Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Global and regional estimates of COPD prevalence: Systematic review and meta–analysis

Background The burden of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) across many world regions is high. We aim to estimate COPD prevalence and number of disease cases for the years 1990 and 2010 across world regions based on the best available evidence in publicly accessible scientific databases. Methods We conducted a systematic search of Medline, EMBASE and Global Health for original, population–based studies providing spirometry–based prevalence rates of COPD across the world from January 1990 to December 2014. Random effects meta–analysis was conducted on extracted crude prevalence rates of COPD, with overall summaries of the meta–estimates (and confidence intervals) reported separately for World Health Organization (WHO) regions, the World Bank's income categories and settings (urban and rural). We developed a meta–regression epidemiological model that we used to estimate the prevalence of COPD in people aged 30 years or more. Findings Our search returned 37 472 publications. A total of 123 studies based on a spirometry–defined prevalence were retained for the review. From the meta–regression epidemiological model, we estimated about 227.3 million COPD cases in the year 1990 among people aged 30 years or more, corresponding to a global prevalence of 10.7% (95% confidence interval (CI) 7.3%–14.0%) in this age group. The number of COPD cases increased to 384 million in 2010, with a global prevalence of 11.7% (8.4%–15.0%). This increase of 68.9% was mainly driven by global demographic changes. Across WHO regions, the highest prevalence was estimated in the Americas (13.3% in 1990 and 15.2% in 2010), and the lowest in South East Asia (7.9% in 1990 and 9.7% in 2010). The percentage increase in COPD cases between 1990 and 2010 was the highest in the Eastern Mediterranean region (118.7%), followed by the African region (102.1%), while the European region recorded the lowest increase (22.5%). In 1990, we estimated about 120.9 million COPD cases among urban dwellers (prevalence of 13.2%) and 106.3 million cases among rural dwellers (prevalence of 8.8%). In 2010, there were more than 230 million COPD cases among urban dwellers (prevalence of 13.6%) and 153.7 million among rural dwellers (prevalence of 9.7%). The overall prevalence in men aged 30 years or more was 14.3% (95% CI 13.3%–15.3%) compared to 7.6% (95% CI 7.0%–8.2%) in women. Conclusions Our findings suggest a high and growing prevalence of COPD, both globally and regionally. There is a paucity of studies in Africa, South East Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean region. There is a need for governments, policy makers and international organizations to consider strengthening collaborations to address COPD globally.
Information Systems Security: Scope, State-of-the-art, and Evaluation of Techniques

To achieve a certain degree of information systems security different techniques have been proposed and implemented so far. It is the aim of this paper to form a basis for their evaluation and comparison. For this purpose a general framework of security is established by defining its scope, most common threats against the security, and two kinds of different comparison and evaluation criteria. The first criteria is a set of requirements on the secrecy and confidentiality of information while the second consists of several structural requirements from which we believe they are essential for a successful and powerful security technique. In our evaluation included are the Discretionary Models, the Mandatory Models, the Personal Knowledge Approach, the Chinese Wall Policy and the Clark and Wilson model of security.
Intergroup contact and minority group empowerment: The perspective of Roma and non‐Roma adolescents in Macedonia

This study focused on the endorsement of Roma empowerment in Macedonia among Roma (N = 187) and non-Roma (Macedonian, Albanian, and Turkish; N = 627) adolescents. Using structural equation modelling, we examined the mediating roles of out-group feelings, negative Roma stereotypes, and perceived social injustice towards the Roma in the association between out-group contact and endorsement of Roma empowerment. In line with the prejudice reduction model, we found for the non-Roma sample that the endorsement of Roma empowerment was higher among adolescents who had more frequent (as well as more positive) contact with Roma, and this was due to more positive feelings towards the Roma, less negative Roma stereotypes, and, in the case of Albanian and Turkish minorities, more perceived social injustice towards the Roma. There was little evidence for the collective action approach in the Roma sample.
Sparse kernel regression modeling using combined locally regularized orthogonal least squares and D-optimality experimental design

The note proposes an efficient nonlinear identification algorithm by combining a locally regularized orthogonal least squares (LROLS) model selection with a D-optimality experimental design. The proposed algorithm aims to achieve maximized model robustness and sparsity via two effective and complementary approaches. The LROLS method alone is capable of producing a very parsimonious model with excellent generalization performance. The D-optimality design criterion further enhances the model efficiency and robustness. An added advantage is that the user only needs to specify a weighting for the D-optimality cost in the combined model selecting criterion and the entire model construction procedure becomes automatic. The value of this weighting does not influence the model selection procedure critically and it can be chosen with ease from a wide range of values.
The Crisis of Public Communication, 1995–2017

The article asks where stands the notion of a crisis of public communication, first promulgated by Blumler and Gurevitch in 1995, in the new communications ecology of 2017. Its focus is a “crisis of communication for citizenship. ” It maintains that the sources of that crisis, spotted in 1995, still apply and have been joined by others. However, today’s political communication system has been radically transformed by digitisation, social media and the Internet, allied to accelerating and multi-faceted currents of social change. Its pluses and minuses for effective citizenship are canvassed in detail. Despite the opening up of many constructive avenues, in two fundamental respects, the prevailing system is still enmeshed in crisis.
Automatic Synthesis of Microprogrammed Control Units from Behavioral Descriptions

This paper presents an approach for automatic synthesis of a microprogrammed control unit from a behavioral description, incorporating two new features: a) A rule based program to automatically design a microprogram sequencer most suited for the given behavior, considering the speed/cost requirements. b) A powerful microinstrunction format optimizer which considers a vast space of alternative formats and a novel encoding scheme.
Attentional Bias and Reactive Attacks in Video Game Player

Video games are widely popular their impacts on player addiction are thus intensively investigated. Considering the importance of reward in addiction, this study investigated whether high penalty feedback has a promoting effect on the maintenance of the reward value of the game stimulation. In Experiment 1, the characteristics of attentional bias of game stimulation were tested using the dot-probe task paradigm. In Experiment 2, changes in the heart rate of game players and non-game players during the game were compared to investigate the physiological activation state of the game players. In Experiment 3, the impacts of different penalties on the aggressive behavior of game players were analyzed. Our results showed that long-term game players exhibited attentional bias toward the game stimuli, which was mainly reflected in terms of the orientation characteristics of attention; during a game, the player’s high physiological activation helped the game stimulus to maintain the reward value in the habitual level. High intensity penalty feedback can maintain the reactive attack state of game players, which helped to maintain the players in a state of high physiological activation during the game. From the perspective of “learning in games” in the Confucian culture, the approach and content of video games must be actively improved.
HEAT TRANSFER FROM A MOVING FLUID SPHERE WITH INTERNAL HEAT GENERATION

In this work, we solve numerically the unsteady conduction-convection equation including heat generation inside a fluid sphere. The results of a numerical study in which the Nusselt numbers from a spherical fluid volume were computed for different ranges of Reynolds number (0<Re<100), Peclet number (0<Pe<10000) and viscosity ratio (0<k<10), are presented. For a circulating drop with Rea0, steady creeping flow is assumed around and inside the sphere. In this case, the average temperatures computed from our numerical analysis are compared with those from literature and a very good agreement is found. For higher Reynolds number (0<Re<100), the Navier-Stokes equations are solved inside and outside the fluid sphere as well as the unsteady conduction-convection equation including heat generation inside the fluid sphere. It is proved that the viscosity ratio k (k = μd/μc) influences significantly the heat transfer from the sphere. The average Nusselt number decreases with increasing k for a fixed Peclet number and a given Reynolds number. It is also observed that the average Nusselt number is increasing as Peclet number increases for a fixed Re and a fixed k.
Geometric Change Detection and Image Registration in Large Scale Urban Environments

3D reconstruction of urban environments has gained a lot of interest in the recent past due to the extensive applicability of 3D models to city planning and monitoring, navigation applications, to name a few. However, cities change with time, with new constructions being built and old taken down. Therefore, to maintain the accuracy of these models, there is a need to update them as changes take place in the environment. Instead of rebuilding the entire model from scratch every time, an efficient technique is proposed to update only those parts of the model which may have undergone a structural change. To this end, an algorithm was devised to detect changes in the geometry of an urban environment using images observing its current state. This ensures that a very simple setup is needed to detect changes on a frequent basis, contrary to the big setups required for 3D acquisition. Keeping the final application in mind, the algorithm was specifically designed to detect only structural changes in the environment, ignoring any changes in its appearance, and ignoring also all the changes which are not relevant for update purposes, such as cars, people etc. Moreover, the algorithm was extended to further deal with the additional challenges introduced with the usage of large scale data, i.e. a city scale image database and 3D model. Images were captured by cars driving around the city, with sensors like GPS and IMU recording their geo-location data. Since this data is typically noisy, an algorithm is also presented to refine this data exploiting the available 3D information. In addition, another method was explored to localize images inside an environment, removing the assumption of the availability of 3D models. In fact, instead of a 3D model, the Google streetview database was used as a reference. In particular, both the streetview images and the graph connecting the locations of these images was exploited, to continuously localize a driving vehicle inside this discrete graph, by comparing them with images captured by a phone mounted on the vehicle.
Modularity approach for community detection in complex networks

Community detection has been one of the relevant areas in the field of graph mining. It imposes a significant challenge to computer scientists, physicists, and sociologists alike, to identify and discover community for large graph with over millions of vertices and edges. Different community detection algorithms have been proposed in different perspective of almost similar aim of identifying the community. In this paper, we apply the modularity measurement on bacterial community found by algorithm proposed. We evaluate the accuracy of the algorithm through series of experiments using real-data, and we are able to report more stable and accurate communities. This could provide an additional and useful information for important species discovered, thus contribute to discover the important functions that could be useful information for phylogenetic studies.
Efektivitas Pelatihan Keterampilan Dasar Konseling untuk Penanggulangan Work Family Conflict (WFC) dan Perancangan Sistem Penyelenggaraan Konseling

Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengukur efektivitas pelatihan keterampilan dasar konseling pada level managerial untuk penanggulangan work family conflict (WFC) pada karyawan di CV. X. Pendekatan yang digunakan dalam penelitian ini adalah pendekatan mix method yanitu kuantitaif dan kualitatif. Pada tahap asesmen menggunakan teknik wawancara dengan menghasilkan TNA (Training Need Analysis). Hasil yang diperoleh dari TNA adalah adanya indikasi konflik kerja-keluarga yang dialami oleh karyawan yang berada pada posisi staff, adanya hubungan yang kurang baik antara atasan, bawahan dimana para bawahan merasa bahwa atasan sering kali bersikap acuh terhadap masalah yang mereka hadapi, serta pengetahuan para manajer yang kurang memadai terkait konseling. Hasil dari pelatihan “Knowing You Better” yang dilakukan kepada para manager di CV. X ini menunjukkan adanya peningkatan pada beberapa aspek dan peserta pelatihan, pada evaluasi pembelajaran knowledge ada 7 orang peserta yang memberikan perubahan hasil yang signifikan, sedangkan pada evaluasi pembelajaran skill ada 5 orang peserta yang memiliki peningkatan yang signifikan. Berdasarkan uji statistik pada evaluasi pembelajaran knowledge yang dilakukan diketahui skor sig (0.016) <0.05, yang dapat diartikan bahwa terdapat perbedaan yang signifikan antara sebelum diberikan dan sesudah diberikannya pelatihan. Selain itu peneliti juga membuat sebuah rangkaian sistem untuk perusahaan berupa sistem penyelenggaraan konseling dan sistem sosialisasi yang dapat digunakan perusahaan untuk memperkenalkan proses konseling kepada seluruh karyawan yang ada di dalam perusahaan, sehingga konseling dapat dilakukan secara berkelanjutan di dalam perusahaan.
On the Qualitative in Drugs Research: Part Two

This issue comprises part two of a double special issue addressing the qualitative in drugs research. In part one, we offered an introductory editorial review which reflected on the history and method of qualitative research in the context of drug use (Rhodes and Moore, 2001). This sought to highlight the multiple role of qualitative methods in complementing and questioning the production and interpretation of data in multi-methods drugs research. We emphasised that a pivotal role of qualitative research is to reflect critically on the inter-subjective nature of data production within context-based paradigms of drugs research. More than merely complementing the findings produced by particular quantitative studies, we emphasised that qualitative data and ethnography in particular has the potential to ‘pose awkward questions of existing drugs paradigms’ (2001, p. 12). Rather than simply viewing differences between quantitative and qualitative methods as ‘unhelpful’ (McKeganey, 1995) or as a problem to be minimised by restricting the role of qualitative research in critiquing assumed-to-be-objective drugs research paradigms (Edwards, 1994), we suggested that multi-method designs should seek to use such
DTG-Plan : Fast Planning by Search in Domain Transition Graphs

Recent advances in classical planning have used the SAS+ formalism, and several effective heuristics have been developed based on the SAS+ formalism. Comparing to the traditional STRIPS/ADL formalism, SAS+ is capable of capturing vital information such as domain transition structures and causal dependencies. DTG-Plan uses a new SAS+ based incomplete planning approach. Instead of using SAS+ to derive heuristics within a heuristic search, we directly search in domain transition graphs (DTGs) and causal graphs (CGs) derived from the SAS+ formalism.
The brain mapping of emotion in human faces: Clinical aplication in epilepsy

Introduction: The ability to process multiple domains of the human face it is a well-developed capability in humans, contributing significantly to social interaction. The extraction of emotional content out of facial features is one such domain, which involves well-known brain structures, whose detailed contribution is nevertheless poorly characterized. Objectives: Our emphasis is on detection and functional characterization of the brain areas involved in emotional processing of faces, with particular focus on the contribution of frontal lobes to processing of basic facial emotion expressions, such as fear and happiness. Methods: Participants were ten healthy volunteers and five patients with occipital lobe epilepsies. Mapping neurovascular (BOLD) responses to fear, happy and neutral facial expressions were obtained through functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). Results: The results from the group of volunteers were used as a base for the construction of a quantitative database that included the following brain structures: fusiform gyrus, insula, amygdala, cingulate gyrus, and frontal-orbital cortex. The maximum Z-score obtained from each ROI as responses to the contrast fear-neutral faces produced higher statistically significant activations in the areas selected. Responses in clinical patients revealed focal impairments only in right hemisphere epilepsies, consistent with a hemispheric asymmetry for emotional processing. Conclusions: The frequent association of some brain structures involved in facial emotion processing in epilepsy suggests that the proposed mapping protocol can be clinically useful to gain deeper insights into the anatomical-functional correlations of this disease.
Spinal Cord Hemisection Facilitates Aromatic L-Amino Acid Decarboxylase Cells to Produce Serotonin in the Subchronic but Not the Chronic Phase

Neuromodulators, such as serotonin (5-hydroxytryptamine, 5-HT) and noradrenalin, play an essential role in regulating the motor and sensory functions in the spinal cord. We have previously shown that in the rat spinal cord the activity of aromatic L-amino acid decarboxylase (AADC) cells to produce 5-HT from its precursor (5-hydroxytryptophan, 5-HTP) is dramatically increased following complete spinal cord transection. In this study, we investigated whether a partial loss of 5-HT innervation could similarly increase AADC activity. Adult rats with spinal cord hemisected at thoracic level (T11/T12) were used with a postoperation interval at 5 days or 60 days. Using immunohistochemistry, first, we observed a significant reduction in the density of 5-HT-immunoreactive fibers in the spinal cord below the lesion on the injured side for both groups. Second, we found that the AADC cells were similarly expressed on both injured and uninjured sides in both groups. Third, increased production of 5-HT in AADC cells following 5-HTP was seen in 5-day but not in 60-day postinjury group. These results suggest that plastic changes of the 5-HT system might happen primarily in the subchronic phase and for longer period its function could be compensated by plastic changes of other intrinsic and/or supraspinal modulation systems.
Finite State Language Models Smoothed Using n-Grams

We address the problem of smoothing the probability distribution defined by a finite state automaton. Our approach extends the ideas employed for smoothing n-gram models. This extension is obtained by interpreting n-gram models as finite state models. The experiments show that our smoothing improves perplexity over smoothed n-grams and Error Correcting Parsing techniques.
GNSS positioning in non-line-of-sight context—A survey

The reliable and accurate localization of people and vehicles is one of the challenges of intelligent transportation systems (ITS)s. This has led to a variety of technical approaches in recent years. Towards an exact positioning via Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS)s the visibility of satellites is an important factor. In this paper, we review the literature regarding the positioning under non-line-of-sight conditions and analyze a range of topics from explicit modeling to empirical data collection. The variety of research indicates the growing interest in reliable and accurate localization in urban areas. Moreover, the development and application of different techniques also suggest the existence of many avenues for further exploration. Accordingly, we develop a taxonomy of the technical design for GNSS applications dealing with NLOS and a typology of the measuring instruments based on an extensive analysis of the state of the art. Thus, the goal of this work is to provide a starting point regarding the state of the art for further research activities in robust GNSS positioning.
Nav1.7 and other voltage-gated sodium channels as drug targets for pain relief

ABSTRACT Introduction: Chronic pain is a massive clinical problem. We discuss the potential of subtype selective sodium channel blockers that may provide analgesia with limited side effects. Areas covered: Sodium channel subtypes have been linked to human pain syndromes through genetic studies. Gain of function mutations in Nav1.7, 1.8 and 1.9 can cause pain, whilst loss of function Nav1.7 mutations lead to loss of pain in otherwise normal people. Intriguingly, both human and mouse Nav1.7 null mutants have increased opioid drive, because naloxone, an opioid antagonist, can reverse the analgesia associated with the loss of Nav1.7 expression. Expert Opinion: We believe there is a great future for sodium channel antagonists, particularly Nav1.7 antagonists in treating most pain syndromes. This review deals with recent attempts to develop specific sodium channel blockers, the mechanisms that underpin the Nav1.7 null pain-free phenotype and new routes to analgesia using, for example, gene therapy or combination therapy with subtype specific sodium channel blockers and opioids. The use of selective Nav1.7 antagonists together with either enkephalinase inhibitors or low dose opioids has the potential for side effect-free analgesia, as well as an important opioid sparing function that may be clinically very significant.
Integrated shadow removal based on photogrammetry and image analysis

This paper presents a methodology to automatically detect and remove the shadows in high‐resolution urban aerial images for urban GIS applications. The image is generated by ADS40, which is a multiple line scanner. The system includes shadow simulation, ray tracing, integrated shadow detection, and shadow removal. The geodetic shadow is simulated from a digital surface model (DSM) and the sun attitude. Using an ADS40 camera model and collinearity equations, the corresponding scan line of the shadow is obtained. Ray tracing is used to determine the visibility of the shadow in the image. A building boundary driven height field ray tracing method is proposed to boost the tracing efficiency. Shadow segmentation is taken from the RGB image at the base of the traced image shadows. The segmentation threshold is derived from the histogram of the traced image shadow area. Shadow removal includes the shadow region and companion region labelling, the histogram processing, and intensity mapping. Some experiment results are presented to show the effectiveness of the methods.