Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Newborns killed or left to die by a parent: a population-based study.

CONTEXT Interest in the discarding or killing of newborns by parents has increased due to wide news coverage and efforts by states to provide Safe Haven legislation to combat the problem. OBJECTIVE To describe the characteristics of these cases in North Carolina. DESIGN, SETTING, AND POPULATION Case series derived from data on all deaths among liveborn infants 0 to 4 days of age reported to the North Carolina medical examiner from 1985 through 2000. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Incidence of newborns known to have been killed or discarded by a parent; epidemiological characteristics of newborns and parents. RESULTS There were 34 newborns known to have been killed or discarded by a parent, comprising 0.002% of all liveborn infants during the 16-year study period, giving a rate of 2.1 per 100 000 per year. A total of 58.8% were male, 41.1% were white, and 52.9% were black. For 29 cases, the perpetrator was determined to be the mother. Among mothers, 50% were single and 20.6% were married (marital status of the remainder was unknown). Thirty-five percent had had other children. Eight mothers (23.5%) were known to have received some prenatal care. The mean age of the mothers was 19.1 years (range, 14-35 years) and more than half were aged 18 years or older. The most common causes of death were asphyxiation/strangulation (41.1%) and drowning (26.5%). CONCLUSIONS In North Carolina, at least 2.1 per 100 000 newborns are known to be killed or left to die per year, usually by their mothers. It is unknown how many of these deaths might be prevented by Safe Haven laws. Efforts to educate the public about these laws need to target the general public. Where resources are limited, the focus should be on on adolescent pregnancy prevention programs, young adults, prenatal care clinics, and married women.
Care of the Critically Ill Emergency Department Patient with Acute Kidney Injury

Introduction. Acute Kidney Injury (AKI) is common and associated with significant mortality and complications. Exact data on the epidemiology of AKI in the Emergency Department (ED) are sparse. This review aims to summarise the key principles for managing AKI patients in the ED. Principal Findings. Timely resuscitation, goal-directed correction of fluid depletion and hypotension, and appropriate management of the underlying illness are essential in preventing or limiting AKI. There is no specific curative therapy for AKI. Key principles of secondary prevention are identification of patients with early AKI, discontinuation of nephrotoxic medication where possible, attention to fluid resuscitation, and awareness of the risks of contrast-induced nephropathy. In patients with advanced AKI, arrangements for renal replacement therapy need to be made before the onset of life-threatening uraemic complications. Conclusions. Research and guidelines regarding AKI in the ED are lacking and AKI practice from critical care departments should be adopted.
Markerless Human–Manipulator Interface Using Leap Motion With Interval Kalman Filter and Improved Particle Filter

The aim of this paper is to propose a novel markerless human-robot interface, which is derived from the idea that the manipulator copies the movements of human hands. With this method, one operator could control dual robots through both his or her hands in a contactless and markerless environment. In order to obtain the position and orientation of human hands in real time, a sensor called leap motion (LM) is employed in this paper. However, because of the tracking errors and noises of the sensor, the measurement errors increase with time. Therefore, interval Kalman filter (IKF) and improved particle filter (IPF) are used to estimate the position and the orientation of the human hands, respectively. Furthermore, in order to avoid the perceptive limitations and the motor limitations, which prevent the operator from carrying out the high-precision experiment, a modification of adaptive multispace transformation (AMT) method is raised to assist the operator to determine the posture of the manipulator. The greatest strength of our method is that it is totally contactless and could estimate the pose of the human hands accurately and stably without any assistance from markers. A series of experiments have been conducted to verify the human-manipulator interface system, and the results show that the system is indeed of high availability and fault tolerance in teleoperation, which means even a novice can easily and successfully control robots with this human-manipulator interface.
A novel CPW bandpass filter based on negative indexed materials for Wi-Max application

Metamaterial is an artificial material which is used to produce negative effects in the materials. In this paper a bandpass filter is proposed by introducing the metamaterial effect in the normal substrate. It was named as novel because of achieving negative effects from the normal substrate material with a compact circuit size of the structure. A coplanar waveguide transmission line is loaded with complementary split ring resonators for providing the structure with negative effects. The proposed filter is simulated and characterized using Method of Moments based IE3D simulator. The designed filter has a bandwidth of 3.2 to 5.2 GHz with the return loss of -45dB and of -0.2dB insertion loss. The size of the filter is about 12 × 12 mm2. With the above properties the proposed metamaterial filter can be used for the Wi-Max application.
A 30‐year convection‐permitting regional climate simulation over the interior western United States. Part I: Validation

A 30‐year high‐resolution (4 km) regional climate simulation (October 1981 to September 2011) is conducted in the interior western United States (IWUS) using the weather research and forecasting (WRF) model. The high spatial resolution is motivated by the IWUS complex terrain environment and the high spatial variability of atmospheric and land surface variables. The simulation, driven by the NCEP climate forecast system reanalysis, is convection‐permitting and uses the Noah multi‐physics land surface model. Modelled surface temperature, precipitation, and snow water equivalent (SWE) are evaluated against snowpack telemetry (SNOTEL) data and against the parameter‐elevation regressions on independent slopes model (PRISM) data set. The modelled daily minimum and maximum surface temperatures match the 4‐km resolution PRISM data, with spatial correlation coefficients close to 1. The simulation accurately captures the observed distribution and amount of seasonal precipitation and the mountain snowpack in the IWUS, although discrepancies exist, especially over the high‐elevation ridges. Simulated seasonal precipitation correlates well with observations, with correlation coefficients exceeding 0.85 for PRISM over the whole domain and 0.88 for SNOTEL over the mountain ranges. The simulation also replicates the spatial pattern of extreme precipitation events well, although it overestimates precipitation intensity and maximum duration of dry spells and underestimates the frequency of wet days. The simulated seasonal mountain snowpack and its spring melt‐off timing show a negative bias at most SNOTEL sites. This validation justifies the use of the 30‐year IWUS data set as a high‐resolution data source, almost equivalent to a reanalysis.
Under Consideration for Publication in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming Epistemic Foundation of Stable Model Semantics

Stable model semantics has become a very popular approach for the management of negation in logic programming. This approach relies mainly on the closed world assumption to complete the available knowledge and its formulation has its basis in the so-called Gelfond-Lifschitz transformation. The primary goal of this work is to present an alternative and epistemic-based characterization of stable model semantics, to the Gelfond-Lifschitz transformation. In particular, we show that stable model semantics can be defined entirely as an extension of the Kripke-Kleene semantics. Indeed, we show that the closed world assumption can be seen as an additional source of 'falsehood' to be added cumulatively to the Kripke-Kleene semantics. Our approach is purely algebraic and can abstract from the particular formalism of choice as it is based on monotone operators (under the knowledge order) over bilattices only.
Comparison of DNA extraction methods for DNA barcoding of non-biting midges

The insect group Chironomidae is used as an environmental indicator for freshwater ecosystems because of its wide distribution and species richness. The morphological identification of chironomids requires expert skill; to this end, the application of DNA barcoding for species identification is a powerful tool. We applied DNA barcoding to chironomid specimens using different preservative conditions and several protocols for extraction and sequencing of DNA and found that the success of sequencing was affected by the condition of specimens and protocols applied. Purification using a silica-membrane filter yielded significantly high DNA quality and was deemed suitable for both old and valuable specimens. On the other hand, rough extraction without any purification and extraction without membrane filters both achieved sufficient DNA quality and sequencing success rates to be applied to wellpreserved and large specimens. For old or air-dried samples, however, rough extraction requires great care because it significantly reduces the efficiency of sequencing. DNA extracted from old or poorly preserved specimens tended to be fragmented and was not successfully sequenced, but using alternative PCR primers targeting a shorter region can improve the success rate. Dried wing specimens on prepared slides and pupal exuviae collected from the water surface were also subjected to DNA extraction and subsequent sequencing, which achieved 18.0% and 41.7% success rates, respectively. Such success rates may be insufficient for some purposes of DNA barcoding, but match particular objectives, for example, a field study with less work by collecting exuviae.
Fault tolerance versus performance metrics for robot systems

The incorporation of fault tolerance techniques into robot systems improves the reliability, but also increases the hardware and computational requirements in the overall system. It is not always clear how to evaluate the merit, or 'effectiveness' of different fault tolerance approaches for a given application. We present a new set of performance criteria designed to measure and compare the effectiveness of robot fault tolerance strategies. The measures, which are designed to evaluate fault tolerance/performance/cost tradeoffs, can also be used to evaluate pure performance or pure fault tolerance strategies. We show their usefulness using a variety of proposed fault tolerance approaches in the literature focusing on multiprocessor control architectures.
Fetal and Childhood Growth and Hypertension in Adult Life

The association between low birth weight and raised blood pressure has been extensively replicated. Little is known about the way childhood growth modifies the effects of low birth weight. We report on the fetal and childhood growth of 1958 men and women who received treatment for hypertension and belong to a cohort of 7086 people born in Helsinki, Finland, during 1924–1933. As expected, the men and women who developed hypertension had low birth weight (P =0.002). They were also shorter in body length at birth (P =0.02). After birth they experienced accelerated growth, so that by 7 years their heights and weights were approximately average. In a simultaneous regression, both birth length and tall height had statistically significant although opposing effects on hypertension (P =0.003 for birth length and 0.009 for height at 7 years). Accelerated postnatal growth was associated with better childhood living conditions. Children who later developed both hypertension and type 2 diabetes, rather than hypertension alone, had small placental size as well as small body size at birth, and their accelerated postnatal growth continued beyond 7 years. We suggest that hypertension may originate through retarded growth in utero followed by accelerated postnatal growth as a result of good living conditions. Retarded fetal growth leads to permanently reduced cell numbers in the kidney and other tissues, and subsequent accelerated growth may lead to excessive metabolic demand on this limited cell mass.
Gender power imbalance on women's capacity to negotiate self-protection against HIV/AIDS in Botswana and South Africa.

BACKGROUND Gender power imbalance, which translates into a power imbalance in sexual interactions, is increasingly being recognized as a factor in fueling the spread of HIV/AIDS by increasing the number of unsafe sexual encounters. OBJECTIVES To examine the influence of gender power imbalance and other factors on women's capacity to negotiate self protection against HIV infection; as well as men's response to the suggested condom use. METHODS Drawing on data gathered from 2658 women aged 18-49 years in a cross-sectional survey in Kwa Zulu Natal Province of South Africa and Botswana, the study used descriptive statistics and logistic regression to reveal a number of gender related factors that significantly affect women's ability to protect themselves against HIV infection. RESULTS Gender power imbalance significantly affects women's ability to suggest condom use to their partners. The study showed that it is women with partners 10 or more years older than them, abused women, and those economically dependent on their partners who are less likely to suggest condom use to their partners. Gender power imbalance also influences men's inclination towards refusing to use the suggested condom. The study showed that men are more likely to refuse to use the condom when the age difference between them and their female partners is wide, if they are in a married relationship, and where there is no communication about HIV/AIDS between them and their partners. What is more disturbing is the finding that it is men with multiple partners who are significantly more likely to refuse to use the condom. CONCLUSION Across all levels of society, there is a need to see a social paradigm shift that transforms relationships between women and men, from the one of inequality and dominance as is the case in patriarchal societies, to equality, respect and consideration for one another.
TR 05-044 PASS : Program Structure Aware Stratified Sampling for Statistically Selecting Instruction Traces and Simulation Points

As modeled microarchitectures become more complex and the size of benchmark program keeps increasing, simulating a complete program with various input sets is practically infeasible within a given time and computation resource budget. A common approach is to simulate only a subset of representative parts of the program selected from the complete program execution. SimPoint [1,2] and SMARTS [10] have shown that accurate performance estimates can be achieved with a relatively small number of instructions. This paper proposes a novel method called Program structure Aware Stratified Sampling (PASS) for further reducing microarchitecture simulation time without losing accuracy and coverage. PASS has four major phases, consisting of building Extended Calling Context Tree (ECCT), dynamic code region analysis, program behavior profiling, and stratified sampling. ECCT is constructed to represent program calling context and repetitive behavior via dynamic instrumentation. Dynamic code region analysis identifies code regions with similar program phase behaviors. Program behavior profiling stores statistical information of program behaviors such as number of executed instructions, branch mispredictions, and cache miss associated with each code region. Based on the variability of each phase, we adaptively sample instances of instruction streams through stratified sampling. We applied PASS on 12 SPEC CPU2000 benchmark and input combinations and achieved average 1.46 % IPC error bound from measurements of native execution on Itanium-2 machine with much smaller sampled instruction streams.
Developing Applications to Automatically Grade Introductory Visual Basic Courses

There are many unique challenges associated with introductory programming courses. For novice programmers, the challenges of their first programming class can lead to a great deal of stress and frustration. Regular programming assignments is often key to developing an understanding of best practices and the coding process. Students need practice with these new concepts to reinforce the underlying principles. Providing timely and consistent feedback on these assignments can be a challenge for instructors, particularly in large classes. Plagiarism is also a concern. Unfortunately traditional tools are not well suited to introductory courses. This paper describes how AppGrader, a static code assessment tool can be used to address the challenges of an introductory programming class. The tool assesses student’s understanding and application of programming fundaments as defined in the current ACM/IEEE Information Technology Curriculum Guidelines. Results from a bench test and directions for future research are provided.
Finding Clauses in Unrestricted Text by Finitary and Stochastic Methods

The paper presents and compares two different methods of parsing, a regular expression method and a stochastic method, with respect to their success in identifying basic clauses in unrestricted English text. These methods of parsing were developed in order to be applied to the task of improving the detection of large prosodic units in the Bell Labs text-to-speech system, and were so applied experimentally. The paper also discusses the notion of basic clause that was defined as the parsing target. The result of a comparison of the error rates of the two parsing methods in the recognition of basic clauses showed that there was a 13% error rate for the regular expression method and a 6.5% error rate for the stochastic method.
The demiphone versus the triphone in a decision-tree state-tying framework

The performances of the demiphone (a context dependent subword unit that models independently the left and the right parts of a phoneme) and the triphone are compared. Continuous density hidden Markov modeling for both types of units is tested with the HTK software using decision-tree state clustering. The speech material is taken from the SpeechDat Spanish database, composed by continuous speech utterances recorded through the public telephone network. The training corpus is speaker and task independent. Two testing sets are tried: isolated words corresponding to speaker names, city names and phonetically rich words; and numbers of Spanish identification cards and dates. The main conclusion is that the demiphone simplifies the recognition system and yields a better performance than the triphone. This result may be explained by the ability of the demiphone to provide an excellent tradeoff between a detailed coarticulation modeling and a proper parameter estimation.
Estimation of Cerebrovascular Reactivity Using Transcranial Doppler, Including the Use of Breath‐Holding as the Vasodilatory Stimulus

Background and Purpose A proportion of individuals with carotid artery stenosis show a reduced cerebrovascular reserve as measured by a reduced cerebral arterial vasodilatory response to carbon dioxide. Two methods of quantifying this vasodilatory response, using transcranial Doppler ultrasonography, have been in general use: the total range of vasodilation between hypocapnia, induced by hyperventilation, and hypercapnia induced by breathing carbon dioxide, and the response to breathing a fixed concentration of 5% carbon dioxide. We studied whether it is possible to use the rise in carbon dioxide occurring during breath-holding as the vasodilatory stimulus. Methods Using transcranial Doppler, cerebral reactivity to carbon dioxide was measured in 23 subjects undergoing intravenous digital subtraction angiography of their carotid arteries for symptoms of cerebrovascular disease. A breath-holding method was compared with the two previous methods, which required administration of carbon dioxide. Results All three methods gave results that correlated highly significantly with the degree of carotid stenosis, although the correlation was highest when the full vasodilatory range was measured. This method was adopted as the gold standard, and the other methods were compared with it The breath-holding method correlated at least as well (p=0.67) as the 5% CO2 method (p=0.64). It identified a similar group of low reactors to our gold standard method, whereas the 5% CO2 method gave some discrepant results. Conclusions The breath-holding method offers potential as a convenient, well-tolerated screening method of assessing carbon dioxide reactivity not requiring the administration of carbon dioxide, although further validation against more established methods of measuring cerebrovascular reserve is first required.
Interactive multimedia services over open NGN testbed

Delivering multimedia services over Next Generation Networks challenges the developers to define a unified and converged framework. However the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) defined by the 3rd Generation Partnership Projects offers basic features of such a framework, which enables the provisioning of multimedia services with quality of service and mobility support across heterogeneous networks. The Fraunhofer Institute FOKUS has recently launched the FOKUS Media Interoperability Lab (MIL) which is based on the "Open IMS Playground" testbed. MIL is as an open environment gathering all major IMS core components, and a triple play toolkit originating from own developments as well as major industry players, which can be used by academic and industrial partners for early prototyping of innovative interactive multimedia services and the related system components. This paper introduces the relevant technologies and provides an overview of the lab architecture and the relevant multimedia services at FOKUS. The validation of this architecture is demonstrated with an implementation of different enablers within the Playground as well as an adapted User Agent demonstrating the interaction of streaming and basic NGN telecommunication services.
The Learning Transformation through Pervasive Interfaces

Learning is an important aspect of life through which humans stay in tune with their biological and physical environment through which that environment is allowed to take shape around them. The complexity and the occurrence of variation in an environment help generate new experiences and provide the humans the opportunity to learn something new. This paper presents an analysis of the change that is evident as the scenario changes from E-learning to M-Learning and then to P-Learning. This paper also provides a glimpse of the extended opportunities of pervasive setup. The new challenges and design techniques of active learning systems are also suggested in this paper.
Heat Transfer in a Pipe With Turbulent Flow and Arbitrary Wall-Temperature Distribution

The first three eigenvalues and constants for the problem of heat flow to a constant property fluid in established turbulent flow in a round pipe are presented for all important values of Reynolds and Prandtl Moduli. These results permit one to compute heat transfer from nonisothermal pipe walls. Comparisons with experiment are good for all fluids from oils to liquid metals. The thermal entry length and rate of heat transfer for low Prandtl Moduli are shown to depend markedly on the wall-temperature profile.