Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
DNA-binding activity and cytotoxic and cell-cycle arrest properties of some new coumarin derivatives: a multispectral and computational investigation.

Coumarins are the most important class of natural compounds found widely in various plants. Many coumarin derivatives with different biological and pharmacological activities have been synthesized. In this study, the antiapoptotic and cytotoxic effects and DNA-binding properties of some synthetic coumarin derivatives (4b, 4d, 4f, 4 g (DBP-g), 4 h and 4j) against K562 cell lines were investigated using different techniques. MTT assay indicated that the DBP-g compound was more active than other derivatives, with a IC50 value of 55 μM, and therefore this compound was chosen for further investigation. Apoptosis induction was assessed using acridine orange/ethidium bromide double-staining and cell-cycle analysis. In addition, in vitro DNA-binding studies were carried out using ultraviolet-visible light absorption and fluorescence spectroscopy, as well as viscosity measurement and molecular modelling studies. In vitro results indicated that DBP-g interacted with DNA through a groove-binding mode with a binding constant (Kb ) of 1.17 × 104 M-1 . In agreement with other experimental data, molecular docking studies showed that DBP-g is a minor groove binder. Overall, it can be concluded that DBP-g could be used as an effective and novel chemotherapeutic agent.
Exact determination of optimal nutritional composition for at-risk newborns tolerating enteral intake-breast milk analysis as a routine future standard in neonatal care.

AIM To analyse the dynamics of macronutrients in breast milk in Slovakian women and compare the dynamics between mothers of hospitalized newborns and donors of human breast milk relative to the gestational age of their babies. METHODS Human milk samples were collected from 101 breastfeeding women and analysed once or repeatedly from September 2017 to August 2018. Group A consisted of 79 mothers of newborns hospitalized at the Neonatal Department of Intensive Medicine (NDIM) of whom 69 were mothers of premature newborns (subgroup A1) and 10 were mothers of term babies (subgroup A2). Group B consisted of 22 breast milk donors registered at the Human Milk Bank at National Institute of Children's Diseases (NICHD). Of these, 4 were mothers of premature newborns (subgroup B1) and 18 were mothers of term newborns (subgroup B2). From subgroup A1, we chose two mothers, one with a hypotrophic newborn and another with a eutrophic newborn. The results were obtained by using the MIRIS breast‑milk analyzer. RESULTS The overall dynamics of macronutrients correspond with other studies, however, we demonstrated that the level of macronutrients in individual cases were different. CONCLUSION The determination of macronutrients in human milk is essential in neonatal care. It provides information about the nutritional value of breast milk and helps to optimise nutrition according to the individual needs of newborns (Fig. 10, Ref. 16).
Testing for Unobserved Heterogeneity in Exponential and Weibull Duration Models

We examine use of the likelihood ratio (LR) statistic to test for unobserved heterogeneity in duration models, based on mixtures of exponential or Weibull distributions. We consider both the uncensored and censored duration cases. The asymptotic null distribution of the LR test statistic is not the standard chi-square, as the standard regularity conditions do not hold. Instead, there is a nuisance parameter identified only under the alternative, and a null parameter value on the boundary of the parameter space, as in Cho and White (2007a). We accommodate these and provide methods delivering consistent asymptotic critical values. We conduct a number of Monte Carlo simulations, comparing the level and power of the LR test statistic to an information matrix (IM) test due to Chesher (1984) and Lagrange multiplier (LM) tests of Kiefer (1985) and Sharma (1987). Our simulations show that the LR test statistic generally outperforms the IM and LM tests. We also revisit the work of van den Berg and Ridder (1998) on unemployment durations and of Ghysels, Gourieroux, and Jasiak (2004) on interarrival times between stock trades, and, as it turns out, affirm their original informal inferences.
Perioperative lymphocytopenia predicts mortality and severe complications after intestinal surgery.

Background Patterns of white blood cells differential count with low lymphocyte number have been associated with poor outcome following sepsis, burns and trauma. Lymphocytopenia, measured preoperatively or in response to surgical stress, may affect complications after bowel resection. Methods Clinical characteristics and white blood cells differential count values, measured both pre- and post-operatively of a cohort of patients submitted to intestinal resection and anastomosis from June 2014 to June 2017 in our General Surgery Division, were retrospectively analyzed. Multivariate logistic regression was used to determine the dependence of mortality and postoperative complications from the clinical characteristics of patients and white blood cells differential count values. Results A total of 301 consecutive patients were studied; 165 (54.8%) were male; mean age was 70 years. Overall, the rate of in-hospital 30-day mortality was 4%. Post-operative morbidity was observed in 124 (41.2%). On multivariate analysis, age adjusted Charlson Comorbidity Index, low preoperatively lymphocyte count, high preoperative monocyte count, high postoperative neutrophil count and anastomotic leak were independently associated with increased in-hospital mortality. Preoperative lymphocytopenia and rectal resection were independently associated with high morbidity rate, while low postoperative lymphocyte count was associated with an increased risk of anastomotic leak. Conclusions Perioperative lymphocytopenia is associated with 30-days mortality, severe complications and anastomotic leak after bowel resection surgery. These routinely available laboratory data could help to identify patients at high-risk for developing complications.
Pupil Dilations in a Head-Mounted Display

Head-mounted displays offer full control over lighting conditions. When equipped with eye tracking technology, they are well suited for experiments investigating pupil dilation in response to cognitive tasks, emotional stimuli, and motor task complexity, particularly for studies that would otherwise have required the use of a chinrest, since the eye cameras are fixed with respect to the head. This paper analyses pupil dilations for 13 out of 27 participants completing a Fitts’ law task using a virtual reality headset with built-in eye tracking. The largest pupil dilation occurred for the condition subjectively rated as requiring the most physical and mental effort. Fitts’ index of difficulty had no significant effect on pupil dilation, suggesting differences in motor task complexity may not affect pupil dilation.
How to model frailty ?

The article studies a mixture model, proposed in Finkelstein and Esaulova (2006), which generalizes many popular models, most notably proportional hazards and accelerated life. In this framework we derive that a crucial feature of the frailty distribution is its regular variation at 0. Among the popular distributions to model unobserved heterogeneity, the gamma, beta, Weibull, and truncated normal densities have this property, as opposed to the inverse Gaussian and lognormal distributions.
Applications of sequencing technology in clinical microbial infection

Infectious diseases are a type of disease caused by pathogenic microorganisms. Although the discovery of antibiotics changed the treatment of infectious diseases and reduced the mortality of bacterial infections, resistant bacterial strains have emerged. Anti‐infective therapy based on aetiological evidence is the gold standard for clinical treatment, but the time lag and low positive culture rate of traditional methods of pathogen diagnosis leads to relative difficulty in obtaining the evidence of pathogens. Compared with traditional methods of pathogenic diagnosis, next‐generation and third‐generation sequencing technologies have many advantages in the detection of pathogenic microorganisms. In this review, we mainly introduce recent progress in research on pathogenic diagnostic technology and the applications of sequencing technology in the diagnosis of pathogenic microorganisms. This review provides new insights into the application of sequencing technology in the clinical diagnosis of microorganisms.
Pushing the Lewis Acidity Boundaries of Boron Compounds With Non-Planar Triarylboranes Derived from Triptycenes.

Bending the planar trigonal boron atom of triphenylborane by connecting its aryl rings with carbon or phosphorus linkers gave access to a series of 9-boratriptycene derivatives with unprecedented structures and reactivities. NMR and X-ray diffraction investigations of the Lewis adducts of these non-planar boron Lewis acids with weak Lewis bases (OPEt 3 , CH 3 CN, EtOAc, Cl - , Br - , I - ) revealed particularly strong covalent bond formation. The first Lewis adduct of a trivalent boron compounds with the Tf 2 N - anion is reported, illustrating the unrivaled Lewis acidity of these pyramidalized boron Lewis acids. Experimental and quantum-chemical investigations showed that increasing the pyramidalization of the boron atom and using a cationic phosphonium linker resulted in an exceptional enhancement of Lewis acidity, pushing forward the boundaries of the Lewis acidity scale of trivalent boron Lewis acids. Introduction of a phosphorus and a boron atom at each edge of a triptycene framework, allowed to access new bifunctional Lewis acid-base 9-phospha-10-boratriptycenes featuring promising reactivity for the activation of carbon-halogen bonds.
EXPERIMENTAL CONFIRMATION OF LIMIT CYCLE OSCILLATION FOR ACTIVE CONTROL OF TRANSONIC FLUTTER IN WIND TUNNEL

The wind tunnel test was carried out with great care obtaining successfully limited numbers of LCO data at dynamic pressures above the open loop flutter point. After confirming a flutter dynamic pressure of the controlled wing, we tried to excite the wing by a leading edge control surface oscillation at three different dynamic pressures in between the open and the closed loop flutter dynamic pressure. Even though the control might have lost the effectiveness due to large amplitude of LCO and resulting amplitude might have broken the wing seriously, we have succeeded in getting smaller amplitude of LCO. Adjusting the mathematical model to new wind tunnel test data, the model could predict the closed loop bifurcation that shows good correspondence to the test data.
FACULTY OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING

Land Use and Land Cover (LULC) information is important for a variety of applications notably ones related to forestry. The segmentation of remotely sensed images has attracted various research subjects. However this is no easy task, with various challenges to face including the complexity of satellite images, the difficulty to get hold of them, and lack of ready datasets. It has become clear that trying to classify on multiple classes requires more elaborate methods such as Deep Learning (DL). Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have a promising potential to be a good candidate for the task. However DNNs require a huge amount of data to train including the Ground Truth (GT) data. In this thesis a DL pixelbased approach backed by the state of the art semantic segmentation methods is followed to tackle the problem of LULC mapping. The DNN used is based on DeepLabv3 network with an encoder-decoder architecture. To tackle the issue of lack of data the Sentinel-2 satellite whose data is provided for free by Copernicus was used with the GT mapping from Corine Land Cover (CLC) provided by Copernicus and modified by Tyke to a higher resolution. From the multispectral images in Sentinel-2 Red Green Blue (RGB), and Near Infra Red (NIR) channels were extracted, the 4th channel being extremely useful in the detection of vegetation. This ended up achieving quite good accuracy on a DNN based on ResNet50 which was calculated using the Mean Intersection over Union (MIoU) metric reaching 0,53MIoU . It was possible to use this data to transfer the learning to a data from Pleiades-1 satellite with much better resolution, Very High Resolution (VHR) in fact. The results were excellent especially when compared on training right away on that data reaching an accuracy of 0,98 and 0,85MIoU .
ENERGY CONSUMPTION EVALUATION DURING MECHANICAL PROCESSING OF AGRICULTURAL VEGETAL BIOMASS

Our century faces a problem that refers to energy consumption and the diminishing supplies of existing fuel. Thus, researchers have been trying to use renewable energy sources and developing new technologies processes of energy production. Lately they can sustain that the most efficient energy source is biogas produced from green energy crops and organized waste matters. In the majority of researches a rise in specific energy consumption together with a lower particle necessity was shown [1, 2, 3, 4]. This paper presents data regarding the energy consumption for mechanical processing of agricultural vegetal biomass (grass of dried hay), respectively for its cutting and then mixing it with liquid (water). Using different paddles we established the power necessary for mixing chopped biomass with water.
Enhanced pool boiling critical heat flux induced by capillary wicking effect of a Cr-sputtered superhydrophilic surfaces

The film growth mechanism by physical vapor deposition (PVD) sputtering shows an intrinsic tendency to keep the surface smooth by eliminating microstructures [1]. In light of boiling heat transfer, the smooth surface potentially reduces active nucleation of bubbles and rewetting of dry spots near the critical heat flux (CHF). This kind of process is highly likely to deteriorate the CHF. Thus, it is essential to produce appropriate microstructures on the surface for the enhancement of the CHF. In this study, to investigate the microstructural effect of thin film-fabricated surfaces on the pool boiling CHF, we controlled the surface roughness in a narrow range of 0.1-0.25 μm and its morphologies, in the form of micro-scratches using PVD sputtering technique. Specifically for DC magnetron sputtering, pure chromium (Cr) was selected as a target material owing to its high oxidation resistance. In order to analyze the CHF trend with changes in roughness, we introduced existing capillary wickingbased models because superhydrophilic characteristics of microstructures are highly related to the capillary wicking behaviors in micro-flow channels. Using the capillary wicking-based model, a force balance, resulting in capillary-induced momentum was slightly modified to be applicable for polished metal surfaces. The surface characteristics were compared using the roughness parameters (i.e., the average roughness Ra and the roughness peak distance Rsm) and the spreading behaviors of a liquid droplet.
Preferential Attachment in Social Media The Case of Nico Nico Douga

In the examination of evolving complex networks, the analysis of preferential attachment is a core research problem. However, the results of studies that examine whether preferential attachment operates in social media networks are conflicting. On the one hand, preferential attachment generally has been found to be a stable predictor of network evolution. On the other hand, IS researchers question the applicability of the preferential attachment hypothesis to social media networks. This study shows that preferential attachment also operates on Nico Nico Douga, a Japanese video sharing service similar to Youtube with more than 20 million registered users. However, this study also reveals that the attachment kernel differs substantially from the classically assumed log-linear form, when estimating the kernel with nonparametric maximum likelihood estimation (PAFit).
On GAP Coreference Resolution Shared Task: Insights from the 3rd Place Solution

This paper presents the 3rd-place-winning solution to the GAP coreference resolution shared task. The approach adopted consists of two key components: fine-tuning the BERT language representation model (Devlin et al., 2018) and the usage of external datasets during the training process. The model uses hidden states from the intermediate BERT layers instead of the last layer. The resulting system almost eliminates the difference in log loss per gender during the cross-validation, while providing high performance.
PERFORMANCE INDICATORS IN THE FREIGHT TRANSPORTATION SECTOR-THE CASE OF THE GREEK MARKET

The concept of supply chain management embraces the activities of transportation and logistics that are generally provided by carriers (ocean, air, railway carriers, truckers), freight forwarding companies, and/or third party logistics providers that intermediate in the movement of goods from shipper to consignee. There are some critical milestones throughout the transportation process that have to be successfully managed, so that the intermediaries provide leveraged performance to the services users. The aim of this study is to identify the critical transportation performance measures and indicators, and to rate their significance in the Greek market through a survey, according to the members of the Association of International Freight Forwarders and Logistics Enterprises of Greece (IFFAG&L), an association member of FIATA (International Federation of Freight Forwarders Associations).
Fluid-based field representation for collision risk assessment on the road scenes

Prediction of the likely evolution in the traffic scenes is a challenging task because of high uncertainty of sensing technology and dynamic environment. It leads to failure of planning for intelligent agents like autonomous vehicles. In this paper, we propose a fluid-based physical model to present the influence of surrounding object's motion on driving safety. In our pipeline, the input sensor could be LiDAR, camera, or multi-modal data. We use a Kalman filter to estimate the state space of each detected object, and adopt the properties of stable fluid to build a riskmap based on the density field. The noisy state space are then modeled as the boundary conditions in the simulation of advection and diffusion process. We test our approach on the public KITTI dataset and find this model could handle the short-term prediction in case of misdetection and tracking failure caused by object occlusion, which shows promising in collision risk assessment on road scenes.
Topical Issue on Strategy Contributions to Cognitive Aging

Abstract Although some cognitive decline with healthy aging appears inevitable, previous research on strategy instruction and training has repeatedly demonstrated that older adults can substantially improve their cognitive performance through effective strategies. At the same time, age-related changes in strategy repertoire, distribution, execution, and selection have also been documented and, in part, been shown to contribute to the observed age-related deficits in cognitive performance. Authored by researchers from France, Germany, Italy, and the U.S., the nine articles of this Topical Issue on Strategy Contributions to Cognitive Aging provide novel insights on age-related differences (and similarities) in strategies across a variety of cognitive domains (episodic [item, source, event] memory, metamemory, decision making, and numeracy), ranging from new insights on traditional memory-encoding strategies such as self-generation to the discovery of novel strategies involved in event memory, metamemory, and numerosity comparison. Further, a review of event segmentation training and two novel training studies demonstrate much potential for the improvement of older adults’ cognitive performance, transferring beyond the trained task—but also identify for whom cognitive strategy training may be less beneficial, necessitating a more intensive or different training approach. All in all, this Topical Issue provides a comprehensive picture of age-related changes in cognitive strategies and means to improve older adults’ strategic approach to cognitive tasks.
Remotely-Controlled Low-Cost Digital Telescope

This paper presents a low-cost web controlled digital telescope which can benefit educational institutions. The system is composed of two webcams to acquire data. One is used as a wide field of view for localization purpose and the second one is used as a narrow field of view using a 40 cm focal length lens and an achromatic doublet to visualize celestial objects. The telescope orientation is performed remotely using two motors through Internet with an in-house developed software running on a Raspberry Pi 3 device. Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT) based server is used to provide a full wireless communication between the user and the telescope for orientation control, data visualization and acquisition. The telescope structure is built using a 3D-printer. An image processing algorithm is presented to calibrate mounting camera misalignment. The overlapping calibration is performed to localize the telescope image onto the large field-of-view image. It is based on Fourier domain cross-correlation technique.
Matrix Metalloproteinase-3 Associated with Severity of Rheumatoid Arthritis: A Meta Analysis

Our study examined the relationship between the levels of matrix metalloproteinases [MMP]-3 and the pathogenesis of Rheumatoid Arthritis [RA]& among severity of the disease. We employed rigorous inclusion and exclusion criteria in various bibliographic databases to extract published studies relevant to this investigation. The Revman manager version 5.3 &winpepi version 11.65 software was used for the statistical analysis. A total of 329 studies were initially searched, and 6 studies with 652 RA patients and 658 healthy controls were included in this meta-analysis. Results are represented in terms of Odds ratios [ORs] and 95% confidence intervals [CIs] to estimate the association between MMP-3 and RA. There was significant association between MMP-3 and RA. Significance between study heterogeneity existed between mild and severe RA. The meta-analysis results suggested that the levels of MMP-3 were higher in patients with RA than those in the control group. Subgroup analysis according to severity showed that the levels of MMP-3 were higher in severe RA than in mild RA. We systematically investigated the association between MMP-3 and RA susceptibility; however, the results show a correlation among the disease severity &these raised level of MMP-3 associated with the
“ A Positive Theory of Bureaucratic Discretion as Agency Choice ” *

* A much earlier (as well as very different and incomplete) version of this paper was prepared for delivery at the Fifth National Public Management Conference. The George Bush School of Government and Public Service. Texas A&M University. College Station, Texas. December 3-4, 1999. The current version has greatly benefitted from the thoughtful insights of Stephen Dilworth, Brad Gomez, and Dale Thomas. A special note of thanks goes to Andy Whitford for implicitly making me realize that the original version of this essay needed a central purpose. None of the aforementioned individuals bear responsibility for any shortcomings associated with this essay.
Spectral and thresholds lasing characteristics of the dye doped steroid cholesteric liquid crystals

Absorption spectra, fluorescence spectra and quantum yields of dyes of various classes in cholesteric liquid crystals (CLC) and in isotropic solutions as well as the thresholds of their lasing in CLC were investigated. The increase of quantum yields of dyes in concentrated CLC-solution in comparison with diluted isotropic ones are established for the first time. It has been shown that neutral phenolenone dyes with voluminous terminal groups which hinder aggregation of their molecules in concentrated solutions.