nils-herrmann/clean_scirepeval huggingface dataset:
An Exploratory Study to Assess Analytical and Logical Thinking Skills of the Software Practitioners using a Gamification Perspective

The link between analytical and logical thinking skills and success of software practitioners attracted an increasing attention in the last decade. Several studies report that the ability to think logically is a requirement for improving software development skills, which exhibits a strong reasoning. Additionally, analytical thinking is a vital part of software development for example while dividing a task into elemental parts with respect to basic rules and principles. Using the basic essence of gamification, this study proposes a mobile testing platform for assessing analytical and logical thinking skills of software practitioners as well as computer engineering students. The assessment questions were taken from the literature and transformed into a gamified tool based on the software requirements. A focus group study was conducted to capture the requirements. Using the Delphi method, these requirements were discussed by a group of experts to reach a multidisciplinary understanding where a level of moderate agreement has been achieved. In light of these, an assessment tool was developed, which was tested on both software practitioners from the industry and senior computer engineering students. Our results suggest that individuals who exhibit skills in analytical and logical thinking are also more inclined to be successful in software development.
Three Dimensional Scapular Kinematics in Patients with Reverse Total Shoulder Arthroplasty during Arm Motion
Venue: Clinics in orthopedic surgery

There have been few reports on altered kinematics of the shoulder after reverse total shoulder arthroplasty (RTSA) We investigated differences in 3 dimensional (3D) scapular motions assessed using an optical tracking system between RTSA treated shoulders and asymptomatic contralateral shoulders during arm motion.  Thirteen patients who underwent RTSA were assessed for active arm elevation in 2 distinct elevation planes (sagittal plane flexion and scapular plane abduction) Their mean age was 72 years (range, 69 to 79 years) and the mean follow up was 24.4 months (range, 13 to 48 months) The dominant side was the right side in all the 13 patients, and it was also the side treated with RTSA. Scapular kinematics was recorded with an optical tracking system. The scapular kinematics and the scapulohumeral rhythm (SHR) of the RTSA shoulders and asymptomatic contralateral shoulders were recorded and analyzed during arm elevation.  There were no significant differences in internal/external rotation and anterior/posterior tilting of the scapula between shoulders during arm motion (p 0.05) However, upward rotation of the scapula differed significantly during arm motion (p 0.035 for sagittal plane flexion; p 0.046 for scapular plane abduction) There were significant differences in the SHR between the two shoulders (p 0.016 for sagittal plane flexion; p 0.021 for scapular plane abduction)  The shoulder kinematics after RTSA showed significant differences from the contralateral asymptomatic shoulders. Increased upward rotation and decreased SHR after RTSA indicate that RTSA shoulders use more scapulothoracic motion and less glenohumeral motion to elevate the arm.
How sensitive is the deltoid moment arm to humeral offset changes with reverse total shoulder arthroplasty?
Venue: Journal of shoulder and elbow surgery

Reverse total shoulder arthroplasty commonly treats cuff deficient or osteoarthritic shoulders not amenable to rotator cuff repair. This study investigates deltoid moment arm sensitivity to variations in the joint center and humeral offset of 3 representative reverse total shoulder arthroplasty subjects. We hypothesized that a superior joint implant placement may exist, indicated by muscle moment arms, compared with the current actual surgical implant configuration.  Moment arms for the anterior, lateral, and posterior aspects of the deltoid muscle were determined for 1521 perturbations of the humeral offset location away from the surgical placement in a subject specific musculoskeletal model with motion defined by subject specific in vivo abduction kinematics. The humeral offset was varied from its surgical position 4 mm in the anterior/posterior direction, 12 mm in the medial/lateral direction, and 10 to 14 mm in the superior/inferior direction.  The anterior deltoid moment arm varied in humeral offset and center of rotation up to 20 mm, primarily in the medial/lateral and superior/inferior directions. The lateral deltoid moment arm varied in humeral offset up to 20 mm, primarily in the medial/lateral and anterior/posterior directions. The posterior deltoid moment arm varied up to 15 mm, primarily in early abduction, and was most sensitive to humeral offset changes in the superior/inferior direction.  High variations in muscle moment arms were found for all 3 deltoid components, presenting an opportunity to dramatically change the deltoid moment arms through surgical placement of the reverse shoulder components and by varying the overall offset of the humerus.
Reduction of copper ions release by a novel ecofriendly electropolymerized nanolayer obtained from a natural compound (carvacrol)
Venue: Journal of hazardous materials

The release of copper ions by copper containing devices, equipments and facilities represents a potential risk for biological systems. Different inhibitory treatments (CuIT) that use organic compounds have been proposed to reduce this environmental hazard but many of them are not in accordance with new regulations. The development of an ecofriendly CuIT based on the use of carvacrol, a natural phenolic compound present in essential oils, is reported here. The effects of carvacrol adsorption (adCarv) and its electropolymerization (polyCarv) were examined. Electropolymerization was attained after cycling the copper electrode in the 0.3 1.0V potential range. Electrochemical techniques complemented by ATR FTIR, XPS, SEM and AFM surface analyses were used to evaluate the composition and characteristics of the layers. Results demonstrated that adCarv includes cetonic structures while polyCarv additionally contains ether bonds. AFM and SEM observations showed the presence of round nanoglobules, larger for adCarv (close to 50nm diameter) Cytotoxicity of adCarv and polyCarv layers on copper was also evaluated. The comparative analysis of both treatments revealed that polyCarv nanolayer is highly protective while the adCarv layer is weakly protective and reduction in cell viability was found. It was concluded that CuIT that leads to polyCarv nanolayer is very effective and ecofriendly.
Field Performance of Heat Pump Water Heaters in the Northeast

Heat pump water heaters (HPWHs) are finally entering the mainstream residential water heater market. Potential catalysts are increased consumer demand for higher energy efficiency electric water heating and a new Federal water heating standard that effectively mandates use of HPWHs for electric storage water heaters with nominal capacities greater than 55 gallons. When compared to electric resistance water heating, the energy and cost savings potential of HPWHs is tremendous. Converting all electric resistance water heaters to HPWHs could save American consumers 7.8 billion dollars annually $182 per household) in water heating operating costs and cut annual residential source energy consumption for water heating by 0.70 quads. Steven Winter Associates, Inc. embarked on one of the first in situ studies of these newly released HPWH products through a partnership with two sponsoring electric utility companies, National Grid and NSTAR, and one sponsoring energy efficiency service program administrator, Cape Light Compact. Recent laboratory studies have measured performance of HPWHs under various operating conditions, but publically available field studies have not been as available. This evaluation attempts to provide publicly available field data on new HPWHs by monitoring the performance of three recently released products (General Electric GeoSpring(TM) A.O. Smith Voltex(R) and Stiebelmore Eltron Accelera(R) 300) Fourteen HPWHs were installed in Massachusetts and Rhode Island and monitored for over a year. Of the 14 units, ten were General Electric models (50 gallon units) two were Stiebel Eltron models (80 gallon units) and two were A.O. Smith models (one 60 gallon and one 80 gallon unit) less
Controlled cellular fusion using optically trapped plasmonic nano heaters
Venue: NanoScience Engineering

Optically trapped plasmonic nano heaters are used to mediate efficient and controlled fusion of biological membranes. The fusion method is demonstrated by optically trapping plasmonic nanoparticles located in between vesicle membranes leading to rapid lipid and content mixing. As an interesting application we show how direct control over fusion can be used for studying diffusion of peripheral membrane proteins and their interactions with membranes and for studying protein reactions. Membrane proteins encapsulated in an inert vesicle can be transferred to a vesicle composed of negative lipids by optically induced fusion. Mixing of the two membranes results in a fused vesicle with a high affinity for the protein and we observe immediate membrane tubulation due to the activity of the protein. Fusion of distinct membrane compartments also has applications in small scale chemistry for realizing pico liter reactions and offers many exciting applications within biology which are discussed here.
DeepRED Rule Extraction from Deep Neural Networks
Venue: DS

Neural network classifiers are known to be able to learn very accurate models. In the recent past, researchers have even been able to train neural networks with multiple hidden layers (deep neural networks) more effectively and efficiently. However, the major downside of neural networks is that it is not trivial to understand the way how they derive their classification decisions. To solve this problem, there has been research on extracting better understandable rules from neural networks. However, most authors focus on nets with only one single hidden layer. The present paper introduces a new decompositional algorithm DeepRED that is able to extract rules from deep neural networks.
Model Informed Risk Assessment and Decision Making for an Emerging Infectious Disease in the Asia Pacific Region
Venue: PLoS neglected tropical diseases

Effective response to emerging infectious disease (EID) threats relies on health care systems that can detect and contain localised outbreaks before they reach a national or international scale. The Asia Pacific region contains low and middle income countries in which the risk of EID outbreaks is elevated and whose health care systems may require international support to effectively detect and respond to such events. The absence of comprehensive data on populations, health care systems and disease characteristics in this region makes risk assessment and decisions about the provision of such support challenging.  We describe a mathematical modelling framework that can inform this process by integrating available data sources, systematically explore the effects of uncertainty, and provide estimates of outbreak risk under a range of intervention scenarios. We illustrate the use of this framework in the context of a potential importation of Ebola Virus Disease into the Asia Pacific region. Results suggest that, across a wide range of plausible scenarios, preemptive interventions supporting the timely detection of early cases provide substantially greater reductions in the probability of large outbreaks than interventions that support health care system capacity after an outbreak has commenced.  Our study demonstrates how, in the presence of substantial uncertainty about health care system infrastructure and other relevant aspects of disease control, mathematical models can be used to assess the constraints that limited resources place upon the ability of local health care systems to detect and respond to EID outbreaks in a timely and effective fashion. Our framework can help evaluate the relative impact of these constraints to identify resourcing priorities for health care system support, in order to inform principled and quantifiable decision making.
The Peruvian Amazon Company's Death: The Jungle Devoured Them

The case of the Peruvian Amazon Company, explores how an unsustainable business model could eventually lead a once successful company to its death. The contribution of the following chapter is based on the description of the causes of the Peruvian Amazon Company's death. Previous studies had analysed the internationalization strategies implemented by the company. Although, an evaluation of causes of the company's real extinction had not been presented.
Influence of Physical Learning Environment in Student's Behavior and Social Relations

One of the current challenges of education is to promote active learning, interaction and participation in the classroom. This challenge might find physical barriers along the way, which hinder or fully prevent it from success. Environmental psychology has been commissioned to study these relationships and behavior of individuals and how they can be influenced by the design of the physical learning environment. The analysis of the more traditional educational environments shows strong patterns of the power of teachers over students. Therefore, the aim of this work is to investigate the physical design factors that influence the learning environment in social relations and the behavior of students in order to help professionals regarding the design and management of educational spaces. Among these factors are those related to the spatial organization and the determining factors of environmental psychology.
Physical Learning Environment: Impact on Children School Readiness in Malaysian Preschools

Preschool physical environments significantly affect children's development. Malaysian government efforts to improve the quality of preschool education shows lack of emphasis on the physical environment. Despite improvements, school readiness is reportedly moderate. Currently, minimal evidences suggest a direct link between the physical environment and school readiness in Malaysia; therefore, this study aims to investigate and propose a clear relationship between these two aspects through literature review. Findings are hoped to help stakeholders to better understand and attract more interest as well as research into this matter to help Malaysia establish better preschools in the future.
Simultaneous Wireless Information and Power Transfer Mechanism in Interference Alignment Relay Networks
Venue: Mob. Inf. Syst.

This paper considers a simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) mechanism in an interference alignment (IA) relay system, in which source nodes send wireless information and energy simultaneously to relay nodes, and relay nodes forward the received signal to destination nodes powered by harvested energy. To manage interference and utilize interference as energy source, two SWIPT receiver is designed, namely, power splitting (PS) and antennas switching (AS) has been considered for relay system. The performance of AS and PS based IA relay systems is considered, as is a new energy cooperation (ECop) scheme that is proposed to improve system performance. Numerical results are provided to evaluate the performance of all schemes and it is shown from the simulations that the performance of proposed ECop outperformed both AS and PS.
APEx: Automated inference of error specifications for C APIs
Venue: 2016 31st IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE)

Although correct error handling is crucial to software robustness and security, developers often inadvertently introduce bugs in error handling code. Moreover, such bugs are hard to detect using existing bug finding tools without correct error specifications. Creating error specifications manually is tedious and error prone. In this paper, we present a new technique that automatically infers error specifications of API functions based on their usage patterns in C programs. Our key insight is that error handling code tend to have fewer branching points and program statements than the code implementing regular functionality. Our scheme leverages this property to automatically identify error handling code at API call sites and infer the corresponding error constraints. We then use the error constraints from multiple call sites for robust inference of API error specifications. We evaluated our technique on 217 API functions from 6 different libraries across 28 projects written in C and found that it can identify error handling paths with an average precision of 94% and recall of 66% We also found that our technique can infer correct API error specifications with an average precision of 77% and recall of 47% To further demonstrate the usefulness of the inferred error specifications, we used them to find 118 previously unknown potential bugs (including several security flaws that are currently being fixed by the corresponding developers) in the 28 tested projects.
Low Power FPGA Design Using Memoization Based Approximate Computing
Venue: IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems

Field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are increasingly used as the computing platform for fast and energy efficient execution of recognition, mining, and search applications. Approximate computing is one promising method for achieving energy efficiency. Compared with most prior works on approximate computing, which target approximate processors and arithmetic blocks, this paper presents an approximate computing methodology for FPGA based design. It studies memoization as a method for approximation on FPGA and analyzes different architectural and design parameters that should be considered. The proposed design flow leverages on high level synthesis to enable memoization based microarchitecture generation, thus also facilitating a C to register transfer level synthesis. When compared with the previous approaches of bit width truncation and approximate multipliers, memoization based approximate computation on FPGA achieves a significant dynamic power saving (around 20% with very small area overhead ;5% and better power to signal noise ratio values for the studied image processing benchmarks.
The first reported case of equine Nocardioform placentitis in New Zealand
Venue: New Zealand veterinary journal

Placentitis is cited as one of the leading causes of abortion in mares worldwide (Tengelsen et al. 1997; Smith et al. 2003; Laugier et al. 2011) Placentitismay also result in the delivery of weak or undeveloped foals that are at greater risk of perinatal mortality (Macpherson and Bailey 2008) Placentitis is most commonly associated with bacterial infection of the fetal membranes (Macpherson and Bailey 2008) Bacteria entering the uterus through the cervix, most likely as a result of poor perineal conformation, cause ascending placentitis. Breach of the normal protective seal made up of the vulva, vestibule, vagina and cervix causes infection and inflammation of the allantochorion. Ascending placentitis is most commonly caused by Streptococcus spp. Staphylococcus spp. and Escherichia coli (Hong et al. 1993; Laugier et al. 2011) Bacteria may also gain access to the placenta systemically.
Solubility Prediction of Active Pharmaceutical Compounds with the UNIFAC Model

The crystallization from solution of an active pharmaceutical ingredient requires the knowledge of the solubility in the entire temperature range investigated during the process. However, during the development of a new active ingredient, these data are missing. Its experimental determination is possible, but tedious. UNIFAC Group contribution method Fredenslund et al. (Vapor liquid equilibria using UNIFAC: a group contribution method, 1977;  1975) can be used to predict this physical property. Several modifications on this model have been proposed since its development in 1977, modified UNIFAC of Dortmund Weidlich et al.  1987) Gmehling et al.  1993) Pharma modified UNIFAC Diedrichs et al.  In this study, we used UNIFAC model by considering the linear temperature dependence of interaction parameters as in Pharma modified UNIFAC and structural groups as defined by KT UNIFAC first order model. More than 100 binary datasets were involved in the estimation of interaction parameters. These new parameters were then used to calculate activity coefficient and solubility of some molecules in various solvents at different temperatures. The model gives better results than those from the original UNIFAC and shows good agreement between the experimental solubility and the calculated one.
The impact of social media volume and addiction on medical student sleep quality and academic performance: A cross sectional observational study

Social media use may be detrimental to sleep quality, self esteem, and mental health and may affect academic performance in medical students. However, the effects of problematic social media use on sleep quality and academic performance in medical students are unknown.  A total of 170 medical students in a Saudi Arabian medical school were studied. The relationships between social media use volume (duration of use per day) and addiction (measured using the Bergen Facebook Addiction Scale) of seven platforms and (i) quality of sleep measured using the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index and (ii) academic performance according to the grade point average were examined. Caffeine intake was considered as a potential confounder, and data were analyzed using uni and multi variable logistic regression.  Poor quality sleep (72.9% and 63.5% during the week or at the weekend, respectively) and social media addiction (27.1% addicted to three or more platforms) were common. Individuals with high volume WhatsApp (odds ratio [OR] 1.59 [1.20 2.10] P 0.001) and Snapchat (OR 1.41 [1.10 1.81] P 0.007) use were more likely to have very poor sleep quality at the weekend, the latter persisting in multivariable analysis. Students who were addicted to Snapchat (OR 2.53 [1.03 6.22] P 0.044) or who were addicted to three or more social media platforms (OR 2.93 [1.19 7.23] P 0.019) had an even greater risk of very poor weekend sleep quality. Social media addiction was not associated with academic performance.  Educational programs on sleep and social media hygiene and changes to class start times to prevent weekend sleep debt should be considered.
Realization of a compact polarization splitter rotator on silicon.
Venue: Optics letters

A novel compact polarization splitter rotator (PSR) is proposed and realized with silicon on insulator nanowires. The present PSR consists of an adiabatic taper, an asymmetric directional coupler (ADC) and a multimode interference (MMI) mode filter. The adiabatic taper enables an efficient mode conversion from the launched TM0 mode to the TE1 mode in a wide waveguide, which is then coupled to the TE0 mode of a narrow waveguide through the ADC. Meanwhile, the launched TE0 mode does not have mode conversion and outputs from the through port directly. The MMI mode filter is cascaded at the through port to filter out the residual power of the TE1 mode so that the extinction ratio of the PSR is improved greatly. The total length of the PSR is ~70 mm and the fabricated PSR has an extinction ratio of ~20 dB over a broadband ranging from 1547 to 1597 nm.