Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Does quality of life of COPD patients as measured by the generic EuroQol five-dimension questionnaire differentiate between COPD severity stages?

OBJECTIVE To assess the discriminative properties of the EuroQol five-dimension questionnaire (EQ-5D) with respect to COPD severity according to Global Initiative for Chronic Obstructive Lung Disease (GOLD) criteria in a large multinational study. METHODS Baseline EQ-5D visual analog scale (VAS) scores, EQ-5D utility scores, and St. George Respiratory Questionnaire scores were obtained from a subset of patients in the Understanding the Potential Long-term Impact on Function with Tiotropium trial, which was a 4-year placebo-controlled trial designed to assess the effect of tiotropium on the rate of decline in FEV(1) in COPD patients aged > or = 40 years, an FEV(1) of < 70% predicted, an FEV(1)/FVC ratio of < or = 70%, and a smoking history of >/= 10 pack-years. RESULTS A total of 1,235 patients (mean post bronchodilator FEV(1), 48.8% predicted) from 13 countries completed the EQ-5D. The EQ-5D VAS and utility scores differed significantly among patients in GOLD stages 2, 3, and 4, also after correction for age, sex, smoking, body mass index (BMI), and comorbidity (p < 0.001). The mean EQ-5D VAS scores for patients in GOLD stages 2, 3, and 4 were 68 (SD, 16), 62 (SD, 17), and 58 (SD, 16), respectively. The mean utility scores were 0.79 (SD, 0.20) for patients in GOLD stage 2, 0.75 (SD, 0.21) for patients in GOLD stage 3, and 0.65 (SD, 0.23) for patients in GOLD stage 4. Effect sizes for the difference in utility scores between patients in GOLD stages 3 and 4 were more than twice as high as those for the difference between patients in GOLD stages 2 and 3. Gender, postbronchodilator FEV(1) percent predicted, the number of hospital admissions and emergency department visits in the year prior to baseline measurements, measures of comorbidity, and BMI were independently associated with EQ-5D utility. EQ-5D utility scores also differed between patients from different countries. French patients especially had lower utility scores than US patients. Utility scores calculated with the US value set were on average 5% higher than those calculated with the UK value set. CONCLUSIONS Increasing severity of COPD was associated with a significant decline in EQ-5D VAS scores and utility scores. These results demonstrate that a generic instrument can assess COPD impact on quality of life and that the scores discriminate between patient groups of known severity. These utility scores will be useful in cost-effectiveness assessments.
Chasing the Negawatt: Visualization for Sustainable Living

Energy and resource management is an important and growing research area at the intersection of conservation, sustainable design, alternative energy production, and social behavior. Energy consumption can be significantly reduced by simply changing how occupants inhabit and use buildings, with little or no additional costs. Reflecting this fact, an emerging measure of grid energy capacity is the negawatt: a unit of power saved by increasing efficiency or reducing consumption.Visualization clearly has an important role in enabling residents to understand and manage their energy use. This role is tied to providing real-time feedback of energy use, which encourages people to conserve energy.The challenge is to understand not only what kinds of visualizations are most effective but also where and how they fit into a larger information system to help residents make informed decisions. In this article, we also examine the effective display of home energy-use data using a net-zero solar-powered home (North House) and the Adaptive Living Interface System (ALIS), North House's information backbone.
Using Intranet technology to foster organizational knowledge creation

Many organizations have embraced intranets with the intent to harness the technology to support knowledge management initiatives. Despite the promise that intranet technology holds in this regard, many of the early research studies indicate rather disappointing results. In this paper we propose a model that organizations can use to conceptualize and reflect on their intranet applications with a view towards more fruitful results, specifically in terms of knowledge creation. We do so by drawing upon Nonaka’s well-known framework of knowledge creation and combining that with a taxonomy of five intranet use modes. For each of Nonaka’s four knowledge creating activities we associate and describe the corresponding primary intranet use mode that we argue can foster the knowledge creation process. We illustrate the arguments with findings from our own empirical intranet field studies and other documented intranet-related knowledge management research. We conclude with some implications of the model and we suggest avenues for further research.
Indentation size effect: a study via the Mechanism-based Strain-Gradient plasticity theory

Recent micro- and nano-indentation experiments have shown strong indentation size effects at the micron and sub-micron scales. Classical plasticity theories cannot explain the indentation size effect because their constitutive models possess no intrinsic material lengths. The Mechanism-based Strain-Gradient (MSG) plasticity theory and its simplified version, the Conventional theory of Mechanism-based Strain-Gradient plasticity (CMSG), have been established from the Taylor dislocation model and have successfully explained the indentation size effect. This paper provides a review of these theories and their applications to study the indentation of face- and body-centred-cubic metals and thin films on hard or soft substrates.
Shortest path stochastic control for hybrid electric vehicles

When a hybrid electric vehicle (HEV) is certified for emissions and fuel economy, its power management system must be charge sustaining over the drive cycle, meaning that the battery state of charge (SOC) must be at least as high at the end of the test as it was at the beginning of the test. During the test cycle, the power management system is free to vary the battery SOC so as to minimize a weighted combination of fuel consumption and exhaust emissions. This paper argues that shortest path stochastic dynamic programming (SP‐SDP) offers a more natural formulation of the optimal control problem associated with the design of the power management system because it allows deviations of battery SOC from a desired setpoint to be penalized only at key off. This method is illustrated on a parallel hybrid electric truck model that had previously been analyzed using infinite‐horizon stochastic dynamic programming with discounted future cost. Both formulations of the optimization problem yield a time‐invariant causal state‐feedback controller that can be directly implemented on the vehicle. The advantages of the shortest path formulation include that a single tuning parameter is needed to trade off fuel economy and emissions versus battery SOC deviation, as compared with two parameters in the discounted, infinite‐horizon case, and for the same level of complexity as a discounted future‐cost controller, the shortest‐path controller demonstrates better fuel and emission minimization while also achieving better SOC control when the vehicle is turned off. Linear programming is used to solve both stochastic dynamic programs. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Monitoring the Home Environment Using Domestic Robot

Today, robots are no longer limited to laboratory experiments; they have found their way into our homes. Being a physical entity itself, a robot can provide the functionality a regular computer does not possess. In the AIBO Monitor project, we use a domestic robot dog as a mediator for people to remotely monitor their home environment. Several design ideas have been explored and are presented in an attempt to maximize the user awareness of the robot’s interaction with the environment.
Human Action Recognition Using Segmented Skeletal Features

We present a novel human action recognition system based on segmented skeletal features which are separated into several human body parts such as face, torso and limbs. Our proposed human action recognition system consists of two steps: (i) automatic skeletal feature extraction and splitting by measuring the similarity in the space of diffusion tensor fields, and (ii) multiple kernel Support Vector Machine based human action recognition. Experimental results on a set of test database show that our proposed method is very efficient and effective to recognize human actions using few parameters, independent of dimensions, shadows, and viewpoints.
Electrophysiological Correlates of Subitizing in Healthy Aging

To understand the nature of age-related changes in enumeration abilities we measured two ERP responses -N2pc and CDA, associated respectively to attentive individuation and VWM- and posterior alpha band (8-15 Hz) event-related desynchronization (ERD), traditionally linked to enhanced target processing. Two groups of old and young participants enumerated a variable number (1-6) of targets presented among distractors. Older participants were less accurate in enumerating targets. ERP results in old participants showed a suppression of N2pc amplitudes for all numerosities, and a decrease in CDA only for the largest set (4-6 targets). In contrast with the pattern for young adults, time/frequency results on older adults revealed neither a modulation of alpha oscillations as a function of target numerosity, nor an effect of ERD lateralization. These patterns indicate that both attention and working memory contribute to the age-related decline in enumeration, and point to an overall decrease in the activity of the visual areas responsible for the processing of the hemifield where the relevant objects are presented.
Program Interferometry

Modern microprocessors have many microarchitectural features. Quantifying the performance impact of one feature such as dynamic branch prediction can be difficult. On one hand, a timing simulator can predict the difference in performance given two different implementations of the technique, but simulators can be quite inaccurate. On the other hand, real systems are very accurate representations of themselves, but often cannot be modified to study the impact of a new technique.
Hyperglycemic Crises and their Complications in Children

The object of this review is to provide the definitions and criteria for diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA) and the hyperglycemic hyperosmolar state (HHS), and convey current knowledge of the causes of permanent disability or mortality from complications of these conditions, of the risk factors for DKA and HHS, and of early indicators and contemporary treatment of suspected cerebral edema. The frequency of DKA at onset of type 1 diabetes mellitus (DM1) varies from 10-70%, depending on availability of health care and frequency of diabetes. At the onset of type 2 diabetes (DM2), DKA occurs in 5-52%. One study reported HHS in approximately 4% of new patients with DM2. Recurrent DKA rates are equally dependent on variability in medical services and socio-economic circumstances, and are estimated to be eight episodes per 100 patient years, with 20% of patients accounting for 80% of the episodes. Mortality for each episode of DKA internationally varies from 0.15-0.31%, with idiopathic cerebral edema accounting for two-thirds or more of this mortality. Other causes of death or disability include untreated DKA or HHS, hypokalemia, hypophosphatemia, hypoglycemia, other intracerebral complications, peripheral venous thrombosis, mucormycosis, rhabdomyolysis, acute pancreatitis, acute renal failure, sepsis, aspiration pneumonia, and other pulmonary complications. Population-based studies from the UK, Australia, the USA, and Canada report cerebral edema incidence in DKA of 0.5-2.0%. Published information does not support the notion that treatment factors are causal in cerebral edema. Younger age, greater severity of acidosis, degree of hypocapnia, and severity of dehydration have been suggested as risk factors in several studies. Bimodal distribution of the time of onset of cerebral edema and wide variation in brain imaging findings suggest the variability and likely multiple causation of the clinical picture. Functional brain scanning has indicated that DKA is accompanied by increased cerebral blood flow suggesting that the predominant mechanism of edema formation is a vasogenic process. A method of monitoring for diagnostic and major and minor signs of cerebral edema has been proposed and tested which indicates that intervention will be required in five individuals to provide early intervention for a single case of cerebral edema. The preferred intervention of mannitol infusion has typically been accompanied by intubation and hyperventilation, but recent evidence indicates outcome is adversely affected by aggressive hyperventilation. The prevention of DKA and HHS at the onset of diabetes mellitus requires a high degree of awareness and suspicion by primary care providers; prevention of recurrent DKA necessitates a diligent team effort.
Droplets, bubbles, and vesicles at chemically structured surfaces

Liquid droplets, gas bubbles, and membrane vesicles which are in contact with chemically structured substrate surfaces can undergo morphological transitions or shape transformations. The structured surfaces considered here consist of two types of surface domains, γ and δ, which attract and repel the droplets, bubbles, and vesicles, respectively. For droplets on a striped γ domain, one has to distinguish droplets with fixed end caps from those with freely moving end caps. Both types of channels undergo morphological wetting transitions. For vesicles, one has a strong adhesion regime in which the vesicle shapes have constant mean curvature and exhibit effective contact angles. One can then map the shape bifurcation diagram for vesicles onto the one for droplets if one includes the constraint of fixed membrane area. We also report preliminary experimental observations of the adhesion of vesicles to chemically structured surfaces.
New Economic School Media and Political Persuasion : Evidence from Russia Ruben Enikolopov

How do media affect voting behavior? What difference can an independent media outlet make in a country with state-controlled media? Our paper addresses these questions by comparing electoral outcomes and votes reported by survey respondents during the 1999 parliamentary elections in Russia for those geographical areas that had access and those that had no access to the only national TV channel independent from the government (“NTV”). The effect is identified from exogenous variation in the availability of the signal, which appears to be mostly idiosyncratic, conditional on controls. The findings are as follows. 1) The presence of the independent TV channel decreased the aggregate vote for the government party by 2.5 percentage points and increased the combined vote for major opposition parties by 2.1 percentage points. 2) The probability of voting for opposition parties increased for individuals who watched NTV even controlling for voting intentions measured one month prior to the elections. 3) NTV had a smaller effect on votes of people with higher political knowledge and those using alternative sources of political news and a larger effect on retired persons who watch TV substantially more than working individuals. ∗ Authors are from the New Economic School. We are very grateful to Maxim Boycko and the Video International Company for sharing data on the NTV coverage and to Timothy Colton for sharing his survey data with us. We thank Alberto Alesina, Robert Bates, Tim Colton, Stefano DellaVigna, Irena Grosfeld, Ethan Kaplan, Chappell Lawson, Gabriel Lenz, Jim Robinson, Claudia Senik, Andrei Shleifer, Jim Snyder, David Strömberg, and seminar participants at the IIES at the University of Stockholm, New Economic School, Harvard University, MIT, Paris School of Economics, Baltic International Centre for Economic Policy Studies, participants of the American Political Science Association Meeting and the Workshop on Media Economics at Zurich for helpful comments.
Comparative analysis of speech dereverberation in noisy acoustical environments

Reverberated speech signals in noisy acoustical environments cause some problems such as reducing speech intelligibility, distinguishing speakers, locating source, quality for hands-free telephony, hearing aid, etc. Adaptive filters can be applied to suppress the interfering signals and reduce the reverberation effects or to dereverberate the received speech signals at microphone. In this paper, Bayesian State-Space Kalman and Wiener filters have been employed to reduce the effect of noise on received speech signal and their results are compared. Also, a dereverberation method is proposed by applying an inverse filter to the received speech signals to reduce the effect of reverberation on received speech signal by single microphone. Different values of the Room Impulse Response are used in the dereverberation procedure and the results are compared. The results show a significant improvement in the quality of the received signal for the desired reverberant environment. Furthermore, the mean opinion score (MOS) of subjective listening quality (LQ) and objective quality score from the perceptual evaluation of speech quality (PESQ) of two different values of RIR coefficient are compared.
Chord Context Algorithm for Shape Feature Extraction

The emergence of new technologies makes it easy to generate information in visual forms, leading everyday to an increasing number of generated digital images. At the same time, the rapid advances in imaging technologies and the widespread availability of Internet access motivate data browsing into these data bases. For image description and retrieval, manual annotation of these images becomes impractical and inefficient. Image retrieval is based on observation of an ordering of match scores obtained by searching through a database. The key challenges in building a retrieval system are the choice of attributes, their representations, query specification methods, match metrics and indexing strategies. A large number of retrieval methods using shape descriptors has been described in literature. Compared to other features, for example, color or texture, object shape is unique. It enables us to recognize an object without further information. However, since shapes are 2D images that are projections of 3D objects, the silhouettes may change from one viewpoint to another with respect to objects and non-rigid object motion (e.g., walking people or flying bird) and segmentation errors caused by lighting variations, partial occultation, scaling, boundary distortion and corruption by noise are unavoidable. As we know, while computers can easily distinguish slight differences between similar objects, it is very difficult to estimate the similarity between two objects as perceived by human beings, even when considering very simple objects. This is because human perception is not a mere interpretation of a retinal patch, but an active interaction between the retinal patch and a representation of our knowledge about objects. Thus the problem is complicated by the fact that a shape does not have a mathematical definition that exactly matches what the user feels as a shape. Solutions proposed in the literature use various approaches and emphasize different aspects of the problem. The choice of a particular representation scheme is usually driven by the need to cope with requirements such as robustness against noise, stability with respect to minor distortions, and invariance to common geometrical transforms or tolerance to occultation, etc. For general shape representation, a recent review is given in [1] [2]. In this chapter, a shape descriptor based on chord context is proposed. The basic idea of chord context is to observe the lengths of all parallel and equidistant chords in a shape, and
Near‐Infrared Quantum Cutting for Photovoltaics

Efficient quantum cutting by the Pr3+-Yb3+ couple is demonstrated for the conversion of blue/green to near-infrared (NIR) radiation with quantum efficiencies close to 200%. The resonant two-step energy transfer process, which involves one higher-energy photon becoming two NIR photons, may lead to the reduction of energy loss in solar cells, revealing how spectral conversion is a promising avenue for boosting solar-cell efficiency.
Functional status measures for integrating medical and social care

Abstract Purpose Identify standard self-report questions about functioning suitable for measuring disability across integrated health and social services. Theory Functional activities can be validly grouped according to the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) chapters of mobility, self-care, and domestic life. Methods Cross-sectional analysis using information on 112,601 persons interviewed as part of the United States National Health Interview Survey on Disability. We combined related sets of questions and tested the appropriateness of their groupings through confirmatory factor analyses. Construct validity was addressed by seeking to confirm clinically logical relationships between the resulting functional scales and related health concepts, including number of physician contacts, number of bed days, perception of illness, and perception of disability. Results Internal consistency for the summed scales ranged from 0.78 to 0.92. Correlations between the functional scales and related concepts ranged from 0.12 to 0.52 in directions consistent with expectations. Conclusions Analyses supported the 3 ICF chapters. Discussions The routine collection of this core set of functions could enhance decision-making at the client, professional, organizational, and policy levels encouraging cooperation among the medical and social service sectors when caring for people with disabilities.
Ceramic nanofibers fabricated by electrospinning and their applications in catalysis, environmental science, and energy technology

This paper provides a brief review of current research activities that focus on the fabrication of ceramic nanofibers by electrospinning, as well as their applications in various areas. We begin with a brief introduction to electrospinning in the context of ceramic nanofibers, and the methods for preparing aligned and/or hollow nanofibers. We then discuss approaches to the fabrication of nanofibers with a hierarchical structure. We continue with a highlight of some recent applications enabled by electrospun ceramic nanofibers, with a focus on three areas: catalysis, environmental science, and energy technology, which are expected to become the most important and exciting subjects of research in this century. In the end, we conclude this review with some perspectives on the future directions and implications for this new class of functional nanomaterials. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
NeuroIR 2015: Neuro-Physiological Methods in IR Research

This Tutorial+Workshop will discuss opportunities and challenges involved in using neuro-physiological tools/techniques (such as fMRI, fNIRS, EEG, eye-tracking, GSR, HR, and facial expressions) and theories in information retrieval. The hybrid format will engage researchers and students at different levels of expertise, from those who are active in this area to those who are interested and want to learn more. The workshop will combine presentations, discussions and tutorial elements and consist of four segments (tutorial, completed research, work-in-progress, closing panel).