Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effects of Smoking and Smoking Cessation on the Intestinal Microbiota

Introduction: We evaluated associations of smoking heaviness markers and the effects of smoking cessation on the intestinal microbiota and cardiovascular disease risk factors in current smokers undertaking a quit attempt. Methods and Results: Participants were current smokers enrolled in a randomized clinical trial of smoking cessation therapies with visits, risk factor measurements, and fecal collections at baseline, 2, and 12 weeks after starting a quit attempt. Genomic DNA was extracted from fecal samples followed by 16S rRNA gene sequencing and analysis using the QIIME2 software workflow. Relative abundances of bacterial taxa and alpha- and beta- diversity measures were compared. Longitudinal changes in bacterial taxa abundances were compared using analysis of covariance (ANCOVA). The 36 smokers were (mean [standard deviation]) 51.5 (11.1) years old (42% male) and smoked 15.1 (6.4) cigarettes per day for 22.7 (11.9) pack-years. Their exhaled carbon monoxide (CO) levels were 17.6 (9.3) ppm. At baseline, relative abundances of the phylum Actinobacteria were correlated inversely with pack-years (rho=-0.44, p=0.008) and Cyanobacteria were correlated positively with CO levels (rho=0.39, p=0.021). After 12 weeks, abundances of the phylaBacteroidetes increased (pANCOVA=0.048) and Firmicutes decreased (pANCOVA=0.036) among abstainers compared to continuing smokers. Increases in alpha-diversity were associated with lower heart rates (rho=-0.59, p=0.037), systolic blood pressures (rho=-0.58, p=0.043), and C-reactive protein levels (rho=-0.60, p=0.034). Conclusions: Smoking cessation leads to minor changes in the intestinal microbiota. It is unclear if the proven health benefits of smoking cessation lead to salutary changes in the intestinal microbiota and if such changes affect cardiovascular disease risk.
Neonatal death: supporting bereaved mothers

Background: Death of a child is a devastating experience for parents, owing to which parents may show dissatisfaction towards medical care or suffer from intense and prolonged grief. The objective of the present study was to explore the needs of bereaved mothers after the death of their infant. Methods: The present study was a descriptive qualitative design that consisted of 10 mothers who have been bereaved in the past year. All mothers were recruited from the registry. Data were obtained through an unstructured single interview and analyzed using conventional content analysis. Results: The current study demonstrated that parents had the same needs despite their different backgrounds, socioeconomic standards, and religious beliefs. Their needs were based on several main points; 1) Lack of sensitivity/method in delivering the news, 2) Bonding with the child; 3) Safety and family support; 4) Providing understanding and meaning; 5) Ability to express emotions. Conclusions: The key components that should be considered to support the bereaved parents include honesty, information, choices, and timing. The present study provided a comprehensive view of the overall experiences of the parents with neonatal death and the ability to give guidance to the healthcare providers.
THE ROLE OF LEADER POLITICAL SKILL AND ETHICAL LEADERSHIP ON EMPLOYEE DEVIANCE BEHAVIOR

Political skill reflects capabilities to show social concern, to make interactions, and to give influence. Political skill is often associated with the leader figure. Leader political skill will determine the style and behavior of leaders, including ethical leadership. Ethical leadership is a leadership process that transfers ethical leader behavior on employee behavior through the mechanism of social learning, exchange and identity. Leaders who have political skill will be viewed to be more ethical than leaders who are lack of political skill. Leaders with political skill will demonstrate their ability to behave in a manner which is consistent with the existing ethical norms. Ethical leadership, in turn, will affect employees in various aspects, such as commitment, satisfaction on the leaders, trust, leaders’effectiveness, and organizational citizenship behavior; it also creates an ethical climate within the organization, which in turn, can reduce employee deviant behavior in the workplace (Kalshoven et al. 2011, Mayer et al., 2010). This study aims to examine the relationship between leader political skill, ethical leadership, ethical climate, and deviant behavior in the workplace.This study is conducted in the local government in Karanganyar, Indonesia. Data is analyzed by using Partial Least Square (PLS), a method which combines path regression and confirmatory factor analysis. Results show that leader political skill is positively and significantly related to ethical leadership which is positively and significantly related to the ethical climate. The ethical climate that is confirmed to mediate the relationship between ethical leadership and deviant behavior is also proved to be negatively and significantly related to employee deviant behavior.
Distributed Fault-Tolerant Classi(cid:2)cation in Wireless Sensor Networks

(cid:151)Fault-tolerance and data fusion have been considered as two fundamental functions in wireless sensor networks. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for distributed multiclass classi(cid:2)cation using a fault-tolerant fusion rule for wireless sensor networks. Binary decisions from local sensors, possibly in the presence of faults, are forwarded to the fusion center that determines the (cid:2)nal classi(cid:2)cation result. Classi(cid:2)cation fusion in our approach is implemented via error correcting codes to incorporate fault-tolerance capability. This new approach not only provides an improved fault-tolerance capability but also reduces computation time and memory requirements at the fusion center. Code matrix design is essential for the design of such systems. Two ef(cid:2)cient code matrix design algorithms are proposed in this paper. The relative merits of both algorithms are also studied. We also develop suf(cid:2)cient conditions for asymptotic detection of the correct hypothesis by the proposed approach. Performance evaluation of the proposed approach in the presence of faults is provided. These results show signi(cid:2)cant improvement in fault-tolerance capability as compared with conventional parallel fusion networks.
Phage display libraries of differently sized bicyclic peptides

Phage selections with combinatorial libraries of uniformly sized bicyclic peptides have recently yielded potent and selective binders of several protein targets. In this work we varied in a combinatorial fashion the ring sizes of bicyclic peptides in phage libraries, expecting that they would yield binders with higher affinities and/or more diverse binding motifs that could be affinity matured. 14 new phage peptide libraries of the format Cys-(Xaa)m-Cys-(Xaa)n-Cys (Xaa are random amino acids, m and n = 3, 4, 5 or 6) were generated and cyclized with tris-(bromomethyl)benzene. Affinity selections against the tumor-associated serine protease urokinase-type plasminogen activator yielded bicyclic peptide inhibitors with a large variety of consensus sequences. Several of the identified consensus sequences were exclusively found in bicyclic peptides having defined ring size combinations. Some of these peptides may bind in orientations that allow affinity maturation of non-conserved regions, while others do not. Having available multiple leads isolated from such bicyclic peptide libraries with variable ring sizes could therefore be a great asset for the generation of high affinity binders.
A web based expert system for identification and management of insect pests of tobacco

Insect pests are one of the major constraints in tobacco crop production resulting in substantial losses. An accurate and rapid diagnosis can help to take up appropriate and timely corrective measures to minimize the yield losses. Web based expert system on insect pests of tobacco, identification, damage symptoms and their management was developed using an online tool “Agridaksh”. The system was developed using ontology based method for identification and management of insect pests and the database was designed in a tree structure. A knowledge model has been created in such a way that includes knowledge acquisition, problem identification and a knowledge retrieval system for tobacco insect pests. This system can be accessed at any location and point of time by the users through user friendly menus and inference engine using Internet. This will be useful to enhance the capacity of tobacco farmers, extension personnel and crop development agencies for effective pest management leading to increased yield and improved quality of tobacco
Personality, stress, coping and coping effectiveness in aiming sport

Aiming sports are assumed to be sensitive to stress and pressure demanding effective coping for competitive excellence. Previous research has revealed that personality may affect coping selection in a direct way by restricting or assisting the use of specific coping strategies or in an indirect way by influencing the nature and appraisal of the stressor experienced or coping effectiveness. Surprisingly, little is known about the influence of personality on appraisal and coping with stressor specifically in aiming sport and in sport, in general. The aim of this study was to examine the influence of personality on the appraisal process, coping and perceived effectiveness among 200 national level athletes (male n = 100, female n = 100) aged between 16 and 25 years (mean = 20.43, SD = 3.03) from a variety of aiming sports. Results revealed that personality influenced coping selection, coping effectiveness, and the intensity of the stressor experienced and perceived control, but not the type of stressor reported. Findings indicated that higher level of neuroticism was associated with lower extraversion, conscientiousness, decreased perception of stress control and lower use of problem-focused coping and lower level of neuroticism was associated with higher intensity of stress experienced and higher use of emotion-focused coping. Higher level of neuroticism was also associated negatively with the effectiveness of useful coping strategies. The other four personality dimensions were associated with the usage and effectiveness of more adaptive coping strategies. Therefore, the present study revealed that personality affects coping selection directly and influences the appraisal process, coping and coping effectiveness.
Characterization of the alpha- and beta- tubulin polypeptides in Saccharomyces cerevisiae

Microtubules, involved in a number of critical, diverse cellular structures and functions, are composed primarily of two related but non-identical, highly conserved subunits, alphaand beta-tubulin. The precise secondary and tertiary interactions of the tubulin subunits are still poorly understood, likely because native alphaor beta-tubulin has not been purified in large enough quantities to perform structural or biochemical analysis. Crystal structures, which would provide extensive structural information about these molecules and their interactions, have not been reported. I sought to characterize the alphaand beta-tubulin polypeptides using two approaches, one genetic and one biochemical. E. Raff's laboratory characterized a series of mutations in the testes-specific beta-tubulin of D. melanogaster. Strains homozygous for B2t8 exhibited an intriguing phenotype. All microtubule structures were disrupted, with Sor Ushaped, rather than O-shaped microtubule cross-sections. The phenotype suggested a defect in packing within the microtubule polymer. Sequence analysis revealed a glutamic acid to lysine substitution at highly conserved position 288. I generated the same mutation in the sole beta-tubulin of S. cerevisiae. Phenotypic analysis revealed no defects in growth at several temperatures, mating, sporulation, or germination. The only phenotype was a slight alteration in the sensitivity to the anti-mitotic drug benomyl. These results demonstrate that microtubules are differentially susceptible to in vivo growth conditions or alterations in the beta-tubulin primary sequence. To examine the properties of the individual tubulin subunits biochemically, we developed a procedure to enrich for alphaor beta-tubulin in the absence of its heterodimeric partner. Co-immunoprecipitated alphaand beta-tubulin dissociated when exposed to low concentrations of non-ionic detergents. GTP inhibited the detergent-mediated separation of tubulin heterodimer. Relatively pure alphaand beta-tubulin was tested for its ability to bind GTP, using a photo-cross-linking assay. Native levels of GTP binding could be restored in the eluates when -both tubulin subunits were present in equimolar amounts, demonstrating both chains contribute to tubulin GTP binding. Thesis supervisor: Dr. Frank Solomon Title: Professor of Biology
Fluorescence-Activated Cell Sorting for CGMP Processing of Therapeutic Cells

level: interMeDiate Cell therapy using embryonic or adult stem cells for regenerative medicine is generating high interest in the global medical community and in the general population. Physicians and patients are looking to cell therapies as potentially curative treatments for diseases such as diabetes, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Parkinson’s disease, Graft versus Host disease (GvHD), and cancer. Cell-based therapeutic products have been administered in clinics for nearly 90 years in the form of blood transfusions and for 50 years in the form of bone marrow transplants. With vast improvements over the past two decades in cell characterization, isolation, and in vitro manipulation, cell therapy has grown to include FDA-approved products such as • cell-infused support matrices to regenerate damaged or injured skin • investigative products for clinical trials such as cell-based vaccines for autoimmunity and cancer • cell-based therapeutics for the treatment of cardiovascular, inf lammatory, autoimmune, and neurodegenerative diseases and cancer. Furthermore, an increasing number of novel cell-based products for such indications have progressed closer to regulatory approval within the past three years. Cell therapy can be defined as the treatment or prevention of disease by administering cells that have been selected, manipulated, or altered outside the body. As more cell-based therapeutic products progress into clinical trials and commercialization, developing bioprocesses compliant with current good manufacturing practices (CGMP) has been challenging. This is because the final products are not traditional biological (secreted) molecules such as monoclonal antibodies but rather the cells themselves. Industry focus has turned to one element of the cell-based product manufacturing process, cell isolation, because of the demonstrated importance of cell purity and the special considerations related to protocol compliance to CGMP regulations. Here, we compare technical aspects of f luorescence-activated cell sorting (FACS) and other cell isolation methods, summarize regulatory guidance for CGMP-compliant cell isolation, and provide points to consider when using FACS within a CGMP compliant manufacturing environment. This is not intended to be a comprehensive review of the field, but provides a basis for further reading and understanding.
Mixed Facial Emotion Recognition using Active Appearance Model and Hidden Conditional Random Fields

Automatic emotion recognition through facial expression analysis is an emerging topic on affective computing and social signal processing which gains more attention. The development on this field has manyinfluences in human life related to the machineinteraction understand human to meet human needs.Existing research on emotion recognition focuses on recognizing basic emotions (happy, sad, surprise, disgust, fear, and angry), but less effort has been done for mixed emotion recognition due to its complexity. The challenge on mixed emotion recognition as a combination of basic emotions are still widely open and has not much been explored. We proposed a combination of Active Appearance Model (AAM) as a facial feature extraction framework and Hidden Conditional Random Field (HCRF) as a temporal classifier with hidden states as a model of mixed facial emotion recognition. The experiment on an arranged temporal CK+ dataset and our own mixed emotion dataset shows an improvement in accuracy rate compare to our previous methods, original CRF and SVM-CRF classifier.
GENTEL : GENerating Training data Efficiently for Learning to segment medical images

Accurately segmenting MRI images is crucial for many clinical applications. However, manually segmenting images with accurate pixel precision is a tedious and time consu-ming task. In this paper we present a simple, yet effective method to improve the efﬁciency of the image segmentation process. We propose to transform the image annotation task into a binary choice task. We start by using classical image processing algorithms with different parameter values to generate multiple, different segmentation masks for each input MRI image. Then, the user, instead of segmenting the pixels of the images, she/he only needs to decide if a segmentation is acceptable or not. This method allows us to efﬁciently obtain high quality segmentations with minor human intervention. With the selected segmentations we train a state-of-the-art neural network model. For the evaluation, we use a second MRI dataset (1.5T Dataset), acquired with a different protocol and containing annotations. We show that the trained network i) is capable to automatically segment cases where none of the classical methods obtained a high quality result ii) generalizes to the second MRI dataset, which was acquired with a different protocol and never seen at training time; and iii) allows to detect missannotations in this second dataset. Quantitatively, the trained network obtains very good results : DICE score - mean 0.98, median 0.99- and Hausdorff distance (in pixels) - mean 4.7, median 2.0-.
Comparative mineral uptake potential of some exotic weeds from family Asteraceae.

To complete life cycle successively all living organisms including human, other animal and plant also require a continuous supply of large number of substances from outside. This need is fulfilled by nutrition uptake in the form of mineral from soil. The essential nutrients required by higher plants are exclusively of inorganic nature. A plant for normal optimal growth requires sixteen different elements. The growth and productivity of plants is directly related to their mineral nutrient status present in soil. The mineral composition requirement varies among different plant species (Arzani et al., 2007). Minerals are essential for human nutrition and that are collected by consumining different plants where they get accumulated maximumly (Ajasa et al., 2004). This availability in plant species is controlled by their genetically fixed nutrient uptake potential, the nutrient ISSN: 2319-7706 Volume 3 Number 3 (2014) pp. 1013-1021 http://www.ijcmas. com
CHARTER SCHOOLS AND THE PROBLEM OF SEGREGATION IN U.S

Charter Schools emerged in the 1990s as an alternative to the U.S. public schools with the hope that charter schools would not be exposed to the same problems of the traditional public schools that are due to high levels of bureaucracy, less autonomy and no competition for students, hence for financial resources. This came about following the success of “magnet schools” that emerged as a product of the previous generation in the 1970s. Likewise, charter school movement had bipartisan support from many levels and today, although still only about 1 percent of students is enrolled in charter schools they emerged as a successful model to traditional public schools and even to the private schools in many areas. U.S. has the most diverse group of students in its history and all the basic trends indicate the diversity will become even greater. Among the school age population after only one generation the entire country will become a minority non-white or non-European in origin. Diversity is growing rapidly in the nation’s suburban rings, which have become the center of American life and politics. Yet schools remain largely segregated and are becoming more so although Americans still believe that their children benefit from integrated education and there is substantial evidence that those beliefs are correct. Segregated schools are still highly unequal. Segregation by race related to segregation by poverty and to many forms of educational inequality for African American and Latino students; few whites experience impoverished schools. Efforts to overcome the effects of segregation through special programs have had some success, but there is no evidence that they have equalized systems of segregated schools. Segregated schools particularly those in big cities have stunningly high levels of high school dropouts and very poor records of preparing students for higher education. Segregation has not been a successful educational or social policy. Yet U.S. school system is experiencing a continuing expansion of segregation for both blacks and Latinos and serious backward movement in the South. Specifically in this study, effect of charter school movement on the issue of ethnic, racial, religious, socio-economic segregation has been analyzed and it has been concluded that in fact there is a relation between the segregation issue and the charter school movement and that this relationship is mostly a negative one unlike magnet schools, which substantially improved the segregation problem in the 1970s; however it was not clear whether it is the charter school movement that is the cause or it is the other way around.
INDUCEMENT OF COGNITIVE CONFLICT IN THE TEACHING OF GAMES TACTICS IN PHYSICAL EDUCATION

Physical Education has been -and is stilldominated by the behaviorist philosophy’s technical approach to teaching and learning, which focuses on the development of technical skills in isolation from the context in which they unfold, i.e. the game situation. A growing number of scientists and researchers in the field claim that this has resulted in the inability of students to transfer the technical skills in the actual game. Moreover, it has effected reduced participation and alienation of students from physical activity. According to constructivist theory, students come to class with existing conceptions or preconceptions regarding the world around them and, if ignored by the teacher, they are simply suppressed, not eliminated. Also, learning is viewed as a process of changing student preconceptions to meet accepted conceptions in each scientific discipline or, to use the commonly accepted term, as a process of conceptual change. The inducement of cognitive conflict constitutes a commonly used instructional strategy in sciences for the achievement of conceptual changes in students’ cognitive structures. A necessary prerequisite to inducing cognitive conflict is the elicitation of student preconceptions so that they are taken under consideration for the design and implementation of subsequent instructional interventions. Additionally, the constructivist philosophy’s tactical approach to teaching in Physical Education, advocates a more holistic approach to learning. It incorporates the cognitive dimension into the learning and teaching of Physical Education. It focuses on the understanding of the game and on game tactics in the realistic context of game-playing, before the learning and development of the technical aspect. The aim of the present paper is to highlight the potential of using the instructional strategy of inducement of cognitive conflict between student preconceptions on game tactics and accepted conceptions in the discipline, in the context of the tactical model of teaching and learning in Physical Education.