nils-herrmann/clean_scirepeval huggingface dataset:
Recent advances in the treatment of colonic diverticular disease and prevention of acute diverticulitis
Venue: Annals of gastroenterology

The incidence of diverticulosis and diverticular disease of the colon is increasing worldwide. Although the majority of patients remains asymptomatic long life, the prevalence of diverticular disease of the colon, including acute diverticulitis, is substantial and is becoming a significant burden on National Health Systems in terms of direct and indirect costs. Focus is now being drawn on identifying the correct therapeutic approach by testing various treatments. Fiber, non absorbable antibiotics and probiotics seem to be effective in treating symptomatic and uncomplicated patients, and 5 aminosalicylic acid might help prevent acute diverticulitis. Unfortunately, robust evidence on the effectiveness of a medical strategy to prevent acute diverticulitis recurrence is still lacking. We herein provide a concise review on the effectiveness and future perspectives of these treatments.
Probiotics in the Treatment of Diverticular Disease. A Systematic Review.
Venue: Journal of gastrointestinal and liver diseases JGLD

Diverticular disease is a common gastrointestinal condition. Low grade inflammation and altered intestinal microbiota have been identified as factors contributing to abdominal symptoms. Probiotics may lead to symptoms improvement by modifying the gut microbiota and are promising treatments for diverticular disease. The aim of this study was to systematically review the efficacy of probiotics in diverticular disease in terms of remission of abdominal symptoms and prevention of acute diverticulitis.  According to PRISMA, we identified studies on diverticular disease patients treated with probiotics (Pubmed, Embase, Cochrane) The quality of these studies was evaluated by the Jadad scale. Main outcomes measures were remission of abdominal symptoms and prevention of acute diverticulitis.  studies (2 double blind randomized placebo controlled, 5 open randomized, 4 non randomized open studies) were eligible. Overall, diverticular disease patients were 764 (55.1% females, age 58 75 years) Three studies included patients with symptomatic uncomplicated diverticular disease, 4 studies with symptomatic uncomplicated diverticular disease in remission, 4 studies with complicated or acute diverticulitis. Mainly (72.7% single probiotic strains had been used, most frequently Lactobacilli. Follow up ranged from 1 to 24 months. Interventions were variable: in 8 studies the probiotic was administered together with antibiotic or anti inflammatory agents and compared with the efficacy of the drug alone; in 3 studies the probiotic was compared with a high fibre diet or used together with phytoextracts. As an outcome measure, 4 studies evaluated the occurrence rate of acute diverticulitis, 6 studies the reduction of abdominal symptoms, and 6 studies the recurrence of abdominal symptoms. Meta analysis on the efficacy of probiotics in diverticular disease could not be performed due to the poor quality of retrieved studies.  This systematic review showed that high quality data on the efficacy of probiotics in diverticular disease are scant: the available data do not permit conclusions. Further investigation is required to understand how probiotics can be employed in this condition.
Probiotics: assessing health professionals' knowledge and understanding

This article presents the results of a survey of primary care professionals, investigating their understanding and use of probiotics. While probiotics were recommended by 51.6% of the nurses who responded, probiotic recommendation was even higher in dietitians (91.2% and GPs (78% The main occasions for recommending probiotics were: during and after a course of antibiotics; irritable bowel syndrome; diarrhoea; for patients who are run down and susceptible to infection; constipation; diverticulitis; ulcerative colitis; before travel abroad; and for older persons and mothers or babies in families with allergic tendencies. Formulating evidence based decisions for this category of functional foods might be difficult, however, as 33.3% of nurses said they had a poor or nonexistent understanding of probiotics. As scientific evidence for probiotics continues to accumulate, with positive results reported in a wide range of health areas, health professionals need to keep up to date, so that they can advise patients.
Probiotics for the Treatment of Symptomatic Uncomplicated Diverticular Disease: Rationale and Current Evidence.
Venue: Journal of clinical gastroenterology

Changes in the colonic microbiota are critical to the pathogenesis of diverticular complications such as diverticulitis and peridiverticular abscesses. However, more subtle changes in microbiota composition may well be important to the more chronic manifestations of diverticulosis. Some studies have shown the presence of bacterial overgrowth in subgroups of patients with diverticular disease and recent studies, using molecular biology techniques, found an increase of proteobacteria and actinobacteria in patients with symptomatic uncomplicated diverticular disease (SUDD) compared with healthy controls. The use of probiotics to modulate intestinal microecology in SUDD appears therefore rational. Although several investigations evaluating the clinical efficacy of probiotics have been performed, no definitive results have yet been achieved, mainly due to the heterogeneity of the available studies. Most of the studies used probiotics in combination with poorly absorbed antimicrobials or anti inflammatory drugs. In only 4 studies, there was a harm using probiotics alone, but only 1 was a placebo controlled, double blind trial. The analysis of the available evidence reveals a poor quality of the published studies, whose design was heterogeneous, with only 2 out of 11 trials being double blind and randomized. Therefore, available data can only suggest a benefit of probiotics in SUDD, but do not allow any evidence based definite conclusion. As a consequence, current guidelines state that there is insufficient evidence to recommend probiotics for symptom relief in patients with diverticular disease.
What's in an education? Implications of CEO education for bank performance

Exploiting a unique hand built dataset, this paper finds that CEO educational attainment, both level and quality, matters for bank performance. We offer robust evidence that banks led by CEOs with MBAs outperform their peers. Such CEOs improve performance when compensation structures are geared towards greater risk taking incentives, and when banks follow riskier or more innovative business models. Our findings suggest that management education delivers skills enabling CEOs to manage increasingly larger and complex banking firms and achieve successful performance outcomes.
Response to: Reliability and validity of telomere length measurements
Venue: International journal of epidemiology

length varies by DNA extraction method: implications for epidemiologic research. Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2013;22: 2047 54. 24. Hofmann JN, Hutchinson AA, Cawthon R et al. Telomere length varies by DNA extraction method: implications for epidemiologic research letter. Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2014;23:1129 30. 25. Denham J, Marques F, Charchar F. Leukocyte telomere length variation due to DNA extraction method.  Tolios A, Teupser D, Holdt LM. Preanalytical conditions and DNA isolation methods affect telomere length quantification in whole blood.  Substantial variation in qPCR measured mean blood telomere lengths in young men from eleven European countries. Am J Hum Biol 2011;23:228 31. 28. Gardner M, Bann D, Wiley L et al. Gender and telomere length: systematic review and meta analysis.  Inconsistent inheritance of telomere length (TL) is offspring TL more strongly correlated with maternal or paternal TL? Eur J Hum Genet 2014;22:8 9. 30. Haycock PC, Heydon EE, Kaptoge S, Butterworth AS, Thompson A, Willeit P. Leucocyte telomere length and risk of cardiovascular disease: systematic review and meta analysis.  Ridout KK, Ridout SJ, Price LH, Sen S, Tyrka AR. Depression and telomere length: A meta analysis.  A meta analysis. Exp Gerontol 2016;75:53 55. 33. Lin P Y, Huang Y C, Hung C F. Shortened telomere length in patients with depression: a meta analytic study.  Mathur MB, Epel E, Kind S et al. Perceived stress and telomere length: A systematic review, meta analysis, and methodologic considerations for advancing the field. Brain, Behav Immun 2016;54:159 69. 35. Zhu X, Han W, Xue W et al. The association between telomere length and cancer risk in population studies. Sci Rep 2016;6: 22243. 36. Aviv A, Valdes AM, Spector TD. Human telomere biology: pitfalls of moving from the laboratory to epidemiology.  Tests for comparing elements of a correlation matrix.
Microbially Accelerated Carbonate Mineral Precipitation as a Strategy for in Situ Carbon Sequestration and Rehabilitation of Asbestos Mine Sites.
Venue: Environmental science technology

A microbially accelerated process for the precipitation of carbonate minerals was implemented in a sample of serpentinite mine tailings collected from the abandoned Woodsreef Asbestos Mine in New South Wales, Australia as a strategy to sequester atmospheric CO2 while also stabilizing the tailings. Tailings were leached using sulfuric acid in reaction columns and subsequently inoculated with an alkalinity generating cyanobacteria dominated microbial consortium that was enriched from pit waters at the Woodsreef Mine. Leaching conditions that dissolved 14% of the magnesium from the serpentinite tailings while maintaining circumneutral pH (1800 ppm, pH 6.3) were employed in the experiment. The mineralogy, water chemistry, and microbial colonization of the columns were characterized following the experiment. Micro X ray diffraction was used to identify carbonate precipitates as dypingite [Mg5(CO3)4(OH)25H2O] and hydromagnesite [Mg5(CO3)4(OH)24H2O] with minor nesquehonite (MgCO3*3H2O) Scanning electron microscopy revealed that carbonate mineral precipitates form directly on the filamentous cyanobacteria. These findings demonstrate the ability of these organisms to generate localized supersaturating microenvironments of high concentrations of adsorbed magnesium and photosynthetically generated carbonate ions while also acting as nucleation sites for carbonate precipitation. This study is the first step toward implementing in situ carbon sequestration in serpentinite mine tailings via microbial carbonate precipitation reactions.
DeepFood: Deep Learning Based Food Image Recognition for Computer Aided Dietary Assessment
Venue: ICOST

Worldwide, in 2014, more than 1.9 billion adults, 18 years and older, were overweight. Of these, over 600 million were obese. Accurately documenting dietary caloric intake is crucial to manage weight loss, but also presents challenges because most of the current methods for dietary assessment must rely on memory to recall foods eaten. The ultimate goal of our research is to develop computer aided technical solutions to enhance and improve the accuracy of current measurements of dietary intake. Our proposed system in this paper aims to improve the accuracy of dietary assessment by analyzing the food images captured by mobile devices e.g. smartphone. The key technique innovation in this paper is the deep learning based food image recognition algorithms. Substantial research has demonstrated that digital imaging accurately estimates dietary intake in many environments and it has many advantages over other methods. However, how to derive the food information e.g. food type and portion size from food image effectively and efficiently remains a challenging and open research problem. We propose a new Convolutional Neural Network CNN based food image recognition algorithm to address this problem. We applied our proposed approach to two real world food image data sets UEC 256 and Food 101 and achieved impressive results. To the best of our knowledge, these results outperformed all other reported work using these two data sets. Our experiments have demonstrated that the proposed approach is a promising solution for addressing the food image recognition problem. Our future work includes further improving the performance of the algorithms and integrating our system into a real world mobile and cloud computing based system to enhance the accuracy of current measurements of dietary intake.
Rigidity Based Surface Recognition for a Domestic Legged Robot
Venue: IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters

Although the infrared (IR) range and motor force sensors have been rarely applied to the surface recognition of mobile robots, they are fused in this letter with accelerometer and ground contact force sensors to distinguish six indoor surface types. Their sensor values are affected by the crawling gait period, therefore, certain components of the fast Fourier transform over these data are included in the feature vectors as well as remarkable discriminative power is observed for the same scalar statistics of different sensing modalities. The machine learning aspects are analyzed with random forests (RF) because of their stable performance and some inherent, beneficial properties for the model development process. The robustness is evaluated with unseen data after the model accuracy is estimated with cross validation (CV) and regardless whether a Sony ERS 7 walks barefoot or wears socks, the forests achieve 94% accuracy. This result outperforms the state of the art techniques for indoor surfaces in the literature and the classification execution is real time on the robot. The above mentioned model development process with RF is documented to create new models for other robots more quickly and efficiently.
The Japanese Welcome Nonwelcome Ambivalence Syndrome toward MarebitolIjinl Gaijin Strangers: Its Implications for Intercultural Communication Research

The recent rapid expansion of worldwide communication and transportation networks has made it both possible and inevitable for the Japanese to encounter strangers from different racial, ethnic, and sociocultural back grounds not only overseas but also in Japan. Simply encountering them without appropriate preparation, however, does not guarantee expected intercultural understanding; it often causes mutual fear, misunderstanding, and suspicion within people placed in such intercultural communication sit uations. The study of intercultural communication, which describes and explains such daily occurrences and possibly solves problems related to them, has been, through most of its academic history, a predominantly U.S. cen tered enterprise in Japan. These days, therefore, Japanese scholars in the field are growingly expected to contribute non Western thoughts and frames of reference from their Japanese sociocultural background. In this scholarly context, the present study attempts to analyze the conventional sociofolkloric marebitol ijinl gaijin ambivalent predispositions and attitudes toward strangers from different racial, ethnic, and sociocultural backgrounds. It will con tribute from non Euro American perspectives to the revision or improve ment of Western intercultural communication theories and research methods by analyzing the long standing Japanese welcome nonwelcome and inclu sion exclusion ambivalence frequently manifested in their encounters with strange people whose racial, ethnic, and sociocultural backgrounds are differ ent from the average Japanese.
TOWARD A COMMON PROCEDURE USING LIKERT AND LIKERT TYPE SCALES IN SMALL GROUPS COMPARATIVE DESIGN OBSERVATIONS

Often, users' opinions in small groups comparative observations are measured through Likert and Likert type items based questionnaires. Resulting data are analyzed in order to find any statistical difference whether positive or negative among the two conditions. Due to the confusion around Likert scales ordinal or interval nature, how to statistically analyze them, is still an open matter of discussion. Should it be a parametric or non parametric approach? This article analyze the existing literature and propose an approach which aim is to avoid fragmentation in this type of research.
Characterization of Complementary and Alternative Medicine Related Consultations in an Academic Drug Information Service
Venue: Journal of pharmacy practice

To characterize requests received through an academic drug information consultation service related to complementary and alternative medicines.  A retrospective review and descriptive analysis of drug information consultations was conducted.  A total of 195 consultations related to complementary and alternative medicine were evaluated. All consultation requests involved questions about dietary supplements. The most common request types were related to safety and tolerability (39% effectiveness (38% and therapeutic use (34% Sixty eight percent of the requests were from pharmacists. The most frequent consultation requests from pharmacists were questions related to drug interactions (37% therapeutic use (37% or stability/compatibility/storage (34% Nearly 60% of complementary and alternative medicine related consultation requests were able to be completely addressed using available resources. Among review sources, Natural Medicines Comprehensive Database, Clinical Pharmacology, Micromedex, and Pharmacist's Letter were the most common resources used to address consultations.  Utilization of a drug information service may be a viable option for health care professionals to help answer a complementary and alternative medicine related question. Additionally, pharmacists and other health care professionals may consider acquiring resources identified to consistently answering these questions.
The Validation of the Citizen Science Self Efficacy Scale (CSSES)

Citizen science programs provide opportunities for students to help professional scientists while fostering science achievement and motivation. Instruments which measure the effects of this type of programs on student motivational beliefs are limited. The purpose of this study was to describe the process of examining the reliability and validity of The Citizen Science Self Efficacy Scale (CSSES) designed to measure the effectiveness of citizen science programs on student self efficacy for scientific observation skills. Fifteen (n =15) field experts and 248 (n 248) eighth grade students participated in three studies. The results suggest that the psychometric properties of this scale are sufficient. Implications for the development and utility of self efficacy scales in a variety of citizen science contexts are discussed. The aim of the present study is twofold: (a) to establish the psychometric properties of a scale developed to measure student self efficacy beliefs for scientific observations in citizen science programs and (b) to describe the process in the validation of a self efficacy scale to support researchers who want to create their own scales for similar citizen science programs. Three studies were conducted to develop the Citizen Science Scale (CSSES) and evaluate its psychometric properties. The purpose of the CSSES was to develop a measure suitable for analysis within a social cognitive career framework and informal natural science contexts. The findings in the present study found that the measure had an acceptable unitary factorial structure and high internal reliability of .89 for the CSSES. The purpose of the Citizen Science Self Efficacy Scale (CSSES) is to assess individual's beliefs about their capabilities for scientific observational skills. This scale is applicable to measuring individual's self efficacy in outdoor learning contexts (e.g. horseshoe crab citizen science context) Given that self efficacy is a strong predictor of academic achievement and motivation, self efficacy scales like the CSSES may provide a way for stakeholders involved in outdoor education to measure student gains and to substantiate program effectiveness. From a methods standpoint, the contribution of this work is to serve as a guide of how to develop a self efficacy scale.
Knowledge extraction through etymological networks: Synonym discovery in Sino Korean words
Venue: 2016 IEEE International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Applications (ICKEA)

Extracting knowledge from a text is a very active area of research. Techniques such as word embedding and LSA have brought great breakthroughs and have been used in applications such as automatic translation. We propose a novel approach to extract knowledge from text that relies on a graph to express the complex etymological structures formed by the historical roots of words. Our approach is specially fit for the study of Sino Korean vo cabulary, where the etymological roots of words are clearly shown in their writing. We use our approach to build a bipartite graph based on the Chinese etymological roots of Sino Korean words, and then use the network structure to extract features describing pairs of nodes. We used these features in a classification scheme to discover pairs of nodes that represent synonym characters. Our model is simpler than previous work on synonym discovery with Chinese characters, and obtains good results. The code and data for our work are made openly available.
Evolutionary Discovery of Multi relational Association Rules from Ontological Knowledge Bases
Venue: EKAW

In the Semantic Web, OWL ontologies play the key role of domain conceptualizations, while the corresponding assertional knowledge is given by the heterogeneous Web resources referring to them. However, being strongly decoupled, ontologies and assertional knowledge can be out of sync. In particular, an ontology may be incomplete, noisy, and sometimes inconsistent with the actual usage of its conceptual vocabulary in the assertions. Despite of such problematic situations, we aim at discovering hidden knowledge patterns from ontological knowledge bases, in the form of multi relational association rules, by exploiting the evidence coming from the evolving assertional data. The final goal is to make use of such patterns for semi automatically enriching/completing existing ontologies. An evolutionary search method applied to populated ontological knowledge bases is proposed for the purpose. The method is able to mine intensional and assertional knowledge by exploiting problem aware genetic operators, echoing the refinement operators of inductive logic programming, and by taking intensional knowledge into account, which allows to restrict the search space and direct the evolutionary process. The discovered rules are represented in SWRL, so that they can be straightforwardly integrated within the ontology, thus enriching its expressive power and augmenting the assertional knowledge that can be derived from it. Discovered rules may also suggest new schema axioms to be added to the ontology. We performed experiments on publicly available ontologies, validating the performances of our approach and comparing them with the main state of the art systems.