Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
[Impact of surgical treatment of female stress urinary incontinence on the quality of life of patients].

OBJECTIVES To evaluate the quality of life of patients with stress urinary incontinence (SUI) operated in the Department of Urology at the Complejo Hospitalario Universitario in Albacete (CHUA). METHODS Between November 2001 and December 2005, 126 patients with SUI have completed a questionnaire in our centre, before and after undergoing surgery with sling techniques. The questionnaire was the King's Health Questionnaire (KHQ), which is a specific instrument for the measurement of quality of life in patients with urinary incontinence. RESULTS Mean patient's age was 57.09 years (DE: 9.57). Twelve women (9.5%) had history of previous urinary incontinence surgery. Mean urinary incontinence evolution time was 114.48 months, with a median of 96 months. 38 patients (30.2%) did not present cystocele, 61 (48.4%) presented grade III cystocele, 25 (19.8%) grade II, and 2 (1.6%) grade I. Before surgery, the scale with best score was Personal relationships, with a mean score of 26.8, whereas the scale with worst scores was Impact of urinary incontinence, with a mean score of 82.96. All operations performed consisted in various techniques of transvaginal slings, except one case (0.8%) in which the Kelly technique was performed. Impact of urinary incontinence was the scale with a greater number of patients improving after surgery; 82.9% of the patients (101 cases) gave a better score. The scales showing greater differences of the mean value comparing before/after surgery were impact of urinary incontinence, limitation on the daily life activity, and limitation on social activity. Personal relationships and General health were the two with the smallest improvements. CONCLUSIONS Surgery demonstrated to improve the symptoms secondary to this disease, therefore, it results in an improvement of the quality of life that is evident in all scales of the questionnaire, mainly in the impact of urinary incontinence, limitations on physical activity, limitations on daily life, and limitation on social activity scales.
Positive Psychosocial Functioning in Later Life: Use of Meaning-Based Coping Strategies by Nursing Home Residents

This study examined factors associated with positive psychosocial functioning in 94 cognitively intact nursing home residents reporting poor physical health. It was hypothesized that greater use of meaning-based coping strategies would be associated with higher levels of positive psychosocial functioning. Participants completed an interview containing measures of coping, affect, psychological well-being, depression, and activities of daily living. Findings suggest that meaning-based coping variables (positive reappraisal, perceived uplifts) accounted for significant variance in positive psychosocial variables but not distress variables. In contrast, physical health variables accounted for significant variance in distress but not positive psychosocial variables. Results support the view that the absence of distress does not necessarily imply optimal mental health. Thus, a comprehensive assessment of mental health in older adults requires inclusion of indices of both positive and negative psychological and social functioning.
Designing for In the Wild Gesture-based Interaction: Lessons Learnt from Vuores

With the emergence of affordable gesture recognition technology, such as the Microsoft Kinect, interactive displays are making their way to in the wild setting, or public spaces, largely as information systems. It then becomes essential to delve deeper into users’ perception of these systems and study the aspects that contribute to a rich and pleasant user experience. In addition to the general principles of interaction design, development and installation of such systems requires an understanding of social affordances or social dynamics between an actor and an audience as well as the role of an individual within a group. Interaction affordances or, hints and clues about ways to interact with the system, and technology affordances or, capabilities of current technology, also help build a smooth interaction and rich user experience. The system needs to be exciting and enticing for users to initiate interaction yet simple enough to allow fluent interaction without any prior experience. This thesis explores the opportunities and challenges introduced by interactive public displays systems in the wild by presenting a case study of a gesture-based system, Energyland, which was installed at the month long annual Finnish Housing Fair in the summer of 2012, in Vuores, Finland. By analyzing the data collected from the user experience questionnaire, system logs, informal user interviews and observations made by researchers, I discuss my findings and compare them to previous work in this area. Overall, users responded very positively to the system experience as evident from the questionnaire consisting of seven factors: individuality, authenticity, story, contract, interaction, sound and pleasantness of the system. Users also stated their interests towards using similar systems in the future. Based on the system logs and researcher observations, social, interaction and technology affordances are the building blocks of user experience for in the wild systems, and there should be mechanisms to help users overcome an initial reluctance to interact by presenting interesting and intriguing interactive content. A key finding was the user’s attitude towards interaction, namely as a risk into the known, which dictates that installation spaces must provide for a quick and easy escape route. The end result of this thesis is a set of guidelines covering the design, implementation and installation process for similar systems involving interactive public displays.
Organizational socialization, career aspirations and turnover intentions among design engineers

– Turnover intention is one's behavioural intention to quit. The purpose of this study is to compare the relative influences of organizational socialization and career aspirations on turnover intentions of design engineers and to address the design of more effective development programmes and the reduction of dysfunctional turnover. , – A study of 442 engineers staffed within “design and development” units is presented, and a research model is tested using structural equation modelling techniques. , – The analysis indicates that design engineers report lower levels of turnover intention when organizational socialization is prominent and an adequate range of opportunities that satisfy career aspirations exist within the organization. , – The cause‐effect relationships among constructs that are empirically derived from the analysis should be further supported by a longitudinal study. Future research should be aimed at exploring the different patterns of turnover intentions of engineers with different career orientations and in organizations with or without rigid formalized career advancement system. , – Managers of technical staff are advised to put an effort to develop and encourage lateral career moves of research and development staff members, particularly for newcomers, by offering a variety of experiences, that is likely to speed up their prompt creation of a better defined self‐concept. , – The originality of the research lies in that it addresses an explanation of engineers’ turnover based on a theoretical framework that jointly combines internal career anchors as well as external career opportunities and socialization, thus striving to fill a gap in existing literature.
Signal Decoding and Receiver Evolution

We use a connectionist model, a recurrent artificial neural network, to investigate the evolution of species recognition in sympatric taxa. We addressed three questions: (1) Does the accuracy of artificial neural networks in discriminating between conspecifics and other sympatric heterospecifics depend on whether the networks were trained only to recognize conspecifics, as opposed to being trained to discriminate between conspecifics and sympatric heterospecifics? (2) Do artificial neural networks weight most heavily those signal features that differ most between conspecifics and sympatric heterospecifics, or those features that vary less within conspecifics? (3) Does selection for species recognition generate sexual selection? We find that: (1) Neural networks trained only on self recognition do not classify species as accurately as networks trained to discriminate between conspecifics and heterospecifics. (2) Neural networks weight signal features in a manner suggesting that the total sound environment as opposed to the relative variation of signals within the species is more important in the evolution of recognition mechanisms. (3) Selection for species recognition generates substantial variation in the relative attractiveness of signals within the species and thus can result in sexual selection.
Success Factors of Agile Software Development

Agile software development methodologies have recently gained widespread popularity. The Agile Manifesto states valuing " individuals, and interactions over processes, and tools, working software over comprehensive documentation, customer collaboration over contract negotiation, and responding to change over following a plan " (Fowler, 2002). However, little is known about how effective and efficient agile practices are over the traditional methodologies, and what their success factors are. There have been several disparate anecdotal evidences about the success of software development projects using agile methodologies. In this paper we provide a consolidated picture of the different predictors of agile software development success. This is intended to be a review paper. We have also presented a conceptual framework illustrating the relationships between the different predictor variables and agile software development success.
Named Entity Recognition Using Web Document Corpus

This paper introduces a named entity recognition approach in textual corpus. This Named Entity (NE) can be a named: location, person, organization, date, time, etc., characterized by instances. A NE is found in texts accompanied by contexts: words that are left or right of the NE. The work mainly aims at identifying contexts inducing the NE’s nature. As such, The occurrence of the word "President" in a text, means that this word or context may be followed by the name of a president as President "Obama". Likewise, a word preceded by the string "footballer" induces that this is the name of a footballer. NE recognition may be viewed as a classification method, where every word is assigned to a NE class, regarding the context. The aim of this study is then to identify and classify the contexts that are most relevant to recognize a NE, those which are frequently found with the NE. A learning approach using training corpus: web documents, constructed from learning examples is then suggested. Frequency representations and modified tf-idf representations are used to calculate the context weights associated to context frequency, learning example frequency, and document frequency in the corpus.
Rationally designed, heterologous S. cerevisiae transcripts expose novel expression determinants

Deducing generic causal relations between RNA transcript features and protein expression profiles from endogenous gene expression data remains a major unsolved problem in biology. The analysis of gene expression from heterologous genes contributes significantly to solving this problem, but has been heavily biased toward the study of the effect of 5′ transcript regions and to prokaryotes. Here, we employ a synthetic biology driven approach that systematically differentiates the effect of different regions of the transcript on gene expression up to 240 nucleotides into the ORF. This enabled us to discover new causal effects between features in previously unexplored regions of transcripts, and gene expression in natural regimes. We rationally designed, constructed, and analyzed 383 gene variants of the viral HRSVgp04 gene ORF, with multiple synonymous mutations at key positions along the transcript in the eukaryote S. cerevisiae. Our results show that a few silent mutations at the 5′UTR can have a dramatic effect of up to 15 fold change on protein levels, and that even synonymous mutations in positions more than 120 nucleotides downstream from the ORF 5′end can modulate protein levels up to 160%–300%. We demonstrate that the correlation between protein levels and folding energy increases with the significance of the level of selection of the latter in endogenous genes, reinforcing the notion that selection for folding strength in different parts of the ORF is related to translation regulation. Our measured protein abundance correlates notably(correlation up to r = 0.62 (p=0.0013)) with mean relative codon decoding times, based on ribosomal densities (Ribo-Seq) in endogenous genes, supporting the conjecture that translation elongation and adaptation to the tRNA pool can modify protein levels in a causal/direct manner. This report provides an improved understanding of transcript evolution, design principles of gene expression regulation, and suggests simple rules for engineering synthetic gene expression in eukaryotes.
Cache Attacks: An Information and Complexity Theoretic Approach

In this paper, we present a formal analysis method of cache-based side-channel attacks by utilizing information and complexity theory. Although AES algorithm is chosen as the subject algorithm in the case study, the method is generic in the sense that it can be applied in many other algorithms that are subject to side-channel attacks. The adopted approach bases its analysis method on intermediate values used during the cryptographic computation observed via side-channels and explores the extent, to which the observations can be exploited in a successful attack. The method allows us to accurately estimate the feasibility of an attack strategy and compare efficiency of different attacks. Ultimate goal is to explore every attack possibility and estimate its corresponding feasibility to determine the optimal level of appropriate countermeasures. Using the method, we analyze four different cache-based attacks on AES and determine the complexity, feasibility, and strength of each attack. Our analysis demonstrates that second round-only attack on AES is feasible when the first and the last rounds are already protected.
Hospitalisation for COPD in Puglia: the role of hospital discharge database to estimate prevalence and incidence.

BACKGROUND AND AIM Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), although largely preventable, is a great health burden in all the countries worldwide. Statistics of morbidity and mortality of COPD show the need for correct management of the disease. Chronic Obstructive Respiratory Diseases (DRG 88) are in 9th place for discharge in in-patient hospital admission. It is necessary to establish specific indicators which are efficacious and relevant for the patient, the doctor and the health manager. This study will analyse the information in respect of hospital admissions (Hospital discharge database) in Puglia for the period 2000-2005. METHODS The analysis was carried out utilising the Puglia Region hospital patient discharge database, selecting those patients with admission for chronic respiratory disease as principal or secondary diagnosis. RESULTS Chronic respiratory diseases are more frequent in males and in people over 45 years old with frequency increasing with age. Geographical distribution shows that there are greater rates of hospitalisation in big cities and in the neighbourhood of industrial areas. Although the trend over time is slight. A higher percentage of re-admission has been found for patients with COPD, and the interval between the two admissions occurs within one or two months; the diagnosis at the second admission is the same as for the first. 10.6% of discharge forms report one diagnosis, especially in patients older than 65 years of age. Little could be said about diagnostic procedures because these are not reported on the discharge form. CONCLUSION Hospitalisation data confirms expectations regarding age and sex of patients. The high hospitalisation rates indicate that in-patients care still remains the only viable treatment for COPD and other chronic respiratory diseases. The high number of exacerbations reflect the absence of out-patients service or community care, and the same diagnosis in more than one episode shows the lack of efficiency of health services and disease management. This data is necessary to understand disease distribution and the modification of disease management in order to reduce health care costs, to increase efficacy in disease control and to limit repeated exacerbation and so to obtain the maximum benefit for the patients.
Cross‐cultural Co‐operation: A Meaningful Challenge

In 1993 Dutch aircraft constructor Fokker was taken over by Deutsche Aerospace, better known as Dasa. Only a few months later Fokker announced yet another major intervention in its organization. On 14 February 1994 the employees were informed about the plans for a third reorganization in three years. As a result, in the coming months 1,900 — out of 8,200 — employees will lose (some part of) their jobs. In his statement to the press the chairman of the board of directors — Van Duinen — expressed his feelings for those concerned, but added:
Pathophysiology of dyspnea in COPD

ABSTRACT Dyspnea refers to the sensation of breathlessness, shortness of breath, or difficulty breathing that is commonly observed in patients with respiratory and cardiac disease. In the United States alone, dyspnea is reported in up to 4 million all-cause emergency room visits annually. Dyspnea can be a symptom of several different underlying physical conditions, typically involving the lung and heart. Indeed, it is an important symptom in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), where it is associated with limited physical activity, increased anxiety and depression, decreased health-related quality of life (HRQoL), and reduced survival. Currently there is no single physiological correlate that will accurately predict dyspnea, particularly because the mechanisms that contribute to respiratory discomfort can vary between diseases and between individuals experiencing breathlessness who have been diagnosed with the same disease. Therefore, various subjective clinical and psychophysical scales and questionnaires are typically used to measure or predict dyspnea. It is the goal of this review to discuss the pathophysiological mechanisms leading to dyspnea, particularly those associated with COPD, the physical and psychological impact on patients, assessment approaches, and modalities currently used to treat it.
Innovation in collaborative health research training: The role of active learning

This paper describes and discusses the essential pedagogical elements of the Partnering in Community Health Research (PCHR) program, which was designed to address the training needs of researchers who participate in collaborative, interdisciplinary health research. These elements were intended to foster specific skills that helped learners develop research partnerships featuring knowledge, capabilities, values and attitudes needed for successful research projects. By establishing research teams called “clusters”, PCHR provided research training and experience for graduate students and post-doctoral fellows, as well as for community health workers and professionals. Pedagogical elements relied on active learning approaches such as inquiry-based and experience-based learning. Links between these elements and learning approaches are explained. Through their work in cluster-based applied research projects, the development of learning plans, and cross-cluster learning events, trainees acquired collaborative research competencies that were valuable, relevant and theoretically informed.
Trafficking and signaling pathways of nuclear localizing protein ligands and their receptors

Interaction of ligands such as epidermal growth factor and interferon‐γ with the extracellular domains of their plasma membrane receptors results in internalization followed by translocation into the nucleus of the ligand and/or receptor. There has been reluctance, however, to ascribe signaling importance to this, the focus instead being on second messenger pathways, including mobilization of kinases and inducible transcription factors (TFs). The latter, however, fails to explain the fact that so many ligands stimulate the same second messenger cascades/TFs, and yet show distinct gene activation profiles. This is particularly apt in the case of the seven STAT TFs that are held to be the mediators of the distinct cellular functions of over 60 ligands. The current review focuses on five representative nuclear localizing ligands for which there is documentation of translocation into the cytosol and nucleus through well‐characterized pathways, in addition to a role in gene activation by ligand/receptor in the nucleus. BioEssays 26:993‐1004, 2004. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Sizing and locating distributed generations for losses minimization and voltage stability improvement

The paper presents analysis of distribution system connected with distributed generations. The study addresses aspects related to optimal sizing and location of DG units for losses minimization and voltage stability improvements. Many cases have investigated to highlight the relationship between the optimum size and location for losses minimization and the optimum size and location for stability improvements. The student version of the AMPL software is used in the proposed study. The objective function is formulated with full consideration of both quality and inequality constraints. On the other hand, the stability index criterion is used for calculating the best location and size for system stability improvements. The 90 bus test system from the literature is used for the different studied cases. The results show that calculating minimum system losses is not necessary to achieve coherence improvement for the voltage stability problem.
Comment on The heliomagnetic field near Earth , 1428-2005 by

McCracken (2007) inverted the galactic cosmic ray record for the interval 1428-2005 to estimate annual averages of the heliomagnetic field (HMF) near Earth during this interval. Quoting from his abstract, There is good agreement with the results obtained by others using two independent methodologies based upon the sunspot [Solanki, Schüssler, and Fligge, 2002] and geomagnetic [Lockwood, Stamper, and Wild, 1999] records There is disagreement with another method based on the geomagnetic record [Svalgaard and Cliver, 2005] that needs to be resolved.  In this comment, we address the reported disagreement of our long-term reconstruction of the HMF strength with that obtained in the other three studies. We show that a recent reconstruction of the HMF by Rouillard, Lockwood, and Finch [2007] agrees much more closely with that of Svalgaard and Cliver than that of Lockwood, Stamper and Wild. We also point out that the Solanki et al. model was developed to reproduce the Lockwood et al. HMF time variation; it does not provide independent support for the Lockwood et al. time series. We suggest that the discrepancy between McCrackens cosmic-ray-based HMF reconstruction and those based on geomagnetic data originates in the Forbush and Neher ionization chamber data (19331957) used to bridge the time gap between the Be time series (1428-1930) and the Climax neutron monitor record (1951-present).