Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Imaging and measuring the mechanical properties of lymphoma cells using atomic force microscopy

Because of its particular imaging mode, atomic force microscope (AFM) provides a new technology to help understand physiological activities at cellular and molecular levels. In the present study, AFM was used to image the morphology and measure the mechanical properties of Burkitt’s lymphoma (BL) cells under near-physiological conditions. Poly-L-lysine was used to immobilize a suspension of BL cells, and the morphology and ultrastructure of BL cells were acquired with a high resolution using AFM. The mechanical properties of live BL cells and glutaraldehyde-fixed BL cells were also measured, and the efficiency of the Hertz model was then calculated. We demonstrate that BL cells become firm after being fixed with glutaraldehyde. The results provide an effective method for characterizing the morphology of suspended cells under near-physiological conditions, and lay the foundation for exploring novel biomarkers at the cellular level for the early and rapid diagnosis and the personalized treatment of diseases.
Principal Component Analysis for Clustering Stock Portfolios

Motivation: Due to the sheer size of the stock market and its dependencies on several factors, a catch-all method of determining stock performance continues to elude the public. Recent developments in machine learning have opened the door to new possibilities for a predictive algorithm. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is one such tool that has allowed for the discovery of hidden interconnectivity in large data sets. We use PCA alongside 𝑘 -means clustering to obtain groups of stocks with similar historical structure with the potential to assist in predictive stock management. Results: In just over five seconds, our algorithm groups a hundred stocks from the New York Stock Exchange with mean correlation 0.2483 into fifty portfolios with mean correlation 0.4299. On average, the stocks in these fifty portfolios experienced price increases and decreases on the same day 65.34% of the time in the sample time frame of 4/17/2000 to 11/10/2017. The algorithm can be extended to encompass more stocks. Implications: This algorithm provides a means to identify stocks with similar structure in both the short and long term. Stocks belonging to the same portfolio after clustering are shown to have positive and negative returns at the same time within the user defined periods of time.
’ s repository of research publications and other research outputs Geological Society of London Scientific Statement : what the geological record tells us about our present and future climate

Lear, Caroline H. ; Anand, Pallavi; Blenkinsop, Tom; Foster, Gavin L. ; Gagan, Mary; Hoogakker, Babette; Larter, Robert D. ; Lunt, Daniel J.; McCave, I. Nicholas. ; McClymont, Erin; Pancost, Richard D. ; Rickaby, Rosalind E. M. ; Schultz, David M. ; Summerhayes, Colin; Williams, Charles J. R. and Zalasiewicz, Jan (2021). Geological Society of London Scientific Statement: what the geological record tells us about our present and future climate. Journal of the Geological Society, 178(1), article no. 239.
ABCDP: Approximate Bayesian Computation with Differential Privacy

We developed a novel approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) framework, ABCDP, which produces differentially private (DP) and approximate posterior samples. Our framework takes advantage of the sparse vector technique (SVT), widely studied in the differential privacy literature. SVT incurs the privacy cost only when a condition (whether a quantity of interest is above/below a threshold) is met. If the condition is sparsely met during the repeated queries, SVT can drastically reduce the cumulative privacy loss, unlike the usual case where every query incurs the privacy loss. In ABC, the quantity of interest is the distance between observed and simulated data, and only when the distance is below a threshold can we take the corresponding prior sample as a posterior sample. Hence, applying SVT to ABC is an organic way to transform an ABC algorithm to a privacy-preserving variant with minimal modification, but yields the posterior samples with a high privacy level. We theoretically analyzed the interplay between the noise added for privacy and the accuracy of the posterior samples. We apply ABCDP to several data simulators and show the efficacy of the proposed framework.
Health care of Brazilian indigenous peoples: Post-implementation of the National Indigenous Health Policy

The objective was to describe, through key points of indigenous health care, what has changed after the implementation of the National Health Care Policy for Indigenous Peoples. For this, the research method chosen was the literature review with a qualitative approach of the results. The studies that composed the sample were retrieved from the SciELO and PubMed databases, from May to August 2018. The results point to the deficiency of training of professionals of the Multidisciplinary Team of Indigenous Health (EMSI) in the context of interethnic relations; the need to define the functions of Indigenous Health Agents (IHA) within EMSI; the good acceptance by indigenous peoples and EMSI regarding biomedical and traditional indigenous treatments, respectively; in addition to the food deficiency of the Indigenous Health Care Information System. That said, there should be trainings in the scope of interethnic action for EMSI and IHA with clear definition of each one’ roles within EMSI, especially the IHA.
Studies on ruminant brucellosis in El Salam canal area, Egypt

1 Animal and Poultry Health Department, Desert Research Center. 2 Theriogenology Department, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Aswan Univ., Egypt. E-Mail: islam_wassif@hotmail.com Abstract The current study is aimed to provide some epidemiological data about brucellosis and its impact among ruminants in the area around El-Salam canal, North Sinai. In addition to determination of the sensitivity, specificity; positive & negative predictive values and diagnostic efficacy of Brucella Antibody Test Kits as a rapid field assay for the diagnosis of brucellosis. Our results revealed that, the overall prevalence rate of brucellosis was 7.1% (12/168) and 10.1% (17/168) using ELISA and Brucella Antibody Test Kits respectively. Out of 168 serum samples; 9 were seropositive and 148 were sero-negative for brucellosis by both ELISA and Brucella Antibody Test Kits. Another 3 and 8 serum samples were only positive with ELISA and Brucella Antibody Test Kits respectively, revealing 75% sensitivity, 94.8% specificity, 47% positive predictive value, 53.5% negative predictive value and 93.4% diagnostic efficacy for this test. Brucellosis was found to be one of the causes of abortion in the study area as 61.9% (13/21) of aborted animals were seropositive for brucellosis. While to a little extent, it can be considered one of infertility causes as 4.7% (7/147) of infertile animals were seropositive for brucellosis. On the other hand, there were 38% (8/21) and 95.2% (140/147) of aborted and infertile animals respectively were sero-negative for brucellosis revealing that, there were another causes of abortion and infertility in the area of study rather than brucellosis and there was a necessity for their further investigations in order to improve the fertility and productivity of the animals in this targeted area.
The Effect of Immediate and Delayed Feedback on the Achievement of Chinese EFL Learners on Reading Comprehension

This study aims to investigate the effect of using two types of feedback (immediate and delayed) in motivating Chinese students to improve English proficiency in the university level. The current study employs 3(immediate feedback, delayed feedback and no feedback) X 3(low level, moderate level and high level) quasi-experimental study. Highlighting the purpose of the current study by adopting three (20182019). 18 English majors in the university were selected to participate in present study for 1 week. By comparing the achievements of pretest and posttest, the result showed that students in the immediate feedback group performed better than students in the delayed feedback group and no feedback group. Additionally, high proficiency learners benefited more from immediate feedback, with making more progress than the other two levels. However, moderate proficiency level learners benefited more from delayed feedback compared to the other two proficiency level groups.
tumefaciens Chromosomal Virulence Region

A genetic analysis of Agrobacterium tumefaciens chromosomal functions required for virulence was undertaken. Large Tn5-containing cosmid clones were isolated frokn DNA of avirulent A. tumefaciens mutants having chromosonal TnS insertions and exhibiting defective attachment to plant cells. The clones from several different mutants each contained overlapping segments of a 30-kilobase A. tumefaciens chromosomal region, which were physically mapped. All chromosomal TnS insertions leading to the avirulent, attachment-defective phenotype were localized within an 11-kilobase portion of this chromosomal virulence region. Transposon
Herding cats: The collection, classification and analysis of web-based content for online researchers

As human interactions take place in online environments, researchers are examining web-based communicative artefacts with increasing attention. One emerging area of interest is the construction of web-based texts, such as blogs, by young children. The analysis of such texts presents novel challenges and opportunities for researchers. Unlike hard copy texts, blogs by their very nature change over time, presenting themselves as ‘moving targets’ for analysis. Analysing blogs is akin to herding cats, which is a feat notoriously difficult to accomplish. Fortunately, blog data is electronic and web-based, which allows for new cataloguing and data management solutions to emerge, and better methods to sort and store large amounts of data. This paper explores the difficulties encountered in capturing online blog data. In doing so, it also showcases a number of solutions for the collection, storage, classification and analysis of electronic, web-based artefacts in general.
What is the role of rapid diagnostic tests for COVID-19 IgM/IgG in the pre-operative period of cosmetic plastic surgery?

Introdução: A doença pelo novo coronavírus 2019 (COVID-19) surgiu na China e se espalhou globalmente com transmissão mundial sustentada de humano para humano. Os testes de diagnóstico rápido COVID-19 IgM/IgG realizados no momento da admissão hospitalar, antes de cirurgia eletiva, estão entre os métodos de rastreamento pré-operatórios mais amplamente utilizados. Objetivos: O objetivo deste estudo é avaliar o papel do teste rápido de anticorpos COVID-19 como triagem em pacientes ambulatoriais em cirurgia plástica estética. Métodos: Uma revisão sistemática foi realizada para estudos publicados desde dezembro de 2019, com vários termos de pesquisa relacionados ao teste rápido de anticorpos para COVID-19 e SARS-CoV-2. Os artigos relevantes foram selecionados por meio da avaliação de títulos e resumos. Artigos pertinentes foram revisados. Dados sobre o nível de evidência, sensibilidade e especificidade foram coletados. Resultados: A estratégia de revisão produziu 409 manuscritos. Um total de 357 estudos foram duplicados ou mostraram-se não relevantes para a questão de pesquisa. Entre os artigos restantes, 28 eram estudos sem informações sobre precisão e 24 eram manuscritos descrevendo medidas de precisão. A sensibilidade variou de 18,4 a 100%, o valor preditivo positivo variou entre 19,7 e 100%, a especificidade variou entre 94 e 100%, e o valor preditivo negativo ficou entre 20 e 100%. Conclusão: Os testes de diagnóstico rápido COVID-19 IgM/IgG podem ser imprecisos. Não encontramos nenhuma evidência para apoiar o teste rápido de anticorpos COVID-19 ou SARS-CoV-2 para pacientes ambulatoriais em cirurgia plástica estética.
Production of Novel Vitamin E Loaded Nanostructure Lipid Carriers and Lipid Nanocapsules for Milk Fortification

In this research, novel vitamin E loaded Nanostructured Lipid Carriers (NLCs) and Lipid Nanocapsules (LNCs) were produced and their physicochemical properties were characterized. The optimum ratio of liquid to solid lipid and vitamin to total formulations were determined. Particle size, polydispersity index, zeta potential, encapsulation efficiency and encapsulation load of optimum formulations were evaluated. Optimized formulations had encapsulation efficiencies of 95 and 99% for NLC and LNC, respectively. X-ray diffraction results indicated a new crystalline lattice with lower degree of crystallinity for vitamin E nanocarriers in comparison to bulk fats because of curvature effects. Fourier transforms infrared spectroscopy showed that there were no adverse reactions between vitamin E and lipids. Release profile and kinetic modeling were investigated in gastrointestinal media that showed developed nanocarriers can protect vitamin E against acidic condition by decreasing its release in gastric media (release percentage of 29 and 4% for NLC and LNC in gastric media, respectively). Milk was fortified with vitamin E loaded nanocarriers and its sensory evaluation indicated their potential application for production of functional food.
m -Stage Epsilon-Greedy Exploration for Reinforcement Learning

Efﬁcient exploration of the environment is a major challenge for reinforcement learning agents, especially in sparse reward settings. This is evident from the fact that simple schemes such as (cid:15) -greedy remain competitive with more complicated algorithms for exploration. In this paper, we propose a generalization of (cid:15) -greedy, called m -stage (cid:15) -greedy in which (cid:15) increases within each episode but decreases between episodes. This ensures that by the time an agent gets to explore the later states within an episode, (cid:15) has not decayed too much to do any meaningful exploration. We provide theoretical results motivating the use of our algorithm in task based environments, and provide experimental evidence in two types of environments demonstrating the effectiveness of our method.
Bioremediation of Toxic Lead from Industrial Effluent Using an Agricultural Waste, Melon Husk Activated With Urea

Lead which is toxic to the environment because of its threat on living organisms is one of the common components of industrial effluent. Urea-activated melon husk was used as an adsorbent to remove lead from simulated industrial effluent. Exposure times, adsorbate concentrations and adsorbent dosages were varied for the most suitable set of conditions for the adsorption process. The Adsorption isotherms correlated fine with the Langmuir and Freundlich isotherm models, with their R values 0.9999 and 1 respectively. Data from the experiment were also assessed to discover the kinetic characteristics of the adsorption process. Adsorption process for the target heavy metal ion was found to follow pseudo-second order adsorption kinetics with r value of 0.9995. Urea-activated melon husk, a readily available adsorbent, was found to be efficient in the uptake of Pb ions in industrial effluents, thus, indicating an excellent alternative for the removal of heavy metals from industrial waste water.
Pseudomonas aeruginosa PAO

The braZ gene for a novel branched-chain amino acid transport system in Pseudomonas aeruginosa PAO was isolated and characterized. Determination of the nucleotide sequence showed that the braZ gene comprises 1,311 nucleotides specifying a protein of 437 amino acids. Hydropathy analysis suggested that the product is an integral membrane protein with 12 membrane-spanning segments. The amino acid sequence showed extensive homology to those of the braB and brnQ gene products, branched-chain amino acid carriers of P. aeruginosa and Salmonella typhimurium, respectively. By using the T7 RNA polymerase-promoter system, the braZ gene product was identified as a protein of an apparent M, of 34,000 on a sodium dodecyl sulfate-polyacrylamide gel. Properties of the transport system encoded by braZ were studied by using P. aeruginosa PA03537, defective in both the highand low-affinity branched-chain amino acid transport systems (LIV-I and LIV-II, respectively). The transport system encoded by braZ was found to be another effective branched-chain amino acid transport system in P. aeruginosa PAO and was thus designated as LIV-III. This system is specific for isoleucine and valine, giving the same Km value of 12 ,uM for these amino acids. The system was found, however, to have a very low affinity for leucine, with a Km value of 150 FiM, which contrasts with the substrate specificities of LIV-I and LIV-II.
Microblogging Sentiment Investor, Return and Volatility in the COVID-19 Era: Indonesian Stock Exchange

The covid-19 pandemic scenario caused the most extensive economic shocks the world has experienced in decades Maintaining financial performance and economic stability is essential during the pandemic period In these conditions, where movement is severely restricted, media consumption is considered to be increasing The social media platform is one of the media online used by the public as a source of information and also expressing their sentiment, including individual investors in the capital market as social media users Twitter is one of the social media microblogging platforms used by individual investors to share their opinion and get information This study aims to determine whether microblogging sentiment investors can predict the capital market during pandemics To analyze microblogging sentiment investors, we classified sentiment using the phyton text mining algorithm and Naive Bayesian text classification into level positive, negative, and neutral from November 2019 to November 2020 This study was on 68 listed companies on the Indonesia stock exchange A Vector Autoregression and Impulse Response is applied to capture short and long-term impacts along with a causal relationship We found that microblogging sentiment investor has a significant impact on stock returns and volatility and vice-versa Also, the response due to shocks is convergent, and microblogging investors in Indonesia are categorized as a "news-watcher" investor
CALCIUM SULFATE: AN ALTERNATIVE FOR ENVIRONMENTALLY FRIENDLY CONSTRUCTION

One of the challenges of the construction industry today is to develop and promote the use of environmentally friendly materials. The production and use of Portland cement clinker as a construction material is part of the problem because of its high generation of CO2 in its manufacture. Therefore, alternative materials that mitigate in some extent this situation become an important task in the development of new materials. The use of calcium sulfate in any form as a construction material has been limited due to its high solubility in water and low development of mechanical strength. However, its use as an alternative cementitious material provides a notable decrease on greenhouse gases produced when it is compared to the manufacture of other hydraulic cementitious materials, since the temperatures required in its manufacturing are relatively low. Therefore, in this study the feasibility of reuse of waste gypsum from the ceramics industry by milling and calcination was evaluated. This calcium sulfate was used as main component in the manufacture of ternary cementitious mixtures. Cementitious test mixtures were manufactured with CaSO4 synthesized from waste gypsum, ground granulated blast furnace slag and silica fume. Small additions of K2SO4, Ca(OH)2 and Portland cement clinker as chemical activators were used. The addition of blast furnace slag and silica fume to the calcium sulfate systems improved its properties and prevented the dissolution in wet environments. The compressive strength achieved by some systems was near 20 MPa at 56 days of curing, showing that this material may be a feasible option for the manufacture of masonry or elements with low structural strength requirements with a proper behavior in wet environments.
Generalizing User Models through Hybrid Hierarchical Control

Reinforcement Learning has two main challenges in the field of Human-Computer Interaction. The first challenge is generalization across tasks and environments. The second challenge is to achieve human-likeness. We propose a Hybrid Hierarchical Control framework for pointing tasks to address both challenges simultaneously. In our framework, we separate high-level decision-making from low-level motor and gaze control. This hierarchical structure promotes generalizability. By constraining the low-level control to human-like capabilities we aim to achieve human-like results. Finally, we present some applications that our framework could be used for.
Cross-Sensor Fingerprint Matching Using Siamese Network and Adversarial Learning

The fingerprint is one of the leading biometric modalities that is used worldwide for authenticating the identity of persons. Over time, a lot of research has been conducted to develop automatic fingerprint verification techniques. However, due to different authentication needs, the use of different sensors and the fingerprint verification systems encounter cross-sensor matching or sensor interoperability challenges, where different sensors are used for the enrollment and query phases. The challenge is to develop an efficient, robust and automatic system for cross-sensor matching. This paper proposes a new cross-matching system (SiameseFinger) using the Siamese network that takes the features extracted using the Gabor-HoG descriptor. The proposed Siamese network is trained using adversarial learning. The SiameseFinger was evaluated on two benchmark public datasets FingerPass and MOLF. The results of the experiments presented in this paper indicate that SiameseFinger achieves a comparable performance with that of the state-of-the-art methods.
Gambling and retirement: A qualitative study of non-problem gambling in the course of life of women

Studies show that differences exist in how women and men gamble. However, publications devoted to senior gamblers usually describe them as a homogeneous group without distinguishing between senior men and women. The purpose of this qualitative research was to explore the experience of gambling by older women. The article presents how interest in gambling developed in a group of older women who gamble recreationally. In-depth interviews conducted with 26 non-addicted women have revealed that in retirement they most often return to this activity known for many years, and the initiation of gambling rarely occurs during this period of life. Retired women gamble more often and more regularly than do younger women, explained by them having fewer responsibilities and more free time, yet they are able to maintain control over their spending on the game. The results of this study suggest that gambling can be valid a form of recreation in retirement, but psychoeducation about threats and the use of responsible gambling strategies is important. Resume Les etudes montrent qu’il y a des differences dans la facon dont les femmes et les hommes jouent. Cependant, les publications consacrees aux aines les decrivent generalement comme un groupe homogene, sans faire la distinction entre les hommes et les femmes. La recherche qualitative avait pour but d’examiner l’experience du jeu chez les femmes âgees. L’article decrit la facon dont l’interet pour le jeu nait dans un groupe de femmes âgees qui jouent par plaisir. Des entrevues approfondies menees aupres de 26 femmes non dependantes ont revele qu’a la retraite, elles reviennent le plus souvent a des activites qu’elles pratiquent depuis de nombreuses annees, et commencent rarement a jouer durant cette periode de leur vie. Les femmes retraitees jouent plus souvent et plus regulierement que les femmes plus jeunes, ce qu’elles expliquent par le fait qu’elles ont moins de responsabilites et plus de temps libre, mais elles arrivent toutefois a controler leurs depenses en jeu. Les resultats de cette etude montrent que le jeu peut etre une forme de loisir a la retraite, mais que la psychoeducation portant sur les menaces et l’emploi de strategies de jeu responsable sont importants.