Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Chronic unremitting urticaria: is the use of antihistamines above the licensed dose effective? A preliminary study of cetirizine at licensed and above‐licensed doses

Recently, several authors have suggested an off‐label increase of antihistamine dosage should be given to patients with chronic urticaria (CU) not responding to the usual, recommended doses, in order to gain better control of the disease. However, this recommendation is not evidence‐based. The objective of this study was to assess the effectiveness of increased doses of antihistamines in patients with CU showing poor control at recommended doses. In total, 22 adult patients with moderate/severe CU not controlled with the usual antihistamine doses were studied. These subjects recorded urticaria severity on a visual analogue scale (range 0–10) for 2 weeks. During the first week, they were treated with cetirizine at the licensed dose (10 mg/day), and with a three‐fold increased dose (10 mg × 3/day) during week 2. Only 1 patient (5%) responded satisfactorily to the increased dosage of antihistamine; in the remaining 21 subjects, urticaria scores did not change, and these patients had to be treated with steroids, ciclosporin, and in 1 case with cyclophosphamide. Disease control was eventually gained in all cases. This study suggests that the proportion of patients with severe CU that may gain a better control of their disease with high, off‐label doses of antihistamines is probably small, and that most patients will eventually have to undergo more aggressive treatments.
On Leaping to Conclusions When Feeling Tired: Mental Fatigue Effects on Impressional Primacy

Abstract An experiment examined the impact of mental fatigue on impression formation. Subjects experiencing fatigue as a result of participation in a lengthy final examination at a university manifested greater magnitude of primacy effects in impressions than did nonfatigued subjects. Those differences disappeared when subjects were held accountable for their impressions. The findings are discussed in reference to the possibility that fatigue renders information processing subjectively costly inducing the need for cognitive closure (Kruglanski, in press) promoting a “freezing” on impressions implied by early information about a social target. Similarly, need for closure is assumed to be lowered by accountability concerns. This analysis is discussed in light of the alternative possibility that the effects of fatigue on impressions stem from a depletion of cognitive capacity.
Dominance and Inequality in X-Rated Videocassettes

Feminists have been concerned about the debasement of women in sexually explicit material. The purpose of this study was to determine the extent of domination and sexual inequality in x-rated videocassettes through a content analysis of 45 widely available x-rated videocassettes. The sample was randomly drawn from a list of 121 adult movie titles widely available in family videocassette rental stores in southern California. Over half of the explicitly sexual scenes were coded as predominantly concerned with domination or exploitation. Most of the domination and exploitation was directed by men toward women. Specific indicators of domination and sexual inequality, including physical violence, occurred frequently. The growth of the videocassette rental industry and the popularity of x-rated films, coupled with the messages these films convey, is a cause for concern.
Clinical and demographic predictors of exercise capacity in end-stage renal disease.

Patients on maintenance hemodialysis therapy for end-stage renal disease have reduced exercise tolerance. Multiple processes related to uremia and hemodialysis have been implicated in the pathophysiology of this impairment. However, limited data are available to identify the separate and combined effects of clinical factors on the degree of impairment for individuals within this population. For this purpose, data from 193 patients who had undergone exercise testing for two clinical trials were retrospectively analyzed. Univariate and multiple linear regression analyses were used to identify demographic and clinical correlates of peak exercise oxygen uptake (VO2). Peak VO2 averaged 18.5 +/- 6.4 mL/min/kg. On univariate analysis, peak VO2 correlated positively with male sex and hemoglobin, serum albumin, and serum creatinine concentrations and correlated negatively with dialytic age and diagnosis of diabetes or chronic heart failure. In a multiple linear regression model, sex, hemoglobin concentration, age, and diagnosis of diabetes each remained statistically significant. Together, factors included in the model accounted for 41% of the variability in peak VO2 (P = 0.0001). Among factors not correlating significantly with peak VO2 were resting blood pressure, serum carnitine level, and urea clearance assessed by Kt/V. Findings show the range of exercise impairment among clinically stable ambulatory hemodialysis patients, which may be sufficient to interfere with normal daily activities for many of these patients. Although this impairment may be broadly attributable to physiological consequences of uremia, the degree of impairment for individual patients is predicted by demographic factors, coexistent disease, and factors potentially modified by medical therapeutics.
Barriers to Preemptive Kidney Transplantation

Background Patients who receive kidney transplants before beginning dialysis (known as preemptive transplantation) have lower rates of morbidity and mortality and a longer work life than do those who receive them after beginning dialysis. But in the United States fewer than 2.5% of patients with end-stage kidney disease undergo transplantation as their initial therapy. Objective To understand barriers to early transplantation, the National Kidney Foundation (NKF) surveyed patients randomly selected from its database. Methods A 28-question survey on socioeconomic factors; perceptions, fears, and concerns about living-donor transplantation; and education regarding transplantation as a treatment option was distributed to a total of 3,586 people randomly chosen from the NKF's database. The database is not limited to kidney patients, and 19.3% of the responses were disqualified because the respondents didn't have chronic kidney disease (CKD) or hadn't undergone kidney transplantation. The 417 responses acceptable for analysis represented at least 12% of qualified survey recipients. Of these, 316 (76%) were kidney transplant recipients from either living or deceased donors and 101 (24%) were patients with CKD who had never undergone transplantation. The surveys sent to the latter group contained slight modifications from those sent to the transplant recipients. We compared responses from people who had undergone kidney transplantation with responses from those who hadn't undergone the procedure. Results Renal transplant recipients had higher incomes and more education, were more often white, and were more likely to have learned about treatment options from a physician than were those who hadn't undergone transplantation. Half of the respondents who hadn't undergone the procedure believed that dialysis must precede transplantation, and 60% viewed transplantation as a last resort. Out-of-pocket expenses were greater for transplant recipients, even though worries about future medical costs were common in both groups. Most respondents were willing to accept a kidney from a living donor, although they were uncomfortable with asking someone to donate. Conclusions Substantial barriers to preemptive kidney transplantation remain for patients with CKD; a lack of financial resources and educational deficits were the most common barriers found in the survey.
When Eyewitnesses Talk

When two people witness an event, they often discuss it. Because memory is not perfect, sometimes this discussion includes errors. One person's errors can become part of another person's account, and this proliferation of error can lead to miscarriages of justice. In this article, we describe the social and cognitive processes involved. Research shows how people combine information about their own memory with other people's memories based on factors such as confidence, perceived expertise, and the social cost of disagreeing with other people. We describe the implications of this research for eyewitness testimony.
Angst- en depressieklachten onder Islamitische vrouwen met homoseksuele gevoelens

The present study has been carried out to examine the level of anxiety and depression in Muslim women with a homosexual inclination. Based on earlier findings in foreign studies the following hypothesis is formulated: ‘There is a higher prevalence of anxiety and depression symptoms in Muslim women with homosexual feelings than the average Dutch population’. Because of being in the minority twice this target group is very vulnerable for a high prevalence of anxiety and depression symptoms (being a Muslim foreigner and having homosexual feelings). This hypothesis is tested with a quantitative research method (three questionnaires) and has been supported by a qualitative research method (semistructured interviews). From the statistic analyses of the quantitative measurement instruments it turned out that Muslim women with homosexual feelings have significantly more anxiety and depression symptoms than the average Dutch population. These findings are confirmed by the qualitative research. The majority of the participants reported in the interviews experiences of tension and confusion in daily life. They also reported the need for appropriate culture specific health care and sympathy from practitioners. In conclusion, the most important recommendation acquired from this study is to broaden the knowledge and give good advice about homosexuality to various cultural communities as well as the practitioners in healthcare.
Organizations or Communities? Changing the Metaphor Changes the Theory

Educational administration must develop an identity of its own The basic theories and root metaphors of the field center on organization, whose assumptions include legitimacy, hierarchy, and self-interest. This conceptualization makes great demands on management and leadership for teachers and principals. Families, communities, and friendship networks are examples of collections of people which are different from those of organization. If educational administration were to understand schools as communities, it would need to address new questions, such as different ties for connecting staff students, and families. Our understanding of authority and leadership would also shift; in communities the sources of authority for leadership are embedded in shared ideas. Finally, a new theory of school as community and new conceptions of administration are preferable to theoretical pluralism.
Gender Differences in the Mental Rotations Test Are Partly Explained by Response Format

Gender differences in the Mental Rotations Test (Vandenberg & Kuse, 1978) are larger than in virtually all other spatial tests and have been highly robust over decades. Several possible explanations for this phenomenon have been proposed. This research tests the hypothesis that the gender differences are partly due to the response format of the MRT (two out of four responses correct in each item). This format, in combination with the high time pressure of the MRT, may be particularly conducive to the performance of highly confident (i.e., frequently male) participants who use "quick-and-dirty" response strategies. In study of 288 students, a new MRT version was used in which a variable number of 0 to 4 alternatives per item were correct. Gender differences were significantly smaller than in the standard MRT. In particular, the performance of highly confident male participants was markedly lower than in the standard MRT.
An extended model predictive control approach to coordinated ramp metering

Ramp metering is the most powerful tool to reduce congestion in freeway management. The problem of designing an on-line coordinated ramp metering strategy is considered in this paper. First, the prevalent model predictive control (MPC) structure is used to formulate the problem with a second-order macroscopic traffic flow prediction model. To reduce the computational effort to match the request of on-line application, the original MPC is then extended with a controller positioning procedure. Not all but only the necessary ramps are selected as controllers by investigating the partial derivation of the cost criterion with respect to each ramp metering rate. Finally, a gradient-based numerical solving algorithm is introduced and the overall method is validated in a hypothetic network. Applying the proposed method, the performance of the freeway network improves as much as 13.4% compared with no-control case. In comparison with the original MPC method, the extended MPC method saves 32.3% computation time while barely degrades the control effectiveness.
Europe Through the Looking-Glass: Comparative and Multi-Level Perspectives

The two main divisions in the social sciences, cross-national comparison and international relations theory, must reconsider their methodologies and paradigms when studying transnationalization and, in particular, European integration. This article reviews the major differences in methods, research orientation and heuristic models between the comparative and international perspectives. Four main differences between the two perspectives are discussed: Galton's problem, the level of analysis, interdependence and (dis)aggregation. Reviewing the different paradigms in European studies, the author argues for a combined, if not synthetic, comparative and multi-level approach. For studying Europe's diversity and unity, a multi-level and multi-centric model seems most promising. Such an approach should take into account both state and non-state actors, as well as the interaction between international and national levels in the Europeanization process.
MusicBox: Personalized Music Recommendation Based on Cubic Analysis of Social Tags

Social tagging is becoming increasingly popular in music information retrieval (MIR). It allows users to tag music items like songs, albums, or artists. Social tags are valuable to MIR, because they comprise a multifaced source of information about genre, style, mood, users' opinion, or instrumentation. In this paper, we examine the problem of personalized music recommendation based on social tags. We propose the modeling of social tagging data with three-order tensors, which capture cubic (three-way) correlations between users-tags-music items. The discovery of latent structure in this model is performed with the Higher Order Singular Value Decomposition (HOSVD), which helps to provide accurate and personalized recommendations, i.e., adapted to the particular users' preferences. To address the sparsity that incurs in social tagging data and further improve the quality of recommendation, we propose to enhance the model with a tag-propagation scheme that uses similarity values computed between the music items based on audio features. As a result, the proposed model effectively combines both information about social tags and audio features. The performance of the proposed method is examined experimentally with real data from Last.fm. Our results indicate the superiority of the proposed approach compared to existing methods that suppress the cubic relationships that are inherent in social tagging data. Additionally, our results suggest that the combination of social tagging data with audio features is preferable than the sole use of the former.
Legendre Fit to the Reflection Coefficient of a Radiating Rectangular Waveguide Aperture

We accurately calculate the reflection coefficient and normalized admittance of radiating open-ended rectangular waveguides and fit our results with a linear combination of Legendre polynomials. We verify the expression to an accuracy of 0.005 with other calculations and examine the impact of flanges and burrs on the accuracy to which the reflection coefficient can be approximated in practice.
The Two Purposes of Teacher Evaluation

States, districts, and schools all across the United States are busy developing or implementing teacher evaluation systems. One can trace this flurry of activity to a variety of reports and initiatives that highlight two failings of past efforts: (1) Teacher evaluation systems have not accurately measured teacher quality because they've failed to do a good job of discriminating between effective and ineffective teachers, and (2) teacher evaluation systems have not aided in developing a highly skilled teacher workforce (Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, 2011; Toch & Rothman, 2008; U.S. Department of Education, 2009; Weisberg, Sexton, Mulhern, & Keeling, 2009). Although efforts to move quickly in designing and implementing more effective teacher evaluation systems are laudable, we need to acknowledge a crucial issue—that measuring teachers and developing teachers are different purposes with different implications. An evaluation system designed primarily for measurement will look quite different from a system designed primarily for development.
Case-Based Multiagent Reinforcement Learning: Cases as Heuristics for Selection of Actions

This work presents a new approach that allows the use of cases in a case base as heuristics to speed up Multiagent Reinforcement Learning algorithms, combining Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) and Multiagent Reinforcement Learning (MRL) techniques. This approach, called Case-Based Heuristically Accelerated Multiagent Reinforcement Learning (CB-HAMRL), builds upon an emerging technique, Heuristic Accelerated Reinforcement Learning (HARL), in which RL methods are accelerated by making use of heuristic information. CB-HAMRL is a subset of MRL that makes use of a heuristic function H derived from a case base, in a Case-Based Reasoning manner. An algorithm that incorporates CBR techniques into the Heuristically Accelerated Minimax--Q is also proposed and a set of empirical evaluations were conducted in a simulator for the Littman's robot soccer domain, comparing the three solutions for this problem: MRL, HAMRL and CB-HAMRL. Experimental results show that using CB-HAMRL, the agents learn faster than using RL or HAMRL methods.
Staying Tuned: TV News Audiences in the Netherlands 1988–2010

With an abundance of TV channels available, viewers with no interest in politics might escape from news watching completely. But whether this is true depends on how viewers deal with an increasing complexity. Do people follow their viewing motives and preferences even more or do unintentional choices prevail? Using people-meter data, the authors studied news exposure over the last 2 decades in the Netherlands. They found increasing levels of news exposure more strongly influenced by the viewing context than by motivations of the viewers. The results showed how a mix of public-service and commercial news still can reach wide audiences today.
Emotions and speech: some acoustical correlates.

This paper describes some further attempts to identify and measure those parameters in the speech signal that reflect the emotional state of a speaker. High‐quality recordings were obtained of professional “method” actors reading the dialogue of a short scenario specifically written to contain various emotional situations. Excerpted portions of the recordings were subjected to both quantitative and qualitative analyses. A comparison was also made of recordings from a real‐life situation, in which the emotions of a speaker were clearly defined, with recordings from an actor who simulated the same situation. Anger, fear, and sorrow situations tended to produce characteristic differences in contour of fundamental frequency, average speech spectrum, temporal characteristics, precision of articulation, and waveform regularity of successive glottal pulses. Attributes for a given emotional situation were not always consistent from one speaker to another.
The Scope of Principal Efforts to Improve Instruction

Researchers have used many angles and perspectives to investigate how principals enact instructional leadership in schools. Most research has emphasized the practices of school leaders, although investigations of leadership styles and leadership processes are also present in the literature. In this study, the authors take a different approach by examining the scope of principal efforts to improve instruction. Scope of principal effort refers to the extent to which principals target or distribute their instructionally oriented work with teachers. Using data from principal web logs and teacher surveys conducted in 51 schools in an urban southeastern district, the authors develop models to examine not only differences in average instructional change at the school level but also variability in instructional change across teachers within schools. The results indicate that the scope of principals’ instructional leadership activities varies from one school to the next, from very broad approaches that target the entire faculty to very targeted approaches that focus on a few teachers, and that the frequency of a principal’s instructional leadership activities with an individual teacher is directly related to the magnitude of instructional changes reported by that teacher. These findings support the notion that principals who focus on the improvement of particular teachers in conjunction with broader approaches can produce greater changes in instructional practice.
Combining amplitude and phase-based features for speaker verification with short duration utterances

Due to the increasing use of fusion in speaker recognition systems, one trend of current research activity focuses on new features that capture complementary information to the MFCC (Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients) for improving speaker recognition performance. The goal of this work is to combine (or fuse) amplitude and phase-based features to improve speaker verification performance. Based on the amplitude and phase spectra we investigate some possible variations to the extraction of cepstral coefficients that produce diversity with respect to fused subsystems. Among the amplitude-based features we consider widely used MFCC, Linear frequency cepstral coefficients, and multitaper spectrum estimationbased MFCC (denoted here as MMFCC). To compute phasebased features we choose modified group delayand all-pole group delay-, linear prediction residual phase-based features. We also consider product spectrum-based cepstral coefficients features that are influenced by both the amplitude and phase spectra. For performance evaluation, text-dependent speaker verification experiments are conducted on the a proprietary dataset known as Voice Trust-Pakistan (VT-Pakistan) corpus. Experimental results show that the fused system provide reduced error rate compared to both the amplitude and phasebased features. On the average fused system provided a relative improvement of 37% over the baseline MFCC systems in terms of EER, DCF (detection cost function) of SRE 2008 and DCF of SRE 2010.