Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Simulation Approach to Detect Arterial Traffic Congestion Using Cellular Data

Cellular data provide a promising way for congestion detection with low cost and high coverage, and the simulation study is a feasible solution to verify the detection method. This paper presents a simulation approach that uses cellular data to detect traffic congestion on urban arterials based on the relationship between cellular data and traffic status. The virtual testbed, which includes three main modules, is developed to perform the cellular activities generation, collection, and aggregation process between cell phones and cell stations. Then, the correlation between cellular data and traffic status data is studied. Finally, three scenarios using the data from testbed are demonstrated to measure the performance of the proposed method under different conditions. The results indicate that the proposed approach is a feasible and efficient way to simulate cellular data generation, collection, and aggregation process. Also, it can be the base for further analysis to detect traffic congestion on arterials using cellular data.
China Overseas Finance Inventory Database

This technical note explains the process of building the China Overseas Finance Inventory (COFI) Database, a comprehensive database covering both Chinese equity and debt foreign investments in the power-generation sector in Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) countries. The note explains how the authors addressed the challenge of matching power plants and their investments across publicly available and commercial databases and how they provided the final database as an open data source.
Quantitative Proteomic Profiling of Murine Embryonic Heart Development Reveals a Role for the Mevalonate Pathway in Cardiomyocyte Proliferation

Defining the molecular mechanisms that govern heart development is essential for identifying the etiology of congenital heart disease. Here, quantitative proteomics was used to measure temporal changes in the cardiac proteome at eight critical stages of murine embryonic heart development. Global temporal profiles of the over 7,300 identified proteins uncovered signature cardiac protein interaction networks that linked protein dynamics with molecular pathways. Using this integrated dataset, we identified and established a functional role for the mevalonate pathway in the regulation of embryonic cardiomyocyte proliferation and cell signaling. Overall, our proteomic datasets are an invaluable resource for studying molecular events that regulate embryonic heart development and contribute to congenital heart disease.
How School Culture Reacts to Change in the Context of Primary Education in Greece

The purpose of this paper is to study the predisposition of school culture to the introduction of change in teaching practices, as this is dictated by the conditions of the 21st century. The conceptual areas discussed include the introduction and implementation of change and innovation in education, 21st century skills and school culture. Since the research primary data was collected in the Greek educational system, the characteristics of the specific context are also analysed. The research methodology develops on a pragmatic basis, combining quantitative and qualitative research methods, namely semi-structured interviews, a survey, and document analysis, within a sequential three-stage design. The development of the research tools and the data analysis is conducted with reference to an originally designed model of four school culture types. The results point to an actual school culture that combines both change negative and change positive characteristics. Specific aspects are evaluated as more change negative school culture characteristics, such as the families’ role and the approach to the development of the personal, social and civic skills, while others as more change positive ones, such as school management.
Ethics of Probabilistic Extreme Event Attribution in Climate Change Science: A Critique

The question whether a single extreme climate event, such as a hurricane or heatwave, can be attributed to human induced climate change has become a vibrant field of research and discussion in recent years. Proponents of the most common approach (probabilistic event attribution) argue for using single event attribution for advancing climate policy, not least in the context of loss and damages, while critics are raising concerns about inductive risks which may result in misguided policies. Here, we present six ethical predicaments, rooted in epistemic choices of single event attribution for policy making, with a focus on problems related to loss and damage. Our results show that probabilistic event attribution is particularly sensitive to these predicaments, rendering the choice of method value laden and hence political. Our review shows how the putatively apolitical approach becomes political and deeply problematic from a climate justice perspective. We also suggest that extreme event attribution (EEA) is becoming more and more irrelevant for projecting loss and damages as socio‐ecological systems are increasingly destabilized by climate change. We conclude by suggesting a more causality driven approach for understanding loss and damage, that is, less prone to the ethical predicaments of EEA.
Knowns and Unknowns about CAR-T Cell Dysfunction

Simple Summary The primary issue of adoptive cell therapy is the poor in vivo persistence. In this context, it is necessary to clarify the fundamental mechanisms of T cell dysfunction. Here we review common dysfunctional states, including exhaustion and senescence, and discuss the challenges associated with phenotypical characterization of these T cell subsets. We overview the heterogeneity among exhausted T cells as well as mechanisms by which T cells get reinvigorated by checkpoint inhibitors. We emphasize that some cancers not responding to such treatment may activate distinct T cell dysfunction programs. Finally, we describe the dysfunction-promoting mechanisms specific for CAR-T cells and the ways to mitigate them. Abstract Immunotherapy using chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells is a promising option for cancer treatment. However, T cells and CAR-T cells frequently become dysfunctional in cancer, where numerous evasion mechanisms impair antitumor immunity. Cancer frequently exploits intrinsic T cell dysfunction mechanisms that evolved for the purpose of defending against autoimmunity. T cell exhaustion is the most studied type of T cell dysfunction. It is characterized by impaired proliferation and cytokine secretion and is often misdefined solely by the expression of the inhibitory receptors. Another type of dysfunction is T cell senescence, which occurs when T cells permanently arrest their cell cycle and proliferation while retaining cytotoxic capability. The first section of this review provides a broad overview of T cell dysfunctional states, including exhaustion and senescence; the second section is focused on the impact of T cell dysfunction on the CAR-T therapeutic potential. Finally, we discuss the recent efforts to mitigate CAR-T cell exhaustion, with an emphasis on epigenetic and transcriptional modulation.
Factors affecting employee commitment of office staff in Ho Chi Minh City

This paper examined the factors affecting the commitment of office staff in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC). The data is collected through questionnaires from 253 office staff; the SPSS software is used to analyse data through Cronbach’s Alpha reliability testing method, Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA), and regression analysis. The research results revealed that training and development opportunities, salary and bonuses, and employee benefits are three critical factors that positively affect the commitment of office staff to the enterprise. The study provides implications or strategies for managers to improve their human resource management and enhance long-term employee commitment. Besides, the study also provides recommendations for future research.
A metamaterial‐inspired wideband high‐gain FABRY–Perot resonator microstrip patch antenna

In this article, a wide impedance bandwidth and gain bandwidth Fabry–Perot resonator microstrip patch antenna based on metamaterials was presented. The metamaterial superstrate, which is constructed by a doubly periodic array of complementary cross elements, achieved stable reflection phase response within the wide desired operation frequency range to broaden the bandwidth. This antenna worked at 13 GHz, and the simulated and measured impedance bandwidth (S11 < −10 dB) was 1.56 and 1.33 GHz, respectively. The simulated 3 dB gain bandwidth was about 1.1 GHz, and the measured results verified the design. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 58:1675–1678, 2016
Zebrafish fin regeneration requires generic and regeneration-specific responses of osteoblasts to trauma

Successful regeneration requires the coordinated execution of multiple cellular responses to injury. In amputated zebrafish fins, mature osteoblasts dedifferentiate, migrate towards the injury and form proliferative osteogenic blastema cells. We show that osteoblast migration is preceded by cell elongation and alignment along the proximodistal axis, which require actomyosin, but not microtubule turnover. Surprisingly, osteoblast dedifferentiation and migration can be uncoupled. Using pharmacological and genetic interventions, we found that NF-κB and retinoic acid signalling regulate dedifferentiation without affecting migration, while the complement system and actomyosin dynamics are required for migration but not dedifferentiation. Furthermore, by removing bone at two locations within a fin ray, we established a trauma model containing two injury sites. We found that osteoblasts dedifferentiate at and migrate towards both sites, while accumulation of osteogenic progenitor cells and regenerative bone formation only occur at the distal-facing injury. Together, these data indicate that osteoblast dedifferentiation and migration represent generic injury responses that are differentially regulated and can occur independently of each other and of regenerative growth. Successful bone regeneration appears to require the coordinated execution of generic and regeneration-specific responses of osteoblast to trauma.
The Roles of NOD-like Receptors in Innate Immunity in Otitis Media

Acute otitis media (AOM) can persist or lead to various complications in individuals in which the innate immune system is impaired. In this context, impaired expression of nucleotide-binding oligomerization domain (NOD)-like receptor (NLR), an intracellular pathogen-recognition receptor (PRR), is involved in the etiology of OM in humans and animals, affecting its development, severity, chronicity, recurrence, and associated complications. To assess this relationship, we reviewed literature reports relating NLR expression patterns with the pathophysiology and clinical features of OM in the larger context of impaired innate immunity. We summarized the results of published studies on the expression of NLRs in animals and humans in acute otitis media (AOM), otitis media with effusion (OME), chronic otitis media (COM) with cholesteatoma, and COM without cholesteatoma. NLRs were expressed mainly in association with bacterial infection in AOM, OME, COM with cholesteatoma, and COM without cholesteatoma. In addition, expression of NLRs was affected by the presence or absence of bacteria, fluid characteristics, disease recurrence, tissue type, and repeated surgery. Various factors of the innate immune system are involved in the pathogenesis of OM in the middle ear. NLRs are expressed in AOM, OME, COM with cholesteatoma, and COM without cholesteatoma. Impaired NLR expression induced the development, chronicity and recurrence of OM and exacerbated associated complications, indicating that NLRs have important roles in the pathogenesis of OM.
Positive Priming Effects Induced by Allochthonous and Autochthonous Organic Matter Input in the Lake Sediments With Different Salinity

Ecological consequences of the increased input of allochthonous and autochthonous organic matter (OM) remains unknown in saline lakes. Here, we reported microbial mineralization of algal and grass OM (represented by autochthonous and allochthonous OM, respectively) in lake sediments with different salinity (1, 40, and 120 g L−1). The addition of algal and grass OM significantly increased the CO2 production rates in the studied sediments. Algal and grass OM input can induce positive priming effect (PE). PE intensity induced by grass OM input was significantly higher than that by algal OM input. PE intensity induced by algal and grass OM input decreased with increasing salinity. Bacterial taxa affiliated with Actinomycetia, Alphaproteobacteria, Bacilli, Bacteroidia, Clostridia, and Gammaproteobacteria played important roles in driving PE generation in the studied sediments. Our finding suggested that the PEs induced by allochthonous and autochthonous OM should be considered in saline lakes that are intensively influenced by climate change.
Fabrication and Characterization of Hydrophobic Cellulose Nanofibrils/Silica Nanocomposites with Hexadecyltrimethoxysilane

Cellulose nanofibrils (CNFs) have attracted much attention because of their renewability and potential biocompatibility. However, CNFs are extremely hydrophilic due to the presence of a large number of hydroxyl groups, limiting their use as a water-resistant material. In this work, we controlled the adsorption behavior of silica nanoparticles on the surface of CNFs by adjusting the synthesis conditions. The silica nanoparticle size and packing efficiency on the CNF surface could be controlled by varying the ammonium hydroxide and water concentrations. In addition, hexadecyltrimethoxysilane (HDTMS) was successfully grafted onto CNF or CNF/silica nanocomposite surfaces, and the quantitative content of organic/inorganic substances in HDTMS was analyzed through XPS and TGA. The HDTMS-modified CNF/silica nanocomposites were more advantageous in terms of hydrophobicity than the HDTMS-modified CNF composites. This is because the silica nanoparticles were adsorbed on the surface of the CNFs, increasing the surface roughness and simultaneously increasing the amount of HDTMS. As a result, the HDTMS-modified CNFs showed a water contact angle (WCA) of ~80°, whereas HDTMS-modified CNF/silica nanocomposites obtained superhydrophobicity, with a WCA of up to ~159°. This study can provide a reference for the expansion of recyclable eco-friendly coating materials via the adsorption of silica nanoparticles and hydrophobic modification of CNF materials.
Visual and auditory cortices represent acoustic speech-related information during silent lip reading

Speech is an intrinsically multisensory signal and seeing the speaker’s lips forms a cornerstone of communication in acoustically impoverished environments. Still, it remains unclear how the brain exploits visual speech for comprehension and previous work debated whether lip signals are mainly processed along the auditory pathways or whether the visual system directly implements speech-related processes. To probe this question, we systematically characterized dynamic representations of multiple acoustic and visual speech-derived features in source localized MEG recordings that were obtained while participants listened to speech or viewed silent speech. Using a mutual-information framework we provide a comprehensive assessment of how well temporal and occipital cortices reflect the physically presented signals and speech-related features that were physically absent but may still be critical for comprehension. Our results demonstrate that both cortices are capable of a functionally specific form of multisensory restoration: during lip reading both reflect unheard acoustic features, with occipital regions emphasizing spectral information and temporal regions emphasizing the speech envelope. Importantly, the degree of envelope restoration was predictive of lip reading performance. These findings suggest that when seeing the speaker’s lips the brain engages both visual and auditory pathways to support comprehension by exploiting multisensory correspondences between lip movements and spectro-temporal acoustic cues. Highlights Visual and auditory cortex represent unheard acoustic information during lip reading Auditory cortex emphasizes the acoustic envelope Visual cortex emphasizes a pitch signature Tracking of unheard features in auditory cortex is associated with behavior
Wave Dissipation and Mean Circulation on a Shore Platform Under Storm Wave Conditions

While wave processes on shore platforms have been recently advanced by a number of field‐based studies, few attention has been paid to the role of bed roughness on wave dissipation and wave setup dynamics in these environments. This study reports on a new field experiment conducted under storm wave conditions on a gently sloping shore platform which was instrumented from 10 m water depth up to the shoreline. Data analyses are complemented with numerical simulations performed with a 3D fully coupled modeling system using a vortex force formalism to represent the effects of short waves on the mean circulation. An accurate representation of wave dissipation by both depth‐induced breaking and bottom friction is found essential to reproduce the transformation of short waves across the platform and the resulting wave setup. Wave energy dissipation by bottom friction is dominant in the subtidal part of the platform and contributes to about 40% of the total wave energy dissipation. The enhanced wave bottom friction on the platform decreases the wave height before breaking, which reduces the contribution of wave forces to the wave setup compared to a smooth bottom (mechanism 1). Conversely, an idealized analysis of the cross‐shore momentum balance reveals that the wave‐induced circulation increases the wave setup, this process being enhanced on a rough bottom (mechanism 2). The contribution of mechanism 2 increases with the bottom slope, accounting for up to 26% of the wave setup for a 1:20 sloping shore platform, and overcoming mechanism 1.
CLEAR: Contrastive Learning for API Recommendation

Automatic API recommendation has been studied for years. There are two orthogonal lines of approaches for this task, i.e., information-retrieval-based (IR-based) and neural-based methods. Although these approaches were reported having remarkable performance, our observation shows that existing approaches can fail due to the following two reasons: 1) most IR-based approaches treat task queries as bag-of-words and use word embedding to represent queries, which cannot capture the sequential semantic information. 2) both the IR-based and the neural-based approaches are weak at distinguishing the semantic difference among lexically similar queries. In this paper, we propose CLEAR, which leverages BERT sen-tence embedding and contrastive learning to tackle the above two is-sues. Specifically, CLEAR embeds the whole sentence of queries and Stack Overflow (SO) posts with a BERT-based model rather than the bag-of-word-based word embedding model, which can preserve the semantic-related sequential information. In addition, CLEAR uses contrastive learning to train the BERT-based embedding model for learning precise semantic representation of programming termi-nologies regardless of their lexical information. CLEAR also builds a BERT-based re-ranking model to optimize its recommendation results. Given a query, CLEAR first selects a set of candidate SO posts via the BERT sentence embedding-based similarity to reduce search space. CLEAR further leverages a BERT-based re-ranking model to rank candidate SO posts and recommends the APIs from the ranked top SO posts for the query. Our experiment results on three different test datasets confirm the effectiveness of CLEAR for both method-level and class-level API recommendation. Compared to the state-of-the-art API recom-mendation approaches, CLEAR improves the MAP by 25%-187% at method-level and 10%-100% at class-level.
Herbivory and its Effect on Tree Growth and Tree Survival in an Enrichment Planting Experiment in Jambi, Sumatra

Tropical rainforests are being transformed into large-scale oil palm monocultures which results in a loss of biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. Thus, enrichment planting, which experimentally increases plant diversity, is an important management strategy to conserve biodiversity in impoverished landscapes. Increased tree diversity has been hypothesized to enhance the biodiversity of all trophic levels. Within the framework of the Collaborative Research Centre 990 (CRC 990), an enrichment planting experiment was established by planting six native tree species of economic value (Parkia speciosa, Archidendron pauciflorum, Durio zibethinus, Dyera polyphylla, Peronema canescens and Shorea leprosula) systematically in varying plot sizes (5x5 m, 10x10 m, 20x20 m and 40x40m) and tree diversity levels (1, 2, 3 and 6 tree species per plot) within an oil palm plantation in the Jambi province of Sumatra. Standing herbivory of each tree individual, that was planted, was quantified 18 months after the establishment of the experiment. Despite many studies focusing on herbivory, this is the first study of standing herbivory of trees within an oil palm plantation. Here, I present the results of the quantification of herbivory with first insights on how the experimental treatments and the choice of tree species have affected leaf damage. My findings show that the experimental treatment of plot size and diversity level did not influence standing herbivory. Nevertheless, leaf damage tended to be lower in high tree diversity plots. The most important factor explaining standing herbivory was the tree species identity. Furthermore, a correlation between growth and standing herbivory was not found. The leaf damage for trees which had survived a drought was compared to the average damage of trees which had died. The comparison showed no differences but revealed a trend for a higher damage of dead trees. Further analyses for a broader understanding on the factors influencing herbivory and their interactions are needed. This knowledge can help in restoring biodiversity in oil palm landscapes in Southeast Asia.
Experimental analysis on the multi-ion-source effect on motional Stark effect diagnostic in KSTAR

The motional Stark effect (MSE) diagnostic is used to obtain the magnetic pitch angle by measuring the direction of the Lorentz electric field induced by the energetic neutral beam injection (NBI) into the plasma. The MSE diagnostic has been operated successfully since 2015 in Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR) [1]. The KSTAR MSE diagnostic was designed to be operated at NBI-A of 100 keV and NBI-B of less than 70keV to guarantee the clean MSE spectra where the MSE spectra of NBI-A is not overlapped by those of NBI-B. Recently, however, the limitation on the allowable NBI-A energy due to the safety issue makes the measured MSE spectra more affected by those of NBI-B, (called the spectra overlap) [2]. Therefore, quantifying the effect of the spectra overlap is necessary. Herein is the experimental analysis on the spectra overlap effect on the polarization angle measurement.