Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Ramipril and Losartan Exert a Similar Long-Term Effect upon Markers of Heart Failure, Endogenous Fibrinolysis, and Platelet Aggregation in Survivors of ST-Elevation Myocardial Infarction: A Single Centre Randomized Trial

Introduction. Blocking the renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system in ST-elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI) patients prevents heart failure and recurrent thrombosis. Our aim was to compare the effects of ramipril and losartan upon the markers of heart failure, endogenous fibrinolysis, and platelet aggregation in STEMI patients over the long term. Methods. After primary percutaneous coronary intervention (PPCI), 28 STEMI patients were randomly assigned ramipril and 27 losartan, receiving therapy for six months with dual antiplatelet therapy (DAPT). We measured N-terminal proBNP (NT-proBNP), ejection fraction (EF), plasminogen-activator-inhibitor type 1 (PAI-1), and platelet aggregation by closure times (CT) at the baseline and after six months. Results. Baseline NT-proBNP ≥ 200 pmol/mL was observed in 48.1% of the patients, EF < 55% in 49.1%, and PAI-1 ≥ 3.5 U/mL in 32.7%. Six-month treatment with ramipril or losartan resulted in a similar effect upon PAI-1, NT-proBNP, EF, and CT levels in survivors of STEMI, but in comparison to control group, receiving DAPT alone, ramipril or losartan treatment with DAPT significantly increased mean CT (226.7 ± 80.3 sec versus 158.1 ± 80.3 sec, p < 0.05). Conclusions. Ramipril and losartan exert a similar effect upon markers of heart failure and endogenous fibrinolysis, and, with DAPT, a more efficient antiplatelet effect in long term than DAPT alone.
Recognizing the Fundamental Right to be Fat: A Weight-Inclusive Approach to Size Acceptance and Healing From Sizeism

Abstract Sizeism permeates and shapes how scientific and professional communities—including therapists—perceive, understand, and behave toward anyone considered fat. In this article, we use scientific evidence to argue for the recognition and establishment of fat acceptance to subvert sizeism. We first critically review the Weight Normative Approach, which dominates scientific discourse on weight, despite being based on sizeist assumptions that are discredited by data. We then articulate the tenets of the Weight Inclusive Approach, which honors size diversity and the promotion of wellness within a social justice framework. We end with strategies for therapists to align their practice with the Weight Inclusive Approach.
Match-running performance of young soccer players in different game formats

ABSTRACT Present study aimed to analyse the effect of game format, age-group, and playing position on match-running variables of soccer players (age ranging from 6.94 ± 0.7 to 13.46 ± 0.5 years; height ranging from 125.36 ± 6.04 to 159.16 ± 7.78 cm; weight ranging from 27.16 ± 5.75 to 49.89 ± 8.89 kgf). Match-running variables were assessed using global positioning system technology. Results suggest that game formats, which include more players have a significant effect on match-running variables than those having fewer players (p < 0.001). Moreover, oldest age-groups covered significantly higher distances in all categories than younger groups, total distance (TD): η2 = 0.32, p < 0.001; low-intensity running (LIR): η2 = 0.09, p < 0.001; high-intensity running (HIR): η2 = 0.25, p < 0.001; very high-intensity running (VHIR): η2 = 0.34, p < 0.001; very high-intensity activity (VHIA): η2 = 0.42, p < 0.001; and sprinting (SP): η2 = 0.41, p < 0.001). Match-running variables also differ among playing positions. Defenders covered lowest TD and HIR in all age-groups; midfielders covered highest TD and LIR in all age-groups (p < 0.001); forwards covered highest VHIR, VHIA, and SP in U14 age-group. Defenders covered lowest TD, LIR, HIR, and VHIR; midfielders covered highest TD and HIR regardless game format (p < 0.001); forwards covered highest VHIR, VHIA, and SP in 11v11 format (p < 0.001). These findings can provide an opportunity for coaches to maximise the efficiency of their training sessions.
Robust Learning for Repeated Stochastic Games via Meta-Gaming

In repeated stochastic games (RSGs), an agent must quickly adapt to the behavior of previously unknown associates, who may themselves be learning. This machine-learning problem is particularly challenging due, in part, to the presence of multiple (even infinite) equilibria and inherently large strategy spaces. In this paper, we introduce a method to reduce the strategy space of two-player general-sum RSGs to a handful of expert strategies. This process, called MEGA, effectually reduces an RSG to a bandit problem. We show that the resulting strategy space preserves several important properties of the original RSG, thus enabling a learner to produce robust strategies within a reasonably small number of interactions. To better establish strengths and weaknesses of this approach, we empirically evaluate the resulting learning system against other algorithms in three different RSGs.
Including the excluded: the case of a student with multiple disabilities*

ABSTRACT The aim of this study was to investigate the coherence between mainstreaming laws and practices in Turkey through a case study involving an elementary school student with multiple disabilities, her parents and her general educator. Multiple sources of data were gathered within a 5-year period and were analyzed inductively. Results showed that the laws and actual practice showed discrepancies with practices lacking the necessary special education support services. On the other hand, the limited services provided by the researchers revealed important gains on behalf of the participants, letting the researchers to conclude that mainstreaming and in fact inclusion is possible within the Turkish educational system even with limited resources and supports.
Named Entity Recognition Based on A Machine Learning Model

For the recruitment information in Web pages, a novel unified model for named entity recognition is proposed in this study. The models provide a simple statistical framework to incorporate a wide variety of linguistic knowledge and statistical models in a unified way. In our approach, firstly, Multi-Rules are built for a better representation of the named entity, in order to emphasize the specific semantics and term space in the named entity. Then an optimal algorithm of the hierarchically structured DSTCRFs is performed, in order to pick out the structure attributes of the named entity from the recruitment knowledge and optimize the efficiency of the training. The experimental results showed that the accuracy rate has been significantly improved and the complexity of sample training has been decreased.
Convolutional coding strategies for code division multiple access cellular communications

This paper investigates the use of nonlinear convolutional coding techniques for use in a DS-CDMA cellular communication system. Comparisons are made between various error-correction strategies and the Wiener minimum mean square error receiver filter implemented with the same bandwidth expansion. The use of Gold codes in conjunction with an orthogonal convolutional encoder is shown to produce comparable performance to conventional convolutional coding for single user environments, and to yield reasonable capacity potential for low numbers of users. Future developments are indicated, including the possible application of this system to multipath channels.
Technology protocols for climate change: an application of fund

A technology protocol to govern long-term international greenhouse gas emission reduction is proposed. The protocol consists of three parameters: a graduation income, below which countries have no emission reduction obligations; a convergence rate, at which emission intensities should approach that of the most carbon-extensive countries; and an acceleration rate, at the which the most carbon-extensive countries should improve its technology over and above the business as usual scenario. Depending on the parameter values, emission reduction ranges from draconian to almost nil. The graduation income and acceleration rate have the expected effects. The effect of the convergence rate is strongly scenario-dependent; some scenarios, perhaps unrealistically assume strong technological convergence in the no policy case; in other scenarios, adopting best commercial technology in the whole world would lead to substantial emission reduction. Not surprisingly, regions prefer different parameters in the technology protocol. Adopting the opinion of the median voter, atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide in the year 2200 would be reduced from 1650 ppm to 950 ppm. This reduction is relatively robust to changes in crucial model parameters. The costs of complying to the technology protocol can be reduced substantially through international trade in emission permits and, particularly, banking and borrowing.
Efforts to Promote Global Education in Japan: The Case of Tottori University and Overseas Practical Education Programs

Participation in overseas programs has recently increased as an international strategy worldwide. However, Japan has been the exception, because the number of Japanese students studying abroad has decreased over the last decade. The Japanese government and universities began efforts to motivate Japanese students to gain international experience. However, efforts to measure the impact of overseas programs other than in English proficiency have been limited. This paper reports the benefits of three types of overseas short-term programs offered by Tottori University (TU) to support Japanese students in studying abroad through the Global Getaway Program (GGP), emphasizing practical training in developing countries. Data for this study were collected from students from 2006 to 2011 before the GGP and 2012 to 2016 after its implementation. Students were tested before and after participating in overseas short-term programs, and results were compared with those who did not participate. The questionnaire survey carried out revealed significant differences in all global competences skills between students who attended overseas programs and those that did not. In addition, after participating in the overseas program, students understood i, why English as a tool for communication will help them grow as internationally minded future leaders, ii, how foreign languages can lead to overseas practical skills, and iii, the importance of field practice as opposed to knowledge only acquired in the classroom. The achievement of this study increases the value of overseas training for the younger Japanese generation and their perception of developing advanced thinking abilities through practical education in developing countries.
Scalable predictive concurrency control for large distributed virtual environments with densely populated objects

We propose an enhanced prediction-based concurrency control scheme that supports the scalability of concurrency control for large distributed virtual environments especially where entities are highly populated and tend to gather closely. The prediction scheme is based on an entity-centric multicast group. Only the users surrounding a target entity multicast the ownership requests via an entity multicast group and become owner candidates. The current owner predicts the next owner among the owner candidates and sends an ownership to the next owner in advance. However, if entities are assigned their own multicast address when they are close to each other, users have to continuously issue join messages as moving by the entities. To reduce the network and message exchange overhead, we use the location proximity of entities in virtual environments. By grouping closely gathered entities into one entity group and sharing a multicast address among group member entities, we reduce the number of frequent join and leave operations and join messages, therefore maintain enough interactive performance. The experiment results show that the proposed mechanism improves scalability especially when entities are closely gathered.
Hotspot management using a hybrid heat sink with stepped pin-fins

Abstract A hybrid heat sink design with microchannels and stepped pin-fins is introduced for the hotspot-targeted thermal management of microprocessors. The thermal and hydraulic performance were assessed numerically and compared to that of a hybrid heat sink with uniform pin-fins. Both hybrid heat sinks were designed to have two zones using rectangular microchannels above the processor’s background area and an array of pin-fins (stepped and uniform pin-fins) over the hotspot area. Conjugate heat transfer analysis was performed with the entire heat sink as the computational domain by solving the three-dimensional Navier-Stokes and energy equations. The hybrid heat sink with stepped pin-fins exhibited remarkable improvement in the temperature uniformity at the hotspot as compared to the one with uniform pin-fins, along with ample improvements in the thermal resistance, maximum temperature rise at the hotspot, and pumping power. A parametric investigation was also performed for the hybrid heat sink with uniform pin-fins to find an optimum geometry based on two geometric parameters: the ratio of the diameter of the pin-fins to their pitch and the total number of pin-fins in the array. The results revealed improvements in the thermal performance, but the pumping power was increased.
PSYCHOPHYSICAL CALIBRATION FOR CONTROLLING THE RANGE OF A VIRTUAL SOUND SOURCE: MULTIDIMENSIONAL COMPLEXITY IN SPATIAL AUDITORY DISPLAY

Just as control over perceived azimuth and elevation of a virtual sound source should be psychophysically calibrated in spatial auditory display, so should perceived range; however, in contrast to azimuth and elevation display, precise control over auditory range has been difficult to achieve. This is partly due to the multidimensional complexity of the human response to spatial auditory stimulation, but it is also due to the multidimensional complexity of the acoustic stimulus for range, which includes a substantial number of independent parameters even in the case of static spatial positioning of sound source relative to listener. In the static case, there is strong dependence of perceived range upon at least the following display parameters: direct sound level, indirect sound level, interaural cross-correlation, and the relation between direct and indirect sound spectra associated with air absorption and close-range head-related effects. If the sound source range varies smoothly over time, other display parameters (such as dynamic variation in pitch of the direct sound, or Doppler shift, and also dynamic variation in the initial time gap) become significant, and interact with the above-listed parameters to produce changes in auditory range that have proven difficult to successfully model. In the absence of a model that integrates variation in all of these display parameters and successfully predicts range variation, two reasonable solutions to the problem of range control present themselves. The first is to base control upon highly realistic simulation, relying on the relatively good match between perceived range and specified range that can be observed when nearly all displayed auditory spatial information is consistent with an adequate physical model. The second solution is to base control upon psychophysical range judgments under conditions of expected use of the display, relying on an inversion of a range prediction model fit to the judgments using multiple regression analysis. This paper presents two examples of successful psychophysical calibration for auditory range control for spatially static sources: One case employed a simplified model of range-dependence in simulated head-related transfer functions for headphone display of virtual sources at close range (within the listener’s personal space). The other case employed a room-related (rather than head-related) loudspeaker-based sound simulation to create auditory imagery of sources relatively far away from a group of simultaneous listeners. This room-related loudspeaker system was designed with the pragmatic goal of reducing reliance upon fixed, known listening locations. In both cases, adequate control over the range of a set of sound sources (short speech samples) was achieved using a look-up table derived by inverting the range prediction equation fit to collected human range ratings.
Value Added Tax and Carousel Fraud Schemes in the European Union and the Slovak Republic

The aim of this contribution is to elaborate on the institute of VAT frauds, with emphasis on Carousel frauds. This document provides compact information concerning VAT fraud schemes within the European Union, problems within the EU VAT system, which was put into force in 1993 and strategises how to tackle VAT frauds as well as de lege ferenda proposals, especially in a view of the European Commission’s proposed solution on the EU ’s common system of VAT . This article focuses on details of functioning of the EU VAT system, it explains relevant sections of the Slovak Penal Code Act pointing out legal issues in practise including examples of criminal conducts falling within the definitions of relevant sections of the Slovak Penal Code Act. This article demonstrates patterns of how carousel frauds are committed, how they evolved as a consequence of globalisation, economic changes, elimination of internal borders and electronic services.Authors chose the very actual topic of carousel frauds in order to reveal the commission of VAT evasions, focus on existing problems and to emphasise the need for improvement of the European Union legislation in the field of VAT frauds. The contribution aims at proposing the solution for minimising the VAT gap.The article utilises a descriptive approach to explain into detail functioning of the carousel frauds due to the fact that patterns used are complicated using a lot of companies to coved fraudulent transactions. Many times legal businesses are used to confuse law enforcement agencies as well as tax authorities of Member States when investigating commitment of VAT frauds e.g. Missing trader intra-Community fraud. In practise even courts have problems to determine which criminal offence of the Slovak Penal Code Act was committed. The article also provides in its Annex I the citations of the Slovak Penal Code Act which is beneficial to experts from Member States of the European Union to compare their jurisdiction to laws applicable in the Slovak Republic to bring the legislations closer or to subject the Slovak legislation to criticism.
Contextual Annotation of Web Pages for Interactive Browsing

With the information on the World Wide Web and in specialized databases exploding, researchers and physicians are in dire need to browse efficiently though the large corpus of information resources in their field of interest. The focus is not any longer to find everything related to your interest, but it shifts to zooming in, based on context and expanding again in neighboring knowledge domains. This paper describes an attempt to develop a completely new, interactive way of browsing distributed corpora of information without the need for multiple different queries in different information resources. Classical search engines generally treat search requests in isolation. The results for a given query are identical, and do not automatically take on board the context in which the user made the request. The system described here explores implicit contexts as obtained from the document that the user is reading. The new approach merges the searching and browsing into one combined "read-and-search" mode and alleviates the shift users are normally forced to between searching and reading.
Fixed window constant modulus algorithms

We propose two batch versions of the constant modulus algorithm in which a fixed block of samples is iteratively reused. The convergence rate of the algorithms is shown to be very fast. The delay to which the algorithms converge can be determined if the peak position of the initialized global channel/equalizer response is known. These fixed window CM algorithms are data efficient, computationally inexpensive and no step-size tuning is required. The effect of noise, and the relationship between the converging delay and noise enhancement are analyzed as well.
An Efficient Technique for Error-Free Implementation of H.264 Using Algebraic Integer Encoding

Video coding technology plays a key role in various multimedia applications. H.264 is the newest video coding standard and has achieved a significant improvement in coding efficiency. The 4*4 integer transform, as one of the key techniques in H.264 video compression standard, is very important for the whole performance of H.264 codec. In this paper we propose a novel algorithm for fast and error-free (infinite-precision) implementation of H.264 based on algebraic integer-encoding scheme. The proposed algorithm has regular structure. Simulation results show that this algorithm will result in reduction of computation complexity while enhancing the quality of obtained image simultaneously. Determining the quality of an image is an open problem that is highly dependent on the specific application that this image will be used for. We propose new measuring quantities for image quality.
API deprecation: a retrospective analysis and detection method for code examples on the web

Deprecation allows the developers of application programming interfaces (APIs) to signal to other developers that a given API item ought to be avoided. But little is known about deprecation practices beyond anecdotes. We examine how API deprecation has been used in 26 open source Java frameworks and libraries, finding that the classic deprecate–replace–remove cycle is often not followed, as many APIs were removed without prior deprecation, many deprecated APIs were subsequently un-deprecated, and removed APIs are even resurrected with surprising frequency. Furthermore, we identify several problems in the information commonly (not) provided to help API consumers transition their dependent code. As a consequence of deprecation, coding examples on the web --- an increasingly important source of information for developers --- can easily become outdated. Code examples that demonstrate how to use deprecated APIs can be difficult to disregard and a waste of time for developers. We propose a lightweight, version-sensitive framework to detect deprecated API usages in source code examples on the web so developers can be informed of such usages before they invest time and energy into studying them. We reify the framework as a prototype tool (Deprecation Watcher). Our evaluation on detecting deprecated Android API usages in code examples on Stack Overflow shows our tool obtains a precision of 100% and a recall of 86% in a random sample of 200 questions.
An effective approach to improving packet delivery fraction of ad hoc network

This paper addresses the subject of improving performance of an ad hoc network system suffering from high resource contention by improving its packet delivery fraction. The suggested system model assumes that nodes can be divided into two classes: the servers that provide services and the clients that request services provided by servers. It is found that for such a system, it is the server and its adjacent nodes that dominate performance, and tend to cause bottlenecks due to congestion. To reduce the possibility of bottleneck occurrences, it is suggested that resource contention of the area where a server node is located be relieved. This is achieved mainly by decoupling route-requesting from service-providing activities, and reducing the former. On the one hand, for each busy, and thus critical server, a node cluster is created by constructing a server-centered connected dominating set to actively reduce contention level. On the other hand, routes are adaptively selected to avoid high congestion area. It is found that in this way, the overall data packet delivery fraction can be improved greatly. Results of simulation experiments demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed approach.