Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Undiagnosed Papilledema in a Morbidly Obese Patient Population: A Prospective Study

Background Idiopathic intracranial hypertension (IIH) is a rare condition that can lead to significant morbidity from visual loss. The cause of IIH is unknown, but IIH is known to be associated with obesity. Obese patients may be at particularly high risk for suffering vision loss from IIH. The purpose of the present study is to determine the prevalence of undiagnosed or asymptomatic papilledema in a population of morbidly obese individuals and to determine if these patients should undergo routine screening for papilledema. Methods Patients presenting to the UC Davis Bariatric Surgery Clinic between February 2008 and January 2011 who met the National Institutes of Health criteria for bariatric surgery were invited to participate in the study. Those patients who met the inclusion criteria and consented to the study were included. Participants were screened for IIH by nonmydriatic fundus photographs and by concerning symptoms prompting direct referral for neuro-ophthalmologic evaluation. Images were reviewed by a neuro-ophthalmologist, and patients with suspicious optic discs underwent neuro-ophthalmologic evaluation. Patients with findings consistent with IIH were sent for neurological evaluation. Results A total of 606 patients with an average body mass index of 47 kg/m2 were included in the study. Seventeen of these patients had photographic optic disc findings or symptoms suspicious for IIH. Seven of these patients did not have disc edema on clinical examination. Six patients were not evaluated in the clinic. Four of the 17 patients had subtle optic disc edema confirmed by clinical evaluation and were referred for full neurological workup. These 4 patients had normal neuroimaging, 3 of whom underwent lumbar punctures with borderline high opening pressures. All 4 patients had unremarkable visual field examinations. Fundus abnormalities other than optic disc edema were discovered in 33 patients. Conclusion Our study suggests that in a morbidly obese patient population, papilledema with significant visual loss is rare. Routine screening with fundus photography of morbidly obese patients likely is not warranted.
Guidelines for designing class-AB output stages

In this communication an approach for analyzing and designing low-power CMOS output stages is proposed. The analysis is carried out by taking into account output stage performance parameters which also affect main characteristics of the overall amplifier. To this aim, three quality factors are defined to afford the designer a better understanding of the relationships between current dissipation, area consumption, bandwidth and linearity.
FPGA family composition and effects of specialized blocks

Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) have gained wide acceptance among low- to medium-volume applications. However, there are gaps between FPGA and custom implementations in terms of area, performance and power consumption. In recent years, specialized blocks - memories and multipliers in particular - have been shown to help reduce this gap. However, their usefulness has not been studied formally on a broad spectrum of designs. As FPGAs are prefabricated, an FPGA family must contain members of various sizes and combinations of specialized blocks to satisfy diverse design resource requirements. We formulate the family selection process as an ldquoFPGA family compositionrdquo problem and propose an efficient algorithm to solve it. The technique was applied to an architecture similar to Xilinx Virtex FPGAs. The results show that smart composition technique can reduce the expected silicon area up to 55%. The benefit of providing multiplier blocks in FPGAs is also shown to reduce total area by 20% using the proposed algorithm.
A Semantic and QoS-aware Broker for Service Discovery

As the Web is increasingly used not only to find answers to specific information needs but also to carry out various tasks by the means of Web services, enhancing the capabilities of current Web search engines with effective and efficient techniques for Web service discovery becomes an important issue. In this paper, we propose a semantic and QoS-aware broker, namely SemQoS, that enables users to discover Web services based on both functional and non-functional criteria. The SemQoS broker relies on a semantic canonical description meta-model that allows describing services in terms of functional and non-functional properties. First, SemQoS discovery approach selects a set of services matching a discovery query with different degrees of approximate matching. The approach relies on deductive reasoning to relax the discovery query's constraints based on semantic service descriptions and domain knowledge. As a second step, the SemQoS broker refines the set of selected services to generate a set of service clusters based on their QoS attributes values. This step allows to prune the search space of a discovery query and determine the best sub-set (cluster) of Web services satisfying user's constraints. We evaluate our approach experimentally using a real Web services dataset.
Pairwise Fused Lasso

In the last decade several estimators have been proposed that enforce the grouping property. A regularized estimate exhibits the grouping property if it selects groups of highly correlated predictor rather than selecting one representative. The pairwise fused lasso is related to fusion methods but does not assume that predictors have to be ordered. By penalizing parameters and differences between pairs of coefficients it selects predictors and enforces the grouping property. Two methods how to obtain estimates are given. The first is based on LARS and works for the linear model, the second is based on quadratic approximations and works in the more general case of generalized linear models. The method is evaluated in simulation studies and applied to real data sets.
PERGANTIAN MAKNA DALAM BAHASA JAWA KRAMA

Akibat politik bahasa nasional, keberadaan bahasa ibu di Indonesia mulai terdesak. Fenomena ini juga menimpa bahasa Jawa. Seringnya intensitas penggunaan bahasa Indonesia di masyarakat penutur bahasa Jawa membuat bahasa Jawa bukan lagi pilihan utama bagi penuturnya. Akibat lanjutannya adalah banyak kosakata bahasa Jawa yang tidak dikenal lagi oleh masyarakat penutur bahasa Jawa. Kosa kata yang mulai tidak dikenal itu umumnya adalah dari ragam krama, yaitu ragam halus dalam bahasa Jawa. Saat ada semangat untuk menggalakkan penggunaan bahasa Jawa, banyak kosakata ragam krama yang terlanjur menghilang. Selanjutnya, masyarakat meraba-raba memakai kosakata krama yang mirip dengan ngokonya, atau mirip dengan kramanya, tetapi bukan ragam krama dari kata yang dimaksud. Ternyata dengan tidak disadari, kata-kata yang digunakan itu merupakan bentuk krama dari kata lain, atau kata yang memiliki arti lain. Ini menyebabkan suatu kata berubah maknanya.
THINC: A Virtual and Remote Display Architecture for Desktop Computing and Mobile Devices

THINC is a new virtual and remote display architecture for desktop computing. It has been designed to address the limitations and performance shortcomings of existing remote display technology, and to provide a building block around which novel desktop architectures can be built. THINC is architected around the notion of a virtual display device driver, a software-only component that behaves like a traditional device driver, but instead of managing specific hardware, enables desktop input and output to be intercepted, manipulated, and redirected at will. On top of this architecture, THINC introduces a simple, low-level, device-independent representation of display changes, and a number of novel optimizations and techniques to perform efficient interception and redirection of display output. This dissertation presents the design and implementation of THINC. It also introduces a number of novel systems which build upon THINC's architecture to provide new and improved desktop computing services. The contributions of this dissertation are as follows: (1) A high performance remote display system for LAN and WAN environments. This system differs from existing remote display technologies in that it focuses on the architecture of the system as a mechanism to improve performance, and not just on the remote display protocol and compression techniques. (2) A novel mechanism to natively support multimedia content in a remote display system in a way that is both transparent to applications and format independent. (3) pTHINC, a system to deliver improved remote display support for mobile devices, both in terms of performance and usability, and provide a competitive, and in some cases superior, alternative to native mobile applications. (4) MobiDesk, a desktop utility computing infrastructure that enables service providers to host desktop sessions in fully virtualized environments. Hosted sessions can be remotely accessed using THINC, they can be migrated across computers to provide high-availability, and can be effectively and efficiently protected from denial of service attacks. (5) Moving beyond remote display, we show how THINC's architecture can be used to provide continuous, low overhead recording of a desktop. Alongside, we introduce a novel way to leverage desktop accessibility services to allow users to search their recording based on captured text content. We have implemented prototypes for these systems, and evaluated their performance in a number of scenarios, and compared it to representative alternatives whenever possible. Our results demonstrate that THINC can provide superior remote display performance, and can be successfully used as a fundamental building block for new and improved desktop applications and services.
Adaptive cyclic and randomized coordinate descent for the sparse total least squares problem

Coordinate descent (CD) is a simple and general optimization technique. We use it to solve the sparse total least squares problem in an adaptive manner, working on the l1-regularized Rayleigh quotient function. We propose two algorithmic approaches for choosing the coordinates: cyclic and randomized. In both cases, the number of CD steps per time instant is a parameter that can serve as a trade-off between complexity and performance. We present numerical experiments showing that the proposed algorithms can approach stationary error near that of the oracle. The randomized algorithm is slightly better than the cyclic one with respect to convergence speed.
A VHDL model and Implementation of a Coarse-Grain Reconfigurable Coprocessor for a RISC Core

This paper presents a coarse-grain reconfigurable machine used as a coprocessor to speed up the execution of computationally demanding tasks, which would be too heavy for a generic RISC core stand alone. A VHDL model of the proposed architecture has been created for simulation and implementation. Some common algorithms for signal processing and multimedia applications have been mapped over our design, to benchmark it and compare the results against another existing architecture. Synthesis results indicate that the area occupation and the operating frequency of our design are reasonable, guaranteeing the physical feasibility of our approach. The amount of clock cycles required to perform the considered algorithms on the proposed architecture is far smaller than the one needed by a RISC core alone running the same software, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed solution
Current evidence for the management of rheumatoid arthritis with biological disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs: a systematic literature review informing the EULAR recommendations for the management of RA

Objectives To review the evidence for the efficacy and safety of biological agents in patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) to provide data to develop treatment recommendations by the European League Against Rheumatism (EULAR) Task Force. Methods Medline, Embase and Cochrane databases were searched for relevant articles on infliximab (IFX), etanercept (ETN), adalimumab (ADA), certolizumab-pegol (CZP), golimumab (GLM), anakinra (ANA), abatacept (ABT), rituximab (RTX) and tocilizumab (TCZ) published between 1962 and February 2009; published abstracts from the 2007–2008 American College of Rheumatology (ACR) and EULAR conference were obtained. Results 87 articles and 40 abstracts were identified. In methotrexate (MTX) naïve patients, biological therapy with IFX, ETN, ADA, GLM or ABT has been shown to improve clinical outcomes (level of evidence 1B). In MTX/other synthetic disease-modifying antirheumatic drug (DMARD) failures all nine biological agents confer benefit (1B), with lower efficacy noted for ANA. RTX, ABT, TCZ and GLM demonstrate efficacy in tumour necrosis factor inhibitor (TNFi) failures (1B). Less evidence exists for switching between IFX, ETN and ADA (3B). Biological and MTX combination therapy is more efficacious than a biological agent alone (1B). A safety review shows no increased malignancy risk compared with conventional DMARDs (3B). TNFi are generally associated with an increased risk of serious bacterial infection, particularly within the first 6 months of treatment initiation; increased tuberculosis (TB) rates with TNFi are highest with the monoclonal antibodies (3B). Conclusions There is good evidence for the efficacy of biological agents in patients with RA. Safety data confirm an increased risk of bacterial infection and TB with TNFi compared with conventional DMARDs.
Development of Fuzzy Logic Controller to Enhance the Performance of a Homing Guided Missile

This paper investigates the application of fuzzy logic for the development of guidance commands for homing missiles. Fuzzy logic approximation of the well-known proportional navigation guidance law is discussed to enhance the interception of targets performing uncertain maneuvers. Fuzzy logic guidance law development employs triangular membership functions. Simulation results using a simulation system are given. Key-Words: Fuzzy logic controller, homing guided missile
Implantation of Mesenchymal Stem Cells Overexpressing Endothelial Nitric Oxide Synthase Improves Right Ventricular Impairments Caused by Pulmonary Hypertension

Background— Pulmonary hypertension (PH) is a life-threatening disease. Bone marrow cell transplantation is reported to reduce the development of PH by increasing vascular beds in pulmonary circulation. However, adenoviral overexpression of endothelial nitric oxide synthase (eNOS) in the lung is also known to reduce PH. Because mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) are potential cell sources for neovascularization, the implantation of MSCs overexpressing eNOS (MSCs/eNOS) may further improve the surgical results. We evaluated the efficacy of MSCs/eNOS implantation in monocrotaline (MCT)-induced PH rats. Methods and Results— MSCs were isolated from rat bone marrow. PH was induced in rats by subcutaneous injection of MCT. One week after MCT administration, the rats received 3 different treatments: MSCs (MSC group), MSCs/eNOS (MSC/eNOS group), or nontreatment (PH group). As the negative control, rats received saline instead of MCT (control group). Right ventricular (RV) hypertrophy and the elevation of RV systolic pressure (RVSP) were evaluated 3 weeks after MCT administration. Moreover, the effects of MSCs/eNOS on survival were investigated in PH induced by MCT 3 weeks earlier. RVSP in both the MSC and MSC/eNOS groups was significantly lower than the PH group. RVSP in the MSC/eNOS group was significantly lower than the MSC group. The RV weight to body weight ratio was significantly lower in the MSC and MSC/eNOS groups than the PH group. The survival time of rats receiving MSCs/eNOS was significantly longer than the nontreatment rats. Conclusion— Intravenous implantation of MSCs/eNOS may offer ameliorating effects on PH-related RV impairment and survival time.
Supporting Awareness through Collaborative Brushing and Linking of Tabular Data

Maintaining an awareness of collaborators' actions is critical during collaborative work, including during collaborative visualization activities. Particularly when collaborators are located at a distance, it is important to know what everyone is working on in order to avoid duplication of effort, share relevant results in a timely manner and build upon each other's results. Can a person's brushing actions provide an indication of their queries and interests in a data set? Can these actions be revealed to a collaborator without substantially disrupting their own independent work? We designed a study to answer these questions in the context of distributed collaborative visualization of tabular data. Participants in our study worked independently to answer questions about a tabular data set, while simultaneously viewing brushing actions of a fictitious collaborator, shown directly within a shared workspace. We compared three methods of presenting the collaborator's actions: brushing & linking (i.e. highlighting exactly what the collaborator would see), selection (i.e. showing only a selected item), and persistent selection (i.e. showing only selected items but having them persist for some time). Our results demonstrated that persistent selection enabled some awareness of the collaborator's activities while causing minimal interference with independent work. Other techniques were less effective at providing awareness, and brushing & linking caused substantial interference. These findings suggest promise for the idea of exploiting natural brushing actions to provide awareness in collaborative work.
Macrophage colony-stimulating factor induction of enhanced macrophage anticryptococcal activity: synergy with fluconazole for killing.

Enhancement of anticryptococcal activity in macrophages by macrophage colony-stimulating factor (M-CSF) and possible synergy between macrophages and fluconazole for killing of Cryptococcus neoformans were tested. M-CSF (48 h)-treated macrophages underwent dramatic morphologic changes and inhibited cryptococcal multiplication by 96% +/- 4%, which was greater (P < .001) than that of macrophages cultured in medium alone. M-CSF (5000 units/mL) induced optimal anticryptococcal activity but did not increase percentage of phagocytosis. NG-mono-methyl-L-arginine did not affect enhanced fungistatic activity. For a very fluconazole-sensitive isolate, fungistatic macrophages synergized with fungistatic doses of fluconazole for killing; for a less sensitive isolate, synergy was significant only when macrophages were activated with M-CSF or interferon-gamma plus lipopolysaccharide; for a fluconazole-resistant isolate, macrophages collaborated with fluconazole for additive fungistasis but not killing, and M-CSF-treated macrophages were significantly more fungistatic with fluconazole than were nonactivated macrophages.
The connection of reflective practice to management competency through a business simulation

This paper reviews critical literature related to learning, reflection and the use of simulations as an adult or experiential learning activity. It describes the impact of a management simulation, designed by one of the authors, as a means of enhancing participant’s competence as practicing managers. Its educational strategy is linked to the input competency movement characterised by the approaches of Boyatzis (1982), Pedler, Boydell, and Burgoyne (2011), Quinn, Faerman, Thompson, McGrath, and St Clair (2008) and Golema, Boyatzis, and McKee (2002). Participants are given the opportunity to reflect on their behaviour and at crucial times during the simulation. At the conclusion of the activity an evaluation form is provided which asks the participants to again reflect on the simulation and how the activity enhanced their learning and insights on their management practice. The emphasis here is on self awareness as a means of increasing their competency in managing others.
Narrative construction of leadership : four realms of leadership in the essays of adult students

This study belongs to the field of leadership research and is focused on relational leadership. Relational leadership research is in its early stages and needs more attention. This study departs mainly from leadership research orientating in leader-centricity and its effectiveness. Relational leadership highlights the notion of leadership as a process, its ongoing nature and the importance of local-historical context. It also introduces the concept of “space between,” the moment where the leadership process is constructed in interaction. This research emphasises the social construction and relational nature of leadership. The study is qualitative and inductive by nature, using narrative methodology in order to make sense, communicate, and construct the leadership phenomenon. The focus of this research is in reconstructing leadership using written essays of adult higher education students. This study contributes in the field of relational leadership processes illustrating four reconstructions of leadership in the form of narratives. The four realities, coined here as realms of leadership, are: Excellence, Balance, Quasi, and Anarchy. They are reconstructions of leadership moments of different kind. This study also contrasts the realms by four core constructs: Professionalism, Behaviour, Development, and Expression. These invisible core constructs fulfil the relational interaction of leadership phenomena. Further, this study argues that the discourse of readjusting in the space between realms is an invisible thread linking the processes together. Leadership constructs in this study of four realms between which readjusting works as an invisible bridge. The contribution of this study belongs to the field of relational leadership exploring and constructing the space between in leadership. By legitimating leadership as a relational process instead of describing it as an individual-based issue, this research and its idea of multiple realities invites the audience to dialogue and discussion.
Localized Fgf10 expression is not required for lung branching morphogenesis but prevents differentiation of epithelial progenitors

Localized Fgf10 expression in the distal mesenchyme adjacent to sites of lung bud formation has long been thought to drive stereotypic branching morphogenesis even though isolated lung epithelium branches in the presence of non-directional exogenous Fgf10 in Matrigel. Here, we show that lung agenesis in Fgf10 knockout mice can be rescued by ubiquitous overexpression of Fgf10, indicating that precisely localized Fgf10 expression is not required for lung branching morphogenesis in vivo. Fgf10 expression in the mesenchyme itself is regulated by Wnt signaling. Nevertheless, we found that during lung initiation simultaneous overexpression of Fgf10 is not sufficient to rescue the absence of primary lung field specification in embryos overexpressing Dkk1, a secreted inhibitor of Wnt signaling. However, after lung initiation, simultaneous overexpression of Fgf10 in lungs overexpressing Dkk1 is able to rescue defects in branching and proximal-distal differentiation. We also show that Fgf10 prevents the differentiation of distal epithelial progenitors into Sox2-expressing airway epithelial cells in part by activating epithelial β-catenin signaling, which negatively regulates Sox2 expression. As such, these findings support a model in which the main function of Fgf10 during lung development is to regulate proximal-distal differentiation. As the lung buds grow out, proximal epithelial cells become further and further displaced from the distal source of Fgf10 and differentiate into bronchial epithelial cells. Interestingly, our data presented here show that once epithelial cells are committed to the Sox2-positive airway epithelial cell fate, Fgf10 prevents ciliated cell differentiation and promotes basal cell differentiation.