Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Deep Neural Network-Based Advisory Framework for Attainment of Sustainable Development Goals 1-6

Research in sustainable development, program design and monitoring, and evaluation requires data analytics for the Sustainable Developments Goals (SDGs) not to suffer the same fate as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The MDGs were poorly implemented, particularly in developing countries. In the SDGs dispensation, there is a huge amount of development-related data that needs to be harnessed using predictive analytics models such as deep neural networks for timely and unbiased information. The SDGs aim at improving the lives of citizens globally. However, the first six SDGs (SDGs 1-6) are more relevant to developing economies than developed economies. This is because low-resourced countries are still battling with extreme poverty and unacceptable levels of illiteracy occasioned by corruption and poor leadership. Inclusive innovation is a philosophy of SDGs as no one should be left behind in the global economy. The focus of this study is the implementation of SDGs 1-6 in less developed countries. Given their peculiar socio-economic challenges, we proposed a design for a low-budget deep neural network-based sustainable development goals 1-6 (DNNSDGs 1-6) system. The aim is to empower actors implementing SDGs in developing countries with data-based information for robust decision making.
Immigration Enforcement and Infant Health

The past two decades were characterized by an unprecedented increase in interior immigration enforcement and heightened stress due to fears of family separation and loss of income among undocumented immigrants. Using vital statistics on infant births from the National Center for Health Statistics for the 2003 through 2016 period and a difference-in-differences design, we compare the health outcomes of infants with likely undocumented mothers before and after the intensification of immigration enforcement within US counties. We find that intensified enforcement, especially during the third trimester, increases the likelihood of low birth weight (<2,500 grams). We also present suggestive evidence that the effect could be driven by heightened stress and fears associated with police-based enforcement during pregnancy. The findings underscore the importance of current immigration policies in shaping the birth outcomes of many American children.
COMPARING MOTIVATION AND PROFILE BETWEEN ARCHAEOTOURISTS AND NONARCHAEOTOURISTS IN NGORONGORO, TANZANIA

The study aims to compare motivation and profile between archaeotourists and non-archaeotourists. It utilizes the push and pull motivational model and distance decay theory, and questionnaire data from a sample of 252 international tourists visiting Ngorongoro Conservation Area (NCA) in Tanzania. The analysis revealed that archaeotourists are more heterogeneous than non-archaeotourists, as they not only attach importance to fascinating stories and the authenticity of past objects, but also to enjoying nature, the geological scenery, doing research on archaeological features and each other's company. In addition, they are older, have plenty of time to visit and are well off.
Abdominal ultrasonographic manifestations in pediatric patients with tuberous sclerosis complex

Background Tuberous sclerosis complex (TSC) is a rare genetic disease which leads to formation of benign tumors in the brain and other organs of the body. Ultrasound (US) can detect the location, quantity, size and internal echo of TSC-associated renal diseases, liver angiomyolipoma (AML), and co-existing lesions, providing important diagnostic basis for clinical diagnosis. The aim of the present study was to investigate the abdominal ultrasonographic features of pediatric TSC and explore the advantages of abdominal ultrasonography in clinical practice. Methods Data of children with TSC, who presented to the Second Affiliated Hospital and Yuying Children’s Hospital, Wenzhou Medical University, between January 2016 and November 2018, were analyzed by a retrospective chart review. The cases were identified from electronic medical records (EMR) system and underwent ultrasonography, we yielded a total of 12 patients. Results The 12 pediatric patients, including 5 boys and 7 girls, ranged in age from 9 months to 13 years old. And they all had a history of epilepsy. All the patients underwent brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) or computed tomography (CT) examination, which revealed a scattered distribution of multiple hyperintense nodules. Of the 12 patients, 10 had TSC-associated bilateral renal AMLs, 5 had hepatic AML, and 4 had renal cysts. Conclusions US is a useful and non-invasive tool for the detection of TSC-associated renal and liver lesions and for clinical follow-up among pediatric patients.
Comparative chemistries of CO and NO oxidation over RuO2(110): insights from first-principles thermodynamics and kinetics

In this contribution, we review our plane wave, supercell density functional theory-based comparisons of CO and NO oxidation chemistry at a RuO2(110) surface. Base metal oxides have long been of interest as catalysts for the oxidation of small molecules such as CO and NO, and understanding of their comparative chemistries on this scientifically important model metal oxide is important for understanding the factors of the control activity. The structures and energies of CO x and NO x adsorbates on the RuO2(110) surface are contrasted, and their thermodynamic stability is quantified using a first-principles phase diagram approach. Distinctly different surface species dominate the two diagrams, reflecting the very different adsorptions and oxidation chemistries of CO and NO. Furthermore, H2O has a dramatic effect on the CO oxidation phase diagram that suggests a bicarbonate ( ) as an important and unrecognised surface poison. These thermodynamic phase diagrams are complemented with mean-field microkinetic models that quantify absolute activity, provide a different window onto surface coverage and highlight the role of various surface species in poisoning activity. Consistent with experiment and previous simulations, CO oxidation is facile under conditions at which both CO and oxygen compete effectively for surface sites. Carbonates are unstable and unimportant to catalysis; facile bicarbonate formation poisons activity in the presence of even small amounts of H2O. An intermediate CO adsorption energy and weak CO2 binding make RuO2 much more effective in oxidising CO than NO, which adsorbs strongly and self-poisons even at high temperatures. RuO2 is predicted to be effective as a reversible NO adsorber. Finally, we reviewed the kinetics of several NO surface reactions and the pathway that may contribute to the decomposition of NO to N2 and N2O over partially reduced surfaces.
A RANSAC Based CAD Mesh Reconstruction Method Using Point Clustering for Mesh Connectivity

Mesh reconstruction is widely used in industrial reverse engineering and other 3D scanning applications. Many of the methods used can accurately and swiftly reconstruct a model from a given input scan dataset – however, in some applications, simplification of the output mesh may be needed to render further computation tractable. This paper presents a method based on a recursive RANSAC point removal approach, where an input point cloud is deconstructed into a set of convex point clusters, each corresponding to a mesh face of the final output model. The combined use of cluster analysis and RANSAC model extraction allows the method to operate on a relatively small number of possible vertex candidates for the final mesh, leading to an output mesh with relatively few faces compared to other approaches.
Formulation and Evaluation of Polymeric Nanoparticulate Gel for Topical Delivery

The aim of the present study was to enhance the permeation of drug into the skin and to reduce the skin irritation. To achieve the objective the drug was formulated in to nanoparticles using chitosan as a polymer and these drug loaded nanoparticles were incorporated in gel. The prepared nanoparticles were characterized by FTIR, DSC, SEM, and particle size. The particle size for optimized nanoparticulate gel (NPG-4) was found to be between 49–305nm. SEM photographs showed that nanoparticles were roughly spherical in shape and free from cracks. The NPG-4 showed 43.9% of encapsulation efficiency and 18.9% drug loading. At the end of 24h the in vitro drug release was found to be 90.1% in pH 7.4 phosphate buffer saline (PBS) and in vitro skin permeation studies NPG-4 showed 2.1mg/cm2 of drug permeation, which was better than the marketed formulation (NIZRAL 2%) cream, which showed only 1.2mg/cm2 of drug permeation. The NPG-4 showed no primary skin irritation when tested on rabbit skin.
Age score for assessing motor function in Chinese older men

Background and objective: Motor performance plays an important role in daily activities for older adults. The purpose of the study was to construct a method for measuring physical fitness age that can be used to assess motor performance in elderly men and to verify its validity. Methods: Four items of physical fitness including grip strength, balancing on one leg with eyes open, 30 s chair stand test and 6 min walk test were selected and measured in a random order. Principal component analysis was employed to build physical fitness age based on motor performance variables from 94 elderly men with a mean age of 71.20 ± 5.05 years. Physical fitness age = 115.516-0.652 × grip strength - 0.142 × balancing on one leg with eyes open - 0.839 × 30 s chair stand - 0.061 × 6 min walk distance + 0.541 × chronological age. Results: Validation test from 13 men with exercise habit and 12 men without exercise habit showed that the physical fitness age in the exercised adults was significantly lower than its chronological age (63.91 ± 5.40 vs. 70.92 ± 4.17, P < 0.001), while no significant difference was observed between physical fitness age and chronological age in the elderly without exercise habits (71.23 ± 7.49 vs. 70.83 ± 5.19, P = 0.646). Conclusion: Physical fitness age is a valid indicator to evaluate and monitor motor performance. Participation in physical exercise may lower the physical fitness age by improving motor performance.
Influence of inorganic salts on biomass production, biochemical composition, and bioethanol production of Populus alba

Abstract: Inorganic salts are very important for the biosynthesis of major components such as cellulose and lignin. In order to investigate biomass production, major components of the biosynthesis of plant cell wall and the bioethanol production of Populus alba, we examined the effect of inorganic salts on in vitro culture systems without specific mineral salts. The medium without H2PO4- was supportive for Populus alba shoot growth, while the absence of NH4+ resulted in poor shoot growth. The medium without H2PO4- and Fe3+ inhibited above-ground biomass production, whereas NH4+ and K+ deprivation led to an enhancement of the same. The root/shoot ratio of Populus alba in the medium without H2PO4- was high compared with plants cultured in the control medium. H2PO4- is deeply involved in lignin biosynthesis, and its removal has been shown to reduce the biosynthesis of lignin. Plants grown on nitrate-free medium were found to be good for enzymatic saccharification and ethanol production. The plants grown in the medium without NO3- showed 72.0% enzyme digestibility, and the yield of ethanol showed 9.58% ethanol productivity after 12 hours. These results can be used as the basis for producing high-quality biomass for future bioethanol production.
Poly(amidoamine) Dendrimer-Functionalized Magnetic Beads as an Immunosensing Probe for Electrochemical Immunoassay for Carbohydrate Antigen-125 in Human Serum

The aim of this study is to develop a new potentiometric immunoassay for carbohydrate antigen-125 (CA125) in human serum by using poly(amidoamine) dendrimer-modified multifunctional magnetic beads conjugated with antibodies as immunosensing probes. With an external magnet, the developed immunosensor exhibited rapid potential response and wide linear range from 0.5 to 55 U/mL with a low detection limit of 0.1 U/mL CA125. The precision, selectivity, and stability of the developed immunosensor were acceptable. Analytical results obtained for the clinical serum specimen by the developed immunosensor were in accordance with those assayed by the enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay method.
Adventure regime of tourism experiences

ABSTRACT This article contributes to the debate about how to conceptually understand adventure tourism experiences. Whilst previous literature is dominated by an agentic psychological view and, to some extent, a structuralist view, the discussion remains largely limited to how the relationship between individuals and various contextual levels may matter in adventure tourism. From a post-structural position in research on consumer culture, we criticize the dominant perspectives. We theorize ‘adventure regime’ as the conceptual tool that may aid researchers in interpreting the formative role played by structures of social interaction that orchestrate practices of liminal adventure tourism experiences. This paper offers empirical illustrations from a study of winter experiences in Arctic Svalbard and discusses how entities of the adventure regime, together with tourism practices, influence meaning negotiations on tourists’ three-day journey by dog sledge.
Domesticating Gay Apps: An Intersectional Analysis of the Use of Blued Among Chinese Gay Men

Drawing on domestication theory and intersectionality theory, this study explores the multiple roles dating apps play in Chinese gay men’s lives amid changing personal and social circumstances. We present in-depth narratives of three Blued users from different generations and classes with unique relationship statuses. The app’s geo-locative features strengthened the gay capital of our younger participant but threatened our middle-aged, closeted participant. Although coming from a homophobic generation, our senior participant had no issue becoming an online celebrity on the app because his wife had passed away, pointing out the intersectional influence of generational and relational backgrounds. Our participants’ socio-economic positions also shaped whom they would interact with on Blued and how these interactions took place. These observations illustrate the relationship between users’ intersectional positions and their domestication of Blued, complementing existing dating app studies that skew toward younger users and focus only on certain elements of app use.
Biological and Chemical Control of Mosquito Population by Optimal Control Approach

This paper focuses on the design and analysis of short-term control intervention measures seeking to suppress local populations of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, the major transmitters of dengue and other vector-borne infections. Besides traditional measures involving the spraying of larvicides and/or insecticides, we include biological control based on the deliberate introduction of predacious species feeding on the aquatic stages of mosquitoes. From the methodological standpoint, our study relies on application of the optimal control modeling framework in combination with the cost-effectiveness analysis. This approach not only enables the design of optimal strategies for external control intervention but also allows for assessment of their performance in terms of the cost-benefit relationship. By examining numerous scenarios derived from combinations of chemical and biological control measures, we try to find out whether the presence of predacious species at the mosquito breeding sites may (partially) replace the common practices of larvicide/insecticide spraying and thus reduce their negative impact on non-target organisms. As a result, we identify two strategies exhibiting the best metrics of cost-effectiveness and provide some useful insights for their possible implementation in practical settings.
An iterative phase-correction method for low-quality phase-shift images and its application

To solve the issue of phase recovery from low-quality fringe images (where the low quality is caused by noise, non-linear intensity and surface reflectivity changes), an iterative phase-correction method is proposed. The high-phase-precision solution is achieved by regenerating the phase-shift-fringe images from the wrapped phase and performing iterative filtering. In general, compared with conventional methods, the proposed iterative phase-correction method has three main advantages: (a) it suppresses the influence of noise without interference from surface reflectivity; (b) it effectively improves the wrapped phase accuracy, thereby improving 3D measurement accuracy, and (c) it effectively recovers the absolute phase (determined by a multi-frequency heterodyne method) information of surfaces with very low or very high reflectivities, without the additional projection of phase-shift-fringe images. The effectiveness of the proposed iterative phase-correction method is verified by simulation and experiment. The proposed method, applied to binocularly structured light, can improve measurement accuracy and greatly improve the effectiveness of measurement of objects with drastic changes in reflectivity. Based on the calibration accuracy (without gamma calibration of the projector) described in this paper, the root-mean-square deviation of the measurement results for binocularly structured light can reach 0.0094 mm.
Chinese life purpose orientation questionnaire: assessing purpose orientations among Chinese college students

Abstract Life-purpose orientations can highly influence people's life paths and well-being. However, existing psychological measurements tend to dismiss the need for assessing the individual’s life purpose orientations, especially in non-Western cultures. This study sought to develop a new measure to assess purpose orientations specific to the Chinese context. We first built the item pool of Chinese college students’ life purpose orientations (Study 1). This was followed by conducting an initial testing of the item pool, and developing a preliminary six-dimension Chinese Life Purpose Orientation Questionnaire (Study 2). Further revision supported a five-dimension questionnaire with adequate validity and reliability (Study 3). The measure's validity and reliability were discussed, and the limitations also were addressed.
CrowdWT

Crowdsourcing is a relatively inexpensive and efficient mechanism to collect annotations of data from the open Internet. Crowdsourcing workers are paid for the provided annotations, but the task requester usually has a limited budget. It is desirable to wisely assign the appropriate task to the right workers, so the overall annotation quality is maximized while the cost is reduced. In this article, we propose a novel task assignment strategy (CrowdWT) to capture the complex interactions between tasks and workers, and properly assign tasks to workers. CrowdWT first develops a Worker Bias Model (WBM) to jointly model the worker’s bias, the ground truths of tasks, and the task features. WBM constructs a mapping between task features and worker annotations to dynamically assign the task to a group of workers, who are more likely to give correct annotations for the task. CrowdWT further introduces a Task Difficulty Model (TDM), which builds a Kernel ridge regressor based on task features to quantify the intrinsic difficulty of tasks and thus to assign the difficult tasks to more reliable workers. Finally, CrowdWT combines WBM and TDM into a unified model to dynamically assign tasks to a group of workers and recall more reliable and even expert workers to annotate the difficult tasks. Our experimental results on two real-world datasets and two semi-synthetic datasets show that CrowdWT achieves high-quality answers within a limited budget, and has the best performance against competitive methods.
Deep web, dark web, dark net

: Recently, online black markets and anonymous virtual currencies have become the subject of academic research, and we have gained a certain degree of knowledge about the dark web. However, as terms such as deep web and dark net, which have different meanings, have been used in similar contexts, discussions related to the dark web tend to be confusing. Therefore, in this paper, we discuss the differences between these concepts in an easy-to-understand manner, including their historical circumstances
Premilinary Studies on Phytochemical Screening of Ulam and Fruit from Malaysia

Alkaloids, saponins, steroid, terpenoid, flavonoids, phenolic distribution in 14 Malaysian favourite ulam and fruit belonging to different families were assessed and compared. The plants investigated were parkia speciosa (petai), solanum torvum (terung pipit), pithecellobium bubalinum (kerdas), moringa oleifera (kacang kelor), dryobalanops oblongifolia (keladan), cosmos caudatus (ulam raja), mentha arvensis (pudina), ocimum sp. (selasih), cymbopogon nardus (serai wangi), eugenia polyantha (serai kayu), Barringtonia scortechinii, (Putat), musa sp. (pisang), talinum paniculatum (akar som) and phyllanthus acidus (cermai). Moringa oleifera leaf and dryobalanops oblongifolia fruit were found contain positive reactions of alkaloids. All the samples studied also show high content of saponin except in bark and seed of parkia speciosa and stem of phyllanthus acidus. Meanwhile, results of the phytochemical screening on saponins, steroids, terpenoids, phenolic and flavonoids showed that cosmos caudatus, ocimum sp. , mentha arvensis, barringtonia scortechinii and moringa oleifera were the active compounds present in the leaves of the plant.
High stability perovskite solar cells under ambient conditions

: Though perovskite solar cells have outstanding commercialisation potential, perovskite materials are very vulnerable to moisture and oxygen. So the main issue for perovskite solar cell is very fast degradation. In order to elaborate on this concern, the stability of perovskite solar cells were investigated in this study. The effect of oxygen and moisture on perovskite solar cells decreased with encapsulation of the cells. Encapsulation has been carried out with ultraviolet cured epoxy resin. Stability tests were taken place in laboratory conditions under solar simulator and also shelf-life tests. Perovskite solar cells showed the highest power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 9.77% with a short circuit current density of 22.5 mA/cm 2 , the open-circuit voltage of 0.94 V and fill factor of 0.46. After 2800 h, perovskite solar cells were still 85% stable in atmospheric conditions. Perovskite solar cells exhibited distinctive durability for shelf-life test in laboratory conditions. The PCE of perovskite solar cells were decreased only 15% of its initial value after 2800 h. In order to elaborate the degradation of perovskite solar cells, the cells are exposed to solar irradiation AM1.5G. Perovskite solar cells degraded gradually with time under solar irradiation; however, this stability test indicated that the solar cells were durable 20% after 500 h exposure to solar irradiation.
Exchange energy density of an atom as a functional of the electron density

An electron-density functional for the conventionally defined exchange energy density of an atom is constructed using Becke’s inhomogeneity parameter QB based on the density matrix expansion of the exchange hole. The proposed functional (the energy density meta-generalized gradient approximation or EDMGGA) has the following properties: (i) The exchange energy density exEDMGGA(r) has correct nuclear cusp and density-tail behaviors. (ii) The corresponding exchange potential δEx[n]/δn(r) is finite near the nucleus and decays asymptotically as −k/r in the tail. Numerical results show that our functional yields total exchange energies for atoms with about the same accuracy as Becke’s widely used functional B88, but significantly improves the local description of the exchange energy density. In one Appendix, by introducing a general coordinate transformation, we show that the asymptotic behavior of the conventionally defined exchange energy density depends upon the choice of the coordinate transformation and th.