Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Immunoliposomes: Synthesis, Structure, and their Potential as Drug Delivery Carriers

Immunoliposomes have emerged as attractive drug targeting vehicles for cancer treatment. This review presents the recent advances in the design of immunoliposomes encapsulating a variety of chemotherapeutic agents. We provided an overview of different routes that can be used to conjugate antibodies to the surfaces of liposomes, as well as several examples of stimuliresponsive immunoliposome systems and their therapeutic potential for cancer treatment.
Effects of analogy learning on locomotor skills and balance of preschool children

ABSTRACT The purpose of this study was to compare the effects of explicit and analogy learning on preschool children’s running, long jump, gallop and balance. The participants were 43 preschool children randomly assigned to the analogy learning group (22 children) or the explicit (21 children). In the explicit learning group explicit instructions were given about body and limb movements of the to-be-learned skill, whereas in the analogy group instructions were given in the form of analogies (i.e. using metaphors). The duration of the intervention was four lessons. Prior to and after the intervention, children were assessed for running, long jump, gallop, and balancing on one foot. The results showed that both groups improved significantly regarding locomotor skills, whereas only the analogy group improved in the balance task. The findings support the use of analogy learning as an alternative to explicit in acquiring locomotor skills and improving balance in preschool children.
Energy-Efficient Bit Allocation for Resolution-Adaptive ADC in Multiuser Large-Scale MIMO Systems: Global Optimality

We consider uplink multiuser wireless communications systems, where the base station (BS) receiver is equipped with a large-scale antenna array and resolution adaptive analog-to-digital converters (ADCs). The aim is to maximize the energy efficiency (EE) at the BS subject to constraints on the users’ quality-of-service. The approach is to jointly optimize both the number of quantization bits at the ADCs and the on/off modes of the radio frequency (RF) processing chains. The considered problem is a discrete nonlinear program, the optimal solution of which is difficult to find. We develop an efficient algorithm based on the discrete branch-reduce-and-bound (DBRnB) framework. It finds the globally optimal solutions to the problem. In particular, we make some modifications, which significantly improve the convergence performance. The numerical results demonstrate that optimizing jointly the number of quantization bits and on/off mode can achieve remarkable EE gains compared to only optimizing the number of quantization bits.
Rumen and total intestinal tract digestibility of protein and amino acids from different roughages, determined in situ

Eight different roughages (clover grass silage, 2 samples of fresh clover grass, fresh ryegrass, winter wheat whole crop silage, pea whole crop silage, dried grass and goats rue) were examined for effective degradability in the rumen and total tract digestibility of individual amino acids (AA), total AA and crude protein using in situ method. Effective degradabilities calculated at a rumen fractional outflow rate of 5%/h, were higher for crude protein than for total A A (the differences ranging from 1.9 to 4.1 percentage points). Arginine was the least degradable amino acid, particularly in silage and in short rumen incubations, although cysteine and phenylalanine also tended to be less degraded than total AA. The most degradable amino acids were alanine and proline in silages, and cysteine, aspartic acid and glutamic acid in the other roughages. Disappearance of total AA from mobile bags containing samples of feeds after 16 h preincubation in the rumen varied from 79.8% in dried grass to 95.9% in fresh clover grass, and was generally similar to the disappearance of crude protein, 79.7-96.3%, respectively. In most of the examined roughages, cystine and glycine disappeared the least, and glutamic acid, aspartic acid and alanine the most from mobile bags, as compared with total AA.
Ecología de paralarvas planctónicas de cefalópodos en áreas de afloramiento costero

The trophic ecology of Octopus vulgaris paralarvae collected in 2008 off the Rı́a de Vigo, NW Spain (42 12.800 N–9 00.000 W), was approached by both morphological and molecular methods. External digestion of prey and posterior suction of the liquefied contents by wild O. vulgaris paralarvae made the morphological identification of gut contents impossible. Thus, a PCRbased method using group-specific primers was selected to identify prey consumed by O. vulgaris paralarvae in the pelagic realm. The mitochondrial ribosomal 16S gene region was chosen for designing group-specific primers, which targeted a broad range of crustaceans and fishes but avoided the amplification of predator DNA. These primers successfully amplified DNA of prey by using a semi-nested PCR-based approach and posterior cloning. Homology search and phylogenetic analysis were then conducted with the 20 different operational taxonomic units obtained to identify the putative organisms ingested. The phylogenetic analysis clustered ingested prey into 12 families of crustaceans (11 belonging to the order Decapoda and 1 to the order Euphausiacea) and two families of fishes (Gobiidae and Carangidae). According to the Czekanowski’s Index (CI), the trophic niche breadth of O. vulgaris paralarvae is low (CI = 0.13), which means that these paralarvae are specialist predators at least during the first weeks of their life cycle. It is the first time that natural prey has been identified in O. vulgaris paralarvae collected from the wild, and such knowledge may be critical to increasing the survival of O. vulgaris hatchlings in captivity, a goal that has been actively pursued since the 1960s by aquaculture
Impact of process parameters on the sourdough microbiota, selection of suitable starter strains, and description of the novel yeast Cryptococcus thermophilus sp. nov.

The adaptability of lactic acid bacteria (LAB) and yeasts to sourdoughs prepared from cereals, pseudocereals and cassava was investigated using PCR-DGGE and bacteriological culture combined with rRNA gene sequence analysis. Sourdoughs were prepared either from flours of the cereals wheat, rye, oat, barley, rice, maize, and millet, or from the pseudocereals amaranth, quinoa, and buckwheat, or from cassava, using a starter consisting of various species of LAB and yeasts. Doughs were propagated until a stable microbiota was established. The dominant LAB and yeast species were Lactobacillus fermentum, Lactobacillus helveticus, Lactobacillus paralimentarius, Lactobacillus plantarum, Lactobacillus pontis, Lactobacillus spicheri, Issatchenkia orientalis and Saccharomyces cerevisiae. The proportion of the species within the microbiota varied. L. paralimentarius dominated in the pseudocereal sourdoughs, L. fermentum, L. plantarum and L. spicheri in the cassava sourdough, and L. fermentum, L. helveticus and L. pontis in the cereal sourdoughs. S. cerevisiae constituted the dominating yeast, except for quinoa sourdough, where I. orientalis also reached similar counts, and buckwheat and oat sourdoughs, where no yeasts could be detected. To assess the usefulness of competitive LAB and yeasts as starters, the fermentations were repeated using flours from rice, maize, millet and the pseudocereals, and by starting the dough fermentation with selected dominant strains. At the end of fermentation, most of starter strains belonged to the dominating microbiota. For the rice, millet and quinoa sourdoughs the species composition was similar to that of the prior fermentation, whereas in the other sourdoughs, the composition differed. Stephanie A. Vogelmann, Michael Seitter, Ulrike Singer, Markus J. Brandt, and Christian Hertel. 2009. Adaptability of lactic acid bacteria and yeasts to sourdoughs prepared from cereals, pseudocereals and cassava and use of competitive strains as starters. Int. J. Food Microbiol. 130:205-212.
An Audit of Documentation relating to Decision-Making Capacity at an Old Age Psychiatric Hospital in England

The Mental Capacity Act 2005 (MCA) guides clinicians in England and Wales in how to support patients to make a capacitous decision. Documentation of patients’ capacity is mandatory for certain decisions in psychiatric hospitals so as to evidence the use of the MCA guidance. Given the importance of decisions such as where to live and what medication to take, the quality of clinician interview and documentation is important to monitor. Method: The quality and quantity of decision-making capacity (DMC) documentation was reviewed in a psychiatric hospital in England for older adults. The clinical records of 49 discharged patients were examined retrospectively. All DMC documentation found was compared with existing legal guidance on capacity assessment. Results: 46/58 DMC documents were found to be insufficient. There was little evidence of what information had been given to patients to enable autonomous decision making, what actions had been undertaken to optimise capacity and what alternative decision options were presented. Conclusions: Consideration should be given by hospital managers to support DMC assessment by staff. Further reflection is needed on the part of regulators regarding the optimum DMC documentation standard, particularly regarding physical health medication for psychiatric inpatients. Guidance and training for all staff involved in the assessment and documentation of DMC should be made available.
Improving Seed Germination and Seedling Vigor Traits of Onion (Allium cepa L.) By using Soaking Pretreatments

Onion (Allium cepa L.) seeds lose viability within 1 -2 years and exhibit a short lifespan. In this study, a factorial experiment in a randomized complete block design with six replications was conducted to determine the effects of soaking seeds for 24 h in distilled water (DW); aerated distilled water (ADW), 0.1% of each (succinic acid, aerated succinic acid (ASA), ascorbic acid, aerated ascorbic acid, nitroben (N), and aerated nitroben (AN) separately; and control (germinating seeds on filter paper with DW), and incubating at a constant temperature of 20°C in the dark. Seeds soaked in ASA showed the highest germination, speed of germination index (SGI), seedling vigor index, seedling dry weight and seedling length (cm). High SGI was also noted in seeds soaked in AN. Seeds soaked in N showed high germination rate and germination energy. The highest values of germination time GT, abnormal seedling percentage, and dead seed percentage were recorded with control treatment. Thus, the germination methods affected the germination traits as well as seedling growth of onion seeds.
Propagation Fidelity and Kinship of Tomato Varieties ‘UC 82’ and ‘M82’ Revealed by Analysis of Sequence Variation

Plant varieties are named and released based on distinct, unique and stable characteristics but may be maintained separately by genebanks or stock centers under separate accession identification numbers. Genetic heterogeneity of the original variety, genetic drift, failure to exclude cross pollination, and propagation error may erode the integrity of genetic resources. The availability of resequencing and genotyping data for duplicate samples enables an analysis to clarify the relationship between specific varieties or independently curated accessions of the same variety while also assessing the fidelity of germplasm maintenance. We accessed both Single Nucleotide Polymorphism (SNP) array genotypes and resequencing data for two important tomato varieties ‘UC 82’and ‘M82’ that have been maintained as separate accessions in collections as important resources for the research and breeding communities. Our analysis of these data suggests that polymorphism rates from resequencing of cultivated tomato are overestimated in the literature due to heterozygous calls caused by either sequence error or coalignment of repetitive sequences. We defined a set of 32,352 robust SNPs from a file containing data for all samples and we compared the distribution of data with SNPs called from a genotyping array. For both analyses, intravariety variation was found in haplotype blocks, with the same haplotypes identified using SNPs detected from array and sequence data. The distribution pattern of variation across the entire genome sequence was similar for both ‘UC 82’and ‘M82’. Overall, the differences between distinct accessions of a variety were nearly as great as the differences between ‘UC 82’and ‘M82’. The similarities between ‘UC82’ and ‘M82’ range from 99.33% to 99.74% and are highly consistent with a common pedigree and shared selection from partially inbred progeny. The data also suggest that these tomato genetic resources have been propagated with high fidelity.
A meta-analysis of transformational leadership in hospitality research

Though the effect of transformational leadership (TFL) on followers has been largely examined in hospitality, the findings are rather inconsistent. This paper aims to provide a quantitative review for the relationship between TFL and follower outcomes in hospitality and a detailed analysis of the moderating variables (cultural differences, measurement instrument, rating sources and time lag). ,To explore the effect sizes of TFL on followers, this study conducted a quantitative meta-analysis based on 62 primary studies, including 66 independent samples (N = 23,037). The outcomes of TFL were categorized into subordinates’ attitudinal outcomes, relational perceptions and behavioral outcomes. ,The results indicate that TFL has the strongest impact on relational perceptions, followed by subordinates’ attitudinal and behavioral outcomes. The results also show that cultural differences, rating sources and time lag partially moderate the relationships between TFL and follower outcomes. ,TFL generally has a high level of validity for explaining attitudinal, behavioral and relational perception outcomes of followers in the field of hospitality. Given that, there have been a large number of studies investigating TFL with follower attitudinal and behavioral outcomes, it might not be necessary to continue applying identical frameworks to investigate the effect of TFL. Instead, future research on TFL is expected to explore the relationship between TFL and followers’ relational perceptions and consider cultural and methodological factors. ,To the best of authors’ knowledge, this is the first meta-analysis to clear theoretical links between TFL and its outcomes in the hospitality context. This study further investigates several moderators that can influence the effects of TFL and helps better understand the influence of TFL in the area of hospitality. The study also provides future research directions for leadership research in the hospitality context.
Proposal for CDN applied Network Architecture in Network environment using Internet and SDN Network

Today's users consume much more content including multimedia such as video and use network-based services. Additionally, users of the mobile device are increased exponentially. Although multimedia content and network-based services take up a large portion of network traffic and consumes the computing power of the server. Therefore, the higher the consumption of high-capacity content, the longer the distance between the server and the client, the more the consumption of various services, the burden on the network and the server will inevitably increase. Various techniques have been proposed to solve these problems. However, the network environment for these methods are presupposed slightly different from each other, so it is difficult to apply directly. Also, more and more regions overlap with other communication methods such as Ethernet networks and mobile networks. The traffic control solutions that are applicable only to specific network methods, such as conventional techniques, are difficult to cope with overall. In this paper, we assume a situation where there is a single trusted node at both the service provider and the consumer (such as a school or company), and multiple users simultaneously consume content that generates high-capacity traffic over Ethernet and SDN networks. In this environment, edge computing and CDN mechanism can be used to reduce the load on the network.
High Precision Open-World Website Fingerprinting

Traffic analysis attacks to identify which web page a client is browsing, using only her packet metadata — known as website fingerprinting (WF) — has been proven effective in closed-world experiments against privacy technologies like Tor. We want to investigate their usefulness in the real open world. Several WF attacks claim to have high recall and low false positive rate, but they have only been shown to succeed against high base rate pages. We explicitly incorporate the base rate into precision and call it r-precision. Using this metric, we show that the best previous attacks have poor precision when the base rate is realistically low; we study such a scenario (r = 1000), where the maximum r-precision achieved was only 0.14. To improve r-precision, we propose three novel classes of precision optimizers that can be applied to any classifier to increase precision. For r = 1000, our best optimized classifier can achieve a precision of at least 0.86, representing a precision increase by more than 6 times. For the first time, we show a WF classifier that can scale to any open world set size. We also investigate the use of precise classifiers to tackle realistic objectives in website fingerprinting, including different types of websites, identification of sensitive clients, and defeating website fingerprinting defenses.
Social Sustainability Empowering the Economic Sustainability in the Global Apparel Supply Chain

Scholarly discussion on the amalgamation of sustainability and supply chain management has been growing in the last decade. However, an integrated social and economic sustainability performance measurement in supply chains is an emerging avenue in the Sustainable Supply Chain Management discourse. Hence, the purpose of this study is to understand how socially sustainable practices affect economic sustainability performances in supply chains. A survey questionnaire and a conceptual framework were developed to explore this relationship. Survey data collected based on responses from 119 managers in the Sri Lankan apparel-manufacturing sector was analyzed using Partial Least Square Structural Equation Modelling. We observed that the practices conducted by apparel manufacturers ensuring the social sustainability of the human factor inside the company (Internally influencing Social Sustainability Practices-ISSP) and in society (Externally Influencing Social Sustainability Practices-ESSP) create a positive impact on the economic performance. However, the effect produced by ISSP was higher compared to the ESSP. This study is based on a single developing country and, thus, should be extended to other countries considering the different institution environments when studying this interrelation between the social and economic sustainability dimensions.
Quantitative proteomics in the characterization of T helper lymphocyte differentiation

The term proteome is used to define the complete set of proteins expressed in cells or tissues of an organism at a certain timepoint. Respectively, proteomics is used to describe the methods, which are used to study such proteomes. These methods include chromatographic and electrophoretic techniques for protein or peptide fractionation, mass spectrometry for their identification, and use of computational methods to assist the complicated data analysis. A primary aim in this Ph.D. thesis was to set-up, optimize, and develop proteomics methods for analysing proteins extracted from T helper (Th) lymphocytes. First, highthroughput LC-MS/MS and ICAT labeling methods were set-up and optimized for analysing the microsomal fraction proteins extracted from Th lymphocytes. Later, iTRAQ method was optimized to study cytokine regulated protein expression in the nuclei of Th lymphocytes. High-throughput LC-MS/MS analyses, like ICAT and iTRAQ, produce large quantities of data and robust software and data analysis pipelines are needed. Therefore, different software programs used for analysing such data were evaluated. Moreover, a pre-filtering algorithm was developed to classify good-quality and bad-quality spectra prior to the database searches. Th-lymphocytes can differentiate into Th1 or Th2 cells based on surrounding antigens, co-stimulatory molecules, and cytokines. Both subsets have individual cytokine secretion profiles and specific functions. Th1 cells participate in the cellular immunity against intracellular pathogens, while Th2 cells have important role in the humoral immunity against extracellular parasites. An abnormal response of Th1 and Th2 cells and imbalance between the subsets are charasteristic of several diseases. Th1 specific reactions and cytokines have been detected in autoimmune diseases, while Th2 specific response and cytokine profile is common in allergy and asthma. In this Ph.D. thesis mass spectrometry-based proteomics was used to study the effects of Th1 and Th2 promoting cytokines IL-12 and IL-4 on the proteome of Th lymphocytes. Characterization of microsomal fraction proteome extracted from IL-12 treated lymphobasts and IL-4 stimulated cord blood CD4+ cells resulted in finding of cytokine regulated proteins. Galectin-1 and CD7 were down-regulated in IL-12 treated cells, while IL-4 stimulation decreased the expression of STAT1, MXA, GIMAP1, and GIMAP4. Interestingly, the transcription of both GIMAP genes was up-regulated in Th1 polarized cells and down-regulated in Th2 promoting conditions.
Cloud-assisted secure and conjunctive publish/subscribe service in smart grids

The publish/subscribe (P/S) service on Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) servers of smart grid need to deal with huge amount of data, which may lead to data burst on AMI servers and serious server crash. Moreover, for protecting data security, sensitive data must be encrypted before being published. It obstacles traditional data utilisation based on plaintext P/S service. Thus, enabling an encrypted data-based P/S service is of paramount importance. Considering the huge amount of data and subscribers, it is necessary to allow conjunctive subscriptions containing mixtures of keywords, numeric data etc., and return data according to a reasonable access control mechanism (ACM). In this study, the authors propose a cloud-assisted secure conjunctive publish/subscribe protocol to challenge the encrypted data-based P/S service on AMI servers. To overcome the data burst, the P/S computation tasks are shifted from AMI servers to the cloud. To support conjunctive P/S operations in a reasonable ACM, a prefix-based membership verification algorithm combining with the ciphertext policy attribute-based encryption is explored. The proposed protocol is proved to be secure against chosen keyword/plaintext attacks under formally defined security models. Experiments on the real-world data set further show proposed protocol indeed introduce low overhead on computation and communication.
A Study on Optimal Design of Optical Devices Utilizing Coupled Mode Theory and Machine Learning

SUMMARY We propose a new design approach to improve the computational e ﬃ ciency of an optimal design of optical waveguide devices utilizing coupled mode theory (CMT) and a neural network (NN). Recently, the NN has begun to be used for e ﬃ cient optimal design of optical devices. In this paper, the eigenmode analysis required in the CMT is skipped by using the NN, and optimization with an evolutionary algorithm can be e ﬃ ciently carried out. To verify usefulness of our approach, optimal design examples of a wavelength insensitive 3dB coupler, a 1 : 2 power splitter, and a wave-length demultiplexer are shown and their transmission properties obtained by the CMT with the NN (NN-CMT) are veriﬁed by comparing with those calculated by a ﬁnite element beam propagation method (FE-BPM).