Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Extraction of Creatinine by Adsorption Onto Pure Micro- and Mesoporous Silica Materials

This report describes the compositional and structural design strategy of a micro- and mesoporous silica materials mesh for the efficient removal of uremic toxins towards blood purification application. Our investigation gives the results of the syntheses involving nonionic surfactants and tetraethylorthosilicate (TEOS) as silica precursors for the extraction of urea and creatinine from human blood. The procedure of materials preparation is widely used in the synthesis of mesoporous solids. By using various amounts of non ionic surfactants (Brij S 100 and TRITON X-114) never used before in the synthesis, micro- and mesoporous purely silica samples were obtained. Structural and textural parameters indicated the presence of mesopores interconnected with micropores in a "wormhole-like" or cubic disposition. Adsorption of urea and creatinine, waste biological molecules, onto silica materials was studied and a drastic diminution of creatinine concentration from blood plasma was observed, by a simple contact at ambient temperature. The synthesis protocol, the characterization of materials as well as the results of creatinine adsorption are detailed and a discussion is proposed in this work. Micro- and mesoporous silica are convenient for both research and biomedical applications.
A Novel Bag-of-Object Retrieval Model To Predict Image Relevance

: Text based image search is now a days a routine work for which generally, image search re-ranking and image result summarization these two effective approaches are used. But these approaches are not suitable for the object queries. In this system, a novel bag-of-object retrieval model is designed to predict image relevance, which is specifically effective for object queries. In this approach, first, an object vocabulary is constructed which contains query-relative objects based on expanded query sets which considers the frequent object patches in the result image collection. Then training model is constructed on the basis of frequent object patches. The efficiency of the proposed model is demonstrated by comparing the results with image search re-ranking and image search result summarization.
Risk-Based Pricing and the Enhancement of Mortgage Credit Availability among Underserved and Higher Credit-Risk Populations

This paper estimates an option-based hazard model of the competing risks of FHA mortgage termination. Results indicate that the elevated default risks of loans originated among lower credit-quality and minority borrowers are more than offset by the damped prepayment speeds of those loans, so as to result in markedly lower loan termination probabilities among underserved borrower groups. Those damped termination risks translate into sizable reductions in risk premia to investors in simulated lower creditquality mortgage pools. Empirical findings suggest that such pooling and risk-based pricing of FHA-insured mortgages could serve to substantially reduce housing finance costs among underserved borrowers, so as to advance both their homeownership opportunities and related federal housing policy objectives.
Hydrophobicity of Siloxane Surfaces in Smectites as Revealed by Aromatic Hydrocarbon Adsorption from Water

The nature of the siloxane surface in smectites was investigated by measuring the adsorption of aromatic hydrocarbons from water by organo-clays. The organo-clays were prepared by replacing the hydrophilic, inorganic exchange cations of a series of smectites with the small, hydrophobic organic cation, trimethylphenylammonium (TMPA). Smectites with a range in charge densities were used that resulted in different TMPA contents in the organo-clays. Adsorption isotherms of benzene, alkylbenzenes, and naphthalene from water by the TMPA-smectites indicated that sorption was inversely related to TMPA content. The Langmuir form of the isotherms suggests that the aromatic compounds adsorb to the clay surface. Possible adsorptive sites in TMPA-smectites are limited to the TMPA cations and the siloxane oxygen surfaces. Because sorption increased as layer charge and TMPA content decreased, the organic compounds must adsorb to the siloxane surfaces.Calculations based on an adsorbed compound monolayer, which was estimated by fitting adsorption data to the Langmuir equation, and the N2 specific surface area of each TMPA-clay, indicate that the surface area occupied by each adsorbed molecule increases as the planar area of the molecule increases. This strongly indicates that the planar surfaces of the compounds adsorb directly to the clay surface. Apparently, the TMPA cations function to keep the smectite interlayers open. Interactions between the phenyl groups of TMPA cations on opposing interlayer clay surfaces may act to increase the size of the adsorptive regions. These results show that the siloxane surfaces of smectites can effectively adsorb aromatic hydrocarbons from water if the hydrophilic, inorganic exchange cations are replaced with small, hydrophobic organic cations. The strong adsorption of hydrophobic organic molecules from water demonstrates the hydrophobicity of the siloxane surfaces in smectites.
Resilience Portfolios and Poly-Strengths: Identifying Protective Factors Associated With Thriving After Adversity

Objective: Interest in protective factors for adversity has burgeoned, but the set of examined protective factors remains limited and most studies have focused on a single or narrow set of adversities. Using the resilience portfolio model as a conceptual framework, this study seeks to identify promising protective factors for individuals exposed to violence and other adversities. We include strengths drawn from the positive psychology literature in addition to established protective factors. We also explore the utility of the concept of poly-strengths, or the number of different types of protective factors an individual has. Method: Participants were 2,565 adolescents and adults from a rural, low-income community in southern Appalachia (64% female). Three kinds of adversity were assessed (victimization, stressful life events, financial strain) along with 23 protective factors representing 3 broader domains that are the focus of the resilience portfolio model: self-regulation, interpersonal strengths, and meaning-making. Results: The combination of strengths and adversities accounted for 42% of the variance in trauma symptoms, 50% of the variance in posttraumatic growth, and 58% of the variance in subjective well-being. Strengths associated with thriving included purpose, optimism, religious involvement, emotional regulation, emotional awareness, psychological endurance, compassion, generativity, and community support. Poly-strengths was uniquely associated with well-being after controlling for other protective factors. Conclusions: Expanding the range of studied protective factors and considering poly-strengths hold considerable promise to better understand resilience. A more strengths-based approach to prevention and intervention could improve outcomes in individuals who have experienced adversity.
Minimizing Market Risks Through Customer Integration in New Product Development: Learning from Bad Practice

Customer integration into the innovation process is about to become a best practice. The leaduser approach has proven to be especially valuable when reducing discontinuous innovation’s market risk. Since the theory of customer integration still lacks a concept and processes, this article illustrates how companies can be helped from a practice perspective to implement customer integration and maximize market safety. Triggered by the results of an in-depth case study, we adapted Lettl’s explorative model of customers’ contribution to the new product development (NPD) process, which was originally developed for the medical technology industry, to engineering companies.
Mining Opinions and Trends from Social Media

The popularity of web and social media has resulted in tremendous growth in the amount of natural language data being generated everyday. Since the size of data is huge, it is not feasible to perform manual analysis and hence there has been a lot of interest in developing novel techniques to automatically analyze text data and discover hidden knowledge. In this report, we discuss sentiment analysis or opinion mining which is a sub-problem of text analysis and aims to detect subjective information such as opinions, feelings and attitudes from text. We describe three different approaches for sentiment analysis that belong to different paradigms of machine learning i.e. unsupervised, supervised and ontology-based learning. We also provide a comparison between the approaches and discuss their benefits and shortcomings. Towards the end, we briefly describe our research direction and plans for the near future.
Inclusion Body Expression and Refolding of Recombinant Bone Morphogenetic Protein-2

Background: Bone Morphogenetic Protein-2 (BMP-2) is a cysteine rich growth factor expressed in homodimeric form and has a pivotal role in osteochondral development and fracture healing. Recent studies have benefited more from recombinant BMP-2 in osteochondral tissue engineering. Cost-effective and easy production at large scale makes Escherichia coli (E. coli) the first choice for recombinant protein expression programs. However, inclusion body aggregation and refolding process limits production and purification of recombinant BMP-2 in bacterial systems. Methods: BMP-2 encoded gene was optimized for expression in bacterial expression system and synthesized with proper restriction sites. The optimized sequence was then cloned in a pET28a expression vector and expressed in Origami™ E. coli strain. The aggregated and monomeric BMP-2 was refolded and purified comparing two oxidoreductase systems and refolding methods as well as different purification techniques. The biological activity of recombinant protein was investigated by increasing alkaline phosphatase activity (ALK) of ATDC-5 cell line. Results: No difference was observed between oxidoreductase systems in improving the efficiency of protein refolding. However, comparisons between two refolding methods showed that pooling monomeric BMP-2 that was refolded under mild condition with equal volume of it refolded under severe oxidoreductase condition resulted in production of more active dimeric protein. Conclusion: A new method for production of biologically active dimeric form of BMP-2 in E. coli expression system was established in this study.
Expression Profile of Two HSP70 Chaperone Proteins in Response to Extreme Thermal Acclimation in Xestia c-nigrum (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae)

Abstract Heat shock proteins 70 (HSP70s) are highly evolutionarily conserved and play important roles in helping insects survive under extreme temperatures. In this study, Xestia c-nigrum (L.) (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae) was stressed at various temperatures, and the impacts on thermotolerance and cold endurance were examined. Two complementary deoxyribonucleic acid (cDNA) clones encoding heat shock cognate 70 (HSC70) and inducible heat shock protein 70 (HSP70), named Xc-HSC70 and Xc-HSP70, respectively, were isolated from X. c-nigrum using reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) and rapid amplification of cDNA ends (RACE). Amino acid sequence analysis indicated that Xc-HSC70 and Xc-HSP70 contained the signature sequences of the HSP70 family, and phylogenetic analysis showed that Xc-HSP70s were consistent with the known insect classification. Genomic DNA structure analysis revealed that the Xc-HSC70 gene contained 8 introns that all conformed to the GT/AG rule, whereas the Xc-HSP70 gene did not contain any introns in the coding region. Fluorescent real-time quantitative RT-PCR revealed that both genes were significantly up-regulated under thermal stress and cold stress. The expression patterns indicated that Xc-HSP70 was heat inducible and Xc-HSC70 was constitutively expressed. The temperature response was more intense for Xc-HSP70 than for Xc-HSC70, regardless of the temperature or developmental stage; however, the expression of Xc-HSC70 and Xc-HSP70 was not altered in the pupa. Taken together, the expression profiles of both genes (Xc-HSP70s) provide good support to the insect for coping with adverse conditions.
COMPUTATION-EFFICIENT QUANTIZATION METHOD

Deep Neural Networks, being memory and computation intensive, are a challenge to deploy in smaller devices. Numerous quantization techniques have been proposed to reduce the inference latency/memory consumption. However, these techniques impose a large overhead on the training procedure or need to change the training process. We present a non-intrusive quantization technique based on re-training the full precision model, followed by directly optimizing the corresponding binary model. The quantization training process takes no longer than the original training process. We also propose a new loss function to regularize the weights, resulting in reduced quantization error. Combining both help us achieve full precision accuracy on CIFAR dataset using binary quantization. We also achieve full precision accuracy on WikiText-2 using 2 bit quantization. Comparable results are also shown for ImageNet. We also present a 1.5 bits hybrid model exceeding the performance of TWN LSTM model for WikiText-2.
Bioethanol Production from Eucalyptus camaldulensis Wood Waste Using Bacillus subtilis and Escherichia coli Isolated from Soil in Afaka Forest Reserve, Kaduna State Nigeria

The economic and ecological problems associated with fossil fuel have raised interest in biofuel research in recent times in different parts of the world. The use of Eucalyptus forest waste biomass with no appreciable value to industries or for food as alternative and cost effective feedstock for bioethanol production was evaluated in this study. E. camaldulensis biomass (bark and leaves) were pretreated separately with acid (2M H2SO4) and Microwave irradiation (250V, 50Hz) prior to fermentation with Bacillus subtilis and Escherichia coli isolated from surrounding soil. Higher yield of reducing sugar were obtained from bark (43 %) and leaves (38.5 %) pretreated by microwave irradiation as compared with acid treated plant biomass. Similarly, Bioethanol volume and concentration of 34.89 g/l and 0.51 % respectively were higher in Microwave irradiated bark of E. camaldulensis at 21 days of fermentation when E. coli and B. subtilis were used in synergy The least bioethanol volume yield of 18.79 g/l and concentration of 0.12 % when bark and leaves of E. camaldulensis were combined was obtained on day 7 of fermentation using E. coli. The study concludes that the amount of dried wastes generated (37.8 kg) from one average stand of Eucalyptus tree could yield significant volume (131,884.2 g/l) of bioethanol when B. subtilis and E. coli are used in synergy.
Trade-offs between Fertility and the Economic Costs of Reproduction

Modern industrialized populations lack the strong positive correlations between wealth and reproductive success that characterize most traditional societies. While modernization has brought about substantial increases in personal wealth, fertility in many developed countries has plummeted to the lowest levels in recorded human history. These phenomena contradict evolutionary and economic models of the family that assume increasing wealth reduces resource competition between offspring, favoring high fertility norms. Here, we review the hypothesis that cultural modernization may in fact establish unusually intense reproductive trade-offs in wealthy relative to impoverished strata, favoring low fertility. We test this premise with British longitudinal data (the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children), exploring maternal self-perceptions of economic hardship in relation to increasing family size and actual socioeconomic status. Low-income and low- education-level mothers perceived the greatest economic costs associated with raising two versus one offspring. However, for all further increases to family size, reproduction appears most expensive for relatively wealthy and well-educated mothers. We discuss our results and review current literature on the long-term consequences of resource dilution in modern families.
A Cross-Sectional Study on the Evaluation of the Lipid Profile of Regular Blood Donors in the Buea Regional Hospital, Cameroon

There is an acute shortage of blood in most blood banks worldwide to meet up with demands for several medical interventions. A few reports have associated regular blood donation to the lowering of lipid profile parameters. Estimating the lipid profile is a conventional method of assessing an individual’s risk for coronary heart disease. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the lipid profile of blood donors as a whole and to determine the effect of regular blood donation on lipid profile. This study was a cross sectional study that involved 146 consented blood donors, 90 of whom were regular blood donors (study group) and 56 irregular blood donors (control group). A volume of 5ml venous blood was drawn from each fasting participant into a dry biochemistry screw capped tube. This was allowed to clot and the serum was used to determine total cholesterol, Low-density lipoprotein, High-density lipoprotein and triglycerides. Their atherogenic indices were also calculated from the values of the lipid profile parameters. The student’s t test was use to compare means of the study group and control group, while linear regression analysis was used to measure amount of change. The mean total cholesterol (173.54 ± 46.28mg/dl), low-density lipoprotein (96.68 ± 39.37mg/dL), triglycerides (79.28 ± 42.95mg/dL) were comparatively lower in the regular blood donors than the irregular donors (174.61 ± 50.57, 98.16 ± 42.71, 79.82 ± 50.07) respectively, even though did not reach statistical significance (P > 0.05). The mean Low/High-density lipoprotein ratio was also lower in the regular donors than in the irregular donors, though not statistically significant (P > 0.05). 2.05% of the population of blood donors had a risky Low/High-density lipoprotein ratio (i.e. ratio ≥ 3.0). Blood donors as a whole may be said to have a reduced risk of developing coronary heart disease as reflected by the low prevalence of risky Low/High-density lipoprotein ratio and this benefit may be enhanced with regular blood donation as reflected by the lower total cholesterol, low-density lipoprotein, and triglyceride levels in regular blood donors.
Mask-SLAM: Robust Feature-Based Monocular SLAM by Masking Using Semantic Segmentation

In this paper, we propose a novel method that combines monocular visual simultaneous localization and mapping (vSLAM) and deep-learning-based semantic segmentation. For stable operation, vSLAM requires feature points on static objects. In conventional vSLAM, random sample consensus (RANSAC) [5] is used to select those feature points. However, if a major portion of the view is occupied by moving objects, many feature points become inappropriate and RANSAC does not perform well. Based on our empirical studies, feature points in the sky and on cars often cause errors in vSLAM. We propose a new framework to exclude feature points using a mask produced by semantic segmentation. Excluding feature points in masked areas enables vSLAM to stably estimate camera motion. We apply ORB-SLAM [15] in our framework, which is a state-of-the-art implementation of monocular vSLAM. For our experiments, we created vSLAM evaluation datasets by using the CARLA simulator [3] under various conditions. Compared to state-of-the-art methods, our method can achieve significantly higher accuracy.
Agricultural Policy Processes and the Youth in Malawi

Evidence exists which shows growing disillusionment with and disinterest in agricultural-based livelihoods among the youth in Africa south of the Sahara. This disillusionment raises concerns for the future of agriculture for the developing world as it can lead to higher rural urban migration, unemployment and lowered agricultural productivity. The engagement of youth in agricultural policy formulation processes is seen as one avenue for motivating youth engagement in agriculture. This research seeks to develop a contextual understanding of the level of engagement of youth in agriculture thus providing evidence which can be used to stimulate youth involvement in the sector. Using a mixed-methods approach, this study analyzes the determinants of the engagement by southern African youth in agricultural policy processes using Malawi as a case study.
A Novel Optical Control Plane for Switching an Electro-Optical Hybrid Node in Translucent WDM Optical Networks

In a translucent network scenario, development of an optical control plane (OCP) that is aware of the location and number of available regenerators and all-optical wavelength converters (AOWCs) is of paramount importance. However, current generalized multiprotocol label switching (GMPLS) protocol suite does not consider the distribution of regenerator and AOWC availability information to all the network nodes. In this paper, we propose a novel optical control plane (OCP) architecture that 1) disseminates information about network components (i.e. regenerators and AOWCs) to all the network nodes, and 2) evaluates candidate routes which use fewest amounts of network components. Performance of the proposed OCP is compared with a recently proposed hybrid OCP approach in terms of blocking performance, number of deployed components and lightpath establishment setup times. The obtained simulation results show that the proposed OCP approach demonstrates low connection blocking and establishes lightpaths by 1) minimizing the overall network cost owing to the deployment of minimum total number of network components, and 2) demonstrating acceptable lightpath establishment setup times at all traffic loads. Further, the proposed OCP methodology is compatible and suitable for controlling the operations of a novel electro-optical hybrid translucent node which is a latency efficient technology capable of delivering a cost effective implementation suitable for large scale deployment.
Catalytic Pyrolysis of General Purpose PolyStyrene Using Red Mud as a Catalyst

In this work, the influence of Red Mud in the pyrolysis of general purpose polystyrene (GPPS) has been studied. The catalytic pyrolysis experiments were carried out using an unstirred semi-batch stainless steel 6.28 liter reactor under nitrogen atmosphere (air free) with Red Mud as a catalyst. The reaction effluents (oil and gases) were condensed in water-cooled condenser. The condensate was weighted to determine the total yield. Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectroscopy (GC-MS) analysis was used to characterize the condensed liquid organic compounds. According to the GC-MS results, styrene, benzene and its derivatives, toluene, naphthalene and a small amount of the other hydrocarbon compounds were identified in condensate liquid. Density, specific gravity, API gravity, kinematics and dynamic viscosity, flash point, fire point, cloud point and pour point of condensate were also measured. Under optimum reaction condition, the yield of pyrolysis reaction was above 90%. The air free reaction condition showed good catalytic pyrolysis of polystyrene with less than 1% coke formation and above 90% selectivity towards formation of aromatic compounds. The specifications of condensate, i.e. density, API gravity, viscosity and flash point observed showed that the liquid obtained can safely be classed as a kerosene. The specific gravity value was close to the specific gravity value of diesel.