Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Reducing Implicit Gender Leadership Bias in Academic Medicine With an Educational Intervention

Purpose One challenge academic health centers face is to advance female faculty to leadership positions and retain them there in numbers equal to men, especially given the equal representation of women and men among graduates of medicine and biological sciences over the last 10 years. The purpose of this study is to investigate the explicit and implicit biases favoring men as leaders, among both men and women faculty, and to assess whether these attitudes change following an educational intervention. Method The authors used a standardized, 20-minute educational intervention to educate faculty about implicit biases and strategies for overcoming them. Next, they assessed the effect of this intervention. From March 2012 through April 2013, 281 faculty members participated in the intervention across 13 of 18 clinical departments. Results The study assessed faculty members’ perceptions of bias as well as their explicit and implicit attitudes toward gender and leadership. Results indicated that the intervention significantly changed all faculty members’ perceptions of bias (P < .05 across all eight measures). Although, as expected, explicit biases did not change following the intervention, the intervention did have a small but significant positive effect on the implicit biases surrounding women and leadership of all participants regardless of age or gender (P = .008). Conclusions These results suggest that providing education on bias and strategies for reducing it can serve as an important step toward reducing gender bias in academic medicine and, ultimately, promoting institutional change, specifically the promoting of women to higher ranks.
RHEOLOGY OF GALACTOMANNAN SOLUTIONS: COMPARATIVE STUDY OF GUAR GUM AND LOCUST BEAN GUM

The rheological properties of several samples of guar gum and locust bean gum, characterized by light scattering and intrinsic viscosity measurements, were studied. The flow curves of concentrated solutions were obtained with a cone-plate viscometer and their viscoelastic properties were measured with a concentric hemispheres viscoelastometer. The two flow-units Ree-Eyring model and the Cross equation gave a good fit to the experimental flow curves. The zero shear rate viscosity, and the relaxation time, of the Ree-Eyring model depend mainly on the reduced concentration c[η]. This result, as well as the viscoelastic properties, indicate that entanglements play a dominant role in concentrated solutions. From a practical viewpoint, it is possible to predict the flow curve of a galactomannan solution at any concentration if the intrinsic viscosity of the sample is known. However, there are secondary differences in the flow parameters, mainly in the relaxation time, which are not ascribed to [η]. It is hypothesized that these differences are due to the mean branching degree rather than to the botanical origin. As, in solution, the smoothest galactomannan macromolecules are more probably aggregated than isolated, further work should aim at establishing the relationships between aggregate formation and degree of branching.
Noncontact inspection of impact damage properties of woven fabric-reinforced composites after low-velocity impact by using air-coupled ultrasonic technique

The impact response to twill weave carbon fabric/epoxy composite laminate structure has been investigated by employing two types of the stacking sequences of composite laminate structure to low-velocity impact loadings by using a Drop-Weight Machine (CEAST 9350 drop tower). An engine hood is the intended application for the composites. The air-coupled ultrasonic C-scan technique (NAUT21) has been selected in order to characterize impact damage size, delamination, flaw detection, and damage in composite laminate structures. The effect of increasing impact energy was illustrated with both types of the stacking sequences of the composite laminate structures until complete perforation of specimens at 25 J due to degradation of mechanical properties of composite laminates. The failure processes of damaged specimens for different three impact energies (5 J, 15 J, and 25 J) were being evaluated comparing load–displacement curves and images of damaged samples were taken from both impacted and nonimpacted sides through C-scan. The performance index and absorbed energy of the tested structures were investigated. The primary damage modes were found to be fiber fracture, delamination, and matrix cracks.
Anytime algorithms for multi-agent visibility-based pursuit-evasion games

We investigate algorithms for playing multi-agent visibility-based pursuit-evasion games. A team of pursuers attempts to maintain visibility contact with an evader who actively avoids tracking. We aim for applicability of the algorithms in real-world scenarios; hence, we impose hard constraints on the run-time of the algorithms and we evaluate them in a simulation model based on a real-world urban area. We compare Monte-Carlo tree search (MCTS) and iterative deepening minimax algorithms running on the information-set tree of the imperfect-information game. The experimental results demonstrate that both methods create comparable good strategies for the pursuer, while the later performs better in creating the evader's strategy.
GENERATING SIMILARITY-BASED PLAYLISTS USING TRAVELING SALESMAN ALGORITHMS

When using a mobile music player en-route, usually only little attention can be paid to its handling. Nonetheless it is desirable that all music stored in the device can be accessed quickly, and that tracks played in a sequence should match up. In this paper, we present an approach to satisfy these constraints: a playlist containing all tracks stored in the music player is generated such that in average, consecutive pieces are maximally similar. This is achieved by applying a Traveling Salesman algorithm to the pieces, using timbral similarities as the distances. The generated playlist is linear and circular, thus the whole collection can easily be browsed with only one input wheel. When a chosen track finishes playing, the player advances to the consecutive tracks in the playlist, generally playing tracks similar to the chosen track. This behavior could be a favorable alternative to the wellknown shuffle function that most current devices ‐ such as the iPod shuffle, for example ‐ have. We evaluate the fitness of four different Traveling Salesman algorithms for this purpose. Evaluated aspects were runtime, the length of the resulting route, and the genre distribution entropy. We implemented a Java applet to demonstrate the application and its usability.
Analogies in the evolution of individual and social immunity

We compare anti-parasite defences at the level of multicellular organisms and insect societies, and find that selection by parasites at these two organisational levels is often very similar and has created a number of parallel evolutionary solutions in the host's immune response. The defence mechanisms of both individuals and insect colonies start with border defences to prevent parasite intake and are followed by soma defences that prevent the establishment and spread of the parasite between the body's cells or the social insect workers. Lastly, germ line defences are employed to inhibit infection of the reproductive tissue of organisms or the reproductive individuals in colonies. We further find sophisticated self/non-self-recognition systems operating at both levels, which appear to be vital in maintaining the integrity of the body or colony as a reproductive entity. We then expand on the regulation of immune responses and end with a contemplation of how evolution may shape the different immune components, both within and between levels. The aim of this review is to highlight common evolutionary principles acting in disease defence at the level of both individual organisms and societies, thereby linking the fields of physiological and ecological immunology.
Supporting People with Dementia in Digital Social Sharing

Sharing online is an important way in which people across the lifespan express themselves, maintain relationships, and connect with others. Yet, people with dementia are often not supported in engaging to the full extent of their abilities, particularly in their interaction with online technology. This paper presents a design case study that examines what it means to design for agency in online sharing involving individuals with dementia. Our work is situated in the context of art therapy for adults with dementia. We present the design and exploration of Moments, a system that allows individuals to share through artwork by manipulating their physical environment. We discuss how designing for agency calls attention to the ways in which the material workspace, including the tools we introduce, and the surrounding social context participate in the creation of agency.
ABDOMINAL OBESITY, DYSLIPIDEMIA, INSULIN RESISTANCE, TYPE 2 DIABETES AND ATHEROSCLEROSIS: WHO IS THE RIGHT PATIENT TO BE TREATED WITH CB1 RECEPTOR ANTAGONISTS?

Introduction The health hazards of abdominal obesity were documented several decades ago when, in 1947, a French physician by the name of Dr. Jean Vague published in Presse Medicale the results of his clinical observations on the “android” type of obesity (“apple shape”) [1]. Vague was the first to suggest that android obesity was the high-risk form of obesity. In contrast, he proposed that “gynoid” obesity (often found in women) was rather benign [1]. Thus, Vague was the first to foresee the importance of upper body, abdominal obesity as a phenotype frequently observed in individuals with cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes and hypertension. Results from epidemiological studies that began to be published in the early eighties confirmed the increased risk of adverse cardiovascular outcomes associated with such a form of overweight/obesity. Most of these studies assessed the absolute or relative amount of abdominal fat using crude anthropometric indices such as waist circumference or the waist-to-hip circumference ratio [2-6]. Very recently, the importance of abdominal obesity beyond overall general adiposity as a risk factor for total mortality has been confirmed in the largest prospective study ever conducted on the topic. Results of the EPIC Key Points
Effects of variable caloric restriction on utilization of ingested energy in rats.

Body weight reductions were produced in five groups of male Wistar rats (325 g) by starvation or by variable degrees of underfeeding. The resulting body weights were maintained, by adjusting daily food intake, at constant levels for at least 18 days. We found that 1) energy conservation (i.e., a reduction in the amount of energy required for maintenance) developed in proportion to reduction in body weight, 2) energy conservation increased even while reduced body weights were maintained at constant levels, 3) reduction in the energy required for maintenance was largely due to reduced resting metabolic rate, 4) a maximal ability to conserve energy seemed to occur in severely food-restricted rats, and 5) the magnitude of energy conservation appeared to be proportional to the absolute reduction in body weight and was unrelated (in the long run) to rapidity of weight loss. This study confirms that precise mechanisms of energy conservation are set in motion by food restriction and attempts to identify some components of this adaptive response.
Extent of cardiac sympathetic neuronal damage is determined by the area of ischemia in patients with acute coronary syndromes.

BACKGROUND Prior studies have demonstrated that acute ischemic injury causes sympathetic neuronal damage exceeding the area of necrosis. The aim of this study was to test the hypothesis that sympathetic neuronal damage measured by (123)I-metaiodobenzylguanidine (MIBG) imaging would be determined by the area of ischemia as reflected by area at risk in patients undergoing reperfusion therapy for acute coronary syndromes. METHODS AND RESULTS In 12 patients, the myocardium at risk was assessed by (99m)Tc-sestamibi SPECT before reperfusion, and infarct size was measured by follow-up (99m)Tc-sestamibi SPECT 1 week later. All patients also underwent (123)I-MIBG SPECT within a mean of 11 days after onset. The SPECT image analysis was based on a semiquantitative polar map approach. Defect size on the (123)I-MIBG or (99m)Tc-sestamibi SPECT was measured for the left ventricle (LV) with the use of a threshold of -2.5 SD from the mean value of a normal database and was expressed as %LV. The (123)I-MIBG defect size (47+/-18%LV) was larger than the infarct size (27+/-23%LV, P<0. 001) but was similar to the risk area (49+/-18%LV, P=NS). Furthermore, the (123)I-MIBG defect size was closely correlated with the risk area (r=0.905, P<0.001). CONCLUSIONS Sympathetic neuronal damage measured by (123)I-MIBG SPECT is larger than infarct size and is closely related to risk area, suggesting high sensitivity of neuronal structures to ischemia compared with myocardial cells.
Effects of graphene nanoplatelets and graphene nanosheets on fracture toughness of epoxy nanocomposites

ABSTRACT The effects of graphene nanoplatelets (GPLs) and graphene nanosheets (GNSs) onfracture toughness and tensile properties of epoxy resin have been studied. A newtechnique for synthesis of GPLs based on changing magnetic ﬁeld is developed. Thetransmission-electron microscopy and the Raman spectroscopy were employed tocharacterize the size and chemical structure of the synthesized graphene platelets. Thecritical stress intensity factor and tensile properties of epoxy matrix ﬁlled with GPL andGNS particles were measured. Inﬂuence of ﬁller content, ﬁller size and dispersion statewasexamined.ItwasfoundthattheGPLshavegreaterimpactonbothfracturetoughnessand tensile strength of nanocomposites compared with the GNSs. For instance, fracturetoughness increased by 39% using 0.5wt% GPLs and 16% for 0.5wt% GNSs. Keywords fracture toughness; graphene nanoplatelet; graphene nanosheets; mechanicalproperties; nanocomposites.NOMENCLATURE a = crack lengthB = single-edge-notch bending specimen thicknessK
Removing Boundary Effect of a Patch-Based Super-Resolution Algorithm

SUMMARY In a patch-based super-resolution algorithm, a low-resolution patch is inﬂuenced by surrounding patches due to blurring. Wepropose to remove this boundary eﬀect by subtracting the blur from thesurrounding high-resolution patches, which enables more accurate sparserepresentation. We demonstrate improved performance through experi-mentation. The proposed algorithm can be applied to most of patch-basedsuper-resolution algorithms to achieve additional improvement. key words: super-resolution, dictionary, sparse representation, patch 1. Introduction High-resolution images contain high frequency detail anddemand for them has increased. However, spatial resolutionis limited by an image sensor or an image acquisition sys-tem[1]. Super-resolution (SR) algorithms can overcome thephysical limitation of the imaging system at low-cost.In a SR algorithm based on a sparse representation,an image patch is represented by a sparse linear combina-tion from an overcomplete dictionary. Assuming that a low-resolution(LR)patchandthecorrespondinghigh-resolution(HR) patch have the same sparse representation vector, weestimate a HR patch for each LR patch[2]. Yang
Effects of Biocide Chlorine on Biochemical Responses of the Dinoflagellate Prorocentrum minimum

Effects of the biocide sodium hypochlorite (NaOCl) on the dinoflagellate Prorocentrum minimum were assessed. Growth rate, pigment concentrations, and chlorophyll autofluorescence were monitored up to 72 hours after NaOCl exposure, and these parameters showed dose‐ and time‐dependent decrease. The 72‐hour EC50 was 0.983 mg/L. Additionally, enzymatic activities of lipid peroxidation and reduced glutathione were significantly altered with increasing NaOCl and exposure time. Thus, NaOCl at doses of 0.5 mg/L induces physiological and biochemical changes in P. minimum, suggesting that chlorine concentrations observed in power plant discharges and in drinking water systems are potentially detrimental to microalgae.
Helicobacter pylori Can Be Induced To Assume the Morphology of Helicobacter heilmannii

ABSTRACT Cultures of Helicobacter pylori obtained from the American Type Culture Collection (strain 43504) were grown as isolated colonies or lawns on blood agar plates and in broth culture with constant shaking. Examination of bacterial growth with Gram-stained fixed preparation and differential interference contrast microscopy on wet preparations revealed that bacteria grown on blood agar plates had a morphology consistent with that normally reported for H. pylori whereas bacteria from broth cultures had the morphologic appearance of Helicobacter heilmannii. Bacteria harvested from blood agar plates assumed an H. heilmannii-like morphology when transferred to broth cultures, and bacteria from broth cultures grew with morphology typical of H. pylori when grown on blood agar plates. Analysis by PCR of bacteria isolated from blood agar plates and broth cultures indicated that a single strain of bacteria (H. pylori) was responsible for both morphologies.
Centrosome assembly in vitro: role of gamma-tubulin recruitment in Xenopus sperm aster formation

Centrioles organize microtubules in two ways: either microtubules elongate from the centriole cylinder itself, forming a flagellum or a cilium ("template elongation"), or pericentriolar material assembles and nucleates a microtubule aster ("astral nucleation"). During spermatogenesis in most species, a motile flagellum elongates from one of the sperm centrioles, whereas after fertilization a large aster of microtubules forms around the sperm centrioles in the egg cytoplasm. Using Xenopus egg extracts we have developed an in vitro system to study this change in microtubule-organizing activity. An aster of microtubules forms around the centrioles of permeabilized frog sperm in egg extracts, but not in pure tubulin. However, when the sperm heads are incubated in the egg extract in the presence of nocodazole, they are able to nucleate a microtubule aster after isolation and incubation with pure calf brain tubulin. This provides a two-step assay that distinguishes between centrosome assembly and subsequent microtubule nucleation. We have studied several centrosomal antigens during centrosome assembly. The CTR2611 antigen is present in the sperm head in the peri-centriolar region. gamma-tubulin and certain phosphorylated epitopes appear in the centrosome only after incubation in the egg extract. gamma-tubulin is recruited from the egg extract and associated with electron-dense patches dispersed in a wide area around the centrioles. Immunodepletion of gamma-tubulin and associated molecules from the egg extract before sperm head incubation prevents the change in microtubule-organizing activity of the sperm heads. This suggests that gamma-tubulin and/or associated molecules play a key role in centrosome formation and activity.
Guard Region Model for Pilot Reuse Analysis in Uplink Massive MIMO Systems

Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) are expected to significantly enhance the spectrum efficiency (SE) and energy efficiency (EE) of future cellular systems. Since the performance gain of massive MIMO is fundamentally limited by pilot contamination, pilot reuse design is crucial to achieve reasonable cell throughput and user rate. In this paper, we leverage stochastic geometry to model pilot reuse in massive MIMO systems by introducing a guard region model to match realistic pilot allocation strategies. The uplink signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) distribution is analytically derived, based on which the benefits of pilot reuse on cell-throughput and user-rate are investigated. The optimal pilot reuse factor for uplink transmission is obtained. We also find through simulations that increasing the pilot reuse factor beyond a certain value would not improve user-rate, and could even lead to a significant loss of the cell throughput.
Database Saliency for Fast Image Retrieval

The bag-of-visual-words (BoW) model is effective for representing images and videos in many computer vision problems, and achieves promising performance in image retrieval. Nevertheless, the level of retrieval efficiency in a large-scale database is not acceptable for practical usage. Considering that the relevant images in the database of a given query are more likely to be distinctive than ambiguous, this paper defines “database saliency” as the distinctiveness score calculated for every image to measure its overall “saliency” in the database. By taking advantage of database saliency, we propose a saliency- inspired fast image retrieval scheme, S-sim, which significantly improves efficiency while retains state-of-the-art accuracy in image retrieval . There are two stages in S-sim: the bottom-up saliency mechanism computes the database saliency value of each image by hierarchically decomposing a posterior probability into local patches and visual words, the concurrent information of visual words is then bottom-up propagated to estimate the distinctiveness, and the top-down saliency mechanism discriminatively expands the query via a very low-dimensional linear SVM trained on the top-ranked images after initial search, ranking images are then sorted on their distances to the decision boundary as well as the database saliency values. We comprehensively evaluate S-sim on common retrieval benchmarks, e.g., Oxford and Paris datasets. Thorough experiments suggest that, because of the offline database saliency computation and online low-dimensional SVM, our approach significantly speeds up online retrieval and outperforms the state-of-the-art BoW-based image retrieval schemes.
Hollow fibers made from a poly(3-hydroxybutyrate)/poly-ε-caprolactone blend

Since poly(3-hydroxybutyrate) (PHB) is inherently brittle and possesses poor elastic properties, hollow fibers produced by melt spinning from pure PHB, as described in our earlier study (Macromolecular Materials and Engineering, 2010, 295/6, 585-594), do not meet the required needs regarding the mechanical performance. Besides hardly available PHB copolymers, also blend systems are known to enhance material properties and have thus been considered to be eligible to fabricate flexible or rather pliable hollow fibers based on PHB. Blends of PHB and poly-! -caprolactone (PCL) are prom- ising for the application in tissue engineering due to the inherent biocompatibility and biodegradability. A wide range of PHB/PCL compositions have been prepared by melt extrusion. Thermal and mechanical properties of the obtained speci- mens were analyzed in order to identify miscibility and degree of dispersion as well as to determine the influence on the overall mechanical performance. Even though these constituents are known to be immiscible, PHB/PCL 70/30 was proven to be an adequate composition. This blend showed a highly increased elongation and was found to be easily processable by melt spinning compared to pure PHB. From this blend well defined dimensionally stable bendable hollow fibers were fab- ricated.