Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Clinical utility of dual-energy CT in the evaluation of solitary pulmonary nodules: initial experience.

PURPOSE To determine the clinical utility of dual-energy computed tomography (CT) in evaluating solitary pulmonary nodules (SPNs). MATERIALS AND METHODS This study was approved by the institutional review board, and informed consent was obtained. CT scans were obtained before and 3 minutes after contrast material injection in 49 patients (26 men, 23 women; mean age, 60.39 years +/- 12.24 [standard deviation]) by using a scanner with a dual-energy technique. Image sets that included nonenhanced weighted average, enhanced weighted average, virtual nonenhanced, and iodine-enhanced images were reconstructed. CT numbers of SPNs on virtual nonenhanced and nonenhanced weighted average images were compared, and CT numbers on iodine-enhanced image and the degree of enhancement were compared. Diagnostic accuracy for malignancy by using CT number on iodine-enhanced image and the degree of enhancement were compared. On the virtual nonenhanced image, the number and size of calcifications were compared with those on the nonenhanced weighted average image. Radiation dose was compared with that of single-energy CT. RESULTS CT numbers on virtual nonenhanced and nonenhanced weighted average images and CT numbers on the iodine-enhanced image and the degree of enhancement showed good agreements (intraclass correlation coefficients: 0.83 and 0.91, respectively). Diagnostic accuracy for malignancy by using CT numbers on iodine-enhanced image was comparable to that by using the degree of enhancement (sensitivity, 92% and 72%; specificity, 70% and 70%; accuracy, 82.2% and 71.1%, respectively). On virtual nonenhanced image, 85.0% (17 of 20) of calcifications in the SPN and 97.8% (44 of 45) of calcifications in the lymph nodes were detected, and the apparent sizes were smaller than those on the nonenhanced weighted average image. Radiation dose (average dose-length product, 240.77 mGy cm) was not significantly different from that of single-energy CT (P = .67). CONCLUSION Dual-energy CT allows measurement of the degree of enhancement and detection of calcifications without additional radiation dose.
Maximization of Mutual Information for Supervised Linear Feature Extraction

In this paper, we present a novel scheme for linear feature extraction in classification. The method is based on the maximization of the mutual information (MI) between the features extracted and the classes. The sum of the MI corresponding to each of the features is taken as an heuristic that approximates the MI of the whole output vector. Then, a component-by-component gradient-ascent method is proposed for the maximization of the MI, similar to the gradient-based entropy optimization used in independent component analysis (ICA). The simulation results show that not only is the method competitive when compared to existing supervised feature extraction methods in all cases studied, but it also remarkably outperform them when the data are characterized by strongly nonlinear boundaries between classes.
Software Development Outsourcing Contract: Structure and Business Value

We address the case where a user contracts for the delivery of a new information system from an independent vendor, both of whom are risk-neutral. The delivery task is partitioned into two consecutive stages: system design and software development. The parties can contract for each stage separately or specify an initial contract that covers both stages. We compare the impact of different contracting structures on prices, project value, project completion probability, and the value to the developer of obtaining the first stage of the contract. Specifically, we show that a two-stage contracting can lead to a higher business value than stage-by-stage contracting. When there is competition for the design stage, the vendors bear more of the software development risk, and the probability the system will be completed depends on the contract structure.
Molecular Identification of a Novel Protein That Regulates Biogenesis of Photosystem I, a Membrane Protein Complex*

Photosystem I (PSI) is a multisubunit pigment-protein complex in the thylakoid membranes of cyanobacteria and chloroplasts. BP26, a random photosynthesis-deficient mutant strain of the cyanobacterium Synechocystis 6803 has a severely reduced PSI content, whereas its photosystem II is present in normal amount. The BP26 mutant is complemented by a novel gene, btpA, that encodes a 30-kDa protein. In this strain, a missense mutation in the btpA gene, resulting in the replacement of a valine by a glycine residue, significantly affects the accumulation of the PSI reaction center proteins, PsaA and PsaB. Northern blot analysis revealed that the steady-state levels of the transcripts from the psaAB operon, encoding these proteins, remain unaltered in the mutant strain. Hence the BtpA protein regulates a post-transcriptional process during the life cycle of the PSI protein complex such as 1) translation of the psaAB mRNA, 2) assembly of the PsaA/PsaB polypeptides and their associated cofactors into a functional complex, or 3) degradation of the protein complex. Close relatives of the BtpA protein have been found in nonphotosynthetic organisms, viz the archaebacterium Methanococcus jannaschii, the eubacterium Escherichia coli, and the nematode, Caenorhabditis elegans, suggesting that these proteins may regulate biogenesis of other protein complexes in these evolutionarily distant organisms.
Bi-spectrum based-EMD applied to the non-stationary vibration signals for bearing faults diagnosis

Empirical mode decomposition (EMD) has been widely applied to analyze vibration signals behavior for bearing failures detection. Vibration signals are almost always nonstationary since bearings are inherently dynamic (e.g., speed and load condition change over time). By using EMD, the complicated non-stationary vibration signal is decomposed into a number of stationary intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) based on the local characteristic time scale of the signal. Bi-spectrum, a third-order statistic, helps to identify phase coupling effects, the bi-spectrum is theoretically zero for Gaussian noise and it's flat for non-Gaussian white noise, consequently the bi-spectrum analysis is insensitive to random noise, which are useful for detecting faults in induction machines. Utilizing the advantages of EMD and bi-spectrum, this article proposes a joint method for detecting such faults, called bi-spectrum based EMD (BSEMD). First, original vibration signals collected from accelerometers are decomposed by EMD and a set of intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) is produced. Then, the IMF signals are analyzed via bi-spectrum to detect outer race bearing defects. The procedure is illustrated with the experimental bearing vibration data. The experimental results show that BSEMD techniques can effectively diagnosis bearing failures.
Beyond Simulation: Treating the Classroom as an Organization

Whether or not the instructor chooses to make explicit the parallels between other organizations and the classroom, issues such as leadership, structure and control still must be handled and how they are handled will have great impact. Students probably learn as much from our classroom managerial behavior as they do from the content of our teaching. Because of the correspondence between what we teach and how we teach, we have a marvelous opportunity
Incidence, outcomes, and cost of foot ulcers in patients with diabetes.

OBJECTIVE To determine the incidence of foot ulcers in a large cohort of patients with diabetes, the risk of developing serious complications after diagnosis, and the attributable cost of care compared with that in patients without foot ulcers. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS Retrospective cohort study of patients with diabetes in a large staff-model health maintenance organization from 1993 to 1995. Patients with diabetes were identified by algorithm using administrative, laboratory, and pharmacy records. The data were used to calculate incidence of foot ulcers, risk of osteomyelitis, amputation, and death after diagnosis of foot ulcer, and attributable costs in foot ulcer patients compared with patients without foot ulcers. RESULTS Among 8,905 patients identified with type 1 or type 2 diabetes, 514 developed a foot ulcer over 3 years of observation (cumulative incidence 5.8%). On or after the time of diagnosis, 77 (15%) patients developed osteomyelitis and 80 (15.6%) required amputation. Survival at 3 years was 72% for the foot ulcer patients versus 87% for a group of age- and sex-matched diabetic patients without foot ulcers (P < 0.001). The attributable cost for a 40- to 65-year-old male with a new foot ulcer was $27,987 for the 2 years after diagnosis. CONCLUSIONS The incidence of foot ulcers in this cohort of patients with diabetes was nearly 2.0% per year. For those who developed ulcers, morbidity, mortality, and excess care costs were substantial compared with those for patients without foot ulcers. The results appear to support the value of foot-ulcer prevention programs for patients with diabetes.
Maximum 4-Degenerate Subgraph of a Planar Graph

A graph $G$ is $k$-degenerate if it can be transformed into an empty graph by subsequent removals of vertices of degree $k$ or less. We prove that every connected planar graph with average degree $d \ge 2$ has a 4-degenerate induced subgraph containing at least $(38-d)/36$ of its vertices. This shows that every planar graph of order $n$ has a 4-degenerate induced subgraph of order more than $8/9 \cdot n$. We also consider a local variation of this problem and show that in every planar graph with at least 7 vertices, deleting a suitable vertex allows us to subsequently remove at least 6 more vertices of degree four or less.
Cellular uptake and toxicity of gold nanoparticles in prostate cancer cells: a comparative study of rods and spheres

Using a series of gold nanoparticles with incremental increase in dimensions but varying geometries (spherical vs rods) we have evaluated the influence of shape, size, surface properties and concentration on cellular uptake, adsorption of proteins and toxicity in a human prostate cancer cell line (PC‐3). In the range of 30–90 nm diameter studied, spherical particles of 50 nm in diameter without polyethylene glycol (PEG) had the highest uptake. Surface attachment of PEG reduced cellular uptake. PEGylated gold nanorods had a net positive charge compared with their spherical counterparts and particle geometry influenced cellular uptake. In the absence of serum proteins the uptake of plain spherical GNPs increased. These studies pave the way for the tailoring of gold nanoparticles for targeted tumor therapy applications. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Sharing Stories: Parents' Involvement in Reading with Inner‐City Nursery Children

Recent research has underlined both the benefits of parents reading stories to their children before they start school and of parental involvement in the early reading stages. A one-year project was carried out in the nursery class of an inner-city primary school to set up a regular book borrowing service to enable and encourage parents to read regularly to their pre-reception class children. The level of parental and child interest was monitored throughout. An attempt to measure the effect of the input was made by testing the children involved in the project at the end of their reception class year. Although the results do not show any significant difference in the level of achievement between the experimental school and the two control schools, the project did reveal an unexpectedly high level of parental interest in orienting children towards literacy.
Translating policy: Power and action in Australia's country towns

Controversies In its present condition, rural Australia is characterised by a discourse of decline that sees country towns and regions as places of demoralisation and despair. From a Foucauldian governmentality perspective, those who live in these spaces are not so much 'powerless' to the demands of urban-based governments and global capital, as rendered governable according to the socio-political ambitions of late capitalism. While important insights have been derived from such analyses, it is argued in this paper that excessive attention is often paid to the power of the state with little concern for the various ways in which local people engage with, and transform the strategies and effects of state power. Rather than utilising the concept of resistance to make sense of these interactions, a sociology of translation is adopted from the Actor Network Theory literature. Applied to two case examples, it shows how governmental policies and programmes are frequently the outcome of the interactions and negotiations that take place between all those enrolled in the actor-network.
Task-Driven Software Summarization

There is a growing interest in software summarization and tools for automatically producing summaries. Discussions of relevant papers at recent conferences led to the observation that software summarization needs to consider migrating away from ``is this a good summary? " and towards ``is this a useful summary? " As a result, it has been suggested that to judge usefulness, one needs to view the summary through the lens of a particular task. A preliminary investigation of this suggestion was undertaken at the 2013 ICSE workshop NaturaLiSE. Initial results and lessons learned from this investigation support the notion that task plays a significant role and thus should be considered by researchers building and accessing automatic software summarization tools.
Cardiac energetics in congestive heart failure.

To the Editor: Johannsson et al1 have recently observed upregulation of the Monocarboxylate transporter 1 (MCT1) in congestive heart failure (CHF). The implied increased uptake of exogenous (systemic) lactate confirms the potential significance of increased carbohydrate metabolism as a compensatory adaptation in CHF and also identifies a potential therapeutic focus. However, 3 points deserve emphasis: (1) Although increased MCT-1 appears to be a feature of at least a subgroup of ventricular dysfunction, certainly indicating an increased reliance on systemic lactate, Johannsson et al interpret a lack of comparable glucose transporter (Glut-1 and -4) upregulation to suggest endogenous glycolytically derived lactate is relatively insignificant. Their assertion derives from the widely held traditional notion that fatty acid metabolism (FAM), coincidentally the major energy source in normal hearts, antagonizes glycolysis and vice versa. Contemporary studies, while accepting a relative fuel polarization with mutual FAM/glycolysis antagonism, also emphasize the benefits of synergy between FAM/glycolysis in muscle.2 An example of this synergism is AMP-dependent protein kinase (AMPK), a fundamental orchestrator of myocyte energy regulation. Activation of AMPK, stimulates …
Blaming the poor: constructions of marginality and poverty in the Kenyan education sector

The article examines how blame and disconnection from the lives of the poor feature in a nexus of ideas about implementing education policy articulated by education officials and teachers in Kenya. Three different approaches to understanding marginality are distinguished, each associated with a different process of setting a boundary concerning the marginalised. This differentiation is used to analyse qualitative data collected between 2007 and 2011 in three sites – a school, a provincial education department, and the national education ministry. Analysis shows how work practices in all sites entail processes of distancing and exclusion which confirm the boundaries associated with marginalisation, rather than overcoming them. We conclude on the need to pay attention to shifting cultural perceptions concerning the marginalised, opening educational opportunities for officials and teachers to examine their presuppositions, and making space for the poor and the marginal to engage politically and culturally in developing inclusion and social justice in schools.
Dart Throwing on Surfaces

In this paper we present dart throwing algorithms to generate maximal Poisson disk point sets directly on 3D surfaces. We optimize dart throwing by efficiently excluding areas of the domain that are already covered by existing darts. In the case of triangle meshes, our algorithm shows dramatic speed improvement over comparable sampling methods. The simplicity of our basic algorithm naturally extends to the sampling of other surface types, including spheres, NURBS, subdivision surfaces, and implicits. We further extend the method to handle variable density points, and the placement of arbitrary ellipsoids without overlap. Finally, we demonstrate how to adapt our algorithm to work with geodesic instead of Euclidean distance. Applications for our method include fur modeling, the placement of mosaic tiles and polygon remeshing.
Vitamin D and the evolution of human depigmentation.

In his recent commentary, Robins (2009) disputed the role played by ultraviolet radiation (UVR), namely, the vitamin-D-producing wavelengths of ultraviolet B (UVB), in the evolution of human skin. He questioned the theory that reduced levels of pigmentation in human skin were selected to facilitate absorption of UVB. He provided evidence to support his idea that people can produce enough vitamin D in their skin, regardless of pigmentation, if they are not pursuing a modern lifestyle. He asserted that, within his framework, rickets was the only selective force that could have influenced the evolution of light pigmentation because other detrimental effects of vitamin D deficiency are unproven. As rickets is increased by industrialization, Robins concluded that ‘‘. vitamin D status could not have constituted the fitness differential between lightly pigmented and darkly pigmented individuals at high latitudes that favored the evolutionary selection of the former’’ (Robins, 2009). In this article, we examine the current evidence for what has been termed the ‘‘vitamin D theory,’’ and highlight the importance of UVB penetration in the evolution of human skin. We begin with an overview of the solar processes involved in cutaneous vitamin D synthesis, followed by a discussion of causal arguments and causation in the context of the vitamin D theory, and conclude with a review of physiological mechanisms and their evolutionary significance.
Parental mediation of children’s videogame playing: a comparison of the reports by parents and children

Through an Internet survey of 536 parent–child dyads, the authors researched which mediation strategies parents used to regulate videogaming by their children (8–18 years). Factor analyses revealed that both parents and children distinguished three types of parental mediation: (1) ‘restrictive mediation’, (2) ‘active mediation’, and (3) ‘co‐playing’. These strategies are comparable with mediation types that were established in research about television. Comparing the parents’ and children’s reports it was found that both groups had highly congruent views about the application of mediation. Parental mediation of videogaming was most strongly predicted by the child’s age and the parents’s game behavior. Furthermore, parents applied more restrictive and active mediation when they feared negative behavioral effects and more often co‐played with their children when they expected positive social‐emotional effects of gaming.
Crime and the Fear of Media

We can take some things for granted when we wonder why there is so much crime fear. First, there is quite a lot about crime in the media. It is hard to be very specific as those researchers that have tried to measure it have all used different methods, sampling approaches, sampling sizes, measurement techniques and definitions of what crime is. Marsh, in one of the few comprehensive reviews, reckoned that crime figured in between 1.6 per cent and 33.5 percent of newspaper coverage. Not very helpful and that's just crime news, and just in newspapers. Television is studied more often (radio less so) and, as far as I know, new media hasn't been considered at all.
Probiotic Enhanced Intestinal Immunity in Broilers against Subclinical Necrotic Enteritis

Along with banning of antibiotics, necrotic enteritis (NE), especially subclinical NE (SNE) whereby no clinical signs are present in chicks, has become one of the most threatening problems in poultry industry. Therefore, increasing attention has been focused on research and application of effective probiotic strains, as an alternative to antibiotics, to prevent SNE in broilers. In the present study, we evaluated the effects of Lactobacillus johnsonii BS15 on the prevention of SNE in broilers. Specifically, assessment determined the growth performance and indexes related to intestinal mucosal immunity in the ileum and cecal tonsil of broilers. A total of 300 1-day-old Cobb 500 chicks were randomly distributed into the following 5 groups: control group (fed with basal diet + de Man, Rogosa, and Sharpe liquid medium [normal diet]), SNE group (normal diet), BS15 group (basal diet + 1 × 106 colony-forming units BS15/g as fed [BS15 diet]), treatment group (normal diet [days 1–28] + BS15 diet [days 29–42]), and prevention group (BS15 diet [days 1–28] + normal diet [days 29–42]) throughout a 42-day experimental period. SNE infection was treated for all chicks in the SNE, BS15, treatment, and prevention groups. The present results demonstrated that BS15 supplementation of feeds in BS15 and prevention groups exerted a positive effect on preventing negative influences on growth performance; these negative influences included low body weight gain and increased feed conversion ratio caused by SNE. Although no changes were detected in all determined indexes in cecal tonsils, BS15-treated broilers were free from SNE-caused damage in villi in the ileum. BS15 inhibited SNE-caused decrease in immunoglobulins in the ileum. In the lamina propria of ileum, T cell subsets of lymphocytes influenced by SNE were also controlled by BS15. BS15 affected antioxidant abilities of the ileum and controlled SNE-induced mitochondrion-mediated apoptosis by positively changing contents and/or mRNA expression levels of apoptosis-related proteins. These findings indicate that BS15 supplementation may prevent SNE-affected growth decline mainly through enhancing intestinal immunity in broilers.
Older Adults’ Outdoor Walking: Inequalities in Neighbourhood Safety, Pedestrian Infrastructure and Aesthetics

Older adults living in high-deprivation areas walk less than those living in low-deprivation areas. Previous research has shown that older adults’ outdoor walking levels are related to the neighbourhood built environment. This study examines inequalities in perceived built environment attributes (i.e., safety, pedestrian infrastructure and aesthetics) and their possible influences on disparities in older adults’ outdoor walking levels in low- and high-deprivation areas of Birmingham, United Kingdom. It applied a mixed-method approach, included 173 participants (65 years and over), used GPS technology to measure outdoor walking levels, used questionnaires (for all participants) and conducted walking interviews (with a sub-sample) to collect data on perceived neighbourhood built environment attributes. The results show inequalities in perceived neighbourhood safety, pedestrian infrastructure and aesthetics in high- versus low-deprivation areas and demonstrate that they may influence disparities in participants’ outdoor walking levels. Improvements of perceived neighbourhood safety, pedestrian infrastructure and aesthetic in high-deprivation areas are encouraged.