Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Assessment of performance in the presence of undesirable outputs: the promotion of livability and sustainable development of cities and countries using Data Envelopment Analysis

This thesis is concerned with the development of innovative models for the assessment and monitoring of performance using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) in the presence of undesirable outputs. The models focus on the construction of composite indicators and are applied to the evaluation of cities and countries with the aim to promote livability and sustainable development. The empirical part of the thesis contributes to the definition of better public policies through the identification of best practice examples and areas with more potential for improvements. The thesis includes four main research topics. The first topic discusses two alternative approaches to incorporate undesirable outputs in composite indicators constructed using DEA models. The first is an indirect approach, based on a standard DEA model which includes a transformation in the measurement scale of the undesirable outputs. The second is a direct approach, based on a DEA model specified with a directional distance function. This topic also discusses the incorporation of restrictions to weights in this context, and proposes a novel specification of assurance region type I weight restrictions. The second topic approaches the measurement of productivity change over time in the presence of undesirable outputs using the Malmquist-Luenberger index and the Luenberger index. An enhanced version of the MalmquistLuenberger index is proposed. The results obtained using the different productivity indices are compared and discussed. The third topic assesses the environmental performance of countries worldwide. The assessment is conducted using the composite indicator specified using the indirect approach proposed in chapter 3. It enables benchmarking in such a way that it is possible to identify the strengths and weaknesses of each country, as well as the peers with similar features to the country under assessment. The last topic develops a framework to assess the livability of European cities covering two components: human well-being and environmental impact. It is proposed a conceptual model that extends the concept of urban livability to include a component related to environmental sustainability. Then, the measurement of cities’ livability is conducted using the composite indicator specified with a directional distance function, as developed in chapter 3. Finally, the evolution of cities’ performance over time is assessed using the Luenberger productivity index. Overall, this thesis contributed to the development of robust tools to evaluate and promote livability and sustainable development in cities and countries, with a view to foster better standards of living now and in the future.
Providers and Families Weigh in on Delays to Pediatric Kidney Transplant Wait-List Activation

Introduction Timely access to kidney transplant is essential to reducing mortality of children with kidney disease. We examined factors affecting providers’ decisions to delay waitlisting, compared perceptions of important factors of providers to families, when delaying activation, and describe recommendations to improve support for pediatric patients and families to overcome waitlisting delays. Methods Using a mixed-methods design, 20 providers and 20 families of pediatric patients with kidney disease, participated in interviews and surveys. Interviews were analyzed using thematic analysis. Surveys were analyzed with descriptive statistics. Results Avoiding retransplantation, treatment nonadherence, poor psychological readiness for transplant, poor physical health, and greater need for social support were the key themes affecting providers’ decisions to delay waitlisting. At least 70% of both providers and families felt that waitlisting should be delayed until patients and families had reliable access to transportation, mental health support, and caregivers who can better understand medical information. At least 70% of families surveyed felt it was important to delay waitlisting until they had regulated blood pressure and well-managed labs. Ethical concerns emerge that waitlisting practices may contribute to disparities in access to transplant. Conclusion Providers and families agree that stabilizing the family situation and improving adherence to treatment are important reasons to delay waitlisting. However, pediatric patients facing greater disparities need easier access to psychological services, strengthened social support, access to economic resources, and stronger relationships with coordinators. Addressing patient burdens is essential for reaching more equitable listing practices.
Short report: engagement with health services during the COVID-19 outbreak: the case of Israeli people with diabetes

ABSTRACT Although continuing to utilize health services remains a key determinant of health, the association between the COVID-19 pandemic and engagement with health services among people with diabetes (PWD) remains unknown. This cross-sectional online survey examined factors associated with PWD’s engagement with health services among 205 Israeli PWD during the subsiding of the first COVID-19 wave in Israel. Participants completed measures of perceived diabetes status, perceived risk, emotional reactions toward COVID-19, sense of mastery, engagement with health services (fear of contracting the virus in health services, canceling a medical appointment), and socio-demographic questionnaires. Most participants were women, their mean age was 40.18 years, and mean years since diagnosis was 15.70. Participants were recruited mainly via diabetes internet forums. Logistic and multiple hierarchical regressions were calculated. The odds of canceling appointment were higher for younger participants and for participants experiencing greater negative emotional reactions. Higher fear of contracting the virus in health services was related to higher perceived risk and experiencing greater negative emotional reactions. Findings suggest that in order to encourage PWD to utilize health services during a virus outbreak, clinical interventions should address PWD’s perceived risk of contracting the virus and their emotional reactions toward COVID-19.
Dietary Intake of Advanced Glycation End Products (AGEs) and Mortality among Individuals with Colorectal Cancer

Advanced glycation end-products (AGEs) may promote oxidative stress and inflammation and have been linked to multiple chronic diseases, including cancer. However, the association of AGEs with mortality after colorectal cancer (CRC) diagnosis has not been previously investigated. Multivariable Cox proportional hazards models were used to calculate hazard ratios and corresponding 95% confidence intervals for associations between dietary intake of AGEs with CRC-specific and all-cause mortality among 5801 participant cases diagnosed with CRC in the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition study between 1993 and 2013. Dietary intakes of AGEs were estimated using country-specific dietary questionnaires, linked to an AGE database, that accounted for food preparation and processing. During a median of 58 months of follow-up, 2421 cases died (1841 from CRC). Individually or combined, dietary intakes of AGEs were not associated with all-cause and CRC-specific mortality among cases. However, there was a suggestion for a positive association between AGEs and all-cause or CRC-specific mortality among CRC cases without type II diabetes (all-cause, Pinteraction = 0.05) and CRC cases with the longest follow-up between recruitment and cancer diagnosis (CRC-specific, Pinteraction = 0.003; all-cause, Pinteraction = 0.01). Our study suggests that pre-diagnostic dietary intakes of AGEs were not associated with CRC-specific or all-cause mortality among CRC patients. Further investigations using biomarkers of AGEs and stratifying by sex, diabetes status, and timing of exposure to AGEs are warranted.
Carbon Footprint Reduction Strategies in the Context of Iran; A Quantitative Survey

Nowadays in many countries all over the world the enhancing amount of carbon footprint in the environment has been created numerous challenges and problems. In Iran as a developing country in the Middle East different efforts have been done in order to decrease the amount of greenhouse gasses. One of the most important areas of research about these issues refers to the construction and construction related sites. Based on the importance of this issue and due to its great influences on the human body, and also its great negative impact on the living environment, during the current study researchers attempted to find out affecting factors and strategies regarding the carbon foot print reductions in the construction sites of Iran. According to the importance of this issue, researchers of this study have been implemented a literature review to identify most important factors regarding carbon footprint reduction factors in the construction industry. After identifying the related questionnaire based on the literature review, reliability and also validity of the questionnaire has been analyzed by SPSS software after applying the pilot study. 25 people in charge with construction management issues have been participated in the quantitative survey. After doing the data analysis, five most important strategies for reducing carbon footprints in the construction sites have been identified namely Change design to the green & sustainability, Optimization of concrete or steel, efficient use of construction plant, using recyclable materials, knowledge of structural designers about carbon reduction methods. Hopefully the results of the current study seems to be useful for a number of people who can benefit from the results namely researchers in the construction management issues in Iran to use the results of the current study in their future career, contractors and managers in the construction sites, and finally administrative executive in the ministry of road and transportation of Iran to use the findings of the study in their future programming. KEY WORD: carbon footprint, construction industry, carbon footprint reduction, greenhouse gases.
Motion sickness. Part II: experimental verification on the railways of a model for predicting motion sickness incidence

This is the second part of a two-part paper in which a new theoretical approach for predicting motion sickness is experimentally validated by field measurements. In this paper, an extended research activity aimed at the validation of a theoretical model (developed by the authors to evaluate the MSI index) is illustrated. The motion sickness incidence(MSI) index represents the percentage of people that vomit within a certain time interval and was defined to evaluate the passengers’ response to low frequency motions. The activity was aimed to a rail scenario and it was conducted together with a well-known company in the railway industry. The rail tests were performed in Slovenia during 2005 (European research project ‘FACT: Fast and Comfortable Trains’). In the paper, a comparison is made between the results, expressed in terms of MSI values and time histories, obtained from experimental results (subjective measures acquired using questionnaires) and by the authors’ theoretical model (starting from experimental objective measures acquired in the form of acceleration time histories).
Power Comparisons of Normality Tests Based on L-moments and Classical Tests

Normality tests are used in the statistical analysis to determine whether a normal distribution is acceptable as a model for the data analysed. A wide range of available tests employs different properties of normal distribution to compare empirical and theoretical distributions. In the present paper, we perform the Monte Carlo simulation to analyse test power. We compare commonly known and applied tests (standard and robust versions of the Jarque-Bera test, Lilliefors test, chi-square goodness-of-ﬁt t est, S hapiro-Francia test, Cramer-von Mises goodness-of-fit test, Shapiro-Wilk test, D ' Agostino test, and Anderson-Darling test) to the test based on robust L-moments. In the text, in Jarque-Bera type test the moment characteristics of skewness and kurtosis are replaced with their robust versions - L-skewness and L-kurtosis. The distributions with heavy tails (lognormal, Weibull, loglogistic and Student) are used to draw random samples to show the performance of tests when applied on data with outliers. Small sample properties (from 10 observations) are analysed up to large samples of 200 observations. Our results concerning the properties of the classical tests are in line with the conclusion of other recent articles. We concentrate on properties of the test based on L-moments. This normality test is comparable to well-performing and reliable tests; however, it is outperformed by the most powerful Shapiro-Wilks and Shapiro-Francia tests. It works well for Student (symmetric) distribution, comparably with the most frequently used Jarque-Berra tests. As expected, the test is robust to the presence of outliers in comparison with sensitive tests based on product moments or correlations. The test turns out to be very universally reliable.
INTEGRACuBe: Exploração de dados analíticos em RDF

O crescimento de conjuntos de dados disponíveis na Web que utilizam o padrão RDF propicia análises de dados que envolvem múltiplas dimensões. Segundo a W3C, um dos recursos para analisar dados multidimensionais é a utilização do vocabulário RDF Data Cube. Contudo ainda há uma carência de instrumentos de apoio para aplicação deste vocabulário em conjuntos de dados. Nesse sentido, este artigo propõe o INTEGRACuBe, um ambiente que utiliza um metaesquema e mecanismos semiautomatizados para apoiar o mapeamento de recursos de dados ao metamodelo RDF Data Cube. Como resultado, será possível a exploração de dados analíticos em RDF. Adicionalmente, um estudo de caso é apresentado no cenário de Gerência de Desenvolvimento de Software.
High bladder pressure reduces the ability to filter out interference from distractors in low perceptual load condition

According to the load theory of attention, an active cognitive control mechanism is needed to ensure that behaviour is controlled by target-relevant information when distractors are also perceived. Although the active cognitive control mechanism consists of working memory, cognitive flexibility, and inhibition components, predictions regarding the load effects of this mechanism were derived mostly from studies on working memory. We aimed to test whether these predictions are also valid for an inhibition component. The inhibitory load was manipulated physiologically by creating different bladder pressure and its effects on distractor interference were examined under low and high perceptual load conditions. The results indicated that the availability of inhibitory control resources was important for decreasing the interference of distractors in the low perceptual load condition and that the high perceptual load reduced the effects of distractors independently from the availability of inhibitory resources. The results were consistent with the predictions of load theory, and to the best of our knowledge, the study provided the first piece of evidence in terms of the load effect of inhibition component on distractor interference.
Applications Of Compressive Sensing Over Wireless Fading Channels

Abstract Wireless fading channels exist mixed noise, the most common noises are gaussian noise and impulse noise, to ensure the quality of the received signal, removing the noise in the channel is very important and necessary. WSDN (wavelet soft-threshold de-noising) can suppress low-intensity gaussian noise well; unfortunately, the denoising effect in removing impulse noise using WSDN is not obvious, especially when noise intensity is relatively high. BPDN (Basis Pursuit Denoising) which is a reconstruction algorithm of compressive sensing can control high-intensity gaussian noise in the channels well preceding WSDN, but also the effect of BPDN denoising the common impulse noise is not obvious, to denoise impulse noise, we adopt IBPDN (Improved Basis Pursuit Denoising) that changes L2 form to noise to L1 form, which was proposed in 2006 by Guosheng Bing. The experimental data show that IBPDN has good anti-noise ability to both gaussian noise and impulse noise; furthermore, more satisfactory results are obtained using IBPDN to mixed noise than those with BPDN.
Startup Control to Eliminate Inrush Current for Star-Connected Cascaded H-Bridge STATCOM

Soft startup is essential to the operation of the star-connected cascaded H-bridge (CHB) STATCOM. The conventional startup stage involves only uncontrolled rectifier process in which the dc voltages are charged by inserting startup resistors to limit the inrush current. Nevertheless, another inrush current is induced at the beginning of normal operation due to the low charged dc voltages during the startup stage. In this article, to eliminate this inrush current, a novel startup control is proposed for further charging the dc voltages after the uncontrolled rectifier process. During this controlled charging process, the startup resistors are not bypassed so as to smoothen the dc voltages and limit the inrush current. In this scenario, the overall dc voltage control with constant charging current is proposed by establishing a relationship between the overall dc voltage and the positive sequence modulation index. Besides, the cluster dc voltage balancing control based on the negative sequence voltage injection is proposed by redistributing the active power of the STATCOM. Moreover, the charging current is designed to reduce the active power of the startup resistors and increase the charging speed. Due to the flexibility of the startup control, it can be applied to any voltage-source-based ac/dc grid-connected converter. Finally, the performance of the proposed control is verified by the simulation and experimental results.
The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Cancer Care and Health-Related Quality of Life of Non-Hispanic Black/African American, Hispanic/Latina and Non-Hispanic White Women Diagnosed with Breast Cancer in the U.S.: A Mixed-Methods Study Protocol

The COVID-19 pandemic has had critical consequences for cancer care delivery, including altered treatment protocols and delayed services that may affect patients’ quality of life and long-term survival. Breast cancer patients from minoritized racial and ethnic groups already experience worse outcomes, which may have been exacerbated by treatment delays and social determinants of health (SDoH). This protocol details a mixed-methods study aimed at comparing cancer care disruption among a diverse sample of women (non-Hispanic White, non-Hispanic Black/African American, and Hispanic/Latina) and assessing how proximal, intermediate, and distal SDoH differentially contribute to care continuity and health-related quality of life. An embedded mixed-methods design will be implemented. Eligible participants will complete an online survey, followed by a semi-structured interview (with a subset of participants) to further understand factors that influence continuity of care, treatment decision-making, and self-reported engagement. The study will identify potentially modifiable factors to inform future models of care delivery and improve care transitions. These data will provide the necessary evidence to inform whether a subsequent, multilevel intervention is warranted to improve quality of care delivery in the COVID-19 aftermath. Additionally, results can be used to identify ways to leverage existing social resources to help manage and support patients’ outcomes.
Dialysis Adequacy among Haemodialysis Patients in Eastern Mediterranean Region: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Introduction: Dialysis adequacy is one of the most important indicators for measuring the quality of care provided in hemodialysis (HD) wards. Despite individual studies, there is still no comprehensive study about dialysis adequacy in the Eastern Mediterranean Region (EMRO). This study was conducted to evaluate the dialysis adequacy in HD patients in the EMRO. Methods: In the present systematic review and meta-analysis international (EMBASE, Scopus, PubMed, Web of Science) and national (SID, MAGIRAN) databases were searched for related articles using keywords “dialysis adequacy” and “EMRO” from 1 January 2000 to April 30, 2020. The quality of studies was studied using Hoy et al instrument. Results: Out of 966 retrieved studies, 63 studies conducted on 15462 HD patients were included. The pooled mean of KT/V and URR were 1.24 (95% CI: 1.19, 1.30) and 63.03% (95% CI: 61.31, 64.75), respectively. The pooled prevalence of Kt/V>1.2 and URR>65.0% were 42.73% (95% CI: 31.58, 53.88) and 42.52% (95% CI: 25.3, 59.7), respectively. Conclusion: The results of the present study indicate the poor dialysis adequacy in the EMRO region and the need to improve the physical infrastructure, workforce, and pieces of equipment in hemodialysis wards.
Social Decisions from Description Compared to Experience Rely on Different Cognitive and Neural Processes

Social decisions reveal the degree to which people consider societal needs relative to their own desires. Although many studies showed how social decisions are taken when the consequences of actions are given as explicit information, little is known about how social choices are made when the relevant information was learned through repeated experience. Here, we compared how these two different ways of learning about the value of alternatives (description versus experience) impact social decisions in 147 healthy young adult humans. Using diffusion decision models, we show that, although participants chose similar outcomes across the learning conditions, they sampled and processed information differently. During description decisions, information sampling depended on both chosen and foregone rewards for self and society, while during experience decisions sampling was proportional to chosen outcomes only. Our behavioral data indicate that description choices involved the active processing of more information. Additionally, neuroimaging data from 40 participants showed that the brain activity was more closely associated with the information sampling process during description relative to experience decisions. Overall, our work indicates that the cognitive and neural mechanisms of social decision making depend strongly on how the values of alternatives were learned in addition to individual social preferences.