Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Impaired Skin Capillary Recruitment in Essential Hypertension Is Caused by Both Functional and Structural Capillary Rarefaction

Capillary rarefaction occurs in many tissues in patients with essential hypertension and may contribute to an increased vascular resistance and impaired muscle metabolism. Rarefaction may be caused by a structural (anatomic) absence of capillaries, functional nonperfusion, or both. The aim of this study was to assess the extent of structural versus functional capillary rarefaction in the skin of subjects with essential hypertension. We examined skin capillary density with video microscopy before and during maximization of the number of perfused capillaries by venous congestion (structural capillary number) and before and during postocclusive reactive hyperemia (capillary recruitment, which may have a structural and/or functional basis). The study group was composed of 26 patients with never-treated essential hypertension and 26 normotensive control subjects. In both groups, intermittently perfused capillaries in the resting state were an important functional reserve for recruitment during postocclusive hyperemia. Recruitment of perfused capillaries during postocclusive reactive hyperemia was decreased in the hypertensive subjects compared with normotensive control subjects (47.9±6.8 versus 55.3±8.2 capillaries/mm2, respectively;P <0.01). During venous occlusion, maximal capillary density was significantly lower in the hypertensive subjects than in the control subjects (52.5±6.6 versus 57.2±8.6 capillaries/mm2, respectively;P <0.05), suggesting structural rarefaction. However, in the hypertensive subjects compared with the normotensive subjects, a smaller proportion of the maximal number of capillaries was perfused during postocclusive hyperemia (91.6±7.5% versus 97.2±2.7%, respectively;P <0.05), suggesting an additional functional impairment of capillary recruitment. If the difference in capillary numbers during venous congestion (≈4.6 capillaries/mm2) truly reflects the structural difference between the normotensive and hypertensive subjects, then, at most, 62% (4.6/7.4×100%) of the difference in capillary numbers during postocclusive hyperemia (≈7.4 capillaries/mm2) can be explained by structural defects, and at least 38% can be explained by functional defects. In conclusion, in patients with essential hypertension, recruitment of perfused capillaries is impaired, which can be explained by both functional and structural rarefaction.
Location‐assisted clustering and scheduling for coordinated homogeneous and heterogeneous cellular networks

The multiple‐input multiple‐output (MIMO) downlink with transmitter coordination in a cellular network is considered. The transmitters are assumed to be either neighbouring base stations (homogeneous) or a base station with a number of remote radio heads that form picocells in its coverage area (heterogeneous). In centralized coordinated transmission from a cluster of nodes, the channel state information (CSI) of users needs to be sent to a central processor for precoding and resource allocation. Real‐time CSI feedback from the users to their home base station and from the base stations to the central processor is a serious challenge from a practical point of view. In this work, efficient location‐assisted limited‐feedback schemes for homogeneous and heterogeneous cellular networks are proposed. First, a hybrid mode transmission scheme with reduced feedback requirement is proposed for a homogeneous network, in which on the basis of the location of users, some are served using a single‐cell multiuser MIMO approach and some using a network MIMO approach. Next, for a heterogeneous network, a location‐assisted clustering and scheduling scheme is proposed for the case of joint reference signals, in which multiple transmission nodes that share the reference signals cannot be distinguished from each other. We evaluate the performance of our schemes with a series of simulations. In the homogeneous scenario, we compare with the case of full CSI, and in the heterogeneous scenario, we compare with joint transmission from all nodes in a cell. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Improved automated quantification of left ventricular size and function from cardiac magnetic resonance images

Assessment of left ventricular (LV) size and function from cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) images requires manual tracing of LV borders on multiple 2D slices, which is subjective, experience dependent, tedious and time-consuming. We tested a new method for automated dynamic segmentation of CMR images based on a modified region-based model, in which a level set function minimizes a functional containing information regarding the probability density distribution of the gray levels. Images (GE 1.5T FIESTA) obtained in 9 patients were analyzed to automatically detect LV endocardial boundaries and calculate LV volumes and ejection fraction (EF). These measurements were validated against manual tracing. The automated calculation ofLV volumes and EF was completed in each patient in <3 min and resulted in high level of agreement with no significant bias and narrow limits of agreement with the reference technique. The proposed technique allows fast automated detection of endocardial boundaries as a basis for accurate quantification of LV size and function from CMR images.
Biomedical Signal Processing and Applications

In biomedical signal processing, the aim is to extract clinically, biochemically or pharmaceutically relevant information in order to enable an improved medical diagnosis. All living things, from cells to organism, deliver signals of biological origin. Such signals can be electric, mechanical, or chemical. All such signals can be of interest for diagnosis, for patient monitoring and biomedical research. The main task of processing biomedical signals is to filter the signal of interest out of from the noisy background and to reduce the redundant data stream to only a few, but relevant parameters. This paper will cover biomedical signal processing as used in diagnostic instrumentation. A number of current research projects will also be outlined with emphasis on intelligent medical diagnosis system.
Being Me: A Kid's Guide to Boosting Confidence and Self-Esteem

Many kids struggle with low confidence. The good news is, Being Me can help kids tackle everyday challenges and build confidence and self-esteem. This handy guide gives kids the tools they need to explore their strengths, feel successful, and be confident in school, with friends, and importantly, with themselves. Loaded with kid-relevant examples, real-life stories, and easy-to-do tips and tricks, Being Me will empower kids to feel happier and more secure and confident with themselves and with everyone else in their lives.
When push comes to shove verbs literally shake due to latent semantic parameters of size and intensity

The ability to predict which patterns are formed in brain scans when imagining a celery or an airplane, based on how these concepts as words co-occur in texts, suggests that it is possible to model mental representations based on word statistics. Whether counting how frequently nouns and verbs combine in Google search queries, or extracting eigenvectors from matrices made up of Wikipedia lines and Shakespeare plots, these latent semantics approximate the associative links that form concepts. However, cognition is fundamentally intertwined with action; even passively reading verbs has been shown to activate the same motor circuits as when we tap a finger or observe actual movements. If languages evolved by adapting to the brain, sensorimotor constraints linking articulatory gestures with aspects of motion might also be reflected in the statistics of word co-occurrences. To probe this hypothesis 3 × 20 emotion, face, and hand related verbs known to activate premotor areas in the brain were selected, and latent semantic analysis LSA was applied to create a weighted adjacency matrix. Hierarchically clustering the verbs and modeling their connectivity within a force directed graph, they divide into modules of mouth and hand motion, facial expressions and negative emotions. Transforming the verbs into their constituent phonemes, the corresponding consonant vowel transitions can be represented in an articulatory space defined by tongue height and formant frequencies. Here the vowels appear positioned along a front to back continuum reflecting aspects of size and intensity related to the actions described by the verbs. More forceful verbs combine plosives and sonorants with fricatives characterized by sustained turbulent airflows, while positive and negative emotional expressions tend to incorporate upor downwards shifts in formant frequencies. Suggesting, that articulatory gestures reflect parameters of size and intensity which might be retrieved from the latent semantics of action verbs.
Association of alcohol consumption with selected cardiovascular disease outcomes: a systematic review and meta-analysis

Objective To conduct a comprehensive systematic review and meta-analysis of studies assessing the effect of alcohol consumption on multiple cardiovascular outcomes. Design Systematic review and meta-analysis. Data sources A search of Medline (1950 through September 2009) and Embase (1980 through September 2009) supplemented by manual searches of bibliographies and conference proceedings. Inclusion criteria Prospective cohort studies on the association between alcohol consumption and overall mortality from cardiovascular disease, incidence of and mortality from coronary heart disease, and incidence of and mortality from stroke. Studies reviewed Of 4235 studies reviewed for eligibility, quality, and data extraction, 84 were included in the final analysis. Results The pooled adjusted relative risks for alcohol drinkers relative to non-drinkers in random effects models for the outcomes of interest were 0.75 (95% confidence interval 0.70 to 0.80) for cardiovascular disease mortality (21 studies), 0.71 (0.66 to 0.77) for incident coronary heart disease (29 studies), 0.75 (0.68 to 0.81) for coronary heart disease mortality (31 studies), 0.98 (0.91 to 1.06) for incident stroke (17 studies), and 1.06 (0.91 to 1.23) for stroke mortality (10 studies). Dose-response analysis revealed that the lowest risk of coronary heart disease mortality occurred with 1–2 drinks a day, but for stroke mortality it occurred with ≤1 drink per day. Secondary analysis of mortality from all causes showed lower risk for drinkers compared with non-drinkers (relative risk 0.87 (0.83 to 0.92)). Conclusions Light to moderate alcohol consumption is associated with a reduced risk of multiple cardiovascular outcomes.
Unsupervised Dimensionality Estimation and Manifold Learning in high-dimensional Spaces by Tensor Voting

We address dimensionality estimation and nonlinear manifold inference starting from point inputs in high dimensional spaces using tensor voting. The proposed method operates locally in neighborhoods and does not involve any global computations. It is based on information propagation among neighboring points implemented as a voting process. Unlike other local approaches for manifold learning, the quantity propagated from one point to another is not a scalar, but is in the form of a tensor that provides considerably richer information. The accumulation of votes at each point provides a reliable estimate of local dimensionality, as well as of the orientation of a potential manifold going through the point. Reliable dimensionality estimation at the point level is a major advantage over competing methods. Moreover, the absence of global operations allows us to process significantly larger datasets. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on a variety of challenging datasets.
The Immune Response to Pneumococcal Proteins during Experimental Human Carriage

Colonization of the nasopharynx is the initial step in all infections caused by Streptococcus pneumoniae. The antibody response to carriage was examined in an experimental model of human colonization in healthy adults. Asymptomatic colonization was detected in 6/14 subjects and continued for up to 122 d. Susceptibility to carriage did not correlate with total serum immunoglobulin (Ig)G to the homotypic capsular polysaccharide. All of the colonized subjects, in contrast, developed a serum IgG and secretory IgA response to a 22 kD protein, whereas 7 of 8 subjects who did not become colonized had preexisting antibody to this protein. Analysis of the 22 kD protein identified it as the NH2-terminal region of pneumococcal surface protein A (PspA). Our findings provide evidence for the role of antibody to this protein fragment in preventing pneumococcal carriage by humans.
The dysarthria—clumsy hand syndrome: A distinct clinical entity related to pontine infarction

Using magnetic resonance imaging, we studied 6 patients with the dysarthria–clumsy hand syndrome. All were found to have pontine infarctions contralateral to the symptomatic side. Clinically, these patients exhibited dysarthria; “clumsiness,” characterized by dysmetria, dysrhythmia, dysdiadochokinesia and sometimes truncal and gait ataxia; and mild ipsilateral weakness. Previous clinical‐anatomical correlations for this syndrome are limited by inconsistencies in clinical diagnostic criteria and low‐resolution imaging methods. In our patients, and in a review of the literature, the overwhelming majority of patients with the dysarthria–clumsy hand syndrome had pontine infarcts. We conclude that if rigid clinical criteria are used, the label of the dysarthria–clumsy hand syndrome predicts a lesion in the contralateral basis pontis.
Particle Swarm Optimization with Reduction for Global Optimization Problems

This paper presents an algorithm of particle swarm optimization with reduction for global optimization problems. Particle swarm optimization is an algorithm which refers to the collective motion such as birds or fishes, and a multi-point search algorithm which finds a best solution using multiple particles. Particle swarm optimization is so flexible that it can adapt to a number of optimization problems. When an objective function has a lot of local minimums complicatedly, the particle may fall into a local minimum. For avoiding the local minimum, a number of particles are initially prepared and their positions are updated by particle swarm optimization. Particles sequentially reduce to reach a predetermined number of them grounded in evaluation value and particle swarm optimization continues until the termination condition is met. In order to show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, we examine the minimum by using test functions compared to existing algorithms. Furthermore the influence of best value on the initial number of particles for our algorithm is discussed. Keywords—Particle swarm optimization, Global optimization, Metaheuristics, Reduction.
Is Crime Contagious?

Understanding whether criminal behavior is “contagious” is important for law enforcement and for policies that affect how people are sorted across social settings. We test the hypothesis that criminal behavior is contagious by using data from the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) randomized housing mobility experiment to examine the extent to which lower local area crime rates decrease arrest rates among individuals. Our analysis exploits the fact that the effect of treatment group assignment yields different types of neighborhood changes across the five MTO demonstration sites. We use treatment by site interactions as instruments for measures of neighborhood crime rates, poverty, and racial segregation in our analysis of individual arrest outcomes. We are unable to detect evidence in support of the contagion hypothesis. Neighborhood racial segregation appears to be the most important explanation for across‐neighborhood variation in arrests for violent crimes in our sample, perhaps because drug market activity is more common in high‐minority neighborhoods.
Racial Bias in Police Investigations

Law enforcement discrimination studies are usually qualified by selection concerns regarding which encounters transpire between individuals and police. This paper overcomes these problems by examining automobile crash investigations by a State Police Department. Because officers are dispatched to investigate crashes on the basis of factors unrelated to driver race, these interactions are effectively exogenous. I show that, conditional on the Census Block Group area of a crash, the race of the investigating officer is uncorrelated with that of the driver. For these investigations, I find that police officers exhibit significant bias in issuing citations to other-race drivers for both moving and nonmoving violations, though no bias is evident for felony violations such as hit-and-run. Because racial bias is present even for easily observable offenses such as expired vehicle registration, these findings are consistent with preference-based rather than statistical discrimination. ∗I am a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Email: westj@mit.edu. I am grateful for valuable comments from Joshua Angrist, David Autor, Jonathan Gruber, Mark Hoekstra, Sally Hudson, Christopher Knittel, Jonathan Meer, James Poterba, Steven Puller, and numerous seminar participants. Any opinions and conclusions in this study are my own and do not necessarily represent the position of the police agency I study, the State in which it operates, or any other State agencies. Any errors in this paper are also my own. I have no relevant or material financial or legal interests related to the research described in this paper.
Minimum Number of k-Cliques in Graphs with Bounded Independence Number

Let us give some definitions first. As usual, a graph G is a pair (V (G), E(G)), where V (G) is the vertex set and the edge set E(G) consists of unordered pairs of vertices. An isomorphism between graphs G and H is a bijection f : V (G) → V (H) that preserves edges and non-edges. For a graph G, let G = ( V (G), ( V (G) 2 ) \E(G) ) denote its complement and let v(G) = |V (G)| denote its order. For graphs F and G with v(F ) ≤ v(G), let P (F,G) be the number of v(F )-subsets of V (G) that induce in G a subgraph isomorphic to F ; further, define the density of F in G to be
Homelessness and citizenship : exploring the meaning and negotiation of place, space and geography for rough sleepers

This doctoral thesis, drawing on a detailed ethnographic study of a small voluntary day-centre for rough sleepers in West Dorset, sets out to explore and elucidate the relationship between contemporary citizenship and 'on-street' homelessness. From this empirically grounded basis I show how the vocabulary of rights and responsibilities is profoundly intertwined in the local governance of homelessness. I situate this mode and style of governance within the contours of public policy efforts that seek to recode behaviour and lifestyles deemed to be deviant, irresponsible and, ultimately, self-excluding. In doing this, I offer a critique of the moral economy of responsibility that draws extensively on the perceptions and experiences of homeless people. Ethically, and in conclusion, emphasis is placed on the importance of pursuing critically engaged and empirically sensitive scholarship which takes homeless people's agency into account in ways that have the potential to 'subvert' political and policy judgements linking contemporary citizenship with 'on-street' homelessness.
Risks from circumcision during the first month of life compared with those for uncircumcised boys.

The records of 136,086 boys born in US Army hospitals from 1980 to 1985 were reviewed for indexed complications related to circumcision status during the first month of life. For 100,157 circumcised boys, there were 193 complications (0.19%). These included 62 local infections, eight cases of bacteremia, 83 incidences of hemorrhage (31 requiring ligature and three requiring transfusion), 25 instances of surgical trauma, and 20 urinary tract infections. There were no deaths or reported losses of the glans or entire penis. By contrast, the complications in the 35,929 uncircumcised infants were all related to urinary tract infections. Of the 88 boys with such infections (0.24%), 32 had concomitant bacteremia, three had meningitis, two had renal failure, and two died. The frequencies of urinary tract infection (P less than .0001) and bacteremia (P less than .0002) were significantly higher in the uncircumcised boys. Serious complications from routine prepuce removal are rare and relatively minor. Circumcision may be beneficial in reducing the occurrence of urinary tract infections and their associated sequelae.
Compassionate Education: A Prolegomena for Radical Schooling

Chapter 1 Preface Chapter 2 Introduction Chapter 3 The Myth of School Violence: The Presence of the Myth The Problematics of Education's Objectives Chapter 4 The Postmodern Challenge: Postmodernism and Neomodernism Schooling in Neocapitalism Chapter 5 Generative Mentoring: Mentoring: The Generation of Self-Image Conditions for Actualization Chapter 6 The Idea of Radical Compassion: Compassion Radical Compassion Chapter 7 Alternative Schooling: The Possibility of a Paradigm Shift Mentoring as an Archimedean Point Chapter 8 Bibliography Chapter 9 Index
Multi object concealed threat detection by late time response analysis

A new approach has been considered to detect threat item among multiple concealed objects by analyzing the delayed time-response of the objects, that would be illuminated by an ultra wide band radar. It was observed that the reflected wave, from the target, produced a delayed damped sinusoidal oscillation, that contained aspect independent complex natural resonances, which was unique for any individual object. A generalized pencil of function is applied for signal processing to extract poles from the scattered late time response of different objects. Application of hamming window function improves discrimination and detection of poles of multiple objects. Determination of the presence of a particular pole or concealed threat is observed upon using this proposed methodology.
The Moderating Effect of Switching Costs on Buyer Loyalty Formation: An Empirical Study of B2B e-Marketplace

The purpose of this study was to identify switching costs and examine the moderating effect of switching costs on buyer loyalty model in the B2B e-marketplace. Then a questionnaire was constructed and data were collected from 649 buyers of a Chinese B2B e-marketplace in 114 countries all over the world. Multi-group analysis was applied to examine the moderating effect of switching costs. Finally, the results indicated that switching costs moderate the relationship between perceived quality and user satisfaction. In light of the major findings, the study provided managerial implications for B2B e-marketplace to enhance buyer loyalty through the management of switching costs.