Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The role of ambulatory oxygen to improve skeletal muscle gene expression in Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease in patients with exercise induced hypoxaemia

Rationale: Hypoxaemia plays a role in the aetiology of abnormal skeletal muscle function in Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) via abnormal protein synthesis and mitochondrial function. Patients exhibiting exercise-induced desaturation (EID) have exercise intolerance, perhaps a consequence of muscle hypoxia. Ambulatory oxygen therapy (AOT) is indicated in these patients; however the evidence is derived from single assessment studies. This thesis explores the role of longer term AOT and whether it favourably alters skeletal muscle gene expression in patients with COPD and EID. Methods: A 12 week randomised controlled trial of AOT against air in 25 patients with COPD and EID was undertaken. Participants underwent skeletal muscle biopsies and exercise assessments. In parallel a systematic review of published literature from 1980-2014 for trials in which AOT was compared to placebo in COPD was completed. Results: The systematic review showed that AOT had no statistical effect on improving exercise capacity (6 minute walk or endurance shuttle walk tests); p=0.44 and p=0.29 respectively. Gene set enrichment analysis show the KEGG pathways of oxidative phosphorylation, PPAR signalling and fatty acid metabolism to be up-regulated following AOT (q<2%) in the clinical trial of AOT versus Air. Conclusion: AOT has limited long term benefit in improving functional exercise capacity. It may however favourably alter gene expression in patients with COPD and EID.
4th Order Moment-Based Linear Prediction for Estimating Ringing Sound of Impulsive Noise in Speech Enhancement

SUMMARY Speech enhancement has been proposed to reduce the impulsive noise whose frequency characteristic is wideband. On the other hand, it is challenging to reduce the ringing sound, which is narrowband in impulsive noise. Therefore, we propose the modeling of the ringing sound and its estimation by a linear predictor (LP). However, it is di ﬃ cult to estimate the ringing sound only in noisy speech due to the auto-correlation property of speech. The proposed system adopts the 4th order moment-based adaptive algorithm by noticing the di ﬀ erence between the 4th order statistics of speech and impulsive noise. The brief analysis and simulation results show that the proposed system has the potential to reduce ringing sound while keeping the quality of enhanced speech.
Mechanisms of Oxidation Degradation of Cr12 Roller Steel during Thermal Fatigue Tests

Degradation by the penetration of oxidation into the Cr12 roller steel is evaluated during thermal fatigue tests in the laboratory in the temperature range of 500–700 °C. A qualitative assessment is carried out with regard to the thermal load, the microstructure and the test temperature. The results show that the specific properties of the microstructure with respect to thermal stress and temperature have a significant influence on the oxidation behavior as well as on the crack propagation mode and crack growth. The conditions that lead to an increase in the oxidation rate and thus to premature and sudden local chipping of the roll surface layer are analyzed and explained.
ADC quantification to classify patients candidate to receive bevacizumab treatment for recurrent glioblastoma

Background Recurrent high-grade gliomas progressing after surgery and temozolomide plus radiation therapy have traditionally been treated using antiangiogenic drugs as the first-line therapy. Since the phase 3 EORTC 26101 trial showed no significant benefit of administering antiangiogenic drugs, the need to identify a biomarker to classify subgroups of potential responders has increased. Purpose To investigate the feasibility of using apparent diffusion coefficient as a predictor of the response of recurrent high-grade gliomas to bevacizumab or classifier for patients showing better response. Material and Methods This retrospective study analyzed magnetic resonance images obtained from 39 patients at the time of high-grade glioma progression who were treated using bevacizumab. The apparent diffusion coefficient maps were quantified and modelled as a mixture of Gaussian functions. The correlation of their descriptors and the time to second progression was studied. Log-rank tests were performed to determine the power of these descriptors as the classifiers for patients exhibiting better survival. Results None of the descriptors showed correlation with time to second progression (r < 0.35) but several of them stratified subgroups showing a better time to second progression passing log-rank tests (P < 0.02). Conclusion Apparent diffusion coefficient cannot be used to predict the time to second progression of recurrent high-grade gliomas treated with bevacizumab, but it can stratify groups with better time to second progression distributions.
Hydrothermal biosynthesis of chromium sulphide nanoparticles using egg yolk and its catalytic activity in degradation of dyes

Wastewater generated from industries consists of non-fixed dyes contributing to environmental pollution. Use of nanotechnology is being exploited for efficient degradation of dyes. Chromium sulphide nanoparticles have potential biological applications such as ion-selective membrane electrodes and probes for colocalization of membrane proteins. The biosynthesis of chromium sulphide nanoparticles by a high temperature hydrothermal approach has been reported herewith using chromium trioxide as the source of chromium and egg yolk (yellow) as the natural source of sulphur. Catalytic efficiency of chromium sulphide nanoparticles calcinated at 400 °C and 1000 °C has been tested for degradation of congo red, eosin Y, methylene blue as well as bromo cresol green of as prepared solutions and at acidic pH (pH 2.0).
Convolutional auto encoders for sentence representation generation

: In this study, we have proposed an alternative approach for sentence modeling problem. The difficulty of the choice of answer, the semantically related questions and the lack of syntactic closeness of the answers give rise to the difficulty of selecting the answer. The deep learning field has recently achieved a pivotal success in semantic analysis, machine translation, and text summaries. The essence of this work, inspired by the human orthographic processing mechanism and using multiple convolution filters with pre-rendered 2-Dimension (2D) representations of sentences, input or output size is to learn the basic features of the language without concerns. For this reason, the semantic relations in the sentence structure are learned by the convolutional variational auto-encoders first, and then the question and answer spaces learned by the auto-encoders are linked with proposed intermediate models. We have benchmarked five variations of our proposed model, which is based on Variational Auto-Encoder with multiple latent spaces and able to achieve lower error rates than the baseline model, which is the base Convolutional LSTM.
Being Encouraged and Discouraged: Baccalaureate Nursing Students’ Experiences of Effective and Ineffective Clinical Faculty Teaching Behaviors

A qualitative study was conducted to investigate baccalaureate nursing students’ identification of and experiences with effective and ineffective clinical faculty teaching behaviors. The 272 participants were asked to identify and write a narrative statement about 1 effective and 1 ineffective clinical faculty behavior they had experienced as a student in the clinical setting. The data were analyzed for emergence of common themes. Identification of the themes provided a meaningful way to capture the essences of the students’ experiences of faculty teaching behaviors that fostered and hindered their nursing education in the clinical setting. The themes common to the responses of the participants were that effective faculty behavior was encouraging, and that ineffective faculty behavior was discouraging. Information from this study may help nursing educators engaged in clinical teaching to positively influence the clinical educational experience for nursing students.
Resolving the Differences in the Simulated and Reconstructed Temperature Response to Volcanism

Explosive volcanism imposes impulse‐like radiative forcing on the climate system, providing a natural experiment to study the climate response to perturbation. Previous studies have identified disagreements between paleoclimate reconstructions and climate model simulations with respect to the magnitude and recovery from volcanic cooling, questioning the fidelity of climate model simulations, reconstructions, or both. Using the paleoenvironmental data assimilation framework of the Last Millennium Reanalysis, this study investigates the causes of the disagreements, using both real and simulated data. We demonstrate that discrepancies since 1600 CE can be largely resolved by assimilating tree‐ring density records only, targeting growing season temperature instead of annual temperature, and performing the comparison at proxy locales. Simulations of eruptions earlier in the last millennium may also reflect uncertainties in forcing and modeled aerosol microphysics.
Effect of ultra-sonication and peptization on the aqueous phase stability of iron oxide nanoparticles

Abstract Since ensuring stability of the nanoparticles in aqueous-phase is essential for biomedical applications, this study evaluated the effect of ultra-sonication followed by peptization on iron-oxide nanoparticles (IONPs) aqueous-phase stability. The IONPs synthesized via two different chemical co-precipitation methods were ultra-sonicated for −5, −10 and 20-min and evaluated using Dynamic light scattering at Day-1, -2, -7 and -15 of the synthesis. The Experiment II-IONPs had lesser hydrodynamic size with better aqueous-phase stability over the time. The decrease in the average size and increase in homogeneity of solution was better following ultra-sonication for 20-min. These IONPs were peptized with perchloric acid to evaluate the effect on stability and longevity. The results showed large proportion of IONPs less than 100 nm even on day-15 post-peptization. Moreover, transmission electron microscopy revealed average size of 11.23 nm with round shape. The study showed positive influence of peptization on the aqueous-phase stability of the IONPs.
Association Between Forced Expiratory Volume in one Second and Glycated Hemoglobin Values in Patients With Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease

Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) is one of the leading causes of mortality worldwide. Evidence shows that COPD increases the risk of type 2 diabetes possibly due to insulin resistance induced by inflammatory cytokines. The aim of the current study was to evaluate the association between forced expiratory volume in one second (FEV1) and plasma glycated hemoglobin (HbA1c) level in patients with COPD. In this study, 50 non-hospitalized patients with COPD were studied. For all patients, a spirometry test was performed and FEV1 was determined. The quality of spirometry was assessed based on Guidelines from the American Thoracic Society/European Respiratory Society Task Force and the severity of COPD was determined based on GOLD criteria. HbA1c was measured by commercial kits. Anthropometric indices were measured and a questionnaire was applied to collect general characteristics of patients. The mean age of patients was 60.18±7.63 years. Seventy-eight percent and 22% of patients were male and female, respectively. Twenty-seven subjects were current smokers and 23 subjects were non-smokers. A significant inverses association was found between HbA1c level and FEV1% in (r= -0.722, P<0.001). There was a statistically significant correlation between weight and HbA1c level (r=0.349, P<0.05), and BMI and HbA1c (r=0.242, P<0.05). We could not find any significant correlation between age and smoking and the level of HbA1c and FEV1 (P>0.05). Our study showed there is a negative correlation between the level of HgA1c and respiratory function in COPD patients
A Compact Triple-Fed High-Isolation SIW-Based Self-Triplexing Antenna

A novel and compact all planer-fed self-triplexing patch antenna is designed and demonstrated for triple-band operation simultaneously. The model is comprised of one substrate-integrated waveguide (SIW) cavity, three planar ports, and one modified I-shaped slot. The proposed antenna is designed in a simple three-step method to achieve improved self-triplexing property. In the first step, a rectangular slot is created and its position is altered to obtain initial isolation (>20 dB) between any two ports. Secondly, the same slot is modified to an I-shape, which creates three patches facing three different ports and radiates at three different frequencies (4.14, 6.1, and 8.32 GHz) with minimum isolations above 28.4 dB. In the third step, one input-port is off-centered to obtain port isolation tradeoff so that isolation between any two ports is better than 30.8 dB. Importantly, the proposed design also supports easy individual frequency tuning using single variable. For demonstration purpose, the antenna is fabricated and characterized. The proposed planar antenna is very simple, compact, and feasible for handheld microwave devices.
Bacteriophage Fusion Peptides Based Targeted Delivery of Therapeutics to Cancer Cells

A very paramount strategy for effective therapeutic management of tumors is the selective delivery of cancer therapeutic to the site of the malady employing the concept of targeted delivery. Although, a pleothora of ligands have been developed for targeting therapeutics to the site of the disease, only a few have been successfully used because of the need of their conjugation to therapeutic nanocarriers. A promising approach is harnessing bacteriophages displaying fusion peptides on all their major coat proteins (landscape phages) for targeting therapeutic-loaded nanocarriers to breast and prostate cancer cells. Screening of multibillion landscape phage has resulted in generation of peptide ligands targeting cancer-specific receptors. Also, spontaneous insertion of isolated phage proteins into therapeutic loaded nanocarriers such as liposomes can enhance their cancer-specific cytotoxicity and exclude the need for complex bioconjugations and derivitization procedures required for targeting. Various breast cancer, prostate cancer and metastatic prostate cancer cells specific landscape phage peptides have been generated by screening landscape phage libraries. These cancer specific-landscape phage clones and their peptides are promising platforms for various applications such targeted drug and gene delivery, cancer cell receptor identification and phage-like particles for gene therapy. As such, these applications are described in this review. Keywords : Bacteriophage. Fusion peptides. Targeted delivery. Cancer. Therapeutics
Fabrication and properties of Si2N2O ceramics for microwave sintering furnace

The Si2N2O ceramics with low dielectric constant, low thermal diffusivity and high thermal shock resistance were successfully prepared by vacuum sintering. The amorphous Si3N4 was used as raw material with Li2CO3 as sintering additive. The phase, microstructure, oxidized resistance, mechanical and dielectric properties of the Si2N2O ceramics were investigated. XRD analysis showed that the suitable content of Li2CO3 could promote the generation of Si2N2O ceramics. However, the excess or insufficient amount of Li2CO3 additive would cause decomposition of Si2N2O phase. The Li2O volatilized at high temperature leaving highly pure (99.63%) porous Si2N2O ceramics. The flexural strength of the porous Si2N2O ceramics (with ≈49.19%of open porosity) was about 30MPa, the residual strength ratio was more than 70% after 1300°C quenching in air. The SiO2 layer formed by oxidization could prevent Si2N2O ceramics from further oxidizing. Therefore, these Si2N2O ceramics will be excellent thermal insulation and wave-transparent materials for high temperature microwave sintering furnace.
Development of Growth Theory for Vapor–Liquid–Solid Nanowires: Wetting Scenario, Front Curvature, Growth Angle, Linear Tension, and Radial Instability

In this paper, we report that under wetting conditions (or modes) of nanowire (NW) growth, when a nonplanar crystallization front emerges under a catalyst droplet, a shift in the three-phase line (TPL) of the vapor–liquid–crystal interface occurs under thermodynamically stable conditions when the angle with respect to the droplet surface, termed the growth angle, is fixed. The growth angle of the NWs is determined not from a geometrical perspective but on the basis of the physical aspects of the processes occurring around the TPL, revealing a size dependence caused by the influence of linear tension of the three-phase contact of a vapor–liquid crystal. The observed radial periodic instability of the NWs is described according to the size dependence of the thermodynamic growth angle, which induces negative feedback in the system. Under the influence of linear tension and positive feedback, the tips or needles of NWs can be formed.
Answer Selection Using Multi-Layer Semantic Representation Learning

Answer selection is the most important module of question answering system. Mining the semantic relevance between questions and answers is the key point of answer selection. However, the answer texts often contain some colloquial expressions and redundant information in some fields. In these cases, some traditional methods of mining text features are complex and the performance improvement is limited. In this paper we investigate using deep learning to enhance the computability of semantics and eliminate the semantic gap for the answer selection module of non-factual question answering system. By integrating different networks to mine the association semantic between questions and answers, a novel multi-layer answer selection model is proposed. The shallow semantic relevance between questions and answers is mined by adding the attention mechanism to CNN, and then the features are input into Bi-LSTM model for further mining to obtain more efficient semantic representation. The experimental results show that compared with other models, our method can achieve the better accuracy in the task of answer selection.
Re‐evaluation of name of hydrogenated poly‐1‐decene (E 907) as food additive

Abstract The Panel on Food Additives and Flavourings added to food (FAF) provided a scientific opinion re‐evaluating the safety of hydrogenated poly‐1‐decene (E 907) when used as a food additive. Hydrogenated poly‐1‐decene (E 907) is authorised as a food additive in the EU in accordance with Annex II to Regulation (EC) No 1333/2008. Hydrogenated poly‐1‐decene is of low acute toxicity and does not raise concern for genotoxicity. Toxicity and carcinogenicity, as well as reproductive and developmental toxicological studies, were not available; therefore, the Panel based the derivation of the acceptable daily intake (ADI) on the no observed adverse effect level (NOAEL) identified in the subchronic study in rats and established an ADI of 20 mg/kg bw per day. Dietary exposure to hydrogenated poly‐1‐decene (E 907) from its use as a food additive was calculated based on regulatory maximum level exposure assessment scenario. Mean exposure to hydrogenated poly‐1‐decene (E 907) from its use as a food additive ranged from no exposure in infants to 2.35 mg/kg bw per day in toddlers. The high exposure to hydrogenated poly‐1‐decene (E 907) ranged from 0 mg/kg bw per day in infants and adults to 6.69 mg/kg bw per day in toddlers. The exposure estimates in the regulatory maximum level exposure assessment scenario did not exceed the ADI of 20 mg/kg bw per day for all population groups. The Panel concluded that the exposure to hydrogenated poly‐1‐decene (E 907) does not raise a safety concern when used at the maximum permitted levels.
Layout Pattern Synthesis for Lithography Optimizations

A set of comprehensive test patterns is important for a number of lithography applications. Pattern diversity is, however, hard to achieve either from parametric patterns or from actual patterns even though they are carefully extracted and classified. Automatic layout pattern synthesis is proposed in this paper. A generative adversarial network (GAN) is employed to generate a new set of discrete cosine transform (DCT) signals. It is converted to an image format through inverse DCT (IDCT). The image is blurred since output DCT signals from GAN correspond to lower frequency region. Another GAN, this time a conditional GAN (cGAN), is introduced to get sharpened layout pattern. A key in this process is to train the two GANs in such a way that generated patterns are different from existing actual patterns while they are still valid layouts. Experiments indicate that synthetic patterns are less redundant and cover 76% more space in image parameter set space than actual patterns. We choose a machine-learning guided OPC as an example application: when synthetic patterns are included to train OPC model, edge proximity error decreases by 21%. Resist model calibration is chosen as a second example: when synthetic patterns are combined with parametric- and real-patterns, CD RMSE decreases by 10.3%.
Assessing Service Quality and Customer Satisfaction in Ghana’s Hotel Industry: A Case Study of Engineering Guest House – KNUST

Background: It has been generally observed that service quality plays a very instrumental role in customer satisfaction. This study therefore, examined the impact of service quality on customer satisfaction in Ghana’s hotel industry, with Engineering Guest House (EGH) of Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST). Methods: In pursuit of the stated objective, descriptive cross-sectional survey was adopted as the research design for this study. Data was sourced from both primary and secondary sources. Structured questionnaires which was the main research instrument was used to elicit information from the participants which comprised mainly of customers of EGH-KNUST who have been patronizing the services of the said entity over 2 years. ANOVA and t-statistics were used to test the hypothesis while regression analysis was used to analyzed the data. Results: The findings showed an R 2 value of 0.762 which reveals that service quality (using the SERVQUAL components) accounted for 76.2% of the variation in customer satisfaction. The f-statistics of 32.318 reveals that the model is statistically significant at 0.05 significant level. Conclusion: It was concluded that there was a significant relationship between service quality and customer satisfaction at EGH-KNUST, hence the guest house should continue to investigate precisely what guests want and develop innovative ways to meeting guests’ expectation. Keywords: Service quality, SERVQUAL model, customer satisfaction DOI: 10.7176/JTHS/47-05 Publication date: February 29 th 2020
Studies on the structure, lipid modification and interactions of the virulence-associated proteins of Rhodococcus equi

Rhodococcus equi is a Gram-positive soil organism that causes an aggressive bronchopneumonia in foals and opportunistic infections in immuno-compromised humans. Virulent strains possess an 80 – 90 kb plasmid that encodes an immunogenic surface-located virulence-associated protein VapA. The virulence of the organism has been largely attributed to this protein since mutants lacking vapA are attenuated for virulence in mice. VapA is an unusual lipoprotein and existing evidence suggests its biogenesis may not involve normal lipoprotein processing. In order to understand the structure of VapA and other virulence associated proteins, their genes were cloned, expressed, purified and crystallised. VapG produce high quality crystals that diffracted to 1.8 A. The structure was resolved to be a closed β-barrel with a long unstructured N-terminus which is similar to both VapB and VapD which have also recently been characterised.