Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effect of Argumentative Discourse based Intervention on Argumentation Ability: A Study of Demographic Factors

Argumentation can be viewed as an important activity in science education aiming at a better understanding of science topics. This article is drawn from doctoral research aiming to assess the effect of an argumentative coursebased intervention on argumentation ability in complement with other variables. This section highlights how students with demographic variations differ in their argumentation ability and how do they respond to the intervention. The population of the study comprised of school students in their transition stage of cognitive development from concrete to abstract thinking; correspondingly, Grade 5 students were selected. An argumentative discourse framework was developed for the contents of the school Science subject adapting to the Toulmin model. 18 weeks of intervention was provided, including 4 weeks introductory training phase followed by a pretest of argumentation ability. Analysis revealed that demographics like gender, age order among siblings, family type, and achievement level play their innate role in determining argumentation ability, and students respond to the intervention correspondingly.
Characterization of Red Peppers (Capsicum annuum) by High-performance Liquid Chromatography and Near-infrared Spectroscopy

ABSTRACT Dehydration of peppers (Capsicum annuum) is a widely used preservation method. In this study, sun- and hot air-dried red peppers were analyzed for American Spice Trade Association color units, capsaicin, dihydrocapsaicin, organic acids, and free sugars by high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), and soluble solids by near-infrared spectroscopy (NIR). In the validation of HPLC protocols, the relative standard deviations were less than 5%, fulfilling the required criteria of Association of Official Analytical Chemists. The concentrations of capsaicin (80.4 mg kg−1), dihydrocapsaicin (38.0 mg kg−1), lactic acid (85.2 mg/100 g), glucose (1.521%), and fructose (3.463%) were slightly higher in sun-dried peppers. Linear discriminant analysis showed that NIR spectroscopy is more useful in discriminating sun- and hot air-dried pepper samples.
Dual Cognitive Tasks Provoke Temporo-Spatial Gait and Anticipatory Postural Adjustments in Healthy Young Adults

Article interplay Postural Usually, dual cognitive tasks require additional attention to maintain postural control during standing and walking. In certain pathologies or injuries, dual cognitive tasks, such as walking and speaking, can challenge the balance system, making certain gait deficiencies more apparent. The issue is identifying normal gait changes compared to gait impairments to understand better the impact cognitive tasks have on gait mechanics. Purpose: To identify changes in temporospatial gait parameters in healthy young adults while walking and performing a cognitive task. Methods: Thirty-four healthy young adults participated in this study. We collected gait parameters with six gyroscopes and accelerometers (distributed on all limbs and trunk) during the 7-meter walk test. Two trials were performed with just walking at a self-selected pace (single task). Then, the participant was asked to perform a cognitive task by counting backward by three from 100 while walking for 7m for two more trials (dual cognitive task). Results: Dual cognitive tasks provoked significant adaptations (p<.05) in gait parameters, such as increased double limb support time and stance phase with a reduction in single limb support time and swing phase. Increase the length of the walking cycle by decreasing the cadence and speed of walking speed. In addition, an increase in mediolateral postural sway, first-step initiation time, and trunk range of motion was observed. Conclusion: Dual cognitive tasks can cause normal alterations in the gait's dynamic component and variations in walking initiation. We recommend studying neuromuscular modification, such as
EVALUATION OF COATINGS FOR SHELF LIFE ENHANCEMENT AND QUALITY RETENTION IN BER (ZIZYPHUS MAURITIANA LAMK.)

Ber, a climacteric fruit crop, is liable to spoilage during storage. This study aims to evaluate the effect of coatings on shelf life and quality retention in ber under ambient storage conditions. Coated and uncoated ber fruits were stored at ambient storage temperatures (±25ºC) for 10 days and accessed every 2 days for analysis. Ber fruits reported minimum weight loss (2.68g), PLW (14.35%) and TSS (9.52%) with the application of petroleum jelly coating. Minimum total sugars (8.98%), minimum reducing sugar content (3.96%), maximum non-reducing sugars (5.69%) and maximum antioxidant activity (63.83%) was recorded in fruits with petroleum jelly coating. This study highlights the importance of coating of fruits for enhanced shelf life and quality retention under ambient storage conditions.
A Deep Learning-Based Seed Classification with Mobile Application

Seed quality is an essential factor in agricultural production. Some seeds are inherently small so it is difficult to identify and classify differences between species. In the traditional method, these differences are classified by experts considering the morphological structure, texture and color. This method involves a classification process that is costly, subjective and time confusing, what makes it necessary to develop a process that can automatically detect the type of seeds. In this study, a mobile application has been developed that quickly detects and classifies seed images with high accuracy using CNN, one of the deep learning techniques.
The impact of COVID-19 on perceptions of home and house design in Saudi Arabia

This research explored the changes that may have occurred in attitudes of people in Saudi Arabia toward their dwellings due to the mandatory quarantine from COVID-19. Two online surveys, one from before the lockdown and one after the lockdown assessed residents’ space requirements. A follow up in-person survey asked about specific aspects of their homes and how their impression of home had changed during the lockdown. It was found that based on their lockdown experiences, residents were moving away from traditional cultural activities such as hospitality and trending toward spaces that would function for family activities such as studying, work from home and entertainment. Further research should examine if these trends remain after former outside pursuits resume.
Early movement does not cause loss of reduction in surgically treated boxer fractures

ABSTRACT BACKGROUND: The surgical treatment of fifth metacarpal fractures, especially using Kirschner (K) wire techniques, has recently become popular because it provides for early hand movement. Successful anatomical reduction of the fracture is often achieved with surgery; however, an anatomical reduction cannot always be achieved and, according to 30° oblique radiography, the fracture is fixed with an apex dorsal angulation below 40°. The aim of this study was to evaluate the stability of such fractures postoperatively and compare the two different angulation options that provide early movement of the hand and wrist. METHODS: Thirty consecutive cases of neck fractures of the fifth metacarpal were treated intramedullarly with one K wire. Cases were divided into two groups: One fixed with anatomical reduction (Group 1) and the other (Group 2) fixed in apex dorsal angulation below 40°, according to 30° oblique radiography. Angulation, shortening, and functional outcome as Quick DASH scores and grip strengths were evaluated at 6 months. RESULTS: The mean correction angle was 56.6° (between 30° and 110°) for Group 1 and the residual angle was 0°. The mean correction angle was 42.4° (between 20° and 75°) for group 2 (Figs. 4 and 5) and the residual angle was 23.6° (between 10° and 45°). The mean Quick DASH scores were 1.9 (SD: 1.7) for Group 1 and 5.67 (SD: 2.93) for Group 2 (p<0.05). Grip strength values were similar for both groups. All the patients returned to their previous occupations without any limitations in an average of 4 weeks (SD: 1.4) (range 2–6 weeks). No complications such as correction loosening or shortening were detected. Rotation was not detected during physical examination. CONCLUSION: Our investigation revealed no risk of shortening or rotation of the fracture; the patients were able to return quickly to their everyday activities.
Crystallized diacetylenic indicator compounds and methods

The present invention discloses a crystallized diacetylenic compound having a certain crystallographic and other characteristics, the crystalline diacetylenic solution of the diacetylenic compounds and mixtures, and the preparation of a solvent system for dissolving identification diacetylenic compound, diacetylenic solution, recrystallization diacetylenic compound, 2,4-hexadiyn-l, 6-bis (alkylurea) compound crystals, and containing crystallized diacetylenic compound environmental condition indicators and time - temperature conditions indicator.
Investigations on Bioactive Compounds and In Vitro Biological Potent of Corchorus olitorius. L from Algerian Cultivar †

The evaluation of phytopharmaceutical, antioxydant and antimicrobial activities still a useful and interesting task, especially for unknown and less used medicinal plants in traditional herbal medicine. These plants represent a new source of active compounds. Corchorus olitorius Linn (Tiliaceae) is an important edible plant in many Arab countries such as Egypt or Sudan1, and extreme east of Algeria, it is used for the preparation of a very popular hot soup (called molokhia). In West Algeria, this plant is reported to be used, for the first time, for medicinal purposes. In the present study, polyphenolic potential and in vitro biological activities of Corchorus olitorius . L are investigated and some preliminary results exhibit an interesting free radical scavenging potential for studied plant proportional to a richness in secondary metabolites .
Role of nanoparticles in tackling COVID-19 pandemic: a bio-nanomedical approach

COVID-19 Pandemic post threats to the life of millions of people across the globe as no specific therapeutics or vaccines have been scientifically proven. In this paper, we discussed the applications of nanoparticles in combating the COVID-19 Pandemic. Nanoparticles have indeed revolutionized medicine often employed for a variety of purposes including therapeutics, nano-devices, biosensors, vaccines, nano drugs, drug carriers, and set to combating the current menace of COVID-19 by providing immense solutions. Nanoparticles play role in tackling infectious diseases via the development of virus-like nanoparticles for the overall improving immune response, point-of-care diagnostic devices for rapid diagnoses, and nano-therapeutics for better treatment.
Deep Metric Learning for K Nearest Neighbor Classification

K Nearest Neighbor (kNN) has gained popularity in machine learning due to its simplicity and good performance. However, kNN faces two problems with classification tasks. The first is that an appropriate distance measurement is required to compute distances between test sample and training samples. The other is the highly computational complexity due to the requirement of searching the nearest neighbors in the whole training data. In order to mitigate these two problems, we propose a novel method named KCNN to enhance the performance of kNN. KCNN uses convolutional neural networks (CNN) to learn a suitable distance metric as well as prototype reduction to learn a reduced set of prototypes which can represent the original set. It has several superiorities compared with related methods. The combination of CNN and kNN empowers it to extract discriminative hierarchical features with which kNN can easily classify. KCNN learns spatial information on an image instead of considering it as a vector to learn distance metric. Moreover, KCNN simultaneously learns a reduced set of prototypes, which help improve classification efficiency and avoid noisy samples of the massive training set. The proposed method has a better robustness and convergence than CNN, especially when projecting input data into a rather low-dimension space.
Provable, Structured, and Efficient Methods for Robustness of Deep Networks to Adversarial Examples

While deep networks have contributed to major leaps in raw performance across various applications, they are also known to be quite brittle to targeted data perturbations.By adding a small amount of adversarial noise to the data, it is possible to drastically change the output of a deep network. The existence of these so-called adversarial examples, perturbed data points which fool the model, pose a serious risk for safety- and security-centric applications where reliability and robustness are critical. In this dissertation, we present and analyze a number of approaches for mitigating the effect of adversarial examples, also known as adversarial defenses. These defenses can offer varying degrees and types of robustness, and in this dissertation we study defenses which differ in the strength of the the robustness guarantee, the efficiency and simplicity of the defense, and the type of perturbation being defendedagainst. We start with the strongest type of guarantee called provable adversarial defenses, showing that is possible to compute duality-based certificates that guarantee no adversarial examples exist within an `p-bounded region, which are trainable and can be minimized to learn networks which are provably robust to adversarial attacks. The approach is agnostic to the specific architecture and is applicable to arbitrary computational graphs, scaling to medium sized convolutional networks with random projections. We then switch gears to developing a deeper understanding of a more empirical defense known as adversarial training. Although adversarial training does not come with formal guarantees, it can learn networks more efficiently and with better empirical performance against attacks. We study the optimization process and revealseveral intriguing properties of the robust learning problem, finding that a simple modification to one of the earliest adversarial attacks can be sufficient to learn networksrobust to much stronger attacks, as well as finding that adversarial training as a general procedure is highly susceptible to overfitting. These discoveries have significantimplications on both the efficiency of adversarial training as well as the state of the field: for example, virtually all recent algorithmic improvements in adversarial training can be matched by simply using early stopping. The final component of this dissertation expands the realm of adversarial examples beyond `p-norm bounded perturbations, to enable more realistic threat modelsfor applications beyond imperceptible noise. We define a threat model called the Wasserstein adversarial example, which captures semantically meaningful imagetransformations like translations and rotations previously uncaptured by existing threat models. We present an efficient algorithm for projecting onto Wassersteinballs, enabling both generation of and adversarial training against Wasserstein adversarial examples. Finally, we demonstrate how to generalize adversarial trainingto defend against multiple types of threats simultaneously, improving upon naive aggregations of adversarial attacks.
Light‐Triggered Clustered Vesicles with Self‐Supplied Oxygen and Tissue Penetrability for Photodynamic Therapy against Hypoxic Tumor

Smart nanocarriers are of particular interest for highly effective photodynamic therapy (PDT) in the field of precision nanomedicine. Nevertheless, a critical challenge still remains in the exploration of potent PDT treatment against hypoxic tumor. Herein, light‐triggered clustered polymeric vesicles for photoinduced hypoxic tumor ablation are demonstrated, which are able to deeply penetrate into the tumor and simultaneously afford oxygen supply upon light irradiation. Hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) and poly(amidoamine) dendrimer conjugating chlorin e6/cypate (CC‐PAMAM) are coassembled with reactive‐oxygen‐species‐responsive triblock copolymer into the polymeric vesicles. Upon 805 nm irradiation, the vesicles exhibit the light‐triggered thermal effect that is able to decompose H2O2 into O2, which distinctly ensures the alleviation of tumor hypoxia at tumor. Followed by 660 nm irradiation, the vesicles are rapidly destabilized through singlet oxygen‐mediated cleavage of copolymer under light irradiation and thus allow the release of photoactive CC‐PAMAM from the vesicular chambers, followed by their deep penetration in the poorly permeable tumor. Consequently, the light‐triggered vesicles with both self‐supplied oxygen and deep tissue penetrability achieve the total ablation of hypoxic hypopermeable pancreatic tumor through photodynamic damage. These findings represent a general and smart nanoplatform for effective photoinduced treatment against hypoxic tumor.
Pengembangan Lembar Kerja Siswa Interaktif Menulis Deskriptive Text Menggunakan Media Wizer dalam Mempromosikan Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) untuk Siswa Kelas 8 Di MTSN 2 Medan

AbstractThe aimed of this study was to develop students’ interactive writing worksheet descriptive text to promote higher order thinking skill. This study was conducted by using Research and Development (R&D) through six stages: gathering information and data, analyzing data, designing materials, validating by experts, revising, and final product. The subject of the study was grade 8 at MTSN 2 Medan. The instruments of the data collection were gathered by interview the teacher and giving the questionnaire. The study conducted interview to English teacher and giving the questionnaire to 35 respondents to get the students’ needs. The interview and questionnaire result proved that the students’ need English learning media which can motivate the students to understand about interactive writing worksheet descriptive text. The product had been validated by the experts are English teacher and English lecturer. The product result was interactive writing worksheet which had been modified to promote Higher Order Thinking Skill. The result of the experts’ validation showed that the media was appropriate to be used on the interactive writing worksheet by getting the average score is 4.5 categorized excellent.Keywords: Interactive writing, Worksheet, Improving Higher Order Thinking Skill, Research and DevelopmentAbstrakTujuan dari penelitian ini adalah untuk mengembangkan LKS menulis descriptive text menggunakan media Wizer dalam mempromosikan Higher Order Thinking Skill (HOTS) untuk meningkatkan keterampilan berpikir tingkat tinggi. Penelitian ini menggunakan metode Research and Development (R&D) melalui enam tahapan yaitu pengumpulan informasi dan data, analisis data, perancangan bahan, validasi oleh ahli, revisi, dan produk akhir. Subjek penelitian ini adalah siswa kelas 8 di MTSN 2 Medan. Instrumen pengumpulan data dilakukan dengan wawancara dan angket. Penelitian ini wawancarai guru bahasa Inggris dan kuesioner kepada 35 responden untuk mengetahui kebutuhan siswa. Hasil wawancara dan angket membuktikan bahwa siswa membutuhkan media pembelajaran bahasa Inggris yang dapat memotivasi siswa untuk memahami descriptive text. Produk divalidasi oleh guru bahasa Inggris dan dosen bahasa Inggris. Produk yang dihasilkan berupa LKS Interaktif yang telah dimodifikasi untuk mengembangkan Keterampilan Berpikir Tingkat Tinggi. Hasil validasi ahli menunjukkan bahwa media tersebut layak digunakan dengan skor rata-rata 4,5 dengan kategori sangat baik.Kata Kunci: Penulisan Interaktif, LKS, Descriptive text, Peningkatan Keterampilan Berpikir Tingkat Tinggi, Penelitian dan Pengembangan
Genetic predictors of cytokine response in ENT-associated encephalitis

(1) Introduction: An imbalance of the genetically determined cytokine response plays a key role in the etiology of ENT-associated encephalitis. In recent years, an attempt has been made to evaluatethe prognostic role of chronic pathology of the paranasal sinuses in the development of acute, subacute and chronic encephalitis and meningitis, which in clinical practice are manifested both as cerebral and focal neurological symptoms and as mental disorders: from borderline to psychotic ones. The problem requires a multidisciplinary approach on the part of the specialists in the following clinical disciplines: neurology (as well as neurobiology), psychiatry, immunology, experimental medicine, otorhinolaryngology, and pharmacogenetics. The solution of this problem is possible with the involvement of preventive and personalized medicine. (2) The purpose: Evaluation the prognostic role of genetic polymorphisms of pro- and antiinflammatory cytokines in the development of ENT-associated encephalitis. (3) Materials and Methods: We conducted a keyword-based analysis of the English and Russian-language articles published within the past 30 years (from 1988 to 2018). The following databases were used in the study: PubMed, MedLine, Web of Science Core Collection (Clarivate Analytics), Web Science, Russian Science Citation Index, Scopus, Scientific Research, Google Scholar, Oxford Press, and eLibrary. (4) Results: In a number of the analyzed works, regardless of the causative agent and viral load, an increased level of pro-inflammatory cytokine production was noted in patients with more severe disease progression, neurological complications and unfavorable outcomes, both in viral encephalitis and in bacterial one. Based on this, 30 single nucleotide variants (SNV), their influence on the expression of pro- and anti-inflammatory cytokine genes, as well as their predictor role in the development of ENT-associated encephalitis were analyzed. Due to the nature of the systemic immune response, the analysis included both cerebral and extracerebral pathology-associated SNV. The inconsistency of the previously obtained results was noted, an attempt to explain this phenomenon was made. The analysis of the dynamics and geography of publications on the stated topic was made, the leading Russian scientific centers in the field were defined. The most promising SNV for further studies were identified. (5) Conclusion: The risk of developing ENT-associated encephalitis is associated with a genetically determined status of the cytokine response and its regulation. Studies of the association of various SNV of genes encoding pro- and anti-inflammatory cytokines in the Russian Federation need to be continued.