Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The perceived impact of the group practice model on enhancing interpersonal skills of predoctoral dental students

Purpose The purpose of this study was to assess if a clinical group practice model has an impact on enhancing the interpersonal skills of predoctoral dental students, what factors may influence the development of these skills, and what, if any, are innovative and technological solutions that can potentially influence interpersonal skills in predoctoral dental students. Methods This study surveyed the faculty responsible for teaching the dental students in a recently developed group practice model. Out of 18 eligible group practice leaders at one US dental school, 17 respondents (94.4%) completed the survey. In addition, this study asked the faculty to provide qualitative response and recommendations to improve interpersonal skills. Based on the feedback, a focus group was conducted to explore opportunities to further enhance the skills. Results The results of the study suggest that the group practice model has a positive and distinct impact on the development of overall interpersonal skills for students. Further research suggests that the greatest impacted areas of personal development are critical thinking skills and teamwork. However, as a way to make the model more effectual, most faculty suggested the need for additional time, for both students and faculty. To some extent, using technology and innovative teaching pedagogies could potentially address the challenge of limited time. Conclusion Based on the results of the survey, one may conclude that with adequate design and conditions, the group practice model can have a positive effect on the interpersonal skills of its students.
Conceptualizing ecological flammability: an experimental test of three frameworks using various types and loads of surface fuels

Vegetation flammability remains poorly defined and involves many intercorrelated components and metrics. Schwilk (2015) proposed a flammability framework with only two axes: total heat release and rate of spread. Pausas et al. (2017) modified this framework by standardizing the heat release axis by fuel load, and adding a third axis of fuel ignitability. We tested these frameworks using data from a field experiment that quantified flammability metrics and survival of Callitris intratropica saplings in relation to fuel type (grass, litter, and mixed grass and litter, all air-dried) and fuel load. Principal components analysis showed PC1 was closely aligned with rate of combustion, flame height and temperature, and PC2 was aligned with duration of combustion. The Schwilk framework separated the fuel types according to rate of spread, and fuel loads according to total heat release. The Pausas framework was less useful in describing community-scale flammability because it removed the effects of fuel load, and there was no support for adding the ignitability axis. Both frameworks successfully predicted sapling mortality, an indicator of fire severity. In addition, the three flammability strategies proposed by Pausas et al. were not well-supported because they assumed unrealistically low heat release by ‘fast-flammable’ fuels. We conclude that the Schwilk framework is useful for conceptualizing community-scale flammability and facilitates modelling for fire management purposes, and exploration of evolutionary relationships.
Design and Verification of a Distributed Communication Protocol

The safety of remotely operated vehicles depends on the correctness of the distributed protocol that facilitates the communication between the vehicle and the operator. A failure in this communication can result in catastrophic loss of the vehicle. To complicate matters, the communication system may be required to satisfy several, possibly conflicting, requirements. The design of protocols is typically an informal process based on successive iterations of a prototype implementation. Yet distributed protocols are notoriously difficult to get correct using such informal techniques. We present a formal specification of the design of a distributed protocol intended for use in a remotely operated vehicle, which is built from the composition of several simpler protocols. We demonstrate proof strategies that allow us to prove properties of each component protocol individually while ensuring that the property is preserved in the composition forming the entire system. Given that designs are likely to evolve as additional requirements emerge, we show how we have automated most of the repetitive proof steps to enable verification of rapidly changing designs.
Target Detection and Tracking in Forward-looking Infrared Image Sequences Using Multiscale Morphological Filters

In this paper, we propose a robust approach for detection and tracking targets in forward looking infrared (FLIR) imagery taken from an airborne moving platform. Based on target intensity and shape information, motion criteria, the proposed algorithm involves three modules. Firstly, we use multiscale morphological filters to remove noise and clutter in tracking window. Secondly, target is detected by segment the image to produce a binary image. In the last step, our algorithm uses spatial-temporal connectivity to detect and track true target. The experiments performed on FLIR image sequences, show the robustness of the proposed approach.
Patient History Elicitation and Diagnostic Decision Making

Technology has changed the way people communicate, and communication between patients and medical professionals has not been exempt from these developments. Clinicians are now text messaging, emailing, and video conferencing patient. Understanding the impact of the new modalities on communication patterns is imperative to ensure quality care. Thirty-two medical professionals of varying experience conducted a patient interview with two confederate patients over an instant messaging system. The first interview was 15 minutes and the second 7 minutes, the latter condition inducing time pressure. The results demonstrated that time pressure has an adverse impact on the medical professionals’ communication patterns. The experience level of the medical professional was a mediating factor with strategies exhibited paralleling those outlined by stages of medical expertise.
Cooperative DNA Recognition Modulated by an Interplay between Protein-Protein Interactions and DNA-Mediated Allostery

Highly specific transcriptional regulation depends on the cooperative association of transcription factors into enhanceosomes. Usually, their DNA-binding cooperativity originates from either direct interactions or DNA-mediated allostery. Here, we performed unbiased molecular simulations followed by simulations of protein-DNA unbinding and free energy profiling to study the cooperative DNA recognition by OCT4 and SOX2, key components of enhanceosomes in pluripotent cells. We found that SOX2 influences the orientation and dynamics of the DNA-bound configuration of OCT4. In addition SOX2 modifies the unbinding free energy profiles of both DNA-binding domains of OCT4, the POU specific and POU homeodomain, despite interacting directly only with the first. Thus, we demonstrate that the OCT4-SOX2 cooperativity is modulated by an interplay between protein-protein interactions and DNA-mediated allostery. Further, we estimated the change in OCT4-DNA binding free energy due to the cooperativity with SOX2, observed a good agreement with experimental measurements, and found that SOX2 affects the relative DNA-binding strength of the two OCT4 domains. Based on these findings, we propose that available interaction partners in different biological contexts modulate the DNA exploration routes of multi-domain transcription factors such as OCT4. We consider the OCT4-SOX2 cooperativity as a paradigm of how specificity of transcriptional regulation is achieved through concerted modulation of protein-DNA recognition by different types of interactions.
Avoiding 5-Circuits in 2-Factors of Cubic Graphs

We show that every bridgeless cubic graph $G$ on $n$ vertices other than the Petersen graph has a 2-factor with at most $2(n-2)/15$ circuits of length $5$. An infinite family of graphs attains this bound. We also show that $G$ has a 2-factor with at most $n/5.8\overline{3}$ odd circuits. This improves the previously known bound of $n/5.41$ [Luko\v{t}ka, M\'a\v{c}ajov\'a, Maz\'ak, \v{S}koviera: Small snarks with large oddness, arXiv:1212.3641 [cs.DM] ].
Routage décentralisé de transactions avec gestion des pannes dans un réseau à large échelle

Emerging Web 2.0 applications such as social networking websites deal with a heavy workload. We envision a novel solution that would allow these applications to scale-up without the need to use a data center. To this end, databases are replicated over a grid, thus, availability and fast transaction processing are achieved. However, achieving both fast and consistent data access challenging at many points: I) centralized control leads to bottleneck source, and 2) dynamic behaviour of nodes can compromise mutual consistency. In this article, we propose a distributed transaction routing algorithm with a suitable fault-management mechanism to deal with node dynamicity and/or node failures. Moreover, we demonstrate the feasibility of our approaches through experimentation and simulation.
Simultaneous Localization and Mapping : Literature Survey

One of the initial solutions to the SLAM problem was proposed by Smith and Cheeseman who used the Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) to jointly represent the landmark position with the pose [38]. Guivant and Nebot [18] developed compressed EKF which performed mapping in local space using a reduced number of landmarks and only performed global update when the robot moved from one local map to another local map. The worst case complexity in this case is O(kn) required for full global update. Paskin [36] proposed thin junction tree filter (TJTF) to maintain manageable complexity. It is an assumed density filtering algorithm where the belief state is represented using a junction tree and proposed a thinning operation to maintain an ever-increasing tree width caused by filtering operations. Estimation in this case is performed in O(kn) time by passing marginalized distribution along the edges of the junction tree. According to Frese et al. [13] “From the perspective of “linear equation solving” this approach is complementary to the approach proposed in this paper. In the Gaussian case the junction tree algorithm is a direct, i.e., exact equation solver based on Schur-complements (corresponding to the marginalized distributions) and approximation is performed on the equation level. In contrast Multilevel Relaxation is an iterative, i.e., approximate equation solver but does not approximate the equations themselves. ”
The Worthwhile Risk of Education: From initiation to co-belonging in and through pedagogical encounters

Abstract This article explores the idea of the worthwhile risk of education, as necessarily involving a transition from one of initiation and risk to that of co-belonging. We commence by considering a contention that while education is a human activity whereby an individual might be initiated into various encounters, the potential experience thereof is as yet un-encountered and strange, and only to be imagined. Following on the idea of education as the subject of imagination—that is, not knowing what to expect beforehand, and thereby being prepared to take some risk—we turn our attention to education as necessarily being accompanied by risk. In this sense, if an individual takes a risk to experience something new and strange, the possibility exists that she could disrupt what she is about to encounter, because engaging with the other, is an activity associated with taking a risk towards increasing imagination. In this way, initiation into something new and strange seems commensurate with the act of taking risks which could involve disruption. By building on ideas of education as a worthwhile risk that engages people deliberatively, we extend our argument to that of education as an initiation into a co-belonging, which recognises people’s ability to both deliberate, and not to deliberate.
The complexity of narrow syntax : Minimalism, representational economy, and simplest Merge

This paper considers the question of formal complexity measurement within linguistic minimalism and argues that information structure properties should not be encoded in narrow syntax as features triggering movement, suggesting that the relevant information is established at the interfaces. Also, it argues for a minimalist model of grammar in which complexity arises out of the cyclic interaction of subderivations. This model allows one to rephrase the question of the formal complexity of a generative grammar, such that a different answer is forthcoming depending on whether we consider the grammar as a whole, or just narrow syntax. The grammar as a whole, including interface components in addition to narrow syntax, as well as recursive interaction among subderivations, is vastly more complicated than a finite-state grammar, but there is no reason for concluding that narrow syntax is not simply finite-state.
Still a Host of Hosts for Wolbachia: Analysis of Recent Data Suggests That 40% of Terrestrial Arthropod Species Are Infected

Wolbachia are intracellular bacteria that manipulate the reproduction of their arthropod hosts in remarkable ways. They are predominantly transmitted vertically from mother to offspring but also occasionally horizontally between species. In doing so, they infect a huge range of arthropod species worldwide. Recently, a statistical analysis estimated the infection frequency of Wolbachia among arthropod hosts to be 66%. At the same time, the authors of this analysis highlighted some weaknesses of the underlying data and concluded that in order to improve the estimate, a larger number of individuals per species should be assayed and species be chosen more randomly. Here we apply the statistical approach to a more appropriate data set from a recent survey that tested both a broad range of species and a sufficient number of individuals per species. Indeed, we find a substantially different infection frequency: We now estimate the proportion of Wolbachia-infected species to be around 40% which is lower than the previous estimate but still points to a surprisingly high number of arthropods harboring the bacteria. Notwithstanding this difference, we confirm the previous result that, within a given species, typically most or only a few individuals are infected. Moreover, we extend our analysis to include several reproductive parasites other than Wolbachia that were also screened for in the aforementioned empirical survey. For these symbionts we find a large variation in estimated infection frequencies and corroborate the finding that Wolbachia are the most abundant endosymbionts among arthropod species.
Socioeconomic Status and the Developing Brain

Childhood socioeconomic status (SES) is associated with cognitive achievement throughout life. How does SES relate to brain development, and what are the mechanisms by which SES might exert its influence? We review studies in which behavioral, electrophysio-logical and neuroimaging methods have been used to characterize SES disparities in neurocognitive function. These studies indicate that SES is an important predictor of neurocognitive performance, particularly of language and executive function, and that SES differences are found in neural processing even when performance levels are equal. Implications for basic cognitive neuro-science and for understanding and ameliorating the problems related to childhood poverty are discussed. Why study the neuroscience of socioeconomic status? What is socioeconomic status (SES), and why would a cognitive neuroscientist have anything to say about it? Volumes have been written about the first question, but for present purposes we will simply say that virtually all societies have better off and less well off citizens, and that differences in material wealth tend to be accompanied by noneconomic characteristics such as social prestige and education [1–6] (Box 1). SES refers to this compound of material wealth and noneconomic characteristics such as social prestige and education. SES is invariably correlated with predictable differences in life stress and neighborhood quality, in addition to less predictable differences in physical health, mental health and cognitive ability [1–15] (Box 1). The relevance of SES to cognitive neuroscience lies in its surprisingly strong relationship to cognitive ability as measured by IQ and school achievement beginning in early childhood. Which neurocognitive systems are implicated in these SES gradients, and what causes the gradients? These are questions for cognitive neuroscience. A small but growing literature has addressed these questions using a variety of research methods. The picture that emerges, of substantial SES disparities in particular neurocognitive systems, has implications for the basic science of cognitive neuroscience and also for real-world solutions to SES-related problems. Neurocognitive performance Although IQ tests reflect the function of the brain, they are relatively uninformative concerning the specific neurocog-nitive systems responsible for performance differences. Recent research has, therefore, incorporated behavioral tests that support more specific inferences. For purposes of relating task performance to underlying systems, we propose the following simple parse of brain function into five relatively independent neurocognitive systems defined anatomically based on studies of patients with lesions and functionally based on activation in brain regions in healthy subjects while performing a specific cognitive task (see …
Assessment of moderate to severe abdominal blood loss using peripheral to central blood oxygen saturation.

PURPOSE There are various definitions and monitoring modalities for hemodynamic status. Each of them has its own advantages and shortcomings. A new hemodynamic index is proposed in this study. This index can be calculated by placing the measured hemoglobin saturation in a formula. Blood samples for this measurement are taken from arterial, antecubital and central venous blood. MATERIAL AND METHODS We calculated this index in three different groups undergoing laparatomy. The control group consisted of patients who underwent elective surgery. The case group with acute internal abdominal bleeding was divided into two groups. Those with more than 20 ml/kg of blood in their abdominal cavity were designated as the severe case group, while those bleeding less were categorized as moderate. Blood samples were taken from ten patients in each group in stable and unstable conditions. RESULTS This index differed significantly between dissimilar hemodynamic conditions. The pre-anesthesia value of this index in the control group showed a mean +/- SD of 8.5 +/- 3.2 vs. 1.6 +/- 0.4 in the moderate case group vs. 0.7 +/- 0.08 in the case group with severe hemodynamic changes (p < .001). The index approximated to the control values as the circumstances improved. After compensation for volume loss, pre-extubation values were not significantly different. These were 9.6 +/- 2 in the control group vs. 8 +/- 2 in the case group with moderate hemodynamic change vs. 8 +/- 1.8 in the severe case group. The likelihood ratio of bleeding increased as this index decreased. CONCLUSION As the hemodynamic condition deteriorates, this index decreases significantly. This index is an accurate indicator for predicting hemodynamic changes compared to some other modalities. Further investigations are needed into the prognostic and therapeutic advantages of this index.
The Unity of Difference: A Critical Appraisal of Niklas Luhmann's Theory of Social Systems in the Context of Corporeality and Spatiality

Niklas Luhmann was one of the most innovative and productive social theorists of the 20th century. He developed a comprehensive and distinctive social theory and his ideas have enriched many disciplines. Yet, only few geographers have engaged with his work. Convinced of its qualities, our intention is to stimulate a critical reception of his theory among human geographers. Here an introduction into his theory of social systems is provided, and the possibilities for a geography of social systems is explored. A key element of our proposal is a differential notion of space as a possibility of distinction, which complements Luhmann's epistemological notion of time. Our conclusion is that a geography of social systems would have to set out conceptually from accessibility systems, which are systems that encompass communications, their necessary physical and ecological environment, as well as their coordination in various dimensions of space and time.
A review on smart grid network security issues over 6LoWPAN

With the evolution of the IoT initiative, data security has become of utmost importance, especially in the area of Smart Metering. The data being transferred across the smart Grid contains sensitive information, which, if not protected from the hands of data thieves would pose a serious security threat. The threat would primarily come in form of informed predictions of the lifestyles of their victims i.e. when they watch TV, when they switch off their loads to go to work and so on. Due to this security threats, the network on which this data transfer is performed will have to be secured. The 6LoWPAN is the network on which the metering devices (which are basically low-power, low-processing devices) will communicate with each other and the Data Analysis Module. Since the 6LoWPAN is the IPv6 for low power devices, it inherits the security and privacy functionalities of the IPv6. This paper will be focused on the techniques of protecting the 6LoWPAN from attacks. It will also talk about the different attacks as well as their methods of protection as regards to the Routing Protocol Layer.
Effect of a Multi-Site Trial using Short Message Service (SMS) on Infant Feeding Practices and Weight Gain in Low-Income Minorities

ABSTRACT Objective: To test the effects of weekly SMS for improving infant feeding practices and infant weight. Methods: This was a multi-site randomized clinical trial in a convenience sample of 202 caregivers of healthy term infants 0–2 months participating in the WIC program in Puerto Rico and Hawaii. Participants were randomized to receive SMS about infant's general health issues (control) or SMS for improving feeding practices (intervention) for four months. Weight, length and infant feeding practices were assessed at baseline and four months later. Results: A total of 170 participants completed the study (n = 86 control and n = 84 intervention). Baseline characteristics were similar between groups. At the end, exclusive breastfeeding rates were similar between groups (67.4% control and 59.1% intervention). Introduction of other foods and beverages, addition of foods to the bottle, placing infants to sleep with milk bottles, caregiver's method and response to feeding infants and distractions while feeding infants were similar between groups. Also, weight status or rate of weight gain was similar between groups. Conclusion: There were no significant improvements in feeding practices or in weight with the intervention. The timeline of the messages in relation to the targeted behavior may have affected the effectiveness of the intervention. Earlier dissemination of messages, higher level of intensity, longer intervention, additional contacts and inclusion of other caregivers may be needed to achieve the desired effects.