Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Practicality and Effectiveness Test of Graphic Design Learning Media Based on Android

— Based on preliminary observations on the implementation of Graphic Design learning, it is indicated that it is only limited to using printed module media, lecture methods, guided practice and not yet using media with android technology. This study aims to: (1) Generate a practical learning media for Graphic Design based on Android Technology. (2) Producing Learning Media Graphic Design based on Effective Android Technology. This research is a Research and Development. This study uses a study design development with 4D development model that consists of four main stages, namely, Define (definition), Design (design), Develop (development), and Disseminate (deployment). Based on the practicality test, the practicality test value was 85%. Effectiveness Test of learning media for Android-based Graphic Design shows effective results , this is also shown with a significant level of 0,000 <0.05, which means that there are significant differences between Student Learning Outcomes before being given an Android-based media ( Pretest ) and learning outcomes students after being given an Android-based media ( Posttest ) in the Informatics Engineering Education Study Program, Faculty of Engineering, State University of Padangs.
Determinants of gingival recessions in Portuguese adults

Objectives: The objective of this study consisted in determining the prevalence of gingival recession and potential risk factors associated in a sample of patients that had a dental appointment in the University Clinic of the Portuguese Catholic University in Viseu, Portugal. Methods: We conducted an epidemiological observational cross-sectional study where a sample of 101 patients was assessed. The participants were subjected to a questionnaire and an intra-oral clinical examination was made in order to assess gingival recessions. Results: The prevalence of recession was 85.1%. The presence of habits and a high plaque index are associated with the onset of recessions and its severity. The aesthetic condition was influenced only in 14.0% of the cases and just 17.4% of the patients with gingival recession had tooth hipersensibility. There is a stronger association between the development of recessions and using a brushing technique based mostly on horizontal movements and brushes with harder bristles. Conclusion: Although further studies need to be applied in a more representative sample, we conclude that the majority of the analyzed sample has already suitable oral health behaviors, however, some need to be modified as the understanding of the need to change certain habits to prevent development of recessions.
A Generic Simulation Model to Improve Procedure Scheduling in Endoscopy Suites

A Generic Simulation Model to Improve Procedure Scheduling in Endoscopy Suites Deborah Susanne Loach Masters of Applied Science Graduate Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering University of Toronto 2010 In 2008 Ontario implemented a screening program for colorectal cancer, which drew attention to the increasing demand for colonoscopies in the province. This trend and the forecasted demand of the new screening program created a need to increase capacity in hospital endoscopy suites. This thesis addresses this need by investigating throughput gains from scheduling according to physician speci c procedure durations in endoscopy suites. This is accomplished through the development of a scheduler and a generic discrete event simulation. Case study results show that physician speci c scheduling can increase throughput in the endoscopy suite while reducing undertime and only slightly increasing overtime. They further indicate the trade o between a 1:2 and 1:1 physician to room ratio, nding that while a 1:1 ratio increases throughput by 33% over a 1:2 ratio, physicians are 1.5 times more productive under a 1:2 ratio.
Determinants of Economic Growth in the Developing Countries: An Extreme Bounds Analysis

The present study aimed to test the hypothesis of inadequacy of growth theories in developing countries by identifying the robust determinants of economic growth under uncertainty in model selection. The extreme bounds analysis approach was adopted, and nearly 11 million regressions were estimated. Results showed that in developing countries, the behavior of some potential determinants of growth, such as corruption and bureaucracy quality, is against economic growth theories, and some of other variables are weak determinants of growth. The findings also confirmed the power of variables such as investment and trade proxies.
Utilization of Induction Furnace Slag in Concrete as Coarse Aggregate

1 Professor and Head, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Islamic University of Technology (IUT), Gazipur 1704, Bangladesh 2 Vice-Chancellor, Islamic University of Technology (IUT), Gazipur 1704, Bangladesh 3 Research Assistant, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Islamic University of Technology (IUT), Gazipur 1704, Bangladesh 4 Under Graduate Student, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Islamic University of Technology (IUT), Gazipur 1704, Bangladesh Corresponding author’s E-mail: apurbo@iut-dhaka.edu
Do Institutional Investors Exploit Market Anomalies? New Evidence from Alternative Mutual Funds

This paper investigates the anomaly trading behavior of a sample of mutual funds mimicking hedge fund strategies, namely alternativemutual funds (AMFs), based on both of their long and short equity positions. We document that AMFs trade on anomalies by buying underpriced stocks and short-selling overpriced peers. While AMFs’ buys and sells based on their long positions do not generate superior performance, their short-selling and covering activity based on their short positions significantly negatively predicts future abnormal returns. However, this predictability is mainly attributed to size and the nine anomaly characteristics considered. Overall, the results suggest that AMFs are sophisticated investors and that their short positions are more informative relative to their long positions.
Experiments with Off-Grid Renewable Energy Entrepreneurs in Rural Rwanda

Applications of lab experiments to real-world phenomena are limited. We fill the gap by examining how gender attitudes and performance under competitive situations in the lab reflect microenterprise outcomes in the renewable energy sector of Rwanda – a country with progressive gender policies despite its traditional patriarchal setup. We use the standard Niederle and Vesterlund (2007) experimental design in addition to a unique dataset from off-grid microenterprises, managed by entrepreneurs who have been working in mixed and single-sex teams since 2016. Our findings show that the gender composition of teams does not affect decisions to compete in the lab. However, returns to education and risk-taking in the real world are more valuable for single-sex teams than for mixed gender teams. We also show that under competitive situations, women perform as well as men. Findings from the field strongly support findings in the lab that female-owned enterprises do not underperform in competitive settings, which corroborates the external validity of our lab results. Given that lab and field findings suggest no significant differentials in terms of competitiveness or performance of females, there exists ample scope to increase women’s involvement in the renewable energy sector of Rwanda.
Social Semantic Emotion Analysis for Innovative Multilingual Big Data Analytics Markets

CNNs) with LSTM networks, in order to automatically learn the best representation of the speech signal directly from the raw time representation. In this novel work on the so-called end-to-end speech emotion recognition, we show that the use of the proposed topology significantly outperforms the traditional approaches based on signal processing techniques for the prediction of spontaneous and natural emotions on the RECOLA database (D4.1, Section 3). In Section 6 we draw conclusions and our approach toward incorporating the methods into the MixedEmotions platform.
Physicochemical and functional properties of cassava flour grown in different locations in Sabah, Malaysia

The tuber of cassava is used as raw materials in the bakery, food, pharmaceutical and garment industries. The nutritional value of cassava roots is important because they are the main part of the plant consumed in developing countries. However, there is much variation in the nutrient quality of the cassava root depends on the several factors, such as geographic location, variety, age of the plant, and environmental conditions. This study was performed to compare and provide information on physicochemical and functional properties of cassava flour planted in two different districts in Sabah, Malaysia, namely Tawau and Semporna. Proximate analysis showed significant differences (p<0.05) in crude protein (2.07 and 2.69%), crude fat (0.55 and 0.68%) and dietary fibre contents (2.38 and 2.09%). Determinations on physicochemical and functional characteristics of the cassava flour showed significant differences (p<0.05) in bulk density (0.57 and 0.79 g/ cm3 ), pH (6.75 and 6.72), colour and foam capacity (3.66 and 7.33%) while there was no significant difference shown in water and oil absorption capacities as well as emulsion capacity. Cassava planted in Semporna was observed to have high values of all pasting property parameters relative to the one planted in Tawau except for the setback viscosity. Gelatinization properties of flours showed significant differences (p<0.05) in onset (70.59 and 68.99°C) and end temperatures (79.81 and 80.03°C).
Three critical factors affecting automated image species recognition performance for camera traps

Abstract Ecological camera traps are increasingly used by wildlife biologists to unobtrusively monitor an ecosystems animal population. However, manual inspection of the images produced is expensive, laborious, and time‐consuming. The success of deep learning systems using camera trap images has been previously explored in preliminary stages. These studies, however, are lacking in their practicality. They are primarily focused on extremely large datasets, often millions of images, and there is little to no focus on performance when tasked with species identification in new locations not seen during training. Our goal was to test the capabilities of deep learning systems trained on camera trap images using modestly sized training data, compare performance when considering unseen background locations, and quantify the gradient of lower bound performance to provide a guideline of data requirements in correspondence to performance expectations. We use a dataset provided by Parks Canada containing 47,279 images collected from 36 unique geographic locations across multiple environments. Images represent 55 animal species and human activity with high‐class imbalance. We trained, tested, and compared the capabilities of six deep learning computer vision networks using transfer learning and image augmentation: DenseNet201, Inception‐ResNet‐V3, InceptionV3, NASNetMobile, MobileNetV2, and Xception. We compare overall performance on “trained” locations where DenseNet201 performed best with 95.6% top‐1 accuracy showing promise for deep learning methods for smaller scale research efforts. Using trained locations, classifications with <500 images had low and highly variable recall of 0.750 ± 0.329, while classifications with over 1,000 images had a high and stable recall of 0.971 ± 0.0137. Models tasked with classifying species from untrained locations were less accurate, with DenseNet201 performing best with 68.7% top‐1 accuracy. Finally, we provide an open repository where ecologists can insert their image data to train and test custom species detection models for their desired ecological domain.
Utility of World Society of Emergency Surgery Sepsis Severity Score in Predicting Outcomes of Intra-abdominal Infections

Background: Intra-abdominal infections are classified as simple or complicated. Many tools have been studied to predict risk factors and outcomes of patients with intra-abdominal infections. None of these tools has been adopted for patient care at the Kenyatta National Hospital (KNH), Kenya. Objective: To determine the utility of the World Society of Emergency Surgery (WSES) Sepsis Severity Score in predicting short-term outcomes of patients managed for complicated intra-abdominal infections. Methods: We conducted a hospital-based prospective cohort study. Patients aged 18 years and above with complicated intra-abdominal infections were recruited. Data were obtained on demographics, condition at admission, time to source control, origin of infection, immune suppressants and complications. IBM SPSS version 21.0 was used to obtain means and standard deviations while logistic regression was used for associations. Results: A sepsis severity score of 6.5, best predicted mortality having a sensitivity of 80% and a specificity of 20.9% were obtained. For each unit increase in the WSES scores, the odds of mortality were 2.1, organ dysfunction 2.2, CCU admission 2.1. Conclusion: Our sepsis severity score has demonstrated good performance in our adult population, and also ability to predict adverse outcomes other than mortality in patients managed for intra-abdominal sepsis. Keywords: WSES, Sepsis, Sepsis severity score, Intra-abdominal infections
Associations of sirtuins with clinicopathological variables and prognosis in human ovarian cancer

Ovarian cancer (OC) is the fifth most frequent cause of cancer-associated mortality worldwide, and is accompanied by asymptomatic progression. Sirtuins (SIRTs) are a family of nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide-dependent protein deacetylases, comprising seven members (SIRT1, SIRT2, SIRT3, SIRT4, SIRT5, SIRT6 and SIRT7). Accumulating evidence has demonstrated that SIRTs act as prognostic estimators in certain types of cancer such as lung cancer, prostate cancer, gastric cancer, breast cancer and colorectal cancer. However, it remains unknown whether individual SIRTs can serve as independent prognostic factors in OC. In the present study, the Kaplan-Meier plotter online database was utilized to examine the prognostic values of SIRT mRNA expression in patients with OC. The results demonstrated that the overexpression of SIRT3, SIRT5, SIRT6 and SIRT7 mRNAs was associated with a good prognosis in patients, whereas elevated mRNA levels of SIRT1 and SIRT4 indicated poor survival in patients with OC. In addition, among the favorable predictors, SIRT3, SIRT5, SIRT6 and SIRT7 overexpression were associated with overall survival (OS), according to clinical characteristics, such as histological classification, clinical stage, pathology grade, drug therapy and tumor protein p53 mutation status in patients with OC. Similarly, SIRT4 mRNA overexpression was associated with poor OS in pathological grade III cancer. High SIRT1 and SIRT4 expression were associated with unfavorable OS at all clinical stages. Furthermore, SIRT1 and SIRT4 were negatively associated with OS in drug-treated patients. In summary, the present study demonstrated that the SIRT family is associated with the prognosis of human OC, suggesting that individual SIRTs may also act as prognostic predictors in patients.
Targeted sequencing analysis of cell-free DNA from metastatic non-small-cell lung cancer patients: clinical and biological implications

Background Sequencing artifacts, clonal hematopoietic mutations of indeterminate potential (CHIP) and tumor heterogeneity have been hypothesized to contribute to the low concordance between tissue and cell-free DNA (cfDNA) molecular profiling with targeted sequencing. Methods We analyzed by targeted sequencing cfDNA from 30 healthy individuals, and cfDNA and matched tumor samples from 30 EGFR-mutant and 77 EGFR wild-type metastatic non-small-cell lung cancer (mNSCLC) patients. Discordant cases were solved by droplet digital PCR (ddPCR). Results By testing cfDNA from healthy donors, we developed an algorithm to recognize sequencing artifacts. Applying this method to cfDNA from mNSCLC patients, EGFR mutations were detected with a good sensitivity (76.7%) and specificity (97.4%). In contrast, sensitivity and specificity for KRAS variants were 61.5% and 93.8%, respectively. All EGFR and KRAS variants detected in plasma but not in tissue were confirmed by ddPCR, thus excluding sequencing artifacts. In a fraction of cases, KRAS mutations found in plasma samples were confirmed in tumor tissue suggesting tumor heterogeneity. KRAS variants were found to be more likely sub-clonal as compared with EGFR mutations, and a correlation between clonal origin and frequency of detection in plasma was found. In a case with both EGFR and KRAS variants in cfDNA, we could demonstrate the presence of the KRAS variant in tumor tissue associated with lack of response to tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs). Conclusions Although sequencing artifacts can be identified in targeted sequencing of cfDNA, tumor heterogeneity and CHIP are likely to influence the concordance between plasma and tissue testing.
The in vitro anti-fibrotic effect of Pirfenidone on human pterygium fibroblasts is associated with down-regulation of autocrine TGF-β and MMP-1

We aimed to investigate the in vitro effect of pirfenidone (PFD) on proliferation, migration and collagen contraction of human pterygium fibroblasts (HPFs). HPFs were obtained from tissue explants during pterygium surgery. After treatment with pirfenidone, the HPFs proliferation was measured by MTT, cell cycle progression measured by flow cytometry, cell migration measured by the scratch assay, and cell contractility evaluated in fibroblast-populated collagen gels. The expression of TGF-β1, TGF-β2, MMP-1 and TIMP-1 were also determined with quantitative PCR, western blot and immunofluorescence staining. Results showed pirfenidone markedly inhibited HPFs proliferation with an IC50 of approximately 0.2 mg/ml. After treatment with 0.2 mg/ml pirfenidone for 24 hours, HPFs were at G0/G1 cell cycle arrest, with significantly reduced cell migration capability and collagen contraction, decreased mRNA and protein expressions of TGF-β1, TGF-β2 and MMP-1, and no alterations of TIMP-1 expression. Thus, we have concluded that pirfenidone at 0.2 mg/ml inhibits proliferation, migration, and collagen contraction of HPFs, which is associated with decreased expression of TGF-β and MMP-1, and pirfenidone might represent a potentially therapeutic agent to prevent the recurrence of pterygium after surgery.
Learning Fundamentals of Building Construction Using 3D Visualization

Despite our current computing age, many students prior to college have limited experiences using technology in instructional settings or in academically productive ways. Compounded by varying academic standards, the computing ability of high school students entering construction management programs vary greatly. This study investigates the impact of computer assisted instruction on learning effectiveness in CAD courses which are integral to construction management curricula. These courses require learners to understand and know the basics of construction processes as well as use state-of-the-art software to explore building construction. Computer assisted instruction enables learners to grasp complex concepts using interactive video tutorials to reduce student frustrations resulting from minimal computing experiences and by assisting students beyond the limited hours of the classroom. To quantify the effect of computer assisted instruction, two student groups were exposed to 1) traditional classroom lecture and laboratory work in the classroom and 2) traditional classroom lectures using online video tutorials. After engaging these learning processes, the students were surveyed and evaluated regarding the students’ understanding of building construction using computer visualization software. Data show normalization of the overall classroom performance with no negative effect on overall student performance when using video tutorials as compared to traditional laboratory methods. Most important, this modified teaching method provides high-quality foundational knowledge in building construction simulation which is applied throughout the academic experience of students.
The Distribution of Hypersensitivity

The recent evolution of health and environmental controversies in industrialized countries has produced the emergence of new illnesses, often categorized as unexplained syndromes. This article examines how the collective movement of people with electromagnetic hypersensitivity has elevated the issue of electromagnetic waves to the point where it garnered, in the winter of 2007-2008, as much media impact as major issues such as asbestos, radioactivity, genetically modified organisms, or pesticides. This research, based on the study of the various actors, arguments, and accounts of people with electrohypersensitivity, proposes a reformulation of the theme of intuition in the world accessible to the senses, an indispensable step in the symmetrical analysis of controversies about medical categories and the distribution of individual and collective experiences
A pilot study of estrogen receptor (ER) expression in pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC).

Background Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is the most common pancreatic neoplasm with 5-year survival as low as 6%. It is therefore imperative to explore potential treatment avenues to improve survival in these groups of patients. Anti-estrogenic hormone therapy (AEHT) is well-tolerated and has been used in estrogen receptor (ER) subgroups of breast cancer. ER is a type of sex hormone receptor which have been reported to be expressed inconsistently in pancreatic cancer. This study aims to identify the presence of ER in PDAC specimens to guide potential use of AEHT in the management of unresectable PDAC. Methods This is a retrospective case control study of 10 patients (5 males, 5 females) who underwent pancreatic resections for PDAC from 2011 to 2012. Sections of the post-operative specimens were prepared and sent for ER staining. Pancreatic tissue specimens that were analysed included (I) ductal epithelial cells; (II) acinar cells; (III) islet cells; (IV) intralobular stromal cells; and (V) adenocarcinoma cells. Results Intralobular stromal cells were positively stained for ER in 7/10 (70%) of the cases, but were of weak intensity and patchy in distribution. Islet cells (<1%) stained for ER in 3/10 (30%) of the cases. Ductal epithelial cells, acinar cells and adenocarcinoma cells stained negative for ER in all of the cases. Conclusions This pilot study did not detect the presence of ER expression in PDAC. ER expression in intralobular stromal and islet cells which was previously unreported, were noted in our study. The role of AEHT in pancreatic cancer remains uncertain and does not appear to be of value at present.