Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Public Spending on Health Care and the Poor

This paper uses new cross-country data to assess the relationship between public spending on health care and the health status of the poor. Data are drawn from two sources: (i) existing data on health status by income quintile tabulated from demographic health surveys in 44 countries; and (ii) our estimates of the health status of the poor in over 70 countries drawn from a new technique in decomposing social indicators. Our estimates confirm that the poor have significantly worse health status than the nonpoor and the regression results provide new evidence that public spending on health care matters more to them. However, the results suggest that increased public spending alone will not be sufficient to significantly improve health status.
TSum: fast, principled table summarization

Given a table where rows correspond to records and columns correspond to attributes, we want to find a small number of patterns that succinctly summarize the dataset. For example, given a set of patient records with several attributes each, how can we find (a) that the "most representative" pattern is, say, (male, adult, *), followed by (*, child, low-cholesterol), etc? We propose TSum, a method that provides a sequence of patterns ordered by their "representativeness. " It can decide both which these patterns are, as well as how many are necessary to properly summarize the data. Our main contribution is formulating a general framework, TSum, using compression principles. TSum can easily accommodate different optimization strategies for selecting and refining patterns. The discovered patterns can be used to both represent the data efficiently, as well as interpret it quickly. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and intuitiveness of our discovered patterns.
Experimental design approach to optimize selective laser melting of martensitic 17‐4 PH powder: part I – single laser tracks and first layer

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of main process parameters of selective laser melting (SLM) technology on single lines and single layers manufactured from 17‐4 PH martensitic powder using the experimental design approach.Design/methodology/approach – A fractional factorial approach has been applied to vary and to identify the optimal set of process parameters using three different powder particle size distributions for 17‐4 PH steel. This paper assesses the impact of influence factors such as process and material parameters on objective factors such as dimension of single lines and single layers, as well as surface roughness.Findings – The influence of process parameters and materials properties on single line and single layer manufacture is shown and proved statistically. The effect of each process parameter and their interactions on single layer and single line stability and quality has been investigated, and a complex objective function analyzing geometrical stability o.
Effects of a Multicomponent Exercise Program on Spatiotemporal Gait Parameters, Risk of Falling and Physical Activity in Dementia Patients

Background: Exercise programs are presumed to rehabilitate gait disorders and to reduce the risk of falling in dementia patients. This study aimed to analyze the specific effects of multicomponent exercise on gait disorders and to determine the association between gait impairments and the risk of falling in dementia patients before and after intervention. Methods: We conducted an 8-week multicomponent exercise program in 16 dementia patients (age 86.7 ± 5.4 years). All participants were assessed several times for gait analysis (Locométrix®), Tinetti score and physical activity (Body Media SenseWear® Pro armband). Results: After 8 weeks of the exercise program, the mean gait speed was 0.12 m/s faster than before the intervention (0.55 ± 0.17 vs. 0.67 ± 0.14 m/s). The multicomponent exercise program improved gait performance and Tinetti score (p < 0.05). Gait performance (gait speed, stride length) was correlated with the Tinetti score (p < 0.05). Conclusion: Analysis of spatiotemporal gait parameters using an accelerometer method provided a quick and easy tool to estimate the benefits of an exercise program and the risk of falling.
Recent theoretical progress in the development of photoanode materials for solar water splitting photoelectrochemical cells

The search for earth-abundant materials that can be used in solar water splitting cells remains an important goal for affordable and environmentally friendly methods for energy conversion and storage. The stability of photoelectrodes in solar water splitting cells is a major challenge in the development of efficient photoelectrodes. This article reviews state-of-the-art theoretical research activities mainly based on density functional theory (DFT) calculations in the development of efficient photoanode materials, focusing on the scientific and technological possibilities offered by photoanode materials, such as BiVO4, α-Fe2O3, WO3, TaON and Ta3N5. We start with a brief introduction to exploring suitable photoanode materials as well as optimizing their energy band configurations for specific applications. This introduction section is followed by the basic theory of photocatalysis. Finally, we discuss the current theoretical progress in the development of photoanode materials according to the DFT results available in the literature to date. This review also highlights crucial issues that should be addressed in future research activities in the summary and outlook section.
Robust Whisper Activity Detection Using Long-Term Log Energy Variation of Sub-Band Signal

The goal in the whisper activity detection (WAD) is to find the whispered speech segments in a given noisy recording of whispered speech. Since whispering lacks the periodic glottal excitation, it resembles an unvoiced speech. This noise-like nature of the whispered speech makes WAD a more challenging task compared to a typical voice activity detection (VAD) problem. In this paper, we propose a feature based on the long term variation of the logarithm of the short-time sub-band signal energy for WAD. We also propose an automatic sub-band selection algorithm to maximally discriminate noisy whisper from noise. Experiments with eight noise types in four different signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) conditions show that, for most of the noises, the performance of the proposed WAD scheme is significantly better than that of the existing VAD schemes and whisper detection schemes when used for WAD.
Fatigue Damage Mechanism and Stress Relaxation in Shot Peened and Polished Nickel Base Materials

Aircraft turbine engine disks operate at high cyclic loads. Low cycle fatigue, by definition involves localized plastic deformation, typically in areas with geometrical stress concentrations and results in multiple cracking. It is common engineering practice to introduce compressive residual stress by processes such as shot peening on the surface of these highly loaded parts to improve fatigue strength. The fatigue strength is improved because of the compressive residual stress offsets some of the operating tensile loads. The combined stresses, when they accumulate cycles above yield will gradually cause the surface compressive residual stress to be reduced until the surface becomes residually stressed in tension which will lead to crack initiation and crack propagation. This work shows the different damage mechanisms found in shot peened and polished specimens after fatigue testing using rotating beam.
An Efficient Image Compression Using Bit Allocation based on Psychovisual Threshold

One of the main part of image compression is a quantization process which give a significant effect to the compression performance. However, image compression based on the quantization produces blocking effect or artifact image. This research proposes a novel bit allocation strategy which assigning an optimal budget of bits in image compression. The bit allocation is proposed to replace the role of the quantization process in image compression. The principle of psychovisual threshold is adopted to develop bit allocation strategy in the image compression. This quantitative research measures the optimal bit of image signals and manages the image quality level. The experimental results show the efficiency of the proposed bit allocation strategy, and that the proposed bit allocation can achieve the almost same compression rate performance while can significantly produces high quality image texture. When compared to JPEG compression, the image compression using bit allocation achieves bit rate savings of up to 4%. The quality image output provides minimum errors of artifact image. The quality image reconstruction improvement is up to 14% and the error reconstruction is reduced by up to 37%. Key Words: Bit allocation, Quantization table, Psychovisual threshold, Image compression
Developmental Trajectories in Primary Schoolchildren Using n-Back Task

Background: Neuropsychological instruments to assess cognitive trajectories during childhood in epidemiological studies are needed. This would improve neurodevelopment characterization in order to identify its potential determinants. We aimed to study whether repeated measures of n-back, a working memory task, detect developmental trajectories in schoolchildren during a 1-year follow-up. Methods: We administered the n-back task to 2897 healthy children aged 7–11 years old from 39 schools in Barcelona (Spain). The task consisted of 2 levels of complexity or loads (2- and 3-back) and 2 different stimuli (numbers and words). Participants performed the task four times from January 2012 to March 2013. To study the trajectories during the follow-up, we performed linear mixed-effects models including school, individual and age as random effects. Results: We observed improvements related to age in n-back outcomes d′, HRT and accuracy, as well as reduced cognitive growth at older ages in d′ and HRT. Greater improvements in performance were observed at younger ages, in 2-back, in verbal rather than numerical stimuli and in girls compared to boys. Boys responded faster at baseline, while girls showed increased growth in 2-back numbers. Children with ADHD (Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder) symptoms (15% of boys and 6% of girls) had a lower working memory at baseline, but they showed similar cognitive growth trajectories in numbers variants of the task, as compared to children without ADHD symptoms. However, the age-related improvement in response speed was not observed in children with ADHD symptoms. Conclusions: Changes in n-back outcomes reflected developmental trajectories in 1-year follow-up. The present results suggest that the repeated administration of this task can be used to study the factors that may alter the cognitive development during childhood.
Automatic Extraction of Soccer Game Events from Twitter

Sports events data is often compiled manually by companies who rarely make it available for free to third parties. However, social media provide us with large amounts of data that discuss these very same matches for free. In this study, we investigate to what extent we can accurately extract sports data from tweets talking about soccer matches. We collected and analyzed tweets about 61 Dutch premier league soccer matches. For each of these matches we 1) extracted the minutes in which an event occurs, 2) classified the event type and 3) assigned events to either the home or away team. Our results show that the aggregation of tweets is a promising resource for extracting game summaries, but further research is needed to overcome data messiness and sparsity problems.
Formal Morphology

A formalism for the description of a system of formal morphology for flexive and agglutinative languages (such as C3ech) is presented, borrowing some notions and the style from the theory of formal languages. Some examples (for Czech adjectives) are presented at the end of the paper. In these examples, the formalism's rules are used for the phonology-based changes as well, but nothing prevents the use of a separate phonology level (e.g. of the Koskenniemi's two-level model) as a front(and back-) end for the analysis (and synthesis).
Cost-optimal quadtrees for ray shooting

Given a set S of objects, called a scene, the rayshooting problem asks, given a ray, what is the first object in S intersected by this ray. A popular approach to speed up ray-shooting queries is to construct a space decomposition such as a quadtree in 2D and an octree in 3D. The query is then answered by traversing the leaves of the tree as they are intersected by the ray, and for each cell in turn, testing for an intersection between the ray and the subset of objects intersecting that cell. In this paper, the only objects we consider are simplices (points and segments inside the unit square [0, 1] in R, or points, segments and triangles inside the unit cube [0, 1] in R). We denote the tree by T in either 2D or 3D, and use the notation Q for quadtrees specifically, and O for octrees. The following cost measure was introduced by Aronov et al. [1] for the purpose of predicting the traversal cost of shooting a ray in R, while using a quadtree (for d = 2) or an octree (for d = 3) to store S:
Removal of a dental implant: An unusual case report

This article is a case report of removal of a dental implant using electrosurgery. A discussion will outline a possibly less invasive method to remove the dental implant. This involves the use of electrosurgery unit to cause a thermo-necrosis of the bone and therefore a weakening of the bone-implant interface. It is suggested that a controlled laboratory experiment be carried out to look at the effects of mono-polar electrosurgery on osseointergration on dental implants and the possible use of this method to allow for simple removal of poorly positioned fixtures and also fixtures with significant bone loss but no mobility.
Synaesthetic Colour in the Brain: Beyond Colour Areas. A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study of Synaesthetes and Matched Controls

Background In synaesthesia, sensations in a particular modality cause additional experiences in a second, unstimulated modality (e.g., letters elicit colour). Understanding how synaesthesia is mediated in the brain can help to understand normal processes of perceptual awareness and multisensory integration. In several neuroimaging studies, enhanced brain activity for grapheme-colour synaesthesia has been found in ventral-occipital areas that are also involved in real colour processing. Our question was whether the neural correlates of synaesthetically induced colour and real colour experience are truly shared. Methodology/Principal Findings First, in a free viewing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiment, we located main effects of synaesthesia in left superior parietal lobule and in colour related areas. In the left superior parietal lobe, individual differences between synaesthetes (projector-associator distinction) also influenced brain activity, confirming the importance of the left superior parietal lobe for synaesthesia. Next, we applied a repetition suppression paradigm in fMRI, in which a decrease in the BOLD (blood-oxygenated-level-dependent) response is generally observed for repeated stimuli. We hypothesized that synaesthetically induced colours would lead to a reduction in BOLD response for subsequently presented real colours, if the neural correlates were overlapping. We did find BOLD suppression effects induced by synaesthesia, but not within the colour areas. Conclusions/Significance Because synaesthetically induced colours were not able to suppress BOLD effects for real colour, we conclude that the neural correlates of synaesthetic colour experience and real colour experience are not fully shared. We propose that synaesthetic colour experiences are mediated by higher-order visual pathways that lie beyond the scope of classical, ventral-occipital visual areas. Feedback from these areas, in which the left parietal cortex is likely to play an important role, may induce V4 activation and the percept of synaesthetic colour.
A Crowdsourcing Platform for Italian Linguistic Field Research

Linguistic field research depends on collecting phrases and sentences as well as their geographical and social characteristics. Collecting such data is usually done by sending researchers in the field to ask questions and fill forms. This traditional field research is time-consuming, costly, and not free of biases. This demonstration paper presents metropolitalia, a Web-based crowdsourcing platform for linguistic field research aiming at overcoming some of the drawbacks of traditional linguistic field research. metropolitalia is built upon Agora, a market for trading with phrases and speculating on their characteristics (such as geographical spread and gender, age, and level of education of speakers) in a playful manner. Borsa Parole, a first game built upon Agora and presented here, incites players to express their own knowledge or, rather, beliefs and aims at gathering data for language studies. This paper describes Agora and Borsa Parole itself, reports on first evaluations of the data gathered so far, and shows a demonstration of Borsa Parole’s use.
Acoustic correlates of phonological status

Languages vary not only in terms of their sound inventory, but also in the phonological status certain sound distinctions are assigned. For example, while vowel nasality is lexically contrastive (phonemic) in Quebecois French, it is largely determined by the context (allophonic) in American English; the reverse is true for vowel tenseness. If phonetics and phonology interact, a minimal pair of sounds should span a larger acoustic divergence when it is pronounced by speakers for whom the underlying distinction is phonemic compared to allophonic. Near minimal pairs were segmented from a corpus of American English and Quebecois French using a crossed design (since nasality and tenseness have opposite phonological status in the two languages). Pairwise time-aligned divergences between contrasts were calculated on the basis of 7 mainstream spoken feature representations, and a set of linguistic phonetic measurements. Only carefully selected phonetic measurements revealed the expected cross-over, with larger divergences for English than French tokens of the tenseness contrast, and larger divergences for French than English tokens for the nasality contrast. We conclude that the phonetic effects of phonological status are subtle enough that only linguistically-informed (or supervised) measurements can pick up on them.
Identification of the optimal parameters for recording cortical potentials evoked by mechanical stimulation of the human oesophagus

Cortical evoked potentials (CEP) have been recorded in response to both electrical stimulation (ES) and mechanical stimulation (MS) of the oesophagus. While the optimal parameters for recording reproducible oesophageal CEP to ES have recently been established, they have not yet been determined for MS, and reported CEP to MS show considerable variability. This study aimed to identify the optimal parameters required to record reproducible MS induced CEP. CEP were recorded from the vertex (Cz) in six subjects (one female; age range 23–47 years). MS was performed 5 cm above the lower oesophageal sphincter by rapidly inflating a 2‐cm long silicone balloon at a frequency of 0.2 Hz. The rise time to maximum inflation was 165 ms. In order to determine the minimum number of stimuli required to produce optimal signal‐to‐noise quality, we acquired data in runs of 25, 50, 100 and 300 stimuli and to determine the stimulation intensity that produced the shortest latency and the largest amplitude CEP, we averaged four runs of 50 stimuli at five different intensities ranging from sensory threshold to pain. CEP reproducibility was then assessed in three subjects on three separate occasions using parameters determined from these measurements. We found that optimal signal‐to‐noise quality was achieved by averaging four runs of 50 stimuli; that P1 latency was shortest and P1‐N1 amplitude largest at intensities of 75% and pain threshold and that highly reproducible CEP were obtained in all individuals. We conclude that it is possible to obtain highly reproducible oesophageal CEP to MS which can now be compared to those obtained by ES in order to identify which is most suitable for clinical studies.
Cell cycle kinetics and development of Hydra attenuata. I. Epithelial cells.

The cell cycle parameters of epithelial cells of Hydra attenuata are described. Specifically the rate of proliferation and the fraction of proliferating cells have been determined under conditions of defined growth rate. Techniques involved standard methods of cell cycle analysis using histological and tissue maceration preparations; pulse-chase and continuous labelling with [ 3 H]thymidine followed by autoradiographic analysis, and microspectrophotometric determination of nuclear DNA content in single cells. The results indicate that more than 90% of hydra epithelial cells are actively proliferating with a cell cycle duration about equal to the tissue doubling time. In well fed hydra the average cell cycle is about 3 days long. S period is 12-15 h, G 1 0-1 h, and mitosis 1.5 h. Most of the cell cycle consists of a long G 2 period of variable duration (24-72 h). The results provide no evidence for a subpopulation of rapidly proliferating cells as predicted by ‘growth zone’ models of hydra morphogenesis. The results also indicate that the population of epithelial cells is self-sustaining requiring no input by differentiation from other cell types. The long and variable G 2 period means that DNA synthesis and the following cell division are effectively uncoupled such that inhibitors of DNA synthesis may not stop epithelial cell division. The variable nature of the G 2 period suggests it as a possible point of control of hydra growth.
Ocean acoustic tomography using travel-time sensitivity kernel

Acoustic tomography uses acoustic field propagating in the ocean to monitor the properties of meso-scale ocean. Traditional acoustic tomography is based on ray theory. However, in the situation of low frequency, ray method may lead to low resolution and precision. Thus, we propose a method of travel time sensitivity kernel, which can realize the estimation of sound speed perturbation of arbitrary position in two nodes transmission precisely. Also the travel time sensitivity kernel method increases the observed quantity and the spatial resolution. First we study the theoretical derivation of travel time sensitivity kernel and then peak arrival detection and solution to the acoustic inverse problem as well. In this paper, we present a series of simulations of ocean acoustic tomography based on travel time sensitivity kernel. Comparison is made between ray method with the method, which illustrates the high resolution and high accuracy of the latter.
Hemolysin Production as a Virulence Marker in Symptomatic and Asymptomatic Urinary Tract Infections Caused by Escherichia coli

Potential virulence, as defined by combined levels of adhesion to urinary epithelial cells, serum resistance, and mouse toxicity, was assessed for Escherichia coli strains causing symptomatic and asymptomatic urinary tract infections in relation to the carriage of hemolysin and other suspected virulence determinants. Hemolysin production (Hly), associated with certain O (O4, O6, O18, and O75), K (5), and hemagglutination (VI and VII) antigenic types but not colicin V production (Cva), was evident in 83 and 60% of isolates in groups possessing high potential virulence and in only 11 and 6% of those with low virulence. Strains of particular O-types were not more virulent per se, but among the serotypes, specific combinations of virulence factors appeared decisive, e.g., O18 HAVI B/D/G Hly+ K5+/− and O18 HAIII/IVB/V Hly− Cva+/− K1+/− strains were, respectively, of high and low potential virulence. Isolates with high potential virulence were found to a similar extent in symptomatic and asymptomatic infections.