Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
PQQ Dietary Supplementation Prevents Alkylating Agent-Induced Ovarian Dysfunction in Mice

Alkylating agents (AAs) that are commonly used for cancer therapy cause great damage to the ovary. Pyrroloquinoline-quinine (PQQ), which was initially identified as a redox cofactor for bacterial dehydrogenases, has been demonstrated to benefit the fertility of females. The aim of this study was to investigate whether PQQ dietary supplementation plays a protective role against alkylating agent-induced ovarian dysfunction. A single dose of busulphan (20 mg/kg) and cyclophosphamide (CTX, 120 mg/kg) were used to establish a mouse model of ovarian dysfunction. Feed containing PQQNa2 (5 mg/kg) was provided starting 1 week before the establishment of the mouse model until the date of sacrifice. One month later, estrous cycle period of mice were examined and recorded for consecutive 30 days. Three months later, some mice were mated with fertile male mice for fertility test. The remaining mice were sacrificed to collect serum samples and ovaries. One day before sacrifice, some mice received a single injection of BrdU to label proliferating cells. Serum samples were used for test hormonal levels. Ovaries were weighted and used to detect follicle counts, cell proliferation, cell apoptosis and cell senescence. In addition, the levels of inflammation, oxidative damage and Pgc1α expression were detected in ovaries. Results showed that PQQ treatment increased the ovarian weight and size, partially normalized the disrupted estrous cycle period and prevented the loss of follicles of mice treated with AAs. More importantly, we found that PQQ treatment significantly increased the pregnancy rate and litter size per delivery of mice treated with AAs. The protective effects of PQQ appeared to be directly mediated by promoting cell proliferation of granulosa, and inhibiting cell apoptosis of granulosa and cell senescence of ovarian stromal cells. The underlying mechanisms may attribute to the anti-oxidative stress, anti-inflammation and pro-mitochondria biogenesis effects of PQQ.Our study highlights the therapeutic potential of PQQ against ovarian dysfunction caused by alkylating agents.
Adaptive Lane Keeping Control of Tractor-Semitrailer Combination Vehicles

In this paper, a new lane keeping control scheme for combination vehicles using trailer wheel steering, front and rear wheel steering of tractor is proposed. At first, an estimator for unknown curvatures of target lanes is proposed. Then, using the estimate of curvatures, a method to estimate ideal combination angle is proposed. Using the estimate of road curvature and ideal combination angle, exact lane keeping can be achieved in steady state. Next, a method to design ideal transient responses for relative lateral distance, relative yaw angle and relative combination angle is proposed.Then, an adaptive steering controller to achieve ideal responses is developed. The proposed controller doesn't require any accurate knowledge of vehicle parameters, and can achieve good lane keeping performance with setting only one design parameter.
Building Environmental Assessment of Construction and Building Materials

Sustainability assessment of buildings can be defined as a specific complex of proceedings oriented towards systematic and objective evaluation of a building's performance. These processes lead to the design, construction and operation of buildings with respect to criteria for sustainable development. Since previous instances, the requirements of environmental safety, suitability and responsibility of buildings have increased. The criteria of sustainability are included in building environmental assessment systems and tools used in different countries for evaluating their sustainable and environmental performance. In recent years the evaluation of building performance in terms of environmental, social and economic aspects has become a topic of discussion in the Slovak Republic, as well. The purpose of this paper is to introduce the building environmental assessment system (BEAS), which was developed at the Technical University of Kosice. The Slovak system was developed on the basis of existing systems used in many countries. The BEAS covers number of environmental, social and cultural factors. The manner and form of indicators evaluation is proposed according to the SBTool. The proposal of the main fields results from the quality of the outdoor and indoor environment, nature and landscape conservation, exploitation of natural resources and so on. The indicators were proposed according to available information analysis from particular fields of building performance as well as on the base of own experimental experiences. The field of building construction will be introduced in the paper.
Understanding Social Behaviors in the Indoor Environment: A complex network approach

Being able to monitor and analyze human interactions in the indoor environment over time has many architectural applications from spatial planning to post occupancy evaluation. In this paper, we present our interdisciplinary approach that interprets human-spatial interactions as a complex network. We combine methods and techniques from sensor networks, signal processing, data mining, network theory, and information visualization to form a novel framework that facilitates versatile investigations. We will demonstrate the framework with a real-world case study: we have collected and analyzed human-spatial interaction data from a workshop scenario where multiple design projects were conducted within a shared studio space.
Small‐size narrow‐frame PIFA for LTE/WWAN/GNSS handset application

A small‐size coupled‐fed planar inverted‐F antenna (PIFA) formed by feeding strip, shorted strip and parasitic strip for eight‐band operation in the mobile phone is proposed and discussed. First coupling the feeding strip and shorted strip generates a lower frequency resonant mode and a wide upper band. Then a parasitic strip has been added and reasonably adjusted its shape, so that the antenna is fully covering the GSM850/900/GNSS/GSM1800/1900/UMTS2100/LTE2300/2500 eight‐band (VSWR <3). With a small size of 11 × 30 × 5 mm3, the proposed antenna can easily be printed on a corner of the circuit board without loading any lumped element and any special media material, ease of manufacturing. And the narrow‐side width of the antenna is only 11 mm, which makes it conducive to the realization of mobile phone narrow‐frame, in line with the current trend of narrow‐frame for mobile phone. Detailed simulation, experimental results and parametric analysis are presented. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 58:1689–1693, 2016
The Role of Social Safety Nets in Community Resilience and Performance of Food Security Projects

This paper examines the role of social safety nets in community resilience and performance of food security projects in Loima sub-County of Turkana County, Kenya. The study was conducted in Loima Sub-County which is in Turkana County of Kenya. The study area is among the poorest in Kenya due to frequent droughts, insecurity and low investments by successive regimes. The study employed semi-structured questionnaires, interview guides and observation check lists to gather data and information on the study variables. A total of 491 households were sampled across 11 sub-locations. The study findings showed that social safety nets have weak positive influence on community resilience and performance of food security projects (r2 = R2 = 0.1757). This implied that social safety nets explained 17.57% of the variation of performance of food security projects while the other percentage was explained by other variables different from social safety nets. The overall F statistic of F = 30.49 (p=0.05) was statistically significant since at (p = 0.000 < 0.05) hence was suitable to analyze the relationship between social safety nets and performance of food security projects. The study found out that the amount of cash transferred from the social safety nets helped vulnerable households to purchase consumable goods but did not enhance livelihood diversification through ownership of productive assets. Resources from the social safety nets were not sufficient to cover every vulnerable household, they were influenced by targeting mechanist, institutional coordination as well as both local and national politics. The study concluded that due to frequent disasters as well as underdevelopment of infrastructure in Loima Sub-County, social safety nets alone were not sufficient to address household food insecurity in long-term. Therefore, the study recommended the need to link the social safety nets with other development programs for long-term resilience building to food insecurity.
Prospective Consent: The Effect of Framing on Cookie Consent Decisions

Prospect theory is a behavioral model of how people make decisions in the presence of risk; this work explores the application of prospect theory, particularly the reference-dependence effect, to user interactions with cookie banners. We identify two possible risks associated with cookies—the functional risk that denying cookies will degrade user experience and the privacy risk that accepting cookies will allow a website to access and sell personal information—and explore how the slant of a cookie consent banner (which risk it emphasizes) and the framing of a banner (whether it emphasizes the potential for gain or the potential for loss) impact user decisions. We conduct an empirical users study (n = 1557) in which we observe how users interact with different cookie banner prompts. We find that for both possible slants, a negative framing is significantly more effective at nudging user decisions. We also find that the combination of slant and framing impact cookie opt-out rates by a factor of three. These results demonstrate the need for further consideration of the ethical implications of framing and nudging in the context of consent requests.
Hierarchical Context Tagging for Utterance Rewriting

Utterance rewriting aims to recover coreferences and omitted information from the latest turn of a multi-turn dialogue. Recently, methods that tag rather than linearly generate sequences have proven stronger in both in- and out-of-domain rewriting settings. This is due to a tagger's smaller search space as it can only copy tokens from the dialogue context. However, these methods may suffer from low coverage when phrases that must be added to a source utterance cannot be covered by a single context span. This can occur in languages like English that introduce tokens such as prepositions into the rewrite for grammaticality. We propose a hierarchical context tagger (HCT) that mitigates this issue by predicting slotted rules (e.g., "besides _") whose slots are later filled with context spans. HCT (i) tags the source string with token-level edit actions and slotted rules and (ii) fills in the resulting rule slots with spans from the dialogue context. This rule tagging allows HCT to add out-of-context tokens and multiple spans at once; we further cluster the rules to truncate the long tail of the rule distribution. Experiments on several benchmarks show that HCT can outperform state-of-the-art rewriting systems by ~2 BLEU points.
INTERFERENCE REDUCTION IN PHASE LOCKED LOOP USING GRAPHICS DOUBLE DATA RATE RANDOM ACCESS MEMORY INTERFACE

: Electromagnetic Interference (EMI) is an increasingly important factor in determining whole-system performance of a mobile system. This is driven by size reduction of the mobile platform and the ever-increasing density of electronic components. In this work, we suggest an analysis approach for EMI effects in the interface between an application processor (AP) and dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) by using an I/O driver model including power delivery network (PDN) effects.A 10 Gbits/s/pin graphics DRAM interface is developed in 65-nm CMOS technology. Several design techniques are proposed for high-speed operation in a noisy environment. A fast precharging data sampler guarantees high-speed sampling without the need for a decision feedback equalizer. In order to increase the data sampling margin, the PLL bandwidth is optimized depending on the system noises, which reduces the clock jitter by up to 55.1%. The crosstalk-induced jitter (CIJ) reduction technique suppresses the DQs jitter by employing the suggested training sequence for the GDDR5 interface. Pre-and de-emphasis are merged in one auxiliary driver. This chip operates at 10 Gbits/s/pin and exhibits a data eye opening of 0.78 UI with the CIJ reduction technique. The power consumptions of the TX and RX are 8.28 and 5.5 pJ/b/channel, respectively . In this work will be carried through CST EMC STUDIO ® (CST EMCS)and MATLAB,which are specialized software package for analyzing crosstalk-induced jitter (CIJ) and electromagnetic interference (EMI) using 3D electromagnetic field simulation.
Satellite Cluster Formation Reconfiguration Based on the Bifurcating Potential Field

The satellite cluster formation reconfiguration has received considerable attention in recent years. However, the traditional centralized control methods are challenging to apply to satellite clusters because of the enormous fuel consumption, and few studies have addressed the mathematical characterization of satellite clusters. This research aims to propose a mathematical characterization method for satellite clusters and investigate the formation reconfiguration control of satellite clusters. This study provided the five-element characterization method to represent the cluster characteristics and internal correlation characteristics of orbiting satellite clusters. In addition, a control method based on bifurcating potential fields was proposed to realize satellite cluster formation’s dynamic migration and rapid reconfiguration. A cluster with 50 satellites was simulated to verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed formation control algorithm. The results show that various formation topologies were achieved by simply changing the bifurcation parameter and configuration adjustment parameters. The five descriptive elements of the satellite cluster can intuitively and effectively reflect the running state of the satellite cluster.
Language Resources for Icelandic

We describe the current status of Icelandic language technology with respect to available language resources and tools. The recent META-NET survey of the state of language tech- nology support for 30 languages clearly demonstrated that Icelandic lags behind almost all European languages in this respect. However, it is encouraging that as a result of the META-NORD project, almost all basic language resources for Icelandic are now available through the META-SHARE repository and the local site , many of them in standard formats and under standard CC or GNU licenses. This is a major achievement since many of these resources have either been unavailable up to now or only available through personal contacts. In this paper, we describe briefly most of the major resources that have been made accessible through META-SHARE; their type, content, size, format, and license scheme. It is emphasized that even though these resources are extremely valuable as a basis for further R&D work, Icelandic language technology is far from having become self-sustaining and the Icelandic language technology community will need support from partners in the Nordic countries and Europe if Icelandic is to survive in the Digital Age.
Leg Task Models for Reproducing Human Dance Motions on Biped Humanoid Robots

In this paper, we propose a method that enables a biped humanoid robot to reproduce human dance motions with its whole body. Our method is based on the paradigm ofLearning from Observation. In this study, a robot uses its own legs to support the body during a dance performance. We proposeleg task models, which can solve the problems caused by severe constraints in adapting human motions to the legs of a robot. First, elements of the leg task models are recognized from motion data captured from human performances. Then motion data of a robot is regenerated from the recognized elements so that the motion is stably executable on the robot. Our method was verified by experiments on a humanoid robotHRP-2using a traditional folk dance. HRP-2 successfully performed dance motions that were automatically reproduced from motion data captured from human dance performances.
Case study of accelerated wear of brake discs made of grey cast iron characterized by increased thermal stability

In this paper, the subject of the analysis is Rotinger High Performance brake disc, characterized by increased thermal resistance, which is a result of adequate design and material solutions. However, despite declared performance, the analyzed discs suffered accelerated wear over a period of about 20 months. The aim of this study was to assess the causes of the disc failure. As a result, it was showed that the applied material solution still does not differ from standard ones. According to the authors of this paper, an appropriate procedure to improve resistance to thermal fatigue is, among others, changing the shape of graphite precipitates from flake to spheroidal.
A Comparative Study to Visualize PtdIns(4,5) P2 and PtdIns(3,4,5) P3 in MDA-MB-231 Breast Cancer Cell Line.

Background Phosphatidylinositol 3,4,5-trisphosphate [PtdIns(3,4,5) P3) and Phosphatidylinositol 4,5-trisphosphate (PtdIns(4,5) P2] form an insignificant amount of phospholipids but play important roles in controlling membrane-bound signalling. Little attention has been given to visualize and monitor changes or differences in the local generation of PtdIns(4,5) P2 and PtdIns(3,4,5) P3 in the cell membranes of MDA-MB-231 breast cancer cell lines. Methods PLCδ1-PH-GFP and Btk-PH-GFP were used as biosensors to detected PtdIns(4,5) P2 and PtdIns(3,4,5)P3 respectively. These biosensors and antibodies were transfected, immuostained and then visualized by confocal microscopy on different cell surfaces. Results Our results showed that PLCδ1-PH-GFP/mCherry was localized at the cell membrane, while Btk-PH-GFP/mCherry was sometimes localized at the cell membrane but there was also a large amount of fluorescence present in the cytosol and nucleus. Our results also showed that the cells that expressed low levels of Btk-PH-GFP the fluorescence was predominantly localised to the cell membrane. While the cells that expressed high levels of Btk-PH-GFP the fluorescence was localization in the cytosol and cell membrane. Our results demonstrated that both anti-PtdIns(4,5)P2 and anti-PtdIns(3,4,5)P3 antibodies were localized everywhere in cell. Conclusion Our results suggest that PLCδ1-PH-GFP and Btk-PH-GFP/mCherry have more specificity, reliability, suitability and accuracy than antibodies in binding with and detecting PtdIns(4,5)P2 and PtdIns(3,4,5)P3 and in studying the molecular dynamics of phospholipids in live and fixed cells.
Development of a Span-Extending Blade Tip System for a Reconfigurable Helicopter Rotor

†‡ This work, conducted under the System Concept Definition phase of the Mission Adaptive Rotor Program, presents the design and validation results for a morphing helicopter rotor blade with an active blade tip, which can increase its active span by 100%, while maintaining a constant chord, effectively doubling the active airfoil area. The technology components include a morphing honeycomb-like structure that has a Poisson’s ratio of zero as it extends and an elastomer-matrix-composite skin that is bonded to the core structure. Design analyses are presented, along with experimental validation testing on hardware specimens. Feasibility of the design has been demonstrated in terms of hardware fabrication methods and overall performance to satisfy system requirements.
The Oral Health of Autistic Children and its Impact on the Mental Health of Parents of Karachi, Pakistan

Background: Autism spectrum disorder is a mental health disorder which affects the oral health of autistic children. The parents of autistic children have to come across various problems associated with mental health. Objective: This study is conducted to assess the oral health of autistic children and its impact on the mental health of parents. Methodology: A cross-sectional study was conducted among 150 parents of autistic children. Out of which 75 were mothers and 75 were fathers. Hence, (DASS 21) was use to assess depression, anxiety and stress of parents. SPSS version-23 was use to analyze the data by applying independent t-test and Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient . (P ≤ 0.05) was considered significant. Results: The findings of the study revealed that autistic children have poor oral health status. Oral symptoms such as caries (p < 0.001), bad breath (p < 0.001), gingivitis (p < 0.001), and breathing from mouth (p < 0.001), biting of objects (p < 0.05) and unfavorable experience of dentist (p < 0.001) was highly significant among autistic children. Hence no significant difference was observed in dietary pattern of autistic children. Depression, anxiety and stress were observed among the parents of autistic children. Conclusion: Dental Carries, bad breath and gingivitis was commonly seen among the autistic children due to poor oral hygiene. In this situation when children are unable to understand parents. It becomes a challenging situation for parents leading to depression, stress and anxiety. Keywords: Autism spectrum disorder, Mental health, Oral health
Aflatoxin B1 variations in animal feeds along the supply chain in Tanzania and its possible reduction by heat treatment

ABSTRACT This study evaluated the presence of aflatoxin B1 in five different animal feeds collected from manufacturers, suppliers and consumers and its possible reduction by heating at 100°C for 180 min. A total of 160 animal feed samples were collected and analyzed by using lateral flow immunoassay method. The results revealed that all animal feeds analyzed were positive for aflatoxin B1 with 91% samples containing high concentrations ranging from 24.00 to 76.23 ng/g above the international allowable standard for animal feeds (20 ng/g). Maize bran (76 ng/g) and sunflower cake (63 ng/g) had higher aflatoxin B1 concentrations, correlating with higher moisture content. Upon heating the feeds, aflatoxin B1 was reduced to a concentration ranging from 2.24 to 9.78 ng/g (<20 ng/g). Our study suggests high potential health problems to animals and humans from aflatoxins requiring proper heating and frequent monitoring of the animal feeds for aflatoxin B1.
A Stage Model of Small Firm Development in New Zealand Wineries

Abstract One of the most dominant models for explaining organizational growth is that of organizational lifecycles. These models assert that firms go through a series of distinct stages or cycles as they develop over time. Despite the proliferation of a number of models of organizational lifecycle there is little empirical support for their general validity. Few studies have been conducted utilizing an inductive case based theory building methodology. This study builds a 4-stage model of organizational life cycle in the New Zealand wine industry. Wineries were found to go through a life cycle over their initial eight years, which included a pre-birth, start-up, expansion and growth stage.