Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Standard procedures for adults in accredited sleep medicine centres in Europe

The present paper describes standardized procedures within clinical sleep medicine. As such, it is a continuation of the previously published European guidelines for the accreditation of sleep medicine centres and European guidelines for the certification of professionals in sleep medicine, aimed at creating standards of practice in European sleep medicine. It is also part of a broader action plan of the European Sleep Research Society, including the process of accreditation of sleep medicine centres and certification of sleep medicine experts, as well as publishing the Catalogue of Knowledge and Skills for sleep medicine experts (physicians, non‐medical health care providers, nurses and technologists), which will be a basis for the development of relevant educational curricula. In the current paper, the standard operational procedures sleep medicine centres regarding the diagnostic and therapeutic management of patients evaluated at sleep medicine centres, accredited according to the European Guidelines, are based primarily on prevailing evidence‐based medicine principles. In addition, parts of the standard operational procedures are based on a formalized consensus procedure applied by a group of Sleep Medicine Experts from the European National Sleep Societies. The final recommendations for standard operational procedures are categorized either as ‘standard practice’, ‘procedure that could be useful’, ‘procedure that is not useful’ or ‘procedure with insufficient information available’. Standard operational procedures described here include both subjective and objective testing, as well as recommendations for follow‐up visits and for ensuring patients’ safety in sleep medicine. The overall goal of the actual standard operational procedures is to further develop excellence in the practice and quality assurance of sleep medicine in Europe.
Geographic visualization: designing manipulable maps for exploring temporally varying georeferenced statistics

Geographic visualization, sometimes called cartographic visualization, is a form of information visualization in which principles from cartography, geographic information systems (GIS), exploratory data analysis (EDA), and information visualization more generally are integrated in the development and assessment of visual methods that facilitate the exploration, analysis, synthesis, and presentation of georeferenced information. The authors report on development and use of one component of a prototype GVis environment designed to facilitate exploration, by domain experts, of time series multivariate georeferenced health statistics. Emphasis is on how manipulable dynamic GVis tools may facilitate visual thinking, pattern noticing, and hypothesis generation. The prototype facilitates the highlighting of data extremes, examination of change in geographic patterns over time, and exploration of similarity among georeferenced variables. A qualitative exploratory analysis of verbal protocols and transaction logs is used to characterize system use. Evidence produced through the characterization highlights differences among experts in data analysis strategies (particularly in relation to the use of attribute "focusing" combined with time series animation) and corresponding differences in success at noticing spatiotemporal patterns.
Displaced intra-articular fractures of the calcaneus.

Most calcaneal fractures occur in male industrial workers, making the economic importance of this injury substantial. Many authors have reported that patients may be totally incapacitated for as long as three years and partially impaired for as long as five years after the injury1,11,39,73,94,133. Although modern operative intervention has improved the outcome in many patients, there still is no real consensus on classification, treatment, operative technique, or postoperative management. In this article, the current thinking regarding the treatment of these very difficult fractures will be reviewed. As early as 1908, Cotton and Wilson suggested that open reduction of a calcaneal fracture was contra-indicated27. McLaughlin agreed, likening attempts at operative fixation to the “nailing of a custard pie to the wall. ”76 Cotton and Wilson recommended closed treatment with use of a medially placed sandbag, a laterally placed felt pad, and a hammer to reduce the lateral wall and “reimpact” the fracture27. Although initially they were enthusiastic about this technique, by the 1920s they had abandoned the treatment of acute fractures altogether and had turned instead to the treatment of healed malunions29. Despite the fact that Bohler11 advocated open reduction in 1931, the principal reasons for the predominance of nonoperative treatment were the technical problems associated with operative treatment. Anesthesia was not always effective, radiography and fluoroscopy were not well developed, antibiotics did not exist, and a sound understanding of the principles of internal fixation was lacking105. The resulting complications of infection, malunion, and nonunion, and the possible need for amputation, made most surgeons believe that treatment should be nonoperative. In 1935, Conn, who was dissatisfied with standard treatment methods, reported on the use of delayed primary triple arthrodesis, with …
Immune Response in the Barrier Epithelia: Lessons from the Fruit Fly Drosophila melanogaster

The barrier epithelia of multicellular organisms frequently come into direct contact with microorganisms and thus need to fulfill the important task of preventing the penetration of pathogens that could cause systemic infections. A functional immune defence in the epithelial linings of the digestive, respiratory and reproductive organs as well as the epidermis/skin of animals is therefore of crucial importance for survival. Epithelial defence reactions are likely to be evolutionarily ancient, and the use of invertebrate animal models, such as insects and nematodes, has been crucial in unravelling the mechanisms underlying epithelial immunity. This review addresses basic questions of epithelial immunity in animals and humans. It focuses on recent developments in the understanding of the immune responses in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster and how the innate immune system acts locally in the epidermis and cuticle, tracheae, gut and genital organs. Both basal immune activities in epithelia that are constantly exposed to microbes as well as positive and negative regulation in response to pathogenic organisms are covered. Important immuno-physiological aspects of epithelial defence mechanisms are also discussed, such as wound healing, re-epithelialization and intestinal homeostasis.
Class 1 integron-associated gene cassettes in Salmonella enterica subsp. enterica serovar Agona isolated from pig carcasses in Brazil.

OBJECTIVES Two multiresistant Salmonella enterica subsp. enterica serovar Agona isolates from pig carcasses were investigated for antimicrobial resistance genes and their location with particular reference to the detection of class 1 integrons. METHODS The two S. Agona isolates were investigated for their in vitro susceptibility to antimicrobial agents and their plasmid content. The resistance genes and class 1 amplicons were identified by PCR assays. Amplicons of class 1 integrons were cloned and sequenced. Transferability of resistance plasmids was confirmed by conjugation. RESULTS Both S. Agona isolates carried conjugative plasmids of approximately 150 kb which harboured all resistance genes detected in the respective isolates. S. Agona 231 was resistant to chloramphenicol by catA1, to tetracycline and minocycline by tet(B), and to sulphonamides by sul1. In addition, it harboured a streptomycin resistance gene strA and a class 1 integron with a new aadA variant designated aadA23, which mediates resistance to streptomycin and spectinomycin. S. Agona 242 also carried the genes catA1, tet(B), and sul1. Moreover, it harboured a second sulphonamide resistance gene, sul2, and a class 1 integron with intact gene cassettes carrying new variants of the trimethoprim resistance gene dfrA15b or the chloramphenicol resistance gene cmlA4. The third gene cassette consisted of a truncated aadA2 gene. CONCLUSIONS The results of this study show that large conjugative multiresistance plasmids are present in S. Agona from pigs. Analysis of the class 1 integrons revealed the presence of new variants of resistance genes so far not detected in Salmonella isolates.
Are Stable Instances Easy?

We introduce the notion of a stable instance for a discrete optimization problem, and argue that in many practical situations only sufficiently stable instances are of interest. The question then arises whether stable instances of NP-hard problems are easier to solve, and in particular, whether there exist algorithms that solve in polynomial time all sufficiently stable instances of some NP-hard problem. The paper focuses on the Max-Cut problem, for which we show that this is indeed the case.
Reduction of excitation by interleukin‐1β in rat neocortical slices visualized using infrareddarkfield videomicroscopy

The cytokine interleukin-1 beta (IL-1β) is thought to be critically involved in the neuroendocrine and behavioral changes which occur in response to systemic infection. In the present study, we have employed the novel technique of infrared-darkfield videomicroscopy to examine the effect of IL-1β on the intrinsic optical signal (IOS), an indicator of the spread of neuronal excitation and synaptic transmission in the mammalian central nervous system. Low doses of IL-1β delivered exogenously to rat neocortical slices produced a reduction of the area of the column-like IOS evoked by orthodromic stimulation. The effect of IL-1β was reversible on washout and not mimicked by heat-inactivated IL-1β. These results suggest a possible modulatory role of IL-1β on synaptic transmission in the rat neocortex which is probably mediated through an activation of GABAA receptors.
The Impact of Agile Principles and Practices on Large-Scale Software Development Projects: A Multiple-Case Study of Two Projects at Ericsson

BACKGROUND: Agile software development methods have a number of reported benefits on productivity, project visibility, software quality and other areas. There are also negative effects reported. However, the base of empirical evidence to the claimed effects needs more empirical studies. AIM: The purpose of the research was to contribute with empirical evidence on the impact of using agile principles and practices in large-scale, industrial software development. Research was focused on impacts within seven areas: Internal software documentation, Knowledge sharing, Project visibility, Pressure and stress, Coordination effectiveness, and Productivity. METHOD: Research was carried out as a multiple-case study on two contemporary, large-scale software development projects with different levels of agile adoption at Ericsson. Empirical data was collected through a survey of project members. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS: Intentional implementation of agile principles and practices were found to: correlate with a more balanced use of internal software documentation, contribute to knowledge sharing, correlate with increased project visibility and coordination effectiveness, reduce the need for other types of coordination mechanisms, and possibly increase productivity. No correlation with increase in pressure and stress were found.
Solving scattering from 3D composite conducting and dielectric object by surface integral equation method

Recently, scattering from 3D composite conducting and dielectric object receives much attention. Traditionally, FEM-BI method is applied to solve the problem. But absorption boundary condition (ABC) is needed in FEM-BI method. In this paper, we use two combinations of surface integral equation to solve the RCS of 3D composite conducting and dielectric object. Fast multipole method (FMM) is used. The problem is formulated in terms of a set of coupled integral equations involving equivalent electric and magnetic surface currents based on the equivalence theorem. The conducting structures and the dielectric materials are modeled by planar triangular patches, RWG basis and Galerkin method are used. The fast multipole method is applied to accelerate the computation of matrix-vector multiplication. The computational complexity and storage requirement is O(N/sup 1.5/), respectively. Numerical results are given for various structures and compared with other available data. The numerical results show that the present method has satisfying accuracy.
v-Promela: a visual, object-oriented language for SPIN

Describes the design of VIP (Visual Interface for Promela), a graphical front-end to the model checker SPIN. VIP supports a visual formalism, called v-Promela, that connects the model checker to modern hierarchical notations for the specification of object-oriented, reactive systems. The formalism is comparable to formalisms such as UML-RT (Unified Modeling Language for Real-Time systems), ROOM (Real-time Object-Oriented Modeling) and Statecharts, but is presented in this paper in a framework that allows us to combine the benefits of a visual, hierarchical specification method with the power of LTL (linear temporal logic) model checking provided by SPIN. Like comparable formalisms, VIP can describe hierarchies of behaviour and of system structure. The formalism is designed to be transparent to the SPIN model checker itself, by allowing all central constructs to be translated mechanically into basic Promela, as already supported by the existing model checker.
Investigations into the Use of Preposition Sense in Semantic Argument Classification

A primary challenge in natural language processing (NLP) is to enable machines to disambiguate the meaning of human language. Semantic role labeling and word sense disambiguation are two key components to find a semantic representation for a sentence. Semantic role labeling is the task of determining the constituents of a sentence that represent semantic arguments with respect to a predicate an labeling each with a semantic role. Word sense disambiguation (WSD) tries to determine the correct meaning of a word in a given context. One word class which is both frequent and highly ambiguous is preposition. The different senses of a preposition express different relations between the preposition complement and the rest of the sentence. The sense of the preposition is related to the semantic role of the domnating prepositional phrase (PP). To understand the semantics of a PP, a system would need access to both the higher level semantics of the semantic role and the finer word-token level semantics of the preposition. In my diploma thesis, I investigate the use of preposition senses for semantic role labeling. First, I evaluate how accurate supervised machine learning methods can disambiguate prepositions for the SRL task. As part of the experiments, I manually annotate prepositions in four sections of the Wall Street Journal section of the Penn Treebank corpus. My experiments show that supervised WSD models need a large, domain specific training set to achieve accurate results. Secondly, I investigate different methods how the preposition sense can be Incorporated into the SRL model. I conduct experiments for three different approaches: direct integration of the preposition sense as a SRL feature, classifier combination and joint inference. My results show that the preposition sense can be a useful feature for SRL, but that more accurate WSD classifiers would be needed to improve state-of-the-art SRL models. The experiments with the joint inference model show that joint learning of semantic roles and preposition senses improves the classification accuracy over competitive, individual models on each task.
Electromechanical Properties Of Atomically Thin Materials

We discuss the effect of elastic deformations on the electronic properties of atomically thin materials, with a focus on bilayer graphene and MoS2 membranes. In these materials distortions of the lattice translate into fictitious gauge fields in the electronic Dirac Hamiltonian that are explicitly derived here for arbitrary elastic deformations, including in-plane as well as flexural (out-of-plane) distortions. We consider bilayer graphene, where a constant fictitious gauge field causes a dramatic reconstruction of the low energy trigonally warped electronic spectrum inducing topological transitions in the Fermi surface. We then present results of ballistic transport in trigonally warped bilayer graphene with and without strain, with particular focus on noise and the Fano factor. With the inclusion of trigonal warping the Fano factor at the Dirac point is still F = 1/3, but the range of energies which show pseudo diffusive transport increases by orders of magnitude compared to the results stemming out of a parabolic spectrum and the applied strain acts to increase this energy range further. We also consider arbitrary deformations of another two-dimensional membrane, MoS2. Distortions of this lattice also lead to a fictitious gauge field arising within the Dirac Hamiltonian, but with a distinct structure than seen in graphene. We present the full form of the fictitious gauge fields that arise in MoS2. Using the fictitious gauge fields we study the coupling between electronic and mechanical degrees of freedom, in particular the coupling between electrons and excited vibrational modes, or vibrons. To understand whether these effects may have a strong influence on electronic transport in MoS2 we calculate the dimensionless electron-vibron coupling constant for all vibron modes relevant for electronic transport. We find that electron-vibron coupling constant is highly sample specific and that the longitudinal stretching mode is the vibron with the dominant coupling. This however reaches maximum values which are lower than those observed in carbon nanostructures.
Likelihood normalization using an ergodic HMM for continuous speech recognition

In recent speech recognition technology, the score of a hypothesis is often defined on the basis of HMM likelihood. As is well known, however, direct use of the likelihood as a scoring function causes difficult problems, especially when the length of a speech segment varies depending on the hypothesis, as in word-spotting, and some kind of normalization is indispensable. In this paper, a new method of likelihood normalization using an ergodic HMM is presented, and its performance is compared with those of conventional ones. The comparison is made from three points of view: recognition rate, word-end detection power and mean hypothesis length. It is concluded that the proposed method gives the best overall performance.
Probabilistic constraint logic programming: formal foundations of quantitative and statistical inference in constrained based natural language processing

In this thesis, we present two approaches to a rigorous mathematical and algorithmic foundation of quantitative and statistical inference in constraint-based natural language processing. The first approach, called quantitative constraint logic programming, is conceptualized in a clear logical framework, and presents a sound and complete system of quantitative inference for definite clauses annotated with subjective weights. This approach combines a rigorous formal semantics for quantitative inference based on subjective weights with efficient weight-based pruning for constraint-based systems. The second approach, called probabilistic constraint logic programming, introduces a log-linear probability distribution on the proof trees of a constraint logic program and an algorithm for statistical inference of the parameters and properties of such probability models from incomplete, i.e., unparsed data. The possibility of defining arbitrary properties of proof trees as properties of the log-linear probability model and efficiently estimating appropriate parameter values for them permits the probabilistic modeling of arbitrary context-dependencies in constraint logic programs. The usefulness of these ideas is evaluated empirically in a small-scale experiment on finding the correct parses of a constraint-based grammar. In addition, we address the problem of computational intractability of the calculation of expectations in the inference task and present various techniques to approximately solve this task. Moreover, we present an approximate heuristic technique for searching for the most probable analysis in probabilistic constraint logic programs.
Opioid use in young veterans.

PURPOSE Data suggest an increase in prescription opioid abuse in recent years. Young veterans represent a group with major risk factors for prescription opioid abuse. The objectives of this study are: (A) to determine the prevalence of chronic opioid use in young veterans over time; (B) to describe the prescribing patterns and monitoring of chronic opioid therapy in young veterans; and (C) to assess opioid management within Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System (VAPAHCS) with an emphasis on effectiveness and safety. METHODS This is a Veterans Affairs Research and Development (R&D) Committee and IRB-approved retrospective, single-center study of young veterans aged 18-30 years on chronic opioid therapy during the study years January 1, 2003, to October 1, 2008. A subset of the study population who were receiving long-acting opioids for a minimum of 6 months was included in the effectiveness and safety analyses. Data were obtained from the Veterans Integrated Service Network (VISN 21) data warehouse, outpatient prescription records, and from electronic chart review. RESULTS The prevalence of chronic opioid use in young veterans has increased from 3 percent in 2003 to 4.5 percent in 2007. Patients on average were exposed to two different opioids and had three different opioid prescribers. Nearly 80 percent of the opioid prescriptions during the study were prescribed by primary care providers and less than 1 percent was from pain specialists. Only 31 percent of patients on chronic opioids had undergone urine drug testing and only 5 percent had signed opioid treatment agreements. No difference in median pain score was observed following initiation of long-acting opioid therapy, and 22 percent of patients (4 of 18) met the prespecified definition of being a responder to long-acting opioid therapy. Five patients (28 percent) on long-acting opioids experienced adverse drug reactions. CONCLUSION The prevalence of chronic opioid use in young veterans has been on the rise in recent years. Young veterans receiving care at VAPAHCS have often had multiple opioid prescribers and have trialed multiple opioid analgesics. Many improvements in appropriate monitoring and management of these patients can be made, which may include providing more training to current staff the development of an opioid refill clinic, and greater utilization of the pain management specialists. Further larger study is warranted to identify successful strategies for improving prescribing and monitoring of opioids as well as potential predictors of response to chronic long-acting opioid therapy.