Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Epidemiological study on postpartum osteitis condensans ilii and efficacy of extracorporeal shock wave therapy for treating this disease

Objective: We aimed to conduct an epidemiological study on osteitis condensans ilii (OCI) during the postpartum period and investigate the efficacy of extracorporeal shock wave therapy (ESWT) for treating this disease. Methods: A total of 560 women who had child delivery in Binzhou People’s Hospital were selected as subjects. Of them, 68 women with postpartum OCI were randomized to either the study group or the control group of 34 cases each. Patients in the control group were given usual treatment, whereas patients in the study group underwent ESWT. Epidemiologic features of OCI in these women were analyzed, and the efficacy and safety of the treatment were investigated. A three-month follow up was conducted to compare patient satisfaction between the groups. Results: The incidence rate of OCI among 560 subjects was 12.14% (68 cases). The lesion was unilateral in 43 women (63.24%) and bilateral in 25 women (36.76%). The total effective rate in the study group was higher than that in the control group (P=0.026). After treatment, both groups exhibited improved results assessed by Visual Analogue Scale and Japan Orthopaedic Association scores (all P<0.05), but the improvements in the study group were greater than those in the control group (P<0.001, P=0.032); also, the study group showed greater remission rates of symptoms than the control group (all P<0.05). Meanwhile, occasional mild adverse reactions occurred similarly in the two groups (all P>0.05). After a three-month follow-up, we found a higher patient satisfaction rate in the study group than in the control group (P=0.032). Conclusion: OCI has a high prevalence in women during postpartum period. ESWT, which can achieve good treatment outcome, can serve as a safe and reliable method for treating women with this disease.
Oral Abscess Caused by Chryseobacterium indologenes in Ball Python (Python regius); A Case Report

Chryseobacterium indologenes is an opportunistic pathogen isolated from human infections and, rarely, from some aquatic animals. A 3-year-old male ball python (Python regius) was admitted to the veterinary clinic by a pet owner because of acute respiratory and swallowing failure. During physical examinations, oral secretions and abscesses were observed in the mouth cavity and throat of the animal. After microbiological analysis including isolation, identification, and 16s rRNA sequencing, C. indologenes was detected as the main cause of the oral abscess in this case. Phylogenetic relatedness analysis showed a close relationship between this isolate and other strains isolated from human infections. Antimicrobial susceptibility testing revealed that the isolate was multi-drug resistant. However, it was very sensitive to minocycline, ceftazidime, and tetracycline. The patient was treated by antibiotic therapy and completely recovered after two weeks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first incidence of C. indologenes in an oral abscess in a ball python. As a result we would consider this organism as an opportunistic animal pathogen with zoonotic potentiality.
The Roles Of Environmental Strategy And Innovation Performance: The Effects Of Absorptive Capacity To Competitive Advantage

This study aimed to resolve the research gap between the absorptive capacity variable against competitive advantage by combining the innovation performance and environmental strategy variables as research novelty. The type of research method used is quantitative, with 150 respondents in the garment and textile industry in Indonesia. The results of this study are that absorptive capacity has no significant positive effect on competitive advantage, absorptive capacity has a significant positive effect on innovation performance, absorptive capacity has a significant positive effect on environmental strategy, innovation performance has no significant positive effect on competitive advantage, the environmental strategy has a significant positive effect on competitive advantage, absorptive capacity affects competitive advantage through innovation performance as an intervening variable, absorptive capacity is having no significant impact on competitive advantage through environmental strategy as an intervening variable.
Computational analysis of a nonlinear fractional emerging Computational analysis of a nonlinear fractional emerging telecommunication model with higher–order dispersive telecommunication model with higher–order dispersive cubic–quintic cubic–quintic

: In this paper, the modiﬁed simplest equation method as one of the computational schemes is applied to a nonlinear fractional emerging telecommunication model with higher-orderer dispersive cubic - quintic for constructing the exact traveling and solitary wave solutions. This model is also known with higher - order dispersive cubic - quintic nonlinear complex fractional Schr¨odinger ( NLCFS ) equation. Moreover, it is used to explain the physical nature of the waves spread, especially in the dispersive medium. The disadvantages of the B - spline schemes are investigated based on the obtained analytical solutions. Some obtained computational solutions are sketched to more illustration of the wave dynamics in the dispersive medium
Riding the Co-Explorers

HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés. Riding the Co-Explorers Hugo Scurto, Bavo van Kerrebroeck, Frédéric Bevilacqua
Developing a Cost Model for a Parallel Genetic Algorithm, a Case Study

Parallel genetic algorithms are very common in the field of evolutionary computing. One of the methods for parallelizing genetic algorithms is global parallelization. In this paper we discuss how to develop a cost model that can be used for predicting the behavior of a parallel genetic algorithm using a structured top down approach. Other metrics such as speedup, efficiency, isoefficiency and cost-optimality are also developed. The parallel genetic algorithm is used for solving a non trivial combinatorial problem (TSP) and actual measurements are taken. The cost model is used to generate expected performance measurements. The average performance prediction accuracy on a parallel machine is around 96.7% for all experiments .
Smiling and Non-smiling Emotion Recognition Based on Lower-half Face using Deep-Learning as Convolutional Neural Network

Image understanding is considered important among researchers. In this paper, a new technique is proposed to classify a detected face into two classes as a smile or non-smile category. First, the system detects and segments only the face. Then, it converts the image from RGB to Gray-Scale and enhances the image via an equalization technique. Where the contribution of this research is depending only on the lower half of the face since most of the smiling information can be perceived from the mouth and its perimeter. Then, a convolutional neural network (CNN) is applied to generate two output nodes. Public GENKI-4K database is used for the experiments, which contains 4000 challenged face images. The results demonstrate that the accuracy with 4-Fold cross-validation is 91%. This approach achieves a promising performance as compared with the state-of-the-art techniques in both accuracy and processing time.
2. ELT Research from the Global South: Uncertainties in a Rarely-Walked Road

Being an educator of English Language Teachers and embracing a decolonial perspective may seem a contradiction. Often times, when talking about this doctoral program to colleagues of other disciplines, they look puzzled because in their worldviews, it would be not possible to form teachers to teach the language of the empire while at the same time problematizing the very same field from the vantage point of decolonialism. But, the world is not black and white. The world has many colors, shades, and textures. And, although we try to keep consistency between our discourses and practices, we also acknowledge that we live in constant contradictions, and are full of questions, doubts, and uncertainties. That is a part of who we are, as well as an important component of the intellectual and academic work.
CHALLENGES IN BROADCAST MEDIA CONTENT CATEGORIZATION

With the sheer volume of content which the media companies need to create and distribute, the categorizing and classifying the content becomes a challenging task. The manual classiﬁcation of media content is too time-consuming, inefﬁ-cient, and expensive. There is an urgent need to automatically classify such data with high accuracy. In this paper, we pro-pose an unsupervised approach to categorize the textual documents of broadcast media content. The proposed approach employs German language word embeddings in combination with tf-idf (term frequency-inverse document frequency) information for representing documents. The categories’ names are derived from the found clusters based on their semantic relevance. The proposed approach is evaluated on a real-life dataset extracted from a German TV channel. Results indicate that using word embedding information is effective compared to the traditional tf-idf representation, obtaining a relative improvement of 17.61%. Additionally, we perform a qualitative analysis that addresses some of the challenges.
The role of mitogen-activated protein kinases in toxic shock syndrome toxin-1 mediated signalling in THP-1 cells

Toxic shock syndrome toxin-1 (TSST-1) is a 22 kDa superantigen produced by Staphylococcus aureus and is the primary cause of toxic shock syndrome (TSS) in humans. The purpose of this project was to determine the effect of mitogen-activated protein (MAP) kinase activity in THP-1 cells prior to the recruitment of T cells. M A P kinases interact with several different kinase pathways and play important roles in many physiological processes including growth and maturation, bacterial pathogen-mediated signalling and cytokine-induced events. THP-1 cells constitutively expresses the TSST-1 binding human leukocyte antigen-DR (HLADR) molecule which we have shown to be upregulated with 100 U/ml IFN-y. Initial experiments set pathophysiological conditions for TSST-1 (MN8) and lipolysaccharide (LPS) mediated signalling in pro-monocytic THP-1 cells. To induce tumor necrosis factor-a (TNF-a) release, TSST-1 (1 ng/ml) required the presence of both THP-1 and T cells in co-culture. The constitutive levels of HLA-DR on THP-1 cells were sufficient to bind to TSST-1 and present SAg to T cells in a manner which induced TNF-a release. Under these condition, TSST-1 induced the release of TNF-a within 12 hours (n=3). This TSST-1-induced TNF-a release was sustained for up to 84 hours after treatment. In contrast, LPS (1 ug/ml) was sufficient to induce the transient release (12 hours) of TNF-a from THP-1 cells alone (n=3). The addition of IFN-y (100 U/ml) and LPS to THP-1 culture induced the sustained release of TNF-a from these cells. To screen for early M A P kinase activation in THP-1 cells alone, THP-1 cells were then treated with 1 ng/ml TSST-1, 1 nM phorbol 12myristate li-acetate (PMA) or RPMI 1640 and lysed within 30 minutes (n=3). Cellular proteins were separated by anion exchange chromatography and assayed for M A P kinase activity using myelin basic protein (MBP) kinase assays. Both TSST-1 and P M A induced a two-fold peak increase in THP-1 M B P kinase
Exploring non-linear relationship between foreign ownership and firm performance

This study aims to examine the impact of foreign ownership on the performance of Indian firms. Additionally, it also analyses the non-linear relationship of foreign ownership with firm performance. A panel data approach has been used in this study. Specifically, the fixed effect estimation technique is used to examine the relationship between foreign ownership and firm performance during the period 2009–2010 to 2018–2019. The foreign institutional shareholders and the foreign corporate bodies hold more shareholding than the foreign individual investors. The authors find that foreign institutional investors and foreign corporate bodies bear a positive relationship with the performance of Indian firms. Additionally, foreign ownership shows a non-linear relationship with firm performance. The results are robust across the various proxies of firm performance, and sub-samples based on foreign ownership
The behavior of CFRP strengthened RC beams subjected to blast loading

Abstract. Carbon Fiber Reinforced Polymer (CFRP) sheets have been widely used in strengthening different concrete elements such as beams, slabs, and columns. This sparked the interest of many researchers to conduct research on CFRP sheets; to have a better understanding for their behavior. This paper studied numerically the effect of using CFRP as a strengthening technique for Reinforced Concrete (RC) beams subjected to blast loading. A previous experimental investigation done by a Chinese researchers was considered in this study as a reference, and was modeled numerically (using ABAQUS) for this study. The model was then calibrated in order to conduct the numerical analysis on the effect of CFRP. Three different configurations of CFRP were considered: bottom CFRP strips for flexural strengthening, diagonal side strips for shear strengthening, and U-shaped strips for both shear and flexural strengthening. The variables considered in this study were; the mid-span deflection, strain in steel reinforcement and structural damage in both beams and CFRP sheets. Results showed that using CFRP in the bottom tensile face of RC beams helps in absorbing blast energy. In addition, using CFRP has shown a reduction in the tensile strain of the beam reinforcements.
Epidemic of Shigella sonnei Infections in Monroe County, New York

Antibiotic susceptibility patterns, plasmid profiles, and endonuclease restriction analysis of plasmid DNA were used in the investigation of an epidemic of Shigella sonnei infections in Monroe County, New York, in 1988 and 1989. The epidemic peaked during the winter, included the simultaneous transmission of the disease from person to person and from common food sources, and especially affected inhabitants of the poor, inner-city neighborhoods, young children of both sexes, and women. Resistance to ampicillin, tetracycline, or trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole, encoded in a 70-MDa plasmid, was found in most of the examined isolates. Unexpectedly, isolates from patients involved in a food-borne outbreak exhibited three different antibiotic susceptibility patterns, suggesting deletion of antibiotic resistance determinants in some strains. Antibiograms clearly separated food-borne outbreak-related and non-foodborne outbreak-related strains, distinguished more strains than did the plasmid profiles, and were useful in tracing the dissemination of individual isolates in the community. Restriction endonuclease analysis substantially increased the discriminatory value of plasmid profiles and validated the antibiogram results. The present study illustrates the complexity of epidemics of S. sonnei infections and shows the value of combining different biological markers in the investigation.
Experimental Investigation and Kinetic Modeling of Potassium Alum Dodecahydrate Thermal Decomposition

Potassium is an essential ion for plant nutrition, usually supplied in the form of chlorides and sulphates. According to Brazilian availability and demand of agriculture fertilizers, the importation of compounds carrying this chemical element is mandatory in order to fulfil the huge demand for this nutrient. Thus, initiatives looking for alternative sources of potassium become increasingly interesting and economically attractive. A potential route is associated with the sulfuric acid digestion of glauconite bearing greensands and sequential unit operations in order to recover aluminium, iron, magnesium and potassium compounds. In the context of this chemical process, the potassium alum (KAl(SO4)2) appears as a relevant intermediate product, which allows the selective recovery of potassium sulphate (K2SO4) and aluminum oxide (Al2O3) through thermal decomposition followed by solubilization in water and filtration. Based on what was said, the present work investigates the kinetics of potassium alum dodecahydrate (KAl(SO4)2.12H2O) decomposition with and without the presence of charcoal, which acts as a reducing agent. Additionally, the current work proposes a novel mathematical model to describe the weight loss as a function of time for both processes (with and in absence of charcoal). Thermogravimetric analyses (TGA) were conducted under inert atmosphere (nitrogen) and using different heating rates (10, 15 and 20 °C min). Given the low required computation time, less than 1 s simulates 160 min of reaction, the proposed model can be used to monitor and control mass compositions at industry.
Problematique Of Use Of The Crispr/Cas9 System To Create And Research Cellular Models Of Cardiovascular Inherited Human Diseases

The genome editing technology has become a powerful method for creating genetically modified cells and organisms, necessary for the genes function and mechanisms of human disease determination. The clustered system with regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRiSPR-), associated with9 (Cas9), quickly became one of the world’s major approaches to genome editing in basic biomedical research in recent years as a result of its simplicity and adaptability. Genome editing CRiSPR/Cas9 werebeing used for correction mutating people's DNA from one base pair to large deletions both in vitro and in vivo. Model systems CRISPR/Cas9 are usedfor a better understanding of many aspects of cardiovascular disease, including lipid metabolic, electrophysiology and genetic heritage. CRiSPR/Cas9 technology has been proven to be effective for editing induced pluripotent stem cells. In spite of these gains, some biological, technical and ethical problems limit therapeutic capacity to edit the genome by cardiovascular diseases. The purpose of the study is to analyze the applications of CRiSPR/Cas9 genome editing in the cardiovascular system, for both disease research and treatment prospects by editing the genome in vivo in the future.
The Factors Impact on Internet Banking Adoption with Special Reference to Kurunegla District

The emerging technology has made a phenomenal growth of the Internet which has changed the pattern of organizations performing their business with customers. The banking industry could not survive without accepting the growth in technology. In order to gain competitive advantage, the banks have introduced internet banking services. However, the customers have not adopted this concept as the banks expected. Literature available in that issue shows a wide range of variations in the understanding of internet banking adoption in different context confirming the inherent nature of such behavioural issues. In the Sri Lankan context as well such variations is available and a shortage of knowledge is available on the impact of factors affecting the internet banking adoption by bank customers. Consequently, the purpose of this study is to identify the factors which impact on internet banking adoption in Kurunegala district having the third largest population density in Sri Lanka. Available research in the Sri Lankan context in this regard is mainly focused on western province. A conceptual model was developed with the support of available literature. Structured questionnaire was administered to collect data from 200 Internet banking customers in Kurunegala district through convenience sampling. Descriptive statistics, correlation analysis and regression analysis are used in the data analysis. This study found that perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, security, perceived risk and social influence have impact on internet banking adoption in Kurunegala district. Further results of multiple regression analysis reveal that most significant predictor was social influence. This study recommends that banks should use awareness programs to increase social influence and provide knowledge to the customers regarding the usefulness of internet banking service than using other banking channels such as mobile and traditional banking.
Investigation of Psychometric Properties of Female Muscularity Scale

Objective: The aim of this study was to investigate the psychometric properties of the Female Muscularity Scale (FMS). Method: Two different samples were determined to reach the research aim. The first of these is a sample of 153 female participants doing exploratory factor analysis. The second sample consisted of 213 women exercising with confirmatory factor analysis and additional analyzes. IBM SPSS Statistics 22 and AMOS 22 software were used in the analysis of the obtained data. Results: According to the results of Exploratory Factor Analysis, the two-factor structure was determined as attitude and behavior according to the results of exploratory factor analysis. As a result of the exploratory factor analysis conducted to test the construct validity of the inventory, 68% of the two-factor structure variance was determined. Internal consistency coefficients were calculated to test the reliability of the scale. Internal consistency coefficients obtained for 213 participants were 0.94 in the “Attitude” sub-scale and 0.92 in the “Behavior” sub-scale. The results of the Confirmatory Factor Analysis (x2 / sd (2.231) value, especially the index of fit, indicates that the model shows a good fit. The results of the confirmatory factor analysis conducted to test the construct validity of the scale showed that the indices of the scale, which consisted of two sub-scales, totaling 10 items, were acceptable. Conclusion: In conclusion, the results of the study revealed that the 10-item FMS is a useful scale for determining the level of drive for muscularity in the Turkish sample of female participants.
A Supervised Approach for Corrective Maintenance Using Spectral Features from Industrial Sounds

The fourth industrial revolution makes extensive use of IoT, AI, and smart sensors for improved automation, safety, production, and prognostics, and health management. In this paper, we address corrective maintenance based on fault recognition relying on sounds produced by machine components. Different spectral features are extracted from industrial sounds and are used as input of supervised learning algorithms for classification between normal and abnormal operations. Experiments using the MIMII (Malfunctioning Industrial Machine Investigation and Inspection) dataset, which contains sound samples produced by pump, slide rail, valve, and fan components, reveals promising results based on the f1-score. We also evaluate the impact of the different spectral features considered, confirming their incremental impact. Finally, we compare our proposal with a baseline alternative from the literature, which employs unsupervised learning and Mel-spectrogram conversion. Our approach improves the AUC (Area Under the Curve) metric by up to 39.5% compared with the baseline approach.