Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Comparison of Macintosh laryngoscope and C-MAC video laryngoscope for intubation in lateral position

Background and Aims: Endotracheal intubation is conventionally performed when the patient is in supine position. It may be required to secure airway in laterally positioned patient. Tracheal intubation in lateral position seems to be difficult because the laryngeal view is compromised. Hence, C-MAC video laryngoscope (Karl Storz, Germany), a newer device using a modified macintosh blade may be useful for intubation in lateral position. Material and Methods: A total of 100 American Society of Anesthesiologists Grade I and II patients, randomly allotted to C-MAC or direct laryngoscopy group. Patients with difficult airway were excluded. After induction of anesthesia, patient was put in right-lateral position and intubation was carried out by consultant who is well-versed in using C-MAC laryngoscope. Time for intubation, number of attempts, Modified Cormack – Lehane grade, mucosal injury, and external laryngeal manipulation applied were noted. Statistical Analysis: Demographics and baseline airway assessments were analyzed using summary statistics. Unpaired t-test was used to assess intubation time. Number of attempts, esophageal intubation, dental injury, mucosal injury, use of stylet, and application of external laryngeal manipulation were analyzed using Chi-square test. Results: Overall intubation success rate was 100%. The time taken in C-MAC group was 24.8 ± 8.5 s and in direct group was 33.8 ± 9.12 s. The number of intubation attempts was not significant. Cormack – Lehane grade was better with C-MAC laryngoscope. Mucosal injury and use of external laryngeal manipulation was more in direct group. Conclusion: C-MAC is better than Macintosh laryngoscope for intubation in lateral position.
Perceived learning outcomes in entrepreneurship education: The impact of student motivation and team behaviour

Purpose – This paper aims to address the impact of a person's motivation to study entrepreneurship on their subsequent levels of performance in terms of the generation of business ideas, while taking into account the effect of student team behaviour.Design/methodology/approach – The paper hypothesises that both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation as well as team behaviour influence the learning outcome and that team behaviour moderates the relationship between motivation and learning outcomes. A survey was used to generate data. A total of 117 students, who participated in pre‐programme, and post‐programme surveys, provided the sample data. First, explorative factor analyses were employed to examine the latent variables. Second, hierarchical lineal regression analyses were carried out to test the proposed hypotheses.Findings – It was found that intrinsic motivation has a negative effect on the learning outcome while extrinsic motivation had a positive one. However, the team (and in particular the resources.
Phylogenetic Likelihood Estimation on GPUs Using Vertical Partitioning Scheme

Phylogenetic likelihood estimation is one of the most time consuming procedures in phylogenetic analysis. In this work, we investigate the effect of using a novel storage method on its parallel execution efficiency. The research finds that better performance can be achieved by harnessing a vertical partitioning scheme, which promotes the speed of GPU thread-level parallelism. We conduct comprehensive experiments to benchmark the proposed method and compare it with four publicly available GPU-based MrBayes methods. In terms of performance improvement, the proposed method achieves the state-of-the-art results. With dual Nvidia GTX 580 GPU cards, the proposed method outperforms the single-core implementation of MrBayes by a speedup factor of up to 133, and outstrips the GPU-based nMC3, aMC3, tgMC3, oMC3 method by speedup factors of up to 1.74, 1.87, 1.60 and 4.17, respectively. We also show that the proposed method applies roughly 6% shared memory in comparison to the previous GPU methods, which indicates that the proposed method may not only significantly improve the performance, but also saves unnecessary resource consumptions. The proposed method is publicly available to facilitate further research on the use of GPU parallel computing technology in high performance phylogenetic analysis.
Investigating the Impact of Cooperative Communication Mechanics on Player Performance in Portal 2

Cooperative communication mechanics, such as avatar gestures or in-game visual pointers, enable player collaboration directly through gameplay. We currently lack a deeper understanding of how players use cooperative communication mechanics, and whether they can effectively supplement or even supplant traditional voice and chat communication. The present research investigated player communication in Portal 2 by testing the game's native cooperative communication mechanics for dyads of players in custom test chambers. Following our initial hypothesis, players functioned best when they had access to both cooperative communication mechanics and voice. We found that players preferred voice communication, but perceived cooperative communication mechanics as necessary to coordinate interdependent actions.
Adaptive Predistortion Using a $\Delta\Sigma$  Modulator for Automatic Inversion of Power Amplifier Nonlinearity

This brief demonstrates a new adaptive digital predistortion architecture particularly suited to mobile handset applications. The central idea is to build a lookup table (LUT) that directly captures the static compressive nonlinearity of the power amplifier (PA) and then insert this LUT into the feedback path of a ΔΣ modulator. The oversampled ΔΣ modulator automatically performs both the inversion of the PA nonlinearity and the interpolation between LUT entries, permitting complex modulation strategies to be handled with an absolute minimum of LUT entries and with a dramatically simplified computational structure. The advantages of this architecture over previous methods include: 1) there is no need to explicitly invert the PA nonlinearity, reducing the complexity for the system designer; 2) the LUT training is done with an open-loop method, improving the training speed; 3) there is no need to explicitly employ numerical interpolation between LUT entries; and 4) digital-to-analog converter (DAC) nonlinearity is incorporated into the predistortion, allowing fast low-resolution DACs to be used in the final system. We built a proof-of-concept prototype for a 900-MHz, 27-dBm PA transmitting a 16-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (16-QAM) signal with a bandwidth of 3.4 MHz. The predistortion system reduced out-of-band distortion products by 10 dB and improved the error vector magnitude from 3.5% to 2.0%.
Becoming Citizens: Youths’ Civic Uses of New Media in Five Digital Cities in East Asia

Asian youths are embracing communication technologies at a burgeoning rate, yet interesting differences in Internet access and use exist among this younger generation. Our empirical investigation provides a rich and comparative look into what Asian youths do online, with an emphasis on an understudied area: their civic uses of new media. Data collected among youths aged between 12 and 17 in Hong Kong, Seoul, Singapore, Taipei, and Tokyo in 2007 show that this ‘digital generation’ has grown up with computers and the Internet, with 96% of them being internet users, and having 6 years of computer experience on average. Our results suggest that the Internet may facilitate citizenship among Asian youths although entertainment-related activities such as downloading music or playing games remain the most popular activities online. Sixty-five percent of them read online news, almost half of them have ever cast a vote on the Internet, and every one in five has signed an online petition. Differences in Internet usage and civic behaviors among youths in five cities are presented, suggesting the contextual nature of Internet use influenced by civic culture.The paper concludes with a discussion of differences in Internet use among Asian youths between 2001 and 2007, together with research implications for better understanding this population.
Faith-Based Organizations as Service Providers and Their Relationship to Government

The welfare reforms initiated in the 1990s prompted increased discussion of the use of faith-based organizations for the provision of social services. This is the second of two articles examining the progress of this debate. The first article provides the scope of inquiry, defines specific characteristics of faith-based organizations, and outlines methods used to study them. This article discusses specific services provided by faith-based organizations and how these organizations are related to the government. Faith-based organizations compared favorably to secular organizations in the services they provided while providing a somewhat narrower range of services. The implementation of Charitable Choice and other faith-based initiatives as policy required consideration of constitutional and practical issues with the implementation of collaborations and partnerships between government and faith-based organizations along with increased government funding and contracting for these organizations.
Advanced high-k dielectric stacks with polySi and metal gates: Recent progress and current challenges

The paper reviews our recent progress and current challenges in implementing advanced gate stacks composed of high-κ dielectric materials and metal gates in mainstream Si CMOS technology. In particular, we address stacks of doped polySi gate electrodes on ultrathin layers of high-κ dielectrics, dual-workfunction metal-gate technology, and fully silicided gates. Materials and device characterization, processing, and integration issues are discussed.
Sex and Ethnic Differences in the Perception of Educational and Career-Related Barriers and Levels of Coping Efficacy.

Participants (168 female and 118 male undergraduate students) completed a brief questionnaire, a measure of perceived educational and career-related barriers, and a measure of coping efficacy. As expected, women and ethnic minorities anticipated significantly more career-related barriers than did men and European American students, respectively. Ethnic minorities also exhibited more perceived educational barriers and lower self-efficacy for coping with perceived career-related barriers relative to their European American counterparts. Findings are discussed in terms of their theoretical implications and practical career counseling applications.
Speaker diarization in meetings domain

The purpose of this study is to develop robust techniques for speaker segmentation and clustering with focus on meetings domain. The techniques examined can however be applied to any other domains. Traditional techniques for speaker diarization developed for telephone conversations or broadcast news are based on a single channel input, which is notably different from meetings domain which can have multiple channel inputs. These techniques when adapted to meetings domain however perform poorer than expected since they do not exploit direction of arrival information, which is available with the presence of multiple microphones. Moreover, many of these techniques are coupled with tunable parameters that need to be manually adjusted for each data set accordingly. In this thesis, our focus is on robust and accurate speaker diarization techniques in meetings. Our aim is to improve the segmentation and clustering performance in diverse conditions while keeping the number of manually tuned parameters to minimal. A comparative study of various distance metrics is first carried out for the purpose of finding the most appropriate metric to use for speaker segmentation and clustering. Our proposed metric is shown to outperform other popular metrics as demonstrated in a speaker verification task. It can be seen as an extension of cross likelihood ratio (CLR) by exploiting the second-order statistic. As an advantage, the computation of this metric is much faster than that of Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC). This work also proposes novel cluster validation methods to determine the optimal number of speakers. In our methods, we define the seperation between sets of intracluster distances and inter-cluster distances as the clustering quality and two metrics are proposed to measure this seperation. For each hypothesized number of speakers, the clustering quality is computed and the maximum value is corresponding to the optimal
Direct Regulation of Aromatase B Expression by 17β-Estradiol and Dopamine D1 Receptor Agonist in Adult Radial Glial Cells

Aromatase cytochrome P450arom (cyp19) is the only enzyme that has the ability to convert androgens into estrogens. Estrogens, which are produced locally in the vertebrate brain play many fundamental roles in neuroendocrine functions, reproductive functions, socio-sexual behaviors, and neurogenesis. Radial glial cells (RGCs) are neuronal progenitor cells that are abundant in fish brains and are the exclusive site of aromatase B expression and neuroestrogen synthesis. Using a novel in vitro RGC culture preparation we studied the regulation of aromatase B by 17β-estradiol (E2) and dopamine (DA). We have established that activation of the dopamine D1 receptor (D1R) by SKF 38393 up-regulates aromatase B gene expression most likely through the phosphorylation of cyclic AMP response element binding protein (CREB). This up-regulation can be enhanced by low concentration of E2 (100 nM) through increasing the expression of D1R and the level of p-CREB protein. However, a high concentration of E2 (1 μM) and D1R agonist together failed to up-regulate aromatase B, potentially due to attenuation of esr2b expression and p-CREB levels. Furthermore, we found the up-regulation of aromatase B by E2 and DA both requires the involvement of esr1 and esr2a. The combined effect of E2 and DA agonist indicates that aromatase B in the adult teleost brain is under tight control by both steroids and neurotransmitters to precisely regulate neuroestrogen levels.
Choice and Accommodation in Parental Child Care Decisions

As women approach parity with men in their representation in the U.S. labor force, child care has become a critical concern both for families and for community development professionals. In this paper, we review recent literature on parental child care decisions and on socio-economic differences in child care utilization. We contrast two bodies of theoretical and empirical research on the determinants of child care arrangements, comparing models of individual consumption choice with models of socially constructed or situated patterns of action. This research suggests that parental child care decisions may be best understood as accommodations—to family and employment demands, social and cultural expectations, available information, and financial, social, and other resources—that often reproduce other forms of economic and social stratification.
Visualization and Biochemical Analyses of the Emerging Mammalian 14-3-3-Phosphoproteome

Hundreds of candidate 14-3-3-binding (phospho)proteins have been reported in publications that describe one interaction at a time, as well as high-throughput 14-3-3-affinity and mass spectrometry-based studies. Here, we transcribed these data into a common format, deposited the collated data from low-throughput studies in MINT (http://mint.bio.uniroma2.it/mint), and compared the low- and high-throughput data in VisANT graphs that are easy to analyze and extend. Exploring the graphs prompted questions about technical and biological specificity, which were addressed experimentally, resulting in identification of phosphorylated 14-3-3-binding sites in the mitochondrial import sequence of the iron-sulfur cluster assembly enzyme (ISCU), cytoplasmic domains of the mitochondrial fission factor (MFF), and endoplasmic reticulum-tethered receptor expression-enhancing protein 4 (REEP4), RNA regulator SMAUG2, and cytoskeletal regulatory proteins, namely debrin-like protein (DBNL) and kinesin light chain (KLC) isoforms. Therefore, 14-3-3s undergo physiological interactions with proteins that are destined for diverse subcellular locations. Graphing and validating interactions underpins efforts to use 14-3-3-phosphoproteomics to identify mechanisms and biomarkers for signaling pathways in health and disease.
TWO LOCAL STRATEGY IMPROVEMENT SCHEMES FOR PARITY GAME SOLVING

The problem of solving a parity game is at the core of many problems in model checking, satisfiability checking and program synthesis. Some of the best algorithms for solving parity game are strategy improvement algorithms. These are global in nature since they require the entire parity game to be present at the beginning. This is a distinct disadvantage because in many applications one only needs to know which winning region a particular node belongs to, and a witnessing winning strategy may cover only a fractional part of the entire game graph. We present two local strategy improvement algorithms which explore the game graph on-the-fly whilst performing the improvement steps. We also compare them empirically with existing global strategy improvement algorithms and the currently only other local algorithm for solving parity games. It turns out that local strategy improvement can outperform these others by several orders of magnitude.
ARIMA vs. Neural networks for wind speed forecasting

In this paper an ARIMA model is used for time-series forecast involving wind speed measurements. Results are compared with the performance of a back propagation type NNT. Results show that ARIMA model is better than NNT for short time-intervals to forecast (10 minutes, 1 hour, 2 hours and 4 hours). Data was acquired from a unit located in Southern Andalusia (Peñaflor, Sevilla), with a soft orography (10 minutes between measurements). This feature is which makes performance of the ARIMA model and the NNT very similar, so a simple forecasting model could be used in order to administrate energy sources. The paper presents the process of model validation, along with a regression analysis, based in real-life data.
TRANSFORMING ASSOCIATE DEGREE NURSING EDUCATION WITH INTERNET TECHNOLOGY

In light of today’s dynamic health care delivery system, nursing education cannot be passive and still produce competent and effective registered nurses. Registered nurses must be able to communicate confidently in order to advocate for their patients and themselves. The nursing faculty at Seminole Community College have accepted the challenge to meet this learning need and move away from the traditional passive lecture learning style. The challenge is to provide active, meaningful, and authentic learning without sacrificing theory and content. Introduction of Internet-based instruction into the curriculum has succeeded in achieving this goal. Offering a nursing course online was initially met with skepticism by some faculty. As they witnessed students becoming more actively involved, they bought into the technology and inquired about more ways to use it. The success of online learning has resulted in a feeling of excitement and rejuvenation among the faculty. In addition to access to private e-mail and bulletin boards, online courses also offered an online syllabus quizzes and case studies, and clinical skill videos. Students who were never heard from in the classroom were now speaking up. This teaching method offered us the means to foster the transformative learning so vital to the education of the registered nurse. The increased confidence our students gained with the computer has increased their chances of future success. The registered nurse licensing exam is taken on a computer. Students no longer experience anxiety about taking the exam in this format. These curriculum enhancements are producing more interactive, assertive, and selfreliant professionals. They are more prepared to enter a technological
PaTrx1 and PaTrx3, Two Cytosolic Thioredoxins of the Filamentous Ascomycete Podospora anserina Involved in Sexual Development and Cell Degeneration

ABSTRACT In various organisms, thioredoxins are known to be involved in the reduction of protein disulfide bonds and in protecting the cell from oxidative stress. Genes encoding thioredoxins were found by searching the complete genome sequence of the filamentous ascomycete Podospora anserina. Among them, PaTrx1, PaTrx2, and PaTrx3 are predicted to be canonical cytosolic proteins without additional domains. Targeted disruption of PaTrx1, PaTrx2, and PaTrx3 shows that PaTrx1 is the major thioredoxin involved in sulfur metabolism. Deletions have no effect on peroxide resistance; however, data show that either PaTrx1 or PaTrx3 is necessary for sexual reproduction and for the development of the crippled growth cell degeneration (CG), processes that also required the PaMpk1 mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) pathway. Since PaTrx1 PaTrx3 mutants show not an enhancement but rather an impairment in CG, it seems unlikely that PaTrx1 and PaTrx3 thioredoxins participate in the inhibition of this MAPK pathway. Altogether, these results underscore a role for thioredoxins in fungal development.
Sensibility Studies on a Transient Thermal Model of the Human Body

The use of computer simulation to actually predict the thermal response of human body in different environments has becoming more important in a way that comfort, or thermal comfort in particular, has been identified as a factor of productivity and performance. In this work, sensitivity studies on a transient thermal model of the human body, previously used to investigate thermal comfort in different fields, are presented. The computational model combines a thermoregulation model of the human body and a model describing the dynamic heat and moisture transfer through clothing. The environment parameters are very important factors related to indoor climatic conditions and consequent comfort sensation. Changes in ambient and radiant temperatures, as well as, in convective and radiant coefficients, are analyzed specially in terms of skin temperature of the human body. The results show that the convection mechanism is dominant over radiation and the mass associated with a specific part of the body, influences the temperature variations. The simulated results and conclusions allow further investigation on the validity of combining this thermal model with CFD models to simulate ventilation, in order to predict thermal comfort indexes for different environments.
Experimental Nephrectomies Using a Novel Telesurgical System: (The Telelap ALF-X)-A Pilot Study.

PURPOSE The SOFAR® Telelap Alf-X (Milan, Italy) is a novel telesurgical system which combines the advantages of both laparoscopy and open surgery. It offers some new features like tactile perception, open site view, eye-tracking control of the camera, and optimal ergonomics. OBJECTIVE The aim of this study is to examine the feasibility and the safety of nephrectomy using a novel telesurgical system with haptic sensation: the Telelap Alf-X. MATERIALS AND METHODS Twelve female swine underwent nephrectomies using the Telelap Alf-X system. Data regarding operative times, estimated blood loss (EBL), surgical methodology, and intraoperative complications are presented. RESULTS The Telelap Alf-X's docking took less than one minute, the system was versatile during each step of the nephrectomy and the operative times have reduced dramatically along the learning curve. One intraoperative complication was recorded (Vena Cava injury-repaired using the robotic system) and the estimated blood loss was minimal. CONCLUSIONS The Telelap Alf-X proved to be safe and reliable and can be easily used by the surgeon. The porcine model nephrectomies proved to be an excellent way to gain experience and avoid future complications.