Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Creatinine clearance, pulse wave velocity, carotid compliance and essential hypertension.

BACKGROUND The vascular hallmark of subjects with end-stage renal disease is increased arterial stiffness independent of blood pressure, wall stress, and cardiovascular risk factors such as hypertension, plasma glucose and cholesterol, obesity, and tobacco consumption. Whether arterial stiffness and kidney function are statistically associated in subjects with plasma creatinine < or =130 micromol/L has not yet been determined. Material. In 1290 subjects with normal or elevated blood pressure values and plasma creatinine < or =130 micromol/L, subjects were divided into three tertiles according to the calculated creatinine clearance. Blood pressure, aortic pulse wave velocity (PWV), and standard cardiovascular risk factors were determined in parallel. In 112 of the hypertensive subjects, common carotid and radial artery structure and function (high-resolution echo-Doppler techniques) also were measured. RESULTS From the 1290 subjects, only the low-tertile group presented a significant negative association between PWV and creatinine clearance independently of blood pressure and standard risk factors. This association was stronger in subjects < or =55 years of age. In the 112 hypertensive subjects, carotid compliance was positively correlated to creatinine clearance even after an adjustment for age, gender, and blood pressure. At less than 55 years of age, creatinine clearance represented 20% of the variance of carotid compliance. Such findings were not observed for radial artery compliance. CONCLUSION Increased stiffness of central arteries is statistically associated with reduced creatinine clearance in subjects with mild-to-moderate renal insufficiency, indicating that kidney alterations may interact not only with small but also large arteries, and this is independent of age, blood pressure, and standard risk factors.
How Probabilistic Risk Assessment Can Mislead Terrorism Risk Analysts

Traditional probabilistic risk assessment (PRA), of the type originally developed for engineered systems, is still proposed for terrorism risk analysis. We show that such PRA applications are unjustified in general. The capacity of terrorists to seek and use information and to actively research different attack options before deciding what to do raises unique features of terrorism risk assessment that are not adequately addressed by conventional PRA for natural and engineered systems—in part because decisions based on such PRA estimates do not adequately hedge against the different probabilities that attackers may eventually act upon. These probabilities may differ from the defender's (even if the defender's experts are thoroughly trained, well calibrated, unbiased probability assessors) because they may be conditioned on different information. We illustrate the fundamental differences between PRA and terrorism risk analysis, and suggest use of robust decision analysis for risk management when attackers may know more about some attack options than we do.
Exact results in the micromechanics of fibrous piezoelectric composites exhibiting pyroelectricity

Piezoelectric fibrous composites of two, three and four phases are considered. The phase boundaries are cylindrical but otherwise the microgeometry is totally arbitrary. The constituents are transversely isotropic, and exhibit pyroelectricity. Exact relations are derived between the local fields arising under a uniform electromechanical loading and a uniform temperature change in the piezoelectric composite. For given overall material symmetry, exact connections are obtained among the effective elastic, piezoelectric and dielectric constants of two- and three- phase systems. It is also shown that the effective thermal stress and pyroelectric coefficients can be expressed in terms of the effective elastic, piezoelectric, dielectric constants and constituent properties in two-, three- and four-phase composites.
Designing Mobile Multimodal Artefacts

Users’ characteristics and their different mobility stages sometimes reduce or eliminate their capability to perform paper-based activities. The support of such activities and their extension through the utilization of non paper-based modalities introduces new perspectives on their accomplishment. We introduce mobile multimodal artefacts and an artefact framework as a solution to this problem. We briefly explain the main tools of this framework and detail two versions of the multimodal artefact manipulation tool: a visual centred and eye-free version. The design and evaluation process of the tool is presented including several
Toughness determination of zirconia toughened alumina ceramics from growth of indentation-induced cracks

Short surface cracks were generated by Vickers indentation on the polished surface of alumina and different zirconia toughened alumina (ZTA) specimens, and their morphology was studied by serial sectioning. These cracks were grown in three-point bend tests under stepwise loading, and variation of toughness with crack extension was plotted to graphically separate the contributions from residual stress intensity and applied stress intensity factors. The plateau toughness determined from the intercept height of the crack extension plots exhibited an upward trend with zirconia content up to 15 vol % ZrO_2 addition in the composition, which was proportional to the fraction of transformable tetragonal grains contributing to transformation toughening.
The Microstructure Characteristics and Wear Resistance of Rapidly Solidified Hypereutectic Al-Si Alloys

Rapidly solidified hypereutectic Al-21Si was prepared by the single roller melt-spinning technique. The microstructure morphology characteristics and phase structures of the alloy were characterized using SEM, TEM and XRD technique. The results showed that the grains were refined and the micro-nano composite structures were formed under rapid solidification. The microstructure of the Al-21Si alloy was composed of micro-nanostructured α-Al phase and feather-needle-like eutectic α-Al+β-Si phase. The α-Al phase was the leading phase in the eutectic α+Si phase. The nucleation and growth of primary silicon are suppressed and primary silicon could not be precipitated. The hypereutectic Al-21Si alloy showed the hypoeutectic solidification microstructure. Wear resistance was improved obviously when the rapidly solidified and was five times higher than that of the traditional casting alloys.
Design of tropical crops pests monitoring system based on wireless sensor network

The power of wireless sensor network node is usually provided by a dry battery, which the power energy is limited, and the life cycle of wireless sensor network is determined by the battery directly. On the basis of the analysis of energy-saving mechanism of wireless sensor networks, have come up with a plant electrolyte power, a new renewable energy, which attains energy from the electrolytes in the body of plants. The plant electrolyte power can be used in the tropical crop pest monitoring system and it can also be widely applied in wireless sensor network node associated with the plant.
Effect of Leucovorin (Folinic Acid) on the Developmental Quotient of Children with Down's Syndrome (Trisomy 21) and Influence of Thyroid Status

Background Seven genes involved in folate metabolism are located on chromosome 21. Previous studies have shown that folate deficiency may contribute to mental retardation in Down's syndrome (DS). Methodology We investigated the effect of oral folate supplementation (daily dose of 1.0±0.3 mg/kg) on cognitive functions in DS children, aged from 3 to 30 months. They received 1 mg/kg leucovorin or placebo daily, for 12 months, in a single-centre, randomised, double-blind study. Folinic acid (leucovorin, LV) was preferred to folic acid as its bioavailability is higher. The developmental age (DA) of the patients was assessed on the Brunet-Lezine scale, from baseline to the end of treatment. Results The intent-to-treat analysis (113 patients) did not show a positive effect of leucovorin treatment. However, it identified important factors influencing treatment effect, such as age, sex, and concomitant treatments, including thyroid treatment in particular. A per protocol analysis was carried out on patients evaluated by the same examiner at the beginning and end of the treatment period. This analysis of 87 patients (43 LV-treated vs. 44 patients on placebo) revealed a positive effect of leucovorin on developmental age (DA). DA was 53.1% the normal value with leucovorin and only 44.1% with placebo (p<0.05). This positive effect of leucovorin was particularly strong in patients receiving concomitant thyroxin treatment (59.5% vs. 41.8%, p<0.05). No adverse event related to leucovorin was observed. Conclusion These results suggest that leucovorin improves the psychomotor development of children with Down's syndrome, at least in some subgroups of the DS population, particularly those on thyroxin treatment. Trial Registration ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT00294593
Massive Multiple Access Based on Superposition Raptor Codes for Cellular M2M Communications

Machine-to-machine (M2M) wireless systems aim to provide ubiquitous connectivity between machine-type communication (MTC) devices without any human intervention. Given the exponential growth of MTC traffic, it is of utmost importance to ensure that future wireless standards are capable of handling this traffic. In this paper, we focus on the design of a very efficient massive access strategy for highly dense cellular networks with M2M communications. Several MTC devices are allowed to simultaneously transmit in the same resource block by incorporating Raptor codes and a simple modulation scheme. This significantly reduces the access delay and improves the achievable system throughput. A simple yet efficient random access strategy is proposed to not only detect the selected preambles, but also estimate the number of devices which have chosen them. No device identification is needed in the random access phase which significantly reduces the signaling overhead. The proposed scheme is analyzed and the maximum number of MTC devices that can be supported in a resource block is characterized as a function of the message length, number of available resources, and the number of preambles. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can effectively support a massive number of MTC devices for a limited number of available resources, when the message size is small.
Long-term monitoring of persistent organic pollutants (POPs) at the Norwegian Troll station in Dronning Maud Land, Antarctica

A first long-term monitoring of selected persis- tent organic pollutants (POPs) in Antarctic air has been conducted at the Norwegian research station Troll (Dron- ning Maud Land). As target contaminants 32 PCB con- geners, - and -hexachlorocyclohexane (HCH), trans- and cis-chlordane, trans- and cis-nonachlor, p,p'- and o,p-DDT, DDD, DDE as well as hexachlorobenzene (HCB) were se- lected. The monitoring program with weekly samples taken during the period 2007-2010 was coordinated with the par- allel program at the Norwegian Arctic monitoring site (Zep- pelin mountain, Ny-Alesund, Svalbard) in terms of priority compounds, sampling schedule as well as analytical meth- ods. The POP concentration levels found in Antarctica were considerably lower than Arctic atmospheric background con- centrations. Similar to observations for Arctic samples, HCB is the predominant POP compound, with levels of around 22 pg m 3 throughout the entire monitoring period. In gen- eral, the following concentration distribution was found for the Troll samples analyzed: HCB > Sum HCH > Sum PCB > Sum DDT > Sum chlordanes. Atmospheric long-range transport was identified as a ma- jor contamination source for POPs in Antarctic environ- ments. Several long-range transport events with elevated lev- els of pesticides and/or compounds with industrial sources were identified based on retroplume calculations with a La- grangian particle dispersion model (FLEXPART).
Geodesic distances for web document clustering

While traditional distance measures are often capable of properly describing similarity between objects, in some application areas there is still potential to fine-tune these measures with additional information provided in the data sets. In this work we combine such traditional distance measures for document analysis with link information between documents to improve clustering results. In particular, we test the effectiveness of geodesic distances as similarity measures under the space assumption of spherical geometry in a 0-sphere. Our proposed distance measure is thus a combination of the cosine distance of the term-document matrix and some curvature values in the geodesic distance formula. To estimate these curvature values, we calculate clustering coefficient values for every document from the link graph of the data set and increase their distinctiveness by means of a heuristic as these clustering coefficient values are rough estimates of the curvatures. To evaluate our work, we perform clustering tests with the k-means algorithm on the English Wikipedia hyperlinked data set with both traditional cosine distance and our proposed geodesic distance. The effectiveness of our approach is measured by computing micro-precision values of the clusters based on the provided categorical information of each article.
Infrared spectroscopy of cataclysmic variables — II. Intermediate polars

We present infrared (0.97-2.45 micron) spectra of the intermediate polars PQ Gem (RE0751+14), BG CMi and EX Hya. The spectra show strong Paschen, Brackett and HeI emission lines from the accretion disc/stream. The infrared continua of PQ Gem and BG CMi can be represented by blackbodies of temperatures 4500 K and 5100 K, respectively, or by power-laws of the form f_nu \propto nu^(0.6,0.9), respectively, and show no evidence of secondary star features. The continuum of EX Hya is doiminated by water bands from the red-dwarf secondary star, which has a spectral type of ~M3. Despite showing circular polarization, PQ Gem and BG CMi show no evidence for cyclotron humps and hence we are unable to measure their magnetic field strengths; any cyclotron emission present must contribute less than ~3 per cent of the infrared continuum flux.
Determination of Young's Modulus of Hydroxyapatite Doped with Magnesium by Vibration Method

Implants and bone reconstruction have known a great development recently. Synthesized bone tissues must have mechanical, physiological and biological properties closer to natural bone, as much as possible. Bioceramics are materials which fulfill these conditions, being biocompatible with mechanical strength similar to bone. One material widely used is hydroxyapatite. Hydroxyapatite is slightly different from bone tissue and it forms the mineral part of bone tissue. In order to improve mechanical properties and biological compatibility hydroxyapatite is doped with different compounds, mainly chemical elements. Magnesium, a chemical element present in human bone structure is one of these compounds.
Float Glass Surface Preparation Methods for Improved Chromium Film Adhesive Bonding

Contact angle measurements using method based on B-spline snakes (active contours) were applied to investigate surface wettability properties of commercial soda-lime-silica float glass subjected to various surface preparation methods. The comparative evaluation of vacuum evaporated chromium thin film adhesion strength to float glass treated under different surface preparation methods was performed using scratch tests. Also, the influence of float glass substrate heating for chromium thin film adhesion strength was investigated. Surface activation and contamination removal by O2 plasma process and RCA-1 surface preparation method revealed the best results, where surfaces were free of hydrophobic contaminants with low contact angles ranging from 4° to 8°. For majority of float glass surface preparation methods the contact angles were observed slightly higher for the “tin side” as compared with “air side”. Soda-lime-silica float glass surface wettability properties of both sides were equalized during bombardment in RIBE unit by Ar+ ion beam. O2 plasma process and RCA-1 surface preparation method for float glass resulted in a higher value of the thin chromium film adhesion to the float glass substrate as measured from the average critical normal force (O2 plasma 0.169 N; RCA-1 0.14 N) in scratch tests. The float glass substrate heating (100 °C) in the vacuum chamber before chromium thin film evaporation process resulted in even higher value of the thin chromium film adhesion to the float glass substrate.DOI: http://dx.doi. org/10.5755/j01.ms.18.2. 1924
Drawing on millions of biomedical journal publications to do predictive biology

The biomedical literature captures the most current biomedical knowledge and is a tremendously rich resource for research. With over 24 million publications currently indexed in the US National Library of Medicine's PubMed index, however, it is becoming increasingly challenging for biomedical researchers to keep up with this literature. Automated strategies for extracting information from it are required. Large-scale processing of the literature enables direct biomedical knowledge discovery. This paper introduces the use of text mining techniques to support analysis of biological data sets, specifically discussing applications in protein function prediction and analysis of genetic variants that are supported by analysis of the literature. Review of the work suggests that methods that integrate simple text analysis with more targeted relation extraction, and methods that combine literature-derived information with complementary biological data, represent the most promising future directions.
Barriers and Facilitators of Implementation of a Mandate for Influenza Vaccination among Healthcare Personnel

Mandatory influenza vaccination is associated with improved healthcare personnel vaccination rates, but institutional barriers to implementation and enforcement are reported. We explored barriers and facilitators to mandatory vaccination among a national sample of hospital administrators. Support from employees and administration were cited as key to the success of a mandate. Infect Control Hosp Epidemiol 2014;35(6):724-727
Comparison of Using NaOH and KOH Activated Fly Ash-Based Geopolymer on the Mechanical Properties

Geopolymer synthesis has two main requirements to fulfil which are the source material that is rich in Silicon (Si) and Aluminum (Al) and alkali activator such as sodium/potassium hydroxide. Sodium hydroxide (NaOH) is widely used for the synthesis of geopolymer compared to potassium hydroxide (KOH) with addition of silicate solution for the purpose of increasing dissolution process. However, the comparison of using different activator in the absence of silicate solution for geopolymer synthesis is not well established. This paper presents an evaluation on compressive strength of fly ash–based geopolymer by using different activator (KOH and NaOH) with respect to different curing conditions (time and temperature) in the absence of sodium silicate. The samples were mixed using mortar mixer and prepared in 50mm x 50mm x 50mm mould for determination of compressive strength. It can be observed that the highest compressive strength up 65.28 MPa was obtained using NaOH. Meanwhile, synthesis using KOH only recorded 28.73 MPa. The compressive strength was better when cured at elevated temperature (60°C) than room temperature (25°C). Further analysis on the microstructure of the highest compressive strength geopolymer samples for both activators was carried out using Field Emission Scanning Microscopy (FESEM) and Raman spectroscopy.
Comparison of two methods of visual magnification for removal of adhesive flash during bracket placement using two types of orthodontic bonding agents

ABSTRACT Objective: This study aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of two methods of visual magnification (operating microscope and light head magnifying glass) for removal of composite flash around orthodontic metal brackets. Material and Methods: Brackets were bonded in the center of the clinical crown of sixty well-preserved human premolars. Half of the sample was bonded with conventional Transbond XT (3M Unitek TM, USA), whereas the other half was bonded with Transbond TM Plus Color Change (3M Unitek TM, USA). For each type of composite, the choice of method to remove the flash was determined by randomly distributing the teeth into the following subgroups: A (removal by naked eye, n = 10), B (removal with the aid of light head magnifying glass, under 4x magnification, n = 10), and C (removal with the aid of an operating microscope, under 40x magnification, n = 10). Brackets were debonded and teeth taken to a scanning electron microscope (SS-x-550, Shimadzu, Japan) for visualization of their buccal surface. Quantification of composite flash was performed with Image Pro Plus software, and values were compared by Kruskal-Wallis test and Dunn’s post-hoc test at 5% significance level. Results: Removal of pigmented orthodontic adhesive with the aid of light head magnifying glass proved, in general, to be advantageous in comparison to all other methods. Conclusion: There was no advantage in using Transbond TM Plus Color Change alone. Further studies are necessary to draw a more definitive conclusion in regards to the benefits of using an operating microscope.
Antiarrhythmic vs. pro-arrhythmic effects depending on the intensity of adrenergic stimulation in a canine anthopleurin-A model of type-3 long QT syndrome.

AIMS The effects of adrenergic activity and beta-blockade were studied in a canine experimental model of type-3 long QT syndrome (LQT3) induced by application of anthopleurin-A. METHODS AND RESULTS Boluses of epinephrine at 0.5 and/or 1.0 microg/kg were administered before and after propranolol, 0.3 mg/kg, and the distribution of the ventricular repolarization and the development of polymorphic ventricular tachyarrhythmia (VA) were assessed. Using needle electrodes, transmural unipolar electrograms were recorded across the left ventricle (LV) and right ventricle (RV). Activation-recovery interval (ARI) was measured in each electrogram to estimate local repolarization during RV pacing at the cycle length of 750 ms after the creation of complete atrioventricular block. Before propranolol, epinephrine, 0.5 microg/kg, did not induce VA in any experiment. However, a dose of 1.0 microg/kg induced polymorphic VA following multiple premature ventricular complex (PVC) in four of six experiments. Epinephrine, 0.5 microg/kg, shortened ARI at all sites and lessened LV transmural ARI dispersion. Neither ARI nor its dispersion could be determined after 1.0 microg/kg of epinephrine because of the induction of PVC, polymorphic VA, or both. Propranolol (i) prevented epinephrine-induced PVC and polymorphic VA in all experiments, (ii) slightly prolonged ARI at all sites, along with a decrease in LV transmural ARI dispersion, and (iii) reversed the epinephrine-induced shortening of ARI. CONCLUSION In this LQT3 model, an increase in adrenergic activity by epinephrine had dose-dependent, opposite effects on ventricular electrical stability. Since beta-adrenergic blockade suppressed epinephrine-induced PVC and polymorphic VA, it might be considered for supplemental therapy to suppress VA in patients presenting with LQT3.