Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Barriers to the use of health services among deaf and hard of hearing adults in Greece: a Cross-Sectional Study

Rationale, Aims and Objectives: To explore the issues related to the use of health services by deaf and hard of hearing adults in Greece.Method: The study population consisted of 140 adults with hearing loss (86 deaf and 54 hard of hearing). We gathered information about sociodemographic characteristics, use of health services characteristics, satisfaction from health providers and complaints during the use of health services.Results: A considerable percentage of the participants did not make appropriate use of healthcare services, as they made avoidable visits to emergency departments even for minor, short-term conditions (p=0.002) or used to just wait for the symptoms to pass in an illness occurrence (p=0.06). They also experienced major difficulties as part of the health visit (p=0.01) and the quality of communication with health providers (p=0.002). The absence of assistive technology, along with the lack of low availability of Sign Language interpreters, were important barriers for those that communicate in Sign Language. Regarding the engagement with healthcare providers, there were high rates of dissatisfaction from doctors, nurses and receptionists related to issues during the use of health services.Conclusions: Our results underscore the fact that deaf and hard of hearing persons constitute a minority population that experience major barriers during the use of health services and considerable difficulties in the healthcare provider-patient relationship. In light of these findings, a special effort must be made to ensure that deaf and hard of hearing individuals receive appropriate, ethical and person-centered healthcare.
The Impact of ISO 9000 Certification on Sales : A Case Study of Mauritius

ISO 9000 is a set of international standards that provide management requirements for creating and maintaining company quality systems. However, existing literature is divided over whether ISO 9000 is good or bad for companies. Several papers have analysed the effects of ISO 9000 certification and have reported different findings. Using an empirical approach, this research seeks to ascertain whether the mean sales of ISO certified companies is significantly greater than those of their non-certified counterparts and assesses the impact of ISO 9000 certification on sales of companies in Mauritius. The methodologies employed are an independent T-test and static and dynamic panel regression analysis. Based on a sample of 39 ISO certified companies and 39 non-ISO certified ones in 20002009, the findings report a significant difference between the mean sales of the two groups (in favour of the certified companies) and a positive and significant relationship between ISO 9000 certification and sales. Also, the dynamic panel analysis confirms this positive relationship. Thus, it can be said that ISO certified companies in Mauritius, experience the benefits of certification through increased sales which also implies increased customer loyalty and confidence and a larger customer base. This paper will help the non-ISO certified firms to consider investing in a suitable quality management system, possibly leading to ISO 9000 certification.
Open domain question answering system using cognitive computing

Technology has advanced so much that in recent times use Internet search engines as primary medium of reference for understanding of any concept and knowledge level doubts. In this paper the main idea is to present an architecture which is the new way of searching for the information present on the Internet and it is based on the new era of computing i.e. cognitive computing. Cognitive computing resolves the situation where ambiguity and uncertainty is present and attempts to mimic the mechanism of human brain. Recent information requirements need an efficient mechanism which should be capable of interacting with users in a more natural way. Our system is intended to manage large amount of textual data and mining suitable knowledge. Thus resulting in a new level of refinement to search results for the user by providing exact answer to the natural language query that are specified by users. Our system will be helpful to the users because system is able to provide succinct answers which do not require end users to wade through a huge amount of data present on the Internet. This paper briefly summarizes the characteristics of cognitive computing and how it is implemented in our open domain question answering system developed using open source software.
Reducing server and network load with shared buffering

Today, content replication methods are common ways of reducing the network and servers load. Present content replication solutions have different problems, including the need for pre-planning and management, and they are ineffective in case of sudden traffic spikes. In spite of these problems, content replication methods are more popular today than ever, simply because of an increasing need for load reduction. In this paper, we propose a shared buffering model that, unlike current proxy-based content replication methods, is native to the network and can be used to alleviate the stress of sudden traffic spikes on servers and the network. We outline the characteristics of a new transport protocol that uses the shared buffers to offload the server work to the network or reduce the pressure on the overloaded links.
LECTURE 16 Applications of Ito calculus to finance Lecture outline

As early as 1900, Louis Bachelier had proposed using Brownian motion as a model for security prices. As insightful as it was, this model is somewhat restrictive. For example it allows stock price to be negative. A more appropriate and accepted model is to assume that stock prices follow a general Ito t t process X(t) = X(0) + 0 dμ(t)dt + σ(t)dB(t), where μ, σ are adapted processes. Suppose we 0 make several investment decisions about this stock. In particular at times t1 < t2 < · · · < tk we decide to hold θk = θ(tk ) stocks of this security. What would be our gain/loss at some later time t > tk ? It is simply j≤k θk (X(tk+1) − X(tk )). It makes sense to assume that our trading strategy θ is an adapted process (including the possibility that θ is deterministic) , since otherwise it means we can predict the market. Thus we can think of θ as a simple adapted process. The simplicity means that we make only k trading decisions. But there is no reason to bound the number of trading decisions apriori (unless we take trading fees into account). So we may think of θ as an arbitrary adapted process θt ∈ Ft. For technical reasons we do assume that θ ∈ H . This is needed so that we exclude the ”doubling” strategy pathology which we saw earlier brings a positive gain with probability one.
Characterization of PTPRG in Knockdown and Phosphatase-Inactive Mutant Mice and Substrate Trapping Analysis of PTPRG in Mammalian Cells

Receptor tyrosine phosphatase gamma (PTPRG, or RPTPγ) is a mammalian receptor-like tyrosine phosphatase which is highly expressed in the nervous system as well as other tissues. Its function and biochemical characteristics remain largely unknown. We created a knockdown (KD) line of this gene in mouse by retroviral insertion that led to 98–99% reduction of RPTPγ gene expression. The knockdown mice displayed antidepressive-like behaviors in the tail-suspension test, confirming observations by Lamprianou et al. 2006. We investigated this phenotype in detail using multiple behavioral assays. To see if the antidepressive-like phenotype was due to the loss of phosphatase activity, we made a knock-in (KI) mouse in which a mutant, RPTPγ C1060S, replaced the wild type. We showed that human wild type RPTPγ protein, expressed and purified, demonstrated tyrosine phosphatase activity, and that the RPTPγ C1060S mutant was completely inactive. Phenotypic analysis showed that the KI mice also displayed some antidepressive-like phenotype. These results lead to a hypothesis that an RPTPγ inhibitor could be a potential treatment for human depressive disorders. In an effort to identify a natural substrate of RPTPγ for use in an assay for identifying inhibitors, “substrate trapping” mutants (C1060S, or D1028A) were studied in binding assays. Expressed in HEK293 cells, these mutant RPTPγs retained a phosphorylated tyrosine residue, whereas similarly expressed wild type RPTPγ did not. This suggested that wild type RPTPγ might auto-dephosphorylate which was confirmed by an in vitro dephosphorylation experiment. Using truncation and mutagenesis studies, we mapped the auto-dephosphorylation to the Y1307 residue in the D2 domain. This novel discovery provides a potential natural substrate peptide for drug screening assays, and also reveals a potential functional regulatory site for RPTPγ. Additional investigation of RPTPγ activity and regulation may lead to a better understanding of the biochemical underpinnings of human depression.
IPTV Bandwidth Demands in Metropolitan Area Networks

In this paper, we analyze the bandwidth requirements in Metropolitan Area Networks (MANs) for providing Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) services. We find that the application with the potential to generate high bandwidth in the MAN is Video on Demand (VoD). However, the amount of bandwidth in the MAN depends on the location of the video servers and cached video content. Therefore, we develop a model of the IPTV network to determine the optimum location of the cached video content. From this model, we find the dependence of the MAN traffic on the fraction of users simultaneously requesting VoD streams. The results show that a significant fraction of future MAN traffic, up to 90%, may be due to these on-demand video services.
Online Social Support Groups/Communities: Implications of Theoretical and Empirical Findings for Individuals Coping With Health Concerns

Numerous studies over the past two decades suggest that people with a variety of health concerns are increasingly turning to online networks for social support. This has led to the rise of online support groups/communities for people facing health concerns. Researchers have found that these groups/communities provide patients, disease survivors, and caregivers a number of advantages and disadvantages in terms of mobilizing social support for their health-related concerns. This chapter will examine these issues in greater detail as well as the theoretical and practical implications of this body of research for patients who use online support communities to help cope with and manage a variety of health issues. It will provide an overview of online social support and health outcomes, discuss key processes and theoretical explanations for the efficacy of online support communities for people facing health concerns, and the limitations of this body of research as well as an agenda for future communication research on health-related online support groups/communities. Online Social Support Groups/Communities: Implications of Theoretical and Empirical Findings for Individuals Coping With Health Concerns
How good are the specs? A study of the bug-finding effectiveness of existing Java API specifications

Runtime verification can be used to find bugs early, during software development, by monitoring test executions against formal specifications (specs). The quality of runtime verification depends on the quality of the specs. While previous research has produced many specs for the Java API, manually or through automatic mining, there has been no large-scale study of their bug-finding effectiveness. We present the first in-depth study of the bug-finding effectiveness of previously proposed specs. We used JavaMOP to monitor 182 manually written and 17 automatically mined specs against more than 18K manually written and 2.1M automatically generated tests in 200 open-source projects. The average runtime overhead was under 4.3x. We inspected 652 violations of manually written specs and (randomly sampled) 200 violations of automatically mined specs. We reported 95 bugs, out of which developers already fixed 74. However, most violations, 82.81% of 652 and 97.89% of 200, were false alarms. Our empirical results show that (1) runtime verification technology has matured enough to incur tolerable runtime overhead during testing, and (2) the existing API specifications can find many bugs that developers are willing to fix; however, (3) the false alarm rates are worrisome and suggest that substantial effort needs to be spent on engineering better specs and properly evaluating their effectiveness.
Communication services in the Web era: How can Telco join the OTT hangout?

Evolutions of communications and the advent of Web real time technologies are further challenging the Telco ecosystem. New architectures are emerging to enable new services in a context where assets as identity, signaling and network management are decoupled and virtually delaminated, so to speak. This paper tackles three challenges to face to enable Telco to embrace these evolutions. First we need a secure, trustful and privacy-friendly way of using services provided by various identity and communication providers. Second, we need a versatile framework to develop and deploy communication services. The third challenge is to overcome the limitation of besteffort networking by enabling specialized network services for de-perimeterized service delivery.
Nutlin-3a Is a Potential Therapeutic for Ewing Sarcoma

Purpose: Although mutations in the TP53 gene occur in half of all cancers, approximately 90% of Ewing sarcomas retain a functional wild-type p53. The low frequency of TP53 alterations in Ewing sarcoma makes this tumor type an ideal candidate for p53-targeted therapies. In this study, we have examined the molecular and cellular responses of cultured Ewing sarcoma cell lines following exposure to Nutlin-3a, a recently developed MDM2 antagonist. Experimental Design: The ability of Nutlin-3a to impart apoptosis or cell cycle arrest in a p53-dependent manner was determined in a comprehensive panel of Ewing sarcoma cell lines. The capacity of Nutlin-3a to augment the antitumor activity of MDM4 antagonists and cytotoxic agents currently used in the clinical treatment of Ewing sarcoma was also investigated. Results: Apoptosis was the primary response of wild-type p53 expressing Ewing sarcoma cell lines. The cytotoxicity of Nultin-3a was also synergistic with the chemotherapeutic agents, vincristine, actinomycin D, doxorubicin, and etoposide in a concentration-dependent manner. Significant MDM4 protein overexpression was observed in Ewing sarcoma cell lines of wild-type p53 status, providing a mechanism through which Ewing sarcomas can develop in the absence of TP53 alterations. This study provides the first evidence of synergism between targeted inhibition of MDM2 and MDM4. Conclusion: Our findings suggest that p53-dependent apoptosis is the primary cellular response of Ewing sarcoma cell lines following exposure to Nutlin-3a. Furthermore, Nutlin-3a can synergize with the current Ewing sarcoma chemotherapy protocols, suggesting p53 activation as a novel systemic therapeutic approach for this disease. Clin Cancer Res; 17(3); 494–504. ©2010 AACR.
2 1 Se p 20 04 Smoothing And Dispersive Estimates For 1 d Schrödinger Equations With Bv Coefficients And Applications

We prove smoothing estimates for Schrödinger equations i∂tφ+ ∂x(a(x)∂xφ) = 0 with a(x) ∈ BV, real and bounded from below. We then bootstrap these estimates to obtain optimal Strichartz and maximal function estimates, all of which turn out to be identical to the constant coefficient case. We also provide counterexamples showing a ∈ BV to be in a sense a minimal requirement. Finally, we provide an application to sharp wellposedness for a generalized Benjamin-Ono equation. Introduction Let us consider (1) i∂tu+ ∂x(a(x)∂xu) = 0, u(x, t = 0) = u0(x). We take a ∈ BV, the space of bounded functions whose derivatives are Radon measures. Moreover, we assume a to be real-valued and bounded from below: 0 < m ≤ a(x)(≤ M). We are interested in proving smoothing and dispersive estimates for the function u. This type of equations has been recently studied by Banica [3] who considered the case where the metric a is piecewise constant (with a finite number of discontinuities). In [3], Banica proved that the solutions of the Schrödinger equation associated to such a metric enjoy the same dispersion estimates (implying Strichartz) as in the case of the constant metric, and conjectured it would hold true for general a ∈ BV as well. Unfortunately, her method of proof (which consists in writing a complete description for the evolution problem) leads to constants depending upon the number of discontinuities rather than on the norm in BV of the metric and consequently does not extend to more general settings. On the other hand, Castro and Zuazua [7] show that the space BV is more or less optimal: they construct metrics a ∈ C0,β for all β ∈ [0, 1[ (but not in BV) and solutions of the corresponding Schrödinger equation for which any local dispersive estimate of the type ‖u(t, x)‖L1loc,t(Lqloc,x) ≤ C‖u0‖Hs fail if 1/p < 1/2−s (otherwise, the estimate is a trivial consequence of Sobolev embeddings). In this article, we prove the natural conjecture, namely that for BV metrics, the Schrödinger equation enjoys Département de mathématiques, UMR 8628 du CNRS, Bât 425 Université Paris-Sud, F-91405 Orsay Laboratoire Analyse, Géométrie & Applications, UMR 7539, Institut Galilée, Université Paris 13, 99 avenue J.B. Clément, F-93430 Villetaneuse
Kallikreins and proteinase-mediated signaling: proteinase-activated receptors (PARs) and the pathophysiology of inflammatory diseases and cancer

Abstract Proteinases such as thrombin and trypsin can affect tissues by activating a novel family of G protein-coupled proteinase-activated receptors (PARs 1–4) by exposing a ‘tethered’ receptor-triggering ligand (TL). Work with synthetic TL-derived PAR peptide sequences (PAR-APs) that stimulate PARs 1, 2 and 4 has shown that PAR activation can play a role in many tissues, including the gastrointestinal tract, kidney, muscle, nerve, lung and the central and peripheral nervous systems, and can promote tumor growth and invasion. PARs may play roles in many settings, including cancer, arthritis, asthma, inflammatory bowel disease, neurodegeneration and cardiovascular disease, as well as in pathogen-induced inflammation. In addition to activating or disarming PARs, proteinases can also cause hormone-like effects via PAR-independent mechanisms, such as activation of the insulin receptor. In addition to proteinases of the coagulation cascade, recent data suggest that members of the family of kallikrein-related peptidases (KLKs) represent endogenous PAR regulators. In summary: (1) proteinases are like hormones, signaling in a paracrine and endocrine manner via PARs or other mechanisms; (2) KLKs must now be seen as potential hormone-like PAR regulators in vivo; and (3) PAR-regulating proteinases, their target PARs, and their associated signaling pathways appear to be novel therapeutic targets.
8 Constructors Can Be Partial, Too

The behavior of regular aggregate data structures (for example, square matrices, complete binary trees, and powerlists 20]), as well as semantic data structures (for example, sorted lists and priority lists), cannot be captured elegantly by using existing speciication techniques and languages such as Larch, Z, OBJ, VDM, or LOTOS. Typically such a data structure is deened as a subsort of a larger data structure. For instance, complete binary trees can be deened as a subsort of binary trees, and powerlists as well as sorted lists can be deened as subsorts of lists. For reasoning about algorithmic descriptions using such data structures, it then becomes necessary to explicitly carry subsort conditions. As shown in 14], this approach makes reasoning about them cumbersome, and the resulting proofs get complex. It is argued in this article that regularity should be exploited while reasoning about speciications based on regular data structures (see also 20]). That does not seem to be possible if regular data structures are modeled using subsorts, perhaps because of incompatibility between regularity and subsorts. Instead of being a beneet, regularity becomes a burden. This situation is somewhat similar to an experience one would have in expressing a speciication involving many data types in an unsorted (single-sorted) notation. Diierent types would have to be characterized by diierent unary predicates, and conditions expressed using these unary predicates would have to be carried around wherever terms of particular data types are used. A multisorted notation and logic are instead preferred. The main idea of this article is to propose a simple extension to the algebraic speciication method that allows constructors of a data structure to be partial in the sense that their behavior may be meaningful only on a subset of the syntactically speciied input domain. An applicability condition is associated with every operation , including a constructor, of a data type. An operation is intended to be invoked only if the associated applicability condition is satissed. As will be shown below, with applicability conditions, regular data structures such as complete binary trees
Evolutionary Approach to Balance Problem of On-Line Action Role-Playing Game

We address the balance problem of on-line Action Role-playing Games(ARPGs) by using an evolutionary architecture which includes intergration with an improved Probabilistic Incremental Program Evolution(PIPE) and Cooperative Coevolutionary Algorithm(CCEA). We construct a game model of the basic on-line ARPG and use it to obtain the training data for a statistical model named Linear Logistic Regression Model(LLRM) by monte carlo method, then we calculate fitness value of the individual based on the prediction of the LLRM. Moreover, some experiments are made to demonstrate the evolutionary architecture is able to find a set of well-balanced Ability-increasing Functions(AIFs), which determine how to increase the ability value with level, for the target game more efficiently and logically.
Enterprise Social Networks: A Business Model Perspective

Enterprise Social Networks continue to be adopted by organisations looking to increase collaboration between employees, customers and industry partners. Offering a varied range of features and functionality, this technology can be distinguished by the underlying business models that providers of this software deploy. This study identifies and describes the different business models through an analysis of leading Enterprise Social Networks: Yammer, Chatter, SharePoint, Connections, Jive, Facebook and Twitter. A key contribution of this research is the identification of consumer and corporate models as extreme approaches. These findings align well with research on the adoption of Enterprise Social Networks that has discussed bottom-up and top-down approaches. Of specific interest are hybrid models that wrap a corporate model within a consumer model and may, therefore, provide synergies on both models. From a broader perspective, this can be seen as the merging of the corporate and consumer markets for IT products and services.
Hierarchical topographic factor analysis

Recent work has revealed that cognitive processes are often reflected in patterns of functional connectivity throughout the brain (for review see [16]). However, examining functional connectivity patterns using traditional methods carries a substantial computational burden (of computing time and memory). Here we present a technique, termed Hierarchical topographic factor analysis, for efficiently discovering brain networks in large multi-subject neuroimaging datasets.