Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effect on public health of a possible increase of the maximum level for ‘aflatoxin total’ from 4 to 10 μg/kg in peanuts and processed products thereof, intended for direct human consumption or use as an ingredient in foodstuffs

Abstract EFSA was asked to deliver a scientific opinion regarding the effect on public health of a possible increase of the maximum level (ML) for ‘aflatoxin total’ (AFT; sum of aflatoxin B1, aflatoxin B2, aflatoxin G1 and aflatoxin G2) from 4 to 10 μg/kg in peanuts and processed products thereof. Aflatoxins are genotoxic and cause hepatocellular carcinomas in humans. The Panel on Contaminants in the Food Chain (CONTAM Panel) evaluated 8,085 samples of peanuts and 472 samples of peanut butter, with > 60% left‐censored. The mean concentration of AFT in peanuts was 2.65/3.56 μg/kg (lower bound (LB)/upper bound (UB)) with a maximum of 1,429 μg/kg. The mean concentration in peanut butter was 1.47/1.92 μg/kg (LB/UB) with a maximum of 407 μg/kg. Peanut oil was not included since all data were left‐censored and the ML does not apply for oil. Exposure was calculated for a ‘Current ML’ and ‘Increased ML’ scenario, and mean chronic exposure estimates for consumers only, amounted to 0.04–2.74 ng/kg body weight (bw) per day and 0.07–4.28 ng/kg bw per day, respectively. The highest exposures were calculated for adolescents and other children. The CONTAM Panel used the cancer potencies estimated by the Joint FAO/WHO Expert Committee on Food Additives for the risk characterisation. Under the scenario of the current ML, the cancer risk was estimated to range between 0.001 and 0.213 aflatoxin‐induced cancers per 100,000 person years. Under the scenario of the increased ML, it ranged between 0.001 and 0.333 aflatoxin‐induced cancers per 100,000 person years. Comparing these data calculated under the current ML scenario with the yearly excess cancer risk of 0.014 shows a higher risk for consumers of peanuts and peanut butter in some surveys. The calculated cancer risks indicate that an increase of the ML would further increase the risk by a factor of 1.6–1.8.
Assessing an Electronic Health Record (EHR): How Do Basic Assumptions in Traditional Health Technology Assessment (HTA), and Empirical Features Fit?

This study aims to reveal the diversity of plant species, the existence of traditional conservation areas, perceptions, meanings and action (praxis) in tengger’s society, East Java. Holly's site (Danyang or petren) is a spiritual belief by the community, related to the point of view of trust, religion, and also the success raised by the groups. People believe the diversity of flora in traditional conservation areas is spiritually sacred whose existence is protected by customary rules. The relationship between local’s believe, religion, biodiversity, and environment is the local wisdom of the tengger tribe. The research method was conducted through free interviews, direct observations by surveys, and attending ceremonies of traditional rituals in traditional conservation holly sites, and worship sites or sanggar pamujan). It leads by traditional leaders called pandhita (shaman) and he is supporter called legen or wong sepuh, and also Tengger’s society. As a results of the study show that traditional rituals are still well and consistently carried out, especially in the Tengger tribe. While the diversity of plant species in the sacred area is very well maintained and respected. Traditional conservation is a combination of religious views and local beliefs, it turns out that it gets more respect than formal conservation. The diversity of plant species in the sacred area as traditional conservation includes 38 species from 33 genus and 24 families. Tengger's indigenous tribe need to have a developing status in customary law and village policy about traditional conservation sites (pedanyangan and sanggar pamujan). Conservation of protected areas and traditional knowledge can be used as a model that must be considered as the key to traditional biodiversity conservation. The community has been able to determine and utilize long-lived tree species, as well as the diversity of other plant species in traditional rituals.
Principles of the Cytological-Energy Analysis of the Extravascular Body Fluids

We have investigated development of organ impairment via detection of local inflammatory response in certain extravascular body fluids, for example in the cerebrospinal fluid, in the intraocular fluid, in the pleural effusion in the abdominal effusion, in the peritoneal dialysate, in the synovial fluid etc. We have used the so called cytological-energy principle to analyse these fluids. An impairment of particular organs is usually associated with a local inflammatory response. Its carriers are immunocompetent cells. Therefore the first step is their detection via cytological investigation of certain extravascular fluid.
Target Costing: Adoption and its Relationships with Competition Intensity, Intended Strategy and Firm Size

The paper aims to examine the level of the adoption of the target costing (TC) system by Saudi manufacturing companies and its relationships with competition intensity, intended strategy and firm size. The paper used a questionnaire survey to measure the adoption of TC and the effect of competition intensity and intended strategy on this adoption. Descriptive statistic and regression analysis were preformed to analyse the data and obtain the results. This study found that Saudi manufacturing companies were interested to adopt the TC system. In addition, it found that the competition intensity positively affects TC adoption. Moreover, the study found that companies that used a differentiation strategy were more inclined to adopt the TC than those that used a cost leadership strategy. Finally, it found that large manufacturing companies tend to adopt TC more than small ones. This is among the pioneer studies to study the TC system in Saudi Arabia, introducing a new area of investigation. Moreover, the study contributes to managerial accounting research in developing economies by providing new insights into the underexplored Saudi Arabia market. The findings of this paper could elucidate the importance of adoption of TC as a technique with a potential to support the economic growth of the country. Keywords: target costing, competitive environment, cost leadership strategy, differentiation strategy, emerging markets, Saudi Arabia
What makes a board director better connected? Evidence from graph theory

We are interested in quantifying and uncovering the relationships that form between the board directors of companies. Using these relationships we compute three network centrality measures for each director in the network and employ them in the analysis of connectedness of directors. Our focus in this study is on the attributes that make a board member better connected. The biological, educational and experiential attributes are used as independent variables to develop a regression model measuring the impact on the three connectivity measures (degree, betweenness and closeness). Our results show that ? Age? has a direct significant impact on all connectedness measures of a board member. We also find that female directors have a higher measure of degree centrality and betweenness centrality, but lower closeness. The number of foreign degrees increases the degree centrality and betweenness centrality but not closeness. The three identified characteristics of ? Age? , ? Gender? , and ? Education? are supporting the idea that a high level of social connection can in part be expected by the characteristics of individual board members and can explain up to 25% of the board member? s connectivity.
Achieving Predictive and Proactive Maintenance for High-Speed Railway Power Equipment With LSTM-RNN

Current maintenance mode for high-speed railway (HSR) power equipment is so outdated that can hardly adapt to the high-standard modern HSR. Therefore, a new possibility is proposed in this article to update the obsoleting maintenance mode of the HSR power equipment by adopting both predictive maintenance and proactive maintenance. With the combination of data-driven (predictive) and model-based (proactive) approaches, two principal constituents—the sample generator and the maintenance predictor—are designed. The maintenance predictor which is powered by the long short-term memory recurrent neural network is developed to realize the goal of predictive maintenance. The sample generator which is formulated by the physical degradation and failure model of HSR power equipment is proposed toward the goal of proactive maintenance. Test results on a gas-insulated switchgear have shown the powerful collaboration between the generator and the predictor, to not only accurately predict future maintenance timing of the switchgear based on historical sample data, but also enrich the data supply proactively to deal with potential data deficiency problems.
Transcatheter Pulmonary Valve Replacement: The Venus P valve-Current Status

* Corresponding Author: Wail Alkashkari, MD Department of Cardiology King Saud Bin Abdulaziz University For Health Science and King Faisal Cardiac Center P.O. Box 9515, Jeddah, 21423, Saudi Arabia Tel. +966 5 056 16454; Fax: +966 1 222 66200; E-Mail: wakash73@hotmail.com Fax +1 203 785 3346 E-Mail: jshd@scienceinternational.org http://structuralheartdisease.org/ © 2018 Journal of Structural Heart Disease Published by Science International Corp. ISSN 2326-4004
Commentary on “Multidisciplinary tumor board decision-making for postoperative radiotherapy in thymic epithelial tumors: insights from the RYTHMIC prospective cohort”

Thymic epithelial neoplasms, including thymoma, thymic carcinoma, and thymic neuroendocrine tumors, are rare intrathoracic malignancies that may act in an aggressive manner (1,2). At least 15 different stage classification systems for these lesions have been proposed and used to varying degrees clinically, most of which have been derived from small data sets (3). Until recently, the most widely used staging classifications were the Masaoka and Masaoka-Koga staging systems, both based on a single institution cohort of less than 100 patients.
South Asia’s Economic Integration with East Asia: An Exploratory Analysis with a Focus on India

Economic integration of South Asia and East Asia has been growing steadily since the 1990s, fuelled by domestic reforms and the emergence of regional supply chains. Within South Asia, India emerged as the largest trading partner and investment destination for East Asian economies. With its new Act East Policy, India has been proactively looking at free trade agreements with Association of Southeast Asian Nation and East Asia, which has brought benefits to South Asia in terms of improved trade and increased investment. This paper assesses the experience of the economic integration of South Asia and East Asia by addressing questions such as the extent of trade integration achieved and impediments to deepening integration. It found that trade and investment linkages are growing as well as casually related. However, attaining the full potential of economic integration is constrained by the insufficient depth in the use of existing trade agreements, barriers to service trade, and poor infrastructure connectivity. Expansion of Regional Comprehensive Economic Cooperation would significantly enhance economic integration of South Asia, particularly India, and East Asia.
Disseminating the Cost of the Empty Chair: Improving Healthcare Access and No-Show Rates Through Age and Disease-Specific Education in the Pediatric Asthma Patient Populations

IV ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS . V CHAPTER 1 . 1 HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES . 1 STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM . 4 PURPOSE AND RATIONALE OF THE STUDY . 4 RESEARCH DESIGN . 5 SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY . 5 RESEARCH QUESTIONS . 6 ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS. 6 LIMITATIONS OF THE STUDY . 7 DEFINITION OF TERMS . 8 SUMMARY . 11 CHAPTER 2 . 13 LITERATURE REVIEW . 13 SOCIETAL BURDEN OF CHRONIC DISEASE . 14 FINANCIAL BURDEN OF CHRONIC DISEASE . 16 PERSONAL HEALTH RISK BEHAVIORS . 19 HEALTH IMPACT OF ADDICTION AND YOUTH SMOKING . 21
River patterns reveal two stages of landscape evolution at an oblique convergent margin, Marlborough Fault System, New Zealand

Abstract. Here we examine the landscape of New Zealand's Marlborough Fault System (MFS), where the Australian and Pacific plates obliquely collide, in order to study landscape evolution and the controls on fluvial patterns at a long-lived plate boundary. We present maps of drainage anomalies and channel steepness, as well as an analysis of the plan-view orientations of rivers and faults, and we find abundant evidence of structurally controlled drainage that we relate to a history of drainage capture and rearrangement in response to mountain-building and strike-slip faulting. Despite clear evidence of recent rearrangement of the western MFS drainage network, rivers in this region still flow parallel to older faults, rather than along orthogonal traces of younger, active strike-slip faults. Such drainage patterns emphasize the importance of river entrenchment, showing that once rivers establish themselves along a structural grain, their capture or avulsion becomes difficult, even when exposed to new weakening and tectonic strain. Continued flow along older faults may also indicate that the younger faults have not yet generated a fault damage zone with the material weakening needed to focus erosion and reorient rivers. Channel steepness is highest in the eastern MFS, in a zone centered on the Kaikōura ranges, including within the low-elevation valleys of main stem rivers and at tributaries near the coast. This pattern is consistent with an increase in rock uplift rate toward a subduction front that is locked on its southern end. Based on these results and a wealth of previous geologic studies, we propose two broad stages of landscape evolution over the last 25 million years of orogenesis. In the eastern MFS, Miocene folding above blind thrust faults generated prominent mountain peaks and formed major transverse rivers early in the plate collision history. A transition to Pliocene dextral strike-slip faulting and widespread uplift led to cycles of river channel offset, deflection and capture of tributaries draining across active faults, and headward erosion and captures by major transverse rivers within the western MFS. We predict a similar landscape will evolve south of the Hope Fault, as the locus of plate boundary deformation migrates southward into this region with time.
Effect of lymphocyte-to-monocyte ratio on survival in septic patients: an observational cohort study

Introduction: The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the potential relationship of lymphocyte-to-monocyte ratio (LMR) with outcomes of septic patients at intensive care unit (ICU) admission. Material and methods: 3087 septic patients were included in the final cohort by using the Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care (MIMIC) database. We evaluated the association of different groups of LMRmax with 28-day survival and 1-year survival via Kaplan-Meier (K-M) analysis and Cox regression analysis. Subgroups analysis of LMRmax was performed to further explore the effect of LMRmax on survival. Results: According to the optimal cut-off value, the cohort was divided into low-LMRmax and high-LMRmax groups. The 28-day and 1-year survival rates were 47.9% and 19.9%, respectively, in the low-LMRmax group, and 60.4% and 25.9%, respectively, in the high-LMRmax group. Univariate logistic regression and K-M analyses revealed that the 28-day and 1-year survival rates of the high-LMRmax group were higher than those of the low-LMRmax group (both p < 0.001). A subgroup analysis of LMRmax identified a significant stepwise decrease in the risk of death at 28 days and 1 year from group 1 to group 4 (LMRmax increased gradually) after adjustment for multiple variables. Conclusions: We report for the first time that a lower LMRmax value is independently predictive of a poor prognosis in septic patients. Therefore, as an inexpensive and readily available indicator, LMRmax may facilitate stratification of prognosis in septic patients.
Embedded predictive control strategy based on Internet of Things technology: Application to a thermal process under imperfect wireless network

This article is concerned with the design of wireless-networked control framework based on Internet of Things technology and predictive control strategy to remote control a thermal benchmark system. In order to improve the control performance of systems, an autonomous real-time solution is proposed for handling network problems. The adopted control strategy is divided into two cooperative parts under a master–slave architecture, in which two STM32 microcontrollers are investigated. The slave board is connected closely to the process and the master one is a distant controller. The microcontrollers communicate wirelessly through the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol. In the master board, a model predictive output-estimator-based controller is designed to control wirelessly the benchmark system, even though the incoming outputs from the slave board are lost. However, a buffered structure is implemented on the slave board to compensate the input losses of the arrived control sequences. The performance of the proposed wireless-networked predictive control compensation strategy for packet loss and perturbation handling in the wireless-networked control system in this work is verified through different experimentation conditions. Also, a comparative study with a wireless-networked proportional integral controller is performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of wireless-networked predictive control strategy for practical Internet of Things applications.
Mitigating ecosystem impacts of bottom trawl fisheries for North Sea sole Solea solea by replacing mechanical by electrical stimulation

Ecosystem effects of bottom trawl fisheries are a major concern. We analysed whether the replacement of mechanical stimulation by electrical stimulation may reduce the adverse impacts on the benthic ecosystem in the beam trawl fishery for sole. Although the use of electricity is not allowed to catch fish in European Union waters, a number of beam trawlers got derogation and switched to pulse trawling to explore the potential to reduce impacts. We extended a recently developed assessment framework and showed that the switch to pulse trawling substantially reduced benthic impacts when exploiting the Total Allowable Catch of sole in the North Sea. We applied the framework to Dutch beam trawl logbook data from 2009 to 2017 and estimated that the trawling footprint decreased by 23%; the precautionary impact indicator of the benthic community decreased by 39%; the impact on median longevity decreased by 20%; the impact on benthic biomass decreased by 61%; the amount of sediment mobilised decreased by 39%. The decrease is due to the replacement of tickler chains by electrode arrays, a lower towing speed and higher catch efficiency for sole. The effort and benthic impact of the beam trawl fishery targeting plaice Pleuronectes platessa in the central North Sea increased with the recovery of the plaice stock. This study illustrates the usefulness of a standardized methodological framework to assess the differences in time trends and trawling impact between gears.
Friends or enemies? Chemical recognition and reciprocal responses among invasive Ponto-Caspian amphipods

Chemical communication plays a significant role in the aquatic environment, enabling the mutual recognition of mates, predators and food items. Invasive species facing new communities are subjected to a huge variety of new scents. Their ability to recognize and interpret them adequately could be the reason of their successful establishment. We studied reciprocal chemical recognition among invasive freshwater Ponto-Caspian gammarids (Dikerogammarus villosus, Dikerogammarus haemobaphes and Pontogammarus robustoides) that often co-occur in native and invaded areas, to test their ability to avoid via chemical signals possible competitor and/or top intraguild-predator. We used a Y-maze with inflow of water to the Y-arms from two source tanks containing the signal (scent of living animals or the alarm cues released by crushed individuals) or a control (dechlorinated tap water), respectively. Time spent in the Y-maze zones, number of visits to the Y-arms and animal activity were analysed. Only D. villosus was attracted to conspecific and heterospecific alarm cues as well as to living heterospecifics. The other two species avoided the scent of D. villosus. We conclude that D. villosus, as the strongest competitor and intra-guild predator (including cannibalism) among the tested species, perceived various scents as potential food cues and posed a threat to other gammarids.
External Fixation by Locking Plate as a Deﬁnitive Treatment of Tibial Distal Metaphyseal Fractures

Background: Traditional external fixation used for open or soft tissue compromised tibial distal metaphyseal fractures is used both as a temporizing or definitive treatment to minimize more traumas to the soft tissue, but it has its own shortcomings such as joint spanning and bulky construct. Lower profile locked plates used as external fixation may overcome such problems. Methods: A series of 16 open or with soft tissue compromised tibial distal metaphyseal fractures were treated using locking plate as a definitive external fixator. Time to union, nonunion, malunion, device failure, function for the knee and ankle, and deep and pin tract infections were evaluated. Results: All fractures healed without any complications (nonunion, malunion, device failure, or infections including deep and pin tracts). The mean time of fracture healing was 18 weeks (ranged 12 to 26). After walking with full weight-bearing for 1 month, the patients underwent plate removal. The mean hospital for special surgery (HSS) score was 89 (ranged 84 to 100) and 95 (ranged 91 to 100), and the mean American orthopaedic foot and ankle society (AOFAS) score was 93 (ranged 89 to 100) and 95 (ranged 92 to 100) at 4 weeks postoperatively and final follow-up (mean period of 16 months). Conclusions: Application of the locking plate as an external fixator for definitive treatment of distal tibial fractures had the advantages of traditional external fixators and at the same time overcame its shortcomings due to its low-profile frame; therefore, it was more acceptable to patients and Joint-sparing frame gave the opportunity for early range of motion and function exercise. It was a safe and reliable technique with minimal complications and excellent outcomes.
Volatility as an Asset Class: Holding VIX in a Portfolio

Hedging market downturns without sacrificing upside has long been sought by investors. If VIX was directly investable, adding it as a hedge to the S&amp;P 500 would result in significantly improved performance over the equity only portfolio. However, tradable VIX products do not provide the hedge or returns investors seek over long-term horizons. Alternatively, deconstructing VIX to find the key S&amp;P 500 options which drive VIX movements leads to a synthetic VIX portfolio that provides a more effective hedge. Using these options captures correlations and returns similar to VIX, and combined with the S&amp;P 500, outperforms the buy-and-hold index portfolio.