Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Functional endoscopic sinus surgery

Over the years intranasal and sinus surgery has changed markedly, from the extreme radicalism of almost total exenteration of the sinus system toa more conservative approach, in keeping with our greater understanding of nasal physiology and the part played by allergy. This transition has been made easier by the availability of a much more intimate approach to the involved areas, by means of telescopes of varying viewing angles with fibreoptic illumination, and the use of instruments designed for these areas and miniaturised where necessary to allow operations on all age groups. The concept of functional endoscopic sinus surgery (FESS) is not new. Indeed, in Europe as long ago as 1901, Hirschmann used a modified cystoscope to investigate these areas. The main impetus for the increased use of the present techniques came from Germany, where in 1978 Messerklinger published endoscopic findings, followed by Stammberger and WoW and in the United States by Kennedy. ' Radiology has also played its part. The use of computerised tomography scans of the accessory nasal sinuses and surrounding areas gives the ear, nose and throat specialist much more information than the standard plain films of previous years. This information, coupled with findings on routine endoscopic inspection (regarding areas of disease, anatornlcal variations and the presence of abnormal secretions) allows the surgeon to decide on the necessity or otherwise of a surgical procedure. The main indications for surgery are: (i) recurring acute sinusitis; (ii) chronic sinusitis; (iii) nasal polyposis and polypoidal sinusitis; (iv) nasal obstruction; (v) chronic headaches; (vi) biopsy.
Testing Claims of Efficacy and Mechanism of Action for Emotion Focused Couples Therapy: A Dyadic Case Study Using Time-Series Design

The overall purpose of this study was to test claims regarding both the efficacy and mechanism of change for Emotion Focused Couple Therapy (EFT). Although a number of treatment outcome studies have been conducted on EFT, the vast majority of these studies emanate from the research laboratories associated with the two founders of EFT. Additionally, most EFT research has examined treatment outcome rather than mechanisms of change. This study used a time-series single-case experimental design approach to examine both the efficacy and the mechanisms of change in EFT for couple distress. I systematically tracked the symptoms of couple distress across the span of an EFT treatment and explored how symptom severity varied over time within the dyad across several measures. Simulation modeling analysis (SMA) for time-series data was used to evaluate the level change across baseline, treatment, and followup phases. Further, crosslag correlational analyses were used to clarify the mechanism of change in EFT. Experimental results from the time-series design provided moderate support for the EFT efficacy claim. Partial support was also found for the underlying EFT mechanism of action claim linking attachment insecurity and marital distress. Two of the EFT mechanism of action claims and an interpersonal mindfulness exploratory hypothesis, however, were unsupported by the experimental data. Implications for future research are discussed.
Cross-Cultural Production and Detection of Deception from Speech

Detecting deception from different dimensions of human behavior has been a major goal of research in psychology and computational linguistics for some years and is currently of considerable interest to military and law enforcement agencies. However, relatively little work has been done to develop automatic methods to detect deception from spoken language or to compare deception detection and production between different cultures. We present results of experiments on a new corpus of deceptive and non-deceptive speech, collected from native speakers of Standard American English and Mandarin Chinese, all speaking English, to investigate acoustic, prosodic, and lexical cues to deception. We report first on the role of personality factors derived from the NEO-FFI (Neuroticism-Extraversion-Openness Five Factor Inventory) and of gender, ethnicity and confidence ratings on subjects? ability to deceive and to detect deception. We then present classification results discriminating deceptive from non-deceptive speech, using these features as well as acoustic and prosodic cues. We find that combining acoustic and prosodic features with information about the speaker? s personality, gender, and language results in a classification accuracy of 65.86%, which represents ~10% relative improvement from baseline accuracy.
A study on performance of V-slot shapes on rectangular patch antenna

In this paper, the base V - slot and sharp V-slot antennas and rectangular patch antenna have been designed. An investigation on the effect of the angles of the antennas and size of the slots on the return loss and radiation patterns had been carried out. The impedance matching network with the transmission line feeding was used in this study. Simulation results of the return loss, VSWR and input impedance were presented.
Copy number increase of ACTN4 is a prognostic indicator in salivary gland carcinoma

Copy number increase (CNI) of ACTN4 has been associated with poor prognosis and metastatic phenotypes in various human carcinomas. To identify a novel prognostic factor for salivary gland carcinoma, we investigated the copy number of ACTN4. We evaluated DNA copy number of ACTN4 in 58 patients with salivary gland carcinoma by using fluorescent in situ hybridization (FISH). CNI of ACTN4 was recognized in 14 of 58 patients (24.1%) with salivary gland carcinoma. The cases with CNI of ACTN4 were closely associated with histological grade (P = 0.047) and vascular invasion (P = 0.033). The patients with CNI of ACTN4 had a significantly worse prognosis than the patients with normal copy number of ACTN4 (P = 0.0005 log‐rank test). Univariate analysis by the Cox proportional hazards model showed that histological grade, vascular invasion, and CNI of ACTN4 were independent risk factors for cancer death. Vascular invasion (hazard ratio [HR]: 7.46; 95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.98–28.06) and CNI of ACTN4 (HR: 3.23; 95% CI: 1.08–9.68) remained as risk factors for cancer death in multivariate analysis. Thus, CNI of ACTN4 is a novel indicator for an unfavorable outcome in patients with salivary gland carcinoma.
Decision support system for inspection and maintenance: a case study of oil pipelines

The existing method of pipeline health monitoring, which requires an entire pipeline to be inspected periodically, is unproductive. A risk-based decision support system (DSS) that reduces the amount of time spent on inspection has been presented. The risk-based DSS uses the analytic hierarchy process (AHP), a multiple attribute decision-making technique, to identify the factors that influence failure on specific segments and analyzes their effects by determining probability of occurrence of these risk factors. The severity of failure is determined through consequence analysis. From this, the effect of a failure caused by each risk factor can be established in terms of cost and the cumulative effect of failure is determined through probability analysis. The model optimizes the cost of pipeline operations by reducing subjectivity in selecting a specific inspection method, identifying and prioritizing the right pipeline segment for inspection and maintenance, deriving budget allocation, providing guidance to deploy the right mix labor for inspection and maintenance, planning emergency preparation, and deriving logical insurance plan. The proposed methodology also helps derive inspection and maintenance policy for the entire pipeline system, suggest design, operational philosophy, and construction methodology for new pipelines.
Americas Conference on Information Systems ( AMCIS ) December 2002 A SOCIAL , TECHNICAL , AND LEGAL FRAMEWORK FOR PRIVACY MANAGEMENT AND POLICIES

Organizational privacy policies and privacy practices reflect an organizations perceived trustworthiness to those with which it conducts business. This paper proposes a framework, based upon an in-depth two-year analysis of Internet privacy policies, for examining an organizations privacy management practices within the context of their respective privacy policies. The framework aids in evaluating privacy from various organizational perspectives: legal, technical, business rules, social norms and contractual norms. It also provides assistance when developing privacy policies for e-commerce Web sites. We discuss a case study in which the framework was employed to analyze 23 Internet health care Web site privacy policies.
Nonlinear regularizations of TV based PDEs for image processing

We consider both second order and fourth order TV-based PDEs for image processing in one space dimension. A general class of nonlinear regularization of the TV functional result in well-posed uniformly parabolic equations in two dimensions. However for the fourth order analogue (Osher et. al. Multiscale Methods and Simulation 1(3) 2003) based on a total variation minimization in an H 1 norm, has very different properties. In particular, nonlinear regularizations should have special structure in order to guarantee that the regularized PDE does not produce finite time singularities.
Role of the parabrachial nucleus in ventilatory responses of awake rats.

1. The parabrachial nucleus (PBN) is thought to play an important role in cardiorespiratory control. However, the circumstances under which it affects ventilation are still not known. The purpose of the present study was to investigate how the PBN modulates the ventilatory responses to hypercapnia, hypoxia or a resistive load in awake rats with chemical lesions of the PBN. 2. In three groups of rats (with lateral PBN lesion, with Kölliker‐Fuse nucleus lesion and control), ventilation was measured under various conditions. 3. There was no difference in the breathing of normal room air in any of the groups. However, the lesioned groups showed a reduced ventilatory response to hyperoxic hypercapnia (inspired CO2 fractions (FI,CO2) of 3, 5, 8 and 10%) and to graded hypoxia (inspired O2 fractions (FI,O2) of 16, 12, 10 and 8%) compared with the control group. The control group showed a biphasic response to sustained hypoxia (FI,O2 at 10% for 30 min), known as ‘hypoxic depression’, while the lesioned groups showed moderate ventilatory exaggeration throughout hypoxia. In response to a resistive load, the lateral PBN lesion group showed no change in ventilatory compensation. 4. The PBN appeared to have a considerable influence on ventilation stimulated in various ways during wakefulness.
Foliar nutrient resorption patterns of four functional plants along a precipitation gradient on the Tibetan Changtang Plateau

Abstract Nutrient resorption from senesced leaves as a nutrient conservation strategy is important for plants to adapt to nutrient deficiency, particularly in alpine and arid environment. However, the leaf nutrient resorption patterns of different functional plants across environmental gradient remain unclear. In this study, we conducted a transect survey of 12 communities to address foliar nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) resorption strategies of four functional groups along an eastward increasing precipitation gradient in northern Tibetan Changtang Plateau. Soil nutrient availability, leaf nutrient concentration, and N:P ratio in green leaves ([N:P]g) were linearly correlated with precipitation. Nitrogen resorption efficiency decreased, whereas phosphorus resorption efficiency except for sedge increased with increasing precipitation, indicating a greater nutrient conservation in nutrient‐poor environment. The surveyed alpine plants except for legume had obviously higher N and P resorption efficiencies than the world mean levels. Legumes had higher N concentrations in green and senesced leaves, but lowest resorption efficiency than nonlegumes. Sedge species had much lower P concentration in senesced leaves but highest P resorption efficiency, suggesting highly competitive P conservation. Leaf nutrient resorption efficiencies of N and P were largely controlled by soil and plant nutrient, and indirectly regulated by precipitation. Nutrient resorption efficiencies were more determined by soil nutrient availability, while resorption proficiencies were more controlled by leaf nutrient and N:P of green leaves. Overall, our results suggest strong internal nutrient cycling through foliar nutrient resorption in the alpine nutrient‐poor ecosystems on the Plateau. The patterns of soil nutrient availability and resorption also imply a transit from more N limitation in the west to a more P limitation in the east Changtang. Our findings offer insights into understanding nutrient conservation strategy in the precipitation and its derived soil nutrient availability gradient.
A Distributed Joint Channel and Slot Assignment for Convergecast in Wireless Sensor Networks

In this work, we study raw convergecast in multichannel wireless sensor networks (WSNs) where the sink may be equipped with multiple radio interfaces. We propose Wave, a simple and efficient distributed joint channel and time slot assignment. We evaluate the number of slots needed to complete the convergecast by simulation and compare it to the optimal schedule and to a centralized solution.
Analyzing the Communicative Functions of Aberrant Behavior

This paper presents some issues related to the assessment of possible communicative functions of aberrant behavior. These issues are addressed in terms of both the behavioral and the pragmatics literature, with the suggestion that the latter can be drawn upon to support and enhance the information derived from traditional functional analyses of behavior. Included are an assessment strategy and tool that can be used to formulate and test hypotheses about functions of behavior.
Risk Aware Provisioning and Resource Aggregation Based Consolidation of Virtual Machines

Server consolidation has emerged as an important technique to save on energy costs in virtualized datacenters. The issue of instantiation of a given set of Virtual Machines (VMs) on a set of Physical Machines (PMs) can be thought of as consisting of a provisioning step where we determine the amount of resources to be allocated to a VM and a placement step which decides which VMs can be placed together on a physical machines thereby allocating VMs to PMs. In this paper, we introduce a provisioning scheme which takes into account acceptable intensity of violation of provisioned resources. In addition we identify a serious shortcoming of existing placement schemes that correct in our correlation aware placement scheme. We consider correlation among aggregated resource demands of VMs while finding the VM-PM mapping. Experimental results reveal that our approach leads to a significant amount of reduction in the number of servers (up to 32% in our settings) required to host 1000 VMs and thus enables us to turn off unnecessary servers. It achieves this by packing VMs more tightly by correlating resource requirements across the entire set of VMs to be placed. We present a comprehensive set of experimental results comparing our scheme with the existing provisioning and placement schemes.
Translating Big Data into Smart Data for Veterinary Epidemiology

The increasing availability and complexity of data has led to new opportunities and challenges in veterinary epidemiology around how to translate abundant, diverse, and rapidly growing “big” data into meaningful insights for animal health. Big data analytics are used to understand health risks and minimize the impact of adverse animal health issues through identifying high-risk populations, combining data or processes acting at multiple scales through epidemiological modeling approaches, and harnessing high velocity data to monitor animal health trends and detect emerging health threats. The advent of big data requires the incorporation of new skills into veterinary epidemiology training, including, for example, machine learning and coding, to prepare a new generation of scientists and practitioners to engage with big data. Establishing pipelines to analyze big data in near real-time is the next step for progressing from simply having “big data” to create “smart data,” with the objective of improving understanding of health risks, effectiveness of management and policy decisions, and ultimately preventing or at least minimizing the impact of adverse animal health issues.
Nonlinear Fault Diagnosis in Diierential Algebraic Systems

A large class of engineering systems are modeled by coupled Diierential and Algebraic Equations (DAEs). Due to the singular nature of the algebraic equations, DAE systems do not satisfy the standard state-space description and require special techniques. So far, the literature has concentrated mostly on the numerical analysis and control aspects of DAE systems. This paper investigates the problem of health monitoring and fault diagnosis in DAE systems. The main objective is the development of numerically feasible on-line approximation schemes for robust and stable fault diagnosis of DAE systems. The proposed fault diagnosis architecture monitors the physical system for any oo-nominal behavior using nonlinear modeling techniques and learning algorithms. The on-line approximation scheme is utilized not only to detect but also to provide a model of any faults, which is useful for fault isolation, identiication and accommodation purposes. The stability and robustness properties of the fault diagnosis scheme are investigated. A simulation example illustrating the ability of the proposed fault diagnosis architecture to detect faults in a chemical reactive ash is presented.
Multi-agent based electricity market simulator with VPP: Conceptual and implementation issues

This paper presents a new architecture for MASCEM, a multi-agent electricity market simulator. The main focus is the MASCEM ability to provide the means to model and simulate Virtual Power Producers (VPP). VPPs are represented as a coalition of agents, with specific characteristics and goals. VPPs can reinforce the importance of distributed generation technologies, mainly based on renewable energy sources, making them valuable in electricity markets. The new features are implemented in Prolog which is integrated in the JAVA program by using the LPA Win-Prolog Intelligence Server (IS) that provides a DLL interface between Win-Prolog and other applications.
Analysis of the time-varying behavior of a PEM fuel cell stack and dynamical modeling by recurrent neural networks

This work presents an analysis of the time-varying behavior of a PEM fuel cell (PEMFC) stack based on experimental results, pointing out some constraints that should be taken into account in the development of a control system for the stack. A system identification methodology based on recurrent neural networks is proposed to model such behavior. A dynamic model using this technique is developed for a commercial PEMFC stack operating under a real load profile. The results show that the neural model is able to track the stack voltage dynamics with a very low error.
Two-Step Dynamic Encoding for Linear Decompressors

In this paper, a new linear decompress or is presented. A specific two-step encoding is incorporated in the implication process to exploit the degree of freedom during ATPG. The proposed decompress or achieves on average 247X test application time reduction for 10 industrial cores. A comparison with multiple seeds per pattern shows that the proposed decompress or achieves higher test application time reduction with fewer test patterns for 7 out of 10 industrial cores.
ConSurf: Identification of Functional Regions in Proteins by Surface-Mapping of Phylogenetic Information

UNLABELLED We recently developed algorithmic tools for the identification of functionally important regions in proteins of known three dimensional structure by estimating the degree of conservation of the amino-acid sites among their close sequence homologues. Projecting the conservation grades onto the molecular surface of these proteins reveals patches of highly conserved (or occasionally highly variable) residues that are often of important biological function. We present a new web server, ConSurf, which automates these algorithmic tools. ConSurf may be used for high-throughput characterization of functional regions in proteins. AVAILABILITY The ConSurf web server is available at:http://consurf.tau. ac.il. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION A set of examples is available at http://consurf.tau. ac.il under 'GALLERY'.
Split-Brain Consensus On A Raft Up Split Creek Without A Paddle

Consensus is critical for distributed systems. The consensus problem is simple with stable nodes and a reliable network, but in practice algorithms have to handle both failure modes. This paper introduces Timber, a system to explore how implementations of the Raft protocol [5] handle partitions and node failures. This application can be used with any implementation of the protocol and introduces network partitions and failures at user-prescribed intervals. We run Timber against two popular implementations of the protocol and discuss the results. We find that some implementations appear to tolerate network partitions, while others can drop more than 20% of writes under a slow, highly partitioned network.
Boolean Algebras, Tarski Invariants, and Index Sets

Tarski defined a way of assigning to each boolean algebra, B, an invariant inv(B) ∈ In, where In is a set of triples from N, such that two boolean algebras have the same invariant if and only if they are elementarily equivalent. Moreover, given the invariant of a boolean algebra, there is a computable procedure that decides its elementary theory. If we restrict our attention to dense Boolean algebras, these invariants determine the algebra up to isomorphism. In this paper we analyze the complexity of the question “Does B have invariant x? ”. For each x ∈ In we define a complexity class Γx, that could be either Σn, Πn, Σn∧Πn, or Πω+1 depending on x, and prove that the set of indices for computable boolean algebras with invariant x is complete for the class Γx. Analogs of many of these results for computably enumerable Boolean algebras were proven in [Sel90] and [Sel91]. According to [Sel03] similar methods can be used to obtain the results for computable ones. Our methods are quite different and give new results as well. As the algebras we construct to witness hardness are all dense, we establish new similar results for the complexity of various isomorphism problems for dense Boolean algebras.