Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Utilization of construction and agricultural waste in Malaysia for development of Green Concrete: A Review

Green Concrete (GC) is defined as a concrete that utilize a waste material for at least one of its component. The production of GC has been increasing due to the drawback of conventional concrete that create many environmental problems. In Malaysia, the amount of waste generates from agricultural and construction industries were increasing every year. Hence, one of the solutions to reduce the impact of conventional concrete and limited landfill spaces due to excessive waste is by utilizing it in concrete. This paper reviews the possible use of construction waste (Recycle Concrete Aggregate) and agricultural waste (Palm Oil Fuel Ash, Rice Husk Ash and Palm Oil Fibre) as partial replacement for the basic material in a concrete to produce an innovative Green Concrete. The optimum replacement level for each type of waste was also been review. Green Concrete also has the potential to reduce environmental pollution and solve the depletion of natural sources. The result from this review shows that the addition of agricultural waste or construction waste in concrete indicate positive and satisfactory strength when compared to normal concrete. Finally, a mass production of Green Concrete can fulfil the Construction Industry Transformation Plan (CITP) 2016-2020 made by CIDB that emphasizes on a construction system which is environmentally sustainable.
Lidocaine's negative inotropic and antiarrhythmic actions. Dependence on shortening of action potential duration and reduction of intracellular sodium activity.

The mechanisms by which lidocaine brings about negative inotropic effects and antiarrhythmic actions in the heart have been examined. Using sheep cardiac Purkinje fibers, we studied the effects of "therapeutic" concentrations of lidocaine (20 microM lidocaine = 5.4 micrograms/ml) on electrical activity, intracellular sodium activity, and tension. For the preparation with a normal, physiological level of intracellular sodium activity (5-9 mM), the application of lidocaine leads to the following actions: action potential duration is decreased, intracellular sodium activity falls, and twitch tension is reduced. If intracellular sodium activity is first elevated (e.g., by sodium pump inhibition) so that arrhythmogenic transient depolarizations (and the underlying transient inward current are seen) then lidocaine has the following actions: The action potential duration is reduced. There is a reduction of the magnitude of the arrhythmogenic transient depolarization (or the underlying membrane current transient inward current). The magnitude of the aftercontraction that accompanies the transient depolarization (or transient inward current) is reduced. If, after sodium pump inhibition, intracellular sodium activity is still rising-then, the application of lidocaine leads to a reduction of the rate of rise of intracellular sodium. From these results, parallel voltage-clamp experiments, and recent work by others, we conclude that lidocaine leads to the reduction of the arrhythmogenic transient depolarization and a reduction of twitch tension by decreasing the inward sodium current. These actions are mediated by a reduction in action potential duration and a reduction of intracellular sodium activity and of intracellular calcium activity (by the sodium-calcium exchange mechanism).
Small-depth Multilinear Formula Lower Bounds for Iterated Matrix Multiplication, with Applications

In this paper, we study the algebraic formula complexity of multiplying $d$ many $2\times 2$ matrices, denoted $\mathrm{IMM}_{d}$, and show that the well-known divide-and-conquer algorithm cannot be significantly improved at any depth, as long as the formulas are multilinear. Formally, for each depth $\Delta \leq \log d$, we show that any product-depth $\Delta$ multilinear formula for $\mathrm{IMM}_d$ must have size $\exp(\Omega(\Delta d^{1/\Delta})). $ It also follows from this that any multilinear circuit of product-depth $\Delta$ for the same polynomial of the above form must have a size of $\exp(\Omega(d^{1/\Delta})). $ In particular, any polynomial-sized multilinear formula for $\mathrm{IMM}_d$ must have depth $\Omega(\log d)$, and any polynomial-sized multilinear circuit for $\mathrm{IMM}_d$ must have depth $\Omega(\log d/\log \log d). $ Both these bounds are tight up to constant factors. 1. Depth-reduction: A well-known result of Brent (JACM 1974) implies that any formula of size $s$ can be converted to one of size $s^{O(1)}$ and depth $O(\log s)$; further, this reduction continues to hold for multilinear formulas. Our lower bound implies that any depth-reduction in the multilinear setting cannot reduce the depth to $o(\log s)$ without a superpolynomial blow-up in size. 2. Separations from general formulas: Our result, along with a non-trivial upper bound for $\mathrm{IMM}_{d}$ implied by a result of Gupta, Kamath, Kayal and Saptharishi (SICOMP 2016), shows that for any size $s$ and product-depth $\Delta = o(\log s),$ general formulas of size $s$ and product-depth $\Delta$ cannot be converted to multilinear formulas of size $s^{\omega(1)}$ and product-depth $\Delta,$ when the underlying field has characteristic zero.
Consumption smoothing : empirical evidence from rural Burkina Faso

This paper analyzes the community insurance of individual consumption against income risks in rural Burkina Faso. The study area is characterized by significant income volatility, particularly for poor households, caused by global or idiosyncratic shocks. The average consumption at village or region community level is used to control for global shocks. The differential effect of income instability on consumption insurance of poor households has been identified. We find robust results by using the General Least Square Method, applied to a 2004-2006 panel data from PNGT2. These results indicate partial consumption insurance by the community. Poor household income is more unstable. Its consumption is more linked to its income variation and less assured by its community during important global shocks. Consumption in the cotton basin is more sensitive to the income risk and less insured by the community. Food consumption is more assured. These results reveal an important role of the rural community in risk sharing, principally in situation of absence of formal insurance structures. 1. Background and objectives The rural Burkina Faso is characterized by important income volatility generated by global or idiosyncratic shocks. This volatility would be particularly for the poor. The main income source in this area is agriculture; then, income is dependent on climatic and socio-economic shocks, as in most of the developing countries (Deaton, 1992, 1997). The instability of household income is a risk on their consumption. Some risks are global, affecting all the households and others are idiosyncratic. However, the formal institutional mechanisms of consumption insurance against these risks are not well developed or not effective. The literature indicates that rural households develop various actions of consumption adjustment in case of income risks. It is, for example, about storage of agricultural food grains, space diversification of land plots exploited, credit, speculation on assets and family solidarity (Townsend, 1995; Asfaw and von Braun, 2004; Deaton, 1997; Morduch, 1994)). Kazianga and Udry (2006) analyzed consumption insurance against income variation on 1981-1985 period in rural zone of Burkina Faso, through cattle, stock of grains and remittances between households. Their study shows a weak share of income risk variation; households use generally the stock of grains in periods of shock. Some formal actions of consumption insurance are carried out in rural 1 Authors such as Dubois (2002) or Alderman and Paxson (1992) have made a review of recent literature on the informal mechanisms of consumption insurance against income risks. pdfMachine by Broadgun Software a great PDF writer! a great PDF creator! http://www.pdfmachine. com http://www.broadgun. com
Modeling the effects of cyclodextrin on intracellular membrane vesicles from Cos-7 cells prepared by sonication and carbonate treatment

Cholesterol has important functions in the organization of membrane structure and this may be mediated via the formation of cholesterol-rich, liquid-ordered membrane microdomains often referred to as lipid rafts. Methyl-beta-cyclodextrin (cyclodextrin) is commonly used in cell biology studies to extract cholesterol and therefore disrupt lipid rafts. However, in this study we reassessed this experimental strategy and investigated the effects of cyclodextrin on the physical properties of sonicated and carbonate-treated intracellular membrane vesicles isolated from Cos-7 fibroblasts. We treated these membranes, which mainly originate from the trans-Golgi network and endosomes, with cyclodextrin and measured the effects on their equilibrium buoyant density, protein content, represented by the palmitoylated protein phosphatidylinositol 4-kinase type IIα, and cholesterol. Despite the reduction in mass stemming from cholesterol removal, the vesicles became denser, indicating a possible large volumetric decrease, and this was confirmed by measurements of hydrodynamic vesicle size. Subsequent mathematical analyses demonstrated that only half of this change in membrane size was attributable to cholesterol loss. Hence, the non-selective desorption properties of cyclodextrin are also involved in membrane size and density changes. These findings may have implications for preceding studies that interpreted cyclodextrin-induced changes to membrane biochemistry in the context of lipid raft disruption without taking into account our finding that cyclodextrin treatment also reduces membrane size.
Características dinâmicas e termodinâmicas dos vórtices ciclônicos de altos níveis no Nordeste do Brasil

The objective of this work was to study the dynamic and thermodynamic characteristics of the High Level Cyclonic Vortexes (HLCV) in the Northeast of Brazil (NEB) using an objective HLCV identification algorithm (OHIA) using ERA-Interim data from the model reanalysis European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), and the Precipitation Impact Assessment (NCEP), the Climate Prediction Center (CPC) of the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) in the period from 1980 to 2016. The OHIA presented efficiency gain after the two improvements added (SVAV method and four new quadrants of the wind turning) and could be redirected to other studies. The OHIA results were confirmed by the climatology itself, identifying 1493 HLCV, 51% occurring in summer, 23% in autumn, 5% in winter and 21% in austral spring. In the analysis of the spatial climatology of HLCV occurrence, the regions with the greatest impact of this system on the continent were: The central region of Pernambuco; The coast in the border of Pernambuco and Paraíba; northern coast of Bahia; Central region of Bahia; South region of Bahia. It was observed that in the South Atlantic Ocean adjacent to the coast of NEB there is a large density of HLCV. In the summer, HLCV occur more frequently in the coastal and south-central regions of Bahia, central Pernambuco and along the coast of the Pernambuco and Paraíba counties, while in the autumn the central and coastal regions of Bahia are most affected. Also, an evidence that this system acts as an inhibitor of precipitation in NEB has been shown when precipitation and preferential positioning of the HLCV is related. This result indicates that in addition to the systems that alter the dynamics of precipitation, the HLCV is responsible for the water deficit. The atmospheric profile of the divergence showed that there is a phase change in the mean atmosphere. The monthly analysis of vorticity and divergence showed that March is the month of HLCV more intense. Two conceptual soundings were made from the previous results, and their results show that the level of condensation (NCL) is 860 hPa at the center of the HLCV and 940 hPa at the edge. The profile on the border region was more unstable than the profile at the center of the HLCV. The behavior analyzed by the thermodynamic indices indicates that situations occur that even without favorable local thermodynamics, the atmosphere responds to a more intense dynamic system that forces conditions to favor convection. The conditional instability analysis showed that at the center of the HLCV, the potential saturated dry temperature near the NCL inhibits convective activity, while at the edge there is a thick layer that favors convection. Key-words: HLCV, tracking, thermodynamic
Treebank-Based Acquisition of a Chinese Lexical-Functional Grammar

Scaling wide-coverage, constraint-based grammars such as Lexical-Functional Grammars (LFG) (Kaplan and Bresnan, 1982; Bresnan, 2001) or Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammars (HPSG) (Pollard and Sag, 1994) from fragments to naturally occurring unrestricted text is knowledge-intensive, time-consuming and (often prohibitively) expensive. A number of researchers have recently presented methods to automatically acquire wide-coverage, probabilistic constraint-based grammatical resources from treebanks (Cahill et al., 2002, Cahill et al., 2003; Cahill et al., 2004; Miyao et al., 2003; Miyao et al., 2004; Hockenmaier and Steedman, 2002; Hockenmaier, 2003), addressing the knowledge acquisition bottleneck in constraint-based grammar development. Research to date has concentrated on English and German. In this paper we report on an experiment to induce wide-coverage, probabilistic LFG grammatical and lexical resources for Chinese from the Penn Chinese Treebank (CTB) (Xue et al., 2002) based on an automatic f-structure annotation algorithm. Currently 96.751% of the CTB trees receive a single, covering and connected f-structure, 0.112% do not receive an fstructure due to feature clashes, while 3.137% are associated with multiple f-structure fragments. From the f-structure-annotated CTB we extract a total of 12975 lexical entries with 20 distinct subcategorisation frame types. Of these 3436 are verbal entries with a total of 11 different frame types. We extract a number of PCFG-based LFG approximations. Currently our best automatically induced grammars achieve an f-score of 81.57% against the trees in unseen articles 301-325; 86.06% f-score (all grammatical functions) and 73.98% (preds-only) against the dependencies derived from the f-structures automatically generated for the original trees in 301-325 and 82.79% (all grammatical functions) and 67.74% (preds-only) against the dependencies derived from the manually annotated gold-standard f-structures for 50 trees randomly selected from articles 301-325.
Analytical jitter model for IP network planning and design

Traditionally, IP Network planning and design is mostly based on average delay or loss constraints which can often be easily calculated. Jitter, on the other hand, is much more difficult to evaluate but this is particularly important to manage the QoS of real-time and interactive services such as VoIP and streaming video. In this paper, we propose a simple model for the delay jitter that is fast enough to be used in networks design algorithms. It takes into account the packets delay correlation and also the correlation of tandem queues that have a significant impact on the end-to-end jitter. We present simple formulas for the jitter of Poisson traffic in a single queue that can be calculated quickly. We then extend them to the end-to-end jitter of a tagged stream based on a tandem queueing network. The results given by the model are then compared with event-driven simulations. We find that they are very accurate for Poisson traffic over a wide range of traffic loads and more importantly, that they yield conservative values for the jitter so that they can be used in network design procedures.
Farmers’ Adoption Of Improved Soybean Varieties in Malawi

Cultivation of improved varieties is one way of increasing productivity of many crops especially in developing countries where there is pressure of land due to high population growth. Adoption studies have proved to be helpful in giving the picture of the performance of technologies amongst users like farmers and in line with this the study was carried out to assess the factors that influence a farmer to adopt improved soybean varieties using cross-sectional data that was collected from 300 households by the Department of Agricultural Research Services (DARs) in 2009. The study used a Hurdle Poisson model in order to effectively assess the socio-economic and demographic characteristics that influence farmers to adopt improved soybean varieties. The results of the study show that amongst the household socio-economic characteristics that were included in the model, age of the household head and farm size were significant at 5 percent level of significance whilst access to information through extension agents and distance to the market were the institutional factors that significantly influence a farmer.
Curcumin attenuates the middle cerebral artery occlusion-induced reduction in γ-enolase expression in an animal model

Curcumin exerts a protective effect in cerebral ischemia through its anti-oxidant and anti-inflammatory activities. γ-enolase is a glycolytic enzyme expressed in neurons that is known to exerts a neuroprotective effect. We investigated whether curcumin regulates γ-enolase expression in focal cerebral ischemic injury in rats. Middle cerebral artery occlusion (MCAO) was performed to induce focal cerebral ischemia. Adult male rats were injected intraperitoneally with either vehicle or curcumin (50 mg/kg) 1 h after MCAO and cerebral cortex tissues were isolated 24 h after MCAO. We found that MCAO-induced injury resulted in a reduction in γ-enolase expression in vehicle-treated animals using a proteomics approach. However, this reduction was attenuated in animals with MCAO treated with curcumin. Reverse-transcription PCR and Western blot analyses also showed that curcumin treatment prevented the MCAO injury-induced reduction in γ-enolase expression. The results of this study suggest that curcumin exerts its neuroprotective function in focal cerebral ischemia by regulating the expression of γ-enolase.
TGFβ-dependent expression of PD-1 and PD-L1 controls CD8+ T cell anergy in transplant tolerance

CD8+ T cell anergy is a critical mechanism of peripheral tolerance, poorly investigated in response to immunotherapy. Here, using a pancreatic islet allograft model and CD3 antibody therapy, we showed, by single cell gene profiling, that intragraft CD8+ lymphocytes coexpressing granzyme B and perforin were selectively depleted through the Fas/FasL pathway. This step led to long-standing anergy of the remaining CD8+ T cells marked by the absence of cytotoxic/inflammatory gene expression also confirmed by transcriptome analysis. This sustained unresponsiveness required the presence of the alloantigens. Furthermore, tissue-resident CD8+ lymphocytes produced TGFβ and expressed the inhibitory receptors PD-1 and PD-L1. Blockade of TGFβ downregulated PD-1 and PD-L1 expression and precipitated graft rejection. Neutralizing PD-1, PD-L1 or TGFβRII signaling in T cells also abrogated CD3 antibody-induced tolerance. These studies unravel novel mechanisms underlying CD8+ T cell anergy and reveal a cell intrinsic regulatory link between the TGFβ and the PD-1/PD-L1 pathways. DOI: http://dx.doi. org/10.7554/eLife.08133. 001
Reprioritizing Genetic Associations in Hit Regions Using LASSO-Based Resample Model Averaging

Significance testing one SNP at a time has proven useful for identifying genomic regions that harbor variants affecting human disease. But after an initial genome scan has identified a “hit region” of association, single‐locus approaches can falter. Local linkage disequilibrium (LD) can make both the number of underlying true signals and their identities ambiguous. Simultaneous modeling of multiple loci should help. However, it is typically applied ad hoc: conditioning on the top SNPs, with limited exploration of the model space and no assessment of how sensitive model choice was to sampling variability. Formal alternatives exist but are seldom used. Bayesian variable selection is coherent but requires specifying a full joint model, including priors on parameters and the model space. Penalized regression methods (e.g., LASSO) appear promising but require calibration, and, once calibrated, lead to a choice of SNPs that can be misleadingly decisive. We present a general method for characterizing uncertainty in model choice that is tailored to reprioritizing SNPs within a hit region under strong LD. Our method, LASSO local automatic regularization resample model averaging (LLARRMA), combines LASSO shrinkage with resample model averaging and multiple imputation, estimating for each SNP the probability that it would be included in a multi‐SNP model in alternative realizations of the data. We apply LLARRMA to simulations based on case‐control genome‐wide association studies data, and find that when there are several causal loci and strong LD, LLARRMA identifies a set of candidates that is enriched for true signals relative to single locus analysis and to the recently proposed method of Stability Selection. Genet. Epidemiol. 36:451‐462, 2012. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
AudioMetro: directing search for sound designers through content-based cues

Sound designers source sounds in massive collections, heavily tagged by themselves and sound librarians. For each query, once successive keywords attained a limit to filter down the results, hundreds of sounds are left to be reviewed. AudioMetro combines a new content-based information visualization technique with instant audio feedback to facilitate this part of their workflow. We show through user evaluations by known-item search in collections of textural sounds that a default grid layout ordered by filename unexpectedly outperforms content-based similarity layouts resulting from a recent dimension reduction technique (Student-t Stochastic Neighbor Embedding), even when complemented with content-based glyphs that emphasize local neighborhoods and cue perceptual features. We propose a solution borrowed from image browsing: a proximity grid, whose density we optimize for nearest neighborhood preservation among the closest cells. Not only does it remove overlap but we show through a subsequent user evaluation that it also helps to direct the search. We based our experiments on an open dataset (the OLPC sound library) for replicability.
Predatory Trading

This paper studies predatory trading: Trading that induces and/or exploits other investors' need to reduce their positions. We show that if one trader needs to sell, others also sell and subsequently buy back the asset. This leads to price overshooting, and a reduced liquidation value for the distressed trader. Hence, the market is illiquid when liquidity is most needed. Further, a trader profits from triggering another trader's crisis, and the crisis can spill over across traders and across assets.
On Crossover Temperatures of Viscous Flow Related to Structural Rearrangements in Liquids

An additional crossover of viscous flow in liquids occurs at a temperature Tvm above the known non-Arrhenius to Arrhenius crossover temperature (TA). Tvm is the temperature when the minimum possible viscosity value ηmin is attained, and the flow becomes non-activated with a further increase in temperature. Explicit equations are proposed for the assessments of both Tvm and ηmin, which are shown to provide data that are close to those experimentally measured. Numerical estimations reveal that the new crossover temperature is very high and can barely be achieved in practical uses, although at temperatures close to it, the contribution of the non-activated regime of the flow can be accounted for.