Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effectiveness of Toric Orthokeratology in the Treatment of Patients with Combined Myopia and Astigmatism

Purpose The purpose of this multi-institute, single-group clinical trial was to evaluate the effectiveness and safety of toric orthokeratology lenses for the treatment of patients with combined myopia and astigmatism. Methods A total of 44 patients were included in this clinical trial. The patients ranged in age from 7 to 49 years, with myopia of -0.75 to -6.0 diopters (D) and astigmatism of 1.25 to 4.0 D. After excluding 21 subjects, 23 subjects (39 eyes) were analyzed after toric orthokeratology lens use. The subjects underwent ophthalmologic examination after 1 day and 1, 2, 3, and 4 weeks of wearing overnight toric orthokeratology lenses. Results A total of 19 subjects (31 eyes) completed the trial after five subjects (eight eyes) dropped out. In the patients who completed the study by wearing lenses for 4 weeks, the myopic refractive error decreased significantly by 2.60 ± 2.21 D (p < 0.001), from -3.65 ± 1.62 to -1.05 ± 1.64 D. The astigmatic refractive error were also significantly decreased by 0.63 ± 0.98 D (p = 0.001), from 2.07 ± 0.83 to 1.44 ± 0.99 D. The mean uncorrected and corrected visual acuities before wearing the lenses were 2.14 ± 0.80 logarithm of the logMAR (logMAR) and 0.05 ± 0.13 logMAR, respectively, which changed to 0.12 ± 0.30 logarithm of the logMAR (p < 0.001) and 0.01 ± 0.04 logMAR (p = 0.156) after 4 weeks. No serious adverse reactions were reported during the clinical trial. Conclusions Our results suggest that toric orthokeratology is an effective and safe treatment for correcting visual acuity in patients with combined myopia and astigmatism.
The Problem of Gender Bias in Japanese High School Textbooks

The aim of this paper is to point out the problem of gender bias in Japanese high school textbooks and suggest some solutions. I have examined the contemporary literature sections in "Kokugo-I", a basic high school text, and "Kokugo-Sogo" , which will be used starting next year. I initially researched the male-to-female ratio of authors and editors of Japanese textbooks over the past ten years. Then later I examined the percentage of literature written by women that is presently being used in the Japanese school system. According to what I found, the percentage of female authors included in the textbooks till does not reach 20% and only 12.9% of the editors are female. These results clearly show us two problems that we are dealing with today: the mostly male editors are not including literature written by women, nor are females being chosen as editors. Another problem I found with the textbooks has to do with the questions following each work. The questions lead students to understand the material in a traditional way, directing them to prepare their answers according to the writer's intention. The questions do not allow for differences in opinion or critical thinking. I chose the short story titled Harunohino-Kageri by Shimao Toshio to illustrate the big difference in opinion between editors and female high school students. In this story, the character "I" recalls his school days, when he always had a sense of inferiority because of his lack of strength and bravery. Due to his inferiority complex, he once chased an unknown girl with the goal of impressing his fellows. Upon reaching the girl, he had no idea what he should o next. This novel perfectly shows the distress of "I" in adolescence. It is valued as a youth novel because readers can relate to the character "I", and as a result it has become a widely used text in Japanese high schools. However, not all readers relate in the same way. Why does this difference in understanding arise? In my experience, some female high school students today have an intuitive understanding ofthe writer's exism and feel that the character "I" looks down on women. This alternative interpretation shows quite a difference in opinion between predominantly male editors, who think that this story is about timeless youth distress and is applicable to everyone today, and actual adolescents who are required to read it. As educators, what can we do about the difference in understanding? Now that we know about he alternative ways of interpreting literature, we need to ensure the development of all high school students' minds. In order to do this, we need to have a "revision of ideas" represented by Feminist Criticism. Editors hould be required to engage in text editing from this new point of view. High school students hould be exposed to literature written by women as well as that written by men. The questions following the works hould encourage students to critically interpret the meaning and to consider many points of view. Only through an overhaul of the current system can we achieve the goal of eliminating gender bias in Japanese high school textbooks.
Approximate Parameter Tuning of Support Vector Machines

Parameter Tuning is an indispensable step to guarantee generalization of support vector machines (SVM). Previous methods can be reduced to a nested two-layer framework, where the inner layer solves a convex optimization problem, and the outer layer selects the hyper-parameters by minimizing either cross validation error or other error bounds. In this paper, we propose a novel efficient parameter tuning approach via kernel matrix approximation, focusing on the efficiency improvement of SVM training in the inner layer. We first develop a kernel matrix approximation algorithm MoCIC. Then, we apply MoCIC to compute a low-rank approximation of the kernel matrix, and then use the approximate matrix to approximately solve the quadratic programming of SVM, and finally select the optimal candidate parameters through the approximate cross validation error (ACVE). We verify the feasibility and the efficiency of parameter tuning approach based on MoCIC on 5 benchmark datasets. Experimental results show that our approach can dramatically reduce time consumption of parameter tuning and meanwhile guarantee the effectiveness of the selected parameters.
Pitchfork bifurcations in blood-cell-shaped dipolar Bose-Einstein condensates

We demonstrate that the method of coupled Gaussian wave packets is a full-fledged alternative to direct numerical solutions of the Gross-Pitaevskii equation of condensates with electromagnetically induced attractive 1/r interaction or with dipole-dipole interaction. Moreover, Gaussian wave packets are superior in that they are capable of producing both stable and unstable stationary solutions and thus of giving access to yet unexplored regions of the space of solutions of the Gross-Pitaevskii equation. We apply the method to clarify the theoretical nature of the collapse mechanism of blood-cell-shaped dipolar condensates: On the route to collapse the condensate passes through a pitchfork bifurcation, where the ground state itself turns unstable, before it finally vanishes in a tangent bifurcation.
Interplay Between Cognition and Mobility in Older Adults

Copyright © 2017 by The Korean Geriatric Society This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Interplay Between Cognition and Mobility in Older Adults
Processor frequency setting for energy minimization of streaming multimedia application

In this paper, we describe a software-controlled approach for adaptively minimizing energy in embedded systems for real-time multimedia processing. Energy is optimized by clock speed setting: the software controller dynamically adjusts processor clock speed to the frame rate requirements of the incoming multimedia stream. The speed-setting policy is based on a system model that correlates clock speed with best-case, average-case and worst-case sustainable frame rate, accounting for data-dependency in multimedia streams. Experiments on an MP3 decoding application show that computational energy can be drastically reduced with respect to fixed-frequency operation.
A hybrid cache architecture with 2D-based prefetching scheme for image and video processing

In this paper, a hybrid cache architecture with high versatility and a wide range of applications is proposed, which is effective in image and video processing. Meanwhile, a new 2D-based prefetching scheme for image and video processing, fully exploiting two dimension data locality, is used in this cache. In this scheme, Prefetching Address Generation (PAG) and Prefetching Time Generation (PTG) are adopted to enhance the accuracy and effectiveness. The experiment results show that 2D-based prefetching scheme can achieve 30% reduction in cache miss rate and accordingly 30% total access time for 2D memory access pattern (dct). This new hybrid cache is verified in JPEG decoder, MPEG-2 decoder and H.264 decoder.
Blood Rheology and Hemodynamics

Blood is a two-phase suspension of formed elements (i.e., red blood cells [RBCs], white blood cells [WBCs], platelets) suspended in an aqueous solution of organic molecules, proteins, and salts called plasma. The apparent viscosity of blood depends on the existing shear forces (i.e., blood behaves as a non-Newtonian fluid) and is determined by hematocrit, plasma viscosity, RBC aggregation, and the mechanical properties of RBCs. RBCs are highly deformable, and this physical property significantly contributes to aiding blood flow both under bulk flow conditions and in the microcirculation. The tendency of RBCs to undergo reversible aggregation is an important determinant of apparent viscosity because the size of RBC aggregates is inversely proportional to the magnitude of shear forces; the aggregates are dispersed with increasing shear forces, then reform under low-flow or static conditions. RBC aggregation also affects the in vivo fluidity of blood, especially in the low-shear regions of the circulatory system. Blood rheology has been reported to be altered in various physiopathological processes: (1) Alterations of hematocrit significantly contribute to hemorheological variations in diseases and in certain extreme physiological conditions; (2) RBC deformability is sensitive to local and general homeostasis, with RBC deformability affected by alterations of the properties and associations of membrane skeletal proteins, the ratio of RBC membrane surface area to cell volume, cell morphology, and cytoplasmic viscosity. Such alterations may result from genetic disorders or may be induced by such factors as abnormal local tissue metabolism, oxidant stress, and activated leukocytes; and (3) RBC aggregation is mainly determined by plasma protein composition and surface properties of RBCs, with increased plasma concentrations of acute phase reactants in inflammatory disorders a common cause of increased RBC aggregation. In addition, RBC aggregation tendency can be modified by alterations of RBC surface properties because of RBC in vivo aging, oxygen-free radicals, or proteolytic enzymes. Impairment of blood fluidity may significantly affect tissue perfusion and result in functional deteriorations, especially if disease processes also disturb vascular properties.
(-1)-Enumeration of Self-Complementary Plane Partitions

We prove a product formula for the remaining cases of the weighted enumeration of self-complementary plane partitions contained in a given box where adding one half of an orbit of cubes and removing the other half of the orbit changes the sign of the weight. We use nonintersecting lattice path families to express this enumeration as a Pfaffian which can be expressed in terms of the known ordinary enumeration of self-complementary plane partitions.
Semiotic Methodology For The Analysis Of The Cultural And Individual Dynamics Of Social Representations: A View From Cultural Psychology

This paper presents a view of semiotics that provides some theoretical elements for bridging some of the gaps between post-Vygotskian cultural psychology and social representation theory. This is done, firstly, through an exploration into the concept of ‘representation’ and, then, by exploring how semiotic action (semiosis) is able to produce signs of increased complexity which ultimately result in representations capable of supporting and communicating shared views of the world within a cultural community. A semiotic model of the shaping of social representations and some methodological procedures borrowed from semiotics are suggested as tools for the formal description and explanation of both personal experiences and social representations.
A multiscale multitemporal land cover classification method using a Bayesian approach

As vegetation time evolution is one of the most relevant information to discriminate the different land cover types, land cover classification requires both temporal and spatial information. Due to the physical properties of remote sensors, this temporal information can only be derived from coarse resolution sensors such as MERIS (300×300 m2 pixel size) or SPOT/VGT (1 km2 pixel size). In this paper, we propose to use jointly high and coarse spatial resolution to perform an efficient high resolution land cover classification. The method is based on Bayesian theory and on the linear mixture model permitting, through a simulated annealing algorithm, to perform a high resolution classification from a coarse resolution time series.
Chemical Reporter for Visualizing Metabolic Cross-Talk between Carbohydrate Metabolism and Protein Modification

Metabolic chemical reporters have been largely used to study posttranslational modifications. Generally, it was assumed that these reporters entered one biosynthetic pathway, resulting in labeling of one type of modification. However, because they are metabolized by cells before their addition onto proteins, metabolic chemical reporters potentially provide a unique opportunity to read-out on both modifications of interest and cellular metabolism. We report here the development of a metabolic chemical reporter 1-deoxy-N-pentynyl glucosamine (1-deoxy-GlcNAlk). This small-molecule cannot be incorporated into glycans; however, treatment of mammalian cells results in labeling of a variety proteins and enables their visualization and identification. Competition of this labeling with sodium acetate and an acetyltransferase inhibitor suggests that 1-deoxy-GlcNAlk can enter the protein acetylation pathway. These results demonstrate that metabolic chemical reporters have the potential to isolate and potentially discover cross-talk between metabolic pathways in living cells.
Queer Man on Campus: A History of Non-Heterosexual College Men, 1945-2000

334 Journal of College Student Development beginning. 10 Things Employers Want You to Learn in College is an intelligent and efficient tool to augment the work of career and school guidance professionals. This book will also make an impact earlier in the life of collegebound students by encouraging thought on how college applies to and prepares them for the world of work, as well as greatly improves their subsequent launch into and ultimate success in the work world as newly minted professionals.
High throughput microscopy: from raw images to discoveries

Technological advances in automated microscopy now allow rapid acquisition of many images without human intervention, images that can be used for large-scale screens. The main challenge in such screens is the conversion of the raw images into interpretable information and hence discoveries. This post-acquisition component of image-based screens requires computational steps to identify cells, choose the cells of interest, assess their phenotype, and identify statistically significant `hits'. Designing such an analysis pipeline requires careful consideration of the necessary hardware and software components, image analysis, statistical analysis and data presentation tools. Given the increasing availability of such hardware and software, these types of experiments have come within the reach of individual labs, heralding many interesting new ways of acquiring biological knowledge.
Coronary calcification detected by electron-beam computed tomography and myocardial infarction. The Rotterdam Coronary Calcification Study.

AIMS Available data are insufficient to determine the relation between coronary calcification and coronary events in the general population. We cross-sectionally examined the association between coronary calcification and myocardial infarction in the prospective Rotterdam Coronary Calcification Study. METHODS AND RESULTS From 1997 onwards, subjects were invited for electron-beam computed tomography scanning to detect coronary calcification. The study was embedded in the population-based Rotterdam Study. Calcifications were quantified in a calcium score according to Agatston's method. Calcium scores were available for 2,013 participants with a mean age of 71 years (standard deviation, 5.7 years). A history of myocardial infarction prior to scanning was present in 229 subjects. Compared to subjects in the lowest calcium score category (0-100), the age-adjusted odds ratio for myocardial infarction in subjects in the highest calcium score category (above 2,000) was 7.7 (95% confidence interval, 4.1-14.5) for men, and 6.7 (95% confidence interval, 2.4-19.1) for women. Additional adjustment for cardiovascular risk factors only slightly altered the estimates. The association was observed across all age subgroups, i.e. also in subjects of 70 years and older. CONCLUSION A strong and graded association was found between coronary calcification and myocardial infarction. The association remained at high ages.
Efficient Realization of an ADFE with a New Adaptive Algorithm

—Decision feedback equalizers are commonly employed to reduce the error caused by intersymbol interference. Here, an adaptive decision feedback equalizer is presented with a new adaptation al-gorithm. The algorithm follows a block-based approach of normalized least mean square (NLMS) algorithm with set-membership ﬁltering and achieves a signiﬁcantly less computational complexity over its conventional NLMS counterpart with set-membership ﬁltering. It is shown in the results that the proposed algorithm yields similar type of bit error rate performance over a reasonable signal to noise ratio in comparison with the latter one.
BENCHMARKING THE PERFORMANCE OF A DSPIC CONTROLLER PROGRAMED WITH AUTOMATICALLY GENERATED CODE

This paper benchmarks a midrange MCU from Microchip (dsPIC33FJ family) used as a controller for a magnetic levitation plant. Basic control algorithms (slightly modified PID and State Space) are tested to present a rough idea of how long it takes to compute one iteration of the control algorithm loop. Beside this, the significance of various optimisation parameters for the code generation process is demonstrated. The measured results demonstrate how important the proper setting of data type arithmetic and Matlab optimisation parameters is.
An Animated Pedagogical Agent that Interacts Affectively with the Student

This paper aims at the conception of an affective and animated pedagogical agent responsible for the interface of the environment with the student and for considering the affective aspects of the interaction with the student in a learning environment. The agent catches the student's affective state by his observable behavior, and applies tactics according to the student's affective state. We believe that using an animated pedagogical agent we can obtain better results at improving a positive mood and positive affective states (for example, good selfconfidence) in the student, since the lifelike character allows a more powerful and realistic interaction with human agents when affective dimensions are aggregated to an educational system.
Reducing the Environmental Sensitivity of Yellow Fluorescent Protein

Yellow mutants of the green fluorescent protein (YFP) are crucial constituents of genetically encoded indicators of signal transduction and fusions to monitor protein-protein interactions. However, previous YFPs show excessive pH sensitivity, chloride interference, poor photostability, or poor expression at 37 °C. Protein evolution in Escherichia coli has produced a new YFP named Citrine, in which the mutation Q69M confers a much lower pK a (5.7) than for previous YFPs, indifference to chloride, twice the photostability of previous YFPs, and much better expression at 37 °C and in organelles. The halide resistance is explained by a 2.2-Å x-ray crystal structure of Citrine, showing that the methionine side chain fills what was once a large halide-binding cavity adjacent to the chromophore. Insertion of calmodulin within Citrine or fusion of cyan fluorescent protein, calmodulin, a calmodulin-binding peptide and Citrine has generated improved calcium indicators. These chimeras can be targeted to multiple cellular locations and have permitted the first single-cell imaging of free [Ca2+] in the Golgi. Citrine is superior to all previous YFPs except when pH or halide sensitivity is desired and is particularly advantageous within genetically encoded fluorescent indicators of physiological signals.
ZF Detectors over Correlated K Fading MIMO Channels

This paper provides a systematic characterization of Zero-Forcing (ZF) detectors over multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channels that experience both small and large-scale fading. In particular, we consider the generic K distribution (Rayleigh/gamma distribution) to model the composite fading fluctuations and also assume the general case of semi-correlated small-scale fading. In the following, novel exact analytical expressions for the achievable sum rate are derived, followed by asymptotic expressions in the high and low Signal-to-Noise ratio (SNR) regimes. In these limiting cases, two common and insightful affine expansions are studied followed by new, closed-form upper and lower bounds on the sum rate that remain tight for all SNRs. In the second part of the paper, we present exact tractable expressions along with first-order expansions for the symbol error rate (SER) and outage probability; we also quantify the performance of ZF detectors in terms of diversity order and array (or coding) gain. The implications of the model parameters on the ZF detector performance are investigated via Monte-Carlo simulations which also validate the theoretical analysis.
Gender differences in serum cortisol levels among patients with major depressive disorder

Introduction: A large amount of evidence supports the involvement of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA) in the pathophysiology of mood disorders. These findings seem to reflect hyperactivity of the HPA axis in depression and are likely related to impaired negative feedback by endogenous glucocorticoids. However, any gender differences related to this involvement are unclear. Material and methods: We collected serum cortisol samples of 71 unmedicated patients with major depressive disorder (21 males, 50 females; age = 38.85 ±13.66) and 60 healthy controls (19 males, 41 females; age = 33.25 ±11.79). All patients met the DSM-IV-R criteria for major depressive disorder, confirmed through the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM Disorders (SCID). Comparisons of the mean cortisol levels between groups were carried out using factorial analysis of covariance, with age and body weight as covariates. Results: There was a statistically significant interaction between diagnosis and gender (F = 6.72, d.f. = 1/109, p = 0.01). Male patients had significantly higher cortisol levels compared to male controls (patients = 12.33 ±3.63 μg/dl, controls = 10.16 ±3.44 μg/dl; F = 6.25, d.f. = 1/35, p = 0.01) whereas female patients had nonsignificantly lower cortisol levels compared to female controls (patients = 9.88 ±3.03 μg/dl, controls = 11.79 ±5.70 μg/dl; F = 2.68, d.f. = 1/83, p = 0.10). Conclusions: Although preliminary, our findings suggest that gender may in part moderate HPA dysfunction in major depressive disorder. Further studies are necessary in order to replicate these findings and investigate their true implications.