Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Experimental Study of Water Infiltration in Unsaturated Horizontal Sand Columns under Various Air Confinement Conditions

The process of water infiltration into initially dry sand was studied in horizontal sand columns under various airtight conditions. To investigate the interrelations among water inflow behavior, air pressure, air confinement effect, and vent effectiveness in unsaturated porous media experiencing dynamic infiltration, a total of five dynamic infiltration experiments with fixed inlet water pressure were performed with different air vents open or closed along the column length. Visualizations of the infiltration process were accompanied by measurements of water saturation, air pressure, and accumulated water inflow. In a column system with an open end, the absence of air pressure buildup reveals that the vent at the column end can significantly reduce the internal air pressure effects during infiltration, and the air phase can be ignored for this case. However, in columns with a tight end, the coupled air and water flow processes can be divided into two completely different periods. Before the water front passed by the most distant open vent, the internal air pressure effects on retarding dynamic infiltration are negligible, similar to the open end case. After this period, the open vents can certainly influence the inflow behavior by functioning as air outlets while they cannot equilibrate pore air pressure with the atmospheric pressure. The remaining air ahead of the front will be gradually confined and compressed, and the significant increase in air pressure highlights the great role of air pressure buildup in reducing the water infiltration rate. The closer the last open vent was to the water inlet, the higher was the increase in air pressure and the greater was the delaying effect on water infiltration. This work may extend the experimental study of water infiltration into the unsaturated soils with different airtight conditions and provide experimental evidence on these coupled mechanisms among the water and air phases in soils.
Detection Limits for Chiral Amino Acids Using a Polarization Camera

The detection of biosignatures on a planetary surface is of high scientific interest, and enantiomeric excesses of organic molecules are one such signature. Enantiomeric excesses can be detected by their polarizing effects on transmitted light. As part of instrument development work for a microscopic imager, the Cold Lightweight Imager for Europa (C-LIFE), we assess the potential of polarization measurements to quantify enantiomeric excesses. We investigated the optical rotation of the amino acids serine and phenylalanine for a range of enantiomeric abundances. Measurements were made with mixtures of serine and phenylalanine as well as Europa-relevant salts to determine how well these combinations can be detected. We also conducted a small number of measurements on samples of bacteria taken from glacial environments. We found that concentrations greater than 10−3 M are needed to detect serine and concentrations greater than 10−4 M are needed to detect phenylalanine, with larger concentrations needed for smaller enantiomeric excesses. Salts do not have a significant effect on the optical rotation. Optical rotation of bacterial samples were detected at concentrations >106 cells ml−1. Systematic errors in our polarization detector limited our sensitivity to optical activity changes of ∼0.008°, leading to an inability to distinguish enantiomeric abundances separated by 5%, but tests show that improvements to our laboratory technique can yield a factor of 20 improvement in sensitivity.
Organochlorine Pesticides in Selected Sewage
Sludge in South Africa : Assessment and Method
Validation

The purpose of this study was to determine the concentrations of organochlorine pesticides (OCPs) in sewage sludge from three wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs), with a view to study their contribution to the environmental pollution of the Amathole District in Eastern Cape, South Africa. Analyses were performed by gas chromatography joined with micro electron capture detector (μECD). The limits of detection (LODs) of the tested congeners varied from 0.04 ng/g α-Lindane (α-BHC) to 0.49 ng/g (endosulfan sulfate), and the limits of quantification ranged from 0.22 ng/g (aldrin) to 2.17 ng/g δ-lindane (δ-BHC). Total concentrations of the 17 congeners for different seasons in the sludge ranged from 191 to 947 ng/g dw. For the six predominant congeners, the total highest concentration levels were found in this order dichlorodiphenyl trichloroethane (DDT), dichlorodiphenyl dichloroethane (DDD), α-BHC, γ-BHC, aldrin and endosulphate 1, and with values of 1512, 1330, 1095, 998, 994 and 547 ng/g respectively. For this result the contamination levels of some congeners for South African sludge can be categorized as high compared with European countries, but moderate to lower compared to other countries worldwide. Some congener (α-BHC, γ-BHC, aldrin, endosulphate 1, DDD and DDT) contents in the samples exceeded limits set by the European Commission for 1000 ng/g set for Σ DDT and 500 ng/g for other pesticide use of sludge in agriculture.
Dental trauma management and it’s awareness in school teachers: A survey in Burhanpur, Madhya Pradesh, India

Aim: To evaluate knowledge and awareness of school teachers in respect to manage the dental trauma, check the background of dental trauma education and to estimate the incidents during their teaching experience. Introduction: The most commonly affected part of the body during accidents and sports injuries in kids are teeth and the surrounding structures. Traumatic dental injuries are a major pediatric concern for the dentist, parents and the society. School is one of the locations with the greatest prevalence of traumatic dental injuries. A significant number of school-aged children experience trauma of some sort to primary or permanent dentition. Methodology: A two stage sampling procedure was followed in the section of the study participants during the first stage by applying simple random sampling procedure, 24 schools out of the total 471 schools from the entire district were selected. In the second stage by considering each selected school as a cluster/unit, the total number of school teachers in each cluster who were present on the day was 285 included as study participants; thus a total of 285 school teachers constituted the final sample. Results: Out of the 285 teachers who participated in the study, 136 had less than 6 years teaching experience 68 had 6-10 years, 39 had 11-15 years 23 had 16-20 and 19 teachers had more than 20 years of experience. Discussion: Majority of teachers responded that the upper front teeth are most commonly traumatized and female teachers were more knowledgeable compared to their male counterparts, regarding the growth pattern of child’s dentition. This can be owed to the caring nature and closeness of female to children.
Prevalence of Coxiella burnetii in Traditional and Industrial Butter and Cream Using Nested Polymerase Chain Reaction in Shahrekord, Iran

Background: A zoonotic disease of global importance known as "Q fever" is caused by Coxiella burnetii agent. The aim of the present research was to determine C. burnetii in the traditional and industrial butter and cream samples in Shahrekord, Iran. Methods: This cross-sectional descriptive study was conducted from March to September 2016. Totally, 200 traditional and industrial butter and cream samples were collected from retailers in different regions of Shahrekord and then tested for C. burnetii via nested polymerase chain reaction (PCR) assays. Results: In this survey, a total of 6 out of 200 samples (3%) were found to be positive for C. burnetii. More precisely, 4 (5.79%), 1 (5%), and 1 (2.56%) samples were related to the traditional bovine cream, traditional sheep butter, and traditional bovine butter samples, respectively. Nevertheless, no C. burnetii infections were found in the industrial butter and cream samples. Conclusions: These results proved that traditional dairy products can be considered as an important reservoir for C. burnetii infection in Iran.
The difficult act of balancing financial and academic performance: Product adaptation strategies at university branch campuses

Adapting a product to suit local requirements is a well-known international marketing strategy. Branch campuses generally adapt programs to suit local requirements. However, the academic fraternity has resisted adaptation on concerns about the dilution of academic standards. This study uses data from five branch campuses to examine the link between adaptation and financial and academic performance. The results indicate that adaption leads to increased financial performance but does not maintain academic standards. The study recommends strategies to maintain a balance between an ethnocentric approach, which calls for similar academic standards, and a geocentric approach, which requires adaptation.
A Study of Motivation in Studying English of the Second Year Undergraduate Students at Aviation Personnel Development Institute (APDI),

This study aimed to investigate integrative and instrumental motivations of 100 secondyear undergraduate students at aviation personnel development institute in Thailand. A motivational survey was conducted by using Attitude / Motivation Test Battery (AMTB) . This research used a quantitative approach with 3 0 questions which divided into six categories of integrative and instrumental motivation. In integrative motivation, three aspects were included: degree of integrativeness, interest in foreign language, and desire to learn language. For instrumental motivation three aspects were included: degree of instrumentality, motivational intensity, and parental encouragement. A questionnaire was used to collect data from 100 undergraduate students. The data from the questionnaire were analyzed by mean, and standard deviation in order to determine the level of motivation in studying English. The findings of this study indicated that APDI students were slightly more integrative motivated to study English. It indicates that integrative motivation is a significant factor among APDI students.
The Impact of The Leader in Me on Student Engagement and Social Emotional Skills

This study examined whether the implementation of The Leader in Me (TLIM) positively impacted grades 4-8 students’ engagement and social emotional outcomes in 89 US schools participating in a Federal Race to the Top District (RTT-D) grant entitled kid•FRIENDLy (kids Focused, Responsible, Imaginative, Engaged, and Determined to Learn), and how varying levels of TLIM implementation fidelity affected student engagement and social emotional outcomes. After one year of TLIM implementation, students in the TLIM schools had greater school engagement than students in the nonTLIM schools after controlling for school demographics. No significant difference was found between TLIM schools and non-TLIM schools on social emotional constructs (responsibility and self-control/selfmanagement skills, emotional and physical wellbeing) that were mapped to the 7 Habits of TLIM. Students in the higher implementation fidelity TLIM schools had stronger school engagement than students in the lower fidelity TLIM and non-TLIM schools. Fidelity levels did not influence the student outcomes on other social emotional constructs.
Leachates From Landfill Sites In Thessaloniki, Greece: Effect Of Aging

Sanitary landfilling still is one of the most common management systems of solid urban wastes. The persistent environmental impact of landfills depends on leachate characteristics. The present study aimed at the characterisation of leachate from two landfill sites in the prefecture of Thessaloniki, Greece. Mavrorachi landfill stands in our study as a representative Greek active landfill site, that started operating in 2008. Tagarades landfill has stopped receiving waste from 2008 after 27 years of full operation. In this investigation, leachate samples were physico-chemically characterised so as to assess their pollution potential and their concentration in regard to the type and age of landfill. Elevated concentrations of inorganic and organic constituents were observed in the leachate composition. COD ranged from 2,490 mg/L to 19,700 mg/L, while the respective range for BOD was 390-14,850 mg/L during a 35-year period. The pH values of the leachate samples presented more moderate fluctuations between 7.3 and 8.5. In addition, the ammoniacal nitrogen content increased as landfill age increased, whereas heavy metals concentrations showed significant variations with a slight decreasing trend. The results presented in this paper proved that as time passed, the values of most parameters decreased as the biodegradable compounds are broken down while the refractory compounds resist to biodegradation. Thus, the age has a pronounced influence on the composition of leachate. This study also focused on quantifying the level of contamination that leachates can be potentially cause on a comparative basis by Leachate Pollution Index (LPI). LPI values showed that pollution load was declining but is still not negligible after 33 years.
NEPHROTOXICITY OF 5-FLUOROURACIL IN MALE MICE AND THE PROBABLE PROTECTIVE ROLE OF VITAMIN C: HISTOLOGICAL AND ULTRASTRUCTURAL STUDIES

The present study investigated the probable protective role of vitamin C in alleviating 5-fluorouracil (5-Fu)-induced nephrotoxicity in male mice (Mus musculus). Thirty male CD-1 mice were equally divided into three groups: Group I (the control group), received 0.9% NaCl; group II, received intraperitoneally (i.p.) 80 mg of 5-Fu/kg body weight (b.wt)/day for four weeks; group III, received (i.p.) 80 mg of 5-Fu plus 12 mg of vitamin C/kg b.wt/day for four weeks. Animals of all groups were killed at the end of the experiment, and the renal tissue samples were taken and processed for light and electron microscopical examinations. Light microscopic observations revealed that administration of 5-Fu caused erosion of the parietal cells of Bowman's capsules, widening of the urinary spaces, and disruption of the glomerular capillaries and hemorrhage. The cells of the proximal and distal tubules exhibited vacuolar degeneration and coagulative necrosis. The nuclei of these cells manifested pyknosis and karyolysis. Ultrastructural examination revealed damage of the parietal epithelium of Bowman's capsules with fusion and destruction of the foot processes of the podocytes. The cells of the proximal tubules displayed destruction of the microvilli constituting the brush borders and degeneration of the mitochondria. The distal tubules displayed destruction of both the basal infoldings and the mitochondria with fragmentation of the rough endoplasmic reticulum. Histological and ultrastructural results revealed that the treatment with vitamin C simultaneously with 5-Fu led to apparent protection of the renal tissue. This might suggest that vitamin C has a protective potential against 5-Fu-induced nephrotoxicity.
Potential effects of high plasma to red blood cell ratio transfusion in pediatric trauma

Objective High ratio of plasma to red blood cells during massive transfusion is associated with improved survival of traumatic injuries in adults, but this has not been demonstrated in children. Our objective was to compare the outcome of children who received high (≥1:2) versus low (<1:2) plasma: red blood cells (P:R) ratios at 24 h from injury. Methods We conducted a retrospective chart review of children <18 years of age who presented to the emergency department over a 7-year period and received massive transfusion (≥40 ml/kg red blood cells or ≥80 ml/kg total blood products in 24 h). Our primary outcome of interest was in-hospital mortality. Results We identified 38 children who received massive transfusion. There was no significant difference in in-hospital mortality (45.8% vs. 64.3%) between the high (n = 24, median ratio 1:1.1) and low P:R ratio (n = 14, median 1:3.2) groups. In subset analyses, there was reduced mortality for high P:R patients with BIG score ≥24 (69.2% vs. 100%) and those taken to the operating room within 6 h of arrival (21.4% vs. 60.0%), respectively (p < 0.05). There was a trend for improved survival in high P:R patients without severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) (0% vs. 40.0%). Conclusions This study suggests that high P:R transfusion may improve in-hospital survival of injured children at high risk of mortality and in children without severe TBI, supporting the need for large, multi-center studies.
Robust Fake News Detection Over Time and Attack

In this study, we examine the impact of time on state-of-the-art news veracity classifiers. We show that, as time progresses, classification performance for both unreliable and hyper-partisan news classification slowly degrade. While this degradation does happen, it happens slower than expected, illustrating that hand-crafted, content-based features, such as style of writing, are fairly robust to changes in the news cycle. We show that this small degradation can be mitigated using online learning. Last, we examine the impact of adversarial content manipulation by malicious news producers. Specifically, we test three types of attack based on changes in the input space and data availability. We show that static models are susceptible to content manipulation attacks, but online models can recover from such attacks.
The Factors that Influence Patients' Use of Telecare System in Taiwan

Background: Due to the improvement of medical treatment and healthcare, life expectancy is longer than before. Many chronic diseases have become the threats to contemporary individuals. How to effectively manage chronic diseases becomes an important topic now. Many experts believe that the implementation of information technology is the possible solution to enhance healthcare service efficiency and cost effectiveness. Methods: With 120 Far EasTone Health+ users' responses, partial least squares (PLS) is applied to assess validation and test linkages in the theoretical model. Results: The influence of perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use on behavioral intention to use was significant. The influence of perceived ease of use on perceived usefulness was significant. The influence of computer self-efficacy on perceived ease of use was significant. The influence of subject norm on perceived usefulness and behavioral intention to use was significant. However, the influence of computer anxiety on perceived ease of use was not significant. Conclusions: The finding and implications of this study may contribute to knowledge of health informatics, particularly on the perception and acceptance of the telecare system innovation among elderly patients. Healthcare service provider or hospital can implement proper introduction and advertisement of the telecare system, effective educations and training programs, and select suitable role models to enhance patients' acceptance of the telecare system.
In silico Protein Structure Comparison of Conotoxins with VI/VII Cysteine Framework

Conopeptides are small disulfide-rich peptides isolated from the venom of marine cone snails, and they are amongst the most interesting of the venom species. In this paper, in silico structural models and alignments of ω-conotoxin and different pharmacological family with the same cysteine framework (VI/VII) will be discussed using computational methods -- FATCAT and POSA. The results show that with the ω-CTX conopeptide aligned with ω-CTX conopeptide, it would most likely have significantly similar structures with lower RMSD as they both function as blockers of voltage-gated calcium channels, and this conopeptide would be ω-CTX MVIIA 1OMGA aligned with ω-CTX MVIIA 1TTK. On the other hand, having compared different pharmacological with ω-CTX would result to a fewer significantly similar results since their amino acid residues, and ion channels are quite different. Multiple alignment of structures across different pharmacological families show similarities in their polypeptide backbone. Hence,conotoxins sharing the same cysteine framework can be used as models for deducing the polypeptide backbone of a conotoxin with unknown structure.
Social media sentiment monitoring in smart cities: an application to Moroccan dialects

Smart cities utilize different devices not only to solve the increasingly serious urban resource shortage, environmental pollution, traffic congestion, security risks but also to identify concerns of citizens. Building a smart city is not free from using social networks that have changed citizen's daily life and becoming a new source of real-time information, so there is no doubt that sentiment analysis can contribute as important decision support. we take these challenges by presenting a set of features that have been used with machine learning techniques, sentiment analysis, text classification to extract the intelligence needed from social media feeds containing Moroccan dialects. A case scenario analyses the opinions of users concerning the traffic in three cities in Morocco is illustrated in the following.
Fully Automatic Diameter Measurement Method Based on Retinal Vessel Segmentation

Many systemic diseases can cause changes of the diameters of retinal vessels and Arteriolar-to-Venular diameter Ratios (AVR) is an important quantitative biomarker in the diagnosis of these diseases. In this paper, we proposed and validated a novel and automatically retinal vessel diameter measurement method. Given the binary segmentation from fundus of eye, the morphological method is firstly used to extract the centerline of the retinal vessels, which was further used to determine the position of special points in vessels. Then, Hessian matrix is used to determine the initial direction of the vascular skeleton point. Finally, the vessel diameter is measured based on the determined vessel centerline and direction information. The proposed method performed superiorly compared to several state-of-the art methods.
Ontology-based sentiment analysis and community detection on social media: application to Brexit

Sentiment Analysis and Community Detection are two of the main methods used to analyze and comprehend human interactions on social media. These domains expanded immensely with the rise of social media, as it provided a free and ever-increasing quantity of data. Domain ontologies are of great assistance in collecting specific data, as it describes the domain's features and their existing relationships. Therefore, we utilize them in collecting subject-specific data on social media. This paper describes the framework we've designed in order to understand, in depth, the impact of a subject on social media users, and also to evaluate the difference between the Lexicon Approach and the Machine Learning Approach, by assessing the strengths and weaknesses of each. This framework also aims to deeply understand the connections that exist between users, depending on their point of view on a particular subject. The resulting framework not only analyzes textual data (by taking into account the negation and sentence POS tags), but also visual one, such as images. In order to test the framework, we chose to analyze the Brexit phenomenon by collecting ontology-based data from Twitter and Reddit, and it had some promising results.
A Metaheuristic Algorithm for the Probabilistic Orienteering Problem

The Probabilistic Orienteering Problem (POP) is a variant of the orienteering problem where customers are available with a certain probability. In a previous work, we approximated its objective function value by using a Monte Carlo Sampling method. A heuristic speed-up criterion is considered in the objective function evaluator. In this work we study systematically the impact of the heuristic speed-up criterion in terms of precision and speed on the Monte Carlo evaluator, as well as the performance of a POP solver we propose, based on the embedding of the Monte Carlo evaluator into a Random Restart Local Search metaheuristic algorithm.