Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Bureaucracy Transformation to Address Globalisation Challenges

Transformation is a pre-requisite for all layers of society to survive any global and internal challenges. Despite being the most critical, bureaucratic transformation should not be conducted only at the structural level as the transformation should apply holistically. It should start with the readjustment of a mindset that improves the clarity of organisational vision and mission, followed by the strengthening and renewal of organisational work. Bureaucratic transformation must simultaneously apply four steps: reframing, restructuring, revitalisation, and renewal, to cope with globalisation. In this era, investment and trade liberalisation positively trigger countries to produce the best goods and services to attract global markets. To have competitive products and gain market trust, enterprises need to meet the performance requirements in terms of time, cost, responsiveness, product line, and quality. Driving institutions to meet the requirements and increasing their competitive performances are the positive effect of investment liberalisation and free trade.
Potato starch-based films: Effects of glycerol and montmorillonite nanoclay concentration

The films can be obtained from renewable resources such as polysaccharides, proteins, and lipids. Potato starch is a polysaccharide found in abundance, low cost, biodegradable, edible, and can be obtained from agro-industrial waste. In the present study, biodegradable films were obtained from potato starch mixed with montmorillonite nanoclay (MMT) as crosslinking agent and glycerin as a plasticizer; and thus characterize properties such as: permeability to water vapor, solubility, thickness, functional groups by FTIR, analysis of the morphology by scanning electron microscopy (SEM), and mechanical properties. 9 mixtures combining different proportions of glycerol (1, 1.5 and 2 ml) with montmorillonite nanoclay (MMT) (0, 0.03 and 0.05 g) were prepared.
Diabetic Retinopathy Detection System from Retinal Images

Diabetes Mellitus is a disorder in metabolism of carbohydrates, and due to lack of the pancreatic hormone insulin sugars in the body are not oxidized to produce energy. Diabetic Retinopathy is a disorder of the retina resulting in impairment or vision loss. Improper blood sugar control is the main cause of diabetic retinopathy. That is the reason why early detection of retinopathy is crucial to prevent vision loss. Appearance of exudates, microaneurysms and hemorrhages are the early indications. In this study, we propose an algorithm for detection and classification of diabetic retinopathy. The proposed algorithm is based on the combination of various image-processing techniques, which includes Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization, Green channelization, Filtering and Thresholding. The objective measurements such as homogeneity, entropy, contrast, energy, dissimilarity, asm, correlation, mean and standard deviation are computed from processed images. These measurements are finally fed to Support Vector Machine and kNearest Neighbors classifiers for classification and their results were analysed and compared.
Litter production as indicator of nutrients to the forest ecosystem

Nutrient cycling within forest ecosystem depend majorly on the quantity of litter falls due to seasonal plant behaviour and the decomposition of the soil organic matter pool due to biotic and abiotic factors of the environment, the rate of organic matter accretion and the qualities of nutrients supplied from external sources. The biomass inputs to the soil ecosystem may be balanced with the mineralization rates so that ecosystem exists in equilibrium. This study seeks to review litter production as critical indicator of nutrients to the forest ecosystem within the context of the following sub-themes: types and sources of leaf litter, seasonality of leaf litter production in the tropical forest, pattern of litters’ production in the forest ecosystem uses of leaf litter production, restoration of land degraded site/erosion, uses of leaf litter production on growth performance of forest species and types of nutrients disposed. The study conclude by re-emphasizing litter production and decomposition as key processes in biogeochemical process of forest ecosystem; and this varies with climate, season, substrate quality, and type of biodiversity. The study recognizes forest plantation as the major pathway for recycling of nutrients in soil system through litterfall or litter production.
The Pro 279 Leu variant in the transcription factor MEF 2 A is associated with myocardial infarction

Introduction: A myocyte enhancer factor 2A (MEF2A) mutation that segregated with coronary artery disease/myocardial infarction (CAD/MI) in a large family has been recently described. In addition, missense mutations in sporadic CAD patients were also reported. Together, these data suggested that mutations in exons 7 and 11 of MEF2A cause CAD /MI. However, this association was refuted by other study. Methods: We analysed the genetic variation of exons 7 and 11 in a large cohort of Spanish MI patients and controls through SSCA and direct sequencing . Results: A rare polymorphism, P279L, was detected both in patients and controls. Carriers of the 279 Leu allele would have a threefold risk of suffering MI compared to controls (p=0.009; OR=3.06, 95%CI=1.17-8.06). In addition, this allele was only found in controls < 50 years. Exon 11 showed a high degree of heterogeneity, caused by a polyglutamine (CAG)n polymorphism, but no significant differences in genotype or allelic frequencies were found. Discussion: the 279 Leu allele should be a genetic risk factor for MI in our population. This effect could be a consequence of a reduce transcriptional activity on MEF2A with 279 Leu. on A ril 0, 2021 by gest. P rocted by coright. hp://jm g.bm jcom / J M ed G eet: frst pulished as 10136/jm g.20. 034710 on 15 Jne 205. D ow nladed fom
The association between neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio and anaphylaxis refractory to epinephrine treatment

Objectives: Anaphylaxis refractory to epinephrine treatment is a potentially fatal condition requiring additional medications. Neutrophil-to lymphocyte ratio (NLR) is commonly used to predict severity in allergic diseases. The aim of this study was to determine the association between NLR and refractory anaphylaxis. Methods: This was a retrospective, observational study of 126 adult anaphylaxis patients arriving at the emergency department between January 2015 and December 2019. Patients were placed into refractory anaphylaxis, if they required more than two 0.3 mg injections of intramuscular epinephrine for symptom resolution, and non-refractory anaphylaxis groups. NLRs were determined at the time of arrival at the hospital and were compared between groups. Results: Thirty-two (25.4%) patients were categorized as refractory anaphylaxis cases. NLR was significantly lower in the refractory anaphylaxis than in the non-refractory anaphylaxis group (P < 0.001). In the multivariate logistic regression analysis model, NLR was inversely associated with the occurrence of refractory anaphylaxis (adjusted odds ratio 0.33, 95% confidence interval 0.13-0.81, P = 0.016). The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of NLR for prediction of refractory anaphylaxis was 0.717 (P < 0.001). The optimal cut-off value of NLR was < 0.68 using the Youden index, with 50.0% sensitivity and 80.9% specificity. Conclusions: NLR was independently and inversely associated with the occurrence of refractory anaphylaxis among anaphylactic patients. Therefore, NLR has the potential to be used as an easy and inexpensive test to predict refractory anaphylaxis in patients.
FINANCIALISATION, WORKING CONDITIONS AND CONTAGION DYNAMICS IN DEVELOPING AND EMERGING ECONOMIES

COVID-19 has been having a severe impact on most aspects of economic and social reality across the globe. However, these effects have been unequally distributed with vulnerable people being affected the most (Ahmed et al., 2020) and the impact is magnified in developing and emerging economies (DEEs). This paper analyses the possible effects of financialisation on the contagion dynamics of COVID-19 in Developing and Emerging Economies (DEEs). Drawing on the growing political economy literature on the effects of financialisation on inequalities and working conditions, we argue that financialisation has influenced a number of social conditions, which affect the reproduction rate of COVID-19 through limiting the physical distancing possibilities. Using available epidemiological data, we provide a preliminary empirical assessment, which suggests that economies that are more financialised and have weaker labour market institutions experienced substantially longer COVID-19 waves. Interestingly, we demonstrate that the worst hit cases were the most financialised DEEs. * Goldsmiths, University of London; ** University College London
Environmental Impact on the Excitation Path of the Red Upconversion Emission of Nanocrystalline NaYF4:Yb3+,Er3+

The mechanism for red upconversion luminescence of Yb–Er codoped materials is not generally agreed on in the literature. Both two-photon and three-photon processes have been suggested as the main path for red upconversion emission. We have studied β-NaYF4:Yb3+,Er3+ nanoparticles in H2O and D2O, and we propose that the nanoparticle environment is a major factor in the selection of the preferred red upconversion excitation pathway. In H2O, efficient multiphonon relaxation (MPR) promotes the two-photon mechanism through green emitting states, while, in D2O, MPR is less effective and the three-photon path involving back energy transfer to Yb3+ is the dominant mechanism. For the green upconversion emission, our results suggest the common two-photon path through the 4F9/2 energy state in both H2O and D2O.
Compatibilities between continuous semilattices

We define compatibilities between continuous semilattices as Scott continuous functions from their pairwise cartesian products to {0, 1} that are zero preserving in each variable. It is shown that many specific kinds of mathematical objects can be regarded as compatibilities, among them monotonic predicates, Galois connections, completely distributive lattices, isotone mappings with images being chains, semilattice morphisms etc. Compatibility between compatibilities is also introduced, it is shown that conjugation of non-additive real-valued or lattice valued measures is its particular case.
Role of 18F-FDG PET/CT in detection of hematogenous metastases of advanced differentiated thyroid carcinoma: a systematic review and meta-analysis

The aim of this study was to collect the evidence on the performance of 2-deoxy-2-[18F]fluoro-D-glucose (F-FDG) Positron Emission Tomography/Computed Tomography (PET/CT) in terms of detection rate (DR) and diagnostic accuracy in identifying hematogenous metastases in patients with differentiated thyroid cancer and compare its performance with that of other imaging techniques. A comprehensive PubMed/MEDLINE database research was carried out to retrieve studies documenting the performance of F-FDG PET/CT in depicting hematogenous metastases in patients with differentiated thyroid cancer. Statistical analysis was performed on a per-patient and per-lesion basis. The literature search yielded 15 articles to be included in the systematic review. F-FDG PET/CT showed a pooled DR of 85.08% on a per-patient analysis and 89.70% on a per-lesion analysis. For bone lesions, a high DR (81.78%) was found for F-FDG PET/CT. For the sub-group analysis of lung lesions, pooled DR was 92.77% for F-FDG PET/CT, 95.02% for CT, and 64.93% for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). On a per-patient analysis, F-FDG PET/CT demonstrated a pooled sensitivity (SS) of 87.3% [95% confidence interval (CI): 77.3%-94%] and a pooled specificity (SP) of 95.6% (95%CI: 87.6-99.1). On a per-lesion analysis (328 metastases), PET/CT showed a pooled SS and SP of 86.3% (95%CI: 73.5%-93.5%) and 93.4% (95%CI: 71.7%-98.8%) in the detection of hematogenous metastases. The presented systematic review and meta-analysis favor the use of F-FDG PET/CT in the detection of hematogenous metastases in patients with differentiated thyroid cancer. The limited literature warrants further studies to confirm our findings. Page 2 of 13 Quartuccio et al. J Cancer Metastasis Treat 2021;7:14 I http://dx.doi. org/10.20517/2394-4722.2020. 118
T RANSLATION M EMORY G UIDED N EURAL M ACHINE

Many studies have proven that Translation Memory (TM) can help improve the translation quality of neural machine translation (NMT). Existing ways either employ extra encoder to encode information from TM or concatenate source sentence and TM sentences as encoder’s input. These previous methods don’t model the semantic relationship between the source sentence and TM sentences. Meanwhile, the training corpus related to TM is limited, and the sentence level retrieval approach further limits its scale. In this paper, we propose a novel method to combine the strengths of both TM and NMT. We treat the matched sentence pair of TM as the additional signal and apply one encoder enhanced by the pre-trained language model (PLM) to encode the TM information and source sentence together. Additionally, we extend the sentence level retrieval method to the n-gram retrieval method that we don’t need to calculate the similarity score. Further, we explore new methods to manipulate the information flow from TM to the NMT decoder. We validate our proposed methods on a mixed test set of multiple domains. Experiment results demonstrate that the proposed methods can significantly improve the translation quality and show strong adaptation for an unknown or new domain.
The phonology of Welsh . ( The Phonology of the World ’ s Languages . )

There is no lack of article-length publications on individual aspects of Welsh phonology. * However, it has been a long wait for a book-length overview, especially one that incorporates modern theoretical insights. Hannahs’ new book is thus a welcome addition to the Phonology of the World’s Languages series. As with other volumes in the series, the author sets out to strike a balance between theory-neutral description and theoretically informed analysis. His framework of choice is Optimality Theory. The book will be of interest to specialist phonologists, Celticists, and linguists with a non-specialist interest in Welsh. The book is divided into seven chapters: an introduction to the history of Welsh and its modern dialects, a phonetic outline, four core chapters on phonology and a final chapter touching on phenomena and issues not addressed elsewhere in the book. Chapter 2 provides a compact but comprehensive overview of Welsh phonetics, including outlines of the consonant and vowel inventories of the main dialects (Hannahs accepts the established broad division into northern and southern varieties). Particularly welcome here are the author’s succinct discussions of a range of phenomena that have not always been clearly described elsewhere, including voicing in stops, gemination, the status of affricates, vowel length and schwa. The chapter provides the reader with a very useful entry to the relevant literature. In Chapter 3, Hannahs presents his analysis of the prosodic structure of the word in Welsh. His description of syllable structure follows well-established practice in two respects: (a) it is based almost entirely on the monosyllabic word, and (b) it assumes that consonant-cluster phonotactics are syllabically conditioned. This approach gives rise to certain anomalies, by no means peculiar to Welsh. For one thing, it leads to the claim that consonant clusters at the end of words form complex codas. If these really are syllabic constituents, defined independently of words, we expect them also to occur elsewhere in the word. The same clusters do indeed also occur medially, but here they pattern in two ways, neither of which is consistent with complex coda status. Some are clearly heterosyllabic. For example, when internal, clusters of falling
FAST ESTIMATION FOR PRIVACY AND UTILITY IN DIF - FERENTIALLY PRIVATE MACHINE LEARNING

Recently, differential privacy has been widely studied in machine learning due to its formal privacy guarantees for data analysis. As one of the most important parameters of differential privacy, controls the crucial tradeoff between the strength of the privacy guarantee and the utility of model. Therefore, the choice of has a great influence on the performance of differentially private learning models. But so far, there is still no rigorous method for choosing . In this paper, we deduce the influence of on utility private learning models through strict mathematical derivation, and propose a novel approximate approach for estimating the utility of any value. We show that our approximate approach has a fairly small error and can be used to estimate the optimal according to the expected utility of users. Experimental results demonstrate high estimation accuracy and broad applicability of our approximate approach.
Optimising usage of salinized lands in the lower part of the river basin for the coastal community in Bentota, Sri Lanka

Land degradation in coastal areas due to seawater intrusion and coastal salinity is one of the major critical problems affecting the sustainable development of Sri Lanka. Coastal salinity risk is increasing in the Bentota area while diminishing land productivity which results in poor food production and giving rise to several socio-economic issues for the community in the area. Bentota is below the agricultural production capacity level and no strategy has been implemented or introduced so far regarding the utilisation of degraded lands in the area. This study identified the optimised extent of salinized lands for paddy, coconut, vegetables, fruits, tea, rubber and cinnamon cultivations based on future coastal salinity effects, land use demand and the development trend of the area. Land use change, rainfall, temperature, topography, floods, soil, ground and surface water are the factors applied in evaluations of land use suitability as the prior requirement for land use optimisation. Future demands of land use were predicted applying population growth models, the theory of land carrying capacity and the ecological footprint. Strategies for optimising the productivity of salinized lands were identified using a stakeholder perception - based approach. The developed sustainable land use pattern will enhance the land productivity of highly (3.4 %), moderately (39.6 %) and slightly (57 %) salinized areas in Bentota . Identified land management strategies will facilitate the spatial planning of future land use of this area by providing guidance to the local authority in the process of allocating salinized lands for enhancing land productivity.
Face Detection in Image and Video using Neural Network

: face detection is an important part in bio-metrics. It is a computer technology which helps to detect and identify human faces in digital images. In this paper face is detected from the given photo and the video using neural networks. Then the detected face can be given for face recognition. Neural networks are trained using face and non face images stored in database. Gabor filters are used for feature extraction from local images. Feed forward neural network is created using back propagation method. From a given input image or video, the face is detected using neural network to enhance the accuracy and performance. The face is detected with the help of trained neural networks.
LIGHTBLUE: Automatic Profile-Aware Debloating of Bluetooth Stacks

The Bluetooth standard is ubiquitously supported by computers, smartphones, and IoT devices. Due to its complexity, implementations require large codebases, which are prone to security vulnerabilities, such as the recently discovered BlueBorne and BadBluetooth attacks. While deﬁned by the standard, most of the Bluetooth functionality, as deﬁned by different Bluetooth proﬁles, is not required in the common usage scenarios. Starting from this observation, we implement L IGHT B LUE , a framework performing automatic, proﬁle-aware debloating of Bluetooth stacks, allowing users to automatically minimize their Bluetooth attack surface by removing unneeded Blue-tooth features. L IGHT B LUE starts with a target Bluetooth application, detects the associated Bluetooth proﬁles, and applies a combination of control-ﬂow and data-ﬂow analysis to remove unused code within a Bluetooth host code. Furthermore, to debloat the Bluetooth ﬁrmware, L IGHT B LUE extracts the used Host Controller Interface (HCI) commands and patches the HCI dispatcher in the Bluetooth ﬁrmware automatically, so that the Bluetooth ﬁrmware avoids processing unneeded HCI commands. We evaluate L IGHT B LUE on four different Bluetooth hosts and three different Bluetooth controllers. Our evaluation shows that L IGHT B LUE achieves between 32% and 50% code reduction in the Bluetooth host code and between 57% and 83% HCI command reduction
Response of baru (Dipteryx alata Vog.) seedlings to liming and NPK application

ABSTRACT The definition of nitrogen doses for baru species becomes necessary because each forest species responds differently to nitrogen fertilization. The aim of this study was to evaluate baru seedlings' response to nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium (NPK) fertilization and liming. The experiment was conducted in a greenhouse in a randomized blocks design, arranged in a 5 × 2 factorial scheme, being the factors consisted of five doses of nitrogen in covering (0, 75, 150, 225, and 300 mg dm−3) and substrate with and without limestone and PK, with four replications. At 60 days after transplanting, the plant height, stem diameter, number of leaflets, leaf area, shoot dry mass, chlorophyll content, N content in the leaves, root length, root volume, root dry mass, height/stem diameter ratio, shoot dry mass/root dry mass ratio, and Dickson quality index were evaluated. The substrate with liming influences positively the root dry mass. Nitrogen and PK fertilization promote increase in the relative chlorophyll content and N concentration in the leaves.