Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Ultrafast spectroscopy of voltage reconfigurable graphene saturable absorbers in the visible and near infrared

We describe a detailed experimental investigation of the ultrafast nonlinear response of a voltage-controlled graphene-gold saturable absorber (VCG-gold-SA) by employing femtosecond pump probe spectroscopy. Visible and near-infrared continuum probe pulses covering the spectral range from 500 nm to 1600 nm were used. In the experiments, the saturation fluence, modulation depth, ultrafast relaxation times, and the saturable absorption bandwidth of the VCG-gold-SA were measured as a function of the applied bias. We observed both saturable absorption and multi-photon absorption regimes as the applied bias voltage was varied between 0 and 2 V. Measurements indicate that under bias voltages in the range of 0–2 V, it should be possible to adjust the insertion loss of the VCG-gold-SA and at the same time, maintain a sufficient amount of modulation depth as well as an attainable level of saturation fluence over an ultrabroad spectral bandwidth. In particular, at the bias voltage of 1 V, the VCG-gold-SA exhibited fast saturable absorber behavior with adjustable insertion loss from 630 nm to 1100 nm. These results clearly demonstrate that the VCG-gold-SA can operate as a versatile mode locker for femtosecond pulse generation from lasers operating in the visible and near-infrared wavelengths.
Transient Simulation of Airflow and Pollutant Dispersion Under Mixing Flow and Buoyancy Driven Flow Regimes in Residential Buildings

The distribution of airflow in a residential building varies with the periodic operation of a heating, ventilating and airconditioning (HVAC) system. Depending on the HVAC fan operation, mixing airflow (fan ON) or stratified airflow (fan OFF) occurs in the space. The objectives of this study are 1) to examine the time needed for room air to stabilize after a central ventilation fan turns ON/OFF and 2) to evaluate how the difference in distribution of gaseous and particulate pollutants in the space depends on fan operation mode. In the study, experiments measured the spatial distribution of airflow and pollutant concentrations in a full-scale environmental chamber. The measured data then provided the basis to establish a reliable computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model, which investigated the concentrations of gaseous and particulate pollutants depending on the mechanical fan operation mode. The results indicate that the transition between mixing flow and stratified flow occurs in a time scale of seconds, implying that the airflow in residential buildings is primarily mixing or stratified flow. The results show little spatial variation of tracer gas and particles in the mixing flow regime, whereas larger temporal and spatial variations are present in stratified flow. Additionally, the variations in particle concentrations are higher than those in gaseous concentrations. In certain areas of the room the particle concentration with stratified flow is up to thirty times higher than that with mixing flow, implying a high potential of exposure to particles when the fan is OFF.
The performance of rigid scopes for tracheal intubation: a randomised, controlled trial in patients with a simulated difficult airway

We compared the Bonfils™ and SensaScope™ rigid fibreoptic scopes in 200 patients with a simulated difficult airway randomised to one of the two devices. A cervical collar inhibited neck movement and reduced mouth opening to a mean (SD) of 23 (3) mm. The primary outcome parameter was overall success of tracheal intubation; secondary outcomes included first‐attempt success, intubation times, difficulty of intubation, fibreoptic view and side‐effects. The mean (95% CI) overall success rate was 88 (80–94)% for the Bonfils and 89 (81–94)% for the SensaScope (p = 0.83). First‐attempt intubation success rates were 63 (53–72)% for the Bonfils and 72 (62–81)% for the SensaScope (p = 0.17). Median (IQR [range]) intubation time was significantly shorter with the SensaScope (34 (20–84 [5–240]) s vs. 45 (25–134 [12–230]) s), and fibreoptic view was significantly better with the SensaScope (full view of the glottis in 79% with the SensaScope vs. 61% with the Bonfils). This might be explained by its steerable tip and the S‐formed shape, contributing to better manoeuvrability. There were no differences in the difficulty of intubation or side‐effects.
GATE: game-based testing environment

In this paper, we propose a game-based public testing mechanism called GATE. The purpose of GATE is to make use of the rich human resource on the Internet to help increase effectiveness in software testing and improve test adequacy. GATE facilitates public testing in three main steps: 1) decompose the test criterion satisfaction problem into many smaller sub-model satisfaction problems; 2) construct games for each individual sub-models and presenting the games to the public through web servers; 3) collect and convert public users' action sequence data into real test cases which guarantee to cover not adequately tested elements. A preliminary study on apache-commons-math library shows that 44% of the branches have not been adequately tested by state of the art automatic test generation techniques. Among these branches, at least 42% are decomposable by GATE into smaller sub-problems. These elements naturally become the potential targets of GATE for public game-based testing.
Supporting ways of learning for Indigenous Australian pre-undergraduate students using Moodle

This paper discusses the way in which the ways of learning and learning strengths of Indigenous Australian university students can be supported by the Moodle learning management system (LMS). Moodle is currently undergoing a pilot phase at CQUniversity before it fully replaces Blackboard and Webfuse as the sole university LMS. Several courses from Nulloo Yumbah, CQUniversity’s Indigenous Learning, Research and Spirituality Centre, are participating in this pilot phase. The literature highlights the way that information communication technologies (ICTs) align with Indigenous ways of learning when learning materials are designed and presented in a way that is culturally relevant. The paper outlines Indigenous learning styles and presents a discussion based around what Moodle does and does not offer to benefit Indigenous learners. From this, a number of the potential benefits and constraints of Moodle are presented and future research directions identified.
Comparative evaluation of standardized alcoholic, hydroalcoholic, and aqueous extracts of Phyllanthus maderaspatensis Linn. against galactosamine-induced hepatopathy in albino rats

Background: Phyllanthus maderaspatensis species (Euphorbiaceae) has been used in folk medicine of many countries as a remedy against several pathological conditions including jaundice and hepatitis. This study is an attempt to evaluate hepatoprotective activity of P. maderaspatensis against galactosamine-induced toxicity and also investigation of polyphenols in each extract. Materials and Methods: The extraction of P. maderaspatensis as per Ayurveda was simultaneously standardized and quantified for biochemical markers viz., polyphenols: Kaempferol, quercetin, catechin, rutin, and ellagic acid by high-performance thin layer chromatography. Hepatotoxicity was induced albino adult rats by intraperitoneal injection of galactosamine (400 mg/kg). The quantified aqueous, hydroalcoholic and alcoholic extract of P. maderaspatensis (200 and 400 mg/kg body weight/day) were compared for evaluation of hepatoprotective potential, which were assessed in terms of reduction in histological damage, change in serum enzymes such as aspartate amino transaminase, alanine amino transaminase and alkaline phosphatase and increase thiobarbituric acid reactive substances. Results and Discussion: The hydroalcoholic extract was found to contain comparatively high amount of kaempferol, quercetin, catechin, rutin, and ellagic acid which are responsible for hepatoprotection. Antioxidant parameters such as glutathione, catalase, and superoxide dismutase activity in liver tissues were restored toward the normalization more significantly by the hydroalcoholic extract when compared with other extracts. The biochemical observations were supplemented with histopathological examination. Conclusion: The hydroalcoholic extract standardized with respect to known biomarkers may be considered as a potent extract against hepatotoxicity.
Learning sparse dictionary for long-term biomedical signal classification and clustering

Long-term observational biomedical signals are often used for many medical diagnoses including sleep disorder and epilepsy. Effective management and usage of this type of data through classification or clustering problem is the key to real-world applications. This work focuses on learning a se of selected sparse basis functions, called a double-sparse dictionary, directly from specific data, in order to produce a collection of discriminative features with low variability. Our approach is to combine wavelet transform with sparse principal component analysis (SPCA), namely wavelet sparse PCA (WSPCA), and apply it to a signal segment matrix. The application of this proposed method is demonstrated by classification and clustering problems of long-term EEG signals, and the results are compared to other PCA-based sparse methods. The nearly perfect classification accuracy (i.e., 99.7%) is obtained by using WSPCA for the data we consider. Although PCA leads to the best performance among all methods we considered, WSPCA does not lose classification accuracy significantly and it is more suitable for long-term signal classification due to the time-domain signal dimension reduction by wavelets.
Wingless and Notch signaling provide cell survival cues and control cell proliferation during wing development

Tissue growth during animal development depends on the coordination of cell proliferation and cell death. The EGF-receptor/MAPK, Hedgehog, Dpp, Wingless (Wg) and Notch signaling pathways have been implicated in growth control in the developing Drosophila wing. In this report, we examine the effects of Notch and Wg on growth in terms of cell proliferation and cell survival. Reduction of Wg signaling impaired compartment and clonal growth, and increased cell death. Inhibition of apoptosis in cells deficient for Wg signaling only partially rescued the clone growth defect, suggesting that Wg is also required to promote cell proliferation. This is supported by the finding that ectopic expression of Wg caused over-proliferation of cells in the proximal wing. Localized activation of Notch had non-autonomous effects on cell proliferation. However, only part of this effect was attributable to Notch-dependent induction of Wg, suggesting that other Notch-inducible signaling molecules contribute to the control of cell proliferation in the wing.
Detection of Cotinine in Newborn Dried Blood Spots

Maternal smoking while pregnant is a plausible risk factor for childhood cancers because many seem to initiate in utero and tobacco-specific carcinogens cross the placenta. Social desirability bias may affect maternal report of smoking in case-control studies and could explain inconsistently observed associations with offspring cancer. Detection of tobacco smoke biomarkers in dried blood spots (DBS), which are increasingly stored by newborn screening programs, may improve retrospective assessment of fetal tobacco exposure. As proof-of-principle, we examined cotinine in DBS of 20 infants enrolled in a pilot study of pregnancy among low-income women. We recruited 107 pregnant women (<30 weeks of gestation) from six Women, Infants, and Children clinics in Minneapolis and St. Paul in 1999. Blood samples obtained at enrollment were tested for total cotinine using gas chromatography/mass spectrometry. Women were then interviewed at 7 months of gestation to determine current smoking habits. DBS were obtained from the Minnesota Department of Health. We tested DBS from 10 infants whose mothers had detectable serum cotinine at baseline and 10 control infants whose mothers had none. One quarter of each DBS was assayed for cotinine using gas chromatography/mass spectrometry; levels were estimated assuming 50 μL blood per sample. Mean cotinine was 29 ng/mL (SD, 7.5), 45 ng/mL (SD, 9.7), and 9 ng/mL (SD, 7.4), respectively, among infants of all smokers, infants of four women who acknowledged smoking at 7 months of gestation, and infants of nonsmokers. These results suggest that DBS analysis may identify infants of women who smoke throughout pregnancy. (Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2007;16(9):1902–5)
The influence of motorcyclist behavior in crash involvement

Introduction: In Singapore, motorcycle crashes account for 50% of traffic fatalities and 53% of injuries. While extensive research efforts have been devoted to improve the motorcycle safety, the relationship between the rider behavior and the crash risk is still not well understood. The objective of this study is to evaluate how behavioral factors influence crash risk and to identify the most vulnerable group of motorcyclists. Methods: To explore the rider behavior, a 61-item questionnaire examining sensation seeking (Zuckerman et al., 1978), impulsiveness (Eysenck et al., 1985), aggressiveness (Buss & Perry, 1992), and risk-taking behavior (Weber et al., 2002) was developed. A total of 240 respondents with at least one year riding experience form the sample that relate behavior to their crash history, traffic penalty awareness, and demographic characteristics. By clustering the crash risk using the medoid portioning algorithm, the log-linear model relating the rider behavior to crash risk was developed. Results and Discussions: Crash-involved motorcyclists scored higher in impulsive sensation seeking, aggression and risk-taking behavior. Aggressive and high risk-taking motorcyclists were respectively 1.30 and 2.21 times more likely to fall under the high crash involvement group while impulsive sensation seeking was not found to be significant. Based on the scores on risk-taking and aggression, the motorcyclists were clustered into four distinct personality combinations namely, extrovert (aggressive, impulsive risk-takers), leader (cautious, aggressive risk-takers), follower (agreeable, ignorant risk-takers), and introvert (self-consciousness, fainthearted risk-takers). “Extrovert” motorcyclists were most prone to crashes, being 3.34 times more likely to involve in crash and 8.29 times more vulnerable than the “introvert”. Mediating factors like demographic characteristics, riding experience, and traffic penalty awareness were found not to be significant in reducing crash risk. Conclusion: The findings of this study will be useful for road safety campaign planners to be more focused in the target group as well as those who employ motorcyclists for their delivery business.
Flexible decomposition of price promotion effects using store-level scanner data

Recent studies in marketing show decompositions of sales promotion effects based on household-level scanner data. Typically, the total elasticity is decomposed into choice, timing, and quantity elasticities. We propose a model that estimates standard, enhanced, and flexible decompositions based on store-level data. The standard decomposition divides the own-brand sales elasticity into a market share ("choice") elasticity, a period share ("timing") elasticity, and a category sales ("quantity") elasticity. The enhanced decomposition includes two extensions. One extension is the separation of the category sales elasticity into a between-store share and a total market elasticity, which allows us to measure cross-store effects of promotions. The other extension is a partition of the market share elasticity into within-brand and between-brand share elasticities. We show that the store-level results for standard decompositions based on four product categories are comparable to extant household-level results. For the two extensions, our empirical results, for one product category each, show small between-store share elasticities but large cannibalization effects between SKUs of the same brand. For improved understanding of promotion effects, we propose flexible decompositions. One is that we allow the decomposition to depend on the type of promotion support, such as feature and/or display. We find that the own-brand sales elasticity increases with more support. Also, for more support, the relative contribution of the period share elasticity increases while the contribution of the market share elasticity decreases. The second type of flexibility is that we allow the decomposition to depend on the magnitude of the discount. We use a flexible, nonparametric, method to account for the latter dependency. We find that with display and/or feature, the own-brand sales elasticities are less negative at higher price discount levels. The decomposition shows that on average, the market share elasticity rapidly becomes less negative while the period share- and the category sales elasticities are fairly constant when the discount increases. Hence, the relative contribution of the latter two elasticities increases at the cost of the relative contribution of the market share elasticity. The flexible estimation of promotion effects, separately for four types of support, provides superior insight into marketplace phenomena relevant to marketing scientists and marketing practitioners.
Dynamic semantics for agent communication languages

This paper proposes dynamic semantics for agent communication languages (ACLs) as a method for tackling some of the fundamental problems associated with agent communication in open multiagent systems. Based on the idea of providing alternative semantic "variants" for speech acts and transition rules between them that are contingent on previous agent behaviour, our framework provides an improved notion of grounding semantics in ongoing interaction, a simple mechanism for distinguishing between compliant and expected behaviour, and a way to specify sanction and reward mechanisms as part of the ACL itself. We extend a common framework for commitment-based ACL semantics to obtain these properties, discuss desiderata for the design of concrete dynamic semantics together with examples, and analyse their properties.
Characterization of a Proteasome and TAP-independent Presentation of Intracellular Epitopes by HLA-B27 Molecules*

Background: HLA-B*2705-Asp116 and HLA-B*2709-His-116 associate differently with AS. Both possess an unpaired Cys-67 in the B pocket. Results: The two molecules cross-present antigens through a proteasome-independent route. Cys-67, although not endorsing this alternative pathway, contributes variously to peptide stabilization. Conclusion: B27 molecules can load peptides in post-ER compartments. Asp-116/His-116 influences the need of an intact B-pocket. Significance: Identifying B27 distinctive features might contribute to the understanding of AS pathogenesis. Nascent HLA-class I molecules are stabilized by proteasome-derived peptides in the ER and the new complexes proceed to the cell surface through the post-ER vesicles. It has been shown, however, that less stable complexes can exchange peptides in the Trans Golgi Network (TGN). HLA-B27 are the most studied HLA-class I molecules due to their association with Ankylosing Spondylitis (AS). Chimeric proteins driven by TAT of HIV have been exploited by us to deliver viral epitopes, whose cross-presentation by the HLA-B27 molecules was proteasome and TAP-independent and not restricted to Antigen-Presenting Cells (APC). Here, using these chimeric proteins as epitope suppliers, we compared with each other and with the HLA-A2 molecules, the two HLA-B*2705 and B*2709 alleles differing at residue 116 (D116H) and differentially associated with AS. We found that the antigen presentation by the two HLA-B27 molecules was proteasome-, TAP-, and APC-independent whereas the presentation by the HLA-A2 molecules required proteasome, TAP and professional APC. Assuming that such difference could be due to the unpaired, highly reactive Cys-67 distinguishing the HLA-B27 molecules, C67S mutants in HLA-B*2705 and B*2709 and V67C mutant in HLA-A*0201 were also analyzed. The results showed that this mutation did not influence the HLA-A2-restricted antigen presentation while it drastically affected the HLA-B27-restricted presentation with, however, remarkable differences between B*2705 and B*2709. The data, together with the occurrence on the cell surface of unfolded molecules in the case of C67S-B*2705 mutant but not in that of C67S-B*2709 mutant, indicates that Cys-67 has a more critical role in stabilizing the B*2705 rather than the B*2709 complexes.
An eighth order Backward Differentiation Formula with Continuous Coefficients for Stiff Ordinary Differential Equations

A block backward differentiation formula of uniform order eight is proposed for solving first order stiff initial value problems (IVPs). The conventional 8-step Backward Differentiation Formula (BDF) and additional methods are obtained from the same continuous scheme and assembled into a block matrix equation which is applied to provide the solutions of IVPs on non-overlapping intervals. The stability analysis of the method indicates that the method is L0-stable. Numerical results obtained using the proposed new block form show that it is attractive for solutions of stiff problems and compares favourably with existing ones. Keywords—Stiff IVPs, System of ODEs,Backward differentiation formulas, Block methods, Stability.
Temporal shifts in the skin microbiome associated with disease flares and treatment in children with atopic dermatitis

Atopic dermatitis (AD) has long been associated with Staphylococcus aureus skin colonization or infection and is typically managed with regimens that include antimicrobial therapies. However, the role of microbial communities in the pathogenesis of AD is incompletely characterized. To assess the relationship between skin microbiota and disease progression, 16S ribosomal RNA bacterial gene sequencing was performed on DNA obtained directly from serial skin sampling of children with AD. The composition of bacterial communities was analyzed during AD disease states to identify characteristics associated with AD flares and improvement post-treatment. We found that microbial community structures at sites of disease predilection were dramatically different in AD patients compared with controls. Microbial diversity during AD flares was dependent on the presence or absence of recent AD treatments, with even intermittent treatment linked to greater bacterial diversity than no recent treatment. Treatment-associated changes in skin bacterial diversity suggest that AD treatments diversify skin bacteria preceding improvements in disease activity. In AD, the proportion of Staphylococcus sequences, particularly S. aureus, was greater during disease flares than at baseline or post-treatment, and correlated with worsened disease severity. Representation of the skin commensal S. epidermidis also significantly increased during flares. Increases in Streptococcus, Propionibacterium, and Corynebacterium species were observed following therapy. These findings reveal linkages between microbial communities and inflammatory diseases such as AD, and demonstrate that as compared with culture-based studies, higher resolution examination of microbiota associated with human disease provides novel insights into global shifts of bacteria relevant to disease progression and treatment.