Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Promoting Charge Separation in Semiconductor Nanocrystal Superstructures for Enhanced Photocatalytic Activity

Increasing the lifetime of photoexcited charge carriers in metal oxide semiconductor nanocrystals is essential for the promotion of their photocatalytic efficiency. In this context, different strategies are developed for tailoring the structural and electronic properties of semiconductors at the single nanocrystal level, mainly including band‐structure engineering, doping, catalyst‐support interaction tuning, and cocatalysts decoration. Recently, an alternative strategy for prolonging the lifetime of photoexcited charge carriers is discovered at the nanocrystal superstructure level. By assembling semiconductor nanocrystals into ordered superstructures, a new pathway is created for the spatial separation of charge carriers between neighboring nanocrystals within the superstructure network. The inter‐nanocrystal charge transfer in the superstructures enables the increased charge separation efficiency of photogenerated electron–hole pairs, prolongs their lifetime and, in turn, improves the photocatalytic activity. In this review, recent developments of nanocrystal‐superstructure‐based photocatalysts and their applications in catalyzing different reactions are summarized. Several perspectives in terms of challenges and future research in this area are highlighted.
Mapping the Tip of the Tongue—Deprivation, Sensory Sensitisation, and Oral Haptics

We investigated the impact of food deprivation on oral and manual haptic size perception of food and non-food objects. From relevant theories (need-proportional perception, motivated perception, frustrative nonreward, perceptual defence, and sensory sensitisation) at least four completely different competing predictions can be derived. Testing these predictions, we found across four experiments that participants estimated the length of both non-food and food objects to be larger when hungry than when satiated, which was true only for oral haptic perception, while manual haptic perception was not influenced by hunger state. Subjectively reported hunger correlated positively with estimated object size in oral, but not in manual, haptic perception. The impact of food deprivation on oral perception vanished after oral stimulations even for hungry individuals. These results favour a sensory sensitisation account maintaining that hunger itself does not alter oral perception but the accompanying lack of sensory stimulation of the oral mucosa. Both oral and manual haptic perception tended to underestimate actual object size. Finally, an enhancing effect of domain-target matching was found, ie food objects were perceived larger by oral than by manual haptics, while non-food objects were perceived larger by manual than by oral haptics.
Williams Syndrome and Music: A Systematic Integrative Review

Background: Researchers and clinicians have often cited a strong relationship between individuals with Williams syndrome (WS) and music. This review systematically identified, analyzed, and synthesized research findings related to WS and music. Methods: Thirty-one articles were identified that examined this relationship and were divided into seven areas. This process covered a diverse array of methodologies, with aims to: (1) report current findings; (2) assess methodological quality; and (3) discuss the potential implications and considerations for the clinical use of music with this population. Results: Results indicate that individuals with WS demonstrate a high degree of variability in skill and engagement in music, presenting with musical skills that are more in line with their cognitive abilities than chronological age (CA). Musical strengths for this population appear to be based more in musicality and expressivity than formal musical skills, which are expressed through a heightened interest in music, a greater propensity toward musical activities, and a heightened emotional responsiveness to music. Individuals with WS seem to conserve the overall structure of musical phrases better than they can discriminate or reproduce them exactly. The affinity for music often found in this population may be rooted in atypical auditory processing, autonomic irregularities, and differential neurobiology. Conclusions: More studies are needed to explore how this affinity for music can be harnessed in clinical and educational interventions.
A Single, Specific Thymine Mutation in the ComK-Binding Site Severely Decreases Binding and Transcription Activation by the Competence Transcription Factor ComK of Bacillus subtilis

ABSTRACT The competence transcription factor ComK plays a central role in competence development in Bacillus subtilis by activating the transcription of the K regulon. ComK-activated genes are characterized by the presence of a specific sequence to which ComK binds, a K-box, in their upstream DNA region. Each K-box consists of two AT-boxes with the consensus sequence AAAA-(N)5-TTTT, which are separated by a flexible spacer resulting in either two, three, or four helical turns between the starting nucleotides of the repeating AT-box units. In this study, the effects of potential determinants of ComK regulation in K-boxes were investigated by testing ComK's transcription activation and DNA-binding affinity on altered K-boxes with mutations either in the spacer between the AT-boxes or in the consensus sequence of the AT-boxes. The most striking result demonstrates the importance of the second thymine base in the AT-boxes. Mutation of this T into a guanine resulted in a threefold reduction in transcription activation and DNA binding by ComK. Transcription activation, as well as DNA binding, was almost completely abolished when both AT-boxes contained a T2-to-G mutation. This result was corroborated by in silico analyses demonstrating that a combination of mutations at the T2 positions of both AT-boxes is not found among any ComK-activated K-boxes, indicating that at least one consensus T2 position is required to maintain a functional K-box. The results suggest an important structural role for T2 in ComK binding, probably by its specific position in the minor groove of the DNA.
Why would corporations behave in socially responsible ways? an institutional theory of corporate social responsibility

I offer an institutional theory of corporate social responsibility consisting of a series of propositions specifying the conditions under which corporations are likely to behave in socially responsible ways. I argue that the relationship between basic economic conditions and corporate behavior is mediated by several institutional conditions: public and private regulation, the presence of nongovernmental and other independent organizations that monitor corporate behavior, institutionalized norms regarding appropriate corporate behavior, associative behavior among corporations themselves, and organized dialogues among corporations and their stakeholders. Concerns about corporate social responsibility have grown significantly during the last two decades. Not only has the issue become commonplace in the business press and among business and political leaders (Buhr & Graf
The potential of UV-visible spectroscopy and chemometrics for determination of geographic origin of three specialty coffees in Indonesia

The growing global trading market for specialty coffee increases the need for better coffee quality evaluation methods. Several Arabica coffees in Indonesia have high commercial value. For this reason, the development of analytical methods with high sensitivity and accuracy for detection of its adulteration was important. This research evaluated the potential of UV-visible spectroscopy and partial least squares discriminant analysis (PLS-DA) for determining the geographic origin of three specialty coffees (Gayo, Kintamani and Wamena) in Indonesia. In this research, 296 coffee samples from three different origins (Gayo, Kintamani and Wamena) were used. All coffee samples were ground using a home-coffee-grinder. We sieved all coffee samples through a nest of US standard sieves (mesh number of 40) on a Meinzer II sieve shaker for 10 minutes to obtain a particle size of 420 µm. All samples were extracted with distilled water and then filtered. For each sample, 3 mL of extracted sample then was pipetted into 10 mm cuvettes for spectral data acquisition. The spectral data were acquired using a Genesys 10s UV-visible spectrometer in the range of 190-1100 nm. A PLS-DA classification model was estimated to classify the origin of specialty coffees by their UV-visible spectra. The best PLS-DA model accurately classified the specialty coffee samples of the prediction sample set with prediction ability of 100% of correct classification for Gayo, Kintamani and Wamena, respectively. The results demonstrate that UV-visible spectroscopy coupled with PLS-DA provides a sensitive and accurate analytical method to distinguish ground roasted coffee samples geographically.
THE EFFECT OF PERISTALSIS ON DISPERSION IN A MICROPOLAR FLUID

The paper presents an analytical solution for dispersion of a solute in the peristaltic motion of a micropolar fluid in the presence of both homogeneous and heterogeneous chemical reactions. The average effective dispersion coefficient has been found using Taylor’s limiting condition under long wavelength approximation. The effects of various relevant parameters on the average coefficient of dispersion have been studied. It is observed that average dispersion increases with amplitude ratio which implies that dispersion is more in the presence of peristalsis. The average dispersion decreases with micropolar parameters in the homogeneous case but increases in the case of combined homogeneous and heterogeneous chemical reactions. Further, average effective dispersion coefficient increases with heterogeneous reaction rate parameter.
Functional connectivity studies of patients with auditory verbal hallucinations

Functional connectivity (FC) studies of brain mechanisms leading to auditory verbal hallucinations (AVHs) utilizing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data are reviewed. Initial FC studies utilized fMRI data collected during performance of various tasks, which suggested frontotemporal disconnection and/or source-monitoring disturbances. Later FC studies have utilized resting (no-task) fMRI data. These studies have produced a mixed picture of disconnection and hyperconnectivity involving different pathways associated with AVHs. Results of our most recent FC study of AVHs are reviewed in detail. This study suggests that the core mechanism producing AVHs involves not a single pathway, but a more complex functional loop. Components of this loop include Wernicke's area and its right homologue, the left inferior frontal cortex, and the putamen. It is noteworthy that the putamen appears to play a critical role in the generation of spontaneous language, and in determining whether auditory stimuli are registered consciously as percepts. Excessive functional coordination linking this region with the Wernicke's seed region in patients with schizophrenia could, therefore, generate an overabundance of potentially conscious language representations. In our model, intact FC in the other two legs of corticostriatal loop (Wernicke's with left IFG, and left IFG with putamen) appeared to allow hyperconnectivity linking the putamen and Wernicke's area (common to schizophrenia overall) to be expressed as conscious hallucinations of speech. Recommendations for future studies are discussed, including inclusion of multiple methodologies applied to the same subjects in order to compare and contrast different mechanistic hypotheses, utilizing EEG to better parse time-course of neural synchronization leading to AVHs, and ascertaining experiential subtypes of AVHs that may reflect distinct mechanisms.
Impacts of Cropping Systems on Aggregates Associated Organic Carbon and Nitrogen in a Semiarid Highland Agroecosystem

The effect of cropping system on the distribution of organic carbon (OC) and nitrogen (N) in soil aggregates has not been well addressed, which is important for understanding the sequestration of OC and N in agricultural soils. We analyzed the distribution of OC and N associated with soil aggregates in three unfertilized cropping systems in a 27-year field experiment: continuously cropped alfalfa, continuously cropped wheat and a legume-grain rotation. The objectives were to understand the effect of cropping system on the distribution of OC and N in aggregates and to examine the relationships between the changes in OC and N stocks in total soils and in aggregates. The cropping systems increased the stocks of OC and N in total soils (0–40 cm) at mean rates of 15.6 g OC m-2 yr-1 and 1.2 g N m-2 yr-1 relative to a fallow control. The continuous cropping of alfalfa produced the largest increases at the 0–20 cm depth. The OC and N stocks in total soils were significantly correlated with the changes in the >0.053 mm aggregates. 27-year of cropping increased OC stocks in the >0.053 mm size class of aggregates and N stocks in the >0.25 mm size class but decreased OC stocks in the <0.053 mm size class and N stocks in the <0.25 mm size class. The increases in OC and N stocks in these aggregates accounted for 99.5 and 98.7% of the total increases, respectively, in the continuous alfalfa system. The increases in the OC and N stocks associated with the >0.25 mm aggregate size class accounted for more than 97% of the total increases in the continuous wheat and the legume-grain rotation systems. These results suggested that long-term cropping has the potential to sequester OC and N in soils and that the increases in soil OC and N stocks were mainly due to increases associated with aggregates >0.053 mm.
Analysis of high-affinity assembly for AMPA receptor amino-terminal domains

Analytical ultracentrifugation (AUC) and steady-state fluorescence anisotropy were used to measure the equilibrium dissociation constant (Kd) for formation of dimers by the amino-terminal domains (ATDs) of the GluA2 and GluA3 subtypes of AMPA receptor. Previous reports on GluA2 dimerization differed in their estimate of the monomer–dimer Kd by a 2,400-fold range, with no consensus on whether the ATD forms tetramers in solution. We find by sedimentation velocity (SV) analysis performed using absorbance detection a narrow range of monomer–dimer Kd values for GluA2, from 5 to 11 nM for six independent experiments, with no detectable formation of tetramers and no effect of glycosylation or the polypeptide linker connecting the ATD and ligand-binding domains; for GluA3, the monomer–dimer Kd was 5.6 µM, again with no detectable tetramer formation. For sedimentation equilibrium (SE) experiments, a wide range of Kd values was obtained for GluA2, from 13 to 284 nM, whereas for GluA3, the Kd of 3.1 µM was less than twofold different from the SV value. Analysis of cell contents after the ∼1-week centrifuge run by silver-stained gels revealed low molecular weight GluA2 breakdown products. Simulated data for SE runs demonstrate that the apparent Kd for GluA2 varies with the extent of proteolysis, leading to artificially high Kd values. SV experiments with fluorescence detection for GluA2 labeled with 5,6-carboxyfluorescein, and fluorescence anisotropy measurements for GluA2 labeled with DyLight405, yielded Kd values of 5 and 11 nM, consistent with those from SV with absorbance detection. However, the sedimentation coefficients measured by AUC using absorbance and fluorescence systems were strikingly different, and for the latter are not consistent with hydrodynamic protein models. Thus, for unknown reasons, the concentration dependence of sedimentation coefficients obtained with fluorescence detection SV may be unreliable, limiting the usefulness of this technique for quantitative analysis.
Church representatives’ perspectives on masculinities in the context of HIV: the case of the Ecumenical HIV and AIDS Initiative in Africa

Despite a growing body of literature related to church leaders challenging dominant norms of masculinities that may enable the spread of HIV, research on masculinity issues among African church representatives who are policy makers is scarce. The objectives of this study were to explore the perspectives on masculinities held by church representatives within the Ecumenical HIV and AIDS Initiative in Africa (EHAIA) and to identify strategies they used to transform masculinities in their respective churches. Qualitative interviews were carried out with 14 church representatives belonging to the EHAIA International Reference Group. These interviews were analysed using thematic analysis and four themes were identified: “barriers to challenge masculinities” may contribute to the spread of HIV; “counterproductive conservative church leadership” fails to challenge dominant forms of masculinities; “facilitators to challenge masculinities” perceived as slowly changing men and “an evolving hope for gender equality” would be perceived in certain marital relationships. The latter two were viewed as positive approaches resulting from masculinity workshops and male priests disclosing their HIV-positive status. This research highlights strategies that may help male church-goers challenge masculinities, support gender equality and, improve the lives of men and women in the context of HIV.
Status of pre-processing of waste electrical and electronic equipment in Germany and its influence on the recovery of gold

Waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) contains gold in low but from an environmental and economic point of view relevant concentration. After collection, WEEE is pre-processed in order to generate appropriate material fractions that are sent to the subsequent end-processing stages (recovery, reuse or disposal). The goal of this research is to quantify the overall recovery rates of pre-processing technologies used in Germany for the reference year 2007. To achieve this goal, facilities operating in Germany were listed and classified according to the technology they apply. Information on their processing capacity was gathered by evaluating statistical databases. Based on a literature review of experimental results for gold recovery rates of different pre-processing technologies, the German overall recovery rate of gold at the pre-processing level was quantified depending on the characteristics of the treated WEEE. The results reveal that — depending on the equipment groups — pre-processing recovery rates of gold of 29 to 61% are achieved in Germany. Some practical recommendations to reduce the losses during pre-processing could be formulated. Defining mass-based recovery targets in the legislation does not set incentives to recover trace elements. Instead, the priorities for recycling could be defined based on other parameters like the environmental impacts of the materials. The implementation of measures to reduce the gold losses would also improve the recovery of several other non-ferrous metals like tin, nickel, and palladium.
Slicing: A New Approach to Privacy Preserving Data Publishing

Several anonymity techniques, such as generalization and bucketization, have been designed for privacy preserving micro data publishing. Recent work has shown that generalization loses considerable amount of information, especially for high dimensional data. Bucketization, on the other hand, does not prevent membership disclosure and does not apply for data that do not have a clear separation between quasi-identifying attributes and sensitive attributes. In this paper, we present a novel technique called overlapping slicing, which partitions the data both horizontally and vertically. We show that overlapping slicing preserves better data utility than generalization and can be used for membership disclosure protection. Another important advantage of overlapping slicing is that it can handle high-dimensional data storage. We show how overlapping slicing can be used for attribute disclosure protection and develop an efficient algorithm for computing the sliced data that obey the '-diversity requirement. Our workload experiment confirm that overlapping slicing preserves better utility than generalization and is more effective than bucketization in workloads involving the sensitive attribute. Our experiments also demonstrate that overlapping slicing can be used to prevent membership disclosure. We consider the collaborative data publishing problem for anonymizing horizontally partitioned data at multiple data providers. We consider a new type of "insider attack" by colluding data providers who may use their own data records (a subset of the overall data) in addition to the external background knowledge to infer the data records contributed by other data providers. The paper addresses this new threat and makes several contributions. First, we introduce the notion of m-privacy, which guarantees that the anonymity data satisfies a given privacy constraint against any group of up to m colluding data providers. Second, we present heuristic algorithms exploiting the equivalence group monotonicity of privacy constraints and adaptive ordering techniques for efficiently checking m- privacy given a set of records. Finally, we present a data provider-aware anonymity algorithm with adaptive m- privacy checking strategies to ensure high utility and m- privacy of anonymity data with efficiency. Experiments on real-life datasets suggest that our approach achieves better or comparable utility and efficiency than existing and baseline algorithms while providing m-privacy guarantee.
Sparse Partial Least Squares Classification for High Dimensional Data

Partial least squares (PLS) is a well known dimension reduction method which has been recently adapted for high dimensional classification problems in genome biology. We develop sparse versions of the recently proposed two PLS-based classification methods using sparse partial least squares (SPLS). These sparse versions aim to achieve variable selection and dimension reduction simultaneously. We consider both binary and multicategory classification. We provide analytical and simulation-based insights about the variable selection properties of these approaches and benchmark them on well known publicly available datasets that involve tumor classification with high dimensional gene expression data. We show that incorporation of SPLS into a generalized linear model (GLM) framework provides higher sensitivity in variable selection for multicategory classification with unbalanced sample sizes between classes. As the sample size increases, the two-stage approach provides comparable sensitivity with better specificity in variable selection. In binary classification and multicategory classification with balanced sample sizes, the two-stage approach provides comparable variable selection and prediction accuracy as the GLM version and is computationally more efficient.
The effectiveness (or lack thereof) of aim-assist techniques in first-person shooter games

Aim-assistance techniques have been shown to work for player balancing in 2D environments, but little information exists about how well these techniques will work in a 3D FPS game. We carried out three studies of the performance of five different aim assists in an Unreal-based game world. The assists worked well in a target-range scenario (study 1), but their performance was reduced when game elements were introduced in a walkthrough map (study 2). We systematically examined the relationships between realistic game elements and assist performance (study 3). These studies show that two techniques -- bullet magnetism and area cursor -- worked well in a wide variety of situations. Other techniques that worked well were too perceptible, and some previously-successful techniques did not work well in any game-like scenario. Our studies are the first to provide empirical evidence of the performance of aim assist techniques in 3D environments, and the first to identify the complexities in using these techniques in real FPS games.