Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A system of integrated care for older persons with disabilities in Canada: results from a randomized controlled trial.

BACKGROUND Care for elderly persons with disabilities is usually characterized by fragmentation, often leading to more intrusive and expensive forms of care such as hospitalization and institutionalization. There has been increasing interest in the ability of integrated models to improve health, satisfaction, and service utilization outcomes. METHODS A program of integrated care for vulnerable community-dwelling elderly persons (SIPA [French acronym for System of Integrated Care for Older Persons]) was compared to usual care with a randomized control trial. SIPA offered community-based care with local agencies responsible for the full range and coordination of community and institutional (acute and long-term) health and social services. Primary outcomes were utilization and public costs of institutional and community care. Secondary outcomes included health status, satisfaction with care, caregiver burden, and out-of-pocket expenses. RESULTS Accessibility was increased for health and social home care with increased intensification of home health care. There was a 50% reduction in hospital alternate level inpatient stays ("bed blockers") but no significant differences in utilization and costs of emergency department, hospital acute inpatient, and nursing home stays. For all study participants, average community costs per person were C dollar 3390 higher in the SIPA group but institutional costs were C dollar 3770 lower with, as hypothesized, no difference in total overall costs per person in the two groups. Satisfaction was increased for SIPA caregivers with no increase in caregiver burden or out-of-pocket costs. As expected, there was no difference in health outcomes. CONCLUSIONS Integrated systems appear to be feasible and have the potential to reduce hospital and nursing home utilization without increasing costs.
Managing the level of detail in 3D shape reconstruction and representation

We address the problem of reconstructing the shape of a solid object from sparse data, and of representing it at multiple levels of detail. We provide a multiresolution model, based on a set of local sculpturing updates on an initial tetrahedral mesh, which supports extraction of representations at an arbitrary level of detail. We present a new sculpturing algorithm that we use to build the multiresolution model.
Hamiltonian evolution and quantization for extremal black holes

We present and contrast two distinct ways of including extremal black holes in a Lorentzian Hamiltonian quantization of spherically symmetric Einstein‐Maxwell theory. First, we formulate the classical Hamiltonian dynamics with boundary conditions appropriate for extremal black holes only. The Hamiltonian contains no surface term at the internal infinity, for reasons related to the vanishing of the extremal hole surface gravity, and quantization yields a vanishing black hole entropy. Second, we give a Hamiltonian quantization that incorporates extremal black holes as a limiting case of nonextremal ones, and examine the classical limit in terms of wave packets. The spreading of the packets, even the ones centered about extremal black holes, is consistent with continuity of the entropy in the extremal limit, and thus with the Bekenstein‐Hawking entropy even for the extremal holes. The discussion takes place throughout within Lorentz‐signature spacetimes.
Improvement in Resolution of Laser Capture Microdissection Using Near-Field Probe to Capture Nanoparticles

Purpose: A modified laser capture micro-dissection (LCM) system is developed to improve resolution to 400 nm, using a laser light (808 nm) transmitted by a near-field tip probe. Materials and methods: Using a 150-nm aperture to heat an ethylene vinyl acetate (EVA) film, melted spots on the average of 400 nm in diameter are generated on the underlying target composed of a 20-nm gold-particle monolayer. The near-field tip probe composed of fiber is set on a 2-D nanometer piezoactuator (PZT) for precise capturing of the monolayer of gold particles. The monolayer of gold particles under the target is bound to the EVA film using a laser, while the remaining EVA film stays on the monolayer. Results: The diameter of the melted spots as small as 400 nm are produced and details are provided that demonstrate the feasibility of the nano-operation of this new LCM system. Conclusion: The new LCM system successfully captures nanoparticles and improves resolution of micro-dissection to 400 nm. With this LCM system, the isolation of a single organelle or bacterium is possible.
Validation of the Policy Advocacy Engagement Scale for frontline healthcare professionals

Background: Nurses, social workers, and medical residents are ethically mandated to engage in policy advocacy to promote the health and well-being of patients and increase access to care. Yet, no instrument exists to measure their level of engagement in policy advocacy. Research objective: To describe the development and validation of the Policy Advocacy Engagement Scale, designed to measure frontline healthcare professionals’ engagement in policy advocacy with respect to a broad range of issues, including patients’ ethical rights, quality of care, culturally competent care, preventive care, affordability/accessibility of care, mental healthcare, and community-based care. Research design: Cross-sectional data were gathered to estimate the content and construct validity, internal consistency, and test–retest reliability of the Policy Advocacy Engagement Scale. Participants and context: In all, 97 nurses, 94 social workers, and 104 medical residents (N = 295) were recruited from eight acute-care hospitals in Los Angeles County. Ethical considerations: Informed consent was obtained via Qualtrics and covered purposes, risks and benefits; voluntary participation; confidentiality; and compensation. Institutional Review Board approval was obtained from the University of Southern California and all hospitals. Findings: Results supported the validity of the concept and the instrument. In confirmatory factor analysis, seven items loaded onto one component with indices indicating adequate model fit. A Pearson correlation coefficient of . 36 supported the scale’s test–retest stability. Cronbach’s α of . 93 indicated strong internal consistency. Discussion: The Policy Advocacy Engagement Scale demonstrated satisfactory psychometric properties in this initial test. Findings should be considered within the context of the study’s limitations, which include a low response rate and limited geographic scope. Conclusion: The Policy Advocacy Engagement Scale appears to be the first validated scale to measure frontline healthcare professionals’ engagement in policy advocacy. With it, researchers can analyze variations in professionals’ levels of policy advocacy engagement, understand what factors are associated with it, and remedy barriers that might exist to their provision of it.
Generalization by structural properties from sparse nested symbolic data

A set of simulations demonstrate that recurrent networks can exhibit generalization by abstraction from extremely sparse but structurally homogenous symbolic data. By cascading two recurrent networks – feeding the second network with discretized hidden states of the first – it is also possible to generalize according to complex structure. By automatic discretization the cascaded architecture assists in scaling up sequential learning tasks and offers explanations to the apparent systematicity and generativity of language use.
Apoptosis, Fas and Fas‐ligand expression in melanocytic tumors

Impaired regulation of apoptosis is known to be associated with the development of various forms of cancer. Fas binding ro its ligand. Fas ligand (Fas‐L), has been shown to trigger apoptosis in various cell types. Fas‐L is expressed by melanoma cells and has been suggested to play a role in melanoma escape from immune surveillance. In the present study, we assessed apoptotic activity and examined Fas and Fas‐L expression in malignant melanomas, Spitz nevi and ordinary melanocytic nevi. We evaluated apoptotic activity using terminal deoxynucleotidyl transferase (TdT)‐mediated dUTP nick end labeling. Apoptotic activity was found to be minimal in melanomas and moderate in Spitz nevi. In contrast, common nevi demonstrated, significant levels of apoptosis in the deep parts of the tumor. Fas was found to be expressed by all Spitz nevi, most melanocytic nevi and approximately half of the malignant melanoma specimens. Fas expression was also significantly more pronounced in Spitz nevus cells as compared with, the two other tumors. The anti‐Fas‐L antibody was found to stain all three melanocytic tumors. Staining was shown to be stronger and more frequent in melanoma cells as compared to the nevus cells. Using the Spearman test, no significant correlation between Fas‐L expression in melanoma cells and apoptosis in MM‐infiltrating mononuclear cells was found, suggesting that Fas‐L expression in melanoma cells may not be instrumental in their ability to escape immune mechanisms of defense. In contrast, increased levels of apoptosis in the deep parts of melanocytic nevi may reflect and possibly contribute to their benign nature.
Posttreatment Feeding Affects Mortality of Bed Bugs (Hemiptera: Cimicidae) Exposed to Insecticides

Abstract Insecticide sprays and dusts are used for controlling bed bugs, Cimex lectularius L. In natural environments, bed bugs have daily access to hosts after they are exposed to insecticides. The established laboratory insecticide bioassay protocols do not provide feeding after insecticide treatments, which can result in inflated mortality compared with what would be encountered in the field. We evaluated the effect of posttreatment feeding on mortality of bed bugs treated with different insecticides. None of the insecticides tested had a significant effect on the amount of blood consumed and percent feeding. The effect of posttreatment feeding on bed bug mortality varied among different insecticides. Feeding significantly reduced mortality in bed bugs exposed to deltamethrin spray, an essential oil mixture (Bed Bug Fix) spray, and diatomaceous earth dust. Feeding increased the mean survival time for bed bugs treated with chlorfenapyr spray and a spray containing an essential oil mixture (Ecoraider), but did not affect the final mortality. First instars hatched from eggs treated with chlorfenapyr liquid spray had reduced feeding compared with nymphs hatched from nontreated eggs. Those nymphs hatched from eggs treated with chlorfenapyr liquid spray and successfully fed had reduced mortality and a higher mean survival time than those without feeding. We conclude that the availability of a bloodmeal after insecticide exposure has a significant effect on bed bug mortality. Protocols for insecticide efficacy testing should consider offering a bloodmeal to the treated bed bugs within 1 to 3 d after treatment.
A Phylogeny of the Family Poritidae (Cnidaria, Scleractinia) Based on Molecular and Morphological Analyses

The family Poritidae formerly included 6 genera: Alveopora, Goniopora, Machadoporites, Porites, Poritipora, and Stylaraea. Morphologically, the genera can be differentiated based on the number of tentacles, the number of septa and their arrangement, the length of the polyp column, and the diameter of the corallites. However, the phylogenetic relationships within and between the genera are unknown or contentious. On the one hand, Alveopora has been transferred to the Acroporidae recently because it was shown to be more closely related to this family than to the Poritidae by previous molecular studies. On the other hand, Goniopora is morphologically similar to 2 recently described genera, Machadoporites and Poritipora, particularly with regard to the number of septa (approximately 24), but they have not yet been investigated at the molecular level. In this study, we analyzed 93 samples from all 5 poritid genera and Alveopora using 2 genetic markers (the barcoding region of the mitochondrial COI and the ITS region of the nuclear rDNA) to investigate their phylogenetic relationships and to revise their taxonomy. The reconstructed molecular trees confirmed that Alveopora is genetically distant from all poritid genera but closely related to the family Acroporidae, whereas the other genera are genetically closely related. The molecular trees also revealed that Machadoporites and Poritipora were indistinguishable from Goniopora. However, Goniopora stutchburyi was genetically isolated from the other congeneric species and formed a sister group to Goniopora together with Porites and Stylaraea, thus suggesting that 24 septa could be an ancestral feature in the Poritidae. Based on these data, we move G. stutchburyi into a new genus, Bernardpora gen. nov., whereas Machadoporites and Poritipora are merged with Goniopora.
Chitosan nanoparticles as a potential nonviral gene delivery for HPV-16 E7 into mammalian cells

Abstract Chitosan nanoparticles (CS NPs) were prepared as a carrier for Human papillomavirus type 16 HPV-16) E7 gene and their gene transfection ability were evaluated in vitro. The plasmid expressing green fluorescent protein (pEGFP) was used as a reporter gene. Gel electrophoresis demonstrated full binding of CS NPs with the pDNA. The transfection of CS-pEGFP NPs was efficient in CHO cells and the expression of green fluorescent proteins was well observed. The expression of E7 proteins was confirmed under SDS-PAGE and western blot analysis. As a conclusion CS NPs may serve as an effective nonviral carrier for delivery of nucleotides into eukaryotic cells.
Attributes and metrics of internal quality that impact the external quality of object-oriented software: A systematic literature review

Quality metrics of software can be categorized into internal quality metrics, external quality metrics, and quality in use metrics. Although existing a close relationship between internal and external quality of software systems, there are no explicit evidences in literature of what are the attributes and metrics of internal quality that impact external quality. Thus, we carried out a systematic literature review for identifying that relationship. After the analysis of 664 papers, 12 papers were studied in depth. As result, we found 65 metrics related primarily to the maintainability, usability, and reliability quality characteristics and the main attributes that impact external metrics are size, coupling, and cohesion.
A Model for Configuration Management of Open Software Systems

The article proposes a model for the configuration management of open systems. The model aims at validation of configurations against given specifications. An extension of decision graphs is proposed to express specifications. The proposed model can be used by software developers to validate their own configurations across different versions of the components, or to validate configurations that include components by third parties. The model can also be used by end-users to validate compatibility among different configurations of the same application. The proposed model is first discussed in some application scenarios and then formally defined. Moreover, a type discipline is given to formally define validation of a configuration against a system specification.
Overexpression of Aurora-A Contributes to Malignant Development of Human Esophageal Squamous Cell Carcinoma

Purpose: Aurora-A/STK15/BTAK, a centrosome-associated oncogenic protein, is implicated in the control of mitosis. Overexpression of Aurora-A has been shown to result in chromosomal aberration and genomic instability. Multiple lines of evidence indicate that Aurora-A induces cell malignant transformation. In the current study, we are interested in investigating the expression of Aurora-A in human esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) and characterizing the association of Aurora-A with ESCCmalignant progression. Experimental Design: Aurora-A protein expression was examined in 84 ESCC tissues and 81 paired normal adjacent tissues by either immunohistochemistry or Western blot analysis. In addition, a gene-knockdown small interfering RNA technique was used in ESCC cells to investigate whether Aurora-A contributes to the ability of a tumor to grow invasively. Results: The amount of Aurora-A protein in ESCC was considerably higher than that in normal adjacent tissues. Overexpression of Aurora-A was observed in 57 of 84 (67.5%) ESCC samples. In contrast, <2% of normal adjacent tissue displayed high expression of Aurora-A. Interestingly, overexpression of Aurora-A seemed to correlate with the invasive malignancy of ESCC. Disruption of endogenous Aurora-A using small interfering RNA technique substantially suppressed cell migrating ability. Conclusion: The findings presented in this report show that Aurora-A expression is elevated in human esophageal squamous cell carcinoma and is possibly associated with tumor invasion, indicating that overexpression of Aurora-A may contribute to ESCC occurrence and progression.
Distributed coverage and connectivity in three dimensional wireless sensor networks

This paper investigates coverage and connectivity issues for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) under three dimensional deployment scenarios. WSNs are deployed over a region to sense the events of interest in a geographical area and transmit collected data to a Base Station (BS). We exploit the inherent redundancy in WSN deployment by finding an optimal set of sensor nodes that can cover the 3D deployment region efficiently while maintaining the network connectivity. In this regard we propose a distributed coverage algorithm (DCA) that allows sensor nodes to form a 1-covered topology by exchanging messages based on the local information. We also present an analytical relation that is used to estimate the sensing range used by the DCA. Experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed scheme.
Markov Random Fields using complex line process: An application to Bayesian image restoration

The problem of image restoration is considered, where the goal is to recover the original image starting from its blurred and noisy degraded version. A Bayesian restoration procedure is introduced based on modeling the image given the measurements as a Markov Random Fields characterized by spatially variant local priors. A suitable complex valued line process is introduced, generalizing previous literature works, to account for both the intensity and the orientation of image edges. The presence and the orientation of image edges are locally estimated by a computationally efficient filtering stage especially tuned to visually relevant image features, namely a first-order Circular Harmonic Function filter. Simulation results shows the effectiveness of the complex line process in describing local image discontinuities.
Ancestral Dependence on Breast Stemness and Nucleotide Excision Repair in Breast Cancer Stem Cells in Novel Human Model Systems

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Identity verification based on haptic handwritten Signature: Novel fitness functions for GP framework

Fitness functions are the evaluation measures driving evolutionary processes towards solutions. In this paper, three fitness functions are proposed for solving the unbalanced dataset problem in Haptic-based handwritten signatures using genetic programming (GP). The use of these specifically designed fitness functions produced simpler analytical expressions than those obtained with currently available fitness measures, while keeping comparable classification accuracy. The functions introduced in this paper capture explicitly the nature of unbalanced data, exhibit better dimensionality reduction and have better False Rejection Rate.
Model-based distributed cooperative control of a robotic manipulator

In this paper, a distributed cooperative control scheme is proposed, where each joint-link pair is controlled by a dedicated controller, and the controllers communicate and cooperate among themselves. As the computational load is distributed among the joint level controllers, the computational lead time is reduced in contrast to a centralized model-based control scheme. In addition, unlike in the decentralized (independent joint) control schemes available in the literature, the proposed control architecture does not neglect the coupled dynamics, instead, utilizes the knowledge of the system dynamics completely.
Nogood based asynchronous distributed optimization (ADOPT ng)

This work proposes an asynchronous algorithm for solving Distributed Constraint Optimization problems (DCOPs) using a new kind of nogoods, namely valued nogoods. The proposed technique is an extension of the asynchronous distributed optimization (ADOPT) where valued nogoods enable more flexible reasoning, leading to important speed-up. Valued nogoods are an extension of classic nogoods that associates each nogood with a threshold and optionally with a set of references to culprit constraints.DCOPs have been shown to have very elegant distributed solutions, such as ADOPT, distributed asynchronous overlay (DisAO), or DPOP. These algorithms are typically tuned to minimize the longest causal chain of messages, as a measure of how the algorithms will scale for systems with remote agents (with large latency in communication). Among the mentioned techniques, DPOP performs very well for the chosen metric (requiring a number of such sequential messages linear in the number of agents), but in general has exponential space requirements. DisAO and ADOPT have the advantage of needing only polynomial space. ADOPT has the property of maintaining the initial distribution of the problem. ADOPT needs a preprocessing step consisting of computing a depth first search (DFS) tree on the agent graph. We show that valued nogoods reduce the practical importance/need of this preprocessing since independent subproblems are now dynamically detected and exploited.
Association of Angiotensin-Converting Enzyme With Low-Density Lipoprotein in Aortic Valvular Lesions and in Human Plasma

Background—Recent studies have demonstrated that lesions of aortic sclerosis and stenosis share several similarities with lesions of atherosclerosis. In atherosclerosis, angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) is expressed by a subset of macrophages. This study was undertaken to determine whether ACE might be present in aortic sclerosis or stenosis lesions. Methods and Results—Immunohistochemistry was performed on 26 paraffin-embedded human aortic valves. Monospecific antibodies were used to identify ACE, macrophages, angiotensin II type 1 receptor (AT-1 receptor), angiotensin II, and apolipoprotein B. Human low-density lipoprotein (LDL) and high-density lipoprotein (HDL) were isolated from plasma of normal volunteers by sequential density-gradient ultracentrifugation. ACE was not present in normal valves but was present in all valves with aortic sclerosis or stenosis lesions. ACE was detected on a subset of lesion macrophages but was present primarily in an extracellular distribution, where it colocalized with apolipoprotein B. ACE was detected by Western blotting on plasma LDL but not on HDL isolated from normal volunteers. Angiotensin II, the enzymatic product of ACE, was colocalized with ACE in valve lesions. ACE also was colocalized with apolipoprotein B in an adjacent coronary atherosclerotic plaque. Conclusions—ACE is present in aortic sclerosis and stenosis lesions, where it may participate in lesion development, as is evidenced by the presence of its enzymatic product, angiotensin II. The observation of an association of ACE with LDL in both lesions and plasma suggests that LDL may deliver ACE to lesions and has implications for the role of ACE-containing LDL in other diseases, such as atherosclerosis.