Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Investigating how the sources of online audio Qur'an empower listeners

Fundamental Islamic principles require that the Qur'an, in whatever format, should remain intact. The Internet is a huge source of different formats of the Qur'an. Unfortunately some people are skeptical about the content of any Islamic resource on the Internet, because of the deception or misleading representation of Islam/Muslims found on many Web sites. However, Islamic resources on the Internet still impact many people in many ways, especially young people. This paper investigates how online audio Qur'an empowers listeners. The online audio Qur'an file can be downloaded and installed on either a mobile device or a PC, or listened to on different websites. The research was carried out through a quantitative survey of 123 respondents; both descriptive and inferential statistic analyses were used to develop and validate a new scale that measures the empowerment through Internet sources of audio Qur'an. The items on the scale measured the key variables that impact people in their use of online audio Qur'an. The result shows that the key attribute empowering listeners is competence.
Combining features from ERP components in single-trial EEG for discriminating four-category visual objects

Categorization of images containing visual objects can be successfully recognized using single-trial electroencephalograph (EEG) measured when subjects view images. Previous studies have shown that task-related information contained in event-related potential (ERP) components could discriminate two or three categories of object images. In this study, we investigated whether four categories of objects (human faces, buildings, cats and cars) could be mutually discriminated using single-trial EEG data. Here, the EEG waveforms acquired while subjects were viewing four categories of object images were segmented into several ERP components (P1, N1, P2a and P2b), and then Fisher linear discriminant analysis (Fisher-LDA) was used to classify EEG features extracted from ERP components. Firstly, we compared the classification results using features from single ERP components, and identified that the N1 component achieved the highest classification accuracies. Secondly, we discriminated four categories of objects using combining features from multiple ERP components, and showed that combination of ERP components improved four-category classification accuracies by utilizing the complementarity of discriminative information in ERP components. These findings confirmed that four categories of object images could be discriminated with single-trial EEG and could direct us to select effective EEG features for classifying visual objects.
Partington-rochelle pancreaticojejunostomy for chronic pancreatitis: analysis of outcome including quality of life.

BACKGROUND/AIMS Obstruction of the main pancreatic duct in chronic pancreatitis (CP) leads to an increased intraductal and intraparenchymal pressure causing pain. In this study we evaluated the outcome of surgical treatment of CP including the quality of life following Partington-Rochellepancreaticojejunostomy (PRP) performed for intractable pain. METHODOLOGY Between July 2002 and May 2008, PRP was performed in 17 patients in whom the diameter of the main pancreatic duct exceeded 7mm and there was no inflammatory tumor in the pancreatic head. Perioperative morbidity and mortality were analyzed in all patients. The long term outcome including the quality of life (Karnofsky index) was evaluated in 9 patients who were followed with a mean 28 (range 13-60) months since surgery. RESULTS Complications in the postoperative period were found in 3 (18%) patients including 1 death due to a myocardial infarction shortly after surgery. All patients submitted to the long-term evaluation reported a significant (p < 0.0001) pain reduction by an average of 6.2 (5-8) points in a 10-points visual analogue scale. The Karnofsky index increased significantly from a mean 52% (40-70%) before surgery up to 82% (70-90%) following surgery and long-term. CONCLUSIONS PRP leads to a substantial quality of life improvement in patients with CP.
Gene expression of purified beta-cell tissue obtained from human pancreas with laser capture microdissection.

CONTEXT Human beta-cell gene profiling is a powerful tool for understanding beta-cell biology in normal and pathological conditions. Assessment is complicated when isolated islets are studied because of contamination by non-beta-cells and the trauma of the isolation procedure. OBJECTIVE The objective was to use laser capture microdissection (LCM) of human beta-cells from pancreases of cadaver donors and compare their gene expression with that of handpicked isolated islets. DESIGN Endogenous autofluorescence of beta-cells facilitated procurement of purified beta-cell tissue from frozen pancreatic sections with LCM. Gene expression profiles of three microdissected beta-cell samples and three isolated islet preparations were obtained. The array data were normalized using DNA-Chip Analyzer software (Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, MA), and the lower confidence bound evaluated differentially expressed genes. Real-time PCR was performed on selected acinar genes and on the duct cell markers, carbonic anhydrase II and keratin 19. RESULTS Endogenous autofluorescence facilitates the microdissection of beta-cell rich tissue in human pancreas. When compared with array profiles of purified beta-cell tissue, with lower confidence bound set at 1.2, there were 4560 genes up-regulated and 1226 genes down-regulated in the isolated islets. Among the genes up-regulated in isolated islets were pancreatic acinar and duct genes, chemokine genes, and genes associated with hypoxia, apoptosis, and stress. Quantitative RT-PCR confirmed the differential expression of acinar gene transcripts and the duct marker carbonic anhydrase II in isolated islets. CONCLUSION LCM makes it possible to obtain beta-cell enriched tissue from human pancreas sections without the trauma and ischemia of islet isolation.
When reactivity fails: The limited effects of hospital rankings

Recent research has advanced the idea that modern society is replete with numerous measuring activities that evaluate the performance of individuals and organisations. Both the research and the application of such measures suggest that the scrutinised actors will internalise the expectations associated with these measures and adjust their behaviour accordingly (‘reactivity’). Usually these expectations involve both technical and moral demands aimed at improving the evaluated activities so as to make them more beneficial, efficient, and transparent for the consumer and society in general. However, both research and practice instantaneously equate their widespread presence with their efficacy, i.e. that their implied behaviour-altering capacity is inevitably achieved. This overlooks that the coupling of measurement and behavioural change is mitigated by the sensemaking processes of the examined actors. Using examples from the US hospital sector, this article shows that patients, medical professionals, and hospitals do not simply conform to the expectations created by hospitals rankings but rather show different forms of resistance, such as ignorance or rejection. Thereby, the paper highlights that the conditions under which measures prove inescapable and substantially influence social fields need to be examined more closely.
Domain-Constraint Transfer Coding for Imbalanced Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) deals with the task that labeled training and unlabeled test data collected from source and target domains, respectively. In this paper, we particularly address the practical and challenging scenario of imbalanced cross-domain data. That is, we do not assume the label numbers across domains to be the same, and we also allow the data in each domain to be collected from multiple datasets/sub-domains. To solve the above task of imbalanced domain adaptation, we propose a novel algorithm of Domain-constraint Transfer Coding (DcTC). Our DcTC is able to exploit latent subdomains within and across data domains, and learns a common feature space for joint adaptation and classification purposes. Without assuming balanced cross-domain data as most existing UDA approaches do, we show that our method performs favorably against state-of-the-art methods on multiple cross-domain visual classification tasks.
Research Priorities of Korean Oncology Nurses

Systematic nursing research activities in South Korea began in the 1970s, but research into oncology did not begin until the mid-1980s. Although the number of Korean oncology nursing studies has increased steadily since then, no national agenda exists for future research in oncology nursing. This study involved a descriptive survey of oncology nursing research priorities among Korean oncology nurses. The analysis included 59 members of the Korean Oncology Nursing Society. The questionnaire used by the Oncology Nursing Society in a US survey was revised and translated into Korean. The questionnaire contained 108 items. In addition, respondents were asked to rank 5 items in order of research priority. The Korean Oncology Nursing Society members ranked prevention of cancer and cancer risk reduction as the top research priority, followed by pain management, quality of life, hospice and end-of-life care, and standards of care. These findings provide the basis for developing a Korean oncology nursing research agenda, and for determining the direction of oncology research funding.
The Economics Behind the Epidemic: Afghan Opium Price and Prescription Opioids in the US

We investigate the effect of variations in the price of opium in Afghanistan on per capita dispensation of prescription opioids in the US. Quarterly county-level data for 2003-2016 indicate that reductions in opium prices significantly increase the quantity of opioids prescribed, and that the magnitude of the effect increases with the county's ex-ante demand for opioids. Most of the increase involves natural and semi-synthetic but not fully synthetic opioids. We further find that both opioid-related deaths and drug-related crimes increase following a decline in the opium price. Finally, firm-level analysis reveals that the stock prices and profits of opioid producers react significantly to opium price shocks. Overall, the findings suggest that supply-side economic incentives have played an important role in the opioid epidemic.
Hierarchical co-segmentation of 3D point clouds for indoor scene

Segmentation of point clouds has been studied under a variety of scenarios. However, the segmentation of scanned point clouds for a clustered indoor scene remains significantly challenging due to noisy and incomplete data, as well as scene complexity. Based on the observation that objects in an indoor scene vary largely in scale but are typically supported by planes, we propose a co-segmentation approach. This technique utilizes the mutual agency between the point clouds captured at different times after the objects' poses change due to human actions. Hence, we hierarchically segment scenes from different times into patches and generate tree structures to store their relations. By iteratively clustering patches and co-analyzing them based on the relations between patches, we modify the tree structures and generate our results. To test the robustness of our method, we evaluate it on imperfectly scanned point clouds from a childroom, a bedroom, and two offices scenes.
Fabrication of micro-nanoprojection arrays and the effect of morphing on the needle profile

In this paper we demonstrate the fabrication of silicon microneedle arrays for vaccine delivery using deep reactive ion etching. Three different scenarios have been investigated to study the effect of morphing the gas flow of SF<inf>6</inf>/C<inf>4</inf>F<inf>8</inf> during the etching process. Results show that morphing the flow rate of SF<inf>6</inf>/C<inf>4</inf>F<inf>8</inf> has a significant impact on the needles' shape and size.
Plaskett's Star: Analysis of the CoRoT photometric data ?

Context. The second short run (SRa02) of the CoRoT space mission for asteroseismology was partly devoted to stars belonging to the Mon OB2 association. An intense monitoring has been performed on Plaskett’s star (HD 47129) and the unprecedented quality of the light curve allows us to shed new light on this very massive, non-eclipsing binary system. Aims. We particularly aimed at detecting periodic variability that might be associated with pulsations or interactions between both components. We also searched for variations related to the orbital cycle that could help to constrain the inclination and the morphology of the binary system. Methods. We applied an iterative Fourier-based prewhitening and a multiperiodic fitting procedure to analyse the time series and extract the frequencies of variations from the CoRoT light curve. We describe the noise properties to tentatively define an appropriate significance criterion and, in consequence, to only point out the peaks at a certain significance level. We also detect the variations related to the orbital motion and study them with the NIGHTFALL programme. Results. The periodogram computed from Plaskett’s star CoRoT light curve mainly exhibits a majority of peaks at low frequencies. Among these peaks, we highlight a list of 43 values, notably including two different sets of harmonic frequencies whose fundamental peaks are located at about 0.07 and 0.82 d −1 . The former represents the orbital frequency of the binary system, whilst the latter could probably be associated with non-radial pulsations. The study of the 0.07 d −1 variations reveals a hot spot most probably situated on the primary star and facing the secondary. Conclusions. The investigation of this unique dataset constitutes a further step in the understanding of Plaskett’s star. These results provide a first basis for future seismic modelling and put forward the probable existence of non-radial pulsations in Plaskett’s star. Moreover, the fit of the orbital variations confirms the problem of the distance of this system which was already mentioned in previous works. A hot region between both components renders the determination of the inclination ambiguous.
Cutting Edge: Ikaros Is a Regulator of Th2 Cell Differentiation1

Ikaros, a hematopoietic transcription factor, has well defined effects on early lymphocyte development in the bone marrow and thymus. In this study we demonstrate that Ikaros is a positive regulator of Th2 cytokine gene expression in peripheral T cells. CD4+ T cells from naive Ikarosnull mice cultured under Th2-skewing conditions express the Th1 cytokine IFN-γ and have reduced IL-4, IL-5, and IL-13 expression. Ikaros directly associates with several Th2 locus regulatory regions in naive CD4+ T cells. The decreased ability to express Th2 cytokines in Ikarosnull T cells corresponds with histone 3 hypoacetylation across the Th2 cytokine locus as well as decreased GATA3 and cMaf and increased T-bet and STAT1 expression. These data support a model whereby Ikaros directly activates Th2 gene expression by promoting local chromatin accessibility during CD4+ T cell differentiation and also acts indirectly to regulate expression of Th2- and Th1-specific transcription factors.
Are they watching? Test-taker viewing behavior during an L2 video listening test

The accessibility of video technology has made it possible to utilize both the auditory and visual channels to present listening texts in the second language (L2) classroom and on L2 listening tests. However, there has been little research investigating the extent to which L2 listeners actually watch the video monitor when presented with a listening video text. The current study investigated test-taker behavior on an L2 video listening test. Thirty-six testtakers were videotaped while taking a listening test composed of six separate video texts, and the amount of time test-takers made eye contact with the video monitor was computed. An analysis of the data indicated that the group of participants oriented to the video monitor 69% of the time while the video text was played. In addition, the study yielded valuable information concerning the consistency of the test-takers’ viewing behavior.
The Electrostatic Nature of C3d-Complement Receptor 2 Association1

The association of complement component C3d with B or T cell complement receptor 2 (CR2 or CD21) is a link between innate and adaptive immunity. It has been recognized in experimental studies that the C3d-CR2 association is pH- and ionic strength-dependent. This led us to perform electrostatic calculations to obtain a theoretical understanding of the mechanism of C3d-CR2 association. We used the crystallographic structures of human free C3d, free CR2 (short consensus repeat (SCR)1–2), and the C3d-CR2(SCR1–2) complex, and continuum solvent representation, to obtain a detailed atomic-level picture of the components of the two molecules that contribute to association. Based on the calculation of electrostatic potentials for the free and bound species and apparent pKa values for each ionizable residue, we show that C3d-CR2(SCR1–2) recognition is electrostatic in nature and involves not only the association interface, but also the whole molecules. Our results are in qualitative agreement with experimental data that measured the ionic strength and pH dependence of C3d-CR2 association. Also, our results for the native molecules and a number of theoretical mutants of C3d explain experimental mutagenesis studies of amino acid replacements away from the association interface that modulate binding of iC3b with full-length CR2. Finally, we discuss the packing of the two SCR domains. Overall, our data provide global and site-specific explanations of the physical causes that underlie the ionic strength dependence of C3d-CR2 association in a unified model that accounts for all experimental data, some of which were previously thought to be contradictory.
SEGCloud: Semantic Segmentation of 3D Point Clouds

3D semantic scene labeling is fundamental to agents operating in the real world. In particular, labeling raw 3D point sets from sensors provides fine-grained semantics. Recent works leverage the capabilities of Neural Networks (NNs), but are limited to coarse voxel predictions and do not explicitly enforce global consistency. We present SEGCloud, an end-to-end framework to obtain 3D point-level segmentation that combines the advantages of NNs, trilinear interpolation(TI) and fully connected Conditional Random Fields (FC-CRF). Coarse voxel predictions from a 3D Fully Convolutional NN are transferred back to the raw 3D points via trilinear interpolation. Then the FC-CRF enforces global consistency and provides fine-grained semantics on the points. We implement the latter as a differentiable Recurrent NN to allow joint optimization. We evaluate the framework on two indoor and two outdoor 3D datasets (NYU V2, S3DIS, KITTI, this http URL), and show performance comparable or superior to the state-of-the-art on all datasets.
Limited privacy protection and poor sensitivity

Background: The statistical linkage key (SLK-581) is a common tool for record linkage in Australia, due to its ability to provide some privacy protection. However, newer privacy-preserving approaches may provide greater privacy protection, while allowing high-quality linkage. Objective: To evaluate the standard SLK-581, encrypted SLK-581 and a newer privacy-preserving approach using Bloom filters, in terms of both privacy and linkage quality. Method: Linkage quality was compared by conducting linkages on Australian health datasets using these three techniques and examining results. Privacy was compared qualitatively in relation to a series of scenarios where privacy breaches may occur. Results: The Bloom filter technique offered greater privacy protection and linkage quality compared to the SLK-based method commonly used in Australia. Conclusion: The adoption of new privacy-preserving methods would allow both greater confidence in research results, while significantly improving privacy protection.
Ratio of optic cup to optic disc. In relation to axial length of eyeball and refraction.

Armaly (I967) found that the ratio of the horizontal diameter of the optic cup to that of the optic disc, in three samples offirst degree relatives, varied directly and similarly between parents and offsprings, and between siblings. The frequency distribution of the ratio did not differ in the three samples and was not influenced by age or sex. He concluded that the ratio was determined genetically in a multifactorial pattern. On the basis of his valuable and interesting observations, he also pointed out that cup-to-disc diameter ratio is not a good criterion of glaucomatous cupping, although inequality between the cups in two eyes may give rise to suspicion. In the present survey, not only the horizontal diameters of the optic cup and disc have been measured, but also their areas, because the area ratio seemed likely to be a better parameter than diameter ratio. These ratios will be considered in relation to axial length and refraction of eyeballs.
Design and Implementation of a Highly Efficient Three-Level T-Type Converter for Low-Voltage Applications

The demand for lightweight converters with high control performance and low acoustic noise led to an increase in switching frequencies of hard switched two-level low-voltage 3-phase converters over the last years. For high switching frequencies, converter efficiency suffers and can be kept high only by employing cost intensive switch technology such as SiC diodes or CoolMOS switches; therefore, conventional IGBT technology still prevails. In this paper, the alternative of using three-level converters for low-voltage applications is addressed. The performance and the competitiveness of the three-level T-type converter (3LT2C) is analyzed in detail and underlined with a hardware prototype. The 3LT2 C basically combines the positive aspects of the two-level converter such as low conduction losses, small part count and a simple operation principle with the advantages of the three-level converter such as low switching losses and superior output voltage quality. It is, therefore, considered to be a real alternative to two-level converters for certain low-voltage applications.
Note on the Intercalation of Kaolinite, Dickite and Halloysite by Dimethyl-Sulfoxide

Various kaolinites, a dickite and halloysites have been treated by DMSO in presence of D2O and subsequently washed by D2O. This procedure allowed to record OD stretching bands which are due specifically to the intercalated fraction and, for the washed samples, to the fraction of the solid which has been intercalated and has subsequently collapsed.No structural difference is found between the intercalated materials prepared from the various minerals. Washing usually restores the starting mineral; however, for a non-tubular halloysite, DMSO intercalation and subsequent washing gave a product similar to kaolinite.
Critical points of Ambrosio-Tortorelli converge to critical points of Mumford-Shah in the one-dimensional Dirichlet case

Critical points of a variant of the Ambrosio-Tortorelli functional, for which non-zero Dirichlet boundary conditions replace the fidelity term, are investigated. They are shown to con- verge to particular critical points of the corresponding variant of the Mumford-Shah functional; those exhibit many symmetries. That Dirichlet variant is the natural functional when addressing a problem of brittle fracture in an elastic material.