Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Ethical concerns and contributions in response to climate change and the links to well-being: a study of university students in The Netherlands.

AIMS This study explored the concerns and contributions of university students in response to the ethical dimensions of climate change, and the implications for their well-being. The study focused on university students as leaders of future society while facing complex environmental and socio-economic challenges. METHODS A total of 8 focus groups (FG) were conducted (66 participants from over 10 different universities across The Netherlands). In addition, 9 in-depth interviews with Dutch university students from different academic backgrounds, and 16 interviews with Dutch key informants in the environment, youth and public health fields were undertaken. The first author also attended (as participant-observer) three major events themed around youth and environmental issues across different regions in The Netherlands. RESULTS University students in the Netherlands are mostly concerned about the increasing social and economic inequalities between the global North and South, and the implications for impoverished and uneducated communities. Participants raised concerns over the transfer of materialistic value systems and unsustainable practices from developed to developing countries. The participants' main contributions in response to climate change were largely driven by feelings of guilt and responsibility, an ecological worldview, and desire to play a positive role in society. CONCLUSION Establishing formal youth platforms across academic, civic and political institutions could provide legitimate and empowering opportunities for university students to participate in consultations and debates of future environmental policies and development strategies. Such platforms could enhance the agency and well-being of university students for addressing their concerns over existing climate inequalities and other ethical dilemmas.
Progesterone Receptor Genotype, Family History, and Spontaneous Preterm Birth

OBJECTIVE: To examine whether women with a personal or family history of preterm birth are more likely to have genetic variation in the human progesterone receptor (hPR). METHODS: Women with a singleton preterm birth at less than 37 weeks of gestation between 2002 and 2006 were identified from a prospectively collected clinical and biologic obstetric database (cases). Women in the control group were those with only term deliveries at or above 38 weeks of gestation. The Utah Population Database was queried for family history (first- or second-degree relative) of preterm birth. DNA was extracted from stored buffy coats and genotyped for six single nucleotide polymorphisms in the hPR. RESULTS: One hundred fifty-four patients (92 women in the preterm case group, 62 women in the term control group) were included. All were white or Hispanic. There were no statistical differences between white and Hispanic allele frequencies. Women in the preterm case group were more likely to carry the minor allele, G (minor allele frequency 0.29 compared with 0.18, P=.035) for rs471767, and were more likely to carry the GT haplotype across rs471767 and rs578029 compared with women in the term control group. Similar haplotype block variation was seen among women with preterm birth plus a family history of preterm birth. CONCLUSION: Allele and haplotype frequencies in the hPR are significantly different among women with preterm birth and women with preterm birth plus a family history of preterm birth. This suggests the hPR gene may be a candidate for association with preterm birth or familial preterm birth. LEVEL OF EVIDENCE: III
Mixing Drivers in Clock-Tree for Power Supply Noise Reduction

In today's process technologies, power supply noise may cause serious clock jitter and circuit malfunction. Noise occurs by the fast and simultaneous voltage switching. A primary contributor to the noise is the clock-tree and the underlying sequential circuits that switch simultaneously, thus causing high current peaks. This work proposes to spread the switching of the clock-tree drivers, while maintaining low skew at the sinks of the tree, where the clocked circuits are connected. Driver switching characterization has been used for fast computation of peak currents, delays and slopes, integrated in a two-phase algorithm. It first constructs the clock-tree in a top-down traversal, employing a mix of high threshold voltage (HVT) and weak low threshold voltage (LVT) clock-drivers. A bottom-up delay correction phase then takes place, aiming at clock skew minimization. The algorithm was implemented in 40 nanometers TSMC process technology, achieving 35% to 70% clock-tree peak current reduction, translated to similar reduction in power supply noise. The proposed method can easily be combined with other existing methods to further reduce the noise.
A Closed-Loop Reconfigurable Switched-Capacitor DC-DC Converter for Sub-mW Energy Harvesting Applications

Energy harvesting is an emerging technology for powering wireless sensor nodes, enabling battery-free operation of these devices. In an energy harvesting sensor, a power management circuit is required to regulate the variable harvested voltage to provide a constant supply rail for the sensor circuits. The power management circuit needs to be compact, efficient, and robust to the variations of the input voltage and load current. A closed-form power expression and custom control algorithm for regulation of a switched-capacitor DC-DC converter with optimal conversion efficiency are proposed in this paper. The proposed regulation algorithm automatically adjusts both the voltage gain and switching frequency of a switched-capacitor DC-DC converter based on its input voltage and load current, increasing the power efficiency across a wide input voltage range. The design and simulation of a fully integrated circuit based on the proposed power managing approach is presented. This power management circuit has been simulated in a 0.25 μm standard CMOS process and simulation results confirm that with an input voltage ranging from 0.5 V to 2.5 V, the converter can generate a regulated 1.2 V output rail and deliver a maximum load current of 100 μA. The power conversion efficiency is higher than 74% across a wide range of the input voltage with a maximum efficiency of 83%.
Eukaryotic picoplanktoncommunitiesoftheMediterraneanSea in summerassessedbymolecularapproaches ( DGGE , TTGE , QPCR )

summerassessedbymolecularapproaches (DGGE,TTGE,QPCR) Dominique Marie, Fei Zhu, Vanessa Balagué, Joséphine Ras, & Daniel Vaulot Station Biologique, UMR7144 CNRS et Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Roscoff, France; Department de Biologia Marina i Oceanografia, Institut de Ciències del Mar, CMIMA, CSIC, Passeig Marı́tim de la Barceloneta, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain; and Laboratoire d’Océanographie de Villefranchesur-mer, UMR 7093 CNRS et Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Villefranche-sur-Mer Cedex, France
Towards Taxonomy of Telecommunication Network Metrics

The metrics and measurements play a crucial role in the whole lifecycle of telecommunication networks. The number of metrics being considered for modern telecommunication systems supporting digital or computing infrastructures has grown exponentially. It requires sophisticated systems for the metrics management which are under development by the industry consortia. For many research tasks, it would be sufficient to identify a relatively small number of recommended metrics to achieve more consistent evaluations of the system performance. There are still many unsolved problems in this area including defining the optimum modeling strategies and the metrics optimality. This paper explores a landscape of the most commonly used telecommunication and computing metrics to illuminate what metrics are available.
Development of Carbon Nanotube-Based Sensors—A Review

Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) have shown great promise as sensing elements in nanoelectromechanical sensors. In this review paper, we discuss the electrical, mechanical, and electromechanical properties of CNTs that are used in such applications. This investigation indicates which nanotube properties should be carefully considered when designing nanotube-based sensors. We then present the primary techniques that have been used for the integration of nanotubes into devices and proceed to give a description of sensors that have been developed using CNTs as active sensing elements
Glycosaminoglycans in the pericellular matrix of chondrons and chondrocytes

This is the first study to quantitate and profile the glycosaminoglycan (GAG) composition of the pericellular matrix (PCM) of chondrons and chondrocytes using the highly sensitive technique; fluorophore‐assisted carbohydrate electrophoresis (FACE). Bovine articular chondrocytes and chondrons were isolated enzymatically. High cell yield and viability were obtained for both preparations. Chondrons had strong immunofluorescent labeling for keratan sulphate and chondroitin‐6 sulphate but no labeling for hyaluronan. We compared the immunofluorescent data with FACE. The quantities of total keratan sulphate were determined to be 0.013 ± 0.002 pg cell−1 and 0.032 ± 0.003 pg cell−1 in the chondrocyte and chondron preparations, respectively. Four internal keratan sulphate sugars were detected (galβ1,4glcNAc6S, gal6Sβ1,4glcNAc6S, glcNAcβ1,3gal and glcNAc6Sβ1,3gal) for both preparations but they were present at significantly higher concentrations in chondron preparations (P < 0.01). Total chondroitin sulphate (CS) was determined to be 0.054 ± 0.004 pg cell−1 and 0.077 ± 0.005 pg cell−1 for chondrocyte and chondron preparations, respectively. Unsulphated CS disaccharide levels were similar but chondrons had significantly more chondroitin‐4 sulphated disaccharides and chondroitin‐6 sulphated disaccharides (P < 0.05). Hyaluronan acid was present at low concentrations (0.010 ± 0.001 pg cell−1) in both chondrocytes and chondrons. In this study, enzyme digestion coupled with FACE separation revealed new information about the differences in GAGs from isolated chondrocyte and chondron preparations. Further investigation of the differences in GAGs from chondrocytes and chondrons from different zones of articular cartilage may be useful for tissue engineering approaches.
Ensemble SVM Method for Automatic Sleep Stage Classification

Sleep scoring is used as a diagnostic technique in the diagnosis and treatment of sleep disorders. Automated sleep scoring is crucial, since the large volume of data should be analyzed visually by the sleep specialists which is burdensome, time-consuming tedious, subjective, and error prone. Therefore, automated sleep stage classification is a crucial step in sleep research and sleep disorder diagnosis. In this paper, a robust system, consisting of three modules, is proposed for automated classification of sleep stages from the single-channel electroencephalogram (EEG). In the first module, signals taken from Pz-Oz electrode were denoised using multiscale principal component analysis. In the second module, the most informative features are extracted using discrete wavelet transform (DWT), and then, statistical values of DWT subbands are calculated. In the third module, extracted features were fed into an ensemble classifier, which can be called as rotational support vector machine (RotSVM). The proposed classifier combines advantages of the principal component analysis and SVM to improve classification performances of the traditional SVM. The sensitivity and accuracy values across all subjects were 84.46% and 91.1%, respectively, for the five-stage sleep classification with Cohen’s kappa coefficient of 0.88. Obtained classification performance results indicate that, it is possible to have an efficient sleep monitoring system with a single-channel EEG, and can be used effectively in medical and home-care applications.
Hybrid Prefix OFDM Transmission Toward Future Wireless Communications

Prefix-based multicarrier transmission is in wide application in current wireless communications, at the expense of extra redundancy and reduced spectral efficiency. In this contribution, we propose a novel hybrid prefix (HP) structure, which can offer higher spectral efficiency for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) based future wireless communications, such as 5G and beyond systems. Compared with the conventional prefix aided OFDM scheme, the proposed HP-OFDM scheme is capable of reducing the average length of the prefix with the aid of a proposed low-complexity detector for efficient signal restoration. We also quantify the signal to interference plus noise and the achievable rate of the proposed HP-OFDM scheme through a theoretical analysis. Furthermore, the bit-error rate (BER) of the proposed HP-OFDM is also theoretically derived. Our scheme results demonstrate that HP-OFDM is capable of reducing the prefix overhead by 50% compared with prefix-aided OFDM, while achieving a BER comparable to that of prefix-aided OFDM.
Chronic administration of grapeseed polyphenols attenuates the development of hypertension and improves other cardiometabolic risk factors associated with the metabolic syndrome in cafeteria diet-fed rats

The effects of grape-seed polyphenols against the development of hypertension and other cardiometabolic conditions associated with the metabolic syndrome (MetS) were studied in rats fed a high-fat, high-carbohydrate diet, known as the cafeteria (CAF) diet. Two groups of Wistar rats were fed standard (STD) or CAF diets for 12 weeks. The CAF diet-fed rats were administered different doses of a low-molecularweight grape-seed polyphenol extract (LM-GSPE) (25, 100 and 200mg/kg per d) or vehicle daily, and the STD diet-fed rats were administered LM-GSPE (100mg/kg per d) or vehicle using ten animals per group. Body weight (BW), waist perimeter (WP) and systolic and diastolic blood pressures (BP) by the tail-cuff method were recorded weekly. The animals were housed in metabolic chambers every 2 weeks to estimate daily food and liquid intakes and to collect faeces and urine samples. The plasma lipid profile was analysed at time 0 and on the 4th, 7th, 10th and 12th weeks of the experiment. Moreover, plasma leptin was measured at the end of the experiment. Results demonstrated that LM-GSPE, when administered with the CAF diet, attenuated the increase in BP, BW, WP and improved lipid metabolism in these animals. However, although the 25and 100-mg/kg per d doses were sufficient to produce beneficial effects on BP and lipid metabolism, a 200-mg/kg per d dose was necessary to have an effect on BW and WP. The present findings suggest that LM-GSPE is a good candidate for a BP-lowering agent that can also ameliorate other conditions associated with the MetS.
Intracellular hyperthermia for cancer using magnetite cationic liposomes: in vitro study.

'Magnetite cationic liposomes (MCL)' were developed as a means to generate intracellular hyperthermia. Affinity of the MCL to glioma cells was ten times higher than that of magnetite 'neutral' liposomes due to the electrostatic interaction based on the positive charge of the MCL. Heat generation of the MCL was studied using agar phantoms and small pellets of rat glioma cells. When a high-frequency magnetic field, 118 kHz, 384 Oe was applied to glioma cells in the presence of MCL, the glioma cell pellet of 80 microl (5.4 mm in diameter) was heated to over 43 degrees C and all the cells died after 40 min irradiation owing to the hyperthermic effect. The terminal temperature of the cell pellet was proportional to the pellet volume when other parameters were constant. It thus appears that the MCL can heat a tumor of more than 80 microl in volume to above 42 degrees C.
Cost-Optimal Caching for D2D Networks With User Mobility: Modeling, Analysis, and Computational Approaches

Caching popular files at the user equipments (UEs) provides an effective way to alleviate the burden of the backhaul networks. Generally, popularity-based caching is not a system-wide optimal strategy, especially for user mobility scenarios. Motivated by this observation, we consider optimal caching with the presence of mobility. A cost-optimal caching problem (COCP) for device-to-device (D2D) networks is modeled, in which the impact of user mobility, cache size, and total number of encoded segments are all taken into account. The hardness of the problem is proved via a reduction from the satisfiability problem. Next, a lower-bounding function of the objective function is derived. By the function, an approximation of COCP (ACOCP) achieving linearization is obtained, which features two advantages. First, the ACOCP approach can use an off-the-shelf integer linear programming algorithm to obtain the global optimal solution, and it can effectively deliver solutions for small-scale and medium-scale system scenarios. Second, and more importantly, based on the ACOCP approach, one can derive a lower bound of global optimum of COCP, thus enabling performance benchmarking of any sub-optimal algorithm. To tackle large scenarios with low complexity, we first prove that the optimal caching placement of one user, giving other users’ caching placements, can be derived in polynomial time. Then, based on this proof, a mobility aware multi-user algorithm is developed. Simulation results verify the effectivenesses of the two approaches by comparing them to the lower bound of global optimum and conventional caching algorithms.
Capecitabine plus docetaxel combination therapy

For patients with anthracycline‐pretreated metastatic breast carcinoma, capecitabine plus docetaxel significantly increased overall survival compared with docetaxel alone. The current study evaluated the cost‐effectiveness of the capecitabine/docetaxel combination versus docetaxel monotherapy, comparing the gain in quality‐adjusted survival with associated health care costs.
A novel Riemannian metric for analyzing HARDI data

We propose a novel Riemannian framework for analyzing orientation distribution functions (ODFs) in HARDI data sets, for use in comparing, interpolating, averaging, and denoising ODFs. A recently used Fisher-Rao metric does not provide physically feasible solutions, and we suggest a modification that removes orientations from ODFs and treats them as separate variables. This way a comparison of any two ODFs is based on separate comparisons of their shapes and orientations. Furthermore, this provides an explicit orientation at each voxel for use in tractography. We demonstrate these ideas by computing geodesics between ODFs and Karcher means of ODFs, for both the original Fisher-Rao and the proposed framework.
Design Crowdsourcing: The Impact on New Product Performance of Sourcing Design Solutions from the “Crowd”

The authors examine an increasingly popular open innovation practice, “design crowdsourcing,” wherein firms seek external inputs in the form of functional design solutions for new product development from the “crowd. ” They investigate conditions under which managers crowdsource design and determine whether such decisions subsequently boost product sales. The empirical analysis is guided by qualitative insights gathered from executive interviews. The authors use a novel data set from a pioneering crowdsourcing firm and find that three concept design characteristics—perceived usability, reliability, and technical complexity—are associated with the decision to crowdsource design. They use an instrumental variable method accounting for the endogenous nature of crowdsourcing decisions to understand when such a decision affects downstream sales. The authors find that design crowdsourcing is positively related to unit sales and that this effect is moderated by the idea quality of the initial product concept. Using a change-score analysis of consumer ratings, they find that design crowdsourcing enhances perceived reliability and usability. They discuss the strategic implications of involving the crowd, beyond ideation, in helping transform ideas into effective products.
Effects of phytoplankton community on production, size, and export of large aggregates: A world‐ocean analysis

We recorded vertical profiles of size distributions of large particles (<100 µm) to a 1000‐m depth in the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans and in the Mediterranean Sea with the Underwater Video Profiler. Of the 410 profiles used in our analysis, 193 also included temperature, salinity, and high‐performance liquid chromatography (HPLC)‐resolved pigments, which were used to characterize the size structure of the phytoplankton community. Classification analysis identified six clusters of vertical profiles of size distributions of particles. Each cluster was characterized by the size distribution of its particles in the mesopelagic layer and the change of the particle‐size distribution with depth. Clusters with large particles in the mesopelagic layer corresponded to surface waters dominated by microphytoplankton, and those with small particles corresponded to surface waters dominated by picophytoplankton. We estimated the mass flux at 400 m using a relationship between particle size and mass flux. Principal‐component regression analysis showed that 68% of the variance of the mass flux at 400 m was explained by the size structure of the phytoplankton community and integrated chlorophyll a in the euphotic zone. We found that coefficient k in the Martin power relationship, which describes the decrease in the vertical mass flux with depth, varies between 0.2 and 1.0 in the world ocean, and we provided an empirical relationship to derive k from the size structure of phytoplankton biomass in the euphotic zone. Biogeochemists and modelers could use that relationship to obtain a realistic description of the downward particle flux instead of using a constant k value as often done.
Re-Framing, Re-Imagining, and Re-Tooling Curricula from the Grassroots: The Chicago Grassroots Curriculum Taskforce.

This article explores the work of the Grassroots Curriculum Taskforce (CGCT), a Chicago-based collaborative that engages in collective production of curricula that more adeptly capture the cultural, economic, and political realities of Chicago Public Schools’ students. We first examine the collaborative processes CGCT undertook with parents, teachers, students, community members/activists, and educational researchers to produce their first unit, Urban Renewal or Urban Removal (URUR). The second section explores CGCT and Northeastern Illinois University’s College of Education’s collaborative effort to partner with practitioners, educators, students, and communities to invest in liberatory grassroots K-12 curriculum while becoming partners in its development. CGCT partnerships are firmly grounded in a framework of mutual respect for the knowledge and expertise that parents, students, teachers, and community members bring to bear on K-12 education. The final section highlights challenges encountered when engaging in grassroots efforts.