Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Iterated Revision as Prioritized Merging

Standard accounts of iterated belief revision assume a static world, about which an agent receives a sequence of observations. More recent items are assumed to have priority over less recent items. We argue that there is no reason, given a static world, for giving priority to more recent items. Instead we suggest that a sequence of observations should be merged with the agent's beliefs. Since observations may have differing reliability, arguably the appropriate belief change operator is prioritized merging. We develop this view here, suggesting postulates for prioritized merging, and examining existing merging operators with respect to these postulates. As well, we examine other suggested postulates for iterated revision, to determine how well they fit with the prioritized merging interpretation. All postulates for iterated revision that we examine, except for Darwiche and Pearl's controversial C2, are consequences of our suggested postulates for prioritized merging.
Improving physician's hand over among oncology staff using standardized communication tool

Cancer patients are frequently admitted to hospital for many reasons. During their hospitalization they are handled by different physicians and other care providers. Maintaining good communication among physicians is essential to assure patient safety and the delivery of quality patient care. Several incidents of miscommunication issues have been reported due to lack of a standardized communication tool for patients' hand over among physicians at our oncology department. Hence, this improvement project aims at assessing the impact of using a standardized communication tool on improving patients' hand over and quality of patient care. A quality improvement team has been formed to address the issue of cancer patients' hand over. We adopted specific hand over tool to be used by physicians. This tool was developed based on well-known and validated communication tool called ISBAR - Identify, Situation, Background, Assessment and Recommendation, which contains pertinent information about the patient's condition. The form should be shared at a specific point in time during the handover process. We monitored the compliance of physician's with this tool over 16 weeks embedded by four ‘purposive’ and ‘sequential’ Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycles; where each PDSA cycle was developed based on the challenges faced and lessons learned in each step and the result of the previous PDSA cycle. Physicians compliance rate of using the tool had improved significantly from 45% (baseline) to 100% after the fourth PDSA cycle. Other process measure was measuring acknowledgment of hand over receipt email at two checkpoints at 8:00 – 9:00 a.m. and 4:00 – 5:00 p.m. The project showed that using a standardized handover form as a daily communication method between physicians is a useful idea and feasible to improve cancer patients handover with positive impact on many aspects of healthcare process and outcomes.
Corrosion Resistance Of Electroless Ni-P/Cu/Ni-P Multilayer Coatings

Ni-P/Cu/Ni-P multilayer coatings were prepared by deposition of Cu layer between two Ni–P layers. The Cu layer was deposited by metal displacement reaction between Cu 2 + and Fe atoms. Corrosion behavior of single-layer Ni-P coatings, double-layer Ni-P/Cu coatings, and three-layer Ni-P/Cu/Ni-P coatings were investigated by electrochemical tests in 3.5% NaCl solution. The three-layer coatings exhibited more positive E corr and decreased I corr compared with conventional single-layer Ni-P coatings, which indicated an improved corrosion resistance. The polarization curves of the three-layer coatings were characterized by two passive regions. The improved corrosion resistance was not only attributed to the function of the blocked pores of Cu. The Cu interlayer also acted as a sacriﬁcial layer instead of a barrier in the coatings, which altered the corrosion mechanism and further improved the corrosion resistance of the coatings.
Maximum principle for non-zero sum differential games of BSDEs involving impulse controls

This paper is concerned with a new kind of non-zero sum stochastic differential games of backward differential equations involving impulse controls. The most distinguishing features of our problem are that the control variables consist of the regular part and the impulsive part and that the domain of regular control is not necessarily convex. We establish a necessary condition in the form of maximum principle with Pontryagin's type for the open-loop Nash equilibrium point of this game, and then give a verification theorem which is a sufficient condition for Nash equilibrium point. The theoretical results are applied to study a linear-quadratic differential game and the equilibrium point is obtained explicitly.
(Big) usage data in web search

EXTENDED ABSTRACT Web Search, which takes its root in the mature field of information retrieval, evolved tremendously over the last 15 years. The field encountered its first revolution when it started to deal with huge amounts of Web pages. Then, a major step was accomplished when engines started to consider the structure of the Web graph and leveraged link analysis in both crawling and ranking. Finally, a more discrete, but no less critical step, was made when search engines started to monitor and exploit the numerous (mostly implicit) signals provided by users while interacting with the search engine. In this tutorial we focus on this “revolution” of large scale usage data.
Small Surface Antigen Variants of HBV Associated with Responses to Telbivudine Treatment in Chronic Hepatitis B Patients

Background Nucleoside/nucleotide analogues are widely used to treat chronic HBV infection, but drug resistance is common. The role of HBV surface gene variants in drug resistance to nucleoside/nucleotide analogues is unknown. We are trying to investigate the dynamics of S gene mutations and how they relate to a patient's virological response in this study. Methods Thirty patients with chronic hepatitis B were enrolled and serum samples were collected at multiple time points during treatment with telbivudine (LdT). The coding regions of the small surface antigen (S-HBsAg) were amplified and sequenced using the 454 GS FLX+ System. Results Sequencing results revealed different dynamics of non-synonymous mutations, such as sL9P, sN40S, sG44E, sW172*, sW182* and sS187F, between patients with a complete virological response and those with a partial virological response. The viral population heterogeneity decreased at week 12 of LdT treatment in patients with a complete virological response, with a concomitant decline in non-synonymous mutations (from an average of 14 to 9.9 per sample) and an increase in the frequencies of major variants (from 14.3% to 40.4%). Conclusions Our findings suggest that the decrease in viral population heterogeneity at an early stage of LdT treatment was associated with the subsequent optimal virological response, and the early appearance of some specific mutations, such as sG44E, sW172* and sW182*, is a potential indicator of a partial virological response in continuing therapy.
Immune responses in preleukaemic and leukaemic AKR mice

The proliferation of haemolytic plaque‐forming cells in the spleen of preleukaemic AKR mice following primary immunization with sheep red cells was slightly delayed and the peak response was not as high as in normal mice. In leukaemic AKR mice, although there were normal numbers of background plaque‐forming cells in the spleens of unimmunized animals, these cells failed to proliferate following antigenic stimulation and no detectable haemolysin antibody response occurred before the seventh day following immunization.
Overexpression of GATA-3 in T Cells Accelerates Dextran Sulfate Sodium-Induced Colitis

Ulcerative colitis (UC) is an inflammatory bowel disease, and its pathogenesis includes genetic, environmental, and immunological factors, such as T helper cells and their secreted cytokines. T helper cells are classified as Th1, Th2, and Th17 cells. However, it is unclear which T helper cells are important in UC. Dextran sulfate sodium (DSS)-induced colitis is a commonly used model of UC. In this study, we induced DSS colitis in Th1 dominant (T-bet transgenic (Tg)) mice, Th2 dominant (GATA-3 Tg) mice, and Th17 dominant (RORγt Tg) mice to elucidate the roles of T helper cell in DSS colitis. The results showed that GATA-3 Tg mice developed the most severe DSS colitis compared with the other groups. GATA-3 Tg mice showed a significant decreased in weight from day 1 to day 7, and an increased high score for the disease activity index compared with the other groups. Furthermore, GATA-3 Tg mice developed many ulcers in the colon, and many neutrophils and macrophages were detected on day 4 after DSS treatment. Measurement of GATA-3-induced cytokines demonstrated that IL-13 was highly expressed in the colon from DSS-induced GATA-3 Tg mice. In conclusion, GATA-3 overexpression in T-cells and IL-13 might play important roles in the development of DSS colitis.
Integrated perception and planning in the continuous space: A POMDP approach

The partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) provides a principled mathematical model for integrating perception and planning, a major challenge in robotics. While there are efficient algorithms for moderately large discrete POMDPs, continuous models are often more natural for robotic tasks, and currently there are no practical algorithms that handle continuous POMDPs at an interesting scale. This paper presents an algorithm for continuous-state, continuous-observation POMDPs. We provide experimental results demonstrating its potential in robot planning and learning under uncertainty and a theoretical analysis of its performance. A direct benefit of the algorithm is to simplify model construction.
Wear transitions and tribochemical reactions in ceramics

Abstract Structural ceramics are used in diverse tribological applications due to their unique properties that include resistance to abrasion and erosion, resistance to corrosive wear, wear resistance at elevated temperatures, low density and unique electrical, thermal and magnetic properties. Applications include precision instrument bearings, cutting tool inserts, prosthetic articulating joints and engine components. Following a brief overview of the processing methods applied to alumina, silicon nitride and silicon carbide, the wear behaviour of these ceramics is reviewed. The wear behaviour changes as the load or the coefficient of friction is increased. This change is associated with a drastic increase in wear at a critical load that depends on the material and test conditions. This transition from mild to severe wear occurs through a microfracture process at the sliding contact. Contact mechanics is used to develop a simple model to determine whether contact failure occurs by a classical brittle process (i.e. cone cracking) or a quasi-plastic behaviour (i.e. small microcracks distributed below the contact surface). The model provides estimates of the transition load within a factor of two of the experimentally obtained values and indicates that the brittle behaviour dominates the observed transition from mild to severe wear in the three ceramics evaluated in this study. The limitations of the model and its use in design of tribological components are discussed. The role of lubrication and tribochemical reactions between ceramic surfaces and atmospheric moisture on the wear behaviour is discussed.
Movement and afferent representations in human motor areas: a simultaneous neuroimaging and transcranial magnetic/peripheral nerve-stimulation study

Neuroimaging combined with transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to primary motor cortex (M1) is an emerging technique that can examine motor-system functionality through evoked activity. However, because sensory afferents from twitching muscles are widely represented in motor areas the amount of evoked activity directly resulting from TMS remains unclear. We delivered suprathreshold TMS to left M1 or gave electrical right median nerve stimulation (MNS) in 18 healthy volunteers while simultaneously conducting functional magnetic resonance imaging and monitoring with electromyography (EMG). We examined in detail the localization of TMS-, muscle afferent- and superficial afferent-induced activity in M1 subdivisions. Muscle afferent- and TMS-evoked activity occurred mainly in rostral M1, while superficial afferents generated a slightly different activation distribution. In 12 participants who yielded quantifiable EMG, differences in brain activity ascribed to differences in movement-size were adjusted using integrated information from the EMGs. Sensory components only explained 10–20% of the suprathreshold TMS-induced activity, indicating that locally and remotely evoked activity in motor areas mostly resulted from the recruitment of neural and synaptic activity. The present study appears to justify the use of fMRI combined with suprathreshold TMS to M1 for evoked motor network imaging.
Research on Cutting Performance of Graphite-Like Carbon Coated Tools in Dry Drilling of Ferrous Metal

The graphite-like carbon (GLC) coating was deposited onto high-speed steel (HSS) twist drills by magnetron sputter ion plating technique. The drilling tests were performed on the ferrous metal under dry cutting conditions. By the analysis and comparison of the flank wear and the drilling forces on drills, the cutting performance of GLC coated HSS tools was researched. The results show that GLC coating with high hardness and low friction coefficient, due to its good adhesion and match with HSS substrate, can significantly improve the cutting performance of HSS twist drills, prolong the tool life, decrease the drilling forces in drilling the ferrous metal. And its cutting performance is better than the hard coated drills in the lower speed, but its thermal stability is inferior to the hard coated drills in the higher speed.
Low-Density Graph Codes That Are Optimal for Binning and Coding With Side Information

In this paper, we describe and analyze the source and channel coding properties of a class of sparse graphical codes based on compounding a low-density generator matrix (LDGM) code with a low-density parity-check (LDPC) code. Our first pair of theorems establishes that there exist codes from this ensemble, with all degrees remaining bounded independently of block length, that are simultaneously optimal for both channel coding and source coding with binary data when encoding and decoding are performed optimally. More precisely, in the context of lossy compression, we prove that finite-degree constructions can achieve any pair (R, D) on the rate-distortion curve of the binary symmetric source. In the context of channel coding, we prove that the same finite-degree codes can achieve any pair (C, p) on the capacity-noise curve of the binary symmetric channel (BSC). Next, we show that our compound construction has a nested structure that can be exploited to achieve the Wyner-Ziv bound for source coding with side information (SCSI), as well as the Gelfand-Pinsker bound for channel coding with side information (CCSI). Although the results described here are based on optimal encoding and decoding, the proposed graphical codes have sparse structure and high girth that renders them well suited to message passing and other efficient decoding procedures.
Motion correction and frequency stabilization for MRS of the human spinal cord

Subject motion is challenging for MRS, because it can falsify results. For spinal cord MRS in particular, subject movement is critical, since even a small movement > 1 mm) can lead to a voxel shift out of the desired measurement region. Therefore, the identification of motion corrupted MRS scans is essential. In this investigation, MR navigators acquired simultaneously with the MRS data are used to identify a displacement of the spinal cord due to subject motion. It is shown that navigators are able to recognize substantial subject motion (>1 mm) without impairing the MRS measurement. In addition, navigators are easy to apply to the measurement, because no additional hardware and just a minor additional user effort are needed. Moreover, no additional scan time is required, because navigators can be applied in the deadtime of the MRS sequence. Furthermore, in this work, retrospective motion correction combined with frequency stabilization is presented by combining navigators with non‐water‐suppressed 1H‐MRS, resulting in an improved spectral quality of the spinal cord measurements. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
CSMMI: Class-Specific Maximization of Mutual Information for Action and Gesture Recognition

In this paper, we propose a novel approach called class-specific maximization of mutual information (CSMMI) using a submodular method, which aims at learning a compact and discriminative dictionary for each class. Unlike traditional dictionary-based algorithms, which typically learn a shared dictionary for all of the classes, we unify the intraclass and interclass mutual information (MI) into an single objective function to optimize class-specific dictionary. The objective function has two aims: 1) maximizing the MI between dictionary items within a specific class (intrinsic structure) and 2) minimizing the MI between the dictionary items in a given class and those of the other classes (extrinsic structure). We significantly reduce the computational complexity of CSMMI by introducing an novel submodular method, which is one of the important contributions of this paper. This paper also contributes a state-of-the-art end-to-end system for action and gesture recognition incorporating CSMMI, with feature extraction, learning initial dictionary per each class by sparse coding, CSMMI via submodularity, and classification based on reconstruction errors. We performed extensive experiments on synthetic data and eight benchmark data sets. Our experimental results show that CSMMI outperforms shared dictionary methods and that our end-to-end system is competitive with other state-of-the-art approaches.
Acceptable intrusiveness of online help in mobile devices

The aim of this study was to examine how users perceive help on a mobile device with respect to the presentation format and the severity of the scenario the user encounters. We examined how 92 participants responded to four different formats of help offered for five different scenarios varying in their severity level using static images displayed in a web browser. The intrusiveness of the help format and the severity of the scenario affected participants' interest in receiving help. In certain conditions it may be helpful to suggest help, in particular when users do not know how to ask for it but show interest in receiving it when offered.
Prevalence of cardiovascular disease risk factor in the Chinese population: the 2007-2008 China National Diabetes and Metabolic Disorders Study.

AIMS Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is now the most prevalent and debilitating disease affecting the Chinese population. The goal of the present manuscript was to analyse cardiovascular risk factors and the prevalence of non-fatal CVDs from data gathered from the 2007-2008 China National Diabetes and Metabolic Disorders Study. METHODS AND RESULTS A nationally representative sample of 46 239 adults, 20 years of age or older, was randomly recruited using a multistage stratified design method. Lifestyle factors, diagnosis of CVD, stroke, diabetes, and family history of each subject were collected, and an oral glucose tolerance test or a standard meal test was performed. Various non-fatal CVDs were reported by the subjects. SUDAAN software was used to perform all weighted statistical analyses, with P < 0.05 considered statistically significant. The prevalence of coronary heart disease, stroke, and CVDs was 0.74, 1.07, and 1.78% in males; and 0.51, 0.60, and 1.10% in females, respectively. The presence of CVDs increased with age in both males and females. The prevalence of being overweight or obese, hypertension, dyslipidaemia, or hyperglycaemia was 36.67, 30.09, 67.43, and 26.69% in males; and 29.77, 24.79, 63.98, and 23.62% in females, respectively. In the total sample of 46 239 patients, the prevalence of one subject having 1, 2, 3, or ≥4 of the 5 defined risk factors (i.e. smoking, overweight or obese, hypertension, dyslipidaemia, or hyperglycaemia) was 31.17, 27.38, 17.76, and 10.19%, respectively. Following adjustment for gender and age, the odds ratio of CVDs for those who had 1, 2, 3, or ≥4 risk factors was 2.36, 4.24, 4.88, and 7.22, respectively, when compared with patients with no risk factors. CONCLUSION Morbidity attributed to the five defined cardiovascular risk factors was high in the Chinese population, with multiple risk factors present in the same individual. Therefore, reasonable prevention strategies should be designed to attenuate the rapid rise in cardiovascular morbidity.
Hearing the Unheard: An Interdisciplinary, Mixed Methodology Study of Women’s Experiences of Hearing Voices (Auditory Verbal Hallucinations)

This paper explores the experiences of women who “hear voices” (auditory verbal hallucinations). We begin by examining historical understandings of women hearing voices, showing these have been driven by androcentric theories of how women’s bodies functioned leading to women being viewed as requiring their voices be interpreted by men. We show the twentieth century was associated with recognition that the mental violation of women’s minds (represented by some voice-hearing) was often a consequence of the physical violation of women’s bodies. We next report the results of a qualitative study into voice-hearing women’s experiences (n = 8). This found similarities between women’s relationships with their voices and their relationships with others and the wider social context. Finally, we present results from a quantitative study comparing voice-hearing in women (n = 65) and men (n = 132) in a psychiatric setting. Women were more likely than men to have certain forms of voice-hearing (voices conversing) and to have antecedent events of trauma, physical illness, and relationship problems. Voices identified as female may have more positive affect than male voices. We conclude that women voice-hearers have and continue to face specific challenges necessitating research and activism, and hope this paper will act as a stimulus to such work.