Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Evidence suggesting that a chronic disease self-management program can improve health status while reducing hospitalization: a randomized trial.

OBJECTIVES This study evaluated the effectiveness (changes in health behaviors, health status, and health service utilization) of a self-management program for chronic disease designed for use with a heterogeneous group of chronic disease patients. It also explored the differential effectiveness of the intervention for subjects with specific diseases and comorbidities. METHODS The study was a six-month randomized, controlled trial at community-based sites comparing treatment subjects with wait-list control subjects. Participants were 952 patients 40 years of age or older with a physician-confirmed diagnosis of heart disease, lung disease, stroke, or arthritis. Health behaviors, health status, and health service utilization, as determined by mailed, self-administered questionnaires, were measured. RESULTS Treatment subjects, when compared with control subjects, demonstrated improvements at 6 months in weekly minutes of exercise, frequency of cognitive symptom management, communication with physicians, self-reported health, health distress, fatigue, disability, and social/role activities limitations. They also had fewer hospitalizations and days in the hospital. No differences were found in pain/physical discomfort, shortness of breath, or psychological well-being. CONCLUSIONS An intervention designed specifically to meet the needs of a heterogeneous group of chronic disease patients, including those with comorbid conditions, was feasible and beneficial beyond usual care in terms of improved health behaviors and health status. It also resulted in fewer hospitalizations and days of hospitalization.
The Design of Social Drones: A Review of Studies on Autonomous Flyers in Inhabited Environments

The design space of social drones, where autonomous flyers operate in close proximity to human users or bystanders, is distinct from use cases involving a remote human operator and/or an uninhabited environment; and warrants foregrounding human-centered design concerns. Recently, research on social drones has followed a trend of rapid growth. This paper consolidates the current state of the art in human-centered design knowledge about social drones through a review of relevant studies, scaffolded by a descriptive framework of design knowledge creation. Our analysis identified three high-level themes that sketch out knowledge clusters in the literature, and twelve design concerns which unpack how various dimensions of drone aesthetics and behavior relate to pertinent human responses. These results have the potential to inform and expedite future research and practice, by supporting readers in defining and situating their future contributions. The materials and results of our analysis are also published in an open online repository that intends to serve as a living hub for a community of researchers and designers working with social drones.
Greedy Compositional Clustering for Unsupervised Learning of Hierarchical Compositional Models

This paper proposes to integrate a feature pursuit learning process into a greedy bottom-up learning scheme. The algorithm combines the benefits of bottom-up and top-down approaches for learning hierarchical models: It allows to induce the hierarchical structure of objects in an unsupervised manner, while avoiding a hard decision on the activation of parts. We follow the principle of compositionality by assembling higher-order parts from elements of lower layers in the hierarchy. The parts are learned greedily with an EM-type process that iterates between image encoding and part re-learning. The process stops when a candidate part is not able to find a free niche in the image. The algorithm proceeds layer by layer in a bottom-up manner until no further compositions are found. A subsequent top-down process composes the learned hierarchical shape vocabulary into a holistic object model. Experimental evaluation of the approach shows state-of-the-art performance on a domain adaptation task. Moreover, we demonstrate the capability of learning complex, semantically meaningful hierarchical compositional models without supervision.
A Real-time Decision Diagram for Timing Analysis and Synthesis

In this paper, we introduce an efficient real-time decision diagram, TBF BDD, characterizing both logical functionality and timing information of circuits. In contrast to the conventional timing methods that discretize time, this decision diagram permits real and continuous time and is applicable to both combinational and synchronous sequential circuits. First, we demonstrate how circuits can be represented functionally and temporally with TBF BDD’s. Then, we prove that TBF BDD’s have a canonical representation, i.e. two circuits have exactly the same timing behavior if and only if their TBF BDD’s are identical (or graphically isomorphic), and construct algorithms to transform TBF BDD’s to this canonical representation. Further, we derive algorithms for manipulating TBF BDD’s and demonstrate their efficiency by showing that these operations have complexities similar to those of binary decision diagrams. Becauseof the many similarities between BDD’s and TBF BDD’s, existing techniques in analysis as well as synthesis may be extended into the timing domain with TBF BDD’s. Finally, we apply TBF BDD’s to the exact computation of delays of combinational circuits, and compare sizes of BDD and TBF BDD with experimental results from ISCAS benchmarks.
Perceptual chunking and its effect on memory in speech processing: ERP and behavioral evidence

We examined how perceptual chunks of varying size in utterances can influence immediate memory of heard items (monosyllabic words). Using behavioral measures and event-related potentials (N400) we evaluated the quality of the memory trace for targets taken from perceived temporal groups (TGs) of three and four items. Variations in the amplitude of the N400 showed a better memory trace for items presented in TGs of three compared to those in groups of four. Analyses of behavioral responses along with P300 components also revealed effects of chunk position in the utterance. This is the first study to measure the online effects of perceptual chunks on the memory trace of spoken items. Taken together, the N400 and P300 responses demonstrate that the perceptual chunking of speech facilitates information buffering and a processing on a chunk-by-chunk basis.
On the robustness of distributed EM based BSS in asynchronous distributed microphone array scenarios

Distributed microphone array (DMA) processing has recently started attracting a lot of attention as a promising alternative to conventional microphone arrays with co-located elements. To perform efﬁcient blind source separation (BSS) in distributed manner, we have recently proposed a clustering based BSS approach that utilizes a distributed expectation-maximization al-gorithm. In this paper, we further investigate the effectiveness of this proposed method in typical DMA situations with drift error, i.e., the inevitable sampling frequency mismatch between different nodes/devices, which is a very important aspect that has yet to be examined. We compare our method experimentally with some conventional methods and their variants newly proposed here, and conﬁrm that our method is robust against drift error and achieves stable performance in various typical DMA scenarios, while the performance of the conventional approaches changes greatly depending on the DMA setup and amount of drift error.
Three dimensional reconstruction of coronary arteries from two views

Geometric measurement of localized lumen stenosis of the coronary artery is an important indicator of heart disease. Three-dimensional (3-D) reconstruction of coronary arteries is of significant interest for providing accurate quantification of coronary vasculature and stenosis information. The overall method of coronary arterial analysis, as presented here includes: segmentation of the coronary vessels followed by medial axes and diameter feature detection for the entire arterial tree; registration of the arterial trees from the two views; 3-D reconstruction from the two view medial axes and correction for any error in 3-D geometry (pose) to obtain final 3-D reconstruction. Measurements were made for performing an error analysis of a pig-cast phantom and human data, in order to evaluate the presented method.
Effects of turbidity and zooplankton availability on the condition and prey selection of pike larvae

Along with increasing eutrophication the pike (Esox lucius) has decreased in numbers in some parts of the Baltic Sea. We undertook a field study to identify the environmental factors affecting condition of pike larvae around the southwestern coast of Finland. We also sampled the natural zooplankton community to reveal food preferences of pike larvae. Our mixed model showed that larval condition decreased with increasing turbidity, whereas temperature, salinity and stomach content were non-significant factors. One third of the variation in larval condition was explained by sampling site, indicating that site characteristics influenced the condition index significantly. The prey selection index showed that pike larvae preferred adult copepods and cladocerans, whereas they ignored rotifers and seemingly copepod nauplii as well. Together, our data show that food availability and several environmental factors are crucial for the condition of pike larvae, and probably also survival and recruitment.
Upregulated Expression of Cytotoxicity-Related Genes in IFN-γ Knockout Mice with Schistosoma japonicum Infection

It is well accepted that IFN-γ is important to the development of acquired resistance against murine schistosomiasis. However, the in vivo role of this immunoregulatory cytokine in helminth infection needs to be further investigated. In this study, parasite burden and host immune response were observed in IFN-γ knockout mice (IFNg KO) infected with Schistosoma japonicum for 6 weeks. The results suggested that deficiency in IFN-γ led to decreased egg burden in mice, with low schistosome-specific IgG antibody response and enhanced activation of T cells during acute infection. Microarray and qRT-PCR data analyses showed significant upregulation of some cytotoxicity-related genes, including those from the granzyme family, tumor necrosis factor, Fas Ligand, and chemokines, in the spleen cells of IFNg KO mice. Furthermore, CD8+ cells instead of NK cells of IFNg KO mice exhibited increased transcription of cytotoxic genes compared with WT mice. Additionally, Schistosoma japonicum-specific egg antigen immunization also could activate CD8+ T cells to upregulate the expression of cytotoxic genes in IFNg KO mice. Our data suggest that IFN-γ is not always a positive regulator of immune responses. In certain situations, the disruption of IFN-γ signaling may up-regulate the cytotoxic T-cell-mediated immune responses to the parasite.
Effect of 6-hydroxydopamine treatment in the area postrema on morphine-induced emesis in ferrets.

To investigate the role of catecholamine release in emesis, we examined the effects of pretreatment with 6-hydroxydopamine (6-OH-DA) administered into the area postrema in morphine-induced emesis in ferrets. In the 6-OH-DA pre-treated animals, the latency to the first emetic response induced by morphine hydrochloride (1.0 mg/kg, s.c.) was significantly prolonged and the number of retches and emetic episodes was markedly reduced. In the medulla oblongata, the levels of dopamine and homovanilic acid were reduced by 6-OH-DA pretreatment. These results suggest that catecholamine release in the medulla oblongata, mainly dopamine release, may play an important role in morphine-induced emesis in ferrets.
Traffic analysis and control at proxy server

Bandwidth optimization for real-time video traffic transmission through the proxy server is a challenging issue for the next-generation network. The self — control of the traffic rate at the proxy server is based on the relative data present in the proxy server or to import the require data from the remote data center node. The smoothness of traffic transmission is highly depended on the self-configuration in the cache memory at the proxy server by used of optimized page replacement procedure. The web proxy cache memory is finite in size. The system performance is highly depended upon the self-optimization of the traffic rate at the proxy server. This paper presents the effect of zipf-distribution parameters to the outbound request and the effect of the parameters to measure the bandwidth requirement for the desire video file. This paper presents some of the relevant results for bandwidth optimization and the effect of traffic control during active transmission for various sizes of video file through the proxy server.
p53 inhibits RNA polymerase III-directed transcription in a promoter-dependent manner

Wild-type p53 represses Alu template activity in vitro and in vivo. However, upstream activating sequence elements from both the 7SL RNA gene and an Alu source gene relieve p53-mediated repression. p53 also represses the template activity of the U6 RNA gene both in vitro and in vivo but has no effect on in vitro transcription of genes encoding 5S RNA, 7SL RNA, adenovirus VAI RNA, and tRNA. The N-terminal activation domain of p53, which binds TATA-binding protein (TBP), is sufficient for repressing Alu transcription in vitro, and mutation of positions 22 and 23 in this region impairs p53-mediated repression of an Alu template both in vitro and in vivo. p53's N-terminal domain binds TFIIIB, presumably through its known interaction with TBP, and mutation of positions 22 and 23 interferes with TFIIIB binding. These results extend p53's transcriptional role to RNA polymerase III-directed templates and identify an additional level of Alu transcriptional regulation.
Post-operative arm complications Breast cancer ( BC ) Quality of life ( QoL ) Japan Arm symptoms and QoL in Japanese breast cancer patients

is Lecturer, Roger Ingham is Professor in Health and Community Psychology at the School of Psychology, University of Southampton, Southampton Across-sectional postal survey was conducted in Japan to investigate the relationships between arm symptom-related variables and quality of life (QoL) among Japanese women with breast cancer (BC) who had undergone surgery. Symptoms other than swelling (pain, loss of strength and poor range of motion) and discomfort in daily activities affected physical well-being, and pain and discomfort also affected psychological well-being. The surgical treatment of breast cancer has improved in sophistication, so most women with early BC no longer undergo radical mastectomies. However, axillary lymph node dissection (ALND), rather than sentinel lymph node biopsy (SLNB), is still widely recommended to check patients’ prognosis, especially in Japan. ALND and radiotherapy following breastconserving surgery have been identified as scar tissue that can cause blockages, and this may increase the chances of infection and inflammation (Harris et al, 2001); the affected area of swelling is so stretched that it is vulnerable to damage by everyday activities. Several studies have reported that more than half of respondents with BC who have undergone surgery complain of post-operative arm complications (Bosompra et al, 2002; McPhail and Wilson, 2000; Taylor 2004), and that the most commonly reported complication is numbness, with the least common being swelling (McPhail and Wilson, 2000). Pain, including heaviness and tightness, has also been reported (Moffatt et al, 2003).
Computer security self-efficacy effect: An extention of Technology-to-Performance chain model

Given a paucity of research and apparent lack of coherence in information system research, it seems that there is no consensus in the information system field as to how security fits into the information system acceptance, usage, success, utilization, and/or performance impact (effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction). This paper is part of an ongoing research project designed to extend the Technology-to-Performance Chain (TPC) model by including the Computer Security Self-Efficacy (CSSE) construct, a strategy of model extension suggested by several researchers. This project aims to examine the research conducted in the last decade in information system journals regarding security issues then based on social cognitive theory, to propose a construct to measure individuals' computer security self-efficacy. Based on the Technology-to-Performance Chain (TPC) model, this study design expected to models and tests relationship among computer security self-efficacy and secures online banking system performance impact. The study will try to answer the question “to what extent has the computer security self-efficacy affected user's perception of secure online banking system effectiveness”. After this research finished, the researcher assume that this study findings will provides an initial step towards understanding of the applicability of social cognitive theory in information system security domain and helps information security professionals design information systems considering the effect of computer security self-efficacy on secure information system.
Ocular Dominance and Visual Function Testing

Purpose. To show the distribution of ocular dominance as measured with sensory and eye sighting methods and its potential relationship with high and low contrast LogMAR visual acuity in presbyopic subjects. Method. Forty-four presbyopes (48.5 ± 3.5 years) participated in this study. Ocular dominance was determined by eye sighting (hole-in-card) and sensorial (+1.50 D lens induced blur) methods. According to the dominance detected with each method (RE: right eye or LE: left eye), patients were classified in dominance type 1 (RE/RE), type 2 (RE/LE), type 3 (LE/RE) and type 4 (LE/LE). Results. Baseline refractive error (MSE) was RE:−0.36 ± 1.67 D and LE:−0.35 ± 1.85 D (P = 0.930). RE was the dominant eye in 61.4% and 70.5% of times as obtained from sensorial and sighting methods, respectively. Most frequent dominance was of type 1 (52.3%), in this case the RE showed statistically significant better distance low contrast LogMAR VA (0.04 LogMAR units) compared to the LE (P < 0.05). Conclusions. The dominance was more frequent in RE in this sample. The eye sighting and sensorial methods to define ocular dominance agreed in more than half of cases. Amount of MSE was not significantly different between dominant and non-dominant eye. But in case of right dominance, the RE presented better distance low contrast VA compared to the LE.
Anemia and Patient Blood Management in Hip and Knee Surgery: A Systematic Review of the Literature

A systematic search was conducted to determine the characteristics of perioperative anemia, its association with clinical outcomes, and the effects of patient blood management interventions on these outcomes in patients undergoing major orthopedic surgery. In patients undergoing total hip or knee arthroplasty and hip fracture surgery, preoperative anemia was highly prevalent, ranging from 24 ± 9% to 44 ± 9%, respectively. Postoperative anemia was even more prevalent (51% and 87 ± 10%, respectively). Perioperative anemia was associated with a blood transfusion rate of 45 ± 25% and 44 ± 15%, postoperative infections, poorer physical functioning and recovery, and increased length of hospital stay and mortality. Treatment of preoperative anemia with iron, with or without erythropoietin, and perioperative cell salvage decreased the need for blood transfusion and may contribute to improved patient outcomes. High-impact prospective studies are necessary to confirm these findings and establish firm clinical guidelines.
Formation-based approach for multi-robot cooperative manipulation based on optimal control design

Cooperative manipulation, where several robots collaboratively transport an object, poses a great challenge in robotics. In order to avoid object deformations in cooperative manipulation, formation rigidity of the robots is desired. This work proposes a novel linear state feedback controller that combines both optimal goal regulation and a relaxed form of the formation rigidity constraint, exploiting an underlying distributed impedance control scheme. Since the presented control design problem is in a biquadratic LQR-like form, we present an iterative design algorithm to compute the controller. As an intermediate result, an approximated state-space model of an interconnected robot system is derived. The controller design approach is evaluated in a full-scale multi-robot experiment.
Incident Stroke Is Associated With Common Carotid Artery Diameter and Not Common Carotid Artery Intima-Media Thickness

Background and Purpose— The common carotid artery interadventitial diameter is measured on ultrasound images as the distance between the media-adventitia interfaces of the near and far walls. It is associated with common carotid intima-media thickness (IMT) and left ventricular mass and might therefore also have an association with incident stroke. Methods— We studied 6255 individuals free of coronary heart disease and stroke at baseline with mean age of 62.2 years (47.3% men), members of a multiethnic community–based cohort of whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Chinese. Ischemic stroke events were centrally adjudicated. Common carotid artery interadventitial diameter and IMT were measured. Cases with incident atrial fibrillation (n=385) were excluded. Multivariable Cox proportional hazards models were generated with time to ischemic event as outcome, adjusting for risk factors. Results— There were 115 first-time ischemic strokes at 7.8 years of follow-up. Common carotid artery interadventitial diameter was a significant predictor of ischemic stroke (hazard ratio, 1.86; 95% confidence interval, 1.59–2.17 per millimeter) and remained so after adjustment for risk factors and common carotid IMT with a hazard ratio of 1.52/mm (95% confidence interval, 1.22–1.88). Common carotid IMT was not an independent predictor after adjustment (hazard ratio, 0.14; 95% confidence interval, 0.14–1.19). Conclusions— Although common carotid IMT is not associated with stroke, interadventitial diameter of the common carotid artery is independently associated with first-time incident ischemic stroke even after adjusting for IMT. Our hypothesis that this is in part attributable to the effects of exposure to blood pressure needs confirmation by other studies. Clinical Trial Registration— URL: http://www.clinicaltrials. gov. Unique identifier: NCT00063440.
Diels_Alder reactions in water

Abstract This review illustrates how water, as an environmentally friendly solvent, can have significant additional benefits when it is used as a solvent for the Diels_Alder reaction. The mechanism by which the unique properties of water enhance the rate and selectivity are discussed. Also, possibilities for the achievement of further increases in rate and enantioselectivity of aqueous Diels_Alder reactions through Lewis-acid and micellar catalysis are reviewed.