Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Effects of Nurse Staffing on Adverse Events, Morbidity, Mortality, and Medical Costs

BackgroundNurse staffing levels are an important working condition issue for nurses and believed to be a determinant of the quality of nursing care and patient outcomes. ObjectivesTo examine the effects of nurse staffing on adverse events, morbidity, mortality, and medical costs. MethodsUsing two existing databases, the study sample included 232 acute care California hospitals and 124,204 patients in 20 surgical diagnosis-related groups. The adverse events included patient fall/injury, pressure ulcer, adverse drug event, pneumonia, urinary tract infection, wound infection, and sepsis. Multilevel analysis was employed to examine, simultaneously, the effects of nurse staffing and patient and hospital characteristics on patient outcomes. ResultsThree statistically significant relationships were found between nurse staffing and adverse events. An increase of 1 hour worked by registered nurses (RN) per patient day was associated with an 8.9% decrease in the odds of pneumonia. Similarly, a 10% increase in RN Proportion was associated with a 9.5% decrease in the odds of pneumonia. Providing a greater number of nursing hours per patient day was associated with a higher probability of pressure ulcers. The occurrence of each adverse event was associated with a significantly prolonged length of stay and increased medical costs. Patients who had pneumonia, wound infection or sepsis had a greater probability of death during hospitalization. ConclusionPatients are experiencing adverse events during hospitalization. Care systems to reduce adverse events and their consequences are needed. Having appropriate nurse staffing is a significant consideration in some cases.
Performance of the Adverse Drug Event Trigger Tool and the Global Trigger Tool for Identifying Adverse Drug Events: Experience in a Belgian Hospital

Background: Medication-related harm can be detected using the adverse drug event (ADE) trigger tool and the medication module of the Global Trigger Tool (GTT) developed by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI). In recent years, there has been some controversy on the performance of this method. In addition, there are limited data on the performance of the medication module of the GTT as compared with the ADE trigger tool. Objectives: To evaluate the performance of the ADE trigger tool and of the medication module of the GTT for identifying ADEs. Methods: The methodology of the IHI was used. A random sample of 20 adult admissions per month was selected over a 12-month period in a teaching hospital in Belgium. The ADE trigger tool was adapted to the Belgian setting and included 20 triggers. The positive predictive value (PPV) of each trigger was calculated, as well as the proportion of ADEs that would have been identified with the medication module of the GTT as compared with the ADE trigger tool. Results: A total of 200 triggers and 62 ADEs were found, representing 26 ADEs/100 admissions. Nineteen ADEs (31%) were found spontaneously without the presence of a trigger. Three triggers never occurred. The PPVs of other triggers varied from 0 to 0.67, with half of them having PPVs less than 0.20. If we had used the medication triggers included in the GTT (n = 11), we would have identified 77% of total ADEs and 67% of preventable ADEs. Conclusions: Applying the trigger tool method proposed by the IHI to a Belgian hospital led to the identification of one ADE out of 4 admissions. To increase performance, refining the list of triggers in the ADE trigger tool and in the medication module of the GTT would be needed. Recording nontriggered events should be encouraged.
Markov modeling of OFDM transmission over frequency selective channels

We present analytical tools for evaluating the performance of Reed-Solomon (RS) codes concatenated to a discrete communications system (DCS), based on the IEEE 802.11 standard, with OFDM modulation and frequency-selective fading channel. The main ideia is to model de DCS with a finite state Markov channel, more specifically the Gilbert-Elliott channel (GEC) in order to represent the successes and failures of the transmission of RS symbols over the DCS. The accuracy of the GEC is evaluated by comparing some statistics generated from simulations for the DCS with the numerically evaluated ones for the DCS.
Comparison of Fundamental Movement Skills among Young Children with Different Gender Age and BMI

Fundamental movement skills are considered as important foundation for establishing the future advanced skills. Early childhood is a critical period for developing the fundamental movement skills. However, most of research studies were focused on children aged above 6 years, and there is a dearth of knowledge among children aged between 3 and years. Therefore, it is necessary to explore the development of fundamental movement skills in preschool children. In this study, test method was conducted to investigate the fundamental movement skills of children ages 3-5 years. One hundred thirty-six boys and 131 girls (mean age = 4.4 years) from 4 different preschools of Chiayi City were participated in this study. Results showed that the locomotor skills were superior to object control skills among participants. The fundamental movement skills performed better with age. No significant differences between boys and girls in locomotor skills. However, boys were better than girls in object control skills, especially, in stationary dribbling skills. Furthermore, participants classified as normal-weight had better performance in object control skills than their under-weight peers. Scores for striking a stationary ball and overhand throw were significantly better in normal-weight and overweight or obese children when compared with their under-weight counterparts. Scores for gallop and horizontal jump skills were significantly higher in normalweight children compared with their overweight or obese counterparts. Interestingly, scores for horizontal jump skill were significantly better in under-weight children as compared with their overweight or obese children. It was concluded that the gender, age, and BMI of preschool children would affect their development of fundamental movement skills.
An Effective Integrated Method for Learning Big Imbalanced Data

The imbalance of data has great effects on the performance of learning algorithms due to the presence of under-represented data and severe class distribution skews. This is one of the new challenges of machine learning data mining. Choosing a suitable metric that addresses the properties and domain characteristics of learning real-world data is critical for achieving a good result in most of machine learning and data mining algorithms. When the dataset is big and imbalanced, even with an accurate metric, it is extremely difficult to achieve good learning performance. This paper proposes an integrated method for learning large imbalanced datasets. In particular, a combination of metric learning algorithms and balancing techniques are experimented. Their performances are compared based on a set of evaluation metrics running on bootstrap datasets of different sizes. The best combination is then selected for learning the full imbalanced datasets. Experiments using the water pipeline datasets collected from various Australia regions in the past two decades show that our proposed method is both practical and effective.
From Taovia to Trustee: Urbanisation, Land Disputes and Social Differentiation in Kakabona

ABSTRACT Land in the vicinity of Honiara is amongst the most contested in Solomon Islands, and peri-urban areas were a focal point for much of the fighting during the 1998–2003 civil conflict. This paper focuses on the historical development of Kakabona, a series of hamlets to the immediate west of Honiara. In order to understand the conditions that preceded the Tension better, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork, archival research and an analysis of court records to examine some of the shifts in land tenure arrangements occurring from the 1950s onwards. While land disputes are often approached as contests over economic resources, I suggest that the arguments mobilised before the courts reveal the profoundly epistemological or ontological challenges that urbanisation raises. Understanding these challenges throws new light on the ways in which urbanisation has worked, firstly, to deepen social fragmentation and inequality and, secondly, to concentrate control over land transactions and disputes in the hands of a relatively small number of men.
Interaction Proxemics: Combining Physical Spaces for Seamless Gesture Interaction

Touch and gesture input have become popular for display interaction. While applications usually focus on one particular input technology, we set out to adjust the interaction modality based on the proximity of users to the screen. Therefore, we built a system which combines technology-transparent interaction spaces across 4 interaction zones: touch, fine-grained, general, and coarse gestures. In a user study, participants performed a pointing task within and across these zones. Results show that zone transitions are most feasible up to 2m from the screen. Hence, applications can map functionality across different interaction zones, thereby providing additional interaction dimensions and decreasing the complexity of the gesture set. We collected subjective feedback and present a user-defined gesture set for performing a series of standard tasks across different interaction zones. Seamless transition between these spaces is essential to create a consistent interaction experience; finally, we discuss characteristics of systems that take into account user proxemics as input modality.
Gaze-controlled driving

We investigate if the gaze (point of regard) can control a remote vehicle driving on a racing track. Five different input devices (on-screen buttons, mouse-pointing low-cost webcam eye tracker and two commercial eye tracking systems) provide heading and speed control on the scene view transmitted from the moving robot. Gaze control was found to be similar to mouse control. This suggests that robots and wheelchairs may be controlled "hands-free" through gaze. Low precision gaze tracking and image transmission delays had noticeable effect on performance.
Performance and Environment Monitoring for Whole-System Characterization and Optimization

As performance advances achievable through chip fabrication technology are reaching their limits, other areas of system design need to be explored. Several different possibilities exist. Our research in the context of the DARPA HPCS project PERCS [11] aims at an infrastructure to characterize and understand the interactions between hardware and software and to affect optimizations based on those characterizations. To achieve this, we have designed and implemented a performance and environment monitoring (PEM) infrastructure that vertically integrates performance events from various layers in the execution stack. The performance understanding achieved with PEM can be used to help tune application behavior on existing systems or potentially to improve future architecture designs by analyzing the PEM data collected on a whole system simulator while varying architecture characteristics. We have developed an architecture for continuous program optimization (CPO) to assist in, and automate the challenging task of performance tuning a system. CPO utilizes the data provided by PEM to detect, diagnose, and eliminate performance problems. We designed and implemented a PEM prototype that feeds the vertical event stream to a performance visualizer, our first PEM client. We describe the CPO architecture and how PEM interacts with CPO. We then present an experiment using the PEM visualization client to understand data gathered across multiple layers of the system, and show how that data was used to positively affect system performance. University of Colorado at Boulder IBM T. J. Watson Research Center. Work supported by Defense Advanced Research Project Agency Contract NBCH30390004 University of Toronto
Improved morpho-phonological sequence processing with constraint satisfaction inference

In performing morpho-phonological sequence processing tasks, such as letter-phoneme conversion or morphological analysis, it is typically not enough to base the output sequence on local decisions that map local-context input windows to single output tokens. We present a global sequence-processing method that repairs inconsistent local decisions. The approach is based on local predictions of overlapping trigrams of output tokens, which open up a space of possible sequences; a data-driven constraint satisfaction inference step then searches for the optimal output sequence. We demonstrate significant improvements in terms of word accuracy on English and Dutch letter-phoneme conversion and morphological segmentation, and we provide qualitative analyses of error types prevented by the constraint satisfaction inference method.
In children with autoimmune thyroid diseases the association with Down syndrome can modify the clustering of extra-thyroidal autoimmune disorders

Abstract Background: It is known that the association with Down syndrome (DS) can affect the phenotypic expression of autoimmune thyroid diseases (AITDs), whilst is unknown whether the clustering of extra-thyroidal autoimmune diseases (ETADs) may also be atypical in DS children. Methods: The aim of this study was to investigate the clustering of ETADs in 832 children with AITDs divided in two groups with or without DS (A and B, respectively) and in four subgroups of patients aged either <6 or ≥6 years. Results: The rate of children with ETADs was significantly higher in Group A; in particular, alopecia areata (p=0.00001) and vitiligo (p=0.00001) were found more often in Group A irrespective of age, whilst the distribution of T1 diabetes mellitus was not different in the two groups. Celiac disease prevalence was significantly higher in DS patients only in the older subgroup. Conclusions: The association with DS may be able to modify the clustering of ETADs in the children with AITDs by favoring the aggregation of some specific diseases such as alopecia areata and vitiligo.
vp-ETX: An Optimization ETX Based Cross Layer Routing Protocol for WMN

The original routing mechanism with the routing metric of ETX (Expected Transmission Count) cannot assure good performance at different network environments. That is because fixed probe interval of ETX cannot adapt the change of network environment. Through simulations we verify the problem of ETX and find the relationship between routing performance and network factor (data rate). Then we propose an optimization routing mechanism with variable probe interval based on ETX (vp-ETX). The probe interval of ETX will be changed according to the information of data rate which is acquired from the application layer. The results of simulations show that vp-ETX could change probe interval of nodes according to real-time network environment and vp-ETX performs better than ETX in specific scenario.
Evaluation of Mean, Gaussian and S&G aggregation windows in stereo correspondence under presence of noise

Few topics in image processing have been as extensively studied as stereo correspondence, these algorithms can be divided into two categories, local and global, depending on how the processing is done in the image. A stereo correspondence algorithm is called local if operate on sections of the images and global this treatment is performed on the entire images. In local algorithms specifically, this aggregation window is used for smoothing volume pairing cost, so that a better match is performed in presence of fronto-parallel regions. This article presents a comparison between Mean, Gaussian and Savitzky-Golay aggregation windows in local algorithms, analyzing the noise in test images and how the selection of the aggregation window affects the performance of the stereo matching algorithm.
A log-linear model with an n-gram reference distribution for accurate HPSG parsing

This paper describes a log-linear model with an n-gram reference distribution for accurate probabilistic HPSG parsing. In the model, the n-gram reference distribution is simply defined as the product of the probabilities of selecting lexical entries, which are provided by the discriminative method with machine learning features of word and POS n-gram as defined in the CCG/HPSG/CDG supertagging. Recently, supertagging becomes well known to drastically improve the parsing accuracy and speed, but supertagging techniques were heuristically introduced, and hence the probabilistic models for parse trees were not well defined. We introduce the supertagging probabilities as a reference distribution for the log-linear model of the probabilistic HPSG. This is the first model which properly incorporates the supertagging probabilities into parse tree's probabilistic model.
Association of penicillin-resistant pneumococci with residence in a pediatric chronic care facility.

Risk factors for the acquisition of penicillin-resistant pneumococci (PRP) were analyzed at a university hospital in New York City. Patients with PRP and control patients with penicillin-sensitive pneumococcal infections were compared. In 1994, 24 (21%) of 113 patients with Streptococcus pneumoniae infections had PRP; 13 PRP isolates were from children and 11 from adults. Only white race (P < .05) and residence in a pediatric chronic care facility (P < .05) were significantly associated with penicillin resistance. An investigation at one chronic care facility revealed that 33% of children (17/52) had PRP colonization. Fourteen of the 17 PRP isolates were also resistant to ceftriaxone. Prior antibiotic use and specifically beta-lactam use were associated with penicillin resistance. All typeable PRP isolates were multidrug-resistant serotype 23. Pediatric residents in chronic care facilities may be an important reservoir of PRP and may serve as a source of PRP transmission when they are transferred to acute care hospitals.
Hsv-1 Strain Mckrae Is More Neuroinvasive than Hsv-1 Kos after Corneal or Vaginal Inoculation in Mice Nih Public Access Author Manuscript

Strains of HSV-1 have been noted to vary in their pathogenesis. We compared the replication of strains KOS and McKrae in mice by two routes of infection, ocular and vaginal. Peripheral replication of KOS was similar (cornea) or attenuated over time (vagina) compared with McKrae; however, McKrae replicated in the nervous system to significantly higher levels than KOS after inoculation by either route. Host genetic background strongly influenced the capacity for virus entry into the nervous system from the vagina. KOS and McKrae replicated equivalently after intracranial inoculation, indicating that McKrae's pathogenic phenotype is linked to neuroinvasiveness rather than neurovirulence. Herpes simplex virus 1 (HSV-1) is a herpesvirus belonging to the neurotropic Alphaherpesvirinae subfamily (Roizman et al., 2012). HSV-1 infections can be asymptomatic or cause cold sores, corneal ulcerations, and rare but life-threatening encephalitis (Roizman et al., 2012). In addition, HSV-1 causes a growing proportion of HSV which also can be asymptomatic, result in painful ulcerative lesions, or sometimes cause aseptic meningitis or autonomic dysfunction (Gupta et al., 2007). Initial HSV-1 infections at mucosal surfaces rapidly spread into sensory neurons, where the virus remains latent until it receives a reactivation stimulus. Numerous strains of HSV-1 have been isolated that vary in their virulence (Bergstrom et al., was originally isolated from a cold sore and has been passaged 12 times in tissue culture. KOS is frequently used to investigate HSV-1 gene function and pathogenesis (Schaffer et al., 1973), and has been described as less virulent than a number of other HSV-1 strains (Luker et al. was isolated from a patient with herpes simplex keratitis (Williams et al., 1965), and passaged an unknown number of times Publisher's Disclaimer: This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it is published in its final citable form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain. in tissue culture. McKrae undergoes spontaneous or induced reactivation at a higher frequency and is among the most virulent HSV-1 strains in animal models (Hill et al. Inter-strain differences in HSV-1 peripheral replication and virulence have been observed in animal models. HSV-1 strain KOS replicates as well …
Activation of Corticotropin-Releasing Factor Receptor 1 Selectively Inhibits CaV3.2 T-Type Calcium Channels

The corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF) peptides CRF and uro-cortins 1 to 3 are crucial regulators of mammalian stress and inflammatory responses, and they are also implicated in disorders such as anxiety, depression, and drug addiction. There is considerable interest in the physiological mechanisms by which CRF receptors mediate their widespread effects, and here we report that the native CRF receptor 1 (CRFR1) endogenous to the human embryonic kidney 293 cells can functionally couple to mammalian CaV3.2 T-type calcium channels. Activation of CRFR1 by either CRF or urocortin (UCN) 1 reversibly inhibits CaV3.2 currents (IC50 of ∼30 nM), but it does not affect CaV3.1 or CaV3.3 channels. Blockade of CRFR1 by the antagonist astressin abolished the inhibition of CaV3.2 channels. The CRFR1-dependent inhibition of CaV3.2 channels was independent of the activities of phospholipase C, tyrosine kinases, Ca2+/calmodulin-dependent protein kinase II, protein kinase C, and other kinase pathways, but it was dependent upon a cholera toxin-sensitive G protein-mediated mechanism relying upon G protein βγ subunits (Gβγ). The inhibition of CaV3.2 channels via the activation of CRFR1 was due to a hyperpolarized shift in their steady-state inactivation, and it was reversible upon washout of the agonists. Given that UCN affect multiple aspects of cardiac and neuronal physiology and that CaV3.2 channels are widespread throughout the cardiovascular and nervous systems, the results point to a novel and functionally relevant CRFR1-CaV3.2 T-type calcium channel signaling pathway.