Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Potential Role for Endogenous Glucagon in Preventing Post-Bariatric Hypoglycemia

Obesity and obesity-related diseases are major public health concerns that have been exponentially growing in the last decades. Bariatric surgery is an effective long-term treatment to achieve weight loss and obesity comorbidity remission. Post-bariatric hypoglycemia (PBH) is a late complication of bariatric surgery most commonly reported after Roux-en-Y gastric bypass (RYGB). PBH is the end result of postprandial hyperinsulinemia but additional endocrine mechanisms involved are still under debate. Our aim was to characterize entero-pancreatic hormone dynamics associated with postprandial hypoglycemia after RYGB. Individuals previously submitted to RYGB (N=23) in a single tertiary hospital presenting PBH symptoms (Sym, n=14) and asymptomatic weight-matched controls (Asy, n=9) were enrolled. Participants underwent a mixed-meal tolerance test (MMTT) to assess glucose, total amino acids (total AA), insulin, C-peptide, glucagon, glucose-dependent insulinotropic polypeptide (GIP), glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1), and neurotensin (NT). We found that hypoglycemia during the MMTT was equally frequent in Sym and Asy groups (p=1.000). Re-grouped according to glucose nadir during the MMTT (Hypo n=11 vs NoHypo n=12; nadir <3.05 mmol/l vs ≥3.05 mmol/l), subjects presented no differences in anthropometric (BMI: p=0.527) or metabolic features (HbA1c: p=0.358), yet distinct meal-elicited hormone dynamics were identified. Postprandial glucose excursion and peak glucose levels were similar (p>0.05), despite distinct late glycemic outcomes (t=60 min and t=90 min: p<0.01), with overall greater glycemic variability in Hypo group (minimum-to-maximum glucose ratio: p<0.001). Hypo group meal-triggered hormone profile was characterized by lower early glucagon (t=15 min: p<0.01) and higher insulin (t=30 min: p<0.05, t=45 min: p<0.001), C-peptide (t=30 min: p<0.01, t=45 min: p<0.001, t=60 min: p<0.05), and GLP-1 (t=45 min: p<0.05) levels. Hyperinsulinemia was an independent risk factor for hypoglycemia (p<0.05). After adjusting for hyperinsulinemia, early glucagon correlated with glycemic nadir (p<0.01), and prevented postprandial hypoglycemia (p<0.05). A higher insulin to glucagon balance in Hypo was observed (p<0.05). No differences were observed in total AA, GIP or NT excursions (p>0.05). In sum, after RYGB, postprandial hyperinsulinemia is key in triggering PBH, but a parallel and earlier rise in endogenous glucagon might sustain the inter-individual variability in glycemic outcome beyond the effect of hyperinsulinism, advocating a potential pivotal role for glucagon in preventing hyperinsulinemic hypoglycemia.
Towards Personalization in the Curative Treatment of Gastric Cancer

Gastric cancer is the fifth most common cancer worldwide and has a high mortality rate. In the last decades, treatment strategy has shifted from an exclusive surgical approach to a multidisciplinary strategy. Treatment options for patients with resectable gastric cancer as recommended by different worldwide guidelines, include perioperative chemotherapy, pre- or postoperative chemoradiotherapy and postoperative chemotherapy. Although gastric cancer is a heterogeneous disease with respect to patient-, tumor-, and molecular characteristics, the current standard of care is still according to a one-size-fits-all approach. In this review, we discuss the background of the different treatment strategies in resectable gastric cancer including the current standard, the specific role of radiotherapy, and describe the current areas of research and potential strategies for personalization of therapy.
Transcriptomes of Different Tissues of Flax (Linum usitatissimum L.) Cultivars With Diverse Characteristics

Citation: Dmitriev AA, Novakovskiy RO, Pushkova EN, Rozhmina TA, Zhuchenko AA, Bolsheva NL, Beniaminov AD, Mitkevich VA, Povkhova LV, Dvorianinova EM, Snezhkina AV, Kudryavtseva AV, Krasnov GS and Melnikova NV (2020) Transcriptomes of Different Tissues of Flax (Linum usitatissimum L.) Cultivars With Diverse Characteristics. Front. Genet. 11:565146. doi: 10.3389/fgene.2020. 565146 Transcriptomes of Different Tissues of Flax (Linum usitatissimum L.) Cultivars With Diverse Characteristics
Flipped learning in an EFL environment: Does the teacher’s experience affect learning outcomes?

In this paper, the authors discuss the findings of a quasi-experimental study of the flipped learning approach in an EFL environment. The authors investigated the composition-writing proficiency of two groups of Japanese university students (n = 38). The teacher of one of these groups had had much experience teaching with the flipped learning model, whereas the other teacher had had no experience. The first aim of the study was to discover if improvements in writing proficiency could be observed within each group. The results indicated that statistically significant improvements were seen both for students studying under a teacher with experience conducting flipped classrooms, t(16) = 4.80, p < . 001, d = 1.27, and a teacher without flipped classroom experience, t(20) = 7.73, p < . 001, d = 1.61. The second aim of the study was to investigate whether any differences in improvement between the two groups occurred. The results suggested that students in both groups improved at similar degrees: F(1, 36) = . 087, p = . 77. These results suggest that regardless of a teacher’s experience with the flipped learning approach, it appears to be a successful way of teaching in EFL environments. The authors conclude that, regardless of the teacher’s experience with the model, the flipped learning approach is an ideal way to increase the amount of individual coaching possible in the classroom, bringing about more efficient learning.
A Case Study on Collaborative Learning in Promoting Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) among English as a Second Language (ESL) Learners

This qualitative study explores how collaborative learning experience promotes higher thinking skills among four students in Universiti Malaysia Pahang. Three research question are posted in the study and these are: How do learners of ESL take responsibility after thinking critically over an issue in collaborative learning? , How is it possible for ESL learners in admitting their initial opinion to be incorrect or partially flawed in collaborative learning environment? And what are the strategies that learners of ESL use in working collaboratively after thinking critically over an issue? Several themes are discussed in relation to the research questions stated.
MPI: A Message-Passing Interface

This paper presents an overview of MPI, a proposed standard message passing interface for MIMD distributed memory concurrent computers. The design of MPI has been a collective effort involving researchers in the Untied states and Europe from many organizations and institutions. MPI includes point-to-point and collective communication routines, as well as support for process groups, communication contexts, and application topologies. While making use of new ideas where appropriate, the MPI standard is based largely on current practice.
Development of Learning Instrument Based on Scientific Learning to Improve Students' Mathematical Problem Solving and Self-Regulated Learning Ability at MTs. Sinar Islami Bingai

This research aims to describe the valid, practical and effective learning instrument based on the scientific learning that has been developed and produce learning instrument for developing valid learning instrument based on a scientific learning to improve mathematical problem solving ability and self-regulated learning at MTs Sinar Islami Bingai. This research is a development research. The development model used is the 4-D model which consists of four stages: define, design, develop and disseminate. The research subject is a learning instrument of the discussion of one variable linear equations and inequalities. The development testing was carried out on class VII of MTs Sinar Islami Bingai. The first development testing is carried out in class VII-2 and The second development testing is carried out in class VII-1 MTs Sinar Islami Bingai. The results of obtained development are: (1) Learning instrument developed were valid; (2) The learning instrument developed practically were indicated by responses of validator who said that learning instrument could be used with little revision or without revision; (3) Effective learning instrument were indicated by classical student learning completeness that has been achieved, positive student response to the components of learning instrument and learning activities developed, and the ability of teachers to manage learning obtain an average good category score. Increased self-regulated learning reached an average of 79.09 in the first development testing and 82.35 in the second one.
Toward a Usable Mixed Reality Authoring Tool

Mixed reality (MR) applications are gaining wider interest in the industry and in the use of mixed reality is spreading into various application fields. Currently the obstacle for MR to become widely used is that MR application authoring consumes a lot of time and resources and current MR authoring environments are designed and restricted for dedicated experts only. In this paper we present the user tests results of a mixed reality authoring tool. The MR authoring tool is built for nonprogrammers who are experts in their own field and who do not have a programming background. The tool needs to be consistent with commonly used tools and use common user interface conventions. When working with MR tools the applications are usually 3D, but development occurs in an office environment from 2D screen, where the users have trouble perceiving the third dimension accurately. The screen should display the coordinate axis and origin of the grid on the screen. To get accurate 3D positioning for the objects, the tool have to support live picture authoring, where the user can observe the object from different angles
Human Resources Planning in Swaziland : Rolls-Royce versus Volkswagen Approaches (Планирование человеческих ресурсов в Свазиленде: подходы фирм Роллс-Ройс и Фольксваген)

Aims to shed some light on the modalities and the need for human resources planning in Swaziland libraries. Systematic forecasts of the libraries' future demand for, and supply of labour should be meticulously undertaken so that Swaziland libraries can put themselves in a better position to plan for the recruitment, selection, training, and career paths of staff. Swaziland's lack of trained personnel with sufficient knowledge to handle the intricacies of automation has necessitated the external recruitment of expatriate staff, with serious implications for the budget. Swaziland assumed the chairmanship of the SADC Regional Training Council (RTC) which now controls the affairs of the Human Resources Development Sector. One of the projects of this sector has been to create a Regional Human Resource Information System (RHRIS). This project has provided guiding principles to those in the region whose responsibility is human resources planning and development. It is essential that SWALA should develop a human resources database for the library profession through its Sub-Committee for Human Resources. The development of a human resources audit in Swaziland libraries will help to determine what skills, knowledge, and abilities are required for particular vacancies or jobs. The idea is to collect enough information which will enable library managers to match their employees to the available jobs.
On Optimal Adaptive Classifier Design Criterion- How many hidden units are necessary for an optimal neural network classifier?

A central problem in classifier design is the estimation of classification error. The difficulty in classifier design arises in situations where the sample distribution is unknown and the number of training samples available is limited. In this paper, We present a new approach for solving this problem. In our model, there are two types of classification error: approximation and generalization error. The former is due to the imperfect knowledge of the underlying sample distribution
Support vector machines for survival analysis: methods and variable relevance

ADVERTIMENT. La consulta d’aquesta tesi queda condicionada a l’acceptació de les següents condicions d'ús: La difusió d’aquesta tesi per mitjà del servei TDX (www.tdx.cat) i a través del Dipòsit Digital de la UB (diposit.ub.edu) ha estat autoritzada pels titulars dels drets de propietat intel·lectual únicament per a usos privats emmarcats en activitats d’investigació i docència. No s’autoritza la seva reproducció amb finalitats de lucre ni la seva difusió i posada a disposició des d’un lloc aliè al servei TDX ni al Dipòsit Digital de la UB. No s’autoritza la presentació del seu contingut en una finestra o marc aliè a TDX o al Dipòsit Digital de la UB (framing). Aquesta reserva de drets afecta tant al resum de presentació de la tesi com als seus continguts. En la utilització o cita de parts de la tesi és obligat indicar el nom de la persona autora.
A Framework to Support the Design of Mobile Applications

This paper introduces a framework that aims to support the design and development of mobile services. The traditional innovation process and its supporting instruments in form of creativity tools, acceptance research and user-generated content analysis are screened for potentials for improvement. The result is a reshaped innovation process where acceptance research and usergenerated content analysis are fully integrated within a creativity tool. Advantages of this method are the enhancement of design relevant information for developers and designers and the possibility to forecast market success. Keywords—design support, innovation support, technology acceptance, user-generated content analysis.
EĞİTİM FAKÜLTESİ ÖĞRENCİLERİNİN YAZILI ANLATIM BECERİLERİNİN SÜREÇ YAKLAŞIMI VE METİNSELLİK ÖLÇÜTLERİ EKSENİNDE DEĞERLENDİRİLMESİ NİĞDE ÜNİVERSİTESİ ÖRNEĞİ

The purpose of this study is to determine situation in using of written expression skills of the education faculty students. For this purpose, was asked from students writing compositions, at different periods and five separate topics. Later, the compositions were examined. Documents, were chosen by way of random method from the inside total composition papers. The compositions were examined from the writing process components and from the criterions relevant to text point of view. According to results of the investigation, the education faculty students’ written expression studies focus on product. As a result of this the compositions have partly the criterions relevant to text.
Load Balancing and Density Dependent Jump Markov Processes EXTENDED ABSTRACT

Wt? provide a new approach for analyzing both static and dynamic randomized load balancing strategies. We demonstrate the approach by providing the first analysis of the following model: customers arrive as a Poisson stream of rate ;\n, X < 1, at a collection of n servers. Each customer chooses some constant d servers independently and uniformly at random from the n servers, and waits.for sewice at the one with the fewest customers. Customers are served according to the first-in first-out (FIFO) protocol, and the sewice time for a customer is exponentially distributed with mean I. We call this problem the supermarket model. We wish to know how the system behaves, and in particular we are interested the expected time a customer spends in the system in equilibrium. The model provides a good abstraction of a :rimple, eficient load balancing scheme in the setting where jobs arrive at a large system of parallel processors. This model appears more realistic than similar models studied p,reviously, in that it is both dynamic and open: that is, customers arrive over time, and the number of customers is notjixed. Our approach consists of two distinct stages: we first develop a limiting, deterministic model representing the behavior as n -+ 00, and then show how to translate results from this model to results for large, but$nite, values of n. The analysis of the deterministic model is interesting in its own ,right. This methodology proves effective for studying a number of similar problems, and simulations demonstrate that fhe method accurately predicts system behavior even for relatively small systems.
Exploring a Causal Model for the Understanding of Outsourcing Partnership

This study explores the sources of influence in a successful outsourcing partnership based on a behavioral-attitudinal theory of IS success. Six major partnership-related variables were identified from the literature in terms of social exchange theory, which has been mainly applied to the study of outsourcing partnerships. A causal model of outsourcing success was proposed in which three attitudinal variables (mutual benefits, commitment, and predisposition) were introduced as intervening variables into the relationship between behavioral variables (shared knowledge, mutual dependency, and organizational linkage) and outsourcing success. This model was then tested using a sample of 225 organizations in Korea. The proposed model was compared with a rival model without such intervening variables. The findings indicate that the proposed model has more significant paths and power than the rival model in assessing the relationship between partnership and outsourcing success.
Age, gender and income: do they really moderate online shopping behaviour?

Purpose – The objective of this paper is to analyse whether individuals' socioeconomic characteristics – age, gender and income – influence their online shopping behaviour. The individuals analysed are experienced e‐shoppers i.e. individuals who often make purchases on the internet.Design/methodology/approach – The technology acceptance model was broadened to include previous use of the internet and perceived self‐efficacy. The perceptions and behaviour of e‐shoppers are based on their own experiences. The information obtained has been tested using causal and multi‐sample analyses.Findings – The results show that socioeconomic variables moderate neither the influence of previous use of the internet nor the perceptions of e‐commerce; in short, they do not condition the behaviour of the experienced e‐shopper.Practical implications – The results obtained help to determine that once individuals attain the status of experienced e‐shoppers their behaviour is similar, independently of their socioeconomic charact.
Abstractive Document Summarisation using Generative Adversarial Networks

The use of automatically generated summaries for long texts is commonly used in digital services. In this thesis, one method for such document summarisation is created by combining existing techniques for abstractive document summarization with LeakGAN – a successful approach at text generation using generative adversarial networks (GAN). The resulting model is tested on two diﬀerent datasets originating from conventional newspapers and the world’s largest online community: Reddit. The datasets are examined and several important diﬀerences are highlighted. The evaluations show that the summaries generated by the model do not correlate with the corresponding documents. Possible reasons are discussed and several suggestions for future research are presented.
Simultaneous Fine-grain Sleep Transistor Placement and Sizing for Leakage Optimization

With the growing scaling of technology, leakage power dissipation has become a critical issue of VLSI circuits and systems designs. Multi-threshold CMOS leads to about 10X leakage reduction in circuit standby mode. In this paper, we reduce leakage current through fine-grain sleep transistor (ST) insertion which makes it easier to guarantee circuit functionality at high speed and improves circuit noise margins [Calhoun,2004]. We model the leakage current reduction problem as a mixed-integer linear programming (MLP) problem in order to simultaneously choose where to add the sleep transistors and the sleep transistors' sizes optimally. The model is solved with both continuous (MLP-C) and discrete (MLP-D) sleep transistor size constraints. Furthermore a method to speed up MLP-D model is introduced. Because of the better circuit slack utilization, our experimental results show that the MLP-C model can achieve 79.75%, 93.56%, 94.99% leakage saving when the circuit slow down is 0%, 3%, 5% respectively. The MLP-C model also achieves on average 74.79% less area penalty compared to the conventional fixed slowdown method when the circuit slowdown is 7%. The MLP-D model can achieve similar leakage saving compared to the MLP-C model. The MLP-CtoD method can speed up the MLP-D model 30X times with almost no difference in leakage reduction.
On speech enhancement in very low SNRs for smart speakers

Human interaction with a smart speaker involves often distant automatic speech recognition (ASR). However, ASR is a rather cumbersome task at significantly high levels of noise. Most of commercial smart speakers in order to achieve high ASR accuracy they tend to reduce the playback signal once the preset keyword is detected. In an effort to dispose this function from the smart speaker, in this thesis a speech enhancement technique is considered in the front-end of the ASR system aiming at the suppression of the dominant noise component in the degraded speech signal. Having a priori knowledge on the playback signal renders adaptive filtering a well-suited speech technique. Therefore, the class of least mean squares (LMS) algorithms is studied and assessed. Among other techniques of this class the transform domain LMS (TDLMS), due to its inherent signal decorrelation properties, is shown to achieve the best performance in terms of noise suppression and improved speech intelligibility as well as word error rate. The results of this study correspond to a set of simulation incorporating real impulse responses measured in both an anechoic and a reverberant environment.
A survey on statistical disclosure control and micro-aggregation techniques for secure statistical databases

This paper surveys the fields of Statistical Disclosure Control (SDC) and Micro-Aggregation Techniques (MATs), which are both areas fundamental to the science of secure Statistical DataBases (SDBs). The paper is written from the perspective of a computer scientist with the hope that it will prove to be a source of reference material useful to researchers and practitioners in the field. The paper first introduces the concept of SDC and describes the domain of its applications and the various data types that are currently used in SDBs. It then proceeds to focus on the family of micro-data types in SDBs. At this juncture, we introduce the importance of the relevant measures, namely the metrics termed as the Information Loss (IL) and the Disclosure Risk (DR), after which we survey the various methods of resolving the conflicting goals that these metrics represent. Thereafter, the paper summarizes the perturbative and non-perturbative SDC methods for micro-data protection, and it focuses on the families of MATs by formally stating the Micro-Aggregation Problem and surveying it in a comprehensive manner. Apart from the paper including a historical view of the field of MATs, it describes a broad selection of work that has been reported more recently. Indeed, we believe that this paper represents a complete overview of the state-of-the-art techniques. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Towards low-cost gigabit wireless systems at 60 GHz:channel modelling and baseband design

• A submitted manuscript is the author's version of the article upon submission and before peer-review. There can be important differences between the submitted version and the official published version of record. People interested in the research are advised to contact the author for the final version of the publication, or visit the DOI to the publisher's website. • The final author version and the galley proof are versions of the publication after peer review. • The final published version features the final layout of the paper including the volume, issue and page numbers.