Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Enhanced cytotoxicity of nitidine against camptothecin‐resistant A549 cells

Drug resistance has been a major issue in cancer chemotherapy. It is therefore important to screen more potent natural anti‐cancer agents for use against the drug‐resistant cancer phenotype. The present study investigated the cytotoxicity of the traditional and natural medicinal agent nitidine (NTD) against the drug‐resistant cancer phenotype of A549 human lung adenocarcinoma cells.
A PORTABLE, RIGID FORCED-AIR WARMING COVER FOR PRE-HOSPITAL TRANSPORT OF COLD PATIENTS

Field care ofthe cold patient can be divided into two phases: (1) rescue/nonvehicular transport and (2) vehicular transport, During lhe first phase, lhere are limited rewarming methods as exogenous heat can only be delivered by heat pacs, human bodies, warm water bottles or if available, inhalation of heated humidified air. The possible heat sources during vehicular transport, however, may be more numerous if the rescue/transport vehicles have sufficient power. One warming therapy lhat has been recently developed in lhe last decade is forced-air warming. This me1hod was used to warm vigorously shivering hypolhermic subjects. Compared with shivering only, forced-air warming decreased lhe post-cooling afterdrop by 30% allhough lhe rewarming rate was unchanged (3). In a clinical study, however, forced-air warming has been shown to ahnost double lhe rewarming rate in emergeocy department care of moderateIy-to-severely hypothermic patients who were likely not shivering (4). We have since used a more powerful prototype of a forced-air warmer in shivering subjects and demonstrated no advantage, compared wilh shivering, for prevention of post-cooling afterdrop but a significant increase in rewarming rate from 3.4 to 5.8°Ch·! (5). We have recently developed a human model for severe hypolhermia where inhibiting shivering with meperidine (up to 2.5 mg'kg') considerably increases core temperature afterdrop, and lhe core does not rewarm spontaneously for up to 3.5 h (6). Using lhis model, we have shown lhat forced-air warming decreases lhe post-cooling afterdrop by ahnost 50% and produces a six-fold increase in lhe subsequent rewarming rate (7). Based on lhis data we have proposed lhe development of a forced-air warming system lhat could be used during emergency transport of cold subjects in lhe air (airplanes, helicopters), at sea (coast guard cutters, ships) or on land (ambulances, etc.). We lherefore felt lhat an appropriate system would include an existing commercial heating unit combined with a new forced-air cover lhat would include lhe following criteria: rigidity to prevent collapse; compactuess for storage; ability to be rapidly assembled; ofrelative inexpeose and lhe ability to accept a heating hose from existing heating units. The goal would be for lhe new cover to provide at least as much heat to lhe skin as lhe existing soft blanket covers.
The role of domestic ‐ firm knowledge in foreign R&D collaborations: Evidence from co ‐ patenting in Indian firms

In this paper, we analyse the role of international patent collaborations in the performance of domestic firms and how the relationship is augmented by the pre-existing capabilities of the domestic firms. Using data on Indian firms, we study patterns of co-invention by Indian firms and foreign partners. The results confirm the crucial role played by the absorptive capacity of domestic firms in enhancing the benefits from the patent collaboration. The evidence we present in this work contributes to existing knowledge on the microeconomics behind the process of technological capability accumulation and catching up in developing countries.
SPATIALLY SAMPLED MEASUREMENTS OF ATMOSPHERIC TURBULENCE USING UNMANNED AERIAL VEHICLES

This paper provides an overview of recently conducted experiments in which atmospheric boundary layer turbulence was measured by unmanned aerial vehicles. These experiments were conducted as part of the large-scale “Lower Atmospheric Process Studies at Elevation a Remotelypiloted Aircraft Team Experiment (LAPSE-RATE)” measurement campaign held in Colorado’s San Luis Valley. Two types of measurements are examined, the first type is focused on measuring profiles of thermodynamic properties for atmospheric boundary layer investigations. Profiles of temperature, wind velocity, and turbulent kinetic energy measured during a morning transition from stable to convective conditions were examined for altitudes up to 900 m above ground level. The second measurement type utilizes long transect flights over nearly homogeneous terrain to spatially measure turbulence statistics. Energy spectra and velocity structure functions up to 10th order were examined and the scaling of the structure function exponents compared to those measured from prior studies.
A MIDDLE−LATE IRON AGE AND EARLY ROMANO-BRITISH SETTLEMENT AT

Excavations in 2014 at Shepherds Spring School, Andover identified a rare Early Neolithic pit containing an important assemblage of worked flint and Carinated Bowl pottery. Middle–Late Iron Age and early Romano-British features included a substantial enclosure ditch of at least two phases, storage pits and the remains of the Portway Roman road.
Survey for Trust-aware Recommender Systems: A Deep Learning Perspective

A significant remaining challenge for existing recommender systems is that users may not trust the recommender systems for either lack of explanation or inaccurate recommendation results. Thus, it becomes critical to embrace a trustworthy recommender system. This survey provides a systemic summary of three categories of trust-aware recommender systems: social-aware recommender systems that leverage users' social relationships; robust recommender systems that filter untruthful noises (e.g., spammers and fake information) or enhance attack resistance; explainable recommender systems that provide explanations of recommended items. We focus on the work based on deep learning techniques, an emerging area in the recommendation research.
QTRAN++: Improved Value Transformation for Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

QTRAN is a multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) algorithm capable of learning the largest class of joint-action value functions up to date. However, despite its strong theoretical guarantee, it has shown poor empirical performance in complex environments, such as Starcraft Multi-Agent Challenge (SMAC). In this paper, we identify the performance bottleneck of QTRAN and propose a substantially improved version, coined QTRAN++. Our gains come from (i) stabilizing the training objective of QTRAN, (ii) removing the strict role separation between the action-value estimators of QTRAN, and (iii) introducing a multi-head mixing network for value transformation. Through extensive evaluation, we confirm that our diagnosis is correct, and QTRAN++ successfully bridges the gap between empirical performance and theoretical guarantee. In particular, QTRAN++ newly achieves state-of-the-art performance in the SMAC environment. The code will be released.
Loyalty over Fairness: Acceptance of Unfair Supreme Court Procedures

Evidence of procedural fairness leads individuals to support Supreme Court decisions, even ones with which they disagree. Yet, in some settings, unfair behavior is seen as acceptable, even praiseworthy, if it yields a pleasing outcome for one’s group. The loyalty norm occasionally trumps the fairness norm, and group loyalty has taken on increasing importance in American politics. I use a nationally representative survey with an embedded experiment, and a convenience sample survey experiment, to relate group (i.e., partisan) loyalty and perceptions of (un)fair behavior to support for the Court. I find that when group concerns are unclear, individuals tend to punish the Court for unfair behavior. However, despite conventional wisdom regarding fairness and support, individuals fail to censure unfair behavior when their group benefits from the Court’s impropriety. These effects hold when integrating preferences regarding specific case outcomes. Perceived unfair procedures do not universally harm evaluations of the Supreme Court.
Prevalence and Mechanism of Injuries in Male Beach Soccer Players

Introduction: One of the preventing injuries methods is recognizing common injuries in sports and causative factors of injury. The aims of this study was to investigate the injuries of beach soccer players in terms of prevalence and mechanism. Methods: The present study is a Cross-sectional and descriptive research that was conducted as a field study. Forty players were selected randomly from two teams of the Yazd province in premier country league that took place in 2019. For recording prevalence and mechanism of injuries, the modified injury report form by Fuller et al. (2006) was used. The SPSS software version 25 and the chi-square test at a significance level P < 0.05 were used for statistical analysis. Results: In total, the most common injuries of beach soccer were in lower extremities (%69.84), and for injury severity, %31.75 were severed injury, and in terms of the type of injuries, the strain was the most of the injuries occurred (%33.33). The amount of injury during the match (%60.26) was higher than the time of training (%39.68). The degree of contact injuries %73.02 was significantly higher than non-contact injuries %26.98 (p <0.05). Conclusion: Most of the injuries in beach soccer are caused by playing bare foot and lack of shoes and guards on the legs and feet, and then on the knee. Contact of players is one of the main sources of injury in beach soccer, which is likely to be effective in preventing injury by changing training, implementing proper techniques, and improving performance factors by using injuries preventive programs.
Applying TAM to Study Online Shopping Adoption Among Youth in the Republic of Macedonia

The purpose of the paper is to analyze factors that determine online shopping adoption among young people in the Republic of Macedonia. Online shopping is gaining popularity especially among youth in the Republic of Macedonia. It has been recognized in general that youth are strongly representative sample of today’s online population. This especially counts to online shoppers in our country. The proposed research framework is TAM based, extended with relevant constructs that are essential for online shopping– trust, website usability and customer service. They are particularly relevant determinants for the Republic of Macedonia having in mind the size of the market, underdeveloped delivery channels, and inability to use online payment, customs barriers etc. as predominant factors that can influence consumers final decision to shop online. Significance of the factors included in our extended TAM model is tested using regression analysis. From the results, all investigated factors are proven to be significant. For further research, moderating effects of demographic factors can be investigated as may contribute to deeper understanding of consumers’ attitudinal intention to shop online. Also, computer anxiety and web irritation can be observed as factors influencing behavior of online shoppers.
Direct and indirect paths leading to contraceptive use in urban Africa

This study examined contraceptive use in the capital cities of four African countries, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Morocco and Senegal. The article sought to answer two questions: (i) what is the hierarchical ordering of causal relationships among the individual factors involved in the use of contraception in the four urban populations considered? More particularly, (ii) as education is a major factor of fertility transition, are two main indirect pathways that have been proposed in the literature (a union-reproductive path and a socio-cultural one), leading from women’s education to contraceptive use, confirmed by the data? Having recourse to a secondary analysis of Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data, the methodology is based on recursive structural models represented by directed acyclic graphs. The empirical analysis confirms the importance of variables such as the desire for children and partner agreement on family planning in explaining contraceptive use. It also highlights a structural union-reproductive path linking female education and contraceptive use. On the contrary, the analysis leads to a tentative rejection of the socio-cultural path, as it is falsified by the data available. The validity of these results is discussed.
Statement Analysis using NLP

- We aim to draw on an important overlooked potential of affective dialogue systems—their application to promote positive emotional states, similar to that of emotional support be-tween humans. This can be achieved by eliciting a more positive emotional valence throughout a dialogue system interaction, i.e., positive emotion elicitation. Existing works on emotion elicitation have not yet paid attention to the emotional benefit for the users. Moreover, a positive emotion elicitation corpus does not yet exist despite the growing number of emotion-rich corpora. Towards this goal, first, we propose a response retrieval approach for positive emotion elicitation by utilizing examples of emotion appraisal from a dialogue corpus. Second, we efficiently construct a corpus using the proposed retrieval method, by replacing responses in a dialogue with those that elicit a more positive emotion. We validate the corpus through crowdsourcing to ensure its quality. Finally, we pro-pose a novel neural network architecture for an emotion-sensitive neural chat-based dialogue system, optimized on the constructed corpus to elicit positive emotion. Objective and subjective evaluations show that the proposed methods result in dialogue responses that are more natural and elicit a more positive emotional response. Further analyses of the results are discussed in this paper.
Final Scientific/Technical Report

A hydrogen gas filled storage ring appears to be a promising approach to reducing the emittance of a muon beam for use in a neutrino factory or a muon collider. A small muon cooling ring is being studied to test the feasibility of cooling by this method. This paper describes the magnet system to circulate the muons. The magnet design is optimized to produce a large dynamic aperture to contain the muon beam with minimum losses. Muons are tracked through the field to verify the design.
Betrayed by the Guardian: Security and Privacy Risks of Parental Control Solutions

For parents of young children and adolescents, the digital age has introduced many new challenges, including excessive screen time, inappropriate online content, cyber predators, and cyberbullying. To address these challenges, many parents rely on numerous parental control solutions on different platforms, including parental control network devices (e.g., WiFi routers) and software applications on mobile devices and laptops. While these parental control solutions may help digital parenting, they may also introduce serious security and privacy risks to children and parents, due to their elevated privileges and having access to a significant amount of privacy-sensitive data. In this paper, we present an experimental framework for systematically evaluating security and privacy issues in parental control software and hardware solutions. Using the developed framework, we provide the first comprehensive study of parental control tools on multiple platforms including network devices, Windows applications, Chrome extensions and Android apps. Our analysis uncovers pervasive security and privacy issues that can lead to leakage of private information, and/or allow an adversary to fully control the parental control solution, and thereby may directly aid cyberbullying and cyber predators.
Enhancing drought tolerance in Camelina sativa L. and Canola napus L. through application of selenium

Considering the burning issue the present study was undertaken in pot culture at the Cholistan Institute of Desert Studies (CIDS), The Islamia University of Bahawalpur, Pakistan for enhancing drought tolerance in two oilseed crops (OC) crops camelina (Camelina sativa L.) and canola (Canola napus L.) through improving physiological, biochemical, and antioxidants activity by foliar application of selenium (Se) under drought stress. Two Camelina (i.e., ‘Australian Camelina’ and ‘Canadian Camelina’) and canola genotypes (i.e., ‘AARI Canola’ and ‘UAF Canola’) were used as plant materials during the growing season of 2016. Both Camelina and Canola genotypes were grown under normal (100% FC) and water deficit (drought stress) (40% FC) conditions. Four levels of Se: such as seeds priming with 75μM Se, foliar application of Se at 7.06 μM and foliar Se in combination with seeds priming (7.06 μM & 75μM) along with control were applied at the vegetative stage of both OC crops for screening drought tolerant genotypes. All treatments were arranged three times in a randomized complete block design. Both OC crops were grown upto the maturity and data on physiochemical, antioxidants and yield components were recorded during this study. Results of the present study indicated that the physio-biochemical parameters such as WP (water potential), OP (osmotic potential), TP (turgor pressure), proline, TSS (total soluble sugar), TFAA (total free amino acids), TPr (total proteins) and TS (total sugars); and total chlorophyll contents were improved by foliar application Se along with seed priming by Se in both OC crops in both drought stress and non-stress (control) conditions. Similarly, osmoprotectants such as GB (Glycinebetaine), anthocyanin, TPC (total phenolic contents) and flavonoids; as well as antioxidants such as APX (ascorbate peroxidase), SOD (superoxide dismutase), POD (peroxidase) and CAT (catalase) were also showed better enhancement in both OC crops through foliar application in combination with seed priming with Se (7.06 μM & 75μM) under normal as well as water deficit (drought) conditions. Yield and its components i.e., branches plant (no.), 1000-seed weight (g), seed and biological yield (t ha) of both OC crops were increased through foliar application in combination with seed priming by Se (7.06 μM & 75μM) under drought and non-drought stress conditions. Both camelina and Canola genotypes categorized based on all the above-mentioned parameters under the water deficit (drought stress) condition and foliar application of Se, the genotype ‘Canadian Camelina’ maintained the highest values for all these attributes. Therefore, it is revealed that foliar application in combination with seed priming by Se helps to improve drought tolerance of OC crops and also leads to an increase in the productivity of crops under drought stress. Among the genotypes, ‘Canadian Camelina’ performed the best when seeds of the genotypes were primed with Se in combination with foliar application of Se at the vegetative stage.
Recurrent Feedback Improves Recognition of Partially Occluded Objects

Recurrent connectivity in the visual cortex is believed to aid object recognition for challenging conditions such as occlusion. Here we investigate if and how artificial neural networks also benefit from recurrence. We compare architectures composed of bottom-up, lateral and top-down connections and evaluate their performance using two novel stereoscopic occluded object datasets. We find that classification accuracy is significantly higher for recurrent models when compared to feedforward models of matched parametric complexity. Additionally we show that for challenging stimuli, the recurrent feedback is able to correctly revise the initial feedforward guess.
RESEARH NOTE -- JSLHR Auditory Processing Differences in Toddlers with Autism Spectrum Disorder Authors

Purpose: Auditory processing measures have been used in an attempt to understand the relationship between neurological mechanisms and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) symptomatology in school-aged children. The focus of the current study was to understand neural auditory processing in 2 to 3-year-olds with ASD. Methods: Auditory processing measures (click auditory brainstem responses (ABRs) and speech-evoked frequency following responses (FFRs)) were hypothesized to differ between typically developing children (n = 18) and children with ASD (n = 18). Auditory processing measures were hypothesized to relate to language development in children with ASD. Results: The current study found limited differences in auditory processing measures between the two groups. No relationships were found between auditory processing measures and language development measures. Conclusions: Future research is necessary to characterize auditory processing in toddlers with ASD. Longitudinal approaches should be considered when studying auditory processing in children with ASD in order to explore its developmental relationship with ASD symptomatology.
Distributed ledger technology applications for improved traceability of food supply chains

Food provenance is critical for establishing consumer and stakeholder trust and overall company reputation and competitiveness. There are many benefits distributed ledger technologies can provide for improved food traceability, such as decreasing fraud, automating processes, providing reliable information of food origin and condition with sensor technologies, thereby ensuring product quality and safety. This paper provides a review of current best practices of distributed ledger technology (DLT) applications in the food domain addressing current challenges and gaps in research and implications for value adoption in food supply chains. The developed research framework provides an initial outlook on suggested DLT integration.
Local Information Opponent Modelling Using Variational Autoencoders.

Modelling the behaviours of other agents (opponents) is essential for understanding how agents interact and making effective decisions. Existing methods for opponent modelling commonly assume knowledge of the local observations and chosen actions of the modelled opponents, which can significantly limit their applicability. We propose a new modelling technique based on variational autoencoders, which are trained to reconstruct the local actions and observations of the opponent based on embeddings which depend only on the local observations of the modelling agent (its observed world state, chosen actions, and received rewards). The embeddings are used to augment the modelling agent's decision policy which is trained via deep reinforcement learning; thus the policy does not require access to opponent observations. We provide a comprehensive evaluation and ablation study in diverse multi-agent tasks, showing that our method achieves comparable performance to an ideal baseline which has full access to opponent's information, and significantly higher returns than a baseline method which does not use the learned embeddings.
Status and breeding ecology of the Common Moorhen Gallinula chloropus in Algeria

The status of the Common Moorhen Gallinula chloropus in Algeria and its breeding ecology in North Africa are reported for the first time. Nest site selection and breeding parameters were studied at two contrasting sites in north-east Algeria: Boussedra, an unprotected freshwater marsh of 55 ha subject to anthropogenic influence, during 2005 and 2008, and Lake Tonga, a protected freshwater marsh of 2 400 ha in 2009. Most nests (92%) at Boussedra were located in dense stands of lesser bulrush Typha angustifolia, whereas a few were found on lower branches of tamarisk Tamarix gallica trees. In contrast, at Lake Tonga nests were predominantly found on Scirpus lacustris (41%) or associated with alder trees Alnus glutinosa (32%). Egg-laying at both sites occurred between early April and the end of June. There was a significant decrease in egg volume as the breeding season progressed. Mean clutch size at Lake Tonga (7.8 ± 2.9, N = 23 clutches) did not differ significantly from that at Boussedra (6.7 ± 2.1, N = 14 clutches). Similarly, hatching success (67–72%) and predation rate of nests with eggs (16–28%) did not vary significantly between sites. The Common Moorhen may be more resilient than marsh specialists to anthropogenic changes.