Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
SCAPING THE BAJAU THROUGH RITUALS AND CELEBRATIONS IN MARITIME OF MALAYSIA AND THE PHILIPPINES

Lexically, the word scape is referred to a specific analogical view of something visible to people on the ground. In cultural studies, the scape is interpreted beyond a physical and visible context. It is a blend of both tangible and intangible cultural dimensions such as music/soundscape and dancescape. Bajau-Sama communities on the East Coast of Sabah and Bajau Laut in the Philippines live harmoniously in an environment where the living of the spiritual world is significant and vital. Balancing the people in the physical and spiritual world through rituals as efficacies are to be performed according to the bonding through inheritance of heirloom for many generations. All scheduled ritual performances not only are fulfilling the agreement between the physical and the spiritual world, but it also produces sounds and movements which add to the scapes of these communities’ world. Music and dance performances in these rituals are identic to the soundscape and dancescape with many types of specific ritual music and dances, i.e., igal soundscape and igal dancescape. The male and female music sounds, dance movements, and phrases in different kind of rituals are not only fulfilling the “manifest functions” but also signify the “latent functions”. Based on the observations of a few rituals among these communities in Semporna, Sabah and Sitangkai Island, Philippines; this paper analyses the scapes of Bajau as both tangible and intangible. This paper will also discuss the significance of these scapes in sustaining Bajau-Sama identity of these areas particularly to Malaysia and the Philippines. Keywords: Bajau-Sama, ritual, celebrations, igal music and dance, identity, Malaysia, the Philippines
Evaluation of pharmacokinetic interactions between bicyclol and co-administered drugs in rat and human liver microsomes in vitro and in rats in vivo

Abstract Bicyclol is a new synthetic anti-hepatitic drug and primarily metabolized by CYP3A. The aim of this study was to evaluate the pharmacokinetic interactions between bicyclol and co-administered drugs including metformin, pioglitazone, atorvastatin, fenofibrate, Cyclosporin A (CsA), and tacrolimus in rat and human liver microsomes (RLMs/HLMs) in vitro and in rats in vivo. The depletion rate of bicyclol in RLMs was significantly inhibited by 44.8% and 35.5% after preincubation with pioglitazone and fenofibrate while the metabolite formation rate of bicyclol in HLMs was inhibited by 26.1% and 23.9% after preincubation and coincubation with tacrolimus, and by 20.2% after preincubation with CsA. Conversely, preincubation and coincubation with bicyclol significantly inhibited the depletion rate of pioglitazone in RLMs by 34.1% and 27.1%, respectively, and the formation rate of para- and ortho-hydroxy atorvastatin in RLMs and HLMs by 20.6–36.2%. There were no significant pharmacokinetic interactions between bicyclol and pioglitazone in rats after a single or multiple oral treatment. As the selected inhibitory drug concentrations in vitro were significantly higher than those in clinical settings and the maximum inhibition rate did not exceed 50%, the clinically significant interaction between bicyclol and these co-administered drugs in humans is predicted less likely to happen.
Observations on the truncated differential of SP block ciphers and their applications to mCrypton and CRYPTON V1.0

Truncated differential attack (TDA) proposed by Knudsen in Fast Software Encryption 1995 (FSE'95) has been widely used in the analysis of block ciphers. In this study, the authors specifically study the security of SP block ciphers against TDA. In FSE'15, Li et al. introduced a meet-in-the-middle technique to construct truncated differential for Feistel ciphers. They first apply Li's technique to SP block ciphers and get some further results. Second, they introduce the concept of generalised truncated difference to control the diffusion of active S-boxes in the truncated differential. On the basis of these, two 5-round truncated differential distinguishers for mCrypton and CRYPTON V1.0 have been constructed. Using these two 5-round distinguishers, they present the first 8-round DA on mCrypton-64 and improve the former best TDA on CRYPTON V1.0 by one round.
Morphometric Analysis of One-Component Polyurethane Foams Applicable in the Building Sector via X-ray Computed Microtomography

A detailed morphometric analysis of one-component polyurethane (PU) expanding foams, with densities of 26 and 28 kg/m3 (‘SUMMER’ and ‘WINTER’ product versions), was conducted to evaluate the topology of the foam cells and to discover processing-to-structure relationships. The microstructural analysis of the heterogeneously distributed pores revealed tight relationships between the foam morphology and the cell topology, depending on the growth rate and local environmental conditions, governed by the properties of the blowing gas used. The most significant morphometric output included the following: open/closed porosity and (heterogeneous) pore distribution, relative density and (homogeneous) strut distribution, and total solid matrix surface and closed pore surface area—at the macroscopic level of the foam. While, at the microscopic level of the cells, the results embraced the following: the size of every detected strut and pore, identified two-dimensional (2D) shapes of the cell faces, and proposed three-dimensional (3D) topologies modelling the PU foam cells. The foam microstructure could be then related with macroscopic features, significant in building applications. Our protocol outlines the common procedures that are currently used for the sample preparation, X-ray scanning, 3D image reconstruction and dataset analysis in the frame of the X-ray computed microtomography (µ-CT) testing of the one-component PU foams, followed by a statistical (multiple Gaussian) analysis and conceptual considerations of the results in comparison with thematic literature.
Hyperglycemia-Associated Dysregulation of O-GlcNAcylation and HIF1A Reduces Anticancer Action of Metformin in Ovarian Cancer Cells (SKOV-3)

Although cancer cells need more glucose than normal cells to maintain energy demand, chronic hyperglycemia induces metabolic alteration that may dysregulate signaling pathways, including the O-GlcNAcylation and HIF1A (Hypoxia-inducible factor 1-alpha) pathways. Metformin was demonstrated to evoke metabolic stress and induce cancer cell death. The aim of this study was to determine the cytotoxic efficiency of metformin on SKOV-3 cells cultured in hyperglycemia and normoglycemia. To identify the potential mechanism, we assessed the expression of O-linked β-N-acetlyglucosamine transferase (OGT) and glycoside hydrolase O-GlcNAcase (OGA), as well as hypoxia-inducible factor 1-alpha (HIF1A) and glucose transporters (GLUT1, GLUT3). SKOV-3 cells were cultured in normoglycaemia (NG, 5 mM) and hyperglycemia (HG, 25 mM) with and without 10 mM metformin for 24, 48, and 72 h. The proliferation rate, apoptotic and necrotic SKOV-3 cell death were evaluated. Real-Time qPCR was employed to determine mRNA expression of OGT, OGA, GLUT1, GLUT3, and HIF1A. Metformin significantly reduced the proliferation of SKOV-3 cells under normal glucose conditions. Whereas, the efficacy of metformin to induce SKOV-3 cell death was reduced in hyperglycemia. Both hyperglycemia and metformin induced changes in the expression of genes involved in the O-GlcNAcylation status and HIF1A pathway. The obtained results suggest that dysregulation of O-GlcNAcylation, and the related HIF1A pathway, via hyperglycemia, is responsible for the decreased cytotoxic efficiency of metformin in human ovarian cancer cells.
HToPred: A Tool for Human Topoisomerase II Inhibitor Prediction

The enzyme human topoisomerase IIα (hTopoIIα) is an important anticancer drug target. Due to the availability of multiple inhibitor‐binding sites in this enzyme, the anti‐hTopoII agents possess high chemical diversity. Chemoinformatics methods can be used to identify lead compounds from large databases for hTopoII inhibitory activity and classify them. In this work, we report the use of machine learning methods to develop classification models for the identification of possible anti‐hTopoIIα agents and to classify them as catalytic inhibitors vs. poisons. Initially, an extensive dataset of small molecules which are reported to be evaluated towards hTopoIIα inhibition was collected from ChEMBL database and literature. Using this dataset, predictive models for classifying small molecules into hTopoIIα inhibitors and non‐inhibitors were developed. Additionally, the model development was taken up for the prediction of the type of hTopoIIα inactivation. Several molecular fingerprints and physicochemical descriptors of the molecules in the dataset were calculated using the chemoinformatics tool RDKit. Various classifiers were evaluated to establish suitable protocol. Further, ensemble models were developed by bagging of homogenous classifier and selective fusion of heterogeneous classifiers. The models were thoroughly validated with 5‐fold cross validation and external validation. The best performing models were incorporated into a tool christened as Human Topoisomerase IIα Inhibitor Prediction (HToPred, http://14.139.57.41/HToPred). A molecular docking based validation for the successful application of HToPred in predicting the mode of enzyme inhibition was performed, which further established the acceptability of this tool. This tool can serve as an important platform to prescreen compounds for anti‐hTopoIIα potential.
Effects of miR‐503‐5p on apoptosis of human pulmonary microvascular endothelial cells in simulated microgravity

Recent studies have shown that microRNA (miRNAs) can play important roles in the regulation of endothelial cell (EC) function. However, the expression profile of miRNAs and their effects on the apoptosis of ECs under microgravity conditions remains unclear. In this study, the apoptosis of human pulmonary microvascular endothelial cells (HPMECs) under simulated microgravity was identified by Annexin V and propidium iodide double staining and transmission electron microscopy. miRNA microarray assay was used to screen the differentially expressed miRNAs in HPMECs under simulated microgravity, and eight differentially expressed miRNAs were identified. Specifically, miR‐503‐5p, which was found to be most significantly upregulated in both microarray and quantitative reverse‐transcription polymerase chain reaction assays, was selected for further functional investigation. Overexpression of miR‐503‐5p induced apoptosis of HPMECs under normal gravity and aggravated the negative effects of simulated microgravity on HPMECs. Furthermore, silencing of miR‐503‐5p expression effectively attenuated the negative effects of simulated microgravity on HPMECs. Further experiments showed that the mRNA and protein expression of anti‐apoptotic factor B‐cell lymphoma‐2 (Bcl‐2), which has been confirmed as a direct target of miR‐503‐5p, was inhibited by the upregulation of miR‐503‐5p and increased by the downregulation of miR‐503‐5p. Taken together, our findings demonstrate, for the first time, that miR‐503‐5p can induce apoptosis of HPMECs under simulated microgravity through, at least in part, inhibiting the expression of Bcl‐2.
Examining the Performance of PARACUDA-II Data-Mining Engine versus Selected Techniques to Model Soil Carbon from Reflectance Spectra

The monitoring and quantification of soil carbon provide a better understanding of soil and atmosphere dynamics. Visible-near-infrared-short-wave infrared (VIS-NIR-SWIR) reflectance spectroscopy can quantitatively estimate soil carbon content more rapidly and cost-effectively compared to traditional laboratory analysis. However, effective estimation of soil carbon using reflectance spectroscopy to a great extent depends on the selection of a suitable preprocessing sequence and data-mining algorithm. Many efforts have been dedicated to the comparison of conventional chemometric techniques and their optimization for soil properties prediction. Instead, the current study focuses on the potential of the new data-mining engine PARACUDA-II®, recently developed at Tel-Aviv University (TAU), by comparing its performance in predicting soil oxidizable carbon (Cox) against common data-mining algorithms including partial least squares regression (PLSR), random forests (RF), boosted regression trees (BRT), support vector machine regression (SVMR), and memory based learning (MBL). To this end, 103 soil samples from the Pokrok dumpsite in the Czech Republic were scanned with an ASD FieldSpec III Pro FR spectroradiometer in the laboratory under a strict protocol. Spectra preprocessing for conventional data-mining techniques was conducted using Savitzky-Golay smoothing and the first derivative method. PARACUDA-II®, on the other hand, operates based on the all possibilities approach (APA) concept, a conditional Latin hypercube sampling (cLHs) algorithm and parallel programming, to evaluate all of the potential combinations of eight different spectral preprocessing techniques against the original reflectance and chemical data prior to the model development. The comparison of results was made in terms of the coefficient of determination (R2) and root-mean-square error of prediction (RMSEp). Results showed that the PARACUDA-II® engine performed better than the other selected regular schemes with R2 value of 0.80 and RMSEp of 0.12; the PLSR was less predictive compared to other techniques with R2 = 0.63 and RMSEp = 0.29. This can be attributed to its capability to assess all the available options in an automatic way, which enables the hidden models to rise up and yield the best available model.
HEAR: Approach for Heartbeat Monitoring with Body Movement Compensation by IR-UWB Radar

Further applications of impulse radio ultra-wideband radar in mobile health are hindered by the difficulty in extracting such vital signals as heartbeats from moving targets. Although the empirical mode decomposition based method is applied in recovering waveforms of heartbeats and estimating heart rates, the instantaneous heart rate is not achievable. This paper proposes a Heartbeat Estimation And Recovery (HEAR) approach to expand the application to mobile scenarios and extract instantaneous heartbeats. Firstly, the HEAR approach acquires vital signals by mapping maximum echo amplitudes to the fast time delay and compensating large body movements. Secondly, HEAR adopts the variational nonlinear chirp mode decomposition in extracting instantaneous frequencies of heartbeats. Thirdly, HEAR extends the clutter removal method based on the wavelet decomposition with a two-parameter exponential threshold. Compared to heart rates simultaneously collected by electrocardiograms (ECG), HEAR achieves a minimum error rate 4.6% in moving state and 2.25% in resting state. The Bland–Altman analysis verifies the consistency of beat-to-beat intervals in ECG and extracted heartbeat signals with the mean deviation smaller than 0.1 s. It indicates that HEAR is practical in offering clinical diagnoses such as the heart rate variability analysis in mobile monitoring.
Towards Efficient SpMV on Sunway Manycore Architectures

Sparse Matrix-Vector Multiplication (SpMV) is an essential computation kernel for many data-analytic workloads running in both supercomputers and data centers. The intrinsic irregularity in SpMV is challenging to achieve high performance, especially when porting to new architectures. In this paper, we present our work on designing and implementing efficient SpMV algorithms on Sunway, a novel architecture with many unique features. To fully exploit the Sunway architecture, we have designed a dual-side multi-level partition mechanism on both sparse matrices and hardware resources to improve locality and parallelism. On one hand, we partition sparse matrices into blocks, tiles, and slices for different granularities. On the other hand, we partition cores in a Sunway processor into fleets, and further dedicate part of cores in a fleet as computation and I/O cores. Moreover, we have optimized the communication between partitions to further improve the performance. Our scheme is generally applicable to different SpMV formats and implementations. For evaluation, we have applied our techniques atop a popular SpMV format, CSR. Experimental results on 18 datasets show that our optimization yields up to 15.5x (12.3x on average) speedups.
Using Dual-Polarization Interferograms to Correct Atmospheric Effects for InSAR Topographic Mapping

Atmospheric effect represents one of the major error sources for interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR), particularly for the repeat-pass InSAR data. In order to further improve the practicability of InSAR technology, it is essential to study how to estimate and eliminate the undesired impact of atmospheric effects. In this paper, we propose the multi-resolution weighted correlation analysis (MRWCA) method between the dual-polarization InSAR data to estimate and correct atmospheric effects for InSAR topographic mapping. The study is based on the a priori knowledge that atmospheric effects is independent of the polarization. To find the identical atmospheric phase (ATP) signals of interferograms in different polarizations, we need to remove the other same or similar phase components. Using two different topographic data, differential interferometry was firstly performed so that the obtained differential interferograms (D-Infs) have different topographic error phases. A polynomial fitting method is then used to remove the orbit error phases. Thus, the ATP signals are the only identical components in the final obtained D-Infs. By using a forward wavelet transform, we break down the obtained D-Infs into building blocks based on their frequency properties. We then applied weighted correlation analysis to estimate the wavelet coefficients attributed to the atmospheric effects. Thus, the ATP signals can be obtained by the refined wavelet coefficients during inverse wavelet transform (IWT). Lastly, we tested the proposed method by the L-band Advanced Land Observing Satellite (ALOS)-1 PALSAR dual-polarization SAR data pairs covering the San Francisco (USA) and Moron (Mongolia) regions. By using Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) data as the reference data, we evaluated the vertical accuracy of the InSAR digital elevation models (DEMs) with and without atmospheric effects correction, which shows that, for the San Francisco test site, the corrected interferogram could provide a DEM with a root-mean-square error (RMSE) of 7.79 m, which is an improvement of 40.5% with respect to the DEM without atmospheric effects correction. For the Moron test site, the corrected interferogram could provide a DEM with an RMSE of 10.74 m, which is an improvement of 30.2% with respect to the DEM without atmospheric effects correction.
Crystalline/Amorphous Blend Identification from Cobalt Adsorption by Layered Double Hydroxides

In this study, the adsorption behavior of CaAl-Cl layered double hydroxide (CaAl-Cl-LDH) with a controlled pH value (pH = 6) on Co(II) ions ([Co] = 8 mM) is investigated. The comprehensively accepted mechanism of cobalt adsorption on LDH is considered to be co-precipitation, and the final adsorbed products are normally crystalline Co-LDH. One unanticipated finding is that crystalline/amorphous blends are found in the X-ray diffraction (XRD) pattern of Co-adsorbed LDH. To shed light on the adsorption products and the mechanisms in the adsorption process of Co(II) in an aqueous solution by CaAl-Cl-LDH, a series of testing methods including Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR), Scanning electron microscope (SEM), High-resolution transmission electron microscopy (HR-TEM), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), and inductively coupled plasma (ICP) are applied to clarify the interaction between cobalt and CaAl-Cl-LDH. According to the comprehensive analysis, the formation of the crystalline/amorphous blends corresponds to two adsorption mechanisms. The crystalline phases are identified as Co6Al2CO3(OH)16·4H2O, which is attributed to the co-precipitation process occurring in the interaction between Co(II) and CaAl-Cl-LDH. The formation of the amorphous phases is due to surface complexation on amorphous Al(OH)3 hydrolyzed from CaAl-Cl-LDH.
Phylogenetic analysis of software evolution, a case study: VE&MINT

Open source projects may face a forking situation at some point during their life-cycle. The traditional view is that forks are a waste of project resources and should be avoided. However, in a wider technological and organisational context, forks can be a way to foster the creation of a software ecosystem. Either way, forking is explicitly allowed by open source licenses. Notwithstanding, methods for quantifying the evolution of forks are currently scarce. The present work attempts to answer the question whether a real-life project has forked. It does so by considering code and organisational characteristics of the project, and analysing these characteristics by applying methods ported from biological phylogenetics. After finding that the project is forked, implications for project governance are discussed.
Perspectives and Experiences with Engaging Youth and Families in Research

Abstract Engaging youth with disabilities and families in research is critical in facilitating knowledge utilization to impact processes and outcomes of services and interventions. Organizations such as INVOLVE in the United Kingdom, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute in the United States advocate for engaging stakeholders in all aspects of the research process. Despite these efforts, there is a need for research to identify best practices and approaches for stakeholder engagement in research as current descriptions around processes are lacking. In this perspective paper, we share our insights and experiences with engaging youth with disabilities and families as members of the research team. We offer considerations and strategies for stakeholder engagement, as well as identify relevant frameworks to facilitate stakeholder engagement in research. We encourage researchers to share and document their experiences with stakeholder engagement in research to provide guidance for others with shared interests. We hope this paper will initiate conversations among researchers about best practices to maximize the full potential of stakeholders’ time and input.