Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Conceptual issues in the measurement of participation among wheeled mobility device users

Purpose. To review current measurement approaches to activity and participation among wheeled mobility users and suggest key factors researchers should consider as they continue to develop and refine both the concept of participation and its measurement. Methods. Literature review and expert opinion. Results. Four issues are reviewed: Participation as a concept and as a key domain of the revised International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF). The ‘perspective’ of current participation self-reports as they reflect the underlying cultural values of autonomy and independence. The lack of sensitivity in current participation measures to assistive technology. The significance of the ICF qualifiers ‘capacity’ and ‘performance’ to the accurate assessment of activity and participation among wheeled mobility users. Conclusions. The following suggestions are offered as researchers continue to develop increasingly sophisticated instruments and methods: (1) participation measures need to be device-specific; (2) measures ought to capture both ‘capacity’ and ‘performance’; (3) methods need to be sensitive to those factors that impact mobility device use over time; (4) methods need to be sensitive to the complexities of both the social and physical environment as they impact device use; and (5) measures need to reflect the impact of multiple mobility device use.
Importance of higher order coupling effects in sub-barrier fusion.

Sub-barrier fusion has often been studied by linearizing couplings to nuclear structure for calculational convenience. Using a Green function technique and the interacting boson model, we are able to include couplings to all orders. After renormalizing the coupling strengths, we find that couplings to all orders lead to improved agreement with data for the fusion cross section and distribution of barriers, compared to the linear couplings.
Can Delirium Be Separated from Dementia?

This presentation reviews the nosological status of delirium and dementia as a prelude to a discussion of how to distinguish them, or even if they are distinguishable. It argues that committee (ICD, DSM) classification systems fossilise the meaning of the syndromes, and thereafter have a baleful effect on research. The distinction between dementia and delirium is a case in point, and it can be argued that this is much less clear than we thought. It is suggested that validation of syndromes as prognostic tools is a logical way out of the nosological swamp into which delirium and dementia research is sinking, and that cognitive improvement should be the key distinction.
Use of intra-articular administration of ethyl alcohol for arthrodesis of the tarsometatarsal joint in healthy horses.

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the efficacy and safety of intra-articular administration of ethyl alcohol for arthrodesis of tarsometatarsal joints in horses. ANIMALS 8 healthy female horses without lameness or radiographic evidence of tarsal joint osteoarthritis. PROCEDURE In each horse, 1 tarsometatarsal joint was treated with 4 mL of 70% ethyl alcohol and the opposite joint was treated with 4 mL of 95% ethyl alcohol. Lameness examinations were performed daily for 2 weeks, followed by monthly evaluations for the duration of the 12-month study. Radiographic evaluations of both tarsi were performed 1 month after injection and every 3 months thereafter. Gross and histologic examinations of the tarsi were undertaken at completion of the study. RESULTS Horses had minimal to no lameness associated with the treatments. Radiography revealed that 8 of 16 joints were fused by 4 months after treatment, with significantly more joints fused in the 70% ethyl alcohol group. Fifteen of 16 joints were considered fused at postmortem examination at 12 months. Gross and histologic examinations revealed foci of dense mature osteonal bone spanning the joint spaces. Bony fusion appeared to be concentrated on the dorsolateral, centrolateral, and plantarolateral aspects of the joints. Significant differences were not detected between treatment groups for lameness or pathologic findings. CONCLUSIONS AND CLINICAL RELEVANCE Administration of ethyl alcohol into the tarsometatarsal joint of healthy horses appeared to facilitate arthrodesis of the joint in a pain-free manner. Results warrant further investigation into the potential use of ethyl alcohol in horses clinically affected with osteoarthritis of the tarsometatarsal and distal intertarsal joints.
3.1: Rethinking K-12 Writing Assessment to Support Best Instructional Practices

The work described in this chapter arises in a specific current United States context: one in which there is tension between best practices in writing instruction and standard approaches to writing assessment, particularly in the context of standardized tests, such as state accountability examinations. On the one hand, the instructional literature emphasizes the importance of teaching deliberate, well-developed writing processes; indicates the value of peer review; and strongly supports an instructional approach in which explicit strategies are taught in meaningful contexts where content matters (Perin, 2009). On the other hand, the requirements of standardized testing often favor creation of relatively decontextualized writing tasks in which students produce essays under timed conditions with little access to external sources of information—a state of affairs that may have deleterious effects on writing instruction, since the predominance of high-stakes assessments often forces instructors to focus on test preparation (Hillocks, 2002, 2008).
Ten years after mutation testing for Lynch syndrome: cancer incidence and outcome in mutation-positive and mutation-negative family members.

PURPOSE Colonoscopies with polypectomies and endometrial biopsies with transvaginal ultrasonography, repeated at 2- to 3-year intervals, are performed for prevention or early detection of cancer in patients with DNA mismatch repair gene mutation causing Lynch syndrome. The long-term effectiveness of surveillance was evaluated in Lynch syndrome family members tested approximately 10 years ago. MATERIALS AND METHODS Cancer incidence and survival were determined after an 11.5-year follow-up in 242 mutation-positive and 367 mutation-negative participants. These participants in 57 Lynch syndrome families with 14 different mutations were at 50% risk. The median age was 36 years (range, 18 to 72 years) in mutation carriers and 42 years (range, 18 to 72 years) in mutation-negative participants, and none had had cancer of the Lynch syndrome type. RESULTS Compliance was 95.9% for the colonic surveillance and 97.1% for the gynecologic surveillance. Colorectal cancer (CRC) occurred in 30 mutation-positive participants, and 74 participants had adenomas removed. Three patients died of CRC. Endometrial cancer (EC) occurred in 19 of 103 women at risk, and 48 women had prophylactic hysterectomy. Six of 112 women at risk had ovarian cancer. The overall cancer risk ratio (RR) in mutation carriers was 5.80 (95% CI, 3.4 to 9.5). Cancer mortality rate (RR = 2.28; 95% CI, 0.82 to 6.31) and overall death rate (RR = 1.26; 95% CI, 0.65 to 2.46) were not significantly increased. CONCLUSION Long-term compliance in surveillance for CRC and EC exceeded 95% in Lynch syndrome. All CRC deaths were not prevented as a result of noncompliance or missed lesions. Still, after 10 years of surveillance, no significant increase in mortality had occurred compared with mutation-negative relatives.
Characterization of DNA degradation using direct current conductivity and dynamic dielectric relaxation techniques

The purpose of this study was to evaluate DNA degradation upon thermal heating using dielectric relaxation and direct current (DC) conductivity methods. Herring sperm DNA, human growth hormone (HgH) plasmid DNA, and secreted alkaline phosphatase (SEAP) plasmid DNA were used as the examples. DNA was heated at 80°C for 1 hour. The dielectric relaxation spectra as a function of the applied field frequency were measured for HgH DNA at 0.5 hours and at 1 hour. The frequency range covered was from 10 kHz to 100 kHz. The DC conductivity measurements were made for all 3 kinds of DNA at 4 time points: 0 hours, 0.5 hours, 0.75 hours, and 1 hour. At each time point the DC conductivity was measured for each sample as a function of concentration via water dilution. The results show that the dielectric relaxation method is less sensitive in characterizing heat-driven DNA degradation. Conversely, DC conductivity is very sensitive. The semiquantitative dependence of the conductivity upon heating suggests that DNA degradation involves more than plasmid DNA nicking. Double strand and single strand breaks may also occur. In addition, herring sperm DNA, HgH DNA, and SEAP DNA, though similar in their DC conductivity functional forms upon dilution, exhibit significant differences in their responses to sustained heating.
Modeling and Verifying Probabilistic Social Commitments in Multi-Agent Systems

Interaction among autonomous agents in Multi-Agent Systems (MASs) is the key aspect for solving complex problems that an individual agent cannot handle alone. In this context, social approaches, as opposed to the mental approaches, have recently received a considerable attention in the area of agent communication. They exploit observable social commitments to develop a verifiable formal semantics by which communication protocols can be specified. However, existing approaches for defining social commitments tend to assume an absolute guarantee of correctness so that systems run in a certain manner. That is, social commitments have always been modeled with the assumption of certainty. Moreover, the widespread use of MASs increases the interest to explore the interactions between different aspects of the participating agents such as the interaction between agents’ knowledge and social commitments in the presence of uncertainty. This results in having a gap, in the literature of agent communication, on modeling and verifying social commitments in probabilistic settings. In this thesis, we aim to address the above-mentioned problems by presenting a practical formal framework that is capable of handling the problem of uncertainty in social commitments. First, we develop an approach for representing, reasoning about, and verifying probabilistic social commitments in MASs. This includes defining a new logic called the probabilistic logic of commitments (PCTLC), and a reduction-based model checking procedure for verifying the proposed logic. In the reduction technique, the problem of model checking PCTLC is transformed into the problem of model checking PCTL so that the use of the PRISM (Probabilistic Symbolic Model Checker) is made possible. Formulae of PCTLC are interpreted over an extended version of the probabilistic interpreted systems formalism. Second, we extend the work we proposed for probabilistic social commitments to be able to capture and verify the interactions between knowledge and commitments. Properties representing the interactions between the two aspects are expressed in a new developed logic called the probabilistic logic of knowledge and commitment (PCTLkc). Third, we develop an adequate semantics for the group social commitments, for the first time in the literature, and integrate it into the framework. We then introduce an improved version of PCTLkc and extend it with operators for the group knowledge and group social commitments. The new refined logic is called PCTLkc+. In each of the latter stages, we respectively develop a new version of the probabilistic interpreted systems over which the presented logic is interpreted, and introduce a new reduction-based verification technique to verify the proposed logic. To evaluate our proposed work, we implement the proposed verification techniques on top of the PRISM model checker and apply them on several case studies. The results demonstrate the usefulness and effectiveness of our proposed work.
Non-intrusive appliance recognition

Energy conservation becomes more important nowadays. The use of smart meters and, in the near future, smart appliances, are the key to achieve reduction in energy consumption. This research proposes a non-intrusive appliance monitor and recognition system for implementation on an embedded system. The research focuses on computational efficiency of such a system as embedded systems usually have limited computation power. In this paper, research has been done on the effects on the accuracy of the sample frequency. The algorithm first detects an event in which an appliance is turned either on or off. Subsequently its profile is extracted. A hierarchical support vector machine (HSVM) is used to classify the appliance. The result is a complete algorithm that recognizes individual appliances within a household. Tests on this appliance recognizer show that the proposed algorithm can correctly detect appliances with reasonable accuracy.
Host–parasite coevolution and patterns of adaptation across time and space

The description of coevolutionary dynamics requires a characterization of the evolutionary dynamics of both the parasite and its host. However, a thorough description of the underlying genetics of the coevolutionary process is often extremely difficult to carry out. We propose that measures of adaptation (mean population fitness) across time or space may represent a feasible alternative approach for characterizing important features of the coevolutionary process. We discuss recent experimental work in the light of simple mathematical models of coevolution to demonstrate the potential power of this phenotypic experimental approach.
Parametric Approximation of Piecewise Quadratic Value Functions for the Control of Complex Systems

Abstract We present a new technique for approximate dynamic programming that is suitable for control of large-scale systems with complex dynamics. The approach improves closed-loop performances from a starting control policy by incrementally updating a value function on-line based on the Bellman's optimality equation. The value function is approximated as a map between the state and the associated cost-to-go value to circumvent the “curse-of-dimensionality. ” The approximation method uses piecewise quadratic representations of the value function, and can considerably reduce the computational requirement compared to the instance-based methods, which store all the historical data and retrieve them for calculating optimal control actions. Hybrid and nonlinear examples are included to demonstrate the applicability of the approach.
The relation of vitamin D status with metabolic syndrome in childhood and adolescence: an update

Abstract Among children and adolescents, metabolic syndrome (MetS) is more common than previously believed. Hence, any information on the relation between vitamin D insufficiency/deficiency and insulin resistance (IR) in this population with risk of developing MetS is of great importance. This review analyzes and evaluates the existing evidence from cross-sectional, observational, and retrospective studies concerning the effect of vitamin D insufficiency/deficiency on MetS as a whole or on its various components. Most data show that insufficient vitamin D status is associated with increased prevalence of MetS or its individual components, mainly blood pressure and IR, often independent of overall obesity or abdominal adiposity. The implications of these findings could be associated with increased risk for developing cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes mellitus in later life. The very few randomized control trials examining any possible beneficial effects of vitamin D supplementation are also included.
The Importance of Estimating Object Extent when Tracking with Correlation Filters

Trackers based on correlation filters have achieved excellent performance in single-target model-free tracking. Several versions exist, incorporating multi-channel features, kernels and scale adaptation. However, they all suffer from a well-known limitation of the tracking-by-detection paradigm: the update step is performed at the last estimated position of the object, so that small inaccuracies accumulate and often lead to the loss of the target. In this paper, we demonstrate that it is possible to partially correct this behaviour using a simple refinement of the estimated position based on a pixel-wise object likelihood. This makes these trackers significantly more robust to shape change, because the model update uses a non-drifted version of the target. Our experiments on the popular VOT2014 and VOT2015 benchmarks demonstrate that our modification is able to considerably improve both the robustness and the accuracy of state-of-the-art correlation trackers.
Purification and properties of glutamate synthase from Nocardia mediterranei

Glutamate synthase was purified about 250-fold from Nocardia mediterranei U32 and characterized. The native enzyme has a molecular weight of 195,000 +/- 5,000 and is composed of two nonidentical subunits with molecular weights of 145,000 +/- 5,000 and 55,000 +/- 3,000. This enzyme is a complex of iron-sulfur flavoproteins with absorption maxima at 278, 375, 410, and 440 nm. It contains 1.1 mol of flavin adenine dinucleotide, 1.0 mol of flavin mononucleotide, 7.5 mol of nonheme iron, and 7.2 mol of acid-labile sulfur per 200,000 g of protein. Km values for L-glutamine, alpha-ketoglutarate, and NADPH were 77, 53, and 110 microM, respectively. The activity of this glutamate synthase is inhibited by its products (i.e., glutamate and NADP), several amino acids, and tricarboxylic acid cycle intermediates.
Female sex and long-term survival post curative resection for non-small-cell lung cancer.

OBJECTIVES To determine whether patient sex has a significant effect on long-term outcomes post curative resection of non-small-cell lung cancer. METHODS We retrospectively analysed a prospectively validated thoracic surgery database (n = 4212), from a single institution, from September 2001 to October 2012. Univariate, Cox multivariate and propensity analysis was performed. Long-term follow-up was carried out via the National Strategic Tracing Service that operates in the United Kingdom. RESULTS One hundred per cent follow-up was achieved. Overall institutional in-hospital mortality was 2.0% for all thoracic resections. Median survival was 2.78 years (range 0-13 years). Two thousand two hundred and thirty-three males and 1979 females were included. Kaplan-Meier survival of all the patients demonstrated superior survival of females for all stages, P = 0.0003, and stage I, P = 0.0006. Female sex conferred no survival advantage in stage II, P = 0.7, and IIIa, P = 0.1. Sub-analysis by histological type demonstrated that females had superior survival with adenocarcinoma compared with males, P < 0.001, but no sex difference existed with squamous carcinomas, P = 0.2. Cox analyses demonstrated that female sex was an advantageous prognostic factor for the entire study group [hazard ratio (HR) 0.82, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.69-0.96] and Stage I only (HR 0.70, 95% CI 0.57-0.63). Sex was of no significance in Stage II and IIIa disease with regard to survival. Sub-analysis demonstrated that female sex was not a significant factor determining survival in patients with squamous carcinoma; however, it was significantly associated with increased survival in patients with adenocarcinoma (HR 0.63, 95% CI 0.51-0.78). A 1:1 propensity analysis confirmed the above findings. CONCLUSION Propensity matching and Cox multivariate regression analysis confirmed the univariate finding that female sex is only associated with improved survival in patients with Stage I adenocarcinoma. Patient sex does not affect survival of patients with squamous carcinoma.
Discoloration of the mucosa caused by different restorative materials – a spectrophotometric in vitro study

OBJECTIVES To evaluate the discoloration of the mucosa caused by different ceramic and metal-based materials. MATERIAL AND METHODS On six pig maxillae, trap-door flaps were prepared bilaterally. Different ceramic and metal-based specimens were placed underneath the flap. To simulate increasing mucosal thicknesses (MC), connective tissue grafts (CTGs) were harvested. Spectrophotometric measurements were performed prior to flap elevation (TBL ) and for each material under the flap alone (1 mm MC) (TMC1 ), with a 1-mm CTG (2-mm MC) (TMC2 ) and with a 2-mm CTG (3-mm MC) (TMC3 ). Tested materials were as follows: Zr1 (zirconia), Zr2 (zirconia + pink ceramic), Zr3 (zirconia), Zr4 (fluorescent zirconia), Zr5 (zirconia), Zr6 (high translucent zirconia), Zr7 (low translucent zirconia) and Zr8 (low translucent zirconia), Gol (gold alloy), Ti1 (titanium alloy), Ti2 (anodized gold-shaded titanium alloy) and Ti3 (anodized pink-shaded titanium alloy). Color differences (ΔE) were calculated comparing the measurement of the native tissue (TBL ) and the measurements with varying mucosal thicknesses (TMC1-3 ). RESULTS For ceramic materials, the median ΔE values for the different time-point comparison ranged as follows: 3.80 (Zr4) - 7.47 (Zr2) (pooled); 3.15 (Zr4) - 8.13 (Zr2) (TBL -TMC1 ); 3.39 (Zr4) - 7.24 (Zr2) (TBL -TMC2 ); 4.31 (Zr8) - 6.99 (Zr2) (TBL -TMC3 ). For metal-based materials, the median ΔE values were as follows: 4.20 (Gol) - 5.82 (Ti3) (pooled); 3.21 (Gol) - 13.56 (Ti1) (TBL -TCM1 ); 4.0 (Ti1) - 5.27 (Gol) (TBL -TCM2 ); 3.11 (Ti1) - 5.11 (Gol) (TBL -TCM2 ). The comparison of the materials and the time points showed in the nonparametric linear mixed model a significant interaction effect between material and time point (P < 0.001). The side was not a significant main effect, nor as term in an interaction with the other two effects. CONCLUSIONS Reconstructive materials result in an evident discoloration of the mucosal tissue, tending to decrease with increasing mucosal thickness. The use of fluorescent zirconia (ceramic materials) or gold alloy (metal-based materials) lead to the least discoloration.
Further studies on the solubilities of xenon and cyclopropane in blood and protein solutions.

The solubility of xenon and krypton in whole blood and plasma has been measured chromatographically and shown to vary from species to species. Some physical-chemical parameters of another nonhydrogen bonding gas—protein system (cyclopropane—serum albumin) have been studied, and no changes in the degree of protein—gas interaction could be observed with changes in pH, temperature, or ionic strength of the solutions.
On the sensitivity of corrosion and fatigue damage detection using guided ultrasonic waves

Constant, long-time monitoring of large plate-like structures, e.g., oil storage tanks, can be performed using permanently attached remote sensors. A guided ultrasonic wave array consisting of piezoelectric transducer elements for the excitation and reception of the first antisymmetric Lamb wave mode A0, has been designed and built. Laboratory measurements for a steel plate containing various defects have been performed. The results are compared to theoretical predictions and the sensitivity of the array device for defect detection is ascertained.