Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
PLASTICITY AND LIGHT INTERCEPTION BY SIX BRYOPHYTES OF CONTRASTED ECOLOGY

SUMMARY (1) Responses of six bryophyte species, of contrasted ecology, to controlled spatial and temporal patchiness in irradiance were investigated. Beams of unfiltered light projected into a shaded container provided standardized simulations of the effects of neighbouring foliage, litter or sunflecks. (2) The responses observed were consistent with the hypothesis that in plants of relatively productive habitats, high morphological plasticity in the rate and direction of shoot proliferation functions as a 'foraging' mechanism which allows resource acquisition in circumstances of localized resource depletion created by the activity of competing neighbours. (3) In bryophytes of shaded and chronically unproductive habitats, plasticity was found to be less pronounced; here the capacity to exploit sunflecks was shown to be important.
Face Identification and Recognition Using Facial Skin Marks - A survey

—Skin biometrics is one of the most reliable physical characteristic than textual passwords. Skin biometrics can be effectively used for person identification in an intuitive way. The natural facial marks and lines on the skin image can be used to identify the correct person. Face verification using facial marks technique has many applications in variety of fields such as criminal identification, person verification, forensics etc. In this paper, different techniques for face verification using facial marks are discussed. Amongst all available techniques the performance parameters are compared to check the performance parameters. Since the area is currently one of the most on the go and the bulk of research is very large, this survey covers some of the significant methods
Engineering proteins via peptide backbone mutagenesis: The effects of thioamide linkages on the folding and stability of short peptides

The development of proteins/peptides as therapeutic agents has emerged as a promising area for drug design. Due to increased antibiotic resistance, search for novel antibiotics has become a primary area of interest within the pharmaceutical industry. Antimicrobial peptides have been a significantly desirable model due to their innate cytolytic effects and favorable interaction with the membranes of bacterial cells within the host. Thioxylated analogues of biologically active peptides have shown increased enzymatic stability and increased selectivity and potency. Thioamide linkages have thus been installed in a variety of short peptides, replacing the backbone amide linkage, in order to study the effects on peptide conformation and stability. Several bioanalytical tools were used in the analysis including circular dichroism spectroscopy, NMR, sizeexclusion high performance liquid chromatography, and fluorescence. The mutation was well-accommodated within several systems, including Trpzip 4 and gramicidin A, and proved to have comparable, and in several cases, enhanced stability in comparison to the wild-type peptides. Index of Abbreviations AMP Antimicrobial peptide CD Circular dichroism DCM Dichloromethane DMF Dimethylformamide DMSO Dimethylsulfoxide DOPC 1,2-dioleoyl-sn-glycero-3-phosphocholine Et2O Diethyl ether EtOAc Ethyl acetate F2*F-MW-β-hairpin MW-β-hairpin Phe thioamide mutant F12*Fgb1 gb1 Phe thioamide mutant Fmoc Fluorenylmethyloxycarbonyl gA Gramicidin A M Molar MeCN Acetonitrile MeOH Methanol MW-β-hairpin Ac-RFVOVNGKEIFQ-NH2 Na2SO4 Sodium sulfate NaOH Sodium hydroxide NH4Cl Ammonium chloride solution P4S10 Phosphorus pentasulfide Phe Phenylalanine RP-HPLC Reverse-phase high performance liquid chromatography
The role of 18F-FDG PET/CT in staging Breast Cancer Comparative analysis with breast MRI

Breast cancer is one of the main causes of mortality in women worldwide. Diagnosing is an important step that allows an early detection of the disease, which increases the chances of survival and the efficiency of the treatment. Staging Breast Cancer is a complex process in which several imaging modalities are fundamental, such as Echography, Mammography, MRI, Bone Scintigraphy, PET/CT and CAT scan. Although PET/CT and MRI are not considered conventional methods for staging breast cancer, they provide essential information to evaluate this disease. The main objective of this thesis is to develop an approach that can semi-automatically detect the primary site of breast cancer using two imaging modalities: whole-body PET/CT and breast MRI. To achieve this goal, a multi-step approach for each modality was developed based on image processing techniques, tested over a database of 143 breast cancer patients collected from IPO-Porto. The developed algorithms are divided into breast tissue identification and lesion detection, in which image processing techniques such as thresholding, co-registration, superpixels and clustering were applied. The best approach was achieved through the tumor detection in PET/CT images, achieving an intersection over union of 0.308, a precision of 0.371, a recall of 0.568 and 2.766 false positives per patient. These results seem promising, however, future work must be implemented to increase the accuracy of the algorithm and improve the overall performance.
Accuracy of different impression techniques for multiple implants angulated to each other: An in vitro study

Aim and objective: To evaluate the accuracy of different impression techniques - namely the closed tray impression technique, the open tray non-splinted impression technique, the open tray splinted technique and an experimental technique for multiple implants placed at an angulation with each other. Materials and Methods: A master model was made of die stone which incorporated four implants having an internal hexagonal connection. The two terminal implants were placed at an angle of 20 degrees (lingually) whereas the two central implants were placed perpendicular to the cast. The samples were divided into four groups (Group I: Closed tray impression technique, Group II: Open tray impression technique non-splinted, Group III: Open tray impression technique splinted and Group IV: Experimental technique) based on the impression technique used. P-values were obtained using one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) with Tukey’s correction for multiple group comparisons.Results: The P-value was greater than 0.05 (0.869) for Group III. Therefore, open tray splinted technique (Group III) was the most accurate impression technique when compared to the other techniques. On Inter - group comparisons it was noted that the values obtained by experimental technique were within close range of the values obtained by open tray splinted impression technique. Whereas, a comparison of Group I with Group III revealed 2 points of statistical significance (2 points of inaccuracy). Comparison of the Group II with Group III showed that all the points were statistically significant (all points were inaccurate). Conclusion: The open tray splinted impression technique provides best results for multiple implants placed at varying angulations. The experimental technique can be beneficial in areas of limited access, reduced mouth opening and exaggerated gag reflex.
IT Ethics and the Role of Perceived Possibility of Disclosure: An Interventional Research

Since the evolution of information technology, concerns have been raised to unethical IT conducts and their significant monetary and non-monetary losses for corporations. To date, a number of endeavors have been undertaken to model individuals' IT ethical behaviors. Perceived importance of the ethical issue, ethical judgment, ethical obligation, ego strength, codes of ethics, and law are some of the influencing factors. A relatively new factor, which needs further empirical examinations, is perceived possibility of disclosure, i.e. the possibility one perceives about disclosing either the unethical behavior or its consequences to others. The objective of this research is to practically examine the influence of perceived possibility of disclosure on ethical conducts in an IT context. Accordingly, an interventional research (pre-post study) is designed and data were gathered from 347 computer stations in an IT-centric company in Iran. Due to the company's codes of ethics, six categories of unethical IT-related behaviors were defined as a) surfing social media, b) checking personal emails, c) sending organizational documents without authorized tools, d) sharing video or music files in local network, e) stockbroking, and f) installing non-job-related software on computers. Two non-simultaneous phases with duration of three months were examined. In the first phase, a total number of 906 unethical behaviors were observed by means of company-wide log-systems. Subsequently, for the second phase, every personnel were formally informed that their working behavior with computer stations is systematically monitored. Then, all computer stations were monitored for another three months and 155 unethical behaviors were observed. Results revealed that in comparison with the first phase, by average more than 82% of unethical behaviors were reduced. In addition, the most three reductions in unethical behaviors were stockbroking (95.91%), transmission of organizational data (91.95%), and software installation (89.51%), respectively. Finally, practical solutions to decrease the risk of unethical conducts in the domain of perceived possibility of disclosure in an IT context are discussed.
Current Status Of Agricultural Soil Fertility In Erode

Soilfertility is an important aspect in agriculture. Fertile soils only produce high nutritive value crops. Nowadays agricultural soils are contaminated due to many reasons. Farmers use synthetic fertilizers and synthetic pesticides for crop production. They play a major role in soil fertility. Physicochemical parameters of soil enable the current status of soil fertility. The soil samples were collected in Erode. All the agricultural soils were acidic in nature. Electrical conductivity of all the samples showed that the soils were good for seed germination. Total dissolved solids and salinity were in appropriate level in all the samples. Organic carbon level were in sufficient level. Macronutrients were in medium level. Calcium and magnesium were in sufficient level in all the soil samples.
Generic Framework Architecture for Verifying Embedded Components

This dissertation presents a framework for the formal verification of standard embedded components such us bus protocol, microprocessor, memory blocks, various IP blocks, and a software component. It includes a model checking of embedded systems components. The algorithms are modeled on SystemC and transformed on Promela language (PROcess or PROtocol MEta LAnguage) with the integration of LTL (Linear Temporal Logic) properties extracting from state machines in order to reduce verification complexity. Thus, SysVerPml is not only dedicated to verifying generated properties but also for the automation integration of other properties in models if needed. In the following, we will provide the answer to the problems of component representation on the design system, what properties are appropriate for each component, and how to verify properties.
Effects of GNSS Receiver Tuning on the PLL Tracking Jitter Estimation in the Presence of Ionospheric Scintillation

Ionospheric scintillation is an interference characterized by rapid and random fluctuations in radio frequency signals when passing through irregularities in the ionosphere. It can severely degrade the performance of Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) receivers, thus increasing positioning errors. Receivers with different tracking loop bandwidths and coherent integration times perform differently under scintillation. This study investigates the effects of GNSS receiver tracking loop tuning on scintillation monitoring and Phase Locked Loop (PLL) tracking jitter estimation using simulated GNSS data. The variation of carrier to noise density ratio (C/N0) under scintillation with different tracking loop settings is also studied. The results show that receiver tuning has a minor effect on scintillation indices calculation. The levels of C/N0 are also similar for different PLL bandwidths and integration times. Additionally, the tracking jitter is estimated by theoretical equations and verified using the relationship with the PLL discriminator output noise, which is calculated using the post‐correlation measurements. Novel approaches are further proposed to calculate 1‐s scintillation index, which enables to compute the tracking jitter at a rate of 1 s. It is found that 1‐s tracking jitter can successfully represent the signal fluctuations levels caused by scintillation. This work is valuable for developing scintillation sensitive tracking error models and is also of great significance for GNSS receiver design to mitigate scintillation effects.
FEATURE EXTRACTION BASED ON FUZZY CLUSTERING AND EMOJI EMBEDDINGS FOR EMOTION CLASSIFICATION

: Emotion analysis is a subset of sentiment analysis that is used to understand emotions in text. Considering the availability of textual data in social media, it is becoming crucial to analyse users’ emotions and bridge the gaps between social media contents and real-world activities including market trends prediction, emotion analysis and emotion monitoring. Despite the extensive research on textual emotion analysis on social media platforms(applications) such as Twitter, analysing the use of emoji in the task of emotion analysis remain light. Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications for Social Media often use publicly available pre-trained word embeddings that exclude emojis or there exists limited number of emojis. However, the use of emojis in social media has increased drastically. In this paper we first use fuzzy clustering to cluster emojis into one or more emotion classes, and then develop pre-trained embeddings for emojis (named as FuzzyMoji2Vec). The proposed emoji embeddings can be used in NLP applications alongside available word embeddings. We demonstrate, for the task of sentiment analysis and emotion analysis, that the resulting emoji embeddings outperform the state-of-the-art existing models.
Controlled Vocabulary for HIV/AIDS: An Evolving Nosological Record of a Diseased Body of Knowledge

In response to a cultural imperative evoked by the AIDS pandemic, the authors have developed a controlled vocabulary specific to HIV/AIDS-encompassing the biomedical, legal, psychosocial, educational, historical, and literary domains-and accessible to communities heavily impacted by the epidemic. The work reflects both knowledge organization systems and environmental perspectives evidenced by the disease. It is intended to serve as a record of the lexicon -past, present, and future-and as a tool to organize the body of knowledge associated with the pandemic.
Chemosystematic of Enterobacteriaceae Familia Obtained from Blood Cultures Based on Total Protein Profiles

The purpose of this study was to determine the chemosystematic of 14 strains of bacteria in blood cultures from Semarang using 1 reference strain S. typhi NCTC 786, based on the total protein profi les with the similarity relationship analysis based on Simple Matching Coeffi cient (SSM) analysis and algorithm method of unweighted pair group with averages (UPGMA) presented in a dendrogram. The results showed that the chemosystematic based on the total protein profi les using SDS-PAGE method can classify the member of bacterial strains of each species. The Clusters respectively consist of 4 strains of S. typhi (similarity: 89.7%), 2 strains of Ser. marcescens (similarity: 89.7%), two strains of E. coli, and one strain of Salmonella ssp, S. typhi NCTC 786 (similarity: 100%). Those three incorporated clusters had the similarity value of 75.3%. Those four strains of Ent. cloacae composed in one cluster (similarity: 100%) are incorporated in a cluster consisting of one strain of Kleb. pneumoniae (similarity: 92.9%). Both clusters were incorporated in a cluster consisting of S. typhi NCTC 786 (similarity: 67.9%). Key words: Enterobacteriaceae, chemosystematic, blood cultures, protein profile
Cross-talk between microRNAs, long non-coding RNAs and p21Cip1 in glioma: diagnostic, prognostic and therapeutic roles

Glioblastoma multiforme is considered one of the most common malignant primary intracranial tumors. Despite treatment with a combination of surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy, patients with glioblastoma multiform have poor prognosis. It has been widely accepted that the occurrence, progression, and even recurrence of glioblastoma multiforme strictly depends on the presence of glioma cancer stem cells. The presence of glioma stem cells reduces the efficacy of standard therapies, thus increasing the imperative to identify new targets and therapeutic strategies in glioblastoma patients. In this regard, the p21 pathway has been found to play an important role in the maintenance of the glioma stem cells. It has been shown that this pathway regulates cancer stem cell pool by preventing hyperproliferation and exhaustion. MicroRNAs, endogenous small non-coding RNAs, and long non-coding RNAs, regulate post-transcription gene expression. These are not only altered in glioma, but also in other cancer types, and are involved in tumor development and progression. Notably, they have also been shown to modulate the expression of proteins in the p21 signaling pathway. This review highlights the extent and complexity of cross-talk between microRNAs, long non-coding RNAs and the p21 pathway, and demonstrates how such interplay orchestrates the regulation of protein expression and functions in glioma and glioma stem cells.
User Loyalty and Willingness to Pay for a Music Streaming Subscription Identifying Asset Specificity in the Case of Streaming Platforms

Music streaming has increased industry revenue and displaced piracy, but limited profits for artists. In this thesis, I examine user loyalty to streaming platforms, focusing on the asset specificity of features and estimating what users are willing to pay for each of these features. A structural equation model of survey data shows that feature satisfaction positively affects both asset specificity of and overall satisfaction with streaming platforms, strengthening user loyalty. Using conjoint analysis (hedonic feature analysis), I estimate that users are willing to pay at least $14.40 per month for platforms that offer algorithm, playlist and social features, and the ability to download music.
Reestablishment of Biological Distance in a Gummy Smile: Case Report

The smile line it’s determined with the exposure area of the periodontium, therefore smiling and exposing >3mm of gingiva is considered unsightly, one of the causes is the altered biological distance, it is necessary to know how to diagnose to propose the appropriate treatment. Case Report: Gingivectomy was performed to make the new gingival margin in order to remove excess tissues; osteotomy and osteoplasty for restoring supracrestal gingival tissues and preserving the case. Results: with this case report is expected to show the importance of reestablishing the biological distance in a gummy smile, in addition to providing the patient with the desired esthetic smile. Conclusion: In conclusion, after diagnostic exams and the correct indication of the technique to restore normal periodontal distances, it was possible restore function, aesthetics and self-esteem to the individual, in addition to maintaining the periodontium with stable, healthy tissues and with no recurrence, even after long periods.
Response of cottontail rabbit populations to herbicide and fire applications on cross timbers rangeland.

Knowledge of how resident wildlife populations respond to brush management strategies is especially limited for rangelands in the cross timbers vegetation type of Oklahoma. We examined how cottontail rabbit (Sylvilagus floridanus) density and habitat use were influenced by applications of tebuthiuron or triclopyr, with and without annual burning, on cross timbers rangeland. Line transect flush-counts, mark-recapture livetrapping, and fecal pellet counts were used to evaluate seasonal differences in population density among 5 brush control treatments. Cottontail rabbits (n = 225) were flushed along 362 km of line transects during 5 census periods. Density in winter was consistently lower than summer for all treatments, except for the untreated control in winter 1987. Line transect density estimates varied from 0 to 1.975 rabbits/ha and suggested that herbicide and annual burning treatments had a positive influence on cottontail rabbit populations compared to untreated controls. Mark-recapture density estimates did not differ among treatments. Fecal pellet counts were greater on herbicide-treated pastures than an untreated control in both spring and fall. Prairie-eastern redcedar (Juniperus virginiana L.) and forest-prairie ecotone habitats were utilized greater than expected by cottontail rabbits. Mature hardwood overstory and mixed-brush habitats were avoided. Tebuthiuron and triclopyr effectively deceased hardwood overstory and increased preferred habitats for cottontail rabbits.
Viral etiology and atopic characteristics in high-risk asthmatic children hospitalized for lower respiratory tract infection

Background Viral etiology and atopic characteristics, e.g., allergens and fractional exhaled nitric oxide (FeNO), play essential roles in asthma development. This study aimed to investigate associations among them in children at high risk of developing asthma to guide reliable diagnosis and treatment of wheezing. Methods From April 2016 to August 2017, 135 children aged <3 years identified as being at high risk of asthma and hospitalized for lower respiratory tract infection (LRTI) with wheezing were recruited as research subjects (observation group). Real-time fluorescent polymerase chain reaction (PCR) was used to explore their etiology. Samples were also evaluated with Phadiatop (Pharmacia Diagnostics AB, Uppsala, Sweden). Additionally, 200 non-asthmatic, non-allergic, healthy children who were screened and followed up in the Echocardiography clinic during the study period were recruited as a healthy control group for FeNO measurement, and the observation group also underwent FeNO measurement. Results Among the observation group, viruses were positively detected in 49.63%. The most often detected virus was human rhinovirus (HRV; 25.19%). Compared with children aged <12 months, those aged 1–3 years were more susceptible to HRV infection and had lower sensitivity rates for inhalant allergens and higher T-IgE. The virus-detected group had a higher sensitivity rate for inhalant allergens compared with the virus-undetected group. FeNO in the observation group was lower than that in the healthy control group. The second-wheezing group had higher sensitivity rates for dust mites and fungi and higher T-IgE levels compared with the first-wheezing group. Conclusions HRV was the most common viral pathogen present during an asthmatic attack in infants and young children at elevated risk of asthma. Allergy is a risk factor for both initial wheezing and repeated wheezing. Inhalant allergen-sensitive children are more susceptible than others to viral infection.