nils-herrmann/clean_scirepeval huggingface dataset:
Hospital Network Competition and Adverse Selection: Evidence from the Massachusetts Health Insurance Exchange

Health insurers increasingly compete on their covered networks of medical providers. Using data from Massachusetts' pioneer insurance exchange, I find substantial adverse selection against plans covering the most prestigious and expensive "star" hospitals. I highlight a theoretically distinct selection channel: these plans attract consumers loyal to the star hospitals and who tend to use their high price care when sick. Using a structural model, I show that selection creates a strong incentive to exclude star hospitals but that standard policy solutions do not improve net welfare. A key reason is the connection between selection and moral hazard in star hospital use.
Healthcare Workers Emotions, Perceived Stressors and Coping Strategies During a MERS CoV Outbreak
Venue: Clinical Medicine Research

Healthcare workers (HCWs) are at high risk of contracting Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS CoV) during an epidemic. We explored the emotions, perceived stressors, and coping strategies of healthcare workers who worked during a MERS CoV outbreak in our hospital.  A cross sectional descriptive survey design.  A tertiary care hospital. Participants HCWs (150) who worked in high risk areas during the April May 2014 MERS CoV outbreak that occurred in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.  We developed and administered a "MERS CoV staff questionnaire" to study participants. The questionnaire consisted of 5 sections with 72 questions. The sections evaluated hospital staffs emotions, perceived stressors, factors that reduced their stress, coping strategies, and motivators to work during future outbreaks. Responses were scored on a scale from 0 3. The varying levels of stress or effectiveness of measures were reported as mean and standard deviation, as appropriate.  Completed questionnaires were returned by 117 (78% of the participants. The results had many unique elements. HCWs ethical obligation to their profession pushed them to continue with their jobs. The main sentiments centered upon fear of personal safety and well being of colleagues and family. Positive attitudes in the workplace, clinical improvement of infected colleagues, and stoppage of disease transmission among HCWs after adopting strict protective measures alleviated their fear and drove them through the epidemic. They appreciated recognition of their efforts by hospital management and expected similar acknowledgment, infection control guidance, and equipment would entice them to work during future epidemics.  The MERS CoV outbreak was a distressing time for our staff. Hospitals can enhance HCWs experiences during any future MERS CoV outbreak by focusing on the above mentioned aspects.
Treatment outcomes for patients with Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (MERS CoV) infection at a coronavirus referral center in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
Venue: BMC Infectious Diseases

BackgroundMiddle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus (MERS CoV) is a poorly understood disease with no known treatments. We describe the clinical features and treatment outcomes of patients with laboratory confirmed MERS CoV at a regional referral center in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.MethodsIn 2014, a retrospective chart review was performed on patients with a laboratory confirmed diagnosis of MERS CoV to determine clinical and treatment characteristics associated with death. Confounding was evaluated and a multivariate logistic regression was performed to assess the independent effect of treatments administered.ResultsFifty one patients had an overall mortality of 37 Most patients were male (78 with a mean age of 54 years. Almost a quarter of the patients were healthcare workers (23.5 and 41 had a known exposure to another person with MERS CoV. Survival was associated with male gender, working as a healthcare worker, history of hypertension, vomiting on admission, elevated respiratory rate, abnormal lung exam, elevated alanine transaminase (ALT) clearance of MERS CoV on repeat PCR polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing, and mycophenolate mofetil treatment. Survival was reduced in the presence of coronary artery disease, hypotension, hypoxemia, CXR (chest X ray) abnormalities, leukocytosis, creatinine >1 5 mg/dL, thrombocytopenia, anemia, and renal failure. In a multivariate analysis of treatments administered, severity of illness was the greatest predictor of reduced survival.ConclusionsCare for patients with MERS CoV remains a challenge. In this retrospective cohort, interferon beta and mycophenolate mofetil treatment were predictors of increased survival in the univariate analysis. Severity of illness was the greatest predictor of reduced survival in the multivariate analysis. Larger randomized trials are needed to better evaluate the efficacy of these treatment regimens for MERS CoV.
Microactuator for autofocus and optical image stabilization in mobile phone cameras using unleveled comb electrodes
Venue: 2016 International Conference on Optical MEMS and Nanophotonics (OMN)

Out of plane translatory and tilting motions were demonstrated using electrostatic microactuators for autofocus and optical image stabilization. The vertical displacement of the device was 90.5 mm at 40 V, with a response time of 10 ms.
Health promoting bioactivities of betalains from red dragon fruit (Hylocereus polyrhizus (Weber) Britton and Rose) peels as affected by carbohydrate encapsulation.
Venue: Journal of the science of food and agriculture

Betalains, which are red purple and yellow pigments, are ideal alternatives to synthetic colorants as they possess strong coloring potential and excellent health contributing properties. However, the instability of betalains toward normal storage and biological conditions, in addition to the limited number of betalain sources, impedes their food application and diminishes their bioactivities. This study aimed to evaluate the health promoting bioactivities of betalains from red dragon fruit (Hylocereus polyrhizus (Weber) Britton and Rose) peels as affected by encapsulation in maltodextrin gum Arabic and maltodextrin pectin matrices.  Encapsulation in maltodextrin gum Arabic and maltodextrin pectin matrices afforded dry betalain powders after lyophilization. Optical microscopy imaging showed that the betalain powders consisted of matrix type and shard like microparticles. ABTS antioxidant assay revealed that maltodextrin gum Arabic betalain (MGB) and maltodextrin pectin betalain (MPB) microparticles possessed higher antioxidant capacities (195.39 8.63 and 201.76 4.06 umol Trolox g 1 microparticles respectively) than the non encapsulated betalain extract (151.07 2.57 umol Trolox g 1 extract) Duck embryo chorioallantoic membrane (CAM) vascular irritation assay showed that the anti inflammatory activity of encapsulated betalains was five to six fold higher than that of non encapsulated betalains (P 0.05) Antiangiogenic activity, as evaluated by duck embryo CAM assay, was enhanced two to four fold by carbohydrate encapsulation. Glutathione S transferase (GST) inducing activity of betalains was likewise improved four to five fold.  The study showed that the antioxidant, anti inflammatory, antiangiogenic and GST inducing activities of betalains from red dragon fruit peels were enhanced through carbohydrate encapsulation.
Co Occurrence Feature Learning for Skeleton Based Action Recognition Using Regularized Deep LSTM Networks
Venue: AAAI

Skeleton based action recognition distinguishes human actions using the trajectories of skeleton joints, which provide a very good representation for describing actions. Considering that recurrent neural networks (RNNs) with Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) can learn feature representations and model long term temporal dependencies automatically, we propose an end to end fully connected deep LSTM network for skeleton based action recognition. Inspired by the observation that the co occurrences of the joints intrinsically characterize human actions, we take the skeleton as the input at each time slot and introduce a novel regularization scheme to learn the co occurrence features of skeleton joints. To train the deep LSTM network effectively, we propose a new dropout algorithm which simultaneously operates on the gates, cells, and output responses of the LSTM neurons. Experimental results on three human action recognition datasets consistently demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model.
The Speakers in the Wild (SITW) Speaker Recognition Database
Venue: INTERSPEECH

The Speakers in the Wild (SITW) speaker recognition database contains hand annotated speech samples from open source media for the purpose of benchmarking text independent speaker recognition technology on single and multi speaker audio acquired across unconstrained or "wild" conditions. The database consists of recordings of 299 speakers, with an average of eight different sessions per person. Unlike existing databases for speaker recognition, this data was not collected under controlled conditions and thus contains real noise, reverberation, intraspeaker variability and compression artifacts. These factors are often convolved in the real world, as the SITW data shows, and they make SITW a challenging database for singleand multispeaker recognition
Infants' preferences for native speakers are associated with an expectation of information
Venue: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

This paper addresses the possible developmental origins of humans' preference for native speakers. Infants' preference to attend to someone speaking their native language is well documented and has been interpreted as a developmental precursor of our adult tendency to divide the social world into groups, preferring members of one's own group and disfavoring others. Here we propose that this preference may originate from infants' desire to acquire information and therefore preferentially interact with social partners who are more likely to provide them with relevant learning opportunities. We demonstrate that 11 mo old infants indeed expect to receive information from native as opposed to foreign speakers, suggesting that infants' selective social interactions may be driven by their motivation to learn. Humans' preference for others who share our group membership is well documented, and this heightened valuation of in group members seems to be rooted in early development. Before 12 mo of age, infants already show behavioral preferences for others who evidence cues to same group membership such as race or native language, yet the function of this selectivity remains unclear. We examine one of these social biases, the preference for native speakers, and propose that this preference may result from infants' motivation to obtain information and the expectation that interactions with native speakers will provide better opportunities for learning. To investigate this hypothesis, we measured EEG theta activity, a neural rhythm shown to index active and selective preparation for encoding information in adults. In study 1, we established that 11 mo old infants exhibit an increase in theta activation in situations when they can expect to receive information. We then used this neural measure of anticipatory theta activity to explore the expectations of 11 mo olds when facing social partners who either speak the infants' native language or a foreign tongue (study 2) A larger increase in theta oscillations was observed when infants could expect to receive information from the native speaker, indicating that infants were preparing to learn information from the native speaker to a greater extent than from the foreign speaker. While previous research has demonstrated that infants prefer to interact with knowledgeable others, the current experiments provide evidence that such an information seeking motive may also underpin infants' demonstrated preference for native speakers.
Multicenter study in Colombia: Impact of a multidimensional International Nosocomial Infection Control Consortium (INICC) approach on central line associated bloodstream infection rates.
Venue: American journal of infection control

The objective of this study was to analyze the impact of a multidimensional infection control approach and the use of the International Nosocomial Infection Control Consortium (INICC) Surveillance Online System on central line associated bloodstream infection (CLABSI) rates from June 2003 April 2010.  We conducted a prospective, before after surveillance study of 2,564 patients hospitalized in 4 adult intensive care units (ICUs) and 424 patients in 2 pediatric ICUs of 4 hospitals in 2 cities of Colombia. During baseline, we performed outcome surveillance of CLABSI applying the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Healthcare Safety Network definitions. During intervention, we implemented the INICC multidimensional approach and the ISOS, which included a bundle of infection prevention practice interventions, education, outcome surveillance, process surveillance, feedback on CLABSI rates and consequences, and performance feedback of process surveillance. Bivariate and multivariate regression analyses were performed using a logistic regression model to estimate the effect of the intervention on the CLABSI rate.  The baseline rate of 12.9 CLABSIs per 1,000 central line (CL) days, with 3,032 CL days and 39 CLABSIs, was reduced to 3.5 CLABSIs per 1,000 CL days, with 3,686 CL days and 13 CLABSIs, accounting for a 73% CLABSI rate reduction (relative risk, 0.27; 95% confidence interval, 0.14 0.52; P=.002)  Implementing the INICC multidimensional infection control approach for CLABSI prevention was associated with a significant reduction in the CLABSI rate of ICUs of Colombia.
Multi Sensor SLAM with Online Self Calibration and Change Detection
Venue: ISER

We present a solution for constant time self calibration and change detection of multiple sensor intrinsic and extrinsic calibration parameters without any prior knowledge of the initial system state or the need of a calibration target or special initialization sequence. This system is capable of continuously self calibrating multiple sensors in an online setting, while seamlessly solving the online SLAM problem in real time. We focus on the camera IMU extrinsic calibration, essential for accurate long term vision aided inertial navigation. An initialization strategy and method for continuously estimating and detecting changes to the maximum likelihood camera IMU transform are presented. A conditioning approach is used, avoiding problems associated with early linearization. Experimental data is presented to evaluate the proposed system and compare it with artifact based offline calibration developed by our group.
Enhanced Subsea Acoustically Aided Inertial Navigation

This paper treats the IMU calibration and validation problem in three settings: Factory production line with the aid of a precision multi axis turntable, in the field on land and at sea, both without specialist test equipment. The treatment is limited to the IMU calibration parameters of key relevance for gyro compassing grade optical gyroscopes and force rebalanced pendulous accelerometers: Scale factor, bias and sensor axes misalignments. Focus is on lowdynamic marine applications e.g. subsea construction and survey. Two different methods of calibration are investigated: Kalman smoothing using an Aided Inertial Navigation System (AINS) framework, augmenting the error state Kalman filter (ESKF) to include the full set of IMU calibration parameters and a least squares approach, where the calibration parameters are determined by minimizing the magnitude of the INS error differential equation output. A method of evaluating calibrations is introduced and discussed. The two calibration methods are evaluated for factory use and results compared to a legacy proprietary method as well as in field calibration/verification on land and at sea. The calibration methods shows similar navigation performance as the proprietary method. This validates both methods for factory calibration. Furthermore it is shown that the AINS method can calibrate in field on land and at sea without the use of a precision multi axis turntable. 1Department of Applied Mathemantics and Computer Science, Technical University of Denmark, DK 2800 Kgs. Lyngby, Denmark 2Sonardyne International Ltd. Yateley, United Kingdom
The assessment of intellectualisation of the movement techniques teaching in terms of effective and pro health training in young football players

Sporting success puts high requirements in terms of physical stress; it causes a major threat to an athlete's health. Therefore, there is a need for effective training methods in order to reduce the number of contusions and sports injuries. For this purpose a method of intellectual training in the mastery of motor actions (playing technique) of young football players is recommended.  The influence of intellectualization on the training process and the state of health was studied in young football players (16 years old) students of the Sports School in Cracow. Continuous research was conducted from 1996 to 2001. A group of 92 players were examined in two groups: 46 experimental group and 46 control group.  Research has shown that the intellectualization of training, which reduced the volume of the body load by 14% has a positive impact on the effectiveness of training and helps to reduce the number of injuries during sports training.  Intellectual training is beneficial to the effectiveness of young football players' technical actions. The intellectualization of the training process reduces the physical burden, and exposing the aware action affects the condition of lower limb injuries in young players.
An Examination of Greek College Students' Perceptions of Positive and Negative Effects of Social Networking Use

The vast array of social media network sites provide individuals with the opportunity for communication based on similar interests, occupations, events, or political views while integrating additional features such as mobile accessibility, video and photo sharing, and blogging. The benefits and drawbacks of social media networking vary depending on cultural and societal constructs. The purpose of the present chapter is to examine Greek college students' perceptions (N 258) of the positive and negative aspects of social networking. It also examines gender and age differences in these perceptions. Findings show that social networking has a positive effect on student learning, communication, and motivation. However, social networking can also lead to feelings of isolation and concerns about academic performance and privacy. Implications for practice are discussed.
Endophytic Trichoderma gamsii YIM PH30019: a promising biocontrol agent with hyperosmolar, mycoparasitism, and antagonistic activities of induced volatile organic compounds on root rot pathogenic fungi of Panax notoginseng
Venue: Journal of ginseng research

Biocontrol agents are regarded as promising and environmental friendly approaches as agrochemicals for phytodiseases that cause serious environmental and health problems. Trichoderma species have been widely used in suppression of soil borne pathogens. In this study, an endophytic fungus, Trichoderma gamsii YIM PH30019, from healthy Panax notoginseng root was investigated for its biocontrol potential.  In vitro detached healthy roots, and pot and field experiments were used to investigate the pathogenicity and biocontrol efficacy of T. gamsii YIM PH30019 to the host plant. The antagonistic mechanisms against test phytopathogens were analyzed using dual culture, scanning electron microscopy, and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) Tolerance to chemical fertilizers was also tested in a series of concentrations.  The results indicated that T. gamsii YIM PH30019 was nonpathogenic to the host, presented appreciable biocontrol efficacy, and could tolerate chemical fertilizer concentrations of up to 20% T. gamsii YIM PH30019 displayed antagonistic activities against the pathogenic fungi of P. notoginseng via production of VOCs. On the basis of gas chromatography mass spectrometry, VOCs were identified as dimethyl disulfide, dibenzofuran, methanethiol, ketones, etc. which are effective ingredients for antagonistic activity. T. gamsii YIM PH30019 was able to improve the seedlings' emergence and protect P. notoginseng plants from soil borne disease in the continuous cropping field tests.  The results suggest that the endophytic fungus T. gamsii YIM PH30019 may have a good potential as a biological control agent against notoginseng phytodiseases and can provide a clue to further illuminate the interactions between Trichoderma and phytopathogens.
Antagonistic and Biocontrol Potential of Trichoderma asperellum ZJSX5003 Against the Maize Stalk Rot Pathogen Fusarium graminearum
Venue: Indian Journal of Microbiology

The efficacy of seven strains of Trichodermaasperellum collected from the fields in Southern China was assessed against Fusarium graminearum (FG) the causal agent of corn stalk rot of maize were in vitro for their antagonistic properties followed by statistical model of principal compound analysis to identify the beneficial antagonist T.asperellum strain. The key factors of antagonist activity were attributed to a total of 13 factors including cell wall degrading enzymes (chitnase, protease and b glucanases) secondary metabolites and peptaibols and these were analyzed from eight strains of Trichoderma. A linear regression model demonstrated that interaction of enzymes and secondary metabolites of T. asperellum strain ZJSX5003 enhanced the antagonist activity against FG. Further, this strain displayed a disease reduction of 71 in maize plants inoculated with FG compared to negative control. Pointing out that the T. asperellum strain ZJSX5003 is a potential source for the development of a biocontrol agent against corn stalk rot.
Biocontrol potential of the antagonistic microorganism Streptomyces enissocaesilis against Orobanche cumana
Venue: BioControl

The root parasitic weed Orobanche cumana (sunflower broomrape) constrains sunflower (Helianthus annuus L. production in many areas of the world. A seed germination experiment, a co culture experiment, and a pot experiment were conducted to study the effect of some soilborne antagonistic microorganisms on O. cumana. Results showed that culture filtrate of Streptomyces enissocaesilis significantly reduced the germination rate of O. cumana seeds both in the seed germination experiment and the co culture experiment, with more than 50 and 40 (after cultivation for eight days) reduction respectively over the control. In the pot experiment, applying S. enissocaesilis reduced the epigaeous number of O. cumana tubercles by 47.5 after 130 days. Furthermore, S. enissocaesilis also increased polyphenol oxidase activity in sunflower roots and improved the beneficial microflora in the rhizosphere soil of sunflower. Selecting biocontrol agents from soilborne antagonistic microorganisms might be a promising strategy for controlling O. cumana.