Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
SYMIAN: Analysis and performance improvement of the IT incident management process

Incident Management is the process through which IT support organizations manage to restore normal service operation after a service disruption. The complexity of real-life enterprise-class IT support organizations makes it extremely hard to understand the impact of organizational, structural and behavioral components on the performance of the currently adopted incident management strategy and, consequently, which actions could improve it. This paper presents SYMIAN, a decision support tool for the performance improvement of the incident management function in IT support organizations. SYMIAN simulates the effect of corrective measures before their actual implementation, enabling time, effort, and cost saving. To this end, SYMIAN models the IT support organization as an open queuing network, thereby enabling the evaluation of both the system-wide dynamics as well as the behavior of the individual organization components and their interactions. Experimental results show the SYMIAN effectiveness in the performance analysis and tuning of the incident management process for real-life IT support organizations.
Peer Review History Title (provisional) a Pilot Study on Record Reviewing with a Priori Patient Selection

BMJ Open publishes all reviews undertaken for accepted manuscripts. Reviewers are asked to complete a checklist review form (see an example) and are provided with free text boxes to elaborate on their assessment. These free text comments are reproduced below. Some articles will have been accepted based in part or entirely on reviews undertaken for other BMJ Group journals. These will be reproduced where possible.
Capacitance to Digital Converter

This paper presents a capacitance to digital converter (CDC) with a fast serial digital output. The CDC is intended to be used as a flexible solution for interfacing multiple capacitive sensors with maximum value lnF. A cable capacitance of up to InF can be tolerated. Two different modes of measurement are available -a normal mode and a fast mode. The conversion time is 39 mus and 64 mus for the fast and the normal mode, respectively. The resolution in normal mode, with cable capacitance less than 400pF, is better than 14 bits. A special multi-slope A-to-D conversion is used, which at the beginning and at the end of the conversion process transforms itself into sigma/delta conversion. The interface is realized on a PCB with a Single Euro-board format. Six sensors can be interfaced in programmable sequence. The power consumption is less than 1W.
Homology of the Fifth Epibranchial and Accessory Elements of the Ceratobranchials among Gnathostomes: Insights from the Development of Ostariophysans

Epibranchials are among the main dorsal elements of the gill basket in jawed vertebrates (Gnathostomata). Among extant fishes, chondrichthyans most resemble the putative ancestral condition as all branchial arches possess every serially homologous piece. In osteichthyans, a primitive rod-like epibranchial 5, articulated to ceratobranchial 5, is absent. Instead, epibranchial 5 of many actinopterygians is here identified as an accessory element attached to ceratobranchial 4. Differences in shape and attachment of epibranchial 5 in chondrichthyans and actinopterygians raised suspicions about their homology, prompting us to conduct a detailed study of the morphology and development of the branchial basket of three ostariophysans (Prochilodus argenteus, Characiformes; Lophiosilurus alexandri and Pseudoplatystoma corruscans, Siluriformes). Results were interpreted within a phylogenetic context of major gnathostome lineages. Developmental series strongly suggest that the so-called epibranchial 5 of actinopterygians does not belong to the epal series because it shares the same chondroblastic layer with ceratobranchial 4 and its ontogenetic emergence is considerably late. This neomorphic structure is called accessory element of ceratobranchial 4. Its distribution among gnathostomes indicates it is a teleost synapomorphy, occurring homoplastically in Polypteriformes, whereas the loss of the true epibranchial 5 is an osteichthyan synapomorphy. The origin of the accessory element of ceratobranchial 4 appears to have occurred twice in osteichthyans, but it may have a single origin; in this case, the accessory element of ceratobranchial 4 would represent a remnant of a series of elements distally attached to ceratobranchials 1–4, a condition totally or partially retained in basal actinopterygians. Situations wherein a structure is lost while a similar neomorphic element is present may lead to erroneous homology assessments; these can be avoided by detailed morphological and ontogenetic investigations interpreted in the light of well-supported phylogenetic hypotheses.
Switches, latches, and amplifiers: common themes of G proteins and molecular motors

N a universe where entropy is increasing, living organisms are a curious anomaly. The organization that distinguishes living organisms from their inanimate surroundings relies upon their ability to execute vectoral processes such as directed movements, ion pumping across membranes, and the assembly of macromolecules and organelle systems. Such phenomena are executed by protein machines that harness chemical energy to drive processes that would be otherwise energetically unfavorable. Two of the best studied protein machines are the ATPhydrolyzing motor proteins and the GTP-hydrolyzing G proteins. Motor proteins (kinesins, myosins, and dyneins) move along cytoskeletal filaments and are involved in generating most of the cellular and intracellular motions that are associated with living organisms. G proteins are a diverse group of molecular switches that regulate information flow in signal transduction pathways and orchestrate an orderly sequence of interactions in protein synthesis, protein translocation across membranes, and trafficking of vesicles in the endocytotic and secretory pathways. Essential to the mechanism of both classes of proteins, the NTP and NDP bound forms of the enzymes exhibit distinct conformations, which enables them to change affinity for target proteins (cytoskeletal polymers for motors and various target proteins for G proteins). Historically, the scientific investigations of motor proteins and G proteins have proceeded along separate paths. However, many of the key questions regarding the role of nucleotide hydrolysis are the same: What is the nature of the conformational switch between NTP and NDP states? How do changes in the nucleotide-binding site affect the binding interaction with target proteins? How are the rate constants governing transitions in the nucleotidase cycle set and controlled? Recent structural and kinetic studies have uncovered intriguing parallels between molecular motors (kinesin and myosin) and G proteins which may be important for understanding these questions. The premise
Normalizing clinical terms using learned edit distance patterns

BACKGROUND Variations of clinical terms are very commonly encountered in clinical texts. Normalization methods that use similarity measures or hand-coded approximation rules for matching clinical terms to standard terminologies have limited accuracy and coverage. MATERIALS AND METHODS In this paper, a novel method is presented that automatically learns patterns of variations of clinical terms from known variations from a resource such as the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS). The patterns are first learned by computing edit distances between the known variations, which are then appropriately generalized for normalizing previously unseen terms. The method was applied and evaluated on the disease and disorder mention normalization task using the dataset of SemEval 2014 and compared with the normalization ability of the MetaMap system and a method based on cosine similarity. RESULTS Excluding the mentions that already exactly match in UMLS and the training dataset, the proposed method obtained 64.7% accuracy on the rest of the test dataset. The accuracy was calculated as the number of mentions that correctly matched the gold-standard concept unique identifiers (CUIs) or correctly matched to be without a CUI. In comparison, MetaMap's accuracy was 41.9% and cosine similarity's accuracy was 44.6%. When only the output CUIs were evaluated, the proposed method obtained 54.4% best F-measure (at 92.1% precision and 38.6% recall) while MetaMap obtained 19.4% best F-measure (at 38.0% precision and 13.0% recall) and cosine similarity obtained 38.1% best F-measure (at 70.3% precision and 26.1% recall). CONCLUSIONS The novel method was found to perform much better than the MetaMap system and the cosine similarity based method in normalizing disease mentions in clinical text that did not exactly match in UMLS. The method is also general and can be used for normalizing clinical terms of other semantic types as well.
Ju n 20 05 Trapped submanifolds in Lorentzian geometry

In Lorentzian geometry, the concept of trapped submanifold is introduced by means of the mean curvature vector properties. Trapped submanifolds are generalizations of the standard maximal hypersurfaces and minimal surfaces, of geodesics, and also of the trapped surfaces introduced by Penrose. Selected applications to gravitational theories are mentioned.
Getting fed up with our feet: Contrast maintenance and the New Zealand English “short” front vowel shift

The dress vowel in New Zealand English (NZE) has been raising for some time, so that it now overlaps the acoustic space of fleece for many younger speakers. This article presents an acoustic analysis of the dress and fleece vowels of 80 speakers and shows that dress continues to raise in contemporary NZE so that for some speakers dress has risen above fleece and can be more front than fleece. fleece has diphthongized as a consequence, making it part of the New Zealand “short front vowel” shift. This suggests that the short/long distinction in New Zealand English may have broken down, at least for the front vowels. The diphthongization of fleece is most advanced in tokens that are followed by voiceless codas. These are the tokens that are most endangered by the high dress, as they are distinguished neither in acoustic space, nor by length.We wish to thank the students who made the original recordings for the Canterbury Corpus and our research assistants Deborah Sagee and Toby Macrae for help with digitizing and marking up the data. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the International Australian Conference on Speech Science and Technology, December 2004, and we are grateful to members of the audience for useful suggestions. Christian Langstrof, Elizabeth Gordon, and an anonymous referee have made useful comments on an earlier draft, and we are also indebted to Elliott Moreton, whose suggestions considerably facilitated our ability to make sense of this data set. This work was partially funded by a grant from the University of Cantebury (U6286).
Synovial tissue macrophages and joint erosion in rheumatoid arthritis.

OBJECTIVES--To analyse the mononuclear cell populations in synovial membrane biopsies obtained before treatment from patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and to correlate the findings with the degree of joint damage occurring over one year. METHODS--Multiple needle biopsy specimens were obtained from inflamed knee joints on entry to the study. The tissue samples were examined using immunohistochemical techniques. The degree of joint damage was estimated using the Larsen radiological index. RESULTS--Twelve patients were studied. It was observed that there was a significant correlation between the number of synovial tissue macrophages and the degree of joint erosion over one year (r = 0.66; p = 0.04). The synovial lining layer contained large numbers of macrophages and the cellularity of the lining layer correlated significantly with the number of macrophages infiltrating the sublining areas (r = 0.65; p = 0.01). Finally, the cellularity of the lining layer correlated with the synovial fluid levels of interleukin-6 (r = 0.66; p = 0.04). The radiological course did not correlate with infiltrating T or B lymphocyte populations, but did correlate with other previously identified indicators of the clinical course, including a high index of disease activity and IgA rheumatoid factors levels. CONCLUSION--This study suggests that synovial tissue macrophages play a critical role in the pathogenesis of joint erosion in RA.
Multi-method System Simulation Analysis as an Implementation and Evaluation Tool for Computerised Pathology Order Entry Systems

Background: Computerised Physician Order Entry (CPOE) systems have the potential to lead to improvements in the quality and efficiency of health care delivery. However, CPOE systems have been found to be difficult and complex to implement and there has been an increased awareness of the need for rigorous evaluation techniques. To date pathology CPOE systems have not been widely researched or evaluated. System Simulation (SysSim) is the application of computer simulation to explore, understand and improve the interaction between structure and action in the health care sector. Objectives: This paper describes the methods for designing a robust SysSim model and illustrates how it will be used to examine the impact of CPOE on care delivery and outcomes. Methods: The model development will use integrated simulation methods that incorporate both agent and system dynamic approaches using the Anylogic object-oriented, Java-based software package. The model will be built using a comprehensive, iterative approach incorporating testing and refinement stages that include: conceptual development and construction; model calibration; simulation and policy testing; and performance experimentation. Results: Our review of the literature identified 10 domains which have been the focus of evaluations of the impact CPOE on pathology services and these have used 39 different indicators. The problem however is that the information contained in individual indicators is usually resented in isolation from other important indicator data. Discussion and conclusions: SysSim allows us to link up data and information and demonstrates how indicators interact and as such provides a powerful evaluation technique. SysSim makes it possible to take a holistic view to evaluation and implementation priorities, based on the understanding that many things are connected to each other. It has the potential to improve planning in complex healthcare environments and to a) investigate the impact of pathology CPOE systems; b) develop methods to increase their uptake and efficiency; and c) evaluate possible response scenarios for dealing with the challenges of implementation.
Reversible Watermarking: Current Status and Key Issues

Over the past few years a number of research papers about reversible watermarks has been produced. Reversible watermarking is a novel category of watermarking schemes. It not only can strengthen the ownership of the original media but also can completely recover the original media from the watermarked media. This feature is suitable for some important media, such as medical and military images, because these kinds of media do not allow any losses. The aim of this paper is to define the purpose of reversible watermarking, reflecting recent progress, and provide some research issues for the future.
Sharing a concept

Though various interesting research problems have been studied in the context of learning agents, few researchers have addressed the problems of one, knowledgeable, agent teaching another agent. Agents can do more than share training data, problem traces, learned policies. In particular, we investigate how an agent can use its learned knowledge to train another agent with a possibly different internal knowledge representation. We have developed an algorithm that can be used by a concept learning agent, the trainer, to iteratively select training examples for another agent, the trainee, without any assumptions about its internai concept representation. We present initial results where the trainer agent is an instance based concept learner and the trainee agent is a decision tree learner.
Intelligent depression detection and support system: Statistical analysis, psychological review and design implication

Depression is a familiar psychological disorder caused by a combination of genetic, biological, environmental, and psychological factors. Untreated depression carries a high cost in terms of relationship problems, family suffering, and loss of work productivity. However diagnosis and treatment of depression is difficult due to varied severity, frequency, and duration of symptoms in depressed individuals. In this study, correlation between depression levels and behavioral trends of individuals has been established through a survey involving around 120 undergraduate students. The survey outcome is analyzed from a psychological viewpoint and finally some design implications on an automated system of depression detection and support system have been proposed.
The Relationship of Career Guidance to VET

This paper examines the relationship of career guidance to vocational education and training (VET). Its aim is to provide a base of analysis and evidence to underpin policy recommendations to countries as part of the OECD policy review of VET. The relationship of career guidance to VET is an under-explored area. Previous policy reviews of career guidance provision (
The design of optimal receiver for opportunistic interference alignment

Opportunistic interference alignment (OIA) has been known to asymptotically achieve the optimal degrees-of-freedom (DoF) in multi-input multi-output (MIMO) interfering multiple-access channels (IMACs) as the number of users scales with signal-to-noise ratio, even though no collaboration between base stations (BSs) is assumed. In some previous studies on OIA, the zero-forcing (ZF) receiver has been used at the BSs since it is sufficient to achieve the optimal DoF. In this paper, we propose a simple minimum distance (MD) receiver in a MIMO IMAC model, enabling us to implement the OIA scheme with no information of other-cell interfering links. Surprisingly, we show that as the number of users increases, the MD receiver not only guarantees the optimal DoF but also asymptotically achieves the optimal capacity obtained along with full information of other-cell interfering links. Simulation results indicates that the MD receiver indeed outperforms the conventional ZF receiver even in practical cellular setups.
DISPERSION DIAGRAM ANALYSIS OF ARRAYS OF MULTISHELL MULTIMATERIAL NANOSPHERES

In this paper, the characteristics of electromagnetic waves supported by three dimensional (3-D) periodic arrays of multilayer multimaterial spheres are theoretically investigated. The spherical particles have the potential to ofier electric and magnetic dipole modes, where their novel arrangements engineer the desired metamaterial performance. Multilayer spheres are designed for controlling both electric and magnetic Mie scattering resonances around the same spectrum. A full wave spherical modal formulation is applied to express the electromagnetic flelds in terms of the electric and magnetic multipole modes. Imposing boundary conditions will determine the required equations for obtaining dispersion characteristics ! a=2…c i ka=2…. A metamaterial constructed from unit-cells of multilayer multimaterial sphere is created. It is demonstrated such compositions can exhibit negative-slope dispersion diagram metamaterial properties in frequency spectrums of interest, where both electric and magnetic Mie scattering resonances occur. Difierent coatings such as silver, gold, indium-tin-oxide (ITO), Al : ZnO, (AZO) and Ga : ZnO (GZO) are used and the operating range and the losses of the resulting metamaterials are compared. It is presented that by adding the third layer to the core-shell structure, due to increased degrees of freedom, the metamaterials operation range will be tunable to the desired frequency.
Using Virtual Document for NTCIR-4 Web Information Retrieval Task

The Web is a large collection of heterogeneous pages. Web documents are not always descriptive and accurate in content. In addition, a significant difference between the problems of Web search and traditional text search is the availability of hyperlinks between pages. A page on the Web might possibly be cited by or cite other pages. When evaluating a page, the neighborhood of the page might be a part of the input. In this paper, in addition to the explicit information unit (page content), a new information unit, a virtual document, is introduced in our systems, which is mainly organized by the associated anchor-text of in-bounds links to a page and also its title data. We analyzed the utility of virtual document for Web searching. Three searching function based on virtual document are proposed in our study: † We propose a way to weight query terms through term entropy in the virtual document collection space.
PDE 5 Inhibition With Sildenafil Improves Left Ventricular Diastolic Function , Cardiac Geometry , and Clinical Status in Patients With Stable Systolic Heart Failure

Background—In heart failure (HF), a defective nitric oxide signaling is involved in left ventricular (LV) diastolic abnormalities and remodeling. PDE5 inhibition, by blocking degradation of nitric oxide second-messenger cyclic guanosine monophosphate, might be beneficial. In a cohort of systolic HF patients, we tested the effects of PDE5 inhibition (sildenafil) on LV ejection fraction, diastolic function, cardiac geometry, and clinical status. Methods and Results—Forty-five HF patients (New York Heart Association class II-III) were randomly assigned to placebo or sildenafil (50 mg three times per day) for 1 year, with assessment (6 months and 1 year) of LV ejection fraction, diastolic function, geometry, cardiopulmonary exercise performance, and quality of life. In the sildenafil group only, at 6 months and 1 year, LV ejection fraction, early diastolic tissue Doppler velocities (E ) at the mitral lateral (from 4.62 to 5.20 and 5.19 m/s) and septal (from 4.71 to 5.23 and 5.24 m/s) annuli significantly increased, whereas the ratio of early transmitral (E) to E lateral decreased (from 13.1 to 9.8 to 9.4) (P 0.01). Changes were accompanied by a reverse remodeling of left atrial volume index (from 32.0 to 29.0 and 29.1 mL/m; P 0.01) and LV mass index (from 148.0 to 130.0 and 128.0 g/m; P 0.01). Furthermore, sildenafil improved exercise performance (peak VO2), ventilation efficiency (ventilation to CO2 production slope), and quality of life (P 0.01). Minor adverse effects were noted: flushing in 4 and headache in 2 treated patients. Conclusions—Findings confirm that in HF, sildenafil improves functional capacity and clinical status and provide the first human evidence that LV diastolic function and cardiac geometry are additional targets of benefits related to chronic PDE5 inhibition. Clinical Trial Registration—URL: http://www.clinicaltrials. gov. Unique identifier: NCT00975494. (Circ Heart Fail. 2011;4:8-17.)
Novel Algorithms for Ranking and Suggesting True Popular Items

: Ranking is the process of giving rank scores to the most popular item by taking user feedback. The most frequently occurring items are given the highest rank score. In practice, one may use prior information about the item popularity. For example, in the survey, the user may select the suggested item or they may also select the others. Suggestion is a list of items that are presented to the users. This is done based on the user’s feedback. The users give their preference of items through feedback and use them in the ranking of items. In this paper, our aim is to propose novel algorithms for suggesting popular items to users in a way that enables learning of the users’ true preference over items. The true preference refers to the preference over the items that would be observed from the users’ selections over items without exposure to any suggestions.