Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Quality measures for symptoms and advance care planning in cancer: a systematic review.

PURPOSE Measuring quality of care for symptom management and ascertaining patient goals offers an important step toward improving palliative cancer management. This study was designed to identify systematically the quality measures and the evidence to support their use in pain, dyspnea, depression, and advance care planning (ACP), and to identify research gaps. METHODS English-language documents were selected from MEDLINE, Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health, PsycINFO (1995 to 2005); Internet-based searches; and contact with measure developers. We used terms for each domain to select studies throughout the cancer care continuum. We included measures that expressed a normative relationship to quality, specified the target population, and specified the indicated care. Dual data review and abstraction was performed by palliative care researchers describing populations, testing, and attributes for each measure. RESULTS A total of 4,599 of 5,182 titles were excluded at abstract review. Of 537 remaining articles, 19 contained measures for ACP, six contained measures for depression, five contained measures for dyspnea, and 20 contained measures for pain. We identified 10 relevant measure sets that included 36 fully specified or fielded measures and 14 additional measures (16 for pain, five for dyspnea, four for depression, and 25 for ACP). Most measures were unpublished, and few had been tested in a cancer population. We were unable to describe the specifications of all measures fully and did not search for measures for pain and depression that were not cancer specific. CONCLUSION Measures are available for assessing quality and guiding improvement in palliative cancer care. Existing measures are weighted toward ACP, and more nonpain symptom measures are needed. Additional testing is needed before the measures are used for accountability, and basic research is required to address measurement when self-report is impaired.
Check image binary with morphological method

During the past few years, automatic check processing has become a popular topic in the field of document image analysis (DIA). Image binary is an important but hard task in automatic check image processing system. Difficulties in binary procedure derive mainly from the different types and positions of seal imprints. In this paper, we proposed a new binary method which is based on the fact that objects in a character image are mostly dark with thin strokes. In order to remove large block backgrounds, we firstly designed a set of morphological perorations to enhance the local feature of thin objects. Then a global threshold is selected and applied to the new enhanced image. Experiment results on 2745 real-life Chinese check images demonstrate the efficiency of our method compared with other commonly used binary methods. The recognition success rate has achieved 91.5%.
A Cost-Benefit Analysis of Using Evidence of Effectiveness in Terms of Progression Free Survival in Making Reimbursement Decisions on New Cancer Therapies

Abstract Payers increasingly require evidence of a statistically significant difference in overall survival (OS) for reimbursement of new cancer therapies. At the same time, it becomes increasingly costly to design clinical trials that measure OS endpoints instead of progression-free survival (PFS) endpoints. While PFS is often an imperfect proxy for OS effects, it is also faster and cheaper to measure accurately. This study develops a general cost-benefit framework that quantifies the competing trade-offs of the use of PFS versus that of OS in oncology reimbursement. We then apply this general framework to the illustrative case of metastatic renal cell carcinoma (mRCC). In the particular case of mRCC, the framework demonstrates that the net benefit to society from basing reimbursement decisions on PFS endpoints could be between $271 and $1271 million in the United States, or between €171 and €1128 million in Europe. In longevity terms, waiting for OS data in this case would result in a net loss of 3549–14,557 life-years among US patients, or 6785–27,993 life-years for European patients. While more stringent standards for medical evidence improve accuracy, they also impose countervailing costs on patients in terms of foregone health gains. These costs must be weighed against the benefits of greater accuracy. The magnitudes of the costs and benefits may vary across tumor types and need to be quantified systematically.
Policy Analysis Using a Village Model: Land-Use in Vietnam

Land-use in Vietnam is an important issue in the future economic growth of the country. There is a long history of many radical changes in land-use policy. Vietnam has become a leading exporter of rice (its main agricultural crop) and thus is subject to the variability of world prices. An extensive survey of some 400 farm households in Vietnam has recently been completed and some of the results are used to provide a description of a small number of households. A report is given on the development of a model, designed to reflect some of the basic economic behaviour of a village for use in examining various policy alternatives and eventually changes in land use and land use policy.
Graph Decomposition Using Node Labels

Dynamic programming is a method in which the solution to a computational problem is found by combination of already obtained solutions to subproblems. This method can be applied to problems on graphs (nodes connected by edges). The graph of interest must then be broken down into successively smaller parts according to some suitable principle. The thesis studies two graph algebras introduced for this purpose (Wanke 1994; Courcelle and Olariu 1994). Nodes have labels, and roughly, the operations are union, edge drawing, and relabeling. Once two nodes have acquired the same label, they can no longer be differentiated at subsequent edge drawings and relabelings. NLC-decompositions and clique-decompositions are derivations of graphs from their individual nodes using the operations of the respective algebra. The width of such a decomposition is the number of distinct labels used, and the minimum width among all decompositions of a particular graph is known as its NLC-width and clique-width respectively. Numerous NP-hard graph problems can be solved efficiently with dynamic programming if a decomposition of small width is given for the input graph. The two algebras generalize the class of cographs, and can refine the modular decomposition of a graph. Moreover, they are related to graph grammars, and the above decompositions of a graph can be seen as possible growth histories for it under certain inheritance principles. The thesis gives a simple description of this. It then shows: • A clique-decomposition can be transformed into an equivalent NLCdecomposition of the same width, and an NLC-decomposition of width k can be transformed into an equivalent clique-decomposition of width at most 2k. • A randomly generated unlabeled graph on a set of n nodes is very likely to have NLC-width and clique-width almost n/2 and n respectively, provided that n is sufficiently large. • If a graph has NLC-width 2, a corresponding decomposition can be found in O(n log n) time. • An NLC-decomposition of width at most log n times the optimal width k can be found in O(n) time.
CBR on Semi-structured Documents: The ExperienceBook and the FAllQ Project

In this article, we present a case-based approach on flexible query answering systems in two different application areas: The E xperienceBook supports technical diagnosis in the field of system administ rat on. In the FAllQ project we use our CBR system for document retrieval in an industrial setting. The objective of these systems is to manage knowledge stored in l ss structured documents. The internal case memory is implemented as a Case Retrieval Net. This allows to handle large case bases with an ef ficient retrieval process. In order to provide multi user access we chose the cl ient server model combined with a web interface.
Target Article: "The Really Fundamental Attribution Error in Social Psychological Research"

We review the classic studies on social influence and the fundamental attribution error to determine (a) whether it is true that behavior of the sort observed in those studies is externally caused in the two senses of external causality used by attribution theorists, (b) whether laypeople have been shown to overestimate the extent to which behavior is internally caused in either of those two senses, and (c) whether there is a better way to characterize the errors people make. We conclude that (a) behavior in those studies has not been shown to be externally caused in the two senses used by attribution theorists, (b) people have not been shown to overestimate the extent to which behavior is internally caused in either of those two senses, (c) there is a different sense of internal versus external causality that better characterizes the errors people make, and (d) these literatures taken together suggest that Americans are far more disposed to preserve face and avoid embarrassment than most people had suspected.
FİNANSAL KRİZ TEORİLERİ VE TÜRKİYE EKONOMİSİNDE 1990 SONRASI FİNANSAL KRİZLER

Finansal krizler genelde dunya ekonomisinde, ozelde ise gelismekte olan ulkelerde 1990 sonrasinda en onemli iktisadi sorunlarin basinda gelmektedir. Turkiye ekonomisi de iktisadi kalkinma surecinde finansman acigi, yapisal sorunlar ve sagliksiz ic-dis finansman kosullari altinda, surekli finansal krizlere acik haldedir. Bu baglamda calismanin temel amaci, finansal kriz teorilerini, dunya ekonomisi ve Turkiye ekonomisinde 1990 sonrasi ortaya cikan finansal krizlerin temel sebep ve sonuclari baglaminda incelemek, Turkiye ekonomisinde finansal krizleri Probit model yardimiyla modellemek, finansal krizlerin ongorulmesi ve onlenmesine yonelik politika onerileri gelistirmektir.
Data Mining of the Concept "End of the World" in Twitter Microblogs

This paper describes the analysis of quantitative characteristics of frequent sets and association rules in the posts of Twitter microblogs, related to the discussion of "end of the world", which was allegedly predicted on December 21, 2012 due to the Mayan calendar. Discovered frequent sets and association rules characterize semantic relations between the concepts of analyzed subjects.The support for some fequent sets reaches the global maximum before the expected event with some time delay. Such frequent sets may be considered as predictive markers that characterize the significance of expected events for blogosphere users. It was shown that time dynamics of confidence of some revealed association rules can also have predictive characteristics. Exceeding a certain threshold, it may be a signal for the corresponding reaction in the society during the time interval between the maximum and probable coming of an event.
Diet-derived 25-hydroxyvitamin D3 activates vitamin D receptor target gene expression and suppresses EGFR mutant non-small cell lung cancer growth in vitro and in vivo

Epidemiologic studies implicate vitamin D status as a factor that influences growth of EGFR mutant lung cancers. However, laboratory based evidence of the biological effect of vitamin D in this disease is lacking. To fill this knowledge gap, we determined vitamin D receptor (VDR) expression in human lung tumors using a tissue microarray constructed of lung cancer cases from never-smokers (where EGFR gene mutations are prevalent). Nuclear VDR was detected in 19/19 EGFR mutant tumors. Expression tended to be higher in tumors with EGFR exon 19 deletions than those with EGFR L858R mutations. To study anti-proliferative activity and signaling, EGFR mutant lung cancer cells were treated with the circulating metabolite of vitamin D, 25-hydroxyvitamin D3 (25D3). 25D3 inhibited clonogenic growth in a dose-dependent manner. CYP27B1 encodes the 1α-hydroxylase (1αOHase) that converts 25D3 to the active metabolite, 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D3 (1,25D3). Studies employing VDR siRNA, CYP27B1 zinc finger nucleases, and pharmacologic inhibitors of the vitamin D pathway indicate that 25D3 regulates gene expression in a VDR-dependent manner but does not strictly require 1αOHase-mediated conversion of 25D3 to 1,25D3. To determine the effects of modulating serum 25D3 levels on growth of EGFR mutant lung tumor xenografts, mice were fed diets containing 100 or 10,000 IU vitamin D3/kg. High dietary vitamin D3 intake resulted in elevated serum 25D3 and significant inhibition of tumor growth. No toxic effects of supplementation were observed. These results identify EGFR mutant lung cancer as a vitamin D-responsive disease and diet-derived 25D3 as a direct VDR agonist and therapeutic agent.
The So-Called Right to Privacy

The constitutional right to privacy has been a conservative bugaboo ever since Justice Douglas introduced it into the United States Reports in Griswold v. Connecticut. Reference to the 'so-called' right to privacy has become code for the view that the right is doctrinally recognized but not in fact constitutionally enshrined. This Article argues that the constitutional right to privacy is no more. The two rights most associated historically with the right to privacy are abortion and intimate sexual conduct, yet Gonzales v. Carhart and Lawrence v. Texas made clear that neither of these rights is presently justified by its proponents on the Court as aspects of constitutional privacy. Other rights that might be protected by a constitutional right to privacy, such as the right to refuse medical treatment or the right to assisted suicide, are either justified on liberty grounds or are not constitutionally protected at all. The Court’s move from privacy to liberty as a constitutional basis for the freedom to make fundamental life decisions strengthens the rights themselves by anchoring them to constitutional text in a text-happy era, and represents a victory for Justice Stevens, who has long advocated such a shift.
A Connectionist Approach to Cost-Based Abduction(Invited Paper)

Cost-based abduction (CBA) is an important NP- hard problem in automated reasoning. In this formalism, evi- dence to be explained is treated as a goal to be proven. Proofs have costs based on how much needs to be assumed to complete the proof, and the set of assumptions needed to complete the least- cost proof are taken as the best explanation for the given evidence. In this paper, we present a connectionist approach to cost-based abduction. We begin by reviewing high order recurrent networks (HORN) and their use in combinatorial optimization. We then formally define the cost-based abduction problem and describe previous work on this problem. This is followed by a description of how HORN's can be applied to the CBA problem and experimental results on a 60-hypothesis, 65-rule CBA problem. We conclude with some remarks on the potential advantages of the connectionist approach. Copyright c ∞ 2004-2005 Yang's
Evaluation of routing schemes for group key distribution in Distributed Sensor Networks

Distributed sensor network (DSN)s are collection of large number of sensor nodes, that are featured with limited energy, computation and power transmission. Each node in the network coordinates with every other node in forwarding their packets to reach the destination. Since these nodes operate in a physically insecure environment, they are vulnerable to different types of attacks and needs a secured and efficient routing path to the destination. The most common way of providing secure communication in DSN is to perform a key management. To have scalability and robustness along with key management, Group Key Management (GKM) is considered. It also provides security services such as Authentication and Confidentiality. In this paper we have Computed Group Key and compared broadcast and Cluster routing protocols for Group key Communication in a Binary Tree DSN.
JOURNEY TO SELF-SUFFICIENCY: AN ANALYSIS OF MOTIVATION LEVEL AND EMPLOYMENT HOPE OF AFFORDABLE HOUSING RESIDENTS

iii LIST OF TABLES vii CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION Problem Statement . 1 Purpose of the Study 4 Significance of the Study 6 CHAPTER TWO: LITERATURE REVIEW Introduction 8 Theories Guiding Conceptualization 8 Major Concepts of Self-Determination Theory 8 Problem Defined by Theory 11 Solutions Informed by Theory 12 Summary 13 CHAPTER THREE: METHODS Introduction 15 Study Design 15 Sampling 16 Data Collection and Instruments 16 Procedures 20 Protection of Human Subjects 20 Data Analysis 21 Summary 21
Troubling women : feminism, leadership, and educational change

Introduction: troubling women - new leaders for hard times? Part 1 Disciplinary technologies: the gendering of educational work power/knowledge at work in educational administration gendered lives - becoming educators, feminists and leaders. Part 2 Disruptive voices: gender equity policy - where to go from here? working in a system not of your own making fixing the feminist gaze upon masculinity. Part 3 Risky business: doing emotional management work - gender, markets and self managing schools embodied authority - the disciplined but disruptive powerful woman dealing with difference. Part 4 Conclusion: a feminist postmasculinist politics of educational leadership.
Decomposing Excess Returns in Stochastic Linear Models

We present a theorem helpful in estimating the mean and variance of a linear function with arbitrary multivariate randomness in its coefficients and variables. We derive a generalized decomposition result from two random linear functions in which the result can be applied to most models using event study analysis. Taking the 1989 minimum wage hike as an example, we found that the apparent lack of an effect is a consequence of two off-setting forces: 1) a negative effect arising from firm-specific traits and 2) a positive effect arising from market performance. In sum, we bring to the analysis a method that helps provide additional insights and can be applied to much of the work using event study.
Thinking out loud V : Innovative case studies on participatory instruments

Empowerment is a critical element in the fight against poverty. In its broadest sense, empowerment refers to the freedom of choice and action to shape one's future. Its critical dimensions include participation, capacity, access to information and accountability - all of which can have a strong impact on development activities. The articles in this volume reflect innovative practices that actively engage the poor to further their own development. Most of the initiatives discussed make use of local knowledge, traditions and skills to formulate strategies that respond to multiple needs, including income generation, poverty reduction, environmental protection, infrastructure provision and information dissemination. These examples demonstrate the capacity, commitment and will of people living in poverty to transform their lives through active and effective engagement. At the same time, they also reflect new paths taken by the teams in the Latin America and Caribbean Regional Office (LCR) of the World Bank to explore and promote empowerment in the Bank's lending and analysis.
Distributed query processing plan generation using iterative improvement and simulated annealing

Huge information is available in distributed database that can be exploited for constructive use. A query posed over a distributed database may get processed against disparate data sources distributed over a network. Each of these sources may contain data relevant to the query. The aim of distributed database system is to provide efficient query processing strategy for the given query. In distributed database scenario, multiple copies of the same data may reside at different sources. As a result, there can be multiple query strategy for a given query and finding an optimal query processing strategy is a combinatorial optimization problem. In this paper, an approach is presented that is able to generate optimal query processing plans for a given user query. The approach uses iterative improvement and simulated annealing algorithms to determine optimal query plans for a given query. The approach uses the cost heuristic defined in [1]
Unions and Collective Bargaining: Economic Effects in a Global Environment

The development of industrial relations in different countries can be essential in their efforts to balance competitiveness with equitable wages and improved working conditions. Consequently, a well-functioning labor market is essential for solid economic performance as well as future economic growth and for the well-being of workers and their families. 'Unions and Collective Bargaining' is a comprehensive reference book which evaluates the economic effects of unions and collective bargaining. This book provides a detailed survey and synthesis of the economic literature on trade unions and collective bargaining and their impact on micro- and macroeconomic outcomes. It shows the effects of collective bargaining in different country settings and time periods
E AP The University of California , Riverside Environmental Chamber Data Base for Evaluating Oxidant Mechanisms : Indoor Chamber Experiments Through 1993 Project Summary

Data collected in the environmental chambers operated by the University of California, Riverside, have been documented and are now available for use by the scientific community for evaluating photochemical mechanisms for urban and regional airshed models. The compiled data include experiments performed in the Statewide Air Pollution Research Center (SAPRC) Evacuable Chamber (EC), Indoor Teflon Chamber #1 (ITC), Indoor Teflon Chamber #2 (ETC), Dividable Teflon Chamber (DTC), and Xenon arc Teflon Chamber (XTC) between September of 1975 through November of 1993. The experiments contained in this data base are listed and summarized, the facility and procedures employed are described, and the analytical and monitoring methods and their calibration data and associated uncertainties are documented. In addition, input data needed to conduct model simulations of the experiments in the data base are included, and the format of the data sets, which are available on the Internet by anonymous FTP, are described. Also available on the Internet are files that permit modeling of the experiments in the data base using the SAPRC-90 and the Carbon Bond IV chemical mechanisms. Recommendations are made concerning the steps that need to be taken before using these data to evaluate chemical mechanisms. This Project Summary was developed by EPA’s National Exposure Research Laboratory, Research Triangle Park, NC, to announce key findings of the research project that is fully documented in a separate report of the same title (see Project Report ordering information at back).
The Adaptive On-line Exam System Based on Agent

With the development and popularization of the Internet/intranet technology, computerized tests will gradually replace traditional paper and pen-based tests on many aspects. It has particular practical significance to explore and study computer network-based tests to objectively and accurately evaluate certain abilities and levels of students to improve the learning efficiency. Agent is a software entity with adaptability and intelligence, thus it can represent the user or other programs to finish a set of work by the means of initiative service. Usage of the Agent technology can add interesting and humanized features to the network tests, reduce network flow, improve testing effectiveness and increase testing quality. By using the Agent technology and building the model of an adaptive network testing system, this paper realizes the exchange and sharing of knowledge among various Agents and personalized tests for students, and it also increases the response speed of the network testing system. In this way, it has improved the shortages of traditional computer adaptive testing system. Research in this paper has important significance to strengthening the intelligence and adaptability of network tests, reduce network flow and improve the effectiveness and quality of network tests.