Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Impact of Digitalization on SME Performance of the EU27: Panel Data Analysis

This article explores the relationship between digitalization and business performance in European small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, which has intensified the need for SMEs to adopt digital technologies for enhanced competitiveness. Conducted through a comprehensive literature review, this study investigates the impact of digitalization on SME performance. Employing the statistical software EViews 12, the research utilizes an econometric analysis of panel data to examine the influence of digitalization on SME performance and validate the formulated hypotheses. The dataset comprises 135 observations collected over a five-year period from 27 European countries. A linear regression model is used to test the hypotheses, revealing the relationship between the independent and dependent variables. Model specifications are determined through various tests. This study’s findings demonstrate that the integration of digital technologies and digital intensity significantly drives digitalization in European SMEs, leading to positive impacts on performance. This article emphasizes the importance of digitalization in SMEs for process streamlining, productivity improvement, and enhanced customer experience, ultimately fostering business growth and development. These empirical findings provide valuable evidence for policymakers to prioritize the identification of appropriate measures for stimulating the integration of new digital tools into SME infrastructure and serve as a foundation for future research in this domain.
Bittersweet Sugars: How Unusual Glycan Structures May Connect Epithelial-to-Mesenchymal Transition and Multidrug Resistance in Cancer

Cancer cells are characterized by metabolic reprogramming, which enables their survival in of-ten inhospitable conditions. A very well-documented example that has gained attraction in re-cent years and is already considered a hallmark of transformed cells is the reprogramming of carbohydrate metabolism. Such a feature, in association with the differential expression of en-zymes involved in the biosynthesis of glycoconjugates, generically known as glycosyltransfer-ases, contributes to the expression of structurally atypical glycans when compared to those ex-pressed in healthy tissues. The latest studies have demonstrated that glycophenotypic alterations are capable of modulating multifactorial events essential for the development and/or progres-sion of the disease. Herein, we will address the importance of glycobiology in modern medi-cine, focusing on the ability of unusual/truncated O-linked glycans to modulate two complex and essential phenomena for cancer progression: the acquisition of the multidrug resistance (MDR) phenotype and the activation of molecular pathways associated with the epithelial–mesenchymal transition (EMT) process, an event deeply linked with cancer metastasis.
Diversity and Ranking of ENSO Impacts along the Eastern Seaboard of Subtropical Southern Africa

El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is the dominant mode of interannual climate variability over southern Africa during the summer half of the year. It is widely accepted that El Niño (La Niña) core summers (December–February) are typically warmer and drier (cooler and wetter) than average over the region. Although it is recognized that the ENSO impacts are nonlinear and not all events result in the expected impact, little or no work has been carried out to systematically explore the diversity and ranking of these impacts. Here, parameter-space bubble plots involving various rainfall and temperature metrics are used to study how such impacts vary over the eastern seaboard of subtropical southern Africa to determine the ENSO events with the strongest impacts, and to identify the most anomalous ENSO cases. Comparison of neutral summers experiencing the strongest droughts/floods with ENSO impacts is also performed. These metrics are designed to be applicable to the interests of farmers and other user groups. It is found that 1987/1988 (2017/2018) was the most unusual El Niño (La Niña) and neutral 1981/1982 had a severe drought, worse than occurs during most El Niños. These unusual cases are explained in terms of regional circulation and SST anomalies. Implications of the results for seasonal forecasting and for farmers are discussed.
DeepScheduler: Enabling Flow-Aware Scheduling in Time-Sensitive Networking

Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) has been considered the most promising network paradigm for time-critical applications (e.g., industrial control) and traffic scheduling is the core of TSN to ensure low latency and determinism. With the demand for flexible production increases, industrial network topologies and settings change frequently due to pipeline switches. As a result, there is a pressing need for a more efficient TSN scheduling algorithm. In this paper, we propose DeepScheduler, a fast and scalable flow-aware TSN scheduler based on deep reinforcement learning. In contrast to prior work that heavily relies on expert knowledge or problem-specific assumptions, DeepScheduler automatically learns effective scheduling policies from the complex dependency among data flows. We design a scalable neural network architecture that can process arbitrary network topologies with informative representations of the problem, and decompose the problem decision space for efficient model training. In addition, we develop a suite of TSN-compatible testbeds with hardware-software co-design and DeepScheduler integration. Extensive experiments on both simulation and physical testbeds show that DeepScheduler runs >150/5 times faster and improves the schedulability by 36%/39% compared to state-of-the-art heuristic/expert-based methods. With both efficiency and effectiveness, DeepScheduler makes scheduling no longer an obstacle towards flexible manufacturing.
Zeno meets modern science

``No one has ever touched Zeno without refuting him''. We will not refute Zeno in this paper. Instead we review some unexpected encounters of Zeno with modern science. The paper begins with a brief biography of Zeno of Elea followed by his famous paradoxes of motion. Reflections on continuity of space and time lead us to Banach and Tarski and to their celebrated paradox, which is in fact not a paradox at all but a strict mathematical theorem, although very counterintuitive. Quantum mechanics brings another flavour in Zeno paradoxes. Quantum Zeno and anti-Zeno effects are really paradoxical but now experimental facts. Then we discuss supertasks and bifurcated supertasks. The concept of localization leads us to Newton and Wigner and to interesting phenomenon of quantum revivals. At last we note that the paradoxical idea of timeless universe, defended by Zeno and Parmenides at ancient times, is still alive in quantum gravity. The list of references that follows is necessarily incomplete but we hope it will assist interested reader to fill in details.
Effective use of collaboration tools in Moodle LMS by Lecturers and Students at South Eastern University of Sri Lanka

In recent years, LMS has become important integral part of Sri Lankan higher educational institutes that greatly influencing in teaching and learning activities specially after the Covid-19 pandemic. There are various commercial and open source LMS systems are available. Most of the Higher Educational Institute in Sri Lanka are using Moodle LMS. Moodle is widely used open-source platform and it contains many activities and resources to support teaching and learning activities. Moodle by default offers collaboration tools such as Wiki, groups, forums and many more and also additional collaboration tools can be installed as external plugins. Collaboration tools are essential for building a community of active learners and share knowledge in a systematic way. This paper attempts to study of the effective usage of collaborative tools in Moodle by both teachers and learners. Teaching staff and students were interviewed at South Eastern University of Sri Lanka from the faculties of Management, Arts & Culture, Islamic Studies and Arabic Language and Technology. This study finds that participants mainly using Moodle as an online source of teaching materials and for conducting continues assessments and that the tools for collaboration are not much utilized. This research study also revealed that many reasons have dampened the usage and commitment of the collaborative features inside Moodle. These may be recognized as structure and user friendliness, reaction speed and a preference for alternative technologies.
Testing for a Unit Root in Time Series with GJR-GARCH Errors

In this paper, the authors simulated the ADF unit root test of finite-sample time series with GJR-GARCH error. The sample length, existence of high-order moment in disturbance, fat-tailedness and levelage effects were analyzed, which shows that the Fuller critical values of z, statistics directly under GED and t conditional distribution of the error term can be used.
Direct numerical simulation of hypersonic turbulent boundary layers with varying freestream Mach number

In this paper, the effects of freestream Mach number on the statistics and large-scale structures in compressible turbulent boundary layers are investigated using direct numerical simulations(DNS). DNS of turbulent boundary layers with nominal freestream Mach number ranging from 3 to 8 are performed. The validity of Morkovin’s scaling, strong Reynolds analogy, and Walz’s equation are assessed. We find that many of the scaling relations used to express compressible boundary layer statistics in terms of incompressible boundary layers still hold for the range of freestream Mach number considered. Compressibility effects are enhanced with increasing freestream Mach number but remain insignificant, and the turbulence dissipation remains primarily solenoidal. Moreover, the variation of near-wall streaks, iso-surface of the swirl strength, and hairpin packets with freestream Mach numbers demonstrates that increasing freestream Mach number decreases the coherency of turbulent structures.
Safety of Non-Vitamin K Antagonist Oral Anticoagulant Treatment in Patients with Chronic Kidney Disease and Kidney Transplant Recipients

The use of novel oral anticoagulants in patients with impaired renal function or undergoing immunosuppressive therapy is limited due to the risk of drug-to-drug interactions and anticoagulation-related adverse events. This article aims to assess the current data on the safety of direct-acting oral anticoagulant-based therapy in the population of kidney transplant recipients and patients with impaired renal function. The most important factors affecting the safety of treatment are the incidence of bleeding events, thromboembolic events, deaths and drug-to-drug interactions. The available data were compared to the findings on warfarin-based anticoagulation. Findings on the use of novel oral anticoagulants in kidney transplant recipients are limited yet promising in terms of safety and efficacy of use. However, current recommendations state that the co-administration of nonvitamin K antagonist oral anticoagulants with several immunosuppressive agents is contraindicated.
Financial Inclusion and Economic Growth in Sub-Saharan Africa—A Panel ARDL and Granger Non-Causality Approach

Many earlier development finance studies have attempted to assess the relationship between financial inclusion and economic growth. However, the findings of these studies vary from economy to economy and region to region due to various social and economic factors. We, therefore, deemed it pertinent to examine the relationship between financial inclusion and economic growth while further identifying the direction of causality between the two variables in twenty-six (26) Sub-Saharan African (SSA) economies using annual secondary data over the 2000–2019 period. In our paper, we used the principal component analysis (PCA) technique to develop a single composite index to proxy financial inclusion while adopting panel unit root, system generalised method of moment (GMM), and ARDL cointegration tests to assess the stationarity properties, assess the factors that affect economic growth, and examine the long-run relationships between financial inclusion and economic growth, respectively. In addition, a Granger non-causality test is used to verify the direction and magnitude of causality. Our study revealed that financial inclusion and economic growth share a strong long-run relationship and that there is bi-directional causality, indicating synergy between these two variables. In order to ensure sustainable economic growth, we thus recommend that developing countries develop macroeconomic policies that will promote financial inclusion while enhancing the functioning and regulation of the domestic financial markets to ensure that all citizens are catered for in the available instruments, products, and service offerings. Within the same policy framework, efforts must be made to further support productive sectors of the economy to ensure economic growth.
Use of Poly Lactic-co-glycolic Acid Nano and Micro Particles in the Delivery of Drugs Modulating Different Phases of Inflammation

Chronic inflammation contributes to the pathogenesis of many diseases, including apparently unrelated conditions such as metabolic disorders, cardiovascular diseases, neurodegenerative diseases, osteoporosis, and tumors, but the use of conventional anti-inflammatory drugs to treat these diseases is generally not very effective given their adverse effects. In addition, some alternative anti-inflammatory medications, such as many natural compounds, have scarce solubility and stability, which are associated with low bioavailability. Therefore, encapsulation within nanoparticles (NPs) may represent an effective strategy to enhance the pharmacological properties of these bioactive molecules, and poly lactic-co-glycolic acid (PLGA) NPs have been widely used because of their high biocompatibility and biodegradability and possibility to finely tune erosion time, hydrophilic/hydrophobic nature, and mechanical properties by acting on the polymer’s composition and preparation technique. Many studies have been focused on the use of PLGA-NPs to deliver immunosuppressive treatments for autoimmune and allergic diseases or to elicit protective immune responses, such as in vaccination and cancer immunotherapy. By contrast, this review is focused on the use of PLGA NPs in preclinical in vivo models of other diseases in which a key role is played by chronic inflammation or unbalance between the protective and reparative phases of inflammation, with a particular focus on intestinal bowel disease; cardiovascular, neurodegenerative, osteoarticular, and ocular diseases; and wound healing.
Controlling of Fruit flies through spraying of broad-spec-

India (Kapoor 2005). The Melon fly damages the cucurbits right from the primordial stages of the crop up to harvest (Viraktamath et al. 2003), which accounts damage varies from 30 to 100% (Ryckewaert et al. 2010). Controlling of Fruit flies through spraying of broad-spectrum insecticides is often not efficient owing to insecticide resistance, insecticide residues, environmental contamination, outbreaks of secondary pests and lethal effects on beneficial insects (Bourtzis et al. 2016). Thus the Biological control has emerged as the most commonly studied control tactic followed by other control methods viz., chemical control, behavioural control, Sterile Insect Technique (SIT) and quarantine treatments (Maru and Sao 2018). SIT is a species-specific and non-polluting method of insect control that relies on the sterilization of mass-reared insects by radiation and the systematic release of sterile males into a target area to induce sterility in the wild population (Knipling 1979). It is a pest control strategy that employs radiation to cause mutations or chromosomal aberrations in germ cells in order to produce reproductively sterile adult insects (Reichard 2002). This technique is successfully used against several insect pest, including Mediterranean fruit fly Ceratitis capitata (Wiedemann), Melon Melon fly, Zeugodacus cucurbitae (Coquillett) (Tephritidae: Diptera) is one of the world’s most economically important horticultural and quarantine insect pests inflicting significant losses to the horticultural industry (Vargas et al. 2015). India is considered to be its native habitat of Melon fly (Dhillon et al. 2005), although it shows the worldwide distribution. Melon fly is a serious pest on cucurbits, but it has also been found in beans, tomatoes and other commercial crops (Clarke et al. 2001; Dhillon et al. 2005). It attacks 81 plant species belonging to 19 different families (De Meyer et al. 2015) and destroys more than 60% of cucurbit crops in
Adaptive Optics Correction of Ocular Higher-Order Aberrations and the Effects on Functional Vision

iii Acknowledgments . iv
Numerical Simulation Research on Characteristics of Underwater Explosive Bubble Jet in Offshore Water

Underwater explosions have always been a hot topic in the field of ship protection. When explosives explode in offshore waters, the influence of seabed and structural boundaries on shock wave propagation and bubble pulsation will become more complicated. In this paper, a numerical simulation study of the underwater explosion between a deformable seabed and a rigid boundary is carried out. Firstly, the ABAQUS software was used to establish a numerical model by using the CEL method. The seabed was regarded as a heavier fluid, and the density ratio of the seabed and water was used to describe the characteristics of the seabed. The validity of the model was verified by comparison with experiments. Then, a series of numerical simulations were carried out by adjust the position of the explosive, the thickness of water medium layer, and the density of the seabed. The results show that: when the position of the explosive is close to the seabed and the rigid boundary, the bubble pulsation period is longer. The water jet and the pulsating pressure of the bubbles have a strong impact on the structure when the explosive is located near to 1 times the theoretical maximum radius of the bubble. As the depth of the water decreases, it can be observed that the bubbles transform from “ellipsoid” to “nipple-like”, and finally tear into upper and lower halves. When the thickness of water medium layer is 1 times the theoretical maximum radius of the bubble, the incident pressure waveforms of the bubble pulsation and the water jet near the structure are chaotic, which is caused by the “tear” phenomenon of the bubble. As the density of the seabed increases, the depth of the intrusion of the bubbles into the seabed becomes smaller and the shape of the bubbles becomes flatter. The research results of this paper can provide reference for the protection design of ships.
NEMA NU 2-2000 performance measurements on an ADAC MCD camera

The clinically oriented NEMA-NU2 performance standards have been performed on an ADAC MCD dual head camera. At 1 cm radius the transverse resolution FWHM (FWTM) was measured to be 5.2 (10.0) mm and the axial was 5.0 (10.6) mm. At 10 cm radius the transverse radial resolution was 4.7 (7.4) mm and the transverse tangential was 8.5 (20.9) mm. The axial resolution was 14.0 (41.1) mm. The peak true count rate was 4365 counts/sec at a concentration of 4.3 kBq/ml. The peak noise equivalent count rate (NECR) was 1617 count/sec at 2.9 kBq/ml. The system scatter fraction was 48%. The maximum relative count rate error observed at the NECR peak was -42%. The sensitivity was 1014 cts/sec/MBq in the centre and 867 cts/sec/MBq at an offset of 10 cm. The contrast for the hot spheres ranged from 18.5 (11.6)% to 11.6 (7.9)% for the contrast ratio of 8:1 (4:1). For the cold spheres it ranged from 41% to 25% with an overall background variability of 7%. The residual error in scatter and attenuation correction was approximately 50%. All measurements were performed at the maximum allowed crystal-to-crystal distance of 810 mm.
The velocity distribution of fragment from air part of cylindrical casing

In some cylindrical casings, the non-explosive material or structure exists. The explosive charge is axially discontinuous, the propagation of detonation wave is also discontinuous, and the driving process of metal casing is diverse from continuous charge. If the non-explosive material or structure in the middle is regarded as air, it is called the cylindrical casing with air part in the middle. Due to the combined effects of rarefaction waves and the detonation wave generated by explosive charges on both sides, existing formulas of fragment velocities from cylindrical casing can neither accurately predict that from explosive charge part, nor predict that from the air part since the mass ratio of the explosive charge to the metal casing in the air part is 0. Adopt the method of simulation analysis, the cylindrical casing with air part in the middle was analyzed. A new formula was established to predict the fragment velocity of air part from cylindrical casing in the middle, which showed good agreement with the simulation results.
Some Problems for Typically Real Functions

Many extremal properties of the class of normalized univalent functions are shared by the class of typically real functions each considered in the unit circle. By the class T of typically real functions we mean those functions f(z), regular for |z| < 1 with f(0) = 0, f'(0) = 1, and such that f(z) > 0 for z > 0, (z) < 0 for > 0. This class was first studied by Rogosinski (4) who proved various simple properties for it. Later Robertson (3) took up the study and proved the following important representation result.
Sensitivity Study on Typical Parameters of Underwater Explosion Numerical Simulation

In the numerical simulation research for underwater explosion, the selection of simulation parameters has a great influence on the results of numerical calculation. Based on the one-dimensional spherical symmetry model, this paper systematically studies the influence of three factors: grid size, water state equation and artificial viscosity coefficient on the important physical parameters of water explosion when TNT explosive is exploded in water. The important physical parameters selected for the explosion in water are the shock wave intensity, the maximu m radius of the bubble and the pulsation period of the bubble. A series of studies are carried out on underwater explosions with different grid sizes, so as to obtain the corresponding recommended grids that meet the calculation accuracy. The influence of different water state equations on the simulation results is discussed. The effect of artificial viscosity coefficient on the simulation results is analyzed. Finally, the similarity law of the model is studied to verify the universality of the model parameters.
Development of breakfast food from black rice and porang supplemented with jackbean and red dragon fruit

This study aim to develop the potential of local food into functional breakfast cereal products that are high in energy and rich in dietary fiber, as an alternative breakfast food for individuals with diabetes. The sample formulation is a factorial experimental study using a Randomized Block Design. The factors are the proportion of composite flour consisting of black rice, porang, and jack bean flour also the addition of red dragon fruit concentrate based on the total weight of composite flour. The chosen breakfast cereal formulation contains moisture (6.07%bw), ash (4.87%bw), protein (8.68%bw), fat (0.38%bw), and carbohydrate (79.99%bw), and crude fiber (43.49%bw) which meets requirements of breakfast cereal in the SNI. It can be concluded that the chosen breakfast cereal is low fat and high fiber food product. Further research is needed to study the effectivity of chosen breakfast cereal on fasting blood glucose of people with diabetes.