Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Evaluation of Antioxidant and Antimicrobial Activity in Relation to Total Phenolic Content of Green Algae from Black Sea

Worldwide, marine algae are known to produce a wide variety of bioactive secondary metabolites and several compounds have been derived from them for the prospective development of novel drugs by the pharmaceutical industry. In this context, Ulva lactuca, Enteromorpha intestinales, and Cladophora vagabunda, isolated from Black Sea coastal waters of Romania, were evaluated for their potential for bioactivity. Extracts of the algae selected for the study were prepared using ethanol. The study presents original results concerning the total phenolic content (TPC), determined by the spectrometric method (Folin-Ciocalteu method) and the individual phenols from each species of seaweed studied were identified by HPLC-DAD techniques. Total antioxidant activity (ACL) was studied by photochemiluminescence method, and antibacterial activity was studied on two strains of bacteria, Escherichia coli ATCC 10536 - gram-negative and Staphylococcus aureus ATCC 6538P - gram-positive. Results indicated that the highest total phenolic content was obtained for Cladophora vagabunda (325.8 mg/100 g f.w.), followed by Ulva lactuca (285.5 mg/100 g f.w.) and the lowest rate was registered by Enteromorpha intestinalis (268.8 mg/100 g f.w.). Through HPLC-DAD techniques, 6 individual phenolic compounds were identified in all analyzed seaweeds. In addition, two other phenolic compounds were identified in lower concentrations in Ulva lactuca, but only one phenolic compound in Enteromorpha intestinalis. The results of this study show that there is a strong correlation between antioxidant activity (ACL), antibacterial activity and total phenolic content (TPC). Antioxidant activity shows the same order as total phenolic content (TPC): Cladophora vagabunda (64.15 nmol/g sample) followed by Ulva lactuca (22.8 nmol/g sample) and Enteromorpha intestinalis (10.4 nmol/g sample). The antibacterial activity recorded in all green seaweeds shows that the inhibition sites are higher on Escherichia coli compared to Staphylococcus aureus.
Growth response of wheat and associated weeds to plant antagonistic rhizobacteria and fungi

Wheat is the staple cereal crop of Pakistan but its growth is rigorously affected by associated weeds. Present study evaluated the synergistic effect of plant antagonistic rhizobacteria and fungi on growth, yield and suppression of wheat-associated weeds. Wheat associated weeds Phalaris minor and Avena fatua were grown in pots containing wheat as well. Pseudomonas aeruginosa strain PAO1 and Trichoderma harzianum T-MN6 were used as amendments to check their effect on two major weeds of wheat. The combined application of PAO1 and T-MN6 reduced the shoot length of Phalaris minor up to 30% and Avena fatua 40%, root length 22% and 28%, fresh biomass 29% and 31% respectively over their sole application. Similarly, inoculation of PAO1 and T-MN6 alone and in combination considerably enhanced growth, yield and physiological parameters of wheat. It was inferred from this study that the synergistic application of PGPR and fungi is a promising option to suppress major weeds of wheat and to enhance growth and yield of wheat.
Does Successful Innovation Require Large Urban Areas? Germany as a Counterexample

abstract Popular theories claim that innovation activities should be located in large cities because of more favorable environmental conditions that are absent in smaller cities or peripheral areas. Germany provides a counterexample to such theories. We argue that a major reason behind the geography of innovation in Germany is the country’s pronounced legacy of political fragmentation that created a decentralized settlement structure, shaped the geographic distribution of universities and public research institutions, and brought about a rather uniform and local access to finance. We show how political fragmentation influenced the emergence of historic centers of knowledge production and impacts the positioning of innovation activities today. We conclude that institutional factors should play a more prominent role in theories that aim at explaining the spatial distribution of innovation activities.
ICBayes: a package of Bayesian semiparametric regression for intervel-censored data

Abstract Interval-censored data arise frequently in medical studies of diseases that require periodic examinations for symptoms of interest, such as disease-free survival (DFS). This paper provides an introduction to the R package ICBayes which implements a set of programs for analyzing case 1 interval-censored data and case 2 interval-censored data under Bayesian semiparametric framework. The main function ICBayes fits commonly-used survival regression models: proportional hazards, proportional odds, and probit. A simulation study is conducted to compare the performance of the package with two R packages that fit Bayesian proportional hazards, proportional odds, and accelerated failure time models. The use of the package is illustrated through analyzing a case 2 interval-censored breast cosmesis data and a case 1 interval-censored animal tumorigenicity data.
Submission Rates of Medication Notebooks in Insurance Pharmacies

Objective:To reveal the current use of medication notebooks in clinical practice and the differences in submission rates of medication notebooks among patients with different sociodemographic and medical characteristics. Methods:We conducted a survey of the submission rates by studying the medication history,from June 19,2014,to July 3,2014. Results:The overall submission rate of returning patients was 57.1%and the submission rate of patients who visit a single medical institution was significantly lower than patients who visit more than two(55.4%vs.67.7%,p<0.001). Multivariate logistic regression also indicated significant differences between the single and multiple medical institution visit group (adjusted OR=2.74[95%CI:1.93-3.89],p<0.001). Submission rates for patients in their 20,30,and 50 s who visit a single medical institution were lower than 40%. Conclusions:To improve the usefulness of the community pharmacy and increase the submission rate,we need to increase awareness of the importance of medication notebooks among patients who visit a single medical institution. Additionally, future studies need to focus on factors such as age-related issues that might affect submission rates.
Patients’ satisfaction with and awareness of electrical stimulation therapy

Introduction. The study purpose was to investigate the effects of electrical stimulation therapy (EST) and to examine whether the patients’ awareness of and satisfaction with EST changed with gender, education level, information on treatment, and number of sessions. Methods. The Electrotherapy Questionnaire, prepared by the researchers, consisting of 20 closed-ended questions, was applied to the participants. A total of 531 volunteers who had completed the physiotherapy program and received EST treatment were included in the study. Pearson’s correlations were used to assess the associations between satisfaction and awareness and gender, education level, number of treatment sessions, and information on treatment. Results. The mean age of the patients was 45.4 ± 5.1 years. overall, 57% of the participants stated that they did not know the purpose of EST; 77% were satisfied with EST; 47.5% maintained that the transmission gel used during EST applications had a healing effect. A significant positive correlation was found only between increasing physiotherapists’ explanations and patients’ satisfaction (r = 0.166, p < 0.05). Conclusions. Patients’ expectation bound with the treatment and their desire to be informed were found to be high. The proportion of those who benefited from EST turned out high. it was shown that patients’ awareness of EST and their perceived wellness were improved by informing the patients about the purpose of the treatment.
Inciting Incidents: How Can We Motivate Family Conversations about Health?

ABSTRACT In many families, there are obstacles to support and collaborate with one another around positive health outcomes. One obstacle in providing support to one another occurs when family members are unaware of the need. In this study, we examine aspects of family conversations about health that affect family members’ decision to share (or not to share) information within the family, specifically information about sleep behaviors and medication intake. We conducted an interview study with independent living elderly parents (n = 11) and adult children (n = 14). We present factors that motivate and discourage family members from talking about sleep and medication within the family. We identified that some family members shift sharing behaviors following life changes that we characterize as “inciting incidents. ” We elaborate the concept of inciting incidents as a resource for design ideas and contribute with a synthesis of design insights for developing family-centered health technologies.
Classroom training versus e-learning: An evaluation of the effective training delivery approach and the impact on employee performance in the Information Technology sector in India

Purpose The aim of the research is compare and identify the effective training method used in trainings and analyse the impact on employee performance in the Information Technology Sector in India. A quantitative research will be used for this research with an attempt to evaluate employee’s opinion on which training method has more impact on their performance. Design/ Methodology/ Approach The research used quantitative research method and the positivist paradigm for data analysis. A questionnaire developed for this study included the multiple choice questions which helped in gathering the demographic information of the participants. Additionally, there were 26 statements based on the Likert scale response which helped in gathering the opinion of the employees based on the two training methods. The snowball sampling technique was used to gather the data as the research demanded a larger greater participation. Findings The findings suggest that there is inclination towards the e-learning approach compared to classroom training. In addition, understanding concepts upon attending the training and the overall experience are the two parameters which have a high correlation in employees performance at the work. Practical Implications Employees are the backbone of the organisation. There are highly significant and are accountable for accomplishing most of the task. Their active participation and contribution in the organisational success or downfall cannot be underestimated. Consequently, maximising the job performance of these unique assets using effective training becomes imperative to the organisations. These trainings not only encourage them to take on the day-to-day challenges, but also nurture them to adapt to the competitive business world. In order to impart the knowledge and inculcate the relevant competencies to these employees to ameliorate their job performance, it is advisable that organisation use effective training methods ( Elnaga and Imran, 2013). Although extensive research has been conducted in the area of the Human Resource Management, the same cannot be said on employee training especially as it concerns developing countries.
Recommendation for Ridesharing Groups Through Destination Prediction on Trajectory Data

In this paper, we aim to provide an optimal passenger matching solution by recommending ridesharing groups of passengers from GPS trajectories. Existing algorithms for rider grouping usually rely on matching pre-selected origin-destination coordinates. Unfortunately, the semantics in the spatial layout (e.g., social interactions and properties of the locations) are ignored, leading to inaccuracies in discovering the ridesharing groups. Meanwhile, the destinations manually entered by users impact the accuracy of matching, as these addresses are usually not available in a road network or are not optimal for passenger pickup. This is particularly true when a passenger travels in a less familiar place. Given a set of passengers and the distribution of their destination, our approach is to compute the ridesharing matching between passengers. The raw GPS trajectories can be characterized by a combination of time constraints, traffic environments, and social activities. We first developed a PrefixSpan-prediction using a partial matching (P-PPM) destination-prediction algorithm to mine the frequent movement patterns from the trajectory data and determine the confidence of the movement rules. Our method uses the total travel time as the matching objective. Our approach is superior to the baseline methods in terms of accuracy (increased from 46% to 80%). We have also achieved significant improvements on other metrics, such as users’ saved travel distance. We demonstrated that using our proposed method, a group of passengers could save over 19% of total travel miles, which shows that the ridesharing scheme could be effective.
Melatonin Induces Apoptosis and Inhibits the Proliferation of Cancer Cells via Reactive Oxygen Species-mediated MAPK and mTOR Pathways

Recent human and animal studies have demonstrated the oncostatic properties of N-acetyl-5-methoxytryptamine (melatonin) in different types of cancer. However, in few cancer cell lines including colorectal cancer cell line (HT-29), acute T cell leukemia cell line (JURKAT) and cervical cancer cell line (HeLa), precise oncostatic mechanism induced by melatonin is yet to be described. The aim of this study is to investigate the effects of melatonin in HT-29, JURKAT and HeLa cells and to determine the underlying molecular mechanism. Cell viability was determined by 3-(4,5-dimethylthiazol-2-yl)-2,5-diphenyltetrazolium bromide (MTT) assay while cell cycle, apoptosis and membrane potential were analysed by flow cytometry. Reactive oxygen species (ROS) was detected by 2',7'. dichlorofluorescein diacetate(DCFH-DA) staining. Protein expressions were determined by Western blot. Our results showed that melatonin suppressed cell proliferation, increased the number of sub G1 hypodiploid cells and cell cycle arrest in HT-29, JURKAT and HeLa cells. Besides, melatonin also induced early and late apoptosis, although there were marked variations in responses between different cell lines (sensitivity; HeLa > HT-29 >JURKAT). Apart from that, staining with DCHF-DA demonstrated ROS production that was induced in a dose-dependent manner in HeLa, HT-29 and JURKAT cells. Moreover, the apoptotic process and oncostatic effect of melatonin were seen to be associated with extracellular-signal-regulated kinase (ERK) and stress-activated protein kinase/c-Jun NH (2)-terminal kinase (SAPK-JNK) signalling cascades in HeLa cells. In HT-29 and JURKAT cells, melatonin induced apoptosis via activation of p38 mitogen-activated protein kinases (p38), ERK and SAPK-JNK signalling pathways. In all three cell lines, the apoptotic event was triggered by the mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR)-mediated activation of the downstream target rapamycininsensitive companion of mTOR (RICTOR) and/or regulatory-associated protein of mTOR (RAPTOR) proteins. Our findings confirm that melatonin induces apoptosis through reactive oxygen speciesmediated dysregulated mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) and mTOR signalling pathways in these cancer cell lines.
Substrate-independent Cu(0)-mediated controlled radical polymerization: grafting of block copolymer brushes from poly(dopamine) modified surfaces

A method is presented allowing the preparation of polymer brushes from numerous monomers and on a variety of substrates. Poly(dopamine) (PDA) is used to cover a series of different surfaces (SiO2, Au, Cu, Al/Al2O3, Teflon) and for the subsequent preparation of bromine containing initiator layers by conversion with 2-bromoisobutyryl bromide (BiBB). Surface-initiated Cu(0)-mediated controlled radical polymerization (SI-CuCRP) enables a rapid polymerization of methacrylates and styrene on the PDA/BiBB layers with minimal effort. When the substrates are faced with a copper plate and submerged into reaction solution containing monomer, solvent and ligand, thick polymer brushes up to hundreds of nanometers can be achieved within 1 h. Despite the simplicity of the method and the fast polymerization rates at room temperature, an outstanding endgroup fidelity, which is unmatched for surface polymerization, can be observed. This fact is demonstrated by the preparation of pentablock copolymer brushes representing the highest block number ever reported for surface-bound polymer.
A multicompetence perspective of hedging in second language academic writing

Most studies on hedging in second language academic writing include data in the second language or in both the first (L1) and the second language (L2) but not data from the same participants in both their L1 and L2. Following the multicompetence framework (Cook, 2012; Cook and Li, 2016; Ortega, 2016), this paper analyses hedging in L2 writing by examining the use of hedges in a group of 24 Spanish learners of English as a L2, both in their L1 and in their L2 in order to have evidence from the learners’ total system, as well as two baseline control groups of 24 native speakers of Spanish and 24 native speakers of English. This study also investigates crosslinguistic influence and convergence in the use of hedges. Hedges were coded following Hyland’s (1994) typology. Chi-square analyses revealed differences between English and Spanish speakers. English speakers and L2 learners also showed differences in the use of hedging devices indicating impersonal expressions and lexical verbs. Findings in the Spanish native control group and Spanish learners of L2 English in their L1 Spanish showed differences in the use of adverbs and nouns. Evidence of crosslinguistic influence was found and findings showing L1-L2 similarity in the use of adverbs in the learners’ group indicated L1-L2 convergence.
From Biomass Towards Chemical Ecology: Progress and New Perspectives for the Study of Food Webs in Marine Ecosystems

Changes of paradigms in the study of food webs in the last decades summarize a fast evolution of concepts: starting from a mechanistic vision of life, scientists recently approached to the emergent properties of ecosystems and started to investigate the informational functions of foods. The development of concepts is illustrated in this thesis by means of various papers, starting from a numerical evaluation of fluxes, moving then to biomasses and energy and approaching finally to several examples of “functional foods” influencing the ecology of key species in complex ecosystems. This exercise also permits comparison of the results with a model-based vision of ecosystems and the development of a general equation linking biodiversity with the availability of trophic resources. The equation, derived from mathematical analysis of networks, is proposed to be applicable to any network of organisms or cells, at various structural levels. It is based on an exponential decay function and it has been here tested on field data obtained in such different environments as a temperate harbour, seagrass beds and coral reefs. Results are encouraging, since a good fitting of the function to the experimental data has been demonstrated.
On a New Class of Multivariate Prior Distributions: Theory and Application in Reliability

In the context of robust Bayesian analysis for multiparameter distributions, we introduce a new class of priors based on stochastic orders, multivariate total positivity of order 2 ( MTP 2 ) and weighted distributions. We provide the new deﬁnition, its interpretation and the main properties and we also study the rela-tionship with other classical classes of prior beliefs. We also consider the Hellinger metric and the Kullback-Leibler divergence to measure the uncertainty induced by such a class, as well as its eﬀect on the posterior distribution. Finally, we conclude the paper with a real example about train door reliability.
Integration of ground-penetrating radar and gamma-ray detectors for non-intrusive localisation of buried radioactive sources

This thesis reports on the integration of ground-penetrating radar (GPR) and gamma ray detectors to improve the non-intrusive localisation of radioactive wastes buried in porous materials such as soil and concrete. The research was undertaken in two phases. In the first phase, a new non-intrusive technique for retrieving the depth of a buried radioactive source from two-dimensional raster radiation images was developed. The images were obtained by moving a gamma-ray detector in discrete steps on the surface of the material volume in which the source is buried and measuring the gamma spectrum at each step. The depth of the source was then estimated by fitting the intensity values from the measured spectra to an approximate three-dimensional gamma-ray attenuation model. This procedure was first optimised using Monte Carlo simulations and then validated using experiments. The results showed that this method is able to estimate the depth of a 658 kBq caesium-137 point source buried up to 18 cm in each of sand, soil and gravel. However, the use of only gamma-ray data to estimate the depth of the sources requires foreknowledge of the density of the embedding material. This is usually III IV difficult without having recourse to intrusive density estimation methods or historical density values. Therefore, the second phase of the research employed integrated GPR and gamma ray detection to solve this density requirement problem. Firstly, four density models were investigated using a suite of materials and the best model was then used to develop the integration method. Results from numerical simulations showed that the developed integration method can simultaneously retrieve the soil density and the depth and radius of disk-shaped radioactive objects buried up to 20 cm in soil of varying conditions with a elative error of less than 10%. Therefore, the integration method eliminates the need for prior knowledge of the density of the embedding material. This work represents the first time data from these two systems i.e., GPR and gamma-ray detector, will be integrated for the detection and localisation of radioactive sources. Furthermore, the results from the developed methods confirm that an integrated GPR and gamma-ray detector system is a viable tool for non-intrusive localisation of buried radioactive sources. This will enable improved characterisation of buried radioactive wastes encountered during the decommissioning of nuclear sites and facilities.
Application of exploratory factor analysis to address the challenge of measuring social capital in a rural communal setting in South Africa

ABSTRACT Social capital (SC) is an umbrella concept combining attributes of multiple latent factors that are not directly observable, making it difficult to measure and express as a single variable. Despite its multidimensional nature, the bulk of empirical studies continue to construct and use unidimensional indicators of SC, generating notable disparities in results derived from the use of these alternative measures. This study employed exploratory factor analysis to search for and construct composite measures capturing the multidimensional facets of structural and cognitive social capital (SC) in a rural communal setting in Africa. Our factor analysis revealed eleven factors describing a diversity of SC components, with clear evidence of multiple features of cognitive SC at the household level. On the other hand, evidence of presence of structural SC was limited, which is a general finding of household level analysis of determinants of SC. Not adequately accounting for elements of informal social networks, is an important weakness of our study, and we accordingly strongly recommend that SC research in developing countries should include, as indicators of structural SC, measures of informal social networks.