Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Exploring the short term psychological impact of Mayer-Rokitansky-Kuster-Hauser (MRKH) syndrome for young women; an interpretational phenomenological analysis approach

Background: MRKH is a congenital condition which renders women unable to menstruate, carry a child, or have sexual intercourse (Edmonds, 2000). However, there is a scarcity of research regarding the psychological impact of the condition. Diagnosis is made in mid to late adolescence, a time where social relationships and identity are salient, hence there may be specific challenges at this point and through the transition to adulthood. Aims: The study aimed to explore the impact of MRKH on young women. Methods: Five women (aged 18 to 22) diagnosed within the past five years took part in a non-directive semi-structured interview. Transcripts were analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. Results: Four themes were identified; hindering independence, a sensitivity to difference, managing intimacy and managing threat to identity. The personal and sensitive nature of MRKH had a significant social impact for the young women’s developing identity, autonomy, and negotiation of peer and sexual relationships. Fear of being stigmatised caused them to manage their presentation to others in order to minimise the impact of their diagnosis. Conclusions: The study offered a unique insight into the social challenges of MRKH in the transition to adulthood. Implications for services and future research directions are indicated.
Perceptions and knowledge about robots in children of 11 years old in México City

This paper seeks to describe the knowledge and perceptions of robots that have a group of 19 children under 11 years old in Mexico City has, interacting with a teleoperated anthropomorphic robot compared with a group of 18 children with the same characteristics that have not interacted with same robot. We seek to focus a precedent in the Mexican children in their context for future development of social robots.
Discovering and engaging with the emotional context of action research: a personal journey

This thesis consists of five elements which, when taken together, articulate the journey of personal and professional development I have undertaken as an action researcher, and convey the emotional context of this type of work. The foundation for my development journey was the undertaking of a three year action research study which aimed to improve the care for older people on two rehabilitation wards in an acute NHS trust. Analysis of findings provided theoretical explanations of what helped and hindered staff from engaging in practice change,with the report presenting a neat and straightforward process of investigation. My experience of undertaking the study was, however, far from the neat and straightforward process articulated, with it being a complex, difficult and painful undertaking which had a personal impact on me. The thesis progresses from the research report to explore and critically reflect on my personal experience of undertaking the action research study, and engages with the experience of other action researchers through a secondary analysis of the literature. Through this work the emotional context of action research is highlighted for all those involved in the process. It is argued that attention to emotions throughout the action research process is essential for both participants and researchers to ensure that the care and support required to manage them can be provided, and to enable such emotions to be used as data that can further inform the field of study. Although the importance of recognising the emotional context of action research is articulated in this thesis, there is a dearth of literature in relation to it. It is concluded that more needs to be written on this aspect of practice so that those new to action research can be made aware of the importance of the emotional components inherent within it, and can ensure that appropriate strategies are in place to enable them to engage with, learn from, and utilise such emotions to further inform their work. The messages in this thesis will be of relevance to those considering, undertaking, supporting and supervising action research studies. In addition, due to the similarities of action research processes, contexts and topic areas to other methods of practice change, they will also be relevant to those involved in general practice development activity.
Overview of the BSS Theory 2 . 1 A Problem

In this paper, a novel method for linear normal mode identification based on Blind Source Separation (BSS) is introduced. Modal coordinates are considered as a specific case of sources that have certain time structure. This structure can be identified by many BSS algorithms. However, algorithms based on second order statistics are particularly suited for the linear normal mode identification. Two well-known BSS algorithms are considered. First, Algorithm for Multiple Unknown Signals Extraction (AMUSE) is used to illustrate the similarity with Ibrahim Time Domain (ITD) modal identification method. Secondly, Second Order Blind Identification (SOBI) is used to demonstrate noise robustness of BSS-based mode shape extraction. Numerical results from these BSS algorithms and ITD method under different noise environments are provided. The Monte Carlo numerical simulations for the noisy cases are specifically used to show the robustness of BSS methods.
Interaction of non-aggregated boar AWN-1 and AQN-3 with phospholipid matrices. A model for coating of spermadhesins to the sperm surface.

Boar spermadhesins are 12-14 kDa lectins which coat the entire acrosomal cap sperm head surface. The large amount of spermadhesins AQN-1, AQN-2, AQN-3, and AWN-1 present on in vitro capacitated spermatozoa (approximately 7 x 10(6) molecules of each spermadhesin per cell) suggested that they may bind to major component(s) of the sperm surface. We have investigated both the aggregation state of spermadhesins in seminal plasma using gel filtration chromatography, and their ability to bind to the major phospholipids of the boar sperm plasma membrane, i.e. phosphorylcholine and phosphorylethanolamine. The bulk (90%) of spermadhesins AQN-3 and AWN-1 were eluted as aggregated proteins (Mr > 50,000) with the void volume of a Sephadex G-50 column; the remaining 10% of the total amount of seminal plasma AWN-1 and AQN-3 were recovered, together with the whole amount of AQN-1 and AQN-2, in a fraction containing low-molecular-mass proteins (Mr 16,000-30,000). None spermadhesin of either gel-filtration fraction bound to a phosphorylcholine affinity matrix. On the other hand, low-molecular-mass (monomeric or dimeric) AQN-3 and AWN-1 were the only spermadhesins retained in a phosphorylethanolamine affinity column. Both AQN-3 and AWN-1 purified from seminal plasma by reverse-phase HPLC retained their lipid-binding capability. In addition, immobilization of AQN-3 and AWN-1 onto a phosphorylethanolamine matrix did not interfere with the ability of the proteins to bind bovine glycoprotein PDC-109, indicating that the structural determinants for the binding lipid and carbohydrates lay on different structural domains. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Signal Analysis Using Fourier-like Wavelets

In continuous-time wavelet analysis, most wavelet presents some kind of symmetry. Based on the Fourier and Hartley transform kernels, a new wavelet multiresolution analysis has been proposed. This approach is based on a pair of orthogonal wavelet functions and can be named as the Fourier-like and Hartley-like wavelet analysis. In this paper we carry a preliminary investigation about potentials applications for the Fourier-like wavelet analysis on signals derived from power systems to illustrate the behavior of such wavelets
A moving fluoroscope to capture tibiofemoral kinematics during complete cycles of free level and downhill walking as well as stair descent

Videofluoroscopy has been shown to provide essential information in the evaluation of the functionality of total knee arthroplasties. However, due to the limitation in the field of view, most systems can only assess knee kinematics during highly restricted movements. To avoid the limitations of a static image intensifier, a moving fluoroscope has been presented as a standalone system that allows tracking of the knee during multiple complete cycles of level- and downhill-walking, as well as stair descent, in combination with the synchronous assessment of ground reaction forces and whole body skin marker measurements. Here, we assess the ability of the system to keep the knee in the field of view of the image intensifier. By measuring ten total knee arthroplasty subjects, we demonstrate that it is possible to maintain the knee to within 1.8 ± 1.4 cm vertically and 4.0 ± 2.6 cm horizontally of the centre of the intensifier throughout full cycles of activities of daily living. Since control of the system is based on real-time feedback of a wire sensor, the system is not dependent on repeatable gait patterns, but is rather able to capture pathological motion patterns with low inter-trial repeatability.
Classification of Staphylococcus albus strains isolated from the urinary tract

Strains of Gram-positive, catalase-positive, coagulase-negative cocci isolated from urine specimens were classified by the system of Baird-Parker (1963). Urinary infections attributed to instrumentation or pathological abnormalities of the urinary tract were caused almost entirely by various Staphylococcus subgroups. These showed a wide range of antibiotic sensitivities, unrelated to subgroups and not obviously related to previous chemotherapy. Attacks of cystitis occurring in otherwise healthy women were usually caused by Micrococcus subgroup 3 strains.
Living FIFO: the experiences and psychosocial wellbeing of Western Australian fly-in/fly-out employees and partners

Using a concurrent multi-methods design employing both quantitative and qualitative methodologies this study investigated the psychosocial wellbeing Western Australian fly-in/fly-out (FIFO) mining employees and their partners. The quantitative phase of the study assessed the psychological wellbeing, relationship satisfaction and perceptions of family function of 90 FIFO mining employees and 32 partners of FIFO employees using the General Health Questionnaire 12, the Dyadic Adjustment Scale and the Family Assessment Device. Analyses revealed that both FIFO employees and their partners are within the norms for healthy functioning on the scales and sub-scales of the measures of psychological wellbeing, relationship satisfaction and perceptions of family function, and that there were no statistically significant differences between the scores of the two groups on any of these measures. Further, there were no significant differences when data were analysed according to family type or profile of absence. Thus, despite perceptions that regular FIFO employment related absence would have adverse impacts on various aspects of wellbeing, the group of FIFO employees and partners in this study report similar levels of psychological wellbeing, relationship satisfaction and perceptions of family function to those of the general Australian population. The qualitative phase used constructivist grounded theory methodology to explore the experiences of FIFO employees and partners of FIFO employees in order to develop an understanding and theoretical scheme of the role of contextual factors in their adaptation to the FIFO lifestyle. In-depth interviews were conducted with a medium sized sample of 16 FIFO employees and 12 partners of FIFO employees. The findings from the qualitative phase are discussed in light of existing literature and the findings from the quantitative phase. The data revealed a number of individual, family, community and workplace factors that impact on individual experiences of and adaptation to the FIFO lifestyle. Informants generally made purposeful and informed choices to undertake FIFO employment based on the notion that “the benefits outweigh the costs”, that the lifestyle associated with FIFO employment would considerably increase individual and family access to financial and psychosocial resources, and that the net gains in personal and family resources would outweigh any losses. These findings challenge earlier presumptions that the regular absences associated with FIFO employment would result in a loss of individual and family resources and would impact negatively on the
Failing at fairness : how our schools cheat girls

"Failing at Fairness", the result of two decades of research, shows how gender bias makes it impossible for girls to receive an education equal to that given to boys. Girls' learning problems are not identified as often as boys' are Boys receive more of their teachers' attention Girls start school testing higher in every academic subject, yet graduate from high school scoring 50 points lower than boys on the SAT Hard-hitting and eye-opening, "Failing at Fairness" should be read by every parent, especially those with daughters.
Aligning economic impact with environmental benefits: A green strategy model

To achieve lower energy consumption many green strategies (e.g. virtualize applications and consolidate them on shared server machines, or optimize the usage of the private cloud by opening up to external consumers) have been discussed. In practice, however, the major incentive for a company to go green is reducing costs. While green strategies often focus on technical and environmental issues, they hardly address the economic impact that they may bring. If green strategies do not lead to an explicit (and significant) reduction of costs (hence increase in revenues) they are nice but not part of the business strategy of the company. In this paper we propose a green strategy model that provides decision makers with the information needed to decide on whether to take green strategies and eventually how to align them with their business strategies. This model provides a means to codify green strategies in such a way that the link between green strategies, their economic impact and green goals becomes explicit. We applied the model in a case study to codify 132 green actions collected from Dutch data centers. This exercise further confirmed the advantage of using the proposed model and helped us identifying future improvements.
The classification of punctured-torus groups.

Thurston’s ending lamination conjecture proposes that a flnitely generated Kleinian group is uniquely determined (up to isometry) by the topology of its quotient and a list of invariants that describe the asymptotic geometry of its ends. We present a proof of this conjecture for punctured-torus groups. These are free two-generator Kleinian groups with parabolic commutator, which should be thought of as representations of the fundamental group of a punctured torus. As a consequence we verify the conjectural topological description of the deformation space of punctured-torus groups (including Bers’ conjecture that the quasi-Fuchsian groups are dense in this space) and prove a rigidity theorem: two punctured-torus groups are quasi-conformally conjugate if and only if they are topologically conjugate.
Lambda-Systolic Routing in a Wavelength-Division Multiplexed All-Optical Butterfly

In this paper we present an all-optical network architecture and a routing protocol for it. A 2r-dimensional coloured optical butterfly (COBF) network consists of P = $2^{2r}$ processors, N = $r2^{2r+1}$ routing nodes, and E = $r2^{2r+2}$ edges. The routing machinery is divided in an r-dimensional front-end and 2r = $\sqrt{P}$ r-dimensional back-ends. Processors are deployed at the level 0 (identical to level 2r) nodes of the network. Routing is based on the use of $\sqrt{P}$ wavelength-multiplexed optical signals, a cyclic control bit sequence, and scheduled sendings of packets. The routing protocol ensures that no electro-optical conversion is needed in the intermediate routing nodes and all the packets injected into the routing machinery will reach their target without collisions. We then present an analysis of the routing algorithm with a batch type routing problem. According to our experiments, a work-optimal routing of an h-relation is achieved with a reasonable size of h ÎΩ(P).
Visual analytical approaches to evaluating uncertainty and bias in crowd sourced crisis information

Concerns about verification mean the humanitarian community are reluctant to use information collected during crisis events, even though such information could potentially enhance the response effort. Consequently, a program of research is presented that aims to evaluate the degree to which uncertainty and bias are found in public collections of incident reports gathered during crisis events. These datasets exemplify a class whose members have spatial and temporal attributes, are gathered from heterogeneous sources, and do not have readily available attribution information. An interactive software prototype, and existing software, are applied to a dataset related to the current armed conflict in Libya to identify ‘intrinsic’ characteristics against which uncertainty and bias can be evaluated. Requirements on the prototype are identified, which in time will be expanded into full research objectives.
A type-preserving closure conversion in haskell

The use of typed intermediate languages can significantly increase the reliability of a compiler. By type-checking the code produced at each transformation stage, one can identify bugs in the compiler that would otherwise be much harder to find. Also it guarantees that any property that was enforced by the source-level type-system is holds also or the generated code. Recently, several people have tried to push this effort a bit further by verifying formally that the compiler indeed preserves typing. This is usually done with proof assistants or experimental languages. Instead, we decided to use Haskell (with GHC's extensions), to see how far we can go with a more mainstream system, supported by robust compilers and plentiful libraries. This article presents one part of our type preserving compiler, namely the closure conversion and its associated hoisting phase, where we use GADTs to let Haskell's type checker verify the we obey the object language's typing rules and that we correctly preserve types from one phase to the other. This should be both a good showcase as well as a good stress test for GADTs, so we also discuss our experience, as well as some trade-offs in the choice of representation, namely between higher-order abstract syntax (HOAS) and a first order representation (i.e. de Bruijn indices) and justify our choice of a de Bruijn representation. We incidentally present a type preserving conversion from HOAS (used in earlier phases of the compiler[6]) to a de Bruijn representation.
Multistage pattern recognition of signals represented in wavelet bases with reject option

We propose a multistage pattern recognition algorithm with a reject option. On every stage, the presented algorithm chooses a class of signal or rejects the signal, i.e. refuses to make a decision. If a class is assigned to the signal on some stage, then the algorithm stops. In the opposite case of a signal rejection, the decision of assigning to a class is made on the next stage. The multiresolution signal representation in wavelet bases allows to take a more accurate signal representation on every following stage. Our approach saves the computation time, when the algorithm selects a class on an early stage basing on a coarse wavelet representation. If the inaccurate representation is insufficient to point out one of classes (e.g. when the a posteriori probability of every class is lower than a fixed bound, in case of Bayesian classifier), the reject option protects from choosing a wrong class. We show that a risk of misclassification for the Bayesian decision rule with a reject option is lower or equal to a risk of the one-stage optimal Bayesian rule.
Hypomagnesaemia associated with long-term use of proton pump inhibitors

Hypomagnesaemia and associated hypocalcaemia and hypoparathyroidism have been increasingly recognised as rare long-term side-effects of proton pump inhibitors (PPIs). The PPIs may inhibit active magnesium (Mg) absorption by interfering with transcellular transient receptor potential melastatin-6 and -7 (TRPM 6 and 7) channels. More recent cell culture studies have suggested concomitant inhibition of passive Mg absorption by omeprazole. After being treated with a range of PPIs, the four patients in our case series developed hypomagnesaemia, which responded to withdrawal of therapy and initiation of Mg replacement. Their clinical course and management demonstrate key aspects of hypomagnesaemia associated with long-term use of PPIs.
One pass cross word decoding for large vocabularies based on a lexical tree search organization

This paper describes the new Philips Research decoder that performs large vocabulary continuous speech recognition in a single pass for cross-word acoustic models and an m-gram language model (with m up to 4) as opposed to our previous technique of multiple passes. The decoder is based on a time-synchronous beam search and a prex tree structure of the lexicon. Cross-word transitions are treated dynamically. A language-model look-ahead technique is applied on the bigram probabilities. On a variety of speech data, reduced error rates are obtained together with signi cant speed-ups con rming the advantage of an early use of all available knowledge sources. In particular, the search e ort of a one-pass trigram decoding is only marginally increased compared to bigram and the integration of cross-word triphones improves the overall accuracy by typically 10% relative.
A CMOS Low Power Fully Digital Adaptive Power Delivery System Based on Finite State Machine Control

A fully digital self-adjusting high efficiency power supply system has been developed based on an FSM control scheme. The system dynamically monitors circuit performance with a slacktime detector, and provides a substantially constant minimum-supply voltage for digital processors to properly operate at a given frequency with regard to different process-voltage-temperature (PVT) and load conditions. The digital FSM scheme significantly reduces the complexity of control loop implementation (<1800 gates) and its own power consumption (<100muW)
Caspase-2 (Nedd-2) Processing and Death of Trophic Factor-Deprived PC12 Cells and Sympathetic Neurons Occur Independently of Caspase-3 (CPP32)-Like Activity

We have previously shown that caspase-2 (Nedd-2) is required for apoptosis induced by withdrawal of trophic support from PC12 cells and sympathetic neurons. Here, we examine the relationship of caspase-2 processing and cell death to induction of caspase-3 (CPP32)-like activity in PC12 cells. Caspase-2 processing, at a site tentatively identified as D333, led to the formation of an N-terminal 37 kDa product. This processing correlated temporally with induction of caspase-3-like activity. Agents previously shown to inhibit caspase-3-like activation, such as bcl-2 and the Cdk inhibitor flavopiridol, also acted upstream of caspase-2 processing. The general caspase inhibitors BAF and zVAD-FMK inhibited N-terminal caspase-2 processing. In contrast, the more selective caspase inhibitor DEVD-FMK inhibited the induction of caspase-3-like activity but did not affect caspase-2 processing or significantly suppress death in PC12 cells or sympathetic neurons. This indicates that caspase-3-like activity is not required for either caspase-2 processing or apoptosis in this paradigm. An antisense oligonucleotide to caspase-2 inhibited cell death but did not affect caspase-3-like activity, indicating that caspase-2 is not upstream of this activity and that activation of caspase-3-like caspases is not sufficient for death. Thus, in our paradigm, caspase-2 processing and caspase-3-like activity are induced independently of each other. Moreover, although death requires caspase-2, caspase-3-like activity is neither necessary nor sufficient for death.