Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Effect Of Service Quality, Brand Experience, Price, Trust, And Convenience Toward Customer Satisfaction And Its Effect To Positive Wom Of Bridestory Indonesia

This study aims to examine the influence and effectiveness of digital marketing dimensions in producing Positive Word of Mouth as the key to brand development in the digital realm. These digital marketing dimensions are Service Quality, Brand Experience, Price Perception, Customer Trust, and Online Convenience, as well as Customer Satisfaction as a mediating variable. The research was conducted using quantitative methods with 206 respondents using Partial Least Square and Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM). This study shows that the Customer Satisfaction variable which is examined through questionnaires and hypothesis testing using SmartPLS-SEM, has a direct influence on Positive WOM. Customer satisfaction itself is also heavily influenced by Service Quality, Brand Experience, Perceived Price, Customer Trust, and Convenience.
Risk assessment in correlation with obesity and laboratory monitoring of the most common female breast cancers in Sarajevo Canton

Introduction: Breast cancer (BC) is a malignant disease that predominantly affects women, with known genetic components such as mutations in tumor suppressor genes BRCA1 and BRCA2. Other risk factors include unhealthy lifestyles, lack of physical activity, and consumption of alcohol and cigarettes. Aging also plays a role in BC development, with hormonal influences such as estrogen and progesterone promoting cancer growth. Material and Methods: Research was conducted using data collection tools for risk factors and tumor markers from primary healthcare unit records. The sample comprised 200 women, divided into two groups based on BC diagnosis, with complete medical documentation. Male BC cases were excluded. Results: Statistical significance was found between genetic components, family history, aging, obesity, alcohol and cigarette consumption, longer hormone exposure, and female BC development using the Chi-Square test, confirmed by Fisher's Exact test. Tumor markers CA 15-3, CEA, CA 19-9, and CA 125 were useful for BC screening and metastasis detection, as determined by the One Sample T-test. In Sarajevo Canton, invasive ductal BC was the most common type among women, while lobular carcinoma in situ was the least common. Conclusion: Correlations between risk factors, including aging, unhealthy lifestyles, and hormone exposure, and increased BC risk were confirmed. Tumor markers CA 15-3, CEA, CA 19-9, and CA 125 were effective in diagnosis, screening, and metastasis detection in females, with sensitivity for regression detection at 81.8% and specificity at 100%.
Oxidative stress and neurotoxicity in Scolelepis goodbodyi (Polychaeta, Spionidae) after an experimental oil spill in a dissipative sandy beach

Biomarkers of environmental contamination have been frequently used in the assessment of marine ecosystem quality because they provide quantitative measures of biological changes in organisms exposed to pollutants such as hydrocarbons from oil spills. Polychaetes have been tested as sentinel organisms of marine environmental health because they are abundant taxa of benthic assemblages and their sedentary lifestyle ensures chronic exposure to toxins in impacted areas. In this study, we evaluated whether the polychaete Scolelepis goodbodyi can be used as a reliable sentinel species for exposure to polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) from an experimental diesel spill in a dissipative sand beach in the Southern Atlantic. The design used in this study comprised replicated control and diesel impact sites sampled four times (one, two, four and seven days) before and after the impact. Total PAH levels reached 114.0 ng g -1 in the impact site one day after the diesel spill; however, the pattern of biomarker responses in S. goodbodyi was primarily influenced by spatial variation rather than being attributed to the simulated diesel spill. The apparent absence of a contaminating effect may be linked to the low levels of the toxins retained in the sediment after the spill was simulated to elicit a response or to the presence of an efficient repair system within the organism. Furthermore, the sediments tested in this study, composed of sandy fractions, had a low capacity to concentrate PAHs after the simulated diesel spill, which may have contributed to the low significant changes in their biomarker activities. Based on our results, further studies testing other Polychaeta species and simulating oil spills in sedimentary environments composed of fine sediments such as salt marshes and mangroves may help produce evidence on more effective biomarker responses in these organisms. Abstract
Selection of Functional Human Sperm with Higher DNA Integrity and Fewer Reactive Oxygen Species

Fertilization and reproduction are central to the survival and propagation of a species. Couples who cannot reproduce naturally have to undergo in vitro clinical procedures. An integral part of these clinical procedures includes isolation of healthy sperm from raw semen. Existing sperm sorting methods are not efficient and isolate sperm having high DNA fragmentation and reactive oxygen species (ROS), and suffer from multiple manual steps and variations between operators. Inspired by in vivo natural sperm sorting mechanisms where vaginal mucus becomes less viscous to form microchannels to guide sperm towards egg, a chip is presented that efficiently sorts healthy, motile and morphologically normal sperm without centrifugation. Higher percentage of sorted sperm show significantly lesser ROS and DNA fragmentation than the conventional swim‐up method. The presented chip is an easy‐to‐use high‐throughput sperm sorter that provides standardized sperm sorting assay with less reliance on operators's skills, facilitating reliable operational steps.
Contagion of Financial Crises in Sovereign Debt Markets

This paper develops a quantitative model of contagion of financial crisis and sovereign default for small open economies that cannot credibly commit to honor their international debts and have common international risk averse investors. The existence of common investors with preferences that exhibit decreasing absolute risk aversion (DARA) generates financial links between the emerging economies sovereign debt markets that help to explain the endogenous determination of credit limits, capital flows, and the risk premium in sovereign bond prices as function not only of the economy's fundamentals, the investors' characteristics (wealth, and degree of risk aversion) but more importantly of the fundamentals of other emerging economies. Therefore this paper provides a theoretical formalization that is the base for and endogenous explanation of the contagion of financial crises. The model shows that whenever a country suffers a domestic shock that forces it to default in its debts, this domestic shock will affect the investor's wealth and therefore her tolerance of risk, producing a contagion of the crisis in those countries whose fundamentals are not solid enough. Also, even when the crisis in a country does not force such country to default, the domestic shock affects the overall riskiness of the investor's portfolio, forcing her to rebalance it. In this case the investor moves away from countries that are ``too'' risky towards countries that are relatively solid, exhibiting a behavior consistent with the observed phenomena denominated as ``flight to quality''. Quantitatively, the application of the model to the case of the Argentinean default of $2001$ and the posterior contagion of the crisis to the neighboring country Uruguay shows that the model with financial links is not only consistent with the business cycle behavior of emerging economies considered but it is also superior to models that do not contemplate such links in the following dimensions: i. ) the model explains a larger proportion and volatility of the spread between sovereign bonds and riskless assets; ii. ) the model explains endogenously the positive correlation between the economies' sovereign bonds spreads, debt flows and consumptions, and iii. ) the model exhibits the behavior observed in the data of higher volatility and comovement of the series of emerging economies during periods of volatility in financial markets prompted by the crisis in some emerging country.
Tobacco Use, Exposure to Secondhand Smoke, and Training on Cessation Counseling Among Nursing Students: Cross-Country Data from the Global Health Professions Student Survey (GHPSS), 2005–2009

The Nursing Global Health Professions Student Survey (GHPSS) has been conducted in schools in 39 countries and the Gaza Strip/West Bank (identified as “sites” for the remainder of this paper). In half the sites, over 20% of the students currently smoked cigarettes, with males having higher rates than females in 22 sites. Over 60% of students reported having been exposed to secondhand smoke in public places in 23 of 39 sites. The majority of students recognized that they are role models in society, believed they should receive training on counseling patients to quit using tobacco, but few reported receiving any formal training. Tobacco control efforts must discourage tobacco use among health professionals, promote smoke free workplaces, and implement programs that train health professionals in effective cessation-counseling techniques.
Color Doppler velocity profile and contrast-enhanced ultrasonography in assessment of liver cirrhosis.

BACKGROUND This study was designed to probe the clinical value in assessing the degree of liver cirrhosis by using the arrival time of contrast agent in the right portal vein in contrast-enhanced ultrasonography, as well as the velocity and flow volume in the right portal vein using the color Doppler velocity profile technique. METHODS Twenty-eight patients with HBV post-hepatic cirrhosis were grouped into compensated (13 patients) and decompensated cirrhosis (15); 30 patients without hepatic cirrhosis served as controls. Written informed consent was obtained from each patient. All the patients with hepatic cirrhosis were pathologically confirmed by percutaneous biopsy. SonoVue was injected to detect the arrival time in the right portal vein. The velocity and flow volume in the right portal vein were measured. The value of each parameter was compared for correlation analysis. RESULTS The arrival time in the right portal vein in the cirrhosis group was much longer than that in the control group (24.92+/-1.34 vs. 20.81+/-0.55 sec, respectively, P<0.01). The mean velocity, maximal velocity and flow volume in the cirrhosis group were much lower than those in the control group (10.64+/-0.84 vs. 14.78+/-0.71 cm/sec, 13.68+/-1.02 vs. 17.30+/-0.68 cm/sec and 358.72+/-23.63 vs. 438.61+/-16.86 ml/min, respectively, P<0.01). With the development of cirrhosis, the arrival time in the right portal vein was longer (P<0.05), and the velocity and flow volume was lower (P<0.01). There was a negative correlation between arrival time and mean velocity, maximal velocity and flow volume in the right portal vein in the cirrhosis group (r=-0.547, P<0.01; r=-0.508, P<0.05; r=-0.471, P<0.05, respectively). CONCLUSIONS With the development of liver cirrhosis, the arrival time of contrast agent in the right portal vein is gradually prolonged, whereas the velocity and flow volume in this vein decreases markedly, and there is a negative correlation between the results of the two methods.
Head tracking by active particle filtering

Particle filtering has attracted much attention due to its robust tracking performance in clutter. However, a price to pay for its robustness is the computational cost. Active particle filtering is proposed in this paper. Unlike traditional particle filtering, every particle in active particle filtering is first driven to its local maximum of the likelihood before it is weighted. In this case, the efficiency of every particle is improved and the number of required particles is greatly reduced. Actually, the number of particles in the active particle filtering is based more on the cluttered degree of the environment and the fitting range of every particle than on the size of the model's configuration space. Extensive experimental results show that the tracker is efficient and robust in tracking a head undergoing translation and full 360/spl deg/ out-of-plane rotation with partial occlusion in cluttered environments.
Role of Melatonin in Viral, Bacterial and Parasitic Infections

In all mammals, the circulating pool of MLTs is synthesized in the pineal gland during the night’s darkness hours. Its main function is synchronizing the organism in the photoperiod. In contrast, extra-pineal MLT is synthesized in peripheral organs, does not follow any circadian rhythm or circulate, and plays a detoxifying and cytoprotective role. Circulating MLT may stimulate both innate and acquired immune responses through its circadian action and by activating high-affinity receptors on immunocompetent cells. Extra-pineal MLT may have antioxidant and anti-inflammatory effects that dampen the innate immune response. These two seemingly divergent roles may be considered to be two sides of the same coin. In fact, the integration of both circulating and extra-pineal MLT functions might generate a balanced and effective immune response against microbial pathogens. The studies described in this review investigated the effects of exogenous MLT in various models of infectious diseases using extremely different doses and treatment schedules. None of them evaluated the possibility of integrating the non-circadian anti-inflammatory effect with the circadian immunoenhancing action of MLT. As a consequence, in spite of the fact that most studies agree that MLT has a beneficial effect against infections, it seems difficult to draw any definite conclusion about its possible therapeutic use.
Neural correlates of syntactic transformations

Many agrammatic aphasics have a specific syntactic comprehension deficit involving processing syntactic transformations. It has been proposed that this deficit is due to a dysfunction of Broca's area, an area that is thought to be critical for comprehension of complex transformed sentences. The goal of this study was to investigate the role of Broca's area in processing canonical and non‐canonical sentences in healthy subjects. The sentences were presented auditorily and were controlled for task difficulty. Subjects were asked to judge the grammaticality of the sentences while their brain activity was monitored using event‐related functional magnetic resonance imaging. Processing both kinds of sentences resulted in activation of language‐related brain regions. Comparison of non‐canonical and canonical sentences showed greater activation in bilateral temporal regions; a greater activation of Broca's area in processing antecedent‐gap relations was not found. Moreover, the posterior part of Broca's area was conjointly activated by both sentence conditions. Broca's area is thus involved in general syntactic processing as required by grammaticality judgments and does not seem to have a specific role in processing syntactic transformations. Hum. Brain Mapp. 22:74–83, 2004. © 2004 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Simple Contrastive Representation Learning for Time Series Forecasting

Contrastive learning methods have shown an impressive ability to learn meaningful representations for image and time series classification. However, these methods are less effective for time series forecasting, as optimization of instance discrimination is not directly applicable to predicting the future outcomes from the historical context. To address these limitations, we propose SimTS, a simple representation learning approach for improving time series forecasting by learning to predict the future from the past in the latent space. SimTS exclusively uses positive pairs and does not depend on negative pairs or specific characteristics of a given time series. In addition, we show the shortcomings of the common contrastive learning frameworks used for time series forecasting through a detailed ablation study. Overall, our work suggests that SimTS is a promising alternative to other contrastive learning approaches for time series forecasting.
Asymptotic Bayesian decision feedback equalizer using a set of hyperplanes

We present a signal space partitioning technique for realizing the optimal Bayesian decision feedback equalizer (DFE). It is known that when the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) tends to infinity, the decision boundary of the Bayesian DFE is asymptotically piecewise linear and consists of several hyperplanes. The proposed technique determines these hyperplanes explicitly and uses them to partition the observation signal space. The resulting equalizer is made up of a set of parallel linear discriminant functions and a Boolean mapper. Unlike the existing signal space partitioning technique of Kim and Moon (1998), which involves complex combinatorial search and optimization in design, our design procedure is simple and straightforward, and guarantees to achieve the asymptotic Bayesian DFE.
Shaping Functional Architecture by Oscillatory Alpha Activity: Gating by Inhibition

In order to understand the working brain as a network, it is essential to identify the mechanisms by which information is gated between regions. We here propose that information is gated by inhibiting task-irrelevant regions, thus routing information to task-relevant regions. The functional inhibition is reflected in oscillatory activity in the alpha band (8–13 Hz). From a physiological perspective the alpha activity provides pulsed inhibition reducing the processing capabilities of a given area. Active processing in the engaged areas is reflected by neuronal synchronization in the gamma band (30–100 Hz) accompanied by an alpha band decrease. According to this framework the brain could be studied as a network by investigating cross-frequency interactions between gamma and alpha activity. Specifically the framework predicts that optimal task performance will correlate with alpha activity in task-irrelevant areas. In this review we will discuss the empirical support for this framework. Given that alpha activity is by far the strongest signal recorded by EEG and MEG, we propose that a major part of the electrophysiological activity detected from the working brain reflects gating by inhibition.
Modélisation spatiale de la production fourragère en zone pastorale nigérienne

This work was carried out on the pastoral zone of Niger, the main objective was to contribute to the improvement of the methods of forage yields predicting mainly in the Sahel and especially in Niger. This is specifically to validate the model BIOMASAH of ARC; test the MEIA model; to establish a reference model by multiple linear regression; test the similarity method and finally compare the methods. The work was carried out on the one hand with the data measured on the ground by the MEIA from 2001 to 2012, reel rainfall of Niger observations network, meteorological parameters from ECMWF and also with satellite images as SPOT NDVI VEGETATION and MODIS, RFE2 of FEWS NET. Validation of BIOMASAH model was made by t and Wilcoxon tests to compare reel biomass and outputs of the model. Pearson, Kendall and Spearman correlation testing was also made. The MEIA model performance was tested by confronting the results between and within SPOT VEGETATION and MODIS sensors, by comparing R2 and RMSE from the integral and maximum NDVI as a predictor of forage yield. Average comparisons by parametric and nonparametric tests were also made to compare the results. The reference model (RM) was produced by multiple linear regression with stepwise method. The selection of variables was based on adjusted R2 and RMSE and the LOOCV leave one out cross validation to calculate R2 for validation, we made also systematic diagnosis of residues for better characterization of the model. The similarity method was performed using the R2, MAD and RMSE as a criterion, the profile of the vegetation growth period of each pixel was plotted for all years. Then we compare the profile of the target year with those of other years
Evidence for the Contribution of the Mehler-Peroxidase Reaction in Dissipating Excess Electrons in Drought-Stressed Wheat

Gross O2 evolution and uptake by attached, drought-stressed leaves of wheat (Triticum aestivum) were measured using a 16O2/ 18O2 isotope technique and mass spectrometry. The activity of photosystem II, determined from the rate of 16O2 evolution, is only slightly affected under drought conditions. During drought stress, net CO2 uptake decreases due to stomatal closure, whereas the uptake of 18O2 is stimulated. The main O2-consuming reactions in the light are the Mehler-peroxidase (MP) reaction and the photorespiratory pathway. From measurements of the rate of carbon flux through the photorespiratory pathway, estimated by the analysis of the specific radioactivities of glycolate, we conclude that the rate of photorespiration is decreased with drought stress. Therefore, the O2 taken up in the light appears to be preferentially used by the MP reaction. In stressed leaves, 29.1% of the photosynthetic electrons are consumed in the MP reaction and 18.4% drive the photorespiratory pathway. Thus, overreduction of the electron transport chain is avoided preferably by the MP reaction when drought stress restricts CO2 reduction.
The Impact of Urbanization to Forest Degradation in Metropolitan Semarang: A Preliminary Study

This paper aims to examine the relationship of urbanization and the consequences of environmental impacts, especially the availability of forests. The analysis used remote sensing data ie Landsat 7 ETM (1990), Landsat 7 ETM (2000), and Landsat 8 OLI (2015). Analysis of forest availability used green vegetation cover parameters with NDVI techniques, while urbanization was measured by looking at the built-up area growth with NDBI techniques. The detection result in 1990 area of urban area was 74.85 km2, in 2000 was 130.83 km2, and in 2015 was 292.74 km2. Given the overall size of the metropolitan area of Semarang (932.14 km2), the proportion of the built up area in 2015 was 31% with an average of 6% per year change in 1990-2000 and 8.2% per year in 2000-2015. Urbanization in this region is characterized by forest conversion into residential and industrial buildings. With increasing area and built-up density, NDBI is found to be proportionately increasing, while NDVI decrease is significant. The results show that NDBI-NDVI correlation is negative (-0.99). It is very important for policy makers to formulate land use control policies in Metropolitan Semarang particularly in responding to the issue of forest conversion.
Phylogeny of Sarocladium (Hypocreales)

The circumscription of the genus Acremonium (Hypocreales) was recently reviewed on the basis of a DNA phylogenetic study. Several species were subsequently transferred to Sarocladium, but the relationships between both genera remained unresolved. Based on multilocus phylogenetic inferences combined with phenotypic data, we have revised the species concepts within Sarocladium and some genetically related species of Acremonium. As a result of these studies, six species are described as new, viz. S. bifurcatum, S. gamsii, S. hominis, S. pseudostrictum, S. subulatum and S. summerbellii. In addition, the new combinations S. implicatum and S. terricola are proposed for A. implicatum and A. terricola, respectively. Sarocladium attenuatum is confirmed as synonym of the type species of the genus, S. oryzae. An epitype and neotype are also introduced for S. oryzae and S. implicatum, respectively. Although Sarocladium species have traditionally been considered as important phytopathogens, the genus also contains opportunistic human pathogens. This study extends the spectrum of clinical species that could be diagnosed as causal agents of human infections.