Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
In Vitro Potency Assay for Newcastle Disease Vaccines

A quantification assay for the Haemagglutinin-Neuraminidase (HN) protein of Newcastle Disease Virus (NDV) has been developed at CIDC-Lelystad as a candidate in vitro potency test for inactivated Newcastle disease (ND) vaccines. In studies performed at CIDC-Lelystad, a high correlation was demonstrated between the results of this candidate in vitro potency assay and the results of the serological potency assay (European Pharmacopoeia monograph 0870; test A) [1-7]. Furthermore, a high correlation between the serological data (Haemagglutination Inhibition-antibody titres) and clinical protection after challenge was demonstrated. Correlation between in vivo and in vitro potency assays was confirmed in a collaborative pre-validation study [8]. In the pre-validation study three Official Medicines Control Laboratories (OMCLs) determined both the NDV-HN antigen content and the in vivo potency (vaccination-serology and vaccination-challenge) of 6 vaccine batches. The conclusion of the pre-validation study was that a large-scale collaborative study should be organised to validate the in vitro method and the suitability of the reference preparation. This report describes the outcome of this study. In brief, 14 laboratories (8 OMCLs and 6 vaccine manufacturers) determined the NDV-HN antigen content of 9 different vaccines in 3 independent tests. The vaccine batches were produced by 5 different manufacturers and represent a quantitative range of ND antigen content. One vaccine batch with insufficient potency and one poultry vaccine not containing NDV were included. Statistical evaluation of the results indicated that the antigen content could be determined with high precision. A good repeatability as well as reproducibility was found. Furthermore all laboratories found a similar ranking of the vaccines, based on the antigen content. Comparison of the antigen content and the in vivo potency of a series of vaccines with relatively low potencies indicated that a threshold relative antigen level of 7.0 antigen units per dose would discriminate between vaccine batches with sufficient and insufficient potency. An in vitro assay with this threshold level for antigen content did not result in any false positive results and only a limited number of false negative results in the BSP055 study. We conclude that the in vitro measurement of the antigen content of inactivated ND-vaccines with the proposed method is a reliable alternative potency assay that could be included as a new method in monograph 0870 on ND-vaccines.
Performance Evaluation of Natural Scenes Features to create Opinion Unaware-Distortion Unaware IQA Metric

There are many challenges facing image quality assessment (IQA) task. The greatest one which has been treated by this research is the difficulty of quantifying and evaluating distorted images quality blindly with no existence of the original (reference) image or partially from it. Choosing the appropriate features plays a significant role in measuring image quality. This study evaluates the efficiency of a set of features in quantifying image quality. The features have been gathered in spatial domain using the techniques of both rich edges and sharper regions of pristine natural images. The performance efficiency of these features examined through comparing them with both features gathered from reference and distorted images. These techniques employed to build two IQA metrics. Results clearly show the proposed pristine natural features competes reference features in assessing the distorted image quality. This proves the validity of these features in creating a robust metrics for evaluating distorted images. When testing the proposed metrics on LIVE database, experiment results show extracting features by means of rich edges is better than extracting it using sharper regions when assess the prediction monotonicity and applying the prediction accuracy evaluation. Besides they show the average outcome of the two techniques not only competes the popular full-reference peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), the structural similarity (SSIM), and the developed NR natural image quality evaluator (NIQE) model but also outperform them.
Association of Soybean Food Intake and Cardiometabolic Syndrome in Korean Women: Korea National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (2007 to 2011)

Background Soybean food consumption has been considered as a possible way to lower incidence of cardiometabolic syndrome (CMS) among Asians. However, results from studies investigating its efficacy on CMS in Asians have been inconsistent. Methods We analyzed the association between soybean intake frequency and prevalence of CMS based on data from the Korea National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey 2007 to 2011. Data of 9,287 women aged 20 to 64 years were analyzed. Food frequency questionnaire was used to assess soybean food consumption frequency. General linear model and multivariable logistic regression model were used to examine the association of soybean intake quintile with CMS and its risk factors. Least square means of metabolic factors mostly showed no significant relevance except liver indexes. Results Compared to participants in the 1st quintile (<2 times/week of soybean food), odds ratios (OR) for CMS and abdominal obesity (AO) in the 4th quintile (8.5 times/week<soybean food≤17 times/week) were 0.73 (95% confidence interval [CI], 0.57 to 0.95) and 0.72 (95% CI, 0.58 to 0.90), respectively. After excluding Tofu products, ORs of CMS, AO, high blood pressure, and hypertriglyceridemia were lower than those without excluding Tofu products. However, results still did not show significant inverse linear trend across frequency quintiles. Conclusion Our findings suggest that soybean intake of 8.5 to 17 times/week was inversely associated with CMS in Korean women. The relation between soybean intake >17 times/week and CMS varied depending on soybean food items.
Evaluation of fish assemblage environment in Huwazah marsh, Iraq using Integrated Biological Index

Received: 21 December 2013 Accepted: 12 February 2014 Published: 20 March 2014 An Index of Biotic Integrity (IBI) was used to assess the status of the fish assemblage of Huwazah marsh, Iraq from October 2005 to September 2006. IBI scores were calculated from 14 separate assemblage metrics based on the species richness, species composition and trophic guilds. After more than two years of restoration activities and improved water quality, the state of the fish community in Huwazah marsh was fair (IBI= 53.2%), and better than the other marshes after four years of restoration. The results revealed that no substantial improvements have been recorded during the late years of restoration, reflect that the environment is still fragile and need time to be recovering. © 2014 PSCI Publisher All rights reserved.
Introspective and Adaptive Runtime Systems

Exascale hardware and applications bring numerous new challenges to the fore. Programmers have to grapple with the increasingly difficult challenges associated with power, temperature, heterogeneity, latencies, transient and persistent load imbalances, and strong scaling. The magnitude of these challenges at exascale strongly argues for lesser manual control by the programmer, and a shift towards automatic resource management during execution. In fact, such automation may be critical to making application development at exascale a feasible and productive effort. At such scale, applications will increasingly need the assistance of active, adaptive runtime systems that can absorb the burden of orchestrating execution. However, mainstream parallel programming paradigms like MPI are low-level by design, with runtimes that are passive on the resource management front. Research on introspective and adaptive runtime systems is essential for high performance and productivity. To enable and empower adaptive runtime systems, it will be necessary to change the programming model and execution model so that it generates migratable and separate work units and data units. The number of such units need to be substantially larger than the physical resources (such as number of cores), creating a degree of freedom that an adaptive runtime system can exploit. Furthermore, to maximize the potential for adaptivity, the RTS should implement an asynchronous data driven execution model, instead of abiding by the constraints of the mainstream bulk synchronous SPMD approach. The RTS then manages when and where work is executed, and where data is placed. New research is needed on developing highly scalable resource management strategies that leverage this control to optimize application performance as the application executes and evolves. We next describe the challenges, opportunities and specific research issues such an approach entails. a) Introspection: To be effective, the RTS must be able to observe application execution as it evolves. This involves inherent application characteristics possibly at the level of basic blocks and communication events. Involving the RTS in scheduling and mapping of work/data units, as well as in mediating communication between them, ensures that it has the hooks to do the measurements needed. These measurements can be used in reactive as well as predictive manner depending on whether the principle of persistence applies (see below). In addition to monitoring application behavior, the RTS must also monitor its hardware substrate: it is expected that the hardware will provide multiple signals and data, as well as expose many control knobs. For example, hardware may provide data on core temperatures, frequencies of corrected failures in caches/memories, and may allow software control of frequencies and voltages. Providing a lightweight system to carry out such monitoring and maintain databases, while tailoring the measurements and the associated overhead to only the metrics needed in particular application phases, is a research issue that must be addressed [3].
Visual Exploration of 3D Shape Databases Via Feature Selection

We present a visual analytics approach for constructing effective visual representations of 3D shape databases as projections of multidimensional feature vectors extracted from their shapes. We present several methods to construct effective projections in which different-class shapes are well separated from each other. First, we propose a greedy heuristic for searching for near-optimal projections in the space of feature combinations. Next, we show how human insight can improve the quality of the constructed projections by iteratively identifying and selecting a small subset features that are responsible for characterizing different classes. Our methods allow users to construct high-quality projections with low effort, to explain these projections in terms of the contribution of different features, and to identify both useful features and features that work adversely for the separation task. We demonstrate our approach on a real-world 3D shape database.
HRTF modeling by different methods

Head Related Transfer Function (HRTF) is commonly used to describe how an ear receives a sound from some point in space. By comparing the results of the convolution of a sound signal and a Head Related Impulse Response (HRIR, inverse Fourier transform of HRTF) in both ears, we are able to localize the source of the sound. There are different ways to obtain a HRTF, measurement being the most obvious. In this paper, we concentrate on three different ways to obtain HRTF of any human – measurement, personalization and a synthesis based on a structural mathematical model of a human body. Each method is shortly described and the results are presented. The aim is to discuss the pros and the cons of each method. We also try to predict the results of the subjective localization tests with different HRTF that are planned in near future, and suggest directions for future work in this area.
Man, You Should See a Therapist: A Quasi-Experimental Research Proposal to Increase Men's Engagement with Mental Health Help-Seeking Behavior using Masculine-Oriented Brochures

This paper seeks to understand reasons for men's underutilization of counseling through the theoretical lens of Connell's (1995) hegemonic masculinity. My hypothesis is that due to the adherence to Western society's dominant masculine traits, men avoid seeking psychotherapeutic help for fear of threatening their masculinity. Following an exploration of key definitions associated with masculinity and a review of existing literature on the relationship between masculinity and mental health help-seeking attitudes/behaviour, I will present a research proposal for a quasi-experimental study using brochures that appeal to men that could be a possible strategy to increase men's participation in therapy. Suggestions for further study will
Isolation and characterization of cDNA clones encoding a novel subfamily sporamin B in sweet potato

Abstract. Effendy J, Labonte DR, Efendi D. 2019. Isolation and characterization of cDNA clones encoding a novel subfamily sporamin B in sweet potato. Biodiversitas 20: 3033-3041. Three cDNAs (IbH23, IbH41, and IbH74) encoding sporamin of sweet potato, were isolated from a skinning injury cDNA library. The open reading frame consisted of 288 nucleotides and the deduced polypeptide sequences consist of 96 amino acids with missing 127 amino acid residues at 5′. The sequences shared identity [42-62% (IbH23 and IbH41) and 40-61% (IbH74)] to sporamins A and B previously identified in other sweet potato species. The IbSpors contained three of four signature cysteine residues of sporamin family (Cys135, Cys198, Cys209). In addition to similarity to sporamins, these cDNA clones also showed similarities to miraculin (29-35%); Kunitz trypsin inhibitor (29-36%); factor Xa inhibitor (32-38%); subtilisin inhibitor (26-37%); seed protein (32%); tumor-related protein (36% in IbH23 and IbH41); and [wound-responsive protein (30%), sexual organ responsive protein (29%), and proteinase inhibitor (26%) can only be found in IbH74]. The three partial mRNA transcripts showed induced and transient expression in response to skinning injury. The phylogenetic analysis revealed that they belonged to a new member of sporamin gene subfamily B and may play key roles in plant defense and wound repair in response to skinning injury in storage roots of sweet potato.
Building a Multilingual and Mixed Arabic-English Corpus

Most currently available test collections and almost all CLIR collections have focused upon general-domain news stories. In addition, most of these corpora are built to help with retrieval of documents based on monolingual queries, even if they are translated. This paper presents the first-phase - building the corpus - of ongoing research to study the trends of multilinguality with special focus on Arabic/English multilingual texts in both queries and documents in scientific domains. The necessity of such a corpus would help a lot in providing good algorithms for Web searching of scholars in the Arabic World. The paper presented also the features of such corpus, how it is collected and how it has been validated in terms of terms frequencies, sparseness and vocabulary growth, using statistical tests. Results showed that the data is imbalanced at present.
Compressed Video Stream Based Object Detection

Nowadays, the need for research on an intelligent video monitoring system is increasing worldwide. Among the object detection methods, the core technology of the intelligent video monitoring system, or object detection using a deep learning-based convolutional neural network, is used widely due to its proven performance. Nonetheless, deep learning-based object detection requires many hardware resources because it decodes the videos to analyze. Therefore, this article suggests an advanced object recognition technique by conducting compressed video stream-based object detection in order to reduce consumption of resources for object detection as well as improve performance and confirms via the performance evaluation that speed and recognition rate improved compared to existing algorithms such as YOLO, SSD, and Faster RCNN.
A SERVANT OF TWO MASTERS

A s an applied science, clinical psychology is the servant of two masters. Arguably, the primary goal of clinical research is to serve the public interest––to produce practicerelevant knowledge designed to improve the effectiveness of interventions and reduce the public health burden of mental disorder. However, on at least a part-time basis, clinical scientists are devoted to developing and testing psychological theories. These public health and theorytesting goals of clinical research are frequently in dynamic tension, as aptly illustrated in the article by Doss and Atkins (2006) on the challenges of investigating treatment mediation in the current clinical research climate. The authors critique commonly accepted methods for demonstrating mediation (e.g., Baron & Kenny, 1986; Kraemer, Wilson, Fairburn, & Agras, 2002) and suggest a variety of quasi-experimental designs for inferring likely mediation, when ethical and practical constraints make the use of traditional designs and analytic approaches difficult to implement. In this commentary, I provide a brief critique of the authors’ arguments and suggested solutions; however, I focus the bulk of my remarks on what I view as the central question underlying their article: How can the demands of public health relevance and theory testing be reconciled in modern psychotherapy research?
Incentivising innovation in the construction sector: the role of consulting contracts

The issue of whether contracts promote innovation and sustainability is an important but overlooked aspect for achieving energy and environmental targets, as well as for creating smart and sustainable cities. In this article, based on the principle/agent problem and Holmström and Milgrom’s work on optimal contracts it is argued that the current general conditions of architectural and engineering consulting agreements in Sweden (ABK 09)—a standard type of contract often used in developer/consultant relations—may not incentivize choices that support the long-term goals of society. Furthermore, although this exploratory study specifically analyses a Swedish standard contract, the question of how contractual incentive structures can optimize real-world performance is a general one, and thus the article’s findings have general applicability. This exploratory study also points to further research into how contractual structures impact climate-neutral buildings. In this way, Swedish consultants who use ABK 09 are incentivized to include low-risk, well-proven, and widely used technologies in order to minimize risks for themselves. This study contributes to resolving this dilemma by suggesting how ABK 09 could be restructured to change the balance between incentives and risk and incentivize innovation and sustainability. As mentioned above, the current study operates at a theoretical level. It discusses six possible changes that would better align the contract with the societal goals of innovation and sustainability.
Financial Consequences of Health Insurance: Evidence from the ACA's Dependent Coverage Mandate

We study the financial effects of health insurance for young adults using the Affordable Care Act’s dependent coverage mandate as a source of exogenous variation. Using nationally representative, anonymized credit report and publicly available survey data on medical expenditures, we exploit the mandate’s implementation in 2010 and its automatic disenrollment mechanism at age 26. Our estimates show that increasing access to health insurance lowered young adults’ out-of-pocket medical expenditures, debt in third-party collections, and the probability of personal bankruptcy. However, most improvements in financial outcomes are transitory, as they diminish after an individual ages out of the mandate at age 26.
Some observations on the biogeochemical cycling of zinc in the Australian sector of the Southern Ocean: a dedication to Keith Hunter

In this study we investigated the distribution of dissolved and particulate zinc (dZn and pZn respectively) and its isotopes in the Subantarctic Zone as part of a Geotraces Process voyage. dZn and pZn depth profiles contrasted each other, with dZn showing depletion within the euphotic zone while pZn profiles showed enrichment. Fitting a power law equation to the pZn profiles produced an attenuation factor of 0.82, which contrasted values for particulate phosphorus, cadmium and copper. The results indicate that zinc has a longer regeneration length scale than phosphorus and cadmium, but shorter than copper. The differential regeneration of pZn relative to that of particulate phosphorus likely explains why dZn appears to have a deeper regeneration profile than that of phosphate. The dZn isotope (δ66Zndissolved) profiles collected across the Subantarctic Zone showed differing profile structures. For one station collected within an isolated cold-core eddy (CCE), δ66Zndissolved showed surface enrichment relative to deep waters. The corresponding pZn isotope profiles within the CCE did not show enrichment; rather, they were subtly depleted in surface waters and then converged to similar values at depth. Zinc isotope fractionation can be explained through a combination of fractionation processes associated with uptake by phytoplankton, zinc complexation by natural organic ligands and zinc regeneration from particulate matter.
Management of Performance in Higher Education Institutions: The Application of the Balanced Scorecard (BSC)

Abstract Universities play a crucial role in the development of any nation. The success of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) is the bedrock of the growth in human capacity required to support the growth of an economy. However, HEIs have been criticized for not playing their rightful role in national development. This has been partly attributed to not being able to manage their performance in view of the dynamic and turbulent environment they are operating in. Most HEIs have been caught up in the “business as usual” situation preferring doing things in the traditional ways as opposed to changing with the times. As a result their survival has been at risk especially from those HEIs who have adopted the “business un-usual” mentality. It is as a result of the challenges facing Kenyan HEIs that this paper proposes an adoption of the Balanced Scorecard as a management tool in HEIs. This paper provides a review of literature on the HEI environment globally and in Kenya, highlighting the challenges faced by Kenyan HEIs and proposes the use of the BSC to address the same. The BSC is a tool that helps mainstream the vision and mission of HEIs in their activities thus making the HEIs become strategy focused organizations. The BSC is a strategic planning and management system used to align business activities to the vision and strategy of the organization and to monitor organization performance against strategic goals. Finally, a sample BSC for HEIs in Kenya is proposed. It is felt that if HEIs focused on the issues proposed and measured their performance on the issues identified, their performance will be improved tremendously.
Conceptualization and Operationalization of the Altruistic and Egoistic Continuum of OCB Motivations

This study proposed a continuum on OCB motivations, incorporating both altruistic motivators and egoistic motivators, which provided a holistic framework on OCB motivation study. The study used a quantitative research design and empirical data collected from hotel employees were used to validate the conceptual framework. The results suggested that although OCBs can be motivated by both altruistic and egoistic motivations, the strength of impacts is dependent on the targets of OCB and the closeness of relationships between employees and OCB targets. The study made significant contribution to research on OCB motivation and also has practical implications to the hotel industry.