Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effect of potential confounding factors on the thrombolysis in myocardial infarction (TIMI) trial frame count and its reproducibility.

BACKGROUND The potential factors that introduce variability into TIMI frame count (TFC) have not been systematically investigated. The goal of this study was to determine if nitrate use, dye injection rate, catheter size, the phase of the cardiac cycle in which dye is injected, or heart rate affect the TFC and to investigate the reproducibility of the TFC. METHODS AND RESULTS The dye injection rate was increased 1 mL/s, and angiography was repeated. A coronary angiogram was taken first with an 8F catheter and then with a 6F catheter. After taking angiograms, intracoronary nitrate was given to the patient, and the second angiography was performed. Basal heart rate was increased 20 beats/min, and angiography was repeated. Dye injection was performed at the beginning of systole and diastole. The TFC was not significantly changed by increasing the dye injection rate (P=0.467) or by changing catheter size (P=0.693). Nitrate administration significantly increased the TFC from 26.4+/-11.9 to 32.8+/-13.3 frames (P<0.001). Dye injection at the beginning of diastole significantly decreased the TFC from 30.1+/-8.8 to 24.4+/-7.9 frames (P<0.001) for the left coronary artery and from 24.16+/-4.49 to 21. 24+/-4.45 frames (P<0.001) for the right coronary artery. Increasing heart rate significantly decreased the TFC from 30.4+/-6.1 to 25. 3+/-7.2 frames (P<0.001). Intraobserver and interobserver reproducibility of the TFC was good (mean difference, 1.33+/-1.24 and 2.57+/-1.72 frames, respectively). CONCLUSIONS Nitrate use, heart rate, and the phase of the cardiac cycle in which dye is injected had significant effects on the TFC. Therefore, studies comparing TFC need to consider these factors, and the use of nitrates should be either standardized or randomized.
Smart Lighting in Multipurpose Outdoor Environments: Energy Efficient Solution using Network of Cooperating Objects

The first applications for smart environments targeted well-scoped spaces and appliances. These applications were strong drivers to advance Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) and the Internet of Things (IoT). With the evolution of the technological base, more complex environments became the new targets. The concept of cooperating objects (CO) enables further advancement of IoT and helps to grasp the multiple aspects of these environments. This paper describes smart lighting application for the multipurpose outdoor environment at the university campus area implemented following the new paradigm. The application is aiming efficient use of energy and future integration with associated industrial systems.
Predictors of Development of Diabetes in Patients With Chronic Heart Failure in the Candesartan in Heart Failure Assessment of Reduction in Mortality and Morbidity (CHARM) Program

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was to identify predictors of incident diabetes during follow-up of nondiabetic patients with chronic heart failure (CHF) in the Candesartan in Heart Failure Assessment of Reduction in Mortality and Morbidity (CHARM) program. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS A total of 1,620 nondiabetic patients had full baseline datasets. We compared baseline demographic, medication, and laboratory data for patients who did or did not develop diabetes and conducted logistic regression and receiver operator characteristic curve analyses. RESULTS Over a median period of 2.8 years, 126 of the 1,620 patients (7.8%) developed diabetes. In multiple logistic regression analysis, the following baseline characteristics were independently associated with incident diabetes in decreasing order of significance by stepwise selection: higher A1C (odds ratio [OR] 1.78 per 1 SD increase; P < 0.0001), higher BMI (OR 1.64 per 1 SD increase; P < 0.0001), lipid-lowering therapy (OR 2.05; P = 0.0005), lower serum creatinine concentration (OR 0.68 per 1 SD increase; P = 0.0018), diuretic therapy (OR 4.81; P = 0.003), digoxin therapy (OR 1.65; P = 0.022), higher serum alanine aminotransferase concentration (OR 1.15 per 1 SD increase; P = 0.027), and lower age (OR 0.81 per 1 SD increase; P = 0.048). Using receiver operating characteristic curve analysis, A1C and BMI yielded areas under the curve of 0.723 and 0.712, respectively, increasing to 0.788 when combined. Addition of other variables independently associated with diabetes risk minimally improved prediction of diabetes. CONCLUSIONS In nondiabetic patients with CHF in CHARM, A1C and BMI were the strongest predictors of the development of diabetes. Other minor predictors in part reflected CHF severity or drug-associated diabetes risk. Identifying patients with CHF at risk of diabetes through simple criteria appears possible and could enable targeted preventative measures.
Regression-Discontinuity Designs and Popular Elections : Implications of Pro-Incumbent Bias in Close U . S . House Races

The regression-discontinuity (RD) design has experienced a resurgence of interest in many fields, including political science. Following David Lee’s pioneering work on the incumbency advantage in U.S. House elections, many scholars have begun to apply RD designs to popular elections. Under certain assumptions, the RD design yields causal estimates that approach the gold standard of randomized experiments. There are good reasons to believe, however, that outcomes of narrowly decided U.S. Congressional elections are anything but random. Consistent with this notion, we demonstrate that bare winners and bare losers in U.S. House elections exhibit dramatic differences on key pretreatment covariates. Bare winners have substantially more financial resources than candidates who just lose and are far more likely to belong to the party that won the previous election in the district. Congressional Quarterly’s pre-election race ratings predict the outcomes of even extremely close elections with a high degree of accuracy. Close House elections are so predictable that it is impossible to achieve covariate balance between matched treated and control observations. We show that post-election recounts do not change election results often enough to account for the large imbalances in pre-election covariates that we observe. We conclude that bare winners and bare losers in U.S. House elections are not exchangeable ex ante. Therefore, the RD design is not valid in the case of U.S. House elections, and its application to other kinds of electoral data requires careful justification of the identifying assumptions. We discuss the practical advantages and drawbacks of RD designs and offer advice on the implementation and interpretation of such designs. We thank David Lee for generously providing replication files for Lee (2008). We also thank Scott Adler, David Brady, Gary Jacobson, Keith Poole, and Jonathan Wand for sharing their data with us. Henry Brady, Andy Eggers, Luke Keele, Winston Lin, Walter Mebane, Jr., Eric Schickler, and Laura Stoker gave useful feedback, and Peter Ryan helped shape the project in its formative stages. Willa Caughey, Mona Fang, and Sarah Weiner provided valuable research assistance. Ph.D. candidate, Travers Department of Political Science, UC Berkeley, http://devincaughey.com Associate Professor, Travers Department of Political Science and Director, Center for Causal Inference and Program Evaluation, Institute of Governmental Studies, UC Berkeley, http://sekhon.berkeley. edu
Are smartphones better than CRC cards?

During early phases of a software development process co-located group work is an important technique that involves all stakeholders to derive requirements and a design of a future software system. However, such group work is usually applied without any computer-assistance and often faces the problem that information is not well preserved for subsequent steps. In order to examine whether group work benefits from computer-assistance, we developed CREWSpace. It leverages mobile devices to allow simultaneous interaction with a shared software model. In particular, it implements a digital variant of the CRC method. In this paper, we discuss advantages and disadvantages of the traditional CRC method, briefly introduce CREWSpace along with important implementation details, and focus on a qualitative usability study. Its results suggest that our prototype keeps the advantages of traditional CRC method and compensates many of its weaknesses.
Vertebral Formula in Red-Crowned Crane (Grus japonensis) and Hooded Crane (Grus monacha)

ABSTRACT Red-crowned cranes (Grus japonensis) are distributed separately in the east Eurasian Continent (continental population) and in Hokkaido, Japan (island population). The island population is sedentary in eastern Hokkaido and has increased from a very small number of cranes to over 1,300, thus giving rise to the problem of poor genetic diversity. While, Hooded cranes (Grus monacha), which migrate from the east Eurasian Continent and winter mainly in Izumi, Kagoshima Prefecture, Japan, are about eight-time larger than the island population of Red-crowned cranes. We collected whole bodies of these two species, found dead or moribund in eastern Hokkaido and in Izumi, and observed skeletons with focus on vertebral formula. Numbers of cervical vertebrae (Cs), thoracic vertebrae (Ts), vertebrae composing the synsacrum (Sa) and free coccygeal vertebrae (free Cos) in 22 Red-crowned cranes were 17 or 18, 9–11, 13 or 14 and 7 or 8, respectively. Total number of vertebrae was 47, 48 or 49, and the vertebral formula was divided into three types including 9 sub-types. Numbers of Cs, Ts, vertebrae composing the Sa and free Cos in 25 Hooded cranes were 17 or 18, 9 or 10, 12–14 and 6–8, respectively. Total number of vertebrae was 46, 47, 48 or 49, and the vertebral formula was divided into four types including 14 sub-types. Our findings clearly showed various numerical vertebral patterns in both crane species; however, these variations in the vertebral formula may be unrelated to the genetic diversity.
The ProcessWall: a process state server approach to process programming

The ProcessWall is a process state server providing storage for process states plus operations for defining and manipulating the structure of those states. It separates the state of a software process from any program for constructing that state. Instead, client programs implement the processes for operating on the process state. This approach has a number of potential benefits such as support for process formalism interoperability, support for multiple process languages, low-cost retro-fitting of process into existing environments, and support for long-term execution of processes. The process server interface provides descriptive mechanisms for representing process state as well as product state. A classification of client programs is provided to show how the state server can be used in a variety of ways.
Fast and Accurate Guidance - Response Times to Navigational Sounds

Route guidance systems are used every day by both, sighted and visually impaired people. Systems, such as those built into cars and smart phones, usually using speech to direct the user towards their desired location. Sounds other than functional and speech sounds can, however, be used for directing people in distinct directions. The present paper compares response times with different stimuli and error rates in the detection. Functional sounds are chosen with and without intrinsic meanings, musical connotations, and stereo locations. Panned sine tones are identiﬁed as the fastest and most correctly identiﬁed stimuli in the test while speech is not identiﬁed faster than arbitrary sounds that have no particular meaning.
Revisiting Network Energy Efficiency of Mobile Apps: Performance in the Wild

Energy consumption due to network traffic on mobile devices continues to be a significant concern. We examine a range of excessive energy consumption problems caused by background network traffic through a two-year user study, and also validate these findings through in-lab testing of the most recent versions of major mobile apps. We discover a new energy consumption problem where foreground network traffic persists after switching from the foreground to the background, leading to unnecessary energy and data drain. Furthermore, while we find some apps have taken steps to improve the energy impact of periodic background traffic, energy consumption differences of up to an order of magnitude exist between apps with near-identical functionality. Finally, by examining how apps are used in the wild, we find that some apps continue to generate unneeded traffic for days when the app is not being used, and in some cases this wasted traffic is responsible for a majority of the app's network energy overhead. We propose that these persistent, widespread and varied sources of excessive energy consumption in popular apps should be addressed through new app management tools that tailor network activity to user interaction patterns.
Campylobacter epidemiology: a descriptive study reviewing 1 million cases in England and Wales between 1989 and 2011

Objectives To review Campylobacter cases in England and Wales over 2 decades and examine the main factors/mechanisms driving the changing epidemiology. Design A descriptive study of Campylobacter patients between 1989 and 2011. Cases over 3 years were linked anonymously to postcode, population density, deprivation indices and census data. Cases over 5 years were anonymously linked to local weather exposure estimates. Setting Patients were from general practice, hospital and environmental health investigations through primary diagnostic laboratories across England and Wales. Participants There were 1 109 406 cases. Outcome measures Description of changes in Campylobacter epidemiology over 23 years and how the main drivers may influence these. Results There was an increase in Campylobacter cases over the past 23 years, with the largest increase in people over 50 years. Changes in the underlying population have contributed to this, including the impacts of population increases after World War I, World War II and the ‘baby boom’ of the 1960s. A recent increase in risk or ascertainment within this population has caused an increase in cases in all age groups from 2004 to 2011. The seasonal increase in cases between weeks 18 (Early May) and 22 (Early June) was consistent across ages, years and regions and was most marked in children and in more rural regions. Campylobacter prevalence by week in each region correlated with temperature 2 weeks before. There were higher prevalences in areas with a low population density, low deprivation and lower percentage of people of ethnic origin. Data from sero–phage and multilocus sequence typing show a few common types and many uncommon types. Conclusions The drivers/mechanisms influencing seasonality, age distribution, population density, socioeconomic and long-term differences are diverse and their relative contributions remain to be established. Surveillance and typing provide insights into Campylobacter epidemiology and sources of infection, providing a sound basis for targeted interventions.
Personal characteristics and job satisfaction

This study examines the relationships among job satisfaction and selected personal variables. Data were collected from 659 participants in various occupational areas in the Czech Republic (managers, accountants, in sales/insurance, PR, advertising, health service, teachers, nature con- servation as well as manual workers and different kinds of skilled workers). The study revealed several personal correlates of job satisfaction. Low negative correlation between job satisfaction and age was found. Next, individuals with higher level of education are more satisfied in job than workers with lower level of education. However, this trend does not hold for individuals with the highest level of education. Those employees are slightly less satisfied. A decreased level of job satisfaction of employees with a higher level of education is explained in terms of certain disap- pointment - those people realized that their education did not lead to extrinsic rewards such as money, prestige, authority, and autonomy. No significant gender differences in job satisfaction were found. Further, managers and employees with supervisory responsibility were more satisfied than workers without supervisory responsibility. Workers are slightly more satisfied in large companies with more than 500 employe- es than in smaller organizations. Moreover, the data revealed that employees from international corporations are definitely more satisfied than employees from other types of organizations. The least satisfied are employees working in public/governmental organizations. Finally, an association between personal traits of the Five-factor personality model, self-efficacy and job satisfaction was inspected. The data indicated that agreeableness, stability, openness, and self-efficacy were posi- tively related to the total job satisfaction.
Spiegelzymes: Sequence Specific Hydrolysis of L-RNA with Mirror Image Hammerhead Ribozymes and DNAzymes

In this manuscript we describe for the first time mirror image catalytic nucleic acids (Spiegelzymes), which hydrolyze sequence specifically L-ribonucleic acid molecules. The mirror image nucleic acid ribozymes designed are based upon the known hammerhead ribozyme and DNAzyme structures that contain L-ribose or L-deoxyribose instead of the naturally occurring D-ribose or D-deoxyribose, respectively. Both Spiegelzymes show similar hydrolytic activities with the same L-RNA target molecules and they also exhibit extra ordinary stabilities when tested with three different human sera. In this respect they are very similar to Spiegelmers (mirror image aptamers), which we had previously developed and for which it has been shown that they are non-toxic and non-immunogenic. Since we are also able to demonstrate that the hammerhead and DNAzyme Spiegelzymes can also hydrolyze mirror image oligonucleotide sequences, like they occur in Spiegelmers, in vivo, it seems reasonable to assume that Spiegelzymes may in principle be used as an antidote against Spiegelmers. Since the Spiegelzymes contain the same building blocks as the Spiegelmers, it can be expected that they will have similar favorable biological characteristics concerning toxicity and immunogenety. In trying to understand the mechanism of action of the Spiegelzymes described in this study, we have initiated for the first time a model building system with L-nucleic acids. The models for L-hammerhead ribozyme and L-DNAzyme interaction with the same L-RNA target will be presented.
An Integral Analysis of Mindfulness and Self-Compassion Among Adolescents

This case study focused on teaching self-compassion to adolescents through a mindfulness program. Self-compassion involves being kind towards oneself, understanding that we are all part of common humanity, and mindfulness. This multi-methods study was grounded in integral theory, which examines self-compassion through multiple lenses with both qualitative and quantitative methodologies. The findings indicated that a mindfulness program teaching self-compassion had many benefits to students, including increased mindful awareness and focused attention; emotional awareness and regulation; self-awareness, self-kindness, and self-acceptance; resiliency and growth mindset; compassion, acceptance, and forgiveness for others; and a belief it could reduce bullying in schools. Mindfulness programs in the school context will need to be introduced slowly over the next several years as students, parents, teachers, and administrators all have to understand the importance of these skills before they can be implemented into the classroom.
The angular momentum of cold dark matter haloes with and without baryons

We investigate the magnitude and internal alignment of the angular momentum of cold dark matter haloes in simulations with and without baryons. We analyse the cumulative angular momentum profiles of hundreds of thousands of well resolved h aloes in the Millennium simulation of Springel et al. and in a smaller, but higher resolu tion, simulation, in total spanning 5 orders of magnitude in mass. For haloes of a given mass, the median specific angular momentum increases with radius as j(6 r) / r. The direction of the vector varies considerably with radius: the median angle between the inner (. 0.25Rvir) and total (6 Rvir) angular momentum vectors is about 25 ◦ . To investigate how baryons affect halo spin, we use another high-resolution simulation, which includes gas cooling, s tar formation and feedback. This simulation produces a sample of galaxies with a realistic di stribution of disc-to-total ratios, D/T : two thirds of the galaxies have D/T > 0.5 in the B-band. The formation of the galaxy spins up the dark matter within 0.1Rvir such that the specific halo angular momentum increases by � 50 per cent in the median. The dark matter angular momentum becomes better aligned, but there remains a broad distribution of (mis-)al ignments between the halo and the central galaxy, with a median angle between their angular momenta of � 30 ◦ . Galaxies have a range of orientations relative to the shape of the halo: hal f of them have their minor axes misaligned by more than 45 ◦ , although only about 10 per cent of the galaxies lie within 30 ◦ of the plane perpendicular to the major axis of their halo. Fi nally, we align a sample of haloes according to the orientation of their galaxies and stack the projected mass distributions. Although the individual haloes are significantly aspherical, galaxy‐halo misalignments produce a stacked mass distribution that cannot be distinguished fr om circular. If the lack of alignment found in our simulations is realistic, it will be extremely d ifficult for weak lensing studies to measure the ellipticity of cold dark matter haloes using thi s technique.
A field study of human-agent interaction for electricity tariff switching

Recently, many algorithms have been developed for autonomous agents to manage home energy use on behalf of their human owners. By so doing, it is expected that agents will be more efficient at, for example, choosing the best energy tariff to switch to when dynamically priced tariffs come about. However, to date, there has been no validation of such technologies in any field trial. In particular, it has not been shown whether users prefer fully autonomous agents as opposed to controlling their preferences manually. Hence, in this paper we describe a novel platform, called TariffAgent, to study notions of flexible autonomy in the context of tariff switching. TariffAgent uses real-world datasets and real-time electricity monitoring to instantiate a scenario where human participants may have to make, or delegate to their agent (in different ways), tariff switching decisions given uncertainties about their own consump- tion and tariff prices. We carried out a field trial with 10 participants and, from both quantitative and qualitative results, formulate novel design guidelines for systems that implement flexible autonomy.
HAND GESTURES RECOGNITION BASED ON VISION

With the ever-increasing diffusion of computers int o the society, it is widely believed that present popular mode of interactions with computers (mouse and keyboard) will become a bottleneck in the effective utilization of informat ion flow between the computers and the human. Vision based Gesture recognition has the pot ntial to be a natural and powerful tool supporting efficient and intuitive interaction betw en the human and the computer. Visual interpretation of hand gestures can help in achievi ng the ease and naturalness desired for Human Computer Interaction (HCI). This has motivate d many researchers in computer vision-based analysis and interpretation of hand ge stures as a very active research area.