Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Assessment and comparison of methods for solar ultraviolet radiation measurements

The high precision measurements of solar ultraviolet (UV) radiation are needed for obtaining meaningful estimates of the terrestrial UV trends associated with the increasing levels of UV due to the depletion of the stratospheric ozone. In this study, the different methods to measure the solar ultraviolet radiation are compared. The methods included are spectroradiometric, erythemally weighted broadband and multi-channel measurements. The comparison of the different methods is based on a litterature review and assessments of optical characteristics of the spectroradiometer Optronic 742 of the Finnish Centre for Radiation and Nuclear Safety (STUK) and of the erythemally weighted Robertson-Berger type broadband radiometers Solar Light models 500 and 501 of the Finnish Meteorological Institute and STUK. An introduction to the sources of error in solar UV measurements, to methods for radiometric characterization of UV radiometers together with methods for error reduction are presented. Reviews on experiences from world-wide UV monitoring efforts and instrumentation as well as on the results from international UV radiometer intercomparisons are presented. Based on the studies earned out in STUK, the overall uncertainty of spectroradiometric measurements can be decreased from a level of approximately up to ±20 % down to ±8 % by thorough assessment of the radiometric characteristics like cosine response, slit function and temperature sensitivity together with stringent quality assurance and quality control procedures in calibration and actual measurements. The estimated uncertainty of the spectroradiometric calibration of the temperature stabilized erythemally weighted broadband meters in solar radiation is ±11 %. The ultimate limit for the lowest uncertainty possible to achieve in solar measurements is approximately from ±5 to 6 % is set by the absolute uncertainty of the primary standards. FINNISH CENTRE FOR RADIATION AND NUCLEAR SAFETY STUK-A115 The choice for the UV monitoring instrumentation depends on the quality of the problem to be addressed. To meet the needs to construct a global climatology and to evaluate the impact of UV radiation on human health and environment, numerous monitoring sites should be established. This necessiates the requirement to deploy easy to operate and low-cost instruments. Presently, the best choice for this purpose is the broadband erythemally weighted radiometers. On the other hand, to be able to provide reliable information for estimation of long-term trends in UV levels or for evaluation of radiative transfer models, a smaller number, but higher accuracy spectral instruments to be operated by trained personnel are needed. FINNISH CENTRE FOR RADIATION STUK-A115 AND NUCLEAR SAFETY
Formation law and criterion of nebulous macroscopic segregation in ZL205A alloy

The appearance of macroscopic segregation in ZL205A alloy castings bears a super resemblance to the appearance of shrinkage porosity, and the chemical composition of the segregation is Al 2 Cu whose microstructure is in the form of dentrite or skeleton crystal. According to the characteristic of nebulous segregation, the formation process could be divided into two steps by the eutectic temperature of Al 2 Cu. Then a criterion for each of the two steps is brought forward on the basis of the shrinkage porosity criterion of low pressure casting.
Facilitators' delivery of a psychosocial intervention in a controlled trial for men with prostate cancer and their partners: a process evaluation

AIM The aim of this paper was to report the process evaluation of facilitators' delivery of a psychosocial intervention (called CONNECT), in a randomized controlled trial, to men with prostate cancer and their partners. BACKGROUND There is a lack of information on the process of implementing psychosocial interventions in controlled trials and, in particular, on the role and performance of facilitators who deliver them. Yet, this information is crucial in assessing whether these interventions are effective or not and why. DESIGN Qualitative design. METHODS Semi-structured qualitative interviews and diaries were used to collect data (January-October 2012) from four facilitators and a co-facilitator. Data were analysed using the Miles et al. FRAMEWORK RESULTS Five themes were discernible. These were 'difficulties to keep to the structure of the intervention', 'selective coverage of topics', 'partner participation', 'overall impression of the group and telephone sessions' and 'perceived benefits to participants'. Issues such as not keeping to the aim of the intervention, deviating from the content and/or reluctance in discussing sensitive issues such as sexual health may mean that the psychosocial effects of the intervention may not have been fully realized. CONCLUSIONS These findings will be useful for further development and evaluation of the intervention. A tentative conceptual framework of factors, related to facilitators, influencing the fidelity of interventions in the context of controlled trials, is offered. This model, which requires further development and testing, will be useful for researchers worldwide who are involved in developing interventions and training facilitators.
Sensitivity to ischaemia of single sympathetic nerve fibres innervating the dorsum of the human foot

Changes in nerve conduction velocity following an impulse (i.e. velocity recovery cycles) reflect after‐potentials, and can provide an indication of altered nerve membrane properties. This study used microneurography to assess the effects of ischaemia on single human sympathetic fibres innervating the dorsum of the foot. It was found that velocity recovery cycles can distinguish whether a sympathetic nerve fibre is depolarized or not. The method may be used to detect membrane depolarization of sympathetic nerve fibres in human patients when autonomic neuropathy is suspected.
Nuclear Expression of GS28 Protein: A Novel Biomarker that Predicts Prognosis in Colorectal Cancers

Aims: GS28 (Golgi SNARE protein, 28 kDa), a member of the soluble N-ethylmaleimide-sensitive factor attachment protein receptors (SNARE) protein family, plays a critical role in mammalian endoplasmic reticulum (ER)-Golgi or intra-Golgi vesicle transport. To date, few researches on the GS28 protein in human cancer tissues have been reported. In this study, we assessed the prognostic value of GS28 in patients with colorectal cancer (CRC). Methods and results: We screened for GS28 expression using immunohistochemistry in 230 surgical CRC specimens. The CRCs were right-sided and left-sided in 28.3% (65/230) and 71.3% (164/230) of patients, respectively. GS28 staining results were available in 214 cases. Among these, there were 26 nuclear predominant cases and 188 non-nuclear predominant cases. Stromal GS28 expression was noted in 152 cases of CRC. GS28 nuclear predominant immunoreactivity was significantly associated with advanced tumour stage (p = 0.045) and marginally associated with perineural invasion (p = 0.064). Decreased GS28 expression in the stromal cells was significantly associated with lymph node metastasis (N stage; p = 0.036). GS28 expression was not associated with epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) immunohistochemical positivity or KRAS mutation status. Investigation of the prognostic value of GS28 with Kaplan-Meier analysis revealed a correlation with overall survival (p = 0.004). Cases with GS28 nuclear predominant expression had significantly poorer overall survival than those with a non-nuclear predominant pattern. Conclusions: Taken together, these results indicate that GS28 nuclear predominant expression could serve as a prognostic marker for CRC and may help in identifying aggressive forms of CRC.
Beneficial Pleiotropic Antidepressive Effects of Cardiovascular Disease Risk Factor Interventions in the Metabolic Syndrome

Background Although the increased prevalence and severity of clinical depression and elevated cardiovascular disease risk represent 2 vexing public health issues, the growing awareness of their combined presentation compounds the challenge. The obese Zucker rat, a model of the metabolic syndrome, spontaneously develops significant depressive symptoms in parallel with the progression of the metabolic syndrome and, thus, represents a compelling model for study. The primary objective was to assess the impact on both cardiovascular outcomes, specifically vascular structure and function, and depressive symptoms in obese Zucker rats after aggressive treatment for cardiovascular disease risk factors with long‐term exercise or targeted pharmacological interventions. Methods and Results We chronically treated obese Zucker rats with clinically relevant interventions against cardiovascular disease risk factors to determine impacts on vascular outcomes and depressive symptom severity. While most of the interventions (chronic exercise, anti‐hypertensive, the interventions (long‐term exercise, antihypertensive, antidyslipidemia, and antidiabetic) were differentially effective at improving vascular outcomes, only those that also resulted in a significant improvement to oxidant stress, inflammation, arachidonic acid metabolism (prostacyclin versus thromboxane A2), and their associated sequelae were effective at also blunting depressive symptom severity. Using multivariable analyses, discrimination between the effectiveness of treatment groups to maintain behavioral outcomes appeared to be dependent on breaking the cycle of inflammation and oxidant stress, with the associated outcomes of improving endothelial metabolism and both cerebral and peripheral vascular structure and function. Conclusions This initial study provides a compelling framework from which to further interrogate the links between cardiovascular disease risk factors and depressive symptoms and suggests mechanistic links and potentially effective avenues for intervention.
Phylogenetic relationship of Asian badger Meles leucurus amurensis revealed by complete mitochondrial genome

Abstract The Asian badger (Meles leucurus amurensis) is widely distributed throughout the northeast of China, and plays an important role in regulating the prey population stability of forest eco-system as mesopredators. We first determined and annotated the whole mtDNA genome of the Asian badger Meles leucurus amurensis to better understand the evolutionary relationship of this subspecies. The complete mitogenome is 16 497 bp in length, includes 13 protein-coding genes, 22 tRNA genes, 2 rRNA genes and 1 control region. We built the phylogenetic tree of Asian badger and other 10 most closely Mustelidae species.
Statistical Measures from Co-occurrence of Codewords for Action Recognition

In this paper, we propose a novel spatiotemporal feature representation based on co-occurrence matrices of codewords, called Co-occurrence of Codewords (CCW), to tackle human action recognition, a significant problem for many real-world applications, such as surveillance, video retrieval and health care. The method captures local relationships among the codewords (densely sampled), through the computation of a set of statistical measures known as Haralick textural features. We apply a classical visual recognition pipeline in which involves the extraction of spatiotemporal features and SVM classification. We investigate the proposed representation in three well-known and publicly available datasets for action recognition (KTH, UCF Sports and HMDB51) and show that it outperforms the results achieved by several widely employed spatiotemporal features available in the literature encoded by a Bag-of-Words model with a more compact representation.
Analysing Employees' Willingness to Disclose Information in Enterprise Social Networks: the Role of organisational Culture

Due to the rise of social media, many companies have started to implement enterprise social networks (ESNs). Compared to existing systems supporting communication and collaboration in organisations, ESNs can foster employees’ productivity and innovativeness by making previously invisible communication among employees visible. However, this visibility can prevent employees from disclosing information within ESNs. As the success of ESNs depends on users’ contributions, it is crucial to understand which factors influence employees’ behaviour in this regard. In this research, we investigate the role of organisational culture in fostering employees’ trusting and mitigating their risk beliefs, two factors we transfer from research on Online Social Networks (OSNs) and hypothesize to be highly relevant for information disclosure in ESNs. Based on data obtained from 282 employees, we find support for our hypotheses and illustrate that group and development culture significantly affect employees’ trusting and risk beliefs, and their willingness to disclose information. Our results imply that organisations should carefully assess employees’ trusting and risk beliefs as well as their culture to account for possible obstacles preventing employees’ information disclosure.
Moving obstacle avoidance of a 5-DOF robot manipulator by using repulsive vector

In order to realize the object grasping of robotic manipulators in dynamic environments, the moving obstacle should be detected and avoided. When the moving speed of the obstacle is lower than that of the end-effector, a collision avoidance algorithm is proposed by using the repulsive vector to ensure the end-effector far away from the obstacle. When the speed of the obstacle is higher than that of the end-effector, the repulsive vector is further improved with the pivot algorithm. Several experiments are implemented on a 5-DOF robotic manipulator, and the end-effector can successfully grasp the object in the environment with moving obstacle.
Enhancement of antibody functions through Fc multiplications

ABSTRACT Antibodies carry out a plethora of functions through their crystallizable fragment (Fc) regions, which can be naturally tuned by the adoption of several isotypes and post-translational modifications. Protein engineering enables further Fc function modulations through modifications of the interactions between the Fc and its functional partners, including FcγR, FcRn, complement complex, and additions of auxiliary functional units. Due to the many functions embedded within the confinement of an Fc, a suitable balance must be maintained for a therapeutic antibody to be effective and safe. The outcome of any Fc engineering depends on the interplay among all the effector molecules involved. In this report, we assessed the effects of Fc multiplication (or tandem Fc) on antibody functions. Using IgG1 as a test case, we found that, depending on the specifically designed linker, Fc multiplication led to differentially folded, stable molecules with unique pharmacokinetic profiles. Interestingly, the variants with 3 copies of Fc improved in vitro opsonophagocytic killing activity and displayed significantly improved protective efficacies in a Klebsiella pneumoniae mouse therapeutic model despite faster clearance compared with its IgG1 counterpart. There was no adverse effect observed or pro-inflammatory cytokine release when the Fc variants were administered to animals. We further elucidated that enhanced binding to various effector molecules by IgG-3Fc created a “sink” leading to the rapid clearance of the 3Fc variants, and identified the increased FcRn binding as one strategy to facilitate “sink” escape. These findings reveal new opportunities for novel Fc engineering to further expand our abilities to manipulate and improve antibody therapeutics.
Dynamic Materials and Devices for Controlling Solar Heat Gain in Buildings

Modern technology and materials science, coupled with an understanding of our energy consumption patterns, allows for the opportunity to realize large-scale energy savings through the implementation of more efficient, adaptive technologies. More efficient heating and cooling of both commercial and residential buildings is a strong candidate for such advancements. Indeed, a significant portion of the annual US energy budget is devoted to the heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) of commercial and residential buildings in order to maintain safe, comfortable internal environments. Dynamic tint windows, both traditional electrochromic devices and reflective devices, are promising candidates to help in the effort to improved building energy efficiency. Use of these technologies, both as integrated devices and in retrofit applications, allows building designers and occupants to adjust the energy properties of the building in response to climate or meteorological conditions in such a way that optimizes the efficiency of the building. While these devices are focused on heat gained and lost through the
Sleep deprivation negatively impacts reproductive output in Drosophila melanogaster

ABSTRACT Most animals sleep or exhibit a sleep-like state, yet the adaptive significance of this phenomenon remains unclear. Although reproductive deficits are associated with lifestyle-induced sleep deficiencies, how sleep loss affects reproductive physiology is poorly understood, even in model organisms. We aimed to bridge this mechanistic gap by impairing sleep in female fruit flies and testing its effect on egg output. We found that sleep deprivation by feeding caffeine or by mechanical perturbation resulted in decreased egg output. Transient activation of wake-promoting dopaminergic neurons decreased egg output in addition to sleep levels, thus demonstrating a direct negative impact of sleep deficit on reproductive output. Similarly, loss-of-function mutation in dopamine transporter fumin (fmn) led to both significant sleep loss and lowered fecundity. This demonstration of a direct relationship between sleep and reproductive fitness indicates a strong driving force for the evolution of sleep. Summary: Sleep loss decreases egg output and thus reproductive fitness in female fruit flies, suggesting an important driving force for the evolution of sleep in animals.
Towards recommendation to trust-based user groups in social tagging systems

Group recommender systems use various strategies to aggregate users' preferences into a common social welfare function which would maximize the satisfaction of all members. Group recommendation is essentially useful for websites, especially for social tagging systems. In this paper, we initially experiment with various rank aggregation strategies for group recommendation in social tagging systems. Specially, we consider trust-based user groups detected by community discovery based on trustable social relations. Also, we present hybrid similarity to estimate the relevance between users and resources. According to experiments on Delicious and Lastfm datasets, CombMAX, CombSUM and CombANZ are more suitable for aggregating individual preference into a group preference in social tagging systems. And group recommendation can achieve better effect than individual recommendation based on our proposed model.
Locking and Enrichment Strategies

A short overview of different locking mechanisms is presented, in which the more recent locking phenomenon tension locking is placed. Tension locking is found during composite forming simulations and occurs when the element edges are unaligned with the fiber directions. Discontinuities in composite forming simulations show similarities with other weak discontinuities such as material interfaces and shear bands found during shear localization. Two enrichment strategies are explored to resolve tension locking in linear triangular elements.
Polish Texts Topic Classification Evaluation

The paper presents preparation, lead and results of evaluation of efficiency of text classification (TC) methods for Polish. The subject language is of complex morphology, it belongs to flexional languages. Thus there is a strong need of making proper text preprocessing in order to guarantee reliable TC. Basing on authors’ practical experience from former TC, IR and general NLP experiments set of preprocessing rules was applied. Also feature-documents matrix was designed with respect to the most promising feature selected. About 216 experiments on exemplar corpus in subject (topic) classification task, with different preprocessing, weighting, filtering (for dimensions reduction) schemes and classifiers was conducted. Results shows there is not substantial increase of accuracy when using most of classical pre-processing steps in case of corpus of large size (at least 1000 exemplars per class). The highest impact authors were able to obtain concerned the system costs of TC processes, not the TC accuracy.
Fabrication of a wettability-gradient surface on copper by screen-printing techniques

In this study, a screen-printing technique is utilized to fabricate a wettability-gradient surface on a copper substrate. The pattern definitions on the copper surface were freely fabricated to define the regions with different wettabilities, for which the printing definition technique was developed as an alternative to the existing costly photolithography techniques. This fabrication process using screen printing in tandem with chemical modification methods can easily realize an excellent wettability-gradient surface with superhydrophobicity and superhydrophilicity. Surface analyses were performed to characterize conditions in some fabrication steps. A water droplet movement sequence is provided to clearly demonstrate the droplet-driving effectiveness of the fabricated gradient surface. The droplet-driving efficiency offers a promising solution for condensation heat transfer applications in the foreseeable future.
DEVELOPMENT OF GAMMA-IRRADIATED LOW MICROBIAL VEGETABLE SALADS FOR IMMUNOCOMPROMISED PATIENTS

Immunocompromised peoples cannot eat raw, uncooked or undercooked foods because of the associated high risk of infection. One way to overcome this situation is the use of ionizing radiation applied to food. This work covers the research and development of some salads, which due to the normal risk of adverse microbiological contamination, are not usually served to immunocompromised hospital patients. Cucumber, tomato, carrot, green leaf lettuce and green capsicum were treated with 1, 2, 2.5 and 3 kGy radiation from a 60 Co gamma irradiator. Changes of the “native” microflora, and some specific nutritional and physical-chemical properties of irradiated salad vegetables were analysed. It was observed that generally 1 kGy irradiated samples had less nutritional loss and better sensory score than the samples irradiated with higher doses. But the initial microflora of the samples were so high that minimum doses required to meet the sanitary microbiological levels suggested for foods intended for immunocompromised people and other potential target groups were 2, 2.5, 2.5 and 2 kGy for cucumber, tomato, carrot and green capsicum respectively. In case of green leaf lettuce the criteria were not met even at above radiation doses. The initial microflora of the samples will have to be reduced before irradiation to meet microbiological sanitary criteria at low dose treatment before safely recommend irradiated salads for hospitalized immunocompromised peoples and other target groups.