Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
MATRIX METALLOPROTEINASE 2, MATRIX METALLOPROTEINASE 9, AND CONNECTIVE TISSUE GROWTH FACTOR IN THE EQUINE TEAR FLUID: POSSIBLE IMPLICATIONS IN CORNEAL WOUND HEALING

of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy MATRIX METALLOPROTEINASE 2, MATRIX METALLOPROTEINASE 9,AND CONNECTIVE TISSUE GROWTH FACTOR IN THE EQUINE TEAR FLUID: POSSIBLE IMPLICATIONS IN CORNEAL WOUND HEALING By Franck J. Ollivier May 2004 Chair: Dennis E. Brooks Major Department: Veterinary Medicine The goals of this study were to investigate the presence of matrix metalloproteinase 2 (MMP-2), matrix metalloproteinase 9 (MMP-9), and connective tissue growth factor (CTGF) in the equine tear film, cornea, and lacrimal glands; to compare the levels of MMP-2, MMP-9 , and CTGF in the tear fluid of horses with healthy eyes and horses with ulcerative keratitis; to document the changes in MMP-2 and MMP-9 levels in horse tear film during corneal healing; and to investigate the in vitro effects of various proteinase inhibitors on the activity of MMP-2 and MMP-9 isolated from the equine tear film. This study demonstrates by immunohistochemistry the expression of MMP-2 protein in the equine lacrimal gland and the gland of the nictitating membrane. The expression of MMP-2 and MMP-9 proteins was also found in the healthy cornea of the horse and was increased in the ulcerated equine cornea. In this study, the level of MMP-2 and MMP-9 activity was determined in a total 330 tear fluid samples by the use of gelatin zymography. MMP proteolytic activity was
Quantitative and qualitative analyses of seed storage proteins from toxic and non-toxic varieties of Jatropha curcas L.

Interest in Jatropha curcas has increased noticeably due to the multifunctional characteristics of the plant. Of particular interest is the high oil content of the seeds which can be used for biodiesel production. The extraction of the oil from the seeds leaves a meal highly enriched in protein (Crude protein ~ 60%), providing a potential protein source for animal nutrition. In order to characterise the seed proteins, protein fractions were extracted from defatted kernel meals of three varieties of J. curcas, a toxic and a non-toxic variety from Mexico, and a toxic variety from Cape Verde, and analysed with respect to their amino acid composition, rumen degradability and gastric digestibility.
Molecular characterization of the effect of plant-based elicitor using microRNAs markers in wheat genome

Recent studies reported a significant contribution of microRNAs (miRNAs) in plant response to elicitors. The aim of our study was to analyse the effect of exogenously applied plant-derived elicitor cobalt-diglycyrrhizinate on Triticum aestivum L. genome based on the functional characterization of stress associated miRNAs. Our results confirmed the impact of cobalt-diglycyrrhizinate on plant genome in a way of plant response stimulation via expression of stress-related miRNAs markers. We found that both miRNAs markers (miR168 and miR395) are involved in response to plant-based elicitor stimuli. The role of miR168 and miR395 as functional markers sensitive to applied elicitors has been confirmed. Marker miR168 is suitable for the mapping of plant genome response to native elicitor, lower concentration of an elicitor is more suitable for plant immune system stimulation and its inappropriate concentrations may be toxic to the plant. Plant genome very sensitively reacts to elicitor stimuli and the question of the appropriate concentration and the time point of elicitor application are crucial.
AUTO-SYNTHESIZE LOGICAL 3D LARGE MODEL BASED ON SIMPLE INPUT PRIMITIVE MODEL

3D modelling is a tedious and time-consuming process in games and entertainment industries. Due to the availability of high performance graphics hardware today, the demand for higher detailed and realistic graphics complicates tremendously the creation of large 3D model such as a city. Several modelling techniques have been introduced to ease the productivity of 3D modelling. However, they only fit for certain models. This paper proposes to auto-synthesize logical and realistic 3D model based on simple input primitive models. The input model will be sub-divided into several parts which the top-most and bottom-most are constrained for rational merging purpose. The body structure is randomly made. Our algorithm is easy to implement and capable to generate variety multifaceted models with only a single touch on a key. Our output is logic and acceptable. It is useful for the artist to have different ways of design.
Intervention Model for Analysing the Impact of Gross Domestic Product in Nigeria

DOI: 10.21276/sjpms.2018. 5.4. 1 Abstract: Every country has it policy, the economic variable stated in this study is fundamental in the policy of Nigeria. The study intervention model of gross domestic product in Nigeria utilizes the quarterly data from 1981 to 2015, sourced from Central Bank of Nigeria, Statistical bulletin. The intervention methods adopted in this study is quasi-experimental in nature and validity of modelling gross domestic product depends upon assumptions about the timing of the intervention stated in the study. The study yields an ARIMA (3,1,1) model without intervention and with intervention at the time 2002 last quarter which was adequate. The study reports intervention slope and the nature of the intervention is abrupt change. The researcher from theoretical and analytical methods recommends better empirical review on monetary policy that tends to influence gross domestic product in Nigeria.
Filial responsibility in care for elderly parents: a mixed study

DOI http://dx.doi. org/10.1590/19820194201900095 Universidade Regional Integrada do Alto Uruguai e das Missões, Frederico Westphalen, RS, Brazil. Unimed Porto Alegre, Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil. Escola de Enfermagem, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil. Grupo Hospitalar Conceição, Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil. Universidade Franciscana Santa Maria, Santa Maria, RS, Brazil. Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil. Confl icts of intere st: article extracted from the Doctoral Thesis “Responsabilidade fi lial no cuidado aos pais idosos e a relação com o bem-estar” (“Filial responsability in the care of the elderly parents and the relationship with the well-being”), presented to the Graduate Nursing Program of the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS). Abstract Objective: To examine the relationship between attitudes of fi lial responsibility and care behaviors of caregiving children. Methods: A mixed-method study with concomitant triangulation of data with 100 caregiving children of elderly people linked to primary care services. At the quantitative stage, the Filial Expectation and Filial Duty Scales were applied to assess the attitudes regarding fi lial responsibility. Care behaviors were assessed through instrumental, emotional and fi nancial support, companionship, and visitation. At the qualitative stage, open-ended questions about care behaviors and attitudes were used. Inferential and thematic analyses and triangulation of the data were done. Results: Financial and emotional support showed an association with Filial Duty (p = 0.050, p = 0.001) and Filial Expectation (p = 0.013, p = 0.023), respectively. At the qualitative stage, these fi lial behaviors emerged as fi nancial overload and teachings for their own children to care for them in old age. Companionship and visitation were associated only with Filial Duty (p = 0.015), similar to the results found in the testimonials relative to be a natural duty and satisfaction of being present in the life of the parents. There was no association between attitudes of fi lial responsibility and help in activities of daily living, diverging from the fi ndings of the category “Diffi culties in being a caregiving child. ” Conclusion: Understanding attitudes and behaviors of care contributes to the improvement of the quality of attention of the professionals that assist this population.
An Online Robot Collision Detection and Identification Scheme by Supervised Learning and Bayesian Decision Theory

This article is dedicated to developing an online collision detection and identification (CDI) scheme for human-collaborative robots. The scheme is composed of a signal classifier and an online diagnosor, which monitors the sensory signals of the robot system, detects the occurrence of a physical human–robot interaction, and identifies its type within a short period. In the beginning, we conduct an experiment to construct a data set that contains the segmented physical interaction signals with ground truth. Then, we develop the signal classifier on the data set with the paradigm of supervised learning. To adapt the classifier to the online application with requirements on response time, an auxiliary online diagnosor is designed using the Bayesian decision theory. The diagnosor provides not only a collision identification result but also a confidence index which represents the reliability of the result. Compared to the previous works, the proposed scheme ensures rapid and accurate CDI even in the early stage of a physical interaction. As a result, safety mechanisms can be triggered before further injuries are caused, which is quite valuable and important toward a safe human–robot collaboration. In the end, the proposed scheme is validated on a robot manipulator and applied to a demonstration task with collision reaction strategies. The experimental results reveal that the collisions are detected and classified within 20 ms with an overall accuracy of 99.6%, which confirms the applicability of the scheme to collaborative robots in practice. Note to Practitioners—This article is intended to provide a novel online collision event handling scheme for robots in industrial environments. This scheme is designed to quickly and accurately detect an accidental collision and distinguish it from the intentional human–robot interaction. The method takes the raw signals from external torque sensors and provides a collision diagnosis result with a reliability index. The simple structure makes it easy to be implemented as a regular fault monitoring routine for collaborative robots. Different from the conventional methods, the proposed collision identification scheme in this article especially focuses on overcoming the following two challenges in practice: first, to timely and accurately report a collision within its early stage, and second, to ensure a high identification accuracy in a complicated environment, where ubiquitous disturbance and noise are unneglectable. The experimental validation at the end of this article confirms its promising application value in human–robot collaboration.
Regulation and Ownership Structures in Listed Firms: Evidence from Europe

This paper explores an extensive novel panel-data set coveringmore than 4,000 listed firms in 16 European countries to study the effects of shareholder protection on ownership structure and firm performance. We document firm-level evidence of a negative effect of shareholder protection on ownership concentration. Differentiating between shareholder types, we find that this effect is mainly driven by strategic investors and institutional ownership is actually positively correlated to shareholder protection. The latter effect, is mainly driven by independent institutional investors. Finally, we find evidence that independent institutional investors fuel firm valuation, and evidence for strategic investors.
Reviewing the Impact of Smartphone Usage on Academic Performance Among Students of Higher Learning

Adoption of Smartphone by students of higher learning has been a global phenomenon in recent years. It is more than an integral part of adolescents’ daily lives and has become the most popular form of electronic communication. Infact, the Smartphone has turned from a technological tool to a social tool. Smartphone and tablets play a very significant role in higher learning student’s information seeking behaviour in meeting their learning and research needs. This paper explores the impact of Smartphone on academic performance of higher learning students. The study revealed high level of awareness about the usage of smartphones by higher learning students for their academic works. Results showcases that smartphones have tremendous impact on their higher education. Especially with easy internet access and high speed browsing as it saves time and money rather than going to cybercafé/college library. Moreover, lack of experts who are technically strong on repairs during fault occurrence, operational difficulties, high cost of data subscription from service providers and fragility are the major problems that are encountered while using smartphones. This study aims in finding out the relationship between smartphone usage and academic performance among students of higher learning. The study involved data collation based on description of the phone usage habit such as browsing frequency, information sourced, sites visited, and examining the effect of smartphones on students’ academic related activities. The hours spent on the phones by students were also gauged and compared with one another focusing on studies and learning perspectives respectively.
INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH OF MAGDALENIAN LAYERS IN BALCARKA

A preparative archaeological survey was carried out in Balcarka Cave in the Moravian Karst in 2007. As the original archaeological layer known from the research carried out by J. Knies from unique items from the Magdalenian Period were not found, sediments with numerous palaeontological finds were investigated. These finds were analysed from both the archaeological and natural science viewpoint. Balcarka Cave (Moravian Karst), rescue excavation, Late Palaeolithic, palaeontology, seasonality, palaeoecology, use-wear analysis, isotopic study Received October 4, 2010 Issued August 2011
Production expectations modulate contrastive inference

Contrastive inferences, whereby a listener pragmatically infers a speaker’s referential intention of a partial referring expression like the yellow by reasoning about other objects in the context, are notoriously unstable. We report a productioncentric model of interpretation couched within the Rational Speech Act framework. Adjective production probabilities a listener expects for objects in a context drive the size of contrastive inferences: the greater the asymmetry in expectation for a speaker to use a pre-nominal adjective for the target rather than for competitors, the greater the listener’s resulting target preference. Modifier production probabilities were collected (Exp. 1) and used to make predictions about comprehension in an incremental decision task (Exp. 2). The model’s interpretation predictions are supported by the data. This account has the potential to explain the fluctuating appearance of contrastive inferences and shifts the explanatory focus away from contrastive inference towards online interpretation of referring expressions more broadly.
Mitochondrial D-loop sequence variation among Hucul horse

Genetic variation in the Czech Hucul horse population was analyzed using a sequence analysis of the D-loop region of mitochondrial DNA. One hundred and sixty-five Hucul horses were tested. Sequencing of the 700-base pairs fragment of the mitochondrial DNA D-loop region revealed 38 mutation sites representing 14 haplotypes, which were clustered into six haplogroups. The genetic information obtained from the mito - chondrial DNA typing is of utmost importance for the future breed-conservation strategies. Hucul is a mountain horse, an indigenous breed of the Carpathians. Thanks to solid body and limbs frame, good health and endurance, this breed is remarkable in its ability to maintain high trotting speed on hills and over tight mountain trails (Ma -
Persistence of Alcohol and Drug Abuse among the Youth in the Presbyterian Church of East Africa

DOI: 10.21276/sjahss.2018. 6.10. 4 Abstract: Global statistics show persistence of alcohol and drug abuse among the youth. In response to this, religious organizations, notably the Christian church have come up with programmes aimed at mitigating alcohol and drug abuse. However, the problem continues to persist despite the significant role religions play in the society. This study sought to investigate why alcohol and drug abuse continue to persist among the youth in the Presbyterian Church of East Africa (PCEA) yet the church has mitigating programmes. The study was guided by Emile Durkheim‟s Functionalism Theory and Sandra Coleman‟s Incomplete Mourning and Addict Theory. The accessible population was church elders, Parish ministers, Presbytery moderators, the PCEA Youth Director and the youth members who included the youth abusing alcohol and drugs. Multistage cluster sampling technique was used to select three PCEA regions. Proportional sampling technique was used to get PCEA Presbytery moderators, church elders, Parish ministers and youth members who formed three clusters. Snowball sampling technique was used to get the youth who are abusing alcohol and drugs. Purposive sampling was used to select the Youth Director as a key informant due to his direct knowledge on alcohol and drug abuse mitigation activities in the PCEA. The study had a total sample of 928 respondents. Descriptive survey research design was used to obtain qualitative data. Instruments for data collection were questionnaires, structured interview schedule and focus group discussions. Data collected using questionnaires was cleaned and coded for analysis using statistical package for social sciences. Tape recorded data from the interview was transcribed verbatim. Data was analyzed qualitatively and presented in summary form using frequency tables and discussions. The study established that the foremost reasons for the persistence of alcohol and drug abuse among the youth in the PCEA is peer influence, curiosity and easy availability of alcohol and drugs. The study recommends that the church in collaboration with the government and other stakeholders should initiate income generating projects for the youth with the aim of keeping them busy and to acquire income. The youth can be encouraged to access youth economic empowerment programmes like the youth enterprise fund. The church should work in collaboration with NACADA, national government and other stakeholders in conducting preventive education and awareness programmes on alcohol and drug abuse in the community. The church should also conduct capacity building for parents to address alcohol and drug abuse among the youth by creating forums to share experiences and equip them with guidance and counseling skills. Creating awareness among parents is also key because it will help them increase their appreciation of their unique role in curbing alcohol abuse among their children.
Neural Network MIMO Detection for Coded Wireless Communication with Impairments

In this paper, a neural network based Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output (MIMO) algorithm is presented. The algorithm is specifically designed to be integrated in a coded MIMO-OFDM system, and is based upon projected gradient descent iterations. We combine our model as a part of a modern coded MIMO-OFDM system, and we compare its performance with common MIMO detectors on simulated data, as well as on field data. We also investigated our model’s performance in the presence of several common communication impairments, and demonstrated empirically its robustness. We show empirically that a single trained model is suited for the detection of both coded and uncoded data, with or without impairments, and in the presence of a wide range of tested SNR levels.
Severity-Aware Semantic Segmentation With Reinforced Wasserstein Training

Semantic segmentation is a class of methods to classify each pixel in an image into semantic classes, which is critical for autonomous vehicles and surgery systems. Cross-entropy (CE) loss-based deep neural networks (DNN) achieved great success w.r. t. the accuracy-based metrics, e.g., mean Intersection-over Union. However, the CE loss has a limitation in that it ignores varying degrees of severity of pair-wise misclassified results. For instance, classifying a car into the road is much more terrible than recognizing it as a bus. To sidestep this, in this work, we propose to incorporate the severity-aware inter-class correlation into our Wasserstein training framework by configuring its ground distance matrix. In addition, our method can adaptively learn the ground metric in a high-fidelity simulator, following a reinforcement alternative optimization scheme. We evaluate our method using the CARLA simulator with the Deeplab backbone, demonstraing that our method significantly improves the survival time in the CARLA simulator. In addition, our method can be readily applied to existing DNN architectures and algorithms while yielding superior performance. We report results from experiments carried out with the CamVid and Cityscapes datasets.
The Readiness of Countries for E-Learning with Special Focusing on the Sudanese Experience

Recently, E-Learning is considered as a mandatory factor for each country need to raises the level of knowledge between its citizens. E-learning can be seen as a result of multi modern technologies such as advances in communication and internet usage. World countries are varying in readiness for applying E-learning. The aim of this paper is to study the comparison between readiness and implementation of E-Learning in the developed and developing countries. E-learning in developed countries is well-established while many developing countries in Africa and Arab world face many challenges. The paper present Sudan efforts to overcome these challenges.
Human leukocyte antigen (HLA) Cw allele association among psoriasis patients from Western India

Psoriasis a common autoimmune disorder characterized by T cell mediated keratinocyte hyperproliferation known to be associated with the presence of certain specific HLA alleles. In this study our aim was to evaluate distribution of Human leukocyte antigen (HLA-Cw) susceptible allele of psoriasis from patients in Western India. The study included 84 Psoriasis patients and 91 normal individuals from the same geographical region. Human leukocyte antigen HLA-C was typed using high resolution polymerase chain reaction- sequence specific oligonucleotide probes (PCR-SSOP) technique. The study revealed significant increase in frequencies of Cw*0202 (OR-6.508, P<0.0001) and Cw*0604 (OR-17.710, P=0.0153) when compared to controls while Cw*1502 (OR-0.130, P=0.0490) were significantly decreased in psoriasis patients. Our study shows a strong association of HLA Cw*0202 and Cw*0604 alleles with psoriasis conferring to its susceptibility to psoriasis patients from Western India.
Board Characteristics and Earnings Management: Evidence from Quoted Firms in Nigeria

The study investigated the association between board characteristics and earnings management practices. A longitudinal survey was used covering a time frame of six years (2007-2012). Historical data were extracted from the financial statements of eighty-eight sampled non-financial firms quoted on the Nigerian Stock Exchange. The statistical instrument used was the fixed effect Panel least Square regression. The study found that board independence and audit committee independence have negative relationship, while managerial shareholdings and board political connections have positive relationship with earnings management practices among Nigerian firms. Recommendations were made.