Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
life in prison: perspectives of drug injectors

Although there is a considerable literature on people's lives in prison, little is known about drug injectors inside prison. Drug injectors with prison experience were invited to discuss prison life during qualitative in-depth interviews and small group discussions. Drug injectors were recruited in the community in England and 24 people participated. Analysis of responses identified the following broad themes as important entering prison and early experiences; prison conditions; prison regimes; days in the lives of drug injectors; relationships and social networks; and informal rules and attitudes. This article draws on drug injectors descriptions to illustrate these findings, in an attempt to help sensitize researchers and policy makers to some of the issues that are at the heart of the problems of responding to drug injectors in prison.
Identification of Cup-Disk Ratio for GlaucomaProne Eyes

In the framework of completely computer assisted diagnosis of glaucoma, an advanced algorithm that identifies the optic cup and optic disk, determines the radius by segmenting out the optic cup and disk and calculates the ratio of the optic cup to disk radius in fundus images of the macula is presented and discussed in this paper. The parameters of thecup to disk ratio in the optic disk region of retina are hallmark of glaucoma detection and allow itsdetection with a high sensitivity. Since detection of the ratio of optic cup to disk radius is asignificant diagnostic task, a major role is being handled by the computer assistance. The optic disk has been found by using red color space image as the optic disk is brighter considering to the other macula region and the contours are identified by means of morphological reconstruction techniques. The detection of optic cup has been done by using the green color space image. The optic disc and the optic cup have been detected by means of thresholding and morphological reconstruction technique.
An Introduction to Iterative Combinatorial Auctions

Combinatorial auctions let bidders to express their preferences on bundles of items and are necessary for optimal allocation of goods. Direct revelation of bidders’s valuation on all combination of goods is exponential in the number of goods, so its expensive and could be impossible. Iterative combinatorial auctions (iterative CAs) are designed to resolve the problem of costly preference elicitation by repeatedly interacting with bidders and collecting information from them, which might guide them through preference elicitation process. This paper is an introduction on iterative CAs. We describe the computational problems regarding the design space of iterative CAs that are present in literature and also describe different design models and approaches and their limitations and advantages.
Barriers and facilitators of medication adherence in hypertensive African Americans: a qualitative study.

OBJECTIVE This study explored the perspectives of hypertensive African-American patients, in 2 primary care practices, regarding the factors they perceived as barriers or facilitators of adherence to prescribed antihypertensive medications. DESIGN This qualitative study used a grounded theory methodology with data collection occurring through in-depth individual patient interviews. SETTING AND PARTICIPANTS One hundred and six hypertensive African-American patients followed at 2 urban primary care practices participated in the open-ended interviews. METHODS During interviews, patients' experiences taking antihypertensive medications and their perceptions of the challenges they face in adhering to their medications as prescribed were explored. Patients were also asked about the situations that make it easy or difficult for them to take their antihypertensive medications as prescribed and the skills they thought were necessary for patients to adhere to their medications as prescribed. All responses were recorded verbatim and analyzed using grounded theory methodology. RESULTS Fifty-eight percent of participants were women, mean age was 56 years, and 60% had uncontrolled hypertension. Four categories of barriers and 5 categories of facilitators were identified. The barriers included patient-specific, medication-specific, logistic, and disease-specific barriers. The facilitators included use of reminders, having a routine, knowledge about hypertension, its treatment and complications, having social support and good doctor-patient communication. CONCLUSION This study provides a framework for investigating issues of medication adherence in hypertensive African Americans by describing a taxonomy of barriers and facilitators of adherence identified by patients.
Course Shopping in Urban Community Colleges: An Analysis of Student Drop and Add Activities

Course shopping, a widely practiced postsecondary enrollment behavior, has rarely been studied. Generally considered benign, the practice may not always prove beneficial. This study identified and named four different types of course shopping behaviors. The research compared each of the four types, finding significant differences in GPA, successful course completion, gender, and course type.
Instrumental and Expressive Traits, Trait Stereotypes, and Sexist Attitudes: What Do They Signify?

College students rated the typical male and female student and themselves on 22 instrumental (I) and 16 expressive (E) items from the PAQ (Spence & Helmreich, 1978) and the BSRI (Bem, 1974), as well as on the BSRI items “masculine” and “feminine. ” They also completed measures of gender stereotypes and sexist attitudes. Significant gender stereotypes were found on all but two I and E items in both genders. Significant gender differences in self-report were found on all the E items but on only 41% of the I items, confirming our hypotheses that societal changes have led women to develop more agentic self-conceptions. The pattern of relationships found between the self-report, stereotype, and attitude measures supports the utility of a multidimensional approach to gender. Responses to the items “masculine” and “feminine” confirm the implications of our hypothesis that these items primarily assess men's and women's basic sense of gender identity.
Ultrafine particles from electric appliances and cooking pans: experiments suggesting desorption/nucleation of sorbed organics as the primary source.

Ultrafine particles are observed when metal surfaces, such as heating elements in electric appliances, or even empty cooking pans, are heated. The source of the particles has not been identified. We present evidence that particles >10 nm are not emitted directly from the heating elements or the metal surfaces. Using repeated heating of an electric burner, several types of cooking pans, and a steam iron, the increase in the number of particles (>10 nm) can be reduced to 0. After the devices are exposed to indoor air for several hours or days, subsequent heating results in renewed particle production, suggesting that organic matter has sorbed on their surfaces. Also, after a pan has been heated to the point that no increase in particles is observed, washing with detergent results in copious production of particles the next time the pan is heated. These observations suggest that detergent residue and organics sorbed from indoor air are the sources of the particles. We hypothesize that organic compounds are thermally desorbed from the hot surface as gaseous molecules; as they diffuse from the hot air near the pan into cooler air, selected compounds exceed their saturation concentration and nucleation occurs.
Compressed Sensing and Routing in Multi-Hop Networks

We study how compressed sensing can be combined with routing design for energy efficient data gathering in sensor networks. We first obtain some bounds on the performance of compressed sensing with simple routing schemes. We then formulate a new problem relating routing paths to data projections, and present a centralized, greedy algorithm for obtaining low coherence projections while simultaneously reducing reconstruction error and communication cost. Simulation results show that the effectiveness of standard compressed sensing techniques is limited when routing costs are considered. A naive, randomized downsampling is shown to outperform the standard techniques in terms of achievable SNR for a given energy budget. While our algorithm has better performance than standard compression sensing, it does not improve significantly over downsampling in terms of the cost. Thus we believe that further investigation is needed to determine if novel routing strategies exist that i) provide a sufficient spatial coverage to enable good coherence properties for compressed sensing along those routes, and ii) have transport costs that do not deviate significantly from those of efficient routing techniques. ∗Intern at ANRG, USC, Summer 2007. †The work described here is supported in part by NSF through grants CNS-0347621, CNS-0627028, CCF-0430061, CNS-0325875, and by NASA through an AIST grant. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF or NASA.
Differential expression of plexin‐a subfamily members in the mouse nervous system

Plexins comprise a family of transmembrane proteins (the plexin family) which are expressed in nervous tissues. Some plexins have been shown to interact directly with secreted or transmembrane semaphorins, while plexins belonging to the A subfamily are suggested to make complexes with other membrane proteins, neuropilins, and propagate chemorepulsive signals of secreted semaphorins of class 3 into cells or neurons. Despite that much information has been gathered on the plexin‐semaphorin interaction, the role of plexins in the nervous system is not well understood. To gain insight into the functions of plexins in the nervous system, we analyzed spatial and temporal expression patterns of three members of the plexin‐A subfamily (plexin‐A1, ‐A2, and ‐A3) in the developing mouse nervous system by in situ hybridization analysis in combination with immunohistochemistry. We show that the three plexins are differentially expressed in sensory receptors or neurons in a developmentally regulated manner, suggesting that a particular plexin or set of plexins is shared by neuronal elements and functions as the receptor for semaphorins to regulate neuronal development. © 2001 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Learning potential and anxious tendency: Test anxiety as a bias factor in educational testing

Abstract Contrary to conventional educational testing, in so-called dynamic assessment subjects are allowed to consult help during testing or are offered prior training. The differential results of both testing procedures are sometimes ascribed to the idea that dynamic tests reflect the breadth of the zone of proximal development on top of independent achievement. Alternative explanations claim that conventional tests are more strongly biased towards various characteristics of persons, which have a negative influence on performance, when compared to dynamic tests. In this study, it was hypothesised that static as well as dynamic assessment is biased towards anxious tendencies of subjects, but the former more strongly than the latter. In order to investigate this supposition, the performance of subjects on dynamic and static tests was systematically compared and related to measures of test anxiety in a longitudinal experiment. In the experiment, repeated measures of independent mathematics achievement as well as mathematics learning potential were gathered among students of secondary education in the Netherlands. Prior to every mathematics test, subjects filled out a test anxiety questionnaire. After every mathematics test, subjects filled out a general state anxiety questionnaire. The participating subjects were students from secondary education, either preparing for higher vocational training or university, aged approximately 15 years on average. The results of the experiment showed that lack of self-confidence is an important constituent factor of test anxiety, apart from worry and emotionality. The data supported the assumption that such testing procedures are less biased towards anxiety than conventional tests, but it was not established that dynamic testing procedures render results that are not biased by test anxious tendencies.
Underground nuclear repositories and international civil liability: the time factor

International conventions dealing with civil liability and compensation for nuclear damage which were mostly adopted in the early 60s were primarily designed to apply to accidents likely to occur during the operation of large nuclear installations. Accordingly, they did not take into consideration the particular aspect of the long-term management and disposal of radioactive waste and, obviously, the introduction of a new category of nuclear facility: the underground repositories for spent nuclear fuel and high-level, long-lived radioactive waste which contain material remaining hazardous for quasi-indefinite periods of time. Since, amendments to these conventions partly allow addressing this particular risk but some serious questions remain concerning the ability of the current legal regime to cope with the test of time.
Estimating paid and unpaid hours of personal assistance services in activities of daily living provided to adults living at home.

OBJECTIVE To estimate the total hours of paid and unpaid personal assistance of daily living provided to adults living at home in the United States using nationally representative household survey data. DATA SOURCES The Disability Followback Survey of the National Health Interview Survey on Disability (NHIS-D) conducted from 1994 to 1997. DATA COLLECTION/EXTRACTION METHODS Data were obtained on persons receiving help with up to 5 ADLs and 10 IADLs, for up to 4 helpers, including the activities they helped with, whether the helper was paid or not, and the number of hours of help provided in the two weeks prior to the survey. The sample consists of 8,471 household-resident adults ages 18 and older receiving help with personal assistance. About 22 percent of the sample has missing data on hours, which we impute by multiple regression models using demographic, ADL, and IADL variables. FINDINGS We estimate that 13.2 million noninstitutionalized adults receive an average of 31.4 hours per week of personal assistance in ADLs and IADLs per week, with 3.2 million people receiving an average of 17.6 hours of paid help and 11.7 million receiving an average of 30.7 hours of unpaid help. More persons ages 18-64 received help than those ages 65 and older (6.9 versus 6.2 million), but working-age recipients had fewer hours (27.4 versus 35.9) per week, due in part to less severe levels of disability. CONCLUSIONS Personal assistance provided to adults with disabilities amounts to 21.5 billion hours of help per year, with an economic value in 1996 approaching $200 billion. Only 16 percent of this total is paid, representing $32 billion in home health services spent annually. This study, the first to estimate hours of assistance for both working-age and older adults, documents that older persons are more likely to receive paid personal assistance, while working-age people rely to a greater extent on unpaid help. This study begins to articulate the division of labor in the provision of personal assistance. Estimates of paid and unpaid hours of help by number of ADLs should inform policy concerning eligibility boundaries in long term care.
Reading skill: some adult comparisons

Three groups of college readers were compared on several information-processing and language comprehension tasks that tap the cognitive components of reading. The groups were skilled readers with high verbal and nonverbal abilities, low-skilled readers with a disparity between verbal and nonverbal abilities, and low-skilled readers who were low in both verbal and nonverbal ability. Results confirm the importance of word processing and general language comprehension in distinguishing skilled from less skilled readers. Results also support the view that reading ability is best described as a continuous function and provide evidence of the reemergence of lower level processing skills in adults as a function of text difficulty
Schooling in Mexico: Staying in or Dropping Out

Educational modernization in a postmodern age - schooling and austerity in Mexico the Mexican educational system - reform, decentralization and modernization the schools - the making of inequlity at local level official curriculum, hidden curriculum or no curriculum at all? between service ideal and stark reality - local-level politics of teaching "to hold one's own in the world" - issues in the educational culture of urban working class families in West Mexico the child's world in and out of class the reluctant authority of the teacher the conditional nature of schooling - the battle of wits between home and school discretion, referral and repulsion - relations of educational provision in West Mexican schools.
One approach to cross-cultural studies of personality

Twenty-three adult and nine junior cross-cultural studies of the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQ) are reviewed. Male and female subjects from 26 different countries were invited to complete translated versions of the EPQ. The data were analysed to give factor comparisons to indicate the degree of resemblance of each country studied to the British groups. Some item substitutions were carried out in accordance with loadings (from factor analyses) and item content. Scoring keys were constructed and resulting reliabilities (alpha coefficients) were calculated. Finally, the method of cross-cultural comparison of norms is discussed.
Clinical and Population Studies Is Sticky Blood Bad for the Brain ? Hemostatic and Inflammatory Systems and Dementia in the Caerphilly Prospective Study

Objective—Hemostasis and inflammation have been implicated in dementia. This study investigates the role of specific hemostatic and inflammatory pathways with incident vascular and nonvascular dementia. Methods and Results—This was a prospective study of a population sample of men aged 65 to 84 years, with baseline assessment of hemostatic and inflammatory factors and cognition measured 17 years later. The sample included 865 men (59 had dementia and 112 had cognitive impairment, not dementia), free of vascular disease at baseline and for whom hemostatic and inflammatory marker data were available and cognitive status was known. A total of 15 hemostatic and 6 inflammatory markers were assessed. Factor analysis was used to identify hemostatic subsystems. The National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke–Association Internationale pour la Recherche et l’Enseignement en Neurologie criteria were used to identify vascular dementia. By using standardized (z) scores for hemostatic and inflammatory markers, and after adjustment for age and risk factors, vascular dementia was associated with fibrinogen (hazard ratio [HR], 1.68; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.02–2.76), factor VIII (HR, 1.79; 95% CI, 1.09 –3.00), and plasminogen activator inhibitor 1 (HR, 3.13; 95% CI, 1.73–5.70). For vascular dementia, the HR risk from high levels of all three hemostatic variables (fibrinogen, factor VIII, and plasminogen activator inhibitor 1) was 2.97 (P 0.001). Inflammatory factors were not associated with vascular dementia. Conclusion—The associations of these hemostatic markers with vascular dementia may implicate clot formation as the primary mechanism and are consistent with a microinfarct model of vascular dementia. (Arterioscler Thromb Vasc Biol. 2010;30:599-604.)
Golf swing tracking and evaluation using Kinect sensor and particle filter

In this paper, we propose a method to track the grip of a golf swing by the use of a Kinect sensor and particle filter and a method to evaluate the swing trajectory using DP matching. Tracking a golf swing with only a Kinect sensor causes tracking of the grip to be difficult, since swing speed is typically fast, both arms overlap each other, and the grip usually becomes hidden behind the swinger's head. Furthermore, tracking a golf swing with only a particle filter also causes tracking of the grip to be difficult, since tracking failure occurs when the color of the grip and swinger's arms is similar. Therefore, by using skeleton information output by a Kinect sensor, we divided the poses of a golf swing into four stages. For each stage, we tracked the exact grip position by changing the tracking method. We also evaluated the swing trajectory using DP matching.
Risk factors for metastatic uveal melanoma after trans-scleral local resection.

AIMS: This study reports the metastatic death rate after trans-scleral local resection of uveal melanoma and identifies relevant risk factors. METHODS: Local resection was performed in 332 patients (mean age 51 years), with follow up ranging to 20.9 years (median for living patients 33 months). The tumours had a mean largest basal diameter of 13.1 mm and mean thickness of 7.5 mm, with 135 containing epithelioid cells. Risk factors were identified by Cox analysis and metastatic rates demonstrated using Kaplan-Meier curves. RESULTS: There were 52 deaths from metastatic melanoma. The significant risk factors were (i) age more than 60 years at treatment (p = 0.001), (ii) mixed/epithelioid tumours (p = 0.003), (iii) superior location of mixed/epithelioid tumours (over and above (ii)) (p = 0.001), (iv) largest basal tumour diameter of 16 mm or more (p < 0.001), (v) lack of adjunctive radiotherapy (p = 0.031), (vi) secondary enucleation for bulky residual/recurrent tumour (p = 0.002), and (vii) secondary enucleation for small residual/recurrent tumour extraocularly (p = 0.019). Metastatic death was not significantly associated with (i) incomplete tumour excision (p = 0.163), and (ii) small residual/recurrent tumour treated by enucleation (p = 0.855). CONCLUSIONS: Survival diminished from 92% at 15 years if less than two risk factors were present to less than 30% in 3.5 years if more than three risk factors were present.
Landing of VTOL UAVs using a stationary robot manipulator: A new approach for coordinated control

This paper deals with the landing of VTOL UAVs under severe conditions. We present a novel system based on a robot manipulator, which is used to support a UAV in the last, most challenging, landing phase. In this phase, the aerial vehicle is connected to the robot by means of a universal hinge. This allows to decouple the UAV's orientation from the robot's end-effector orientation. The main contribution of the paper is a new control approach for the whole system composed of a VTOL UAV and a manipulator. A combination of a backstepping controller accounting for the UAV's dynamics with an impedance controller for the manipulator is used for coordinated control of the whole system. The proposed approach allows to independently control position and orientation of a VTOL UAV, whereby an arbitrary stable attitude controller can be used for the flying vehicle. The advantage of the presented approach is that the interaction forces between robot and UAV are taken into account explicitly and that a Lyapunov stability proof for the UAV subsystem can be derived directly. Robustness and performance of the control approach are investigated in simulation and experiments. The experimental results for an AR.Drone quadrotor and a DLR/KUKA light-weight robot with seven degrees-of-freedom are presented in the paper.