Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Radiation risk from pediatric cardiac catheterization: friendly fire on children with congenital heart disease.

Congenital heart disease (CHD) is the most prevalent and fatal of all birth defects, occurring in nearly 1 in 100 live births.1 Before the advent of cardiac surgery for congenital cardiac malformations, less than one fifth of children born with such lesions reached adulthood. The progress of surgical management and, more recently, interventional catheterization has allowed an increasing number of congenital heart defects to be corrected surgically so that an increasing number of patients reach adolescence and adult life, even those with complex defects.2,3 Article see p 1903 Indeed, grown-up patients with surgically repaired CHD are a large and growing population, estimated to be 1 million in United States in the year 2000 compared with an estimated 300 000 in 1980, and 1.4 million cases are anticipated in 2020.2 Numbers are likely to be similar in the European Union, although no hard figures are available.3 One worrisome social and medical problem in the management of patients with CHD is certainly the long-term effects of intensive medical exposure to ionizing radiation received during childhood, especially for interventional catheterization procedures.4–7 Pediatric cardiac catheterizations are undoubtedly an essential diagnostic and therapeutic tool for the diagnosis and the treatment of CHD; however, they also deliver one of the highest radiation doses to patients.4–7 Ionizing radiation exposure is a definite risk factor for cancer development. Children are especially vulnerable to the oncogenic effects of radiation. Tissues and organs that are growing and developing are more sensitive to radiation effects than those that are fully mature. Moreover, the oncogenic effects of radiation require a long latent period (decades) that varies with the type of malignancy. Thus, an infant or child patient has a longer lifetime risk for developing radiation-induced cancers than adult patients.8 In addition, catheterization procedures are also …
Queueing Analysis of Distributed MAC in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks with Differentiated Services

A queueing analysis of a distributed and energy-aware medium access control (MAC) protocol is presented for wireless ad hoc networks with service differentiation. We consider a battery-powered node in the network with two different types of traffic, and model the node as a MAP/PH/1/K non-preemptive priority queue with multiple vacations to model the sleep and wakeup mechanism of the MAC layer as the server of the queues. Taking into account the non-saturation case for the queueing analysis of the MAC protocol, using phase-type distribution for both the service and the vacation processes, and combining the priority queueing model with the vacation queueing model make the analysis very general and comprehensive.
The Largest Respectful Function

Respectful functions were introduced by Sangiorgi as a compositional tool to formulate short and clear bisimulation proofs. Usually, the larger the respectful function, the easier the bisimulation proof. In particular the largest respectful function, defined as the pointwise union of all respectful functions, has been shown to be very useful. We here provide an explicit and constructive characterization of it.
Introduction to the SUIF 2.0 Compiler System

We give a brief overview of the new SUIF 2.0 compiler system which is currently being developed by the Stanford Compiler Group. We describe the SUIF 2.0 libraries at a very high level, focusing on the concepts without going into the gory details of the interfaces and the implementation.
Oral Peanut Challenge Identifies an Allergy but the Peanut Allergen Threshold Sensitivity Is Not Reproducible

Background Double-blind placebo-controlled food challenge, DBPCFC, the gold standard for diagnosing food allergy, is time-consuming and potentially dangerous. A basophil allergen threshold sensitivity test, CD-sens, has shown promising results as a diagnostic tool in food allergy. Objectives To evaluate the reproducibility of oral peanut challenge and compare the outcome to CD-sens in peanut-sensitized children. Methods Twenty-seven children (4–19 years) underwent a DBPCFC followed by a single-blind oral food-challenge. The peanut challenges (1 mg to 5 g) were evaluated by severity scoring. Blood samples were drawn for CD-sens before the two first challenges. Results Thirteen children (48%) did not react at any of the challenges. Fourteen reacted at both peanut challenges but not to placebo. Only two of these children reacted at the same threshold dose and with the same severity score. All other children scored differently or reacted at different doses. For children with a positive challenge the geometric mean of the ratio of the doses was 1.834 (p = 0.307) and the arithmetic mean of the difference between the severity scores was 0.143 (p = 0.952). No association was obtained between the two peanut challenges regarding severity score (rs = 0.11, p = 0.71) or threshold dose (rs = 0.35, p = 0.22). Among the children positive in peanut challenge, 12 were positive in CD-sens. Two were low-responders and could not be evaluated. Geometric mean of the ratio of CD-sens values in children with a positive challenge was 1.035 (p = 0.505) but unlike for the severity score and the threshold dose the association between the two CD-sens values was strong (rs = 0.94, P<0.001). Conclusions For a positive/negative test the reproducibility is 100% for both peanut challenge and CD-sens. However, a comparison of the degree of allergen threshold sensitivity between the two tests is not possible since the threshold dose and severity scoring is not reproducible.
The Perception of Arrival Time for Different Oncoming Vehicles at an Intersection

We make an appeal to bring the theoretical tools of ecological psychology to focus on road-traffic accidents that result from making left turns. Following a review of previous arrival-time literature, we report an experiment that was conducted in a fixed-base driving simulator to determine the perceptual basis for judgments to turn left. We manipulated the arrival time (Ta) of an oncoming vehicle, the viewing distance to that vehicle, and the type of oncoming vehicle. Forty-eight participants were randomly assigned to a group in which a motorcycle, a compact car, a full-size car, or a delivery truck represented the oncoming vehicle. There were equal numbers of male and female participants in the four groups. As Ta, was increased, underestimation of vehicle Ta also increased. Significant main effects were found for Ta, gender of participants, vehicle type, and viewing distance; significant effects were also found for interactions for gender by Ta and gender by vehicle type. Men and women differed in their accuracy of judgments for vehicle types; men were more accurate in estimating the arrival of delivery vans and motorcycles than women. The accuracy of Ta estimation for the type of the approach vehicle and distance removed suggests that participants used vehicle-size information in their judgments. We present a discussion of a number of "disappearancen methodological issues and research applications. Language: en
Psychometric Properties of the Learning Approach Inventory: A Confirmatory Factor Analysis

Objective : To determine the internal consistency and construct validity of the Learning Approach Inventory (LA-i) among first year medical students in a Malaysian medical school. Methods : Cross sectional study was done on 196 first year medical students in Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM). The items of the LA-i were framed based on characteristics of three learning approaches. The Cronbach’s alpha reliability analysis, exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis were applied to measure internal consistency and construct validity. These analyses were done using Predictive Analytics SoftWare (PASW) version 18 and Analysis of Moment Structure (AMOS) version 19. The Composite Reliability (CR) and Average Variance Extracted (AVE) were calculated manually to measure construct reliability and convergent validity. Result : A total of 196 medical students responded to this study. Exploratory factor analysis showed that three potential constructs were extracted from the inventory. The confirmatory factor analysis showed the three factor model with nine items had a good fit with the latent constructs (X 2 (df) = 26.07 (20), p = 0.163, RMR = 0.04, GFI = 0.969, AGFI = 0.93, NFI = 0.967, RFI = 0.941, IFI = 0.992, TLI = 0.985, CFI = 0.992, RMSEA = 0.04). Each domain of the final model of the LA-i has three items. The Cronbach’s alpha value of the AL-i was 0.86. The Cronbach’s alpha values of surface, strategic and deep approach domains were 0.62, 0.73 and 0.88 respectively. Most of learning approach domains had Composite Reliability and Average Variance Extracted values were more than 0.6 and 0.5 respectively indicating good construct reliability and adequate convergent validity. Conclusion : This study suggested that the three factor model with 9-items of the LA-i has a good fit and shown good psychometric values. It is a valid and reliability measurement to determine learning approaches among first year medical students.
Study of the neurotransmitter dopamine and the neurotoxin 6-hydroxydopamine by electrospray ionization coupled with tandem mass spectrometry.

Electrospray ionization combined with tandem mass spectrometry has been applied to a study of dopamine and 6-hydroxydopamine, an important neurotransmitter and a well-known neurotoxin, respectively. Both protonated and deprotonated molecules were observed for the two compounds. Upon collision-induced dissociation of protonated and deprotonated 6-hydroxydopamine molecules, the number of fragmentation pathways observed was greater than that observed with protonated and deprotonated dopamine molecules; the greater proclivity to fragment of the former is due to the 6-substituted hydroxyl group, which is para to the 3-OH group and ortho to the CH2CH2NH2 group. Furthermore, 6-hydroxydopamine showed a greater propensity to oxidize than did dopamine when sample solutions were kept uncovered in the air for 24 h prior to mass spectrometric examination. Radical structures of the four main oxidation products of 6-hydroxydopamine have been suggested on the basis of their product ion mass spectra; one or more of these oxidation products may be responsible for the cytotoxic property of 6-hydroxydopamine.
Dysregulation of p56lck Kinase in Patients with Systemic Lupus Erythematosus

In this study we investigated one of the possible mechanisms of p56lck down-regulation in peripheral blood lymphocytes (PBLs) from Systemic Lupus Erythematosus (SLE) patients and we correlated p56 dysregulation with accelerated apoptosis in SLE PBLs. PBLs from SLE patients and healthy donors were isolated. p56lck protein expression and Ick mRNA level were estimated by immunoblotting and RT-PCR, respectively. FACS analysis was used to evaluate the apoptosis and p56 levels in apoptotic and non-apoptotic PBLs. A non-radioactive Tyrosine Kinase Assay Kit was used to measure p56, ck activity. Our results demonstrated that PBLs from SLE patients displayed lower levels of Ick mRNA and p56lck protein as compared to healthy donors. The apoptosis of fresh or cultured PBLs was enhanced in SLE patients, especially in anti-DNA negative group. The expression of p56lck was inverse correlated with apoptosis of fresh and cultured SLE PBLs, especially in anti-DNA negative patients. Double staining FACS analysis showed that p56lck expression was lower in apoptotic than in non-apoptotic PBLs. p56ick specific activity was directly correlated to apoptosis in SLE PBLs. While the low expression of p56lck may be the result of lower degree of synthesis, the increased specific activity could directly correlated to the extent of apoptosis in SLE PBLs. Based on our observations, we assume that the p56lck dysregulation could play a role in SLE pathogenesis
Serum bilirubin and genes controlling bilirubin concentrations as biomarkers for cardiovascular disease.

BACKGROUND Serum bilirubin has been consistently shown to be inversely related to cardiovascular disease (CVD). Recent studies showed serum bilirubin to be associated with CVD-related factors such as diabetes, metabolic syndrome, and body mass index. Although the association of serum bilirubin with CVD has been found in both retrospective and prospective studies, less information is available on the role of genes that control bilirubin concentrations and their association with CVD. CONTENT In this review, we provide detailed information on the identity of the major genes that control bilirubin concentrations and their association with serum bilirubin concentrations and CVD risk. We also update the results of the major studies that have been performed on the association between serum bilirubin, CVD, and CVD-related diseases such as diabetes or metabolic syndrome. Studies consistently indicate that bilirubin concentrations are inversely associated with different types of CVD and CVD-related diseases. A conditional linkage study indicates that UGT1A1 is the major gene controlling serum bilirubin concentrations, and this finding has been confirmed in recent genomewide association studies. Studies also indicate that individuals homozygous for UGT1A1*28 have a significantly lower risk of developing CVD than carriers of the wild-type alleles. SUMMARY Serum bilirubin has a protective effect on CVD and CVD-related diseases, and UGT1A1 is the major gene controlling serum bilirubin concentrations. Pharmacologic, nonpharmacologic, or genetic interventions that increase serum bilirubin concentrations could provide more direct evidence on the role of bilirubin in CVD prevention.
A Closer Look at Reporting Bias in Conflict Event Data

Recent data collections about political violence are frequently based on media reports, which can lead to reporting bias. This is an issue in particular for the emergent literature on communication technology and conflict, since this technology may not only affect violence, but also the reporting about it. Using the effect of cellphones on violence as an example, this article presents a quantitative assessment of reporting bias in a micro-level analysis. Comparing media-based event reports and those from military sources, the results show that the purported violence-increasing effect of cellphone coverage is partly due to higher reporting rates of violence in cellphone-covered areas. A simple diagnostic procedure for this problem is implemented. Applied to the analysis of cellphones and violence in Africa, it produces a pattern that is consistent with reporting bias driving much of the effect found in the Pierskalla and Hollenbach (2013) study about this topic.
SENA: Preserving Social Structure for Network Embedding

Network embedding transforms a network into a continuous feature space. Network augmentation, on the other hand, leverages this feature representation to obtain a more informative network by adding potentially plausible edges while removing noisy edges. Traditional network embedding methods are often inefficient in capturing - (i) the latent relationship when the network is sparse (the network sparsity problem), and (ii) the local and global neighborhood structure of vertices (structure preserving problem). We propose SENA, a structural embedding and network augmentation framework for social network analysis. Unlike other embedding methods which only generate vertex features, SENA generates features for both vertices and relations (edges) by minimizing a well-designed objective function composed of a loss function and a regularization. The loss function reduces the network-sparsity problem by learning from both the edges present (true edges) and absent (false edges) in the network; whereas the regularization term preserves the structural properties of the network by efficiently considering - (i) the local neighborhood of vertices and edges, and (ii) the network spectra, i.e., eigenvectors of a symmetric matrix representing the network. We compare SENA with four baseline network embedding methods, namely DeepWalk, SE, SME and TransE. We demonstrate the efficacy of SENA through a task-based evaluation setting on different real-world networks. We consider the state-of-the-art algorithms for (i) community detection, (ii) link prediction and (iii) knowledge graph query answering, and show that with SENA's representation, these algorithms achieve up to 10%, 9% and (surprisingly) 108% higher accuracy respectively compared to the best baseline embedding methods.
Performance Analysis of Two-Hop Relayed Transmission in Asymmetric Rayleigh and Nakagami-m Fading Environment

This paper present the performance analysis of two-hop relayed transmission over asymmetric Rayleigh and Nakagami-m fading environment. Nakagami-m fading is considered because it works as generalized fading model. The model proposed by Nakagami uses m parameter to describe the fading conditions for both Rayleigh and Rician fading. Closed form expression for Outage Probability and Average Bit Error Probability are derived to study the performance of the system and also illustrate the positive impact of the Nakagami-m parameter on the system performance.
Exploiting the gap between human and machine abilities in handwriting recognition for web security applications

Automated recognition of unconstrained handwriting continues to be a challenging research task. In contrast to the traditional role of handwriting recognition in applications such as postal automation, bank check reading etc, in this thesis we have explored the use of handwriting recognition for Web security. HIPs (Human Interactive Proofs) are automatic reverse Turing tests designed so that virtually all humans can pass the test but state-of-the-art computer programs will fail. HIPs based on machine printed text are now commonly used to defend against bot attacks. We have investigated a new methodology to design efficient HIPs that exploits the gap between the abilities of humans and computers in reading handwritten text images. There are three specific research problems that we have addressed: (1) the design of an algorithm to automatically generate random and infinitely many distinct handwritten HIPs, (2) a method for quantifying the strengths of human reading abilities and the weaknesses of state-of-the-art handwriting recognizers, and (3) identification of the parameters (slant, stroke width, character gaps, etc) which can be controlled so that the HIPs are human readable but not machine readable. We have used a large repository of handwritten word images that current handwriting recognizers cannot read, even when provided with a lexicon. We have simulated handwriting for generating synthetic word images by using a tracing program that follow the contours of real scanned characters and represents them with third order splines, which are then manipulated to generate the variations in writing styles. The idea is to design HIPs that exploit the knowledge of the common source of errors in automated handwriting recognition systems and at the same time take advantage of the salient aspects of human reading. For example, humans can tolerate intermittent breaks in strokes (using the Gestalt law of continuity) but current programs fail when the breaks vary in size or exceed certain thresholds. The simultaneous interplay of several Gestalt laws of perception adds to the challenge of finding the range of parameters that separate human and machine abilities. We have conducted extensive experiments using simulated handwritten word images as well as real images transformed by a suite of controlled parameters which reaffirm the superiority of humans in reading handwritten text, especially under conditions of low image quality, clutter and occlusion. We have also demonstrated empirically that handwritten HIPs are more efficient than those currently used and are a viable option for challenge-response protocols in Web security applications.
Strong vocational education – a safe way to the labour market? A case study of the Czech Republic

Background: In its communications, the European Commission stresses the importance of vocational education and endorses apprenticeship training. Educational systems that have dual tracks of academic alongside vocational learning routes have been shown to generate better labour market outcomes for school leavers and smooth the school-to-work transition. On the other hand, dual tracked educational systems can reinforce the effect of social origin on educational performance: the differences between the achievement of students from a background characterised by low socio-economic status and students from high socio-economic status backgrounds are greater in a tracked system than in a comprehensive one. In addition to these general tendencies, the content and organisation of vocational education differ in individual countries, as do its strengths and weaknesses and impacts on the labour market prospects of young people. Purpose: This paper studies vocational education in the Czech Republic: specifically, its apprenticeship track leading directly to the labour market. It seeks to answer questions about whether the Czech apprenticeship education system provides its students with the knowledge and skills necessary for success in the modern labour market, and whether it facilitates their transition from school to work. The paper also studies the impact of the high vocational specificity of the Czech education system on educational inequalities and the development of these inequalities over time. Sample: The research questions are answered using statistical data and analyses of Czech data from international surveys of adult skills: the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), which studied probability samples of adults aged 16–65 years. The IALS data were collected in 1998 and included 3132 cases, and the PIAAC data were collected in 2012 and included 6102 cases. Design and methods: The IALS and PIAAC data were analysed using binary logistic regression. Descriptive statistics from PIAAC, statistical yearbooks of education and national surveys on the transition from school to work were also used to provide evidence. Results: The analyses show that in spite of its high vocational specificity, the efficiency of the Czech education system in facilitating transition to the labour market is relatively low, as are the achievement outcomes of its apprentices. This high differentiation, moreover, contributes significantly and increasingly to educational inequalities. In the light of those findings, the paper discusses features of the Czech apprenticeship education system and intended policy measures that are aiming to retain the current structure of the system and foster apprenticeship education.