Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Rapid intracranial clot removal with a new device: the alligator retriever.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Despite availability of an approved drug to treat acute cerebral ischemia, most patients with stroke do not realize a good outcome. A method that would rapidly increase or restore cerebral perfusion before irreversible cell death should improve patient outcomes. MATERIALS AND METHODS We recently had the opportunity to treat 6 middle-aged-to-elderly patients who presented with signs and symptoms of acute cerebral ischemia, by mechanically removing their (predominantly) middle cerebral artery clots by using a new retrieval device that had been previously approved by the US Food and Drug Administration for intravascular retrieval of foreign bodies. During a 2-month period, the 6 patients were treated in 5 separate institutions. No patient had an unsuccessful attempt at clot removal. The cases were collected by personal communication with each operator. RESULTS In all instances, use of the device resulted in rapid clot removal. Each patient had a large improvement in National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale score. Two of the 6 patients had experienced failure of another clot retrieval device, and 3 patients required no systemic thrombolytics, reducing the likelihood of one of the most feared complications of stroke therapy, intracranial hemorrhage. SUMMARY We believe that use of this device may result in improved outcomes for patients with acute ischemic stroke. In our limited experience, it provided a rapid, safe, and effective means for achieving revascularization.
Geographic poverty traps? A micro model of consumption growth in rural China

How important are neighbourhood endowments of physical and human capital in explaining diverging fortunes over time for otherwise identical households in a developing rural economy? To answer this question we develop an estimable micro model of consumption growth allowing for constraints on factor mobility and externalities, whereby geographic capital can influence the productivity of a household's own capital. Our statistical test has considerable power in detecting geographic effects given that we control for latent heterogeneity in measured consumption growth rates at the micro level. We find robust evidence of geographic poverty traps in farm-household panel data from post-reform rural China. Our results strengthen the equity and efficiency case for public investment in lagging poor areas in this setting. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
College Students' Use of Electronic Communication with Parents: Links to Loneliness, Attachment, and Relationship Quality

Despite the ubiquitous use of new communication technologies, gaps in our knowledge remain regarding who is likely to rely on particular technologies and potential ramifications of these forms of communication on individuals' relationships and adjustment. In an online survey, 211 college students reported on their use of electronic communication with a parent who they identified as their closest family member. Results indicated that students who report more frequent phone conversations with parents also report more satisfying, intimate, and supportive parental relationships, but those students who use a social-networking site to communicate with parents report higher levels of loneliness, anxious attachment, as well as conflict within the parental relationship. The findings offer new evidence on how electronic communication technology with parents is related to adjustment in college students. Our study also suggests that further research is needed using longitudinal designs to understand better young adults' use of technology to communicate in today's society.
Biological and molecular variability of human immunodeficiency virus type 2 isolates from The Gambia

Seven new human immunodeficiency virus type 2 (HIV-2) isolates (CBL-20 to CBL-26) from The Gambia were characterized. Their cytopathogenicity and growth in vitro correlated with the severity of clinical disease. CBL-22 was highly sensitive to neutralization by HIV-2 sera and was cross-neutralized by some HIV-1 sera. These findings, the differing sizes of envelope glycoproteins of individual isolates, and the sequence analysis of amplified regions of the viral DNAs show that these HIV-2 isolates from one geographical region in West Africa exhibit biological and genome variability comparable to that observed for HIV-1.
Clinical practice guideline: management of acute pancreatitis.

ABSTRACT There has been an increase in the incidence of acute pancreatitis reported worldwide. Despite improvements in access to care, imaging and interventional techniques, acute pancreatitis continues to be associated with significant morbidity and mortality. Despite the availability of clinical practice guidelines for the management of acute pancreatitis, recent studies auditing the clinical management of the condition have shown important areas of noncompliance with evidence-based recommendations. This underscores the importance of creating understandable and implementable recommendations for the diagnosis and management of acute pancreatitis. The purpose of the present guideline is to provide evidence-based recommendations for the management of both mild and severe acute pancreatitis as well as the management of complications of acute pancreatitis and of gall stone-induced pancreatitis.
The Use of Virtual and Mixed Reality Environments for Urban Behavioural Studies

Virtual/mixed reality 3D models of real -world environments can be used to run behavioural and other experiments with real human subjects, replacing the traditional approach where studies are conduct ed in physical environments. Use of the virtual/mixed reality environments can minimize problems related to feasibility, experimental control, ethics and cost, but care must be taken to en sure that the environments are immersive and create “suspension of d isbelief”. In this position paper the issues involved are discussed and illustrated by a 3D virtual model of an urban environment that is being used to study the role of fear in pedestrian navigation.
Carers continuing to care after residential care placement

One of the most difficult times for family carers is when the person they care for moves into a residential care home. Although they are relieved to some extent of the day-to-day tasks of caring, they lose the company of their loved one, which can be especially difficult for spouse carers. It is not always easy to obtain residential placement near to the carer's home, so carers may have to travel some distance to see the person they care for, which they often do on a daily basis. Furthermore, they lose control of the care provided, including the perceived quality of that care. They may also lose services, such as home care, or benefits, such as carer payments, that they were receiving on behalf of the person they were caring for or due to their caring responsibilities. These issues are often poorly recognized and managed in a service system that focuses more on the instrumental rather than emotional and social aspects of care for older people. It is often thought that residential care placement signifies the end of the caring role. However, qualitative research in this area highlights that family care is not relinquished when the cared for person goes into residential care and this is clearly demonstrated in the review of the qualitative literature by Afram and colleagues in this issue.
Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports A Potential Function Approach to the Flow of Play in Soccer

There is a growing literature on the statistical analysis of data from association-football/ soccer games, seasons or groups of seasons. In contrast this paper is concerned with a single play, that is a sequence of successful passes. The play studied contained 25 passes and ended in a goal for Argentina in World Cup 2006. One question addressed is how to describe analytically the spatial-temporal movement of such a particular sequence of passes. The basic data are points in the plane, successively joined by straight lines. The resulting figure represents the trajectory of the moving soccer ball. The approach of this study is to develop a useful potential function, a concept arising from physics and engineering. In particular the potential function leads to a regression model that may be fit directly by linear least squares. The resulting potential function may be used for simple description, summary, comparison, simulation, prediction, model appraisal, bootstrapping, and employed for estimating quantities of interest. The purpose illustrated here is to simulate play in a game where the ball goes back and forth between two teams each having their own potential function.
GENOA - A Customizable, Language- And Front-end Independent Code Analyzer

Programmers working on large software systems spend a great deal of time examining code and trying to understand it. Code Analysis tools (e.g., cross referencing tools such as CIA and Cscope) can be very helpful in this process. In this paper we describe GENOA, an application generator that can produce a whole range of useful code analysis tools. GENOA is designed to be language- and front-end independent; it can be interfaced to any front-end for any language that produces an attributed parse tree, simply by writing an interface spec- ification. While GENOA programs can perform arbitrary analyses on the parse tree, the GENOA language has special, compact iteration operators that are tuned for expressing simple, polynomial time analysis programs; in fact, there is a useful sublanguage of GENOA that can express precisely all (and only) polynomial time (PTIME) analysis prograrns on parse-trees. Thus, we argue that GENOA is a convenient "little language" to implement simple, fast analysis tools. We describe the system, provide several practical examples, and present complexity and expressivity results for the abovementioned sublanguage of GENOA.
Study of free radicals in neonates born through meconium stained amniotic fluid deliveries.

INDIAN PEDIATRICS 956 VOLUME 42__SEPTEMBER 17, 2005 Study of Free Radicals in Neonates Born Through Meconium Stained Amniotic Fluid Deliveries 8 Group A2, meconium stained 14 Group B1, meconium stained with birth asphyxia 11Group B2) were subjects of the study. Informed consent was taken from the parents. Only FT-AGA babies were included so as to avoid other confounding variables. Babies with neonatal sepsis, hyperbilirubinemia and congenital malformations were excluded. The levels of malondialdehyde (MDA), hypoxanthine and xanthine were estimated in cord and 24 hours serum samples(3,4). Severe birth asphyxia was defined as Apgar score <3 at 1 minute. Student’s t test, paired t test and one way Anova were applied for statistical significance.
Water-Related Parasitic Diseases in China

Water-related parasitic diseases are directly dependent on water bodies for their spread or as a habitat for indispensable intermediate or final hosts. Along with socioeconomic development and improvement of sanitation, overall prevalence is declining in the China. However, the heterogeneity in economic development and the inequity of access to public services result in considerable burden due to parasitic diseases in certain areas and populations across the country. In this review, we demonstrated three aspects of ten major water-related parasitic diseases, i.e., the biology and pathogenicity, epidemiology and recent advances in research in China. General measures for diseases control and special control strategies are summarized.
Active contours initialization for ultrasound carotid artery images

One of the major issues of active contouring methods is their sensitivity to the initial contour that is provided by the user. Unless it is drawn close enough to the actual contour, it may lead to unsatisfactory results. Thus, most active contour algorithms require considerable user interaction to provide a good initial contour. In this paper we present an efficient and fast rule- based algorithm for generating a good carotid artery initial contour from ultrasound images. Our algorithm reduces user interaction, as a user is only required to place a seed point inside the region of interest. Sensitivity, precision rate, and overlap ratio have been used to assess the amount of correlation between manually segmented lumens by an experienced clinician and by our algorithm, where the obtained 95% confidence interval of the mean value of these measures over all test cases are: [78.32% plusmn 1.98], [91.77% plusmn 1.96], and [72.68% plusmn 1.90], respectively. Furthermore, the output of our proposed scheme can be used as an input to any active contour algorithm to produce even better results.
A 0.6–2.7 GHz Semidynamic Frequency Divide-by-3 Utilizing Wideband RC Polyphase Filter in 0.18  $\mu$m CMOS

A wideband complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) semidynamic frequency divide-by-3 covering more than two octave bandwidths is presented. The wideband operation without requiring a quadrature signal source is realized by employing a three-stage RC polyphase filter. The transfer function analysis on Type-II two- and three-stage polyphase filters is performed to provide analytic solutions of the peak phase error and peak attenuation. Implemented in 0.18 mum CMOS, the divide-by-3 operates over the input frequency range between 0.6 and 2.7 GHz while dissipating 15 mA from a 1.8 V supply.
Viscoelastic Fluid over a Stretching Sheet with Electromagnetic Effects and Nonuniform Heat Source / Sink

A magnetic hydrodynamic MHD of an incompressible viscoelastic fluid over a stretching sheet with electric and magnetic dissipation and nonuniform heat source/sink has been studied. The buoyant effect and the electric number E1 couple with magnetic parameter M to represent the dominance of the electric and magnetic effects, and adding the specific item of nonuniform heat source/sink is presented in governing equations which are the main contribution of this study. The similarity transformation, the finite-difference method, Newton method, and Gauss elimination method have been used to analyze the present problem. The numerical solutions of the flow velocity distributions, temperature profiles, and the important wall unknown values of f ′′ 0 and θ ′ 0 have been carried out. The parameter Pr, E1, or Ec can increase the heat transfer effects, but the parameter M or A∗ may decrease the heat transfer effects.
Asymptotically stable limit cycles generation by using nullspace decomposition and energy regulation

In this paper we address the problem of generating asymptotically stable limit cycles for a fully actuated multibody mechanical system through a feedback control law. Using the concept of conditional stability the limit cycle can be designed for a lower dimensional dynamical system describing how the original one evolves on a chosen submanifold and the corresponding velocity space. Moreover, the controller can be split up in two parts that can be independently designed and analyzed in order to reach the constraint submanifold and then produce the oscillation. Even if designed assuming a lower dimensional system, the limit cycle implies a periodic motion for the whole system.
Experiences at scale with PGAS versions of a Hydrodynamics application

In this work we directly evaluate two PGAS programming models, CAF and OpenSHMEM, as candidate technologies for improving the performance and scalability of scientific applications on future exascale HPC platforms. PGAS approaches are considered by many to represent a promising research direction with the potential to solve some of the existing problems preventing codebases from scaling to exascale levels of performance. The aim of this work is to better inform the exacsale planning at large HPC centres such as AWE. Such organisations invest significant resources maintaining and updating existing scientific codebases, many of which were not designed to run at the scales required to reach exascale levels of computational performance on future system architectures. We document our approach for implementing a recently developed Lagrangian-Eulerian explicit hydrodynamics mini-application in each of these PGAS languages. Furthermore, we also present our results and experiences from scaling these different approaches to high node counts on two state-of-the-art, large scale system architectures from Cray (XC30) and SGI (ICE-X), and compare their utility against an equivalent existing MPI implementation.
Impact of subjective dataset on the performance of image quality metrics

The interest in objective quality assessment have significantly increased over the past decades. Several objective quality metrics have been proposed and made publicly available, moreover, several subjective quality assessment databases are distributed in order to evaluate and compare the metrics. However, several question arises: are the objective metrics behaviours constant across databases, contents and distortions? how significantly the subjective scores might fluctuate on different displays (i.e. CRT or LCD)? which objective quality metric might best evaluate a given distortion? In this article, we analyse the behaviour of four objective quality metrics (including PSNR) tested on three image databases. We demonstrate that the performances of the quality metrics can strongly fluctuate depending on the database used for testing. We also show the consistency of all metrics for two distinct displays.
Impact of charging interruptions in coordinated electric vehicle charging

This paper investigates the impact of interrupted and uninterrupted charging strategies of plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) on the aggregated load profile while considering the user convenience, i.e., the desired state-of-charge of battery at the departure time. First, this paper introduces a new coordinated charging algorithm with interrupted charging intervals. Then, coordinated charging algorithms with uninterrupted and interrupted charging strategies are compared, with heuristic prioritizing policies, on different base-load characteristics under different PEV penetration rates. The impact is quantified in tenns of the variance of the aggregated load profile. The impact of the priority assignment policies on the aggregated load variance is also explored.
Money and Inflation in the Euro Area: A Case for Monetary Indicators?

This paper studies the relationship between inflation, output, money and interest rates in the euro area, using data spanning 1980-2000. The P model is shown to have considerable empirical support. Thus, the "price gap" or, equivalently, the "real money gap" (the gap between current real balances and long-run equilibrium real balances), has substantial predictive power for future inflation. The real money gap contains more information about future inflation than the output gap and the Eurosystem's money-growth indicator (the gap between current M3 growth and a reference value). The results suggest that the Eurosystem's money-growth indicator is an inferior indicator of future inflation.
Ferric Iron Reduction by Bacteria Associated with the Roots of Freshwater and Marine Macrophytes

ABSTRACT In vitro assays of washed, excised roots revealed maximum potential ferric iron reduction rates of >100 μmol g (dry weight)−1 day−1 for three freshwater macrophytes and rates between 15 and 83 μmol (dry weight)−1 day−1 for two marine species. The rates varied with root morphology but not consistently (fine root activity exceeded smooth root activity in some but not all cases). Sodium molybdate added at final concentrations of 0.2 to 20 mM did not inhibit iron reduction by roots of marine macrophytes (Spartina alterniflora and Zostera marina). Roots of a freshwater macrophyte, Sparganium eurycarpum, that were incubated with an analog of humic acid precursors, anthroquinone disulfate (AQDS), reduced freshly precipitated iron oxyhydroxide contained in dialysis bags that excluded solutes with molecular weights of >1,000; no reduction occurred in the absence of AQDS. Bacterial enrichment cultures and isolates from freshwater and marine roots used a variety of carbon and energy sources (e.g., acetate, ethanol, succinate, toluene, and yeast extract) and ferric oxyhydroxide, ferric citrate, uranate, and AQDS as terminal electron acceptors. The temperature optima for a freshwater isolate and a marine isolate were equivalent (approximately 32°C). However, iron reduction by the freshwater isolate decreased with increasing salinity, while reduction by the marine isolate displayed a relatively broad optimum salinity between 20 and 35 ppt. Our results suggest that by participating in an active iron cycle and perhaps by reducing humic acids, iron reducers in the rhizoplane of aquatic macrophytes limit organic availability to other heterotrophs (including methanogens) in the rhizosphere and bulk sediments.
An ID-based key agreement protocol based on ECC among users of separate networks

This paper proposes an identity based key agreement protocol based on elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) between users of different networks with independent private key generations (PKGs). Instead of bilinear pairings which commonly used for contracting identity based schemes, the proposed protocol makes use of elliptic curves to obtain more computational efficiency. The proposed protocol develops Cao et al's protocol for situations that two users of independent organizations or networks with separate servers want to share a secret key via an insecure link. The main novelty of this paper is security proof of the proposed protocol in the random oracle model. The security proof argues the security attributes of the proposed protocol.
Plasticity and Robotics

The link between robotic systems and living systems is increasingly considered to be important. However finding out more precisely which properties these two kinds of system must share is a difficult question to answer. It is suggested that behavioral plasticity constitutes a crucial property that robots must share with living beings. A classification is then proposed for the different aspects of plasticity that contribute to global behavioral plasticity in robotic and living systems. These are mainly divided into four dimensions and three orders. Finally some consequences of this classification are mentioned regarding the future of biologically-inspired robotics and the role of evolutionary AI.
Highly Efficient Saturated Power Amplifier

In this article, a high-efficiency saturated amplifier has been presented. This amplifier takes advantage of the nonlinear output capacitor to shape the voltage waveform. The nonlinear capacitor generates substantial second harmonic voltage with small higher order harmonics. Thus, using √2 times larger fundamental load and the proper second harmonic termination, the resultant voltage waveform can be half-sinusoidal. For high efficiency, the PA should be driven by the large input power. Therefore, the current of the PA is bifurcated, resulting in the quasirectangular current shape. The resultant output waveforms are similar to those of class-F1 amplifiers, whose waveforms are optimal for high efficiencies. Based on harmonic source/ load-pull simulation, the saturated amplifier has been designed using Cree's GaN HEMT CGH40006P packaged model. The matching networks for the input and output were optimized using the Momentum simulator. The implemented amplifier delivered a PAE of 80.1% at 3.475 GHz. The simulation and measurement results verify that the saturated amplifier is suitable for a high-efficiency PA over a relatively high frequency band.