Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A receiver-based 802.11 rate adaptation scheme with On-Demand Feedback

Classical 802.11 rate adaptation algorithms rely on feedback from the receiver to correctly choose a sending rate, typically in the form of acknowledgments (ACKs). In the absence of such frames, novel techniques are required for rate selection. We present a novel On-Demand Feedback Rate Adaptation algorithm (OFRA) that works with ACK-less traffic. Feedback information is sent on-demand using a control frame to explicitly inform the transmitter about which bit rate to use on subsequent data frames. This approach guarantees standard conformity and exhibits fast and accurate bit rate adaptation at the cost of a modest overhead increase. We evaluate the performance of OFRA against various state-of-the-art rate adaptation schemes by means of simulations. If ACK frames are to be transmitted, OFRA performs better than related work in most considered scenarios, and on par in the others. In the absence of ACKs, OFRA provides large goodput gains under good channel conditions and comparable goodput in other situations.
Integrating Adolescent Substance Abuse Treatment with HIV Services: Evidence-Based Models and Baseline Descriptions

Adolescents with substance use disorders are at high risk for contracting Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV)/Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS) and other sexually transmitted infections (STIs). Adolescence is the period of sexual maturation that compounds the issues associated with infection transmission for this risk-taking group. Integrated treatment models for implementing HIV education, counseling, and testing is a promising approach. This study describes four substance abuse treatment programs of varying levels of care that integrated HIV services for adolescents. Additionally, the evidence-based substance abuse treatment and HIV models are discussed and the baseline characteristics presented. The authors provide a discussion and offer recommendations for service implementation and additional research.
Comparison of Long-term Clinical Outcomes between Descemet's Stripping Automated Endothelial Keratoplasty and Penetrating Keratoplasty in Patients with Bullous Keratopathy

Purpose To compare 2-year clinical outcomes of Descemet's stripping automated endothelial keratoplasty (DSAEK) and penetrating keratoplasty (PK) in patients with bullous keratopathy. Methods A retrospective chart review was performed to obtain 2 years of follow-up data of DSAEK or PK at a single center from March 2009 to September 2012. The study comprised 15 eyes of DSAEK and 11 eyes of PK. Outcome measures included best-corrected visual acuity (BCVA), spherical and keratometric changes, central corneal thickness, endothelial cell density, intraocular pressure, and postoperative complications. Graft survival rate was assessed by Kaplan-Meier survival analysis. Results There were no differences in patient baseline characteristics between the two groups. At postoperative 2 years, better BCVA of 0.69 ± 0.51 logarithm of the minimum angle of resolution (logMAR) was found after DSAEK compared to 0.88 ± 0.48 logMAR after PK. Refractive cylinder in DSAEK and PK was −2.60 ± 1.53 and −6.00 ± 1.05 diopters (D), respectively, and keratometric cylinder was 3.27 ± 3.70 and 6.34 ± 3.51 D, respectively, at postoperative 2 years. The difference of mean spherical equivalents between postoperative 1 month and 2 years was 0.84 D after DSAEK and 2.05 D after PK. A hyperopic shift of 1.17 D was present after 2 years of DSAEK. The mean endothelial cell density at postoperative 2 years was 1,548 ± 456 cells/mm2 for DSAEK and 1,052 ± 567 cells/mm2 for PK, with a cell loss of 19.96% vs. 52.38%, respectively when compared to postoperative 1 month. No significant difference in central corneal thickness was found between DSAEK and PK (592 ± 75 vs. 563 ± 90 µm, respectively). Finally, the 2-year survival rate did not differ significantly between DSAEK and PK (93.3% vs. 81.8%, respectively, p = 0.344). Conclusions Compared to PK, DSAEK provided more stable refractive errors with better visual outcome, lower endothelial cell loss, and a lower rate of graft rejection at postoperative 2 years in patients with bullous keratopathy.
Robust variance estimation with dependent effect sizes: practical considerations including a software tutorial in Stata and spss

Methodologists have recently proposed robust variance estimation as one way to handle dependent effect sizes in meta‐analysis. Software macros for robust variance estimation in meta‐analysis are currently available for Stata (StataCorp LP, College Station, TX, USA) and spss (IBM, Armonk, NY, USA), yet there is little guidance for authors regarding the practical application and implementation of those macros. This paper provides a brief tutorial on the implementation of the Stata and spss macros and discusses practical issues meta‐analysts should consider when estimating meta‐regression models with robust variance estimates. Two example databases are used in the tutorial to illustrate the use of meta‐analysis with robust variance estimates. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Evaluation of resuscitation fluids on endothelial glycocalyx, venular blood flow, and coagulation function after hemorrhagic shock in rats

BACKGROUND Endothelial glycocalyx (EG) plays an essential role in endothelium integrity and may be compromised by hemorrhagic shock. The effects of currently available resuscitation fluids such as Hextend (HEX) or lactated Ringer’s solution (LR) on vascular function and coagulation are not well understood. The aim of the present study was to compare the effects of fresh frozen plasma (FFP) with HEX or LR in their ability to repair EG structure, promote volume expansion, increase blood flow, and prevent coagulopathy. METHODS A total of 121 microvessels from cremaster muscle were studied in 32 anesthetized instrumented rats. After baseline systemic and microvascular measurements, 40% hemorrhage followed by resuscitation was performed, and measurements were repeated. Coagulation was evaluated using ROTEM to assay clot formation time, clotting time, firmness, strength, and lysis. Velocity and “platelet component” of strength were calculated. Fluorescein isothiocyanate or Texas Red bound to Dextrans was injected to estimate EG thickness in vivo. RESULTS Respiratory rate, blood pH, base excess, and lactate returned to near-baseline levels in all treatments. Hemodilution caused by LR and HEX decreased firmness, prolonged clotting time, and lowered platelet counts. EG thickness in HEX- and LR-treated rats was 50% lower, and plasma syndecan 1 was 50% higher than sham and FFP groups. Blood flow and shear rate were restored in the HEX group. Resuscitation with FFP improved coagulation and blood flow. CONCLUSION Our findings support the concept of cardiovascular and microvascular stabilization by infused FFP, in which the increase in microvascular perfusion associated with restored EG is essential for an optimal resuscitation strategy.
Competence of Polish primary-care doctors in the pharmacological treatment of hypertension.

RATIONALE, AIMS AND OBJECTIVES Compliance with treatment guidelines for hypertension is variable. This study assessed the competence of Polish general practitioners in compliance with hypertension treatment guidelines, and doctor and patient characteristics associated with compliance. METHODS The study was conducted on a random sample of Polish primary-care doctors working in clinics contracted by the national health insurance funds. Doctors completed a questionnaire consisting of eight case vignettes describing patients with elevated blood pressure. The cases differed on three variables relating to the level of blood pressure, the presence or absence of diabetes mellitus, and the presence or absence of other risk factors. Doctors were asked to give their treatment decision for each case. Demographic data and details of the doctor's practice were also collected. Treatment decisions were tabulated, and associations between doctor and patient characteristics and treatments were assessed. RESULTS One hundred twenty-five doctors (65% response rate) completed the questionnaire. Compliance with treatment guidelines was judged to be 51%. Poor compliance with guidelines was noted for patients with diabetes mellitus. The level of blood pressure was the strongest predictor of drug treatment. Angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors were the most frequently prescribed medications. Appropriate decisions were associated with practice in large cities. CONCLUSIONS Compliance with hypertension treatment guidelines was judged to be poor in this study of a sample of Polish primary-care doctors using case vignettes to test competence. Additional emphasis on hypertension guidelines in training doctors is needed, especially for diabetic patients and for doctors outside urban centres.
Behavioral model synthesis with Cones

The Cones synthesis system for automatic generation of VLSI implementations is discussed. Named for the cones in sequential logic, Cones takes behavioral models written in C and produces gate-level implementations in technologies such as standard cells and programmable logic arrays or programmable logic devices. The overall design is produced faster, more efficiently, and with fewer errors. Designers are free to concentrate on functions, instead of on the details of the implementation technology. <<ETX>>
Cardiac sympathetic nerve terminal function in congestive heart failure

AbstractIncreased cardiac release of norepinephrine (NE) and depleted cardiac stores of NE are two salient features of the human failing heart. Researchers from my laboratory have shown that these changes are accompanied by a functional defect of NE uptake in the cardiac sympathetic nerve terminals. Our studies have shown that the decrease of NE uptake is caused by reduction of NE transporter density in the sympathetic nerve endings, and this change is responsible, at least in part, for the increased myocardial interstitial NE, decreased myocardial adrenoceptor density, and increased myocyte apoptosis in experimental cardiomyopathies. We have also provided evidence in both intact animals and cultured PC12 cells that the decrease of NE transporter is induced by the actions of oxidative metabolites of exogenous NE, involving endoplasmic reticulum stress and impaired N-glycosylation of the NE transporter. This change in the cardiac sympathetic NE uptake function, as demonstrated by [123I] metaiodobenzylguanidine in human studies, may not only serve as an important prognostic variable in patients with congestive heart failure, but also be used as a surrogate for the efficacies of various therapeutic interventions for heart failure. Finally, increasing evidence suggests and further studies are needed to show that the cardiac sympathetic nerve terminal function may be a direct target for pharmacologic treatment of congestive heart failure.
Control of compensatory stepping reactions: Age-related impairment and the potential for remedial intervention

Stepping is a prevalent and functional reaction to loss of balance, yet this element of postural control has only recently begun to receive due attention. It is likely that the impaired ability to execute compensatory stepping reactions is an important contributor to the unsteadiness, loss of balance confidence, and risk of falling that is associated with aging and age-related pathology. Even healthy, active older adults appear to experience difficulty in controlling stepping reactions, as evidenced by a tendency to require multiple steps to recover equilibrium. There seems to be a particular problem in controlling lateral stability. When stepping in response to forward or backward loss of balance, older adults often experience difficulty in countering the tendency of the body to fall laterally during the step. When stepping in response to lateral loss of balance, they often have problems controlling movement of the swing foot so as to avoid collision with the stance limb. The problems in controlling late.
An Ontology-Based Metamodel for Software Patterns

Patterns have been successfully used in software design to reuse proven solutions. But the complex interconnections and the number of pattern collections is becoming a barrier for identifying relevant patterns and pattern combinations for a given design context. More formal representations of patterns are needed that allow machine processing and the creation of systematic pattern languages that guide composition of patterns into coherent design solutions. In this paper, we present a technique based on Description Logic and Semantic Web technologies to address these problems. A metamodel is presented for developing pattern languages using this technology. Usability patterns are used to demonstrate how this metamodel can be instantiated to form a pattern language for that domain. Our technique provides a computational basis for building intelligent tools that utilize patterns to support software development activities.
Automatic Music Transcription using Audio-Visual Fusion for Violin Practice in Home Environment

Violin practice in a home environment, where there is often no teacher available, can benefit from automatic music transcription to provide feedback to the student. This paper describes a high performance violin transcription system with three main contributions. First, as onset detection is an important but challenging task for automatic transcription of pitched non-percussive music, such as from the violin, we propose an effective audio-only onset detection approach based on supervised learning. The proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods substantially. Second, we introduce the visual modality, i.e., bowing and fingering of the violin playing, to infer onsets, thus enhancing the audio-only onset detection. We devise automatic and realtime video processing algorithms to extract indicative features of onsets from bowing and fingering videos. Third, we evaluate state-of-the-art multimodal fusion techniques to fuse audio and visual modalities and show this improves onset detection and transcription performance significantly. The audio-visual fusion based violin transcription system provides more accurate transcribed results as learning feedback even in acoustically inferior environments. With efficient and fully automatic audio-visual analysis components, the system can be easily deployed in a home environment.
Personality Disorder Symptomatology Associated with Adolescent Depression and Substance Abuse

A study was conducted to investigate the extent to which adolescent depression and substance abuse are associated with personality disorder symptomatology. The Personality Diagnostic Questionnaire—Revised (PDQ-R), the Revised Hopkins Symptom Checklist (SCL-90-R), and a standard retrospective substance use diary were administered to 441 undergraduate students, 166 of whom completed the substance use diary at baseline, with readministrations 1 and 2 months later. Results indicated that: (1) Depressed adolescents reported significantly greater symptomatology on the PDQ-R antisocial, avoidant, borderline, paranoid, passive-aggressive, schizotypal, and composite scales than did nondepressed adolescents, even after global psychiatric symptomatology was controlled statistically. (2) Heavy users of alcohol, marijuana, and/or tobacco reported significantly greater symptomatology on the PDQ-R antisocial, borderline, and composite scales than did adolescents in a comparison group, after global psychiatric symptomato.
Nidotherapy: making the environment do the therapeutic work

Nidotherapy is the formal term introduced to describe the systematic manipulation of the physical and social environment to help achieve a better fit for a person with a persistent or permanent mental disorder. This approach is described in detail and its merits are compared with more conventional ways of dealing with such problems. This involves the creation of a certain number of terms that may be viewed as unnecessary jargon but help to shorten communication in an area where systematic monitored interventions are relatively uncommon.
Massive multi lingual corpus compilation: Acquis Communautaire and totale

The paper discusses the compilation of massively multilingual corpora, the EU ACQUIS corpus, and the corpus annotation tool “totale”. The ACQUIS text collection has recently become available on the Web, and contains EU law texts (the Acquis Communautaire) in all the languages of the current EU, and more, i.e. parallel texts in over twenty different languages. Such document collections can serve as the basis for multilingual parallel corpora of unprecedented size and variety of language, useful as training and testing dataset for a host of different HLT applications. The paper describes the steps that were undertaken to turn the text collection into a linguistically annotated text corpus. In particular, we discuss the harvesting and wrapper induction of the corpus, and the usage of its annotation with EuroVoc descriptors. Next, the text annotation tool “totale” which does multilingual text tokenization, tagging and lemmatisation is presented. The tool implements a simple pipelined architecture which is, for the most part, fully trainable, requiring a word-level syntactically annotated text corpus and, optionally, a morphological lexicon. To train totale for seven different languages we have used the MULTEXT-East corpus and lexicons; we describe this resource and the training of totale, and its application to the ACQUIS corpus. Finally, we turn to the current experiments in aligning the corpus, and developments we plan to undertake in the future.
Correlation between Anammox Activity and Microscale Distribution of Nitrite in a Subtropical Mangrove Sediment

ABSTRACT The distribution of anaerobic ammonium oxidation (anammox) in nature has been addressed by only a few environmental studies, and our understanding of how anammox bacteria compete for substrates in natural environments is therefore limited. In this study, we measure the potential anammox rates in sediment from four locations in a subtropical tidal river system. Porewater profiles of NOx− (NO2− plus NO3−) and NO2− were measured with microscale biosensors, and the availability of NO2− was compared with the potential for anammox activity. The potential rate of anammox increased with increasing distance from the mouth of the river and correlated strongly with the production of nitrite in the sediment and with the average concentration or total pool of nitrite in the suboxic sediment layer. Nitrite accumulated both from nitrification and from NOx− reduction, though NOx− reduction was shown to have the greatest impact on the availability of nitrite in the suboxic sediment layer. This finding suggests that denitrification, though using NO2− as a substrate, also provides a substrate for the anammox process, which has been suggested in previous studies where microscale NO2− profiles were not measured.
Mass media vs. personal sources of information about the presidential assassination: A comparison of six investigations

John Milton said “Where there is much desire to learn, there will of necessity be much arguing, much writing, and many opinions, for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making. ” One of the most unsettled parts of the field of communication research and theory is the area of “ricochet” or “two‐step” information flow (briefly, the mass media tell the opinion leaders who tell others face‐to‐face). The assassination of President Kennedy provided an opportunity for a number of researchers to investigate the diffusion of information in a crisis situation. One of these studies, by Harold Mendelsohn, was published in the Spring 1964 issue of the Journal under the title “Broadcast vs. Personal Sources of Information in Emergent Public Crises: The Presidential Assassination. ” In the present article, Stephen Spitzer compares the results of six different studies of information dissemination in connection with the presidential assassination. Because his conclusions directly contradicted Dr. Mendelsohn's study,.
Perils and pitfalls of reporting sex differences

The idea of sex differences in the brain both fascinates and inflames the public. As a result, the communication and public discussion of new findings is particularly vulnerable to logical leaps and pseudoscience. A new US National Institutes of Health policy to consider both sexes in almost all preclinical research will increase the number of reported sex differences and thus the risk that research in this important area will be misinterpreted and misrepresented. In this article, I consider ways in which we might reduce that risk, for example, by (i) employing statistical tests that reveal the extent to which sex explains variation, rather than whether or not the sexes ‘differ’, (ii) properly characterizing the frequency distributions of scores or dependent measures, which nearly always overlap, and (iii) avoiding speculative functional or evolutionary explanations for sex-based variation, which usually invoke logical fallacies and perpetuate sex stereotypes. Ultimately, the factor of sex should be viewed as an imperfect, temporary proxy for yet-unknown factors, such as hormones or sex-linked genes, that explain variation better than sex. As scientists, we should be interested in discovering and understanding the true sources of variation, which will be more informative in the development of clinical treatments.
Characterization, antibacterial and biological activities of phenolic fraction of argentinean red wines

For the first time, the qualitative and quantitative characterization of phenolic compounds of lower molecular weight fraction (LMF) were evaluated in commercial Cabernet Sauvignon (CS) and Tannat (T) wines varieties produced in Cafayate, Argentine. The antimicrobial activity against Pediococcus pentosaceus 12p, spoilage wine bacteria as well as the "in vitro" antioxidant and antihypertensive activities were also evaluated. The composition of LMF obtained by liquid- liquid extraction with ethyl acetate, determined by HPLC-DAD, showed a total content of phenolic compounds of 229.4 and 311.1 mg L -1 for CS and T wines respectively. Synthetic like-wine media (SWM), pH 4.5 supplemented with LMF at identical concentration of the wine (1X), four (4X) and eight times concentrated (8X), was inoculated with P. pentosaceus 12p at 10 7 CFU mL -1 . Samples were collected at the beginning and final incubation time to determine cell viability in MRS-agar medium and the damage of the cell membrane integrity by electron microscopy observation. In the presence of LMF at 1X concentration, both fractions diminish growth parameters without cellular damage. In the presence of LMF of CS and T wine varieties four and eight times concentrated, cellular death of the microorganism as well as plasmatic membrane disruption was observed. The LMF of both wines analyzed in this study have high antioxidant, radical scavenging and antihypertensive activity. The use of phenolic compounds as potential antimicrobial agents could be an effective additive to controll wine spoilage bacteria, adding on wines beneficial properties to human health.