Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Use of glasgow-blatchford bleeding score reduces hospital stay duration and costs for patients with low-risk upper GI bleeding

Background and study aims: Upper gastrointestinal (UGI) bleeding is a frequent cause of hospitalization. Its severity may be assessed before endoscopy using the Glasgow-Blatchford Bleeding Score (GBS), a score validated to identify patients requiring clinical intervention. The aim of this study was to assess whether the GBS was effective for shortening hospital stay and reducing costs in patients with an UGI bleeding predicted at low risk of requiring clinical intervention. Patients and methods: Consecutive outpatients presenting with UGI bleeding at our hospital were prospectively included. In the observational study phase, UGI endoscopy was performed in all patients according to routine clinical practice. In the interventional study phase, patients with a GBS of 0 were discharged with an appointment for an outpatient UGI endoscopy. All patients had follow-up at 7 and 30 days. Need for clinical intervention was defined as performance of endoscopic hemostasis, blood transfusion or surgery. Results Two-hundred and eight patients were included, 104 in each study phase; complete follow-up was obtained in 201 patients. GBS varied from 0 to 18, with 15 (14 %) and 11 (11 %) patients having a GBS of 0 in the observational and interventional study phase, respectively. For patients with a GBS of 0, hospital stay was shorter (6 versus 19 h, P < 0.01), and costs were lower (845 EUR versus 1272 EUR, P = 0.002) in the interventional versus the observational study phase. For patients with a GBS > 0, hospital stay duration did not significantly differ between study phases (189 versus 207 h, P = 0.726). No adverse event was observed in the patients sent home with a GBS of 0 during the interventional study phase. Conclusions Implementing the GBS as a tool for triage of hospital outpatients who present with UGI bleeding allowed us to identify those who could safely be discharged for ambulatory management. Implementing this change in the hospital strategy significantly shortened hospital stay and decreased management costs.
Dedollarizing the Peruvian Economy

Financial dollarization creates design problems for economic policy as increases the level of financial vulnerability. However, countries with high levels of dollarization have done almost nothing to reduce it. In this paper we study two ways to do it and we evaluate them within a model that emphasizes a portfolio approach. We calibrate the model to replicate the Peruvian economy. The two policy options that we consider are: (i) increasing the risk of dollar deposits, reducing the level of coverage in the safety net mechanism; (ii) increasing the relative volatility of inflation vis-a-vis real depreciation. Our results show that the former has the potential risk of lowering the level of financial intermediation, whereas the second might be more effective to de-dollarize the economy.
Team formation in digital forensics

A major problem in Digital Forensics (DF) is the often huge volumes of data that has to be searched, filtered, and indexed to discover patterns that could lead to forensic evidence. The nature of, and the process by which the data was collected also means that the data contain information about persons that are not involved, or only incidentally involved in the crime under investigation. Privacy is therefore another potential issue that needs to be dealt with in a DF investigation. This paper shows that techniques of the Team Formation (TF) task can be used to address both of these problems.
AN INTRODUCTION TO CULTURAL ALGORITHMS

In this paper a computational model of the cultural evolution process is described. This model integrates several traditional approaches to modeling cultural evolution into a common conceptual framework. This framework depicts cultural evolution as a process of dual inheritance. At the micro-evolutionary level there is a population of individuals, each described in terms of a set of behavioral traits. Traits are passed from generation to generation at this level by means of a number of socially motivated operators. At the macro-evolutionary level, individuals are able to generate "mappa" that generalize on their experience. These individual mappa can be merged to form group mappa and these group mappa can be generalized and specialized using a variety of generic and problem specific operators. A specific implementation of Cultural Algorithms is described using Genetic Algorithms to represent the population space and Version spaces (or lattices) to represent the set of possible schemata that can be produced via generalizations on the population space. Individual and group mappa are defined as subspaces within the lattice. It is shown how the addition of a belief space to the traditional Genetic Algorithm framework can affect the rate at which learning can take place in terms of the modifications that it produces in the traditional schema theorem for Genetic Algorithms.
On computing the minimum distance for faster than Nyquist signaling

The degradation suffered when pulses satisfying the Nyquist criterion are used to transmit binary data at a rate faster than the Nyquist rate over the ideal band-limited (brick-wall) channel is studied. The minimum distance between received signals is used as a performance criterion. It is well-known that when Nyquist pulses (i.e. pulses satisfying the Nyquist criterion) are sent at the Nyquist rate, the minimum distance between signal points is the same as the pulse energy. The main result is to show that the minimum distance between received signals is the same as the pulse energy for rates of transmission about 25% beyond the Nyquist rate, which is the best possible result. In fact, one can even identify the precise error event and signaling rate that causes the minimum distance to be no longer equal to the pulse energy. The mathematical formulation of the problem is analyzed. >
Qualitative Pharmacokinetic Modeling of Drugs

We hypothesize that a representation of drug-drug interactions (DDIs) based on physiologic, pharmacokinetic (PK) and pharmacodynamic (PD) mechanisms will provide more accurate and useful information to clinicians than current approaches that simply tabulate and index pairwise interactions of drugs. This paper explores the strengths, weaknesses, and difficulties of modeling drug mechanisms and reports on our initial work designing and implementing a drug KB based on qualitative pharmacokinetic mechanisms.
Performance Analysis using Bayesian Classification-Case Study of Software Industry

There has been rapid improvement in the ability to construct software systems , firstly by developing reliable hardware and second by developing effective process oriented methodologies. However there has been a lack of emphasis in people component of software engineering. This paper examines the human component and brings out interesting patterns for enhancing human performance. IT companies are constantly reaching out to find ways for software success and quality and innovations for having a competitive edge over other companies. It has been found that human aspects seem to dominate the most expensive project failures. Therefore Human Aspect of Software Engineering has emerged as a new dimension in software engineering in recent years. IT industry have a large set of data having precious information related to project personnel. Data mining technique has the ability to discover knowledge from this unexplored data. In this paper, data mining techniques particularly Bayesian classification method is applied on the data related to team members of a software company to help an organization to find the right project personnel who will contribute largely to project success by performing well. This study will help the organization to reduce the failure ratio of software to a significant level and enhance the quality of the software by deploying the right person at the very start of all software process.
A Sensor Classification Strategy for Robotic Manipulators

In practice the robotic manipulators present some degree of unwanted vibrations. The advent of lightweight arm manipulators, mainly in the aerospace industry, where weight is an important issue, leads to the problem of intense vibrations. On the other hand, robots interacting with the environment often generate impacts that propagate through the mechanical structure and produce also vibrations. In order to analyze these phenomena a robot signal acquisition system was developed. The manipulator motion produces vibrations, either from the structural modes or from endeffector impacts. The instrumentation system acquires signals from several sensors that capture the joint positions, mass accelerations, forces and moments, and electrical currents in the motors. Afterwards, an analysis package, running off-line, reads the data recorded by the acquisition system and extracts the signal characteristics. Due to the multiplicity of sensors, the data obtained can be redundant because the same type of information may be seen by two or more sensors. Because of the price of the sensors, this aspect can be considered in order to reduce the cost of the system. On the other hand, the placement of the sensors is an important issue in order to obtain the suitable signals of the vibration phenomenon. Moreover, the study of these issues can help in the design optimization of the acquisition system. In this line of thought a sensor classification scheme is presented. Several authors have addressed the subject of the sensor classification scheme. White (White, 1987) presents a flexible and comprehensive categorizing scheme that is useful for describing and comparing sensors. The author organizes the sensors according to several aspects: measurands, technological aspects, detection means, conversion phenomena, sensor materials and fields of application. Michahelles and Schiele (Michahelles & Schiele, 2003) systematize the use of sensor technology. They identified several dimensions of sensing that represent the sensing goals for physical interaction. A conceptual framework is introduced that allows categorizing existing sensors and evaluates their utility in various applications. This framework not only guides application designers for choosing meaningful sensor 17
Copper Stress Causes an in Vivo Requirement for the Escherichia coli Disulfide Isomerase DsbC*

In Escherichia coli, the periplasmic disulfide oxidoreductase DsbA is thought to be a powerful but nonspecific oxidant, joining cysteines together the moment they enter the periplasm. DsbC, the primary disulfide isomerase, likely resolves incorrect disulfides. Given the reliance of protein function on correct disulfide bonds, it is surprising that no phenotype has been established for null mutations in dsbC. Here we demonstrate that mutations in the entire DsbC disulfide isomerization pathway cause an increased sensitivity to the redox-active metal copper. We find that copper catalyzes periplasmic disulfide bond formation under aerobic conditions and that copper catalyzes the formation of disulfide-bonded oligomers in vitro, which DsbC can resolve. Our data suggest that the copper sensitivity of dsbC– strains arises from the inability of the cell to rearrange copper-catalyzed non-native disulfides in the absence of functional DsbC. Absence of functional DsbA augments the deleterious effects of copper on a dsbC– strain, even though the dsbA– single mutant is unaffected by copper. This may indicate that DsbA successfully competes with copper and forms disulfide bonds more accurately than copper does. These findings lead us to a model in which DsbA may be significantly more accurate in disulfide oxidation than previously thought, and in which the primary role of DsbC may be to rearrange incorrect disulfide bonds that are formed during certain oxidative stresses.
Dynamic demand and pricing strategy in e-book market

E-reading has experienced rapid growth in the past few years and has raised new questions. On the supply side, retailers such as Amazon jointly sell e-readers and e-books. It remains unclear how they can coordinate the two products to conduct intertemporal price discrimination (IPD). On the demand side, it remains unclear how much of e-book sales come from cannibalizing print books and how much serve as market expansion to the book business. I empirically address these questions using individual-level data from 2008 to 2012. I estimate a dynamic structural model of consumer e-reader adoption and subsequent book purchases, including quantity, reading format (e-book or print book), and retailer choices (Amazon, other online retailers, or offline bookstores) in a number of book genres. The estimation reveals two consumer types, avid readers and general readers, who self-select into buying e-readers based on their unobserved heterogeneous book tastes. Compared with general readers, avid readers buy more books, adopt e-readers earlier, and have larger cannibalization rates. The two types also have different relative demand elasticities between e-readers and e-books. Given the estimated demand system, I simulate the optimal dynamic pricing strategies of e-readers and ebooks for the monopolist retailer Amazon who faces forward-looking consumers. I find that Amazon should harvest on e-readers and invest in e-books. Complementarity provides the firm a novel dimension of consumer heterogeneity (the relative demand elasticities between e-readers and e-books) to exploit. The joint IPD strategy provides a better screening device for more profitable consumers and limits consumer's ability to intertemporally arbitrage. To evaluate the impact of e-books on print book sales, I simulate the world without e-books and compare it with the observed one. I find that 42% of e-book sales come from cannibalizing print book sales and that 58% come from market expansion. Of the cannibalization effect, offline bookstores bear 53% of the cannibalization loss, while Amazon bears 32% and other online retailers bear 15%. I further explore how the impact of ebooks would change under alternative pricing arrangements. Overall, the results have managerial implications to publishers, book retailers, and policymakers in the e-book market. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Economics First Advisor Holger Sieg This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn. edu/edissertations/1087
Title Stata.com Mi Impute Mvn — Impute Using Multivariate Normal Regression

Syntax Menu Description Options Remarks and examples Stored results Methods and formulas References Also see Syntax mi impute mvn ivars = indepvars if , impute options options impute options Description Main * add(#) specify number of imputations to add; required when no imputations exist * replace replace imputed values in existing imputations rseed(#) specify random-number seed double store imputed values in double precision; the default is to store them as float by(varlist , byopts) impute separately on each group formed by varlist Reporting dots display dots as imputations are performed noisily display intermediate output nolegend suppress all table legends Advanced force proceed with imputation, even when missing imputed values are encountered noupdate do not perform mi update; see [MI] noupdate option * add(#) is required when no imputations exist; add(#) or replace is required if imputations exist. noupdate does not appear in the dialog box.
Thymic Development of CD4+25hi Foxp3+ T-Regulatory Cells Echoes their Suppressogenic Capacity in Periphery

The CD4 + 25 hi Foxp3 + T regulatory (T-reg) cells are naturally-born in thymus and they are critical for maintain- ing the tolerance to self and non-self antigens. Foxp3 is the master-regulatory gene of development and function of this cell subset. Using two mouse strains that share the same MHC class II (H-2 d ) haplotype, we found that Foxp3 is early ex- pressed in the CD3 + 4 - 8 - 25 +/- 44 - (DN3/4) double negative thymocytes. Furthermore, Foxp3 showed a differential kinetics of expression in the thymus of these two strains that were controlled through the rates of proliferation and apoptosis of T- reg precursors, but not by epigenetic alterations at the Foxp3 gene promoter. Faster T-reg proliferation and lower apopto- sis were associated with higher Foxp3 + thymic cell output. Also, faster proliferating T-reg precursors showed lower ex- pression of CD3/TCR complex, leptin receptor, Bad, and Caspase3 early in the DN stage of differentiation. Despite a dif- ferential T-reg thymic output in these two mouse strains, the size of peripheral CD4 + 25 hi Foxp3 + T-reg compartment was homeostatically normalized. However, the Foxp3 + T-reg suppression tested in an autoimmune mouse model for diabetes was stronger in mice with a higher T-reg thymic output. These findings demonstrate a differential thymic development and suppressive capacity of Foxp3 + T-reg cells in two genetic backgrounds regardless the MHC II haplotype. This raises the question of whether a differential suppressogenic capacity of the T-reg compartment may affect the susceptibility to autoimmune disorders in individuals from different ethnic groups.
Epitope Flexibility and Dynamic Footprint Revealed by Molecular Dynamics of a pMHC-TCR Complex

The crystal structures of unliganded and liganded pMHC molecules provide a structural basis for TCR recognition yet they represent ‘snapshots’ and offer limited insight into dynamics that may be important for interaction and T cell activation. MHC molecules HLA-B*3501 and HLA-B*3508 both bind a 13 mer viral peptide (LPEP) yet only HLA-B*3508-LPEP induces a CTL response characterised by the dominant TCR clonetype SB27. HLA-B*3508-LPEP forms a tight and long-lived complex with SB27, but the relatively weak interaction between HLA-B*3501-LPEP and SB27 fails to trigger an immune response. HLA-B*3501 and HLA-B*3508 differ by only one amino acid (L/R156) located on α2-helix, but this does not alter the MHC or peptide structure nor does this polymorphic residue interact with the peptide or SB27. In the absence of a structural rationalisation for the differences in TCR engagement we performed a molecular dynamics study of both pMHC complexes and HLA-B*3508-LPEP in complex with SB27. This reveals that the high flexibility of the peptide in HLA-B*3501 compared to HLA-B*3508, which was not apparent in the crystal structure alone, may have an under-appreciated role in SB27 recognition. The TCR pivots atop peptide residues 6–9 and makes transient MHC contacts that extend those observed in the crystal structure. Thus MD offers an insight into ‘scanning’ mechanism of SB27 that extends the role of the germline encoded CDR2α and CDR2β loops. Our data are consistent with the vast body of experimental observations for the pMHC-LPEP-SB27 interaction and provide additional insights not accessible using crystallography.
Video Authentication: Issues and Challenges

Video authentication aims to ensure the trustworthiness of the video by verifying the integrity and source of video data. It has gained much attention in the recent years. In this paper we present the issues in the designing of a video authentication system. These issues include the classification of tampering attacks, levels of tampering attack and robustness. Further we present the categorization of existing video authentication techniques with their shortcomings. Moreover we have also given the challenging scenarios in which the video authentication would be a critical task.
Driver Response to Active Front Steer and Power-Assist Failures

Active Front Steer (AFS) has the ability to apply varying road wheel; angles for the same steering wheel angle, depending on the speed of the vehicle. It achieves this by changing the steering gain dynamically and can be a useful drive aid: less steering wheel input is required at low speeds than a more traditional fixed-gain steering system to achieve the same radius of turn. Should an AFS system fail, it is designed to revert back to a fixed-gain system. Concerns have been expressed by designers of AFS systems that this sudden change in steering gain may prove hazardous for drivers and be particularly difficult for them to handle. The aims of this study are to: (1) compare drivers’ behavior using both fully-functioning AFS and power-assisted, fixed-gain rack-and-pinion steering systems; (2) compare driver behavior and response to the failures of both AFS and to the power-assist of a fixed-gain, rack-and-pinion steering system; and (3) conclude whether failure of AFS is potentially more hazardous than failure of the power-assist of fixed-ratio, rack-and-pinion steering systems.
Diplomarbeit MIMO Receivers Using Soft Information

Multiple input multiple output (MIMO) wireless systems that use multiple transmit and receive antennas allow a gain in reliability (diversity gain) and capacity (multiplexing gain). Unfortunately, these advantages come at the cost of higher computational complexity, particularly when using soft detection (SD). SD features improved performance compared to hard detection and is a prerequisite for iterative receiver structures (turbo receivers). In this diploma thesis we consider the sphere decoder for soft-output MIMO detection and present modifications that allow flexible trade-offs between computational complexity on the one hand and performance and diversity on the other hand. For the trade-off between complexity and performance we incorporate LLR clipping into the sphere decoding algorithm that allows to adjust the trade-off via the clipping level. For the trade-off between complexity and diversity we use a partial equalizer followed by a mismatched ML detector where the trade-off is adjusted using a single parameter governing the amount of pre-equalization. Additionally to these two modifications we present a lower bound on partial sphere decoder metrics that allows to reduce the complexity of the detection using the sphere decoder without performance degradation. The thesis is rounded up by simulations that evaluate the performance of the presented detection schemes.
The Basic Tools of Formal Ontology

The term ‘formal ontology’ was first used by the philosopher Edmund Husserl in his Logical Investigations to signify the study of those formal structures and relations – above all relations of part and whole – which are exemplified in the subject-matters of the different material sciences. We follow Husserl in presenting the basic concepts of formal ontology as falling into three groups: the theory of part and whole, the theory of dependence, and the theory of boundary, continuity and contact. These basic concepts are presented in relation to the problem of providing an account of the formal ontology of the mesoscopic realm of everyday experience, and specifically of providing an account of the concept of individual substance.
Receive soft antenna selection for spatial-multiplexing MIMO systems in interference-dominated channels

In this paper, we find the optimum soft antenna selection (SAS) which maximizes the mutual information for the multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) spatial multiplexing transmission in an interference channel. In this optimization problem, a 2-Dimensional (2D) directive interference model is used. We first find an optimal solution for SAS without applying any constraint on it and then propose a sub-optimal solution for the case when a phase-shift-only passive linear network (PLN) is used to implement the SAS method. Moreover, we compare the performance of the SAS method with a full-complexity MIMO system in the presence of above modeled interference through a simulation study.