Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Collaborative Active Textbooks

Abstract This paper describes CAT, a Web-based algorithm animation system. CAT augments the expressive power of Web pages for publishing passive multimedia information with a full-fledged interactive algorithm animation system. It improves on previous Web-based algorithm animations by providing a framework that makes it easy to construct new animations, including those that involve multiple views. Because views of the same running algorithm may reside on different machines, CAT is particularly well-suited for electronic classrooms and remote learning environments. This strategy is an improvement over the electronic classroom systems we are aware of, which simply display the same X window on multiple machines and are only viable in local-area networks. We believe our framework generalizes to electronic textbooks in arbitrary domains.
The biopsychosocial model of general practice: rhetoric or reality?

BACKGROUND For more than 20 years, general practitioners have been encouraged to adopt a 'biopsychosocial' model of health care, that is, encompassing physical, psychological and social aspects. AIM A study was undertaken to explore the extent to which general practitioners' views about the acceptable boundaries of their work are consistent with a biopsychosocial model. METHOD A semi-structured postal questionnaire was sent to all 494 members of the Royal College of General Practitioners in Mersey Region who were general practitioner principals. The general practitioners were asked to list up to three topics presented by patients that they considered to be appropriate, and up to three topics that they considered to be inappropriate, to a general practitioner's knowledge and skills. The general practitioners were asked to rate, on a five-point scale of appropriateness, each of a list of 12 topics about which patients might have problems and present. Responses were analysed by sex and age of respondents. RESULTS The response rate was 42%. Acute physical problems were most often listed appropriate by respondents, followed by chronic physical and psychological problems. The topics most often considered inappropriate were bureaucracy and social issues. Among the list of 12 specified topics, respondents considered terminal care and hypertension to be more appropriate than housing issues, spiritual worries, welfare rights or political issues. The sex of respondents did not relate to differences in results. Respondents aged 35 years and over generally considered topics presented by their patients to be more appropriate than did their younger colleagues. CONCLUSION The general practitioner respondents in this study appeared to hold the view that general practitioners should work to a bio(psycho) rather than a biopsychosocial model of health care.
Periodic FDTD Characterization of Guiding and Radiation Properties of Negative Refractive Index Transmission Line Metamaterials

The application of the Finite Difference Time Domain technique, equipped with periodic boundary conditions, can lead to the fast full-wave characterization of negative refractive index (NRI) structures. Employing the so-called sine-cosine method, the guiding and radiating properties of the NRI transmission-line medium are determined. Surface wave effects are captured, while the operation of the medium as a leaky-wave antenna (within its fast-wave region) is also modeled. The efficiency of this approach stems from the fact that all these results are obtained by simulating up to two unit cells of the periodic NRI medium under study.
Obstacles to Process Integration along the Supply Chain: Manufacturing Firms Perspective

Supply chain management has generated much interest in recent years for a number of reasons. Many managers now realize that actions taken by one member of the chain can influence the profitability of all others in the chain. Firms are increasingly thinking in terms of competing as part of a supply chain against other supply chains, rather than as a single firm against other individual firms. Many companies have successfully implemented supply chain concepts with spectacular results. Efficient supply chains have enabled these firms to compete better. What were the reasons for their successes? What were the obstacles these firms faced in their journeys to achieve integration in their networks? How were they able to overcome these obstacles? Using review of the literature, this article reveals the dominating factors motivating manufacturing firms to engage in supply chain management activities, the barriers they face upon implementation, the strategies or bridges used to overcome the barriers, and the benefits that are available to successful companies. The major barriers identified by this paper include; silo mentality, lack of supply chain visibility, lack of trust, lack of knowledge and activities causing the bullwhip effect.
Modelling small-patterned neuronal networks coupled to microelectrode arrays

Cultured neurons coupled to planar substrates which exhibit ‘well-defined’ two-dimensional network architectures can provide valuable insights into cell-to-cell communication, network dynamics versus topology, and basic mechanisms of synaptic plasticity and learning. In the literature several approaches were presented to drive neuronal growth, such as surface modification by silane chemistry, photolithographic techniques, microcontact printing, microfluidic channel flow patterning, microdrop patterning, etc. This work presents a computational model fit for reproducing and explaining the dynamics exhibited by small-patterned neuronal networks coupled to microelectrode arrays (MEAs). The model is based on the concept of meta-neuron, i.e., a small spatially confined number of actual neurons which perform single macroscopic functions. Each meta-neuron is characterized by a detailed morphology, and the membrane channels are modelled by simple Hodgkin–Huxley and passive kinetics. The two main findings that emerge from the simulations can be summarized as follows: (i) the increasing complexity of meta-neuron morphology reflects the variations of the network dynamics as a function of network development; (ii) the dynamics displayed by the patterned neuronal networks considered can be explained by hypothesizing the presence of several short- and a few long-term distance interactions among small assemblies of neurons (i.e., meta-neurons).
Gastritis May Boost Odds of Dementia

Introduction: Given the high prevalence of dementia and its devastating consequences, identifying risk factors for dementia is a public health priority. The present study aims to assess whether gastritis increases the odds of dementia. Methodology: The data for this study, consisting of 2926 community-dwelling older adults, were obtained from the National survey entitled “Mental Health and Quality of Life of Older Malaysians. ” Dementia was diagnosed using the Geriatric Mental State-Automated Geriatric Examination for Computer-Assisted Taxonomy. Results: Prevalence of dementia was considerably higher among older adults with gastritis (29.5%) compared to those without gastritis (13.2%). After adjusting for age, gender, marital status, educational attainment, hypertension, stroke, and diabetes, gastritis was significantly associated with more than twice odds of dementia (adjusted odds ratio = 2.42, P < .001, 95% confidence interval = 1.68-3.49). Conclusions: The findings from this population-based observational study showing evidence that gastritis may increase the risk of dementia provide avenue for further inquiries into dementia.
Inrush current suppression characteristics for HVDC converter

This paper presents novel control methods to suppress the inrush current in soft-start operation for HVDC converter. The HVDC (Higher Voltage Direct Current) system attracts attention to accomplish efficient energy management. However, the inrush current and overshoot of the output voltage which exceeds far larger than the rated values occur when the dc-dc converter in HVDC system starts its operation. For this reason, the soft-start operation is performed to prevent them. In the conventional soft-start operation, the dc-dc converter must start up very slowly to deal with the light load condition. In the proposed method, the fastest speed of the soft-start is obtained because the soft-start speed is determined dependent with load condition. The speed of it is controlled as a approximate function of output current which is obtained from the simulation results in advance. This proposed method to be applied the soft-start of two types. For soft-start operation two different types of function is adapted and compared. In the simulation result using 5W and 800W classes of the dc-dc converters, it is confirmed that the proposed method has a superior soft-start characteristic compared to the conventional soft-start.
Information technology portfolio management implementation: a case study

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the implementation of IT portfolio management (IT PoM) and develop a framework guided by adaptive structuration theory to describe the key structures, features, and appropriation steps needed to effectively manage IT investments and assets. Design/methodology/approach Using a longitudinal case study approach, data were collected over an eight-month period from a US Fortune 500 company during its IT PoM implementation effort. Findings The case analysis highlights three major IT PoM features appropriated by the organization: creating the portfolio; assessing and analyzing the portfolio characteristics based on risk, benefits, alignment, criticality, and cost; and balancing decisions to start projects or terminate under-performing IT assets such as servers and applications. The spirit of IT PoM was interpreted differently by different stakeholders (data providers, business units, and IT PoM team) leading to resistance to implementation. The case data underscores the importance of establishing a governance steering committee and new internal structures to help push the balancing decisions across the organization. Research limitations/implications The results are useful in developing guidelines and strategies to achieve successful implementation of IT PoM and to highlight critical factors that practitioners need to pay close attention to during an IT PoM implementation. Originality/value This study represents one of the first attempts to describe a detailed IT PoM implementation process and how IT PoM appropriation process can lead to improved decision making within the organization.
Active Learning-based Local Graph Matching for Textual Entailment

This paper presents a robust textual entailment system using the principle of just noticeable difference in psychology, which we call a local graph matching-based system with active learning. First, although an early textual entailment task often involved two rather simple sentences of T (“Text”) and H (“Hypothesis”), the recent textual entailment task often involves multiple / complex / compound sentences in T (and H). In this context, the search for corresponding subgraphs of T and H is one important task with regard to the principle of just noticeable difference where irrelevant items will work as noise for the similarity-based graph-matching approach. Our approach concerns to reduce such noise by linguistic preprocessing being conscious of the topic mentioned by H via subject alignment. Second, by definition of textual entailment task, one interesting task involves the understanding of T which will not be detected by the similaritybased method. Third, one bottleneck of textual entailment task is the performance drop by unknown words and named-entities. We explore reducing the unknown words and named-entities, incorporating meaning in parentheses / rhetorical expressions / semantic roles, and additional feature of language model from deep learning. Our result for RTE2 corpus was 80.49 for macro F1 score, 84.95 for precision for the positive entailment, and 79.95 for recall for negative entailment.
Facilitating Flow Experience in People with Intellectual Disability Using a Music Intervention Program

Flow is an internal state defined as a condition whereby a person is intensively involved in an activity and ignores the time spent and the place that he/she is in. The purpose of this paper is to empirically support strategies that are assumed to facilitate flow experiences among people with intellectual disability using a music intervention program. For this purpose, thirty adolescents and young adults with mild to moderate intellectual disability were randomly selected to participate in a within subject experimental design with four conditions. The results of one way repeated measure ANOVA and its following comparisons in pairs revealed that the participants were unable to sustain flow experience when no optimal challenge was provided for them. However, providing successful optimally challenging musical experiences for these people or stimulating them to look for new challenges by involving them in innovative behaviors are effective strategies to facilitate their flow experiences.
Conic-sector-based controller synthesis: Theory and experiments

The Passivity Theorem is a popular input-output stability analysis tool. However, passivity violations, which are often due to sensor and actuator dynamics, may cause instabilities, necessitating the adoption of alternative stability results. This paper presents experimental results employing controllers that ensure stability via the Conic Sector Theorem. A new conic sector controller synthesis method mimicking an ℋ2-optimal controller is presented and compared to an existing conic sector controller synthesis method, and an ℋ2 controller itself. The conic controllers are found to yield increased robustness and improved performance in the presence of passivity violations.
Analysis of and techniques for adaptive equalization for underwater acoustic communication

Abstract : Underwater wireless communication is quickly becoming a necessity for applications in ocean science, defense, and homeland security. Acoustics remains the only practical means of accomplishing long-range communication in the ocean. The acoustic communication channel is fraught with difficulties including limited available bandwidth, long delay-spread, time-variability, and Doppler spreading. These di difficulties reduce the reliability of the communication system and make high data-rate communication challenging. Adaptive decision feedback equalization is a common method to compensate for distortions introduced by the underwater acoustic channel. Limited work has been done thus far to introduce the physics of the underwater channel into improving and better understanding the operation of a decision feedback equalizer. This thesis examines how to use physical models to improve the reliability and reduce the computational complexity of the decision feedback equalizer. The specific topics covered by this work are: how to handle channel estimation errors for the time varying channel, how to use angular constraints imposed by the environment into an array receiver, what happens when there is a mismatch between the true channel order and the estimated channel order, and why there is a performance difference between the direct adaptation and channel estimation based methods for computing the equalizer coeffcients. For each of these topics, algorithms are provided that help create a more robust equalizer with lower computational complexity for the underwater channel.
A exploração de modelos e os níveis de abstração nas construções criativas com robótica educacional

No presente estudo a robotica educacional e discutida no contexto da atividade escolar do ensino fundamental. Com base em estudos de caso, analisa a conduta dos Ss na exploracao de modelos e os niveis de abstracao envolvidos nas construcoes criativas com robotica educacional. Para tanto, foram explorados elementos teoricos envolvendo as definicoes de criatividade no contexto do desenvolvimento tecnologico e de robotica educacional construtivista, com base nos pressupostos da Epistemologia Genetica de Jean Piaget. Foi possivel observar que o uso bem sucedido dos modelos nas construcoes criativas esteve condicionado a possibilidade de reflexionamento e reflexao por parte dos sujeitos. Observou-se, tambem, que as transformacoes de controle podem servir de evidencia para as construcoes criativas. Finalmente, constatouse tambem que a criatividade pode se revelar nas transformacoes do proprio pensamento, na abertura de novos possiveis, novas condicoes para o sujeito operar no campo das acoes, mentais e objetivas, possibilitando ao sujeito exercer a criatividade e a invencao.
Buprenorphine in the Treatment of Opiate Dependence

Abstract Compelling clinical evidence establishes that buprenorphine is similar to methadone in efficacy for opiate detoxification and maintenance but safer than methadone in an overdose situation. The Drug Abuse Treatment Act of 2000 (DATA 2000) enabled US physicians with additional training to prescribe buprenorphine to a limited number of opiate-dependent patients. The sublingual tablets Subutex® (buprenorphine alone) and Suboxone® (a combination of buprenorphine and naloxone) meet the specifications of DATA 2000. Suboxone is intended to discourage intravenously administration and has less abuse potential than buprenorphine alone. Suboxone is generally recommended for maintenance treatment except for women who are pregnant. Subutex is recommended in treatment of pregnant women. A buprenorphine opiate withdrawal syndrome can occur in newborns. Although intravenous buprenorphine abuse is a significant public health problem in some countries, buprenorphine alone or in combination with naloxone has less potential for abuse than heroin and some prescription opiates, such as oxycodone. Pharmacotherapy from physicians' offices makes buprenorphine treatment acceptable to some opiate-dependent patients who would not accept treatment in traditional opiate-maintenance clinics. For reasons not adequately understood, some patients find discontinuation of buprenorphine following long-term use difficult. This article reviews the pharmacology of buprenorphine, summarizes evidence supporting the safety and efficacy of buprenorphine and provides clinical guidelines for treatment.
Kinematics and cooperative control of a robotic spinal surgery system

SUMMARY Spinal surgery is considered a high-risk surgery. To improve the accuracy, stability, and safety of such operations, we report the development of a novel six-degrees-of-freedom Robotic Spinal Surgical System that can assist surgeons in performing transpedicular surgery, one of the most common spinal surgeries. After optimization performed using Response Surface Methodology, the largest available workspace of the robot is determined and is found to easily cover the entire operation area. Cooperative control and navigation-based active control are implemented for different processes of the operation. We propose a hybrid control approach based on the speed and torque interface at the joint level. In this mode, the robot is compliant in Cartesian space, benefitting both the accuracy and efficiency of the operation. A comprehensive assessment index, combining the subjective and objective criteria in terms of positioning and operation efficiency, is proposed to compare the performance of cooperative control in speed mode, torque mode, and hybrid control mode. Active fine adjustment experiments are carried out to verify the positioning accuracy, and the results are found to satisfy the requirements of operation. As an application example, a pedicle screw insertion experiment is performed on a pig vertebral bone, demonstrating the effectiveness of our system.
Pharmacogenetics of drug‐induced arrhythmias: a feasibility study using spontaneous adverse drug reactions reporting data

The bottleneck in pharmacogenetic research on rare adverse drug reactions (ADR) is retrieval of patients. Spontaneous reports of ADRs may form a useful source of patients. We investigated the feasibility of a pharmacogenetic study, in which cases were selected from the database of a spontaneous reporting system for ADRs, using drug‐induced arrhythmias as an example.
Optimizing chronic HIV care in the Dutch Caribbean: a questionnaire based study on experience and perception of healthcare workers.

OBJECTIVE Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection has become a chronic disorder for which adaptation of current healthcare practices is needed. In Curaçao, a new organization of chronic HIV care is being set up based on task shifting in which healthcare workers (HCWs) will deliver HIV care more prominently within the primary healthcare system. In preparation for implementation of the proposed task-shifting model, we investigated the perception of HCWs regarding existing HIV care in Curaçao and the need for training in HIV/AIDS among HCWs. SUBJECTS AND METHODS An in-depth questionnaire based study was used. Nineteen HCWs of seven different cadres were interviewed. The questionnaire constituted four sections: quality of existing HIV care, respondents own knowledge and willingness to be trained, need for training in HIV/AIDS and preferred educational approaches. RESULTS Quality of existing HIV services in Curaçao is considered acceptable but needs improvement mainly to facilitate integration of chronic HIV care. All respondents indicated that training in HIV/AIDS is needed among HCWs in Curaçao, especially for nurses and general practitioners. All were willing to participate in training with varying amounts of time to be spent. Training should be tailored to the level of expertise of HCWs and to the role a HCW is expected to have in the new healthcare delivery framework. CONCLUSION There is need for training to ensure the effective integration of chronic HIV care into the existing healthcare delivery system in Curaçao. There is a willingness and need in all cadres for training with e-learning as a preferred educational tool.
Distributed token management in Calypso file system

This paper presents the design and implementation of a distributed token manager for a cluster-optimized, distributed Unix file system. In this file system, tokens provide cache consistency and support for single-system Unix semantics. The paper describes the token types used, token arbitration protocol, deadlock-free implementation, fault-tolerance, and recovery. The key contributions of the work reported here are: (1) An efficient protocol for token arbitration, which minimizes bottlenecks and hence enhances scalability; (2) A practical approach to handling deadlocks, race conditions, and recovery issues, which complicate token manager design and implementation. <<ETX>>