Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Prevalence of Child Maltreatment across the Globe: Review of a Series of Meta‐Analyses

In this review, we combine and compare the results of a series of meta-analyses on the prevalence of child sexual, physical and emotional abuse and physical and emotional neglect, including 244 publications and 551 prevalence rates for the various types of maltreatment. Child maltreatment research seems to be dominated by research on sexual abuse, studies in developed parts of the world and research using self-report measures. The overall estimated prevalence rates for self-report studies (mainly assessing maltreatment ever during childhood) were 127/1000 for sexual abuse (76/1000 among boys and 180/1000 among girls), 226/1000 for physical abuse, 363/1000 for emotional abuse, 163/1000 for physical neglect and 184/1000 for emotional neglect. The overall estimated prevalence rates for studies using informants (mainly assessing the 1-year prevalence of maltreatment) were four per 1000 for sexual abuse and three per 1000, respectively, for physical abuse and emotional abuse. We conclude that child maltreatment is a widespread, global phenomenon affecting the lives of millions of children all over the world, which is in sharp contrast with the United Nation's Convention on the Rights of the Child. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Key Practitioner Messages: Child maltreatment research is dominated by research on sexual abuse. The prevalence rates for informant studies were lower than for self-report studies. The prevalence of child maltreatment is largely similar across the globe. ‘Research seems to be dominated by research on sexual abuse, studies in developed parts of the world and research using self-report measures’
Employing phase-conjugation antenna array to beam microwave power from satellite to earth

This paper conducts theoretical study on employing phase-conjugation antenna array to beam microwave power from satellite to earth in the context of space solar power (SSP) applications. Our analysis reveals that, the phase-conjugation array must have aperture dimension greater than 1 km × 1 km in order to be applicable to practical SSP systems. Moreover, antenna array with such a large size does not behave as a conventional phased array, in that the power receiver on earth resides in the array's Fresnel region rather than far-field region.
Association between Glucose Levels and Intraocular Pressure: Pre- and Postprandial Analysis in Diabetic and Nondiabetic Patients

The aim of this study was to evaluate the relationship between glucose levels and intraocular pressure (IOP) fluctuation in diabetic and nondiabetic patients. Seventeen nondiabetic and 20 diabetic subjects underwent a complete ophthalmic examination, capillary glucose testing, and applanation tonometry in two distinct situations: first, fasting for at least 8 hours and, second, postprandial measurements. Baseline glucose levels were higher in diabetic patients (P < 0.001). Postprandial IOP was significantly higher than baseline IOP in diabetic (P < 0.001) and nondiabetic patients (P = 0.006). Postprandial glucose levels were significantly higher than baseline measurements in both diabetic (P = 0.005) and nondiabetic patients (P = 0.015). There was a significant association between glucose levels variation and IOP change in both diabetic patients (R 2 = 0.540; P < 0.001) and nondiabetic individuals (R 2 = 0.291; P = 0.025). There is also a significant association between the baseline glucose levels and IOP change in diabetic group (R 2 = 0.445; P = 0.001). In a multivariable model, the magnitude of glucose level change remained significantly associated with IOP variation even including age, baseline IOP, ancestry, and gender as a confounding factor (P < 0.001). We concluded that there is a significant association between blood glucose levels and IOP variation, especially in diabetic patients.
The Processing Speed of Scene Categorization at Multiple Levels of Description: The Superordinate Advantage Revisited

Recent studies have sought to determine which levels of categories are processed first in visual scene categorization and have shown that the natural and man-made superordinate-level categories are understood faster than are basic-level categories. The current study examined the robustness of the superordinate-level advantage in a visual scene categorization task. A go/no-go categorization task was evaluated with response time distribution analysis using an ex-Gaussian template. A visual scene was categorized as either superordinate or basic level, and two basic-level categories forming a superordinate category were judged as either similar or dissimilar to each other. First, outdoor/ indoor groups and natural/man-made were used as superordinate categories to investigate whether the advantage could be generalized beyond the natural/man-made boundary. Second, a set of images forming a superordinate category was manipulated. We predicted that decreasing image set similarity within the superordinate-level category would work against the speed advantage. We found that basic-level categorization was faster than outdoor/indoor categorization when the outdoor category comprised dissimilar basic-level categories. Our results indicate that the superordinate-level advantage in visual scene categorization is labile across different categories and category structures.
LIDAR ACTIVITIES AND RESEARCH PRIORITIES IN THE COMMERCIAL SECTOR

Laser altimetry, more commonly referred to in the commercial sector as LiDAR mapping, is becoming a commonplace operational tool in photogrammetry, survey and mapping firms. Its use has grown rapidly over the past five years due to the increasing availability of commercial off-the-shelf sensors, advancements in the design and capabilities of the sensors themselves and an increased awareness of the advantages of using LiDAR technology for elevation data capture by end users. As a result LiDAR mapping has been experiencing strong growth, which in turn has spurred further developments in the technology and even greater demand for the data products. Due to the relatively small size of the lidar mapping sector, capital investment in internally funded research and development appears to be limited. As a result further growth and development of the technology in the commercial sector will depend heavily on the ability to work cooperatively with the academic and research sector to define common research priorities and objectives, especially as relates to specific applications. Education of end users to increase awareness and acceptance of the technology along with establishing approved methodologies and quality control guidelines are also areas of overlap between the commercial and government sectors. Potential research priorities given commercial sector needs will be discussed and ranked with an emphasis on software tools. Undeveloped aspects of research-oriented laser altimetry, especially as relates to waveform capture and analysis will be discussed in the context of potential commercial markets.
A General Framework for Program

We present a framework for reasoning about programs that incorporates programmer speciied assertions and subsumes both Hoare-Logic veriication and program analysis. Our aim is to support combinations of diierent program reasoning algorithms in a tightly coupled way, and to provide a formal basis for the correctness of the combined eeorts. Our framework is based on an extension of Hoare Logic, which we call Conditional Hoare Logic (CHL). Whereas Hoare Logic identiies user assertions with formulas in Hoare triples (user assertions are typically just treated as speciications of loop invariants), CHL formally separates user assertions from formulas manipulated in proofs by treating user assertions as part of the program text. Central to our framework is the notion of transformation of CHL-proofs. Starting from a distinguished transformation for \exact reasoning", we deene a calculus of CHL-proof transformations based on well-known combinators of abstraction, functional composition, intersection and xpoint iteration. We show that all algorithms deenable using the calculus are correct, and that the calculus includes a wide variety of program reasoners, including traditional veriiers and analyzers, and combinations thereof.
Low-power manycore accelerator for personalized biomedical applications

Wearable personal health monitoring systems can offer a cost effective solution for human healthcare. These systems must provide both highly accurate, secured and quick processing and delivery of vast amount of data. In addition, wearable biomedical devices are used in inpatient, outpatient, and at home e-Patient care that must constantly monitor the patient's biomedical and physiological signals 24/7. These biomedical applications require sampling and processing multiple streams of physiological signals with strict power and area footprint. The processing typically consists of feature extraction, data fusion, and classification stages that require a large number of digital signal processing and machine learning kernels. In response to these requirements, in this paper, a low-power, domain-specific manycore accelerator named Power Efficient Nano Clusters (PENC) is proposed to map and execute the kernels of these applications. Experimental results show that the manycore is able to reduce energy consumption by up to 80% and 14% for DSP and machine learning kernels, respectively, when optimally parallelized. The performance of the proposed PENC manycore when acting as a coprocessor to an Intel Atom processor is compared with existing commercial off-the-shelf embedded processing platforms including Intel Atom, Xilinx Artix-7 FPGA, and NVIDIA TK1 ARM-A15 with GPU SoC. The results show that the PENC manycore architecture reduces the energy by as much as 10X while outperforming all off-the-shelf embedded processing platforms across all studied machine learning classifiers.
Dissolution and Solubility Behavior of Fenofibrate in Sodium Lauryl Sulfate Solutions

The solubility of fenofibrate in pH 6.8 McIlvaine buffers containing varying concentrations of sodium lauryl sulfate was determined. The dissolution behavior of fenofibrate was also examined in the same solutions with rotating disk experiments. It was observed that the enhancement in intrinsic dissolution rate was approximately 500-fold and the enhancement in solubility was approximately 2000-fold in a pH 6.8 buffer containing 2% (w/v) sodium lauryl sulfate compared to that in buffer alone. The micellar solubilization equilibrium coefficient (k*) was estimated from the solubility data and found to be 30884 ± 213 L/mol. The diffusivity for the free solute, 7.15 × 10− 6 cm2/s, was calculated using Schroeder's additive molal volume estimates and Hayduk-Laurie correlation. The diffusivity of the drug-loaded micelle, estimated from the experimental solubility and dissolution data and the calculated value for free solute diffusivity, was 0.86 × 10− 6 cm2/s. Thus, the much lower enhancement in dissolution of fenofibrate compared to its enhancement in solubility in surfactant solutions appears to be consistent with the contribution to the total transport due to enhanced micellar solubilization as well as a large decrease ( ∼ 8-fold) in the diffusivity of the drug-loaded micelle.
Localization of Medullary Functional Abnormalities in Experimental Papillary Necrosis

Summary Renal function was investigated in rats 3 d or 4 wk after an injection of 2‐bromoethylarnine hydrobromide (BEA) 40–125 mg/kg body weight. Animals developed necrosis of renal papillary structures other than collecting ducts (subtotal renal papillary necrosis) (RPN) or necrosis of all structures in the distal papilla, including collecting ducts (total RPN). Glomerular filtration rate (GFR) was reduced in animals with total RPN (667 SD 168 mUl/min/100 g body weight, n = 5) in comparison with controls (1065 103, n = 5; P <0.001) but was unimpaired in animals with subtotal RPN (1162 200, n = 4; P >0.3). Maximum urinary osrnolality (Umax) was significantly decreased in subtoatal RPN (1241 388 rnOsmlkg, n = 4) and in total RPN (626 f 293, n = 5) in comparison with controls (2216293, n = 5). Free water reabsorption (TcH2O) was impaired in animals with total RPN but was not significantly reduced in the presence of subtotal RPN. Total RPN did not affect free water formation (CH2O). It is concluded that impaired TCH2O occurs in RPN because of the damage to the collecting duct, and not because of necrosis of the thin limbs juxtarnedullary nephrons.
Drug Offenses, Gender, Ethnicity, and Nationality

Although imprisonedwomen represent about6% of the total prison population in England and Wales, their numbers have been increasing rapidly during the past several years. Recently, statistics also show that ethnic minorities and foreign-born women are overrepresented in the prison system in Britain. Using the intersectional approach, this article uses official prison data between 1993 and August 2005 to analyze the relationship between ethnicity and nationality and the imprisonment ofwomen in England and Wales. The picture that is presented by the analysis is one in which foreign nationals of ethnic minority background, primarily Blacks, are overrepresented in prison in England and Wales.
Closed-Form SER Expression for APSK Based on the Kite Structure

In communication systems, amplitude phase shift keying (APSK) arises as a potential solution to mitigate performance degradations due to channel non-linearities. Since it combines the characteristics of PSK and those of amplitude shift keying (ASK), APSK is also likely to be robust in systems influenced by phase noise. It is, therefore, solicited in cascaded systems involving visible light communications (VLC) as the second communication technology. This letter proposes the design of an APSK constellation, based on the kite structure, suitable for such cascaded systems. The constellation design is detailed and the symbol error probability is derived in closed-form. The bit error rate performance is compared with those of quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) and PSK. Findings reveal that for <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$ 2\eta = 4$ </tex-math></inline-formula> (<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$ \eta $ </tex-math></inline-formula> being the common number of symbols per ring), the proposed APSK scheme has similar performance with <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${Q}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>PSK and <italic>4</italic>QAM, and, for <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$2\eta > 8$ </tex-math></inline-formula>, the APSK scheme outperforms the corresponding PSK, making it a good candidate for cascaded VLC systems. Even though the proposed scheme is outperformed by QAM, it gains up to about 5 dB over the PSK for an error rate of <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$ 10^{-8} $ </tex-math></inline-formula>.
Comorbidities of COPD

By 2020, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) will be the third cause of mortality. Extrapulmonary comorbidities influence the prognosis of patients with COPD. Tobacco smoking is a common risk factor for many comorbidities, including coronary heart disease, heart failure and lung cancer. Comorbidities such as pulmonary artery disease and malnutrition are directly caused by COPD, whereas others, such as systemic venous thromboembolism, anxiety, depression, osteoporosis, obesity, metabolic syndrome, diabetes, sleep disturbance and anaemia, have no evident physiopathological relationship with COPD. The common ground between most of these extrapulmonary manifestations is chronic systemic inflammation. All of these diseases potentiate the morbidity of COPD, leading to increased hospitalisations and healthcare costs. They can frequently cause death, independently of respiratory failure. Comorbidities make the management of COPD difficult and need to be evaluated and treated adequately.
Spectral Graph Reduction for Efficient Image and Streaming Video Segmentation

Computational and memory costs restrict spectral techniques to rather small graphs, which is a serious limitation especially in video segmentation. In this paper, we propose the use of a reduced graph based on superpixels. In contrast to previous work, the reduced graph is reweighted such that the resulting segmentation is equivalent, under certain assumptions, to that of the full graph. We consider equivalence in terms of the normalized cut and of its spectral clustering relaxation. The proposed method reduces runtime and memory consumption and yields on par results in image and video segmentation. Further, it enables an efficient data representation and update for a new streaming video segmentation approach that also achieves state-of-the-art performance.
Controlling childhood obesity: A systematic review on strategies and challenges

Background: Childhood obesity is a global health problem with short- and long-term health consequences. This systematic review presents a summary of the experiences on different family-, school-, and clinic-based interventions. Materials and Methods: Electronic search was conducted in MEDLINE, PubMed, ISI Web of Science, and Scopus scientific databases. We included those studies conducted among obese individuals aged up to 18 years. Our search yielded 105 relevant papers, 70 of them were conducted as high quality clinical trials. Results: Our findings propose that school-based programs can have long-term effects in a large target group. This can be related to this fact that children spend a considerable part of their time in school, and adopt some parts of lifestyle there. They have remarkable consequences on health behaviors, but as there are some common limitations, their effects on anthropometric measures are not clear. Due to the crucial role of parents in development of children's behaviors, family-based interventions are reported to have successful effects in some aspects; but selection bias and high dropout rate can confound their results. Clinic-based interventions revealed favorable effects. They include dietary or other lifestyle changes like increasing physical activity or behavior therapy. It seems that a comprehensive intervention including diet and exercise are more practical. When they have different designs, results are controversial. Conclusion: We suggest that among different types of interventional programs, a multidisciplinary approach in schools in which children's family are involved, can be the best and most sustainable approach for management of childhood obesity.
Outcome in Adult Life for more Able Individuals with Autism or Asperger Syndrome

The paper reviews what is known about outcome in adult life for more able individuals within the autistic spectrum. Because of the problems associated with differential diagnosis, the results of studies involving high-functioning people with autism and Asperger syndrome are combined. The review focuses predominantly on long-term follow-up research and covers outcome in terms of cognitive, linguistic, academic and adaptive functioning; educational and employment history; independence and social relationships; and behavioural and psychiatric problems. The stability of IQ and other measures over time, and variables related to outcome, are also investigated.
Angiogenesis in rabbit hepatic tumor after transcatheter arterial embolization.

AIM To investigate the effect of transcatheter arterial embolization (TAE) on angiogenesis of hepatic tumor. METHODS Twenty New Zealand White rabbits were randomly divided into two groups of 10 each and VX2 carcinoma was implanted in the left medial lobes of the livers. Fourteen days later, a silicon catheter was inserted into the left hepatic artery of rabbit with VX2 hepatic tumor and infusion was performed via the hepatic artery using Lipiodol (the TAE group) or saline (the control group). Rabbits were sacrificed 7 d after treatment and tumor tissues were excised. Expression of vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) protein and microvessel density (MVD) of tumors were examined using immunohistochemistry. The staining intensity of VEGF was evaluated with a computer-assisted image-analyzer. Reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) was used to detect the VEGF mRNA expression of tumors. RESULTS MVD was higher in the TAE group compared with the control group (28.6+/-10.6 vs 16.3+/-6.9, P<0.01). Expression of VEGF protein was enhanced after TAE. The staining intensity of VEGF in the TAE group was 0.162+/-0.018, significantly higher than in the control group (0.142+/-0.01, P<0.01). At mRNA level, VEGF165 mRNA was significantly higher in the TAE group compared with the control group (2.58+/-0.42 vs 1.99+/-0.21, P<0.001). MVD was well correlated to VEGF expression in both the TAE group (r=0.69, P<0.05) and the control group (r=0.72, P<0.05). CONCLUSION TAE promotes the development of neovascularization of residual tumors through up-regulation of VEGF expression, possibly due to hypoxic insult.
Finger motion capture from wrist-electrode contact resistance

Hand motion capture is an important yet challenging topic for biomechanics and human computer interaction. We proposed a novel electrical sensing technology for capturing the finger angles from the variation of the wrist shape. The proposed device detects the signal related to the wrist-electrode contact resistances, which change according to the variation of the wrist shape accompanying finger movements. The developed sensing device consists of a wrist band, sixteen electrodes and a sensing circuit of contact resistances. We investigated the relationships between the finger angles and the system outputs by using a glove-type joint angle sensor. As a result, we confirmed high correlations of the system outputs with the finger angles for several electrodes. Therefore, we conclude that the proposed system can be used for the estimation of the finger joint angles.
Women in Parliaments: Descriptive and Substantive Representation

This essay reviews two research programs. The first focuses on variations in the number of women elected to national parliaments in the world (descriptive representation), and the second focuses on effects of women's presence in parliament (substantive representation). The theory of the politics of presence (Phillips 1995) provides reasons for expecting a link between descriptive and substantive representation. The safest position would be to say that results are “mixed” when it comes to empirical support for the theory of the politics of presence. However, when a large number of studies covering a wide set of indicators on the importance of gender in the parliamentary process are piled together, the picture that emerges shows that female politicians contribute to strengthening the position of women's interests.
Abusive Supervision and Contextual Performance: The Mediating Role of Emotional Exhaustion and the Moderating Role of Work Unit Structure

This study examined the processes linking abusive supervision to employee contextual performance by focusing on the mediating influence of emotional exhaustion and the moderating influence of work unit structure. Data were obtained from 285 subordinate–supervisor dyads from three manufacturing companies in north-eastern China. The results revealed that: (i) emotional exhaustion mediated the relationships between abusive supervision and the contextual performance dimensions of interpersonal facilitation and job dedication; and (ii) work unit structure moderated these relationships such that the relationships were stronger in mechanistic than in organic work unit structures.