Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Carotid Plaque Echolucency Increases the Risk of Stroke in Carotid Stenting: The Imaging in Carotid Angioplasty and Risk of Stroke (ICAROS) Study

Background—Carotid artery stenting (CAS) has recently emerged as a potential alternative to carotid endarterectomy. Cerebral embolization is the most devastating complication of CAS, and the echogenicity of carotid plaque has been indicated as one of the risk factors involved. This is the first study to analyze the role of a computer-assisted highly reproducible index of echogenicity, namely the gray-scale median (GSM), on the risk of stroke during CAS. Methods and Results—The Imaging in Carotid Angioplasty and Risk of Stroke (ICAROS) registry included 418 cases of CAS collected from 11 international centers. An echographic evaluation of carotid plaque with GSM measurement was made preprocedurally. The onset of neurological deficits during the procedure and the postprocedural period was recorded. The overall rate of neurological complications was 3.6%: minor strokes, 2.2%, and major stroke, 1.4%. There were 11 of 155 strokes (7.1%) in patients with GSM ≤25 and 4 of 263 (1.5%) in patients with GSM >25 (P=0.005). Patients with severe stenosis (≥85%) had a higher rate of stroke (P=0.03). The effectiveness of brain protection devices was confirmed in those with GSM >25 (P=0.01) but not in those with GSM ≤25. Multivariate analysis revealed that GSM (OR, 7.11; P=0.002) and rate of stenosis (OR, 5.76; P=0.010) are independent predictors of stroke. Conclusions—Carotid plaque echolucency, as measured by GSM ≤25, increases the risk of stroke in CAS. The inclusion of echolucency measured as GSM in the planning of any endovascular procedure of carotid lesions allows stratification of patients at different risks of complications in CAS.
Child Custody Decisions: How Legal and Mental Health Professionals View the Concept of ‘Best Interests of the Child’

Close scrutiny of legal precedents and psychological literature has revealed significant differences in the views of legal and mental health professionals regarding the major criteria used in custody decisions. This article carries the investigation further and considers empirically the responses to the criteria of these two groups of professionals in South Africa. Findings show subtle but significant differences between them, particularly with regard to the ‘child’ dimension of the ‘best interests’ concept. The implications for mental health professionals in their evaluation of custody cases, and in their giving of testimony, are underscored.
A multibaseline stereo system with active illumination and real-time image acquisition

We describe our implementation of a parallel depth recovery scheme for a four-camera multibaseline stereo in a convergent configuration. Our system is capable of image capture at video rate. This is critical in applications that require three-dimensional tracking. We obtain dense stereo depth data by projecting a light pattern of frequency modulated sinusoidally varying intensity onto the scene, thus increasing the local discriminability at each pixel and facilitating matches. In addition, we make most of the camera view areas by converging them at a volume of interest. Results show that we are able to extract stereo depth data that are, on the average, less than 1 mm in error at distances between 1.5 to 3.5 m away from the cameras. <<ETX>>
TWEETS AND TRUTH

This paper examines how social media are influencing the core journalistic value of verification. Through the discipline of verification, the journalist establishes jurisdiction over the ability to objectively parse reality to claim a special kind of authority and status. Social media question the individualistic, top-down ideology of traditional journalism. The paper considers journalism practices as a set of literacies, drawing on the theoretical framework of new literacies to examine the shift from a focus on individual intelligence, where expertise and authority are located in individuals and institutions, to a focus on collective intelligence where expertise and authority are distributed and networked. It explores how news organizations are negotiating the tensions inherent in a transition to a digital, networked media environment, considering how journalism is evolving into a tentative and iterative process where contested accounts are examined and evaluated in public in real-time.
Foreign Glycoproteins Can Be Actively Recruited to Virus Assembly Sites during Pseudotyping

ABSTRACT Retroviruses like human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1), as well as many other enveloped viruses, can efficiently produce infectious virus in the absence of their own surface glycoprotein if a suitable glycoprotein from a foreign virus is expressed in the same cell. This process of complementation, known as pseudotyping, often can occur even when the glycoprotein is from an unrelated virus. Although pseudotyping is widely used for engineering chimeric viruses, it has remained unknown whether a virus can actively recruit foreign glycoproteins to budding sites or, alternatively, if a virus obtains the glycoproteins through a passive mechanism. We have studied the specificity of glycoprotein recruitment by immunogold labeling viral glycoproteins and imaging their distribution on the host plasma membrane using scanning electron microscopy. Expressed alone, all tested viral glycoproteins were relatively randomly distributed on the plasma membrane. However, in the presence of budding HIV-1 or Rous sarcoma virus (RSV) particles, some glycoproteins, such as those encoded by murine leukemia virus and vesicular stomatitis virus, were dramatically redistributed to viral budding sites. In contrast, the RSV Env glycoprotein was robustly recruited only to the homologous RSV budding sites. These data demonstrate that viral glycoproteins are not in preformed membrane patches prior to viral assembly but rather that glycoproteins are actively recruited to certain viral assembly sites.
Who gets chemotherapy for metastatic lung cancer?

STUDY OBJECTIVES To determine the prevalence and factors associated with chemotherapy use in elderly patients presenting with advanced lung cancer. DESIGN A retrospective cohort study using administrative data. SETTING AND PATIENTS We analyzed the medical bills for the 6,308 Medicare patients > 65 years old with diagnosed stage IV non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) in the 11 SEER (survival, epidemiology, and end results) regions between 1991 and 1993. The main outcome measure, chemotherapy administration, was identified by the relevant medical billing codes. Patient sociodemographic and disease characteristics were obtained from the SEER database and census data. RESULTS Almost 22% of patients received chemotherapy at some time for their metastatic NSCLC. As expected, younger patients and those with fewer comorbid conditions were more likely to receive chemotherapy. However, several nonmedical factors, such as nonblack race, higher socioeconomic status, treatment in a teaching hospital, and living in the Seattle/Puget Sound or Los Angeles SEER regions, also significantly increased a patient's likelihood of receiving chemotherapy. CONCLUSION Compared to previous reports, the prevalence of chemotherapy use for advanced NSCLC appears to be increasing. However, despite uniform health insurance coverage, there is wide variation in the utilization of palliative chemotherapy among Medicare patients, and nonmedical factors are strong predictors of whether a patient receives chemotherapy. While it is impossible to know the appropriate rate of usage, nonmedical factors should only influence a patient's likelihood of receiving treatment if they reflect patient treatment preference. Research to further clarify the costs, benefits, and patient preferences for chemotherapy in this patient population is warranted in order to minimize the effect of nonmedical biases on management decisions.
A novel simplification method of point cloud with directed Hausdorff distance

Three dimensional (3D) point clouds are typically used in computer vision and pattern recognition areas. In general, the raw point cloud has large numbers of redundant points which require excessively large storage space and lots of time for post-processing. This paper presents a synthetic point cloud simplification method to obtain computationally manageable point sets. First, a coarse-to-fine feature extraction manner is designed with normal vectors deviation and k-means clustering methods, which can concentrate more sample points in regions of high curvature. Additionally, the directed Hausdorff distance is performed directly on the point cloud which samples the point cloud judiciously with an edge-preserving manner. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is effective for point cloud simplification, and it exhibited superior performance compared to existing techniques.
Competing values in software process improvement: a study of cultural profiles

Purpose – The purpose of the article is to investigate the impact of organizational culture on software process improvement (SPI). Is cultural congruence between an organization and an adopted process model required? How can the level of congruence between an organizational culture and the values and assumptions underlying an adopted process model be assessed? Design/methodology/approach – The competing values framework and its associated assessment instrument are used in a case study to establish an organizational culture profile of a software development business unit within the case company. The instrument is supplemented with a technique to produce culture profiles of texts such as process models like the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) and the case company's quality management system. The different profiles are subsequently analyzed and compared.Findings – The culture profile of the CMMI confirms previous research and depicts a result‐oriented, formalized, and structured organization. A c.
Median nerve somatosensory evoked potentials in migraine

In visual evoked potential studies, habituation during stimulus repetition with the same stimulus at a constant intensity has been found to be abnormal in migraineurs between attacks. The purpose of this study was to investigate habituation of somatosensory evoked potentials (SEPs) and the effects of migraine on them. Eighty‐five subjects were included in the study: 30 healthy volunteers (HVs) and 55 migraineurs [30 with migraine without aura (MO), 25 with migraine with aura (MA)]. During continuous stimulation at 3 Hz, four blocks of 100 responses were sequentially averaged of Erb's point (N9), cervical (N13), and cortical (N20) median nerve SEPs. Mean amplitude changes in the second, third and fourth blocks are expressed as percentages of the first block. There was habituation to N13 and N20 in the second, third and fourth blocks in HVs. In the migraine groups, there was no habituation; on the contrary, potentiation was found. This potentiation was statistically significant only in the second blocks for N13 (MO P=0.007, MA P=0.01 versus HVs). However, in both migraineur groups, the rate of N20 potentiations was statistically significant versus that in HVs for all blocks (all P < 0.05). It is concluded that whilst physiological habituation occurs in HVs for cervical and cortical SEPs, in migraine patients there is an interictal deficit of habituation of this sensory modality.
Assessing the Impact of Information Technology on Supply Chain Management

Companies attempt to companies are attempting to find ways to improve their flexibility and responsiveness and in turn competitiveness by changing their operations strategy, methods and technologies that include the implementation of supply chain management (SCM) paradigm. Hence, information technology (IT) can enhance the agility of SCM. The aspects, however, which IT impact on SCM are not equal. In this paper, we specify the areas that IT affects on supply chain, and evaluate it. Since the judgments of Iranians automobile industry are qualitative, the evaluation has been done by fuzzy ranking method.
Human macrophage tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-alpha production induced by Trypanosoma brucei gambiense and the role of TNF-alpha in parasite control.

Trypanosoma brucei gambiense, a causative agent of sleeping sickness, induced a dose-dependent production of tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-alpha by human macrophages in vitro. TNF-alpha was also induced in the Mono Mac 6 cell line, which indicates a direct effect of parasite components on macrophages. Parasite-soluble factors were also potent inducers of TNF-alpha. The addition of anti-TNF-alpha to cocultures of macrophages and parasites increased the number of trypanosomes and their life span, whereas irrelevant antibodies had no effect. TNF-alpha may have a direct role (i.e., direct trypanolytic activity) and/or an indirect one, such as TNF-alpha-mediated induction of cytotoxic molecules. A direct dose-dependent lytic effect of TNF-alpha on purified parasites was observed. This lytic effect was inhibited by anti-TNF-alpha. These data suggest that, as in experimental trypanosomiasis, TNF-alpha is involved in parasite growth control in human African trypanosomiasis.
Talker background and individual differences in the speech intelligibility benefit

One way talkers can increase intelligibility is by producing clear speech. Though clear speech, as opposed to conversational speech (ConvS), generally increases intelligibility (known as the clear speech intelligibility benefit), not all talkers exhibit the same degree of benefit. Ferguson showed that while intelligibility increased across talkers for clear speech, when looking at individual talkers, the benefit ranged from -12.1 –33.3%. While most talkers were more intelligible during clear speech, some talkers actually became less intelligible. To explain individual differences like these, most researchers have explored acoustic, temporal, and syntactic factors. The current study probes three additional factors, ones relating to talker background: talker experience communicating with nonnative (L2) speakers, talkers’ attitudes toward nonnatives, and talker experience as an L2 speaker. Twenty L2 English listeners transcribed sentences from 20 L1 English speakers as they were produced in ConvS and nonnative directed speech (NNDS; a type of clear speech). Intelligibility scores for ConvS and NNDS were compared to measure individual differences in intelligibility and to calculate the clear speech benefit for each talker. Scores were compared with the talkers’ answers on a questionnaire to determine whether the variables affected the talkers’ intelligibility. Results of the transcription task showed greater overall intelligibility for NNDS than ConvS; however, this was not the case for all talkers. Additionally, talkers varied
Governing education without reform: the power of the example

There is an increasing emphasis today on different forms of evidence-based policy in education. Several authors address the related emergence of new patterns of governing and describe forms of governing by numbers and related practices of governing by comparison. There is, however, less focus on the governmental use of soft evidence such as examples of good practice. Drawing on the analysis of governing practices in Belgium (Flanders) and Europe, this article attempts to examine in detail how soft evidence, among other elements, constitutes the current governing configuration. It is argued that this configuration includes several mechanisms that appear as evident but have far-reaching consequences: imposing spaces of meaning and discussion, deciding on what is within one's control and what is not, making people believe there is no longer something beyond themselves that is an excuse for actual self-improvement. What takes shape as part of techniques of contextualization, personalization, and permanent monitoring is ‘the power of the example’: learning from examples in view of increased performance. The conclusion expresses some concerns about the tendencies toward a manipulative society.
Choice of metrics used in collaborative filtering and their impact on recommender systems

The capacity of recommender systems to make correct predictions is essentially determined by the quality and suitability of the collaborative filtering that implements them. The common memory-based metrics are Pearson correlation and cosine, however, their use is not always the most appropriate or sufficiently justified. In this paper, we analyze these two metrics together with the less common mean squared difference (MSD) to discover their advantages and drawbacks in very important aspects such as the impact when introducing different values of k-neighborhoods, minimization of the MAE error, capacity to carry out a sufficient number of predictions, percentage of correct and incorrect predictions and behavior when attempting to recommend the n-best items. The paper lists the results and practical conclusions that have been obtained after carrying out a comparative study of the metrics based on 135 experiments on the MovieLens database of 100,000 ratios.
Acute administration of the CB1 cannabinoid receptor antagonist SR 141716A induces anxiety‐like responses in the rat

ANIMAL models have revealed that psychoactive cannabinoids induce both anxiolytic and anxiety-like reactions which are dose- and context-dependent. In the present study we examined the acute actions of the CB1 cannabinoid receptor antagonist SR 141716A in both the defensive withdrawal test and the elevated plus-maze in rats. Acute administration of SR 141716A (0.1, 1 and 3 mg kg−1) induced defensive responses in both anxiety tests, at a dose of 3 mg kg−1. This dose had no effect on horizontal locomotor activity and did not activate the hypothalamus–pituitary–adrenal axis, although several cannabinoid withdrawal-like behavioural symptoms were observed. These results demonstrate that blockade of the endogenous cannabinoid tone might induce anxiety-like responses in rats.
Framework Planning of an Integrated Management Platform Applied for Environment Protection Based on SOA Infrastructure

With the acceleration of industrialization and urbanization, environmental protection in developing countries such as China is under ever-increasing pressure. The establishment and improvement of environment protection management tools, particularly the digital systems, with properties of fast and efficient for environment problems disposal occur as an urgent task for scientific and government organizations. Based on a practical study of environment management systems, we analyze the existing problems of currently-in-use platforms, and propose a SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) based method that is further implemented in an application, which is labeled with "service mode of unified storage, unified service" and "one-stop landing". A detailed systemic frame design is introduced in this paper. The actual practice of platform based on the proposed strategy releases positive scalability, reusability and extensibility.
Heterogeneous nuclear ribonucleoprotein B1 expression in malignant mesothelioma

Heterogeneous nuclear ribonucleoprotein B1, an RNA‐binding protein required for mRNA maturation, reportedly is overexpressed in early lung cancer and in several other tumors, including precancerous lesions. Expression of the protein was assessed immunohistochemically in 39 specimens of malignant mesothelioma and five of non‐neoplastic pleura, and by flow cytometry in a human epithelioid mesothelioma cell line. No tumor showed overexpression, but 29 of 39 cases showed modest expression. Patients whose tumors showed expression had significantly better survival rates than others. Epithelioid tumors and reactive mesothelial cells were more likely to express the protein than sarcomatoid tumors and resting mesothelial cells. Flow cytometric analysis of an epithelioid mesothelioma cell line demonstrated stronger expression in exponentially growing than growth‐restricted cells. Heterogeneous nuclear ribonucleoprotein B1 is expressed widely in malignant mesotheliomas and in reactive mesothelial cells, but is not overexpressed. This protein may regulate proliferation linked with differentiation toward epithelioid morphology in mesothelial cells. Expression of the protein may be a prognostic indicator for patents with malignant mesothelioma. (Cancer Sci 2006; 97: 1175–1181)
Passive compensation of nonlinear robot dynamics

In this paper, we derive a coordinate-free formulation of a passive controller that makes a mechanical system track reference curves in a potential field. Contrary to conventional reference tracking, we do not specify a single time-varying trajectory that the system has to track. Instead, we specify a whole curve that the system has to stay on at all times. Using tools from differential geometry, we first derive a controller that makes the system move along arbitrary (smooth enough) reference curves while keeping the kinetic energy constant. We then apply the results to the case of movement in an artificial potential field, in which case, the reference curves are completely determined by the potential field and cannot be chosen arbitrarily. Simulation then shows the performance of the controller on a benchmark robot with two degrees of freedom.
The Life Trajectory Interview for Youth (LTI‐Y): method development and psychometric properties of an instrument to assess life‐course models and achievement

This paper describes the rationale, development and psychometric properties of the Life Trajectory Interview for Youth (LTI‐Y), an instrument designed to assess cognitive models of the life course and life‐course achievement. This method was developed over 13 months of pilot research, and applied with a population of 350 participants from the Great Smoky Mountain Study, a longitudinal epidemiological study of mental health in western North Carolina comprising 1420 youths (among them 350 Cherokee Native Americans). The LTI‐Y is designed to address gaps in our understanding of the links between large‐scale structural conditions and social processes and individual outcomes such as mental health. Scale consistency (n = 350) was good to high, whereas test‐retest reliability in a limited sample (n = 18) was moderate to good, depending on the domain and dimension of data considered. Overall, psychometric properties indicate fairly stable and consistent life‐course strategies and priorities. Although developed and piloted with youth from Western North Carolina, the methods described could be applied to any population of interest. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
A Psychometric Comparison of the Internet Addiction Test, the Internet-Related Problem Scale, and Self-Diagnosis

One of the more prominent issues in the field of Internet addiction is the validity of the instrument used to assess users' level of Internet involvement. Many of the instruments used to assess Internet addiction have high face validity but have yet to be tested psychometrically. The aim of this study is to compare two of the most used Internet addiction research measures, the Internet Addiction Test (IAT) and the Internet-Related Problem Scale (IRPS), along with a self-diagnostic question simply asking Internet users if they thought they were addicted to the Internet. A total of 225 Internet users participated in the study (69 males and 156 females). Participants who defined themselves as Internet addicts had higher scores on both the IAT and IRPS, and the three different Internet addiction measures were strongly correlated to each other. For the IAT, factor analysis generated three factors (emotional/psychological conflict; time management issues; mood modification) explaining 56.3% of the variance. For the IRPS, factor analysis generated four factors (negative effects of Internet use; mood modification; loss of control; increased Internet use) explaining 60.2% of the variance. The implications for these findings are discussed.