Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
ORAL HEALTH-RELATED QUALITY OF LIFE OF VILLAGERS IN A SEMI-URBAN DISTRICT IN MALAYSIA

Oral health is essential to general health. It influences the quality of life of an individual. Oral health-related quality of life (OHRQoL) is the impact of oral disease or conditions in the oral cavity on functional, psychosocial and pain, including discomfort. The objective of this study was to investigate OHRQoL of villagers in a semi-urban district in Malaysia in relation to diabetes mellitus, hypertension and overweight or obesity using the validated Malay version of the General Oral Health Assessment Index (GOHAI-Malay). A cross-sectional study was conducted using a stratified two-stage sampling method. Participants were asked to rate their oral health status. They were then interviewed by using the validated GOHAI-Malay questionnaire. The data were tested for normality using Shapiro-Wilks test. Subsequently, Mann-Whitney and Kruskal-Wallis statistical tests were used to determine the level of significance set at p<0.05. A total of two hundred participants from four villages were interviewed. The age of the participants was between 18 to 89 years old with mean age of 55.3 (±16.5) years. A total of 56.5% of participants interviewed were females and 13.5% had tertiary education. The mean GOHAI score was 53.66 (±7.4) which ranged from 30 to 60. It was found that 47.5% of the participants showed good quality of life (QOL), 24.0% fair and 28.5% poor. The GOHAI score was statistically significant according to age groups (p<0.001), level of education (p<0.001) and hypertension (p=0.003). The OHRQoL was inversely related to age. Participants with higher educational level indicated better OHRQoL. Participants with hypertension as an underlying health condition appeared to have lower perception of OHRQoL. These findings provide the input in designing intervention activities involving medical and dental practitioners to improve OHRQoL among villagers with hypertension.
Korean Multinational Firms in Factory Asia and Home- Country Effects on Plant Turnover and Job Reallocation

During the last decade multinational firms originated from Asian emerging countries such as China and Korea have rapidly grown worldwide, but the effects of these multinational firms on their home countries have been rarely studied. Using Korean firm-plant matched dataset in 2008–2013, we examine the effects of the multinational firms on plant turnover and job reallocation at home. We find that Korean multinational firms are more likely not only to close down their domestic manufacturing plants but also to open new plants than non-multinationals. Along with the active plant turnover, Korean multinational firms have more active job reallocation across their domestic manufacturing plants within the firms, but which does not result in net job loss. After participating in Factory Asia, Korean multinational firms reorganize their manufacturing plants at home rather than hollow out home plants. This suggests that the home-country effect of Asian multinational firms’ participation in global supply chains might be different from those of advanced countries’ multinational firms. JEL Classification: D22, F23
Disturbed temporal dynamics of episodic retrieval activity with preserved spatial activity pattern in amnestic mild cognitive impairment: A simultaneous EEG-fMRI study

Hao Shu Zhongda Hospital, Southeast University Lihua Gu Zhongda Hospital, Southeast University Ping Yang South China Normal University Molly V. Lucas Standford University Lijuan Gao Zhongda Hospital, Southeast University Hongxing Zhang Xinxiang Medical University Haisan Zhang Xinxiang Medical University Zhan Xu MD Anderson Cancer Center Wei Wu South China University of Technology Ling Li University of Electronic Science and Technology of China Zhijun Zhang (  janemengzhang@vip.163.com ) Southeast University https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5480-0888
Insulin Inhibits Apoptosis of Macrophage Cell Line, THP-1 Cells, via Phosphatidylinositol-3-Kinase–Dependent Pathway

Abstract— Hyperinsulinemia has recently been reported as a risk factor for atherosclerotic diseases such as coronary heart disease; however, its precise mechanism is not well understood. To elucidate the role of insulin in the development of atherogenesis, we have investigated the effect of insulin on cell survival in macrophages, which are known to be important in the atherosclerotic process. Apoptosis was induced in macrophage cell lines derived from human monocytes or murine macrophages by serum starvation. Insulin administration retarded macrophage apoptosis by means of DNA laddering, dimethylthiazol diphenyltetrazolium bromide assay, and annexin V binding assay. Insulin also enhanced mRNA expression and protein production of the antiapoptotic Bcl-XL gene in a dose-dependent manner within the range of physiological concentrations. In the exploration of the signaling pathway involved in these antiapoptotic effects of insulin, pretreatment of cells with a specific inhibitor of phosphatidylinositol-3-kin.
Designing Acoustic Scene Classification Models with CNN Variants Technical

This technical report describes our Acoustic Scene Classification systems for DCASE2020 challenge Task1. For subtask A, we designed a single model implemented with three parallel ResNets, which is named Trident ResNet. We have confirmed that this structure is beneficial when analyzing samples collected from minority or unseen devices, and confirmed 73.7% classification accuracy for the test split. For subtask B, we used the Inception module to build a model named Shallow Inception that has fewer parameters than the CNN of the DCASE baseline system. Due to the sparse structure of the Inception module, we have enhanced the accuracy of the model up to 97.6%, while reducing the number of parameters.
Does Venture Capital Substitute Islamic Profit and Loss Sharing Contracts? Theoretical Analysis on Musharakah and Venture Capital

This paper emphasizes on the conflicts of interest between agents in order to assess whether venture capital can be a potential model of musharakah in imperfect markets. To achieve this purpose, this study opts for the financial contracting enforceability approach and MonteCarlo simulation to identify the contract that maximizes the value of the firm subject to the enforcement constraint for the agent and the participation constraint for the principal, taking into account market frictions, and the two levels of the industrial shocks. Findings reveal that musharakah is the optimal contract for agents, subject to their constraints when the shock is low and high. In addition, the simulation results indicate that the increase in market frictions engenders higher profit-sharing ratio for the financier when venture capital and musharakah financings are used. The increase in the value of the firm in case of high shock is attributed to the increase in the profit-sharing ratios for both contracts to mitigate the selfish behavior of the agent. Therefore, the financier tends to require a higher profit-sharing ratio as a compensation for the severer information asymmetry. JEL Classifications: C61, G24, G32, L24.
LARGE SHAREHOLDERS AND DIVIDEND PAYOUT IN MALAYSIA

The dividend puzzle remains an interesting subject especially in emerging markets where agency problem is severe. This study examines the issues by assessing the large shareholders controlling interest in manager owned firms and corporation owned firms. A sample data of 762 Malaysian public listed firms covering the period from 2008 to 2014 are examined. The results show a statistically significant non-linear relationship between the largest shareholder (LO) and dividend payout for manager owned (MO) firms. MO firms reduce dividend distribution according to assets and revenue when the largest shareholder’s controlling stake is low. However, at a higher level of controlling stake, MO firms increase dividend distribution, irrespective of firms share prices, assets and revenues. The study shows that corporation owned (CO) firms do not associate significantly with the dividend payout, but MO firms pursue different types of dividend distribution policies. Lastly, there is a need to improve the role of the second largest shareholder as a governance mechanism.
New Insights into Financial Sector Development and Economic Growth Nexus in Nigeria

This paper examined the relationship between financial sector development and economic growth in Nigeria. The paper used the Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Autoregressive Distributed Lag Model (ARDL),Structural Break Test and the Pairwise Granger Causality Test (PGC) to examine the effect of financial development on economic growth in Nigeria and to establish which theory holds for Nigeria between the demand-following and the supply-leading theory. Annual time series data between 1981 and 2016 was used for the study. Data on real gross domestic product, broad money supply/gdp, inflation, credit to the private sector/gdp, total liquid liabilities, total stocks/shares traded and total stock market capitalization were sourced from the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) statistical bulletin. The structural break unit root test revealed that all the variables are stationary at their first difference except for inflation that was stationary in its level form; the bound test cointegration analysis established the existence of long run relationship among the variables. The ARDL revealed that financial development negatively and insignificantly affected economic growth in Nigeria during the period
ACOUSTIC SCENE CLASSIFICATION WITH MULTIPLE DECISION SCHEMES Technical Report

This technical report describes the ADSPLAB team’s submission for Task1 of DCASE2020 challenge. Our acoustic scene classiﬁ-cation (ASC) system is based on the convolutional neural networks (CNN). Multiple decision schemes are proposed in our system, including the decision schemes in multiple representations, multiple frequency bands, and multiple temporal frames. The ﬁnal system is the fusion of models with multiple decision schemes and models pre-trained on AudioSet. The experimental results show that our system could achieve the accuracy of 84 . 5% (ofﬁcial baseline: 54 . 1% ) and 92 . 1% (ofﬁcial baseline: 87 . 3% ) on the ofﬁcially provided fold 1 evaluation dataset of Task1A and Task1B, respectively.
Management of Anthracnose Disease of Mungbean Through New Fungicidal Formulations

The mungbean crop suffers from several fungal diseases, among which anthracnose caused by Colletotrichum gloeosporioides is one of the serious disease observed regularly in mungbean growing areas of Gujarat and its incidence has increased alarmingly during the recent years in Gujarat. Among the nine fungicides at three concentrations were screened under in vitro condition against C. gloeosporioides by poisoned food technique revealed propiconazole, carbendazim (12%) + mancozeb (63%) and propineb completely inhibited the mycelial growth and proved to be most effective over rest of the treatments. The next best were azoxystrobin + difenconazole and trifloxystrobin + tebuconazole. Based on in vitro screening, promising fungicides were selected and re-evaluated under field condition against anthracnose of mungbean. Experiment under field condition revealed that anthracnose disease of mungbean can effectively managed by seed treatment with Thiram 75 SD, 3 g/kg seeds + two foliar sprays at 15 days interval starting from initiation of disease with trifloxystrobin + tebuconazole (75 WG), 0.075 per cent or with carbendazim + mancozeb (75 WP), 0.075 per cent. One of the key reasons for success of strobilurins that it gives a control of fungi from all four groups of plant pathogens i.e. Ascomycota, Basidiomycota, Deuteromycota and Oomycota.
What really happens in initiation? – Investigating the subprocesses and features of emerging buyer-seller relationships

preview 1 What really happens in initiation? – Investigating the subprocesses and features of emerging buyer-seller relationships A Competitive Paper Accepted to the 24 th IMP Conference in Uppsala, Sweden 2008 Leena Aarikka-Stenroos Turku School of Economics, Turku, Finland Department of Marketing leena.aarikka-stenroos@tse.fi
Lightweight Convolutional Neural Networks on Binaural Waveforms for Low Complexity Acoustic Scene Classification

In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of training low complexity convolutional neural networks directly from waveforms. While the vast majority of proposed approaches perform ﬁxed feature extraction based on time-frequency representations such as spectro-grams, we propose to fully exploit the information in waveforms directly and to minimize the model size. To do so, we train one dimensional Convolutional Neural Networks (1D-CNN) on raw, sub-sampled binaural audio waveforms, thus exploiting phase information within and across the two input channels. In addition, our approach relies heavily on data augmentation in the temporal domain. Finally, we apply iterative structured parameter pruning to remove the least important convolutional kernels, and perform weight quantization in ﬂoating point half precision. We apply this approach on the TAU Urban Acoustic Scenes 2020 3class dataset, with two network architectures : a 1D-CNN based on VGG-like blocks, as well as a ResNet architecture with 1D convolutions, and compare our re-sults with the baseline model from the DCASE 2020 challenge, task 1 subtask B. We report four models that constitute our submission to the DCASE 2020 challenge, task 1 subtask B. Our results show that we can train, prune and quantify a small 1D-CNN model to make it 20 times smaller than the 500 KB challenge limit with an accuracy at baseline level (87.6 %), as well as a larger model achieving 91 % of accuracy while being 8 times smaller than the challenge limit. ResNets could be successfully trained, pruned and quantiﬁed in order to be below the 500 KB limit, achieving up to 91.2 % accuracy. We also report the stability of these results according to data augmentation and monoraul versus binaural inputs
The Effect of Regulatory Rulings on Cash Flow Volatility and Firm Risk

The purpose of this study is to extend prior research of Goel and Thakor (2014), and Morris (2012), who had conducted preliminary analysis of the effect of major financial regulatory reform. Whereas these studies were limited in that they assessed only one year and focused on singular regulatory issues, this study assess three major financial regulatory mandates over the past two decades, namely; Regulation FD, Sarbanes-Oxley, and Dodd-Frank. In addition, an analysis is made of the effects of these regulatory rulings for five quarters after passage. Analysis is conducted on both cash flow volatility, and risk measures in assessing predictive value of security returns after passage of such regulation. Findings indicate that after passage of major financial regulations, the majority of firms in the sample, for each regulatory sample group, have an increase in both cash flow volatility and overall firm risk, expressed through beta. For each of the three regulatory sample groups which have below average betas and cash flow volatility measures, the information content of earnings for these firms contains significant security return predictive value. For each of the three regulatory sample groups which have above average betas and cash flow volatility measures, the information content of earnings for these firms contains insignificant security return predictive value.
LncRNA MALAT1 affects the biological behavior of Parkinson’s disease model cells by downregulating miR-181a

To explore the value of lncRNA MALAT1 in Parkinson’s disease (PD) and its effects on PD model cells through miR-181a. A total of 64 PD patients admitted to The Central Hospital of Wuhan, Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, from August 2017 to August 2019 were enrolled as a research group (res group), and 70 healthy individuals during the same period were enrolled as a control group (con group). The expression of MALAT1 in the peripheral blood of participants in the two groups was determined. In addition, human neuroblastoma cells (SH-SY5Y) and normal human brain glial cells (HEB) were purchased, and MPP+ was used to construct PD model cells. The biological behavior of SH-SY5Y cells transfected with MALAT1 or miR-181a was detected, and the relationship between MALAT1 and miR-181a was verified by a dual luciferase reporter (DLR) assay. MALAT1 was overexpressed in the peripheral blood of the PD patients and in Parkinson’s model cells, and miR181a had lower expression in PD model cells (all P<0.05). After being transfected with MALAT1 inhibition sequence and miR-181a mimic sequence, the PD model cells showed weakened proliferation and invasion abilities and an increased apoptosis rate (all P<0.05). Additionally, the DLR assay revealed that the luciferase activity of MALAT1WT was inhibited by miR-181a-mimics (P<0.05), and the co-transfection experiment of si-MALAT1 and miR-181amimics revealed that the influence of miR-181a-mimics on cell viability was reversed by si-MALAT1. MALTA1 was highly expressed in PD, and it promotes the proliferation and invasion of PD model cells and inhibits their apoptosis by targeting the inhibition of miR-181a, which may be the key to the diagnosis and treatment of PD in the future.
Comparison of video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery and standard surgical approach in treatment malignant thymus tumor stage I and II - propensity score analysis

Introduction/Objective. Besides sternotomy, video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery (VATS) is used for thymus tumors treatment. The objective of our study was to compare oncological and perioperative outcomes in patients with I? II stage of thymic tumors treated with VATS or standard sternotomy procedures. Method. The study included only primary I? II thymoma according to the Masaoka classification, treated between May 2006 and February 2018. Out of 116 treated patients that had pathohistologically verified stage, 100 (86.2%) were matched by propensity score for sex, age, body mass index, myasthenia, tumor size, Masaoka classification stage. Oncological (direct post-operative survival, recurrence) and perioperative outcomes (intraoperative and postoperative complications, length of hospitalization) that affect the efficacy and safety of surgical techniques have been analyzed and compared between the two groups. Results. Among 50 patients operated by VATS, 34 patients (68%) were treated by uniportal approach, 13 (26%) by biportal and three (6%) by threeportal approach. The VATS intervention had shorter intervention time (p < 0.001), duration of hospitalization (p < 0.001), and usage of thoracic drainage (p < 0.001). There was a significant difference in terms of late control (p < 0.001). There was no significant difference between the groups regarding visual analogue scale score, as well as in terms of the time of recurrence (p = 0.305, p = 0.268). Conclusion. Compared to standard sternotomy, VATS thymectomy is an equally effective and significantly safer method with a minimum rate of intra and postoperative complications.
Flint recycling in the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age: Evidence for small flakes production by means of recycling at Ein-Zippori, Israel

This paper presents a new techno-typological analysis of a sample of small flakes that were produced through recycling from discarded blanks at the late Pottery Neolithic and Early Bronze Age site of Ein-Zippori, Lower Galilee, Israel. This study shows that the systematic production of small flakes from previously discarded blanks was not related to a scarcity in raw materials, but rather to specific decisions concerning the types of tools needed to carry out necessary tasks. These results are supported by use-wear analysis briefly noted on here and presented in more detail in a separate paper. The results further indicate the importance of reconstructing the life history of recycled items and its influence on the composition and variability of the lithic assemblages. The results indicate that recycling was a significant lithic production trajectory during the late Pottery Neolithic and in the Early Bronze Age. Recycling also contributes to the variability in the lithic assemblages of these periods. Furthermore, this study, together with earlier studies about lithic recyclying during Paleolithic times, suggest that flint recycling was a basic and long-term (continuous) perception and behavioral pattern that played an important role in lithic assmblages and in life ways of prehistoric people during Paleolithic, Neolithic and Early Bronze Age times.
From cross-cutting goal to organizational actions

The implementation of cross-cutting policy goals poses different challenges for governments; governing the multi-actor institutional landscape and ensuring alignment by single organisations to these cross-cutting goals. These issues become more complex in the era of agencification and New Public Governance (NPG), as interorganizational relationships are increasingly loosely coupled and based on network-based coordination mechanisms. Can organizations in a strongly agencified government apparatus still be coordinated by the use of hierarchy-like coordination, in other words with a strictly coupled system? This question is even more pressing in the case of austerity measures, where results have to be achieved in a short period of time. In this paper we focus on the extent to which single line departments and agencies internally translate government-wide austerity measures into their organizational organization-specific objectives, budgets and monitoring systems. We consider this internal translation to be an indicator of the alignment to these cross-cutting goals by line department and agencies. As such it can be considered as an indicator of the effectiveness of the governance by ministers and central departments of these government-wide austerity measures. We expect however that not only the governance system matters but also organizational features like the size, formal autonomy and policy sector of the involved line departments and agencies. In contrast to the formulated hypothesis the results show that line departments and agencies within our selection with a larger size incorporate goals less intensively than smaller organizations. Organizations within