Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Hydrogen Production from Mixture of Biomass and Polyethylene Waste in Fluidized Bed Catalytic Steam Co-Gasification Process

Energy from renewable source is expected to complement the energy derived from fossil fuel resources. In current research, an efficient method to produce hydrogen by blending palm kernel shell (PKS) with polyethylene (PE) waste via catalytic steam gasification is studied at pilot scale fluidized bed gasifier. This paper reports the results obtained from a series of experiment that have been performed to improve the hydrogen production efficiency. By mixing the PE waste with biomass and using those as feedstock revealed an increase in the product gas volume percent and hydrogen yield. The highest H2 content 76.18 vol% achieved at 800 oC using 25 wt% of PE mixed with PKS. A fuel gas with a calorific value up to 15.98 MJ/Nm 3 was produced which has the potential to be used in engines.
Examination of a theoretical model for oral health-related quality of life among youths with cleft.

OBJECTIVES We evaluated relationships among physical and psychological indicators and oral health-related quality of life (OHRQOL) in youths with cleft. METHODS We recruited youths aged 7 to 18 years with cleft palate (n = 282) or cleft lip and palate (n = 918) and their caregivers into a 5-year observational investigation at 6 US treatment centers from 2009 to 2011. At baseline, youths completed surveys to assess psychological status. After clinical evaluation, 433 youths received a recommendation for surgery. We developed structural models from the baseline data incorporating age, gender, race, and cleft diagnosis to examine direct relationships between depressive symptoms and, in separate models, self-concept and sense of mastery and OHRQOL. Subsequent models examined the possible mediating effect of surgical recommendation. RESULTS Depressive symptoms were negatively and self-concept and self-efficacy were positively associated with OHRQOL. Surgical recommendation appeared to mediate the effect of psychological well-being, but not depression, on OHRQOL, even after adjustment for cleft diagnosis. In some models, individual-level characteristics were significant. CONCLUSIONS Path analyses support the theoretical model and underscore the importance of examining positive psychosocial characteristics such as resiliency and self-concept in this patient population.
Pathophysiologically relevant concentrations of tumor necrosis factor-alpha promote progressive left ventricular dysfunction and remodeling in rats.

BACKGROUND Although patients with heart failure express elevated circulating levels of tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-alpha) in their peripheral circulation, the structural and functional effects of circulating levels of pathophysiologically relevant concentrations of TNF-alpha on the heart are not known. METHODS AND RESULTS Osmotic infusion pumps containing either diluent or TNF-alpha were implanted into the peritoneal cavity of rats. The rate of TNF-alpha infusion was titrated to obtain systemic levels of biologically active TNF-alpha comparable to those reported in patients with heart failure (approximately 80 to 100 U/mL), and the animals were examined serially for 15 days. Two-dimensional echocardiography was used to assess changes in left ventricular (LV) structure (remodeling) and LV function. Video edge detection was used to assess isolated cell mechanics, and standard histological techniques were used to assess changes in the volume composition of LV cardiac myocytes and the extracellular matrix. The reversibility of cytokine-induced effects was determined either by removal of the osmotic infusion pumps on day 15 or by treatment of the animals with a soluble TNF-alpha antagonist (TNFR:Fc). The results of this study show that a continuous infusion of TNF-alpha led to a time-dependent depression in LV function, cardiac myocyte shortening, and LV dilation that were at least partially reversible by removal of the osmotic infusion pumps or treatment of the animals with TNFR:Fc. CONCLUSIONS These studies suggest that pathophysiologically relevant concentrations of TNF-alpha are sufficient to mimic certain aspects of the phenotype observed in experimental and clinical models of heart failure.
Two-dimensional melting via sine-Gordon duality

Motivated by the recently developed duality between elasticity of a crystal and a symmetric tensor gauge theory by Pretko and Radzihovsky, we explore its classical analog, that is a dual theory of the dislocation-mediated melting of a two-dimensional crystal, formulated in terms of a higher derivative vector sine-Gordon model. It provides a transparent description of the continuous two-stage melting in terms of the renormalization-group relevance of two cosine operators that control the sequential unbinding of dislocations and disclinations, respectively corresponding to the crystal-to-hexatic and hexatic-to-isotropic fluid transitions. This renormalization-group analysis compactly reproduces seminal results of the Coulomb gas description, such as the flows of the elastic couplings and of the dislocation and disclination fugacities, as well the temperature dependence of the associated correlation lengths.
Schwann cells induce sprouting in motor and sensory axons in the adult rat spinal cord

Circumscribed lesions were made within either the corticospinal tract or the ascending dorsal column tracts at the upper cervical level in adult rats. The responses of the tract axons were studied by orthograde transport from injections of horseradish peroxidase or biocytin. At 2 d, the ends of the cut axons were swollen, and the lesions induced en passant varicosities in the adjacent uncut axons. Although there have been reports of retraction, we found that even after several weeks, large numbers of cut axons still persisted in the central lesion area (where there was complete tissue destruction and intense macrophage infiltration), and also in the adjacent regions of the tract. The cut ends were expanded into a variety of shapes--large, complex, bulbous, and recurved--and many had profuse local branches with or without small, terminal-type varicosities. A suspension of Schwann cells cultured from neonatal sciatic nerve was injected by a minimally traumatic air pressure microinjection technique so as to form a bolus, comparable in size to the lesions, in either the corticospinal or the ascending dorsal column tracts at the upper cervical level. Despite previous findings that corticospinal axons do not elongate into peripheral nerve grafts, we found that both corticospinal and ascending dorsal column axons sprouted in response to contact with the transplanted Schwann cells. The response to the Schwann cells was much more rapid than to the lesions. By 2 d, in both descending and ascending tracts, both the axons that had been severed at the time of injection and also the adjacent uncut axons had already given rise to the branches that (unlike the localized sprouting seen after the long- term lesions) extended for considerable distances parallel to and fasciculating with each other and with the uncut tract axons. In addition, a mass of fine, tortuous, varicose branches invaded the superficial parts of the Schwann cell grafts, where they formed aborizations with small bead-like expansions resembling presynaptic boutons; as in their normal terminal fields, the aborizations formed by the corticospinal axons were smaller and finer than those formed by the ascending axons.
This Paper Is Included in the Proceedings of the 11th Usenix Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (nsdi '14). Mica: a Holistic Approach to Fast In-memory Key-value Storage Mica: a Holistic Approach to Fast In-memory Key-value Storage

MICA is a scalable in-memory key-value store that handles 65.6 to 76.9 million key-value operations per second using a single general-purpose multi-core system. MICA is over 4–13.5x faster than current state-of-the-art systems , while providing consistently high throughput over a variety of mixed read and write workloads. MICA takes a holistic approach that encompasses all aspects of request handling, including parallel data access, network request handling, and data structure design, but makes unconventional choices in each of the three domains. First, MICA optimizes for multi-core architectures by enabling parallel access to partitioned data. Second, for efficient parallel data access, MICA maps client requests directly to specific CPU cores at the server NIC level by using client-supplied information and adopts a lightweight networking stack that bypasses the kernel. Finally, MICA's new data structures—circular logs, lossy concurrent hash indexes, and bulk chaining—handle both read-and write-intensive workloads at low overhead.
Das Brief Symptom Inventory (BSI) als Instrument zur Qualitätssicherung in der Psychotherapie.

Zusammenfassung. Anhand einer Stichprobe von N = 1252 Patienten, die in einer von drei Ambulanzen der Christoph-Dornier-Stiftung fur Klinische Psychologie behandelt wurden und hauptsachlich unter Angststorungen litten, wurde die Reliabilitat und Validitat des Brief Symptom Inventory (BSI; Derogatis, 1993) untersucht. Vergleiche mit Daten der Symptom-Check-Liste (SCL-90-R) zeigten ahnliche psychometrische Qualitaten fur beide Instrumente. Fur die Primardimensionen des BSI ergaben sich befriedigende interne Konsistenzen von . 70 bis . 89 mit einem α = . 96 fur den Global Severity Index (GSI). Die konvergente Validitat zeigte hohe Korrelationen zu inhaltsnahen klinischen Selbstbeurteilungsskalen. Mit Hilfe der Pra-Post-Daten von N = 617 Patienten, die kognitiv-verhaltenstherapeutisch behandelt wurden, konnten vergleichbare Effektstarken fur die SCL-90-R und das BSI ermittelt werden. Die Generalisierbarkeit der Befunde ist durch das Vorherrschen von Angstpatienten in dieser Stichprobe eingeschrankt.
Statins and their increased risk of inducing diabetes

Introduction: Statins are evidence-based drugs to prevent cardiovascular (CV) disease. However, their benefits have been disputed by a statin-related increased risk of new onset diabetes (NOD) in randomized controlled trials and meta-analyses. Areas covered: This review provides an update based on recent outstanding evidence on the statin effect on the risk of diabetes. It also describes mechanisms potentially explaining adverse effects of statins on glucose homeostasis. PubMed was searched for original articles and reviews published from January 2010 (inclusive) to May 2015 (inclusive), which include the Search terms statins, diabetes, glucose, and insulin. NOD risk seems to be more relevant with high-intensity rather than with low-intensity statin treatment. Also, this risk is particularly increased in patients at risk for the development of diabetes. It appears that statins adversely affect glucose homeostasis in parallel with their 3-hydroxy-3-methylglutaryl-coenzyme A inhibition capacity. It was suggested that lipophilic statins are more diabetogenic than the hydrophilic ones. Mechanisms explaining statin diabetogeneicity include impaired insulin secretion by pancreatic β cells together with increased insulin resistance of various tissues. Expert opinion: The CV outcome benefits from statin use outweigh the diabetes menace. However, patients at risk for the development of diabetes should be prescribed statins with caution.
High-Fidelity Simulation and Parametric Analysis of Static Indirect Freeze Desalination Process

Attaining water sustainability is crucial, while the failure to address challenges of the current desalination processes, i.e. high energy demand and cost negatively affects the global development goals. Freeze desalination (FD) technology has a great potential to overcome such challenges as it needs only 20% of energy required by the conventional thermal processes. FD is a crystallization-based technology where freshwater is separated from the saline water mixture in forms of ice crystals by cooling. In this work, high-fidelity numerical simulation of indirect FD process in a rectangular crystallizer is done using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling of incompressible multispecies flow with solidification/melting. The model was used to perform parametric studies considering the effect of (i) initial brine salinity, (ii) freezing temperature, and (iii) initial brine temperature. Results showed that brines with lower salinities tends to provide better process performance. Lower freezing temperature will obviously provide larger ice block; however, it is associated with lower removal efficiency of salt. Similarly, decreasing the initial temperature seems to be highly affecting the growth rates and ice purity. Nevertheless, static layer indirect FD seems to be less productive when compared to other dynamic indirect freezing methods as progressive and falling film. Overall, more insight was given into the FD process using the CFD modeling in which it can be used as a prefect supporting tool for further experimental design and development.
Innovative signature based intrusion detection system: Parallel processing and minimized database

Securing information systems these days in not an option rather than it is a must. The increasing number of attacks on networks and individual systems raised the need for a fast, light, and reliable Intrusion Detection System (IDS). There are two types of detection that an IDS uses: anomaly based detection and signature based detection. This paper focus on the signature based detection. Signature based IDS suffers from the huge number of signatures stored in its database. Some researchers provided the concept of frequent signature database to solve database size problem but never discussed how to deal with new signatures and the old signature that became unnecessary. This paper represents a proposed module that uses parallel processing with small databases with most frequent signatures and an updating agent. This module could be used for both Host based IDS and Network based IDS.
The Relationship of Emotion to Cognition: A Functional Approach to a Semantic Controversy

Abstract We first review the main points in the dispute about whether emotion is primary and independent of cognition (Zajonc), or secondary and always dependent upon cognition (Lazarus), and suggest that the dispute is largely one of definition. Because definitional disputes seldom clarify substantive, theoretical points, we suggest a variety of questions regarding cognition-emotion interaction. To stimulate discussion of these issues, we propose a componential model in which emotions are seen to develop from simpler, reflex-like forms (“wired-in” sensory-motor processes) to complex cognitive-emotional patterns that result from the participation of at least two distinct levels of memory and information processing, a schematic and a conceptual level. These systems are typically activated by a continuous stimulus check process which evaluates five environment-organism attributes: novelty; pleasantness; goal conductiveness; coping potential; and consistency with social norms and self-relevant values. Questi.
Learning evaluation functions for global optimization

In complex sequential decision problems such as scheduling factory production, planning medical treatments, and playing backgammon, optimal decision policies are in general unknown, and it is often difficult, even for human domain experts, to manually encode good decision policies in software. The reinforcement-learning methodology of “value function approximation” (VFA) offers an alternative: systems can learn effective decision policies autonomously, simply by simulating the task and keeping statistics on which decisions lead to good ultimate performance and which do not. This thesis advances the state of the art in VFA in two ways. First, it presents three new VFA algorithms, which apply to three different restricted classes of sequential decision problems: Grow-Support for deterministic problems, ROUT for acyclic stochastic problems, and Least-Squares TD(λ) for fixed-policy prediction problems. Each is designed to gain robustness and efficiency over current approaches by exploiting the restricted problem structure to which it applies. Second, it introduces STAGE, a new search algorithm for general combinatorial optimization tasks. STAGE learns a problem-specific heuristic evaluation function as it searches. The heuristic is trained by supervised linear regression or Least-Squares TD(λ) to predict, from features of states along the search trajectory, how well a fast local search method such as hillclimbing will perform starting from each state. Search proceeds by alternating between two stages: performing the fast search to gather new training data, and following the learned heuristic to identify a promising new start state. STAGE has produced good results (in some cases, the best results known) on a variety of combinatorial optimization domains, including VLSI channel routing, Bayes net structure-finding, bin-packing, Boolean satisfiability, radiotherapy treatment planning, and geographic cartogram design. This thesis describes the results in detail, analyzes the reasons for and conditions of STAGE's success, and places STAGE in the context of four decades of research in local search and evaluation function learning. It provides strong evidence that reinforcement learning methods can be efficient and effective on large-scale decision problems.
Predictive Outcomes for HER2-enriched Cancer Using Growth and Metastasis Signatures Driven By SPARC

Understanding the mechanism of metastatic dissemination is crucial for the rational design of novel therapeutics. The secreted protein acidic and rich in cysteine (SPARC) is a matricellular glycoprotein which has been extensively associated with human breast cancer aggressiveness although the underlying mechanisms are still unclear. Here, shRNA-mediated SPARC knockdown greatly reduced primary tumor growth and completely abolished lung colonization of murine 4T1 and LM3 breast malignant cells implanted in syngeneic BALB/c mice. A comprehensive study including global transcriptomic analysis followed by biological validations confirmed that SPARC induces primary tumor growth by enhancing cell cycle and by promoting a COX-2–mediated expansion of myeloid-derived suppressor cells (MDSC). The role of SPARC in metastasis involved a COX-2–independent enhancement of cell disengagement from the primary tumor and adherence to the lungs that fostered metastasis implantation. Interestingly, SPARC-driven gene expression signatures obtained from these murine models predicted the clinical outcome of patients with HER2-enriched breast cancer subtypes. In total, the results reveal that SPARC and its downstream effectors are attractive targets for antimetastatic therapies in breast cancer. Implications: These findings shed light on the prometastatic role of SPARC, a key protein expressed by breast cancer cells and surrounding stroma, with important consequences for disease outcome. Mol Cancer Res; 15(3); 304–16. ©2016 AACR.
Local corticosterone production and angiotensin-I converting enzyme shedding in a mouse model of intestinal inflammation.

AIM To investigate local corticosterone production and angiotensin-I converting enzyme (ACE) protein expression and their interaction in healthy and inflamed intestine. METHODS Acute intestinal inflammation was induced to six weeks old male Balb/c mice by administration of either 3% or 5% dextran sodium sulfate (DSS) in drinking water for 7 d (n = 12 in each group). Healthy controls (n = 12) were given tap water. Corticosterone production and ACE protein shedding were measured from ex vivo incubates of the small and large intestine using EIA and ELISA, respectively. Morphological changes of the intestinal wall were assessed in hematoxylin-eosin stained tissue preparations of jejunum and distal colon. Effects of angiotensin II, captopril and metyrapone on corticosterone production was assessed by incubating pieces of small intestine of healthy mice in the presence of 0.1, 1 or 10 μmol/L angiotensin II, 1, 10 or 100 μmol/L captopril or 1, 10 or 100 μmol/L metyrapone solutions and measuring corticosterone released to the incubation buffer after 90 min (n = 5 in each group). RESULTS Both concentrations of DSS induced inflammation and morphological changes in large intestines but not in small intestines. Changes were observed as distortions of the crypt structure, mucosal erosion, immune cell infiltration to the mucosa and submucosal edema. Ex vivo corticosterone production (2.9 ± 1.0 ng/mL vs 2.0 ± 0.8 ng/mL, P = 0.034) and ACE shedding (269.2 ± 97.1 ng/mL vs 175.7 ± 52.2 ng/mL, P = 0.016) were increased in small intestines in 3% DSS group compared to the controls. In large intestine, corticosterone production was increased compared to the controls in both 3% DSS (229 ± 81 pg/mL vs 158 ± 30 pg/mL, P = 0.017) and 5% DSS groups (366 ± 163 pg/mL vs 158 ± 30 pg/mL, P = 0.002). Large intestine ACE shedding was increased in 5% DSS group (41.5 ± 9.0 ng/mL vs 20.9 ± 5.2 ng/mL, P = 0.034). Angiotensin II treatment augmented corticosterone production in small intestine at concentration of 10 μmol/L (0.97 ± 0.21 ng/mg protein vs 0.40 ± 0.09 ng/mg protein, P = 0.036). CONCLUSION Intestinal ACE shedding is increased by DSS-induced intestinal inflammation and parallels local corticosterone production. ACE product angiotensin II stimulates corticosterone formation in healthy intestine.
A Twitter knowledge sharing model based on small businesses in the Western Cape

In this paper, the researcher set out to show how Twitter could be used as knowledge sharing platform in small South African businesses in the Western Cape. The purpose of the study was to implement a Twitter knowledge sharing platform in three small businesses in the Western Cape so as to measure the potential of the platform as knowledge sharing medium. The researcher gathered data through semi-structured interviews. This paper aimed to shed more light on two aspects identified in the literature as a gap in the knowledge on using social networking services as a knowledge sharing platform. Firstly the focus was placed on incorporating Twitter throughout a business as a whole. Secondly, the platform is no longer considered novel, and as such it was revisited at this time. The sample comprised of 15 semi-structured interview participants across three small businesses. Although it became apparent that small businesses are not willing to use Twitter exclusively as knowledge sharing tool, foregoing traditional platforms, the researcher proposed a use case of Twitter, which he believes takes the greatest advantage of the functions Twitter affords.
Pro-self, prosocial, and pro-organizational foci of proactive behaviour: Differential antecedents and consequences

The paper aims to further knowledge of proactive employee behaviour by exploring whether pro-organizational, prosocial, and pro-self focused proactive behaviour can be measured in an empirically distinct manner, and whether these types of proactive behaviour show differential relationships with other variables. Results of two multi-source studies using self-rated and peer-rated measures empirically support the distinctiveness of the different foci of proactive behaviour. Study 1 (N = 117 dyads) shows that the different foci of proactive behaviour are differentially related to different foci of affective commitment. Study 2 (N = 126 dyads) builds on these findings and shows that different foci of proactive behaviour have differential relationships with transformational leadership, goal orientations, and individual task performance.