Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Use of Plasma Tube for the Emergency Tests in Clinical Chemistry Laboratory

The major considerations for the STAT testing performed in laboratories are to obtain a fast and accurate test result. Increasing number of instruments and methods have been developed for making it possible to perform the STAT testing on plasma rather than serum. The aim of this study is to compare the STAT test results of the serum and plasma sample tubes. Venous blood samples of 78 patients were collected into BD Vacutainer®SSTTMII Advance serum gel and Vacutainer®BarricorTM plasma tube. The sampling orders of the tubes were switched during blood collection and loading the tubes into the instruments in order to ensure randomization. It was ensured the tubes were inverted, completely filled, and were allowed serum tubes to clot for a minimum of 30 minutes from the time of blood collection. It was determined that the chloride and sodium tests had a good concordance and the remaining tests had a strong level of concordance. Albumin, ALT, Amylase, AST, Bilirubin, Direct Bilirubin, BUN, Calcium, Chloride, Creatinine, Mg, Na, CK, CRP, Urea, BNP, troponin-T, D-dimer analysis was similar for both, with no significant difference. While it helps to improve TAT since no clotting time is required to obtain plasma it also supports sample quality and accurate test results with the absence of fibrin formation at plasma tube which is possible at serum tube samples. Plasma tubes may be used instead of serum tubes due to the possibility of hemolysis caused by sample transfer required to obtain serum.
The combined use of steam-treated bentonites and natural zeolites in the oenological refining process

Abstract Industrial minerals, particularly bentonites, have long been used in treatments to improve the stability and shelf life of white wines. We evaluated a new combination of rocks and minerals, including steam-treated bentonites and natural zeolites (chabazite and phillipsite), to greatly reduce the risk of protein and tartaric instability of wines. Detailed mineralogical, chemical and electrokinetic studies of these materials were conducted using powder X-ray diffraction (PXRD), X-ray fluorescence (XRF), microporosimetry, BET surface-area analysis and zeta-potential measurements. Several model wine solutions containing Bovine Serum Albumin (BSA) were prepared to evaluate the oenological performance of the rock/mineral combinations. UV-VIS spectrophotometry and ion chromatography were used to evaluate the degree of wine stabilization from the protein and tartaric point of view. The experimental results showed that steam treatment modifies both the microporosity and external surface area of the bentonite. These changes in surface area, along with creation of hydrophobic surfaces, significantly modified the behaviour of the steam-treated bentonites, requiring an increase in the amount of material necessary to bring the protein content to required levels. An important benefit derived from the use of steam-treated bentonites is that the pre-mixing with water before addition to wine is not necessary, as the material is readily dispersed. Finally, the addition of natural zeolites effectively decreased the potassium content, thereby improving the tartaric stability of white wines. In addition, this procedure results in minimal waste, as the bentonite-zeolite mixture can be reused as soil amendments in agriculture.
Examining Marketing and Operations Integration in Public Sector Industries

Extant research has focussed on the interface of marketing and operations in the private sector. However, existing research has neglected how effectively public sector organisations integrate marketing and operations. Previous private sector oriented research has emphasized the importance of cross-functional integration to develop the competitive performance of organisations, and in particular between marketing and operations functions. This is because of the direct contribution of these two areas to create value for customers. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to examine marketing and operations interface in case study organisations in the public textile industry sector in Iraq; which may struggle to develop their capabilities in the post war Iraqi market. The research carried out 21 semi-structured interviews in the cases in order to gather and to build in-depth understanding regarding the interactions of marketing and operations. The study explored a new approach to investigate the integration between marketing and operations in the Iraqi public sector industries. The research makes significant advances on the extant literature given its focus on a public sector manufacturing industry, with particular emphasis on a post conflict industrial environment and developing country. It posits a theoretical model to drive future research and influence management practice.
Exchange Rates and Monetary Policy with Heterogeneous Agents: Sizing up the Real Income Channel

Introducing heterogeneous households to a New Keynesian small open economy model amplifies the real income channel of exchange rates: the rise in import prices from a depreciation lowers households’ real incomes, and leads them to cut back on spending. When the sum of import and export elasticities is one, this channel is offset by a larger Keynesian multiplier, heterogeneity is irrelevant, and expenditure switching drives the output response. With plausibly lower short-term elasticities, however, the real income channel dominates, and depreciation can be contractionary for output. This weakens monetary transmission and creates a dilemma for policymakers facing capital outflows. Delayed import price pass-through weakens the real income channel, while heterogeneous consumption baskets can strengthen it.
Grazing enhances carbon cycling, but reduces methane emission in the Siberian Pleistocene Park tundra site

Abstract. Large herbivore grazing has been shown to substantially alter tundra soil and vegetation properties as well as carbon fluxes, yet observational evidence to quantify the impact of herbivore introduction into Arctic permafrost ecosystems remains sparse. In this study we investigated growing season CO2 and CH4 fluxes with flux chambers on a former wet tussock tundra inside Pleistocene Park, a landscape experiment in Northeast Siberia with a 22 year history of grazing. Reference data for an undisturbed system were collected on a nearby ungrazed tussock tundra. Linked to a reduction in soil moisture, topsoil temperatures at the grazed site reacted one order of magnitude faster to changes in air temperatures compared to the ungrazed site and were significantly higher, while the difference strongly decreased with depth. Overall, both GPP (gross primary productivity, i.e. CO2 uptake by photosynthesis) and Reco (ecosystem respiration, i.e. CO2 release from the ecosystem) were significantly higher at the grazed site with notable variations across plots at each site. The increases in CO2 component fluxes largely compensated each other, leaving NEE (net ecosystem exchange) similar across grazed and ungrazed sites for the observation period. Soil moisture and CH4 fluxes at the grazed site decreased over the observation period, while in contrast the constantly water-logged soils at the ungrazed site kept CH4 fluxes at significantly higher levels. Our results indicate that grazing of large herbivores promotes topsoil warming and drying, effectively accelerating CO2 turnover while decreasing methane emissions. Our experiment did not include autumn and winter fluxes, and thus no inferences can be made for the annual NEE and CH4 budgets at tundra ecosystems.
CuRe: Learning Curiosity-Driven Representations for Reinforcement Learning

: Vision-based reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising approach to 1 solve control tasks involving images as the main observation. State-of-the-art 2 RL algorithms still struggle in terms of sample efﬁciency, especially when using 3 image observations. This has led to increased attention on integrating state rep-4 resentation learning (SRL) techniques into the RL pipeline. Work in this ﬁeld 5 demonstrates a substantial improvement in sample efﬁciency among other bene-6 ﬁts. However, to take full advantage of this paradigm, the quality of samples used 7 for training plays a crucial role. More importantly, the diversity of these samples 8 could affect the sample efﬁciency of vision-based RL, but also its generalization 9 capability. In this work, we present an approach to improve sample diversity. Our 10 method enhances the exploration capability of RL algorithms, by taking advan-11 tage of the SRL setup. Our experiments show that our proposed approach boosts 12 the visitation of problematic states, improves the learned state representation, and 13 outperforms the baselines for all tested environments. These results are most ap-14 parent for environments where the baseline methods struggle. Even in simple en-15 vironments, our method stabilizes the training, reduces the reward variance, and 16 promotes sample efﬁciency. 17
Lifetime image reconstruction super resolution microscopy: principles, applications and underlying photophysics

Many biological structures exist on a scale smaller than can be resolved by conventional fluorescence microscopy, which has limited the study of cellular processes. For this reason, there has been a large amount of research over the past decade dedicated to the development of super resolution microscopy techniques, which allow optical imaging of structures below the so-called resolution limit. In particular there has been much interest in developing super resolution microscopy techniques capable of non-destructive imaging of living samples. A novel super resolution microscopy technique, lifetime image reconstruction super resolution (LIR-SR), is presented here; this uses continuous wave stimulated emission depletion (CW STED) to shorten the fluorescence lifetimes of fluorophores within a labelled sample. Differential lifetime shortening across the area of a scanning laser beam pair in the microscope results in spatial variation in the distribution of detected fluorescence on a nanosecond timescale, which can be subsequently used to reconstruct a super resolution image. Detailed theory of LIR-SR is explained, as well as the microscope hardware and computational methods used for its implementation. The technique is then tested on structures of known size and shape to gauge performance, and future directions for the technique are discussed. Spectroscopic studies of CW STED are also undertaken to better understand the underlying photophysics of the process. The effects of solvent viscosity on CW STED are investigated and analysed, and a mathematical model of CW STED is presented. Further investigations are then undertaken which address a wide range of factors which could affect CW STED, including out-of-focus fluorescence and involvement of the triplet state, and possible refinements to the model of CW STED are suggested in light of the experimental results.
Effect of Near-Fault Pulsed Ground Motions on Seismic Response and Seismic Performance to Tunnel Structures

Seismic analysis of tunnels close to or crossing seismogenic faults is a complex problem, which is often neglected at the design stage for the lack of specific codes or guidelines and also because underground structures are considered less vulnerable than that of the corresponding above-ground facilities. Near-fault ground motions are generally assumed to providing more powerful energy to tunnel structures. Therefore, a recently developed velocity pulse equivalent model is proposed to synthesize the artificial near-fault pulsed ground motion for the seismic response behavior of the tunnel structure. A newly proposed nonlinear dynamic time history methodology, the incremental dynamic analysis method, is introduced into the analysis of seismic performance and fragility for tunnel structures. This study takes the Zheduoshan tunnel as a case study to illustrate the effects of velocity pulse on the seismic response behavior and seismic performance. The applicability of different seismic intensity measures is preliminarily discussed, and the vulnerability of the tunnel structure at different characteristic locations is analyzed. Afterward, the seismic vulnerability probabilities of the tunnel structure under the action of the near-fault pulsed ground motions and the far-field ground motions are presented, and then, the failure probabilities of the tunnel structure under the three-level support requirements are obtained. Research results provide an objective assessment of the velocity pulse effects and acts as a reference for the likely seismic damage assessment of tunnel structures.
Cascades Across Networks Are Sufficient for the Formation of Echo Chambers: An Agent-Based Model

Investigating how echo chambers emerge in social networks is increasingly crucial, given their role in facilitating the retention of misinformation, inducing intolerance towards opposing views, and misleading public and political discourse (e.g., disbelief in climate change). Previously, the emergence of echo chambers has been attributed to psychological biases and inter-individual differences, requiring repeated interactions among network-users. In the present work we show that two core components of social networks—users self-select their networks, and information is shared laterally (i.e. peer-to-peer)—are causally sufficient to produce echo chambers. Crucially, we show that this requires neither special psychological explanation (e.g., bias or individual differences), nor repeated interactions—though these may be exacerbating factors. In fact, this effect is made increasingly worse the more generations of peer-to-peer transmissions it takes for information to permeate a network. This raises important questions for social network architects, if truly opposed to the increasing prevalence of deleterious societal trends that stem from echo chamber formation.
Drainage of an ice-dammed lake through a supraglacial stream: hydraulics and thermodynamics

Abstract. The glacier-dammed Lac des Faverges, located on Glacier de la Plaine Morte (Swiss Alps), drained annually as a glacier lake outburst flood since 2011. In 2018, the lake volume reached more than 2 × 106 m3 and the resulting flood caused damages to the infrastructure downstream. In 2019, a supraglacial channel was dug to artificially initiate a surface lake drainage, thus limiting the lake water volume and the corresponding hazard. The peak in lake discharge was successfully reduced by over 90 % compared to 2018. We conducted extensive field measurements of the lake-channel system during the 48-days drainage event of 2019 to characterize its hydraulics and thermodynamics. The derived Darcy-Weisbach friction factor, which characterizes the water flow resistance in the channel, ranges from 0.17 to 0.48. This broad range emphasizes the factor’s variability, and questions the choice of a constant friction factor in glacio-hydrological models. For the Nusselt number, which relates the channel-wall melt to the water temperature, we show that the classic, empirical Dittus-Boelter equation with the standard coefficients is not adequately representing our measurements, and we propose a suitable pair of coefficients to fit our observations. This hints at the need to continue the research into how heat transfer at the ice/water interface is described in the context of glacial hydraulics.
Reduced Temperature Sensitivity of Maximum Latewood Density Formation in High-Elevation Corsican Pines under Recent Warming

Maximum latewood density (MXD) measurements from long-lived Black pines (Pinus nigra spp. laricio) growing at the upper treeline in Corsica are one of the few archives to reconstruct southern European summer temperatures at annual resolution back into medieval times. Here, we present a compilation of five MXD chronologies from Corsican pines that contain high-to-low frequency variability between 1168 and 2016 CE and correlate significantly (p < 0.01) with the instrumental April–July and September–October mean temperatures from 1901 to 1980 CE (r = 0.52−0.64). The growth–climate correlations, however, dropped to −0.13 to 0.02 afterward, and scaling the MXD data resulted in a divergence of >1.5 ◦C between the colder reconstructed and warmer measured temperatures in the early-21st century. Our findings suggest a warming-induced shift from initially temperature-controlled to drought-prone MXD formation, and therefore question the suitability of using Corsican pine MXD data for climate reconstruction.
Extrapolation of Volatility Persistence in Stock Returns Based on Momentum and Price Reversal Strategies

In this paper we re-examine the influence of common risk factors in momentum and price reversal based portfolios and extrapolate the role of volatility persistence. We show that accounting for conditional heteroskedasticity increases the evidence that common risk factor misses the continuation of size and momentum based portfolio returns. We also provide a characterization of predictable heteroskedasticity in the variability of portfolio returns formed on various past-return behaviors and demonstrate that accounting for conditional heteroskedasticity increases the evidence that a three factor model captures the reversal for the post-formation returns of long-term losers (smaller distressed stocks) and winners (strong stocks). The interesting aspect of our result is that various classes of firms react differently to volatility risk and both the average size and book-to-market equity of firms are important sources of potential risk loading even under the presence of strong volatility persistence.
Dose–Effect Relationship Between Gastric Cancer and Common Digestive Tract Symptoms and Diagnoses in Anhui, China

Background Early prevention and diagnosis are key to reducing the huge burden of gastric cancer (GC). Nearly half of the population worldwide are suffering from some form of digestive tract conditions (symptoms/diagnoses, DTCs) but their relations with GC are not well understood. We aim to explore the relationships (especially dose–effect relationships) between GC and DTCs. Methods This study used data from a community-based case–control study in Anhui, China during 2016–2019 and performed multivariate conditional logistic regression modeling of the associations between GC and DTCs. Results A total of 2255 participants (451 cases and 1804 controls) completed the study. Statistically significant relations (P<0.05) were found between GC and the presence of gastroesophageal reflux [odds ratio (OR)=1.41], odynophagia (OR=1.87), stomach discomfort (OR=1.86), poor appetite (OR=2.01) and Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori) infection (OR=4.39). When the DTCs were divided into duration grades, all these ORs presented an increasing trend (P<0.05), being 1.89 to 2.45 for gastroesophageal reflux, 1.63 to 3.78 for stomach discomfort, 2.36 to 5.29 for poor appetite, and 3.95 to 10.03 for H. pylori infection. When the DTCs were divided into severity grades, the ORs also witnessed an increasing trend (P<0.05), being 1.69 to 2.52 for gastroesophageal reflux, 2.44 to 3.56 for stomach discomfort, and 2.22 to 2.75 for poor appetite. When the DTCs were divided into duration-severity grades, the ORs displayed a much steeper increasing trend, being 0.49 to 4.96 for gastroesophageal reflux, 1.50 to 6.33 for odynophagia, 0.47 to 3.32 for stomach discomfort, and 0.40 to 10.47 for poor appetite. In contrast, the ORs for the lower DTCs were generally tested without statistical significance. Conclusion The study revealed consistent dose–effect associations between GC and duration of gastroesophageal reflux, stomach discomfort, poor appetite, and H. pylori infection; severity of gastroesophageal reflux, stomach discomfort and poor appetite; and duration-severity of gastroesophageal reflux, odynophagia, stomach discomfort and poor appetite. These should inform future prevention, diagnosis and further research in patients with GC.
Female differential allocation in response to extrapair offspring and social mate attractiveness

Abstract Renewed debate over what benefits females might gain from producing extra‐pair offspring emphasizes the possibility that apparent differences in quality between within‐pair and extra‐pair offspring are confounded by greater maternal investment in extra‐pair offspring. Moreover, the attractiveness of a female's social mate can also influence contributions of both partners to a reproductive attempt. Here, we explore the complexities involved in parental investment decisions in response to extra‐pair offspring and mate attractiveness with a focus on the female point of view. Adult zebra finches paired and reproduced in a colony setting. A male's early‐life diet quality and his extra‐pair reproductive success were used as metrics of his mating attractiveness. Females paired with males that achieved extra‐pair success laid heavier eggs than other females and spent less time attending their nests than their mates or other females. Extra‐pair nestlings were fed more protein‐rich hen's egg than within‐pair nestlings. Females producing extra‐pair offspring had more surviving sons than females producing only within‐pair offspring. Collectively, results show that females differentially allocate resources in response to offspring extra‐pair status and their social mate's attractiveness. Females may also obtain fitness benefits through the production of extra‐pair offspring.
Teleophthalmology Service: Organization, Management, Actual Current Applications, and Future Prospects

Teleophthalmology (TO) consists of the clinical and therapeutic approach to the patient (e-Health) using informatic and telecommunication systems. Already widespread worldwide, it aims to improve patient care, expand the healthcare offer, and access to medical care by reducing overall costs. Despite the organizational, legal, and management difficulties, the substantial economic investments necessary for the start-up of equipped structures and efficient territorial services are amply rewarded by economic results and optimal services for professionals and patients. This review specifically analyses the current scenario of teleophthalmology, the points for and against its application in different sociodemographic realities, and in particular, the current and future fields of use.
Salivary characteristics may be associated with burning mouth syndrome?

Background Burning mouth syndrome (BMS) it is characterized by burning and uncomfortable sensations with no clinical alterations or laboratory findings. The evaluation of the salivary characteristics of people with BMS can help the understanding of the pathogenesis of this condition. This case-control study aimed to trace the salivary profile of women with burning mouth syndrome (BMS). Material and Methods 40 women with BMS and 40 control women were recruited. Unstimulated salivary flow rate (uSFR), pH, salivary cortisol levels, salivary viscosity, and oral health impact profile (OHIP-14 questioner) were determined. P< 0.05 was considered statistically significant. Results For uSFR, mean values obtained for BMS and for control group respectively were 0.35 and 0.61 mL/min; for pH, 7.23 and 7.34; for cortisol levels, 0.36 and 0.15 μg/dL; for viscosity values, 31.1 and 45.01 mPas and for OHIP-14 scores, 21.7 and 5.7. To uSFR, cortisol levels, viscosity values and OHIP-14 scores, differences were statistically significant. Salivary cortisol levels and OHIP-14 scores were correlated positively (rho = 0.624; p< 0.05). Conclusions BMS women have lower uSFR and salivary viscosity and higher salivary cortisol levels that were associated with worse quality of life, compared with the control group. Key words:Xerostomia, Burning mouth syndrome, Viscosity.