Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Method for Construction of Lyapunov Functions for Higher Order Sliding Modes

A method to construct (strict) Lyapunov Functions for a class of Higher Order Sliding Modes (HOSM) algorithms, that are homogeneous and piecewise state affine is presented. It is shown first that several HOSM algorithms presented in the literature posses these properties. The basic idea of the construction method is borrowed from the constructive proofs of the Lyapunov’s Converse Theorems. It is shown, by means of some concrete examples of second and third order, that the construction of the Lyapunov Function can be done for this class of systems. The obtained Lyapunov functions allow the estimation of the convergence time, the values of the gains that render the origin finite time stable, and the robustness of the algorithms to bounded perturbations.
INFLATION AND ECONOMIC GROWTH

The basic question that we find ourselves struggling with in the area of general economic policy is how successful we are going to be in trying to cool an inflation which by now is running well into its fourth year. This gives rise to one of the practical problems in the management of economic policy: the problem of the substantial lags which exist between a change in policy and the visible effect of that change on the economic scenein a nation not noted for its patience in economic matters. When we read that the Federal Reserve Board has increased the discount rate, we are inclined to check it out in the grocery store the next morning, and if we find it had no effect on prices, to conclude that obviously the policy failed. This tendency leads to a certain amount of "popular" support for direct controls on wages and prices. If the problem is rising prices, some suggest that we just decree that prices cannot rise and thereby eliminate the problem, at least ostensibly so.
Impact of the 2007 - 2009 world financial crisis on share price behaviour at the Nairobi stock exchange

Numerous studies have been carried out to examine how stock prices respond to various occurances and events. The financial turmoil originating in the developed world in August 2007 spilled over to developing countries, and Sub Saharan Africa was not immune to the secondary effects of the global financial crisis. Private capital inflows to Sub Saharan Africa were relatively robust up to the first half of 2008, but dropped sharply from the third quarter of 2008, owing to a reduced capability and propensity to invest on the part of foreign investors. The purpose of the study is to examine the effects the 2007 2009 global financial crisis on share price behaviour at NSE. Secondary data from the Nairobi Stock exchange database for all listed companies was utilised. The population and sample of interest in this study comprised of all companies quoted on the Nairobi stock exchange. The period studied was January 2005 to December 2009.The sample consists of monthly mean share prices of all companies listed at NSE and monthly NSE share indices. A trend analysis of share price performance and NSE share indices was carried out. The study noted a negative trend characterised by plunging stock market activity between August 2008 and February 2009.The study concludes that the global financial crisis had negative effects on the share price behaviour.
Methods for Measuring DNA Adducts and Abasic Sites II: Methods for Measurement of DNA Adducts

This unit contains protocols for analyzing DNA adducts separated from the DNA backbone. HPLC is used to quantify total guanine or ribo‐ or deoxynucleotides as well as methods for analyzing specific adducts. These methods include HPLC with electrochemical detection, immunoaffininty chromatography to enrich for specific adducts, and gas and liquid chromatography in combination with HPLC and mass spectrometry.
Climate Change in the Media andPublic Perceptions of it:Investigating the differences betweenTabloid and Broadsheet Newspapers.

Climate change is a big issue in today’s world and holds a potential risk to society, it is therefore important to gauge what the publics understanding of the issue is. The focus of this study is to try and understand what the public think about climate change being reported in the media and if newspapers influence people’s opinions and attitudes towards climate change. The research carried out consisted of examining several examples of newspaper headlines about climate change from tabloid and broadsheet newspapers and also conducting a questionnaire in the North West of England to find out people’s attitudes and knowledge about climate change in the media and the influence tabloids and broadsheets it could have on them. The study found that most participants thought they had a good understanding of the climate change issue and the most commonly acknowledged sources of this knowledge were school and newspapers. There were some differences between the opinions of broadsheet and tabloid readers; broadsheet readers tended to think that newspaper information was not entirely trustworthy and were aware that newspapers can be very persuasive, whereas tabloid readers appeared more inclined to believe what they read.
Etoposide and carboplatin: a highly effective combination in relapsed or refractory Wilms' tumor--a phase II study by the French Society of Pediatric Oncology.

PURPOSE Since we had previously demonstrated encouraging efficacy of etoposide in patients with relapsed or refractory Wilms' tumor (WT), the likely synergism between etoposide and platinum compounds prompted us to conduct a phase II study of a combination with carboplatin. PATIENTS AND METHODS Twenty-six relapsed or refractory WT patients were included in a phase II study of two courses of combination etoposide 100 mg/m2/d for 5 days and carboplatin 160 mg/m2/d for 5 days, with a 21-day interval between the two courses. Initial stages were I (n = 2), II (n = 8), III (n = 6), IV (n = 6), V (n = 3), and unknown (n = 1). Sites of diseases were lung(s) (11 patients), abdomen-pelvis or liver or primary tumor (six patients), and multiple (eight patients). Histology was unfavorable in three of 26 patients. RESULTS Complete response (CR) was documented in eight patients and partial remission (PR) in 11 (overall response rate, 73%). Stable disease (SD) was observed in five patients and progressive disease (PD) in two. Thrombocytopenia (grade IV) was the major toxicity, and platelet transfusions were required in all but two patients. Grade III anemia and grade III to IV neutropenia were seen in 19 and 23, respectively, of 25 assessable first courses. Venoocclusive disease of the liver was fatal in one child who had undergone irradiation to the whole abdomen, 8 weeks before study. CONCLUSION Combination etoposide and carboplatin has impressive activity in refractory or relapsed WT at the cost of high-grade hematologic toxicity, especially thrombocytopenia. It is of great interest in second-line therapy, since eight of 26 patients are still alive in continuous CR (median follow-up duration, 40 months; range, 24 to 56). This combination deserves further investigation as first-line or consolidation treatment.
Hypocholesterolemia is a significant predictor of death in a cohort of chronic hemodialysis patients.

BACKGROUND Although hypocholesterolemia is common in chronic hemodialysis patients, its effect on survival has not been studied in a large patients population. METHODS A cohort of chronic hemodialysis patients (N = 1167) was prospectively followed from January 1991 to January 2001. The survival impact of this cohort, who were divided according to different baseline levels of serum cholesterol, were calculated with the multivariate Cox proportional hazard analysis after adjusting for baseline clinical and laboratory variables. RESULTS During the study period, 567 (48.6%) patients died. The mean (SD) baseline level of serum cholesterol was 171.0 (40.8) mg/dL and ranged from 76 to 378 mg/dL. The five-year survival rate was highest (0.812) in the subgroup that had a serum cholesterol range of 200 to 219 mg/dL and was lowest (0.608) in the subgroup with serum cholesterol values of <140 mg/dL. The five-year survival rate was 0.735 in the subgroup with serum cholesterol of > or =220 mg/dL. Serum cholesterol was a significant predictor of death with an adjusted hazards ratio (95% confidence interval) was 0.939 (0.891 to 0.989). In a subgroup of patients with serum albumin values > or =4.5 g/dL (N = 128), the adjusted hazards ratio was even greater at 1.370 (1.105 to 1.692). Other than sex, body mass index and serum albumin were significant determinants of baseline levels of serum cholesterol. CONCLUSIONS Hypocholesterolemia was an independent predictor of death in patients on chronic hemodialysis. This impact of hypercholesterolemia on survival was only evident in a subgroup of patients whose serum albumin was more than 4.5 g/dL.
Growth of human immunodeficiency type 1-infected and uninfected children: a prospective cohort study in Kigali, Rwanda, 1988 to 1993.

OBJECTIVE To compare the anthropometric characteristics of children with and without HIV-1 infection. METHODS In a prospective cohort study of 218 children born to HIV-1 seropositive mothers and 218 children born to HIV-1 seronegative mothers in Kigali, Rwanda, 3 groups were compared: infected children (n = 46); uninfected children born to seropositive mothers (n = 140); and uninfected children born to seronegative mothers (n = 207). Weight, height and head circumference were measured at birth, every 3 months during the first year of life and every 6 months thereafter. The weight-for-age, height-for-age, weight-for-height and head circumference-for-age mean z scores were calculated. RESULTS The weight-for-age, height-for-age and head circumference-for-age mean z scores were lower among HIV-infected children than among uninfected ones at each time period. The reduction in the weight-for-age mean z score was the greatest between 12 and 36 months. The reduction in the height-for-age mean z score of HIV-infected children was persistently below 2 SD after 9 months of age. On the other hand the weight-for-height mean z score was not consistently lower in HIV-infected children when compared with uninfected ones. The anthropometric characteristics of uninfected children born to seropositive mothers were similar to those of children born to seronegative mothers. CONCLUSIONS In this study HIV-infected children were more frequently stunted (low height-for-age) than uninfected ones. Wasting (low weight-for-height) was not common among HIV-infected children.
Allocation of Database Files Across Parallel Stores for Efficient Processing of Partial-Match Queries.

Abstract : This report presents the results of research on the allocation of binary cartesian product database files across several stores (such as disks) which are accessible in parallel so that the average time required to perform the retrieval (by using several parallel accesses) of all buckets specified by a partial-match query is objective of constructing efficient packings of Hamming spheres in hypercubes. The viewpoint of binary cartesian product file allocation thus produced allowed in our research the creation of allocations for two particular sizes of the set of stores such that the average processing time for partial-match queries was smaller than that of the best allocation technique found in the literature for these same two cases. It also provides a framework in which good allocations for other particular sizes of the set of stores, and possibly for general sets of stores, might be found.
Energy efficient bootstrapped CMOS inverter for ultra-low power applications

This paper describes an energy efficient boot-strapped CMOS inverter for ultra-low power applications. The proposed design is achieved by internally boosting the gate voltage of the transistors (via the charge pumping technique), and the operating region is shifted from the sub-threshold to a higher region, enhancing performance and improving tolerance to PVT variations. Despite the proposed bootstrapped driver operates with a sub-threshold power supply it uses fewer transistors engaging in this region by utilizing two stages. The first stage is a normal driver with PMOS and NMOS transistors that are driven by the enhancing voltage circuit (stage 2) which generates voltage levels theoretically between −VDD for pulling up to 2Vdd for pulling down. Our analysis shows that the proposed implementation achieves around 20% reduction in energy consumption compared to conventional designs under a supply voltage of 0.15V VDD.
Outcome of intensive inpatient treatment for combat-related posttraumatic stress disorder.

OBJECTIVE This study analyzed the outcome of a 4-month intensive inpatient program for combat-related posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among Vietnam veterans. METHOD The subjects were 51 male veterans with PTSD who completed the inpatient treatment program. Comprehensive measures of PTSD and psychiatric symptoms, as well as social functioning, were assessed at admission, discharge, and 6, 12, and 18 months after discharge. RESULTS The overall study group showed an increase in symptoms from admission to follow-up and a decrease in violent actions and thoughts and legal problems. Family and interpersonal relationships and overall morale were improved at discharge but then returned to pretreatment levels at 18 months. Patient evaluations also indicated that the program affected morale and interpersonal relationships but not symptoms. CONCLUSIONS The chronic nature of combat-related PTSD among Vietnam veterans is evident. The study raises the possibility that long-term intensive inpatient treatment is not effective, and other forms of treatment should be considered after rigorous study of such variables as length of stay, trauma versus rehabilitation focus, and patient characteristics.
Resazurin reduction assays for screening of anti-tubercular compounds against dormant and actively growing Mycobacterium tuberculosis, Mycobacterium bovis BCG and Mycobacterium smegmatis.

OBJECTIVES To develop simple, rapid, low-cost and robust assays for screening drugs against dormant and actively growing mycobacteria. METHODS Actively growing aerobic and hypoxia-adapted dormant cultures of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, Mycobacterium bovis BCG and Mycobacterium smegmatis were tested for susceptibility to standard antimicrobial drugs by resazurin reduction assay. The visual and fluorimetric MICs were compared with those obtained by the standard cfu assay. RESULTS Drug MICs for M. tuberculosis and M. bovis BCG were determined by the aerobic resazurin microplate assay (REMA) and correlated well with those obtained by the cfu assay. Metronidazole and nitrofurans showed comparable bactericidal activity in the hypoxic resazurin reduction assay (HyRRA). The HyRRA assay was noted to be superior to the cfu assay in that it distinguished between metabolically active dormant bacteria and non-viable organisms, unlike the cfu assay that could not differentiate between these two populations. The HyRRA assay performed with good concordance in both fluorimetric and visual formats to distinguish between bactericidal and bacteriostatic effects of a drug. CONCLUSIONS The REMA and HyRRA assays will be useful for anti-tubercular anti-dormancy compound screening and drug susceptibility testing in a safe, reliable, easy and cost-effective manner particularly in low resource countries. The application of the assays in M. smegmatis or M. bovis BCG offers the distinct advantage of rapidly and safely screening anti-tubercular compounds in a high-throughput format.
How robust are quantified survey data? Evidence from the United States

Much survey data on consumer expectations is collected in the form of qualitative tendency surveys. For econometric modelling purposes it is useful to translate these into quantitative measures of the mean and dispersion of expectations. This paper develops “quantified” measures of unemployment, interest rate and inflation expectations for the US. These are compared with each other, and with direct quantitative estimates of expected inflation, and they are used to explore what factors matter for consumer perceptions of their own financial situation, and for their assessment of the economy as a whole. Mean expectations estimates form qualitative surveys appear fairly robust, but estimated standard deviations prove very unreliable.
Effects of Melatonin on Plasma S-Nitrosoglutathione and Glutathione in Streptozotocin-Treated Rats

The aim of this study was to determine the effects of streptozotocin-induced diabetes on plasma reduced glutathione (GSH) and S-nitrosoglutathione (GSNO) levels. Further, the study investigated whether an antioxidant, pineal hormone melatonin, could protect against STZ-induced effects. STZ significantly decreased plasma GSH but increased the levels of plasma GSNO. Daily supplementation with melatonin restored plasma thiol to control values. Data suggest that STZ-induced hyperglycemia and compounds that act as scavengers of free radicals and peroxynitrite like melatonin may exert protection against STZ-induced toxicity.
Semantic Annotation of High-Resolution Satellite Images via Weakly Supervised Learning

In this paper, we focus on tackling the problem of automatic semantic annotation of high resolution (HR) optical satellite images, which aims to assign one or several predefined semantic concepts to an image according to its content. The main challenges arise from the difficulty of characterizing complex and ambiguous contents of the satellite images and the high human labor cost caused by preparing a large amount of training examples with high-quality pixel-level labels in fully supervised annotation methods. To address these challenges, we propose a unified annotation framework by combining discriminative high-level feature learning and weakly supervised feature transferring. Specifically, an efficient stacked discriminative sparse autoencoder (SDSAE) is first proposed to learn high-level features on an auxiliary satellite image data set for the land-use classification task. Inspired by the motivation that the encoder of the prelearned SDSAE can be regarded as a generic high-level feature extractor for HR optical satellite images, we then transfer the learned high-level features to semantic annotation. To compensate the difference between the auxiliary data set and the annotation data set, the transferred high-level features are further fine-tuned in a weakly supervised scheme by using the tile-level annotated training data. Finally, the fine-tuning process is formulated as an ultimate optimization problem, which can be solved efficiently with our proposed alternate iterative optimization method. Comprehensive experiments on a publicly available land-use classification data set and an annotation data set demonstrate the superiority of our SDSAE-based high-level feature learning method and the effectiveness of our weakly supervised semantic annotation framework compared with state-of-the-art fully supervised annotation methods.
Is it justifiable for managers of organizations to delegate duties and responsibilities at all times

th June, 2013 Delegation is an interesting subject matter among several contemporary scholars and management practitioners. The study appreciates that effective delegation of power is as old as the biblical era of prophetic ministry of evangelism; and yet there have been some managers who have not paid heed to what it means to effectively enforce the ethos of delegating power and authority. To this extent, this research paper delves deeper, and on the basis of experience gained overtime by the researcher, to underscore the need and benefits of effective delegation of duties and responsibilities if an expanding organization is to be successful in executing its mandatory obligations. The study notes that effective delegation of duties and responsibilities should not just be taken for granted, it should an inbuilt process in an organization which should be nurtured and enabled to be part and parcel of an organization’s culture.
Effect of acute carbon monoxide exposure on heart rate variability in patients with coronary artery disease *

Epidemiological studies have shown that air pollution is associated with increased cardiovascular mortality. Although the pathophysiological mechanisms behind this association have remained largely unknown, it has been suggested that changes in cardiac autonomic function may play a role. In this study, we investigated the association between acute carbon monoxide (CO) exposure and cardiac autonomic function as measured by heart rate variability (HRV) in subjects with stable coronary artery disease. Twenty‐four hour ambulatory electrocardiographic recording with simultaneous continuous personal CO concentration monitoring was performed in six male patients with angiographically verified coronary artery disease three times with 1‐week intervals. Time domain measures of HRV were calculated for 5‐min segments before and during the CO exposure periods. For further analysis CO exposures were divided into low (≤2·7 p.p.m.) and high (>2·7 p.p.m.) CO exposure periods. The mean of maximum CO levels during 61 CO exposure periods was 4·6 p.p.m. (SD 5·0 p.p.m.). High CO exposure was associated with an increase in the square root of the mean of the sum of the squares of differences between adjacent RR intervals (r‐MSSD) (P = 0·034). Heart rate remained unchanged during the CO exposure. In conclusion, acute CO exposure which represented most likely exposure derived from traffic seems to modify cardiac autonomic control in patients with stable coronary artery disease.
In-Building DAS for High Data Rate Indoor Mobile Communication

As well known, providing high data rate wireless mobile services is difficult in indoor environments, particularly in multi-floor buildings. One way to achieve high data rate wireless transmissions is to reduce the radio transmission distance between the transmitter and the receiver by using distributed antenna systems (DASs) employing frequency reuse. However, frequency reuse causes co-channel interference, which is detrimental to system performance. In this paper, the impact of cochannel interference on the achievable uplink spectral efficiency of an in-building wireless communication system employing DAS is examined. In the system, remote antenna units (RAUs) are deployed on each floor throughout the building and connected to a central unit (CU) where received signals are processed. System performance is investigated by using a propagation channel model derived from multi-floor, in-building measurement results. The proposed scheme exploits the penetration loss of the signal through the floors, resulting in frequency reuse in spatially separated floors, which increases system spectral efficiency and also reduces co-channel interference. Location based RAU selection and deployment options are investigated. System performance is evaluated in terms of location-specific spectral efficiency for a range of potential mobile terminal (MT) locations and various in-building propagation characteristics.