Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Distributed Architecture and Interconnection Scheme for Multiple Model Particle Filters

In this paper, we present a hardware architecture for a sampling importance resampling filter (SIRF) applied to systems with multiple interacting models. This filter outperforms traditional filters in practical scenarios due to superior abilities of the SIRFs in dealing with nonlinear and/or non-Gaussian models. Compared to existing approaches, our method does not require knowledge of model transition probabilities and keeps a constant number of particles per model at all times. This allows for a regular hardware structure with deterministic execution time. A highly scalable, parallel architecture consisting of distributed processing elements and a central unit is described. We propose an interconnection scheme and data exchange protocol using the concept of distributed resampling that greatly speeds up filter execution and drastically reduces the required interconnect to a single bus without causing any communication bottleneck. The proposed architecture is evaluated on a Xilinx FPGA platform for a multiple model target tracking application and its efficiency and scalability is shown
A cost analysis of operative repair of major laparoscopic bile duct injuries.

BACKGROUND Major bile duct injuries occur infrequently after laparoscopic cholecystectomy, but may result in life-threatening complications. Few data exist on the financial implications of duct repair. This study calculated the costs of operative repair in a cohort of patients who underwent reconstruction of the bile duct after major ductal injury. OBJECTIVE To calculate the total in-hospital cost of surgical repair of patients referred with major bile duct injuries. METHODS A prospective database was reviewed to identify all patients referred to the University of Cape Town Private Academic Hospital, South Africa, between 2002 and 2013 for assessment and repair of major laparoscopic bile duct injuries. The detailed clinical records and billing information were evaluated to determine all costs from admission to discharge. Total costs for each patient were adjusted for inflation between the year of repair and 2013. Results. Forty-four patients (33 women, 11 men; median age 48 years, range 30 - 78) underwent reconstruction of a major bile duct injury. First-time repairs were performed at a median of 24.5 days (range 1 - 3,662) after initial surgery. Median hospital stay was 15 days (range 6 - 86). Mean cost of repair was ZAR215,711 (range ZAR68,764 - 980,830). Major contributors to cost were theatre expenses (22%), admission to intensive care (21%), radiology (17%) and specialist fees (12%). Admission to a general ward (10%), consumables (7%), pharmacy (5%), endoscopy (3%) and laboratory costs (3%) made up the balance. CONCLUSIONS The cost of repair of a major laparoscopic bile duct injury is substantial owing to prolonged hospitalisation, complex surgicalintervention and intensive imaging requirements.
IBM Research Report Visualizing Risk

We describe the issues surrounding the visualization and communication of risk. Colloquially, “risk” has many meanings; we define it as a probability distribution (discrete or continuous), the entirety of which is important to be understood. While the display of uncertainty has had some measure of attention, though primarily in one dimension, the communication of risk is complicated by the difficulty for many people to accurately understand and contemplate the idea of a probability distribution to begin with, in part due to well-documented psychological biases. We review the scientific and experimental background of this subject and propose guidelines for the effective presentation of risk information, in the specific application area of transportation in a metropolitan area.
Moléculas que marcam o tempo: implicações para os fenótipos circadianos

OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to review the molecular chronobiology studies in the last 36 years in order Eto point out the advances in this area to health professionals. METHOD: We searched in the PubMed and Scopus data banks for articles related with human molecular chronobiology. The keywords used were "clock genes, circadian rhythms, diurnal preference, delayed sleep phase syndrome, advanced sleep phase syndrome, photoperiod and mood disorder". DISCUSSION: The knowledge about molecular mechanism of circadian rhythms increased a lot in the last years and now we are able to better understand the details of molecular processes involved in circadian and sleep regulation. Studies show that polymorphisms in clock genes are associated with sleep and mood disorders. These studies will be helpful to further elucidate the regulation of molecular mechanisms of circadian rhythms. CONCLUSIONS: The development of these studies in molecular chronobiology can be helpful to treat circadian and mood disorders and to prevent health risks caused by intercontinental flights (Jet Lag), nocturnal or shift work schedule.
Classification of Students with Handicaps

Classification is more than the assignment of objects or people to certain classes (in this paper class, category, and taxon are used synonymously) because of shared characteristics. Insofar as people are concerned, classification is a social act which, at the extremes, can cast them in the positions of deviates who must be removed from community life or can legitimize extraordinary supportive interventions in their behalf. The current classification system that is used to provide handicapped or disabled children with special services and education in the schools is anomalous: In the past the categories were used to keep children with special needs out of the mainstream of education and society, but now, under the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (Public Law 94-142), such children are to be included in the mainstream of education whenever feasible. Whether they need to be labeled is very much in controversy. This is not to say that no classification system is necessary, but rather that the current practices, because they represent a hodge podge of approaches and purposes, should be carefully examined and revised as necessary. As a starting point, I suggest Robbins' (1966) acute perception that the choice of categories in a classification system "implies that the category chosen is good for something" (p. 5). It is essential, therefore, that we consider the purposes of classifying children. The importance of classification in the lives of children can hardly be overemphasized. In his report of the study of classification, which he led, Hobbs (1975) warned that "nothing less than the futures of children is at stake" (p. 1) in the formation of categories. Subsequently, he characterized the current system for classifying handicapped children as "a major barrier to the efficient and effective delivery of services to them and their families and thereby impedes efforts to help them" (1980, p. 274). Categories and labels may be essential, nevertheless, because they "open up opportunities for exceptional children, facilitate the passage of legislation in their interest,
Regression of electrocardiographic left ventricular hypertrophy during antihypertensive treatment and the prediction of major cardiovascular events.

CONTEXT Electrocardiographic left ventricular hypertrophy (LVH) is a strong predictor of cardiovascular (CV) morbidity and mortality. However, the predictive value of changes in the magnitude of electrocardiographic LVH criteria during antihypertensive therapy remains unclear. OBJECTIVE To test the hypothesis that lesser severity of electrocardiographic LVH during antihypertensive treatment is associated with decreased CV morbidity and mortality, independent of blood pressure levels and reduction and treatment modality. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS Double-blind, randomized, parallel-group study conducted in 1995-2001 among 9193 men and women with hypertension aged 55 through 80 years (mean, 67 years), with electrocardiographic LVH by Cornell voltage-duration product or Sokolow-Lyon voltage criteria and enrolled in the Losartan Intervention For Endpoint Reduction in Hypertension (LIFE) study. INTERVENTIONS Losartan- or atenolol-based treatment regimens, with follow-up assessments for at least 4 (mean, 4.8 [SD, 0.9]) years. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE Composite end point of CV death, myocardial infarction (MI), or stroke in relation to severity of electrocardiographic LVH determined at baseline and on subsequent electrocardiograms obtained at 1 or more annual revisits. RESULTS Cardiovascular death, nonfatal MI, or stroke occurred in 1096 patients (11.9%). In Cox regression models controlling for treatment type, baseline Framingham risk score, baseline and in-treatment blood pressure, and severity of baseline electrocardiographic LVH by Cornell product and Sokolow-Lyon voltage, less-severe in-treatment LVH by Cornell product and Sokolow-Lyon voltage were associated with 14% and 17% lower rates, respectively, of the composite CV end point (adjusted hazard ratio [HR], 0.86; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.82-0.90; P<.001 for every 1050-mm x ms [1-SD] decrease in Cornell product; and HR, 0.83; 95% CI, 0.78-0.88; P<.001 for every 10.5-mm [1-SD] decrease in Sokolow-Lyon voltage). In parallel analyses, lower Cornell product and Sokolow-Lyon voltage were each independently associated with lower risks of CV mortality (HR, 0.78; 95% CI, 0.73-0.83; P<.001; and HR, 0.80; 95% CI, 0.73-0.87; P<.001, respectively), MI (HR, 0.90; 95% CI, 0.82-0.98; P=.01; and HR, 0.90; 95% CI, 0.81-1.00; P = .04), and stroke (HR, 0.90; 95% CI, 0.84-0.96; P=.002; and HR, 0.81; 95% CI, 0.75-0.89; P<.001). CONCLUSIONS Less-severe electrocardiographic LVH by Cornell product and Sokolow-Lyon voltage criteria during antihypertensive therapy is associated with lower likelihoods of CV morbidity and mortality, independent of blood pressure lowering and treatment modality in persons with essential hypertension. Antihypertensive therapy targeted at regression or prevention of electrocardiographic LVH may improve prognosis.
A Pilot Study of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Social Support Group Interventions with Newly Diagnosed Cancer Patients

ABSTRACT Cancer patients commonly have psychological and social problems, and several psychological approaches have been used to reduce their psychological distress. For example, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) has been used in individual therapy but seldom in a group setting, and no approaches have used a comparison group to evaluate the confusing effects of social support. Also, few studies have evaluated the effects of social support by using a nonintervention group for comparison. This article describes a study of 31 newly diagnosed, psychologically distressed cancer patients, 9 of whom were consecutively assigned to a CBT group and 8, to a social support group. An additional 14 patients were allocated to a “declincrs” nonintervention group. When the interventions ended after eight weeks, the scores of the patients in both intervention groups on standardized scales demonstrated some limited improvements in their psychological states and coping styles. However, the coping styles of the CBT patients .
What makes a “good manager”? Positioning gender and management in students’ narratives

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to address the relationships between gender and management in the narratives of students. More specifically, the authors discuss how the discourse on management is mobilized as a discursive practice able to make some form of that activity thinkable and practicable: who can be a CEO? What kind of managerial competencies are attributed to men/women CEOs? What kind of moral order is expressed in the stories told? Design/methodology/approach – Stimulus texts have been used to elicit narratives. Students were asked to complete a short story regarding a fictive managerial character, either female or male, whose performance and attitude they were asked to evaluate. Findings – The paper discusses how the collected stories as a whole expressed a conception of what counts as a “good manager” and how management is gendered. In the analysis, the authors discuss whether and how the relationships between gender and management are changing, or the basic assumptions about “think man.
A review of the animate-inanimate distinction in infancy: Implications for models of social and cognitive knowing

The ability to distinguish people from things sheds light on an important theoretical question: how is the development of social cognition related to the development of physical cognition? According to Piaget (1954), cognition is unitary and the processes used in dealing with the physical world are the same as those employed in the social world. This statement should be questioned. Although people and objects share certain fundamental properties (size, shape, etc.), only people can communicate, act independently and have feelings and intentions. Thus, people seem much more complex to deal with than things. If all cognitive development derives from the growth of a unitary system, then knowledge about animate objects should lag behind that of inanimate objects. The present paper explores this idea by examining what infants know about the attributes that distinguish people from things. It is concluded that the onset of this distinction begins early in life. Even 2-month-old infants treat people and objects differently when confounding variables of the stimuli are controlled. Rather than lagging behind, the infants' understanding of people appears precocious. The infants' recognition of the crucial distinction between the two classes suggests that a conceptual system is beginning to be formed soon after birth. This conceptual system appears different for social and non-social objects and serves as a foundation from which infants might come to understand the distinctive properties of animate and inanimate objects.
Reasoning Chains: Causal Models of Policy Reasoning in Mass Publics

Citizens do not choose sides on issues like busing or abortion whimsically. They have reasons for their preferences – certainly they can give reasons for them. But how is this possible? Citizens as a rule pay little attention to politics, indeed take only a modest interest in it even during election campaigns when their interest in politics is at its height. And since they pay little attention to politics, it is hardly surprising that they know little about it. Many, in fact, are quite ignorant of basic facts of political life – such as the identity of the party that controls Congress or indeed the name of the congressman who represents them. Which, of course, raises a question of some interest: how do citizens figure out what they think about political issues, given how little they commonly know about them?
Memory DoS Attacks in Multi-tenant Clouds: Severity and Mitigation

In cloud computing, network Denial of Service (DoS) attacks are well studied and defenses have been implemented, but severe DoS attacks on a victim's working memory by a single hostile VM are not well understood. Memory DoS attacks are Denial of Service (or Degradation of Service) attacks caused by contention for hardware memory resources on a cloud server. Despite the strong memory isolation techniques for virtual machines (VMs) enforced by the software virtualization layer in cloud servers, the underlying hardware memory layers are still shared by the VMs and can be exploited by a clever attacker in a hostile VM co-located on the same server as the victim VM, denying the victim the working memory he needs. We first show quantitatively the severity of contention on different memory resources. We then show that a malicious cloud customer can mount low-cost attacks to cause severe performance degradation for a Hadoop distributed application, and 38X delay in response time for an E-commerce website in the Amazon EC2 cloud. Then, we design an effective, new defense against these memory DoS attacks, using a statistical metric to detect their existence and execution throttling to mitigate the attack damage. We achieve this by a novel re-purposing of existing hardware performance counters and duty cycle modulation for security, rather than for improving performance or power consumption. We implement a full prototype on the OpenStack cloud system. Our evaluations show that this defense system can effectively defeat memory DoS attacks with negligible performance overhead.
Neuromuscular Aspects of Women's Orgasms

Abstract Two models of women's orgasm are examined in light of known neuromuscular functioning. It is concluded that both models have difficulties in their formulations concerning the triggering mechanisms of orgasm, and neither model attempts to account for the clonic nature of the response. An alternative model is presented which more fully accounts for the orgasmic response. Theoretical and clinical implications of this new model are discussed.
An effective method of 3D facial features segmentation

The facial features segmentation based on image information, due to the influence of illumination, posture variation and expression, segmentation accuracy is literally not too inspiring. Using 3D face model is one of the effective approaches to tackle the problems above. In this paper, an effective method of 3D facial features segmentation based on the geometric features and statistical features of the 3D coordinates of the face model is proposed. The key curvatures, such as gaussian and mean curvature vector, maximum and minimum curvature vector, are first extracted based on triangular mesh surface analysis. Then, 3D facial feature regions are roughly partitioned by the method of clustering. The optimizing segmentation result is subsequently completed under the guidance of the structural model of facial feature region which is built based on diverse structural characteristics of a human face. Experimental results demonstrate that our method has an excellent performance of the segmentation of the eyes, nose, and mouth regions.
A Giant European Dinosaur and a New Sauropod Clade

Fossils of a giant sauropod dinosaur, Turiasaurus riodevensis, have been recovered from terrestrial deposits of the Villar del Arzobispo Formation (Jurassic-Cretaceous boundary) of Riodeva (Teruel Province, Spain). Its humerus length (1790 millimeters) and estimated mass (40 to 48 metric tons) indicate that it may have been the most massive terrestrial animal in Europe and one of the largest in the world. Phylogenetic analysis indicates that the fossil represents a member of a hitherto unrecognized group of primitive European eusauropods that evolved in the Jurassic.
The supravital staining of osteoclasts with neutral-red: their distribution on the parietal bone of normal growing mice, and a comparison with the mutants grey-lethal and hydrocephalus-3

It is shown that the osteoclasts can be supravitally stained with neutral-red so that they are clearly visible under the dissecting microscope. Their distribution on the parietal bone of normal mice at several ages from birth to 28 days and the detailed appearance of neutral-red stained osteoclasts is described. It is shown that the staining reaction varies between individual cells, and some evidence is presented as to the relation of the neutral-red granules to cytoplasmic inclusions and to the Golgi apparatus. The bearing of the data on the origin and fate of osteoclasts is discussed. It is suggested that some of the small osteoclasts arise by separation from larger ones. Preliminary experiments on the application of the method to other parts of the skeleton by injection of the dye are described. The distribution of osteoclasts on the parietal bone of the grey-lethal and hydrocephalus-3 mutants is compared with the normal and the occurrence of giant osteoclasts in the grey-lethal is noted. A comparison of the normal and the grey-lethal by osteoclast counts is reported, and the accuracy of the method assessed. It is shown that the grey-lethal is deficient in number of osteoclasts, and possibly in the amount of osteoclast material. The distribution of osteoclast size in the normal and grey-lethal is compared. Some critical suggestions are put forward concerning the influence of mechanical factors in cranial growth, and the bearing of the present data on the problem is considered. Emphasis is laid on the tendency for a normal pattern of osteoclasts to be maintained even when the mechanical conditions are probably abnormal.
Impact of Incident Venous Thromboembolism on Risk of Arterial Thrombotic Diseases

Background— Growing evidence supports an association between venous thromboembolism (VTE) and arterial thrombotic diseases (ie, myocardial infarction and ischemic stroke). We aimed to study the association between VTE and future arterial events and to determine the population attributable risk of arterial events by VTE in a large prospective cohort recruited from the general population. Methods and Results— In 1994 to 1995 and 1993 to 1997, 81 687 subjects were included in the Tromsø Study and in the Diet, Cancer and Health Study and followed up to the date of incident venous and arterial events (myocardial infarction or ischemic stroke), death or migration, or to the end of the study period (2010 and 2008, respectively). There were 1208 cases of VTE and 90 subsequent arterial events during a median follow-up of 12.2 years. An association between VTE and future arterial events was found in all women and men aged <65 years but not in men aged >65 years. Women <65 years old with VTE had 3.3-fold higher risk of arterial disease (adjusted hazard ratio, 3.28; 95% confidence interval, 1.69–6.35) compared with women of the same age without VTE. The corresponding hazard ratio in men aged <65 years was 2.06 (95% confidence interval, 1.32–3.20). Only 0.9% of the arterial events were attributed to VTE, and the VTE explained 63.8% of the risk of arterial events among VTE patients. Conclusions— Our findings imply that women and young men with VTE have higher risk of arterial thrombotic disease than those without VTE. However, only 1% of the arterial thrombotic events in the population are attributed to VTE.
An architecture for a wide area distributed system

Distributed systems provide sharing of resources and information over a computer network. A key design issue that makes these systems attractive is that all aspects related to distribution are transparent to users. Unfortunately, general-purpose wide area distributed systems that allow users to share and manage arbitrary resources in a transparent way hardly exist. In particular, they generally do not take into account the most important properties that characterize wide area systems: 1) A very large number of users and resources, 2) an inherent latency problem caused by the distance between nodes, 3) heterogeneity due to a variety of underlying operating systems and networks, and 4) involvement of multiple administrative organizations.The research described in this paper is part of the Globe Project (Globe stands for GLobal Object Based Environment). The goal of this project is the design and implementation of a wide area distributed system that provides a convenient programming abstraction and full transparency. The main contribution of this paper is the description of a new system for distributed shared objects. In contrast to other systems, the implementation of distribution, consistency, and replication of state is completely encapsulated in a distributed shared object. This allows for object-specific solutions, and provides the right mechanism for building efficient and truly scalable systems.