Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Screening for risk of persistent posttraumatic stress in injured children and their parents.

CONTEXT Injury, a leading health threat to children, is also a common cause of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in childhood. Most injured children with PTSD are not diagnosed or treated. OBJECTIVE To develop a stand-alone screening tool for use by clinicians during acute trauma care to identify injured children and their parents who are at risk of significant, persistent posttraumatic stress symptoms. DESIGN The Screening Tool for Early Predictors of PTSD (STEPP) was derived from a 50-item risk factor survey administered within 1 month of injury as part of a prospective cohort study of posttraumatic stress in injured children and their parents. Symptoms of PTSD were assessed at least 3 months after injury. SETTING Urban, pediatric level I trauma center. PARTICIPANTS A sample of 269 children aged 8 to 17 years admitted for treatment of traffic-related injuries between July 1999 and October 2001, and one parent per child, completed a risk factor survey assessing potential predictors of PTSD outcome. One hundred seventy-one families (63%) completed a follow-up assessment. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES The Clinician-Administered PTSD Scale for Children and Adolescents and the PTSD Checklist served as criterion standards for child and parent outcomes, respectively. Positive cases were defined as those meeting criteria for at least subsyndromal PTSD with continuing impairment ("persistent traumatic stress"). RESULTS The STEPP contains 4 dichotomous questions asked of the child, 4 asked of one parent, and 4 items obtained easily from the emergency medical record. STEPP sensitivity in predicting posttraumatic stress was 0.88 for children and 0.96 for parents, with negative predictive values of 0.95 for children and 0.99 for parents. The odds ratio for prediction of persistent traumatic stress was 6.5 (95% confidence interval [CI], 1.8-22.8) in children and 26.6 (95% CI, 3.5-202.1) in parents. CONCLUSIONS The STEPP represents a new method to guide clinicians in making evidence-based decisions for the allocation of scarce mental health resources for traumatic stress. Its brevity and simple scoring rule suggest that it can be easily administered in the acute care setting.
Identifying SNPs predictive of phenotype using random forests

There has been a great interest and a few successes in the identification of complex disease susceptibility genes in recent years. Association studies, where a large number of single‐nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) are typed in a sample of cases and controls to determine which genes are associated with a specific disease, provide a powerful approach for complex disease gene mapping. Genes of interest in those studies may contain large numbers of SNPs that classical statistical methods cannot handle simultaneously without requiring prohibitively large sample sizes. By contrast, high‐dimensional nonparametric methods thrive on large numbers of predictors. This work explores the application of one such method, random forests, to the problem of identifying SNPs predictive of the phenotype in the case‐control study design. A random forest is a collection of classification trees grown on bootstrap samples of observations, using a random subset of predictors to define the best split at each node. The observations left out of the bootstrap samples are used to estimate prediction error. The importance of a predictor is quantified by the increase in misclassification occurring when the values of the predictor are randomly permuted. We extend the concept of importance to pairs of predictors, to capture joint effects, and we explore the behavior of importance measures over a range of two‐locus disease models in the presence of a varying number of SNPs unassociated with the phenotype. We illustrate the application of random forests with a data set of asthma cases and unaffected controls genotyped at 42 SNPs in ADAM33, a previously identified asthma susceptibility gene. SNPs and SNP pairs highly associated with asthma tend to have the highest importance index value, but predictive importance and association do not always coincide. Genet. Epidemiol. 28:171–182, 2005. © 2004 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
A Survey of Human Computation Systems

Human computation is a technique that makes use of human abilities for computation to solve problems. The human computation problems are the problems those computers are not good at solving but are trivial for humans. In this paper, we give a survey of various human computation systems which are categorized into initiatory human computation, distributed human computation and social game-based human computation with volunteers, paid engineers and online players. For the existing large number of social games, some previous works defined various types of social games, but the recent developed social games cannot be categorized based on the previous works. In this paper, we define the categories and the characteristics of social games which are suitable for all existing ones. Besides, we present a survey on the performance aspects of human computation system. This paper gives a better understanding on human computation system.
Personal and Collective Resilience Building- A Suicide Prevention Program for Schools Using Positive Psychology. Consultancy Project for an Irish Secondary School

Ireland has the second highest rate of child suicide in Europe. This dissertation using qualitative methods explores the risks, causes and aftermath of suicide in relation to how positive psychology (PP) can assist in addressing those insights in order to build resilience and reduce suicide ideation for school aged children in Ireland. The client is Principal of a secondary school in Southern Ireland, who suffered the tragic loss of three senior pupils to suicide over a period of five years. The schools’ mission statement settled upon; “How can positive psychology help us to understand the risks and causes of suicide in school aged children and how can we apply those insights to instill resilience and prevent further tragedies in our school” Positive psychology defined as the science of what makes life worth living offers a relevant contrast for suicide which is concerned with proactively ending life. Point one explores suicide from three perspectives; those who have survived a serious attempt to end their own lives- parasuicide, those who have lost a relative or close one to suicide and lastly the organisations set up to address suicide ideation and effects. Point two takes the lead from these insights to give a good grounding in the areas of positive psychology research and theory that relate to the risks and causes of suicide and how they apply to school aged children. Point three is a plan of recommendations to address the problem through positive psychology interventions (PPI’s) which could be put in place to build resilience and prevent suicide in the clients’ and other schools. This dissertation concludes in a five slide presentation with a ten-minute voice over.
Assessment and management of the complete clinical response of rectal cancer to chemoradiotherapy

Preoperative chemoradiotherapy is considered by many as the preferred treatment strategy for distal rectal cancer. The observation of complete tumour regression has led to the proposition of nonoperative management of selected patients with complete clinical response (cCR) following treatment. We present results for the treatment of distal rectal cancer during 1991–2005. We have outlined the issues concerning adequate tumour assessment, the definition of complete response, and the advantages and disadvantages of conservative or surgical resection in patients with clinical and radiological evidence of cCR.
Chocolate: a reservation-based real-time Java environment on Windows/NT

The authors present Chocolate, a reservation based real time Java run-time environment that runs on Windows NT. We first present a brief overview of the emerging real time Java standard and the Resource Kernel (RK) approach to providing timely, guaranteed and enforced access to system resources. Chocolate is a real time Java Virtual Machine that interfaces the real time Java programming language with the abstractions of a resource kernel. It also supports memory regimes to control allocation time and a protocol to bound priority inversion. This version of Chocolate is implemented on top of NT/RK, an OS environment that includes a "portable resource kernel" within the NT kernel. Our detailed evaluation of Chocolate shows that the overhead introduced by NT/RK is acceptable. A real time Java audio package on Chocolate demonstrates significantly better performance than its non real time counterpart. However, our Hartstone benchmark evaluations also show that our NT/RK implementation does have its drawbacks due to the lack of hard real time capabilities within Windows NT.
Influence of regular exercise training on post-exercise hemodynamic regulation to orthostatic challenge

To prevent orthostatic hypotension, arterial blood pressure (BP) is neurally and hormonally regulated via increases in heart rate (HR) and peripheral vascular tone. After dynamic exercise, however, the latter arm is blunted because of the increased vasodilators in exercised muscles. Orthostatic tachycardia is likely a more important compensatory mechanism for post-exercise orthostatic intolerance in individuals who have higher leg vasodilator capacity, such as endurance-trained athletes. To test the hypothesis that regular endurance training was associated with the greater augmentation of tachycardia response to post-exercise orthostasis, we compared hemodynamic responses to 5-min 60° head-up tilt (HUT) before and after 60 min of cycling at 70% of HR reserve in the endurance-trained (n = 8) and sedentary men (n = 9). Calf peak vascular conductance was 62% greater in the endurance-trained than the sedentary (P < 0.001). After the exercise, the HUT-induced reduction of SV was significantly augmented in the endurance-trained (from −27.7 ± 6.9 to −33.7 ± 7.7 ml, P = 0.03) but not in their sedentary peers. Nevertheless, MAP was well maintained during post-exercise HUT even in the endurance-trained (from 81 ± 10 to 80 ± 8 mmHg). Tachycardia responses during sustained orthostasis were significantly increased in the sedentary (1.3-fold vs. pre-exercise) and more in the endurance-trained (2.0-fold). The augmented response of HUT-induced tachycardia was greater in the endurance-trained than the sedentary (P = 0.04). Additionally, cardiovagal baroreflex sensitivity (BRS), evaluated by the HR response to the hypotensive perturbation, was improved after the exercise in the endurance-trained (from −0.56 ± 0.32 to −1.03 ± 0.26 bpm/mmHg, P = 0.007) but not in the sedentary. These results suggest that in the endurance-trained men the increased orthostatic tachycardia and augmented cardiovagal BRS may favorably mitigate accumulated risks for orthostatic intolerance in the early phase of post-exercise.
Restricted exchangeable partitions and embedding of associated hierarchies in continuum random trees

We introduce the notion of a restricted exchangeable partition of N and study natural classes of such partitions. We obtain integral representations, study associated coalescents and fragmentations, embeddings into continuum random trees and convergence to such limit trees. As an application, we deduce from the general theory developed here a particular limit result conjectured previously for Ford’s alpha model and its non-binary extension, the alpha-gamma model, where restricted exchangeability arises naturally. AMS 2000 subject classifications: 60G09, 60J80.
DEM GENERATION BY MEANS OF NEW DIGITAL AERIAL CAMERAS

Based on practical experiences with the first generation of digital cameras the impact of four new digital aerial cameras on the DEM generation is estimated. The cameras are evaluated with respect to elevation accuracy, area coverage and image quality. In the derived formulae for the absolute accuracy of elevations a camera factor is applied, which summarizes several features in one number. The produced graphs show the potential of the new cameras regarding the relative and absolute accuracy of automatically derived elevations. For better absolute elevation accuracy the increase of the base/height ratio and of the resolving power of lenses are more important than the reduction of the pixel size. Improvement of the elevation accuracy by means of multi-ray photogrammetry is discussed.
The Effect of Wind Power Installations on Coastal Tourism

We surveyed more than 1,000 randomly sampled, out-of-state tourists at Delaware, USA beaches in 2007. After providing respondents with wind turbine project photo-simulations at several distances, we inquired about the effect development would have on visitation. Approximately one-quarter stated that they would switch beaches if an offshore wind project was located 10 km from the coast, with avoidance diminishing with greater distance from shore. Stated avoidance is less than: avoidance with a fossil fuel power plant located the same distance inland; attraction to a beach with offshore wind turbines; and the percentage stating they would likely pay to take a boat tour.
Inhibitory effects of the ultrasound-targeted microbubble destruction-mediated herpes simplex virus-thymidine kinase/ganciclovir system on ovarian cancer in mice

The aim of the present study was to investigate the effect of the ultrasound-targeted microbubble destruction mediated (UTMD) herpes simplex virus-thymidine kinase (HSV-TK) and ganciclovir (GCV) system on ovarian cancer (OC). This study was conducted between June and December 2012 in the Animal Biosafety Level III Laboratory of Wuhan University. Mice with OC were randomly divided into four groups: i) HSV-TK plus microbubbles (MBs) plus ultrasound (US) (n=15); ii) HSV-TK plus US (n=15); iii) HSV-TK (n=15); and iv) phosphate-buffered saline (n=15). The inhibitory effect and survival time in the experimental groups were compared with those in the control group. The TK protein expression was detected by western blot analysis. Tumor cell apoptosis was detected by terminal deoxynucleotidyl transferase-mediated dUTP nick end labeling and caspase-3 activity analysis. The data showed that the efficiency of HSV-TK gene transfection and the tumor inhibitory effects were significantly increased in the HSV-TK plus MBs plus US group compared with those in the control group (P<0.01). UTMD-mediated HSV-TK treatment has also improved the rat survival rate (P<0.01). In conclusion, UTMD can effectively transfect the HSV-TK gene into target tissues and exert a significant inhibitory effect on OC in mice.
Search-based relevance association with auxiliary contextual cues

In this work, we target at solving the Bing challenge provided by Microsoft. The task is to design an effective and efficient measurement of query terms in describing the images (image-query pairs) crawled from the web. We observe that the provided image-query pairs (e.g., text-based image retrieval results) are usually related to their surrounding text; however, the relationship between image content seems to be ignored. Hence, we attempt to integrate the visual information for better ranking results. In addition, we found that plenty of query terms are related to people (e.g., celebrity) and user might have similar queries (click logs) in the search engine. Therefore, in this work, we propose a relevance association by investigating the effectiveness of different auxiliary contextual cues (i.e., face, click logs, visual similarity). Experimental results show that the proposed method can have 16% relative improvement compared to the original ranking results. Especially, for people-related queries, we can further have 45.7% relative improvement.
Study of insulin resistance in relation to serum IGF-I levels in subjects with different degrees of glucose tolerance

AIM: We studied the correlations between fasting and post-lunch serum IGF-I concentrations, and insulin resistance and insulin sensitivity in subjects with various degrees of glucose tolerance. MATERIALS AND METHODS: A total of 12 nondiabetic subjects, 09 subjects with impaired glucose tolerance (IGT) and 18 patients with newly diagnosed type-2 diabetes of either sex (mean age, 46 years) were recruited. None of the participants received any drug treatment at the commencement of the study. Fasting as well as post-lunch blood samples were collected from all the subjects and anthropometric and biochemical parameters were analyzed. RESULTS: Fasting serum IGF-I concentrations were negatively correlated with fasting serum glucose, insulin, C-peptide, triglycerides, total LDL and VLDL cholesterol, homeostatic model assessment of insulin resistance (HOMA-IR), and age. Fasting serum IGF-I concentrations were positively correlated with fasting blood HDL cholesterol and homeostatic model assessment of insulin sensitivity (HOMA-S) in only diabetic subjects. Post-lunch serum IGF-I concentrations were positively correlated with HDL and LDL cholesterol. Correlations with HOMA-S with these metabolic anthropometric variables were of similar magnitude and direction as that of IGF-I concentrations. IGF-I concentrations were significantly lower in the subjects with World Health Organization-defined metabolic syndrome compared with the subjects without metabolic syndrome (P < 0.0001). CONCLUSIONS: Our data indicate that IGF-I could be a useful marker in the insulin resistance syndrome. The post-lunch low-IGF-I levels help in better identification of subjects at risk for type-2 diabetes mellitus and cardiovascular disease.
A Triangular Decomposition Access Method for Temporal Data - TD-tree

In this study, we investigate and present a new index structure, Triangular Decomposition Tree (TD-tree), which can efficiently store and query temporal data in modern database applications. TD-tree is based on spatial representation of interval data and a recursive triangular decomposition of this space. A bounded number of intervals are stored in each leaf of the tree, which hence may be unbalanced. We describe the algorithms used with this structure. A single query algorithm can be applied uniformly to different query types without the need of dedicated query transformation. In addition to the advantages related to the usage of a single query algorithm for different query types and better space complexity, the empirical performance of the TD-tree is demonstrated to be superior to its best known competitors. Also, presented concept can be extended to more dimensions and therefore applied to efficiently manage spatio-temporal data.
Receptive field structure of burst and tonic firing in feline lateral geniculate nucleus

There are two recognised modes of firing activity in thalamic cells, burst and tonic. A low‐threshold (LT) burst (referred to from now on as ‘burst’) comprises a small number of high‐frequency action potentials riding the peak of a LT Ca2+ spike which is preceded by a silent hyperpolarised state > 50 ms. This is traditionally viewed as a sleep‐like phenomenon, with a shift to tonic mode at wake‐up. However, bursts have also been seen in the wake state and may be a significant feature for full activation of recipient cortical cells. Here we show that for visual stimulation of anaesthetised cats, burst firing is restricted to a reduced area within the receptive field centre of lateral geniculate nucleus cells. Consistently, the receptive field size of all the recorded neurons decreased in size proportionally to the percentage of spikes in bursts versus tonic spikes, an effect that is further demonstrated with pharmacological manipulation. The role of this shrinkage may be distinct from that also seen in sleep‐like states and we suggest that this is a mechanism that trades spatial resolution for security of information transfer.
Drug-sensitive FGFR2 mutations in endometrial carcinoma

Oncogenic activation of tyrosine kinases is a common mechanism of carcinogenesis and, given the druggable nature of these enzymes, an attractive target for anticancer therapy. Here, we show that somatic mutations of the fibroblast growth factor receptor 2 (FGFR2) tyrosine kinase gene, FGFR2, are present in 12% of endometrial carcinomas, with additional instances found in lung squamous cell carcinoma and cervical carcinoma. These FGFR2 mutations, many of which are identical to mutations associated with congenital craniofacial developmental disorders, are constitutively activated and oncogenic when ectopically expressed in NIH 3T3 cells. Inhibition of FGFR2 kinase activity in endometrial carcinoma cell lines bearing such FGFR2 mutations inhibits transformation and survival, implicating FGFR2 as a novel therapeutic target in endometrial carcinoma.
Secure GDoF of  $K$-User Gaussian Interference Channels: When Secrecy Incurs No Penalty

Recently, Geng et al. have shown that from the perspective of generalized degrees of freedom (GDoF), power control and treating interference as noise (TIN) is optimal for a broad class of Gaussian interference channels. In this work, we show that for TIN-optimal interference channels identified by Geng et al., secrecy constraints on unintended messages incur no GDoF penalty, which leads us to a secure capacity region characterization within a constant gap.
Inside education organizing: Learning to work for educational change

Inside Education Organizing: Learning to Work for Educational Change by Michael Pier Evans Dissertation Director Dennis Shirley, Ed.D. Over the past fifteen years there has been a growing scholarly interest in education issues among community based organizations (CBOs). Education organizing is the mobilization of parents and community members for the purpose of transforming schools and CBOs have already demonstrated their ability to impact both student outcomes and educational policy (Shirley, 1997). The Annenberg Institute found that “successful organizing strategies contributed to increased student attendance, improved standardized test score performance, higher graduation rates and college-going aspirations” (Mediratta, Shah, & McAlister, 2008 ). While an increasing number of researchers are exploring this phenomenon, we know little about the experiences of CBOs members who are engaged in this work. Utilizing a qualitative case study approach and a conceptual framework that draws from situated learning, social capital, and networking theory, this study explored the following questions as they relate to the experiences of members in three different CBOs: • What motivates families to participate in CBOs involved in education organizing? • How do members learn the work of education organizing? What skills (if any) are acquired as both individuals and as a collective, and how are they developed? • What impact (both material and personal) does participation have on CBO members’ lives? Findings from this study revealed that participation in the process of education organizing has the potential to not only transform schools, but the participants themselves. Initial understandings of self-interest evolved to include broader social concerns. Members reported increases in confidence, desire, and ability to fully participate in democratic processes. The findings also indicated that the effectiveness of a CBO is related to its organizational structure, its members’ capacity for learning, the types of issues that members are trying to address, and the strength of their relationships within local civic ecologies. Those groups that were able to operate in diverse networks while developing the necessary technological, political, and cultural knowledge generally met with the most success. TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures and Tables . ii Acknowledgements. ii