Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Numerical Investigation on Multiphase Flows in Various Configurations of Microchannels Using Computational Fluid Dynamics

A two-dimensional domain of multiphase flow analyses in this study using the Volume of Fluid (VOF) model was carried out in order to simulate and predict the fluid flows and mixing performance of two miscible liquids in various microchannel configurations. The various microchannels configurations were designed accordingly and the simulation was carried out based on the justified conditions, assumptions and considerations by using the commercial computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software, FLUENT. The grid type and size of the computational domain were verified in terms of stability by performing the grid independence analysis. The result showed that static mixing would be possible to achieve in various configurations of microchannels, however, the simulation results predicted that it appeared to be more efficient in complex and retrofitted microchannels. It showed the potential to promote and enhance chaotic advection, compositions distribution, and diffusivity as compared to basic microchannels that are mostly dependent only on the injection focus. Furthermore, the Reynolds number appeared to be a significant factor to enhance the mixing performance in microchannel beside the configurations.
Assessing the Knowledge, Attitudes, and Vaccination Practices Towards COVID-19 Vaccination Among Mainland Chinese Nursing Students and Interns: A Multicenter Cross-Sectional Study

Objective This study investigated factors influencing the knowledge, attitudes, practice profiles, and vaccination intentions among Chinese nursing students and nursing interns toward the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) vaccination. Materials and Methods The multicenter cross-sectional study was based on a self-reported questionnaire collecting information among nursing students and nursing interns from three major geographic regions of China, and the sample was selected by consecutive sampling. The questionnaire was developed by knowledge, attitudes, and practice (KAP) theory. Univariate and multivariate logistic regression were used for statistical analysis. Results A total of 3180 nursing students and interns (effective rate: 99.8%) from six Chinese provinces were polled. The vaccine hesitation rate was 9.65% (307/3180), 2230 participants (70.1%) had gotten at least one dose of the vaccine, and 643 participants (67.7%) had indicated a readiness to be vaccinated. The results showed that older age, higher academic background, perfect vaccine management, others’ recommendations, influenza vaccination history, epidemic under control, knowledge of vaccines or intervals, and vaccine knowledge training were associated with higher vaccination rates. Conversely, vaccine hesitancy was caused by a perceived lack of physical need, uncertainty about vaccination requirements, and fear of vaccination. Conclusion This study provided population-based estimates of COVID-19 vaccine uptake intention among mainland Chinese nursing students and interns. Factors such as age, education, vaccine knowledge, and attitudes influence COVID-19 vaccine behaviour. Relevant authorities should understand the barriers to COVID-19 vaccination from knowledge, attitude and practice, which is significant for formulating effective response strategies in future global public health crises.
Identifying the Factors Affecting MSMEs’ Intention to Buy Flavor B2 Replacer as Halal Seasoning Solution

Consumption of halal food is currently not only a concern of the Muslim community, but non-Muslim communities have also paid attention to halal products due to their high health orientation. Lard oil is one of the ingredients to improve the taste of food; however, besides being haram, lard contains quite a complex fat content, so all people with health problems cannot consume it. Various breakthroughs have been made by innovating new products, such as the development of artificial flavors that can produce taste characteristics similar to lard but are healthy and halal to consume. This article examines the factors that influence the interest in using food and beverage providers to replace lard with B2 replacer products based on halal awareness, halal food knowledge and perceived value with attitude as a mediating variable. By taking a sample of 372 MSMEs food and beverage providers in the DKI Jakarta area using a purposive sampling technique, this study found that perceived value is the most powerful factor influencing purchase intention, followed by the halal awareness factor. However, halal food knowledge was found to have no direct effect on purchase intention.
A territory‐wide opportunistic, hospital‐based HCV screening in the general population from northern Italy: The 1969–1989 birth‐cohort

The World Health Organization (WHO) goal of Hepatitis C Virus (HCV) elimination by 2030 rose awareness about the need of screening plans, worldwide. In Italy, graduated screening starting from people born in 1969–1989 might be the most‐effective strategy. We performed an opportunistic HCV screening study in the general population attending health facilities in Lombardy region, Northern Italy.
Diversity of calcareous dinoflagellate cysts in surface sediments of Gullmar Fjord, Sweden – an unrecognized gene pool of the Thoracosphaeraceae (peridineaen dinoflagellates).

An unexpectedly diverse and unusual association of calcareous dinoflagellate cysts (Thoracosphaeraceae) is reported from surface sediments of Gullmar Fjord, Sweden. The association is interpreted to be extant and comprises eight taxa, five of which have not been previously reported from this area. The taxa are Calcigonellum elongatum, Caracomia arctica, Leonella granifera, Praecalcigonellum schizosaeptum, Scrippsiella acuminata, S. lachrymosa, S. rotunda, and Scrippsiella sp. aff. S. trifida. The association is unique, as it combines pelagic and neritic taxa previously not found together, which might be explained by the highly seasonal environmental conditions of Gullmar Fjord. The recovered cysts reveal a variety of new morphological and ultrastructural details: P. schizosaeptum has a radial ultrastructure and most likely a Type A archaeopyle; wall-forming crystals of C. elongatum and S. lachrymosa show a compound ultrastructure, while those of P. schizosaeptum and S. rotunda grow epitaxially. Such differences in the ultrastructure of the wall forming crystallites suggest the possibility of fundamentally different biomineralisation mechanisms in calcareous dinoflagellates. At least two distinct species are currently united in S. rotunda, with cysts described from the Gulf of Naples, Norway and the China Sea being different to those of the type locality and Gullmar Fjord. Among the taxa recovered from Gullmar Fjord are rare species with an uncommon combination of morphological features, and include species whose molecular data is currently unavailable. An inclusion of their molecular data, particularly that of C. arctica and P. schizosaeptum, into phylogenetic reconstructions would be crucial to further elucidate the ongoing discussion on the systematic significance of the various cyst characters, such as archaeopyle-, ultrastructure-, and tabulation-type.
Drift in the tropics: Phylogenetics and biogeographical patterns in Combretaceae

Aim: The aim of this study was to further advance our understanding of the species-rich, and ecologically important angiosperm family Combretaceae to provide new insights into their evolutionary history. We assessed phylogenetic relationships in the family using target capture data and produced a dated phylogenetic tree to assess fruit dispersal modes and patterns of distribution.
How Credibly Do CMIP6 Simulations Capture Historical Mean and Extreme Precipitation Changes?

Future precipitation changes are typically estimated from climate model simulations, while the credibility of such projections needs to be assessed by their ability to capture observed precipitation changes. Here we evaluate how skillfully historical climate simulations contributing to the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) capture observed changes in mean and extreme precipitation. We find that CMIP6 historical simulations skillfully represent observed precipitation changes over large parts of Europe, Asia, northeastern North America, parts of South America and western Australia, whereas a lack of skill is apparent in western North America and parts of Africa. In particular in regions with moderate skill the availability of very large ensembles can be beneficial to improve the simulation accuracy. CMIP6 simulations are regionally skillful where they capture observed (positive or negative) trends, whereas a lack of skill is found in regions characterized by negative observed precipitation trends where CMIP6 simulates increases.
Non-Markovian branching processes in population dynamics and population genetics

In this thesis we consider a general branching population. The lifetimes of the individuals are supposed to be i.i. d. random variables distributed according to an arbitrary distribution. Moreover, each individual gives birth to new individuals at Poisson rate independently from the other individuals. The tree underlying the dynamics of this population is called a splitting tree. The process which count the number of alive individuals at given times is known as binary homogeneous Crump-Mode-Jagers processes. Such processes are known, when properly renormalized, to converge almost surely to some random variable. Thanks to the study of the underlying splitting tree through the tools introduced by A. Lambert in 2010, we show a central limit theorem associated to this a.s. convergence. Moreover, we suppose that individuals undergo mutation at Poisson rate under the infinitely many alleles assumption. We are mainly interested in the so called allelic frequency spectrum which describes the frequency of sizes of families (i.e. sets of individuals carrying the same type) at fixed times. Thanks to the methods developedin this thesis, we are able to get approximation results for the frequency spectrum. In a last part, we study some statistical problems for size constrained Galton-Watson trees. Our goal is to estimate the variance of the birth distribution. Using that the contour process of such tree converges to a Brownian excursion as the size of the tree growth, we construct estimators of the variance of the birth distribution
Impact of dividend payments by listed oil and gas companies on their valuation

the right proportions in the distribution of net profit into the retained part and the part transferred to the shareholders will translate into the company’s value. the first part of the paper contains theoretical considerations on macroeconomic, microeconomic and the capital market determinants influencing companies’ distribution of net profit. A large group of microeconomic factors – long-term trends in changes of net profit, shareholder structure, the company’s life cycle and its investment opportunities – as well as a selection of financing sources facilitating the attainment of the optimal capital structure are discussed. the most important macroeconomic factors include the economic situation, the level of inflation, sector specifics and the situation on the stock market. the authors present the results of empirical research in which they assume that the dividend yield of companies from the oil and gas sector influences the value of the company depending on the level of investments shaping the book value of shares, and that the dividend yield affects the duration of the return on capital expressed as the price to net profit ratio, and thus the level of company risk. the calculated Pearson linear correlation coefficients show an insignificant influence of the dividend yield on the value of companies from the oil and gas sector. this value is determined by a number of other factors. the study is based on statistical data for 2010–2020 derived from Warsaw Stock Exchange Yearbooks.
Demystifying the nexus between social media usage and overtourism: evidence from Hangzhou, China

ABSTRACT Several destinations across the globe experience the challenge of overtourism. Literature identifies social media as one of the driving factors of overtourism. Although some prior studies have explored the relationship between social media and overtourism, the connection between the two still lacks a strong empirical validation. In light of this, we empirically established the relationship between social media usage (SMU) and overtourism, drawing upon Uses and Gratifications Theory (UGT). Quantitative data were collected from 209 tourists who had visited Hangzhou and analysed using PLS-SEM. Research findings reveal that social media usage contributes to overtourism through the mediating effect of tourist flow concentration, even though the influence is weak. Consequently, only 10.2% of the variance in overtourism is explained by the model, suggesting a weak effect of social media usage on overtourism. Implications and limitations are discussed, and avenues for further research are suggested.
Consensus and Diffusion for First-Order Distributed Optimization Over Multi-Hop Network

Distributed optimization is a powerful paradigm to solve various problems in machine learning over networked systems. Existing first-order optimization methods perform cheap gradient descent by exchanging information per iteration only with single-hop neighbours in a network. However, in many agent networks such as sensor and robotic networks, it is prevalent that each agent can interact with other agents over multi-hop communication. Therefore, distributed optimization method over multi-hop networks is an important but overlooked topic that clearly needs to be developed. Motivated by this observation, in this paper, we apply multi-hop transmission to the outstanding distributed gradient descent (DGD) method and propose two typical versions (i.e., consensus and diffusion) of multi-hop DGD method, which we call CM-DGD and DM-DGD, respectively. Theoretically, we present the convergence guarantee of the proposed methods under mild assumptions. Moreover, we confirm that multi-hop strategy results in higher probability to improve the spectral gap of the underlying network, which has been shown to be a critical factor improving performance of distributed optimizations, thus achieves better convergence metrics. Experimentally, two distributed machine learning problems are picked to verify the theoretical analysis and show the effectiveness of CM-DGD and DM-DGD by using synthesized and real data sets.
Nonparametric and Parametric Methods for Solar Oscillation Spectra

The study of the systematic oscillations of the Sun has led to better understanding of the Sun’s inner structure and dynamics, and may help to resolve inconsistencies between observations and the standard solar model. Recent studies have concluded that solar modal structure remains coherent past turbulence in the convection zone and imprints its signatures on the solar wind and the interplanetary magnetic field fluctuations, and these structures are coherent with atmospheric pressure variations, terrestrial seismic oscillations, and data from communications systems. Time series containing modal structure can be expected to contain several thousands of resolved and unresolved line components in very short bands in frequency, and the measurement of these modes pushes spectrum estimation methods for time series to its limit. This thesis presents two theoretical contributions for modeling solar oscillations in power spectra (i) expressions for the expected number and shape of significant spurious peaks in spectrum estimates are given, in the absence of modal structure, and a permutation test for the identification of spectra containing pathological numbers of modal components. (ii) A model for maximum likelihood estimation of the solar oscillation parameters in composite spectra is given. The scientific contributions of this thesis are (a) identification of highly significant modal artifacts in solar wind measurements as seen by the Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) on the 2 − 3mHz band and (b) quantification of the presence of modal structure in secondary cosmic rays (specifically neutrons) on Earth.
ROOTS PROXIMITY OF MAXILLARY MOLARS TO MAXILLARY SINUS ON CBCT AMONG PATIENTS PRESENTED FOR ORAL AND MAXILLOFACIAL PROCEDURES

Objectives: To determine the distance between the maxillary fi rst and second molar roots andthe maxillary sinus fl oor on CBCT.Materials and Methods: This descriptive cross sectional study was conducted in the department oforal and maxillofacial surgery Khyber College of dentistry Peshawar after approval from EthicalReview Committee of hospital. All adult patients full fi lling the inclusion criteria were includedin the study. Data was collected on specially designed Performa. The vertical distance betweenmaxillary 1st and 2nd Molar roots, Right and left side were measured on CBCT Coronal view.The data was analysed by SPSS version 22 for descriptive statistics. Student t test was used tocompare the distances.Results: Total 60 patients included in the study. Male to female ratio was 2:1. Maxillary secondmolar mesio-buccal root showed least distance from fl oor of maxillary sinus followed by maxillary2nd molar palatal root and palatal root of 1st molar.Conclusion: The preoperative assessment of the roots of maxillary molars is important for avoidance of sinus related complications because most of the times these roots are in close proximity withthe maxillary sinus, particularly in the maxillary 2nd molar region as demonstrated in this study.
Dendritic Cell-Derived Exosomes Driven Drug Co-Delivery Biomimetic Nanosystem for Effective Combination of Malignant Melanoma Immunotherapy and Gene Therapy

Purpose Malignant melanoma (MM), the most lethal skin cancer, is highly invasive and metastatic. These qualities are related to not only genetic mutations in MM itself but also the interaction of MM cells with the immune system and microenvironment. This study aimed to construct a combined immunotherapy and gene therapy drug delivery system for the effective treatment of MM. Methods Mature dendritic cell (mDC) exosomes (mDexos) with immune induction functions were used as carriers. BRAF siRNA (siBRAF) with the ability to silence mutated BRAF in MM was encapsulated in mDexos by electroporation to construct a biomimetic nanosystem for the codelivery of immunotherapy and gene therapy drugs (siBRAF-mDexos) to the MM microenvironment. Then, we investigated the nanosystem’s serum stability and biocompatibility, uptake efficiency in mouse melanoma cells (B16-F10 cells), cytotoxicity against B16-F10 cells and inhibitory effect on BRAF expression. Furthermore, we evaluated its antimelanoma activity and safety in vivo. Results SiBRAF-mDexos were nanosized. Compared to siBRAF, siBRAF-mDexos displayed significantly increased serum stability, biocompatibility, uptake efficiency in B16-F10 cells, and cytotoxicity to B16-F10 melanoma cells; they also had a significantly greater inhibitory effect on BRAF expression and induced T-lymphocyte proliferation. Moreover, compared with siBRAF, siBRAF-mDexos showed significantly enhanced anti-MM activity and a high level of safety in vivo. Conclusion The study suggests that the siBRAF-mDexo biomimetic drug codelivery system can be used to effectively treat MM, which provides a new strategy for combined gene therapy and immunotherapy for MM.
Corporate Governance and Firm Value of the Auto Sector-An Empirical Evidence

This study has aimed to investigate the most relevant governance variables which may affect automobile firms’ performance. The step-wise regression has been applied in stages on different variables incorporated in the study. The impact of all variables has been analyzed separately and model fit has been tested for 30 automobile firms. This research divulges that Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Duality was pointedly related to a firm’s performance, lending credence to the validity of the Stewardship theory. The number of independent directors on the audit committee, on the other hand, was found to be pointedly and negatively associated with firms’ performance and supported the agency theory. In this paper, the firm's size and age have a significant impact on Earnings Per Share (EPS). This study supports the stewardship theory and agency theory of corporate governance. The results expand the body of knowledge by providing empirical evidence that governance variables such as CEO duality and audit committee independence ratio have an impact on the performance of the firm. This study presents evidence that the duality of the CEO’s position and the independent audit committees is significant and of paramount importance.
Improved application of remote referencing data in aeromagnetic processing: insights and applications from global geomagnetic modelling

Magnetic surveys are an important method of understanding subsurface geology, however there are several reasons why correction by remote referencing may fail, including local induced effects, activity levels of the field, and simple distance between survey and base station. We look for ways to improve correction by remote referencing using insights from global field models and comparisons of data from a wide range of observatories. We investigate the conditions in which the behaviour of nearby observatories differ from each other, and where the CM4 comprehensive model fails to match the observed behaviour of the local geomagnetic field. The misfits are separated by cause: those due to the activity level of the geomagnetic field, and the location of the observatory. We see that CM4 is a good match to observatories in the conditions it was designed for (midlatitudes and Kp up to 2), but also that it can produce a good fit to stations out of this range (up to Kp of 3 or 4). The correlation of misfits to CM4 allows us to separate effects due to latitude, and location on the coast. Further investigation allows us to suggest some corrections that may improve the quality and extent of magnetic data gained by surveys in these locations. High latitude stations show changes in behaviour which fall into latitudinally split groups, most likely due to the presence of induced fields from ionospheric currents. Ensuring base station and survey fall into the same grouping would eliminate many of the problems this causes. Geomagnetic storms often lead to survey data being unusable due to their effects. We find that while X component data contains mostly storm signal, the Y and Z components at many stations contain retrievable data. The recovery period of the storm can, for most stations, be used after a regression is applied. We also consider the effects of induced fields due to the tides and the coast effect -well-known effects that can be seen at many stations. We find a correction for the dominant M2 tidal effect using cosine waves. We also find an approximate correction for the coast effect, using cosine or sine waves of the Sq period as appropriate for the station pair chosen. It is also noted that small differences in location can have a large effect on the induced fields, as seen at GUI and TAM, where storms seem to have a smaller than expected effect.