Procedural skills are often trained for the first time in skills laboratories, which provide a sheltered learning environment. However, costs to implement and maintain skills laboratories are considerably high. Therefore, the purpose of the present study was to investigate students’ patterns of attendance of voluntary skills-lab training sessions and thereby answer the following question: Is it possible to measure an effect of the theoretical construct related to motivational psychology described in the literature – ‘Assessment drives learning’ – reflected in patterns of attendance at voluntary skills-lab training sessions? By answering this question, design recommendations for curriculum planning and resource management should be derived. Method: A retrospective, descriptive analysis of student skills-lab attendance related to voluntary basic and voluntary advanced skills-lab sessions was conducted. The attendance patterns of a total of 340 third-year medical students in different successive year groups from the Medical Faculty at the University of Heidelberg were assessed. Results: Students showed a preference for voluntary basic skills-lab training sessions, which were relevant to clinical skills assessment, especially at the beginning and at the end of the term. Voluntary advanced skills-lab training sessions without reference to clinical skills assessment were used especially at the beginning of the term, but declined towards the end of term. Conclusion: The results show a clear influence of assessments on students’ attendance at skills-lab training sessions. First recommendations for curriculum design and resource management will be described. Nevertheless, further prospective research studies will be necessary to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the motivational factors impacting students’ utilisation of voluntary skills-lab training in order to reach a sufficient concordance between students’ requirements and faculty offers, as well as resource management.
Encoded distributed optimization

Today, many real-world machine learning and data analytics problems are of a scale that requires distributed optimization; unlike in centralized computing, these systems are vulnerable to network and node failures. Recently, coding-theoretic ideas have been applied to mitigate node failures in such distributed computing networks. Relaxing the exact recovery requirement of such techniques, we propose a novel approach for adding redundancy in large-scale convex optimization problems, making solvers more robust against sudden and persistent node failures and loss of data. This is done by linearly encoding the data variables; all other aspects the computation operate as usual. We show that under moderate amounts of redundancy, it is possible to recover a close approximation to the solution under node failures. In particular, we show that encoding with (equiangular) tight frames result in bounded objective error, and obtain an explicit error bound for a specific construction that uses Paley graphs. We also demonstrate the performance of the proposed technique for three specific machine learning problems, (two using real world datasets) namely ridge regression, binary support vector machine, and low-rank approximation.
Monoclonal antibodies to human lung tumor antigens demonstrated by immunofluorescence and immunoprecipitation.

Various studies have demonstrated the usefulness of monoclonal antibodies in recognizing discrete tumor antigenic determinants. The present study describes the tissue reactivity of monoclonal antibodies prepared against a squamous cell carcinoma of the lung. Antigens were purified from the tumor extract by anti-beta 2 microglobulin affinity chromatography. These beta 2-associated antigens demonstrated tumor specificity by the leukocyte adherence inhibition assay. Antibody-secreting hybridomas were generated by fusion of mouse myeloma cells with mouse spleen cells immunized with purified tumor antigens. Hybridomas were selected by a solid-phase tumor membrane-binding immunoassay. The target specificity of the secreted monoclonal antibodies was ascertained by radioimmunoprecipitation analysis and indirect immunofluorescence on various human tumor and normal tissue sections. Monoclonal antibody-secreting hybridomas 48.4. 8 and 48.4. 2 secreted immunoglobulin that selectively immunoprecipitated polypeptide fragments from human lung tumor membrane antigens. Hybridoma 9.2. 2 secreted antibody that was strongly positive by indirect immunofluorescence on all tested lung squamous cell carcinomas. Adjacent or intervening normal lung tissue did not display significant immunofluorescence. Adenocarcinomas of the lung were negative or focally positive when focal squamous cell differentiation was present. Oat cell carcinomas were negative. The secreted antibody did not significantly stain three extrapulmonary tumors or a variety of normal tissues.
The decreasing value of our research to management education

For centuries we have expected the best teachers also to be scholars. Scholar comes from the Old English word for student, someone who is committed to learning. This tells us how scholars are expected to approach their teaching: Scholars know the latest knowledge, seek to contribute new knowledge, and are always learning. Despite worries that good scholarship and good teaching vie for faculty members’ time and attention (e.g., Clark, 1997; Massy & Zemsky, 1994), for centuries the best universities have expected their teachers to be scholars and their scholars to be teachers. Echoing this expectation, Becker and Kennedy (2005) argued that creating knowledge and imparting knowledge are complementary activities. This is based on the belief that their students should be taught what is current, and that those who are actively learning are seemingly less prey to the arrogance of assuming they already know everything about a subject. Doing scholarship should make us humble about how limited our understandings are, and in this ideal educational setting, teachers and students work together to explore new ideas and accept that their knowledge is always tentative. Of course, this ideal (or what Marsh & Hattie, 2002, called “this myth”) too often fails, and those failings have been extensively discussed (e.g., Burke & Rau, 2010). Here we do not question whether scholars make better teachers or offer suggestions about how to improve scholarship (e.g., Loyd, Kern, & Thompson, 2005), or teaching (e.g., Christensen & Carlile, 2009), but focus on the decreasing usefulness of management scholarship to management teaching. The practice of scholarship should do more than make scholars more humble teachers; scholarship is expected to be more than an activity done for its own sake. Society pays for scholarship in the hope that it will produce new knowledge, some of which teachers can share and discuss with their management students and with the practicing managers in their executive education sessions. While not all knowledge need have immediate practical value, we expect that some management research knowledge, as an applied social science, can be shared with our students. As we detail below, there is a role for research that increases other scholars’ understanding of sometimes esoteric issues. However, management is not molecular biology, and our editors’ demands for implications-for-practice sections in the scholarly articles they publish reflect a general expectation for useable knowledge in much of management research. Here we present evidence that our scholarship is increasingly failing us as teachers: The research published in our best scholarly journals has become less actionable over time, and so, less useful to our students. We ask, “Has management research become less useful to our students and practitioners? If so, what might we do as individual scholar/teachers and as a community of educators to respond to this trend? ”
Extended-release nifedipine and the risk of intestinal obstruction: a population-based study

Objectives To examine the risk of bowel obstruction in older adults during treatment with extended-release nifedipine compared with patients treated with amlodipine. Design Retrospective cohort study using multiple linked healthcare databases. Setting Ontario, Canada from 1 April 1997 to 31 December 2010. Participants We identified patients aged 66 years and older who started treatment with Adalat XL, an extended-release nifedipine product employing a tablet delivery system associated with mechanical bowel obstruction. For comparison, we studied patients receiving amlodipine, a long-acting calcium channel blocker that does not utilise the same delivery system and has not been implicated as a cause of bowel obstruction. Propensity score matching was used to ensure similarity of patients receiving the two drugs. Primary outcome measure HR for the association between extended-release nifedipine relative to amlodipine and hospitalisation for bowel obstruction during therapy. Results Over the 13-year study period, we identified 103 657 patients treated with extended-release nifedipine and 204 733 patients treated with amlodipine. In these two groups, 591 (0.6%) and 1185 (0.6%) of patients were hospitalised for bowel obstruction, respectively. We found no difference in the risk of bowel obstruction among patients treated with extended-release nifedipine compared with amlodipine (HR 1.09, 95% CI 0.96 to 1.24). Conclusions Bowel obstruction during treatment with extended-release nidefipine is rare, and the risk is not appreciably greater than that during treatment with amlodipine.
Probabilistic Subgraph Matching on Huge Social Networks

Users querying massive social networks or RDF databases are often not 100% certain about what they are looking for due to the complexity of the query or heterogeneity of the data. In this paper, we propose "probabilistic subgraph" (PS) queries over a graph/network database, which afford users great flexibility in specifying "approximately" what they are looking for. We formally define the probability that a substitution satisfies a PS-query with respect to a graph database. We then present the PMATCH algorithm to answer such queries and prove its correctness. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates that PMATCH is efficient and scales to massive social networks with over a billion edges.
Neurobiology of Attention‐Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder in Preschoolers

There is abundant evidence that attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a neurobiologic disorder. Yet, some of the most common methods for directly assessing neurobiologic substrates have not been used in 3- to 5-year-old preschoolers. Therefore, we must use other means to infer the neurobiology of ADHD in this young age group. In this review, we provide the following: (1) a brief review of neuropsychologic studies of preschoolers with ADHD; (2) a brief summary of structural and functional neuroimaging studies of ADHD in older children as they might relate to findings in preschoolers; (3) an empirically based theory of the neurologic substrate of ADHD, in particular, the cerebellar-prefrontal-striatal network; (4) an overview of the evidence for the etiology of ADHD; and (5) support for the idea that the neurobiology of ADHD is largely stable over time, such that we can infer abnormalities in preschoolers on the basis of data from older children with ADHD. We hope that this information can be used to guide our thinking and treatment approaches in these young children with ADHD.
Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience Computational Neuroscience Anti-hebbian Spike-timing-dependent Plasticity and Adaptive Sensory Processing

synaptic plasticity at the synapse carrying predictive signals sculpts a negative image of predictable sensory input patterns from a background of sensorimotor activity. The summation of these negative images with the sensory input results in a cancelation of predictable features. 1 MorMyrid electrosensory systeM Mormyrid electric fish have an electric organ in their tail that generates a weak electric field. A motor command causes the electric organ to discharge in pulses (Bennett, 1970; Hopkins, 1995), like the flexing of a muscle. By detecting distortions caused by external objects in the fish's own electric field, mormyrids can navigate through their environment without vision (Assad et al., 1999; Von der Emde, 1999). This active electrolocation system is similar to echolocation in bats. The electric organ discharge (EOD) is also used for communication with conspecifics (Hopkins, 1988). Mormyrids have three types of electroreceptors that serve three different functions (Bodznick and Montgomery, 2005; Kawasaki, 2005): active electrolocation, communication, and passive detection of external sources of electric fields, such as moving organisms. Behaviorally relevant stimuli associated with prey result in extremely small changes in the fish's self-generated field detected by receptors for active electrolocation and relatively weak fields caused by the prey's movement detected by receptors for passive electrolocation. Expectations and predictions are essential for efficient processing sensory information (Barlow, 1990). If expected sensory patterns are subtracted from sensory signals, then novel sensory patterns, important to the survival of an organism, are accentuated. Any novel stimulus that is persistently associated with other neu-ral signals will eventually become predictable. Hence, sensory processing systems must continually adapt to changing sensory environmental conditions to take full advantage of such predictive coding strategies. Because biological processes interact across different time scales in adaptive sensory systems, mathematical modeling is helpful to untangle multiple causes from their effects. This review discusses attempts that have been made to model adaptive sensory filters based on spike-timing-dependent plasticity (STDP). The model systems are found in electrosensory systems, but the principles discussed here are applicable to many sensory systems. The two types of electrosensory systems that we will discuss in terms of modeling are the passive and active electrosensory system of weakly electric fish. We will focus on the initial processing structure in the electrosensory lateral line lobe (ELL) of mormyrid electric fish, where passive and active electrosensory information is conveyed and processed by separate sensory pathways. The basic functional structure of these two electrosensory …
Establishment of underwater wireless acoustic MODEM using C-OFDM

Establishing an underwater wireless acoustic communication link for practical applications is still a difficult task because of the severe channel conditions. Doppler and range spread are extremely high for under water channels (UWC) compared to ordinary radio channels. Moreover, the ever varying nature of the UWC increases the uncertainty in predicting the worst case values of doppler spread and range spread. In recent years, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) has emerged as the single solution to most of the problems in wireless communication systems. OFDM has dominated over single carrier modulation techniques mainly because of the simple, robust and low complexity receiver design with high data rate and high band width efficiency. But, it is only very recently that people have started exploring the usage of OFDM for UWC. In this paper, the design, modeling and testing of coded OFDM based underwater acoustic communication system for high data rate applications is explained.