Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
THERMOGRAVIMETRIC ANALYSIS AND WEATHERING STUDY BY WATER IMMERSION OF ALKALI TREATED BAMBOO FIBRES

The effect of alkali treatment of bamboo strips on the thermal degradation and weathering properties of bamboo strips were investigated in this work. Dried Bamboo strips with average dimensions of 100 x15x (1.1-1.5) mm were mercerized with caustic soda solution (10%, 15%, 20%, and 25%) (w/v) at ambient temperature maintaining a liquor ratio of 15:1. All types of bamboo specimens were subjected to thermogravimetric analysis and accelerated weathering by water immersion and further characterized by flexural property measurements. The % water absorption and dimensional changes were recorded at 100% humidity, room temperature and atmospheric pressure. The results showed that the treated bamboo strips showed a higher deterioration in flexural properties compared to the untreated ones. Thermo-gravimatric analysis of all the samples indicated better thermal properties of alkali treated samples. Highest activation energy was observed with 15% alkali treated bamboo sample.
Genome Sequence of meso-2,3-Butanediol-Producing Strain Serratia marcescens ATCC 14041

ABSTRACT Serratia marcescens strain ATCC 14041 was found to be an efficient meso-2,3-butanediol (meso-2,3-BD) producer from glucose and sucrose. Here we present a 5.0-Mb assembly of its genome. We have annotated 4 coding sequences (CDSs) for meso-2,3-BD fermentation and 2 complete operons including 6 CDSs for sucrose utilization.
Design Consideration and Performance Analysis of Substrate Integrated Waveguide Components

This paper presents a new design scheme and measurement results of circuit discontinuities on the basis of the recently proposed substrate integrated waveguide technology. Design considerations are discussed with respect to H-plane step, post resonator, 90° bend and 90° curvature, which are analyzed using an equivalent rectangular waveguide model. Results show a good agreement between design predictions and practical measurements. Loss properties of the discontinuities are also examined. It is demonstrated that the radiation loss of the new substrate integrated waveguide is smaller as compared to dielectric and conductor losses.
Post-disaster risk management: From the perspective of policy acceptance of earthquake survivors in China

A huge earthquake jolted Wenchuan, China, shocking the whole world. It is worth noting that the disaster brought several factors of social instability, and how to conduct social risk management effectively becomes the top priority. Whether post-disaster public policies are perceived to be reasonable and accepted by the victims plays an important role in post-disaster risk management. Therefore, exploring the impact mechanism of post-disaster public policy acceptance in earthquake-stricken region will be conducive to strengthen targeted risk management and ensure social stability. A field study was applied to the local survivors of the earthquake-stricken region, which was designed to examine the effect of procedural justice and the collective outcome favorability on post-disaster policy acceptance through hierarchical regression analysis method. The results (7V=290) indicated that perceived collective outcome favorability had larger effect on the post-disaster policy acceptance than perceived procedural justice. Furthermore, perceived procedural justice interacted with collective outcome favorability. That is procedural justice promoted policy acceptance only when people's perception of outcome was favorable to the whole survivor group; when it was unfavorable, procedural justice lost its positive effect on policy acceptance.
Early experience and parent-of-origin-specific effects influence female reproductive success in mice

Recent studies on mammals investigating parent-of-origin-specific effects such as genomic imprinting and maternal effects have demonstrated their impact on short-term measures of fitness, for example offspring growth. However, the long-term fitness consequences of parent-of-origin-specific effects and their role outside the immediate mother–offspring interaction remain largely unexplored. Here, we show that female mice mated to males that inherited the same set of paternal and maternal genes as themselves have a higher reproductive success than females mated to males of reciprocal genotype. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the early social environment experienced by an individual influences its reproductive success. Females raised with unrelated siblings in a mixed litter had a subsequent lower reproductive success than those that were fostered together with all their biological siblings in unmixed litters. Our results highlight the important influence of parent-of-origin-specific effects and conditions in early development on long-term reproductive success in mammals and suggest that parent-of-origin-specific effects may provide the underlying mechanism for beneficial coadaptation between genotypes, for example, in mate choice.
Letter to the Editor: Bacillus Calmette-Guerin (BCG) Treatment Failures with Non-Muscle Invasive Bladder Cancer: A Data-Driven Definition for BCG Unresponsive Disease

We would like to commend Steinberg et al. on their efforts to develop a data-driven sub-classification for an increasingly accepted disease state of non-muscle invasive bladder cancer – i.e. BCG unresponsive disease. The authors used data collected in the Phase II BCG-Interferon-2B trial originally published in 2006 [1] and performed subset analyses on the outcomes of patients who underwent additional intravesical therapy (in this case, combination BCG/IFN therapy) [2]. Factors assessed included age, gender, number of prior BCG courses, BCG failure interval, BCG strain, number of prior TURBT’s, and tumor size. Notably, most patients did not receive maintenance BCG, since the trial was initiated prior to acceptance of this as standard of care. Based on their analysis, for patients with CIS, the highest risk group was found to be those who had ≥2 episodes of BCG failure and disease-free interval of <12 months from BCG treatment (estimated RFS 14% at 24 months). For those with papillary tumors, risk factors for failure included ≥2 episodes of prior BCG
Early-onset schizophrenia: Symptoms and social class of origin

Background: The genesis of schizophrenia is multifactorial, including biological and environmental risk factors. We tested for an interactive effect between early-onset schizophrenia (EOS) and social class of origins (socioeconomic status (SES)). Data were further analyzed for a possible connection to type of schizophrenic symptoms. Sampling/Methods: Data for the study are taken from the medical records of 642 patients from a large state hospital in the northeastern United States. Clinical assessments were divided into positive and negative symptomatology through application of the Scale for the Assessment of Negative Symptoms (SANS), the Scale for the Assessment of Positive Symptoms (SAPS) and the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS). Detailed information about age of onset and SES of origin was obtained through Social Service Assessment interviews. Results: We uncovered a significant impact of EOS among the poor that elevates risk for negative symptomatology. Conclusion: Poor SES alone does not increase the likelihood of EOS, but it magnifies the deleterious effect of EOS on negative symptoms. Future research on these variables may inform the relative contribution of each.
Software process improvement: practical guidelines for business success, Addison Wesley Longman, UK, 1997, 447 pp

This book will help you to manage and control the quality of your organization's software products. Continually dealing with the problems caused by software defects can be both time-consuming and demanding but Sami Zahran's pragmatic approach will take you from reactive fire-fighting to a preventative culture of disciplined and continuous process improvement. This book will help you: establish a process-focused software development organizatio design and implement procedures for developing quality software in time and within budge benchmark your organization against the industry standards for the software process, including the Capability Maturity Model (CMM), ISO 9001, the new standard ISO/IEC 15504 (originally known as SPICE) and Bootstrap.
Does emotional expression make a difference in reactions to breast cancer?

PURPOSE/OBJECTIVES To examine the feasibility of using an emotional expression intervention with patients with cancer and test the hypothesis that emotional expression improves psychosocial adjustment. DESIGN Sequentially randomized pretest/post-test design with repeated measures. SETTING Two radiation therapy (RT) facilities. SAMPLE Women completing RT for stage I or II breast cancer, who spoke and read English, were independent in self-care, and provided written consent. Subjects (N = 44) were middle-aged (mean = 53.6 years), Caucasian, married, and well educated. METHODS Following a baseline interview, subjects were sequentially randomized to an attentional control group, a single dose, or a three-dose emotional expression writing group. Interventions were administered at the time of completion of RT. Follow-up telephone interviews were completed at 1, 4-6, 16, and 28 weeks post-RT. MAIN RESEARCH VARIABLES Positive and negative affect, intrusiveness of thoughts, use of avoidant coping, side effect severity, trait negative affectivity, content of written essay, and themes derived from content analysis. FINDINGS A high level of acceptance and completion of emotional expression existed, but no effect of the intervention on psychosocial adjustment was evident. Process measures in the three-dose group changed as expected. No relationship existed between content changes and outcome measures. CONCLUSIONS Emotional expression is feasible for patients with cancer, but the efficacy of the intervention in improving mood and decreasing cognitive intrusion and avoidance was not supported. Emotional expression processes were consistent with those seen in other samples and may influence outcomes that were not addressed in this study. IMPLICATIONS FOR NURSING PRACTICE More extensive testing is needed, including additional outcome variables. Essays reveal concerns around communication, recurrence, and health behavior changes that should be considered in practice.
An efficient implementation for broadcasting data in parallel applications over Ethernet clusters

This paper introduces a natural implementation for broadcasting data on Ethernet based clusters used for parallel computing. Initially, it will be shown that libraries for Message Passing between processes such as PVM and implementations of MPI do not implement efficiently this operation or there is no reliability in terms of its performance. An implementation for broadcast messages is presented, taking into account the Ethernet based hardware layer found in most of the clusters used for parallel computing. The proposed implementation for broadcasting data is compared with the broadcast message available in PVM and LAM/MPI. Also, some comments are made about the proposed broadcast messages when the hardware layer is not Ethernet based. Finally, it will be shown by experimentation how the proposed broadcast message is used in the context of parallel linear algebra operations, specifically for parallel matrix multiplication.
Nationwide trends in the prescription of beta-blockers and angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors after myocardial infarction in Denmark, 1995–2002

Objectives To study the use of beta-blockers and angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitors after acute myocardial infarction (AMI) in Denmark from 1995 to 2002. Design Information about patients with first AMI aged ≥30 years and the dispensing of beta-blockers and ACE inhibitors from pharmacies within 30 d from discharge was obtained from the National Patient Registry and the Danish Registry of Medicinal Product Statistics. Results Beta-blocker use increased from 38.1% of patients in 1995 to 67.9% in 2002 (OR=3.85, CI: 3.58–4.13). Women, elderly patients and patients taking loop-diuretics and antidiabetic drugs received beta-blockers less frequently, but patients taking loop-diuretics or antidiabetic drugs had the greatest increase. ACE inhibitor use increased from 24.5 to 35.5% (OR=1.86, CI: 1.72–2.01). Women, patients aged <60 years or ≥80 years and patients not taking loop-diuretics received ACE inhibitors less frequently, but patients not taking loop-diuretics had the greatest increase. Conclusions Beta-blocker use increased markedly post-AMI from 1995 to 2002, whereas ACE inhibitor use increased modestly. The results suggested undertreatment of women, elderly patients and people with diabetes.
CATARSI — Cap and trade assessment by remote sensing investigation: An algorithm for crop and forest biomass estimate

In this paper the results obtained during the CATARSI project have been shown. The aim was to implement an algorithm capable to extract soil moisture and vegetation biomass from SAR data at both L and X bands. An algorithm based on Artificial Neural Networks was tested on SAR images collected in 2010 during the BioSAR (L-band) campaign in Sweden for the retrieval of forest biomass and in 2010-2012 in Italy by using COSMO-SkyMed (X-band) data for the retrieval of agricultural crop biomass. The results obtained demonstrated a clear sensitivity of backscattering at these frequencies to the biomass of both agricultural crops and forests. The retrieval algorithm was able to identify different levels of biomass with a notable accuracy.
Wavelet image coding using cluster growing embedding

A novel embedded image coding method denoted as cluster growing embedding (CGE) is proposed in this paper. Similar to some of state-of-the-art wavelet image coding algorithms, CGE can encode images efficiently by exploiting the self-similarity across subbands in the wavelet domain. By utilizing morphological dilation, CGE forms significance clusters in each wavelet subband, and then exploits the parent-child relationship between subbands to encode the significance map information of one image. A salient new feature of CGE is that it tries to first encode the significance bits in the neighborhood of those already formed clusters. Therefore, CGE is more compatible to the functionality of embedded coding. Meanwhile, CGE is shown to be very suitable to the object-oriented coding framework along with the shape adaptive discrete wavelet transform (SA-DWT).
Contextualizing Retrieval of Full-Length Documents

We address some issues relating to retrieval from unfamiliar text collections consisting of full-length documents. We claim that displaying query results in terms of inter-document similarity is inappropriate with long texts, and suggest instead that the results of simple initial queries should be contextualized according to category sets that correspond to the main topics of the texts. We argue that main topics of long texts should be represented by multiple categories, since in most cases one category cannot adequately classify a text. We describe a new automatic categorization algorithm that does not require pre-labeled texts and a prototype browsing interface that presents a simple mechanism for displaying multi-dimensional information.
Supervised learning techniques for backpropagation networks

A discussion is presented of three techniques which offer significant improvement in training time. In the first, training is restricted to those samples for which the network fails to predict correctly. The training process is extended to the entire training data set as the performance of the network improves. In the second technique, an acceleration process is used for neurons which produce the same output class for the inputs provided by the training sample. In the third technique, the learning rate is optimized, on the fly, to get the optimal improvement for each training pass. A derivation is presented for an optimal matching of momentum and learning rate
Theophylline in obstructive sleep apnea. A double-blind evaluation.

Twelve patients with documented obstructive sleep apnea were enrolled in a double-blind placebo controlled crossover trial of oral theophylline, (Uniphyllin) 800 mg, taken at night for four weeks. Overnight polysomnography, using standard techniques, was performed at the end of each treatment period. The total number of apneas (A) and hypopneas (H) decreased significantly while receiving theophylline compared to placebo, from 398 (69), mean (SEM), to 283 (72), p less than 0.01. Sleep quality was, however, significantly worse while receiving theophylline. Obstructive A and H were very much decreased with theophylline (p less than .001), and even when the data were adjusted for the more disturbed sleep with theophylline, this decrease remained significant; the obstructive A and H index fell from 49 (8.7) on placebo to 40 (9) while receiving theophylline, p = 0.02. There was no difference in the numbers of central or mixed A and H, and mean A and H duration was unchanged on the two study nights. Oxygen desaturations greater than 4 percent were less with theophylline treatment (p = 0.02), but mean overnight SaO2 was unchanged. We conclude that theophylline may be beneficial in patients with OSA, but part of the improvement is due to a deterioration in sleep quality.
Phylogenetic relationships of African caecilians (Amphibia: Gymnophiona): Insights from mitochondrial rRNA gene sequences

Abstract Africa (excluding the Seychelles) has a diverse caecilian fauna, including the endemic family Scolecomorphidae and six endemic genera of the more cosmopolitan Caeciliidae. Previous molecular phylogenetic studies have not included any caecilians from the African mainland. Partial 12S and 16S mitochondrial gene sequences were obtained for two species of the endemic African Scolecomorphidae and five species and four genera of African caeciliids, aligned against previously reported sequences for 16 caecilian species, and analysed using parsimony, maximum likelihood, Bayesian and distance methods. Results are in agreement with traditional taxonomy in providing support for the monophyly of the African caeciliid genera Boulengerula and Schistometopum, and for the Scolecomorphidae. They disagree in indicating that the Caeciliidae is paraphyletic with respect to the Scolecomorphidae. Although more data from morphology and/or molecules will be required to resolve details of the interrelationships of the African caecilian genera, the data provide strong support for at least two origins of caecilians in which the eye is reduced and covered with bone, and do not support the hypotheses that the caecilian assemblages of Africa, and of East and of West Africa are monophyletic.
Static and dynamic fusimotor action on the response of IA fibres to low frequency sinusoidal stretching of widely ranging amplitude

1. Single fusimotor fibres were stimulated repetitively to test their action on the responsiveness of muscle spindle primary endings in the cat soleus to sinusoidal stretching of both large and small amplitude. Frequencies of 0·06‐4 Hz were used at amplitudes from 10 μm to 3 mm.
Predictive maintenance for motors based on vibration analysis with compact rio

The following article outlines the design and construction of a working prototype of a vibrational analysis system, with the purpose of using it as a lower cost alternative to existing solutions. With the use of CompactRIO equipment, triaxial accelerometers, low-pass filters and a LabVIEW, it enables spectral analysis of the different frequencies present in the vibrations of a motor. This analysis can then be used to diagnose, report and recommend actions for predictive maintenance, based on the 10816-1 standard. Said prototype was tested on electric motors and was determined to be functional since its results showed similarity to the theoretical results.
Safety and Efficacy of Dextran-Rosmarinic Acid Conjugates as Innovative Polymeric Antioxidants in Skin Whitening: What Is the Evidence?

Background: Melanins are high molecular weight pigments responsible for the mammalian skin and hair colour and play a key role in skin protection from UV radiation; however, their overproduction and excessive accumulation lead to pigmentation problems including melasma, freckles, uneven colouring, and age spots. Therefore, the modulation of melanin synthesis represents a critical issue in medicine and cosmetology. In the present study, an innovative polymeric antioxidant to be used as skin whitening agent is developed by the conjugation of dextran with rosmarinic acid. Methods: Dextran-rosmarinic acid conjugates (DEX-RA) were synthesized in a one-pot method starting from Origanum vulgare aqueous leaf extract and dextran. The total polyphenol content and the antioxidant activity were assessed by Folin-Ciocalteau assay and 2,2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl radical (DPPH) and bleaching tests, respectively. The efficacy of DEX-RA was evaluated by inhibition of tyrosinase activity, in vitro diffusion and stability studies and in vivo studies. The biocompatibility of the conjugates was investigated by 3-[4,5-Dimethylthiaoly]-2,5-diphenyltetrazoliumbromide (MTT) and EPISKIN™ model. Results: Efficacy and safety studies confirmed the antioxidant and tyrosinase inhibitory activities and the biocompatibility of the synthesized conjugates. Conclusion: The polymeric conjugates, comparing to the free antioxidant, show a long-lasting efficacy combined to an enhanced stability resulting in an improved performance of the cosmetic formulations prepared using this innovative whitening agent as a bioactive ingredient.
Executive Stock Option Exercise with Full and Partial Information on a Drift Change Point

We analyse the valuation and exercise of an American executive call option written on a stock whose drift parameter falls to a lower value at a change point given by an exponential random time, independent of the Brownian motion driving the stock. Two agents, who do not trade the stock, have differing information on the change point, and seek to optimally exercise the option by maximising its discounted payoff under the physical measure. The first agent has full information, and observes the change point. The second agent has partial information and filters the change point from price observations. Our setup captures the position of an executive (insider) and employee (outsider), who receive executive stock options. The latter yields a model under the observation filtration $\widehat{\mathbb F}$ where the drift process becomes a diffusion driven by the innovations process, an $\widehat{\mathbb F}$-Brownian motion also driving the stock under $\widehat{\mathbb F}$, and the partial information optimal stopping problem has two spatial dimensions. We analyse and numerically solve to value the option for both agents and illustrate that the additional information of the insider can result in exercise patterns which exploit the information on the change point.