Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Ethnochemistry and Ethnomedicine of Ancient Papua New Guineans and Their Use in Motivating Students in Secondary Schools and Universities in PNG

For more than 50,000 years of Papua New Guinea's human history, Papua New Guineans have been making significant contributions to Science, particularly in the fields of Chemistry and Medicine. However, because of the absence of any written language for over 800 dialects, the information has not been recorded and the contributions of ancient Papua New Guineans have largely gone unnoticed and unrecognized. However, during the past 40 years, some researchers, Holdsworth(1), Woodley (2), Timi(3), Dindi (4), Rai(5) have conducted scientific studies on medicinal plants in PNG which probably would have been used by ancient Papua New Guineans to treat deceases. Identification of the plants were carried out with the help of villagers initially and then with botanists and chemists Papua New Guinea. Chemical characterization was carried out by chemists in Papua New Guinea. Nine years ago, the author was able to introduce a Unit in the Grade 11 and 12 Chemistry Syllabus under the title 'Traditional Chemical Practices' which consists of traditional chemical and medicinal activities. Similar units had been introduced at undergraduate level in the University of PNG 7 years ago. Already there is evidence that the learning of what their ancestors had discovered and used has been an inspiration to students, and can stress the importance of learning modern scientific principles and methods to build on what their forefathers had done. This paper summarizes some of the scientific contributions of ancient Papua New Guineans, and endeavours to show how the studying of them at school and university levels may have influenced students to join chemical and medical streams at universities and encouraging first year undergraduates to take up chemistry in later years. 1. I ntroduction Papua New Guinea is characterized by geological, ethnic and biological diversity. It contains approximately 6% of the world's biodiversity in 1% of the worlds land area. This allowed people of this country to use its flora and other resources to produce what they wanted. Although not widely documented and appreciated, medicine and chemistry have been associated with Papua New Guineans for thousands of years. They also have been using indigenous plants for treatment of diseases for thousands of years. The first medicinal plants recorded in Papua New Guinea were shown to the Russian botanist and explorer Miklouho- Maclay who lived on Coast of now Madang Province from 1871 and 1876. Many other traditional plants used as medicines have been since recorded by missionaries, visiting botanists and anthropologists. Several research projects in traditional medicine are currently being conducted at the University of Papua New Guinea, Institute of Medical Research and Wau Ecology Institute of Papua New Guinea.
The ERP Revolution : Surviving Versus Thriving

This paper presents preliminary findings from a research project that examined how firms are generating business value from their investments in enterprise resource planning implementations. The research, which was done jointly with Benchmarking Partners, describes the stages of ERP implementations, the obstacles that firms encountered in generating benefits from the system, and some critical success factors. This research report will be the basis for a paper that examines the implications of ERPs on organizations.
Interdependence within and among 'Supply Chains'

It has been argued that the SCM area lacks sufficient theoretical underpinnings resulting in simplified conceptualisations of supply chains and their contexts, and furthermore, that theory may be helpful to uncover some of the complexity characterising supply chains. The aim of this article is to analyse interdependencies existing within as well as among supply chains. Thompson's (1967) and Richardson's (1972) dependency concepts are used to elaborate on this issue. We conclude that supply chains need to be analysed within their contexts, since this has consequences for recommendations concerning the organising and management of supply chains.
Hyper-graph matching via reweighted random walks

Establishing correspondences between two feature sets is a fundamental issue in computer vision, pattern recognition, and machine learning. This problem can be well formulated as graph matching in which nodes represent feature points while edges describe pairwise relations between feature points. Recently, several researches have tried to embed higher-order relations of feature points by hyper-graph matching formulations. In this paper, we generalize the previous hyper-graph matching formulations to cover relations of features in arbitrary orders, and propose a novel state-of-the-art algorithm by reinterpreting the random walk concept on the hyper-graph in a probabilistic manner. Adopting personalized jumps with a reweighting scheme, the algorithm effectively reflects the one-to-one matching constraints during the random walk process. Comparative experiments on synthetic data and real images show that the proposed method clearly outperforms existing algorithms especially in the presence of noise and outliers.
Quality of Experience-Centric Management of Adaptive Video Streaming Services

Video streaming applications currently dominate Internet traffic. Particularly, HTTP Adaptive Streaming (HAS) has emerged as the dominant standard for streaming videos over the best-effort Internet, thanks to its capability of matching the video quality to the available network resources. In HAS, the video client is equipped with a heuristic that dynamically decides the most suitable quality to stream the content, based on information such as the perceived network bandwidth or the video player buffer status. The goal of this heuristic is to optimize the quality as perceived by the user, the so-called Quality of Experience (QoE). Despite the many advantages brought by the adaptive streaming principle, optimizing users’ QoE is far from trivial. Current heuristics are still suboptimal when sudden bandwidth drops occur, especially in wireless environments, thus leading to freezes in the video playout, the main factor influencing users’ QoE. This issue is aggravated in case of live events, where the player buffer has to be kept as small as possible in order to reduce the playout delay between the user and the live signal. In light of the above, in recent years, several works have been proposed with the aim of extending the classical purely client-based structure of adaptive video streaming, in order to fully optimize users’ QoE. In this article, a survey is presented of research works on this topic together with a classification based on where the optimization takes place. This classification goes beyond client-based heuristics to investigate the usage of server- and network-assisted architectures and of new application and transport layer protocols. In addition, we outline the major challenges currently arising in the field of multimedia delivery, which are going to be of extreme relevance in future years.
Do Drugs Have Religious Import

Until six months ago, if I picked up my phone in the Cambridge area and dialed KISS-BIG a voice would answer, "Ifif. " These were coincidences: KISS-BIG simply happened to be the letter equivalents of an arbitrarily assigned telephone number, while I.F. I.F. represented the initials of an organization with the improbable name of the International Federation for Internal Freedom. But the coincidences were apposite to the point of being poetic. "Kiss big" caught the euphoric, manic, life-embracing attitude that characterized this most publicized of the organizations formed to explore the newly synthesized consciousness-changing substances, while the organization itself was surely one of the "iffy-est" phenomena to appear on our social and intellectual scene in some time. It produced the first firings in Harvard's history, an ultimatum to get out of Mexico in five days, and "the miracle of Marsh Chapel" in which during a two-and-one-half hour Good Friday service ten theological students and professors ingested psilocybin and were visited by what they generally reported to be the deepest religious experiences of their lives. Despite the last of these phenomena and its numerous if less dramatic parallels, students of religion appear by and large to be dismissing the psychedelic drugs which have sprung to our attention in the sixties as having little religious relevance. The position taken in one of the most forward-looking volumes of theological essays to have appeared in recent years (1) accepts R. C. Zaehner's Mysticism Sacred and Profane as having "fully examined and refuted" the religious claims for mescaline which Aldous Huxley sketched in The Doors of Perception . This closing of the case strikes me as premature, for it looks as if the drugs have light to throw on the history of religion, the phenomenology of religion, the philosophy of religion, and the practice of the religious life itself.
Reduction in White Matter Connectivity, Revealed by Diffusion Tensor Imaging, May Account for Age-related Changes in Face Perception

An age-related decline in face processing, even under conditions in which learning and memory are not implicated, has been well documented, but the mechanism underlying this perceptual alteration remains unknown. Here, we examine whether this behavioral change may be accounted for by a reduction in white matter connectivity with age. To this end, we acquired diffusion tensor imaging data from 28 individuals aged 18 to 86 years and quantified the number of fibers, voxels, and fractional anisotropy of the two major tracts that pass through the fusiform gyrus, the pre-eminent face processing region in the ventral temporal cortex. We also measured the ability of a subset of these individuals to make fine-grained discriminations between pairs of faces and between pairs of cars. There was a significant reduction in the structural integrity of the inferior fronto-occipital fasciculus (IFOF) in the right hemisphere as a function of age on all dependent measures and there were also some changes in the left hemisphere, albeit to a lesser extent. There was also a clear age-related decrement in accuracy of perceptual discrimination, especially for more challenging perceptual discriminations, and this held to a greater degree for faces than for cars. Of greatest relevance, there was a robust association between the reduction of IFOF integrity in the right hemisphere and the decline in face perception, suggesting that the alteration in structural connectivity between the right ventral temporal and frontal cortices may account for the age-related difficulties in face processing.
Does Metaphyseal Cement Augmentation in Fracture Management Influence the Adjacent Subchondral Bone and Joint Cartilage?

AbstractAugmentation of implants with polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA) bone cement in osteoporotic fractures is a promising approach to increase implant purchase. Side effects of PMMA for the metaphyseal bone, particularly for the adjacent subchondral bone plate and joint cartilage, have not yet been studied. The following experimental study investigates whether subchondral PMMA injection compromises the homeostasis of the subchondral bone and/or the joint cartilage.Ten mature sheep were used to simulate subchondral PMMA injection. Follow-ups of 2 (4 animals) and 4 (6 animals) months were chosen to investigate possible cartilage damage and subchondral plate alterations in the knee. Evaluation was completed by means of high-resolution peripheral quantitative computed tomography (HRpQCT) imaging, histopathological osteoarthritis scoring, and determination of glycosaminoglycan content in the joint cartilage. Results were compared with the untreated contralateral knee and statistically analyzed using nonparametric tests.Evaluation of the histological osteoarthritis score revealed no obvious cartilage damage for the treated knee; median histological score after 2 months 0 (range 4), after 4 months 1 (range 5). There was no significant difference when compared with the untreated control site after 2 and 4 months (P = 0.23 and 0.76, respectively). HRpQCT imaging showed no damage to the metaphyseal trabeculae. Glycosaminoglycan measurements of the treated joint cartilage after 4 months revealed no significant difference compared with the untreated cartilage (P = 0.24). The findings of this study support initial clinical observation that PMMA implant augmentation of metaphyseal fractures appears to be a safe procedure for fixation without harming the subchondral bone plate and adjacent joint cartilage.
An automatic approach for the generation of the roadmap for multi-AGV systems in an industrial environment

This paper deals with the automatic generation of a roadmap. We propose an approach to build a roadmap for Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) used for logistics operations in industrial environments. The algorithm computes a roadmap in such a way that the coverage, the connectivity and the redundancy of the paths are maximized. In this way the flexibility and the efficiency of the AGV system can be increased. The proposed approach is validated by means of comparison with different roadmaps manually built in real plants.
Valid comparisons of antifibrinolytic agents used in cardiac surgery.

Bleeding is a major source of morbidity and mortality after cardiac surgical procedures. Patients who return to the operating room for bleeding have a 4-fold increase in mortality and a similar increase in the rate of sternal infection. The significance of this issue is underscored by the fact that patients undergoing cardiac surgery consume up to 30% of the nation’s blood supply. During massive hemorrhage resulting from trauma, the life-saving benefits of blood transfusion are well documented. However, in the more common setting of elective blood and blood component transfusions in intensive care units using arbitrary transfusion triggers, the benefits of transfusion are not well established and may have a net negative influence on outcomes. Indeed, the overt dangers of transfusion are unequivocal (hepatitis C, HIV, fever, infection, increased costs, transfusion reaction), and evidence of the covert dangers of blood transfusion (prolonged intensive care unit stay, increased mortality, increased morbidity) after cardiac surgery is persuasive.1 Because both bleeding itself and the transfusions administered to compensate for blood loss have an untoward impact on outcomes, there is strong motivation to decrease the occurrence of bleeding associated with cardiac surgical procedures in the first place. In this regard, the Society of Thoracic Surgeons Workforce on Evidence Based Surgery, in conjunction with the Society of Cardiovascular Anesthesiologists, recently published a comprehensive guideline outlining appropriate methods for blood conservation in cardiac surgery.2 Article p 2801 Recently, Mangano et al published the short-term3 and longer-term4 results of the same observational study comparing the 3 antifibrinolytic agents available for use in cardiac surgical patients (aprotinin, e-aminocaproic acid [EACA], and tranexamic acid [TXA]) with control patients who received neither of these agents. These studies caused considerable concern among cardiac surgeons and regulatory agencies because the authors concluded that aprotinin was associated with a …
Keyframe-Based Visual-Inertial SLAM using Nonlinear Optimization

The fusion of visual and inertial cues has become popular in robotics due to the complementary nature of the two sensing modalities. While most fusion strategies to date rely on filtering schemes, the visual robotics community has recently turned to non-linear optimization approaches for tasks such as visual Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM), following the discovery that this comes with significant advantages in quality of performance and computational complexity. Following this trend, we present a novel approach to tightly integrate visual measurements with readings from an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) in SLAM. An IMU error term is integrated with the landmark reprojection error in a fully probabilistic manner, resulting to a joint non-linear cost function to be optimized. Employing the powerful concept of ‘keyframes’ we partially marginalize old states to maintain a bounded-sized optimization window, ensuring real-time operation. Comparing against both vision-only and loosely-coupled visual-inertial algorithms, our experiments confirm the benefits of tight fusion in terms of accuracy and robustness.
Residential Proximity to Major Roadways Is Associated With Increased Levels of AC133+ Circulating Angiogenic Cells

Objectives—Previous studies have shown that residential proximity to a roadway is associated with increased cardiovascular disease risk. Yet, the nature of this association remains unclear, and its effect on individual cardiovascular disease risk factors has not been assessed. The objective of this study was to determine whether residential proximity to roadways influences systemic inflammation and the levels of circulating angiogenic cells. Approach and Results—In a cross-sectional study, cardiovascular disease risk factors, blood levels of C-reactive protein, and 15 antigenically defined circulating angiogenic cell populations were measured in participants (n=316) with moderate-to-high cardiovascular disease risk. Attributes of roadways surrounding residential locations were assessed using geographic information systems. Associations between road proximity and cardiovascular indices were analyzed using generalized linear models. Close proximity (<50 m) to a major roadway was associated with lower income and higher rates of smoking but not C-reactive protein levels. After adjustment for potential confounders, the levels of circulating angiogenic cells in peripheral blood were significantly elevated in people living in close proximity to a major roadway (CD31+/AC133+, AC133+, CD34+/AC133+, and CD34+/45dim/AC133+ cells) and positively associated with road segment distance (CD31+/AC133+, AC133+, and CD34+/AC133+ cells), traffic intensity (CD31+/AC133+ and AC133+ cells), and distance-weighted traffic intensity (CD31+/34+/45+/AC133+ cells). Conclusions—Living close to a major roadway is associated with elevated levels of circulating cells positive for the early stem marker AC133+. This may reflect an increased need for vascular repair. Levels of these cells in peripheral blood may be a sensitive index of cardiovascular injury because of residential proximity to roadways.
Impact Evaluation of Malaria Control Interventions on Morbidity and All-Cause Child Mortality in Rwanda, 2000–2010

Abstract. The impressive decline in child mortality that occurred in Rwanda from 1996–2000 to 2006–2010 coincided with a period of rapid increase of malaria control interventions such as indoor residual spraying (IRS); insecticide-treated net (ITN) distribution and use, and improved malaria case management. The impact of these interventions was examined through ecological correlation analysis, and robust decomposition analysis of contextual factors on all-cause child mortality. Child mortality fell 61% during the evaluation period and prevalence of severe anemia in children 6–23 months declined 71% between 2005 and 2010. These changes in malaria morbidity and mortality occurred concurrently with a substantial increase in vector control activities. ITN use increased among children under five, from 4% to 70%. The IRS program began in 2007 and covered 1.3 million people in the highest burden districts by 2010. At the same time, diagnosis and treatment with an effective antimalarial expanded nationally, and included making services available to children under the age of 5 at the community level. The percentage of children under 5 who sought care for a fever increased from 26% in 2000 to 48% in 2010. Multivariable models of the change in child mortality between 2000 and 2010 using nationally representative data reveal the importance of increasing ITN ownership in explaining the observed mortality declines. Taken as a whole, the evidence supports the conclusion that malaria control interventions contributed to the observed decline in child mortality in Rwanda from 2000 to 2010, even in a context of improving socioeconomic, maternal, and child health conditions.
Homophily and the Glass Ceiling Effect in Social Networks

The glass ceiling effect has been defined in a recent US Federal Commission report as "the unseen, yet unbreakable barrier that keeps minorities and women from rising to the upper rungs of the corporate ladder, regardless of their qualifications or achievements". It is well documented that many societies and organizations exhibit a glass ceiling. In this paper we formally define and study the glass ceiling effect in social networks and propose a natural mathematical model, called the biased preferential attachment model, that partially explains the causes of the glass ceiling effect. This model consists of a network composed of two types of vertices, representing two sub-populations, and accommodates three well known social phenomena: (i) the "rich get richer" mechanism, (ii) a minority-majority partition, and (iii) homophily. We prove that our model exhibits a strong moment glass ceiling effect and that all three conditions are necessary, i.e., removing any one of them will prevent the appearance of a glass ceiling effect. Additionally, we present empirical evidence taken from a mentor-student network of researchers (derived from the DBLP database) that exhibits both a glass ceiling effect and the above three phenomena.
Visual Abstraction and Stylisation of Maps

Abstract We explore visual map abstraction for the generation of stylized renderings of 2D map data. We employ techniques that are centred around the concept of shape simplification and graph layout and that allow iterative abstraction of 2D maps. We use data from publicly available sources and show how we can iteratively generate aesthetic renditions of these maps. These renditions do not have the goal to allow for navigation tasks, but instead show the map data in a distorted manner. The techniques used to create these images apply simplification, abstraction/generalisation, and displacement operations to the map elements in varying orders and add stylistic shading to produce aesthetic renditions for print or electronic displays. The degree of abstraction/generalisation can be individually chosen and determines the characteristics of the distorted map: whether components retain their shape, degenerate, or are processed in a manner that the abstraction becomes the focus of the image rather than the underlying map data. The renditions can be further personalized by choosing shading and colours for this shading. Together, the presented techniques allow for playful and creative exploration of aesthetic renditions of 2D map data.
On the Public Perception of Police Forces in Riot Events - The Role of Emotions in Three Major Social Networks During the 2017 G20 Riots

In this paper, we present a study on the impact of emotions on information diffusion during a riot event. In particular, we analyze a data-set consisting of more than 750 thousand social media messages related to the 2017 G20 summit that have been extracted from Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Because of the controversies surrounding police operations during violent protests, our analysis especially focuses on emotions conveyed in messages related to the local police. We found that a) negative emotions of high arousal (anger and fear) dominate in messages mentioning the police on all three social networks, b) emotional content was forwarded (retweeted) more often, regardless of the corresponding emotion valence, and c) in contrast to previous studies we found that emotions have a considerably larger impact on the retweeting behavior than the number of hashtags a message contains.