Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Effectiveness and Efficiency of Disease Management Programs for Patients with Chronic Diseases

Objective: Disease management (DM) approach is increasingly advocated as a means of improving effectiveness and efficiency of healthcare for chronic diseases. To evaluate the evidence on effectiveness and efficiency of DM, evidence synthesis was carried out. Methods: To locate eligible meta-analyses and systematic reviews, we searched Medline, EMBASE, the Cochrane Library, SCI-EXPANDED, SSCI, A&HCI, DARE, HTA and NHS EED from 1995 to 2010. Two reviewers independently extracted data and assessed a study quality. Results: Twenty-eight meta-analyses and systematic reviews were included for synthesizing evidence. The proportion of articles which observed improvement with a reasonable amount of evidence was the highest at process (69%), followed by health services (63%), QOL (57%), health outcomes (51%), satisfaction (50%), costs (38%) and so on. As to mortality, statistically significant results were observed only in coronary heart disease. Important components in DM, such as a multidisciplinary approach, were identified. Conclusion: The evidence synthesized shows considerable evidence in the effectiveness and efficiency of DM programs in process, health services, QOL and so on. The question is no longer whether DM programs work, but rather which type or component of DM programs works best and efficiently in the context of each healthcare system or country.
Rare-event Probability Estimation via Empirical Likelihood Maximization

We explore past and recent developments in rare-event probability estimation with a particular focus on a novel Monte Carlo technique Empirical Likelihood Maximization (ELM). This is a versatile method that involves sampling from a sequence of densities using MCMC and maximizing an empirical likelihood. The quantity of interest, the probability of a given rare-event, is estimated by solving a convex optimization program related to likelihood maximization. Numerical experiments are performed using this new technique and benchmarks are given against existing robust algorithms and estimators.
Constructing a Unified Framework and a Causal Model of Occupational Satisfaction, Trainee Reactions, Perception of Learning, and Perceived Training Transfer

This chapter introduces the framework and causal model of occupational satisfaction, trainee reactions, perception of learning, and perceived training transfer. It argues that dimensions of occupational satisfaction, trainee reactions, and perception of learning have mediated positive effect on perceived training transfer. Perception of learning positively mediates the relationships between occupational satisfaction and perceived training transfer and between trainee reactions and perceived training transfer. Furthermore, the author hopes that understanding the theoretical constructs of occupational satisfaction, trainee reactions, perception of learning, and perceived training transfer through the use of the framework and causal model will not only inform researchers of a better design for studying occupational satisfaction, trainee reactions, perception of learning, and perceived training transfer, but also assist in the understanding of intricate relationships between different factors. Kijpokin Kasemsap Suan Sunandha Rajabhat University, Thailand DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-5137-1.ch003
Detection and removal of anomalies in digitized animation film

In this article, the problem of detecting and removing anomalies in digitized animation film is addressed. The impetus of this article comes from the motion picture industry, where several studios are rereleasing vintage film to the public which are often accompanied by visual degradation in the film color, grain, and overall quality. These degradations, or anomalies, can be seen as unwanted visual artifacts that are usually larger than one pixel in size and appear in only one frame. One of the novelties of this article is that the restoration of animation film, as opposed to “real‐world” image sequences, is investigated. It often contains additional artifacts and raises other issues not found in most sequences. These artifacts are first defined, and the appropriate steps for their detection and removal are described. Experiments with the proposed algorithm were performed using scenes from the animation film Fantasia, courtesy of Walt Disney Feature Animations, and are discussed in detail. Although our algorithm was developed for the removal of artifacts on animation film, aspects of it can be applied to nonanimated film. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Int J Imaging Syst Technol, 9, 283–293, 1998
cFAST: A fast color feature detector

By extending the basic idea of FAST it is possible to create a detector that can operate directly on a RGB color image and on it detect a higher number of features. The higher number of points and the simplification of the metric put us in the position to impose an additional condition on the keypoints. In order to do so we picked up a problem of FAST and defined a condition for similar points. This additional condition enables results that are better than FAST with regard to stability. Furthermore this condition enables a fast implementation, so that with the triple amount of input data due to the color channels less than threefold of time is required.
MOSIX: Implementation, trend and benchmark in Malaysia

This paper is part of a larger project on MOSIX cluster computing. This paper also is a continuation of the previously published paper regarding MOSIX potential performance and threat (M. Hakim, J. Jais, 2008). The main focuses are on MOSIX implementation, survey and benchmark on MOSIX performance. In this paper, the information is presented in a broad to narrow approach, which is from an overview of shared network and all the way to the MOSIX. We also test several testing algorithm to benchmark the performance of MOSIX in order to find out the real potential of MOSIX distributed operating system.
Exhibit design with multimedia and cognitive technologies impact assessment on Luca Giordano, Raphael and the Chapel of the Magi in Palazzo Medici Riccardi, Florence

The projects focus on the observer's response to the aesthetic experience, enhancing it through the use of multimedia technologies modulated in line with the approaches of contemporary cognitive science. The entire experience is then subjected to an impact analysis, based on a protocol combining quantitative and qualitative methods specially drafted by an interdisciplinary working group. The research investigates the psychophysiological responses induced by immersion in an enriched environment. These are investigated to determine the reaction of the entire psyche-soma system, and in particular emotional reactions in the phenomenological approach.
Fear Avoidance and Self-efficacy in Relation to Pain and Sexual Impairment in Women With Provoked Vestibulodynia

BackgoundProvoked vestibulodynia is believed to be the most frequent cause of vulvodynia in women of childbearing age, with prevalence rates of up to 12% in the general population. Despite this high prevalence and the fact that vestibulodynia impacts negatively on quality of life, in particular sexual functioning, there has been a paucity of sound research to elucidate the condition's etiology. More specifically, few studies have focused on the role of psychologic factors in the experience of vulvo-vaginal pain and associated sexual impairment. ObjectivesThe present study aimed to determine the extent to which fear avoidance variables (catastrophizing, anxiety, fear of pain, hypervigilance) and self-efficacy differentially influenced changes in levels of induced and intercourse pain and also associated sexual dysfunction in these women. MethodsData were obtained from 75 vestibulodynia participants who completed a gynecologic examination, structured interview, and standardized questionnaires. ResultsThe results of regression analyses revealed that higher catastrophizing, fear of pain, and hypervigilance in addition to lower self-efficacy together accounted for 15% of the variation in increased intercourse pain intensity. Among these, only catastrophizing contributed unique variance to intercourse pain. Results also showed that higher state anxiety and fear of pain (escape/avoidance) and also lower self-efficacy explained 22% of the variation in women's sexual impairment. However, only self-efficacy was found to be an independent correlate of sexual impairment. ConclusionFindings support a theoretical model of vestibulodynia as a pain disorder influenced among others by cognitive and affective factors.
Active Mode Sub-Clock Power Gating

This paper presents a technique, called sub-clock power gating, for reducing leakage power during the active mode in low performance, energy constrained applications. The proposed technique achieves power reduction through two mechanisms: 1) power gating the combinational logic within the clock period (sub-clock) and 2) reducing the virtual supply to less than Vth rather than shutting down completely as is the case in conventional power gating. To achieve this reduced voltage, a pair of NMOS and PMOS transistors are used at the head and foot of the power gated logic for symmetric virtual rail clamping of the power and ground supplies. The sub-clock power gating technique has been validated by incorporating it with an ARM Cortex-M0 microprocessor which was fabricated in a 65nm process. Two sets of experiments are done: the first experimentally validates the functionality of the proposed technique in the fabricated test chip and the second investigates the utility of the proposed technique in example applications. Measured results from the fabricated chip show 27% power saving during the active mode for an example wireless sensor node application when compared to the same microprocessor without sub-clock power gating.
Real-time traffic classification for unified communication networks

The key feature of Unified Communications (UC) lies in its ability to provide the service that the customer wants, when he wants and regardless of the device being used. At the heart of the UC architecture, which spans different layers from application layer to network, comes the Quality of Service (QoS) framework that is essential to provide adequate service to different communication session's call participates. The heterogeneity of access networks and diversity of a UC session's participants make it necessary to classify incoming traffic based on its type and the QoS requirements of the participating parties. The existence of different traffic classifications for different existing access networks raises the question of how to classify incoming traffic when it belongs to a diverse set of access networks and devices. In this paper, we investigate different classification methods currently adopted in different access networks and industry standards. We introduce a traffic classification method that should satisfy the requirements of realtime traffic that traverses most of the existing access networks. The classification method has been tested using both First In First Out (FIFO) and Weighted Fair Queuing (WFQ) schedulers to evaluate different classes performance in a shared environment with diverse QoS requirements. The results obtained showed the feasibility of our proposed classification.
By Jie Liu and

fundamentally from its desktop or Internet counterparts. Embedded computing is not simply computation on small devices. In most control applications, for example, embedded software engages the physical world. It reacts to physical and user-interaction events, performs computation on limited and competing resources, and produces results that further impact the environment. Of necessity, it acquires some properties of the physical world, most particularly, time. Despite the fact that both value and time affect the physical outputs of embedded systems, these two aspects are developed separately in typical embedded software design. The functionality is determined at design time with assumptions such as zero or a fixed nonzero run-time delay. The actual timing properties are determined at run time by a real-time operating system (RTOS). Typically, an RTOS offers as control of these timing properties one number for each task, a priority. Whether a piece of computation can be finished or brought to a quiescent state at a particular time is totally a dynamic phenomenon, and it depends largely on the hardware platform, when the inputs arrive, what other software is running at that time, and the relative priorities. These factors are usually out of the control of embedded system designers and may break the timing assumptions that the control algorithms may rely on. In most control applications, this run-time uncertainty is undesirable or even disastrous. We believe that two steps can be taken to improve the design process for embedded software and to bridge the gap between the functionality development and timing assurance: • rigorous software architectures that expose resource utilization and concurrent interactions among software components • specification, compilation, and execution mechanisms that preserve timing properties throughout the software life cycle. A component-based software architecture can help compilers to determine the logical dependencies and shared resources among components. By bringing the notion of time and concurrent interaction to the programming level, compilers and run-time systems can be developed to preserve both timing and functional properties at run time. Recent innovations in real-time programming models such as port-based objects (PBOs) [1] and Giotto [2] are examples that take a time-triggered approach to scheduling software components and to preserving their timing properties. These purely time-triggered approaches, although explicitly controlling the timing of each component, require tasks to be periodic and do not handle irregularly spaced new information (or events) well.
Structural and functional properties of two types of horizontal cell in the skate retina

Two morphologically distinct types of horizontal cell have been identified in the all-rod skate retina by light- and electron- microscopy as well as after isolation by enzymatic dissociation. The external horizontal cell is more distally positioned in the retina and has a much larger cell body than does the internal horizontal cell. However, both external and internal horizontal cells extend processes to the photoreceptor terminals where they end as lateral elements adjacent to the synaptic ribbons within the terminal invaginations. Whole-cell voltage-clamp studies on isolated cells similar in appearance to those seen in situ showed that both types displayed five separate voltage-sensitive conductances: a TTX-sensitive sodium conductance, a calcium current, and three potassium-mediated conductances (an anomalous rectifier, a transient outward current resembling an A current, and a delayed rectifier). There was, however, a striking difference between external and internal horizontal cells in the magnitude of the current carried by the anomalous rectifier. Even after compensating for differences in the surface areas of the two cell types, the sustained inward current elicited by hyperpolarizing voltage steps was a significantly greater component of the current profile of external horizontal cells. A difference between external and internal horizontal cells was seen also in the magnitudes of their TEA-sensitive currents; larger currents were usually obtained in recordings from internal horizontal cells. However, the currents through these K+ channels were quite small, the TEA block was often judged to be incomplete, and except for depolarizing potentials greater than or equal to +20 mV (i.e., outside the normal operating range of horizontal cells), this current did not provide a reliable indicator of cell type. The fact that two classes of horizontal cell can be distinguished by their electrophysiological responses, as well as by their morphological appearance and spatial distribution in the retina, suggests that they may play different roles in the processing of visual information within the retina.
An experimental study of the correlation between surface roughness and light scattering for rough metallic surfaces

We present an experimental study of the angular distribution of light scattered from several rough metallic surfaces, which cover a range of roughness conditions. The substrate materials are steel or glass; roughened by bead-blasting, grinding, or etching; and aluminum- coated. The measured surface-roughness statistics are filtered by using a composite roughness model. The raw mechanical roughnesses range from 0. 21μm to 2. 66μm; the high-frequency small-scale roughnesses range from 0. 13μm to 0. 86μm. The optical wavelength is 550nm, so that the roughness-to-wavelength ratio is of order one. A BRDF model based on the Kirchhoff approximation is used to establish a relationship between surface-height statistics and the angular distribution of the scattered light. Angular distributions calculated with the BRDF model are fit to the measurements. The best-fit roughness statistics from the BRDF model agree closely with those measured for the high-frequency small-scale roughness component. The latter roughness component, which has the highest surface slopes, is thus the primary contributor to the angular distribution of the reflected light. We show that the Kirchhoff approximation can be applied to rough metallic surfaces that have multiple scales of roughness and near-, but not perfect, Gaussian surface-height distributions.
Sequence-Based Prediction of RNA-Binding Proteins Using Random Forest with Minimum Redundancy Maximum Relevance Feature Selection

The prediction of RNA-binding proteins is one of the most challenging problems in computation biology. Although some studies have investigated this problem, the accuracy of prediction is still not sufficient. In this study, a highly accurate method was developed to predict RNA-binding proteins from amino acid sequences using random forests with the minimum redundancy maximum relevance (mRMR) method, followed by incremental feature selection (IFS). We incorporated features of conjoint triad features and three novel features: binding propensity (BP), nonbinding propensity (NBP), and evolutionary information combined with physicochemical properties (EIPP). The results showed that these novel features have important roles in improving the performance of the predictor. Using the mRMR-IFS method, our predictor achieved the best performance (86.62% accuracy and 0.737 Matthews correlation coefficient). High prediction accuracy and successful prediction performance suggested that our method can be a useful approach to identify RNA-binding proteins from sequence information.
Temporal variability in a multicomponent trait: nuptial coloration of female two-spotted gobies

Animals that breed more than once may face different environmental and physiological conditions at each reproductive event. Costs and benefits of sexual ornaments could therefore vary both within and between breeding seasons. Despite this, the ornaments are often assumed to be fixed, and temporal changes in ornamentation have rarely been investigated. Female two-spotted gobies (Gobiusculus flavescens) have colorful orange bellies when sexually mature and nest-holding males prefer females with more colorful bellies. This nuptial coloration is caused both by the carotenoids-rich gonads being directly visible through the skin and by the chromatophore pigmentation of the abdominal skin. Toward the end of the breeding season, males become rare and females become the more competitive sex. We show that female ornamentation of G. flavescens is a complex multicomponent trait and that the separate components, as well as their interactions, are variable. As gonads matured, they became more colorful while the abdominal skin became more transparent, causing more intense belly coloration in sexually mature females. However, coloration varied greatly also among fully mature females, suggesting that it may not only be a signal of readiness to spawn. Indeed, belly coloration predicted gonad carotenoid concentration, but there were several important seasonal differences in color expression. Females sampled toward the end of the breeding season were more colorful. This was due to seasonal increases in both gonad carotenoid concentration and skin coloration. Thus, at a time when competition over males is stronger and the terminal reproductive event approaches, females appear to invest more in signaling. Copyright 2009, Oxford University Press.
Automated System Testing Using Visual GUI Testing Tools: A Comparative Study in Industry

Software companies are under continuous pressure to shorten time to market, raise quality and lower costs. More automated system testing could be instrumental in achieving these goals and in recent years testing tools have been developed to automate the interaction with software systems at the GUI level. However, there is a lack of knowledge on the usability and applicability of these tools in an industrial setting. This study evaluates two tools for automated visual GUI testing on a real-world, safety-critical software system developed by the company Saab AB. The tools are compared based on their properties as well as how they support automation of system test cases that have previously been conducted manually. The time to develop and the size of the automated test cases as well as their execution times have been evaluated. Results show that there are only minor differences between the two tools, one commercial and one open-source, but, more importantly, that visual GUI testing is an applicable technology for automated system testing with effort gains over manual system test practices. The study results also indicate that the technology has benefits over alternative GUI testing techniques and that it can be used for automated acceptance testing. However, visual GUI testing still has challenges that must be addressed, in particular the script maintenance costs and how to support robust test execution.
WikiLyzer: Interactive Information Quality Assessment in Wikipedia

Digital libraries and services enable users to access large amounts of data on demand. Yet, quality assessment of information encountered on the Internet remains an elusive open issue. For example, Wikipedia, one of the most visited platforms on the Web, hosts thousands of user-generated articles and undergoes 12 million edits/contributions per month. User-generated content is undoubtedly one of the keys to its success, but also a hindrance to good quality: contributions can be of poor quality because anyone, even anonymous users, can participate. Though Wikipedia has defined guidelines as to what makes the perfect article, authors find it difficult to assert whether their contributions comply with them and reviewers cannot cope with the ever growing amount of articles pending review. Great efforts have been invested in algorithmic methods for automatic classification of Wikipedia articles (as featured or non-featured) and for quality flaw detection. However, little has been done to support quality assessment of user-generated content through interactive tools that combine automatic methods and human intelligence. We developed WikiLyzer, a Web toolkit comprising three interactive applications designed to assist (i) knowledge discovery experts in creating and testing metrics for quality measurement, (ii) Wikipedia users searching for good articles, and (iii) Wikipedia authors that need to identify weaknesses to improve a particular article. A design study sheds a light on how experts could create complex quality metrics with our tool, while a user study reports on its usefulness to identify high-quality content.