Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The hip joint as an egg shape: a comprehensive study of femoral and acetabular morphologies

ABSTRACT Understanding the morphological features characterising a normal femoral head and acetabular cavity is critical for a more comprehensive and updated definition of hip anatomy. Based on anatomical observations, MacConaill introduced the notion that spheroidal articular surfaces are better represented by ovoidal shapes, in comparison with the still well-established spherical shape. This work tests MacConaill’s classification by using a surface-fitting framework to assess the goodness-of-fit regarding the largest assortment of sphere-like shapes presented in a single study (i.e. a total of 10 different shapes: sphere, rotational conchoids, rotational ellipsoid, ellipsoid, superellipsoid, Barr’s superellipsoid, tapered ellipsoid, Barr’s tapered superellipsoid, ovoid, superovoid). Anatomical data of the femoral head and acetabular cavity were obtained from computed tomography scans of a gender-balanced, asymptomatic 15 population of 30 adult subjects. The framework involved image segmentation with active contour methods, mesh smoothing and decimation, and surface fitting to point clouds was performed with genetic algorithms. The statistical analysis of the surface-fitting errors revealed the superior approximation of non-spherical shapes: superovoids provided the best fit for each femoral head and acetabular cavity, whereas spheres presented the worst fitting values. We also addressed gender variability in bony 20 hip geometry as sphericity, ellipticity, conicity and squareness were measured.
AMNIOTIC MEMBRANE TRANSPLANTATION IN THE OCULAR SURGERY

Background. To review the use and proposed mechanisms of amniotic membrane transplantation in the ocular surgery: preparing and storage; indication for the use of amniotic membrane and description of different surgical procedures. Methods. Significant clinical and experimental publications are reviewed and our results are presented. Results. Amniotic membrane transplantation stimulates epithelialization and has anti-inflammatory and anticicatrical effect. Conclusions. Good results of treatment with amniotic membrane transplantation can be seen in resolving a persistent epithelial defect of the cornea, symptomatic bullous keratopathy after cataract surgery, acute chemical and thermal burn of the ocular surface and limbal stem cell deficiency.
Experience of using mental health indicators in six low and middle-income countries where mental health is integrated in primary care: a qualitative study

Background Successful scale up of integrated primary mental health care requires routine monitoring of key programme performance indicators. A consensus set of mental health indicators has been proposed but evidence on their use in routine settings is lacking. Aims To assess the acceptability, feasibility, perceived costs and sustainability of implementing indicators relating to integrated mental health service coverage in six South-Asian (India, Nepal) and sub-Saharan African countries (Ethiopia, Nigeria, South Africa, Uganda). Method A qualitative study using semi-structured key informant interviews (n=128) was conducted. The ‘Performance of Routine Information Systems’ framework for assessing the performance of the implementation of new forms to measure mental health indicators served as the basis of a coding framework covering three main categories: (1) technical; (2) organisation; and (3) behavioural determinants. Results
The Active Mining Project

The need for collecting the relevant information mining useful knowledge and promptly reacting to situ ation change is ever increasing in the society of information ood Active mining project explores the mechanisms of active information collection to e ectively search and preprocess necessary information user centered ac tive mining to e ectively mine various forms of information sources and active user reaction to make the mined knowledge easily accessible for prompt feedback The project aims at exhibiting the spiral e ect of these interleaved three mechanisms by challenging to analyze a common medical dataset as a test bed
Biological traits of macroinvertebrates from Puna peatbogs: Patterns along spatial environmental gradients

We investigated the relationships between the biological traits of macroinvertebrates and the environmental characteristics of 13 peatbogs of the Puna and High Andean ecoregions. We recorded the abundance of aquatic macroinvertebrates and 8 focal biological traits (maximum size, body shape, body flexibility, exoskeleton hardness, type of respiration, locomotion, functional feeding group, and specific adaptations to flow constraint). At each sampling point within each bog we measured elevation as well as different physical-chemical characteristics of the water. We used RLQ analysis, which links environmental features (R) with biological traits (Q) through taxon abundances (L). Water temperature, specific conductivity, and flow were most strongly associated with variation in invertebrate traits among the bogs. We developed a graphic model of the habitat templet that accounts for how these environmental factors shape the observed diversity of traits. We expect organisms to have different traits depending on where their habitat falls on the habitat templet. By delineating the nature of the relationship between traits and habitat features, this paper provides the basics for understanding functional aspects of peatbogs such as resource uses in the context of operating ecological filters.
Preschool Teachers’ Perspectives on Using English Language to Teach

In the Malaysian National Preschool Standards-based Curriculum context, preschool teachers are being asked to use English as a medium of instruction for part of their teaching activities. However, there have been criticisms that low English language proficiencies among these teachers may have hindered their ability to provide meaningful educational experiences for the children in their care. Yet, little is understood about the language proficiency of these teachers in their own context. An explanatory mixed methods design has been used in the present study with data collected in two phases. In the quantitative phase, a survey is used to investigate 204 preschool teachers’ current levels of English proficiency, the levels they think necessary for using it effectively, and the gap between the two levels. The qualitative phase uses semi-structured interviews with 12 preschool teachers. The preschool teachers believe that high or advanced language proficiency would be needed for its effective use. However, in the interviews, they also consider empathy for the children, a passion for teaching, the ability to make the class fun and interesting as equally important. There is also a lot of ‘language switching’ between English, the Malay language and the mother tongue to meet the requirements of the day’s lesson. Although preschool teachers in general showed positive stances about the decision to use English for part of the instructional time, they also suggest that some form of benchmarks that address the kinds or levels of English language proficiency needed for its effective use would be useful.
Investigating the Crowd’s Creativity for Creating On-Demand IoT Scenarios

ABSTRACT The IoT industry supplies a plethora of Internet connected devices and services supporting smart home automation. However, end-users having little knowledge of the features and possibilities of such technologies, face difficulties in conjuring up useful application scenarios combining such devices and services, thus missing out on potential applications outside those provided by vendors. A remedy for such end-users can potentially be found in crowdsourcing IoT scenario creation. For such an enterprise to be viable it is essential to assess whether crowdsourcing can result in practical and original scenarios. This article reports two studies aiming to establish the practicality and originality of crowdsourced IoT scenarios for smart homes. In the first study, we recruited 102 crowd workers who created 306 scenarios in various categories. We then recruited a second cohort of 620 crowd workers to rate the scenarios’ creativity. In the second study, we evaluated the corpus of IoT scenarios by 20-experienced smart home users recruited through a screening survey. Our results show that the crowd evaluations of originality and creativity are strongly correlated with those of smart home users. Our major IoT-specific findings in relation to creativity are: a) The number of IoT devices and the number of combination of devices impact how creative the scenarios are perceived; b) Workers with self-reported intermediate programming knowledge wrote more creative scenarios when compared to workers having expert knowledge; c) Computational metrics such as text metrics can provide the basis for automated assessment of the scenarios’ creativity. Finally, an inductive thematic analysis of the scenarios revealed interesting themes (e.g., types of rules, automation styles and novel operators) which can serve as a guide for designing more expressive and intuitive end-user development solutions, in the context of IoT.
HC-SPH: A conserved serine protease homolog of S1 superfamily in the triangle-shell pearl mussel (Hyriopsis cumingii)

Serine proteases play central roles in immune defense in invertebrates through innate immunity, and are particularly important complement system in molluscs because their susceptibility to infection due to lack of an adaptive immune ability. A gene encoding the serine protease homolog from the triangle - shell pearl mussel (Hyriopsis cumingii) was identified and designated as HC-SPH in this study. Protein sequence analysis revealed that HC-SPH consists of a typical Tryp_SPc functional domain of serine protease of S1 family lead by a signal peptide, and the molecule shares a highly conserved sequence and structural organization with other members, including a cleavage site, 3 enzymatic active sites and 3 substrate binding sites, so that it was clustered into a trypsin-like serine protease subfamily of the S1 superfamily. Semi - quantitative analysis of the amplicons separated on agarose gel by comparing to the β-actin products revealed that the digestive gland had a strong expression while the gonads were seen as weak expression sites. Infected by Aeromonas hydrophila, the gene expression was significantly up - regulated in the kidney at the 6 hours post challenge (hpc), stomach at 12 hpc and gills at 24 hpc while the expression maintained steadily unchanged in the digestive gland. However, up to 48 hpc, the expression levels in all four tissues reached significantly high, and also joined by a high level of expression in intestine that was down - regulated before 24 hpc, to build up an enhanced immune defense. The complementary up - regulation of the gene expression in these tissues suggested a temporal and spatial reinforce model for HC-SPH in immune response.
Environmental Attention-Guided Branchy Neural Network for Speech Enhancement

The performance of speech enhancement algorithms can be further improved by considering the application scenarios of speech products. In this paper, we propose an attention-based branchy neural network framework by incorporating the prior environmental information for noise reduction. In the whole denoising framework, first, an environment classification network is trained to distinguish the noise type of each noisy speech frame. Guided by this classification network, the denoising network gradually learns respective noise reduction abilities in different branches. Unlike most deep neural network (DNN)-based methods, which learn speech reconstruction capabilities with a common neural structure from all training noises, the proposed branchy model obtains greater performance benefits from the specially trained branches of prior known noise interference types. Experimental results show that the proposed branchy DNN model not only preserved better enhanced speech quality and intelligibility in seen noisy environments, but also obtained good generalization in unseen noisy environments.
Morphological decomposition in Bantu: a masked priming study on Setswana prefixation

ABSTRACT African languages have rarely been the subject of psycholinguistic experimentation. The current study employs a masked visual priming experiment to investigate morphological processing in a Bantu language, Setswana. Our study takes advantage of the rich system of prefixes in Bantu languages, which offers the opportunity of testing morphological priming effects from prefixed inflected words and directly comparing them to priming effects from prefixed derived words on the same targets. We found significant priming effects of similar magnitude for both prefixed inflected and derived word forms, which were clearly dissociable from prime-target relatedness in both meaning and (orthographic) form. These findings provide support for a (possibly universal) mechanism of morphological decomposition applied during early visual word recognition that segments both (prefixed) inflected and derived word forms into their morphological constituents.
The Price of Good Friendships: Examining the Roles of Relationship Norms and Perceived Controllability in Service Failure Encounters

Despite companies’ efforts to cultivate positive relationships with their consumers, negative relational episodes such as customer service failures are inevitable. This study examines how perceived controllability of a service failure determines responses from consumers who have previously formed quality relationships with the company. Specifically, it distinguishes two types of quality relationships: communal and exchange relationships. It investigates how these two types of relationships interact with different levels of perceived service failure controllability, and collectively influence consumers’ emotional, cognitive, and behavioral responses (i.e., anger, perceived betrayal, and negative WOM intention) to the failure encounters. Results of an online experiment (N = 140) show that consumers experience a greater level of anger and perceived betrayal when they consider the service failure as highly controllable (vs. uncontrollable) by the company. More important, this effect pattern only occurs when prior company-consumer relationships are communal rather than exchange. The results of this study enrich our body of knowledge on the role of company-consumer relationships in service failure encounters and provide useful guidelines for company-consumer relationship development and service failure management and recovery.
The construction and use of a Francisella tularensis DNA microarray.

A DNA microarray was designed and constructed using the genome sequence of the highly virulent obligate intracellular pathogen Francisella tularensis strain Schu S4. The microarray was optimised and then tested by performing a comparative genomics study on Francisella strains. The microarray was used to distinguish between Francisella strains at the subspecies level, detecting differences between the genomes of the subspecies at a similar rate to differences previously published from Francisella comparative genomics studies. Further analysis of the genomic differences identified between subspecies using the microarray has provided some suggestions as to the genetic basis for the relative attenuation of one subspecies, and similarly, differences identified between the F. tularensis live vaccine strain and its progenitor strain provided some clues as the genetic basis for the attenuation of the vaccine strain. The microarray was also used to carry out functional genomics studies on Francisella novicida cultured under in vitro stress conditions: iron starvation, oxidative stress, elevated temperature, and acidic pH. A number of genes were regulated in response to each of these conditions, and a detailed analysis of the data has provided insights into the stress response of Francisella, and some of the mechanisms that it may employ upon encountering similar stresses in vivo.
Empirical investigation: performance and power-consumption based dual-level model for exascale computing systems

Exascale computing systems (ECS) are anticipated to perform at Exaflop speed (1018 operations per second) using power consumption <20 MW. This ultrascale performance requires the speedup in the system by thousand-fold enhancement in current Petascale. For future high-performance computing (HPC), power consumption is one of the vital challenges faced to achieve Exaflops through the traditional way of increasing clock-speed. One standard way to attain such significant performance is through massive parallelism. In the early stages, it is hard to decide the promising parallel programming approach that can provide massive parallelism to attain ExaFlops. This article commences with a short description and implementation of algorithms of various hybrid parallel programming models (PPMs) for homogeneous and heterogeneous cluster systems. Furthermore, the authors evaluated performance and power consumption in these hybrid models by implementing in two HPC benchmarking applications such as square matrix multiplication and Jacobi iterative solver for two-dimensional Laplace equation. The results demonstrated that the hybrid of heterogeneous (MPI + X) outperformed to homogeneous parallel programming (MPI + OpenMP) model. This empirical investigation of hybrid PPMs is a leading step for researchers and development communities to select a promising model for emerging ECS.
MPPT for Electromagnetic Energy Harvesters Having Nonnegligible Output Reactance Operating Under Slow-Varying Conditions

Most maximum power point trackers (MPPTs) for electromagnetic energy harvesters (EMEHs) are based on resistive matching technology, where the input resistance of the MPPT is made equal to the magnitude of the output impedance of the harvester. This is valid when the output reactance of the EMEH is much smaller than its output resistance. However, some EMEHs, such as permanent magnet generator, have nonnegligible output reactance. The discrepancy between the power extracted by the resistive matching technology and the maximum extractable power will increase as the output reactance increases. Under high excitation frequency and low operating temperature, the effect of the output reactance will become more dominant. In order to deal with such issue, an MPPT that can counteract the effect of the coil inductance and match with the coil resistance is presented. It does not require knowing coil parameters a priori and the harvester will be operated at its true maximum power point. A 7-W prototype for testing the proposed algorithm has been built and evaluated. Its performance is favorably compared with the amount of power extracted with the resistive matching technology.
Tax Compliance: Research Methods and Decision Processes

Traditionally, research focuses on individual taxpayers that—when faced with a decision under uncertainty—are assumed to maximize their profits through rational decision processes. However, economic psychology and behavioral economics reveal several anomalies where the observed effects are opposite to the theoretical predictions. Moreover, psychological research provides evidence for the importance of factors such as the understanding of the tax law, attitudes toward taxes and tax morale, personal and social norms, and perception of distributive and procedural justice. In this paper, we provide a review of the research on tax compliance decisions. We address traditional approaches to study compliance decisions and anomalies as well as the psychological determinants of compliance. Since different research methods reveal different results, we describe the arsenal of research methods and their strengths and weaknesses. We pay specific attention to results from process tracing approaches in tax compliance research. We conclude with practical implications for policymakers and researchers in the field.
Pazar Yönlülük ve İnovasyonun Performans Üzerindeki Etkisi: Antalya’da Bir Araştırma

Kuresellesme ile birlikte isletmelerin rekabet cercevesi genislemistir. Bu yuzden isletmelerin surdurulebilir rekabet avantaji saglamak icin; birtakim degisiklikler yapmasi gerekmektedir. Pazar yonluluk; isletmelerin rekabet avantaji saglamasina katki saglayan onemli bir stratejik yaklasimdir. Ancak degisen pazar sartlarinda bu strateji tek basina yeterli olmamakta; onu guclendirecek daha baska stratejilere ihtiyac duyulmaktadir. Bununla birlikte; inovasyon da isletmeler icin onemli bir strateji haline gelmistir. Bu baglamda bu arastirmanin amaci, isletmelerin inovasyona bakis acisini ve pazar yonlulugun isletme performansina etkisini arastirmaktir. Bu kapsamda bir pilot arastirma yapilmistir. Yapilan pilot arastirmada Isparta ilinde faaliyet gosteren isletmelerden veri toplanmistir. Bu calisma ise Antalya Organize Sanayii bolgesindeki cesitli sektorlerde faaliyet gosteren isletmeler uzerinde yapilmistir. Literaturde inovasyon ve pazar yonlulugun performans uzerinde pozitif etkisi oldugunu tespit eden veya pazar yonlulugun ya da inovasyonun herhangi bir boyutuyla degerlendiren calismalar bulunmaktadir. Ancak inovasyon ve pazar yonlulugun kabul goren boyutlarini butuncul bir sekilde ele alan calismalarin yeterince olmamasi nedeniyle, bu arastirma alana katki saglayacak bir calisma olmasi nedeniyle onem tasimaktadir.
Local Source Vp and Vs Tomography in the Mount St. Helens Region With the iMUSH Broadband Array

We present new 3‐D P wave and S wave velocity models of the upper 20 km of the Mount St. Helens (MSH) region. These were obtained using local‐source arrival time tomography from earthquakes and explosions recorded at 70 broadband stations deployed as part of the imaging Magma Under St. Helens (iMUSH) project and augmented by several data sets. Principal features of our models include (1) low P wave and S wave velocities along the St. Helens seismic zone to depths of at least 20 km corresponding to high conductivity imaged by iMUSH magnetotelluric studies. This delineates a zone of weakness that magma can exploit at the location of MSH; (2) a 5‐ to 7‐km diameter, 6–15 km deep, 3–6% negative P wave and S wave velocity anomaly beneath MSH, consistent with previous estimates of the source region for recent eruptions. We interpret this as a magma storage region containing up to 15–20 km3 of partial melt, which is about 5 times more than the largest documented eruption at MSH; (3) a broad region of low P wave velocity below 10‐km depth extending between Mount Adams and Mount Rainier along and to the east of the main Cascade arc, which is likely due to high‐temperature arc crust and possible presence of fluids or melt; (4) several anomalies associated with surface‐mapped features, including high‐velocity igneous units such as the Spud Mountain and Spirit Lake plutons and low velocities in the Chehalis sedimentary basin and the Indian Heaven volcanic field. Our results place further constraints on the geometry of these features at depth.