nils-herrmann/clean_scirepeval huggingface dataset:
The impact of Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID 19) on health systems and household resources in Africa and South Asia
Venue: medRxiv
Year: 2020

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID 19) epidemics strain health systems and households. Health systems in Africa and South Asia may be particularly at risk due to potential high prevalence of risk factors for severe disease, large household sizes and limited healthcare capacity.  We investigated the impact of an unmitigated COVID 19 epidemic on health system resources and costs, and household costs, in Karachi, Delhi, Nairobi, Addis Ababa and Johannesburg. We adapted a dynamic model of SARS CoV 2 transmission and disease to capture country specific demography and contact patterns. The epidemiological model was then integrated into an economic framework that captured city specific health systems and household resource use.  The cities severely lack intensive care beds, healthcare workers and financial resources to meet demand during an unmitigated COVID 19 epidemic. A highly mitigated COVID 19 epidemic, under optimistic assumptions, may avoid overwhelming hospital bed capacity in some cities, but not critical care capacity.  Viable mitigation strategies encompassing a mix of responses need to be established to expand healthcare capacity, reduce peak demand for healthcare resources, minimise progression to critical care and shield those at greatest risk of severe disease.
TRANSLATION AND ADAPTATION OF THE BATES JENSEN WOUND ASSESSMENT TOOL FOR THE BRAZILIAN CULTURE
Year: 2015

Methodological study aimed at translating and adapting The Bates Jensen Wound Assessment Tool for the Brazilian culture, through five stages: translation, synthesis, back translation, review by an expert panel, and, testing of the translated version. The Portuguese version was evaluated by 28 nurses who tested the understanding and practicality of the items. The expert panel evaluated the equivalence between the original and translated versions, resulting in concordance lower than 80% for seven items of the General Guidelines, which were modified. In the instrument, 13 items obtained a concordance rate exceeding 80% except for Wound Status Continuum, which achieved 40% Testing the translated version indicated good practicality. The Bates Jensen Wound Assessment Tool is available in Brazil for research and use in clinical practice. Reliability and validity testing should be considered in future studies.  Wound healing. Nursing assessment.
Guided Electromagnetic Waves Propagating in a Two Layer Cylindrical Dielectric Waveguide with Inhomogeneous Nonlinear Permittivity
Year: 2015

The paper focuses on the problem of monochromatic electromagnetic TM wave propagation in a two layer circular cylindrical dielectric waveguide. The space outside the waveguide is filled with isotropic medium having constant permittivity. The inner core of the waveguide is filled with isotropic medium having constant permittivity; the cladding of the core is filled with isotropic inhomogeneous nonlinear permittivity (the nonlinear term is expressed by Kerr law) Existence of guided modes which depend harmonically on z (the waveguide axis coincides with z axis) is proved and their localization is found. Numerical results including different type of nonlinearities are presented. A comparison with the linear case is given. The existence of a new propagation regime is predicted.
DECSTR: Learning Goal Directed Abstract Behaviors using Pre Verbal Spatial Predicates in Intrinsically Motivated Agents
Venue: ArXiv
Year: 2020

Intrinsically motivated agents freely explore their environment and set their own goals. Such goals are traditionally represented as specific states, but recent works introduced the use of language to facilitate abstraction. Language can, for example, represent goals as sets of general properties that surrounding objects should verify. However, language conditioned agents are trained simultaneously to understand language and to act, which seems to contrast with how children learn: infants demonstrate goal oriented behaviors and abstract spatial concepts very early in their development, before language mastery. Guided by these findings from developmental psychology, we introduce a high level state representation based on natural semantic predicates that describe spatial relations between objects and that are known to be present early in infants. In a robotic manipulation environment, our DECSTR system explores this representation space by manipulating objects, and efficiently learns to achieve any reachable configuration within it. It does so by leveraging an object centered modular architecture, a symmetry inductive bias, and a new form of automatic curriculum learning for goal selection and policy learning. As with children, language acquisition takes place in a second phase, independently from goal oriented sensorimotor learning. This is done via a new goal generation module, conditioned on instructions describing expected transformations in object relations. We present ablations studies for each component and highlight several advantages of targeting abstract goals over specific ones. We further show that using this intermediate representation enables efficient language grounding by evaluating agents on sequences of language instructions and their logical combinations.
Privacy Preserving Probabilistic Record Linkage Using Locality Sensitive Hashes
Venue: DBSec
Year: 2016

As part of increased efforts to provide precision medicine to patients, large clinical research networks (CRNs) are building regional and national collections of electronic health records (EHRs) and patient reported outcomes (PROs) To protect patient privacy, each data contributor to the CRN (for example, a health care provider) uses anonymizing and encryption technology before publishing the data. An important problem in such CRNs involves linking records of the same patient across multiple source databases. Unfortunately, in practice, the records to be matched often contain typographic errors and inconsistencies arising out of formatting and pronunciation incompatibilities, as well as incomplete information. When encryption is applied on these records, similarity search for record linkage is rendered impossible. The central idea behind our work is to create characterizing signatures for the linkage of attributes of each record using minhashes and locality sensitive hash functions before encrypting those attributes. Then, using a privacy preserving record linkage protocol we perform probabilistic matching based on Jaccard similarity measure. We have developed a proof of concept for this protocol and we show some experimental results based on synthetic, but realistic, data.
Unbiased classification of sensory neuron types by large scale single cell RNA sequencing
Venue: Nature Neuroscience
Year: 2015

The primary sensory system requires the integrated function of multiple cell types, although its full complexity remains unclear. We used comprehensive transcriptome analysis of 622 single mouse neurons to classify them in an unbiased manner, independent of any a priori knowledge of sensory subtypes. Our results reveal eleven types: three distinct low threshold mechanoreceptive neurons, two proprioceptive, and six principal types of thermosensitive, itch sensitive, type C low threshold mechanosensitive and nociceptive neurons with markedly different molecular and operational properties. Confirming previously anticipated major neuronal types, our results also classify and provide markers for new, functionally distinct subtypes. For example, our results suggest that itching during inflammatory skin diseases such as atopic dermatitis is linked to a distinct itch generating type. We demonstrate single cell RNA seq as an effective strategy for dissecting sensory responsive cells into distinct neuronal types. The resulting catalog illustrates the diversity of sensory types and the cellular complexity underlying somatic sensation.
A Framework for Implementing Higher Order Thinking Skills (Problem Solving, Critical Thinking, Creative Thinking, and Decision Making) in Engineering Humanities
Venue: 2019 Advances in Science and Engineering Technology International Conferences (ASET)
Year: 2019

Learning skill is the ability to acquire basic knowledge and concepts across multiple dimensions (e.g. affective, psychomotor, and cognitive) Thinking is the ability to challenge and eventually develop acquired knowledge to a higher attainment level.The proposed framework models here are intended for developing, stimulating, and engaging students' complex thinking process skills. This is a higher order thinking level and consists of four subthinking skills, i.e. problem solving, critical thinking, creative thinking, and decision making. Common and supporting thinking skills of these four levels are identified and derived from the literature, and additional sublearning skills are defined as general capacities to perform a set of tasks and further development of students' higher order thinking abilities. Furthermore, questions for focusing thinking or learning activities are developed to transform learned knowledge and skills into practical activities. Hence, course assignments (e.g. homework and quizzes) and learning tools (e.g. mind map, flowchart) were developed to engage students in developing their skills in these four thinking levels. Learning assignments and tasks, as related to complex thinking and related subthinking skills, can be mapped to students' learning outcomes, assessed, and eventually allow evaluating learning skills. Proposed teaching activities' initial assessments show high improvement in student learning and were applied successfully in higher education and partially tested first grade students. Furthermore, it is implemented using a blended learning approach through providing skills based assignments (e.g. homework, quizzes) interactive lectures, and using learning tools such as mind maps. Initial assessment of students' outcomes showed an improvement by 20% as compared with course sections with typical course delivery mode.
Analysis of Rutting Characteristics of Semi rigid Base Asphalt Pavement
Year: 2011

Rutting development regularities of different pavement structures,rutting proportion of different asphalt layers of surface course and the relationship between rutting and asphalt layer thickness were analyzed with finite element software ABAQUS to study rutting characteristics of semi rigid asphalt pavement.The results show that(1) Rutting development is similar to the permanent deformation of asphalt mixtures.It also represents three phrases and does not represent the constant speed phrase properly.Rutting development speed almost remains constant only in a certain range of loading cycles.(2) Rutting development regularities of different pavement structures are similar,that is,the initial rutting develops quickly,and rutting develops stably later,but rutting will enter the damage stage speedily at the end.(3) Rutting proportion of intermediate layer is much higher than the other layers,and great attention should be paid to improving rutting resistance of asphalt mixture at intermediate layer.(4) For semi rigid asphalt pavement structure,the relation between rutting and asphalt layer thickness is not linear,whereas rutting increase gradually slows down with increasing thickness.
ASSESSMENT OF KNOWLEDGE AND PRACTICE REGARDING INFECTION CONTROL MEASURES AMONG STAFF NURSES
Venue: Port Said Scientific Journal of Nursing
Year: 2019

Nurses are often exposed to various infections during the course of carrying out their nursing activities. Therefore nurses should have knowledge and strict adherence to infection control practice.  The study aimed to assess the level of knowledge and level of practice of infection control measures among staff nurses.  A descriptive correlation research design was utilized with total sample of (245) staff nurses who were working in Meniet El Nasr Central Hospital that affiliated to Ministry of Health. Tools of data collection: Self administered questionnaire sheet was used to assess nurses' knowledge about infection control measures and an observation checklist that was used for assessing staff nurses' practice.  Revealed that 85.3% of staff nurses had unsatisfactory knowledge and 71.0% of them had inadequate practice regarding infection control measures.  The findings pointed to, the majority of the staff nurses had unsatisfactory knowledge and inadequate practice regarding infection control measures.  Training course program is necessary to increase nurses' knowledge and practice towards nosocomial infection control measures regularly.
Environmental implications of increased US oil production and liberal growth agenda in post Paris Agreement era.
Venue: Journal of environmental management
Year: 2020

Contextualising on the internationally low oil prices era and historically high oil production in USA and refusal to honour the commitments under Paris Agreement (COP: 21) this study investigates the role of education, oil prices and natural resources on energy demand and CO2 emissions in the USA for the period of 1976 2016. In so doing, we employed a bounds testing approach to cointegration accounting for structural breaks in the series. Key findings suggest the presence of a long run association between underlying variables. The abundance of natural resources and economic growth of the US economy seem to weigh on environmental quality by increasing energy consumption and carbon emissions. Oil prices show a negative association with energy consumption as well as carbon emissions suggesting that a low oil prices regime can lead to an increase in carbon emissions and energy consumption. Interestingly, education seems to play an important role by reducing energy consumption and carbon emissions, resultantly improving the US environmental quality. Our findings have profound environmental implications in terms of efforts to tackle climate change and meeting the Paris agreement (COP: 21) ambitions with reality and USA policy stance.
Facilitating empathy through virtual reality
Year: 2017

This research experimentally investigated whether virtual reality experience can prompt greater empathy and whether greater engagement with a virtual reality connects this virtual reality experience to empathy. Randomly assigned participants viewed a documentary featuring a young girl living in a refugee camp either in a virtual reality format or in a control two dimensional format. Results indicated that the virtual reality experience resulted in greater engagement and a higher level of empathy for the refugee girl compared to the control condition. Greater engagement was a process connecting the virtual reality experience to empathy. Virtual reality has the potential to influence interpersonal emotions such as empathy.
LE PROCESSUS DE TRANSMISSION DES VALEURS CHEZ LES JEUNES Etude comparative de trois configurations colombiennes
Year: 2006

La these repose sur un travail de terrain fait en Colombie avec des jeunes. Elle propose un nouveau regard sur la comprehension de la transmission des valeurs et les processus d'identification, en mettant en relief l'importance des "configurations" des interactions, du corporel et du vecu. L'auteur emprunte a Norbert Elias ce terme de "configuration" parce qu'il depasse l'idee d'une societe independante des individus et d'un individu atome, independant des autres individus. Dans ce contexte on comprend que ce sont les individus ensemble qui forment des "configurations concretes" que l'on ne peut analyser sans tenir compte chez les actants de l'intentionnalite de leurs actions. Dans une premiere partie l'auteur fait le point sur ce que signifie "crise des valeurs" Il analyse ensuite ce qu'est la transmission dans ses processus complexes et varies. Il souligne les principaux aspects distinguant l'adolescence et la jeunesse qui peuvent nous aider a comprendre les modes de transmission dans ces tranches d'age. La deuxieme partie etudie ces modes et leurs caracteristiques, leurs succes et leurs echecs en comparant trois configurations differentes celles d'un college urbain, d'un quartier populaire et d'une communaute indienne. Un chapitre est consacre a la transmission familiale. La troisieme partie consiste dans l'analyse de l'ensemble des donnees recueillies. Elle releve les caracteristiques requises du transmetteur, les modes et les moyens de la transmission, et comment le recepteur s'incorpore, fait siennes, les valeurs transmises. Une attention particuliere est accordee ici a la place du corporel et a la perception psychoaffective des valeurs.
Consistent neural network empirical physical formula constructions for nonlinear scattering intensities of dye doped nematic liquid crystals with ultraviolet pump laser driven Fredericksz threshold shifts
Year: 2018

Intrinsic high nonlinearity in experimentally measured laser scattering intensities poses significant difficulties in analyzing various molecular and optical properties of nematic liquid crystals (NLCs) In this respect, as we theoretically proved in a previous paper, universal nonlinear function approximator layered feedforward neural network (LFNN) can be applied to construct consistent empirical physical formulas (EPFs) for nonlinear physical phenomena. The novelty of this paper is that, by using our previous conference paper data (literature data or simply data for short) for He Ne probe laser illumination nonlinear scattering intensities of dye doped NLCs with ultraviolet pump laser driven Fredericksz threshold (FT) shifts, we constructed definitive LFNN EPFs for these illumination intensities of nonlinear scattering exhibiting FT shifts. The dyes used in the literature data were methyl red (MR) azo and disperse red (DR) anthraquinone. The LFNN EPFs fitted the data very well. Moreover, magnificent LFNN test set forecastings over previously unseen data confirmed the consistent LFNN EPFs inferences of the intensities of scattering. The LFNN EPFs properly extracted the FT threshold shifts, as well as revealing the intensity dependencies on the kind of dye used. We, therefore, conclude the LFNN consistently infers nonlinear physical laws governing the NLC scattering data. Provided that sufficient scattering intensity data is available, these nonlinear physical laws embedded in LFNN EPFs may potentially be useful for investigating various NLC molecular structure parameters in molecular nonlinear optics domain. This knowledge may be applicable in developing new optical materials.
Poly(ester amide)s from poly(alkylene succinate)s and rapid crystallizing amido diols: Synthesis, thermal properties and crystallization behavior
Year: 2020

Random poly(ester amide)s are synthesized from succinic acid, ethylene glycol or 1,4 butanediol and different aliphatic amido diols symmetric a,o diols containing two amide moieties. The formation of chain terminating N succinimide end groups, which limit the molecular weight attainable by common synthetic strategies, is effectively suppressed. Poly(ester amide)s crystallize in a suprastructure similar to that of even even polyamides. The thermal properties of both types of poly(ester amide)s synthesized are considerably improved and transition temperatures are tunable by changing the ratio of aliphatic diol to rapidly crystallizing amido diol in the feed. Using ethylene glycol as diol component, Tg and Tm of the material could be enhanced from 12 to 2 degC and 97 to 157 degC, respectively, while an increase from 33 to 8 degC and 115 153 degC was observed for their 1,4 butanediol derived counterparts. Furthermore, the slow crystallization rate of poly(ethylene succinate) from molten state could be significantly accelerated by the introduction of amide moieties into the polymer backbone.
A study on heatsink fin wave optimization for climate control seat
Year: 2017

This research optimizes a heatsink fin wave that improves the cooling and heating efficiency in a Climate control seat (CCS) The design of existing CCS considers the occupant's pressure, duct shape, blower blade shape, blower cogging torque, and mesh nozzles. However, the heatsink fin wave shape is overlooked in spite of its outstanding thermal efficiency. To address such problems, this research optimized the shape of the heatsink by defining the wave pitch, height pitch, and fin pitch. Parametric analysis (PA) was used such that the effective decision of the variables could be selected within each range of the variances. As a result, the cooling and the heating system operated more efficiently and the time required to reach the target temperature was reduced when compared to the existing system. The performance of the CCS was demonstrated by simulations and experiments.
Gender attitudes of police officers: Selection and socialization mechanisms in the life course.
Venue: Social science research
Year: 2019

Police officers may have attitudes that are more traditional than the general public, perhaps impacted by a unique "working personality" but recent evidence suggests that more conservative individuals may be drawn to policing (LeCount, 2017) In this article I draw from the life course perspective to evaluate the degree to which two mechanisms explain police gender attitudes, selection into policing or socialization while on the job. I examine gender attitudes relating to division of labor in the home and women's disadvantage in the labor market, comparing police to non police using the National Longitudinal Survey of the High School Class of 1972. Following employment patterns for respondents at the start of their policing career (age 18 to age 25) I find more support for occupational socialization than selection. A fixed effects model shows that men who became police officers shifted to become more traditional in their gender attitudes in comparison to other men while the average person in the cohort became less traditional. Women who entered policing in the mid 1970s were less traditional than other women and police status was not significantly related to their attitudes. While attitudes do not necessarily predict behavior, the results suggest that experiences in police work can enhance traditional gender attitudes. Policy recommendations are discussed.
Age Dependent Decrease of Mitochondrial Complex II Activity in a Familial Mouse Model for Alzheimer's Disease.
Venue: Journal of Alzheimer's disease JAD
Year: 2018

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a severe neurodegenerative disorder for which the exact etiology is largely unknown. An increasingly recognized and investigated notion is the pathogenic role of mitochondrial dysfunction in AD. We assessed mitochondrial oxidative phosphorylation (OXPHOS) enzyme activities in the APPswe/PS1DE9 mouse model from 4.5 to 14 months of age. We show an age dependent decrease in mitochondrial complex II activity starting at 9 months in APP/PS1 mice. Other enzymes of the OXPHOS do not show any alterations. Since amyloid b (Ab) plaques are already present from 4 months of age, mitochondrial dysfunction likely occurs downstream of Ab pathology in this mouse model.