Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Effect of Lemon Inhalation Aromatherapy on Nausea and Vomiting of Pregnancy: A Double-Blinded, Randomized, Controlled Clinical Trial

Background: Nausea and vomiting of pregnancy are amongst the most common complaints that effects on both the physical and mental conditions of the pregnant women. Due to the increasing tendency of women to use herbal medications during pregnancy, the effect of lemon inhalation aromatherapy on nausea and vomiting of pregnancy was investigated in this study. Objectives: The aim of this study was to determine the effect of lemon inhalation aromatherapy on nausea and vomiting during pregnancy. Materials and Methods: This was a randomized clinical trial in which 100 pregnant women with nausea and vomiting who had eligibility criteria were randomly divided into intervention and control groups based on four- and six-random block sampling method. Lemon essential oil and placebo were given to the intervention and control groups, respectively, to inhale it as soon as they felt nausea. The nausea, vomiting, and retch intensity were investigated 24 hours before and during the four days of treatment by means of PUQE-24 (24-hour Pregnancy Unique Quantification of Emesis). Results: There was a statistically significant difference between the two groups in the mean scores of nausea and vomiting on the second and fourth days (P = 0.017 and P = 0.039, respectively). The means of nausea and vomiting intensity in the second and fourth days in the intervention group were significantly lower than the control group. In addition, in intragroup comparison with ANOVA with repeated measures, the nausea and vomiting mean in the five intervals, showed a statistically significant difference in each group (P < 0.001 and P = 0.049, respectively). Conclusions: Lemon scent can be effective in reducing nausea and vomiting of pregnancy.
Natural Color Holographic Stereograms By Superimposing Three Rainbow Holograms

A single-wavelength laser and a set of color-separated, black-and-white, two-dimensional photographs are used to produce three holographic stereograms, each containing a lightness scale corresponding to an appropriate concentration of the original primary color. The real images are individually projected and exposed onto a single holographic emulsion. This hologram, when reconstructed in white light, produces the overlapping spectra of three rainbow holograms. In image areas of equal density, these superimposed spectra create a shade of gray proportional to their combined intensities. All mixtures of colors and tones are found in other image areas. Detailed studies of the primary-color, viewing zones reveal misalignments and curvatures due to chromatic, spherical aberrations. The resulting color misregistration limits image depth to a few centimeters. However, within a restricted viewing area, three-dimensional images do appear in full natural color.
Sustainable Ecotourism Management in Kenya

The study of ecotourism impacts and their management offers many opportunities to reflect on the importance of sustainability and the possibilities of implementing approaches which move us in a new direction. Sustainability, then, is about the struggle for diversity in all its dimensions. The concern for biodiversity, in its broadest sense, encompasses not only threatened flora and fauna, but also the survivability of these human communities, as stewards of the natural environment and as producers. The research which adopts both quantitative and qualitative approaches, reports on the few attempts to identify ecotourism impacts and their management from the perspectives of all the stakeholders concerned which includes the visitors, tour operators, accommodation outlets, local community and Park and Reserve Management. The findings of this research therefore have implications for conservation management from the ecotourism point of view as well as an enhanced sustainable community development in Amboseli National Park and Masai Mara National Reserve. Key Words: Amboseli, Ecotourism, Management, Masai Mara, Sustainable
Iterative learning control with restricted input subspace for electrode array-based FES

In this paper techniques to identify and apply a restricted input subspace within the iterative learning control framework are developed. This is motivated by the increasing popularity of electrode arrays within rehabilitation and assistive technology communities, which allow functional electrical stimulation (FES) to be applied independently to each array element. This enables more selective muscle activation and improved control of human motion, but increases the input space dimension significantly so that model identification becomes impractical. The approach in this paper embeds past experience and/or structural knowledge in the subspace selection, and derives iterative learning controllers with favorable properties that are independent of the input basis employed. Experimental results using a 40 element surface electrode array confirm accurate tracking of three reference hand postures.
Dynamic analysis of weather and climate : atmospheric circulation, perturbations, climatic evolution

The English language second edition of Dynamic Analysis of Weather and Climate is based on the updated French second edition text and illustrations of La Dynamique du Temps et du Climat (2000). The text is expanded through the incorporation of some material from Marcel Leroux's Global Warming: Myth Or Reality (2005) together with new material covering recent events, including the UK inundations 2007, the German inundations 2008, illustrations and bibliographical important updates - such as IPCC AR4 2007 and references up to 2008. This second edition will therefore be the most up to date, complete synthesis of the late author's research and understanding of weather and climate, as explained to a graduate student or engineer school level audience. The organization of the book makes it clear and logical to follow. New illustrations and satellite images provide the reader with a better understanding of the concepts. The new material demonstrates the relevance of the author's research in relation with new reports and meteorological events which now appear to be the best validation of the late author's thesis.
Optical and microphysical parameters of the Mt. Pinatubo aerosol as determined from MIPAS-B mid-IR limb emission spectra

High-resolution mid-IR limb emission spectra were recorded during a flight of the Michelson interferometer for passive atmospheric sounding, balloon-borne version (MIPAS-B) from Kiruna, northern Sweden (68°N) on March 14/15, 1992. These spectra are affected by the Mt. Pinatubo stratospheric aerosol, which caused an enhanced continuum emission, especially in spectra of low tangent altitudes. Aerosol extinction coefficients were retrieved from MIPAS-B spectra at approximately 60 spectral positions in the 750–980 cm−1 and 1180–1380 cm−1 spectral ranges. Retrieved aerosol extinction coefficients range from 6×10−4 km−1 to 3×10−3 km−1 in tangent altitudes 11.3 km and 14.5 km and from 5×10−5 km−1 to 1×10−3 km−1 in 16.1 km. Their distinct spectral shape indicates the presence of H2SO4-H2O droplets. Compositions and size distribution parameters were retrieved by least squares fitting of Mie-generated spectral extinction coefficients to the ones derived from the spectra. Estimated spectral single-scattering albedos between 0.08 and 0.3 indicate the significance of thermal multiple scattering. Multiple-scattering corrections led to an increase of spectral extinction coefficients by 5–50% with highest changes at lowest tangent altitudes. Accordingly, estimated volume densities have increased by 4–20% to values of 3.66, 2.85, and 0.93 μm3 cm−3 for tangent altitudes 11.3, 14.5, and 16.1 km, respectively. Retrieved H2SO4 weights of 66–70% are in good agreement with values derived from stratospheric temperatures and water vapor partial pressures. Estimated surface densities are systematically low in comparison with in situ size distribution measurements. This finding is explained by the underestimation of small particles by the use of a monomodal size distribution in the analysis. Retrieved effective radii of up to 0.8 μm were found to be consistent with the temporal evolution of the Mt. Pinatubo aerosol.
Impact of Grazing Livestock and Distance from Water Source on Soil Fertility in Southern Mongolia

Abstract The impact of livestock grazing on soil nutrients and vegetation parameters was studied in dry montane steppes of southern Mongolia in order to assess the risk of habitat degradation. Data were collected along transects radiating away from permanent water sources. Dung unit density counts revealed gradients of livestock activity, but utilization belts around water sources overlapped, indicating that pastoral land use affects the entire landscape. Dung unit counts corresponded to gradients in soil nutrient parameters (C, N, P), which significantly decreased with distance from the wells. However, no significant correlation was observed for plant species richness and vegetation composition with distance from water source. This indicates that soil parameters and livestock grazing exert a relatively smaller influence on the vegetation than the high inter-annual variability in precipitation. Therefore, the ecosystem at the study site was found to react in a non-equilibrium way, which suggests that the risk of degradation is low, at least insofar as plant community composition is concerned.
Fast Approximations for Online Scheduling of Outpatient Procedure Centers

This paper presents a new model for online decision making. Motivated by the health care delivery application of dynamically allocating patients to procedure rooms in outpatient procedure centers, the online stochastic extensible bin packing problem is described. The objective is to minimize the combined costs of opening procedure rooms and utilizing overtime to complete a day’s procedures. The dynamic patient allocation decisions are made in an uncertain environment where the number of patients scheduled and the procedure durations are not known in advance. The resulting optimization model’s tractability focuses the paper’s attention on approximation methods and a special case that is amenable to decomposition-based solution methods. Theoretical performance guarantees are presented for list-based approximation methods as well as an approximation that is common in practice where procedure rooms are reserved for patient groups in advance. Numerical results based on a real outpatient procedure center demonstrate the favorable results of the list-based approximations based on their average and worst case performances. Further, the numerical experiments show that the policy of reserving procedure rooms for patient groups in advance can perform very poorly. These results are contrary to common practice and favor alternative, and still easy-to-implement, policies.
Converse Coding Theorems for Identification via Channels

In identification via channels, the sum of two types of error probabilities of identification goes to one as the block length of transmission tends to infinity at rates above capacity when channels satisfy some stochastic properties. This is well known as a strong converse theorem for the identification via channels. In this paper, we prove that the sum of two error probabilities tends to one exponentially and derive an explicit lower bound of this exponent function.
A biomimetic approach to robot table tennis

Playing table tennis is a difficult motor task that requires fast movements, accurate control, and adaptation to task parameters. Although human beings see and move slower than most robot systems, they significantly outperform all table tennis robots. One important reason for this higher performance is the human movement generation. In this article, we study human movements during table tennis and present a robot system that mimics human striking behavior. Our focus lies on generating hitting motions capable of adapting to variations in environmental conditions, such as changes in ball speed and position. Therefore, we model the human movements involved in hitting a table tennis ball using discrete movement stages and the virtual hitting point hypothesis. The resulting model was evaluated both in a physically realistic simulation and on a real anthropomorphic seven degrees of freedom Barrett WAMTM robot arm.
Non-invasive Monitoring of Ultrasound-Stimulated Microbubble Radiation Enhancement Using Photoacoustic Imaging

Modulation of the tumour microvasculature has been demonstrated to affect the effectiveness of radiation, stimulating the search for anti-angiogenic and vascular-disrupting treatment modalities. Microbubbles stimulated by ultrasound have recently been demonstrated as a radiation enhancer when used with different cancer models including PC3. Here, photoacoustics imaging technique was used to assess this treatment's effects on haemoglobin levels and oxygen saturation. Correlations between this modality and power doppler assessments of blood flow, and histology measurements of vascular integrity and cell death were also investigated. Xenograft prostate tumours in SCID mice were treated with 0, 2, or 8 Gy radiation combined with microbubbles exposed to 500 kHz ultrasound at a peak negative pressure of 0, 570, and 750 kPa. Tumours were assessed and levels of total haemoglobin, oxygen saturation were measured using photoacoustics before and 24 hours after treatment along with power doppler measured blood flow. Mice were then sacrificed and tumours were assessed for cell death and vascular composition using immunohistochemistry. Treatments using 8 Gy and microbubbles resulted in oxygen saturation decreasing by 28 ± 10% at 570 kPa and 25 ± 29% at 750 kPa, which corresponded to 44 ± 9% and 40 ± 14% respective decreases in blood flow as measured with power doppler. Corresponding histology indicated 31 ± 5% at 570 kPa and 37 ± 5% at 750 kPa in terms of cell death. There were drops in intact vasculature of 15 ± 2% and 20 ± 2%, for treatments at 570 kPa and 750 kPa. In summary, photoacoustic measures of total haemoglobin and oxygen saturation paralleled changes in power doppler indicators of blood flow. Destruction of tumour microvasculature with microbubble-enhanced radiation also led to decreases in blood flow and was associated with increases in cell death and decreases in intact vasculature as detected with CD31 labeling.
A system for word-wise handwritten script identification for Indian postal automation

Postal automation is a topic of research over the last few years. There are many works towards the postal automation in USA, UK, Japan and Australia, but for Indian postal automation there is no significant work. This paper deals with word-wise handwritten script identification for Indian postal automation. In the proposed scheme at first document skew is detected and corrected. Non-text parts are then segmented from the document using run length smoothing algorithm (RLSA). Next, using a piece-wise projection method the destination address block (DAB) is at first segmented into lines and then links into words. Using water reservoir concept we compute the busy-zone of the word. Finally, using matra/Shirorekha, water reservoir concept based feature, etc. a tree classifier is generated for word-wise Bangla/Devnagari and English scripts identification.
Least significant changes and monitoring time intervals for high-resolution pQCT-derived bone outcomes in postmenopausal women

Background: Least Significant Change (LSC) assists in determining whether observed bone change is beyond measurement precision. Monitoring Time Interval (MTI) estimates time required to reliably detect skeletal changes. MTIs have not been defined for bone outcomes provided by high resolution peripheral quantitative computed tomography (HR-pQCT). The purpose of this study was to determine the LSCs and MTIs for HR-pQCT derived bone area, density and micro-architecture with postmenopausal women. Methods: Distal radius and tibia of 33 postmenopausal women (mean age: 77, SD: ±7 years), from the Saskatoon cohort of the Canadian Multicentre Osteoporosis Study (CaMos), were measured using HR-pQCT at baseline and 1-year later. We determined LSC from precision errors and divided them by the median annual percent changes to define MTIs for bone area, density, and micro-architecture. Results: Distal radius: HR-pQCT LSCs indicated a 1-8% observed change was needed for reliable monitoring of bone area and density while a 3-18% change was needed for micro-architectural measures. The longest MTIs (>3 years) pertained to cortical and trabecular area and density measures, cortical thickness and bone volume fraction; the shortest MTIs (~2 years) pertained to bone micro-architectural measures (trabecular number, thickness, separation and heterogeneity). Distal tibia: LSCs indicated a <1-5% observed change was needed for reliable monitoring of bone area and density, while a 3-19% change was needed for micro-architectural measures. The longest MTIs (>3 years) pertained to trabecular density, bone volume fraction, number, separation and heterogeneity; the shortest MTIs (~1 year) pertained to cortical and trabecular area, cortical density and thickness. Conclusion: MTIs suggest that performing HR-pQCT follow-up measures in postmenopausal women every 2 years at the distal radius and every 1 year at the distal tibia to monitor true skeletal changes as indicated by the LSCs.
LUNAR LightweightUnderlay Network Ad-HocRouting

In this paperwe presentan new ad hoc routing systembasedupon simple principles regarding the routing strategy and the implementationapproach. In the routing areawe (re-)introducethe end-to-endprinciple, letting the communicatingendnodesmake the decisionsconcerning the behaviour of intermediate nodes. We adopta routingstrategy that is a mixtureof on-demandandpro-acti ve routing in order to minimize the possibledown-timesof communication paths. Implementation-wisewe useexplicit ”resolution commands” sent to neighbour nodes to provide LUNAR functionality. A freely available implementationhas beenproducedthat includesauto-configurationof IP network addressesanddefault gateway routing,makingLUNAR a fully self-configuringad-hocroutingsolution which supportsboth unicastandbroadcaststylesof communication. In a direct comparisonLUNAR matchedor outperformedthe availableLinux implementationsof AODV andOLSR.
Different blood pressure indexes on intracranial arterial stenosis in Asymptomatic Polyvascular Abnormalities in Community study in China

Background: The association between hypertension and cerebrovascular events is shown in some large-scale studies, but it remains unclear which blood pressure index is the most sensitive risk factor for cerebrovascular stenosis. Methods: We investigated the potential associations between different blood pressure indexes and intracranial arterial stenosis (ICAS) in the study. The population-based Asymptomatic Polyvascular Abnormalities in Community study examined asymptomatic intracranial arterial abnormalities in a Chinese population and included participants aged more than 40 years without a history of stroke, transient ischemic attack, and coronary heart disease. ICAS was diagnosed by transcranial Doppler sonography. Blood pressure was measured with a mercury manometer three times; an average result of SBP and DBP was used, and mean arterial pressure (MAP) and pulse pressure (PP) were calculated for the statistical analysis. Results: Out of the 4422 study participants, 711 (16.1%) showed an asymptomatic ICAS. After adjusting for age, waist circumference, drinking, diabetes, dyslipidemia, and blood concentration of uric acid, C-reactive protein, and homocysteine, ICAS was significantly associated with a higher SBP [from decile 6, odds ratio (OR) 3.093; 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.909, 5.012; P < 0.01), a higher MAP (from decile 7, OR 2.889; 95% CI 1.853, 4.504; P < 0.01), and a higher PP (from decile 5, OR 2.295;95% CI 1.463, 3.601; P < 0.01). Using a receiver-operating characteristic curve to estimate the predictive value of different blood pressure indexes for ICAS, SBP, MAP, and PP, were predictive indexes for ICAS and PP showed the largest predictive value (area under the curve = 0.737). Conclusions: The current study results suggest that SBP, MAP, and PP are all associated with asymptomatic ICAS. PP may be the most sensitive index to predict ICAS.
Feature Weighting Scheme for Text Categorization Based on Rough Set

Feature weighting is an important issue in text categorization. In this paper we analyze the characteristics of rough set theory and TF-IDF, and propose a feature weighting scheme for text categorization by applying approximation accuracy and approximation quality in variable rough set model. The decision information of a feature for categorization is introduced into the weight, which reflects the importance of the feature.
Prevalence of Trachoma at Sub-District Level in Ethiopia: Determining When to Stop Mass Azithromycin Distribution

Background To eliminate blinding trachoma, the World Health Organization emphasizes implementing the SAFE strategy, which includes annual mass drug administration (MDA) with azithromycin to the whole population of endemic districts. Prevalence surveys to assess impact at the district level are recommended after at least 3 years of intervention. The decision to stop MDA is based on a prevalence of trachomatous inflammation follicular (TF) among children aged 1–9 years below 5% at the sub-district level, as determined by an additional round of surveys limited within districts where TF prevalence is below 10%. We conducted impact surveys powered to estimate prevalence simultaneously at the sub-district and district in two zones of Amhara, Ethiopia to determine whether MDA could be stopped. Methodology Seventy-two separate population-based, sub-district surveys were conducted in 25 districts. In each survey all residents from 10 randomly selected clusters were screened for clinical signs of trachoma. Data were weighted according to selection probabilities and adjusted for correlation due to clustering. Principal Findings Overall, 89,735 residents were registered from 21,327 households of whom 72,452 people (80.7%) were examined. The prevalence of TF in children aged 1–9 years was below 5% in six sub-districts and two districts. Sub-district level prevalence of TF in children aged 1–9 years ranged from 0.9–76.9% and district-level from 0.9–67.0%. In only one district was the prevalence of trichiasis below 0.1%. Conclusions/Significance The experience from these zones in Ethiopia demonstrates that impact assessments designed to give a prevalence estimate of TF at sub-district level are possible, although the scale of the work was challenging. Given the assessed district-level prevalence of TF, sub-district-level surveys would have been warranted in only five districts. Interpretation was not as simple as stopping MDA in sub-districts below 5% given programmatic challenges of exempting sub-districts from a highly regarded program and the proximity of hyper-endemic sub-districts.