Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Evaluation of the London Smoking Cessation Transformation Programme: a time–series analysis

Abstract Background and aim National social marketing campaigns have been shown to promote smoking cessation in England. There is reason to believe that regional and city‐wide campaigns can play a valuable role in reducing smoking prevalence over and above any national tobacco control activity. This study aimed to assess the impact of the London Smoking Cessation Transformation Programme, a multi‐component citywide smoking cessation programme, on quit attempts and quit success rates. Design and Setting Interrupted time–series analyses, using Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) and generalized additive models (GAM) of population trends in the difference between monthly quit attempts and quit success rates among smokers who made a quit attempt in London versus the rest of England before and during the first year of the programme. Participants A total of 55 528 past‐year adult smokers who participated in a monthly series of nationally representative cross‐sectional surveys in England between November 2006 and August 2018. Twelve and a half per cent of smokers lived in London (intervention region) and 87.5% lived in the rest of England (control region). Measurements Monthly prevalence of quit attempts and quit success rates among smokers who made a quit attempt. Findings The monthly difference in prevalence of quit attempts in London compared with the rest of England increased by 9.59% [95% confidence interval (CI) = 4.35–14.83, P < 0.001] from a mean of 0.04% pre‐intervention to 9.63% post‐intervention. The observed increase in success rates among those who tried was not statistically significant (B = 4.72; 95% CI = –2.68 to 12.11, P = 0.21); Bayes factors indicated that these data were insensitive. GAM analyses confirmed these results. Conclusion The promotion of the London Smoking Cessation Transformation Programme during September 2017 was associated with a significant increase in quit attempts compared with the rest of England. The results were inconclusive regarding an effect on quit success among those who tried.
Expression Profile Analysis of Differentially Expressed Circular RNAs in Steroid-Induced Osteonecrosis of the Femoral Head

Background A growing number of studies have suggested that circular RNAs (circRNAs) serve as potential diagnostic biomarkers in many diseases. However, the role of circRNAs in steroid-induced osteonecrosis of the femoral head (SONFH) has not been reported. Methods Secondary sequencing was performed to profile circRNA expression in peripheral blood samples from three SONFH patients and three healthy individuals. We confirmed our preliminary findings by qRT-PCR. Bioinformatics analysis was conducted to predict their functions. Results The result showed 345 dysregulated circRNAs. qRT-PCR of eight selected circRNAs preliminarily confirmed the results, which were consistent with RNA sequencing. Bioinformatics analyses were performed to predict the functions of circRNAs to target the genes of miRNAs and the networks of circRNA-miRNA-mRNA interactions. Conclusions This study provides a new and fundamental circRNA profile of SONFH and a theoretical basis for further studies on the functions of circRNAs in SONFH.
GMM-MUD: An Effective Multiuser Detection Algorithm for DS-UWB-Based Space Formation Flying Systems

In this paper, an effective multiuser detection (MUD) is proposed for direct sequence ultrawideband- (DS-UWB-) based space formation flying systems. The proposed method called GMM-MUD is based on Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) to suppress multiple access interference. The GMM describes probability distributions of the hypothesis testing problem which is used for bit classification. To reveal the difference between correct bits and error bits, the preprocessing operation applies a mapping function based on optimal multiuser detection. The parameters of GMM are estimated by using expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm. EM algorithm employs iterative operation to simplify the complexity of maximum likelihood estimation method and considers the mapping values of received bits as the observations. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed GMM-MUD algorithm achieves good performances in terms of bit error rate performance, user capacity, and near-far resistance. Moreover, the computational complexity is low enough for space formation flying applications.
BONN GRADUATE SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS UNIVERSITY OF BONN

The topic of insolvency risk in connection with life insurance companies has recently attracted a great deal of attention. In this paper, the question is investigated of how the value of the equity and of the liability of a life insurance company are affected by the default risk and the choice of the relevant bankruptcy procedure. As an example, the U.S. Bankruptcy Code with Chapter 7 and Chapter 11 bankruptcy procedures is used. Grosen and Jørgensen’s (2002) contingent claim model, implying only a Chapter 7 bankruptcy procedure, is extended to allow for more general bankruptcy procedures such as Chapter 11. Thus, more realistically, default and liquidation are modelled as distinguishable events. This is realized by using so–called standard and cumulative Parisian barrier option frameworks. It is shown that these options have appealing interpretations in terms of the bankruptcy mechanism. Furthermore, a number of representative numerical analyses and comparative statics are performed in order to investigate the effects of different parameter changes on the values of the insurance company’s equity and liability, and hence on the value of the life insurance contract. To complete the analysis, the shortfall probabilities of the insurance company implied by the proposed models are computed and compared.
Effects of the phase content and grain size on the electrical and energy storage properties of lead-free BNBT ceramics with substituted La3+

Abstract Lead-free [(Bi0.5Na0.5)0.94Ba0.06]1-xLaxTiO3 (BNBT-xLa) ceramics with x = 0, 0.01, 0.02, 0.03, 0.04, 0.05 and 0.06 mol. % were synthesized by the solid-state combustion technique with calcination and sintering temperatures of 750 °C and 1150 °C, respectively, for 2 h. The phase formation, microstructure, dielectric, ferroelectric and energy storage properties of the BNBT-xLa ceramics were investigated. The XRD patterns of the powders showed a pure perovskite phase for all samples. The average particle size increased from 298 to 379 nm with increasing x. All ceramics showed coexisting rhombohedral and tetragonal phases. When x rose, the content of the tetragonal phase increased, as validated by the Rietveld refinement method. The average grain size decreased from 1.43 to 0.81 µm when x increased from 0 to 0.05 and then started to increase. The Curie temperature (T d) of the samples shifted to lower temperatures with rising x, owing to an increased tetragonal phase. The maximum dielectric constant (ε m), remanent polarization (P r) and coercive field (E c) decreased with increasing x. The BNBT-0.05La ceramic exhibited the smallest grain size, and lowest P r = 0.8 µC/cm2 and E c = 2.9 kV/cm, with the highest energy storage efficiency (η ∼ 78.31%) and a large effective energy storage density (W ∼ 0.83 J/cm3) measured in an electric field of 80 kV/cm.
Smarter Software Engineering Methods for Smart Environments

Wearable technology and improved processing of streaming data have contributed to the advancement of the Internet of Things (IoT) and its applications such as smart living and working environments. The development of use-cases for such solutions continue to evolve and are supported by research into security, privacy and UX, which are all seen as central to developing appropriate and acceptable solutions. Development of IoT systems may also follow best-practice engineering principles (model-driven development and testing, formal methods etc.) to ensure they will meet all requirements and perform as expected in (often) uncontrolled environments. We argue, however, that there are two key concepts that are still overlooked. We deﬁne these as ‘Data Sovereignty Manage-ment’ (DSM) and ‘Quality of Life’ measurements (QoL). In this paper we present examples of how and why DSM and QoL should be considered central within the development of IoT systems, and propose that software engineering methods be extended to include these.
Evaluation and comparison of automatic methods to identify health queries

The use of the Web to find health information is a common practice nowadays. The improvement of Health Information Retrieval depends on studies that, frequently, require the identification of health-related queries. Being usually done by human assessors, this identification may turn out to be inefficient and even impracticable in some cases. To overcome this problem we propose, analyze and compare automatic methods to identify health-related queries. One type of methods uses health vocabularies and the other analyses the co-ocurrence of query terms with the word “health” in web page results. Our goal is to compare the two different strategies of automatic classification, to compare several variants in each strategy and to verify if its performance is enough to be executed without human intervention. The evaluation was done comparing the automatic classification with the classification made by a team of ten human assessors, in a pool of 20,000 queries. The use of Yahoo! to calculate the co-occurrence rate at a threshold value of 0,5 was the method with best trade-off between sensibility (73%) and specificity (79%).
Acute management, imaging, and prognosis of urinary tract infections in infants and children older than one month

Urinary tract infections (UTI) are a common and important clinical problem in childhood. Upper urinary tract infections (ie, acute pyelonephritis) may lead to renal scarring, hypertension, and end-stage renal dysfunction. Although children with pyelonephritis tend to present with fever, it can be difficult on clinical grounds to distinguish cystitis from pyelonephritis, particularly in young children (those younger than two years) [1]. Thus, we have defined UTI broadly here without attempting to distinguish cystitis from pyelonephritis. Acute cystitis in older children is discussed separately. (See "Acute cystitis in children older than two years and adolescents".) The acute management and prognosis of UTI in children will be reviewed here. The epidemiology, risk factors, clinical features, diagnosis, long-term management, and prevention of UTI in children and UTI in newborns are discussed separately. (See "Epidemiology and risk factors for urinary tract infections in children" and "Clinical features and diagnosis of urinary tract infections in infants and children older than one month" and "Long-term management and prevention of urinary tract infections in children" and "Urinary tract infections in newborns".)
Effects of seed aging on subsequent seed reserve utilization and seedling growth in soybean

Reduced seedling growth is a consequence of seed deterioration. The heterotrophic seedling growth can be considered as the product of three components: (1) initial seed weight, (2) the fraction of seed reserves which are mobilized, and (3) the conversion efficiency of mobilized seed reserves to seedling tissues. It is not clear which of these component (s) is affected by seed deterioration. To study this subject, germination characteristics and seedling growth from deteriorated soybean (Glycine max) seeds were studied; seeds were incubated at two different temperatures of 34 oC and 40 oC for varying times. The results indicated that seed deterioration results in decreased percentage and rate of germination and decreased percentage of normal seedlings. Seedling growth and the fraction of seed reserve mobilization indicated a significant decrease with the advance of deterioration. However, the effect of seed deterioration on the conversion efficiency of mobilized reserves to seedling tissues was not significant. Thus efforts to improve seedling germination and growth in plant breeding programs should focus on improvement of fraction of mobilized seed reserves.
Galago: A Modular Distributed Processing and Retrieval System

The open source IR community must address the new needs of the current search engine landscape. While it is still possible for an individual to perform effective research or run a small to moderatesized search engine on a single machine, the scope of search engine applications has moved far beyond these parameters. The exciting new frontiers of information retrieval lie now at the extremes: either the system and available resources are far more constrained than a desktop (as in mobile phones and tablets), or resources are expected to be available in quantities orders of magnitude larger (as in webscale systems). To inform the decisions in designing the next-generation of open source search engines (OSSEs), we present a retrospective assessment of the Galago search engine, an open source retrieval system developed at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. We have successfully deployed Galago over large clusters for both indexing and retrieval. At the other end of the spectrum, we have also successfully installed Galago on Android-based smart-phones and tablets, providing search capabilities over the personal data — tweets, social media posts, blog-feeds, emails, texts, browsing history, etc.— stored on one’s cell phone. These experiences have provided us with information that we feel is essential to communicate to all potential designers of open source search engines. In this paper, we discuss the aspects of Galago that we believe are worthy of carrying forward into the next generation of open source retrieval systems. Conversely, we also discuss the roadblocks encountered, both in terms of adoption by the larger research community and the difficulties in learning to use the system effectively. We hope that this retrospective will inform the architects of the next generation of open source retrieval systems.
Delft University of Technology Coastscan Continuous monitoring of coastal change using terrestrial laser scanning

Sandy coasts are vulnerable to predicted climate change, but also need to safeguard coastal housing, recreation, safety and ecology. “Building with Nature” is an important approach for resilient coastal maintenance, but corresponding predictive modelling tools are partly inconclusive, due to a lack of measurements over multiple spatial and temporal scales. The aim of the CoastScan project is to develop a monitoring system to measure and understand dry coast topography over multiple scales with a permanent laser scanner. A field campaign was setup at Kijkduin, The Netherlands to monitor a kilometre of beach for up to 6 months. The first permanent laser scanning results show a promising ability to monitor the coast over multiple scales: hourly topography is obtained with a quality at the millimetre range, while time series at four different locations lasting 10 days show subtle variations that could not be
Comparison of Moisturizer Containing 5% Urea, Natural Moisturizing Factors, Ceramide, and Glyceryl Glucoside with 5% Urea Lotion for the Treatment of Xerosis in Children with Chronic Kidney Disease

Background: Xerosis is a common skin manifestation in chronic renal disease. Itching from dry skin causes skin discomfort, scratch marks, and compromises skin barrier function. Objective: To compare the efficacy of moisturizer containing 5% urea, natural moisturizing factors (NMFs), ceramide, and glyceryl glucoside (GG) with 5% urea lotion for treatment of xerosis in patients with underlying stable chronic kidney disease. Material and Method: We performed a randomized, double-blind, split-side, experimental study in 50 children with xerosis in stable chronic kidney disease. The patients were assigned sequentially by block randomization to use either moisturizing lotion containing 5% urea, NMFs, ceramide, and GG or 5% urea on opposite sides of the lower leg, twice daily for four weeks. The moisturizers were repacked in identical bottles. Clinical severity of xerosis, skin hydration, and transepidermal water loss (TEWL) were evaluated at baseline and at at one, two, and four weeks. Results: Forty-seven of 50 patients completed the study. The mean age was 13.43±2.3years. Both products significantly decreased clinical severity of scaling and roughness from baseline (p<0.001). Application of moisturizer containing 5% urea, NMFs, ceramide, and GG resulted in significantly higher skin hydration and lower TEWL compared with 5% urea lotion (both p<0.01), from week 1. Regarding the safety of using urea in chronic kidney disease, there were no significant differences in blood urea nitrogen (BUN) and creatinine levels between preand post-treatment (p = 0.627). No adverse effects were reported. Conclusion: Both moisturizing lotions containing 5% urea, NMFs, ceramide, and GG and 5% urea were effective in improving scaling and roughness, skin hydration, and skin barrier function in stable chronic pediatric kidney disease patients. Additional ingredients, such as NMFs, ceramide, and GG can significantly improve xerosis, skin hydration, and skin barrier function. Products containing 5% urea applied on the lower legs for four weeks do not increase BUN or creatinine levels.
Investigation of the effect of the inspection intervals on the track geometry condition

Abstract In order to evaluate the railway track geometry condition and plan maintenance activities, track inspection cars run over the track at specific times to monitor it and record geometry measurements. Applying an adequate inspection interval is vital to ensure the availability, safety and quality of the railway track, at the lowest possible cost. The aim of this study has been to investigate the effect of different inspection intervals on the track geometry condition. To achieve this, an integrated statistical model was developed to predict the track geometry condition given different inspection intervals. In order to model the evolution of the track geometry condition, a piecewise exponential model was used which considers break points at the maintenance times. Ordinal logistic regression was applied to model the probability of the occurrence of severe isolated defects. The Monte Carlo technique was used to simulate the track geometry behaviour given different inspection intervals. The results of the proposed model support the decision-making process regarding the selection of the most adequate inspection interval. The applicability of the model was tested in a case study on the Main Western Line in Sweden.
Preferences of end-users for raw and post-edited NMT in a business environment

This paper presents an evaluation conducted with end-users of translations produced by Swiss Post’s in-house Language Service. The aim is to assess whether end-users i) would rate post-edited MT more highly than raw MT; ii) would find that Swiss Post’s customized NMT system produces better results than a general-purpose, off-the-shelf NMT engine (DeepL) and, lastly, when aware of translation production metadata, iii) would be willing to pay for post-edited texts. This latter aspect in particular was intended to help determine whether the customers would still value human intervention or whether they would rather accept a lower quality translation and associated risks if this means they can save on costs. Results show that the post-edited texts are preferred by the majority of the participants, even when production metadata are revealed. The in-house customized engine seems to produce better results than DeepL, since the end-users choose the raw output from our system more often than from DeepL.
Deep-Rhythm for Global Tempo Estimation in Music

It has been shown that the harmonic series at the tempo frequency of the onset-strength-function of an audio signal accurately describes its rhythm pattern and can be used to perform tempo or rhythm pattern estimation. Recently, in the case of multi-pitch estimation, the depth of the input layer of a convolutional network has been used to represent the harmonic series of pitch candidates. We use a similar idea here to represent the harmonic series of tempo candidates. We propose the Harmonic-Constant-Q-Modulation which represents, using a 4D-tensors, the harmonic series of modulation frequencies (considered as tempo frequencies) in several acoustic frequency bands over time. This representation is used as input to a convolutional network which is trained to estimate tempo or rhythm pattern classes. Using a large number of datasets, we evaluate the performance of our approach and compare it with previous approaches. We show that it slightly increases Accuracy-1 for tempo estimation but not the average-mean-Recall for rhythm pattern recognition.
Chapter on Vision for Routledge Handbook of the Computational Mind

In today’s textbooks, and for centuries before now, it has been commonplace to explain the workings of the mammalian eye as being similar to those of a non-biological camera. The same principles of optics are exemplified in each kind of device, and it has tempted some to say that the eye is a fleshy, gelatinous, photographic machine. So from our vantage point it is surprising that before Kepler’s discovery of the optical laws of image formation in the eye (living or dead) and camera obscura, this comparison was not readily available to early theorists of vision. Ibn al-Haytham (“Alhazen”) was the first to apply inferentialist notions to the theory of vision, prefiguring Helmholtz and also current computational accounts. However, he did not explain the workings of the eye in terms of optical laws that hold across living, non-living and artefactual structures. His understanding of the eye presupposed capacities for the reception of Aristotelian forms that could only occur in an animate structure (Meyering 1989, p.45-48).
Compile-time GPU Memory Access Optimizations

In the last three years, GPUs are more and more being used for general purpose applications instead of only for computer graphics. Programming these GPUs is a big challenge; in current GPUs the main bottleneck for many applications is not the computing power, but the memory access bandwidth. Two compile-time optimizations are presented in this paper to deal with the two most important memory access issues. To describe these optimizations, a new notation of the parallel execution of GPU programs is introduced. An implementation of the optimizations shows that performance improvements of up to 40 times are possible.
The Spherically Symmetric Collapse of Collisionless Matter Exploring Critical Phenomena through Finite Volume Methods

We present a novel numerical study of critical phenomena in the massive, spherically symmetric Einstein-Vlasov system. After casting of the Vlasov equation in flux-conservative form, a finite volume approach is used to evolve the distribution function in phase space. Such an approach yields solutions with well defined convergence behavior; a property both crucial for critical phenomena research and also one that supersedes previous Monte-Carlo dominated Einstein-Vlasov research. Up to machine precision, and in accord with work by Schaeffer, Rein and Rendall [12] and Olabarietta and Choptuik [19, 20], the critical solution for distributions having constant angular-momentum-squared-per-particle, l, are shown to be static intermediate attractors. Near-critical solutions are also shown to exhibit the logarithmic scaling associated with Type I critical phenomena. We also look at critical phenomena for two interacting distributions with different values of l, displaying evidence that even in this two-species coupled case, the critical solution exhibits Type I scaling and staticity. Finally, the massless case is studied, and evidence for Type I scaling and staticity is presented. The question of whether or not the critical solution is universal remains unanswered for all cases. However, at least without some nontrivial rescaling of variables, there is no clear evidence for universality in our results at the current time.