Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
International Journal of Innovative Research in Science , Engineering and Technology

ABSTRACT: Phytochemical and pharmacognostic analysis and thin layer chromatography were carried out on, vitex negundo L. The phytochemical screening revealed the presence of phlobatannins, carbohydrates, tannins, glycosides, volatile oils, resins, balsams, flavonoids and saponins, while terpenes, sterols, anthorquinones and phenols were absent. The pharmacognostic analysis revealed moisture content of 11.60 %, ash value of 6.24%, water soluble extractive value of 22.45 %, alcohol soluble extractive value of 5.99% and acid insoluble ash of 1.21%. The thin layer chromatography development revealed three spots for hexane extract, six spots for ethyl acetate and five spots for methanol.
Assessing the effect of weight and weight loss in obese persons with type 2 diabetes

The objective of this study was to assess specific areas of life in which obesity affects individuals with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM), and changes that obese persons with T2DM experience with weight loss of varying degrees. Thirty in-depth interviews were conducted in persons identified as: age ≥40 years, diagnosed with T2DM for ≥2 years, on oral antihyperglycemic medications >3 months, BMI 30–35 kg/m2, having attempted to lose weight in the last 2 years. Participants (60% female, mean age 53 years, 53% Caucasian, mean BMI 32.2 kg/m2) agreed that 5% weight loss, while not reflective of an ultimate goal, would be meaningful and important; benefits were expected to accrue in physical functioning, self-confidence, blood glucose levels, and motivation to keep losing weight. Participants reported the greatest effect of weight loss on energy, physical activity, mobility, pain, and clothes/appearance. Participants reported weight affecting mood, with feelings of depression and frustration most commonly described. This research indicates that weight loss is likely to affect health-related quality of life in obese individuals with T2DM. Given the purported weight loss benefits of many emerging diabetic medications, it will be important to include measures of weight-related quality of life in future clinical trials of these agents.
Characterisation of Phosphate Accumulating Organisms and Techniques for Polyphosphate Detection: A Review

Phosphate minerals have long been used for the production of phosphorus-based chemicals used in many economic sectors. However, these resources are not renewable and the natural phosphate stocks are decreasing. In this context, the research of new phosphate sources has become necessary. Many types of wastes contain non-negligible phosphate concentrations, such as wastewater. In wastewater treatment plants, phosphorus is eliminated by physicochemical and/or biological techniques. In this latter case, a specific microbiota, phosphate accumulating organisms (PAOs), accumulates phosphate as polyphosphate. This molecule can be considered as an alternative phosphate source, and is directly extracted from wastewater generated by human activities. This review focuses on the techniques which can be applied to enrich and try to isolate these PAOs, and to detect the presence of polyphosphate in microbial cells.
Fingerprinting Localization with Cruciate Directional Antennas for Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper proposes a novel fingerprinting localization scheme, called FLCDA (Fingerprinting Localization with Cruciate Directional Antennas), using only one anchor node equipped with four directional antennas whose orientations are perpendicular to adjacent ones. The proposed FLCDA consists of two phases. In the RSSI gathering phase, a sensor node is placed at reference positions to send signals. And the RSSI values of the signals received by the four antennas are stored in the anchor node as the positions’ fingerprints. In the localizing phase, the anchor node localizes a target sensor node by receiving its signals with the four directional antennas. The position associated with the fingerprint most matched with the received signals’ RSSI values is assumed to be the target node’s position. We also design and implement some techniques to accelerate FLCDA without affecting the accuracy too much. FLCDA and its variants are also compared with related ones.
Automated software testing using a metaheuristic technique based on Tabu search

The use of techniques for automating the generation of software test cases is very important as it can reduce the time and cost of this process. The latest methods for automatic generation of tests use metaheuristic search techniques, i.e. genetic algorithms and simulated annealing. There is a great deal of research into the use of genetic algorithms to obtain a specific coverage in software testing but there is none using the metaheuristic Tabu search technique. In this paper, we explain how we have created an efficient testing technique that combines Tabu search with Korel chaining approach. Our technique automatically generates test data in order to obtain branch coverage in software testing.
‘… might go to Birmingham, Leeds … up round there, Manchester … and then we always come back here …’: The conceptualisation of place among a group of Irish women travellers

This study of a group of Irish women travellers in the South of England provides the opportunity for a discourse of situated self-identity within a mobilities paradigm. The stability-aspiring travellers’ community, to which the women in the study belong, invites a reflection on existing approaches to place-identity in that these women conceptualise their place in terms of its positive affordances and services that make their life liveable. The five women’s emerging discourses of both mobility and stability suggest that their emotional attachment to the place where they momentarily reside can be explained in terms of the beneficial results they gain from it. A scrutiny of the deictics used by the women, as well as a qualitative interactional analysis of the semi-structured interviews, suggests that for these travellers the sociolinguistic phenomenon of place-identity is layered and scalar so as to account for a loyalty to their distant provenience from Ireland, together with their present attachment to the encampment. As these women conceptualise place in terms of what it can provide for their families and community, their often idealised conceptualisation of locality resembles a Foucauldian ‘heterotopia of compensation’, in which the meticulous functioning of the site protects the community and defends it from outer contaminations.
Ocean–Atmosphere Covariability in the Western Arabian Sea*

Abstract The western Arabian Sea exhibits strong spatial variability in sea surface temperature (SST) during the southwest monsoon, with changes in SST that can exceed 5°C over 200 km. Exploration of satellite-based and in situ data shows a strong connection between mesoscale SST features and changes in the atmospheric boundary layer. The fundamental relationship is that of weak (strong) wind velocities overlying cold (warm) SST features. There are also coherent changes in other near-surface meteorological parameters, such as the air–sea temperature difference and relative humidity—indicating changes in the stability of the planetary boundary layer over the mesoscale SST features. These relationships are similar to those recently reported over the equatorial Pacific tropical instability wave region. This observed covariability of atmospheric boundary layer structure and SST results in variations of the surface heat and moisture fluxes; latent heat flux is modified by changes in relative humidity (principa.
Seeking construct validity grounded in constructivist epistemology: development of the survey of contemporary learning environments

This study focused on the development of a new classroom environment instrument for late-elementary students. The development of the survey of contemporary learning environments (SoCLE) followed a content analysis of three similar instruments on constructivist learning environments and the literature on characteristics of contemporary learning environments. Through a bottom-up development process, grounded in the epistemological foundations of constructivism, we note the difficulty in operationalizing student perceptions of contemporary learning environments and point to challenges in developing well-grounded construct validity. In a field study of 453 fifth–sixth grade students, the SoCLE was defined with three subscales: Reflective Processes (α = 0.68), Ownership (α = 0.65), and Multiple Perspectives (α = 0.53). The Ownership and Multiple Perspectives subscales indicated relationships with overall academic achievement assessed by a nation-wide testing program, the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills. In a multiple linear regression model, ownership predicted the overall composite achievement score, as well as reading comprehension, social studies, and science subscores. Multiple perspectives predicted the language subscore. These findings highlight that characteristics of contemporary learning environments that are epistemologically based may support achievement in late-elementary students.
Paradoxes of the postmodern reactionary Michel Rio and Michel Houellebecq

This study examines two writers, Michel Rio and Michel Houellebecq, who have encountered opposite fortunes among the public and critics. However, they share numerous writing practices associated with postmodernism that include mixing literary forms, integrating epistemological discourses, doubling characters, avoidance of meta-narratives, and destabilizing interpretation through irony, fractured perspectives and the parodic recycling of popular genres such as detective fiction and eroticism. Moreover, both display putatively reactionary elements in their fiction: Houellebecq quite explicitly, Rio through his sexual and political imaginary (especially in the Francis Malone `enquêtes'). We conclude that both writers are indeed rooted in reactionary habits of thought, but Rio's practices place him in the camp of modernism (hierarchy of epistemologies, elitist stereotyping, scientism), while Houellebecq falls among the postmodernists (neutralizing voices of authority, erasing high/low cultural distinction, refusal of progress, denial of the subject). The di ference in their literary strategies no doubt accounts at least in part for their diverse receptions, with Rio remaining inside a familiar (albeit intellectually demanding) model while Houellebecq enacts a highly debatable but radical critique of the modern notions of humanism, the desiring subject, and the benefits of liberal democracy.
Clinical outcome in gastrointestinal stromal tumor patients who interrupted imatinib after achieving stable disease or better response.

BACKGROUND Imatinib has been found to be effective in the treatment of patients with gastrointestinal stromal tumors (GIST). We sought to evaluate the clinical outcome of imatinib interruption in GIST patients who had achieved stable disease (SD) or showed better response to imatinib therapy. METHODS From July 2001 to December 2004, we prospectively collected clinical data from 62 consecutive patients with advanced GIST, of whom 58 (93.5%) achieved SD or better response to imatinib therapy and were included in this study. Imatinib therapy was interrupted in 14 of the 58 patients (interruption group, INT), after a median time of 11.9 months. Progression-free survival (PFS) after imatinib interruption was calculated and imatinib-refractory PFS and overall survival (OS) were compared between the INT group and the 44 patients who continued imatinib treatment (continuation group, CONT). RESULTS After a median follow-up of 17.9 months following imatinib interruption, nine patients (64%) had progressive disease (PD) with a median PFS from the date of imatinib interruption of 10.0 months. Median PFS dated from the time of imatinib initiation in the INT group was 21.8 months (95% CI, 17.3-26.3 months), but was not reached in the CONT group (P=0.029). Following imatinib reintroduction in the INT group, 88% of patients achieved disease control. There were no statistically significant differences in imatinib-refractory PFS (P=0.405) and OS (P=0.498) between the groups. CONCLUSION In GIST patients controlled with imatinib, treatment might be interrupted, at least temporarily, when clinically warranted.
The Effect of Oral Vs. Intravenous Rehydration on Circulating Myoglobin and Creatine Kinase

Beasley, KN, Lee, EC, McDermott, BP, Yamamoto, LM, Emmanuel, H, Casa, DJ, Armstrong, LE, Kraemer, WJ, and Maresh, CM. The effect of oral vs. intravenous rehydration on circulating myoglobin and creatine kinase. J Strength Cond Res 24(1): 60-67, 2010-Physical activity of significant intensity and duration may cause varying degrees of skeletal muscle damage, but it is unclear whether mode of rehydration will attenuate muscle tissue disruption caused by exercise in the heat. To examine the effects of the mode of rehydration on markers of muscle damage (myoglobin and creatine kinase [CK]), 11 healthy active men (age = 23 ± 4 years, body mass = 80.9 ± 3.9 kg, height = 180.5 ± 5.4 cm) completed 4 experimental trials consisting of an exercise dehydration protocol (to −4% of baseline body mass), followed by a rehydration period (oral, intravenous [IV], oral and IV combined, and ad libitum), and finishing with an intense exercise challenge that included treadmill running and sprinting and a box lifting protocol. During rehydration, subjects returned to −2% of baseline body mass unless completing the ad libitum trial during which they consumed fluids as thirst dictated. Myoglobin (Mb) and CK were measured during euhydrated rest. Post-exercise blood was drawn at 1 and 24 hours post exercise challenge for Mb and CK, respectively. Urine was collected during euhydrated rest and 1-hour post exercise challenge for measurement of Mb clearance. Mb concentrations increased significantly from pre (1.06 ± 0.20, 0.88 ± 0.07, 1.15 ± 0.25 and 0.92 ± 0.06 nmol·L−1) to post (1.52 ± 0.28, 1.44 ± 0.11, 1.71 ± 0.45 and 1.58 ± 0.39) for IV, oral, oral and IV combined, and ad libitum, respectively, but were not significantly different among trials. Serum CK concentrations remained within the normal physiological range for all trials. Thus, despite previous research that clearly indicates the benefit of ingesting fluids during exercise to attenuate muscle damage, there were no significant differences between the modes of rehydration on circulating Mb and CK.
Shortest Paths with Pairwise-Distinct Edge Labels: Finding Biochemical Pathways in Metabolic Networks

A problem studied in Systems Biology is how to find shortest paths in metabolic networks. Unfortunately, simple (i.e., graph theoretic) shortest paths do not properly reflect biochemical facts. An approach to overcome this issue is to use edge labels and search for paths with distinct labels. In this paper, we show that such biologically feasible shortest paths are hard to compute. Moreover, we present solutions to find such paths in networks in reasonable time.
Using Consensus Building Procedures With Expert Raters to Establish Comparison Scores of Behavior for Direct Behavior Rating

To date, rater accuracy when using Direct Behavior Rating (DBR) has been evaluated by comparing DBR-derived data to scores yielded through systematic direct observation. The purpose of this study was to evaluate an alternative method for establishing comparison scores using expert-completed DBR alongside best practices in consensus building exercises, to evaluate the accuracy of ratings. Standard procedures for obtaining expert data were established and implemented across two sites. Agreement indices and comparison scores were derived. Findings indicate that the expert consensus building sessions resulted in high agreement between expert raters, lending support for this alternative method for identifying comparison scores for behavioral data.
Galectin-3 negatively regulates TCR-mediated CD4+ T-cell activation at the immunological synapse

We have investigated the function of endogenous galectin-3 in T cells. Galectin-3-deficient (gal3−/−) CD4+ T cells secreted more IFN-γ and IL-4 than gal3+/+CD4+ T cells after T-cell receptor (TCR) engagement. Galectin-3 was recruited to the cytoplasmic side of the immunological synapse (IS) in activated T cells. In T cells stimulated on supported lipid bilayers, galectin-3 was primarily located at the peripheral supramolecular activation cluster (pSMAC). Gal3+/+ T cells formed central SMAC on lipid bilayers less effectively and adhered to antigen-presenting cells less firmly than gal3−/− T cells, suggesting that galectin-3 destabilizes the IS. Galectin-3 expression was associated with lower levels of early signaling events and phosphotyrosine signals at the pSMAC. Additional data suggest that galectin-3 potentiates down-regulation of TCR in T cells. By yeast two-hybrid screening, we identified as a galectin-3-binding partner, Alix, which is known to be involved in protein transport and regulation of cell surface expression of certain receptors. Co-immunoprecipitation confirmed galectin-3-Alix association and immunofluorescence analysis demonstrated the translocation of Alix to the IS in activated T cells. We conclude that galectin-3 is an inhibitory regulator of T-cell activation and functions intracellularly by promoting TCR down-regulation, possibly through modulating Alix's function at the IS.
Kefir Grains Change Fatty Acid Profile of Milk during Fermentation and Storage

Several studies have reported that lactic acid bacteria may increase the production of free fatty acids by lipolysis of milk fat, though no studies have been found in the literature showing the effect of kefir grains on the composition of fatty acids in milk. In this study the influence of kefir grains from different origins [Rio de Janeiro (AR), Viçosa (AV) e Lavras (AD)], different time of storage, and different fat content on the fatty acid content of cow milk after fermentation was investigated. Fatty acid composition was determined by gas chromatography. Values were considered significantly different when p<0.05. The highest palmitic acid content, which is antimutagenic compost, was seen in AV grain (36.6g/100g fatty acids), which may have contributed to increasing the antimutagenic potential in fermented milk. Higher monounsaturated fatty acid (25.8g/100g fatty acids) and lower saturated fatty acid (72.7g/100g fatty acids) contents were observed in AV, when compared to other grains, due to higher Δ9-desaturase activity (0.31) that improves the nutritional quality of lipids. Higher oleic acid (25.0g/100g fatty acids) and monounsaturated fatty acid (28.2g/100g fatty acids) and lower saturated fatty acid (67.2g/100g fatty acids) contents were found in stored kefir relatively to fermented kefir leading to possible increase of antimutagenic and anticarcinogenic potential and improvement of nutritional quality of lipids in storage milk. Only high-lipidic matrix displayed increase polyunsaturated fatty acids after fermentation. These findings open up new areas of study related to optimizing desaturase activity during fermentation in order to obtaining a fermented product with higher nutritional lipid quality.
Dynamics of a Role Theory for the Worker's Judgement

Abstract : Specific illustrations are presented to show that the worker seeks a degree of control over the physical demands and intrinsic satisfaction of task performance; authority, pay and security of positions; task competence and the mateship relation of persons. The extent to which the worker seeks control over additional benefits and promotion features of positions is limited by the kind of benefit under consideration, and the success ideology which characterize the lives of men at the lower levels of industrial administration.
PD control with on-line gravity compensation for robots with flexible links

A proportional-derivative (PD) control with online gravity compensation is proposed for regulation tasks of robot manipulators with flexible links. The control law is an extension of a previous PD control with constant gravity compensation at the desired configuration. It is based on a gravity-biased modification of the desired link deflection and requires measuring only position and velocity on the joint side. Global asymptotic stability of the control law at the desired robot configuration is proven via Lyapunov argument and La Salle's Theorem. Simulation tests on a two-link arm are carried out in order to compare performance of the new scheme with respect to the case of constant gravity compensation and results on the advantages of the on-line compensation are shown.
Self-Calibrating Equalizer for Optimal Jitter Performance Using On-chip Eye Monitoring

Magnitude of equalization applied by a receiver equalization circuit varies across silicon process and environmental conditions. We propose a novel method to auto calibrate a programmable receiver equalization circuit to a target gain equalization value without the use of any external test equipment or channel. This method is built upon on-chip eye monitoring and internal loop back capabilities, which are used to measure the gain equalization value. By executing this on-chip gain equalization measurement for various equalizer settings, the setting which produces equalization that is closest to the target value can be determined. This has been implemented in 45nm CMOS for a PCI Express 2.0 transceiver hardware running at 5Gbps. Lab results with test silicon demonstrate the on-chip eye height measurement capabilities.
Party System Development and Indigenous Populations in Latin America The Bolivian Case

The article links the relatively weaker institutionalization of political party systems in certain Latin American countries to the size of the country's indigenous population in order to explain a statistically significant inverse empirical relationship between the two variables. It argues that elites in countries with proportionally significant indigenous populations in the early 20th century organized political parties to dominate subordinate groups in ways that were distinct from those employed by elites in countries with far smaller indigenous populations. The geographic isolation and cultural distinctiveness of such populations provided elites with unique tools for exclusion and domination that enabled them to stall the political participation of indigenous peoples until the late 1980s. A case study of Bolivia's political party system is used to illustrate the hypothesis and to show how indigenous peoples were finally able in the 1990s to enter the formal political system, suggesting that entrenched .
Non negative sparse representation for Wiener based source separation with a single sensor

We propose a new method to perform the separation of two sound sources from a single sensor. This method generalizes Wiener filtering with locally stationary, non-Gaussian, parametric source models. The method involves a learning phase for which we propose three different algorithm. In the separation phase, we use a sparse non negative decomposition algorithm of our own. The algorithms are evaluated on the separation of real audio data.
A Novel Image Registration Algorithm Using SIFT Feature Descriptors

This paper focuses on the problem of image registration, which is a fundamental and important problem in computer vision. As local features are effective to tackle the task of image registration, hence, we exploit SIFT feature descriptors to describe the interesting key points in images. The reasons is that SIFT can extract features which are invariant to scaling, orientation, affine transforms and illumination changes. Afterwards, to lower the effects of outliers, the nearest distance ratio method is used to get initial matched feature descriptor pairs, and then scale-orientation joint restriction is used to detect false matching SIFT descriptor pairs. After using Random Sample Consensus to prune outliers, image registration results can be obtained. In the end, we develop an experiment based on QuickBird and IKONOS datasets, and very positive results are achieved.