Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Characterization of Nb2O5-Ni Coating Prepared by DC Sputtering

The Nb2O5-Ni coating was processed using DC sputtering on structural steel and study characterization of composite coating SEM/EDS inspection indicated clearly perfect incorporation of Nb2O5 within the nickel rich. Increasing in surface roughness and decreasing in average diameters of particles were obtained for coated surface compared with uncoated surface from AFM analysis, in addition, microhardness test and thickness test showed that increasing of the hardness value to 163 HV for Nb2O5 - Ni composite coating compared to 132 HV for uncoated samples, the hardness for Ni coating also increasing to155 HV and the thickness for Nb2O5-Ni composite coatings increased significantly compared to uncoated samples.
Social network sites and obsessive-compulsive disorder: An investigation with suppression analyses

This research examined the relationship between social network site (SNS) intensity, SNS addiction, and the severity of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), alongside its factors of obsession and compulsion. The overlap of SNS intensity and SNS addiction was controlled in the study to predict the measured severity of OCD. In this study, 204 Malaysian undergraduate students were recruited to complete the revised Facebook Intensity Scale, the revised Bergen Facebook Addiction Scale, and the self-report version of the Yale-Brown Obsessive-Compulsive Scale. The overlap of SNS intensity and SNS addiction was supported by their significant positive correlation. Furthermore, SNS addiction significantly correlated with the measured OCD and its corresponding factors. The hierarchical regression analysis revealed that the entry of SNS intensity enhanced the facilitative effect of SNS addiction on OCD and its factors. Therefore, the role of SNS intensity as a suppressor was supported. In the same regression model, SNS intensity predicted the severity of OCD and its compulsion subscale negatively. Implications and directions for future research were also discussed in this manuscript.
The Ekman spiral for piecewise-uniform diffusivity

10 We re-visit Ekman’s (1905) classic problem of wind-stress induced ocean currents to 11 help interpret observed deviations from Ekman’s theory, in particular from the predicted 12 surface current deflection of 45◦. While previous studies have shown that such deviations 13 can be explained by a vertical eddy viscosity varying with depth, as opposed to the 14 constant profile taken by Ekman, analytical progress has been impeded by the difficulty 15 in solving Ekman’s equation. Herein, we present a solution for piecewise-constant eddy 16 viscosity which enables a comprehensive understanding of how the surface deflection angle 17 depends on the vertical profile of eddy viscosity. For two layers, the dimensionless problem 18 depends only on the depth of the upper layer and the ratio of layer viscosities. A single 19 diagram then allows one to understand the dependence of the deflection angle on these 20 two parameters. 21
Increased levels of serum Hcy and UA as well as the thickness of carotid intima-media correlates with the severity of coronary artery lesions CURRENT STATUS: POSTED

Background: To investigate the correlation between serum homocysteine (Hcy) and uric acid (UA) levels as well as the carotid intima-media thickness (IMT) and the severity of coronary artery lesions in elderly patients with coronary heart disease (CHD). Methods: A total of 156 elderly patients (≥60 years old) with CHD were recruited in the study group; 54 healthy subjects were selected as the control group. Serum Hcy and UA levels, IMT, SYNTAX score and Sullivan scores were measured and analyzed by Pearson correlation. The study group were further divided into low (≤20 points, n=72), middle (21-39 points, n=56) and high (≥40 points, n=28) score groups according to their SYNTAX score and the levels of other indexes between them were compared. The risk factors for CHD and the correlation were analyzed by univariate analysis and logistic regression. Results: SYNTAX scores showed that the levels of serum Hcy, UA, and the IMT in middle (20.03 ± 7.88) μmol/L, (326.34 ± 79.34) μmol/L, (1.26 ± 0.07) mm) and high score (28.98 ± 8.04) μmol/L, (456.67 ± 98.34) μmol/L, (1.33 ± 0.08) mm groups were significantly higher compared to the low score group (11.34 ± 3.83) μmol/L, (206.78 ± 60.45) μmol/L, (1.19 ± 0.05) mm), while the high score group had the highest levels (all P < 0.001). Serum Hcy, UA levels and the IMT were positively correlated with SYNTAX and Sullivan scores (all P < 0.001). Additionally, male gender, smoking, history of hypertension, systolic pressure, pulse pressure, Hcy, UA, IMT, and BMI independently correlated with the severity of CHD (all P < 0.05). Conclusions: The serum levels of Hcy and UA and the IMT in patients with CHD were significantly elevates, and positively correlated with the severity of coronary artery lesions, which may Logistic
ORIGINAL RESEARCH PAPER RETROSPECTIVE STUDY OF LATERAL NECK SWELLINGS IN TERTIARY HOSPITAL AND THE ROLE OF FNAC IN THE DIAGNOSIS

MATERIALS AND METHODS: We have undertaken retrospective descriptive study of neck swellings admitted during the period of 3 years in MediCiti Institute of Medical Sciences, Ghanpur, Medchal Dist. They are categorized into midline thyroid related swellings and lateral neck swellings of non-thyroid origin. In 5 years, between the period of 2011-2016, out of 215 neck swellings, midline thyroid swellings are 104 and 111 are lateral neck swellings of non-thyroid origin. Common neck swelling is of reactive hyperplasia of the lymph node followed by tuberculous cervical lymphadenitis.
Developing a Model for Sustainability Assessment in LARG Supply Chains using System Dynamics

Due to the growing global pressures for industries to become more sustainable, organizations are forced to implement new management practices at all organizational levels to achieve sustainability in the supply chain. New management practices should be measured in terms of assessing the sustainability performance. The purpose of this paper is to provide a model for assessing the sustainability performance of lean, agile, resilient, and green (LARG) supply chain management practices in the automotive supply chain using the system dynamics approach. In this paper, LARG supply chain management practices were identified and were prioritized using fuzzy DEMATEL and fuzzy analytic network process. The findings show that scenarios of improvement in the implementation of total quality management, just in time, flexible transportation and combined scenario (just in time and long-term relationships with suppliers) will lead to a more sustainable supply chain. The results of these scenarios show improvement of sustainability in the supply chain. Also the results show that lean strategy is a very important for achieving sustainability in the supply chain.
Inhibiting STAT3 and Activating TLR Against Tumors With OPSS Liposomes, Curcumin, and TLR Agonists

In solid malignancies such as breast cancer, the tumor cells create an immunosuppressive environment through the aid of macrophages. The macrophages become tumor-associated and inhibit a T-cell response critical to removing the cancerous cells. The main signaling pathway responsible for the macrophages’ pro-tumoral behavior is the STAT3 signaling pathway, a subset of the JAK/STAT signaling pathway that prevents the toll-like receptor (TLR) expression. TLRs are essential to the immune system's anti-tumoral response. Therefore, to repolarize the macrophages in from a pro-tumoral to an anti-tumoral form, curcumin (STAT3 inhibitor), and TLR agonists (TLR stimulant) were delivered to a co-culture using complement C3 liposomes (OPSS liposomes). The OPSS liposomes cause macrophages to uptake the liposomes, allowing for targeted drug delivery to macrophages. 4T1 cancer cells and BMDMs were co-cultured and treated with control liposomes containing PBS, OPSS liposomes containing curcumin and TLR agonist, and OPSS liposomes containing TLR agonist. RT-qPCR measured gene expression, and flow cytometry measured protein expression. This study’s results point to the effectiveness of the OPSS liposome, curcumin, and TLR agonist treatment. The combination of curcumin and TLR agonist appear to effectively inhibit the STAT3 signaling pathway and activate the expression of TLR. Future studies should implement the OPSS liposome, curcumin, and TLR agonist treatment in a mouse model and observe for a potential T-cell response.
Mineral trioxide aggregate and areas of its use in dentistry: A literature review

Mineral trioxide aggregate is a biocompatible dental material consisting of thyroxide powder and hydrophilic particles. In addition to their dentinogenic and osteogenic potentials, it also exhibits good sealing properties. It has a wide range of areas of use in endodontic and restorative dentistry. In clinical practice, it is a material of choice in many applications such as repair of perforations, root-end fillings, apexhivation and regenerative endodontic treatment procedures, vital pulp treatments.
Comparison of some metabolic and sex hormones in selected vertebrates in different seasons

Different environmental factors affect animal physiological status. Day length and temperature are the two main factors that have been proved to cause changes in different hormones. The current study aimed to compare seasonal changes of some hormones such as testosterone (T), estradiol-17-β (E2) and thyroid hormones (T4, thyroxine; and T3, triiodothyronine) in selected vertebrates (amphibians, fish and mammals). These hormones were assayed by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). The present results indicated that; T3 had the highest concentration in both sexes of amphibians during winter and the lowest one was found in the investigated mammals of both sexes during summer and autumn. Regarding, T4 also showed the highest concentration in both sexes of amphibians during winter and the lowest one was recorded in male mammals during summer. In relation to E2, in females; the highest and detectable concentration was observed in fishes during summer and the lowest one was found in mammals during winter. On the other hand, in males, its highest concentration was found in birds during spring, and the lowest one was recorded in amphibians during winter. Testosterone showed the highest concentration in female birds during summer, while the lowest one was recorded in amphibians during summer. In males, the highest T level was observed in fishes during summer, while the lowest one was found in amphibians in the same season. According to the results, significant changes in levels of steroid hormones, as well as thyroids in the selected animals from different classes were closely correlated to the length of the day and seasons.
U NCERTAINTY W EIGHTED O FFLINE R EINFORCEMENT L EARNING

Offline Reinforcement Learning promises to learn effective policies from previously-collected, static datasets without the need for exploration. However, existing Q-learning and actor-critic based off-policy RL algorithms fail when bootstrapping from out-of-distribution (OOD) actions or states. We hypothesize that a key missing ingredient from the existing methods is a proper treatment of uncertainty in the offline setting. We propose Uncertainty Weighted Actor-Critic (UWAC), an algorithm that models the epistemic uncertainty to detect OOD stateaction pairs and down-weights their contribution in the training objectives accordingly. Implementation-wise, we adopt a practical and effective dropout-based uncertainty estimation method that introduces very little overhead over existing RL algorithms. Empirically, we observe that UWAC substantially improves model stability during training. In addition, UWAC out-performs existing offline RL methods on a variety of competitive tasks, and achieves significant performance gains over the state-of-the-art baseline on datasets with sparse demonstrations collected from human experts.
Corporate Governance and Disclosure Verifiability as Determinants of Disclosure Tone in the Egyptian Context Prepared by

This study explores the extent to which Corporate Governance (CG) and disclosure verifiability are represented among the key determinants of disclosure tone in the context of Egyptian companies’ board of directors’ annual reports. The sample includes the Egyptian EGX100 companies, listed from 2013 to 2017. This study uses a panel date with fixed effect regression model to test the main hypotheses. It employs a manual content analysis which focuses on statements as a measurement unit to calculate the disclosure tone. The net positive news is captured by calculating the variance between positive news and negative news. The results indicate that the EGX100 companies’ boards of directors’ annual reports disclose more positive than negative news. In addition, all board diversity variables impact on the disclosure tone of such reports. Further, CEO tenure is the only variable related to CEO power that has a significant association with disclosure tone. Similarly, when compared to backward-looking information, the disclosure of forwardlooking information is more likely to have a significant relationship with disclosure tone. In addition, with the exception of company size, there is an insignificant association between all control variables and disclosure tone. Based on the limited literature relating to developing countries’ capital markets, this study contributes to the accounting literature by providing empirical evidence of CG’s effect and disclosure verifiability on the disclosure tone in emerging markets.
DETERMINANTS OF MENTAL WELL-BEING IN SERBIA2

In this paper we examined the determinants of mental well-being in Serbia. Mental well-being is defined as a state of well-being in which the individual realizes his or her own potential, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and fruitfully, and is able to make a contribution to his or her community. Although the studies from this field on nationally representative samples from other countries are widely present, they are entirely neglected in Serbia. We used nationally representative Serbian samples from 2011 and 2016 that come from the European Quality of Life Survey. The data indicate that mental well-being declines with age, especially among older woman categories. Second, subjective general health is the most significant determinant of mental well-being. Optimism about own future, feeling tense, and satisfaction with family life come next. We also examined trends of mental well-being in five-years between the two rounds of the survey and found its slight but statistically non-significant decline.
The utility of intraoperative neuromonitoring on simple posterior lumbar fusions-analysis of the National Inpatient Sample.

Background Several studies have demonstrated the utility of intraoperative neuromonitoring (IOM) including somatosensory evoked potentials (SSEPs), motor-evoked potentials (MEPs), and electromyography (EMG), in decreasing the risk of neurologic injury in spinal deformity procedures. However, there is limited evidence supporting the routine use of IOM in elective posterolateral lumbar fusion (PLF). Methods The National Inpatient Sample (NIS) was analyzed for the years 2012-2015 to identify patients undergoing elective PLF with (n=22,404) or without (n=111,168) IOM use. Statistical analyses were conducted to assess the impact of IOM on length of stay, total charges, and development of neurologic complications. These analyses controlled for age, gender, race, income percentile, primary expected payer, number of reported comorbidities, hospital teaching status, and hospital size. Results The overall use of IOM in elective PLFs was found to have increased from 14.6% in the year 2012 to 19.3% in 2015. The total charge in hospitalization cost for all patients who received IOM increased from $129,384.72 in 2012 to $146,427.79 in 2015. Overall, the total charge of hospitalization was 11% greater in the IOM group when compared to those patients that did not have IOM (P<0.001). IOM did not have a statistically significant impact on the likelihood of developing a neurological complication. Conclusions While there may conceivably be benefits to the use of this technology in complex revision fusions or pathologies, we found no meaningful benefit of its application to single-level index PLF for degenerative spine disease.
An Analysis of Metaphor in Batak Toba Song Lyrics (Mother Love’s Theme)

The aims of this research are to classify Metaphors in Batak Toba Song Lyrics (Mother's Love Theme). This research used Kovecse’s theory (2010) said that there are three types of Metaphor: Structural Metaphors, Ontological Metaphors, and Orientational Metaphors. The method in this research applied qualitative method. The data were collected by downloading eight collection of Batak Toba Song Lyrics (Mother's Love Theme), listening them, transcribing them in English Language, identifying and putting them into table.The data were also analyzed by analyzing the data, classifying the data, deciding the research findings, and drawing the conclusion. The result in this research, there are 21 the data found in eight collection of Batak Toba Song Lyrics (Mother's Love Theme), namely 5 structural (23, 80%), 10 ontological (47,61%), and 6 orientational (28,57%). Therefore, a number of selected Bataknese songs were dominated by ontological metaphor
de Simulação para Sistemas 5 G Simulation Platform for 5 G Systems

Thanks to the technological advances in communications, it has never been so fast and simple to communicate with people anywhere in the world, as well as enjoying a variety of services, only by using a mobile phone with internet access. But the increasing number of users and features requires an ever-demanding design of wireless communication systems, with the constant need to increase speed and efficiency in information transmission. A new generation of wireless communication systems that will revolutionize the way we share information is currently emerging, promising a significant increase in transmission rates. This generation presents itself as 5G. In order to optimize the bandwidth usage, current 4G systems already use a signal modulation technique called OFDM, and future 5G systems will also make use of this technique. Despite having optimum spectral performance, OFDM modulation has a high signal Peak-to-Average Power Ratio (PAPR), which can cause the power amplifiers to operate in a non-linear zone. This may compromise the electrical efficiency of the system and increase the probability of error in information transmission. To evaluate the performance of wireless communication systems against the distortions caused by the amplification of OFDM signals, a simulation platform was developed. In this platform are included laboratory measurements for two types of amplifiers in different operating environments that are typical in 5G systems. In order to understand how different system characteristics differently affect its performance, signals with two distinct bandwidths are tested for three digital signal modulation techniques. The tests also consider the effects of the wireless channel as well as schemes of multi-antenna systems.
Gone at Last: Removing the Hypothesis-Only Bias in Natural Language Inference via Ensemble Adversarial Training

Natural Language Inference (NLI) datasets contain annotation artefacts resulting in spurious correlations between the natural language utterances and their respective entailment classes. These artefacts are exploited by neural networks even when only considering the hypothesis and ignoring the premise, leading to unwanted biases. Belinkov et al. (2019b) proposed tackling this problem via adversarial training, but this can lead to learned sentence representations that still suffer from the same biases. We show that the bias can be reduced in the sentence representations by using an ensemble of adversaries, encouraging the model to jointly decrease the accuracy of these different adversaries while fitting the data. This approach produces more robust NLI models, outperforming previous de-biasing efforts when generalised to 12 other datasets (Belinkov et al., 2019a; Mahabadi et al., 2020). In addition, we find that the optimal number of adversarial classifiers depends on the dimensionality of the sentence representations, with larger sentence representations being more difficult to de-bias while benefiting from using a greater number of adversaries.
Bank Public Status and Mortgage Lending Discrimination

Comparing private banks that went public through mergers and acquisitions with similar private banks, we find that going public reduces the mortgage denial rates for African American borrowers by 6.1-6.3 percentage points. The results are not driven by changes in borrower risk characteristics, lender risk preferences, securitization, or increased disclosure requirements. The effect is more pronounced in areas suffering from stronger racial biases. Our results suggest that the dispersed ownership can mitigate biased preferences of concentrated private ownership and thereby alleviates taste-based discrimination in mortgage lending.
Does Firm Age Affect Learning-by-Exporting? Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa

Using a unique dataset from three Sub-Saharan African countries, we investigate how learning-by-exporting varies across firm age. Assuming a Cobb-Douglas production technology, we use propensity score matching methods to match exporters (treated) and non-exporters (control) to test for learning-by-exporting effects across firm age. Our findings reveal that new exporters are different from non-exporters. We find high productivity growth rates among younger firms than older firms. However, productivity gains do not come with entry to the market but rather set in after the year of entry. Our findings suggest that the firm’s age is an important component for the learning mechanism to take effect. Learning effects display marked diminishing returns and only important during the early stages of firm internationalization. On policy, export promotion policies should target supporting start-ups to access export markets.
International Student Mobility and Household Consumption: Evidence from China

As a result of the expansion of exports of higher education, the number of international students in China showed an average yearly growth rate of 23% between 2004 and 2018. This paper investigates whether the export of higher education improves household’s wellbeing in China. Specifically, we study if there is a causal relationship between the exports of higher education and household consumption. We combine province-level data of the number of international students with the information from the Family Panel Studies (CFPS) survey. Using a shift-share instrumental variable approach, we find that a one percent increase in educational exports (measured as the number of international students) increased household consumption in around 0,06%. The results indicate that growth in income/wealth is an important channel that promotes household consumption. Furthermore, we find education exports mainly affect household developmental consumption, especially for housing and education consumption. We also find that implementing incentive policies will not reduce the promotion effect of education export on household consumption. Finally, a vital conclusion of our work is that education exports not only can bring more trade benefits but also can relieve the negative consequences of the low household consumption rate in China.