Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
EFFECT OF INSECTICIDE-TREATED BED NETS (ITNs) ON THE GENETIC DIVERSITY OF P. FALCIPARUM CIRCUMSPOROZOITE PROTEIN (CSP) IN A MALARIA HOLOENDEMIC AREA OF WESTERN KENYA. / I LMuIA NNE NDANU (BSc)

Malaria continues to place a major burden on health and economic development in the poorest and most marginalized areas of the world. Widespread parasite resistance to antimalarial drugs and vector resistance to insecticides led to renewed global efforts to explore alternative, cost-effective and efficacious malaria control tools. Use of insecticide-treated bed nets (I'FNs) has emerged as one of the most cost-effective malaria control strategy prompting initiation of large-scale IlN programmes in many endemic areas. The use of II'Ns has been associated with 7090% reduction in malaria transmission and significant reductions in morbidity and mortality in vulnerable populations. However, the intensity of malaria transmission determines parasitemia levels, rates of acquisition of immunity in human populations and parasite recombination rates in mosquito vectors. Therefore, we hypothesized that the significant reduction in parasitemia associated with IlN use could have an impact on genetic diversity of polymorphic parasite genes that are under selective pressure, therefore affecting the frequency of circulating haplotypes. To test the hypothesis, we designed the current study to assess the effect of on the genetic diversity of the polymorphic immune epitopes of Plasmodium falciparum circum sporozoite protein (CSP), a leading malaria vaccine candidate antigen. Parasite-positive blood samples collected from children enrolled in a series of cross-sectional surveys conducted at baseline, 14, 30 and 46-months post IlN intervention in a malaria holoendemic area were used to isolate DNA. Standard PCR and cycle sequencing were used to determine point mutations in the C-terminal domain of the CSP gene encoding helper T-cell epitopes, Th2R and Th3R. The nature and extent of CSP gene diversity was compared between parasites from children in intervention and control areas, and in the four cross-sectional surveys using haplotype diversity and the 1t statistic. Differences in the proportion of haplotypes between bed net and control areas and between the different surveys were determined by Chi-square and permutation tests. There were 77 Th2R and 33 Th3R haplotypes detected in this study signifying the high polymorphism of the CSP immune epitopes in natural parasite populations. The most prevalent Th2R and Th3R haplotypes were PSDQHIEKYLKTIQNSLS and NKPKDQLDYEND, 13% and 33.1% respectively. Most of the circulating haplotypes had a very low frequency « 5 copies). The 3D7-type haplotype had a very low frequency. Although there was no consistency in the prevalence of the haplotypes in IlN and control areas and overtime, there was a trend towards decreased genetic diversity after the first 30 months of IlN use. After 48 months of IlN use the genetic diversity had increased. This has implications on the ongoing field testing of CSP-based malaria vaccines including the RTS,S multi-site trials.
REASSOCIATION AND REACTIVATION OF GLUCOSE 6-PHOSPHATE DEHYDROGENASE FROM STREPTOMYCES AUREOFACIENS AFTER DENATURATION BY 6 M UREA

Glucose 6-phosphate dehydrogenase (G6PD) from Streptomyces aureofaciens was purified and denatured in 6 M urea. Denaturation led to complete dissociation of the enzyme into its inactive monomers, 98% loss of the enzyme activity, about 30% decrease in the protein fluorescence and a 10 nm red shift in the emission maximum. Dilution of urea-denatured enzyme resulted in regaining of the enzyme activity and the native protein fluorescence. The renatured enzyme was indistinguishable from the native enzyme based on a number of enzymological and physicochemical criteria. Regaining of the protein fluorescence occurred immediately after diluting the denatured enzyme and before reactivation started. The reactivation process was also monitored by measuring the accessibility of histidine residues toward diethylpyrocarbonate modification. As the reactivation proceeded, less histidine residues were able to be modified. Nicotineamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD + ), nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide phosphate (NADP + ) and glucose 6-phosphate stimulated the reactivation rate at different degrees. It seemed likely that specific ligands stimulated reactivation by binding to an inactive form of the enzyme leading to a different pathway of refolding. The data are consistent with a model for enzyme renaturation and reactivation in which NAD + and NADP + pull the enzyme toward different conformational structures.
CONTRASTED FORAGING TACTICS IN TWO SPECIES OF POLYPHAGOUS CATERPILLARS

Polyphagy can occur at the level of species, population or individual. We analyzed foraging by two polyphagous species of caterpillar in the field and laboratory in a first investigation of the differences between polyphagy at different levels. We sought to obtain details that would inform different regulatory mechanisms and different adaptive bases. The fast-growing noctuid, Trichoplusia ni is known to be polyphagous at the level of species and population, while the slower-growing arctiid, Grammia geneura, is additionally polyphagous at the level of the individual. T. ni individuals showed greater uniformity in time spent feeding, had longer but fewer feeding bouts, and moved very little, compared with G. geneura. While T. ni rested on the food, G. geneura more commonly rested off it. T. ni individuals rarely mixed food items but rather showed increased preference for the rearing food, while G. geneura individuals habitually took a mixture of food items. We relate the differences to several potential physiological and ecological factors that are contrasted, including the crypsis of T. ni which alters with the food plant, and to the probable aposematism of G. geneura.
Self-perceived stigma and its effect on quality of life among Malaysians living with human immunodeficiency virus

Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) epidemic remains a significant burden in Malaysia. Stigma related to HIV and its effect on the quality of life (QOL) of persons living with HIV (PLHIV) remains under-reported. The aim of the present study was to assess self-perceived stigma amongst PLHIV attending an urban community clinic and its influence on their QOL. Data was collected using HIV Stigma Scale and WHO-QOL HIV BREF Scale. The overall stigma experienced by PLHIV in this community was higher than previous studies (mean ± SD; 103.37 ±18.14). Majority participants had fear disclosing their disease status, while personalized stigma or the experience of prejudice and rejection was the least experienced. The overall QOL was low and was significantly impaired in social relationship domain (mean ± SD; 12.72 ± 3.59). However, their ability to perform daily activities was not affected by the illness (mean ± SD; 14.48 ± 2.91). PLHIV with higher spiritual values demonstrate lower perception of negative self-image and inferiority (r= -0.54). This finding was unique to PLHIV in this study and suggested the importance of spirituality and personal beliefs on their self-esteem. In conclusion, stigma remains as a significant problem among PLHIV in this community. Primary care offers the best platform to promote a holistic management of PLHIV, where the integration between counselors, religious experts, family and non-governmental associations could come together. The management of PLHIV is unique in every community, hence individualized approach based on cultural norms and beliefs could assist in the overall management of PLHIV.
A novel technique for estimating the compact myocardium in fishes reveals surprising results for an athletic air-breathing fish, the Pacific tarpon

A method for quickly assessing the relative proportion of compact myocardium in the ventricle of teleosts is introduced and used in juvenile Pacific tarpon Megalops cyprinoides , a member of the only air-breathing elopomorph teleost genus. The proportion of compact myocardium increased with body mass, reaching up to 60% of the ventricular mass. The finding for tarpon was a surprising discovery since recent literature has suggested that air breathing evolved primarily as means of supplying oxygen to the fish heart during activity. The present data, which represent the first quantitative assessment of the compact myocardium for any air-breathing fish, suggest that myocardial oxygen supply in the tarpon is supplemented by the coronary circulation associated with compact myocardium during exercise, while air breathing is important during aquatic hypoxia. Compact myocardium was also measured as a point of reference in an extant representative from a more ancient fish lineage than the elopomorphs, the water-breathing spiny dogfish Squalus acanthias and found to be only 9% of ventricular mass. In conclusion, the presence of a coronary circulation in extant elasmobranchs may mean that the coronary circulation evolved well before air breathing in fishes and, for tarpon at least, the coronary oxygen supply to the ventricular myocardium has not necessarily been superseded by air breathing.
OBSERVATION OF SUPERNOVA REMNANT IC 443 WITH THE FERMI LARGE AREA TELESCOPE

We report observation of the supernova remnant (SNR) IC 443 (G189.1+3.0) with the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope Large Area Telescope (LAT) in the energy band between 200 MeV and 50 GeV. IC 443 is a shell-type SNR with mixed morphology located off the outer Galactic plane where high-energy emission has been detected in the X-ray, GeV and TeV gamma-ray bands. Past observations suggest IC 443 has been interacting with surrounding interstellar matter. Proximity between dense shocked molecular clouds and GeV–TeV gamma-ray emission regions detected by EGRET, MAGIC, and VERITAS suggests an interpretation that cosmic-ray (CR) particles are accelerated by the SNR. With the high gamma-ray statistics and broad energy coverage provided by the LAT, we accurately characterize the gamma-ray emission produced by the CRs accelerated at IC 443. The emission region is extended in the energy band with θ68 = 0. °27 ± 0. °01(stat) ± 0. °03(sys) for an assumed two-dimensional Gaussian profile and overlaps almost completely with the extended source region of VERITAS. Its centroid is displaced significantly from the known pulsar wind nebula (PWN) which suggests the PWN is not the major contributor in the present energy band. The observed spectrum changes its power-law slope continuously and continues smoothly to the MAGIC and VERITAS data points. The combined gamma-ray spectrum (200 MeV
Queensland Fruit Fly Invasion of New Zealand: Predicting Area Suitability Under Future Climate Change Scenarios

The Queensland fruit fly (Bactrocera tryoni) is a significant horticultural pest in Australia, and has also established in other parts of the Pacific. There is a significant risk to New Zealand of invasion by this species, and several recent incursions have occurred. The potential effects of climate change on the distribution and impacts of invasive species are well known. This paper uses species distribution modelling using Maxent to predict the suitability of New Zealand to the Queensland fruit fly based on known occurrences worldwide and Bioclim climatic layers. Under current climatic conditions the majority of the country was generally in the lower range, with some areas in the medium range. Suitability prediction maps under future climate change conditions in 2050 and 2070, at lower emission (RCP 2.6) and higher emission (RCP 8.5) scenarios generally show an increase in suitability in both the North and South Islands. Calculations of the shift of suitable areas show a general movement of the centroid towards the south-east, with the higher emission scenario showing a greater magnitude of movement.
The Roles of Food Industries as a Part of Food Tourism Development for Woman Empowerment in Bogor

This study was conducted to determine the role of food tourism development on Disability Issues of Social Welfare (DISW) women's empowerment in Bogor. Preliminary studies indicate the role of food tourism development on DISW women's empowerment did by food industries, so this study focused on the role of food industries to empowering DISW women in the Bogor City and Regency. The study was conducted by using a triangulation approach and data collection techniques were a review of documents, surveys, interviews, and observations. The study was conducted in 23 micro-scale food industries and two small-scale food industries. The result showed the Bogor City and Regency has spearheaded the development of food tourism. The development of food tourism needs support of food industries development, vice versa. The development of food industries in Bogor especially the micro scale was absorbing the DISW women labor in Bogor. DISW women workers who do not have a college education, poor, family's main breadwinner, do not have skills and work experience accepted to work in micro-scale food industries. The same roles were not carrying out by small-scale food industries because they asked the qualification standards for workers. In terms of labor protection of women, micro-scale industries do not implement labor protection standards such as the certainty of continuity of employment, salary standard, fixed income given when maternity leave, illness or childbirth and holiday allowances. Based on the results of research, the development of food tourism was influencing development of the food industries and the development of the food industries especially micro-scale industries was absorbing the DISW women labor force. The roles of food tourism development for woman empowerment in Bogor were provide job opportunities to help woman to enhance their financial income, their work skill and opportunity to networking and training. The results showed the government and employers are expected to provide the protection of women workers.
Energy Efficient Monitoring using Kalman Filter

An Internet of Things (IoT) environment uses information gathering and sharing to draw conclusions, make decisions and predict future occurrences. The technology connects devices such as mobile phones and sensors in private homes and elsewhere into a network of communication with joint operational purpose. Continuously collecting information is often infeasible due to factors such as sensor-availability, memory capacity and power efficiency. Decision making within the IoT network is however based on accurate variable information and a reduction in the measurement frequency must be done thoughtfully. Additionally, a system with batterypowered devices that simultaneously harvest energy from the environment by e.g. solar panels can contribute with surplus energy to the IoT network. Continuous measurements would limit the accumulated energy contribution, and we therefore seek to replace the measurements by predictions, allowing greater accumulated energy surplus to be transferred. This thesis presents solutions for making energy efficient data collection from solar panels with battery-powered sensors by applying a monitoring algorithm. Decisions within the algorithm are based on eventand self-triggering controls by looking at the value contribution at each data-collecting time step. Energy surplus is measured as the accumulated effort to avoid battery discharge, and prediction accuracy is computed as a joint probability where uncertainty increases with the consecutive number of predictions. A multivariate Seasonal Autoregressive Moving Average (SARMA) model is fitted with temperature and humidity data collected from solar panels at NTNU and transformed to a state space representation. The conversion is used to obtain predictions from a multivariate Kalman filter, which is an approach to on-line filtering and prediction problems. Because there are two objectives to be satisfied, a multicriteria constraint with weighted average on prediction accuracy and energy surplus is applied to analyse the performance. After monitoring, a trade-off between the objectives is needed, since, the result depends on the decision makers preference, which could be either to have confident data collection or high amount of accumulated energy surplus.
Recommender 시스템 Scalable Hybrid Recommender System with Temporal Information

Recommender Systems have gained much popularity among researchers and is applied in a number of applications. The exponential growth of users and products poses some key challenges for recommender systems. Recommender Systems mostly suffer from scalability and accuracy. The accuracy of Recommender system is somehow inversely proportional to its scalability. In this paper we proposed a Context Aware Hybrid Recommender System using matrix reduction for Hybrid model and clustering technique for predication of item features. In our approach we used user item-feature rating, User Demographic information and context information i.e. specific time and day to improve scalability and accuracy. Our Algorithm produce better results because we reduce the dimension of items features matrix by using different reduction techniques and use user demographic information, construct context aware hybrid user model, cluster the similar user offline, find the nearest neighbors, predict the item features and recommend the Top Nitems.
Roads Leading to Self–Employment: Comparing Transgenerational Entrepreneurs and Self–Made Start–Ups

This article studies the event history of business foundation. Three theoretical concepts—human, financial, and social capital—are linked to investigate how entry into self–employment varies over time. Data from a cohort of Dutch inhabitants born in 1939/1940 who have been interviewed three times during their lives (in 1952, 1983, and 1993) allows for testing hypotheses that state clear differences between two different roads toward business ownership. Empirical results show that the baseline hazard decreases with time for transgenerational entrepreneurs with self–employed parents, but increases for self–made start–ups. Social capital is a better predictor for starting an enterprise than human capital.
Network design for urban light transport

The Urban Light Transport (ULTra) project is concerned with the development of an on-demand transport system of driver-less taxis running on their own dedicated guideway network. The network consists of a number of stations together with a collection of one-way guideways linking them up. The Study Group was asked to develop a tool that when given the user demand, locations of the stations, the costs of building and the time taken to travel along all potential links, determines which links to include in the network. The objectives are to balance the benefit to users, in terms of convenience, with the construction cost, and to satisfy topological constraints determined by engineering considerations.
How should economics curricula be evaluated ? 1

This paper explores the evaluation of economics curricula. It argues that the dominant approach in economics education, experimentalism, has serious limitations which render it an unsuitable evaluation method in some cases. The arguments against experimentalism are practical, ethical and also rest on a view of the world as a complex, open system in which contexts are unique and generalised regularities are unlikely. In such an environment, as often found in educational contexts, alternative methods are advisable, at least as part of a suite of approaches in a realistic, case-based, mixed-methods approach to evaluation. Thus, economics curricula should be evaluated using a method or set of methods most appropriate to the particular object case. As such, there is no single answer to the question posed. JEL classification: A20, A22, B4, B5, C80, C9
International Conference on Structural Integrity , ICSI 2017 , 4-7 September 2017 , Funchal , Madeira , Portugal Joining TWIP-Steel Simulation Models

During their operation, modern aircraft engine components are subjected to increasingly demanding operating conditions, especially the high pressure turbine (HPT) blades. Such conditions cause these parts to undergo different types of time-dependent degradation, one of which is creep. A model using the finite element method (FEM) was developed, in order to be able to predict the creep behaviour of HPT blades. Flight data records (FDR) for a specific aircraft, provided by a commercial aviation company, were used to obtain thermal and mechanical data for three different flight cycles. In order to create the 3D model needed for the FEM analysis, a HPT blade scrap was scanned, and its chemical composition and material properties were obtained. The data that was gathered was fed into the FEM model and different simulations were run, first with a simplified 3D rectangular block shape, in order to better establish the model, and then with the real 3D mesh obtained from the blade scrap. The overall expected behaviour in terms of displacement was observed, in particular at the trailing edge of the blade. Therefore such a model can be useful in the goal of predicting turbine blade life, given a set of FDR data. © 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. Peer-review under responsibility of the Scientific Committee of PCF 2016.
Obesity, Cigarette Prices, Youth Access Laws, and Adolescent Smoking Initiation

This paper examines the role of body weight in smoking initiation by adolescents. We estimate discrete-time hazard models of the decision to initiate smoking using data from the Children of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1979 Cohort. We control for cigarette prices, tobacco control policies and socioeconomic factors. To avoid problems stemming from the endogeneity of body weight, we also estimate models using the method of instrumental variables. We find clear gender differences. Lighter girls are less likely to initiate smoking, while current weight is uncorrelated with initiation among boys. Among girls, smoking initiation is insensitive to cigarette prices, but among boys smoking initiation is negatively correlated with cigarette prices. These gender-specific differences may help explain the mixed evidence of the impact of price on smoking initiation found in previous literature.
Statistical Implementation of Segmentation of Dermoscopy Images using Multistep Region Growing

A method for segmentation of skin cancer images, firstly the algorithm automatically determines the compounding colors of the lesion, and builds a number of distance images equal to the number of main colors of the lesion (reference colors). These images represent the similarity between reference colors and the other colors present in the image and they are built computing the CIEDE2000 distance in the L*a*b* color space. Texture information is also taken into account extracting the energy of some statistical moments of the L* component of the image. The method has an adaptative, N-dimensional structure where N is the number of reference colors. The segmentation is performed by a texturecontrolled multi-step region growing process. The growth tolerance parameter changes with step size and depends on the variance on each distance image for the actual grown region. Contrast is also introduced to decide the optimum value of the tolerance parameter, choosing the one which provides the region with the highest mean contrast in relation to the background. Keywordsregion growing, segmentation, texture-controlled