Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Direct and indirect antibacterial effects of various concentrations of triple antibiotic pastes loaded in a methylcellulose system.

We investigated the direct and indirect (residual) antibacterial effects of various concentrations of triple antibiotic paste (TAP) loaded into a methylcellulose system. Enterococcus faecalis (E. faecalis) was grown on sterilized dentin blocks (n = 60) and treated with clinically used TAP (1,000 mg/mL), low concentrations of methylcellulose-based TAP (100, 10, and 1 mg/mL), placebo paste, or 1.5% NaOCl (n = 10). The pastes were then removed, and biofilm disruption assays were performed. Additional dentin blocks (n = 120) were pretreated with the same experimental groups (n = 20). The pastes were rinsed off, and the samples were immersed independently in phosphate-buffered saline for 2 and 4 weeks (n = 10). E.faecalis was then grown on the dentin blocks, and biofilm disruption assays were performed. Fisher's Exact and Wilcoxon rank sum tests were used for statistical analyses. With regard to direct antibacterial effects, all treatment groups demonstrated complete eradication of biofilms in comparison to placebo paste, while 10 mg/mL of TAP or higher provided substantial residual antibacterial effects. However, dentin treated with 1 mg/mL of TAP or 1.5% NaOCl did not provide substantial residual antibacterial effects. Dentin pretreated with 10 mg/mL of TAP or higher exhibited extended residual antibacterial effects and can thus be used during endodontic regeneration. (J Oral Sci 58, 575-582, 2016).
Business Process Re-engineering: A Panacea for Reducing Operational Cost in Service Organizations

Organizations in today’s business environment struggle on how to reduce operation cost in order to set prices that can be afforded by many customers while obtaining reasonable profit. In order to reduce Operational Cost, service organizations have been working hard to identify techniques that facilitate business processes improvement for reduced Operational Cost. In so doing, the global literature indicates that service organizations adopt Business Process Re-engineering technique as a panacea of reducing Operational Cost. Despite a documented potentiality of Business Process Re-engineering technique, there are mixed empirical results, findings and conclusions regarding the effect of Business Process Re-engineering on Operational Cost. Therefore, this paper aimed at assessing and explaining effects of BPR on Operational Cost. The study used cross-sectional survey design to investigate the effect of BPR on Operational Cost. Intensive literature review enabled the construction of structural measurement model, formulation of testable hypotheses and operationalization of constructs. In order to test the model and hypotheses, data were collected from ninety five (95) service organizations in Tanzania. Results of the study reveal that BPR and delivering speed have no direct effects on Operational Cost; they indirectly affect Operational Cost through the mediations of service quality. Therefore, BPR influences first both service quality and delivery speed in affecting Operational Cost of service organizations. It is now recommended that service organizations should use Business Process Re-engineering as panacea of reducing Operational Cost.
How Does Project Supervisor Maintain Sustainability of Project Members? A Study from Leadership Perspective

Project members’ innovative behavior is crucial to their sustainability and successful implementation of the project. This research develops a conceptual model to explore the effect of project supervisor leadership skills on member’s innovative behavior. The model is examined by a sample of 437 project members in Taiwan. The results show that project supervisors’ emotional healing positively influences members’ innovative behavior through affect-based trust in their supervisor and supervisor conceptual skill has an inverted-U impact on members’ innovative behavior through cognition-based trust in their supervisor. This paper further discusses implications of these conclusions for additional research on the association between leadership skills and innovative behavior.
Individual and Corporate Social Responsibility

Society’s demands for individual and corporate social responsibility as an alternative response to market and distributive failures are becoming increasingly prominent. We first draw on recent developments in the “psychology and economics” of prosocial behavior to shed light on this trend, which reflects a complex interplay of genuine altruism, social or self image concerns, and material incentives. We then link individual concerns to corporate social responsibility, contrasting three possible understandings of the term: the adoption of a more long-term perspective by firms, the delegated exercise of prosocial behavior on behalf of stakeholders, and insider-initiated corporate philanthropy. For both individuals and firms we discuss the benefits, costs and limits of socially responsible behavior as a means to further societal goals.
Biased PNG for target observability enhancement against nonmaneuvering targets

This paper proposes a biased proportional navigation guidance (BPNG) law providing enhanced target observability for passive homing missile systems against a nonmaneuvering target. After examining the line-of-sight (LOS) rate equation, which is an important parameter of target observability and which reveals that the LOS rate is proportional to the rate of cross-range deviation, a bias term of BPNG is formulated using the rate of cross-range deviation to generate an additional LOS rate. The closed-form trajectory solution of the proposed guidance law is derived, and its capturability and characteristics are then investigated. Using numerical simulations, the performance of the proposed guidance law is determined in conjunction with a target state estimator.
Inventory of medicinal plants in the Site of Biological and Ecological Interest of Kharouba ( Central Plateau , Morocco )

The Site of Biological and Ecological Interest (SBEI) of Kharouba remains undiscovered and less valorized despite its floristic diversity. Set in the Central Plateau region of Morocco, this site offers not only some nice Tetraclinis stands (Tetraclinis articulata (Vahl.) Masters), but also harbors one of the natural forests with an important floristic richness. This work aims to evaluate the floristic diversity and to elaborate a catalog of the medicinal plants of Kharouba SBEI. The methodology adopted is based on the inventory of all medicinal plants existing among a total of 145 floristic plants of the SBEI. The results of this study led us to identify 52 medicinal plants belonged to 49 genera and 33 families mainly: Asteraceae, Apiaceae, Oleaceae and Anacardiaceae. Among the identified species in this study zone 7 are abundant, 13 moderately abundant and 32 are rare to very rare.
Interferon-β Suppresses Murine Th1 Cell Function in the Absence of Antigen-Presenting Cells

Interferon (IFN)-β is a front-line therapy for the treatment of the relapsing-remitting form of multiple sclerosis. However, its immunosuppressive mechanism of function remains incompletely understood. While it has been proposed that IFN-β suppresses the function of inflammatory myelin antigen-reactive T cells by promoting the release of immunomodulatory cytokines such as IL-27 from antigen-presenting cells (APCs), its direct effects on inflammatory CD4+ Th1 cells are less clear. Here, we establish that IFN-β inhibits mouse IFN-γ+ Th1 cell function in the absence of APCs. CD4+ T cells express the type I interferon receptor, and IFN-β can suppress Th1 cell proliferation under APC-free stimulation conditions. IFN-β-treated myelin antigen-specific Th1 cells are impaired in their ability to induce severe experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (EAE) upon transfer to lymphocyte-deficient Rag1-/- mice. Polarized Th1 cells downregulate IFN-γ and IL-2, and upregulate the negative regulatory receptor Tim-3, when treated with IFN-β in the absence of APCs. Further, IFN-β treatment of Th1 cells upregulates phosphorylation of Stat1, and downregulates phosphorylation of Stat4. Our data indicate that IFN-γ-producing Th1 cells are directly responsive to IFN-β and point to a novel mechanism of IFN-β-mediated T cell suppression that is independent of APC-derived signals.
Climate teleconnections to Yangtze river seasonal streamflow at the Three Gorges Dam, China

In this study, we identify climatic influences on summer monsoon inflow to the Three Gorges Dam (TGD) in the Yangtze River Basin and use indices of these influences to predict streamflow one season ahead. Summer monsoon streamflow at Yichang hydrological station (YHS) was analyzed for the period 1882–2003. Statistical analysis was used to develop a predictive model for summer streamflow using preceding climate variables. Linear correlation maps were constructed using 3‐month ahead climate fields to identify regions that exhibit teleconnections with streamflow at Yichang. The analysis revealed regions in the eastern Indian and western Pacific Oceans that influence YHS streamflow. These regions and variables are consistent with those identified by previous studies of regional rainfall. In addition, snow cover in the Yangtze upland region provides predictive skill, likely due to snowmelt contributions to streamflow. A regression model for prediction using these indices provides a prediction R2 greater than 0.5, which is robust under the ‘leave one out’ cross‐validation. A skillful prediction can provide guidance for water management in the Yangtze River Basin, e.g. the Three Gorges Dam and future projects for South‐to‐North water transfer. Copyright © 2006 Royal Meteorological Society
A Review of Ethical Leadership and Other Ethics- Related Leadership Theories

The role of ethics in leadership studies is very important for organizations. Leadership without ethics and integrity can be harmful both for the organizational stakeholders and society. The high-profiled scandals and the leadership involvement in unethical activities caused increase attention of the scholars and mainstream media in the leadership ethics (Hartog, 2015). This resulted a growing research in the field of ethical leadership behavior. For this reason, the present study review ethics-related leadership including ethical leadership and other ethic-related leadership theories to better understand the importance of the ethics and morality in these leadership constructs. This study also presented a comprehensive review on ethical leadership and its similarities and differences with other related leadership styles. Another focus of this study was to present the definitions of each leadership style and their scales, and to establish that how ethical leadership is distinct from each leadership style. Future directions and conclusion are presented in the last of the paper.
Workplace hazards and social positioning efforts of male adolescent labourers in suburb sawmills, Lagos State Nigeria

Young people with low socioeconomic background require resilience to survive in a city with limited opportunities. Unintendedly such efforts sometimes affect their well-being. Such is the case of adolescent dwelling in some urban suburbs across cultures. Based on sixteen faceto- face interviews with adolescent boys working as labourers in suburb sawmills; this paper situates the notion of boyhood and survival into adulthood within a social space. The findings revealed conscious absorption with the notion of boyhood through certain rules of engagement and survival measures. These strategies include self-care practices geared towards achieving a healthy body for contextualised performance in the factory settings. However, this comes with series of consequences as boys lived out the social notions of boyhood and rules of engagement in activities for survival and social recognition. Hence, understanding and targeting the positive survival strategies of this social category of adolescents could be useful to empower and minimise the hazards of working and growing as adolescents in the physical and social spaces of sawmills. Keywords : Sawmills, Hazards, urban slums, boyhood, masculinities Les jeunes a faible contexte socio-economique necessitent resilience pour survivre dans une ville avec des possibilites limitees. Unintendedly ces efforts affectent parfois leur bien-etre. Tel est le cas de l’adolescent demeure dans certaines banlieues urbaines a travers les cultures. Base sur seize entretiens en face a face avec des adolescents travaillant comme ouvriers dans les scieries de la banlieue; Ce document situe la notion de jeunesse et de la survie a l’âge adulte dans un espace social. Les resultats ont revele une absorption consciente avec la notion d’enfance grâce a certaines regles de mesures de l’engagement et de survie. Ces strategies comprennent des pratiques d’auto-soins orientes vers la realisation d’un corps sain pour la performance contextualisee dans les reglages d’usine. Toutefois, cela vient avec serie de consequences que les garcons vivaient les notions sociales de la jeunesse et des regles d’engagement dans des activites de survie et de reconnaissance sociale. Par consequent, la comprehension et le ciblage des strategies de survie positifs de cette categorie sociale des adolescents pourrait etre utile de responsabiliser et de minimiser les risques lies au travail et de plus en plus comme des adolescents dans les espaces physiques et sociaux des scieries. Mots-cles : scieries , les dangers, les bidonvilles , enfance , masculinites
Accidental carbon monoxide poisoning with severe cardiorespiratory compromise in 2 children.

Carbon monoxide is a colorless, odorless gas produced as a by-product of incomplete combustion. Carbon monoxide poisoning accounts for approximately 3500 deaths in the United States annually. Carbon monoxide in exhaust fumes from motor vehicles accounts for most deaths due to carbon monoxide poisoning; however, poorly functioning heating systems, inhaled smoke, and propane-operated forklifts also can cause carbon monoxide poisoning. We report 2 cases of severe cardiorespiratory compromise in 3-year-old identical twin girls that occurred after they were exposed for an estimated 12 to 18 hours to a faulty furnace producing high levels of carbon monoxide.
Finding Significant Stress Episodes in a Discontinuous Time Series of Rapidly Varying Mobile Sensor Data

Management of daily stress can be greatly improved by delivering sensor-triggered just-in-time interventions (JITIs) on mobile devices. The success of such JITIs critically depends on being able to mine the time series of noisy sensor data to find the most opportune moments. In this paper, we propose a time series pattern mining method to detect significant stress episodes in a time series of discontinuous and rapidly varying stress data. We apply our model to 4 weeks of physiological, GPS, and activity data collected from 38 users in their natural environment to discover patterns of stress in real life. We find that the duration of a prior stress episode predicts the duration of the next stress episode and stress in mornings and evenings is lower than during the day. We then analyze the relationship between stress and objectively rated disorder in the surrounding neighborhood and develop a model to predict stressful episodes.
SwiftTuna: Responsive and incremental visual exploration of large-scale multidimensional data

For interactive exploration of large-scale data, a preprocessing scheme (e.g., data cubes) has often been used to summarize the data and provide low-latency responses. However, such a scheme suffers from a prohibitively large amount of memory footprint as more dimensions are involved in querying, and a strong prerequisite that specific data structures have to be built from the data before querying. In this paper, we present SwiftTuna, a holistic system that streamlines the visual information seeking process on large-scale multidimensional data. SwiftTuna exploits an in-memory computing engine, Apache Spark, to achieve both scalability and performance without building precomputed data structures. We also present a novel interactive visualization technique, tailed charts, to facilitate large-scale multidimensional data exploration. To support responsive querying on large-scale data, SwiftTuna leverages an incremental processing approach, providing immediate low-fidelity responses (i.e., prompt responses) as well as delayed high-fidelity responses (i.e., incremental responses). Our performance evaluation demonstrates that SwiftTuna allows data exploration of a real-world dataset with four billion records while preserving the latency between incremental responses within a few seconds.
Effects of Public and Private Schools on Academic Achievement

The Korean high school system is regulated and monitored by then government to ensure that (i) middle school graduates are randomly assigned to private and public high schools and (ii) the tuitions are the same for both institutions. Hence, any difference between the academic performances of the graduates from private and public high schools is a result from the difference in the schools’ efforts towards the students’ academic achievement. Results show that the students in private schools have better academic performance than those in public schools. Moreover, significant difference exists among boys-only, coed, and girls-only schools. The students’ income level influences their academic performance.
Dietary intake and factors influencing eating behaviours in overweight and obese South Asian men living in the Kingdom: a study.

Objective It is widely recognised that South Asian men living in the UK are more likely to develop type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) than their white British counterparts. Despite this, limited data have been published quantifying current dietary intake patterns and qualitatively exploring eating behaviours in this population. The objectives of this study were to (1) assess diet, (2) explore perceptions of T2DM, (3) investigate factors influencing eating behaviours in overweight/obese South Asian men and (4) determine the suitability of the UK Diet and Diabetes Questionnaire (UKDDQ) for use in this population. Methods A cross-sectional mixed-methods design, including assessment of dietary intake using UKDDQ (n=63), followed by semistructured interviews in a purposive sample (n=36). Results UKDDQ scores indicated 54% of participants had a ‘healthy’ diet with a mean sample score of 3.44±0.43 out of a maximum of 5. Oily fish consumption was low (1.84±1.85). Body weight was positively associated with a high-added sugar subscore (r=0.253, p=0.047), with 69.8% of the men having ‘unhealthy’ intakes of sugar-sweetened beverages. Cultural commitments (eg, extended family and faith events), motivation and time were identified as key barriers to dietary change, with family support an important facilitator to making healthy dietary changes. Participants stated that UKDDQ was suitable for assessing diets of South Asians and suggestions for tailoring questions related to rice consumption, providing examples of Indian sweets, and including ghee as a fat source. study are similar to those observed in the general UK population. Consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages in particular was high; given the association between their consumption and the risk of T2DM, this should be an area of primary focus for healthcare professionals. Nevertheless, there are sociocultural factors unique to this population that need to be considered when designing culturally specific programs to reduce the development of T2DM in this high-risk population.
THE ROLE OF CORPORATE ZAKAT ON OPTIMAL CAPITAL STRUCTURE POLICY: EVIDENCE FROM MALAYSIAN FIRMS

In the finance literature, the relationship between capital structure and firm value has been extensively investigated, both theoretically and empirically. The main issue on corporate finance is how firms dealing with the important decision of capital structure. In this study, a model of capital structure is formulated in which corporate tax and zakat payment exist by firms into the consideration of combination of debt and equity. The theoretical model as shown by comparative statics prove the implication which is negatively relationship between leverage of the firm and the corporate zakat payment. Meanwhile, the empirical evidence reveals several implication as follows, (1) tax deduction reduces the current liability item relative to the firms that prefer equity financing, (2) the significant of zakat is consistent with the theoretical model that zakat would encourage firm to issue more equity than debt, (3) the strong significant relationship between return on assets with the leverage are the leading indicator of capital structure in all models. Keywords: C apital structure, C orporate tax, Z akat JEL Classification: C33, G32, H2
Photocatalytic degradation of dyes in water with micro-sized TiO 2 as 1 powder or coated on porcelain gres tiles 2 3

Photocatalytic degradation of dyes in water with micro-sized TiO2 as powder or coated on porcelain-grès tiles / Claudia L. Bianchi; Enrico Colombo; Sara Gatto; Marta Stucchi; Giuseppina Cerrato; Sara Morandi; Valentino Capucci. In: JOURNAL OF PHOTOCHEMISTRY AND PHOTOBIOLOGY. A, CHEMISTRY. ISSN 1010-6030. 280(2014), pp. 2731. Original Citation: Photocatalytic degradation of dyes in water with micro-sized TiO2 as powder or coated on porcelain-grès tiles
Information Invariants for Distributed Manipulation 1

In (Donald, 1995), we described a manipulation task for cooperating mobile robots that can push large, heavy objects. There, we asked whether explicit local and global communication between the agents can be removed from a family of pushing protocols. In this paper, we answer in the aarmative. We do so by using the general methods of (Donald, 1995) analyzing information invariants. We discuss several measures for the information complexity of the task: (a) How much internal state should the robot retain? (b) How many cooperating agents are required, and how much communication between them is necessary? (c) How can the robot change (side-eeect) the environment in order to record state or sensory information to perform a task? (d) How much information is provided by sensors? and (e) How much computation is required by the robot? To answer these questions, we develop a notion of information invariants. We develop a technique whereby one sensor can be constructed from others by adding, deleting, and reallocating (a) { (e) among collaborating autonomous agents. We add a resource to (a) { (e) and ask: (f) How much information is provided by the task mechanics? By answering this question, 1 we hope to develop information invariants that explicitly trade-oo resource (f) with resources (a) { (e). The protocols we describe here have been implemented in several diierent forms, and we report on experiments to measure and analyze information invariants using a pair of cooperating mobile robots for manipulation experiments in our laboratory.
NON-UNIFORM ILLUMINATION CORRECTION IN TRANSMISSION ELECTRON MICROSCOPY

Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) provides resolutions on the order of a nanometer. Hence, it is a critical imaging modality for biomedical analysis at the sub-cellular level. One of the problems associated with TEM images is variations in brightness due to electron imaging defects or non-uniform support films and specimen staining. These variations render image processing operations such as segmentation more difficult. The correction requires estimation of the global illumination field. In this paper, we propose an automatic method for estimating the illumination field using only image intensity gradients. The closed-form solution is very fast to compute.