Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Responses of a Semi-dwarf Wheat to Temperatures Representing a Tropical Dry Season. I. Non-Extreme Temperatures

SUMMARY Under controlled environment conditions a semi-dwarf wheat, Mexico 120, was subjected to day temperatures of 32 and 27°C, with night temperatures of 21 or 16°C, which are similar to those occurring for a large part of the dry (winter) season of the Ord River valley area of northern Australia. Temperature differences imposed only during the 23 days between sowing and floral initiation produced effects which persisted throughout later growth, when all plants were grown under one temperature regime. The effects of temperature differences before floral initiation were greater than those of similar temperature differences imposed after ear emergence began. The maximum temperatures occurring even in the coolest months probably limit maximum potential grain yields in an environment similar to that of the Ord River valley.
Coordination and Commitment in International Climate Action: Evidence from Palm Oil

Weak environmental regulation has global consequences. When domestic regulation fails, the international community can intervene by targeting emitters with import tariffs. I develop a dynamic empirical framework for evaluating import tariffs as a substitute for domestic regulation, and I apply it to the market for palm oil, a major driver of deforestation and one of the largest sources of emissions globally. Coordinated, committed tariffs reduce emissions by 39% relative to 40% under domestic regulation, but free-riding concerns undermine coordination and static incentives undermine commitment. Alternatives include unilateral EU action and a domestic export tax, which reduce emissions by up to 6% and 39%. The export tax generates significant revenue at the expense of foreign consumers and is fiscally appealing independent of emission concerns.
Title : Crystal structures of bacterial Small Multidrug Resistance transporter EmrE in 1 complex with structurally diverse substrates 2

22 Proteins from the bacterial small multidrug resistance (SMR) family are proton-coupled 23 exporters of diverse antiseptics and antimicrobials, including polyaromatic cations and 24 quaternary ammonium compounds. The transport mechanism of the Escherichia coli transporter, 25 EmrE, has been studied extensively, but a lack of high-resolution structural information has 26 impeded a structural description of its molecular mechanism. Here we apply a novel approach, 27 multipurpose crystallization chaperones, to solve several structures of EmrE, including a 2.9 Å 28 structure at low pH without substrate. We report five additional structures in complex with 29 structurally diverse transported substrates, including quaternary phosphonium, quaternary 30 ammonium, and planar polyaromatic compounds. These structures show that binding site 31
CAiD: A Self-supervised Learning Framework for Empowering Instance Discrimination in Medical Imaging

Recently, self-supervised instance discrimination methods have achieved significant success in learning visual representations from unlabeled natural images. However, given the marked differences between natural and medical images, the efficacy of instance-based objectives, focusing on learning the most discriminative global features in the image (i.e., wheels in bicycle), remains unknown in medical imaging. Our preliminary analysis showed that high global similarity of medical images in terms of anatomy hampers instance discrimination methods in capturing a set of distinct features, negatively impacting their performance on medical downstream tasks. To alleviate this limitation, we have developed a simple yet effective self-supervised framework, called Context-Aware instance Discrimination ( CAiD ). CAiD aims to improve instance discrimination learning by providing finer and more discriminative information encoded from diverse local context of unlabeled medical images. We conduct a systematic analysis to investigate the utility of the learned features from a three-pronged perspective: (i) generalizability and transferability, (ii) separability in the embedding space, and (iii) reusability. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that CAiD (1) enriches representations learned from existing instance discrimination methods; (2) delivers more discriminative features by adequately capturing finer contextual information from individual medial images; and (3) improves reusability of low/mid-level features compared to standard instance discriminative methods. As open science, all codes and pre-trained models are available on our GitHub page
Research on Runtime Query Optimization Technology of Spark SQL

Spark SQL uses SQL to describe the task of data analysis and optimizes it according to the theory of query optimization, which effectively improves the efficiency of execution. However, the query optimization of Spark SQL still has the following shortcomings at present. It requires the operator to collect statistics information explicitly through the collection commands of statistics information. In addition, because the collected statistics information is not accurate enough, the optimization effect will be poor. To solve the above problems, this paper proposes an algorithm that collects statistics at runtime and optimizes the query adaptively. The algorithm uses Bloom Filter Pruning to prune data that does not meet the join conditions before a join operation is executed. In order to estimate the cardinality of the intermediate relationship of the join more accurately, the algorithm uses AMS Sketch and Bloom Filter to estimate the cardinality. Finally, the algorithm generates an optimization algorithm of the join based on the connection of graph. Experiments have proven that the BFP algorithm can prune the input of join by up to 12% without considering the join order. The algorithm for join plan generation can produce the optimal plans in 14 out of 18 queries without pre-collecting statistics data and save execution time by up to 31%, and the time spent on the collection of statistics information is no more than 5% of the total execution time.
Use of Fonseca’s Questionnaire to assess the prevalence and severity of Temporomandibular disorders among university students - a cross sectional study

Aim: Temporomandibular disorders (TMD) are one of the main causes of non-dental orofacial pain. It has been reported that TMD occurred more frequently among individuals in stressful situations and that university students are more likely to have a high risk of anxiety related disorders. This study aims to assess the prevalence and severity of TMD in undiagnosed population consisting of students of different faculties in a university campus in Bengaluru using the Fonseca’s questionnaire.Material and Methods: Descriptive cross-sectional study conducted at a University Campus, Bengaluru. Completed forms of Fonseca’s questionnaire were collected from the sample consisted of 300 students. The questionnaire had two main parts. First part collected demographic information and past relevant histories. Second part had Fonseca’s 10 questions. The TMD severity was categorized as no TMD (0-15), mild TMD (20-40), moderate TMD (45-65) and severe TMD (70-100). Results: 33.3% on the sample showed varying signs of TMD. There was no statistically significant differences found between the TMD and non TMD groups with respect to age and sex. But when comparing varying grades of TMD there was a statistically highly significant difference seen in relation to age of the subjects.Conclusions:A high prevalence of TMD was found in the university students with majority of the cases having milder signs of TMD.
The Association between Hypoxia-Induced Low Activity and Apoptosis Strongly Resembles That between TTX-Induced Silencing and Apoptosis

In the penumbra of a brain infarct, neurons initially remain structurally intact, but perfusion is insufficient to maintain neuronal activity at physiological levels. Improving neuronal recovery in the penumbra has large potential to advance recovery of stroke patients, but penumbral pathology is incompletely understood, and treatments are scarce. We hypothesize that low activity in the penumbra is associated with apoptosis and thus contributes to irreversible neuronal damage. We explored the putative relationship between low neuronal activity and apoptosis in cultured neurons exposed to variable durations of hypoxia or TTX. We combined electrophysiology and live apoptosis staining in 42 cultures, and compared effects of hypoxia and TTX silencing in terms of network activity and apoptosis. Hypoxia rapidly reduced network activity, but cultures showed limited apoptosis during the first 12 h. After 24 h, widespread apoptosis had occurred. This was associated with full activity recovery observed upon reoxygenation within 12 h, but not after 24 h. Similarly, TTX exposure strongly reduced activity, with full recovery upon washout within 12 h, but not after 24 h. Mean temporal evolution of apoptosis in TTX-treated cultures was the same as in hypoxic cultures. These results suggest that prolonged low activity may be a common factor in the pathways towards apoptosis.
The use of a figure-of-merit (FOM) for optimization in digital mammography: an exploratory study in Malta

This PhD thesis comprises an exploratory study in digital mammography physics that portrays two essential components. The first component (1) presents the first national survey of the technical performance of mammography equipment in Malta using the European Protocol [1-3]. This demonstrated considerable differences in the technical performance of the mammography units across the country with a wide range in performance, patient dose and image quality. A common problem was that many clinics had implemented computed radiography (CR) systems to replace existing film-screen (FS) systems without due consideration to optimization. All direct digital (DR) mammography units met current international technical performance standards and the effectiveness of DR mammography in reducing patient dose and maintaining high image quality compared to CR has been confirmed. The second component (2) was to explore the use of a figure-of-merit (FOM) for optimization and characterisation in digital mammography. The use of image quality parameters in digital mammography such as contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) or signal-difference-to-noise ratio (SDNR), signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and detective quantum efficiency (DQE) have been traditionally used for the quantitative evaluation of the system performance against international standards or guidelines. The use of FOMs is relatively new and may be considered as a new quality assurance tool in digital mammography permitting the quantitative and simultaneous assessment of image quality and patient dose. The main objective in having a FOM is to have a numerical expression representing the efficiency and efficacy of a given system gauging how good or poor a system is performing. This may be useful in optimization and in predicting a predetermined or expected image quality with a given amount of radiation dose for a given system. The most interesting aspect of the FOMs in this work will be to investigate and explore the possibility for inter-system comparison.
Goodness‐of‐fit tests for parametric models based on biased samples

The authors study the problem of checking the adequacy of a parametric model for a distribution using several possibly censored weight biased samples. They discuss identifiability problems related to the underlying distribution and the distributions of the biased samples. They propose a test statistic based on the supremum of the weighted aggregated martingale residual processes from a number of such samples. Both numerical and graphical procedures are discussed, which the authors apply to do model checking for oil exploration drilling data.
In-vivo human study of skin optical properties in individuals with obesity

Obesity is a widespread chronic illness which affects over 40% of the US adult population and its world-wide prevalence has increased over the years impacting both low and high-income countries. Obesity has been linked to higher risk of non-communicable diseases such as cardiovascular disease, type-2 diabetes, dyslipidemia, hypertension, among others. Currently the mostly prescribed regimes to combat chronic illness associated with obesity are efforts to change diet, behavior, and physical activity. Wearable devices have the potential of helping users reduce their obesity levels as these devices can easily acquire and communicate biometric data with users and clinicians. However, these technologies depend on optical sensors that are sensitive to molecular skin composition. We hypothesize that individuals with high BMI levels will present changes in skin optical properties when compared to their non-obese counterparts. Our objective is to capture skin optical properties at the wrist among a diverse cohort using a commercial optical system for research use. To meet an appropriate power, the human study, composed of males and females, is conducted with 100 adult participants. Statistical methods, including linear regression and t-tests, are used to determine interactions between measured data and participant demographics. We believe these results can improve design of optical wearables for the obese.
Laser induced fluorescence of cervical tissues: an in-vitro study for the diagnosis of cervical cancer from the cervicitis

The transformation of normal cervix to cervicitis as well as to cervical cancer is accompanied with biochemical alterations at cellular level. Laser induced fluorescence (LIF) can reflect those changes either as variations in the fluorescence intensity or as shift in the fluorescence maxima of bio fluorophores present in tissues. The curve resolved fluorescence investigation of tissues under 325 nm excitation provides collagen, bound nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NADH) and free NADH as the discrimination factors between normal, cervicitis and cervical cancer. Even though the fluorescence emission intensity derived from collagen fiber is comparable in both normal and cervicitis, a considerable reduction was observed for the cervical cancer tissues compared to the former. Fluorescence corresponding to bound NADH is found to be reduced during the progression from normal to cervicitis and to cervical cancer, whereas the free NADH shows an opposite trend. The principal component analysis (PCA) was performed to obtain classification of spectral data from different categories on a reduced dimensional space. Furthermore, to test the usefulness of the recorded fluorescence spectra in discriminating the malignant and non-malignant (cervicitis and normal) samples, a supervised machine learning model based on support vector machine (SVM) was built using the PCA-reduced data. The proposed SVM model was able to detect the malignant samples with a sensitivity of 94.19% and specificity of 96.51%. Moreover, the Raman spectral data from the corresponding tissue sites corroborate well with the observations derived from the fluorescence measurement. The results obtained in the present pilot study strongly suggests the potential of LIF technique combined with multivariate data analysis tool for the diagnosis of cervicitis and cervical malignancy.
A Behavioural Perspective on Vietnam's Corporate Safety Measures and Nudges in Covid-19

Robust enforcement of safety procedures is of critical importance for businesses in Vietnam in their efforts to prepare employees for a return to physical workplaces, especially in a country with only 38.8% of its population fully vaccinated as of late November 2021 (Ritchie et al., 2020). In academic literature, nudges are traditionally believed to enhance compliance to protective measures (Debnath and Bardhan, 2020). The aim of this paper is to test the strength of such theoretical analysis of nudges’ effectiveness by applying it to the context of companies in Vietnam. We performed a survey of 41 companies in various sectors and used regression models to interpret our data. One study found a positive significant relationship between automatic registration, monetary rewards, and percentage of employees vaccinated. In the same study, we found an average increase in vaccine uptake of 27.7% to 45.6% due to vaccination nudges. In our second study, we found no evidence that sanitising nudges encourage employees’ usage of sanitary utensils provided to them. Although our small sample size was a major limitation of this study, our findings put the functionality of nudges into a developing country’s context and analysed socio-economic factors that might have caused our results to differ from prior research. With this study being the first to examine the use of nudges to promote pro-health behaviour in large corporations during COVID-19, future research could delve deeper into the effect of other non-mandatory safety measures on overall workplace health.
Influence of urbanization on hourly extreme precipitation over China

The impact of rapid urbanization on the spatiotemporal pattern of short-term extreme precipitation in China remains unclear at the subnational scale. In this study, we present a general framework that measures urbanization-induced variation in hourly extreme wet season precipitation (April–October) from 1985 to 2012, with reference to a dynamic urban–rural station classification based on annual changes in urban extent. We found that urbanization in south China (<29° N) brings more extreme precipitation to urban areas than to suburbs, and reduces extreme precipitation continually over urban areas in parts of the north and northeast. Over 60% of provincial capital cities show significant changes in extreme precipitation due to urbanization, including smaller size cities separated from large urban clusters. Urbanization enhances extreme precipitation mainly in the local main part of the rainy season, which refers to May in the south (e.g. urban–rural differences of 0.70 mm h−1 in Guangzhou) and July–September in the central and north (1.16 mm h−1 in August of Beijing). Urbanization also increases hourly extreme precipitation at peak times in diurnal cycles. The results indicate that urbanization has caused overall more and more heterogeneous spatial patterns over China and concentrated distributions during the rainy season and peak time. These patterns warrant attention when assessing the risk of increased waterlogging and flash flooding in urban areas.
From molecular pathways to neural populations: investigations of different levels of networks in the transverse slice respiratory neural circuitry.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost, I would like to express my utmost gratitude to Dr. Jeffrey C. Smith from NIH, who recognized issues potentially detrimental to my academic career in 2009 and took actions by bringing these issues to the attention of the proper authority. With his support, I have been able to finally defend myself. Without him, the gravity of the situation would never have been officially acknowledged, and I would never have been able to complete my research work at Georgia Institute of Technology. Therefore, I hereby thank him for his trust and respect, and will carry his grace and magnanimous example with me in my heart pour toujours. I would also like to thank my advisor, Professor Robert Butera, who gave me free-reign to define, design, implement, and guide the evolution of my research work. In addition, especially during the committee update meetings, Professor Hang Lu, Professor Astrid Prinz, and Professor Eberhard Voit from my PhD committee have all given me invaluable guidance with infinite patience. Without them, I would not have been able to accomplish what I have accomplished during my oral defense. A large part of the computational work presented in this document is made possible by the fine individuals from Simatra Modeling Technologies (www.simatratechnologies.com), who allowed me to set up a workstation in their office and utilized their software to finish my simulations. Research work performed by previous colleagues – Dr. Luke Purvis and Ms. Jie Shao – has provided the solid foundation which facilitated my research; for this, I cannot thank them enough. Last but not least, I would like to thank several distinguished individuals & mentors – Mrs. M. all of them have supported me, helped me develop my career path, and taught me great courageous life lessons especially during the more difficult periods of my life – thank you!
Reference Standards for Nerve Conduction Studies of Individual Nerves of Lower Extremity With Expanded Uncertainty in Healthy Korean Adults

Objective To develop a set of reference standards for tibial motor, common peroneal motor, sural sensory, and superficial peroneal sensory nerve conduction studies (NCSs) with expanded uncertainty in a healthy Korean population. Methods Standardized procedures were conducted for individual lower extremity NCSs of 199 healthy participants in their 20s (n=100) and 50s (n=99). Mean values and expanded uncertainties for parameters were analyzed with thorough consideration of multiple uncertainty factors under the International Guide to the Expression of Uncertainty in Measurement. In addition, side-to-side differences in onset latency, amplitude, and nerve conduction velocity (NCV) were analyzed. Results Mean (reference range) for distal onset latency, baseline to negative peak amplitude, NCV of tibial motor nerve in males in their 20s were 4.3 ms (3.1–5.4 ms), 7.1 mV (3.4–10.9 mV), and 50.7 m/s (42.2–59.3 m/s), respectively; sural sensory nerve baseline to negative peak amplitude in males in their 20s was 21.7 μV (8.3–35.2 μV). Including the aforementioned data, we present a vast dataset of normative mean values and expanded uncertainties for NCSs of the leg in a healthy Korean population. Furthermore, upper limits for normal side-to-side differences for onset latency, amplitude, and NCV of each nerve are suggested. Conclusion To our knowledge, this is the first study to present the reference standards of leg NCSs with consideration for multifactorial uncertainties in an Asian population. We expect these results to help practitioners make reliable and reproducible clinical decisions.
Powerpoint Interaktif Materi Interaksi Manusia dengan Lingkungannya Kelas Sekolah Dasar

Penelitian ini dilatarbelakangi guru belum menggunakan media pembelajaran yang inovatif dan menarik dalam muatan pembelajaran IPS, sehingga siswa kesulitan dalam memahami materi. Peneltian ini bertujuan untuk mengembangkan media powerpoint interaktif materi interaksi manusia dengan lingkungannya muatan pembelajaran IPS kelas V SD Negeri Wonorejo 03 Kabupaten Semarang. Metode penelitian yang digunakan adalah Research and Development. Teknik pengumpulan data yang digunakan adalah wawancara, observasi, data dokumen, dan angket. Hasil penelitian ahli menunjukan bahwa media powerpoint interaktif telah lolos uji kelayakan. Penilaian dari ahli materi mendapatkan persentase 100% termasuk dalam kriteria sangat layak, dan penilaian dari ahli media mendapatkan persentase 100% termasuk dalam kriteria sangat layak. Hasil tanggapan dari siswa dan guru kelas V terhadap media powerpoint interaktif memperoleh persentase sebesar 99,48% dan 100% dengan kategori sangat layak. Simpulan dari penelitian ini adalah media powerpoint interaktif materi interaksi manusia dengan lingkungannya muatan pembelajaran IPS layak digunakan sebagai media pembelajaran di kelas.