Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Generalized formulation for resonance frequency of even polygonal microstrip antennas

ABSTRACT A generalized expression has been derived for resonance frequency of polygonal microstrip antennas with even number of edges using modified magnetic wall method. Nature of polygonal resonators is analyzed with their equivalence to corresponding circumcircle resonators. Magnetic wall has been transformed into a dynamic function of vertex angle of polygons. The transformed magnetic wall includes the effect of non-uniform fringing around vertices and edges. A scheme to achieve the complete response of circular antennas from square and other polygonal antennas has also been presented. The proposed general expression accurately gives resonance frequency of even polygonal antennas at the fundamental frequency as well as higher harmonics. The proposed expression and theory agree with simulation and measured results of different polygonal antennas.
Survival of Civil Society Organizations Across Multiple Political Regimes: The Case of the Czech Scouting Organization Junák, 1914–2019

ABSTRACT This article explores how civil society organizations survive multiple regime changes. This is a case study of Junák, a Czech scouting organization, that experienced the shift from democratic capitalism to authoritarian communism and back again. I build on archival and interview data to test how new institutional concepts of the regulative, normative, and cultural-cognitive institutional pressures fare when applied to organizational survival across regime change. I found that Junák responded to institutional pressures through a multiplicity of responses, including isomorphic, ceremonial, and innovative changes as well continuity of selected attributes. During communism, ceremonial change prevailed, helping the CSO to preserve some of its organizational aspects. After 1989, Junák opted for a combination of change and continuity. This case study raises new questions about voluntarism in Central and Eastern Europe during authoritarianism and its impact on civil society and its organizations after 1989.
Potential biomarkers and molecular mechanisms in preeclampsia progression

Abstract This study aimed to explore potential biomarkers and molecular mechanisms in preeclampsia (PE) progression. Gene expression profiles of GSE147776 and GSE96984 were downloaded, followed by the identification of common differentially expressed genes (co-DEGs) and common differentially expressed lncRNAs (co-DElncRNAs) in PE patients between the two datasets. Key genes were identified using gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA), followed by functional enrichment analyses. Subsequently, the miRNAs of key genes and miRNA-related lncRNAs were predicted, followed by the construction of the lncRNA–miRNA–gene ceRNA network. Furthermore, the key genes associated with different gestational stages were identified. As a result, 192 co-DEGs and 16 co-DElncRNAs were revealed from the two datasets. Based on two outstanding PE-associated pathways, including glaucoma and PE, identified by GSEA, ten key genes, including IGFBP1, CORIN, and C3, were revealed. Key genes, including IL1A and IL1B, were enriched in the developmental process involved in reproduction. Furthermore, ceRNAs, such as LINC00473-miR-4476-IL1A, LINC00473-miR-1291-IL1B, and NAV2-AS4-miR-6131-REN, were identified. Moreover, REN expression was significantly upregulated in the first- and second-trimester placentae compared to C-section-term placentae. In conclusion, these key genes may serve as novel biomarkers for PE. The detection of REN expression may help in the early prediction of PE and the initiation of prophylactic medical treatment.
Mobilisation or immobilisation-based treatments for first carpometacarpal joint osteoarthritis: A systematic review and meta-analysis with subgroup analyses

Introduction Both joint mobilisation and immobilisation are thought to be effective in the treatment of first carpometacarpal joint (CMCJ) osteoarthritis (OA). The objective of this review was to establish whether either intervention reduced pain and improved pinch strength in people with first CMCJ OA in the short term and assess whether one intervention is superior to the other. Method This was a systematic review and meta-analysis. Seven databases were searched until May 2021. Only RCTs were included. The Cochrane Risk of Bias Tool and the Grade of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluation system were utilised to rate the evidence. Random-effects meta-analysis with subgroup analyses were used. Results Eight studies were included with a total of 417 participants. Mobilisation treatments included manual therapy with or without exercise while immobilisation interventions utilised thumb splinting with several different designs. Very low-quality and low-quality evidence showed that mobilisation led to statistically but not clinically significant improvements in pain (standardised mean difference (SMD) = 0.53; 95% confidence interval (CI) = 0.03 to 1; I2 = 60%; p = 0.06) and pinch strength (SMD = 0.35; 95% CI = 0.03 to 0.7; I2 = 12%; p = 0.3) compared to placebo. Very low-quality and low-quality evidence showed no effect on pain and pinch strength compared to a control or no intervention. Subgroup analyses revealed no difference between interventions. Discussion Neither mobilisation nor immobilisation alone led to clinically important improvements in pain or pinch strength in the short term in people with symptomatic first CMCJ OA. Neither therapeutic strategy appeared to be superior.
Coordinated motion control model of a six-wheeled rocker lunar rover

At present, control methods of the six-wheeled rocker lunar rover primarily consist of setting the same driving parameters for each wheel. This type of control method ignores the multiple active driving characteristics of the lunar rover and causes parasitic power loss. The main cause of the parasitic power loss is the uncoordinated motion of the driving elements. Therefore, in this article, a coordinated motion programming model of the six-wheeled rocker lunar rover based on the velocity projection theorem, the quasi-static mechanical model, and the rated power of the motor is established to eliminate parasitic loss, reduce driving energy, and improve energy efficiency. The analytical solution of the programming model based on the Kuhn–Tucker condition is also calculated. The coordinated motion control model saves energy, and it is suitable for other wheeled-type planet rovers. This model provides technical support for reducing the energy consumption of planet rovers.
Hacking or Engineering? Towards an Extended Entrepreneurial Software Engineering Model

Startups play a key role in software-based innovation. They make an important contribution to an economy’s ability to compete and innovate, and their importance will continue to grow due to increasing digitalization. However, the success of a startup depends primarily on market needs and the ability to develop a solution that is attractive enough for customers to choose. A sophisticated technical solution is usually not critical, especially in the early stages of a startup. It is not necessary to be an experienced software engineer to start a software startup. However, this can become problematic as the solution matures and software complexity increases. Based on a proposed solution for systematic software development for early-stage startups, in this paper, we present the key findings of a survey study to identify the methodological and technical priorities of software startups. Among other things, we found that requirements engineering and architecture pose challenges for startups. In addition, we found evidence that startups’ software development approaches do not tend to change over time. An early investment in a more scalable development approach could help avoid long-term software problems. To support such an investment, we propose an extended model for Entrepreneurial Software Engineering that provides a foundation for future research.
NB-IoT Coverage and Sensor Node Connectivity in Dense Urban Environments: An Empirical Study

Wireless sensor networks have enabled smart infrastructures and novel applications. With the recent roll-out of Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) cellular radio technology, wireless sensors can be widely deployed for data collection in cities around the world. However, empirical evidence regarding the coverage and connectivity of NB-IoT in dense urban areas is limited. This article presents an empirical study that focuses on evaluating the coverage and connectivity of NB-IoT in a dense urban environment. We have designed an NB-IoT sensor node and deployed over 100 of them in high-rise apartment buildings in Hong Kong. These sensor nodes utilize a commercial NB-IoT network to collect high-resolution water flow data for machine learning model training and provide timely feedback to users. We collect and analyze the empirical NB-IoT signal measurements from the sensor nodes deployed in various challenging outdoor and indoor environments for over three months. These empirical measurements reveal correlations between NB-IoT connectivity and sensor installation environments. We also observe that inter-cell interference, as a result of coverage by multiple neighboring NB-IoT cells in a dense urban environment, is a source of connectivity degradation. We discuss potential issues that IoT application designers and system integrators might encounter in practical NB-IoT devices deployment, and we propose a transmission decision algorithm based on signal measurements for mitigating energy wasted due to transmission failures. Finally, we demonstrate the results and the benefits of using high-resolution water flow data collected by our purpose-built NB-IoT sensor nodes for studying the patterns of domestic water consumption in Hong Kong.
What About My Privacy?Helping Users Understand Online Privacy Policies

Software systems have become an integral part of our daily lives. However, users tend to forget that they are not only consuming information, but also delivering personal information to service providers. This data collection means that users’ privacy sphere is increasingly at stake. Informing users about what and how data is collected is pivotal for reaching transparency, trustworthiness, and ethics in modern systems. The main purpose of privacy policies is to inform users about what happens to their personal data. But instead they are extensive and purposefully obfuscating. Information about data practices are hidden in long and ambiguous text passages. To mitigate this, in this paper, we present a concept implemented as a web extension to support the end-user in dealing with privacy policies by providing easier access and visual explanations to privacy-related information. We evaluated the usefulness of our tool in a user study with 65 participants. The results show that our approach helps users to find a privacy policy faster and also supports users to better comprehend the relevant information. Our tool is a first step towards facilitating to deal with privacy policies from the end-user perspective. The results of the study and the positive feedback from the participants show a high degree of acceptance and potential for the tool to increase users’ privacy awareness.
Evolution of personality and locomotory performance traits during a late Pleistocene island colonization in a treefrog

Recent empirical and theoretical studies suggest that personality and locomotory performance traits are crucial components of the dispersal syndromes, and that they can evolve during a dispersal process. Island colonisation is one the best characterized processes in dispersal biogeography, and its implication in the evolution of phenotypic traits has been investigated over a wide range of temporal scales. However, the effect of island colonization on personality and performance traits of natural populations has been little explored, and no studies have addressed these processes in the context of late-Pleistocene range expansions. Here, we investigated the contribution of island colonisations triggered by post-glacial range expansions to intraspecific variation in personality and locomotory performance traits. We compared boldness, exploration, jumping performance, and stickiness abilities, in three equidistant populations of the Tyrrhenian tree frog Hyla sarda, two from the source area and one from the colonised island. Individuals from the colonised population were significantly bolder than individuals from the source area, as they emerged sooner from a shelter (p=0.028), while individuals from the source area showed markedly higher jumping and stickiness performance (both p<0.001). We discuss these results in the context of the major microevolutionary processes at play during range expansion, including selection, spatial sorting, and founder effects. However, irrespective of the processes contributing the most, our results clearly indicate that late Pleistocene climatic changes have had major consequences not just on species’ range dynamics, but also on the spatial patterns of phenotypic variation within species, including personality and locomotory traits variation.
An algorithmic framework for isoform-specific functional analysis

Gene Ontology (GO) overrepresentation analysis characterizes the biological mechanisms common to sets of differentially expressed genes identified by high-throughput experiments. To date, GO overrepresentation analysis has mainly been used to evaluate differentially expressed genes, but short- and long-read RNA-seq technologies now allow increasingly accurate identification of differential alternative splicing. The function of most splice isoforms remain unknown, but if acccurate predictions could be made, overrepresentation analysis could be applied to differentially spliced isoforms to assess the functional implications of alternative splicing in RNA-seq experiments. We present isopret (Isoform Interpretation), a new paradigm for isoform function prediction based on the expectation-maximization framework. isopret leverages the relationships between sequence and functional isoform similarity to infer isoform specific functions in a highly accurate fashion. This enabled us to adapt GO overrepresentation analysis, which to date has been limited to differential gene expression, to be extended to assess overrepresentation of GO annotations in differentially spliced isoforms. An analysis of 100 RNA-seq studies including investigations of development, cancer, and common disease demonstrated that expression and splicing regulate different sets of biological functions. We make isopret predictions freely available in a desktop application that can be used to analyze differential expression and splicing in any bulk RNA-seq dataset.
Topological analysis of brain dynamics in autism based on graph and persistent homology

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a heterogeneous disorder with a rapidly growing prevalence. In recent years, the dynamic functional connectivity (DFC) technique has been used to reveal the transient connectivity behavior of ASDs’ brains by clustering connectivity matrices in different states. However, the states of DFC have not been yet studied from a topological point of view. In this paper, this study was performed using global metrics of the graph and persistent homology (PH) and resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data. The PH has been recently developed in topological data analysis and deals with persistent structures of data. The structural connectivity (SC) and static FC (SFC) were also studied to better show the advantages of DFC analysis. Significant discriminative features between ASDs and typical controls (TC) were only found in states of DFC. Moreover, the best classification performance was offered by persistent homology-based metrics in two out of four states. In these two states, some networks of ASDs compared to TCs were more segregated and isolated (showing the disruption of network integration in ASDs). The results of this study demonstrated that topological analysis of DFC states could offer discriminative features which were not discriminative in SFC and SC. Also, PH metrics compared to graph global metrics can open a brighter avenue for studying ASD and finding candidate biomarkers. Highlights States of dynamic functional connectivity (DFC) were more informative than static FC and structural connectivity when comparing ASDs with controls. Global metrics of persistent homology (PH) in comparison to graph ones could better distinguish between ASDs and controls. The PH metrics could offer the best classification performance in dynamic states where the networks of ASDs compared to controls were more segregated and isolated.
Disrupted Decision-Making: EcoHIV Inoculation Following a History of Cocaine Use

Independently, chronic cocaine use and HIV-1 viral protein exposure induce neuroadaptations in the frontal-striatal circuit; how the frontal-striatal circuit responds to HIV-1 infection following chronic drug use, however, has remained elusive. After establishing a history of both sucrose and cocaine self-administration, a pretest-posttest experimental design was utilized to evaluate preference judgment, a simple form of decision-making dependent upon the integrity of frontal- striatal circuit function. During the pretest assessment, male rats exhibited a clear preference for cocaine, whereas female animals preferred sucrose. Two posttest evaluations (3 Days and 6 Weeks Post Inoculation) revealed that, independent of biological sex, inoculation with chimeric HIV (EcoHIV), but not saline, disrupted decision-making. Prominent structural alterations in frontal-striatal circuit dysfunction were evidenced by synaptodendritic alterations in pyramidal neurons in the medial prefrontal cortex. Thus, the EcoHIV rat affords a biological system to model how the frontal-striatal circuit responds to HIV-1 infection following chronic drug use.
Alt-Texify: A Pipeline to Generate Alt-text from SVG Visualizations

: Data visualizations are used everywhere on the web to convey data and insight. However, interpreting these visualizations is reliant on sight, which poses a problem for the visually impaired who rely on screen readers. Alternative text descriptions are often missing from visualizations or not of a helpful quality, which the screen readers rely on to interpret them for the user. In this short paper, we propose Alt-Texify, a pipeline to generate alternative text descriptions for SVG-based bar, line and scatter charts. Our pipeline classiﬁes the chart type and extracts the data and labels from the SVG code and inserts the relevant information into a description template. Our approach extracts the data and labels deterministically, allowing for factually accurate descriptions 99.74% of the time.
Gamification of MOOCs and Security Awareness in Corporate Training

: The rapid development of digital technology in today's times can enrich distance learning in the corporate sector, in a variety of ways. Nowadays, instructors have the capability to incorporate gamification into their teaching and make use of digital tools to create powerful online learning environments for research and problem analysis and simulation projects to improve training. Gamified MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) can enhance the motivation and engagement of trainees in a meaningful way to achieve learning goals. This paper aims to present innovative insights on the content of gamified MOOCs in the corporate training context, to enhance Security Awareness Training. Our methodology is based on Deterding’s 2015 framework for gameful design, the lens of intrinsic skill atoms and we go a step further in our paper to propose a new approach, that is a structural model as a variation to Deterding's framework, that can find practical implementation in Integrated Development Environments (IDE) for gamified MOOCs. Gamified MOOCs when used as part of a cyber security awareness program, can play a significant role in the improvement of the overall training program as we describe in our case studies for Security Awareness Training.
Emerging Nanotheranostics for 5-Fluorouracil in Cancer Therapy: A Systematic Review on Efficacy, Safety, and Diagnostic Capability

The conventional concept of using nanocarriers to deliver chemotherapeutic drugs has advanced to accommodate additional diagnostic capability. Nanotheranostic agents (NTA), combining both treatment and diagnostic tools, are an ideal example of engineering-health integration for cancer management. Owing to the diverse materials used to construct NTAs, their safety, effectiveness, and diagnostic accuracy could vary substantially. This systematic review consolidated current NTAs incorporating 5-fluorouracil and elucidated their toxicity, anticancer efficacy, and imaging capability. Medline and Embase databases were searched up to March 18, 2022. The search, selection, and extraction were performed by the preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analysis (PRISMA) guidelines to ensure completeness and reproducibility. Original research papers involving 5-fluorouracil in the preparation of nanoparticles which reported their efficacy, toxicity, and diagnostic capability in animal cancer models were recruited. The quality of included studies was assessed using the Collaborative Approach to Meta-Analysis and Review of Animal Data from Experimental Studies (CAMARADES) checklist. Nine studies were eligible for the systematic review. There was no significant toxicity reported based on animal weight and organ histology. Complete tumor remission was observed in several animal models using chemo-thermal ablation with NTAs, proving the enhancement of 5-fluorouracil efficacy. In terms of imaging performance, the time to achieve maximum tumor image intensity correlates with the presence of targeting ligand on NTAs. The NTAs, which are composed of tumor-targeting ligands, hold promises for further development. Based on the input of current NTA research on cancer, this review proposed a checklist of parameters to recommend researchers for their future NTA testing, especially in animal cancer studies. Systematic Review Registration: website, identifier registration number.
Comparative Analysis of the Gut Microbiota of Mandarin Fish (Siniperca chuatsi) Feeding on Compound Diets and Live Baits

Siniperca chuatsi feeds on live fry throughout their life. The sustainable development of its farming industry has urgently necessitated the development of artificial diets to substitute live baits. It has been demonstrated that gut microbiota assists in feed adaptation and improves the feed conversion rate in fish. Therefore, this study aimed to understand the potential role of intestinal microorganisms in the domestication of S. chuatsi with a compound diet. Accordingly, we performed 16S rRNA sequencing of the gut microbial communities in S. chuatsi groups that were fed a compound diet (including large and small individuals) and live baits. A total of 2,471 OTUs were identified, and the large individual group possessed the highest number of unique OTUs. The α-diversity index of the gut microbiota in groups that were fed a compound diet was significantly higher (p < 0.05) than that in the live bait group. There were no significant differences in the α-diversity between the large and small individual groups. However, relatively higher numbers of Lactococcus, Klebsiella, and Woeseia were observed in the intestines of the large individual group. Prediction of the metabolic function of the microbiota among these three fish groups by Tax4Fun revealed that most metabolic pathways, such as glycan metabolism and amino acid metabolism, were typically more enriched for the larger individuals. The results indicated that certain taxa mentioned above exist in large individuals and may be closely related to the digestion and absorption of compound diets. The present study provides a basis for understanding the utilization mechanism of artificial feed by S. chuatsi.