Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Adjustment of Fragility Models and Proportional Risks Applied to Diabetic Retinopathy Data

Survival analysis is currently one of the fastest-growing areas in the field of statistical analysis, with a solid theory for adjusting regression models to study certain phenomena, which have, in their structure, the characteristic of having incomplete observations in the sample called censorship. Although such models can efficiently represent the phenomenon under study in many situations, some of them do not take into account the existence of an unobservable variable present in most studies, called frailty. This fragility denotes the susceptibility of the event to occur by a determined individual or object under investigation. The objective of this work was to show that in situations where frailty is present, the use of models that capture the variability of this variable is more viable for the analysis of these data when compared to conventional models in survival studies. For this purpose, a comparative analysis was performed between these models, adjusted for a set of data from patients diagnosed with Diabetic Retinopathy, and a simulation study was also carried out for the gamma fragility model with different percentages of censorship and heterogeneity. After adjusting the models, it can be seen that the fragility models performed better when compared to the Cox model, with an emphasis on the gamma fragility model, which generated the lowest value for AIC and BIC. The simulation study showed that high censorship rates impair the degree of predictability of the fragility model and that high heterogeneity rates contribute to parameter estimates.
Hydrochemical Characterization of Water Resources From Reverse Osmosis Desalination Plants

The desalination of the brackish waters is a technology of coexistence with the semi-arid and its adoption implies in determining the environmental impacts due to the reject brine generated. Therefore, this work evaluated the hydrochemical characteristics of well water (feed water), drinking water (purified) and reject brine from reverse osmosis desalination plants in Western Meso-region, Rio Grande do Norte state, Brazil. During the periods between October 2013 and November 2014, four water samples were taken at seven inland desalination plants in communities and rural settlements. The hydrochemical characteristics of the waters were evaluated using multivariate statistical analysis. The following physico-chemical parameters of water collected were evaluated: electrical conductivity (ECw), pH, concentrations of cations (sodium, potassium, calcium and magnesium) and anions (chloride, carbonate and bicarbonate), Sodium Adsorption Ratio, Langelier Saturation Index, Stability Index of Ryznar, and the Calcium/Magnesium ratio. Well water and reject brine were classified into six groups, while purified water was classified into seven groups with different levels of risk of salinization, sodification and ions toxicity.
Ten-Year Responses of Underplanted Northern Red Oak to Silvicultural Treatments, Herbivore Exclusion, and Fertilization

Establishing adequate advanced oak reproduction prior to final overstory removal is crucial for regenerating oak forests in the eastern U.S. Many management approaches exist to this end, but benefits associated with any individual technique can depend on the suite of techniques employed and the geographic location. At four mixed-hardwood upland forest sites in central and southern Indiana, we tested factorial combinations of deer fencing, controlled-release fertilization, and various silvicultural techniques (midstory removal, crown thinning, and a shelterwood establishment cut) for promoting the growth and survival of underplanted red oak seedlings. Crown thinning resulted in slow growth and low survival. Midstory removal and the shelterwood establishment cut were nearly equally effective for promoting seedling growth. Seedling survival was strongly influenced by fencing, and differences in survival between silvicultural treatments were minimal when fencing was employed. Fertilization had minimal effects overall, only increasing the probability that unfenced seedlings were in competitive positions relative to surrounding vegetation. We suggest that underplanting oak seedlings can augment natural reproduction, but the practice should be accompanied by a combination of midstory removal and fencing, at a minimum, for adequate growth and survival.
The complete mitochondrial genome of the dwarf sperm whale Kogia sima (Cetacea: Kogiidae)

Abstract The dwarf sperm whale is a small, toothed cetacean, which was suggested to be two separate species based on the evidence derived from partial mitochondrial DNA sequence. Here, the complete mitochondrial genome of Kogia sima (16,379 bp in length) has been analyzed for building the database. It was similar to the typical mammalian mtDNA, containing 37 genes (13 protein-coding genes, 2 rRNA genes, and 22 tRNA genes) and a non-coding region. Overall base composition of the complete mitochondrial DNA is A (31.2%), G (14.4%), C (29.4%), T (25.0%), the percentage of A and T (56.2%) is higher than G and C (43.8%). All genes in K. sima were distributed on the H-strand, except for the ND6 subunit gene and 9 tRNA genes which were encoded on the L-strand. The phylogenetic relationships of 15 Odontoceti species were reconstructed based on the 13 protein-coding genes using the Bayesian inference method.
Knowledge in Transition in Healthcare

Organizations are challenged by the need to transform Dynamic Knowledge, embedded in each worker, into Static Knowledge, rooted in factual documental information. However, innovation and knowledge creation seem to be facilitated by the personal knowledge and life experiences of people, which appear to be dynamic. The tensions between Dynamic and Static Knowledge in facilitating the transfer and sharing of knowledge arise as compelling research as well as practical topic for organizations. Our paper aims to investigate such tensions by employing a case study. We decided to deepen such dynamics in the healthcare field, given its importance for business and society. In more detail, we analyzed one Emergency Room (ER) department through a series of interviews. Our findings highlight the importance of the right balance between Static and Dynamic Knowledge. On the one hand, the healthcare organization recognized the need to incorporate knowledge into practical and tangible instruments. On the other hand, the flows of Dynamic Knowledge must be fostered through a culture of knowledge translation and sharing, and the development of soft skills.
Diatom biomonitoring – scientific foundations, commonly discussed issues and frequently made errors

Abstract Contemporary assessment of the ecological status of aquatic ecosystems is based on various groups of organisms, including diatoms. Biological assessment, implemented by the Water Framework Directive, has been applied worldwide for more than 15 years. Currently, the most basic “tool” used in biomonitoring are diatom indices, which are routinely applied in Europe and other countries around the world. In Poland, the diatom indices have been used for over 5 years, which is a period of time allowing to summarize and evaluate the effectiveness of these methods in the assessment of aquatic ecosystems. The purpose of this work was to analyse the use of diatom indices in the biomonitoring of surface water by collecting data on the possibilities and limitations of using diatom indices for the objective assessment of water quality. Attention was paid to mistakes made in the course of biological assessment performed with the use of diatom phytobenthos, which have a significant impact on the obtained results. The paper also contains suggestions for introducing several important changes in biological monitoring, which will improve its quality and efficiency in assessing the ecological status of various aquatic ecosystems.
The role of branching in the maintenance of diversity in watersheds

Stream systems are characterized by a hierarchical dendritic branching pattern, which is thought to have important consequences for stream community structure. However, branching is associated with many other changes in stream condition, which make disentangling the effects of branching from associated environmental changes challenging. Moreover, much difficulty arises in scaling up local effects of branching within a watershed to the watershed as a whole, which is where diversity is arguably maintained and management and restoration efforts are assessed. Here, we show that branching can be present with no associated changes to community dynamics, either locally or in the watershed as a whole when branching affects only dispersal patterns and not environmental structure. We explore violations of these conditions to identify how branching can modify environmental conditions affecting coexistence in the watershed. We show that the strength of coexistence in the watershed depends in all essentials on the amount of environmental heterogeneity with only a small role for other factors. Only when streams are small relative to the scales of environmental change or dispersal can branching affect the strength of watershed-scale coexistence independently of changes to environmental heterogeneity in the watershed, but these effects are small and depend on interactions with environmental variation. We suggest that focusing on environmental heterogeneity rather than branching patterns will yield the greatest understanding of the drivers of stream community structure and the greatest benefits for management and restoration of stream communities.
Slicing and Dicing: Using video editing software to teach film

Film and television courses have become standard in many English, humanities, and communications departments. While these courses can cover an array of topics, many departments’ introductory courses include a formal analysis of film. Traditionally, formal analysis includes screening films and having students analyze formal film elements, either in class discussion or course papers (e.g., Restivo 1995; Tomasulo, 1995; Welsch, 1997). However, film ripping1 and editing software provide film students opportunities to break films into scenes and remix them, creating their own texts. “Slicing and dicing” films in this way provides film students opportunities to actively engage with films and even produce their own videos explaining how films work as textual and cultural objects. Media production challenges students to combine formal and narrative elements for deeper analysis. The purpose of this study is to gauge students’ perceptions on learning basic film studies concepts in a 300 level “Introduction to Film” course from more actively engaged “slicing and dicing” activities as compared to traditional reading, viewing, lecturing, and discussion activities.
Two-stage Gene Selection and Classification for a High-Dimensional Microarray Data

Microarray technology has provided benefits for cancer diagnosis and classification. However, classifying cancer using microarray data is confronted with difficulty since the dataset has high dimensions. One strategy for dealing with the dimensionality problem is to make a feature selection before modeling. Lasso is a common regularization method to reduce the number of features or predictors. However, Lasso remains too many features at the optimum regularization parameter. Therefore, feature selection can be continued to the second stage. We proposed Classification and Regression Tree (CART) for feature selection on the second stage which can also produce a classification model. We used a dataset which comparing gene expression in breast tumor tissues and other tumor tissues. This dataset has 10,936 predictor variables and 1,545 observations. The results of this study were the proposed method able to produce a few numbers of selected genes but gave high accuracy. The model also acquired in line with the Oncogenomics Theory by the obtained of GATA3 to split the root node of the decision tree model. GATA3 has become an important marker for breast tumors.
Nitrogen Deficiency-Dependent Abiotic Stress Enhances Carotenoid Production in Indigenous Green Microalga Scenedesmus rubescens KNUA042, for Use as a Potential Resource of High Value Products

The microalgal strain Scenedesmus rubescens KNUA042 was identified in freshwater in Korea and characterized by evaluating its stress responses in an effort to increase lipid and carotenoid production. Under a two-stage cultivation process, the algal strain that generally exhibits optimal growth at a nitrate (source of nitrogen) concentration of 0.25 g L −1 was challenged to different exogenous stimuli—salinity (S), light intensity (L), combined L and S (LS), and nitrogen deficiency (C)—for 14 days. Lipid production and carotenoid concentration increased in a time-dependent manner under these physicochemical conditions during the culture periods. Lipid accumulation was confirmed by thin layer chromatography, BODIPY staining, and fatty acid composition analysis, which showed no differences in the algal cells tested under all four (C, S, L, and LS) conditions. The quality of biodiesel produced from the biomass of the algal cells met the American Society for Testing and Materials and the European standards. Total carotenoid content was increased in the LS-treated algal cells (6.94 mg L −1 ) compared with that in the C-, S-, and L-treated algal cells 1.75, 4.15, and 1.32 mg L −1 , respectively). Accordingly, the concentration of canthaxanthin and astaxanthin was also maximized in the LS-treated algal cells at 1.73 and 1.11 mg g −1 , respectively, whereas lutein showed no differences in the cells analyzed. Conversely, chlorophyll a level was similar among the C-, S-, and LS-treated algal cells, except for the L-treated algal cells. Thus, our results suggested that S . rubescens KNUA042 was capable of producing carotenoid molecules, which led to the maximum values of canthaxanthin and astaxanthin concentrations when exposed to the combined LS condition compared with that observed when exposed to the salinity condition alone. This indicates that the algal strain could be used for the production of high-value products as well as biofuel. Furthermore, this article provides the first evidence of carotenoid production in S . rubescens KNUA042.
Review of Student-Built Spectroscopy Instrumentation Projects

One challenge of teaching chemical analysis is the proliferation of sophisticated, but often impenetrable, instrumentation in the modern laboratory. Complex instruments, and the software that runs them, distance students from the physical and chemical processes that generate the analytical signal. A solution to this challenge is the introduction of a student-driven instrument-building project. Visible absorbance spectroscopy is well-suited to such a project due to its relative simplicity and the ubiquity of absorbance measurements. This Article reviews simple instructor- and student-built instruments for spectroscopy, providing an overview of common designs, components, and applications. This comprehensive summary includes options that are suitable for in-person or remote learning with K–12 students and undergraduates in general chemistry, analytical chemistry, instrumental analysis, and electronics courses.
Utilizing k-means clustering to extract bone tumor in CT scan and MRI images

Segmentation is one of the most significant parts of medical image processing. In image segmentation, the digital image is part of multiple sets of pixels. Magnetic Resonance Imaging, MRI and CT scanning is very important imaging techniques to explore the inner physiological constructions of the body noninvasively. A bone tumor is one of more life-threatening diseases, so exact detaching of the tumor regions is a pressing need. In this work, the K-means algorithm is employed on six MRI and CT scan images with different numbers of clusters. As well as many morphological operations like opening and dilation were applied after extract the fine tumor areas effectively. The results and the calculated surface areas of the separated tumor regions were compared to the radiologist delineation and the percent relative differences were found ranged from (0.63-1.75) % for MRI images and (0.34-1.51) % for CT scan images. This result indicates the high-quality performance of the adopted segmentation clustering-based method.
Aggregate growth models from a Schumpeterian perspective

The paper presents a critical assessment of the Schumpeterian macroeconomic approach to economic growth. Taking as reference a representative sample of important works within this tradition, the paper identifies the main contributions and limitations of the macroeconomic Schumpeterian literature to understanding economic growth. More specifically, the literature review carried out in this paper focuses on three of Schumpeter’s ideas that have become particularly influential in macroeconomic growth theory: (i) the role of technological transfer in productivity growth in follower countries; (ii) the importance of research intensity for technical progress; and (iii) the prominence of technological competitiveness for trade performance. The contribution of the paper is twofold: (i) it provides an organized review of the macroeconomic literature until its present state; and (ii) it indicates important gaps in this literature that should be the focus of further research.
Effect of Human Disturbance on Genetic Structure of Rare and Endangered Paphiopedilum micranthum Implied the Habitat Status

Seven populations of Paphiopedilum micranthum from Southeast China were used to assess the influence of human disturbance on genetic structure through analysis with sequence-related amplified polymorphism technology. The results indicated that there was high genetic diversity at species level (p = 81.25%; I = 0.3709) and a significantly higher differentiation level compared to that those of other outcrossing orchid species, and that moderately disturbed populations sustained higher genetic diversity indexes than the natural populations. This study revealed that human disturbance and population size did not significantly affect the populations’ genetic diversity but aggravated their differentiation. This may suggest that the habitat had a much greater influence on genetic variation.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE APPLICATIONS FOR PREDICTING SOME STAND ATTRIBUTES USING LANDSAT 8 OLI SATELLITE DATA: A CASE STUDY FROM TURKEY

Forest resources inventory is one of the essential parts of the sustainable forest management. Remote sensing applications have broad usage areas for this aim, since field measurements are costly, time consuming and laborious. Monitoring forest resources with various satellite images has found wide usage areas in forestry. In this study, the relationships between some stand attributes (mean diameter, basal area, stand volume and number of trees) and texture values obtained from Landsat 8 OLI satellite image were investigated for Crimean pine (Pinus nigra J.F. Arnold subsp. pallasiana (Lamb.) Holmboe) stands in Kastamonu region of Turkey. The multiple linear regression analysis and artificial neural networks (ANN) were utilized to fit stand parameters using texture values. To form the ANN architectures, various transfer functions in hidden and output layers and number of nodes ranged from 1 to 20 in hidden layer were used, and a total of 180 architectures were designed for each stand attribute. The results indicated that the regression models had low R values (0.399 for mean diameter, 0.337 for basal area, 0.332 for stand volume, and 0.183 for number of trees), and the most of the ANN models were better than the regression models for predicting stand attributes. The model containing hyperbolic tangent transfer functions in both hidden and output layers for mean diameter (R = 0.593), logistic transfer function in hidden layer and hyperbolic tangent function in output layer for basal area and stand volume (R = 0.632 and 0.650, respectively), and hyperbolic tangent function in hidden layer and linear function in output layer for number of trees (R = 0.610) were the best ANN models. This study concluded that the ANN models developed with Landsat 8 OLI were useful to predict stand parameters better than the regression models in Crimean pine stands located in Kastamonu, Turkey.
Leadership and Context to Create the New Technological Society

Technological advances have been instrumental in creating a new form of society, where developments have led to the creation of new products and mechanisms, precipitating a revolution of all aspects of personal and professional life. Every sector has seen changes in service and product delivery with improvements and paradigm change being prevalent. The advent of disruptive technologies have caused major shifts in social, political and economic life. The recent global pandemic exemplifies the revolution in communications, where socialisation, commerce and professional activities, including teaching and government, could continue despite severe restrictions on the movements of most of the global population [1]. The 'new normal' was virtual, via standard, widely available technologies. This entails the use of systems thinking to develop new knowledge via artificial intelligence, analysis of big data to enhance understanding, formation of virtual teams to deliver societal outcomes, agile techniques to organise innovation and transformational leadership to stimulate the requisite changes. Research to identify and create these changes has been critical in global developments to date. This paper uses a review of a broad range of literature to consider the key requirements for leadership and environmental context to develop and sustain the new technological society. The objective is to try to provide a summary of some of the critical elements needed to further the 'new world order'. This will provide a basis for further debate and questions concerning leadership and the use of resources in the next iteration of the technological society.
High-Throughput Genotyping of CRISPR/Cas Edited Cells in 96-Well Plates

The emergence in recent years of DNA editing technologies—Zinc finger nucleases (ZFNs), transcription activator-like effector (TALE) guided nucleases (TALENs), clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)/Cas family enzymes, and Base-Editors—have greatly increased our ability to generate hundreds of edited cells carrying an array of alleles, including single-nucleotide substitutions. However, the infrequency of homology-dependent repair (HDR) in generating these substitutions in general requires the screening of large numbers of edited cells to isolate the sequence change of interest. Here we present a high-throughput method for the amplification and barcoding of edited loci in a 96-well plate format. After barcoding, plates are indexed as pools which permits multiplexed sequencing of hundreds of clones simultaneously. This protocol works at high success rate with more than 94% of clones successfully genotyped following analysis.