Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Reexamining the Evidence of an Ecological Association between Income Inequality and Health

Several recent studies have made the provocative claim that income inequality is an important determinant of population health. The primary evidence for this hypothesis is the repeated finding--across countries and across U.S. states--that there is an association between income inequality and aggregate health outcomes. However, most of these studies examine only a single cross section of data and employ few (or even no) control variables. We examine the relationship between income inequality and aggregate health outcomes across thirty countries over a four-decade span and across forty-eight U.S. states over five decades. In large part, our findings contradict previous claims.
Assessment of depression following acute myocardial infarction using the Beck depression inventory

Survivors of myocardial infarction (MI) who are depressed are at increased risk of cardiac death and morbidity than those who are not depressed.1 This adverse effect is independent of the severity of the underlying ischaemic heart disease.1 However, additional care is rarely taken of depressed patients, largely due to a failure in identification. Most studies have used time consuming interviews requiring specially trained staff that may be impractical for day to day use in the clinical setting. The Beck depression inventory (BDI) is a self report inventory which is simple, accurate at identifying depression, and has been used in the USA to indicate those with an adverse prognosis. However, prevalence of depression in the UK may be different to that in the USA when using similar methods post-MI.23 Cultural and socioeconomic differences between the USA and UK may exist to uncouple the prognostic association between an elevated BDI score and adverse prognosis. Therefore, the aims of this study were to determine the prevalence of an elevated BDI and to determine the relation between BDI score and prognosis in a UK population following MI. All patients aged less than 75 years consecutively hospitalised with MI to a district general hospital, between 1999 and 2000, …
Investigating the relationship between feed and helminthic burden of captive birds of prey in Hong Kong.

The life cycle of most parasitic helminthes is related to their hosts feeding habits. Thus we need to investigate the impact of diet on the host's helminthic parasite burden. Not many studies in captive raptors have been conducted and published regarding parasitic infections. The aim of this study is to evaluate the helminthic burden of raptors kept in captivity and establish a relationship with the feed provided. A total of N = 51 different species of captive birds of prey were fed different diets consisting in different combinations of day old chicks, chicken breast, whole chicken carcass and mice. Their feces were sampled and the parasite burden was determined. A negative binomial model was successfully fitted to the data and the feeds "mice" (P < 0.001) and "whole chicken carcass" (P < 0.001) significantly contributed to an increase in the observed burden. Significant differences were also found between species (P < 0.001). Raptors fed adult animal carcasses and offal may explain the increase in the observed burden as these feeds have a larger probability of being contaminated by a larger variety of helminthic fauna.
Efficient Modeling of Missile RCS Magnitude Responses by Gaussian Processes

An efficient technique for modeling radar cross section magnitude responses versus frequency is presented. The technique is based on Gaussian process regression and makes it possible to significantly reduce the number of expensive computer simulations required to accurately resolve these responses. Examples of two missiles are used to evaluate the proposed technique. Average predictive normalized root-mean-square errors (RMSEs) of 1.24% and 1.63% were obtained, with the worst RMSE being less than 2.2%. These results were significantly better than results obtained with alternative techniques, including geometric theory of diffraction-based modeling and support vector regression.
Lung Function and Respiratory Symptoms in Hard Metal Workers Exposed to Cobalt

Objective: To follow-up lung function and airway symptoms in workers exposed to cobalt dust at a hard metal plant. Methods: A total of 582 employees underwent spirometry and completed a questionnaire. A historical exposure matrix was created, assigning figures for historical and recent work-related exposure. Results: At the time of employment, 5% reported symptoms from respiratory tract. At follow-up, 5% suffered from persistent coughing and 7% reported asthma; 20% were daily smokers. Among nonsmokers without asthma, an evident, statistically nonsignificant, dose–response effect was seen between increasing cobalt exposure and decline in FEV1 (forced expiratory volume in the first second). In all exposure categories, the FEV1 in smokers declined 10 mL more per year than for nonsmokers. Conclusions: Even low levels of cobalt exposure seem to hamper lung function both in smokers and nonsmokers. This impact is considered low in relation to the effect of aging.
Design and development of hardware and software for wireless Head-Mounted Displays

With the introduction of a new head-mounted displays models on the consumer market, the interest to those devices raised dramatically in the recent past. Although only a few wireless head-mounted display models are available today, there is a certain range of applications where those are required. Existing solutions that allow using conventional head-mounted displays for such applications wirelessly are either very expensive or too cumbersome. This thesis is aimed to overcome those drawbacks with a new solution of a distributed design. Wired HMD is being connected to a compact, low-cost, portable computer that displays a real-time compressed video stream, transferred from a computer performing the actual rendering of an HMDenabled application. A prototype according to the proposed design was developed and evaluated.
The influence of the site of sampling and assay medium upon the measurement and interpretation of blood lactate responses to exercise.

UNLABELLED This paper reports the findings of two investigations into methodological problems associated with the interpretation of blood lactate (BLa) in the sports sciences. In Experiment 1, brachial artery (A), antecubital venous (V) and fingertip capillary (C) blood samples were drawn simultaneously from nine subjects (mean age 21.1 +/- 1.3 years) during an incremental treadmill protocol and immediately assayed for BLa concentration. Experiment 2 investigated the extent of lactate concentration differences in whole blood (WB), lysed blood (LB) and plasma (P) measured using a YSI 23 AM analyser. In Experiment 1, a comparison of the mean BLa concentrations obtained from the three sites revealed no significant differences (P greater than 0.05). Correlations between BLa samples from different sites were very high, with r values ranging from 0.858 to 0.983. In Experiment 2, the mean lactate concentrations were: WB, 4.7 +/- 2.7 mM; LB, 5.0 +/- 3.0 mM; P, 7.0 +/- 3.8 mM. Plasma (P) values were significantly higher than WB and LB. Values from all sites were highly correlated with coefficients ranging from 0.963 to 0.987. IN CONCLUSION (1) Significant arterial and venous BLa concentration differences do not exist during incremental treadmill exercise. (2) As capillary BLa concentrations reflect arterial values, their use in laboratory and field settings is recommended. (3) Lactate concentration differences in whole blood, lysed blood and plasma will influence the assessment of performance at fixed lactate reference values. (4) If the inter-laboratory test procedures are to be standardized and results compared, precise reporting of lactate sampling and assay techniques is critical.
The genetics and embryology of zebrafish metamerism

Somites are the most obvious metameric structures in the vertebrate embryo. They are mesodermal segments that form in bilateral pairs flanking the notochord and are created sequentially in an anterior to posterior sequence concomitant with the posterior growth of the trunk and tail. Zebrafish somitogenesis is regulated by a clock that causes cells in the presomitic mesoderm (PSM) to undergo cyclical activation and repression of several notch pathway genes. Coordinated oscillation among neighboring cells manifests as stripes of gene expression that pass through the cells of the PSM in a posterior to anterior direction. As axial growth continually adds new cells to the posterior tail bud, cells of the PSM become relatively less posterior. This gradual assumption of a more anterior position occurs over developmental time and constitutes part of a maturation process that governs morphological segmentation in conjunction with the clock. Segment morphogenesis involves a mesenchymal to epithelial transition as prospective border cells at the anterior end of the mesenchymal PSM adopt a polarized, columnar morphology and surround a mesenchymal core of cells. The segmental pattern influences the development of the somite derivatives such as the myotome, and the myotome reciprocates to affect the formation of segment boundaries. While somites appear to be serially homologous, there may be variation in the segmentation mechanism along the body axis. Moreover, whereas the genetic architecture of the zebrafish, mouse, and chick segmentation clocks shares many common elements, there is evidence that the gene networks have undergone independent modification during evolution. Developmental Dynamics 236:1422–1449, 2007. © 2007 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
ANALYSIS AND METHODS TO TEST CLASSIFICATION OF NORMAL AND PATHOLOGICAL HEART SOUND SIGNALS

An acute shortage of cardiologists and many rural clinics were run by nurses in Indonesia. We proposed to develop of a screening technique based on artificial intelligence that classifies of normal and pathological heart sound signals of human subjects due to signs important and symptoms for heart diagnosis based on knowledge of auscultation experts. Heart sound signal analysis system consisted of three stages. Firstly, preprocessing. Secondly, feature extraction with respect to the cardiac cycle based on wavelet analysis to differentiate normal and pathological heart sounds. Feature reduction using PCA was also carried out to reduce the dimension of the heart sound feature vectors for classification. Thirdly, three classifiers: ANN MLP-BP, FCM clustering and HCM clustering to classify normal, systolic murmur, diastolic murmur, and continuous murmur, respectively. The performance of each classifier was evaluated with statistical validation method. From our experimental results, the three classifiers that showed significant potential in their use as an alternative diagnostic tool were compared. The ANN achieved the best performance as an automated classifier rather than FCM and HCM methods. Its performance was 100% for sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy, respectively, of input 20,000 features. Furthermore, for input 300 features, the performance was 98.90%, 99.37%, and 99.03% for sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy, respectively. The heart sound signal analysis system was suitable to classify of normal and pathological cases. The proposed method was considered very important for objective screening and very useful as an alternative diagnostic tool that complies with the requirements for rural clinics. We hoped that the method would be beneficial in study of auscultatory technique for medical students. Surrogate data modeling of pathological heart sounds signals as an alternative tool of the heart sound simulator and for classification purpose was further study.
Long-term survival analysis after laparoscopic radical nephrectomy.

PURPOSE This report assesses the long-term oncological efficacy of laparoscopic radical nephrectomy compared with open radical nephrectomy in patients with clinically localized renal cell carcinoma. MATERIALS AND METHODS We analyzed the data from 121 patients who underwent radical nephrectomy between 1991 and 1999 for clinical tumor stage T1/2 N0M0. The medical records of all patients were retrospectively reviewed with emphasis on tumor recurrence and survival. Statistical comparison was performed using Kaplan-Meier analysis. RESULTS The median followup was 73 months for the laparoscopic group and 80 months for the open group. Of the 67 patients who underwent laparoscopic surgery, 53 survived without any recurrence of disease, 2 are currently alive with metastasis, 2 died of metastatic disease in months 12 and 17, and 10 patients died without any disease recurrence. Laparoscopic port site metastasis did not develop in any patients. Of the 54 who underwent open surgery, 34 survived without any recurrence of disease, 1 currently has metastasis, 6 died of metastasis within 17 to 74 months, and 13 died without any disease recurrence. A comparison of the 5 and 10-year disease-free survival rates of the laparoscopic and open groups revealed no significant differences. In addition, the 5 and 10-year cancer specific and actuarial survival rates were not significantly different. CONCLUSIONS Based on long-term followup, our evaluation confirmed for clinical tumor stage T1/2 N0M0 that laparoscopic radical nephrectomy is oncologically equivalent to open radical nephrectomy.
Stroke incidence, case fatality, and mortality in the WHO MONICA project. World Health Organization Monitoring Trends and Determinants in Cardiovascular Disease.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE This report compares stroke incidence, case fatality, and mortality rates during the first years of the WHO MONICA Project in 16 European and 2 Asian populations. METHODS In the stroke component of the WHO MONICA Project, stroke registers were established with uniform and standardized rules for case ascertainment and validation of events. RESULTS A total of 13,597 stroke events were registered from 1985 through 1987 in a total background population of 2.9 million people aged 35 to 64 years. Age-standardized stroke incidence rates per 100,000 varied from 101 to 285 in men and from 47 to 198 in women. The combined stroke attack rates for first and recurrent events were approximately 20% higher than incidence rates in most populations and varied to the same extent. Stroke incidence rates were very high among the population of Finnish men tested. The incidence of stroke was, in general, higher among populations in eastern than in western Europe. It was also relatively high in the Chinese population studied, particularly among women. The case-fatality rates at 28 days varied from 15% to 49% among men and from 18% to 57% among women. In half of the populations studied, there were only minor differences between official stroke mortality rates and rates measured on the basis of fatal events registered and validated for the WHO MONICA stroke study. CONCLUSIONS The WHO MONICA Project provides a unique opportunity to perform cross-sectional and longitudinal comparisons of stroke epidemiology in many populations. The present data show how large differences in stroke incidence and case-fatality rates contribute to the more than threefold differences in stroke mortality rates among populations.
Cusps in complex boundaries of one-dimensional Teichmüller space

This paper gives a concrete proof of the conjectural phenomena on the complex boundary one-dimensional slices: every rational boundary point is cusp shaped. This paper treats this problem for Bers slices, the Earle slice, and the Maskit slice. In proving this, we also show that every Teichmüller modular transformation acting on a Bers slice can be extended as a quasiconformal mapping on its ambient space. Furthermore, using this extension, we discuss similarity phenomena on the boundaries of Bers slices, and also compare these phenomena with results in complex dynamics. We will also give a result, related to the theory of L. Keen and C. Series, of pleated varieties in quasifuchsian space of once punctured tori.
A Low-Loss Single-Pole-Double-Throw (SPDT) Switch Circuit

A low-loss single-pole-double-throw (SPDT) switch circuit using lateral RF MEMS switches has been developed on glass to operate from DC to 20 GHz. High compactness and low loss can be obtained by use of the lateral switches and coplanar waveguide (CPW) configuration. The circuit provides > 24-dB isolation and < 0.9-dB insertion loss up to 20 GHz. The pull-in voltage of the switch is only 12.4 V, with a switching-on time of 35 mus and a switching-off time of 36 mus. A single-mask silicon-on-glass (SiOG) fabrication process has been developed to fabricate the SPDT switch circuit on glass, which has the advantages of low loss and high yield. The whole circuit has a size of 1.64 mm times 1.3 mm.
Body sensor networks

Some patients, especially patients with chronic diseases such as heart disease, require continuous monitoring of their condition. Wearable devices for patient monitoring were introduced many years ago – for instance, wearable ambulatory ECG (electrocardiogram) recorders commonly known as Holter monitors (Figure 1) are used for monitoring cardiac patients. However, these monitors are quite bulky and can only record the signal for a limited time. Patients are often asked to wear a Holter monitor for a few days and then return to the clinic for diagnosis. This often overlooks transient but life-threatening events. In addition, we don’t know under what condition the signals are acquired, and this often leads to false alarms. For example, a sudden rise in heart rate may be caused by emotion, such as watching a horror movie, or by exercise, rather than by a heart condition. Body sensing To address these issues, the concept of Body Sensor Networks (BSN) was first proposed in 2002 by Prof. Guang-Zhong Yang from Imperial College London. The aim of the BSN is to provide a truly personalised monitoring platform that is pervasive, intelligent, and Figure 1 A patient wearing a Holter monitor
Rapid prenatal diagnosis of fetal Zellweger syndrome by biochemical tests, complementation studies, and molecular analyses

Molecular Genetics, Department of Human Genetics, CHU Sart-Tilman, University of Liège, Belgium Clinical Genetics, Department of Human Genetics, CHU Sart-Tilman, University of Liège, Belgium Department of Pathology, CHU Sart-Tilman, University of Liège, Belgium Department of Gynecology-Obstetrics, CHR Citadelle, Liège, Belgium Department of Medical Imaging, CHR Citadelle, Liège, Belgium Laboratory Genetic Metabolic Diseases, Academic Medical Center, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Metabolic Unit, Department of Human Genetics, CHU Sart-Tilman, University of Liège, Belgium *Correspondence to: François-Guillaume Debray. E-mail: fg.debray@chu.ulg. ac.be
Role of the cytoskeleton during early development

Oocytes, eggs, and embryos from a diverse array of species have evolved cytoskeletal specializations which allow them to meet the needs of early embryogenesis. While each species studied possesses one or more specializations which are unique, several cytoskeletal features are widely conserved across different animal phyla. These features include highly‐developed cortical cytoskeletal domains associated with developmental information, microtubule‐mediated pronuclear transport, and rapid intracellular signal‐regulated control of cytoskeletal organization. © 1992 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Chloroquine reduces blood pressure and forearm vascular resistance and increases forearm blood flow in healthy young adults.

The effects of chloroquine on resting blood pressure, forearm blood flow (FBF), and forearm vascular resistance (FVR) and on the responses to cold stimulation were studied in healthy young adults. Chloroquine sulphate (800 mg) reduced systolic pressure and increased FBF (P < 0.05) but had no effect on resting FVR. Cold immersion increased systolic pressure (from 108.8 +/- 1.7 mmHg to 127.8 +/- 6.9 mmHg; P < 0.05) diastolic pressure (from 73.4 +/- 2.7 to 95.2 +/- 6.2 mmHg; P < 0.01) and FVR (from 5.9 +/- 0.9 to 13.0 +/- 1.9 a.u.; P < 0.001) but reduced FBF (from 14.3 +/- 1.64 to 10.1 +/- 1.29 ml min-1; P < 0.05). Chloroquine reduced the increase in FVR reduced by cold stimulation (P < 0.01), but had little effect on the BF and FBF responses to cold stimulation. The hypotensive effect of chloroquine could be attributed, at least in part, to the observed fall in vascular resistance.
Communication Confidence in Persons with Aphasia

Abstract Communication confidence is a construct that has not been explored in the aphasia literature. Recently, national and international organizations have endorsed broader assessment methods that address quality of life and include participation, activity, and impairment domains as well as psychosocial areas. Individuals with aphasia encounter difficulties in all these areas on a daily basis in living with a communication disorder. Improvements are often reflected in narratives that are not typically included in standard assessments. This article illustrates how a new instrument measuring communication confidence might fit into a broad assessment framework and discusses the interaction of communication confidence, autonomy, and self-determination for individuals living with aphasia.
Theory and practice of error control codes

algorithmics and modular computations, Theory of Codes and Cryptography (3). From an analytical 1. RE Blahut. Theory and practice of error control codes. eecs.uottawa. ca/∼yongacog/courses/coding/ (3) R.E. Blahut,Theory and Practice of Error Control Codes, Addison Wesley, 1983. QA 268. Cached. Download as a PDF 457, Theory and Practice of Error Control CodesBlahut 1984 (Show Context). Citation Context.ontinued fractions.
Formal verification of a snoop-based cache coherence protocol using symbolic model checking

Formal verification of cache coherence in a multiprocessor environment is essential in ascertaining the validity of a cache coherence protocol. Although a number of cache coherence verification techniques are available, very few authors have reported results on verification of cache coherence protocols using symbolic model checking. In this paper we present the verification of a three state snoop-based cache coherence protocol using model checking in VIS. As symbolic model checking is beset with the state explosion problem, directly verifying the protocol for a large number of processors is infeasible. We have developed a set of modeling strategies that we found useful in verifying cache coherence of two to five processor configurations. In this paper, we report the techniques we adopted in modeling and verifying the protocol.
The Economic Significance of Orthopaedic Infections

Musculoskeletal infections are a leading cause of patient morbidity and rising healthcare expenditures. The incidence of musculoskeletal infections, including soft-tissue infections, periprosthetic joint infection, and osteomyelitis, is increasing. Cases involving both drug-resistant bacterial strains and periprosthetic joint infection in total hip and total knee arthroplasty are particularly costly and represent a growing economic burden for the American healthcare system. With the institution of the Affordable Care Act, there has been an increasing drive in the United States toward rewarding healthcare organizations for their quality of care, bundling episodes of care, and capitating approaches to managing populations. In current reimbursement models, complications following the index event, including infection, are not typically reimbursed, placing the burden of caring for infections on the physician, hospital, or accountable care organization. Without the ability to risk-stratify patient outcomes based on patient comorbidities that are associated with a higher incidence of musculoskeletal infection, healthcare organizations are disincentivized to care for moderate- to high-risk patients. Reducing the cost of treating musculoskeletal infection also depends on incentivizing innovations in infection prevention.