Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Comparison of seaweed pack and mudpack as treatment for knee osteoarthritis: a prospective randomized controlled study

Objective: For knee osteoarthritis (OA), there is a demand for alternative modalities in order to delay surgery and to avoid the side effects of medications. This study compared the effects of applying seaweed pack and mudpack for the treatment of knee OA. Design: Randomized controlled trial. Methods: Twenty-five patients with knee OA who satisfied the criteria were included. The patients were divided into two groups according to the treatment method: mudpack (n=12) and seaweed pack (n=13). The two groups were treated for 20 minutes, twice a day for five continuous days at the Ocean Healing Center at Wando Island, South Korea. Participants were assessed by clinical scores (Western Ontario and McMaster Universities Osteoarthritis Index, Hospital for Special Surgery Knee Score, Knee injury and Osteoarthritis Outcome Score and 36-Item Short Form Health Survey) and lab results (erythrocyte sedimentation rate, C-re-active protein, insulin-like growth factor-1 [IGF-1], tumor necrosis factor- α [TNF- α ]) during the follow-up period. Results: For the most part, clinical scores improved after therapy and maintained improvements for four weeks in both groups ( p <0.05). In the seaweed group, TNF- α was significantly decreased at two weeks post-therapy ( p <0.05). In both groups, IGF-1 was significantly increased immediately post-therapy ( p <0.05). There were no statistically significant differences after therapy between the groups in clinical scores and labs. Conclusions: Seaweed packs and mudpacks had similar positive effects for knee OA. Additionally, the seaweed pack group showed decreased levels of TNF- α at two weeks post-treatment, which may explain the reduced inflammatory reaction. For rehabilitation therapy, use of seaweed packs may serve as an alternative modality for the treatment of knee OA.
A Conceptual Understanding of How Educational Technology Coaches Help Teachers Integrate iPad Affordances into Their Teaching.

Educational technology (ed tech) coaches can help teachers and students integrate iPad affordances into their teaching and learning. A brief overview of affordance theory is provided. While investigating the under-researched practices of ed tech coaches, the authors identified iPad affordances and tabulated these, revealing links between the iPad’s technological capabilities, technological affordances and pedagogical affordances. Nine iPad technological capabilities, such as the camera, were aligned with some of their technological affordances, such as taking a photo. These were matched to some pedagogical affordances, such as taking a photo for educational purposes. Finally, different categories in the table were combined into six broad strands unveiling how ed tech coaches use them to change teacher pedagogy with benefits for teachers, students and parents. Ed tech coaches often naturally build teachers’ TPACK, mostly through the SAMR model. Specifically, they change teachers’ pedagogy by focusing on polysynchronous teaching and learning; digital, transformed learning; student ownership of learning with teachers as facilitators; students as teachers of content and technology; teachers’ triple agendas of content elaboration, academic argument, and digital citizenship; and student creativity.
Aqueous Solution Surface Chemistry of Carbon Nanotubes

Since the rediscovery of carbon nanotubes (CNTs) by Iijima in 1991, a plethora of applica‐ tions have been developed in the fields of biomolecular science, catalysis, environmental chemistry and medicine. Relevant to the development of these new technologies, it is impor‐ tant to effectively characterize and tune the chemical and electronic structures of these mate‐ rials for desired properties. Within the last 15 years, an array of surface characterization methods have been developed to assay the surface structures of single(SWNTs) and multiwalled (MWNTs) carbon nanotubes, in particular as organic moieties and catalytically active metal nanoparticles are tethered to them. Distinctive physical, chemical, electrical and high thermal properties of CNTs make these materials suitable for widespread applications, such as fuel cells, semiconducting materials in electronics, atomic force microscopy probes, mi‐ croelectrodes, adsorbents to remove pollutants from waste water, electrochemical sensing and drug carriers. Aqueous surface chemistry plays a vital role in determining the fate and transport of CNTs. A large fraction of the atoms in CNTs reside at or near the surface (Sayes et al., 2006; Bottini et al., 2006). Pristine carbon nanotubes are barely soluble in liquids. To introduce nanotubes in more easily dispersible forms, they require functionalization. These processes entail attaching various organic moities to the sidewalls, which can be used to tether catalytically reactive nanoparticles. Biomolecules require electron mediators to pro‐ mote electron transfer needed for effective biosensing (Sampath et al., 1998). Electrochemical metal ion sensors require certain functional groups which show potential affinity towards particular metal ions (Mojica et al., 2007). Surface electrostatic interactions in solution also influence the sorption properties of these materials to entrain environmental contaminants on the CNT sidewalls (Tavallai et al., 2012).
Heteromeric assembly of P2X subunits

Transcripts and/or proteins of P2X receptor (P2XR) subunits have been found in virtually all mammalian tissues. Generally more than one of the seven known P2X subunits have been identified in a given cell type. Six of the seven cloned P2X subunits can efficiently form functional homotrimeric ion channels in recombinant expression systems. This is in contrast to other ligand-gated ion channel families, such as the Cys-loop or glutamate receptors, where homomeric assemblies seem to represent the exception rather than the rule. P2XR mediated responses recorded from native tissues rarely match exactly the biophysical and pharmacological properties of heterologously expressed homomeric P2XRs. Heterotrimerization of P2X subunits is likely to account for this observed diversity. While the existence of heterotrimeric P2X2/3Rs and their role in physiological processes is well established, the composition of most other P2XR heteromers and/or the interplay between distinct trimeric receptor complexes in native tissues is not clear. After a description of P2XR assembly and the structure of the intersubunit ATP-binding site, this review summarizes the distribution of P2XR subunits in selected mammalian cell types and the biochemically and/or functionally characterized heteromeric P2XRs that have been observed upon heterologous co-expression of P2XR subunits. We further provide examples where the postulated heteromeric P2XRs have been suggested to occur in native tissues and an overview of the currently available pharmacological tools that have been used to discriminate between homo- and heteromeric P2XRs.
Sums of Squares Relaxations of Polynomial Semidefinite Programs

A polynomial SDP (semidefinite program) minimizes a polynomial objective function over a feasible region described by a positive semidefinite constraint of a symmetric matrix whose components are multivariate polynomials. Sums of squares relaxations developed for polynomial optimization problems are extended to propose sums of squares relaxations for polynomial SDPs with an additional constraint for the variables to be in the unit ball. It is proved that optimal values of a sequence of sums of squares relaxations of the polynomial SDP, which correspond to duals of Lasserre’s SDP relaxations applied to the polynomial SDP, converge to the optimal value of the polynomial SDP. The proof of the convergence is obtained by fully utilizing a penalty function and a generalized Lagrangian duals that were recently proposed by Kim et al for sparse polynomial optimization problems.
On the Comparison of Relative Clustering Validity Criteria

Many different relative clustering validity criteria exist that are very useful in practice as quantitative measures for evaluating the quality of data partitions, and new criteria have still been proposed from time to time. These criteria are endowed with particular features that may make each of them able to outperform others in specific classes of problems. Then, it is a hard task for the user to choose a specific criterion when he or she faces such a variety of possibilities. For this reason, a relevant issue within the field of cluster analysis consists of comparing the performances of existing validity criteria and, eventually, that of a new criterion to be proposed. In spite of this, there are some conceptual flaws in the comparison paradigm traditionally adopted in the literature. The present paper presents an alternative methodology for comparing clustering validity criteria and uses it to make an extensive comparison of the performances of 4 well-known validity criteria and 20 variants of them over a collection of 142,560 partitions of 324 different data sets of a given class of interest.
Evaluation of Water Quality Based on Artificial Neural Network Using VB

Evaluation of water environment quality plays an important role in environment science. By analyzing the factors influencing multi-reach water quality, a RBF neural network model with water quality is developed using neural network theory and method. It is integrated into a software package using VB program. The software has a friend interactive interface, and someone not knowing artificial neural network can easily operate it. The development of software verifies that visual language VB is suitable to developing engineering softwares.
Facetons: face primitives with adaptive bounds for building 3D architectural models in virtual environment

We present faceton, a geometric modeling primitive designed for building architectural models, using a six degrees of freedom (DoF) input device in a virtual environment (VE). A faceton is given as an oriented point floating in the air and defines a plane of infinite extent passing through the point. The polygonal mesh model is constructed by taking the intersection of the planes associated with the facetons. With the simple drag-and-drop and group interaction of faceton, users can easily create 3D architecture models in the VE. The faceton primitive and its interaction reduce the overhead associated with standard polygonal mesh modeling in VE, where users have to manually specify vertexes and edges which could be far away. The faceton representation is inspired by the research on boundary representations (B-rep) and constructive solid geometry (CSG), but it is driven by a novel adaptive bounding algorithm and is specifically designed for the 3D modeling activities in an immersive virtual environment.
Performance Analysis of Public Cloud Computing Providers

The objective of this paper is to perform a comprehensive performance comparison of public cloud services for computing and to analyze the correlation between their prices and performance. Eight representative public cloud providers were divided into two groups using market share: small cloud providers and large cloud providers. Results revealed that these offered computing services vary widely in performance and price; most small cloud providers have more stable and better computing performance than large cloud providers; the performance of CPU impact price significantly.
Supervised Kernel Change Point Detection with Partial Annotations

In this article, we propose an automatic procedure to calibrate change point detection algorithms. Our approach expands on the ability of an expert to provide very rough segmentation estimates, called partial annotations, for a few signal examples. Our contribution consists in a supervised strategy to learn a kernel Mahalanobis metric, which, once combined with a detection algorithm, can replicate the expert’s segmentation strategy on new signals. Contrary to previous works, our approach is non-parametric, supervised and naturally accommodates partial annotations. Experiments on real-world data show that supervision significantly improves detection performance.
Hypothesis testing in a rule discovery problem: When a focused procedure is effective

We investigated individuals’ ability to use negative evidence in hypothesis testing. We compared performance in two versions of Wason's (1960) rule discovery problem. In the original version, a triple of numbers- {2, 4, 6}- was presented as an example of a rule that the experimenter had in mind (i.e., “increasing numbers”). Participants had to discover the rule by proposing new triples. In the other version, the same triple was presented as a counterexample to the experimenter's rule (i.e., “decreasing numbers”). We predicted that, in both conditions, participants would form hypotheses based on the features of the triple, and test only instances of the hypothesized rule. However, in the counter-example condition, such focused testing would invariably produce negative evidence. As a consequence, participants would be forced to revise their hypotheses. The reported results corroborated our predictions: Participants solved the counter-example version significantly better than the original problem.
Regularization of Inverse Visual Problems Involving Discontinuities

Inverse problems, such as the reconstruction problems that arise in early vision, tend to be mathematically ill-posed. Through regularization, they may be reformulated as well-posed variational principles whose solutions are computable. Standard regularization theory employs quadratic stabilizing functionals that impose global smoothness constraints on possible solutions. Discontinuities present serious difficulties to standard regularization, however, since their reconstruction requires a precise spatial control over the smoothing properties of stabilizers. This paper proposes a general class of controlled-continuity stabilizers which provide the necessary control over smoothness. These nonquadratic stabilizing functionals comprise multiple generalized spline kernels combined with (noncontinuous) continuity control functions. In the context of computational vision, they may be thought of as controlled-continuity constraints. These generic constraints are applicable to visual reconstruction problems that involve both continuous regions and discontinuities, for which global smoothness constraints fail.
Invitation games and the price of stability

Given an arbitrary 2-player game G that we refer to as the basic game, we propose a notion of a multiplayer invitation game that proceeds for a fixed number of rounds, where in each round some player (whose identity is determined by a scheduler) gets to invite a player of his choice to play a match of the basic game. The question that we study is how does the price of stability of the invitation game compare to that of the basic game. For a wide range of schedulers we prove a dichotomy result, showing that there are only two types of basic games, those that we call invitation resistant in which the price of stability of the invitation version is equal to that of the basic game, and those that we call asymptotically efficient in which the price of stability tends to 0 as the number of rounds grows. 1 In particular, when the basic game is the prisoners dilemma the game is asymptotically efficient if and only if the payoff when both players defect is nonzero.
Mutual Information and Conditional Mean Estimation in Poisson Channels

Following the discovery of a fundamental connection between information measures and estimation measures in Gaussian channels, this paper explores the counterpart of those results in Poisson channels. In the continuous-time setting, the received signal is a doubly stochastic Poisson point process whose rate is equal to the input signal plus a dark current. It is found that, regardless of the statistics of the input, the derivative of the input-output mutual information with respect to the intensity of the additive dark current can be expressed as the expected difference between the logarithm of the input and the logarithm of its noncausal conditional mean estimate. The same holds for the derivative with respect to input scaling, but with the logarithmic function replaced by x log x. Similar relationships hold for discrete-time versions of the channel where the outputs are Poisson random variables conditioned on the input symbols.
Inclusion of the Bovine Neutrophil Beta-Defensin 3 with Glycoprotein D of Bovine Herpesvirus 1 in a DNA Vaccine Modulates Immune Responses of Mice and Cattle

ABSTRACT Bovine herpesvirus 1 (BoHV-1) causes recurrent respiratory and genital infections in cattle and predisposes them to lethal secondary infections. While modified live and killed BoHV-1 vaccines exist, these are not without problems. Development of an effective DNA vaccine for BoHV-1 has the potential to address these issues. As a strategy to enhance DNA vaccine immunity, a plasmid encoding the bovine neutrophil beta-defensin 3 (BNBD3) as a fusion with truncated glycoprotein D (tgD) and a mix of two plasmids encoding BNBD3 and tgD were tested in mice and cattle. In mice, coadministration of BNBD3 on the separate plasmid enhanced the tgD-induced gamma interferon (IFN-γ) response but not the antibody response. BNBD3 fused to tgD did not affect the antibody levels or the number of IFN-γ-secreting cells but increased the induction of tgD-specific cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTLs). In cattle, the addition of BNBD3 as a fusion construct also modified the immune response. While the IgG and virus-neutralizing antibody levels were not affected, the number of IFN-γ-secreting cells was increased after BoHV-1 challenge, specifically the CD8+ IFN-γ+ T cells, including CD8+ IFN-γ+ CD25+ CTLs. While reduced virus shedding, rectal temperature, and weight loss were observed, the level of protection was comparable to that observed in pMASIA-tgD-vaccinated animals. These data show that coadministration of BNBD3 with a protective antigen as a fusion in a DNA vaccine strengthened the Th1 bias and increased cell-mediated immune responses but did not enhance protection from BoHV-1 infection.
Comparison of coefficients used for DNA Analysis by PRAPD

The alterations caused by eight different similarity coefficients were evaluated in the clustering and ordination of 27 common bean cultivars analyzed by RAPD markers. The Anderberg, simple matching, Rogers and Tanimoto, Russel and Rao, Ochiai, Jaccard, Sorensen-Dice, and Ochiai II's [4] coefficients were tested. Comparisons among the coefficients were made through correlation analysis of genetic distances obtained by the complement of these coefficients, dendrogram [2] evaluation. The employment of different similarity coefficients caused few alterations in cultivar classification, since correlations among genetic distances were larger than 0.86. Nevertheless, the different similarity coefficients altered the projection efficiency in a two-dimensional space and formed different numbers of groups by Tocher's optimization procedure[25]. Among these coefficients, Russel and Rao's was the most discordant and the Sorensen-Dice was considered the most adequate due to a higher projection [9] efficiency in a two-dimensional space. Even though few structural changes were suggested in the most different groups, these coefficients altered some relationships between cultivars with high genetic similarity. The total eighteen algorithms of coefficient are used in PRAPD. The output of final result can be clustered by UPGMA tool which classifies the species hierarchical.
Effects of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, rhizobium and phosphorus on mungbean (Vigna radiata) in saline soil

A pot experiment was carried out in the nethouse of Soil Science Division of Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute (BARI), Joydebpur, Gazipur in 2017 and 2018 with an objective to evaluate the potentiality of AM fungi, Rhizobium and P in different best combinations on germination (%), growth, yield and yield contributing characters, nodulation, sporulation and nutrient concentration of mungbean under low salinity (4 dSm-1) stress condition. The experiment was designed in CRD with 10 treatments and 4 replications. Mungbean variety BARI Mung-6 was used as a test crop. Peat based rhizobial inoculum (BARI RVr-403) was used in this experiment @ 50 g kg-1 seed and the population density of inoculum being above 108 cfu g-1 inoculant. Soil based AM inoculum containing 275 ± 20 spores and infected root pieces of the host plant was used in each pot. There were 10 treatments viz. T1: Control (Not absolute control), T2: Arbuscular mycorrhiza (AM) + 50% P, T3: AM + 75% P, T4: AM + 100% P, T5: Rhizobium + 50% P, T6: Rhizobium + 75% P, T7: Rhizobium + 100% P, T8: AM + Rhizobium + 50% P, T9: AM + Rhizobium + 75% P and T10: AM + Rhizobium + 100% P. The highest seed yield (2.28 g plant-1, 46.2% higher over control in 2017 and 2.97 g plant-1, 33.8% higher over control in 2018) and stover yield (5.23 g plant-1, 30.8% higher over control in 2017 and 5.67 g plant-1, 32.8% higher over control in 2018) were found in AM + Rhizobium + 75% P treatment. Dual inoculation significantly increased P, S, Mg, Fe, Mn and Zn concentration of mungbean plant compared to control. The results suggest that inoculation of AM fungi and Rhizobium along with 75% of recommended P rate can help increased mungbean yield under low salinity stress condition through influence on nodulation, colonization and nutrient uptake. Bangladesh J. Agril. Res. 44(1): 153-165, March 2019
A Phase-Field Model and Its Numerical Approximation for Two-Phase Incompressible Flows with Different Densities and Viscosities

Modeling and numerical approximation of two-phase incompressible flows with different densities and viscosities are considered. A physically consistent phase-field model that admits an energy law is proposed, and several energy stable, efficient, and accurate time discretization schemes for the coupled nonlinear phase-field model are constructed and analyzed. Ample numerical experiments are carried out to validate the correctness of these schemes and their accuracy for problems with large density and viscosity ratios.
Antioxidant activity, total phenolic, and total flavaonoid of extracts and fractions of red fruit (Pandanus conoideus Lam)

Red fruit (Pandanus conoideus Lam) is one of the fruits commonly consumed as diet by societies, especially in Papua, Indonesia. Preliminary research revealed that among three extracts of red fruit evaluated, ethyl acetate extract had the highest antiradical activities; therefore, this research was directed to fractionate ethyl acetate extract, evaluate antioxidant activities using in vitro methods of 2,2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) radical scavenging, reducing power, and metal chelating activity, and to determine the phenolics and flavonoid contents of ethyl acetate extract and its fractions. Ethyl acetate extract and its fractions can strongly scavenge DPPH radical with IC 50 value ranged from 5.25 to 53. 47µg/ml. Its antiradical scavenging activity revealed a moderate relationship with the total phenolics content (r 2 = 0.645) and with flavonoid content (r2 = 0.709). Ethyl acetate extract and its fractions also had a capability to reduce Fe 3+ to Fe 2+ with reduction activity ranged 91.26 - 682.18 µg ascorbic acid equivalent/g extract or fraction. These extract and its fractions had metal chelating activity lower than that of EDTA (IC 50 18.19 μg/ml). Red fruit can be used as natural antioxidant source to prevent diseases associated with free radical.