Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Cloning and Characterization of Cholesterol 25-Hydroxylase (ch25h) From a Marine Teleost, Chinese Tongue Sole (Cynoglossus semilaevis), and Its Gene Expressions in Response to Dietary Arachidonic Acid

Our previous studies have shown that ARA regulated the gonadal steroidogenesis and the synthesis of gonadotrophin-releasing hormone (GnRH) in the brain in a gender-dependent manner in Chinese tongue sole, a marine teleost with typical sex dimorphism. As a following up-study, the current study aimed to clone and characterize a gene responding to dietary ARA differently between males and females, cholesterol 25-hydroxylase (ch25h), which has important roles in cholesterol and lipid metabolism of mammals, but is rarely investigated in fish. The full-length cDNA of Chinese tongue sole ch25h was cloned and characterized, and its transcription in the gonads, brain and liver of both males and females in response to dietary ARA levels (0.34, 2.53, and 9.63% of TFA) was investigated. The Chinese tongue sole Ch25h, which putatively is Ch25h subtype B, shared moderate identity to its known orthologs of other teleost and lower identity to human Ch25h. It has high transcription levels in the gonads, followed by skin and muscle, but low levels in the intestine, spleen, and kidney. High ARA levels significantly increased the ch25h transcription in the gonads and brain of male fish, but did not affect the transcription in the females. However, the effect of dietary ARA on ch25h transcription in the liver showed an opposite gender-difference pattern to those in the gonads and brain. To our knowledge, this is the first study in marine teleost investigating the nutritional regulation of ch25h expression.
Inventory Model in a CVRP Distribution Network with Uniformly Distributed Demand

At the present time, business and industrial organizations are given the task of good planning when determining any type of acquisition for their services. That is, identify and evaluate the different options of provision of inventory that allow the company to maintain and improve its offer. Within this evaluation, it can be noticed that the decision of the management and administration of resources, involves the problem of distribution (goods and services), being also of great importance within the supply chain. In this way, in this paper, we analyze the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem with ellipsoidal distances, which includes an inventory model with uniformly distributed demands, so that inventory costs and distances are minimized. With this contribution, the way to minimize total costs in a distribution period can be refined. For validation, computational evaluations obtained from the mathematical model and backed by the software are presented (LINGO 18.0 -MATLAB).
Splintage for Ulnar Deviation

It appears that ulnar drift is of functional rather than anatomical origin, combined with the laxity of tissues secondary to the disease, and the pressure of usage. The constant activities of daily living and domestic chores will force a woman's hands into ulnar drift, and this is supported by the fact that it is twice as common in women as in men. The metacarpo-phalangeal joints, unlike the inter-phalangeal joints, normally have lateral mobility when in extension. Rheumatoid disease attacks the intrinsic muscles, and the capsular and ligamentous structures which normally control the integrity and stability of the lateral movement at the metacarpo-phalangeal joints. The normal relationships of the metacarpo-phalangeal joints are, therefore, altered and the lateral instability known as ulnar drift develops.
Percentile transformation and recalibration functions allow harmonization of thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH) immunoassay results

Abstract Background The comparability of thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH) results cannot be easily obtained using SI-traceable reference measurement procedures (RPMs) or reference materials, whilst harmonization is more feasible. The aim of this study was to identify and validate a new approach for the harmonization of TSH results. Methods Percentile normalization was applied to 125,419 TSH results, obtained from seven laboratories using three immunoassays (Access 3rd IS Thyrotropin, Beckman Coulter Diagnostics; Architect System, Abbott Diagnostics and Elecsys, Roche Diagnostics). Recalibration equations (RCAL) were derived by robust regressions using bootstrapped distribution. Two datasets, the first of 119 EQAs, the second of 610, 638 and 639 results from Access, Architect and Elecsys TSH results, respectively, were used to validate RCAL. A dataset of 142,821 TSH values was used to derive reference intervals (RIs) after applying RCAL. Results Access, Abbott and Elecsys TSH distributions were significantly different (p < 0.001). RCAL intercepts and slopes were −0.003 and 0.984 for Access, 0.032 and 1.041 for Architect, −0.031 and 1.003 for Elecsys, respectively. Validation using EQAs showed that before and after RCAL, the coefficients of variation (CVs) or among-assay results decreased from 10.72% to 8.16%. The second validation dataset was used to test RCALs. The median of between-assay differences ranged from −0.0053 to 0.1955 mIU/L of TSH. Elecsys recalibrated to Access (and vice-versa) showed non-significant difference. TSH RI after RCAL resulted in 0.37–5.11 mIU/L overall, 0.49–4.96 mIU/L for females and 0.40–4.92 mIU/L for males. A significant difference across age classes was identified. Conclusions Percentile normalization and robust regression are valuable tools for deriving RCALs and harmonizing TSH values.
Ideal Sequence of Didactic Lectures and Simulation in Teaching Transesophageal Echocardiography Among Anesthesiologists.

OBJECTIVE Performing a basic perioperative transesophageal echocardiography (TEE) requires 3-dimensional knowledge of cardiac anatomy, psychomotor skills, and image interpretation. Commonly, lectures followed by simulation sequence is used for teaching TEE. Differences may occur among learners when this sequencing of instructional components is altered. The authors investigated the ideal sequence of lectures and simulation in teaching basic perioperative TEE. DESIGN Prospective randomized comparative study. SETTING Simulation room in a large academy tertiary care center. PARTICIPANTS Noncardiac anesthesiologists in Singapore with no prior knowledge of TEE. INTERVENTION Comparison of acquisition and retention of knowledge and skills between the lecture followed by simulation group (LS) and the simulation followed by lecture (SL) group. MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS Knowledge was assessed using multiple-choice questions (MCQs) and skills using a skill test. The primary outcome measured was the MCQ scores (post-course and retest) and the skill test scores (post-course and retest). Of the 43 anesthesiologists who were recruited, 22 were randomized into the LS group and 21 to the SL group. All participants took pre-course and post-course MCQs and post-course skill tests. Post-tests were repeated 1 month after the course to assess retention. There was no significant difference in the post-course MCQ (85.87% v 81.82%) and skill test scores (85.78% v 81.55%) between the SL and LS groups, respectively. The SL group demonstrated significantly better retention of knowledge at 1 month (MCQ score 83.5% v 72.73%; p = 0.003) and skills (skill test score 85.32% v 1.90%; p = 0.016) than the other. CONCLUSION This study showed that, for retention (at 1 month) of both knowledge and skills, it is preferable to teach practical skills followed by theoretical knowledge to anesthesiologists who are complete novices to TEE.
The study of seroprevalence of hepatitis E virus and an investigation into the lifestyle behaviours of the aborigines in Malaysia

Malaysia is a non‐endemic country for hepatitis E virus (HEV) infection. However, seroprevalence as high as 50% among samples of aboriginal people were reported over two decades ago. A total of 207 samples collected from seven aboriginal villages in rural settlements across two states in Malaysia were analysed for anti‐HEV IgG and IgM by an enzyme‐linked immunoassay. Following the detection of anti‐HEV seroprevalence, we organized health outreach to inform and educate the community. Qualitative interviews were conducted with individuals tested positive for anti‐HEV antibodies. Data derived from interviews and observations were used to investigate possible lifestyle behaviours associated with HEV infection. Anti‐HEV IgG was detected in six samples (5.9%) from the village of Dusun Kubur. Qualitative inquiry and observation study revealed poor dietary and household hygiene, contaminated food and water, contact with animal faeces, unsanitary and domestic waste disposal, and wildlife reservoirs could be the contributing factors for transmission and acquisition of HEV infection. Investigation during health outreach is important to provide insights for future empirical research and implementation for improvement of lifestyle behaviours among the aborigines. Managing the risk of HEV infection in the aborigines may reduce the risk of HEV transmission to the local communities.
NCMCMDA: miRNA-disease association prediction through neighborhood constraint matrix completion

Emerging evidence shows that microRNAs (miRNAs) play a critical role in diverse fundamental and important biological processes associated with human diseases. Inferring potential disease related miRNAs and employing them as the biomarkers or drug targets could contribute to the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of complex human diseases. In view of that traditional biological experiments cost much time and resources, computational models would serve as complementary means to uncover potential miRNA-disease associations. In this study, we proposed a new computational model named Neighborhood Constraint Matrix Completion for MiRNA-Disease Association prediction (NCMCMDA) to predict potential miRNA-disease associations. The main task of NCMCMDA was to recover the missing miRNA-disease associations based on the known miRNA-disease associations and integrated disease (miRNA) similarity. In this model, we innovatively integrated neighborhood constraint with matrix completion, which provided a novel idea of utilizing similarity information to assist the prediction. After the recovery task was transformed into an optimization problem, we solved it with a fast iterative shrinkage-thresholding algorithm. As a result, the AUCs of NCMCMDA in global and local leave-one-out cross validation were 0.9086 and 0.8453, respectively. In 5-fold cross validation, NCMCMDA achieved an average AUC of 0.8942 and standard deviation of 0.0015, which demonstrated NCMCMDA's superior performance than many previous computational methods. Furthermore, NCMCMDA was applied to three different types of case studies to further evaluate its prediction reliability and accuracy. As a result, 84% (colon neoplasms), 98% (esophageal neoplasms) and 98% (breast neoplasms) of the top 50 predicted miRNAs were verified by recent literature.
Design of Iris Recognition Biometric System

Now a days to access any secured system passwords are used. These passwords can be forgotten. In order to avoid these issues biometric security systems are implemented. Biometric security system makes use of human characteristics for their reliable identification. Iris recognition system uses iris of the human for identification. The pattern of iris of individual never changes over the time and hence it provides accurate authentication of the human. To evoke these discriminating features of iris, various methods had been used in the previous papers. In this proposed work design of iris recognition system consist of Segmentation, Normalization, Feature extraction using Gabor Filter and Feature matching using hamming distance algorithm applied on image of 320x280 dimensions obtained from CASIA database. For edge detection Canny edge detection algorithm is implemented. Experimental analysis shows that Gabor filter has shown better accuracy of iris segmentation and this design of iris biometric system has better performance.
Optimization, Design, and Analysis of Flexible-Grid Optical Networks with Physical-Layer Constraints

The theme of this thesis is the optimization, design, and analysis of flexible-grid optical networks that are constrained by physical-layer impairments (PLIs). We consider three flexible-grid network scenarios. The networks in the first class are static nonlinear transparent backbone networks where physical-layer resources are allocated to each traffic demand. The networks in the second class are traffic-variable nonlinear translucent backbone networks where regenerator sites are necessary to recover optical signals from the accumulated noise in long-distance transmission. The third class is data-center networks based on optical spatial division multiplexing. Within each class, our focus is primarily on an efficient and balanced allocation of network resources. Both optimization formulations and heuristic algorithms are proposed for each class. The contributions of this thesis can thus be categorized into three topics, as outlined below. First, we consider the optimization of network resources in the presence of PLI. The PLI between optical connections is characterized by the Gaussian noise (GN) model and incorporated into resource allocation algorithms. As an example, for a link-level optical communication system, the spectrum usage can be reduced by roughly up to 22% by accurately modelling the PLIs and assigning proper modulation formats and spectrum to optical connections. For resource allocation in the network level, the power spectral density of each optical connection is optimized in addition to the previously mentioned resources. As a second topic, the design of flexible-grid optical networks is studied. Specifically, we consider the regenerator location problem in traffic-variable translucent backbone networks. Due to the constantly changing traffic, the PLIs suffered by optical connections are also stochastic and, thus, have to be handled from a probabilistic perspective. A statistical network assessment process is used to characterize the noise distributions suffered by optical connections on each link, based on which a heuristic algorithm is proposed to select a set of regenerator sites with the minimum blocking probability. Finally, we study the trade-off between the blocking probability and total throughput in the modular data center networks (DCNs) based on different optical spatial division multiplexing switching schemes. This performance trade-off is caused by the coexistence of traffic demands with extremely different data rates and number of requests in DCNs. A heuristic resource allocation algorithm is proposed to enable flexible tuning of the objective function and achieve a balanced network performance.
Alkali Earth Metal Molybdates as Catalysts for the Selective Oxidation of Methanol to Formaldehyde—Selectivity, Activity, and Stability

Alkali earth metal molybdates (MMoO4, M = Mg, Ca, Sr, and Ba) were investigated as catalysts for the selective oxidation of methanol to formaldehyde in the search for more stable alternatives to the current industrial iron molybdate catalyst. The catalysts were prepared by either sol-gel synthesis or co-precipitation with both stoichiometric ratio (Mo:M = 1.0) and 10 mol% to 20 mol% excess Mo (Mo:M = 1.1 to 1.2). The catalysts were characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD), nitrogen physisorption, Raman spectroscopy, temperature programmed desorption of CO2 (CO2-TPD), and inductively coupled plasma (ICP). The catalytic performance of the catalysts was measured in a lab-scale, packed bed reactor setup by continuous operation for up to 100 h on stream at 400 °C. Initial selectivities towards formaldehyde of above 97% were achieved for all samples with excess molybdenum oxide at MeOH conversions between 5% and 75%. Dimethyl ether (DME) and dimethoxymethane (DMM) were the main byproducts, but CO (0.1%–2.1%) and CO2 (0.1%–0.4%) were also detected. It was found that excess molybdenum oxide evaporated from all the catalysts under operating conditions within 10 to 100 h on stream. No molybdenum evaporation past the point of stoichiometry was detected.
HYPER-TEMPORAL REMOTE SENSING FOR SCALING BETWEEN SPECTRAL INDICES AND FLUX TOWER MEASUREMENTS

Quantifying spatial and temporal variations of the environmental variables is a significant challenge in the Earth’s System studies. This can be addressed by tracking the exchange rate of carbon between land surface and the atmosphere through an effective integration of the tower-based flux measurements and remote sensing observations. However, confidence of these data with regard to extending into ecosystem or regional scales remains uncertain, particularly in heterogeneous landscapes. This paper studies how data with the necessary spatial and temporal sampling may be obtained for a typical temperate forest in southern England. A time series of the inter-calibrated Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) from the Disaster Monitoring Constellation (DMC) over the flux tower extent suggested that the spatial variability of the canopy changed significantly during transitions from leaf-off to leaf-on conditions because of canopy patchiness at high spatial resolution, scales finer than a coarse satellite-sensor pixel. The availability of three acquisitions within five days during early March provided the opportunity to look at the sensitivity of the NDVI to extraneous factors, which showed the uncertainty in this spectral index to vary with the flux footprint coverage, peaking at around 5% early in the season. This is comparable to the error that could be introduced by uncertainty in atmospheric correction specifically the parameterisation of aerosols. Thus, in the case of Wytham Woods, it may be more important to improve the representation of aerosols in the atmospheric model used than replace the generalised flux tower extent with a realistic flux footprint.
Driver Authentication for Smart Car Using Wireless Sensing

In the present evolving world, automobiles have become an intelligent electronic machine and are no longer a mere transport medium. In this article, we attempt to make them smarter by introducing the idea of in-car driver authentication using wireless sensing and develop a system that can recognize drivers automatically. The proposed system can recognize human identity by identifying the unique radio biometric information recorded in the channel state information (CSI) through multipath propagation. However, since the environmental information is also captured in the CSI, the performance of radio biometric recognition may be degraded by the changing environment. In this article, we first address the problem of “in-car changing environments” where the existing wireless sensing-based human identification system fails. We build a long-term driver radio biometric database consisting of radio biometrics of seven people collected over a period of two months. We leverage this database to create machine learning models that make the proposed system adaptive to new in-car environments. Second, we study the performance of the in-car driver authentication system with increasing effective bandwidth. We realize an effective bandwidth of 960 MHz by exploiting the multiantenna and frequency diversities in commercial WiFi devices. The performance of the proposed system is shown to improve with increasing effective bandwidth and the long-term experiments demonstrate the feasibility and accuracy of the proposed system. The accuracy achieved in the two-driver scenario is up to 99.13% for the best case.
The Case of L2 Japanese and L2 English

The systematic effect of first language (L1, henceforth) characteristics on foreign or second language (L2, henceforth) speech has been investigated extensively at the segmental level (for reviews, see Flege l987, l995; Leather & James 1996). For a valid assessment of how L1 characteristics af fect L2 speech patterns, it is also necessary to investigate the suprasegmental or prosodic aspect of language transfer phenomena (for a review of earlier studies of L2 prosody, see Ueyama 2000). In this paper, we present a contribution to the study of a specific aspect of L2 prosody, i.e., L2 speaker's awareness of the minimal (word level) prosodic units of their target language. In particular, we study the cases of L2 English learned by native Japanese speakers and L2 Japanese learned by native American English speakers.
3D interaction techniques for musical expression

As Virtual Reality headsets become accessible, more and more artistic applications are developed, including immersive musical instruments. 3D interaction techniques designed in the 3D User Interfaces research community, such as navigation, selection and manipulation techniques, open numerous opportunities for musical control. For example, navigation techniques such as teleportation, free walking/flying and path-planning enable different ways of accessing musical scores, scenes of spatialised sound sources or even parameter spaces. Manipulation techniques provide novel gestures and metaphors, e.g. for drawing or sculpting sound entities. Finally, 3D selection techniques facilitate the interaction with complex visual structures which can represent hierarchical temporal structures, audio graphs, scores or parameter spaces. However, existing devices and techniques were developed mainly with a focus on efficiency, i.e. minimising error rate and task completion times. They were therefore not designed with the specifics of musical interaction in mind. In this paper, we review existing 3D interaction techniques and examine how they can be used for musical control, including the possibilities they open for instrument designers. We then propose a number of research directions to adapt and extend 3DUIs for musical expression
A Performance Analysis of Vector Length Agnostic Code

Vector extensions are a popular mean to exploit data parallelism in applications. Over recent years, the most commonly used extensions have been growing in vector length and amount of vector instructions. However, code portability remains a problem when speaking about a compute continuum. Hence, vector length agnostic (VLA) architectures have been proposed for the future generations of ARM and RISC-V processors. With these architectures, code is vectorized independently of the vector length of the target hardware platform. It is therefore possible to tune software to a generic vector length. To understand the performance impact of VLA code compared to vector length specific code, we analyze the current capabilities of code generation for ARM’s SVE architecture. Our experiments show that VLA code reaches about 90% of the performance of vector length specific code, i.e. a 10% overhead is inferred due to global predication of instructions. Furthermore, we show that code performance is not increasing proportionally with increasing vector lengths due to the higher memory demands.
INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY FOR SOIL MECHANICS AND GEOTECHNICAL ENGINEERING

For investigating floor heave behavior and controlling technique of roadway intersection in deep mine, creep deformation characteristics of floor around roadway intersection was studied by Flac and the effects of shear plastic critical value, reinforcement measurement on creep deformation of floor around roadway intersection were discussed. As a result, the creep deformation curve can be divided into two stages including initial creep deformation stage and softening deformation stage, which can explain the case that deformation of roadway intersection is little before a certain time, but then increases at a high speed; only when total shear plastic value exceeds the critical value can second creep stage take place; reinforcement measurement with bolting in roof and ribs has little effect on floor heave, yet exerting pressure against floor can reduce floor heave obviously.