Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Evaluation of the Antihyperlipidemic and Antioxidant Properties of the Aqueous Leaf Extract of Camellia sinensis in Oil-induced Hyperlipidemic Rats

Hyperlipidemia, one of the major risk factors for cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) is associated with risks of ischemic stroke, atherosclerosis and myocardial infarction. It is characterized by abnormally high levels of triglycerides, cholesterol and reduced highdensity lipoproteins in the blood. In 2007, World Health 4 listed high level of cholesterol as one of the top five leading causes of global mortality and it is believed that by the year 2020, CVDs will become the leading cause of death and disability worldwide. 6 Although several factors have been reported to cause hyperlipidemia, changes in lifestyle especially consumption of diets rich in saturated fat greater than 10 % of total daily calories and cholesterol intake greater than 300 mg per day are main contributors to high level of lipid in the blood. Lipid-lowering therapy is important in the prevention and/or lowering the risk of CVDs and stroke. The treatment may involve reducing lipid levels through lifestyle measures or by the use of drugs such as statins (HMG CoA inhibitors) to inhibit the biosynthesis of cholesterol and fibrates, which enhances the clearance of triglyceride-rich lipoprotein. The high cost of these drugs, their recorded side effects and at times scarcity have increased the quest for herbal products that possess lipid-lowering potential, with minimal or no side effect thus making herbal formulations to attain widespread acceptability as therapeutic agents in many developing Countries.
Ka-band aeronautical satellite communications experiments using COMETS

This paper describes the results of evaluation tests of an aeronautical satellite communications experiments system in the Ka-band using Japan's communications and broadcasting engineering test satellite (COMETS). An active phased-array antenna with an open-loop satellite tracking capability operating in the Ka-band was installed just behind the passenger window of an airplane to receive a satellite signal. The propagation measurements showed that the received signal power was stable within a signal-power variation of 1 dBp-p while the airplane was cruising at 600 km/h. At specific directions of the antenna, the radiowave reflected from the wing of the airplane was measured to be 18.5 dB lower in power compared with the line-of-sight signal. To confirm the designed link budget, the multibeam antenna pattern of COMETS' on-board antenna was measured while the airplane flew across two antenna beams. The antenna pattern matched the one measured in a ground test before launch. Two binary phase-shift keying (BPSK) modems, one for pilot-assisted coherent detection and the other for multiple-symbol differential detection, were used to measure the bit-error rate (BER). The measured received signal energy per bit per noise power density (E/sub b//N/sub 0/) at a BER of 10/sup -4/ showed only a small degradation of about 1 dB from that measured in a translator loop-back test.
Is there value in co-designing with end-users?

The growing use of digital artifacts in everyday life is forcing designers to recognize new dimensions in interactivity. In the new product space, traditional products have become fusions of hardware and software components where functions and behaviour emerge over use and time. To address higher complexity of human-computer interactions instigated by rapid technological development raises new challenges for industrial designers of interactive products and environments. Recent exploratory research suggests that a re-examination of traditional design methodologies would be beneficial as current approaches are proving insufficient. Traditional methods typically involve end-users as passive informants in contrast to participatory design methods where users co-design throughout the design process. This study examines the value of applying participatory design methods to industrial design. Practitioners compare and evaluate data generated from traditional design methods and from participatory design techniques. The findings provide evidence of the benefits to implementing participatory design methods in industrial design practice.
Advanced Flux-Switching Permanent Magnet Brushless Machines

This paper overviews the recent development and new topologies of flux-switching (FS) machines, with particularly emphasis on the permanent magnet (PM) type. Specific design issues, including winding configurations, combinations of stator and rotor pole numbers, rotor pole width, split ratio, etc., are investigated, while the torque capability of selected FSPM machines is also compared.
Speak Louder Than Actions : The Impact of Politics on Economic Performance

In this paper, a new approach to disclose the impact of politics on economic growth is presented: we use data derived from content analysis of party manifestos as measures of party preferences. In a panel of 23 OECD countries, we detect a positive impact of party support for various market-liberal policies on economic performance. In particular, we show that parties which were more concerned with market interventions and – to a lesser extent – welfare state policies impacted on growth negatively; those which proposed incentives for business as well as technology and infrastructure had a positive impact. Moreover, the robustness of the results is demonstrated in a model averaging framework. Classification: O40, H11, P16
Anatomy of herpes simplex virus DNA. II. Size, composition, and arrangement of inverted terminal repetitions

Electron microscope studies on self-annealed intact single strands and on partially denatured molecules show that herpes simplex virus 1 DNA consists of two unequal regions, each bounded by inverted redundant sequences. Thus the region L (70 percent of the contour length of the DNA) separates the left terminal region a1b from its inverted repeat b'a'1, each of which comprises 6 percent of the DNA. The region S (9.4 percent of DNA) separates the right terminal region cas (4.3 percent of the DNA) from its inverted repeat a'sc'. The regions of the two termini which are inverted and repeated itnernally differ in topology. Thus, cas is guanine plus cytosine rich, whereas only the terminal 1 percent of the a1b region, designated as subregion a1, is guanine plus cytosine rich.
Velocity variations at Columbia Glacier captured by particle filtering of oblique time-lapse images

We develop a probabilistic method for tracking glacier surface motion based on time-lapse imagery, which works by sequentially resampling a stochastic state-space model according to a likelihood determined through correlation between reference and test images. The method is robust due to its natural handling of periodic occlusion and its capacity to follow multiple hypothesis displacements between images, and can improve estimates of velocity magnitude and direction through the inclusion of observations from an arbitrary number of cameras. We apply the method to an annual record of images from two cameras near the terminus of Columbia Glacier. While the method produces velocities at daily resolution, we verify our results by comparing eleven-day means to TerraSar-X. We find that Columbia Glacier transitions between a winter state characterized by moderate velocities and little temporal variability, to an early summer speed-up in which velocities are sensitive to increases in melt- and rainwater, to a fall slowdown, where velocities drop to below their winter mean and become insensitive to external forcing, a pattern consistent with the development and collapse of efficient and inefficient subglacial hydrologic networks throughout the year.
Deep Neural Networks for Handwritten Chinese Character Recognition

Automatic handwriting recognition is an important task since it can be used to replace human beings in various activities such as identifying postal addresses on envelopes, information in bank checks, and several other tedious tasks that humans need to perform. Convolutional Neural Networks are a power machine learning method for computer vision tasks, having achieved state-of-the-art results in the recognition of handwritten Arabic digits and also in multiple distinct alphabets. In this work, we extensively explore the performance of those networks for handwritten Chinese characters recognition (HCCR). For such, we have trained several models based on popular convolutional neural networks architectures that are commonly used for large-scale image recognition, and we also employ several distinct architectural fusion methods, resulting in more than 18 classification approaches. We report the results of all 18 configurations in the well-known HWDB and ICDAR2013 datasets.
Identification Semi-Automatique de Mots-Germes pour l'Analyse de Sentiments et son Intensité

Dans le but d'exploiter les opinions dans les tweets, cet article presente une classification a partir du sentiment contenu au sein des tweets. Nous presentons une methode d'identifi-cation de nouveaux mots-germes. Ils sont utilises pour la prediction de l'intensite de sentiments des mots en co-occurrence avec ces mots-germes. Ensuite, le calcul de similarites entre sentiments est applique en utilisant: la mesure de la similarite entre deux mots et l'utilisation de plongement de mots (e.g. word2vec, GloVE) couple a la mesure cosinus. Les resultats montrent l'importance de l'utilisation de mots-germes adaptes aux tweets, ainsi que la taille et le pretrai-tement de corpus. Pour conclure, nous avons obtenu les meilleurs resultats grâce a l'application de la methode utilisant le plongement de mots couplee a la mesure cosinus. ABSTRACT. For the purpose of opinion exploring in tweets, this article presents a sentiment classification of tweets content. First, we present a method to identify new sentiment similarity seed words. These seed words are used for predicting sentiment intensity of other words and short phrases in co-occurrence. Then, for testing sentiment similarity, we use: Similarity Measures methods between words and cosine similarity measure between the word embedding representations (e.g. word2vec, GloVE). The experiments results highlight the importance of adapted for tweets seed words. In addition of the corpora size and its pre-treatement. As a conclusion, best results were achieved using cosine similarity measure between the word embedding representations. MOTS-CLES : Mots-germes, Twitter, Mesure de la Similarite, Plongement de mot, Word2vec, GloVe.
Yeast Cells Cannot Incorporate Queuine into Their tRNA

Abstract The compound known as queuine has been found in the tRNAs of virtually all animals, plants, and bacteria. It is absent in yeast tRNA. Mice have a dietary requirement for queuine and are dependent either on their diet or intestinal flora for this hypermodified purine. We tested the possibility that yeast were like higher mammals in that they could not synthesize queuine but would incorporate it into their tRNA if it was made available to them. This report shows that this is not the case and that yeast cells not only cannot synthesize queuine but they cannot incorporate exogenous queuine into their tRNA.
DESIGN AND CONSTRUCTION OF MICROSTRIP UWB ANTENNA WITH TIME DOMAIN ANALYSIS

In this paper, a compact design and construction of microstrip Ultra Wide Band (UWB) antenna is proposed. The proposed antenna has the capability ofoperating between 4.1 GHz to 10 GHz. The antenna parameter in frequency domain analysis have been investigated to show its capability as an effective radiating element. Furthermore, time domain Gaussian pulse excitation analysis in UWB systems is also demonstrated in this paper. As a result, the simulation results demonstrated reasonable agreement with the measurement results and good ultra-wideband linear transmission performance has also been achieved in time domain.
Transforming a Fructan:Fructan 6G-Fructosyltransferase from Perennial Ryegrass into a Sucrose:Sucrose 1-Fructosyltransferase1[C]

Fructosyltransferases (FTs) synthesize fructans, fructose polymers accumulating in economically important cool-season grasses and cereals. FTs might be crucial for plant survival under stress conditions in species in which fructans represent the major form of reserve carbohydrate, such as perennial ryegrass (Lolium perenne). Two FT types can be distinguished: those using sucrose (S-type enzymes: sucrose:sucrose 1-fructosyltransferase [1-SST], sucrose:fructan 6-fructosyltransferase) and those using fructans (F-type enzymes: fructan:fructan 1-fructosyltransferase [1-FFT], fructan:fructan 6G-fructosyltransferase [6G-FFT]) as preferential donor substrate. Here, we report, to our knowledge for the first time, the transformation of an F-type enzyme (6G-FFT/1-FFT) into an S-type enzyme (1-SST) using perennial ryegrass 6G-FFT/1-FFT (Lp6G-FFT/1-FFT) and 1-SST (Lp1-SST) as model enzymes. This transformation was accomplished by mutating three amino acids (N340D, W343R, and S415N) in the vicinity of the active site of Lp6G-FFT/1-FFT. In addition, effects of each amino acid mutation alone or in combination have been studied. Our results strongly suggest that the amino acid at position 343 (tryptophan or arginine) can greatly determine the donor substrate characteristics by influencing the position of the amino acid at position 340. Moreover, the presence of arginine-343 negatively affects the formation of neofructan-type linkages. The results are compared with recent findings on donor substrate selectivity within the group of plant cell wall invertases and fructan exohydrolases. Taken together, these insights contribute to our knowledge of structure/function relationships within plant family 32 glycosyl hydrolases and open the way to the production of tailor-made fructans on a larger scale.
Calcification in atherosclerosis: Bone biology and chronic inflammation at the arterial crossroads

Dystrophic or ectopic mineral deposition occurs in many pathologic conditions, including atherosclerosis. Calcium mineral deposits that frequently accompany atherosclerosis are readily quantifiable radiographically, serve as a surrogate marker for the disease, and predict a higher risk of myocardial infarction and death. Accelerating research interest has been propelled by a clear need to understand how plaque structure, composition, and stability lead to devastating cardiovascular events. In atherosclerotic plaque, accumulating evidence is consistent with the notion that calcification involves the participation of arterial osteoblasts and osteoclasts. Here we summarize current models of intimal arterial plaque calcification and highlight intriguing questions that require further investigation. Because atherosclerosis is a chronic vascular inflammation, we propose that arterial plaque calcification is best conceptualized as a convergence of bone biology with vascular inflammatory pathobiology.
The underground mall

Purpose – A dynamic retailing format is emerging in metropolitan cities across the USA: the underground mall (UGM). The UGM is a place of trade where a cluster of socially networked buyers (i.e. potential customers) and sellers (i.e. retailers) meet face‐to‐face in a private setting (i.e. in the seller's garage or in a neighborhood clubhouse) for the purpose of trade. This study seeks to detail how this unique retailing format operates and examines factors influencing consumption within this gray market.Design/methodology/approach – Two theories were utilized in developing a framework for data collection: gray markets and market embeddedness. Data were collected via in‐depth interviews with 16 UGM shoppers. The data were analyzed and interpreted according to the protocol for phenomenology.Findings – A combination of diverse retailing and socialization benefits drives the gray market of the UGM. Retailing benefits include a wide variety of vendors and products, unique items, convenience, a personalized sho.
Surveillant assemblages of governance in massively multiplayer online games: a comparative analysis

This paper explores governance in Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs), one sub-sector of the digital games industry. Informed by media governance studies, Surveillance Studies, and game studies, this paper identifies five elements which form part of the system of governance in MMOGs. These elements are: game code and rules; game policies; company community management practices; player participatory practices; and paratexts. Together these governance elements function as a surveillant assemblage, which relies to varying degrees on lateral and hierarchical forms of surveillance, and the assembly of human and non-human elements. Using qualitative mixed methods we examine and compare how these elements operate in three commercial MMOGs: Eve Online, World of Warcraft and Tibia. While peer and participatory surveillance elements are important, we identified two major trends in the governance of disruptive behaviours by the game companies in our case studies. Firstly, an increasing reliance on automated forms of dataveillance to control and punish game players, and secondly, increasing recourse to contract law and diminishing user privacy rights. Game players found it difficult to appeal the changing terms and conditions and they turned to creating paratexts outside of the game in an attempt to negotiate the boundaries of the surveillant assemblage. In the wider context of self-regulated governance systems these trends highlight the relevance of consumer rights, privacy, and data protection legislation to online games and the usefulness of bringing game studies and Surveillance Studies into dialogue.
Vietnam's state‐owned enterprise reform

Purpose – Under the pressure of competition from non‐state‐owned enterprises (non‐SOEs) since the Renovation in 1986, the Government of Vietnam has sought to reform state‐owned enterprises (SOEs) in order to improve their productivity and efficiency. Whilst the theoretical efficiency benefits from the SOE reform have interested many, this study seeks to add empirical insights to this debate using Williamson's transaction cost economics (TCE). Design/methodology/approach – Organizational integration and transaction costs – two dimensions of firm efficiency – were compared between SOEs and non‐SOEs using multivariate analyses of variance (MANOVA). The analysis was conducted in the context of the within‐firm logistics processes of international multimodal transport (IMT) in Vietnam.Findings – SOEs were as efficient as non‐SOEs along organizational integration and transaction costs dimensions.Research limitations/implications – Results of the study contribute to the ongoing research on SOEs reform in Vietnam.
Using a canny-edge-detection based method to characterize in-plane micro-actuators

This paper developed an automatic optical inspection (AOI) technology for characterizing the motion amplitude and the vibration mode shape of in-plane micro-actuators. The technology involves a multi-stage image process method. It includes an image contrast enhancement step and a Canny edge detection method. To evaluate this approach, a rotational electrostatic actuator has been prepared for testing. This actuator performed low contrast optical micrographs under first vibration mode. The testing result shows that the technology can handle low contrast microscopic images quite well. The suggested method successfully provides quantitative information to identify the vibration amplitudes and mode shape of the tested actuator with a space resolution of 0. 46μm/pixel.
Microscopy for cryptosporidiosis screening in remote areas.

increased the ability of HIV-1 RT to effectively discriminate between the normal substrate dCTP and 3TC-triphosphat and G333D also enhanced the ability of RT containing TAMs and M184V to bind template/primer terminated by AZTmonophosphate, thereby restoring ATP-mediated excision of AZT-MP under steady-state assay conditions. [4] In this theoretical research, the author tried to explain the energy change corresponding to the G333D mutation within HIVRT. Here, the author found that both mutants critically affect the net energy requirement. Decreased energy requirement can be observed. It should be mentioned that not only the quantum energy change but also the conformational change due to mutation can be expected. These two phenomena bring the difÞ culties for occurrence of reaction and further imply the drug resistance. The results from this study can be useful for antiretroviral drug design and coping with the problem of G333D mutation HIV-RT-related drug resistance. This study can be a good model for further study in this area. The author suggests further studies on other mutants of HIVRT and their effects on drug resistance.
Annihilation density distribution calculations for medically important positron emitters

The effect of positron range on the image-plane resolution of tomographic images is evaluated through calculations based on a model which employs beta-decay energy spectra and an empirical range formula. Predicted range distribution functions are compared with published measurements for three medically important positron emitters: (11 )C, (68)Ga, and (82)Rb. The effect of tomographic slice thickness on point-source annihilation distribution functions is also demonstrated. Line-spread functions are calculated using the model, for the above isotopes as well as for (18)F, (15)O, and (13)N. Image-plane resolution predictions are made for high-resolution positron cameras for various positron emitting isotopes with end-point energies up to 4 MeV.
Enhancing Transparency of Black-box Soft-margin SVM by Integrating Data-based Prior Information

The lack of transparency often makes the black-box models difficult to be applied to many practical domains. For this reason, the current work, from the black-box model input port, proposes to incorporate data-based prior information into the black-box soft-margin SVM model to enhance its transparency. The concept and incorporation mechanism of data-based prior information are successively developed, based on which the transparent or partly transparent SVM optimization model is designed and then solved through handily rewriting the optimization problem as a nonlinear quadratic programming problem. An algorithm for mining data-based linear prior information from data set is also proposed, which generates a linear expression with respect to two appropriate inputs identified from all inputs of system. At last, the proposed transparency strategy is applied to eight benchmark examples and two real blast furnace examples for effectiveness exhibition.
Development of EST-SSR markers for the invasive plant Tithonia diversifolia (Asteraceae)1

Premise of the study: Tithonia diversifolia (Asteraceae) is an invasive plant species that can outcompete natives and thus poses a great threat to biodiversity in introduced areas. Here, expressed sequence tag-simple sequence repeat (EST-SSR) markers were developed and characterized. Methods and Results: Sixteen polymorphic microsatellite loci were isolated from T. diversifolia using transcriptome sequencing and bioinformatic screening. The number of alleles per locus varied from two to four alleles in 48 individuals from three populations. Most of these primers also amplified in T. rotundifolia and some even in Parthenium hysterophorus. Conclusions: These markers are useful for investigating the genetic structure and evolutionary process of T. diversifolia, which may provide important information for better management.