Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Exploring Inner-City Residents' and Foreigners' Commitment to Improving Air Pollution: Evidence from a Field Survey in Hanoi, Vietnam

Solutions for mitigating and reducing environmental pollution are important priorities for many developed and developing countries. This study was conducted to better understand the degree to which inner-city citizens and foreigners perceive air pollution and respond to it, particularly how much they willingly contribute to improving air quality in Vietnam, a lower-middle-income nation in Southeast Asia. During mid-December 2019, a stratified random sampling technique and a contingent valuation method (CVM) were employed to survey 199 inhabitants and 75 foreigners who reside and travel within the inner-city of Hanoi. The data comprises four major groups of information on: (1) perception of air pollution and its impacts, (2) preventive measures used to mitigate polluted air, (3) commitments on willingness-to-pay (WTP) for reducing air pollution alongside reasons for the yes-or-no-WTP decision, and (4) demographic information of interviewees. The findings and data of this study could offer many policy implications for better environmental management in the study area and beyond.
Analysis of biometric data using watermarking techniques

: This paper evaluates and analyses the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) frequency bands for embedding and extracting of the biometric data using DWT single level and multilevel watermarking approach with and without the use of alpha blending approach. In addition, singular value decomposition (SVD) combined with DWT is used to embed and extract the watermark image. The performance of compression and decompression approaches has been analyzed to examine the robustness and to check whether the compression function does destroy the integrity of the watermarked image. We investigate the proposed approach to understand how robust the watermarked on different sub-band is against the image processing and geometric attacks. The experimental results show that the DWT multilevel and SVD watermarking approach is more robust than the other watermarking methods implemented in this paper. The DWT bands dominate the approximate coefficient band (LL) in high-intensity alpha value. When the intensity is reduced, the coefficient standout to be very robust against the remaining bands.
Supramolecular combinations of humic polyanions as potent microbicides with polymodal anti-HIV-activities

This article focuses on linking structures of fractionated humic polyanions (PAs), which were molecularly defined using ultrahigh resolution Fourier transform mass spectrometry (FTMS), to their antiviral activities with respect to laboratory HIV-1 strains. Anti-HIV-1 activity was proven using a full HIV-1 replication system validated for antiviral testing. We demonstrated that all humic PAs tested in our study were capable of inhibiting HIV fusion. The most hydrophobic fractions of humic and hymatomelanic PAs also strongly inhibited HIV-1 reverse transcriptase. The structure–activity analysis revealed the direct relationship of antiviral activities with contribution of CHO molecules in humic PA composition and lipophilicity index, and the inverse relationship with their carboxylic and total acidity. This was explained by the supramolecular character of humic PAs, the properties of which are ruled rather by the contribution of most potent scaffolds than by the total charge density. It is concluded that all humic PAs tested in this study can be considered as promising precursors for developing cost-effective combinatorial microbicides with polymodal anti-HIV activity and low cytotoxicity capable of preventing HIV-1 transmission.
Factors Affecting the Rooting of Grape Cuttings II. Growth Regulators

Indolebutyric acid, naphthaleneacetic acid, and gibberellic acid did not improve the rooting of cuttings of St. George, 1613, and AXR #1 rootstocks. The use of IBA improved the rooting of cuttings of Salt Creek. Gibberellic acid was detrimental to the rooting of cuttings of Salt Creek. The solution containing IBA-NAA was detrimental to the rooting of cuttings of 1613, Salt Creek, and AXR #1. The use of bottom heat did not improve the rooting of cuttings of Salt Creek.
Qualità, provenienza e tecnologia degli oli di oliva vergini

The production of extra virgin olive oil from different locations in Italy were examine. The productions have been checked for the following parameters: spectrophotometric properties, free fatty acids content, minor polar components, tocopherols, peroxide value. About the samples it was known: region and period of the year of production, cultivars, proportion of the different olives from different cultivars, type of milling unity. The work was devoted to obtain informations about the antioxidant quality and its variations during the harvesting period
Impact of sex on the adaptation of adult mice to long consumption of sweet-fat diet

In rodents, the most adequate model of human diet-induced obesity is obesity caused by the consumption of a sweet-fat diet (SFD), which causes more pronounced adiposity in females than in males. The aim of this work was to determine the sex-associated effect of SFD on the expression of genes related to carbohydrate-lipid metabolism in adult mice. For 10 weeks, male and female С57Bl mice were fed a standard laboratory chow (Control group) or a diet, which consisted of laboratory chow supplemented with sweet cookies, sunflower seeds and lard (SFD group). Weights of body, liver and fat depots, blood concentrations of hormones and metabolites, liver fat, and mRNA levels of genes involved in regulation of energy metabolism in the liver, perigonadal and subcutaneous white adipose tissue (pgWAT, scWAT) and brown adipose tissue (BAT) were measured. SFD increased body weight and insulin resistance in mice of both sexes. Female mice that consumed SFD (SFD females) had a greater increase in adiposity than SFD males. SFD females showed a decreased expression of genes related to lipogenesis (Lpl) and glucose metabolism (G6pc, Pklr) in liver, as well as lipogenesis (Lpl, Slca4) and lipolysis (Lipe) in pgWAT, suggesting reduced energy expenditure. In contrast, SFD males showed increased lean mass gain, plasma insulin and FGF21 levels, expressions of Cpt1α gene in pgWAT and scWAT and Pklr gene in liver, suggesting enhanced lipid and glucose oxidation in these organs. Thus, in mice, there are sex-dependent differences in adaptation to SFD at the transcriptional level, which can help to explain higher adiposity in females under SFD consumtion.
What we know, what we do not know, and what we need to know, before using analgesics in fish

There is considerable pressure for Animal Care and Ethics Councils to recommend using analgesics in experiments that involve fish. Although we do have some data regarding this issue, I argue that we do not know enough to recommend any being used. For example, the doses of morphine used in fish experiments range from 10 to 3000 mg/kg relative to doses used in mammals that typically range from 2 to 5 mg/ kg. I recommend that we continue to use anaesthetics that are commonly used with fish (tricaine, benzocaine, and eugenol) because these also probably act as analgesics in fish as they do in mammals, and thus, may have some analgesic properties post-operatively. There are no adequate tests that would allow us to recommend using analgesics for farmed fish that may be consumed by humans or pets.
Revisiting Understanding Entrepreneurs Using the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator

At one point, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) was used rather actively in entrepreneurship research in an effort to define and understand the entrepreneurial personality. Despite consistent findings that MBTI intuitors or Ns were dominant in type the use of the instrument faded away. Recently, intuition per se has been of interest as it relates to entrepreneurship. This paper proposes the efficacy of revisiting the use of the MBTI as a way to understand and develop entrepreneurship.
Can Consumer Rights Improve Service Quality? Evidence from European Air Passenger Rights

Under EU Air Passenger Rights legislation (“EC261”), carriers must provide assistance and cash compensation to passengers in case of long delay. We study whether the regulation reduces ight delay. EC261 applies uniformly to ights departing from the EU, but covers only EU carriers on EU–bound ights. Exploiting this variation, we nd that regulated ights are 5% more likely to arrive on time, and mean arrival delay is reduced by almost four minutes. The e ect is strongest on routes with little competition, and for legacy carriers. Thus, consumer rights can improve quality when incentives from competition are weak.
the 2021 USENIX

Fine-tuning is an increasingly common technique that leverages transfer learning to dramatically expedite the training of huge, high-quality models. Critically, ﬁne-tuning holds the potential to make giant state-of-the-art models pre-trained on high-end super-computing-grade systems readily available for users that lack access to such costly resources. Unfortunately, this potential is still difﬁcult to realize because the models often do not ﬁt in the memory of a single commodity GPU, making ﬁne-tuning a challenging problem. We present FTPipe, a system that explores a new dimension of pipeline model parallelism, making multi-GPU execution of ﬁne-tuning tasks for giant neural networks readily accessible on commodity hardware. A key idea is a novel approach to model partitioning and task allocation, called Mixed-pipe. Mixed-pipe partitions the model into arbitrary computational blocks rather than layers, and relaxes the model topology constraints when assigning blocks to GPUs, allowing non-adjacent blocks to be executed on the same GPU. More ﬂexi-ble partitioning affords a much better balance of the compute-and memory-load on the GPUs compared to prior works, yet does not increase the communication overheads. Moreover, and perhaps surprisingly, when applied to asynchronous training, Mixed-pipe has negligible or no effect on the end-to-end accuracy of ﬁne-tuning tasks despite the addition of pipeline stages. Our extensive experiments on giant state-of-the-art NLP models (BERT-340M, GPT2-1.5B, and T5-3B) show that FT-Pipe achieves up to 3 × speedup and state-of-the-art accuracy when ﬁne-tuning giant transformers with billions of parameters. These models require from 12GB to 59GB of GPU memory, and FTPipe executes them on 8 commodity RTX2080-Ti GPUs, each with 11GB memory and standard PCIe
Numerical simulation of biochemical changes in a viscous liquid canned food during sterilisation using computational fluid dynamics

Natural convection heating of a viscous liquid (concentrated cherry juice 74°Brix) in a cylindrical can heated from all sides has been simulated. The governing equations for continuity, energy and momentum conservation together with those for bacteria and vitamins C, B 1 and B2 concentrations are solved numerically. Arrhenius equation is used to describe the temperature dependency of the bacteria death and vitamin destruction kinetic. The results of the simulation show the recirculating flow inside the can and the formation of a secondary flow at the bottom of the can due to the reverse flow. The slowest heating zone covers the whole cross sectional area of the can at the early stages of heating then migrates during heating and settles at the bottom of the can. In this simulation the bacteria and vitamin concentrations are found to depend on both temperature distribution and flow pattern.
Motivational Strategies in the Secondary School EFL

This contribution reports on a study of the motivational strategies used in the English as a foreign language classroom in Ecuador. The sample consisted of secondary school teachers (N=80) and students (N=350) who were recruited randomly. Using a mixed-methods approach – a questionnaire and a semi-structured interview – the results revealed an interesting picture of motivational strategies. Specifically, the findings disclosed that the teachers used six categories of motivational strategies in their pedagogical practice. The degree of utilisation of each category varied from high to low. The most frequent category was Displaying Appropriate Teacher Behaviours, whereas the least common was Promoting Learner Autonomy. Of the six categories used by the teachers, the three that students found most motivating were Creating a Friendly Classroom Atmosphere and a Cohesive Learner Group, Selecting and Presenting Instructional Activities and Displaying Appropriate Teacher Behaviours. The study also revealed that the students wished to be exposed to more diverse motivational strategies, especially those from the Promoting Learner Autonomy, Encouraging Positive Self-evaluation and Making Learning Stimulating and Attractive categories. The teachers agreed with the students’ choices; yet their preferences for motivational strategy categories were sequenced differently.
Response of vegetation and soil to different grazing intensities of alpine grassland in Northern Tibet

An uneven distribution of grazing pressure in time and space leads to local land overuse and ecological degradation. However, the quantification of grazing intensity lacks direct monitoring data. It is difficult to accurately simulate the response of vegetation and soil to different grazing pressures under free grazing patterns using alternative indicators or controlled experiments. There is also a lack of research on the varying response of different grassland types with grazing intensity. In this study, a high⁃precision grazing trajectory dataset derived from wearable GPS locators, used for cattle and sheep, to simulate the grazing intensity, construct a grid⁃scale grazing spatial distribution and grazing intensity division method, and combine grassland community plot survey. Nagqu, Tibet was used as the study area. We could explore
Causality Relationship between Energy Consumption and Economic Growth in the European Union Countries

This study presents the causality relationship between energy consumption and economic growth as a scope of Cobb Douglas production function by using Dynamic Panel Data Analysis for 28 European countries in the 1990-2014 period. The Dynamic Panel Data Analysis method proposed in this study considers the real Gross Domestic Production (GDP) as a dependent variable, while Capital, Labor, and Energy Consumption parameters are considered as independent variables. To indicate the causality relation between GDP and Capital, Labor and Energy Consumption parameters, Arellano-Bond autocorrelation test is applied by taking the first difference of the defined parameters. Furthermore, the Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) is used to validate the obtained results of the Arellano-Bond autocorrelation test. The results of this study show that the GDP has a direct relationship with all independent variables-i.e. Capital, Labor, and Energy Consumption. By a predefined value for the increase in these independent variables, each of the dependent variables demonstrates a unique amount of increase.
Primary Risk Factors of Post-ERCP Pancreatitis: A Review

During 1968, Endoscopic retrograde pancreatography (ERCP) is widely playing a therapeutic role commonly to utilize the diagnostic procedure. The demonstration in its treatment plan includes choledocholithiasis and the biliary system disorders progressive to pancreatic neoplasm in both the conditions of perioperative and postoperative risk factors. [1-3] Based on serious complications beginning at post ERCP pancreatitis (PEP), it is highly approachable for magnetic resonance cholangio-panreatography MRCP. [4] According to the Japanese studies in its international medical practice, the guidelines of its specific risk factors [5,6] start in females carrying the history of pancreatitis technically with Oddi sphincter dysfunctions, the cannulation infections with other certain procedures including percutaneous sphincterotomy, endoscopic sphincterotomy, and pancreatography [7-9].
A Review of Clinical Trials That Contributed to Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease Treatment Protocols

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) has remained a leading cause of death worldwide and is expected to increase its burden on the healthcare system in the coming future. Numerous clinical trials have been conducted over the years and as a result, many drugs became a part of the treatment protocols of COPD. Currently, there are also several drugs under development. This review will help future researchers to grasp salient features of previous studies and use them in their future trials in order to reduce the morbidity and mortality of COPD. Randomized control trials provide strong evidence for any hypothesis in a research study. This review focuses on major COPD trials in the last two decades including TORCH, UPLIFT, POET, WISDOM, and TIOSPIR. It showcases the main clinical question, primary outcome, and result of these five trials.
A feasible approach to dispose of soil washing wastes: adsorptive removal of chlorobenzene compounds in aqueous solutions using humic acid modified with monoolein (HA–M)

Humic acid (HA), one of most ubiquitous natural resources in the world, was modified with monoolein to prepare a novel hydrophobic adsorbent (HA–M) for removal of chlorobenzene compounds (CBs) from aqueous solutions. The influence of pH, temperature, coexisting organics and initial concentration on the adsorption capacity of HA–M for CBs were investigated to obtain the optimum removal efficiency. Furthermore, the adsorption kinetics and isotherms were researched as well as the column adsorption studies to reveal the mechanism for HA–M to adsorb CBs. The experimental results indicated that the HA–M materials exhibit high removal efficiency of CBs (>90%) in a wide range of pH values and temperatures. The adsorption of CBs with HA–M was realized by the hydrophobic interactions between CBs and HA–M. In addition, the HA–M also performed high removal efficiency toward organochlorine pesticides (OCPs) in aqueous solutions. Most important, the excellent adsorbability of the super-hydrophobic HA–M adsorbent could be comparable or fairly good compared with other adsorbents. Consequently, our present investigations provided a facile synthesis route for the highly effective and recyclable hydrophobic adsorbent for the adsorptive removal of CBs and OCPs from aqueous solutions.
The impact of energy consumption on economic growth in developed and post-transition countries of European Union

This paper aims to investigate the impact of renewable and non-renewable energy consumption on economic growth. Analysis was conducted for 16 developed EU member states over the period from 1990 to 2018 and 11 post-transition EU member states over the period from 1995 to 2018. We also compared obtained results with results for the period until 2014. The pooled mean group (PMG) model was used to capture dynamic relationship in a short and long run. The empirical results show that consumption of both energy sources has an impact on economic growth in the long run in both groups of countries. However, the results differ between the developed and post-transition EU countries. In developed EU countries renewable energy consumption has a negative impact on economic growth, while non-renewable energy consumption has a positive impact. In posttransition EU countries results are opposite, meaning that in these countries there is a tendency to shift from less efficient and more polluting energy sources to more efficient energy options which can be a stimulus to economic growth.
Clinical and echocardiographic findings in a cross-sectional study of HIV-infected adults in Enugu, Nigeria.

BACKGROUND Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection and highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) are implicated in cardiovascular diseases. The objective of this study was to evaluate the clinical and echocardiographic findings in HIV-infected adults. METHODS One hundred HIV subjects on HAART, 100 HAART-naïve patients and 100 controls were recruited in this cross-sectional study. RESULTS Mean CD4 cell count was significantly higher in the HAART-exposed (408.43 ± 221.62) than the HAART-naïve groups (250.06 ± 154.26) (p < 0.001). Weight loss (49%), skin lesions (14%), body weakness (24%), oral thrush (10%) and lymphadenopathy (10%) were more prevalent in HAART-naïve patients (p < 0.05). Dimensions of aortic root (2.71 cm), left atrium (3.27 cm) and left ventricular mass index (79.95) were significantly higher in HIV-positive subjects on HAART (p < 0.05). CONCLUSIONS Clinical features of HIV and the CD4 nadir were more prevalent in the HIV-positive, HAART-naïve subjects. Dimensions of the aortic root, left atrium and left ventricle were relatively larger in the HAART-exposed patients while wall thickness and ejection fraction were higher in the HAART-naïve subjects.
The lipid peroxidation derived DNA adduct γ-OHPdG levels in paraneoplastic liver tissues predict postoperative outcomes of hepatoma

Chronic necroinflammation in liver induces lipid peroxidation and oxidative stress, which contributes to hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) development. Gamma-hydroxy-1, N2-propanodeoxyguanosine (γ-OHPdG), a promutagenic DNA adduct, is derived from lipid peroxidation. Little is known about the clinical roles of γ-OHPdG in relationship to HCC progression. Here, we showed that γ-OHPdG levels were highly expressed in the cancerous HCC tissues (P = 0.020, compared to those in noncancerous parts). Postoperative outcome analysis revealed that higher γ-OHPdG expression in the paraneoplastic noncancerous tissues was independently associated with shorter distant metastasis-free survival (P = 0.020). In subgroup analysis, higher γ-OHPdG expression in the noncancerous tissues in hepatitis B related HCC subgroup was associated with shorter overall survival (P = 0.016) and distant metastasis-free survival (P = 0.006). However, in patient subgroups including non-cirrhosis, bilirubin < 1.2 mg/dL, alanine transaminase < 41 U/L, or aspartate transaminase < 31 U/L, higher γ-OHPdG expression in the cancerous tissues was associated with longer overall survival (P < 0.03 for all). In vitro experiments showed that cell viability was suppressed upon hydrogen peroxide treatment in liver cancer cell lines. In conclusion, lipid peroxidation derived marker, γ-OHPdG, in the paraneoplastic noncancerous and cancerous liver tissues predicted postoperative outcomes in HCC patients.
Modeling Customer Lifetime Value Under Uncertain Environment.

: Customer lifetime value (CLV) is an essential measure to determine the level of profitability of a customer to a firm. Customer relationship management treats CLV as the most significant factor for measuring the level of purchases and, consequently, the profitability of a given customer. This motivates researchers to compete in developing models to maximize the value of CLV. Dynamic programming models in general—and the Q-learning model specifically—play a significant role in this area of research as a model-free algorithm. This maximizes the long-term future rewards of a certain agent, given their current state, set of possible actions, and the next state of that agent, assuming the customer represents the agent and CLV is their future reward. However, due to the stochastic nature of this problem, it is inaccurate to obtain a single crisp value for Q. In this paper, fuzzy logic and neutrosophic logic shall be utilized to search for the membership values of Q to capture the stochasticity and uncertainty of the problem. Both fuzzy Q-learning and neutrosophic Q-learning were implemented using two membership functions (i.e., trapezoidal, and triangular) to search for the optimal Q value that maximizes the customer's future rewards. The proposed algorithms were applied to two benchmark datasets: The Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD) cup 1998 direct mailing campaign dataset and the other from Kaggle, related to direct mailing campaigns. The proposed algorithms proved their effectiveness and superiority when comparing them to each other or the traditional deep Q-learning models.