Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Hypertension Programmed in Adult Hens by Isolated Effects of Developmental Hypoxia In Ovo

Supplemental Digital Content is available in the text. In mammals, pregnancy complicated by chronic hypoxia can program hypertension in the adult offspring. However, mechanisms remain uncertain because the partial contributions of the challenge on the placenta, mother, and fetus are difficult to disentangle. Here, we used chronic hypoxia in the chicken embryo—an established model system that permits isolation of the direct effects of developmental hypoxia on the cardiovascular system of the offspring, independent of additional effects on the mother or the placenta. Fertilized chicken eggs were exposed to normoxia (N; 21% O2) or hypoxia (H; 13.5%–14% O2) from the start of incubation (day 0) until day 19 (hatching, ≈day 21). Following hatching, all birds were maintained under normoxic conditions until ≈6 months of adulthood. Hypoxic incubation increased hematocrit (+27%) in the chicken embryo and induced asymmetrical growth restriction (body weight, −8.6%; biparietal diameter/body weight ratio, +7.5%) in the hatchlings (all P<0.05). At adulthood (181±4 days), chickens from hypoxic incubations remained smaller (body weight, −7.5%) and showed reduced basal and stimulated in vivo NO bioavailability (pressor response to NG-nitro-L-arginine methyl ester, −43%; phenylephrine pressor response during NO blockade, −61%) with significant hypertension (mean arterial blood pressure, +18%), increased cardiac work (ejection fraction, +12%; fractional shortening, +25%; enhanced baroreflex gain, +456%), and left ventricular wall thickening (left ventricular wall volume, +36%; all P<0.05). Therefore, we show that chronic hypoxia can act directly on a developing embryo to program hypertension, cardiovascular dysfunction, and cardiac wall remodeling in adulthood in the absence of any maternal or placental effects.
In vivo imaging of synaptic SV2A protein density in healthy and striatal-lesioned rats with [11C]UCB-J PET

The number of functionally active synapses provides a measure of neural integrity, with reductions observed in neurodegenerative disorders. [11C]UCB-J binds to synaptic vesicle 2A (SV2A) transmembrane protein located in secretory vesicles. We aimed to assess [11C]UCB-J PET as an in vivo biomarker of regional cerebral synaptic SV2A density in rat lesion models of neurodegeneration. Healthy anesthetized rats had [11C]UCB-J PET and arterial blood sampling. We compared different models describing [11C]UCB-J brain uptake kinetics to determine its regional distribution. Blocking studies were performed with levetiracetam (LEV), an antiepileptic SV2A antagonist. Tracer binding was measured in rodent unilateral acute lesion models of Parkinsonism and Huntington’s disease, induced with 6-hydroxydopamine (6-OHDA) and quinolinic acid (QA), respectively. [3H]UCB-J autoradiography was performed in postmortem tissue. Rat brain showed high and fast [11C]UCB-J uptake and washout with up to 80% blockade by LEV. [11C]UCB-J PET showed a 6.2% decrease in ipsilateral striatal SV2A binding after 6-OHDA and 39.3% and 55.1% decreases after moderate and high dose QA confirmed by autoradiography. In conclusion, [11C]UCB-J PET provides a good in vivo marker of synaptic SV2A density which can potentially be followed longitudinally along with synaptic responses to putative neuroprotective agents in models of neurodegeneration.
A Systems Theoretic Process Analysis of the Medication Use Process in the Operating Room

Background: While 4 to 10% of medications administered in the operating room may involve an error, few investigations have prospectively modeled how these errors might occur. Systems theoretic process analysis is a prospective risk analysis technique that uses systems theory to identify hazards. The purpose of this study was to demonstrate the use of systems theoretic process analysis in a healthcare organization to prospectively identify causal factors for medication errors in the operating room. Methods: The authors completed a systems theoretic process analysis for the medication use process in the operating room at their institution. First, the authors defined medication-related accidents (adverse medication events) and hazards and created a hierarchical control structure (a schematic representation of the operating room medication use system). Then the authors analyzed this structure for unsafe control actions and causal scenarios that could lead to medication errors, incorporating input from surgeons, anesthesiologists, and pharmacists. The authors studied the entire medication use process, including requesting medications, dispensing, preparing, administering, documenting, and monitoring patients for the effects. Results were reported using descriptive statistics. Results: The hierarchical control structure involved three tiers of controllers: perioperative leadership; management of patient care by the attending anesthesiologist, surgeon, and pharmacist; and execution of patient care by the anesthesia clinician in the operating room. The authors identified 66 unsafe control actions linked to 342 causal scenarios that could lead to medication errors. Eighty-two (24.0%) scenarios came from perioperative leadership, 103 (30.1%) from management of patient care, and 157 (45.9%) from execution of patient care. Conclusions: In this study, the authors demonstrated the use of systems theoretic process analysis to describe potential causes of errors in the medication use process in the operating room. Causal scenarios were linked to controllers ranging from the frontline providers up to the highest levels of perioperative management. Systems theoretic process analysis is uniquely able to analyze management and leadership impacts on the system, making it useful for guiding quality improvement initiatives. A systems theoretic process analysis identified unsafe control actions linked to causal scenarios that could lead to medication errors. Scenarios came from perioperative leadership, management of patient care and execution of patient care. Supplemental Digital Content is available in the text.
Individual- and clinic-level factors associated with achieving glycemic control in a large cohort of people with HIV in care-Washington, D.C.

BACKGROUND Optimal management of non-communicable diseases, including Diabetes Mellitus (DM), is crucially important as people with HIV (PWH) live longer with antiretroviral therapy (ART). Our objective was to assess patient-and clinic-level factors associated with achieving a hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) ≤7.0% among PWH and DM. SETTING The DC Cohort, an observational clinical cohort of PWH, followed from 2011-2019 at 12 sites in Washington, DC. METHODS Among PWH with diagnosed DM and an elevated HbA1c (> 7.0%), we examined the association between achieving an HbA1c ≤7.0% and demographic and clinical factors, including time-updated medication data, and clinic-level factors related to services and structure. A multilevel marginal extended Cox regression model was generated to identify factors associated with time to HbA1c ≤7.0%. RESULTS Over half (52.3%) of 419 participants achieved an HbA1c ≤7.0%. Individual-level factors associated with HbA1c ≤7.0% included a diagnosis of DM after enrollment, and a longer time since HIV diagnosis (HR=2.65 and 1.13, p<0.05 for both). Attending a clinic with an endocrinologist was associated with the outcome (aHR=1.41 95%CI [1.01,1.97]). Additionally, comparing clinics that treat everyone, refer everyone, or have a mix of treating and referring, showed an association between attending a clinic that treats everyone (aHR=1.52 95%CI [1.21,1.90]), or a clinic that refers everyone (aHR=2.24 95%CI [1.63,3.07]) compared to clinics with a mix in achieving glycemic control. CONCLUSION Multiple factors are associated with achieving glycemic control in an urban cohort of PWH. Determining if specific services or structures improve DM outcomes may improve health outcomes for PWH and DM.
Endoscopic management of stricturing Crohn's disease

The natural history of Crohn's disease (CD) usually begins with primary intestinal inflammation, which progresses gradually to stricturing lesions. Stricture is a complicated, intractable but very common clinical problem in the management of CD. Difficulties remain in treating stricturing CD because of the limited efficacy of drug therapy and relapse of stricturing lesions cannot be completely avoided by surgery. Endoscopic management is a bridging therapy between drug therapy and surgical intervention, mainly including endoscopic balloon dilatation and endoscopic stricturotomy, and has been found to be effective for treating stricturing CD. Its explicit curative effect, less invasiveness and high safety performance make endoscopic management more acceptable by both the physician and patient. Although some patients require repeated endoscopic treatment and ultimately cannot avoid surgery, yet it can significantly delay the time to surgery and improve the quality of life. Physicians carrying out the endoscopic procedure need to be trained for performing this procedure. In this review we summarized the diagnosis and endoscopic treatment of stricturing CD.
Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling in Online Shopping: the Moderator Effect Between Impulsive Buying Tendency and Behavior

Single’s Daywas first promoted by Alibaba's shopping website on November 11, 2009. Ten years later, Taobao successfully developed this day into a global carnival shopping festival. This research focuses on undergraduate business school students through online questionnaires across the Taiwan Strait. This study is based on five impact factors, including impulse buying tendencies, herd behavior, website features, promotional techniques and impulse buying behavior. No evidence showed that gender, age and monthly disposable income affect students’ buying behavior. This study also found that herd behavior, website features and promotional techniques are moderator effects between impulse buying tendency and impulse buying behavior. We also proved that website design and the opinions of their peers affect consumers' decision aking. According to the analysis, in the current online shopping environment, operators should pay more attention to herd behavior, website features and promotional techniques. This study suggests that the industry should provide sufficient information to reduce emotional conflict, and use these important factors to attract consumers' future purchases.
The LDP in Digital Business Startups: The Case of raiserve

Uncertainty in the early development of digital business startups can benefit from data-driven testing of hypotheses. Examining literature in lean startups, lean user experience and lean software development, we highlight underlying assumptions of existing lean models. We conceptualize the Lean Discovery Process that recognizes that uncertainty arises in the business model, product and customer/market. The Lean Discovery Process focuses on testing from the early business idea through to fully realized product stages of an innovation development. We conceptualize the minimum viable customer and support early testing with concepts from market research and collective intelligence. Using the case of raiserve, a social entrepreneurship venture, we demonstrate early opportunities to apply lean principles and rigorous hypothesis testing in a Lean Discovery Process that results in significant reductions in time and expense of product development.
Influence of Peer Interaction through Peer Components on Talent Identification for Players in Rugby Clubs in Kenya

The quality of the relationship between adolescents and their peers, as well as the type of peers they associate with, play important roles in aiding or impeding their career choices. The influence of peer interaction through peer components have, however, not been examined in talent identification amongst rugby players in Kenya. The objective of this study therefore was to investigate the influence of peer components on talent identification for players in rugby clubs in Kenya. The peer components included rugby being viewed as a prestigious sport, on the basis of social interaction and as a health and fitness gain. Data were collected using Questionnaires and interviews from rugby players (n= 125) and coaches (n=15) during the 2018/2019 Kenya Rugby Union league competition. Data were analyzed through both descriptive and inferential statistics of Chisquare test of independent measures. The study concluded that the peer components had a significant influence on talent identification for rugby players in Kenya. In addition, the most influential peer component was identified as health and fitness gains from the findings. The study recommends the use of friends as a key socio-economic variable for talent identification for rugby clubs in Kenya. Other studies involving other socio-cultural components that are likely to impact on talent identification like family, coaches, schools, club infrastructure, need to be conducted
PyTorchFI: A Runtime Perturbation Tool for DNNs

PyTorchFI is a runtime perturbation tool for deep neural networks (DNNs), implemented for the popular PyTorch deep learning platform. PyTorchFI enables users to perform perturbations on weights or neurons of DNNs at runtime. It is designed with the programmer in mind, providing a simple and easy-to-use API, requiring as little as three lines of code for use. It also provides an extensible interface, enabling researchers to choose from various perturbation models (or design their own custom models), which allows for the study of hardware error (or general perturbation) propagation to the software layer of the DNN output. Additionally, PyTorchFI is extremely versatile: we demonstrate how it can be applied to five different use cases for dependability and reliability research, including resiliency analysis of classification networks, resiliency analysis of object detection networks, analysis of models robust to adversarial attacks, training resilient models, and for DNN interpertability. This paper discusses the technical underpinnings and design decisions of PyTorchFI which make it an easy-to-use, extensible, fast, and versatile research tool. PyTorchFI is open-sourced and available for download via pip or github at: https://github.com/pytorchfi
Justification and Theory for a Frequency-Specific Spectral Panning tool based on Duplex Theory

The following paper is an investigation into duplex theory of sound localization and the justification for a spatial audio application based on the theory. Functions and filters are defined for the time/phase differences and the amplitude/spectral differences between each ear caused by sounds originating from a specific location relative to the listener. These transformations are applied within a standalone application created in MATLAB that can take a monoaural sound file, apply a specific spatial characteristic relative to azimuthal angle, elevation angle and head radius, and output a stereo sound file.
Characterizing Whitebark and limber pine Habitat in Alberta: Mapping highly localized tree species across a large study area

The endangered white pines, whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis) and limber pine (Pinus flexilis), are crucial for Alberta alpine ecosystems. A province-wide species distribution map for whitebark and limber pine does not exist and will be important for future management strategies. An initial attempt to model whitebark and limber pine using the pre-existing dataset found that an insufficient density of presence data for the province resulted in an oversimplified, overabundant estimation of whitebark and limber pine presence. To address this, our study conducted ground surveys and acquired high resolution aerial imagery throughout the foothills and mountain ranges of Alberta. This data was analyzed and filtered to produce a large, high-precision inventory of whitebark and limber pine locations in Alberta. Through field observations, aerial photo analysis and extensive literature review, whitebark and limber pine habitat was characterized as having a multivariate dependency on elevation, hillslope profile, hydrologic regime, natural disturbance regime, and the relative abundance of lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta), alpine larch (Larix lyallii), alpine fir (Abies lasiocarpa), and Engelmann spruce (Picea
ASSESSMENT OF POWER TRANSFORMER RELIABILITY

Power transformers are one of the most important parts of power systems and often the most valuable asset in a substation. Understanding how and when transformers are likely to fail is a critical point in the asset management of large networks. Due to aging and inadequate maintenance some critical failures in power transformers may occur. Thus, the aim is to reduce the failure rate as low as possible. One way to minimize failure probability is the analysis of old failures and their conditions in order to understand the reasons for severe failures and to improve maintenance procedures by means of this knowledge. In this contribution the results of a failure data survey of 20 utilities in Germany, Swiss, Austria and the Netherlands based on a newly developed questionnaire are presented. The investigated transformer population covers more than 23800 unit-years and reveals a failure rate of 0.3% for 110kV and 0.6% for 220kV and 380kV for major failures. The hazard curve function shows considerable low failure rates for a transformer age below 30 years. Tap changer and windings are with one third each the main components leading to major failures.
COMPUTATIONALLY EFFICIENT VOICE DIALING SYSTEM A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF ELECTRICAL AND ELECTRONICS ENGINEERING AND THE INSTITUTE OF ENGINEERING AND SCIENCES OF BILKENT UNIVERSITY IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF SCIENCE By

COMPUTATIONALLY EFFICIENT VOICE DIALING SYSTEM Mustafa Hakan Solmaz M.S. in Electrical and Electronics Engineering Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Enis Çetin September 1998 Subband based feature parameters are becoming widely used for speech recognition purposes. In this thesis a subband-based, small-vocabulary, speaker-dependent, isolated-word recognition system is proposed. The most distinctive property of the proposed system is its low computational cost which enables it to run at real-time on a simple microcontroller. The system is used as the core of a voice dialer which is designed to work together with Karel switchboxes. In training section first, an energy-based endpoint (startingpoint) detection method is applied for speech detection. Then feature extraction is applied on a fixed length, pcm-quantized (a-law) speech long enough to cover a single word. In recognition section template matching is used to find the most likely vocabulary element. A recognition rate of 93% is obtained in the simulations.
Research on Factors Influencing University Teachers’ Acceptance of Blended Learning in a Selected University in China

— Teachers are considered to play a key role in implementing the blended learning method. This study intends to explore the factors that will influence teacher’s acceptance of blended learning based on the theory of innovation diffusion. 191 teachers from a selected university in China participated in the study. The data collected were analyzed using SPSS 24.0. The results of regression analysis show that school support, perceived ease of use, compatibility, relative advantage, and communication channels contribute to university teachers’ acceptance of blended learning. Recommendations and suggestions are proposed to promote the level of teachers’ acceptance of blended learning in Chinese universities.
Spatially and temporally resolved electron density measurements in streamers in dielectric liquids

Spatially and temporally resolved spectroscopic measurements of light emitted from positive streamers in transformer oil are presented. Analyses of the measurements performed with a DC needle–plane gap yield electron densities and indications of the atomic excitation temperatures in the streamers. The hydrogen emission reveals an electron density below 1016 cm−3 during the main part of the streamer propagation time (80–90%). Later the light is also characterized by emission from a high-density plasma with electron densities in the range 1018–1019 cm−3. The electron density during this time increases approximately linearly with distance from the initiation point and a density factor of four higher has been measured at the streamer tip than at the root. Measurements with high spectral resolution detect both high and low electron densities simultaneously. A tentative model of the interior of the streamer plasma, spatially resolved, is presented.
What do I get out of it? Reflection on the use of incentives for civic engagement

Incentives are a popular element among gamification approaches. They specifically aim to increase people’s motivation in an activity or topic. However, offering incentives and giving out rewards can backfire as they only add to extrinsic motivation and might even replace the intrinsic interest. This paper reflects on the usage of incentives as part of the strategy of gamifying civic engagement in an attempt to foster participation. A case study is presented where the potential impact of offering incentives in a participatory contexts are investigated. The case study is essentially a field trial that has been conducted with a number of participants using/evaluating a pervasive mobile participation application that pushes polls to participants’ devices. We analysed which type of an incentive is the most likely to motivate participants to complete the survey, and whether there is a correlation between a user’s trust in the sending institution and the likelihood of answering the poll. Our findings show that incentives do influence participation. Some participants, however, reported concerns with respect to handling of personal information and location tracking. Based on the results of this study we discuss potential opportunities and challenges of providing incentives in the context of digital participation. We argue that offering those people incentives is not ethical as it resembles persuading them to do something against their will.
Implementation of a new strain split to model unilateral contact within the phase field method

A new orthogonal split of strain tensor into compressive and tensile parts is implemented within the phase field model to mimic unilateral contact condition with which any existing cracks and any crack propagation have to comply. The resulting phase field model offers several advantages as compared to other available schemes. First, it involves rigorous orthogonality between traction and compression parts. Second, it yields remarkably simple, new analytical expressions of the projectors which provide computational saving during the crack propagation simulation. Finally, it can be applied to arbitrary initial elastic anisotropic media, which is not the case of other available strain tensor split operators. A detailed comparison of the fracture responses predicted by the present model and other approaches is provided. It is shown that the present orthogonal decomposition is able to accurately predict experimental results and removes spurious effects found in other schemes for specific loads like compression.