Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Investigating chemotherapy adverse events : incidence, costs and consequences

Background: In Australia, economic evaluation is an important tool in prioritising healthcare spending. Adverse events of chemotherapy affect patients’ physical health and quality of life; however, they are often excluded from chemotherapy economic evaluations. This thesis explores the incidence, costs and consequences of chemotherapy adverse events and the implications for cost-effectiveness. Key Objectives: 1. Examine how adverse events are incorporated into models of chemotherapy cost-effectiveness. 2. Develop Australia-based models of costs and consequences of four common adverse events. 3. Estimate incidence of adverse events in clinical practice. 4. Estimate costs of adverse events in clinical practice. 5. Compare rates of adverse events in clinical practice with rates reported in clinical trials. Methods: There are four components to this research. The first is a systematic review examining how adverse events are incorporated into existing models of chemotherapy cost-effectiveness (Objective 1). The second is the use of decision analytic modelling to develop models of the costs and consequences of diarrhoea, nausea/vomiting, anaemia and neutropoenia. These can then become standard components of future models of chemotherapy cost effectiveness (Objective 2). The third is the use of regression to estimate the incidence and costs of adverse events (Objectives 3 and 4) in an administrative dataset linked to routinely collected data on pharmaceutical and medical service use. Finally, an analysis of a prospective cohort of 482 individuals undergoing chemotherapy examines the frequency of adverse events (Objective 3) in comparison with those reported in clinical trials (Objective 5). Results: The systematic review revealed that adverse events are not included in models of chemotherapy cost-effectiveness in any rigorous way. The models developed demonstrate that rigorous, systematic consideration of the key costs and consequences of adverse events is possible, and provide a standard way to include adverse events in future models. Older or sicker individuals in the administrative dataset were more likely to experience adverse events, although incidence was low. Mean healthcare costs significantly increased with treatment for nausea, anaemia or neutropoenia but not diarrhoea. The prospective cohort study identified higher rates of adverse events than reported in clinical trials, with low-severity events particularly common. Conclusions: In exploring the incidence, costs and consequences of chemotherapy adverse events, this thesis demonstrates that it is possible to model the key costs and consequences of chemotherapy adverse events, and that clinical practice data may reduce bias in these models. This is a significant contribution to determining true chemotherapy costs and consequences.
Market Efficiency Hypothesis Application in the Czech Republic – the FOREX Case

Abstract The Market Efficiency Hypothesis (MEH) in its weak form assumes that stock prices already reflect all the available past information. In the other words in the absence of the new information stock should remain unchanged. It is impossible to achieve abnormal long-term returns. More the technical analysis seems to be useless in contrary with the fundamental analysis. It is necessary to say that the MEH is an essential part of rational economics.
Potential policy impacts: Establishment of Indonesian mining state-owned holding company

Government of Republic of Indonesia has been working to establish and operate the State-Owned Holding Company for Mining sector. There has been a long debate in whether in public, government institution, even in the industry on how this policy would give impact to all stakeholders within the business. While this mining state-owned holding company keep going on its mission to achieve the policy’s objectives, in order to monitor the track we are at, this paper is trying to observe on the potential policy impacts and how can we manage to solve any damage, if there is any, so that the negative implications from the policy can be understood better and well handled by the government as well as the holding.
Algorithms and methods for video transcoding.

Video transcoding is the process of dynamic video adaptation. Dynamic video adaptation can be defined as the process of converting video from one format to another, changing the bit rate, frame rate or resolution of the encoded video, which is mainly necessitated by the end user requirements. H.264 has been the predominantly used video compression standard for the last 15 years. HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding) is the latest video compression standard finalised in 2013, which is an improvement over H.264 video compression standard. HEVC performs significantly better than H.264 in terms of the Rate-Distortion performance. As H.264 has been widely used in the last decade, a large amount of video content exists in H.264 format. There is a need to convert H.264 video content to HEVC format to achieve better Rate-Distortion performance and to support legacy video formats on newer devices. However, the computational complexity of HEVC encoder is 2-10 times higher than that of H.264 encoder. This makes it necessary to develop low complexity video transcoding algorithms to transcode from H.264 to HEVC format. This research work proposes low complexity algorithms for H.264 to HEVC video transcoding. The proposed algorithms reduce the computational complexity of H.264 to HEVC video transcoding significantly, with negligible loss in Rate-Distortion performance. This work proposes three different video transcoding algorithms. The MV-based mode merge algorithm uses the block mode and MV variances to estimate the split/non-split decision as part of the HEVC block prediction process. The conditional probability-based mode mapping algorithm models HEVC blocks of sizes 16×16 and lower as a function of H.264 block modes, H.264 and HEVC Quantisation Parameters (QP). The motion-compensated MB residual-based mode mapping algorithm makes the split/non-split decision based on content-adaptive classification models. With a combination of the proposed set of algorithms, the computational complexity of the HEVC encoder is reduced by around 60%, with negligible loss in Rate-Distortion performance, outperforming existing state-of-art algorithms by 20-25% in terms of computational complexity. The proposed algorithms can be used in computation-constrained video transcoding applications, to support video format conversion in smart devices, migration of large-scale H.264 video content from host servers to HEVC, cloud computing-based transcoding applications, and also to support high quality videos over bandwidth-constrained networks.
Compact Piecewise Linear Model Based Temperature Control of Multicore Systems Considering Leakage Power

Temperature control of the new-generation integrated multicore system is challenging. This is because the leakage power, which is significant in modern systems, is nonlinearly related to temperature, resulting in a complex nonlinear control problem in thermal management. In this article, a new dynamic thermal management (DTM) method with compact piecewise linear (PWL) model based predictive control is proposed to solve the nonlinear control problem. First, a compact PWL thermal model, which takes dynamic power as input, is built by combining multiple local compact linear thermal models expanded at several Taylor expansion points. These local compact linear thermal models are obtained by sampling-based model order reduction with high accuracy. Their Taylor expansion points are selected by a systematic scheme, which exploits the thermal behavior property of the multicore chips. Based on the compact PWL thermal model, a new predictive control method is proposed to compute the future power recommendation for DTM. By approximating the nonlinearity accurately with the compact PWL thermal model and being equipped with predictive control technique, the new DTM achieves an overall high quality temperature management with smooth and accurate temperature tracking. Experimental results show that the new method outperforms the linear model predictive control based method and the echo state network based predictive thermal management method in temperature management quality with lower computing overhead.
Data provenance and trust establishment in the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a network of heterogeneous networks encompassing various forms of communications form the current traditional communication models to ubiquitous and pervasive machine to machine communications. In such an ever expanding, dynamic, and complex environment, it becomes vital to know the origin or the source of data and whether this data can be trusted or no. This requires not only accurate, secure, and correct data collection processes; but also provisioning of data provenance throughout the life‐cycle of an IoT device and the data it produces. To this end, this work introduces a provenance‐based trust management solution, which provides a trust establishment mechanism amongst communicating devices in the IoT. It provides a way to quantitatively assess the trustworthiness of data supplied by a given IoT device. Thus, providing a novel solution to preserve data provenance of IoT devices. This IoT data provenance solution extends the capabilities of our previously proposed IoT platform known as the IoT‐management platform, which aimed at preserving the privacy of users in the IoT.
Holographic duals of lower dimensional theories

En la presente tesis se exponen una serie de resultados en el marco de la dualidad AdS/CFT concernientes a teorias de campos en 2+1 y 1+1 dimensiones. En primer lugar se detalla una familia uniparametrica de soluciones de supergravedad duales a teorias 2+1-dimensionales basadas en conjuntos de N D2-branas con D4-branas fraccionales con una variedad transversa de holonomia Spin(7). Estas teorias tienen la particularidad de no ser confinantes a pesar de tener un mass gap. Ademas la presencia de un punto fijo en el flujo del grupo de renormalizacion de una de las teorias hace que exista un comportamiento cuasiconforme para las que tienen un valor del parametro cercano. Se calcula el espectro de modos de spin 0 y spin 2 para toda la familia de soluciones descrita y se estudia el comportamiento cuasiconforme de las teorias que lo presentan en funcion de la escala de energia usando una hard-wall en el infrarrojo. Finalmente, se encuentran ecuaciones BPS que describen soluciones duales a teorias de supersimetria reducida (N=(0,3), N=(0,2) y N=(0,1)) en 1+1 dimensiones con grados de libertad de sabor. El sistema se construye considerando D1-branas con un espacio transverso de holonomia especial (Sp(2), SU(4) y Spin(7) respectivamente) y anadiendo D5-branas que comparten con las D1-branas las direcciones de la teoria gauge. En todos los sistemas considerados se encuentra una solucion que fluye desde el ultravioleta de tipo D1-brana hasta una solucion AdS3 en el infrarrojo.
QoS-aware Traffic Management in Software Defined Networking

Software defined networking (SDN) provides effective traffic management solution by separating control and data planes, global centralization control, and being programmable. And, the traditional shortest path routing cannot provide effective traffic engineering because it only aware shortest path. The constraint-aware routing is more efficient than the traditional shortest path routing, however, it needed to estimate constraints such as link capacity, delay, jitter, and so on and it cannot guarantee the future traffic demands. This paper proposed QoS-aware traffic management method in SDN to guarantee the QoS-aware traffic by selecting the optimal path based on the estimated constraints. First, the proposed traffic management method categorized traffic classes: QoS-aware traffic and non QoS-aware traffic classes. Then, the proposed method estimated the QoS parameters and calculated the optimal path based on the estimated parameters. Finally, the QoS-aware traffic routed with the optimal path and non QoS-aware traffic simply routed through the shortest path. The proposed method is validated by using network emulator, Mininet and SDN controller, ONOS. The experiment results of throughput and packet loss show that our proposed method outperformed the other two traffic management methods.
Patients with Multiple Functional Gastrointestinal Disorders (FGIDs) Show Increased Illness Severity: A Cross-Sectional Study in a Tertiary Care FGID Specialty Clinic

Objectives Overlaps between different functional gastrointestinal disorders (FGIDs) are common. However, little is known about the impact of this overlap on patients' health status. This study is aimed at analyzing the differences between patients with multiple as compared to one single FGID. Methods A retrospective, cross-sectional study was conducted with patients presenting to a tertiary care FGID specialty clinic between 06/2012 and 01/2015 (n = 294). They were characterized primarily according to their GI symptom severity (IBS-SSS) and secondarily to their physical as well as psychosocial symptom burden, quality of life, health care utilization, and work-related impairment. Differences between patients with >1 vs. 1 FGID were analyzed. Results Of the 294 patients, 92.2% fulfilled the Rome III criteria for any FGID, and 48.0% had >1 FGIDs. FGID patients had a median age of 38 [23.0] years; 72.0% were female. Median GI symptom severity (IBS-SSS) scores were 339 [126] and 232 [163] in patients with >1 and 1 FGID, respectively (p < .001). Furthermore, patients with >1 FGIDs had higher general somatic symptom severity, higher illness anxiety, lower quality of life, and more work-related impairment. Almost no differences were found regarding their somatic as well as mental comorbidities. Conclusions Multiple FGIDs are associated with an increased risk for complicated courses of illness as reflected in higher GI and somatic symptom severity, as well as stronger psychosocial and diet- and work-related impairment. Stepped and interdisciplinary models of care including psychosocial expertise and dietary advice are needed, especially for patients with multiple FGIDs.
Unsteady solute dispersion by electrokinetic flow in a polyelectrolyte layer-grafted rectangular microchannel with wall absorption

The dispersion of a neutral solute band by electrokinetic flow in polyelectrolyte layer (PEL)-grafted rectangular/slit microchannels is theoretically studied. The flow is assumed to be both steady and fully developed and a first-order irreversible reaction is considered at the wall to account for probable surface adsorption of solutes. Considering low electric potentials, analytical solutions are obtained for electric potential, fluid velocity and solute concentration. Special solutions are also obtained for the case without wall adsorption. To track the dispersion properties of the solute band, the generalized dispersion model is adopted by considering the exchange, the convection and the dispersion coefficients. The solutions developed are validated by comparing the results with the predictions of finite-element-based numerical simulations. Even though the solutions can take any form of initial solute concentration into account, the results are presented by considering a solute band of rectangular shape. The results reveal that, while the short-term transport coefficients are strongly affected by the initial concentration profile, the long-term values are not dependent upon the initial conditions. In addition, it is shown that the mass transport coefficients are strong functions of the channel aspect ratio; hence, approximating a rectangular geometry by the space between two parallel plates may lead to considerable errors in the estimation of mass transport characteristics. This is particularly important for the dispersion coefficient for which the long-term values for a slit microchannel are quite different from those for a rectangular channel of very high aspect ratio. It is also illustrated that the exchange and convection coefficients increase on increasing the Damköhler number, whereas the opposite is true for the dispersion coefficient. The convection and dispersion coefficients are generally increasing functions of the PEL fixed charge density and the PEL thickness and decreasing functions of the PEL friction coefficient. Last but not least, a thicker electric double layer is found to provide a larger degree of solute dispersion, which is the opposite of that observed in a microchannel with bare walls.
Crisis of Policy Reporting: Evidence From Australian Election Campaigns, 2001–2013

ABSTRACT Election campaigns are highly stylised periods in politics, with the media acting as an important conduit of information between voters and politicians. But how well does news coverage inform voters about policy matters during elections? More specifically, has the quality of policy news provided by the press in election campaigns declined this century? This article examines this latter question using empirical data from five Australian federal election campaigns. It analyses newspaper coverage of tax, health and education issues during a period of economic upheaval in the Australian media landscape. Drawing upon a content analysis of 1270 newspaper articles, this study finds that newspapers published fewer detailed policy stories in latter election campaigns. The evidence suggests that there was a decline in the quality of policy reporting provided by the press between 2001 and 2013. These changes in the quality of policy journalism have broader implications for the vibrancy of debate in Australian elections.
Vibration Criteria Analysis on Floor due to Human Walking

The development of concrete material technology and modern structural design pattern in Malaysia may not consider the effect of vibration from seismic and other sources. Floor vibration may affect the serviceability of the structural and also provide uncomfortable environment to occupants. The main purpose of this study is to investigate the dynamic analysis on floor at the first floor of Faculty of Technology Management and Business (FPTP) building. The analyses are compared with the vibration criteria guidelines by Gordon (1991) to identify the vibration sensitivity of the floor. The investigation on floor vibration due to people walking is using Finite Element Modelling (FEM) in ANSYS software in order to perform modal analysis and transient analysis. Modal analysis shows the result of the natural frequency of the floor and different mode shapes react with subjected various frequency. The time history of the vibration signal will be performed by transient analysis. Furthermore, the results are transferred to MATLAB software (e.g. VSATs) to assess the vibration criteria curve. The results of the vibration plot show the middle of floor panel and laboratory room are categorized under ISO level. Therefore, it can be concluded that this room is not suitable to accommodate the sensitive equipment particularly at the middle of the floor.
Enabling Low Cost Flexible Smart Packaging System With Internet-of-Things Connectivity via Flexible Hybrid Integration of Silicon RFID Chip and Printed Polymer Sensors

A flexible hybrid integration strategy combing both advantages of the silicon chip and the printed polymer sensors is demonstrated for low cost smart packaging with internet-of-things connectivity. In the system, the silicon chip, as the general part, performs wireless energy harvesting, sensor signal acquisition, data processing and transmission through mature standard interfaces. The functions, form factor, and substrate of the printed polymer sensors can be customized according to the packaging requirements. To prove the feasibility, a 13.56 MHz radio frequency identification (RFID) chip with multi-sensor interface is designed and taped out. Ammonia and anti-open sensors are fabricated using the same conducting polymer (PEDOT:PSS) through solution printing processes. After characterization of their performance individually, a flexible smart packaging system is implemented with packed pork by integrating the RFID chip and the sensors onto a packaging film. Both the product quality and the integrity of the packaging are able to be conveniently inspected with a smartphone.
Characteristics and effects of intensive training in young children with cerebral palsy and parents' experiences of family-centred services investigated in a survey, a systematic review and a randomised controlled trial

Background: Young children with cerebral palsy (CP) receive a variety of interventions to prevent and/or reduce activity limitations and participation restrictions. Some of these interventions are intensive, and it is a challenge to identify the optimal intensity. Therefore, the objective of this systematic review was to describe and categorise intensive motor function and functional skills training among young children with CP, to summarise the effects of these interventions, and to examine characteristics that may contribute to explain the variations in these effects. Methods: Ten databases were searched for controlled studies that included young children (mean age less than seven years old) with CP and assessments of the effects of intensive motor function and functional skills training. The studies were critically assessed by the Risk of bias tool (RoB) and categorised for intensity and contexts of interventions. Standardised mean difference were computed for outcomes, and summarised descriptively or in meta-analyses. Results: Thirty-eight studies were included. Studies that targeted gross motor function were fewer, older and with lower frequency of training sessions over longer training periods than studies that targeted hand function. Home training was most common in studies on hand function and functional skills, and often increased the amount of training. The effects of constraint induced movement therapy (CIMT) on hand function and functional skills were summarised in six meta-analyses, which supported the existing evidence of CIMT. In a majority of the included studies, equal improvements were identified between intensive intervention and conventional therapy or between two different intensive interventions. Conclusions: Different types of training, different intensities and different contexts between studies that targeted gross and fine motor function might explain some of the observed effect variations. Home training may increase the amount of training, but are less controllable. These factors may have contributed to the observed variations in the effectiveness of CIMT. Rigorous research on intensive gross motor training is needed. Systematic review registration number: CRD42013004023.