Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
11. Chronic Kidney Disease and Risk Management: Standards of Care in Diabetes-2023.

The American Diabetes Association (ADA) "Standards of Care in Diabetes" includes the ADA's current clinical practice recommendations and is intended to provide the components of diabetes care, general treatment goals and guidelines, and tools to evaluate quality of care. Members of the ADA Professional Practice Committee, a multidisciplinary expert committee, are responsible for updating the Standards of Care annually, or more frequently as warranted. For a detailed description of ADA standards, statements, and reports, as well as the evidence-grading system for ADA's clinical practice recommendations and a full list of Professional Practice Committee members, please refer to Introduction and Methodology. Readers who wish to comment on the Standards of Care are invited to do so at professional.diabetes. org/SOC.
The Influence of Coffee Husk Ash as a Filler on the Performance of Bituminous Concrete Mix

Utilization of agricultural waste by-products in road construction has become a common practice in developing countries. The present study investigates the effect of coffee husk ash compared to basaltic stone dust on the performance of bituminous concrete mixes for road construction. Based on the Marshall mix design, a total of thirty (30) asphalt concrete specimens were prepared with basaltic stone dust and coffee husk ash as a filler with bitumen content between 4.0% and 6.0% at varying increments of 0.5%, and the Marshall stability test was performed on full mixes to determine the optimum asphalt content of the mixtures. From the test results, it is seen that specimens made with coffee husk ash and basaltic stone dust are found to have satisfactory Marshall properties, and moisture susceptibility shows that mixes using CHA filler provide better resistance to moisture effects than mixtures using BSD filler. When compared to BSD, the CHA shows an 8.43% increase in OBC. From the laboratory results, it has been shown that specimens made with coffee husk ash and basaltic stone dust are found to satisfy Marshall parameters and indirect tensile strength of bituminous concrete mixes when the coffee husk ash exhibits better performance than basaltic stone dust, which indicates that the CHA shows an increase of 35.80% compared to basaltic stone dust. The research findings indicated that the TSR of the paving mixes using basaltic stone dust was 94.58% and that using coffee husk ash was 105.03%, where both fillers satisfy the minimum limiting value of 80%. Overall, using coffee husk ash as a filler in hot mix asphalt concrete helps to solve a significant agricultural waste disposal issue while also being environmentally friendly.
Metal abundance range in the Draco dwarf galaxy

The multichannel scanner of the Hale telescope was used to measure the spectral flux distributions of 23 red giants in the Draco system over the range lambda lambda 3240 to 7620. The memberships of these stars in Draco were checked by use of the spectral scans, and for 17 of them the observations are of sufficient quality that estimates of metal abundance can be made. The scans of the Draco stars resemble in every way the scans of red giants in globular clusters. Large differences are seen among the scans of the Draco stars, which are due to a range in Fe/H. The distribution over metal abundance was found from the abundance estimates; its half-width corresponds to an abundance range of a factor of 2.7. The mean metal abundance (Fe/H) = -1.86 +- 0.09, which is larger than the abundance of M92. This result does not support the previous claims that Draco is more metal poor than the most metal-deficient globular clusters. The implications of these results for the interpetations of Draco's color--magnitude diagram and variable star population are discussed. The chemical evolution of Draco was modeled with simple models that assume mass loss and prompt initial enrichment. These modelsmore » provide adequate fits to the observed abundance distribution, and suggest that the proto-Draco was initially approx. 100 times more massive than Draco is today. 10 figures, 2 tables. « less
Direct measurement of xenon flashtube opacity

The optical transmission of a xenon flashtube has been measured at wavelengths from 2500 to 10 000 A and at currents up to 5000 A/cm2. It is found that the absorption increases with current and with wavelength. Above about 5000 A and a current of 4000 A/cm2, a discharge tube 1 cm thick is nearly opaque. At shorter wavelengths or lower currents, the discharge is fairly transparent.
Achieving High Availability in Inter-DC WAN Traffic Engineering

Inter-DataCenter Wide Area Network (Inter-DC WAN) that connects geographically distributed data centers is becoming one of the most critical network infrastructures. Due to limited bandwidth and inevitable link failures, it is highly challenging to guarantee network availability for services, especially those with stringent bandwidth demands, over inter-DC WAN. We present <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mathsf {TEDAT}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>, a novel Traffic Engineering (TE) framework for Diverse Availability Targets (DAT), where a Service Level Agreement (SLA) is defined to ensure that each bandwidth demand must be satisfied with a stipulated probability, when subjected to the network capacity and possible failures of the inter-DC WAN. <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mathsf {TEDAT}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> has two core components, i.e., traffic scheduling and failure recovery, which are crystalized through different mathematical models and theoretically analyzed. They are also extensively compared against state-of-the-art TE schemes, using a testbed as well as real trace driven simulations across different topologies, traffic matrices and failure scenarios. Our evaluations show that, compared with the optimal admission strategy, <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mathsf {TEDAT}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> can speed up the online admission control by <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$30\times $ </tex-math></inline-formula> at the expense of less than 4% false rejections. On the other hand, compared with the latest TE schemes like FFC and TEAVAR, <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mathsf {TEDAT}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> can meet the bandwidth availability SLAs for 23%~60% more demands under normal loads, and when network failure causes SLA violations, it can retain 10%~20% more profit under a pricing and refunding model.
The Value of Open Banking Data for Application Credit Scoring: Case Study of a Norwegian Bank

Banks generally use credit scoring models to assess the creditworthiness of customers when they apply for loans or credit. These models perform significantly worse when used on potential new customers than existing customers, due to the lack of financial behavioral data for new bank customers. Access to such data could therefore increase banks’ profitability when recruiting new customers. If allowed by the customer, Open Banking APIs can provide access to balances and transactions from the past 90 days before the score date. In this study, we compare the performance of conventional application credit scoring models currently in use by a Norwegian bank with a deep learning model trained solely on transaction data available through Open Banking APIs. We evaluate the performance in terms of the AUC and Brier score and find that the models based on Open Banking data alone are surprisingly effective in predicting default compared to the conventional credit scoring models. Furthermore, an ensemble model trained on both traditional credit scoring data and features extracted from the deep learning model further outperforms the conventional application credit scoring model for new customers and narrows the performance gap between application credit scoring models for existing and new customers. Therefore, we argue that banks can increase their profitability by utilizing data available through Open Banking APIs when recruiting new customers.
A New Algorithm for State-Constrained Separated Continuous Linear Programs

During the last few decades, significant progress has been made in solving large-scale finite-dimensional and semi-infinite linear programming problems. In contrast, little progress has been made in solving linear programs in infinite-dimensional spaces despite their importance as models in manufacturing and communication systems. Inspired by the research on separated continuous linear programs, we propose a new class of continuous linear programming problems that has a variety of important applications in communications, manufacturing, and urban traffic control. This class of continuous linear programs contains the separated continuous linear programs as a subclass. Using ideas from quadratic programming, we propose an efficient algorithm for solving large-scale problems in this new class under mild assumptions on the form of the problem data. We prove algorithmically the absence of a duality gap for this class of problems without any boundedness assumptions on the solution set. We show this class of problems admits piecewise constant optimal control when the optimal solution exists. We give conditions for the existence of an optimal solution. We also report computational results which illustrate that the new algorithm is effective in solving large-scale realistic problems (with several hundred continuous variables) arising in manufacturing systems.
Comparing antigenaemia- and microfilaraemia as criteria for stopping decisions in lymphatic filariasis elimination programmes in Africa

Background Mass drug administration (MDA) is the main strategy towards lymphatic filariasis (LF) elimination. Progress is monitored by assessing microfilaraemia (Mf) or circulating filarial antigenaemia (CFA) prevalence, the latter being more practical for field surveys. The current criterion for stopping MDA requires <2% CFA prevalence in 6- to 7-year olds, but this criterion is not evidence-based. We used mathematical modelling to investigate the validity of different thresholds regarding testing method and age group for African MDA programmes using ivermectin plus albendazole. Methodolgy/Principal findings We verified that our model captures observed patterns in Mf and CFA prevalence during annual MDA, assuming that CFA tests are positive if at least one adult worm is present. We then assessed how well elimination can be predicted from CFA prevalence in 6-7-year-old children or from Mf or CFA prevalence in the 5+ or 15+ population, and determined safe (>95% positive predictive value) thresholds for stopping MDA. The model captured trends in Mf and CFA prevalences reasonably well. Elimination cannot be predicted with sufficient certainty from CFA prevalence in 6-7-year olds. Resurgence may still occur if all children are antigen-negative, irrespective of the number tested. Mf-based criteria also show unfavourable results (PPV <95% or unpractically low threshold). CFA prevalences in the 5+ or 15+ population are the best predictors, and post-MDA threshold values for stopping MDA can be as high as 10% for 15+. These thresholds are robust for various alternative assumptions regarding baseline endemicity, biological parameters and sampling strategies. Conclusions/Significance For African areas with moderate to high pre-treatment Mf prevalence that have had 6 or more rounds of annual ivermectin/albendazole MDA with adequate coverage, we recommend to adopt a CFA threshold prevalence of 10% in adults (15+) for stopping MDA. This could be combined with Mf testing of CFA positives to ensure absence of a significant Mf reservoir for transmission.
IAES International Journal of Artificial Intelligence (IJ-AI)

Received May 8, 2022 Revised Nov 29, 2022 Accepted Dec 12, 2022 Word embedding has become the most popular method of lexical description in a given context in the natural language processing domain, especially through the word to vector (Word2Vec) and global vectors (GloVe) implementations. Since GloVe is a pre-trained model that provides access to word mapping vectors on many dimensionalities, a large number of applications rely on its prowess, especially in the field of sentiment analysis. However, in the literature, we found that in many cases, GloVe is implemented with arbitrary dimensionalities (often 300d) regardless of the length of the text to be analyzed. In this work, we conducted a study that identifies the effect of the dimensionality of word embedding mapping vectors on short and long texts in a sentiment analysis context. The results suggest that as the dimensionality of the vectors increases, the performance metrics of the model also increase for long texts. In contrast, for short texts, we recorded a threshold at which dimensionality does not matter.
Solution of steady-state one-dimensional conservation laws by mathematical programming

Solution of steady-state scalar conservation laws $[ f(u) ]_x + \tau [ f(u) ]_y = 0$ ($\tau $ constant) on the unit square is considered for the two cases $f(u) = u$ and $u^2$. Piecewise constant Dirichlet conditions producing shocked solutions are given on the boundary of the unit square. A nonsingular perturbation $2\varepsilon u$ ($\varepsilon $ sufficiently small positive number), rather than a singular perturbation such as $ - \varepsilon (u_{xx} + u_{yy} )$, is added to the conservation law. The perturbed equation is discretized in a finite-volume sense on each of the cells of a grid of $mn$ equal rectangular cells (m in the x-direction and n in the y-direction). Numerical values of u are located at the cell vertices. The arclength and area integrals of the finite-volume formulas are discretized by the trapezoidal rule. A system of $mn$ equations results for the $(m-1)(n-1)$ unknown values of u in the interior of the domain. This system is solved in the $l_1 $ sense; that is, the sum of the absolute.
Behavioral and axon histomorphometric analyses after intraneural transplantation of human skin‐ and nerve‐derived Schwann cells in nude rats

We have recently isolated and expanded skin‐derived Schwann cells (Sk‐SCs) from human skin and showed that they are largely similar to nerve‐derived Schwann cells (N‐SCs). Here, we extend our investigation into functional assessments of the nude rats that received human Sk‐SCs and N‐SCs after intraneural delivery into crushed and decellularized tibial nerve in adult nude rats.
A Cost-Effective Reusable Tissue Mimicking Phantom for High Intensity Focused Ultrasonic Liver Surgery

A polyacrylamide polysaccharide hydrogel (PASG) containing a nonionic surfactant of the polyoxyethylene nonylphenyl ethers series (NP14) has been adapted to the fabrication of a reusable cost-effective ultrasonic tissue-mimicking phantom for real-time visualization of the thermal lesions by high intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) irradiation. The constructed NP14 (40% in w/v) PASG is optically transparent at room temperatures, and it turns out to be opaque white as heated over the clouding points of about 55 °C and returns to its original transparent state after cooling. The acoustic property of the proposed phantom is similar to those of human liver tissues, which includes the acoustic impedance of 1.68 Mrayls, the speed of sound of 1595 ± 5 m/s, the attenuation coefficient of 0.52 ± 0.05 dB cm−1 (at 1 MHz), the backscatter coefficient of 0.21 ± 0.09 × 10−3 sr−1 cm−1 (at 1 MHz), and the nonlinear parameter B/A of 6.4 ± 0.2. The NP14-PASG was tested to assess the characteristic information (sizes, shapes, and locations) of the thermal lesions visualized when exposed to typical HIFU fields (1.1 MHz, focal pressure up to 20.1 MPa, focal intensity 4075 W/cm2). The proposed NP14-PASG is expected to replace the existing costly BSA-PASG used for more effective testing of the performance of therapeutic ultrasonic devices based on thermal mechanisms.
Significant increase in natural disturbance impacts on European forests since 1950

Over the last decades, the natural disturbance is increasingly putting pressure on European forests. Shifts in disturbance regimes may compromise forest functioning and the continuous provisioning of ecosystem services to society, including their climate change mitigation potential. Although forests are central to many European policies, we lack the long‐term empirical data needed for thoroughly understanding disturbance dynamics, modeling them, and developing adaptive management strategies. Here, we present a unique database of >170,000 records of ground‐based natural disturbance observations in European forests from 1950 to 2019. Reported data confirm a significant increase in forest disturbance in 34 European countries, causing on an average of 43.8 million m3 of disturbed timber volume per year over the 70‐year study period. This value is likely a conservative estimate due to under‐reporting, especially of small‐scale disturbances. We used machine learning techniques for assessing the magnitude of unreported disturbances, which are estimated to be between 8.6 and 18.3 million m3/year. In the last 20 years, disturbances on average accounted for 16% of the mean annual harvest in Europe. Wind was the most important disturbance agent over the study period (46% of total damage), followed by fire (24%) and bark beetles (17%). Bark beetle disturbance doubled its share of the total damage in the last 20 years. Forest disturbances can profoundly impact ecosystem services (e.g., climate change mitigation), affect regional forest resource provisioning and consequently disrupt long‐term management planning objectives and timber markets. We conclude that adaptation to changing disturbance regimes must be placed at the core of the European forest management and policy debate. Furthermore, a coherent and homogeneous monitoring system of natural disturbances is urgently needed in Europe, to better observe and respond to the ongoing changes in forest disturbance regimes.
The Asymptotic Behavior of the Solutions of Some Semilinear Elliptic Equations in Cylindrical Domains

Abstract The bounded solutions of some semilinear elliptic equations in unbounded cylindrical domains are considered. Their asymptotic behavior as |x| → ∞ (x = coordinate along the axis of the cylinder) is analyzed and used to establish uniqueness and monotonicity in the x-variable of travelling wavefronts of some parabolic problems
Dietary Supplementation with Black Raspberries Altered the Gut Microbiome Composition in a Mouse Model of Colitis-Associated Colorectal Cancer, although with Differing Effects for a Healthy versus a Western Basal Diet

Black raspberries (BRB) are rich in anthocyanins with purported anti-inflammatory properties. However, it is not known whether dietary supplementation would ameliorate Western-diet enhanced gut inflammation and colon tumorigenesis. We employed a mouse model of colitis-associated colorectal cancer (CAC) to determine the effects of dietary supplementation with 5 to 10% (w/w) whole, freeze-dried BRB in male C57BL/6J mice fed either a standard healthy diet (AIN93G) or the total Western diet (TWD). In a pilot study, BRB suppressed colitis and colon tumorigenesis while also shifting the composition of the fecal microbiome in favor of taxa with purported health benefits, including Bifidobacterium pseudolongum. In a follow-up experiment using a 2 × 2 factorial design with AIN and TWD basal diets with and without 10% (w/w) BRB, supplementation with BRB reduced tumor multiplicity and increased colon length, irrespective of the basal diet, but it did not apparently affect colitis symptoms, colon inflammation or mucosal injury based on histopathological findings. However, BRB intake increased alpha diversity, altered beta diversity and changed the relative abundance of Erysipelotrichaceae, Bifidobacteriaceae, Streptococcaceae, Rikenellaceae, Ruminococcaceae and Akkermansiaceae, among others, of the fecal microbiome. Notably, changes in microbiome profiles were inconsistent with respect to the basal diet consumed. Overall, these studies provide equivocal evidence for in vivo anti-inflammatory effects of BRB on colitis and colon tumorigenesis; yet, BRB supplementation led to dynamic changes in the fecal microbiome composition over the course of disease development.
The Mediation Chain Effect of Cognitive Crafting and Personal Resources on the Relationship between Role Ambiguity and Dentists’ Emotional Exhaustion

Based on Job Demands-Resources (JD-R), Conservation of Resources (COR) and self-regulation theories integration, this study investigated the association between role ambiguity and emotional exhaustion among 191 Romanian dentists, as well as the chain mediating role of cognitive crafting and three personal resources (resilience, optimism, and self-efficacy). Three conceptual models which included, separately, the three personal resources were proposed. PROCESS macros were used to verify the hypotheses related to the testing of the path mediation models. The results indicated that role ambiguity was directly and positively associated with dentists’ burnout. More importantly, the sequential indirect effect of role ambiguity on burnout via mediators in chains (cognitive crafting and resilience for the first model; cognitive crafting and optimism for the second model; cognitive crafting and self-efficacy for the third model) was significant. The findings provide a direction for dentists’ health intervention because it reveals how the negative impact of role ambiguity on emotional exhaustion increasing can be buffered by the cumulative effect of cognitive crafting and different personal resources, as a result of their chain reinforcement.
Venture vs Investment, Which Type of Financing was more Demanded by Agriculture, Forestry, and Aquaculture Sector?

COVID-19 creates uncertainty on business. SMEs in Indonesia need to take a loan to survive. Sharia banks could give credit financing based on Islamic law. This study has a purpose to observe if the total value of credit financing issued by sharia bank in Indonesia affects the total financing of agriculture, forestry, and aquaculture sectors. This study uses secondary data taken from ojk.co.id as the sample. The independent variable is credit financing use for capital venture and investment. Dependent variables are the total financing in the agricultural, forestry, and aquaculture sectors. Data is analyzed using the linear regression method. The data of each variable was also tested using a T-test to analyze if there were significant changes during the COVID-19 pandemic. Result showed that financing of capital venture has a moderate impact on the total of credit financing for agriculture and forestry sector, while investment is none. Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic has no effect in changing the number of credits issued by sharia banks nor credit received by agriculture, forestry, and aquaculture sectors. Sharia bank implemented two pillars of maqashid, which are the protection of life and wealth in issuing credit financing. The total of credit issued by sharia banks in Indonesia affected Agriculture & forestry sectors for capital, but not for investment. Sharia bank implemented two pillars of maqashid, which are the protection of life and wealth in issuing credit financing