Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Distribution of ocular biometric parameters and refraction in a population-based study of Australian children.

PURPOSE To study the distribution of spherical equivalent refraction and ocular biometric parameters in a young Australian population. METHODS Noncontact methods were used to examine ocular dimensions and cycloplegic autorefraction in a stratified random cluster sample of year 1 Sydney school students (n = 1765), mean age 6.7 years (range, 5.5-8.4 years). Repeated measures of axial length, anterior chamber depth, and greatest and least corneal radius of curvature (CR1, CR2, respectively) were taken in each eye. Refraction was measured as the spherical equivalent. RESULTS Mean spherical equivalent refraction in right eyes was +1.26 +/- 0.03 D (SEM; range, -4.88 to +8.58). The distribution was peaked (kurtosis 14.4) and slightly skewed to the right (skewness, 1.7). Prevalence of myopia, defined as spherical equivalent refraction < or = -0.5 D, was 1.43% (95% CI, 0.94-2.18) in the overall population. Axial length, anterior chamber depth, and corneal radii of curvature were normally distributed. The mean axial length in right eyes was 22.61 +/- 0.02 mm (SEM; range, 19.64-25.35). The mean anterior chamber depth was 3.34 +/- 0.01 mm (SEM; range, 2.14-4.06). Mean CR1 was 7.85 +/- 0.01 mm (SEM) and mean CR2 was 7.71 +/- 0.01 mm (SEM). The distribution of axial length/mean corneal radius ratio was peaked (leptokurtic) with a mean of 2.906. Mean axial length was longer, anterior chambers were deeper, and corneas were flatter in the boys. CONCLUSIONS A peaked (leptokurtic) distribution of spherical equivalent refraction was present in this predominantly hyperopic 6-year-old population. The results also showed that ocular biometric measures were normally distributed, with statistically significant gender differences found in measurements.
Horizon for Scientific Practice: Scientific Discovery and Progress

In this article, I introduce the notion of horizon for scientific practice (HSP), representing limits or boundaries within which scientists ply their trade, to facilitate analysis of scientific discovery and progress. The notion includes not only constraints that delimit scientific practice, e.g. of bringing experimentation to a temporary conclusion, but also possibilities that open up scientific practice to additional scientific discovery and to further scientific progress. Importantly, it represents scientific practice as a dynamic and developmental integration of activities to investigate and analyze the natural world. I use the discovery of the clotting factor, thrombin, and the experiments conducted by the Johns Hopkins physiologist, William Howell, on the enzymatic nature of thrombin to illustrate the notion of HSP. In a concluding section, I compare the notion of HSP to other notions for scientific practice proposed in the history and philosophy of science literature.
Innovation Practices and Firm Performances : An Empirical Investigation in Turkey

In this empirical research, how marketing managers evaluate their firms’ performances and use this evaluation to decide to make innovation in Turkey is examined. They use some standards which are past performance of the firm, target performance of the firm, competitor performance, and average performance of the industry to compare and evaluate the firms’ performances. It is hypothesized that marketing managers and owners of the firm compare the firms’ current performance with these four standards at the same time to decide when to make innovation relating to any aspects of the firm, either management style or products. Relationship between the comparison of the firm’s performance with these standards and innovation are searched in the same regression model. The results reveal that apart from other antecedents of making innovation, managers’ evaluation of performance results play a significant role in making innovation.
Predicting Successful Pulmonary Vein Isolation In Patients With Atrial Fibrillation By Brain Natriuretic Peptide Plasma Levels

Background Catheter ablation for atrial fibrillation is a clinically established treatment by now while success rate varies between 60% and 85%. Interventional treatment of atrial fibrillation is still a challenging technique associated with a long procedure time and risk of major complications in up to 6 % of treated patients. The aim of this study was to investigate the predictive value of plasma brain natriuretic peptide (BNP) in patients undergoing pulmonary vein isolation concerning stable sinus rhythm after ablation. Methods In 68 consecutive patients with atrial fibrillation (AF) and normal left ventricular ejection fraction, BNP was measured at baseline before pulmonary vein isolation (PVI). All patients received a 7-days-holter monitoring 3 months after radiofrequency (RF) ablation in order to detect recurrent AF episodes. Results 48 patients with paroxysmal and 20 patients with persistent AF were enrolled. Baseline BNP was significantly higher in patients with persistent AF compared to patients with paroxysmal AF (145,5 pg/ml vs. 84,4 pg/ml; p<0,05). 3 months after PVI 38 patients (79,1%) with paroxysmal AF had a stable sinus rhythm documented on 7-days-holter monitoring, where as in 10 patients (20,9%) AF episodes were detected. Patients with a successful PVI showed significantly lower BNP plasma levels at baseline compared to patients with AF recurrrence (68,7 pg/ml vs. 144,1 pg/ml; p<0,05). In patients with persistent AF 55% (11 cases) had no recurrence of AF at 3 months 7-days holter and in 9 patients (45%) AF recurred. BNP plasma levels at baseline were lower in patients with stable sinusrhythm after 3 months compared to the group of recurrent AF (105,8 pg/ml vs. 193,3 pg/ml; p=0,11). Conclusions Patients with AF and low preprocedural BNP plasma levels showed a better outcome after PVI. Thus BNP may be helpful in patient selection for a successful treatment of AF by PVI.
Paper and Pencil Anxiety

The current superabundance of papers concerned with verbal yardsticks of anxiety (e.g., Taylor, 1953; Cattell, 1955; Gordon & Sarason, 1955; Castaneda, e i al., 1956) may be sufficient to immunize prospective readers against another report on the subject, but the potential usefulness of the products of research in this area is undeniable. Some of the problems encountered here prevail in almost every division of psychology. One of these is the problem of definition. Numerous definitions of anxiety have been offered. Some theorists conceive of anxiety as a response, others as a drive. In like manner, the concept of emotional stress, often used as a synonym for anxiety, is now a stimulus, now an intervening variable or hypothetical construct, and now a response. The writer, in an earlier paper (Aiken, 1961), has outlined a definition program for terms such as anxiety and stress, an approach which begins by isolating intraand inter-individual response clusters or patcerns and chen determining what stimuli are reliably and contiguously precedent to these responses. Anxiecy and stress are pictured as ! ligher order concepts referring to the "mapping" of stimuli onto the given response clusters, an anxiety reaction being a particular type of stress reaction. Both physico-chemical and ideational responses are admissible as evidence for response patcerns or clusters. Recent research employing physiological variables (Lacey, 1956; Speisrnan, et dl., 1761) has found evidence for the existence of such clusters and patcerns. Investigations on ideational (verbal report) data, using similar methods, have also been conducted. For example, Cattell (1955) has studied anxiety by applying factor analysis to responses on questionnaires. However, the items on the IPAT (Cattell, 1955), like those on the Taylor scale (Taylor, 1953), are mixtures of stimuli and responses, and the validity of several items on the former instrument is questionable. The approach preferred by the present writer is to separate cause from effect in defining anxiety and to develop anxiety reaction or response scales, scores on which can chen be related to various stimulus statements. A second problem, the solution of which appears to be a matter of taste rather rhan proof, is the generality vs. specificity of anxiety. Spence (1956) conceptualizes anxiety as a generalized drive, while ocher investigators (Gordon & Sarason, 1955; Aiken & Dreger, 1761) have indicated the existence of specific situational anxieties. The terms "general anxiety" and "situational anxieties" are probably unfortunate choices because they may suggest that a
Semisupervised Classification of Hyperspectral Images by SVMs Optimized in the Primal

This paper addresses classification of hyperspectral remote sensing images with kernel-based methods defined in the framework of semisupervised support vector machines (S3VMs). In particular, we analyzed the critical problem of the nonconvexity of the cost function associated with the learning phase of S3VMs by considering different (S3VMs) techniques that solve optimization directly in the primal formulation of the objective function. As the nonconvex cost function can be characterized by many local minima, different optimization techniques may lead to different classification results. Here, we present two implementations, which are based on different rationales and optimization methods. The presented techniques are compared with S3VMs implemented in the dual formulation in the context of classification of real hyperspectral remote sensing images. Experimental results point out the effectiveness of the techniques based on the optimization of the primal formulation, which provided higher accuracy and better generalization ability than the S3VMs optimized in the dual formulation
Comparison and Combination of Lightly Supervised Approaches for Language Portability of a Spoken Language Understanding System

Portability of a spoken dialogue system (SDS) to a new domain or a new language is a hot topic as it may imply gains in time and cost for building new SDSs. In particular in this paper we investigate several fast and efficient approaches for language portability of the spoken language understanding (SLU) module of a dialogue system. We show that the use of statistical machine translation (SMT) can reduce the time and the cost of porting a system from a source to a target language. For conceptual decoding, a state-of-the-art module based on conditional random fields (CRF) is used and a new approach based on phrase-based statistical machine translation (PB-SMT) is also evaluated. The experimental results show the efficiency of the proposed methods for a fast and low cost SLU language portability. In addition, we propose two methods to increase SLU robustness to translation errors. Overall, it is shown that the combination of all these approaches can further reduce the concept error rate. While most of the experiments in this paper deal with portability from French to Italian (given the availability of the Media French corpus and its subset manually translated into Italian), a validation of our methodology is eventually proposed in Arabic.
A High-Level Language for Rule-Based Modelling

Rule-based languages such as Kappa excel in their support for handling the combinatorial complexities prevalent in many biological systems, including signalling pathways. But Kappa provides little structure for organising rules, and large models can therefore be hard to read and maintain. This paper introduces a high-level, modular extension of Kappa called LBS-κ. We demonstrate the constructs of the language through examples and three case studies: a chemotaxis switch ring, a MAPK cascade, and an insulin signalling pathway. We then provide a formal definition of LBS-κ through an abstract syntax and a translation to plain Kappa. The translation is implemented in a compiler tool which is available as a web application. We finally demonstrate how to increase the expressivity of LBS-κ through embedded scripts in a general-purpose programming language, a technique which we view as generally applicable to other domain specific languages.
¿Disimulan los progenitores en litigio por la custodia en el 16 PF-5?

Forensic evaluation of parents litigating for custody comprises the assessment of the parental attributes and of favourable self-reporting. As for this, a multi-method evaluation approach is adopted, including psychometric tests, particularly the 16 PF-5 as a reference questionnaire. With the aim of knowing if the litigant parents are able to present a self-favorable report on the 16 PF-5, the strategies followed to fake good, and the effects of faking good on the primary and global scales, 488 parents, 244 in child custody litigation and 244 parents under standard instructions, answered the Spanish adaptation of the 16 PF-5. The results showed that litigant parents biased their responses; that they manipulated their impression and avoided infrequent responses; and that their manipulation is related to the exaggeration of positive attributes and the concealment or denial of the negative ones. The implications of the findings for forensic psychologist practice are discussed.
Switching recovery control of a quadcopter UAV

This paper presents a switching recovery strategy to cope with a loss of control of one actuator. The proposed switching scheme enables the quadcopter to complete a task with the remaining controls. Attitude and velocity feedback controllers are designed using structured H∞ optimization technique. Closed-loop stability of the resulting switching system is analysed using minimum dwell time theory. An average dwell time is also computed exploiting multiple Lyapunov-like function that accounts for delays in the detection of the control failure. Results demonstrate the potential of the proposed switching recovery scheme.
The Second Stage of a Thin Wafer IGBT Low Loss 1200V LPT-CSTBT&#8482; with a Backside Doping Optimization Process

We have done research for the purpose of improving of total performance of 1200V light punch-through (LPT) IGBTs that utilizing carrier stored trench-gate bipolar transistor (CSTBTtrade). This paper reports that the total loss can be dramatically improved by a vertical shrink of LPT-CSTBT to a structure with a thin N drift and a new backside collector layer possessed of both reinforced N buffer and lengthened carrier lifetime. The new LPT-CSTBT demonstrates lower on-state voltage (VCE(sat)), lower turn-off loss (EOFF ), lower junction leakage current (@398 ~ 423K) than that of the conventional one presented in ISPSD'02. Our results show, for the first time, that the proposed new collector structure is much more effective as a collector one because of making it positive to choose any position in the trade-off characteristic between VCE(sat) and EOFF without utilizing any conventional carrier lifetime technique. From the viewpoint of low total loss and choosing widely characteristic position in the VCE(sat) and EOFF trade-off curve, the new LPT-CSTBT with new LPT technology is a promising candidate for high voltage power device
Myths and truths concerning estimation of power spectra: the case for a hybrid estimator

It is widely believed that maximum-likelihood estimators must be used to provide optimal estimates of power spectra. Since such estimators require the inversion and multiplication of N d x N d matrices, where N d is the size of the data vector, maximum-likelihood estimators require at least of order N 3 d operations and become computationally prohibitive for N d greater than a few tens of thousands. Because of this, a large and inhomogeneous literature exists on approximate methods of power-spectrum estimation. These range from manifestly suboptimal but computationally fast methods, to near-optimal but computationally expensive methods. Furthermore, much of this literature concentrates on the power-spectrum estimates rather than the equally important problem of deriving an accurate covariance matrix. In this paper, I consider the problem of estimating the power spectrum of cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies from large data sets. Various analytic results on power-spectrum estimators are derived, or collated from the literature, and tested against numerical simulations. An unbiased hybrid estimator is proposed that combines a maximum-likelihood estimator at low multipoles and pseudo-C estimates at high multipoles. The hybrid estimator is computationally fast (i.e. it can be run on a laptop computer for Planck-sized data sets), nearly optimal over the full range of multipoles, and returns an accurate and nearly diagonal covariance matrix for realistic experimental configurations (provided certain conditions on the noise properties of the experiment are satisfied). It is argued that, in practice, computationally expensive methods that approximate the O(N 3 d) maximum-likelihood solution are unlikely to improve on the hybrid estimator, and may actually perform worse. The results presented here can be generalized to CMB polarization and to power-spectrum estimation using other types of data, such as galaxy clustering and weak gravitational lensing.
Environmental policy integration: a state of the art review

The principle of environmental policy integration (EPI) attracts great scholarly interest as well as widespread political backing. Political support is particularly strong in the European Union, where it enjoys a prominent quasi-constitutional status. However, the practical fulfilment of EPI appears to lag well behind these aspirations, although the evidence base of this widely held view remains rather fragmented. This article aims to review the ‘state of the art’ in EPI research and practice from the perspective of its conceptual meaning, processes of implementation and outcomes ‘on the ground’. It finds that the political commitment to EPI is indeed widespread, especially in industrialized states, but that deep disagreement surrounds its actual application. In terms of everyday practices, ‘policy integration’ is complex and contingent, and there are few ‘best practices’ that can be easily shared between jurisdictions. Finally, knowledge about policy outcomes is very sparse indeed, and policy-making systems seem very ill prepared to address this lacuna. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.
Categorizing and assessing negative symptoms

Purpose of review To provide a review on studies published in the last year relevant to the categorization and assessment of negative symptoms. Recent findings Recent research supported the validity of the ‘deficit/non-deficit schizophrenia’ categorization. Few studies confirmed the validity of the category ‘persistent negative symptoms’, whereas no recent study explored the validity of the category ‘predominant negative symptoms’. The two-factor structure of the negative dimension is supported by studies reporting different correlates for the two subdomains: diminished expression and avolition/apathy. The need to further split avolition/apathy in two distinct components, that is anhedonia and amotivation, is confirmed in recent papers. Additional approaches to the assessment of negative symptoms have been proposed, including the self-assessment of negative symptoms, and the evaluation of negative symptoms in daily life and their assessment by means of computerized analyses. Summary Negative symptoms represent an unmet need in the care of schizophrenia, as they are associated to poor response to available treatments and to poor functional outcome. Their accurate categorization and assessment represent a major challenge for research on neurobiological substrates and new treatment strategies.
Functional Interplay Between Angiotensin II and Nitric Oxide: Cyclic GMP as a Key Mediator

Abstract—Angiotensin II (Ang II) and nitric oxide (NO) signaling pathways mutually regulate each other by multiple mechanisms. Ang II regulates the expression of NO synthase and NO production, whereas NO downregulates the Ang II type I (AT1) receptor. In addition, downstream effectors of Ang II and NO signaling pathways also interact with each other. A feedback mechanism between Ang II and NO is critical for normal vascular structure and function. Imbalance of Ang II and NO has been implicated in the pathophysiology of many vascular diseases. In this review, we focus on the diverse ways in which Ang II and NO interact and the importance of the balance between the signaling pathways activated by these mediators.
Using retrieval measures to assess similarity in mining dynamic web clickstreams

While scalable data mining methods are expected to cope with massive Web data, coping with evolving trends in noisy data in a continuous fashion, and without any unnecessary stoppages and reconfigurations is still an open challenge. This dynamic and single pass setting can be cast within the framework of mining evolving data streams. In this paper, we explore the task of mining mass user profiles by discovering evolving Web session clusters in a single pass with a recently proposed scalable immune based clustering approach (TECNO-STREAMS), and study the effect of the choice of different similarity measures on the mining process and on the interpretation of the mined patterns. We propose a simple similarity measure that has the advantage of explicitly coupling the precision and coverage criteria to the early learning stages, and furthermore requiring that the affinity of the data to the learned profiles or summaries be defined by the minimum of their coverage or precision, hence requiring that the learned profiles are simultaneously precise and complete, with no compromises.In our experiments, we study the task of mining evolving user profiles from Web clickstream data (web usage mining) in a single pass, and under different trend sequencing scenarios, showing that compared oto the cosine similarity measure, the proposed similarity measure explicitly based on precision and coverage allows the discovery of more correct profiles at the same precision or recall quality levels.
Chloride Influx Provokes Lamellipodium Formation in Microglial Cells

Lamellipodium extension and retraction is the driving force for cell migration. Although several studies document that activation of chloride channels are essential in cell migration, little is known about their contribution in lamellipodium formation. To address this question, we characterized chloride channels and transporters by whole cell recording and RT-PCR, respectively, as well as quantified lamellipodium formation in murine primary microglial cells as well as the microglial cell-line, BV-2, using time-lapse microscopy. The repertoire of chloride conducting pathways in BV-2 cells included, swelling-activated chloride channels as well as the KCl cotransporters, KCC1, KCC2, KCC3, and KCC4. Swelling-activated chloride channels were either activated by a hypoosmotic solution or by a high KCl saline, which promotes K+ and Cl- influx instead of efflux by KCCs. Conductance through swelling-activated chloride channels was completely blocked by flufenamic acid (200μM), SITS (1mM) and DIOA (10μM). By exposing primary microglial cells or BV-2 cells to a high KCl saline, we observed a local swelling, which developed into a prominent lamellipodium. Blockade of chloride influx by flufenamic acid (200μM) or DIOA (10μM) as well as incubation of cells in a chloride-free high K+ saline suppressed formation of a lamellipodium. We assume that local swellings, established by an increase in chloride influx, are a general principle in formation of lamellipodia in eukaryotic cells.