Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Electrochemical behavior and differential pulse voltammetric determination of ceftazidime, cefuroxime-axetil and ceftriaxone

The voltammetric behavior of ceftazidime, cefuroxime-axetil and ceftriaxone has been examined in pH range 2.0 - 8.0 by cyclic and differential pulse voltammetry using hanging mercury drop electrode. The effect of the pH and scan rate on the peak currents and potentials was examined. The nature of the electrode reduction process in acid solution was found to be diffusion controlled for ceftazidime and cefuroxime-axetil, but strongly influenced by the adsorption in the case of ceftriaxone reduction. Ceftriaxone adsorption decreased with the increase of pH, and at pH>7 the reduction process became diffusion controlled. Based on this study, DPV method was developed, validated and suggested for determination of ceftazidime at pH 2.0, cefuroxime-axetil at pH 3.5 and for ceftriaxone at pH 8.0. Linear concentration ranges, LOD and LOQ were determined. The method was applied for determination of cephalosporins in pharmaceutical dosage forms: Ceftazidime powder, Ceroxim tablets and Longaceph powder for injection solution.
Mapping monthly precipitation in Sweden by using GIS

Spatial distribution of monthly precipitation is largely influenced by topography. This study focuses on deriving a gridded dataset of monthly precipitation from station observations in Sweden during 1961-2004, with help of topographic information. In order to study the influence of topography on the spatial distribution of precipitation, Sweden has been divided into three regions based on the large-scale setting of the geography. The influence of topography on the spatial distribution of monthly precipitation normals is obvious in southern region year round, and in summer time in northern and central regions at the 2 km resolution. Regression models have been built individually for each calendar month between monthly precipitation normals and selected topographical factors: elevation, slope, PX, PY, and distance to west coast. The models explain the spatial distribution of precipitation from 26.0% to 74.0% in southern region, from 9.6% to 65.6% in central region, and from 14.4% to 57.8% in northern region. After removing the effect of terrain height on spatial distribution of precipitation normals by using the regression model, the residuals are then interpolated onto a regular grid using three interpolation methods (IDW, kriging and cokriging). Cross-validation shows that kriging with spatially detrended residuals performs best and it has been chosen to interpolate the monthly precipitation normals during 1971-2000. Then, monthly precipitation anomalies from 1961 to 2004 have been gridded with all three methods. Co-kriging with elevation has similar performance, while IDW shows lowest skill when comparing with the results of kriging. Monthly normals for period 1971 to 2000 have been added back to the anomalies predicted by using kriging method to get the monthly precipitation from 1961 to 2004. Validation with independent observational data from 133 stations not used in the interpolation shows that interpolations with kriging method in mostly southern region and northeast part of Sweden are highly consistent with the original data, while several stations in northwest are always overestimated, which could be caused by the overestimated influence of topography. The study suggests that the Swedish precipitation distribution could be partially explained by topographical variables, especially in Southern and summer time in Central and Northern Sweden, and the kriging with detrended data can be used in gridding monthly precipitation with higher precision. All the work has been done in GIS (ArcGIS) and the final precipitation climatology has been created suing widely applied Raster and NetCDF formats, which ensures the easy application of the dataset in both climate studies and other fields.
Evaluation of Sample Size Effect on Spearman and Polyserial Correlation Coeffificients

Copyright © 2018 by Türkiye Klinikleri ABSTRACT Correlation analysis, which examines whether there is a relationship between two or more variables, is a statistical method that is widely used in many areas such as in the health field. When analyzing the relationship between variables, it is important to know which correlation coefficients should be used according to variable types. If one of the two variables considered to be in a linear relationship does not show normal distribution, the linear relationship between the order of the variables is evaluated by the Spearman rho correlation coefficient. In practice, the relationship between an ordinal and a continuous variable is generally evaluated by the Spearman rho correlation coefficient, assuming that the ordinal variables do not fit the normal distribution. However, in the literature, the necessity of using the polyserial correlation coefficient between an ordinal and continuous variable is mentioned. The purpose of this study is to examine the extent to which the results obtained from the polyserial correlation coefficients are separated from the Spearman rho correlation coefficient for different sample sizes. For this purpose, the separation of polyserial correlation coefficients from the Spearman rho correlation coefficient, which is derived from 10,000 MCMC data for each of the 30 different sample sizes, has been investigated. If the sample size is less than 500, it is observed that the discrepancies are increased, and that the confidence intervals of these discrepancies become larger. It is not always possible to work with large samples in the health field. Especially in studies in the health field, if the sample size is less than 500, the correlation between an ordinal and a continuous variable must be evaluated with the polyserial correlation coefficient.
Firm Financing in India: Recent Trends and Patterns

Using balance sheet information for nearly 6,000 firms between 1994-2003, this study investigates recent firm financing patterns in India. The paper documents the overall use of debt and, in particular, the role of bank financing (short-term and long-term), trade credit, intrabusiness group borrowing and foreign financing. The study examines financing patterns over time and explores differences across firms by sector, age, ownership type, export orientation, and, in particular, size. In terms of trends, we find that while debt to asset ratios have been relatively stable, nominal debt growth has slowed down in recent years. At the same time, firms’ repayment capacity, as measured by the interest coverage ratio has exhibited a U-shaped pattern falling during 1997-99 and recovering in recent years. Throughout the period of study, bank financing as a share of total debt has increased, while borrowing from non-bank financial institutions fell sharply. In terms of differences across firms, the most robust finding is that debt levels increase with firm size. Smaller firms have especially less debt relative to larger firms if they are young (below 10 years since incorporation), if they are in the manufacturing sector, and if they are located in Southern India. Furthermore, while the ratio of debt to assets has been relatively stable for large firms, we observe a significant decline for smaller firms. Overall, the findings presented in the paper provide suggestive (but not definite) evidence of stronger credit constraints for smaller firms. * We would like to thank Priya Basu and Leora Klapper for guidance and suggestions for this study. Niraj Verma and Mahesh Vyas were instrumental in helping us obtain and understand the data we use. Xuxin Alex Yu provided excellent research assistance.
Locating the doctoral study in the ‘paradigm skirmishes’: Challenges and prospects for adopting a paradigm cradle

It is important to understand the thought patterns of students and supervisors that underlie the choice of paradigm and determine the progression of doctoral studies as an integral part of articulating scholarship at the doctoral level and subsequently, to completing the research. This paper traces a student’s and a supervisor’s thought patterns in the contested space of paradigms by adopting Bryman’s (2007) phrase ‘paradigm skirmishes’ to explore their experiences of a doctoral research study. It analyses some of the contested issues in paradigm proliferation and juxtaposes the doctoral research journey within it. We observe that engaging within the paradigm ‘skirmish arena’ is a tricky process, but an inevitable part of the doctoral student’s academic discourse. The use of the term ‘cradle’ in this paper is a metaphor to imply the ‘nurturance’ and ‘upbringing’ that doctoral students might require to develop intellectual maturity in academic authority and voice. As a ‘written conversation of minds’ of supervisor and supervisee, this paper not only traces some of the tensions that doctoral students undergo, but also illustrates how some university structures and supervision are critical to nurturing originality and critical engagement with discourse, particularly during moments of uncertainty and intellectual exhilaration.
Fluorescent Labeling of Purified β2 Adrenergic Receptor

The purpose of the present study was to develop an approach to directly monitor structural changes in a G protein-coupled receptor in response to drug binding. Purified human β2 adrenergic receptor was covalently labeled with the cysteine-reactive, fluorescent probe N,N′-dimethyl-N-(iodoacetyl)-N′ - (7 - nitrobenz −2 - oxa −1,3diazol-4-yl)ethylenediamine (IANBD). IANBD is characterized by a fluorescence which is highly sensitive to the polarity of its environment. We found that the full agonist, isoproterenol, elicited a stereoselective and dose-dependent decrease in fluorescence from IANBD-labeled β2 receptor. The change in fluorescence could be plotted against the concentration of isoproterenol as a simple hyperbolic binding isotherm demonstrating interaction with a single binding site in the receptor. The ability of several adrenergic antagonists to reverse the response confirmed that this binding site is identical to the well described binding site in the β2 receptor. Comparison of the response to isoproterenol with a series of adrenergic agonists, having different biological efficacies, revealed a linear correlation between biological efficacy and the change in fluorescence. This suggests that the agonist-mediated decrease in fluorescence from IANBD-labeled β2 receptor is due to the same conformational change as involved in receptor activation and G protein coupling. In contrast to agonists, negative antagonists induced a small but significant increase in base-line fluorescence. Despite the small amplitude of this response, it supports the notion that antagonists by themselves may alter receptor structure. In conclusion, our data provide the first direct evidence for ligand-specific conformational changes occurring in a G protein-coupled receptor. Furthermore, the data demonstrate the potential of fluorescence spectroscopy as a tool for further delineating the molecular mechanisms of drug action at G protein-coupled receptors.
Development of fresh and cryopreserved early-stage ovarian follicles, with special attention to ruminants.

This paper gives a survey of our research on the development, cryopreservation, in vitro culture and transplantation of early-stage follicles in the past two decades, relative to those obtained by other researchers. Hereby, attention is specially focussed on findings with ruminants. Apart from our histological, immunocytochemical, viability, biochemical, endocrine, cryostore, in vitro and in vivo data on cow, sheep and goat follicles, some general information on the various in vitro culture, cryopreservation and transplantation techniques is given. We conclude that (i) we are still far away from obtaining fertilizable oocytes from in vitro cultured ruminant early-stage follicles, that can be used for invitro production of healthy embryos or offspring, and (ii) our cryopreservation techniques seem good enough to store ruminant early-stage follicles for an undetermined time without viability impairment, followed by further development after thawing in shortor long-term in vitro cultures or in transplantation experiments.
Locality Aware Zeroing: Exploiting Both Hardware and Software Semantics

Both managed and native languages use memory safety techniques to ensure program correctness and as a security defense. A critical element of memory safety is to initialize newly allocated memory to zero before making it available to the program. In this thesis I explore the performance impact of zero initialization and show that it comes with a substantial overhead. I also show that this overhead can be largely removed with new designs that exploit both the language semantics of zero initialization and the hardware semantics of memory hierarchies Programmers increasingly choose managed languages to develop large scale applications. One of the reasons is that managed languages offer automatic memory management (garbage collection), which protects against memory leaks and dangling pointers. Garbage collection encourages programs to allocate large numbers of small and medium size objects, leading to significant overheads of zero initializing objects — on average the direct cost of zeroing is 4% to 6% and up to 50% of total application time on a variety of modern processors. Zeroing incurs indirect costs as well, which include memory bandwidth consumption and cache displacement. Existing virtual machines (VMs) either: a) minimize direct costs by zeroing in large blocks, or b) minimize indirect costs by integrating zeroing into the allocation sequence to reduce cache displacement. This thesis first describes and evaluates zero initialization costs and the two existing designs. The microarchitectural analysis of prior designs inspires two better designs that exploit concurrency and non-temporal cache-bypassing store instructions to reduce the direct and indirect costs simultaneously. The best strategy is to adaptively choose between the two new designs based on CPU utilization. This approach improves over widely used hot-path zeroing by 3% on average and up to 15% on the newest Intel i7-2600 processor, without slowing down any of the benchmarks. These results indicate that zero initialization is a surprisingly important source of overhead in existing VMs and that our new software strategies are effective at reducing this overhead. These findings also invite other optimizations, including software elision of zeroing and microarchitectural support.
Active Damping of LLCL Filters Using PR Control for Grid-Connected Three-Level T-Type Converters

In this paper, an active damping control scheme for LLCL filters based on the PR (proportional-resonant) regulator is proposed for grid-connected three-level T-type PWM converter systems. The PR controller gives an infinite gain at the resonance frequency. As a result, the oscillation can be suppressed at that frequency. In order to improve the stability of the system in the case of grid impedance variations, online grid impedance estimation is applied. Simulation and experimental results have verified the effectiveness of the proposed scheme for three-phase T-type AC/DC PWM converters.
Critical timing for reproductive allocation in a capital breeder: evidence from sandeels

Life-history theory predicts a tradeoff in resource allocation between early maturation and growth in species which exhibit indeterminate growth. However, since life-history models assume that the fitness payoff of each developmental strategy at completion is known, they are unable to encapsulate the mechanics by which maturation is controlled under natural conditions. To determine the proximate conditions which influence variation in reproductive investment, we recorded somatic growth, sexual maturation and fecundity in individually marked first-time maturing lesser sandeels Ammodytes marinus. Cytological investigation revealed that the transition in gonad development from primary to secondary stages occurred between June and August in both sexes. Using logistical regression, variation in maturation could be attributed to both initial weight and observed differences in resource accrual during this period, suggesting that if growth prior to this period is inadequate in smaller fish then maturation remains inhibited. For those females that did mature, potential fecundity positively correlated with final body size. Our findings indicate that small changes in the timing of the availability of their zooplankton prey could explain the large regional variability in maturity at age exhibited by sandeels in the field.
Characterizing the structure of nonlinear systems using gradual wavelet reconstruction

In this paper, classical surrogate data methods for testing hypotheses concerning nonlinearity in time-series data are extended using a wavelet-based scheme. This gives a method for systematically exploring the properties of a signal relative to some metric or set of metrics. A signal continuum is defined from a linear variant of the original signal (same histogram and approximately the same Fourier spectrum) to the exact replication of the original signal. Surrogate data are generated along this continuum with the wavelet trans- form fixing in place an increasing proportion of the proper- ties of the original signal. Eventually, chaotic or nonlinear behaviour will be preserved in the surrogates. The technique permits various research questions to be answered and ex- amples covered in the paper include identifying a threshold level at which signals or models for those signals may be considered similar on some metric, analysing the complexity of the Lorenz attractor, characterising the differential sensi- tivity of metrics to the presence of multifractality for a turbu- lence time-series, and determining the amplitude of variabil- ity of the Hexponents in a multifractional Brownian motion that is detectable by a calculation method. Thus, a wide class of analyses of relevance to geophysics can be un- dertaken within this framework.
The Definition of Intelligent Computer Aided Software Engineering (I-CASE) Tools

The growing complexity of the software systems being developed and the use of different methodologies indicate the need for more computer support for automating software development process and evolution activity. Currently, Computer-Aided Software Engineering (CASE), which is a set of software systems aimed to support set of software process activities, does this automation. While CASE tools prove its importance to develop high quality software, unfortunately CASE tools doesn’t cover all software development activities. This is because some activities need intellectual human skills, which are not currently available as computer software. To solve this shortcoming, Artificial Intelligence (AI) approaches are the ones that can be used to develop software tools imitating these intellectual skills. This paper presents the definition of Intelligent Computer Aided Software Engineering (I-CASE). The definition encompasses two steps. The first step is a clear decomposition of each basic software development activity to sub activities, and classify each one of them whether it is an intellectual or procedural job. The second step is the addressing of each intellectual (un-automated) one to proper AI-based approach. These tools may be integrated into a package as an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) or could be used individually. The discussion and the next implementation step are reported. Keywords : Software Engineering, CASE tools, Artificial Intelligence
The local luminosity function of star-forming galaxies derived from the Planck Early Release Compact Source Catalogue

The Planck Early Release Compact Source Catalogue (ERCSC) has offered the first opportunity to accurately determine the luminosity function of dusty galaxies in the very local Universe (i.e. distances ≲100 Mpc), at several (sub-)millimetre wavelengths, using blindly selected samples of low-redshift sources, unaffected by cosmological evolution. This project, however, requires careful consideration of a variety of issues including the choice of the appropriate flux density measurement, the separation of dusty galaxies from radio sources and from Galactic sources, the correction for the CO emission, the effect of density inhomogeneities and more. We present estimates of the local luminosity functions at 857 GHz (350 μm), 545 GHz (550 μm) and 353 GHz (850 μm) extending across the characteristic luminosity L⋆, and a preliminary estimate over a limited luminosity range at 217 GHz (1382 μm). At 850 μm and for luminosities L ≳ L⋆ our results agree with previous estimates, derived from the Submillimeter Common-User Bolometer Array (SCUBA) Local Universe Galaxy Survey, but are higher than the latter at L ≲ L⋆. We also find good agreement with estimates at 350 and 500 μm based on preliminary Herschel survey data.
Recent research on competitiveness and clusters: what are the implications for regional policy?

This paper reviews implications of recent research on competitiveness and clusters for regions and regional policy. A new framing of competitiveness clarifies the role of regions. Its empirical findings align well with the literature on drivers of regional performance, but there are opportunities for mutual learning. A step-change in the availability of data on clusters and cluster policies has enabled new research approaches. Clusters are shown to have a close association with regional economic performance and evolution. Cluster policies are largely focused on strengthening existing agglomerations, not creating new ones. The paper discussed several practical insights for regional policy makers.
Forecasting Exchange Rates with Mixed Models

Gaining accuracy in exchange rate forecasting applications provides true benefits for financial activities. Supported today by the advancements in computing power, machine learning techniques provide good alternatives to traditional time series estimation methods. Very approached in time series forecasting are Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) which offer robust results and allow a flexible data manipulation. When integrating both, the “white-box” feature of conventional methods and the complexity of machine learning techniques, forecasting models perform even better in terms of generated errors. In this study, input variables (independent variables) are selected using an ARIMA technique and are further employed in differently configured multilayered feed-forward neural networks using Broyden-Fletcher-Goldfarb-Shanno (BFGS) optimization algorithm to perform predictions on EUR/RON and CHF/RON exchange rates. Results in terms of mean squared error highlight good results when using mixed models.
Kappa-casein gene polymorphism in Holstein and Iranian native cattle by polymerase chain reaction restriction fragment length polymorphism (PCR-RFLP)

Caseins amount to nearly 80% of the protein output in cow milk. Caseins are biologically important proteins and they are also a raw material for the cheese making industry. The aim of this study was to identify kappa-casein genotype in Holstein and Iranian native cattle. DNA was extracted from 457 blood samples of 247 Holstein and 210 native cattle for identification and genotyping of kappa-casein gene by polymerase chain reaction restriction fragment length polymorphism (PCR-RFLP) assay using HindIII and TaqI restriction endonucleases. The PCR product of the specific primer K-F and K-R gives the 379 bp specific band. Digestion of 379 bp fragment by restriction endonuclease HindIII generated two fragments of 156 and 223 bp. Result of the cut with this enzyme indicate there genotypes AA, AB and BB in the samples. Also, the amplified DNA (379 bp) from the samples remained undigested by TaqI restriction enzyme. These findings suggest that BB genotype could be a good factor for increase of fat and protein content of milk.