Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Relationship of nursing home staffing to quality of care.

OBJECTIVE To compare nursing homes (NHs) that report different staffing statistics on quality of care. DATA SOURCES Staffing information generated by California NHs on state cost reports and during onsite interviews. Data independently collected by research staff describing quality of care related to 27 care processes. STUDY DESIGN Two groups of NHs (n=21) that reported significantly different and stable staffing data from all data sources were compared on quality of care measures. DATA COLLECTION Direct observation, resident and staff interview, and chart abstraction methods. PRINCIPAL FINDINGS Staff in the highest staffed homes (n=6), according to state cost reports, reported significantly lower resident care loads during onsite interviews across day and evening shifts (7.6 residents per nurse aide [NA]) compared to the remaining homes that reported between 9 to 10 residents per NA (n=15). The highest-staffed homes performed significantly better on 13 of 16 care processes implemented by NAs compared to lower-staffed homes. CONCLUSION The highest-staffed NHs reported significantly lower resident care loads on all staffing reports and provided better care than all other homes.
Role of the Nlrp3 Inflammasome in Microbial Infection

The intracellular Nod-like receptor Nlrp3 has emerged as the most versatile innate immune receptor because of its broad specificity in mediating immune response to a wide range of microbial or danger signals. Nlrp3 mediates assembly of the inflammasome complex in the presence of microbial components leading to the activation of caspase-1 and the processing and release of the pro-inflammatory cytokines IL-1β and IL-18. In this review, we give an update on the recent literature examining the role of Nlrp3 inflammasome in response to fungal, bacterial, and viral infections.
Efficient Data Association for Vision-Based SLAM

A new approach to vision-based simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is proposed. the scale invariant feature transform (SIFT) features is landmarks, The minimal connected dominating set(CDS) approach is used in data association which solve the problem that the scale of data association increase with the map grows in process of SLAM . SLAM is completed by fusing the information of binocular vision and robot pose with Extended Kalman Filter (EKF). the system has been implemented and tested on data gathered with a mobile robot in a typical office environment. Experiments presented demonstrate that proposed method improves the data association and in this way leads to more accurate maps.
Policy interconnections in party competition: Issue linkages in 23 countries.

This thesis argues that party ideologies are made up of a series of issues that vary in the extent of their interconnections. This approach to party programmes builds on Converse's (1964) description of belief systems and on Downs' (1957) understanding of ideologies. The concept of policy interconnections, originally applied to voter preferences, can also be used to understand party ideologies. In fact, parties are likely to exhibit stronger interconnections than voters. The strength, nature and effect of policy interconnections are examined for 23 Western European and English-speaking democracies using two expert surveys and the dataset of the Comparative Manifesto Project. Three distinctions need to be made in order to understand how party policies are interconnected. First, linkages between issues are based either on an inherent logic or on historical and sociological circumstance. Logic-based interconnections are more consistent across contexts than circumstance-based interconnections. Moreover, parties are more likely to alter policy stances on two areas simultaneously if the issues are linked through logic. Second, linkages exist for position and salience, but salience interconnections are weaker than their positional counterparts. This helps explain the strategic attraction of salience manipulation. Finally, positions can be more extreme or more moderate than the overall mean party preferences, a characteristic termed the 'degree of unusualness'. Parties are likely to stress such unusual positions, especially if they are small, niche competitors. The findings of this thesis have important implications for the study of party competition. For example, strategies such as vote-maximization and salience manipulation are directly affected by the impact of policy interconnections. This approach therefore significantly extends existing spatial models of party competition and challenges some of their assumptions. As interconnections influence voter choice and coalition formation, there are also broader implications for political representation.
Purification of Houttuynia cordata Thunb. Essential Oil Using Macroporous Resin Followed by Microemulsion Encapsulation to Improve Its Safety and Antiviral Activity

Essential oil extracted from Houttuynia cordata Thunb. (H. cordata) is widely used in traditional Chinese medicine due to its excellent biological activities. However, impurities and deficient preparations of the essential oil limit its safety and effectiveness. Herein, we proposed a strategy to prepare H. cordata essential oil (HEO) safely and effectively by combining the solvent extraction and the macroporous resin purification flexibly, and then encapsulating it using microemulsion. The extraction and purification process were optimized by orthogonal experimental design and adsorption-desorption tests, respectively. The average houttuynin content in pure HEO was then validated at 44.3% ± 2.01%, which presented a great potential for industrial application. Subsequently, pure HEO-loaded microemulsion was prepared by high-pressure homogenization and was then fully characterized. Results showed that the pure HEO-loaded microemulsion was successfully prepared with an average particle size of 179.1 nm and a high encapsulation rate of 94.7%. Furthermore, safety evaluation tests and in vitro antiviral testing indicated that the safety and activity of HEO were significantly improved after purification using D101 resin and were further improved by microemulsion encapsulation. These results demonstrated that the purification of HEO by macroporous resin followed by microemulsion encapsulation would be a promising approach for industrial application of HEO for the antiviral therapies.
Insulin resistance and insulin secretory dysfunction are independent predictors of worsening of glucose tolerance during each stage of type 2 diabetes development.

OBJECTIVE Although prospective studies indicate that insulin resistance and insulin secretory dysfunction predict type 2 diabetes, they provide limited information on the relative contributions of both abnormalities to worsening glucose tolerance at different developmental stages of the disease. We therefore assessed the predictive effect of insulin resistance and insulin secretory dysfunction separately for the progression from normal glucose tolerance (NGT) to impaired glucose tolerance (IGT) and from IGT to diabetes. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS Insulin-stimulated glucose disposal (M) (hyperinsulinemic clamp), acute insulin secretory response (AIR) (25-g intravenous glucose tolerance test), and body composition (hydrodensitometry or dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry) were measured in 254 Pima Indians with NGT and in 145 Pima Indians with IGT, who were then followed for 0.5-13 years. RESULTS After follow-ups of 4.4 +/- 3.1 and 5.5 +/- 3.4 years, 79 (31%) of the subjects with initial NGT had developed IGT, and 64 (44%) of the subjects with initial IGT had developed diabetes. In proportional-hazards analyses with adjustment for age, sex, and percent body fat, low M and low AIR were independent predictors of both the progression from NGT to IGT (relative hazards [95% CI] for 10th vs. 90th percentile: M 2.4 [1.2-4.7], P < 0.02; AIR 2.1 [1.1-4.1], P < 0.04) and from IGT to diabetes (M 2.5 [1.3-5.0], P < 0.01; AIR 1.8 [0.99-3.3], P = 0.055). CONCLUSIONS During each stage of the development of type 2 diabetes, insulin resistance and insulin secretory dysfunction are independent predictors of worsening glucose tolerance and are, therefore, both targets for the primary prevention of the disease.
modular system programming in MINIX 3

Jorrit Herder holds a M.Sc. degree in computer science from the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam and is currently a Ph.D. student there. His research focuses on operating system reliability and security, and he is closely involved in the design and implementation of MINIX 3. Herbert Bos obtained his M.Sc. from the University of Twente in the Netherlands and his Ph.D. from the Cambridge University Computer Laboratory. He is currently an assistant professor at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, with a keen research interest in operating systems, high-speed networks, and security. Ben Gras has a M.Sc. in computer science from the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam and has previously worked as a sysadmin and a programmer. He is now employed by the VU in the Computer Systems Section as a programmer working on the MINIX 3 project. Philip Homburg received a Ph.D. from the Vrije Universiteit in the field of wide-area distributed systems. Before joining this project, he experimented with virtual memory, networking, and X Windows in Minix-vmd and worked on advanced file systems in the Logical Disk project. Andrew S. Tanenbaum is a professor of computer science at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. He has written 16 books and 125 papers and is a Fellow of the ACM and a Fellow of the IEEE. He firmly believes that we need to radically change the structure of operating systems to make them more reliable and secure and that MINIX 3 is a small step in this direction.ing systems were being developed in the early 1960s, the designers were so worried about performance that these systems were written in assembly language, even though high-level languages such as FOR-TRAN, MAD, and Algol were well established. Reliability and security were not even on the radar. Times have changed and we now need to reexamine the need for reliability in operating systems. If you ask ordinary computer users what they like least about their current operating system, few people will mention speed. Instead, it will probably be a neck-and-neck race among mind-numbing complexity, lack of reliability, and security in a broad sense (viruses, worms, etc.). We believe that many of these problems can be traced back to design decisions made 40 or 50 years ago. In particular, the early designers' goal of putting speed above all else led to monolithic designs with the entire operating system running as a single binary program in kernel mode. When the …
Design of RSSI Threshold based Routing Protocol for Static Wireless Sensor Networks

Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) is one of the important link quality estimators in wireless networks. Howe ver, in previous studies significant importance is not given to RS SI as a link metric. In this thesis, we wish to study the properti es of RSSI and design a routing procol based on RSSI as a link metric for static wireless sensor networks. In this phase, w e studied the characteristics of RSSI and its implications on the packet error rate. Our key observations show that RSSI can be a potential wireless link metric which can be used to design a more stable routing protocol.
Breed better banners: Design automation through on-line interaction

Abstract The aim of this article is to explore the use of an automated design system based on a Genetic Algorithm to design banner advertising. Just as genes encode traits in living organisms and propagate the most successful traits by natural selection, so this algorithm propagates features of the most successful banner advertisements and extinguishes the least successful traits. In the current experiment at a major on-line store selling CDs, the algorithm interactively evolved 320 different Web-banners over a period of 23 days. Although the algorithm exhibited some deficiencies, the results indicate that the method is viable. It created innovative designs that performed increasingly better than reference banners, improving the click-through rate from 0.68% for a standard banner to 3.1% by the 16th generation of design, without human intervention from the advertiser. The article concludes with a discussion of some conceptual issues and directions for future research.
Feature Analysis of Recommender Techniques Employed in the Recommendation Engines

Problem statement: Recommender Systems (RS) have become a widely researched area as it is extensively used in web usage mining and E-co mmerce platforms. Approach: There were a number of recommender systems available to suggest the web pages for the web users. Results: A recommender system acted as an intelligent intermed iary that automatically generates and predicts information and web pages, which suit the users' be havior and users' needs. Conclusion: The various recommender models and analyzing the key features of those models and analyzing the features of portal sites that employ recommender systems to hel p the research community are the key features of this study and survey.
Docking of a Mobile Robot Using Visual Bearings

Previous works by the authors [Wei et al., 2003; 2004] have developed a simple bearing-only control law for a mobile robot with demonstrated convergence to a unique final pose and orientation. Here, we use a time-varying weight strategy to first draw the robot towards a known “good” starting region and then a second set of weights is used for docking. This strategy allows the robot to dock successfully from a wider range of initial positions. Experimental results demonstrate the method and show an unexpected bonus: the docking accuracy achieved is significantly better than the previous approaches.
DNA Interaction Studies of Selected Polyamine Conjugates

The interaction of polyamine conjugates with DNA double helix has been studied. Binding properties were examined by ethidium bromide (EtBr) displacement and DNA unwinding/topoisomerase I/II (Topo I/II) activity assays, as well as dsDNA thermal stability studies and circular dichroism spectroscopy. Genotoxicity of the compounds was estimated by a comet assay. It has been shown that only compound 2a can interact with dsDNA via an intercalative binding mode as it displaced EtBr from the dsDNA-dye complex, with Kapp = 4.26 × 106 M−1; caused an increase in melting temperature; changed the circular dichroism spectrum of dsDNA; converted relaxed plasmid DNA into a supercoiled molecule in the presence of Topo I and reduced the amount of short oligonucleotide fragments in the comet tail. Furthermore, preliminary theoretical study has shown that interaction of the discussed compounds with dsDNA depends on molecule linker length and charge distribution over terminal aromatic chromophores.
A Theoretical Framework for Specifying and Analyzing Context-Aware Adaptation

An effective adaptation of user interfaces approximates technological benefits to the actual needs, wishes and requirements of end users. Today the significant heterogeneity of contexts of use, given mainly by the diversity of devices and the easier access to technology, enables an interaction from many distinct environments and covers different application domains and users’ profiles. However the majority of the applications currently available still rely in a conventional context of use, i.e. an able-bodied user, with a Desktop PC in stable environment. Thus several usability issues are often found, requiring a deeper investigation of how adaptation can be efficiently defined and analyzed regardless of application domains. This paper proposes a theoretical framework that considers dimensions of context and adaptation to support stakeholders in the specification and analysis of context- aware adaptation.
Mood and cognitive functions in anaesthetists working in actively scavenged operating theatres.

Twenty-two anaesthetists participated in a study to assess the influence of occupational exposure to anaesthetic agents on mood (arousal and stress) and cognitive functions. In a cross-over design, each anaesthetist worked one day in a reference facility (for example, intensive care) and another day in a scavenged operating theatre where time-weighted exposure averaged nitrous oxide 58 p.p.m. and halothane 1.4 p.p.m. The results showed that arousal scores reached a peak in the middle of the theatre day, but this appeared to reflect the nature of operating theatre work rather than exposure. Reports of stress were also unaffected by exposure, although higher scores were associated with longer and more demanding work. Similarly, there was no evidence that exposure impaired performance of tasks assessing syntactic and semantic reasoning, verbal and spatial memory, sensory-motor reaction time and attention. Performance in these tasks was, however, sensitive to the cognitive demands of the tasks and to naturally varying non-exposure factors. It is concluded that, compared with the reference condition, the concentrations of anaesthetic agents found in actively scavenged operating theatres have no detrimental effect on either the mood or the cognitive functions of anaesthetists.
Analysis of Healing Effect of Alginate Sulfate Hydrogel Dressing Containing Antimicrobial Peptide on Wound Infection Caused by Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus

Background: Wound infections caused by methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus are a health problem worldwide; therefore, it is necessary to develop new antimicrobial compounds. Considering broad-spectrum antimicrobial activity and low probability of drug resistance to peptides, applications these peptides are being studied extensively. Objectives: In this study, to control drug release over time, an alginate sulfate-based hydrogel impregnated with the CM11 peptide as the antimicrobial agent was developed, and its healing effects were tested on skin infections caused by methicillin-resistant S. aureus strains in a mouse model. Materials and Methods: Minimum inhibitory and minimum bactericidal concentrations of the CM11 peptide and alginate hydrogel in combination with the peptide were determined. Forty mice were divided into 4 groups: 1 group as a negative control (without treatment; however, 5 mice received hydrogel dressing without peptide), 1 group as a positive control (2% mupirocin treatment), and 2 groups as test groups. To establish skin infection, 200 μL of bacterial suspension with 3 × 108 CFU/mL concentration was subcutaneously injected in the scapular region of the mice. On the basis of the in vitro minimal bactericidal concentration of the alginate hydrogel containing peptide for 15 clinical isolates, hydrogel containing 128 mg/L of peptide was used for wound dressing over an 8-day period. Results: The highest and lowest numbers of wounds were observed on day 2 in the negative and positive control groups, respectively. During the 8-day period, the positive control and hydrogel containing peptide treatment groups showed similar levels of wound healing. Conclusions: This study showed that compared to standard drug treatment, treatment with hydrogel containing peptide had substantial antibacterial effects on S. aureus wound infections in mice.
Numerical biases on IMF determinations created by binning

We detect and quantify significant numerical biases in the determination of the slope of power laws with Salpeter (or similar) indices from uniformly-binned data using chi-square minimization. The biases are caused by the correlation between the number of stars per bin and the assigned weights and are especially important when the number of stars per bin is small. This result implies the existence of systematic errors in the values of IMFs calculated in this way. We propose as an alternative using variable-size bins and dividing the stars evenly among them. Such variable-size bins yield very small biases that are only weakly dependent on the number of stars per bin. Furthermore, we show that they allow for the calculation of reliable IMFs with only a small total number of stars. Therefore, they are a preferred alternative to the standard uniform-size binning.
Consumption risk sharing under private information when earnings are persistent

In this paper we quantitatively investigate the implications of a model of consumption risk sharing where infinitely-lived households are subject to exogenous idiosyncratic shocks to their earnings, and where the realization of these shocks are private information. Our theoretical contribution relative to the existing literature is to allow for persistence in earnings. This creates some formidable obstacles to recursive computation of the optimal contract. If the earnings process follows a Markov chain whose state space has N elements, the state space for the optimal dynamic contracting problem has N continuous dimensions and is a nontrivial subset W in RN . Such a problem is prohibitively complex, first because of the dimension of the dimensionality of the state space and, second, because it is difficult to solve for W itself.
Human Resource Management with Information Technology: A Systematic Literature Review

Information Technology (IT) systems have greatly impacted organizations and HumanResource Management (HRM) is no exception. In this context, IT is often introduced withthe rationale that it could offer benefits such as cost reduction, time savings and strategictransformation. Many organizations have invested in e-HRM systems in hope oftransforming the Human Resource department (HR) into a strategic ally. Extant research,however, shows that many organizations fail to achieve intended effects from their ITinvestments and as result beliefs around the strategic value of e-HRM vary. This thesisaims to critically examine the link between e-HRM investments and strategic value. To thisend, we ask the following research question: “why does E-HRM systems fail to effectuate astrategic transformation of the HR department given their perceived capabilities to thecontrary? “. To answer this question we conducted a systematic literature review of e-HRMresearch published between 2009-2014. The review focused on perceptions about e-HRMsystems within organizations and sought to unearth how perceptions shape the route of ITimplementation towards a strategy outcome. Our findings indicate that the majority of thestudies are not guided by a leading theoretical paradigm. Furthermore strategic barrierssuch as implementation problems and limited use of the system that does not reflect itspotential are identified and discussed. By examining some common factors that have beenidentified to shape the translation of e-HRM systems from initial perception to actualizeduse we lay the foundation for more nuanced theorizing of HRM use within contemporaryorganizations.