Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
DEVELOPMENT OF A LOW-COST, HAND-HELD MULTI-SENSOR SYSTEM FOR THE MONITORING OF SMALL WATER BODIES

For small-scale monitoring of small water bodies, conventional methods such as GNSS or total station measurements are used. The data acquisition is usually carried out in profile form supplemented with extra measurements of break edges, slope edges or bank courses. However, these methods can be used efficiently only on small sections and with low temporal resolution. At the same time, as the length of rivers or creeks to be monitored increases, the cost-effectiveness of the above methods decreases. Further limitations such as very small sections that are difficult to access and also sections that are sometimes heavily overgrown also prevent the use of large measuring platforms. By contrast, with use of a hand-held compact multi-sensor platform it is possible to survey several hundred kilometres of the smallest rivers and creeks. This publication demonstrates the use of such a platform to record microwatersheds. For this purpose, the Creek4D project, the measurement principle and the sensor technology used are shown. In addition, first measurement data and the calibration strategy are shown. * Corresponding author
On Revelations and Revolutions: Drinking Ayahuasca Among Palestinians Under Israeli Occupation

The ritualistic use of ayahuasca can induce a feeling of unity and harmony among group members. However, such depoliticized feelings can come in the service of a destructive political status quo in which Palestinians are marginalized. Through 31 in-depth interviews of Israelis and Palestinians who drink ayahuasca together, and through participatory observations, such rituals were examined. In this setting marginalization was structurally rooted by the group’s inability to recognize Palestinian national identity or admit the ongoing Israeli injustice toward Palestinians. Although the groups avoided politics, they still find their way into these rituals. This happened through occasional ayahuasca-induced revelatory events, in which individuals were confronted with a pressing truth related to the oppressive relations between Jewish Israelis and Palestinians. Three case studies of such revelatory events are described in this paper. Affected by emotions of pain, anger, and guilt, these participants developed resistance toward the hegemonic Israeli ritual structure. This was followed by an urge to deliver an emancipatory message to the rest of the group, usually through a song. Moreover, affected subjects developed a long-lasting fidelity to the truth attained at these events. In time, this fidelity led to the expansion of ayahuasca practices to other Palestinians and the politicization of the practice. The article draws on Badiou’s theory in Being and Event (1988) to analyze the relations between the Israeli ritual structure, the Palestinian revelatory event, and the emancipatory fidelity that followed. Badiou’s theory elucidates the egalitarian revolutionary potential, which is part of the sociopsychopharmacology of psychedelics.
How to Repurpose the University: A Resilience Lens on Sustainability Governance

Universities have an important role in moving society towards a more sustainable future. However, this will require us to repurpose universities, reorienting and refocusing the different university domains (education, research, campus, and outreach) towards sustainability. The governance structures and processes used to embed sustainability into the activities and operations of the institution are critical to achieving the required transformation. Our current university systems which are seen as contributing to socio-ecological system unsustainability are resilient to change due to slow variables such as organisational and sector-wide prevailing paradigms and culture. Therefore, to repurpose a university requires us to destabilise our prevailing system, crossing a threshold into a new stable system of a ‘sustainable university' across all its domains. This paper utilises an adaptation of Biggs et al. (2012) resilience principles for the governance of social-ecological systems to provide a framework to consider aspects of university governance for sustainability that can be utilised to repurpose universities towards sustainability, and destabilize unsustainable elements of the system. This paper draws out examples relating to sustainability governance within universities with regards to the four principles of (i) managing diversity and redundancy, (ii) managing connectivity, (iii) managing slow variables and feedbacks, and (iv) encouraging learning and experimentation within the context of complex adaptive systems. In this article, we have shown that using resilience in a non-normative way is possible (to decrease resilience of an unsustainable system), and that it can also be valuable to help understand how to shift organisational governance towards a particular end-state (in this case, university governance that advances sustainability). This paper provides an example of how to operationalise resilience principles of relevance to the resilience literature as well as providing a practical framework to guide higher education institution governance for sustainability.
The Family Function and Exercise Behavior of Chinese College Students: A Moderated Mediation Model of Exercise Value Cognition and Only-Child Status

The purpose of this study is to investigate the mediating role of exercise value cognition between family function (FF) and exercise behavior and the moderating role of an only-child status. A questionnaire survey was conducted on 504 Chinese college students using the FF scale, the exercise value cognition scale, and the exercise behavior scale. The analysis yielded four main findings. (1) There are significant differences between an only-child and a non-only-child for negative exercise behavior and FF. The only-child group has a higher average FF score and a lower average negative exercise score. (2) Exercise behavior and four of its dimensions—exercise autonomy, attention control, exercise planning, and situational induction—are each significantly positively correlated with FF and exercise value cognition. (3) FF is a significantly positive predictor of exercise behavior, both directly and through exercise value cognition, which plays a partial mediating role. (4) Only-child status significantly moderates the mediating effect of exercise value cognition in the link between FF and exercise behavior. The intergroup differences mainly manifest in the influence of FF on exercise behavior and the influence of exercise value cognition on exercise behavior. In the only-child subsample, exercise value cognition plays a complete mediating role. The results of the current study demonstrated the important role that FF and exercise value cognition played in promoting the exercise behavior of college students. These findings have important implications for exercise behavior in adolescents by maintaining sound communication between family members and developing a healthy lifestyle or value cognition.
Large-Scale Molecular Dynamics Simulations Reveal New Insights Into the Phase Transition Mechanisms in MIL-53(Al)

Soft porous crystals have the ability to undergo large structural transformations upon exposure to external stimuli while maintaining their long-range structural order, and the size of the crystal plays an important role in this flexible behavior. Computational modeling has the potential to unravel mechanistic details of these phase transitions, provided that the models are representative for experimental crystal sizes and allow for spatially disordered phenomena to occur. Here, we take a major step forward and enable simulations of metal-organic frameworks containing more than a million atoms. This is achieved by exploiting the massive parallelism of state-of-the-art GPUs using the OpenMM software package, for which we developed a new pressure control algorithm that allows for fully anisotropic unit cell fluctuations. As a proof of concept, we study the transition mechanism in MIL-53(Al) under various external pressures. In the lower pressure regime, a layer-by-layer mechanism is observed, while at higher pressures, the transition is initiated at discrete nucleation points and temporarily induces various domains in both the open and closed pore phases. The presented workflow opens the possibility to deduce transition mechanism diagrams for soft porous crystals in terms of the crystal size and the strength of the external stimulus.
Effects of intra-hippocampal corticosterone and sleep on consolidation of complex memory of aversive experience in rats

Formation and consolidation of memories for highly stressful (traumatic) events is a complex process that involves interplay between multiple memory systems and has implications for etiology and treatment of stress- and trauma-related disorders. Here we study effects of sleep/wake state and high intra-hippocampal corticosterone on consolidation of aversive contextual memories as well as consolidation of association between simple trauma-related cues and fear response in rats. Animals were implanted with EEG and EMG electrodes for sleep assessment and cannulas for intra-hippocampal corticosterone application. They were familiarized to a “safe box” and then trained in fear conditioning paradigm in a distinct “shock box” with a prominent simple auditory cue serving as a phasic background cue. Immediately after conditioning, animals received bilateral intra-hippocampal saline (1μl) or corticosterone (10ng in 1μl saline) injection and were either allowed to sleep or were kept awake for a following two-hour consolidation period. Memory test twenty-four hours later revealed that the saline-injected animals with sleep during consolidation had significantly stronger freezing response in the shock box compared to the safe box as well as increased freezing in response to the tone. Lack of post-learning sleep in saline injected animals led to generalization of fear response to the safe context, while association between simple cue and fear response was preserved. High intra-hippocampal corticosterone level during memory consolidation led to generalization of fear response to the safe context, regardless of sleep/wake state, while enhancement of response to single stimulus was not observed. Our results show how manipulation of conditions during consolidation can lead to greatly variable complex memories for a traumatic episode and distinct behavioral outcomes. Highlights We studied effect of sleep and intrahippocampal corticosterone on consolidation of memories surrounding stressful event modeled by fear conditioning in rats. Sleep following traumatic fear conditioning event is important for subsequent manifestation of fear response (freezing) specifically in the context of traumatic event but not in a neutral safe context. Lack of sleep or high intra-hippocampal corticosterone level during memory consolidation leads to generalization of fear response to both the traumatic and safe context. Increased freezing in response to a trauma-related auditory cue was observed in saline injected rats regardless of wake/sleep state during consolidation. Post-learning intra-hippocampal corticosterone injection blocked response to a trauma-related auditory cue regardless of wake/sleep state during consolidation.
Optimised production of disulfide-bonded fungal effectors in E. coli using CyDisCo and FunCyDisCo co-expression approaches

Effectors are a key part of the arsenal of plant pathogenic fungi and promote pathogen virulence and disease. Effectors typically lack sequence similarity to proteins with known functional domains and motifs, limiting our ability to predict their functions and understand how they are recognised by plant hosts. As a result, cross-disciplinary approaches involving structural biology and protein biochemistry are often required to decipher and better characterise effector function. These approaches are reliant on high yields of relatively pure protein, which often requires protein production using a heterologous expression system. For some effectors, establishing an efficient production system can be difficult, particularly those that require multiple disulfide bonds to achieve their naturally folded structure. Here, we describe the use of a co-expression system within the heterologous host E. coli termed CyDisCo (cytoplasmic disulfide bond formation in E. coli) to produce disulfide bonded fungal effectors. We demonstrate that CyDisCo and a naturalised co-expression approach termed FunCyDisCo (Fungi-CyDisCo) can significantly improve the production yields of numerous disulfide bonded effectors from diverse fungal pathogens. The ability to produce large quantities of functional recombinant protein has facilitated functional studies and crystallisation of several of these reported fungal effectors. We suggest this approach could be useful when investigating the function and recognition of a broad range of disulfide-bond containing effectors.
A NETWORK PERFORMANCE COMPARISON OF WEBRTC AND SIP AUDIO AND VIDEO COMMUNICA TIONS

Multimedia services are one of the internet needs with high data traffic network count since 2019. Two of the multimedia services, Web Real-Time Communications (WebRTC) and Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), have been widely used in applications for conducting video conferencing. The main objective of this research is to analyze network performance by an application with a client-server for audio and video communications developed with WebRTC and SIP protocols. The SIP system uses the FreePBX server, and the softphone application uses Bria. Whereas WebRTC uses JavaScript with servers on Ubuntu using Node.js. The analysis application uses a star topology and runs on a local network using Wi-Fi. After testing, the results show that the throughput, jitter, and packet loss of WebRTC are better than SIP. This result is caused by several factors including the type of codec, the type of platform, and the way of signaling and routing of each protocol.
A NOVEL PROCEDURE FOR GENERATION OF SAR-DERIVED ZTD MAPS FOR WEATHER PREDICTION: APPLICATION TO SOUTH AFRICA USE CASE

The knowledge of tropospheric water vapor distribution can significantly improve the accuracy of Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) models. The present work proposes an automatic and fast procedure for generating reliable water vapor products from the synergic use of Sentinel-1 Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery and Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) observations. Moreover, a compression method able to drastically reduce, without significant accuracy loss, the water vapor dataset dimension has been implemented to facilitate the sharing through cloud services. The activities have been carried in the EU H2020 TWIGA project framework, aimed at providing water vapor maps at Technology Readiness Level 7.
A Survey of Supervised Learning Models for Spiking Neural Network

There has been a significant attempt to derive supervised learning models for training Spiking Neural Networks (SNN), which is the third and most recent generation of Artificial Neural Network (ANN). Supervised SNN learning models are considered more biologically plausible and thus exploits better the computational efficiency of biological neurons and also, are less computationally expensive than second generation ANN. SNN models have also produced competitive performance in most tasks when compared to second generation ANNs. These advantages, coupled with the difficulty in adopting the well established learning models for second generation networks to train SNN due to the difference in information coding led to the recent introduction of supervised learning models for training SNN. However, lack of comprehensive source of literature detailing strides made in this area, and the challenges and prospects of SNN serves as a hindrance to further exploration and application of SNN models. A comprehensive review of supervised learning methods in SNN is presented in this paper in which some widely used SNN neural models, learning models and their basic concepts, areas of applications, limitations, prospects and future research directions are discussed. The main contribution of this paper is that it presents and discusses trends in supervised learning in SNNwith the aim of providing a reference point for those desiring further knowledge and application of SNN methods.
Exploring the Ethnopharmaceutical Plants of Osing Tribe in Banyuwangi Regency: Potential Application for COVID-19 Therapy

Ethnopharmacy is the study on herbs or plants that certain ethnic groups practice for treating particular illness. Scientific reporting of beneficial therapeutic plants through this study could promote further development of herbal medicines. We conducted an ethnopharmacy study at several villages of Osing tribe located in Banyuwangi, Indonesia, to identify plants that have the potential to be tested for certain bioactivity, in this case, for COVID-19 therapy. The snowball and purposive sampling methods using qualitative and quantitative research with semi-structured interviews and questionnaires were applied for this study. The parameters used were the Use Value (UV), Informant Consensus Factor (ICF), and Fidelity Level (FL). The plants used in this study were obtained and determined at Balai Konservasi Tumbuhan Kebun Raya Purwodadi, the Indonesian Institute of Science. The results were then followed by the literature study on the plants’ potential for COVID-19 therapy. Plant exploration was obtained by considering the results of UV calculation. Based on UV calculations in ethnopharmacy studies, there are several plants that are considered essential and have more efficacies. They are temulawak, turmeric, suruh, Exploring the Ethnopharmaceutical Plants of Osing Tribe in Banyuwangi Regency: Potential Application for COVID-19 Therapy 114 gigen-gigen, mating, anggrek merpati and pace. Three of the eight plants potentially possess immunomodulatory activity that can be used to prevent the infections of SARS-CoV-2. They are the temulawak (Curcuma xanthorrhiza), turmeric (Curcuma domestica) and gigen-gigen (Centella asiatica).
Dashboard Visualisation for Healthcare Performance Management: Balanced scorecard method

OBJECTIVE: The increase in demand for hospitalisation in an environment of financial stress has hastened the quest for more efficient healthcare delivery systems. In the past performance management methodologies in the healthcare sector have been predominantly static resulting in a lack of consistency, comparability and timeliness. To mitigate these shortcomings this research work has attempted to create a conceptual framework in the digital dashboard format. SETTING: Of the frameworks presently used, the Balanced Scorecard(BSC) is very popular, primarily because the BSC is a management system (not just a measurement system) that helps an organization highlight its vision and translate them into action. DESIGN: The design adopted in this research work is primarily qualitative and exploratory. The methodology includes collating KPIs from published literature, crystallising them using the Delphi Method and applying the Likert-scale to prioritise them. To facilitate visualisation of the prioritised KPIs in the BSC format, the construction of a digital dashboard was envisaged. RESULTS: A dynamic dashboard was created in the BSC format with three Key Performance Indicators(KPI) for each of the four perspectives. 1. Financial: Return on assets, average daily collections and working capital ratio 2. Customer Perspective: Patient satisfaction, lost business – number of appointments not attended and percentage of patients Leaving Against Medical Advice(LAMA) 3. Internal Processes: Billing and collections/posting time, emergency patients triaged within 15 minutes of arrival and patient waiting time 4. Learning And Growth: Empowerment (decision-making & participation), employee satisfaction and strategic alliances/partnerships
Empirical estimation of marine phytoplankton assemblages in coastal and offshore areas using an in situ multi-wavelength excitation fluorometer

Phytoplankton assemblages are important for understanding the quality of primary production in marine ecosystems. Here, we describe development of a methodology for monitoring marine phytoplankton assemblages using an in situ multi-wavelength excitation fluorometer (MEX) and its application for seasonal observations in coastal and offshore areas around Japan. The MEX recorded the fluorescence excited with nine light-emitting diodes, temperature, and sensor depth. We prepared reference datasets comprising temperature, MEX fluorescence, and plant-pigment-based chemotaxonomy phytoplankton assemblages. Target MEX fluorescence was decomposed by reference MEX fluorescence using a linear inverse model for calculating coefficients after the reference data were limited by temperature, followed by reconstruction of plant-pigment-based chemotaxonomy of the target MEX fluorescence using the coefficients and the chemotaxonomy assemblages of the reference data. Sensitivity analysis indicated poor estimation of the proportion and/or chlorophyll a-based abundance of chlorophytes, haptophytes, prasinophytes, and prochlorophytes; however, limiting the estimations to five chemotaxonomic groups [diatoms, dinoflagellates, cryptophytes, cyanobacteria (cyanophytes and prochlorophytes), and other eukaryotes (chlorophytes, haptophytes, and prasinophytes)] resulted in positive correlations of both the proportion and abundances, suggesting that the five taxonomic abundances were well-estimated using the MEX. Additionally, MEX observations denoted spatial and seasonal variations of phytoplankton assemblages, with high contributions from other eukaryotes in every area and season, cyanobacteria highly during the summer in surface Kuroshio and Japan Sea waters, and diatoms in the Oyashio and Oyashio–Kuroshio transition areas and the Okhotsk Sea. Furthermore, ratios of water-column-integrated chlorophyll-based abundances to those on the surface at the chemotaxonomy group level were differed among the areas and groups. These findings suggested that phytoplankton-assemblage monitoring in the vertical direction is essential for evaluation of their current biomass, and that the MEX promotes the acquisition of these observations.
A Cytosolic Reductase Pathway is Required for Complete N-Glycosylation of an STT3B-Dependent Acceptor Site

N-linked glycosylation of proteins entering the secretory pathway is an essential post-translational modification required for protein stability and function. Previously, it has been shown that there is a temporal relationship between protein folding and glycosylation, which influences the occupancy of specific glycosylation sites. Here we use an in vitro translation system that reproduces the initial stages of secretory protein translocation, folding and glycosylation under defined redox conditions. We found that the efficiency of glycosylation of hemopexin was dependent upon a robust NADPH-dependent cytosolic reductive pathway, which could also be mimicked by the addition of a membrane impermeable reducing agent. The identified hypoglycosylated acceptor site is adjacent to a cysteine involved in a short range disulfide bond, which has been shown to be dependent on the STT3B-containing oligosaccharyl transferase. We also show that efficient glycosylation at this site is dependent on the STT3A-containing oligosaccharide transferase. Our results provide further insight into the important role of the ER redox conditions in glycosylation site occupancy and demonstrate a link between redox conditions in the cytosol and glycosylation efficiency.