Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Raman Imaging and Fluorescence Lifetime Imaging Microscopy for Diagnosis of Cancer State and Metabolic Monitoring

Simple Summary In spite of significant improvements in diagnosis and treatment options, cancer treatments still suffer from late detection and patient-specific multidrug resistance causing limited efficacy of systemic drug therapies. This review delineates the pioneering works on current advances in Raman spectroscopy and fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy and their non-invasive application in in vitro and in vivo cancer identification, early-stage monitoring, drug screening, and metabolic analysis. In addition, the remaining challenges and limitations of the methods will be discussed and important aspects of their application in the clinic, enabling them to be a real asset to clinicians in the future and complementing current gold standard methods, will be explained. Abstract Hurdles for effective tumor therapy are delayed detection and limited effectiveness of systemic drug therapies by patient-specific multidrug resistance. Non-invasive bioimaging tools such as fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy (FLIM) and Raman-microspectroscopy have evolved over the last decade, providing the potential to be translated into clinics for early-stage disease detection, in vitro drug screening, and drug efficacy studies in personalized medicine. Accessing tissue- and cell-specific spectral signatures, Raman microspectroscopy has emerged as a diagnostic tool to identify precancerous lesions, cancer stages, or cell malignancy. In vivo Raman measurements have been enabled by recent technological advances in Raman endoscopy and signal-enhancing setups such as coherent anti-stokes Raman spectroscopy or surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy. FLIM enables in situ investigations of metabolic processes such as glycolysis, oxidative stress, or mitochondrial activity by using the autofluorescence of co-enzymes NADH and FAD, which are associated with intrinsic proteins as a direct measure of tumor metabolism, cell death stages and drug efficacy. The combination of non-invasive and molecular-sensitive in situ techniques and advanced 3D tumor models such as patient-derived organoids or microtumors allows the recapitulation of tumor physiology and metabolism in vitro and facilitates the screening for patient-individualized drug treatment options.
A High Plane of Nutrition Is Associated with a Lower Risk for Neonatal Calf Diarrhea on Bavarian Dairy Farms

Simple Summary Calf mortality and morbidity are still unacceptably high on many dairy farms worldwide. Neonatal calf diarrhea is the most common cause of disease and death in young calves. This study attempted to identify risk factors that are associated with the outbreak of this multifactorial disease on Bavarian dairy farms. For this purpose, farms with calf diarrhea as a herd problem were compared to farms without veterinarian treatment for calf diarrhea for one year before the study visit. The main factor that was associated with a lower risk of neonatal diarrhea was the provision of adequate amounts of milk as compared with lower milk feeding levels. In contrast, supplementation with iron soon after birth was associated with a higher risk for calf diarrhea as a herd problem. It is well known that poor colostrum management and restricted milk feeding compromise calf development and weaken the immune system. Therefore, it is not surprising that calves receiving more colostrum and more milk have a higher chance of remaining healthy. Ad libitum feeding of calves in the first three weeks of life is recommended. The observed association between an increased calf diarrhea risk and supplementation with iron after birth requires further investigation. Abstract In all bovine production systems, neonatal calf diarrhea remains worldwide an important issue of economic losses and animal welfare. The aim of the present study was to identify risk factors for neonatal calf diarrhea as a herd health problem on Bavarian dairy farms. For the purpose of this study, management factors related to calf health were retrospectively compared between 59 dairy farms with calf diarrhea as a herd problem with those of 18 control farms, where no veterinary treatment of calves for neonatal calf diarrhea took place for at least one year prior to the farm visit. A multivariable binary logistic regression analysis of management factors indicated that administration of 3 L or more of colostrum at the second feeding after birth (Odds ration [OR] = 0.21, 95% confidence interval [95% CI] = 0.05–0.89), ad libitum feeding of milk during the first week of life (OR = 0.06, 95% CI = 0.006–0.60), and administration of an iron containing preparation after birth (OR = 10.9, 95% CI = 1.25–95.6) were independently associated with the presence of a herd problem with neonatal diarrhea. Results of this study therefore suggest that a higher plane of nutrition is a protective factor with regard to the occurrence of neonatal diarrhea on Bavarian dairy farms. These findings support the establishment of ad libitum feeding programs in dairy calf rearing.
MVMD-MOMEDA-TEO Model and Its Application in Feature Extraction for Rolling Bearings

In order to extract fault features of rolling bearings to characterize their operation state effectively, an improved method, based on modified variational mode decomposition (MVMD) and multipoint optimal minimum entropy deconvolution adjusted (MOMEDA), is proposed. Firstly, the MVMD method is introduced to decompose the vibration signal into intrinsic mode functions (IMFs), and then calculate the energy ratio of each IMF component. The IMF component is selected as the effective component from high energy ratio to low in turn until the total energy proportion Esum(t) ≥ 90%. The IMF effective components are reconstructed to obtain the subsequent analysis signal x_new(t). Secondly, the MOMEDA method is introduced to analyze x_new(t), extract the fault period impulse component x_cov(t), which is submerged by noise, and demodulate the signal x_cov(t) by Teager energy operator demodulation (TEO) to calculate Teager energy spectrum. Thirdly, matching the dominant frequency in the spectrum with the fault characteristic frequency of rolling bearings, the fault feature extraction of rolling bearings are completed. Finally, the experiments have compared MVMD-MOEDA-TEO with MVMD-TEO and MOMEDA-TEO based on two different data sets to verify the superiority of the proposed method. The experimental results show that MVMD-MOMEDA-TEO method has better performance than the other two methods, and provides a new solution for condition monitoring and fault diagnosis of rolling bearings.
The Impact of Gender on Chinese Elementary School Teachers' Perceptions of Student Behavior Problems.

Conclusions: Results suggest that the most frequent type of student behavior problems in China differ from the West, and also differ for boys and girls. Teacher gender and student gender interactions appeared to influence teachers' perceptions of behavior problem seriousness. These findings support the idea that an exploration of gender and culture may be required for a more complete understanding of students' behavior problems.
The Journal of Macro Trends in Health and Medicine Effect of Buteyko Method on Asthma Control and Quality of Life of Filipino Adults with Bronchial Asthma

Background: The Buteyko Method is a non-pharmaceutical technique that has shown to be effective in decreasing the frequency and severity of asthma attacks in certain populations. Objectives: The aim of this study is to determine the effect of the Buteyko Method on asthma control and quality of life in Filipino adults with bronchial asthma. Methods: A quasi-experimental approach with pre-test and post-test design was used to evaluate the effect of the Buteyko Method. Sixteen adults with bronchial asthma, aged 18-40 years old, participated in the study. The experimental group (n=8) was given a 2 hour lecture on Buteyko Method and performed 90 minutes of breathing exercises daily. The control group (n=8) continued their usual treatment regimen. Asthma control and quality of life scores were measured every week for four consecutive weeks using the Asthma Control Questionnaire (ACQ) and Asthma Quality of Life Questionnaire (AQLQ). Findings: The experimental group showed a significant improvement in asthma control scores (p=0.029) and quality of life scores (p=0.006) after the 4 week period. The control group, however, showed no significant differences in asthma control scores (p=0.289) nor in their quality of life scores (p=0.390). Conclusion: The Buteyko Method has a significant positive effect on asthma control and quality of life when used as adjunct treatment in adults with bronchial asthma.
The Federal Reserve Is Not Very Constrained by the Lower Bound on Nominal Interest Rates

ABSTRACT:I survey the literature on monetary policy at the zero lower bound (ZLB) and effective lower bound (ELB) to make three main points: First, the Federal Reserve's forward guidance and large-scale asset purchases are effective monetary policy tools at the ZLB/ELB. Second, during the 2008–15 U.S. ZLB period, the Fed was not very constrained in its ability to influence medium- and longer-term interest rates and the economy. And third, the risks of the Fed being significantly constrained by the ELB in the future are typically greatly overstated. I conclude that the Federal Reserve is not very constrained by the lower bound on nominal interest rates.
Calibration Routine for Quantitative Three-Dimensional Flow Field Measurements in Drying Polymer Solutions Subject to Marangoni Convection

Surface-tension induced flows may have a significant impact on the surface topography of thin films or small printed structures derived from polymer solution processing. Despite a century of research on Marangoni convection, the community lacks quantitative experimental flow field data, especially from within drying solutions. We utilize multifocal micro particle tracking velocimetry (µPTV) to obtain these data and show a calibration routine based on point spread function (PSF) simulations as well as experimental data. The results account for a varying sample refractive index, beneficial cover-glass correction collar settings as well as a multifocal lens system. Finally, the calibration procedure is utilized exemplarily to reconstruct a three-dimensional, transient flow field within a poly(vinyl acetate)-methanol solution dried with inhomogeneous boundary conditions.
Detection, not mortality, constrains the evolution of virulence

Why would a pathogen evolve to kill its hosts when killing a host ends a pathogen’s own opportunity for transmission? A vast body of scientific literature has attempted to answer this question using “trade-off theory,” which posits that host mortality persists due to its cost being balanced by benefits of other traits that correlate with host mortality. The most commonly invoked trade-off is the mortality-transmission trade-off, where increasingly harmful pathogens are assumed to transmit at higher rates from hosts while the hosts are alive, but the pathogens truncate their infectious period by killing their hosts. Here I show that costs of mortality are too small to plausibly constrain the evolution of disease severity except in systems where survival is rare. I alternatively propose that disease severity can be much more readily constrained by a cost of behavioral change due to the detection of infection, whereby increasingly harmful pathogens have increasing likelihood of detection and behavioral change following detection, thereby limiting opportunities for transmission. Using a mathematical model, I show the conditions under which detection can limit disease severity. Ultimately, this argument may explain why empirical support for trade-off theory has been limited and mixed.
Fabry—Perot imaging of NGC 6090 in H2 emission

We have obtained an H2v=1–0 S(1) image of a merging galaxy system, NGC 6090, by using a Fabry–Perot imager. The H2 emission originates between the double nuclei of pre-merger galaxies, and exhibits an arc-like or ring-like structure almost connecting the double nuclei. This structure is similar to that suggested for Arp 220 from the velocity field measured by CO radio emission. The separation of the double nuclei in NGC 6090 is 5–6 arcsec, corresponding to a projected distance of 3–4 kpc. This is much larger than that of Arp 220 and suggests that the molecular gas distribution can form an organized shape between the nuclei, such as a ring, in a rather early phase of merging.
Comparative Evaluation and Ranking of the European Countries Based on the Interdependence between Human Development and Internal Security Indicators

New solutions and techniques for developing country policies are used under real conditions. The present study aims to propose a new approach for evaluating and ranking the European countries by using the interrelation between two groups of criteria, associated with the Human Development Index (HDI) and the World Internal Security and Police Index (WISPI). HDI and its components rank countries by value and detail the values of the components of longevity, education and income per capita. WISPI focuses on the effective rendering of security services and the outcome of rendered services. The priority of criteria is determined in the descending order of their correlation values with other group criteria. The criteria weights are set simultaneously for both groups by applying the weight balancing method WEBIRA. The methodology based on minimising sum of squared differences of the weighted sums within groups is used. Finally, the generalised criteria measuring the level of the country are calculated using the SAW method. Cluster analysis of the countries was carried out and compared with MCDM results. The study revealed that WEBIRA ranking of countries is basically consistent with the results of cluster analysis. The proposed methodology can be applied to develop the management policy of the countries, as well as to their evaluation and ranking by using various indices, criteria and procedures. The results of this research can also be used to reveal national policy choices, to point out government policy priorities.
Survey on Human Activity Recognition based on Acceleration Data

Human activity recognition is an important area of machine learning research as it has many utilization in different areas such as sports training, security, entertainment, ambient-assisted living, and health monitoring and management. Studying human activity recognition shows that researchers are interested mostly in the daily activities of the human. Therefore, the general architecture of HAR system is presented in this paper, along with the description of its main components. The state of the art in human activity recognition based on accelerometer is surveyed. According to this survey, Most of the researches recently used deep learning for recognizing HAR, but they focused on CNN even though there are other deep learning types achieved a satisfied accuracy. The paper displays a two-level taxonomy in accordance with machine learning approach (either traditional or deep learning) and the processing mode (either online or offline). Forty eight studies are compared in terms of recognition accuracy, classifier, activities types, and used devices. Finally, the paper concludes different challenges and issues online versus offline also using deep learning versus traditional machine learning for human activity recognition based on accelerometer sensors.
I T ] 2 8 Ju l 2 01 5 LP-decodable multipermutation codes ∗

In this paper, we introduce a new way of constructing and decoding multipermutation codes. Multipermutations are permutations of a multiset that generally consist of duplicate entries. We first introduce a class of binary matrices called multipermutation matrices, each of which corresponds to a unique and distinct multipermutation. By enforcing a set of linear constraints on these matrices, we define a new class of codes that we term LP-decodable multipermutation codes. In order to decode these codes using a linear program (LP), thereby enabling soft decoding, we characterize the convex hull of multipermutation matrices. This characterization allows us to relax the coding constraints to a polytope and to derive two LP decoding problems. These two problems are respectively formulated by relaxing the maximum likelihood decoding problem and the minimum Chebyshev distance decoding problem. Because these codes are non-linear, we also study efficient encoding and decoding algorithms. We first describe an algorithm that maps consecutive integers, one by one, to an ordered list of multipermutations. Based on this algorithm, we develop an encoding algorithm for a code proposed by Shieh and Tsai, a code that falls into our class of LP-decodable multipermutation codes. Regarding decoding algorithms, we propose an efficient distributed decoding algorithm based on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). Finally, we observe from simulation results that the soft decoding techniques we introduce can significantly outperform hard decoding techniques that are based on quantized channel outputs.
High Sensitivity Optical Sensing Based on Modal Interferences in One-Dimensional Photonic Crystals

A one-dimensional photonic crystal supporting two modes is presented as an interferometric integrated optical sensor. The sensing is carried out by obtaining the phase difference between both modes propagated through the same nanometric structure and how it changes when a refractive index (RI) variation over the sensor takes place. Due to the slow-light phenomenon, high sensitivities values are reached near the photonic bandgap edge region. As a result, a high performance, compact, and single-channel optical sensing approach is theoretically calculated and demonstrated with a wide range of applications in the biosensing field.
Towards Sentiment Analysis of Tobacco Products’ Usage in Social Media

Contemporary tobacco-related studies are mostly concerned with a single social media platform while missing out on a broader audience. Moreover, they are heavily reliant on labeled datasets, which are expensive to make. In this work, we explore sentiment and product identification on tobacco-related text from two social media platforms. We release SentiSmoke-Twitter and SentiSmoke-Reddit datasets, along with a comprehensive annotation schema for identifying tobacco products’ sentiment. We then perform benchmarking text classification experiments using state-of-the-art models, including BERT, RoBERTa, and DistilBERT. Our experiments show F1 scores as high as 0.72 for sentiment identification in the Twitter dataset, 0.46 for sentiment identification, and 0.57 for product identification using semi-supervised learning for Reddit.
The Effect of Work Satisfaction and Motivation to Turnover Intention with Organizational Commitment as Mediator Variable on Azevedo Consultant Firm

Work satisfaction is basically a very individual concept and highly depends on personalities of each employee. However there are several factors related to employee satisfaction such as social satisfaction, physical satisfaction, and financial satisfaction. This study aims to test the effect of Work Satisfaction and Motivation to Turnover Intention with Organizational Commitment as mediator variable. This study is split into two research model. The variables used in this study are Work Satisfaction and Motivation as independent variables, Organizational Commitment as mediating variables, and Turnover Intention as the dependent variable. The method used in this study is multiple regression analysis with SPSS version 23 as statistical tool. The results suggest that Work Satisfaction has positive and significant impact to Organizational Commitment, Motivation has positive and significant impact to Organizational Commitment, Work Satisfaction has negative and significant impact to Turnover Intention, Motivation has negative and significant impact to Turnover Intention, Organizational Commitment has negative and significant impact to Turnover Intention.
A viral histone H 4 encoded by Cotesia plutellae bracovirus inhibits haemocyte-spreading behaviour of the diamondback moth , Plutella xylostella

Received 13 November 2007 Accepted 23 December 2007 Histone H4 is highly conserved and forms a central-core nucleosome with H3 in eukaryotic chromatin. Its covalent modification at the protruding N-terminal region from the nucleosomal core can change the chromatin conformation in order to regulate gene expression. A viral H4 was found in the genome of Cotesia plutellae bracovirus (CpBV). The obligate host of the virus is an endoparasitoid wasp, C. plutellae, which parasitizes the diamondback moth, Plutella xylostella, and interrupts host development and immune reactions. CpBV has been regarded as a major source for interrupting the physiological processes during parasitization. CpBV H4 shows high sequence identity with the amino acid sequence of P. xylostella H4 except for an extended N-terminal region (38 aa). This extended N-terminal CpBV H4 contains nine lysine residues. CpBV H4 was expressed in P. xylostella parasitized by C. plutellae. Western blot analysis using a wide-spectrum H4 antibody showed two H4s in parasitized P. xylostella. In parasitized haemocytes, CpBV H4 was detected predominantly in the nucleus and was highly acetylated. The effect of CpBV H4 on haemocytes was analysed by transient expression using a eukaryotic expression vector, which was injected into non-parasitized P. xylostella. Expression of CpBV H4 was confirmed in the transfected P. xylostella by RT-PCR and immunofluorescence assays. Haemocytes of the transfected larvae lost their spreading ability on an extracellular matrix. Inhibition of the cellular immune response by transient expression was reversed by RNA interference using dsRNA of CpBV H4. These results suggest that CpBV H4 plays a critical role in suppressing host immune responses during parasitization.
Worldwide Acreage and Yield Response to International Price Change and Volatility: A Dynamic Panel Data Analysis for Wheat, Rice, Corn, and Soybeans

This article estimates a worldwide aggregate supply response for key agricultural commodities— wheat, rice, corn, and soybeans—by employing a newly-developed multi-country, crop-calendar-specific, seasonally disaggregated model with price changes and price volatility applied accordingly. The findings reveal that, although higher output prices serve as an incentive to improve global crop supply as expected, output price volatility acts as a disincentive. Depending on the crop, the results show that own-price supply elasticities range from about 0.05 to 0.40. Output price volatility, however, has negative correlations with crop supply, implying that farmers shift land, other inputs, and yield-improving investments to crops with less volatile prices. Simulating the impact of price dynamics since 2006, we find that price risk has reduced the production response of wheat in particular—and to a lesser extent, rice—thus dampening price incentive effects. The simulation analysis shows that the increase in own-crop price volatility from 2006–2010 dampened yield by about 1–2% for the crops under consideration.