Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Contact line instability and pattern selection in thermally driven liquid films

Liquids spreading over a solid substrate under the action of various forces are known to exhibit a long wavelength contact line instability. We use an example of thermally driven spreading on a horizontal surface to study how the stability of the flow can be altered, or patterns selected, using feedback control. We show that thermal perturbations of certain spatial structure imposed behind the contact line and proportional to the deviation of the contact line from its mean position can completely suppress the instability. Due to the presence of mean flow and a spatially nonuniform nature of spreading liquid films the dynamics of disturbances is governed by a non-normal evolution operator, opening up a possibility of transient amplification and nonlinear instabilities. We show that in the case of thermal driving the non-normality can be significant, especially for small wavenumber disturbances, and trace the origin of transient amplification to a close alignment of a large group of eigenfunctions of the ev.
Comparison of in vitro toxicity of silver ions and silver nanoparticles on human hepatoma cells

Scientific information on the potential harmful effects of silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) on human health severely lags behind their exponentially growing applications in consumer products. In assessing the toxic risk of AgNP usage, liver, as a detoxifying organ, is particularly important. The aim of this study was to explore the toxicity mechanisms of nano and ionic forms of silver on human hepatoblastoma (HepG2) cells. The results showed that silver ions and citrate‐coated AgNPs reduced cell viability in a dose‐dependent manner. The IC50 values of silver ions and citrate‐coated AgNPs were 0.5 and 50 mg L−1, respectively. The LDH leakage and inhibition of albumin synthesis, along with decreased ALT activity, indicated that treatment with either AgNP or Ag ions resulted in membrane damage and reduced the cell function of human liver cells. Evaluation of oxidative stress markers demonstrating depletion of GSH, increased ROS production, and increased SOD activity, indicated that oxidative stress might contribute to the toxicity effects of nano and ionic forms of silver. The observed toxic effect of AgNP on HepG2 cells was substantially weaker than that caused by ionic silver, while the uptake of nano and ionic forms of silver by HepG2 cells was nearly the same. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Environ Toxicol 31: 679–692, 2016.
Degradation of Wheat Straw by Fibrobacter succinogenes S85: a Liquid- and Solid-State Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Study

ABSTRACT Wheat straw degradation by Fibrobacter succinogenes was monitored by nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy and chemolytic methods to investigate the activity of an entire fibrolytic system on an intact complex substrate. In situ solid-state NMR with 13C cross-polarization magic angle spinning was used to monitor the modification of the composition and structure of lignocellulosic fibers (of 13C-enriched wheat straw) during the growth of bacteria on this substrate. There was no preferential degradation either of amorphous regions of cellulose versus crystalline regions or of cellulose versus hemicelluloses in wheat straw. This suggests either a simultaneous degradation of the amorphous and crystalline parts of cellulose and of cellulose and hemicelluloses by the enzymes or degradation at the surface at a molecular scale that cannot be detected by NMR. Liquid-state two-dimensional NMR experiments and chemolytic methods were used to analyze in detail the various sugars released into the culture medium. An integration of NMR signals enabled the quantification of oligosaccharides produced from wheat straw at various times of culture and showed the sequential activities of some of the fibrolytic enzymes of F. succinogenes S85 on wheat straw. In particular, acetylxylan esterase appeared to be more active than arabinofuranosidase, which was more active than α-glucuronidase. Finally, cellodextrins did not accumulate to a great extent in the culture medium.
A review on oil palm empty fruit bunch fiber-reinforced polymer composite materials

Natural fiber-reinforced polymer composite materials have emerged in a wide spectrum of area of the polymer science. The composite produced from these types of materials are low density, low cost, comparable specific properties, and most importantly they are environmental friendly. The composite materials produced from oil palm fibers and commercially available polymers have offered some specific properties that can be comparable to conventional synthetic fiber composite materials. However, these properties are greatly dependent on the compatibility of oil palm fibers and matrix phase with moisture absorption as one of the critical issues that becomes the drawbacks of the oil palm fiber polymer composite materials. Apparently, it greatly affects the physical as well as mechanical properties of the composite materials. The present review reports the work on oil palm empty fruit bunch (OPEFB) fiber-reinforced polymer composites with some interest on the OPEFB physical structure, and chemical compositions. Finally, the incorporation of OPEFB into polymeric materials leads to several interesting consequences on the water absorption characteristics and the mechanical properties, which have been reviewed.
Appearance of the pattern deviation map as a function of change in area of localized field loss.

PURPOSE To determine the influence of the spatial extent and the depth of localized field loss on the computation of the General Height (GH) method for estimating the diffuse component of visual field loss and, therefore, on the subsequent appearance of the Pattern Deviation (PD) map. METHODS Varying shapes and depths of localized glaucomatous field loss were modeled in each of 82 Humphrey Field Analyzer Program 30-2 fields (82 normal eyes) by superimposing, on the fields from the normal eyes, the PD defect depth (P < 0.05) of one visual field from each of 123 patients with glaucoma. The difference in GH between each of the 10,086 modeled fields and the GH in the corresponding measured normal field was derived and the relationship to possible differences in the location-by-location significance levels of each pair of PD maps determined. RESULTS For the group mean overestimation in the GH of -0.79 dB, the 50th, 90th, and 95th percentiles of the modeled fields described 23.4%, 37.9%, and 42.6% locations, respectively, exhibiting an underestimation in PD statistical significance. As the size of the superimposed field loss increased, the overestimation of the GH increased, and the underestimation of PD statistical significance became more apparent. This error was independent of defect depth. CONCLUSIONS The localized component of field loss in glaucoma produced an overestimation of diffuse loss and a consequent underestimation of the severity of focal loss by PD analysis. This effect increased as the spatial extent of the loss became more extensive and will lead to an underestimation of progressive localized field loss.
Actions in the Eye: Dynamic Gaze Datasets and Learnt Saliency Models for Visual Recognition

Systems based on bag-of-words models from image features collected at maxima of sparse interest point operators have been used successfully for both computer visual object and action recognition tasks. While the sparse, interest-point based approach to recognition is not inconsistent with visual processing in biological systems that operate in `saccade and fixate' regimes, the methodology and emphasis in the human and the computer vision communities remains sharply distinct. Here, we make three contributions aiming to bridge this gap. First, we complement existing state-of-the art large scale dynamic computer vision annotated datasets like Hollywood-2 [1] and UCF Sports [2] with human eye movements collected under the ecological constraints of visual action and scene context recognition tasks. To our knowledge these are the first large human eye tracking datasets to be collected and made publicly available for video, vision.imar. ro/eyetracking (497,107 frames, each viewed by 19 subjects), unique in terms of their (a) large scale and computer vision relevance, (b) dynamic, video stimuli, (c) task control, as well as free-viewing. Second, we introduce novel dynamic consistency and alignment measures, which underline the remarkable stability of patterns of visual search among subjects. Third, we leverage the significant amount of collected data in order to pursue studies and build automatic, end-to-end trainable computer vision systems based on human eye movements. Our studies not only shed light on the differences between computer vision spatio-temporal interest point image sampling strategies and the human fixations, as well as their impact for visual recognition performance, but also demonstrate that human fixations can be accurately predicted, and when used in an end-to-end automatic system, leveraging some of the advanced computer vision practice, can lead to state of the art results.
On properties of modulation spectrum for robust automatic speech recognition

We report on the effect of band-pass filtering of the time trajectories of spectral envelopes on speech recognition. Several types of filter (linear-phase FIR, DCT, and DFT) are studied. Results indicate the relative importance of different components of the modulation spectrum of speech for ASR. General conclusions are: (1) most of the useful linguistic information is in modulation frequency components from the range between 1 and 16 Hz, with the dominant component at around 4 Hz, (2) it is important to preserve the phase information in the modulation frequency domain, (3) the features which include components at around 4 Hz in the modulation spectrum outperform the conventional delta features, (4) the features which represent the several modulation frequency bands with appropriate center frequency and bandwidth increase recognition performance.
Constrained mirror placement on the Internet

Internet service providers and infrastructural companies often employ mirrors of popular content to decrease client download time and server load. Due to the immense scale of the Internet and decentralized administration of the networks, companies have a limited number of sites (relative to the size of the Internet) where they can place mirrors. Mirrors of popular content are usually replicated on every site to maximize reachability to clients. We study the performance improvements as the number of mirrors increases under different placement algorithms subject to the constraint that mirrors can be placed only at certain locations. Although there are extensive theoretical studies on center placement and, analytical and empirical studies on Web cache placement, we are not aware of any published literature on mirror placement especially in the case of constrained mirror placement. Our results show that increasing the number of mirror sites under the constraint is effective in reducing client download time and reducing server load only for a surprisingly small range of values regardless of the mirror placement algorithm.
Identification and characterization of the genes encoding the type 3 and type 1 fimbrial adhesins of Klebsiella pneumoniae

Strains of Klebsiella pneumoniae are known to express two morphologically and functionally distinct filaments, the type 3 and the type 1 fimbriae. The gene (mrkD) encoding the adhesion of K. pneumoniae type 3 fimbriae was identified by transcomplementation analysis with the pap fimbrial gene cluster of Escherichia coli. The nucleotide sequence of the mrkD gene was determined. In addition, the determinant coding for the K. pneumoniae type 1 fimbrial adhesion was identified, and its nucleotide sequence was deduced. The predicted amino acid sequences of the K. pneumoniae adhesion proteins are compared, and similarities with the major fimbrial structural proteins (MrkA and FimA) are discussed.
Plasticity in the Meiotic Epigenetic Landscape of Sex Chromosomes in Caenorhabditis Species

During meiosis in the heterogametic sex in some species, sex chromosomes undergo meiotic sex chromosome inactivation (MSCI), which results in acquisition of repressive chromatin and transcriptional silencing. In Caenorhabditis elegans, MSCI is mediated by MET-2 methyltransferase deposition of histone H3 lysine 9 dimethylation. Here we examined the meiotic chromatin landscape in germ lines of four Caenorhabditis species; C. remanei and C. brenneri represent ancestral gonochorism, while C. briggsae and C. elegans are two lineages that independently evolved hermaphroditism. While MSCI is conserved across all four species, repressive chromatin modifications are distinct and do not correlate with reproductive mode. In contrast to C. elegans and C. remanei germ cells where X chromosomes are enriched for histone H3 lysine 9 dimethylation, X chromosomes in C. briggsae and C. brenneri germ cells are enriched for histone H3 lysine 9 trimethylation. Inactivation of C. briggsae MET-2 resulted in germ-line X chromosome transcription and checkpoint activation. Further, both histone H3 lysine 9 di- and trimethylation were reduced in Cbr-met-2 mutant germ lines, suggesting that in contrast to C. elegans, H3 lysine 9 di- and trimethylation are interdependent. C. briggsae H3 lysine 9 trimethylation was redistributed in the presence of asynapsed chromosomes in a sex-specific manner in the related process of meiotic silencing of unsynapsed chromatin. However, these repressive marks did not influence X chromosome replication timing. Examination of additional Caenorhabditis species revealed diverse H3 lysine 9 methylation patterns on the X, suggesting that the sex chromosome epigenome evolves rapidly.
Structural Vector Autoregressions With Nonnormal Residuals

In structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) modeling, sometimes the identifying restrictions are insufficient for a unique specification of all shocks. In this paper it is pointed out that specific distributional assumptions can help in identifying the structural shocks. In particular, a mixture of normal distributions is considered as a possible model that can be used in this context. Our model setup enables us to test restrictions which are just-identifying in a standard SVAR framework. The results are illustrated using a U.S. macro data set and a system of U.S. and European interest rates.
Towards a Definition of Source-Code Plagiarism

A survey using a scenario-based questionnaire format has provided insight into the perceptions of U.K academics who teach programming on computing courses. This survey across various higher education (HE) institutions investigates what academics feel constitutes source-code plagiarism in an undergraduate context. Academics' responses on issues surrounding source-code reuse and acknowledgement are discussed. A general consensus exists among academics that a ldquozero tolerancerdquo plagiarism policy is appropriate; however, some issues concerning source-code reuse and acknowledgement raised controversial responses. This paper discusses the most important findings from the survey and proposes a definition of what can constitute source-code plagiarism from the perspective of U.K. academics who teach programming on computing courses.
Organophosphorus pesticide exposure decreases sperm quality: association between sperm parameters and urinary pesticide levels

Several studies have suggested that human semen quality has declined over the past decades and some of them have associated it with occupational exposure to pesticides. However, most of these studies have not been associated with a reliable exposure level and have been designed mostly as cross‐sectional studies. The present work evaluates, in a longitudinal follow‐up study, the effect of organophosphate pesticides (OP) at three occupational exposure levels on semen quality. In addition, the study examined the association between OP urinary levels and sperm parameters in exposed and unexposed workers. A total of 139 semen samples from 52 volunteers were assessed. Urinary OP levels were measured by gas‐liquid chromatography.
Role in vivo for gamma interferon in control of pneumonia caused by Chlamydia trachomatis in mice

In a model of pneumonia caused by murine Chlamydia trachomatis, depletion experiments with monoclonal antibody to gamma interferon (IFN-gamma) made mice more susceptible. Repletion experiments giving exogenous recombinant murine IFN-gamma were not consistently protective. IFN-gamma may be necessary but not sufficient in host defense against the organism.
(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction: Investigating the Role of Goal Value and Mood in Habitual Technology Use

Many of our daily activities are guided by habits and so are users’ interactions with technology. IS research has made significant strides acknowledging this perspective, emphasizing the importance of habits for continued system use. We seek to contribute to this research, taking a closer look at the effects of habits on the quality of IS use. As experience shows, habits may not always be a good thing. Therefore, we study the conditions under which positive effects of habitual behavior on users’ satisfaction can be realized. In a study among 303 smartphone users, we investigate the role of goal value and mood for individuals’ satisfaction. We find that these devices are prone to dissatisfying usage habits which are absent of a particular goal value, especially when individuals are feeling tense. As these habits may be considered questionable, our study has several practical implications, too.
The Structural Context of Team Learning: Effects of Organizational and Team Structure on Internal and External Learning

This paper reports on a study of structural antecedents to team learning. In a study of self-managed pharmaceutical research and development teams, we first find that more team-level structure is associated with more internal learning as well as more external learning. We then establish that more organizational-level structure is negatively associated with both internal and external learning. We find that psychological safety mediates the positive relationship between team structure and team learning, and that task autonomy constraints mediate the negative relationship between organizational structure and team learning. Investigating the interaction effect between team and organizational structure, we find, unexpectedly, that organizational structure supports external team learning under conditions of less team structure. Specifically, when teams have less team structure, the relationship between organizational structure and external team learning is positive. This structure substitutability finding suggests that although more organizational structure, on average, hurts external team learning, there are situations in which it helps. An important implication of the study is that multiple levels of structure, and their interactions, should be taken into consideration when assessing structural effects on team learning.
Epileptic MEG Spikes Detection Using Common Spatial Patterns and Linear Discriminant Analysis

Epilepsy is a brain disorder, where patients' lives are extremely disturbed by the occurrence of sudden unpredictable seizures. This paper develops patient-independent signal processing techniques based on common spatial patterns and linear discriminant analysis to detect epileptic activities (spikes) from multi-channel brain signal recordings. In contrast to current existing studies which heavily rely on the analysis of electroencephalogram (EEG) data for the detection of epileptic activities, this research work considers magnetoencephalography (MEG) recordings for the detection of epileptic spikes. This requires careful development since unlike EEG spikes, MEG spikes do not have well-defined morphological characteristics. Due to the recent advances in MEG technology, it became possible to consider MEG signals to detect and analyze epileptic activities, but efforts to develop signal processing tools in this area are still in its outset, as compared with those devoted to EEG signal processing.
Evaluation of Shear Bond Strength of Total- and Self-etching Adhesive Systems after Application of Chlorhexidine to Dentin Contaminated with a Hemostatic Agent

Statement of the Problem Hemostatic agents may influence the bond strength of different bonding agents. Also, chlorhexidine has shown positive effects on bond strength values and their combination effect has not been reported yet. Purpose The aim of this study was to evaluate the effect of contamination with a hemostatic agent on shear bond strength (SBS) of total- and self-etching adhesive systems and the effect of chlorhexidine application after removal of the hemostatic agent. Materials and Method In this experimental study, the occlusal enamel of each sixty caries-free mandibular molars was removed and their midcoronal dentin was exposed. The specimens were then mounted in auto-polymerizing resin 1mm apical to CEJ. Then, the specimens were divided into 6 groups (n=10) based on contamination with a hemostatic agent (H), application of chlorhexidine (CHX) and the adhesive system used; and then were classified as Group 1: Adper Single Bond (ASB); Group 2: H+ASB; Group 3: H+0.2% CHX+ASB; Group 4: Clearfil SE Bond (CSB); Group 5: H+CSB; Group 6: H+0.2% CHX+CSB. Then, composite resin rods (4×2 mm) were built up on the dentin surfaces and after thermocycling, the SBS (MPa) was evaluated. Statistical analysis was performed using two-way ANOVA and post hoc Tukey tests (p< 0.05). Results There were statistically significant differences between bond strength values of group 1 (ASB) and group 2 (H+ASB) (p< 0.001) and group 1 (ASB) and group 3 (H+CHX+ASB) (p< 0.001). Similarly, significant differences were seen between group 4 (CSB) and group 5 (H+CSB) (p< 0.001) and between group 4 (CSB) and group 6 (H+CHX+CSB) (p< 0.001). Conclusion Contamination with hemostatic agent reduced the SBS of both total- and self-etching adhesive systems. In addition, application of chlorhexidine after the removal of hemostatic agent had a negative effect on SBS of total- and self-etching adhesive systems.
Inhibition of sodium‐linked glucose reabsorption normalizes diabetes‐induced glomerular hyperfiltration in conscious adenosine A1‐receptor deficient mice

Glomerular hyperfiltration is commonly observed in diabetics early after the onset of the disease and predicts the progression of nephropathy. Sustained hyperglycaemia is also closely associated with kidney hypertrophy and increased electrolyte and glucose reabsorption in the proximal tubule. In this study, we investigated the role of the increased tubular sodium/glucose cotransport for diabetes‐induced glomerular hyperfiltration. To eliminate any potential confounding effect of the tubuloglomerular feedback (TGF) mechanism, we used adenosine A1‐receptor deficient (A1AR−/−) mice known to lack a functional TGF mechanism and compared the results to corresponding wild‐type animals (A1AR+/+).