Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Development and Characterization of Poly-ε-caprolactone Nanocapsules Containing β-carotene Using the Nanoprecipitation Method and Optimized by Response Surface Methodology

Nanoparticles demonstrate an important role in the protection of bioactive compounds from external factors such as temperature, oxygen and light. In this study, poly-ε-caprolactone (PCL) nanoparticles entrapped β-carotene was produced using the nanoprecipitation method. Firstly, was evaluated the lipophilic surfactant effect and carrier agent of the active compound in the nanocapsules formulation. After choosing the most stable formulation, the nanocapsules production was optimized using β-carotene, caprylic/capric triglycerides (CCT) and soybean lecithin. Response surface methodology (RSM) was adopted to evaluate the influence of soy lecithin concentration, volume of CCT and β-carotene concentration in the particle size, zeta potential, polydispersity index (PDI), encapsulation efficiency and recovery. Formulations containing soy HIGHLIGHTS  PCL/β-carotene nanocapsules were produced by the nanoprecipitation method and optimized by
Comparative Analysis between Anthropometry and Subjective Methods in Nutritional Evaluation in Cancer: A Systematic Review

This study aims to evaluate the anthropometric indicators used in cancer patients, comparing them with one another and with the subjective methods of nutritional assessment. Methodology: A search was made in January 2018 in the databases Medline (PubMed), Latin American and Caribbean Literature in Health Sciences (Lilacs) and Scientific Electronic Library Online (Scielo), with the descriptors oncology, cancer, evaluation, anthropometry, adults, elderly and malnutrition. Results: A total of 10 articles were included in this review. All of them used body mass index (BMI) to diagnose malnutrition; however, fewer malnourished individuals were identified by this method. In addition to BMI, the most used anthropometric indicators were arm muscle circumference, tricipital skinfold and arm perimeter, used in most articles, being the most malnourished identified by it. As for subjective methods, fewer malnourished patients were tracked when compared to perimeters and folds. Conclusion: It is concluded that the arm perimeter is the most anthropometric indicator use in tracking of malnutrition in cancer patients, considering the prevalence.
In silico screen identifies a new Toxoplasma gondii mitochondrial ribosomal protein essential for mitochondrial translation

Apicomplexan parasites cause diseases such as malaria and toxoplasmosis. The apicomplexan mitochondrion shows striking differences from common model organisms, including in fundamental processes such as mitochondrial translation. Despite evidence that mitochondrial translation is essential for parasites survival, it is largely understudied. Progress has been restricted by the absence of functional assays to detect apicomplexan mitochondrial translation, a lack of knowledge of proteins involved in the process and the inability to identify and detect mitoribosomes. Using mRNA expression patterns, 279 candidate mitochondrial housekeeping components were identified in Toxoplasma. 11 were validated, including the mitoribosomal small subunit protein 35 (TgmS35). TgmS35 tagging enabled the detection of a macromolecular complex corresponding to the mitoribosomal small subunit for the first time in apicomplexans. A new analytical pipeline detected defects in mitochondrial translation upon TgmS35 depletion, while other mitochondrial functions remain unaffected. Our work lays a foundation for the study of apicomplexan mitochondrial translation. Abbreviated summary The apicomplexan mitochondrion is divergent and essential yet poorly studied. Mitochondrial translation is predicted to utilize ribosomes assembled from fragmented rRNA but this was never shown. Knowing the mitochondrial protein content is critical for these studies. We identified 11 new mitochondrial proteins via in-silico searches. Tagging and depletion of a mitoribosomal small subunit protein enabled the first detection of a macromolecular ribosomal complex, and provided proof of principle for our new mitochondrial translation analytic pipeline.
Regional differences in the attitudes of veterinary students in Croatia towards welfare of farm and companion animals

The aim of this study was to examine the attitudes of veterinary students in Croatia based on their home region towards the level of cognitive abilities and welfare in farm and companion animals. The survey encompassed 505 (91%) students of all six years of the integrated undergraduate and graduate study programme at the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia. Student attitudes were examined through 17 statements using fivepoint Likert scale. The survey was focused on cattle, pigs, poultry, dogs and cats. The results obtained revealed that students from Zagreb and central Croatia expressed significantly higher attitudes (P<0.05) towards the level of thought process in cattle, pigs, dogs and cats, and the level of welfare in pigs than students from eastern Croatia and Dalmatia. Foreign students expressed the highest level of concern about the welfare of laying hens, and the lowest about the welfare of dogs and cats. Students from Lika and Gorski Kotar expressed the highest level of concern about the welfare of dogs and cats. No regional differences were determined in student attitudes towards the level of emotions in the observed species. The study results confirmed the existence of regional differences in the attitudes of Croatian veterinary students towards the welfare of farm and companion animals. The findings suggest that these differences may not only be the result of cultural differences among Croatian regions, but veterinary students may also increasingly encounter welfare issues in certain regions, especially in the case of companion animals.
STCAM: Spatial-Temporal and Channel Attention Module for Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition

Capturing the dynamics of facial expression progression in video is an essential and challenging task for facial expression recognition (FER). In this article, we propose an effective framework to address this challenge. We develop a C3D-based network architecture, 3D-Inception-ResNet, to extract spatial-temporal features from the dynamic facial expression image sequence. A Spatial-Temporal and Channel Attention Module (STCAM) is proposed to explicitly exploit the holistic spatial-temporal and channel-wise correlations among the extracted features. Specifically, the proposed STCAM calculates a channel-wise and a spatial-temporal-wise attention map to enhance the features along the corresponding feature dimensions for more representative features. We evaluate our method on three popular dynamic facial expression recognition datasets, CK+, Oulu-CASIA, and MMI. Experimental results show that our method achieves better or comparable performance compared to the state-of-the-art approaches.
Engineering Students’ Challenging Learning Experiences and their Changing Attitude towards Academic Performance

: This study determined the challenging learning experiences of engineering students while completing their degree program as factor that might influence to their changing attitude towards achieving higher academic performance. Mixed method of research was utilised in the study considering the total population of 75 graduating students for quantitative and 12 students for qualitative part of the study using focus group discussion. Results showed that engineering students have significantly higher level of positive attitude towards academic performance during their junior level but significantly lower after taking professional courses. Attaining high academic performance still really matters for the engineering students during their junior level but continuously changing their perspective due to encountered challenging experiences while taking the professional courses. Performance in General Engineering courses describes the attitude of the students towards academic performance in personal aspect while professional courses define their attitude in professional aspect. The finding of the qualitative research revealed that there are three themes emerged in the challenging experiences of the engineering students and these are: Abandoned Social Freedom, Survival of the Fittest and Future Oriented Mindset which contributed to the changing perspectives of the engineering students.
Analysis of the neurology consultations in the emergency department and diagnostic accuracy of emergency physicians for the neurologic emergencies

Aim: The aims of this study are twofold: Firstly, it aims at determining the profile of patients who are requested to consult neurology in the emergency department. Secondly, it aims at evaluating the concordance between the pre-consultation neurologic diagnoses and the post-consultation diagnoses in the emergency department. Material and Methods: The study presents a retrospective evaluation of the records of the patients who were admitted to the emergency department and requested neurology consultation between July 1st, 2018 and July 1st, 2019. Demographic characteristics, admission types, diagnostic imaging procedures, requested consultations, pre-consultation diagnoses, duration of neurology consultation, post-consultation diagnoses, and outcome of patients in the emergency department are included in the analysis. Results: Neurology consultation was requested for 347 (0.83%) patients among 41,850 emergency department admissions during the study period. The female/male distribution of consulted patients was 50.7% vs. 49.3%. The ambulatory admission and ambulance arrival rates to the emergency department were 51.9% (n = 180) and 48.1% (n = 167), respectively. Only neurology consultation was requested for 227 patients (65.4%), while the additional consultation/consultations other than neurology consultation were needed for 120 (34.6%) patients. Diagnostic accuracy was 60.8% for the study sample and 71.2% for the patients requiring neurology consultation only. The diagnostic accuracy of ischemic stroke was 84.7%. The hospitalization rate of the study sample was 64% (n = 222). The majority of hospitalized patients were admitted by the neurology department (n = 182). Conclusion: The high accuracy of the diagnosis of ischemic stroke in this study may result from all neurology consultations in our emergency department being requested by the emergency physician specialists. On the other hand, carefully integrated algorithms and neurological examination training will be useful to improve diagnostic accuracy in other neurological emergencies.
Empirical Analysis on the State of Transfer Learning for Small Data Text Classification Tasks Using Contextual Embeddings

—Recent developments in the NLP (Natural Language Processing) ﬁeld have shown that deep transformer based language model architectures trained on a large corpus of unlabeled data are able to transfer knowledge to downstream tasks efﬁ-ciently through ﬁne-tuning. In particular, BERT and XLNet have shown impressive results, achieving state of the art performance in many tasks through this process. This is partially due to the ability these models have to create better representations of text in the form of contextual embeddings. However not much has been explored in the literature about the robustness of the transfer learning process of these models on a small data scenario. Also not a lot of effort has been put on analysing the behaviour of the two models ﬁne-tuning process with different amounts of training data available. This paper addresses these questions through an empirical evaluation of these models on some datasets when ﬁne-tuned on progressively smaller fractions of training data, for the task of text classiﬁcation. It is shown that BERT and XLNet perform well with small data and can achieve good performance with very few labels available, in most cases. Results yielded with varying fractions of training data indicate that few examples are necessary in order to ﬁne-tune the models and, although there is a positive effect in training with more labeled data, using only a subset of data is already enough to achieve a comparable performance with traditional non-deep learning models trained with substantially more data. Also it is noticeable how quickly the transfer learning curve of these methods saturate, reinforcing their ability to perform well with less data available.
Spatial frequency tuning of perceptual learning and transfer in global motion

Perceptual learning is typically highly specific to the stimuli and task used during training. However, recently it has been shown that training on global motion can transfer to untrained tasks, reflecting the generalising properties of mechanisms at this level of processing. We investigated a) if feedback was required for learning when using an equivalent noise global motion coherence task, and b) the transfer across spatial frequency of training on a global motion coherence task, and the transfer of this training to a measure of contrast sensitivity. For our first experiment two groups, with and without feedback, trained for ten days on a broadband global motion coherence task. Results indicated that feedback was a requirement for learning. For the second experiment training consisted of five days of direction discrimination on one of three global motion tasks (broadband, low or high frequency random-dot Gabors), with trial-by-trial auditory feedback. A pre- and post-training assessment was also conducted, consisting of all three types of global motion stimuli (without feedback) and high and low spatial frequency contrast sensitivity. We predicted that if learning and transfer is cortically localised, then transfer would show specificity to the area processing the task (global motion). In this case, we would predict a broad transfer between spatial frequency conditions of global motion only. However, if transfer occurred as a result of backward generalisation, a more selective transfer would occur matching the low-pass broadband tuning of the area processing global motion. Our training paradigm was successful at eliciting improvement in the trained tasks over the five days. However, post-training transfer to trained or untrained tasks was only reported for the low spatial frequency trained group. This group exhibited increased sensitivity to low spatial frequency contrast, and an improvement for the broadband global motion condition. Our findings suggest that the feedback projections from global to local stages of processing play a role in transfer.
Nutritional and environmental factors affecting the morphogenesis of Candida albicans: A key to virulence

Candida albicans is an opportunistic fungal pathogen that plays an important role in the early part of infectious process by extravagating and disseminating to the target organs, whereas hyphal forms appear to be required for the mortality resulting from a deep-seated infection. C. albicans morphogenesis is regulated by numerous environmental cues and other signaling pathways. We investigated the morphogenesis in C. albicans in the presence of serum at different temperatures (20 °C, 30 °C and 37 °C). C. albicans were also grown in simple growth medium ‘SDB’ and subsequently cultured from Fetal bovine serum and Soybeans dextrose broth (SDB) on Sabouraud dextrose agar, Yeast extract potato dextrose agar and Spider medium. The combination of serum and temperature is excellent at promoting the yeast to mycelial conversion and it also induces the expression of hyphal specific genes. Our results demonstrate that the combination of serum and each temperature provides a distinct proportion of blastospores, budding yeast cells, germ tube, pseudohyphae and true hyphal cells. Remarkable change in colonial pattern between the cells cultured after incubating in serum and the cells cultured after incubating in SDB was observed in SDA in contrast with YEPD and Spider medium. On most solid media, colonies of C. albicans are composed of three types of cells: budding yeast, pseudohyphae and hyphae. All three forms are also found in infected tissues, and the transition between these forms is a key for pathogenesis.
The introduction, spread and ecology of redclaw crayfish Cherax quadricarinatus in the Zambezi catchment

Two of the four crayfish species brought to Zambia for aquaculture since 1979 are now naturalised. Procamburus clarkii occurs in the Maramba River at Livingstone, close to a former fish farm, whereas Cherax quadricarinatus, deliberately introduced to a number of sites in the Zambezi and Kafue River catchments since 2001, is now widespread and highly invasive. High rates of dispersal, up to 111 km y−1 downstream, might be the result of passive transport on floating vegetation. Significantly more synodontid Synodontis sp. catfish were caught in Fladen traps in the Kafue River in crayfish-free areas compared with crayfish-infested areas, but the possibility that synodontids became trap averse in the presence of crayfish was not ruled out. No difference was found in the numbers of Single-spined River Crab Potamonautes unispinus caught in crayfish-free and infested areas. Alien temnocephalans, commonly found on crayfish, are now also present on crabs P. unispinus on the Kafue Flats. The artisanal gill net fishery has been harmed by the introduction of C. quadricarinatus and no significant commercial fishery has developed. However, without more information on the adverse impacts, and stronger fisheries regulation, there is a high risk C. quadricarinatus and P. clarkii will be introduced to uninfested catchments with irreversible consequences for artisanal fishermen and the environment.
Risk Factors Associated with HIV Infection among Male to Transvestites in Five Cities in Indonesia in 2015

Transgender people are 49 times more likely to live with HIV than common people. In 2015 HIV prevalence in Indonesia increased from 2011. This study aims to determine the risk factors associated with HIV infection in transvestites. This study used a cross-sectional design, using data from the Indonesian Ministry of Health’s Integrated Biological and Behavior Survey in 2015, the study population was all transvestites in five cities in Indonesia, the sample was someone who was biologically male but behaved like a woman, aged ? 15 years interviewed and have complete data. We investigate risk factors associated with HIV infection. Data analysis used the SPSS application, for p-value statistical tests <0.05 were considered statistically significant. Results: 64% of transvestites aged over 30 years, 57% had low education, 67% of transvestites had anal sex in the past week, 86% of transvestites used condoms during sex, the results of multivariate analysis showed that factors associated with HIV infection were having sex with male client at last week (OR=1.60, 95% CI: 1.04-2.45); age ? 30 years (OR=1.61, 95% CI: 1.10-2.38) and had a history of symptoms of STIs in the last year (OR=1.88, 95% CI: 1.24-2.85). Risk factors associated with HIV infection among transvestites in five cities in Indonesia are having anal sex with male client in the past week; Age ? 30 years; and have a history of symptoms of STIs in the past year.
Relationship between platelet-to-lymphocyte ratio and fractional flow reserve in left anterior descending artery with intermediate stenosis

Aim: Platelet-to-lymphocyte ratio has been used as a determinant factor for coronary artery disease. Since platelet activation is central to the initiation of atherosclerosis, our goal was to evaluate the relationship between platelet-to-lymphocyte ratio and fractional flow reserve (FFR) values in the left anterior descending artery (LAD) with intermediate coronary stenosis. Material and Methods: The present report encompassed 173 subjects having stable angina pectoris. These subjects were categorized into 2 groups: 91 subjects with a FFR less than or equal to 0.80 and 82 patients with a FFR greater than 0.80. The platelet-tolymphocyte ratio of each subject was determined from the complete blood count. The two groups were evaluated for differences using a Student's unpaired t-test. A p-value of <0.05 was considered statistically significant. Results: The average platelet-to-lymphocyte ratio value of subjects with a FFR less than or equal to 0.80 were significantly higher than those with a FFR greater than 0.80 ((115.5±38.0) vs. (103.8±38.9), p=0.04). The correlation between platelet-to-lymphocyte ratio with stenosis degree was significant (r= 0.22, p= 0.003). Conclusion: Platelet-to-lymphocyte ratio was associated with a FFR measurement of equal or less than to 0.80 in subjects with stable angina pectoris.
The Association between Modes of Access to Betting Games and Problem Gambling among Adolescents : Focusing on Comparisons between On-line and Land-based Modes

This study examined the modes of access to betting games among adolescents and analyzed the influence of on-line betting games (e.g., legalized gambling, illegal gambling, speculative games) on problem gambling. The raw data from the 2018 Survey on Youth Gambling Problems were used. Using a sample of 5,101 school adolescents who were from first-grade middle school students to second-grade high school students and who experienced betting games during the last three months, this study conducted cross tabulation and logistic regression analyses. Of the adolescents who experienced betting games, 17.8% experienced on-line games that were composed of 4.9% in illegal gambling, 2.4% in speculative games, and 0.4% in legalized gambling. Compared to land-based modes of gambling, on-line illegal gambling, legalized gambling, and speculative games were associated with higher odds of problem gambling. While on-line illegal gambling was associated with higher odds of problem gambling for female adolescents, on-line illegal gambling, legalized gambling, and speculative games were associated with higher odds of problem gambling for male adolescents. This study discussed intervention strategies to address problem gambling and modes of betting games among adolescents. ■ keyword :∣Adolescents∣Betting Games∣Problem Gambling∣On-line and Land-based Modes∣ * 본 연구는 한국도박문제관리센터의 연구지원으로 수행하였고, 연구용역과제「2018년 청소년 도박문제 실태조사」원자료의 일부 를 활용하였음 접수일자 : 2020년 04월 28일 수정일자 : 2020년 06월 09일 심사완료일 : 2020년 06월 25일 교신저자 : 장혜림, e-mail : hlchang@sjs.ac. kr 한국콘텐츠학회논문지 '20 Vol. 20 No. 7 140
Investigating consumer intention to adopt mobile payment systems: an Indian perspective

The flabbergasting decision of demonetisation paved out a smooth path for mobile payment systems which earlier was covered with roadblocks. The current study examines the impact of attitude towards mobile payment systems on intention to adopt mobile payment systems through the application of technology acceptance model. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis were applied to ascertain the relationship between observed variables and to evaluate research constructs, their validity and composite reliability in the present research. Structural equation modelling and path analysis was employed to assess the hypothesised relationships of the research model. The research study reveals that there exists a positive relationship among all the observed variables used in the study. Perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness have a positive impact on attitude to adopt mobile payment systems. Also, there exists a substantial positive relationship between attitude to adopt mobile payment systems and intention to adopt mobile payment systems.