Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Supramolecular Hydrogen-Bonded Liquid Crystals Formed from 4-(4′-Pyridylazophenyl)-4″-alkoxy Benzoates and 4-Substituted Benzoic Acids

Four pyridine-based derivatives (I 10, I 12, I 14, and I 18) with molecular formula CnH2n+1O-C6H4COOC6H4-N = N-C5H4N, that differ from each other in the number of carbon atoms, n, were prepared and characterized for their mesophase behavior. The number of carbons in the alkoxy chain varies between 10, 12, 14, to 18 atoms, respectively. Liquid crystalline properties were studied for two series of hydrogen-bonded liquid crystal complexes, consisting of the central 4-pyridylazophenyl benzoate and substituted benzoic acids. In the first series of the supramolecular complexes (group A), the lengths of the alkoxy chains on both of the azo pyridine and the benzoic acid components have varied between 10, 12, 14, and 18 carbons. In the second series (group B), the same proton-acceptors, i.e., the pyridyl azo derivatives, were used but with benzoic acids para-substituted with small compact polar groups, X. All of the newly prepared pyridine-based derivatives and their hydrogen-bonded complexes were found to be mesomorphic. The newly prepared pyridine-based derivatives and their supramolecular complexes in both groups were characterized for their mesophase behavior by differential scanning calorimetry, DSC, and polarized light microscopy, PLM. Four 4-alkoxybenzoic acids (CmH2m+1OC6H4COOH, II 10, II 12, II 14, and II 18) were used in group A series; the number of carbons (m) of their alkoxy groups also varies between 10, 12, 14, and 18, respectively. Substituents on the other group of acids (III a−f) in group B series vary, respectively, between CH3O, CH3, H, Br, CN, and NO2. Smectic C mesophase is induced in most of the binary mixtures investigated.
Interactive Image Exploration for Visually Impaired Readers using Audio-augmented Touch Gestures

Technologies such as text to speech and hardware braille displays provide alternative representations of electronic text. As a result, electronic documents provide increased accessibility to print-disabled users. However, non-textual graphical information in electronic documents remain largely inaccessible to the blind population. In this study, we explore audio-visual sensory substitution as a means of rendering graphical information present in electronic documents to blind users. To achieve this, we have extended the audio rendering approach used by the well-established vOICe algorithm to allow interactive and localised exploration of an image by means of gestures and the touch screen of a standard commercially-available tablet. The effectiveness of our approach was evaluated in a set of user trials that required six sighted and six blind subjects to identify elements of scenes consisting of a number of geometrical shapes and emoticons. Our results show that both groups of subjects were more successful at identifying shapes using the interactive algorithm than with the baseline vOICe algorithm to a highly statistically significant degree. Furthermore, the results indicate that this improvement is greatest for the most complex scenes. We conclude that, by introducing an interactive touch interface, the vOICe algorithm can be successfully extended to allow interactive exploration and interpretation of diagrams, thereby improving accessibility to material such as scientific publications.
Quantitative Non-Linear Inverse Scattering: A Wealth of Possibilities Through Smart Rewritings of the Basic Equations

Non-linearity arising from mutual interactions is one of the two main difficulties to be addressed in inverse scattering. In this paper, we first review and describe under a common rationale some approaches which have been introduced in literature in order to counteract non-linearity. In particular, we focus on possible rewritings of the Lippman Schwinger basic equation such to reduce the ‘degree of non-linearity’ of inverse scattering problem. In detail, three different rewritings are discussed and compared by emphasizing similarities and differences, and in the same ‘rewriting’ spirit, we also summarize and discuss the ‘Virtual Experiments’ framework. Then, some possible and effective joint exploitations of the above concepts are introduced, discussed and tested against numerical examples.
Ab Initio Calculations of Band Gaps and Absolute Band Positions of Polymorphs of RbPbI3 and CsPbI3: Implications for Main-Group Halide Perovskite Photovoltaics

Lead halide perovskites have attracted great interest because of rapid improvements in the efficiency of photovoltaics based on these materials. To predict new related functional materials, a good understanding of the correlations between crystal chemistry, electronic structure, and optoelectronic properties is required. Describing the electronic structure of these materials using density functional theory provides a choice of exchange-correlation functionals, including hybrid functionals, and inclusion of spin-orbit coupling, which is critical for the correct description of band gap and absolute band positions (ionization energy). Here, various computational schemes that employ different choices of exchange-correlation and hybrid functionals, and include or exclude spin-orbit coupling were implemented to examine these effects. Using PbI2 as an initial structural model, it is found that standard exchange correlation functionals (PBE) in conjunction with spin-orbit coupling suffice to locate ionization ene.
Effects of Annona Muricata Linn. Water Leaf Extract in Melamine-Induced Renal Impairments in Male Rats

The ameliorative effects of Annona muricata water leaf extract on renal impairments caused by induction of melamine were studied in male albino rats. Forty (40) albino rats were randomly distributed into various groups I to V (n=8). Group I (vehicle control) got 7ml/kg b.w of 10% tween 80, Groups II to V got 1000mg/kg body weight of melamine for 10 days. Group III was then given standard reference drug (100mg/kg b.w) allopurinol. While doses of 300 and 500mg/kg b.w of water leaf extracts were administered to Groups IV and V. Phytochemical analysis of water extracts yielded alkaloids (70mg/g), flavonoids (40mg/g), tannins (1.35mg/g), oxalates (0.66mg/g), Saponins (7.90mg/g), Cyanogenic glycosides (1.73mg/g), and phytates (1.34mg/g). Oral acute toxicity test gave zero mortality up to 5000mg/kg b.w for water extracts. Treatment with water extracts at 300mg/kg b.w resulted in significant (P<0.05) decrease in serum creatinine and urea while 500mg/kg b.w only resulted in significant (P<0.05) decrease in creatinine when compared to melamine-induced renal impaired rats that were not treated. The findings imply that renal impairment caused by melamine could be ameliorated at low dose of leaf extract of Annona muricata. Hence the leaf could be effective in the management of renal impairment.
Novel Saccharide-Photoinduced Electron Transfer Sensors Based on the Interaction of Boronic Acid and Amine

Two boronic acid systems, monoboronic acid 3 and diboronic acid 8, were synthesized. When saccharides form cyclic boronate esters with these boronic acids, the Lewis acid-base interaction between the boronic acid moiety and tertiary amine is strengthened; when saccharides form cyclic boronate esters with boronic acids the acidity of the boronic acid is enhanced. The strength of this acid-base interaction modulates the photoinduced electron transfer (PET) from the amine to anthracene. Both of these compounds show increased fluoresecence at pH 7.77 through supression of the photoinduced electron transfer from nitrogen to anthracene on saccharide binding, a direct result of the stronger boron-nitrogen bond. Compound 3 shows the typical selectivity of monoboronic acids towards saccharides. Compound 8 which has a cleftlike structure is particularly selective and sensitive for, glucose due to the formation of an intramolecular 1:1 complex between the two boronic acids and the 1,2- and 4,6-hydroxyls of glucose. This is the first example in which ditopic recognition of monosaccharides is achieved in a PET sensor system.
Effects of Different Functions of Attention on School Grades in Primary School Children

The present study aimed at exploring the effects of distinct attention functions on school grades in primary school children. The sample consisted of 208 Greek primary school children (2nd up to 6th grade) of both genders. The participants were examined individually with the Test of Attentional Performance for Children (KITAP). KITAP is a non-verbal computerized test battery designed to assess a variety of attention functions in children (e.g., selective, divided, sustained attention, flexibility). Performance in Language, Mathematics and Average mean performance was rated by the teachers. Vocabulary and working memory measures from WISC were used as control variables. The hierarchical regression analyses results provide empirical evidence for the a unique contribution of distractibility, alertness, sustained attention, divided attention, and inhibitory control scores to school grades after controlling for the effect of gender and verbal intelligence scores. Attention errors, omissions of critical stimuli, and variability scores were found to be the most sensitive indices for predicting school grades. Educational implications are discussed.
Rater Effects and Double Scoring in IRT Proficiency Estimation

Scoring constructed-response (CR) items often involves dealing with rater effects and multiple item scores. This paper presents the performance of IRT models when double ratings are used as item scores over single ratings when rater effects are present. Study 1 examined the influence of the number of ratings on the accuracy of proficiency estimation in the generalized partial credit model (GPCM), under varying levels of rater effects. Study 2 compared the accuracy of proficiency estimation of two IRT models (GPCM versus hierarchical rater model, HRM) for double ratings. The main findings were as follows: (1) rater effects substantially reduced the accuracy of IRT proficiency estimation; (2) double ratings relieved the negative impact of rater effects on proficiency estimation and improved the accuracy relative to single ratings; (3) IRT estimators showed different patterns in the conditional accuracy; (3) as more items and larger number of score categories were used, the accuracy of proficiency estimation improved; and (4) the HRM consistently showed better performance than the GPCM.
Significance of Mother Tongue influence on Saudi Female EFL Learners: a Critical Discourse Analysis

The speculation, that the Saudi EFL learners with less exposure to the target language exhibit more mother tongue influence on their second language speaking, is apparent. The phonetic similarity of two languages helps EFL learners to grasp the lexical accent with the accurate articulation of the words from the second language. However, the difference in sound patterns in various languages prompts the learners to mispronounce the words more frequently. This critical study endeavors to evaluate the influential aspects of the mother tongue on the EFL learners’ second language (L2) discourse. This research is carried out through a qualitative method for critical discourse analysis to answer the main question; what significant errors students make that reflect their mother tongue influence? For a comparative study, the participants are the Saudi undergraduates from multidimensional sections of female colleges in King Khalid University and the non-native English-speaking teachers from five different nations, who also manifest the influence of their mother tongue on English language speaking. Their recorded presentations and conversations were analyzed to identify the interference of their mother tongue on their English language performance. The language patterns of both students and the teachers eventually affect their English language efficiency. The significant outcome of this study reveals the possibility of the pros and cons of the mother tongue on L2 learning. The data also revealed that the inability of faculty members to produce the flawless accent of the English language has a significant effect on Saudi learners’ oral performance.
The Relationship of Environmental Uncertainty, Accounting Information System Efficiency and Energy Efficiency with Environmental and Operational Performance in Indonesia

Focusing on the current environmental era, the present study aims to evaluate the role of accounting and environment in driving the firm’s performance. Therefore, the study is motivated to evaluate the specific relationship of energy efficiency, accounting information system efficiency and environmental uncertainty with business performance. The current study measures the empirical impact of the performance drivers on two vital domains of a firm’s performance. The results of partial least square structural equational modelling confirm that energy efficiency and accounting information system efficiency have a positive and significant impact on operational and environmental performance. Moreover, the results further suggested that environmental uncertainty have a negative and significant impact on operational and environmental performance in multinational firms of Indonesia.
Periodontal Parameters in Indonesian Elderly and its Association with Cognitive Impairment

Periodontitis and cognitive impairment are very prevalent among the elderly. Increasing evidence indicates that there is a link between these two conditions. This study aimed to assess the association between periodontal health and cognitive function among nursing home residents in Jakarta, Indonesia. A cross-sectional study of 91 elderly subjects was conducted in a public nursing home in Jakarta, Indonesia. Subjects underwent cognitive and periodontal examinations. Cognitive function was assessed using the Hopkins Verbal Learning Test (HVLT). The following periodontal parameters were evaluated: plaque index (PlI), oral hygiene index (OHI), papillary bleeding index (PBI), pocket depths, gingival recession, attachment loss, and tooth loss. Sixty-one subjects had cognitive impairment and 30 subjects were cognitively normal. There were significant differences (p<.05) in age and education between the cognitively normal and cognitively-impaired subjects. However, there were no significant differences in gender between the two groups. There were significant differences in the plaque indices, OHI, papillary bleeding indices, pocket depths, gingival recession, attachment loss, and tooth loss between cognitively normal and cognitively-impaired subjects (p<.05). There were significant correlations between all periodontal parameters and cognitive function scores (p<.05). This study indicates that poorly periodontal health is significantly associated with cognitive impairment. Clinical article (J Int Dent Med Res 2020; 13(3): 1009-1012)
MARKETING COMMUNICATION IN THE CONTEXT OF SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION

The main focus of the article is to indicate the role of marketing communication in the context of social responsibility of public administration. The objective is to analyse selected forms and tools of marketing communication of Local Government Units. The communication conducted by local authorities should stimulate civic activity in public matters which is necessary for the proper management process in local government units. The more active the citizens are, the greater the chance to strengthen the resources of municipalities. These deliberations are based on the authors’ experience, supported by the analysis of literature.
The Impact of Socioeconomic Status and Ethnicity on Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease Patients

The Impact of Socioeconomic Status and Ethnicity on Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease Patients By Donald G Abshier MPA, Grand Canyon University, 2015 BS, Grand Canyon University, 2013 Doctoral Study Submitted in Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements for the degree of Doctor of Public Health Walden University February 2021 Abstract Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a progressive and debilitating respiratory condition that leads to significant medial and financial burdens. For many patients with COPD, multiple socioeconomic factors contribute to health disparities, including income, education, employment status, and race/ethnicity. The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of SES and race/ethnicity on COPD patients. For thisChronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a progressive and debilitating respiratory condition that leads to significant medial and financial burdens. For many patients with COPD, multiple socioeconomic factors contribute to health disparities, including income, education, employment status, and race/ethnicity. The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of SES and race/ethnicity on COPD patients. For this cross-sectional study, using secondary data analysis, the Social-Ecological Model (SEM), which discusses five levels of influence, was utilized. Data from over 3,222 participants aged 18 and over, living in Nevada were obtained from the 2018 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) study. Research questions were assessed using Pearson’s Chi-square and binomial logistic regression; bivariate analysis was used to determine the impact that SES and race/ethnicity had on COPD patients. According to the binomial logistic regression models, income p =. 004, education p = . 026, and employment status p = . 000 were statistically significant and had an impact on Nevada COPD patients in 2018. However, race/ethnicity, p = . 199, was not statistically significant thus did not have an impact on COPD patients in Nevada in 2018. Strategies based on this study could decrease cigarette sales that target individuals with low SES. The positive social change benefits from this study could reduce the number of people with low SES contract COPD. Initialing laws around the marketing of cigarettes in low-income areas might bring positive social change by decreasing the number of individuals who contract COPD, improvising their quality of life, and reducing medical expenses. The Impact of Socioeconomic Status and ethnicity on Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease Patients
ECLARE: Extreme Classification with Label Graph Correlations

Deep extreme classification (XC) seeks to train deep architectures that can tag a data point with its most relevant subset of labels from an extremely large label set. The core utility of XC comes from predicting labels that are rarely seen during training. Such rare labels hold the key to personalized recommendations that can delight and surprise a user. However, the large number of rare labels and small amount of training data per rare label offer significant statistical and computational challenges. State-of-the-art deep XC methods attempt to remedy this by incorporating textual descriptions of labels but do not adequately address the problem. This paper presents ECLARE, a scalable deep learning architecture that incorporates not only label text, but also label correlations, to offer accurate real-time predictions within a few milliseconds. Core contributions of ECLARE include a frugal architecture and scalable techniques to train deep models along with label correlation graphs at the scale of millions of labels. In particular, ECLARE offers predictions that are 2–14% more accurate on both publicly available benchmark datasets as well as proprietary datasets for a related products recommendation task sourced from the Bing search engine. Code for ECLARE is available at https://github.com/Extreme-classification/ECLARE
A Liquid Crystal Microlens with Hole-Patterned Electrodes on Both Substrates

Electrically controlled lens properties (liquid crystal microlens) can be obtained by utilizing molecular orientation effects in an axially symmetric nonuniform electric field. Excellent lens properties can be obtained using a symmetric electrode structure with hole-patterned electrodes on both substrates. Several kinds of optical properties have been investigated and characteristic phenomena of the liquid crystal microlens are discussed in terms of a molecular orientation model.
Induced OWA Operator for Group Decision Making Dealing with Extended Comparative Linguistic Expressions with Symbolic Translation

Nowadays, decision making problems have increased their complexity and a single decision maker cannot handle these problems, with a more diverse and comprehensive view of them being necessary, which results in group decision making (GDM) schemes. The complexity of GDM problems is often due to their inherent uncertainty that is not solved just by using a group. Consequently, different methodologies has been proposed to handle it, in which, the use of the fuzzy linguistic approach stands out. Among the multiple fuzzy linguistic modeling approaches, Extended Comparative Linguistic Expressions with Symbolic Translation (ELICIT) information has been recently introduced, which enhances classical linguistic modeling that is based on single terms by providing linguistic expressions in a continuous linguistic domain. Its application to decision making is quite promising, but it is necessary to develop enough operators to accomplish aggregation processes in the decision solving scheme. So far, just a small number of aggregation operators have been defined for ELICIT information. Hence, this paper aims at providing new aggregation operators for ELICIT information by developing novel OWA based operators, such as the Induced OWA (IOWA) operator in order to avoid the OWA operator needs of reordering its arguments, because ELICIT information does not have an inherent order due to its fuzzy representation. Our proposal not only consists of extending the definition of an IOWA operator for ELICIT information with crisp weights, but it is also proposed a type-1 IOWA operator for ELICIT information in which both weights and arguments are fuzzy as well as the use of ELICIT information constructing the order inducing variable to reorder the arguments. Additionally, the use of ELICIT information in GDM demands the ability to manage majority based decisions that are better represented in the IOWA operator by linguistic quantifiers. Hence, a majority-driven GDM process for ELICIT information is proposed, which it is the first proposal for fulfilling the majority solving process for GDM while using ELICIT information. Eventually, an illustrative example and a brief comparative analysis are presented in order to show the performance of the proposal and its feasibility.
Biochemical and structural analysis of marine polysaccharide lyases

9 Introduction . 10 Material and methods . 11 Bacterial strain . 11 Construction of recombinant plasmid for overexpression . 12 Protein expression and purification . 12 Refolding of alginate lyase from inclusion bodies . 13 Phylogenetic analysis . 13 Enzymatic assays. 14 Substrate preparation . 14 Enzyme activity. 14 Dynamic light scattering . 14 Cleavage mechanisms of the enzyme . 15 Structural analysis . 15 Dynamic light scattering . 15 Analytical size exclusion chromatography. 15 II Protein crystallization and X-ray crystallography . 15 3D structure modelling . 16 Results and discussion . 16 Protein expression and purification of Alys . 16 Protein size of PL7-1 . 18 Phylogeny of PL7-1 and homologous enzymes . 19 Influence of physicochemical parameters on enzyme activity of PL7-1. 22 Crystallized PL7-1 and preliminary diffraction analysis . 26 3D structural analysis of PL7 . 26 Chapter 2: Crystal structure of the ulvan lyase from Formosa agariphila KMM3901 . 34 Abstract . 34. 34 Introduction . 35 Material and methods . 36 Microorganism and culture conditions . 36 Protein purification . 37 Thermal stability . 37 Analytical size exclusion chromatography. 38 Protein crystallization and X-ray data collection . 38 Phylogenetic analysis . 39 Results and discussion . 39 Phylogeny of ulvan lyase and homologous enzymes. 39 Protein size and thermal stability . 40 Determination of enzyme structure . 43 Conclusion . 46 Outlook . 46 References . 51 Supplementary information . 62 Statement . 80