Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Non-invasive ventilation in acute respiratory failure

INTRODUCTION Nomenclature Non-invasive ventilation (NIV) refers to the provision of ventilatory support through the patient’s upper airway using a mask or similar device. This technique is distinguished from those which bypass the upper airway with a tracheal tube, laryngeal mask, or tracheostomy and are therefore considered invasive. In this document NIV refers to non-invasive positive pressure ventilation, and other less commonly used techniques such as external negative pressure or rocking beds will not be discussed. (NIPPV is an alternative abbreviation but it is more cumbersome and involves ambiguity as to whether “N” is for “non-invasive” or “nasal”.) Continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) in this document refers to the non-invasive application of positive airway pressure, again using a face or nasal mask rather than in conjunction with invasive techniques. Although it might be open to debate as to whether the use of non-invasive CPAP in acute respiratory failure constitutes ventilatory support, it is included in this document because of the confusion which commonly arises between NIV and CPAP in clinical practice.
Labeling of active neural circuits in vivo with designed calcium integrators

Taking a snapshot of active brain circuitry Neuroscientists now have a method to mark active populations of neurons in vivo to study circuit activity in the behaving animal. Fosque et al. designed and thoroughly validated a fluorescent protein–based reagent that allows permanent marking of active cells over short time scales. This indicator, termed CaMPARI, switches from its native green to a red fluorescent state by simultaneous illumination with violet light and exposure to increased levels of intracellular calcium. CaMPARI successfully marked active nerve cells in Drosophila, zebrafish, and mouse brains. Science, this issue p. 755 A fluorescent sensor allows cellular-resolution snapshots of activity across the whole brains of freely moving organisms. The identification of active neurons and circuits in vivo is a fundamental challenge in understanding the neural basis of behavior. Genetically encoded calcium (Ca2+) indicators (GECIs) enable quantitative monitoring of cellular-resolution activity during behavior. However, such indicators require online monitoring within a limited field of view. Alternatively, post hoc staining of immediate early genes (IEGs) indicates highly active cells within the entire brain, albeit with poor temporal resolution. We designed a fluorescent sensor, CaMPARI, that combines the genetic targetability and quantitative link to neural activity of GECIs with the permanent, large-scale labeling of IEGs, allowing a temporally precise “activity snapshot” of a large tissue volume. CaMPARI undergoes efficient and irreversible green-to-red conversion only when elevated intracellular Ca2+ and experimenter-controlled illumination coincide. We demonstrate the utility of CaMPARI in freely moving larvae of zebrafish and flies, and in head-fixed mice and adult flies.
A Problem in Permutations: the Game of 'Mousetrap'

Abstract The game of 'Mousetrap, a problem in permutations, first introduced by Arthur Cayley in 1857 and independently addressed by Cayley and Adolph Steen in 1878, has been largely unexamined since. The game involves permutations of n cards numbered consecutively from 1 to n . The cards are laid out face up in some order and the game is played by counting on the cards, beginning the count with 1. If at any time the number of the count matches the number on the card, this is called a hit and the card is thrown out. The counting begins again with 1 on the next card and returns to the first card when the n th card is reached. Each time a card is hit, that card is removed and the counting starts over at 1. The game continues until all the cards have been hit and thrown out (the player wins) or until the counting reaches n with no cards having been hit (the cards win). The game is re-introduced here and a summary of both Cayley's and Steen's work is presented. Computer programs, written to generate the types of permutations dealt with by Steen, uncovered discrepancies in his work. Further examination of these discrepancies lead to the discovery of a combinatorial pattern of coefficients which Steen was unable to recognize because of his computational errors. Corrected versions of Steen's erroneous formulas are presented.
Peer Physical Aggression and Its Association With Aggressive Beliefs, Empathy, Self-Control, and Cooperation Skills Among Students in a Rural Town of China

This study explored the prevalence of peer physical aggression (PPA) and its association with aggressive beliefs, empathy, self-control, and cooperation skills among 1,719 7th-to-9th-grade students in a rural town in the central China province of Henan. The data were collected by the self-administered questionnaire anonymously. Results showed that 17.9% of the students reported that they had one or more times of physical aggressive behaviors toward their peers in the past 12 months. The reported rate of PPA was significantly higher in boys (24.7%) than in girls (10.7%). After adjusting the factors of gender and grade, result of logistic regression analysis showed that having a higher level of aggressive beliefs was PPA risk factor; a higher level of self-control was protective factor, but there were no significant association between PPA and the factors of empathy and cooperation skills. These results indicated that helping students to decrease their aggressive beliefs and to improve their self-control skill would aid in the prevention of youth violence.
Academic Achievement, Violent Victimization, and Bullying Among U.S. High School Students

The authors examined the relationship between adolescents’ experiences with violent victimization and academic achievement. Data from the 2009 Youth Risk Behavior Survey were analyzed for males (N = 8,537) and females (N = 7,816). Multinomial logistic regression analyses were employed to estimate the relationship between academic achievement and violent victimization. Among males and females, 6.6% and 4.4%, respectively, earned grades of mostly Ds or Fs during the past year. Among males, those earning mostly Ds or Fs had an increased odds of having been injured in a fight (adjusted odds ratio [OR] = 2.2, 95% confidence interval [95% CI]: 1.5-3.3) or threatened at school (OR = 2.0, 95% CI: 1.3-2.9) when compared to males who earned mostly As or Bs. Moreover, those who earned mostly Cs were at increased odds of having been threatened at school when compared to males who earned mostly As or Bs (OR = 1.4, 95% CI: 1.1-1.9). Among females, those earning mostly Ds or Fs had a higher odds of having been bullied at school (OR = 1.6, 95% CI: 1.1-2.3 ), threatened at school (OR = 1.5, 95% CI: 1.1-2.3), or violently victimized by an intimate partner (OR = 2.0, 95% CI: 1.4-3.0) when compared to females who earned mostly As or Bs. Similar findings were observed when examining females earning mostly C grades. Academic achievement is linked to victimization patterns among male and female adolescents. Although the temporality of the relationship is unclear, the strength of the associations increase as academic achievement decreases.
Motzkin Numbers

In this paper Motzkin numbersMn(which are related to Catalan numbers) are studied. The (known) connection to Tchebychev polynomials is discussed with applications to the Hankel matrices of Motzkin numbers. It is shown that the sequenceMnis logarithmically concave with limMn+1/Mn=3. Finally, two ballot-number type sequences forMnare derived, with an application to directed animals.
Full crop protection from an insect pest by expression of long double-stranded RNAs in plastids

Bypassing a plant's defense for pest defense Colorado potato beetles can skeletonize the leaves on a potato plant, devastating crop yields. Insecticides are increasingly useless as the beetle evolves resistance. Zhang et al. used RNA interference to take down this beetle (see the Perspective by Whyard). Success required shifting production of the double-stranded RNA to the plastids to evade the plant's own RNA management mechanisms. The insect's own RNA interference mechanisms then inactivated two everyday genes that the beetle can't do without. Science, this issue p. 991; see also p. 950 Insect-targeted RNAs expressed in chloroplasts avoid degradation and can protect potato plants from the Colorado potato beetle. [Also see Perspective by Whyard] Double-stranded RNAs (dsRNAs) targeted against essential genes can trigger a lethal RNA interference (RNAi) response in insect pests. The application of this concept in plant protection is hampered by the presence of an endogenous plant RNAi pathway that processes dsRNAs into short interfering RNAs. We found that long dsRNAs can be stably produced in chloroplasts, a cellular compartment that appears to lack an RNAi machinery. When expressed from the chloroplast genome, dsRNAs accumulated to as much as 0.4% of the total cellular RNA. Transplastomic potato plants producing dsRNAs targeted against the β-actin gene of the Colorado potato beetle, a notorious agricultural pest, were protected from herbivory and were lethal to its larvae. Thus, chloroplast expression of long dsRNAs can provide crop protection without chemical pesticides.
67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, a Jupiter family comet with a high D/H ratio

The provenance of water and organic compounds on Earth and other terrestrial planets has been discussed for a long time without reaching a consensus. One of the best means to distinguish between different scenarios is by determining the deuterium-to-hydrogen (D/H) ratios in the reservoirs for comets and Earth’s oceans. Here, we report the direct in situ measurement of the D/H ratio in the Jupiter family comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko by the ROSINA mass spectrometer aboard the European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft, which is found to be (5.3 ± 0.7) × 10−4—that is, approximately three times the terrestrial value. Previous cometary measurements and our new finding suggest a wide range of D/H ratios in the water within Jupiter family objects and preclude the idea that this reservoir is solely composed of Earth ocean–like water.
Adaptive Thresholds for Robust Face Detection with a Short Cascade of Classifiers

In this paper we present the preliminary results of our research on face detection which show that it is possible to significantly improve the performance of a single strong classifier (in terms of high detection rate and reduced number of false positives) by adapting the detection threshold to each input image instead of using the fixed thresholds learned in the training step. Moreover, if this adaptive thresholds are used at the last stage of a short cascade of classifiers (less than 5 stages in all), we show that the performance of the cascade is close to that of a longer 'classical' cascade, while its computational cost is much lower.
Age‐related changes in rat colon mechanics

To determine whether myogenic factors are responsible for slowed colonic transit in senescent rats, maximum shortening velocity (V0), compliance of the series elastic component (SEC), measurements of passive force in calcium‐depleted tissue and peak isometric force (F0) were examined in proximal and distal colonic circular smooth muscle from 6‐ and 30‐monthold Fischer rats (n = 5). After mucosa was removed, measurements were made on strips stimulated with 80 m>m KCl in a 2.5 m>m Ca2+ Kreb's solution. Muscle strips were quick released at peak isometric force (F0) to afterloads of 60% of F0. The changes in muscle length from zero to 40 msec and 1 to 2 sec after release during isotonic contraction were used to calculate the SEC and V0 as a fraction of total muscle length. Passive force (Fp) was measured in 2.5 m>m Ca2+ Kreb's solution and in a zero Ca2+, 0.1 m>m EGTA solution to determine the contribution of contractile and passive elements to passive force. The results of these studies indicate there is no difference in the V0 (L0/sec) of adult (8.4 ± 1.5) and aged (7.5 ± 2.0) animals (P ± 0.05). Peak force (F0) in the distal colon of the aged rats was greater than adult rats (1.23 ± 0.1 vs 0.85 ± 0.01 kg/cm2, P = 0.05). The stiffness of the parallel elastic component and the length‐tension relationship were similar in adult and aged animals. Negligible decreases in Fp were observed in zero calcium medium. However, basal contractile tone was elevated in aged animals (P = 0.05). These studies indicate basic differences in aged colonic circular muscle that may contribute to altered bowel transit and function during ageing.
A Retweet Network Analysis of the European Parliament

Social media analytics is increasingly used to uncover underlying real-world phenomena. The goal of this paper is to evaluate the role of Twitter in identifying communities of influence when the "ground truth" is known. We consider the European Parliament (EP) Twitter users during a period of eight months, in which they posted over 370,000 tweets. We define influence as a retweet relation between two Twitter users. We construct two networks of influence: (i) core, where both users are EP members, and (ii) extended, where one user can be outside the EP. We detect communities in both networks and compare them to the "ground truth": the political group and country of the EP members. The results show that the core network closely matches the political orientation, while the extended network reflects the country of origin. This provides empirical evidence that the formation of retweet networks and community detection are appropriate tools to reveal the actual relationships, and can therefore be used to uncover hidden properties when the "ground truth" is not known.
Scale Invariant Descriptor for Content Based Image Retrieval in Biomedical Applications

Content based image retrieval (CBIR) is an application of computer vision which tackles the problem of recovering images in large datasets based on a similarity criterion. The role of CBIR in biomedical field is potentially very important, since every day large volumes of different types of images are produced. An effective and reliable CBIR system can help the decision-making process and support the diagnosis made by the clinician, thanks to the possibility to analyze images similar to the one under test. Many successful CBIR systems use features based on local descriptors for image retrieval. In this work, a Bag-of-Words encoding paradigm based on the Scale Invariant Descriptor (SID) is used to extract robust features from the images. For the evaluation of the proposed technique, three datasets in biomedical field have been used: OASIS, which is an MRI dataset, Emphysema and NEMA, which are instead CT datasets. In order to evaluate the effectiveness and the reliability of the proposed technique also in other application fields, some experiments have been carried out on the ORL facial image dataset, used for biometric applications. The results show that the proposed technique outperforms or is comparable to state-of-art CBIR techniques.
Avaliação dos efeitos de um programa sensório-motor no padrão da marcha de idosas

INTRODUCTION: Many changes that take place with aging have an impact of a functional nature and result, as one of the most important consequences, in disorders in the gait pattern of the elderly. OBJECTIVES: To evaluate the effectiveness of a sensorial-motor program on the gait pattern of elderly females. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Fulfilling the exclusion and inclusion criteria, a group of volunteers was formed comprised of 15 elderly females who were submitted to analysis of the marching pattern by videometry, whose images were processed by the software DgeeMe 1.0. After that, they were submitted to a sensorial-motor training, by means of a circuit which included eight exercise stations with proprioceptive and balance stimuli. The frequency of training was three weekly sessions with duration of 30 minutes, for two months. Then, a new analysis of the gait was carried out, considering the temporal and spatial components. RESULTS: In spite of the improvement in the temporal and spatial components of the gait, a statistical significance was verified only for the result observed in the variable of length of step (p = 0.02). CONCLUSION: It was concluded that the sensorial-motor training, even though it is able to improve the balance of the elderly subject, bringing her safety to develop the gait, can not affect this function directly in its biomechanical aspects.
Representing and Visualizing Fluid Flow Images and Velocimetry Data by Nonlinear Dynamical Systems

Abstract Nonlinear phase portraits are employed to represent the streamlines of scalar flow images generated by particle tracing experiments. The flow fields are decomposed into simple component flows based on the critical point behavior. A Taylor series model is assumed for the velocity components, and the model coefficients are computed by considering both local critical point and global flow field behavior. A merge and split procedure for complex flows is presented, in which patterns of neighboring critical point regions are combined and modeled. The concepts are extended to the compression of vector field data by using orthogonal polynomials derived from the Taylor series model. A critical point scheme and a block transform are presented. They are applied to velocity fields measured in particle image velocimetry experiments and generated by computer simulations. Compression ratios ranging from 15:1 to 100:1 are achieved.
Directional Moving Averaging Interpolation for Texture Mapping

Abstract In texture mapping, several filtering techniques have been proposed which allow prefiltering of a texture. It has been demonstrated that the shape-variant filter kernel has better performance than its shape-invariant counterpart. However, the conventional shape-variant filtering in which the filtering area is warping-based uses the same kernel for high-detail areas as for low-detail areas of the image in texture space. In this paper we propose a hybrid interpolation filtering method for texture mapping which is based on content-based space-variant directional filtering concepts. First, we classify the local image area in the texture space into three types of blocks: constant, oriented, and irregular blocks. Second, for constant and irregular blocks, we use local average filtering and elliptical weighted average (EWA) filtering, respectively. Third, for oriented blocks, we propose a new filtering method called elliptical weighted adaptive directional moving average (EWADMA) filtering. In the experiments, we show that our method may recover the distorted images with better subjective quality.
Finding the Minimal Set of Maximum Disks for Binary Objects

A two-dimensional binary object can be totally covered by a set of disks. From this follows that any object might be represented by these disks rather than by the pixels. This paper deals with the problem of finding the most efficient version of this representation which is called the minimal set of maximum disks (MSD). The proposed algorithm picks candidate disks from the local maxima in the Euclidean distance transform. Then a relation table for the pixel coverage of these disks is estabished, but only for the border pixels which makes the table size reasonable. Three basic table reduction steps are executed to extract and include necessary disks to MSD while eliminating and excluding the unnecessary disks.
The Elderly Fall Risk Assessment and Prediction Based on Gait Analysis

In this paper, a cell phone and a three dimension accelerometer are used to develop a simple fall risk prediction system. Accelerometer offers a practical and low cost method of objectively monitoring human walking. This paper gives the gait stability and gait symmetry definition only under the data conditions of acceleration. According to the gait model, the stability and symmetry of gait are analyzed and calculated, at last not only the individual's gait can be evaluated, but it also constituted a gait assessment model. The proposed gait assessment model can be used to predict the fall risk of walking subject. The experiment results show that this method achieved better performance of prediction and efficiency.
A Content Validity Study of the Pediatric Evaluation of Disability Inventory

The Pediatric Evaluation of Disability (PEDI) was developed as a comprehensive functional assessment instrument for pediatric rehabilitation. The PEDI samples content in the domains of self-care, mobility, toileting, and social cognition. These content domains are evaluated by three separate scales: 1) functional skills/behaviors, 2) caregiver assistance of complex activities, and 3) environmental modifications and equipment. The PEDI can be used as a parent report/structured interview instrument or by professionals observing the child's functional behavior in a hospital, outpatient, or educational setting. This article describes the development edition (pilot) of the PEDI and includes a report of a content validity study with 31 expert reviewers. Overall, the content validity and feasibility of the PEDI were supported. Revisions made in the standardization version of the PEDI based on the content validity study are discussed.
Femoral component rotation during total knee arthroplasty

One-hundred consecutive posterior cruciate retaining total knee arthroplasties were performed by one surgeon in 81 patients with an average age of 69 years. Diagnoses included osteoarthritis in 93 knees and rheumatoid arthritis in seven. The femoral alignment necessary to create a rectangular flexion gap was determined and compared with Whiteside's line, the transepicondylar axis, and a line in 3° external rotation relative to the posterior condyles of the femur. The transepicondylar axis most consistently recreated a balanced flexion space whereas 3° external rotation off the posterior condyles was least consistent especially in knees in valgus.
Effects of Poly-Victimization on Adolescent Social Support, Self-Concept, and Psychological Distress

Past research has demonstrated the particularly damaging effects of exposure to multiple forms of victimization, or “poly-victimization,” on youth mental health. The primary objective of the present study is to begin to identify the mechanisms that help explain its powerful impact. Analyses are based on two waves of longitudinal data from the National Survey of Children’s Exposure to Violence (NatSCEV), conducted in 2008 and 2010, that comprised a telephone sample of 1,186 youth ages 10 to 17. Using structural equation modeling, we examine direct and indirect effects on distress symptoms of increased, decreased, and stable high poly-victimization between Waves 1 and 2 compared to no or low victimization in both waves. Specifically, we consider the extent to which reductions in core psychosocial resources, including family support, peer support, self-esteem, and mastery, mediate the relationship between these poly-victimization conditions and distress. Relative to stable low victimization, both increased poly-victimization and stable high poly-victimization were associated with declines in all four resources. However, only self-esteem and mastery significantly mediated the association between poly-victimization and distress, with mastery showing the strongest effect. Although significant indirect effects were evident, poly-victimization still had a strong direct effect on distress with resource factors controlled. Findings support the hypothesis that the potent effect of poly-victimization on youth mental health is, in part, due to its damaging influence on core psychosocial resources.