Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Properties of Geopolymer Concrete from Local Fly Ash (FA) and Palm Oil Fuel Ash (POFA)

Geopolymer is an inorganic polymer from activation of source materials that rich of silica and alumina with alkaline activator. Previous studies reveal that the geopolymer has engineering properties and durability, which is equivalent or higher than the Ordinary Portland Cement (OPC) concrete. This paper presents properties of geopolymer concrete prepared with local Palm Oil Fuel Ash (POFA) and Fly Ash (FA) from agro-industrial waste in Riau Province, Indonesia. The POFA and FA were activated by a combination of sodium hydroxide and sodium silicate. The specimens were cured at room temperature for 24 hours before steam cured for another 24 hours at 60OC. Hardened properties namely compressive strength, tensile strength, flexural strength and modulus of elasticity, and water penetration of both POFA and FA geopolymer concrete were determined at 7, 14 and 28 days. Results showed that local POFA and FA as geopolymer source materials could produce mix with strength 19-22.5 MPa at 28 days. The compressive strength, tensile strength, flexural strength and modulus of elasticity of both geopolymer tended to increase slightly with time. In general, the results suggest that the local POFA and FA are potential as source material to produce geopolymer concrete.
Comparison of microarray-based predictive systems for early recurrence of cancer

In our previous study, we successfully developed a novel predictive system with microarray data in order to predict early intrahepatic recurrence of hepatocellular carcinoma after curative resection. We compare our system with other systems in terms of the predictive performance. From experimental results, our system was superior to other systems. This success comes from our gene selection procedure that can cope with the sample variability.
Effects of brinzolamide on ocular haemodynamics in healthy volunteers

Aim: A prospective, randomised study to evaluate effects of brinzolamide on ocular haemodynamics in healthy volunteers. Methods: 30 volunteers (12 men, 18 women; 28.3 (SD 7.8) years) were prospectively randomised to either brinzolamide or placebo during a 2 week double masked treatment trial. Examinations were performed at baseline and after 2 weeks of treatment. Intraocular pressure was measured and automatic static perimetry (Humphrey field analyser, 24-2) and contrast sensitivity (CSV 1000, Vector Vision) were performed. Retrobulbar blood flow velocities (peak systolic and end diastolic velocity) and resistive indices (RI) of ophthalmic artery, central retinal artery and of temporal and nasal short posterior ciliary arteries were measured by colour Doppler imaging (Sonoline Sienna Siemens). In video fluorescein angiograms (scanning laser ophthalmoscope, Rodenstock) arteriovenous passage time (AVP, dilution curves) and peripapillary diameters of retinal arterioles and venules were measured by means of digital image analysis. Results: Intraocular pressure was significantly decreased by brinzolamide (p<0.0001). Neither brinzolamide nor placebo changed visual field global indices after treatment. Contrast sensitivity at 3 cycles per degree was significantly higher in the placebo group (p<0.05). Apart from an increase of RI in ophthalmic artery under placebo treatment (p<0.05) there was no effect in retrobulbar haemodynamics in both groups. Brinzolamide therapy alone resulted in a significant reduction of AVP compared to baseline (p<0.05), while peripapillary retinal vessels diameters remained unaffected. Conclusions: Apart from the expected decrease of intraocular pressure brinzolamide showed no significant change in retrobulbar haemodynamics, but a significant shortening of AVP. Since in glaucoma AVP is prolonged indicating vascular dysfunction this effect might be beneficial in glaucoma therapy.
Peering Strategic Game Models for Interdependent ISPs in Content Centric Internet

Emergent content-oriented networks prompt Internet service providers (ISPs) to evolve and take major responsibility for content delivery. Numerous content items and varying content popularities motivate interdependence between peering ISPs to elaborate their content caching and sharing strategies. In this paper, we propose the concept of peering for content exchange between interdependent ISPs in content centric Internet to minimize content delivery cost by a proper peering strategy. We model four peering strategic games to formulate four types of peering relationships between ISPs who are characterized by varying degrees of cooperative willingness from egoism to altruism and interconnected as profit-individuals or profit-coalition. Simulation results show the price of anarchy (PoA) and communication cost in the four games to validate that ISPs should decide their peering strategies by balancing intradomain content demand and interdomain peering relations for an optimal cost of content delivery.
Soft substrate as a sacrificial layer for fabrication free-standing SU-8-based nanofluidic system

In this paper, we describe a new fabrication process utilizing polydimethylesiloxane (PDMS) and polyester (PET) as a sacrificial substrate for fabricating free-standing SU-8-based nanofluidic system. The soft substrate permits SU-8 UV cured patterning and layer-to-layer bonding, and allows the SU-8 structures to be easily peeled off from the substrate after complete fabrication. In the process, PDMS-on glass is used as a handling wafer, on which SU-8 based trenches is imprinted by a flexible film mold using low-pressure nanoimprint lithography. The reservoir pattern of SU-8 is fabricated on the bonding layer, in which PET serves as substrate. The nanochannel is sealed by optimized bonding process, which is flexible and easily controllable with the use of soft substrate as a sacrificial layer. After bonding process, PDMS and PET could be easily peeled off from nanaofluidic system. The SEM results shows that the height of the fully enclosed nanochannels will be about hundreds nanometer. Large area of free standing SU-8 structure layers are successfully fabricated and peeled off from the soft substrate layer as single continuous sheets.
Analysis of Synchronization Between Two Modules of Pulse Neural Networks with Excitatory and Inhibitory Connections

To study the synchronized oscillations among distant neurons in the visual cortex, we analyzed the synchronization between two modules of pulse neural networks using the phase response function. It was found that the intermodule connections from excitatory to excitatory ensembles tend to stabilize the antiphase synchronization and that the intermodule connections from excitatory to inhibitory ensembles tend to stabilize the in-phase synchronization. It was also found that the intermodule synchronization was more noticeable when the inner-module synchronization was weak.
Design of a minimal silencer for the silent mating-type locus HML of Saccharomyces cerevisiae

The silent mating-type loci HML and HMR of Saccharomyces cerevisiae contain mating-type information that is permanently repressed. This silencing is mediated by flanking sequence elements, the E- and I-silencers. They contain combinations of binding sites for the proteins Rap1, Abf1 and Sum1 as well as for the origin recognition complex (ORC). Together, they recruit other silencing factors, foremost the repressive Sir2/Sir3/Sir4 complex, to establish heterochromatin-like structures at the HM loci. However, the HM silencers exhibit considerable functional redundancy, which has hampered the identification of further silencing factors. In this study, we constructed a synthetic HML-E silencer (HML-SS ΔI) that lacked this redundancy. It consisted solely of Rap1 and ORC-binding sites and the D2 element, a Sum1-binding site. All three elements were crucial for minimal HML silencing, and mutations in these elements led to a loss of Sir3 recruitment. The silencer was sensitive to a mutation in RAP1, rap1-12, but less sensitive to orc mutations or sum1Δ. Moreover, deletions of SIR1 and DOT1 lead to complete derepression of the HML-SS ΔI silencer. This fully functional, minimal HML-E silencer will therefore be useful to identify novel factors involved in HML silencing.
Effect of Synthetic Fiber Surface Treatment on the Post-Crack Residual Strength and Toughness of Fiber Reinforced Concrete

This research involves an experimental investigation into the improvement of bonding characteristics between a mixture of polyethylene/polypropylene fibers and concrete comparing various chemical and physical surface treatments and their effect on the mechanical properties of the fiber reinforced concrete (FRC). For the chemical surface treatment, several techniques of chemical etching of the fiber's surface were used, such as two types of chromic acid solutions, potassium permanganate, and hydrogen peroxide solutions. For the physical surface treatment, UV treatment and a combination of UV and Ozone treatment were used. Non-treated and treated fibers were added at 0.32% by volume and 0.50% for the best treatment method. Compressive, flexural strength and contact angle were measured to quantify bond improvement. Among the chemical treatment techniques, chromic acid solution type B was found to be the most efficient technique versus potassium permanganate which had negative effect on the bonding strength between fibers and concrete. Investigations of physical treatment techniques showed using UV does not have a significant change on the bonding strength, but 10 minute exposure of fibers to the UV lamp in presence of ozone gave the best result in bonding of fibers. As a cumulative result, using the chemical treatment was found to be a more efficient technique rather than the physical treatment in surface modification of fibers. The contact angle was found to have no correlation to the toughness. The higher volume of fibers gave better properties than the surface treatment techniques indicating surface treatment may not be an economical alternative.
A compositional analysis of broadcasting embedded systems

This work takes as its starting point D Kendall's CANdle/bCANdle algebraic framework for formal modelling and specification of broadcasting embedded systems based on CAN networks. Checking real-time properties of such systems is beset by problems of state-space explosion and so a scheme is given for recasting systems specified in Kendall's framework as parallel compositions of timed automata; a CAN network channel is modelled as an automaton. This recasting is shown to be bi-similar to the original bCANdle model. In the recast framework,"compositionality" theorems allow one to infer that a model of a system is simulated by some abstraction of the model, and hence that properties of the model expressible in ACTL can be inferred from analogous properties of the abstraction. These theorems are reminiscent of "assume-guarantee" reasoning allowing one to build simulations component-wise although, unfortunately, components participating in a "broadcast" are required to be abstracted "atomically". Case studies are presented to show how this can be used in practice, and how systems which take impossibly long to model-check can tackled by compositional methods. The work is of broader interest also, as the models are built as UPPAAL systems and the compositionality theorems apply to any UPPAAL system in which the components do not share local variables. The method could for instance extend to systems using some network other than CAN, provided it can be modelled by timed automata. Possibilities also exist for building it into an automated tool, complementing other methods such as counterexample- guided abstraction refinement.
Bifurcation Analysis of Jansen's Neural Mass Model

We present a mathematical model of a neural mass developed by a number of people, including Lopes da Silva and Jansen. This model features three interacting populations of cortical neurons and is described by a six-dimensional nonlinear dynamical system. We address some aspects of its behavior through a bifurcation analysis with respect to the input parameter of the system. This leads to a compact description of the oscillatory behaviors observed in Jansen and Rit (1995) (alpha activity) and Wendling, Bellanger, Bartolomei, and Chauvel (2000) (spike-like epileptic activity). In the case of small or slow variation of the input, the model can even be described as a binary unit. Again using the bifurcation framework, we discuss the influence of other parameters of the system on the behavior of the neural mass model.
Method for Attaining Caraway Seed Oil Fractions with Different Composition

Caraway (Carum carvi L.) is a medicinal and aromatic plant; its seeds (fruits) are used as spice and they contain essential oils. We hypothesized that by collecting caraway oil at different time points during the extraction process, we could obtain oil fractions with distinct chemical composition. A hydrodistillation time (HDT) study was conducted to test the hypothesis. The caraway seed oil fractions were collected at eight different HDT (at 0 – 2, 2 – 7, 7 – 15, 15 – 30, 30 – 45, 45 – 75, 75 – 105, and 105 – 135 min). Additionally, a non‐stop HD for 135 min was conducted as a control. Most of the oil was eluted early in the HD process. The non‐stop HDT treatment yielded 2.76% oil by weight. Of the 24 essential oil constituents, limonene (77 – 19% of the total oil) and carvone (20 – 79%) were the major ones. Other constituents included myrcene (0.72 – 0.16%), trans‐carveol (0.07 – 0.39%), and β‐caryophyllene (0.07 – 0.24%). Caraway seed oil with higher concentration of limonene can be obtained by sampling oil fractions early in HD process; conversely, oil with high concentration of carvone can be obtained by excluding the fractions eluted early in the HD process. We demonstrated a method of obtaining caraway seed oil fractions with various and unique composition. These novel oil fractions with unique composition are not commercially available and could have much wider potential uses, and also target different markets compared to the typical caraway essential oil.
Accurate Range-Free Localization for Anisotropic Wireless Sensor Networks

Position information plays a pivotal role in wireless sensor network (WSN) applications and protocol/algorithm design. In recent years, range-free localization algorithms have drawn much research attention due to their low cost and applicability to large-scale WSNs. However, the application of range-free localization algorithms is restricted because of their dramatic accuracy degradation in practical anisotropic WSNs, which is mainly caused by large error of distance estimation. Distance estimation in the existing range-free algorithms usually relies on a unified per hop length (PHL) metric between nodes. But the PHL between different nodes might be greatly different in anisotropic WSNs, resulting in large error in distance estimation. We find that, although the PHL between different nodes might be greatly different, it exhibits significant locality; that is, nearby nodes share a similar PHL to anchors that know their positions in advance. Based on the locality of the PHL, a novel distance estimation approach is proposed in this article. Theoretical analyses show that the error of distance estimation in the proposed approach is only one-fourth of that in the state-of-the-art pattern-driven scheme (PDS). An anchor selection algorithm is also devised to further improve localization accuracy by mitigating the negative effects from the anchors that are poorly distributed in geometry. By combining the locality-based distance estimation and the anchor selection, a range-free localization algorithm named Selective Multilateration (SM) is proposed. Simulation results demonstrate that SM achieves localization accuracy higher than 0.3r, where r is the communication radius of nodes. Compared to the state-of-the-art solution, SM improves the distance estimation accuracy by up to 57% and improves localization accuracy by up to 52% consequently.
Tinea pedis et unguium in the Muslim community of Durban, South Africa

Background In a pilot study performed in eight mosques in the Durban area, it was found that the prevalence of tinea pedis et unguium in the adult Muslim male population regularly attending mosques was higher than in the nonMuslim male population. The aims of the present study were: (i) to determine the prevalence of tinea pedis et unguium in the adult Muslim male population regularly attending mosques; (ii) to investigate the role of mosque carpets and ablution areas in the spread of infection; and (iii) to develop strategies to combat the infection.
Plasticity in Bulk Metallic Glass Composites Containing Dual Amorphous Phases

Bulk metallic glass (BMG) composites with dual amorphous phases were fabricated by spark plasma sintering of a mixture of Cu-based and Zr-based amorphous powders in their overlapped supercooled liquid region. The Zr-based amorphous phases are well distributed homogeneously in the Cu-based metallic glass matrix after consolidation. The BMG composite still remains as an amorphous structure after consolidation. The BMG composite with dual amorphous phases shows macroscopic plasticity after yielding, and the plastic strain increased to around 3.4% in the BMG composite containing 30 vol% Zr-based amorphous phase. The successful consolidation of BMG composite with enhanced plasticity was achieved by introducing a second amorphous phase in the metallic glass matrix.
Proteases and chaperones are the most abundant proteins in the parasitophorous vacuole of Plasmodium falciparum‐infected erythrocytes

After invasion of erythrocytes, the human malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum resides within a parasitophorous vacuole (PV) which forms an interface between the host cell cytosol and the parasite surface. This vacuole protects the parasite from potentially harmful substances, but allows access of essential nutrients to the parasite. Furthermore, the vacuole acts as a transit compartment for parasite proteins en route to the host cell cytoplasm. Recently we developed a strategy to biotin label soluble proteins of the PV. Here, we have paired this strategy with a high‐throughput MALDI‐TOF‐MS analysis to identify 27 vacuolar proteins. These proteins fall into the following main classes: chaperones, proteases, and metabolic enzymes, consistent with the expected functions of the vacuole. These proteins are likely to be involved in several processes including nutrient acquisition from the host cytosol, protein sorting within the vacuole, and release of parasites at the end of the intraerythrocytic cycle.
Multicore acceleration of priority-based schedulers for concurrency bug detection

Testing multithreaded programs is difficult as threads can interleave in a nondeterministic fashion. Untested interleavings can cause failures, but testing all interleavings is infeasible. Many interleaving exploration strategies for bug detection have been proposed, but their relative effectiveness and performance remains unclear as they often lack publicly available implementations and have not been evaluated using common benchmarks. We describe NeedlePoint, an open-source framework that allows selection and comparison of a wide range of interleaving exploration policies for bug detection proposed by prior work. Our experience with NeedlePoint indicates that priority-based probabilistic concurrency testing (the PCT algorithm) finds bugs quickly, but it runs only one thread at a time, which destroys parallelism by serializing executions. To address this problem we propose a parallel version of the PCT algorithm~(PPCT). We show that the new algorithm outperforms the original by a factor of 5x when testing parallel programs on an eight-core machine. We formally prove that parallel PCT provides the same probabilistic coverage guarantees as PCT. Moreover, PPCT is the first algorithm that runs multiple threads while providing coverage guarantees.
Mass Spectrometric Analyses of Purified Rhesus Monkey Rhadinovirus Reveal 33 Virion-Associated Proteins

ABSTRACT The repertoire of proteins that comprise intact gammaherpesviruses, including the human pathogen Kaposi's sarcoma-associated herpesvirus (KSHV), is likely to have critical functions not only in viral structure and assembly but also in the early stages of infection and evasion of the host's rapidly deployed antiviral defenses. To develop a better understanding of these proteins, we analyzed the composition of rhesus monkey rhadinovirus (RRV), a close phylogenetic relative of KSHV. Unlike KSHV, RRV replicates to high titer in cell culture and thus serves as an effective model for studying primate gammaherpesvirus structure and virion proteomics. We employed two complementary mass spectrometric approaches and found that RRV contains at least 33 distinct virally encoded proteins. We have assigned 7 of these proteins to the capsid, 17 to the tegument, and 9 to the envelope. Of the five gammaherpesvirus-specific tegument proteins, three have no known function. We also found three proteins not previously associated with a purified herpesvirus and an additional seven that represent new findings for a member of the gamma-2 herpesviruses. Detergent extraction resulted in particles that contained six distinct tegument proteins in addition to the expected capsid structural proteins, suggesting that this subset of tegument components may interact more directly with or with higher affinity for the underlying capsid and, in turn, may play a role in assembly or transport of viral or subviral particles during entry or egress.
Sphere-packing bound for classical-quantum channels

We study lower bounds on the optimal error probability in channel coding at rates below capacity, commonly termed sphere-packing bounds. In this work, we establish a sphere-packing bound for classical-quantum channels, which significantly improves previous prefactor from the order of subexponential to polynomial. Furthermore, the gap between the obtained error exponent for constant composition codes and the best known classical random coding exponent vanishes in the order of o(log n/n), indicating our sphere-packing bound is almost exact in the high rate regime. The main technical contributions are two converse Hoeffding bounds for quantum hypothesis testing and the saddle-point properties of error exponent functions.
Characterization of fabricated three dimensional scaffolds of bioceramic-polymer composite via microstereolithography technique

Microstereolithography is a method used for rapid prototyping of polymeric and ceramic components. This technique converts a computer-aided design (CAD) to a three dimensional (3D) model, and enables layer per layer fabrication curing a liquid resin with UV-light or laser source. The aim of this project was to formulate photocurable polymer reinforced with synthesized calcium pyrophosphate (CPP), and to fabricate a 3D scaffolds with optimum mechanical properties for specific tissue engineering applications. The photocurable ceramic suspension was prepared with acrylate polyester, multifunctional acrylate monomer with the addition of 50–70wt% of CPP, photoinitiators and photoinhibitors. The 3D structure of disc (5 mm height × 4 mm diameter) was successfully fabricated using Envisiontec Perfactory3® . They were then sintered at high temperature for polymer removal, to obtain a ceramic of the desired porosity. The density increased to more than 35% and the dimensional shrinkage after sintering were 33%. The discs were then subjected compressive measurement, biodegradation and bioactivity test. Morphology and CPP content of the sintered polymer was investigated with SEM and XRD, respectively. The addition of CPP coupled with high temperature sintering, had a significant effect on the compressive strength exhibited by the bioceramic. The values are in the range of cancellous bone (2–4 MPa). In biodegradation and bioactivity test, the synthesized CPP induced the formation of apatite layer and its nucleation onto the composite surface.