nils-herrmann/clean_scirepeval huggingface dataset:
Implementation of EMG and Force Based Control Interfaces in Active Elbow Supports for Men With Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy: A Feasibility Study
Venue: IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering

While there is an extensive number of studies on the development and evaluation of electromyography (EMG) and force based control interfaces for assistive devices, no studies have focused on testing these control strategies for the specific case of adults with Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) This paper presents a feasibility study on the use of EMG and force as control interfaces for the operation of active arm supports for men with DMD. We have built an experimental active elbow support, with a threefold objective: 1) to investigate whether adult men with DMD could use EMG and force based control interfaces; 2) to evaluate their performance during a discrete position tracking task; and 3) to examine users' acceptance of the control methods. The system was tested in three adults with DMD (21 22 years) Although none of the three participants had performed any voluntary movements with their arms for the past 3 5 years, all of them were 100% successful in performing the series of tracking tasks using both control interfaces (mean task completion time EMG: 6.8 4.8 s, force: 5.1 1.8 s) While movements with the force based control were considerably smoother in Subject 3 and faster in Subject 1, EMG based control was perceived as less fatiguing by all three subjects. Both EMG and force based interfaces are feasible solutions for the control of active elbow supports in adults with DMD and should be considered for further investigations on multi DOF control.
Culturally adapted Family Intervention (CaFI) for African Caribbeans diagnosed with schizophrenia and their families: a feasibility study protocol of implementation and acceptability
Venue: Pilot and Feasibility Studies

BackgroundAfrican Caribbeans in the UK have the highest schizophrenia incidence and greatest inequity in access to mental health services of all ethnic groups. The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) highlights this crisis in care and urgent need to improve evidence based mental healthcare, experiences of services and outcomes for this group. Family intervention (FI) is clinically and cost effective for the management of schizophrenia but it is rarely offered. Evidence for FI with minority ethnic groups generally, and African Caribbeans in particular, is lacking. This study aims to test the feasibility and acceptability of delivering Culturally adapted Family Intervention (CaFI) to African Caribbean service users diagnosed with schizophrenia.DesignThis is a feasibility cohort design study. Over a 12 month intervention period, 30 service users and their families, recruited from hospital and community settings, will receive ten one hourly sessions of CaFI. Where biological families are absent, access to the intervention will be optimised through 'family support members' trusted individuals nominated by service users or study volunteers.We shall collect data on eligibility, uptake, retention and attrition and assess the utility and feasibility of collecting various outcome measures including readmission, service engagement, working alliance, clinical symptoms and functioning, perceived criticism, psychosis knowledge, familial stress and economic costs. Measures will be collected at baseline, post intervention and at 3 month follow up using validated questionnaires and standardised interviews. Admission rates and change in care management will be rated by independent case note examination. Variability in the measures will inform sample size estimates for a future trial. Independent raters will assess fidelity to the intervention in 10 of sessions. Feedback at the end of each session along with thematically analysed qualitative interviews will examine CaFI's acceptability to service users, families and healthcare professionals.DiscussionThis innovative response to inequalities in mental healthcare experienced by African Caribbeans diagnosed with schizophrenia might improve engagement in services, access to evidence based interventions and clinical outcomes. Successful implementation of CaFI in this group could pave the way for better engagement and provision across marginalised groups and therefore has potentially important implications for commissioning and service delivery in ethnically diverse populations. This study will demonstrate whether the approach is feasible and acceptable and can be implemented with fidelity in different settings.
From 'bisexual' to 'queer' the radical sexuality of Paul Goodman

This article explores the nature of Paul Goodman's sexuality within his historical context, arguing that his radical queerness influenced his social and political radicalism in important ways. His unrepentant homosexuality allowed him to identify as a social rebel, and it also broadened his understanding of the human condition. His visibility as a self identified 'queer' provided a model for the early 1970s American gay liberation movement. Goodman's conservative attitudes about gender, however, also encouraged the sexism found in many 1960s American social movements.
Paul Goodman and the Gestalt theory of self

Paul Goodman contributed to the Gestalt theory of self in a number of ways, not least by extending some of Fritz Perls' founding insights and further distancing the theory from its psychoanalytical underpinning. His seminal text Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality (co authored with Perls and Ralph Hefferline, 1951) introduced the ideas of 'creative adjustment' and the 'autonomous criterion' which are central to his own, more nuanced perspective.
The Effect Of Organizational Communication Towards Resistance To Change: A Case Study In Banking Sector

Today's business environment is more dynamic due to vast technological growth. This growth is most visible in the IT industry. Efficiency, together with work life balance, is found to be one of the most important factors of success at workplace. Positive impacts of work life balance include: retention of employees towards their employer, better motivation, and increased efficiency due to an increased employee satisfaction. Recent literature findings show a direct positive relationship between efficiency and work life balance. Flexible work arrangements have positive impact on work life balance and efficiency. This study analyzes the impact of flexible work arrangements on employees' work life balance and efficiency, using a non random convenience sample selected from BiH's IT employees. In the initial phase of data collection, quantitative survey instrument was adopted based on the original one from Mount Holyoke University. It was translated and back translated from English to Bosnian and again back to English and then verified as the part of pilot testing on 40 IT employees. The study was conducted in a cross sectional time manner in the period June July 2016. A modified, 18 questions, primary quantitative survey instrument with a 5 point Likert scale was conducted on 503 Bosnian IT employees. Fourteen questions covered inferential and last four descriptive statistics. The study aims to test if there is a significant relationship between flexible work arrangements, work life balance, and employee efficiency with respect to their gender, age, time they travel to work and their children status. The results indicate that flexible work time and location can have a positive impact on employee work life balance and this opinion is shared by all the employees surveyed. Although 64.80% of participants stated that their work life is balanced with their personal life, there is always place for improvement. Participants agree that better work life balance, caused by flexible work time and flexible work location, will improve their efficiency and reduce stress.
Exploring the factors influencing the negotiation process in cross border M&A

This research study provides an empirical examination of the impact of national cultural distance, organizational cultural differences, communication, and planned employee retention on the effectiveness of negotiation process in the cross border mergers acquisitions (M&As) We developed and tested a conceptual framework of negotiation process in order to provide a framework for analysis of the key components of the negotiation process in the cross border M&A. The findings indicate that communication positively influence antecedent and concurrent phase of negotiation process. In addition, national cultural distance and organizational cultural differences negatively influence the effectiveness of concurrent phase. We also found that national cultural distance moderates the relationship between communication and effectiveness of concurrent phase of the negotiation process, as such that the positive effect of communication is lower when national cultural distance is higher. Furthermore, we found that planned employee retention positively affect the effectiveness of concurrent phase. Finally, the effectiveness of concurrent phase positively influence the effectiveness of consequent phase i.e. M&A agreement. The contribution of this study lies in providing new insights on negotiation associated factors for incumbent executives, in order to enable them to better plan and implement cross border mergers and acquisition deals.
Enhancing and Combining Sequential and Tree LSTM for Natural Language Inference
Venue: ArXiv

Reasoning and inference are central to human and artificial intelligence. Modeling inference in human language is notoriously challenging but is fundamental to natural language understanding and many applications. With the availability of large annotated data, neural network models have recently advanced the field significantly. In this paper, we present a new state of the art result, achieving the accuracy of 88.3% on the standard benchmark, the Stanford Natural Language Inference dataset. This result is achieved first through our enhanced sequential encoding model, which outperforms the previous best model that employs more complicated network architectures, suggesting that the potential of sequential LSTM based models have not been fully explored yet in previous work. We further show that by explicitly considering recursive architectures, we achieve additional improvement. Particularly, incorporating syntactic parse information contributes to our best result; it improves the performance even when the parse information is added to an already very strong system.
Learning Natural Language Inference with LSTM
Venue: NAACL

Natural language inference (NLI) is a fundamentally important task in natural language processing that has many applications. The recently released Stanford Natural Language Inference (SNLI) corpus has made it possible to develop and evaluate learning centered methods such as deep neural networks for natural language inference (NLI) In this paper, we propose a special long short term memory (LSTM) architecture for NLI. Our model builds on top of a recently proposed neural attention model for NLI but is based on a significantly different idea. Instead of deriving sentence embeddings for the premise and the hypothesis to be used for classification, our solution uses a match LSTM to perform word by word matching of the hypothesis with the premise. This LSTM is able to place more emphasis on important word level matching results. In particular, we observe that this LSTM remembers important mismatches that are critical for predicting the contradiction or the neutral relationship label. On the SNLI corpus, our model achieves an accuracy of 86.1% outperforming the state of the art.
Frequency domain Waveform Inversion with Irregular Surface Based on Variable Grid Finite Difference Method

Irregular topography is common in onshore seismic exploration, and this has a significant influence on the accuracy of inversion. It is essential to introduce the effect of surface topography in the full waveform inversion to improve the accuracy of inversion. We develop a variable grid finite difference frequency domain modeling algorithm with the irregular topography, and incorporate it into a full waveform inversion algorithm for the first time. The finite difference method (FDM) can be applied to forward modeling with higher efficiency and simplicity, compared with classical finite element method and finite volume method. However, the conventional FDM suffers from severe dispersion. To balance the artificial diffractions and the computational cost, the computational domain containing the surface is discretized by fine rectangular grids, while the rest of the model is discretized by coarse grids. In the full waveform inversion algorithm with irregular surface, the strong nonlinearity arising from free surface multiples is another challenging issue. We apply successive inversions of frequency overlapping group and layer stripping method to improve the stability of iterative procedure. In the meantime, the pseudo Hessian matrix is used to scale the gradient to accelerate convergence. We validated the accuracy of our algorithm by numerical tests.
Modified Fuzzy C Means and Ensemble based Framework for Min Cost Localization and Power Constraints in Three Dimensional Ocean Sensor Networks

In this paper, the optimization problem is considered for Minimum Cost Localization Problem (MCLP) in 3D Ocean Sensor Network (OSN) The main aim of OSN is to localize all underwater sensors or the minimum travel distance of the ship which deploys and measures the anchors using the minimum number of anchor nodes. Statistical Analysis Minimum Cost Discrete multi valued Particle Swarm Optimization (MCDPSO) and Hybrid Bee Linear Genetic Colony Algorithm (HBLGCA) are combined in this Hybrid Ensemble Framework Model (HEFM) Minimum travel distance of the ship which deploys and the anchors for OSNs are determined by the finalized minimum travel distance results. In Hybrid Ensemble Framework, a set of optimization algorithm using both trilateration and local sweep operations are presented to address the problem. The set of anchor node and its travelling order sequence are picked using both trilateration and local sweep operations based on a set of HEFM which is proposed by the hardness of 3D localization.  Most of the existing localization algorithms only focus on checking the localizability of a network and/or distribution of nodes within a set of anchor nodes which are static in nature and measurement of distance to localize. The main aim of today's algorithm is to determine the min cost localization problem depending on a particular method that might not provide optimal results. To overcome all the above problem hybrid ensemble framework is formalized. Because of the complexity of the distributed approach, the current localization algorithms cause overhead and latency. Cluster based architecture for range free localization is proposed in this paper to eradicate these problems in Wireless Sensor Network. The similar nodes are grouped using Modified Fuzzy C Means (MFCM) clustering. Some parameters such as quality of a link, energy and coverage are used to select the cluster head.  These methods give better results for certain applications such as location based routing due to localization problem and the results have been measured in terms of the energy, power and Quality of Service (QoS) The simulation results, show that the overhead, localization error, latency are reduced in proposed HEFM framework and the localization accuracy is increased.
SPECTRE: A Fast and Scalable Cryptocurrency Protocol
Venue: IACR Cryptol. ePrint Arch.

A growing body of research on Bitcoin and other permissionless cryptocurrencies that utilize Nakamoto's blockchain has shown that they do not easily scale to process a high throughput of transactions, or to quickly approve individual transactions; blocks must be kept small, and their creation rates must be kept low in order to allow nodes to reach consensus securely. As of today, Bitcoin processes a mere 3 7 transactions per second, and transaction confirmation takes at least several minutes. We present SPECTRE, a new protocol for the consensus core of crypto currencies that remains secure even under high throughput and fast confirmation times. At any throughput, SPECTRE is resilient to attackers with up to 50% of the computational power (up until the limit defined by network congestion and bandwidth constraints) SPECTRE can operate at high block creation rates, which implies that its transactions confirm in mere seconds (limited mostly by the round trip time in the network) Key to SPECTRE's achievements is the fact that it satisfies weaker properties than classic consensus requires. In the conventional paradigm, the order between any two transactions must be decided and agreed upon by all non corrupt nodes. In contrast, SPECTRE only satisfies this with respect to transactions performed by honest users. We observe that in the context of money, two conflicting payments that are published concurrently could only have been created by a dishonest user, hence we can afford to delay the acceptance of such transactions without harming the usability of the system. Our framework formalizes this weaker set of requirements for a crypto currency's distributed ledger. We then provide a formal proof that SPECTRE satisfies these requirements.
Determinantes Economicos de los Flujos de Viajeros a Mexico

espanolMexico se ha convertido en uno de los principales destinos turisticos en el mundo, lo que se refleja en los altos lugares ocupados en los listados internacionales. Sin embargo, el sector turistico mexicano ha presentado una marcada dependencia de la economia estadounidense, motivo por el que en este trabajo, mediante un Modelo Estructural de Vectores Autorregresivos, SVAR, se analiza el impacto de crecimiento economico de los Estados Unidos y las variaciones del tipo de cambio peso dolar americano en la llegada de visitantes a Mexico, hallandose en ambos casos una influencia positiva y significativa. EnglishMexico has become one of the top tourist destinations in the world, which is reflected in the high places obtained in the international rankings. However, the Mexican tourism sector has presented a strong dependence on the US economy. That is why in this work by using a Structural Vector Autoregressive Model, SVAR, we examine and measure the impact of the US economic growth and the exchange rate Peso American Dollar on the total visitor arrivals to Mexico. We have found that both variables have had a positive and a statistically significant influence on the Mexican tourism sector
Un espacio para el desarrollo: Los mercados de vivienda en America Latina y el Caribe

Los barrios marginales representan una perenne ofensa visual en America Latina y el Caribe. Existe un mayor numero de personas que moran en viviendas en pesimo estado en esta region que en otros paises con el mismo nivel de ingresos. La mayoria de los hogares que viven en las capitales de la region no puede costear una vivienda legalmente construida en un terreno que cuente con acceso a los servicios basicos de infraestructura tales como agua y servicios sanitarios. La region tendria que invertir una suma superior a los $300 millardos, o casi el 8 por ciento de su producto interno bruto, para proporcionar una vivienda adecuada para todos sus ciudadanos. Los Gobiernos por si solos no pueden solucionar este problema, particularmente si continuan enfocandose en tratar los sintomas en lugar de abordar la causa raiz. Esta ultima edicion de la publicacion insignia del BID, Desarrollo en las Americas, ofrece un analisis de fondo de las oportunidades que tienen los paises para mejorar sus mercados inmobiliarios urbanos y facilitar la via hacia soluciones que involucren al sector privado.
Demographic variation in how the social brain processes news messages
Venue: Politics Life Sciences

A high capacity for visual perception distinguishes Homo sapiens from other primates. This human ability to detect social cues and retain visual records of social networks has been tested mostly with static facial images in laboratory settings. However, media consumption has become closely entangled with the way social life is navigated. Therefore, the study reported here tested demographic differences (gender and education) in visual information processing of social and nonsocial objects featured in audiovisual news content. Women recognized (accuracy) and recalled (salience) social images better than men. On the other hand, men were more skilled at recognizing, but not recalling, nonsocial images. Participants with lower educational levels recognized and recalled fewer images than individuals with higher educational levels. Interactions between demographic variables and time suggest that memory records for social images are more stable than those for nonsocial images. Memory may have survival relevant importance, serving navigational functions that vary across environmental demands, resulting in differences across demographic groups.
Effects of Magnesium Supplementation on Blood Pressure: A Meta Analysis of Randomized Double Blind Placebo Controlled Trials.
Venue: Hypertension

The antihypertensive effect of magnesium (Mg) supplementation remains controversial. We aimed to quantify the effect of oral Mg supplementation on blood pressure (BP) by synthesizing available evidence from randomized, double blind, placebo controlled trials. We searched trials of Mg supplementation on normotensive and hypertensive adults published up to February 1, 2016 from MEDLINE and EMBASE databases; 34 trials involving 2028 participants were eligible for this meta analysis. Weighted mean differences of changes in BP and serum Mg were calculated by random effects meta analysis. Mg supplementation at a median dose of 368 mg/d for a median duration of 3 months significantly reduced systolic BP by 2.00 mm Hg (95% confidence interval, 0.43 3.58) and diastolic BP by 1.78 mm Hg (95% confidence interval, 0.73 2.82) these reductions were accompanied by 0.05 mmol/L (95% confidence interval, 0.03, 0.07) elevation of serum Mg compared with placebo. Using a restricted cubic spline curve, we found that Mg supplementation with a dose of 300 mg/d or duration of 1 month is sufficient to elevate serum Mg and reduce BP; and serum Mg was negatively associated with diastolic BP but not systolic BP (all P<0.05) In the stratified analyses, a greater reduction in BP tended to be found in trials with high quality or low dropout rate (all P values for interaction <0.05) However, residual heterogeneity may still exist after considering these possible factors. Our findings indicate a causal effect of Mg supplementation on lowering BPs in adults. Further well designed trials are warranted to validate the BP lowering efficacy of optimal Mg treatment.
MERS and the dromedary camel trade between Africa and the Middle East
Venue: Tropical Animal Health and Production

Dromedary camels are the most likely source for the coronavirus that sporadically causes Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) in humans. Serological results from archived camel sera provide evidence for circulation of MERS coronavirus (MERS CoV) among dromedary camels in the Greater Horn of Africa as far back as 1983 and in Saudi Arabia as far back as 1992. High seroprevalences of MERS CoV antibodies and the high virus prevalence in Saudi Arabian dromedary camels indicate an endemicity of the virus in the Arabian Peninsula, which predates the 2012 human MERS index case. Saudi Arabian dromedary camels show significantly higher MERS CoV carrier rates than dromedary camels imported from Africa. Two MERS CoV lineages identified in Nigerian camels were found to be genetically distinct from those found in camels and humans in the Middle East. This supports the hypothesis that camel imports from Africa are not of significance for circulation of the virus in camel populations of the Arabian Peninsula.