Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
CHAPTER 1 SOLVENT MICROEXTRACTION : COMPARISON WITH OTHER POPULAR SAMPLE PREPARATION METHODS

One of the most important steps in any analytical procedure is sample preparation. Most analyses are carried out on samples containing complex mixtures of very small amounts of the chemicals that need to be identified and/or quantified. At the same time, most sample matrices, such as soils or wastewater, are also very complex. Thus, a successful sample preparation method typically has three major objectives: (1) sample matrix simplification and/or replacement, (2) analyte enrichment, and (3) sample cleanup. Many useful sample preparation methods have been developed over the years to address specific needs for analyzing waste and drinking water, foods, medicinals, soil, and air. As an example, many of the most important methods were codified for the analysis of waste and drinking water samples, as exemplified by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) 500 and 600 methods. However, these sample preparation and analysis methodologies, which originally involved traditional laboratory liquid–liquid, liquid–solid, and gaseous extractions, suffered from a number of limitations, including the requirement for significant time-consuming manual labor or in some cases, the use of large quantities of hazardous extracting solvents. As a result, there has been a continual search for improved sample preparation procedures with the following goals: (1) reduction in the number of steps
Gene Combination of CD44 rs187116, CD133 rs2240688, NF-κB1 rs28362491 and GSTM1 Deletion as a Potential Biomarker in Risk Prediction of Breast Cancer in Lower Northern Thailand

Background: Biomarkers play an important role in oncology, including risk assessment, treatment prediction, and monitoring the progression of disease. In breast cancer, many genes are used as biomarkers. Since, several SNP variations of hallmark – related genes have been reported to be of value in risk prediction in various cancers and populations, some genetic polymorphism loci were combined and reported as biomarkers for use in the risk assessment of breast cancer in Thai people. Methods: Twelve cancer gene hallmarks (15 polymorphic loci) were selected and genotyped in 184 breast cancer patients and 176 healthy individuals in Phitsanulok, Thailand. Results: AA genotype of CD44 rs187116 (c.67+4883G>A), the C allele of CD133 rs2240688 (c.*667A>C), the *2 allele (4 bp deletion) of NF-κB1 rs28362491 and the homozygous null allele genotype of GSTM1 were significantly associated with an increased risk of breast cancer (p<0.05). A combination of these 4 significant loci showed that AA-AA-*1*1-homozygous null allele genotype has the greatest correlation with increased risk of breast cancer (OR = 21.00; 95% CI: 1.77 to 248.11; p = 0.015), followed by GA-AA-*2*2- homozygous null allele genotype (p = 0.037) and GG-AC-*1*2- homozygous null allele genotype (p = 0.028). Conclusion: These findings suggest that the polymorphisms of CD44 rs187116 (c.67+4883G>A), CD133 rs2240688 (c.*667A>C), NF-κB1 rs28362491 and GSTM1 homozygous null allele genotype might be associated with an increased risk of breast cancer, and this gene combination could possibly be used as biomarkers for risk prediction, which would be of benefit in planning health surveillance and cancer prevention.
Rational Inattention : A Disciplined Behavioral Model

A recent growing body of studies shows that many important phenomena in economics are, or can be, driven by the fact that humans cannot digest all available information, but they can choose which exact pieces of information to attend to. Such phenomena span macroeconomics, finance, labor economics, political economy, and beyond. People’s choices of what information to attend to, i.e., what optimal heuristic to use, are driven by current economic conditions and determine the form of mistakes that they make. Combining these behavioral insights together with optimizing approaches of classical economics yields a new generally applicable model. The implied behavior features numerous types of empirically supported departures from existing classical models, is potentially highly practical for answering policy questions, and motivates further empirical work. One distinction from most models in behavioral economics is that this model allows for studying the adaptation of agents’ behavioral biases due to changes in policy or economic conditions. ∗European Central Bank and CEPR (bartosz.mackowiak@ecb.int) †CERGE-EI and CEPR (filip.matejka@cerge-ei.cz) ‡Goethe University Frankfurt and CEPR (wiederholt@wiwi.uni-frankfurt.de) §We thank Vladimir Novak and Andrei Matveenko for exemplary research assistance.
Aalborg Universitet The industry 4 . 0 Journey Start the learning journey with the reference architecture model industry 4 . 0

The wave of the fourth industrial revolution (Industry 4.0) is breaking on manufacturing companies. In manufacturing, one of the buzzwords of the moment is "Smart production". Smart production involves manufacturing equipment with many sensors that can generate and transmit large amounts of data. Data and information from manufacturing operations are however not used by most manufacturing companies and this impedes organizational learning. To address this problem, the authors applied in a Smart Production Laboratory the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) Reference Architecture Model Industry 4.0 (RAMI4.0) standard for Smart production. The instantiation contributed to organizational learning in the laboratory by collecting and sharing up-to-date information concerning manufacturing equipment.
Standardizing Proteomics Workflow for Liquid Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry: Technical and Statistical Considerations

Introduction: The quantitative measurements based on liquid chromatography (LC) coupled with mass spectrometry (MS) often suffer from the problem of missing values and data heterogeneity from technical variability. We considered a proteomics data set generated from human kidney biopsy material to investigate the technical effects of sample preparation and the quantitative MS. Methods: We studied the effect of tissue storage methods (TSMs) and tissue extraction methods (TEMs) on data analysis. There are two TSMs: frozen (FR) and FFPE (formalin-fixed paraffin embedded); and three TEMs: MAX, TX followed by MAX and SDS followed by MAX. We assessed the impact of different strategies to analyze the data while considering heterogeneity and MVs. We have used analysis of variance (ANOVA) model to study the effects due to various sources of variability. Results and Conclusion: We found that the FFPE TSM is better than the FR TSM. We also found that the one-step TEM (MAX) is better than those of two-steps TEMs. Furthermore, we found the imputation method is a better approach than excluding the proteins with MVs or using unbalanced design.
Diagnosis and treatment of adrenal insufficiency including adrenal crisis: a Japan Endocrine Society clinical practice guideline

This clinical practice guideline of the diagnosis and treatment of adrenal insufficiency (AI) including adrenal crisis was produced on behalf of the Japan Endocrine Society. This evidence-based guideline was developed by a committee including all authors, and was reviewed by a subcommittee of the Japan Endocrine Society. The Japanese version has already been published, and the essential points have been summarized in this English language version. We recommend diagnostic tests, including measurement of basal cortisol and ACTH levels in combination with a rapid ACTH (250 µg corticotropin) test, the CRH test, and for particular situations the insulin tolerance test. Cut-off values in basal and peak cortisol levels after the rapid ACTH or CRH tests are proposed based on the assumption that a peak cortisol level ≥18 µg/ dL in the insulin tolerance test indicates normal adrenal function. In adult AI patients, 15–25 mg hydrocortisone (HC) in 2–3 daily doses, depending on adrenal reserve and body weight, is a basic replacement regime for AI. In special situations such as sickness, operations, pregnancy and drug interactions, cautious HC dosing or the correct choice of glucocorticoids is necessary. From long-term treatment, optimal diurnal rhythm and concentration of serum cortisol are important for the prevention of cardiovascular disease and osteoporosis. In maintenance therapy during the growth period of patients with 21-hydroxylase deficiency, proper doses of HC should be used, and long-acting glucocorticoids should not be used. Education and carrying an emergency card are essential for the prevention and rapid treatment of adrenal crisis.
What Do You Need Today ? – An Empirical Systematization of Application Areas for Chatbots at Digital Workplaces Completed Research

The application of chatbots in digital workplaces is currently on the rise. Especially in customer or employee support scenarios this kind of artificial intelligence and natural language-based human-computer interface is been used. However, the application of chatbots in real work scenarios is still considered barely and unknown. Therefore, we aim at surveying the current application of chatbots at workplaces. Thus, we conducted an empirical cross-section interview study. Our findings show that chatbots can perform five tasks, which have to be considered in seven application areas. Furthermore, we show generalized results for the combination of tasks and application areas in order to be reused by practice and science in the future.
CLASSIFICATION USING ONTOLOGY-BASED NEURAL NETWORKS

State of the art sound event classification relies in neural networks to learn the associations between class labels and audio recordings within a dataset. These datasets typically define an ontology to create a structure that relates these sound classes with more abstract super classes. Hence, the ontology serves a source of domain knowledge representation of sounds. However, the ontology information is rarely considered, and specially under explored to model neural network architectures. We propose ontology-based neural network architectures for sound event classification. We defined a framework to design simple network architectures that preserve an ontological structure. The networks are trained and evaluated using the MSoS dataset. Results show an improvement in accuracy demonstrating the benefits of the ontology.
Precise local control of liquid crystal pretilt on polymer layers by focused ion beam nanopatterning

Background: The alignment of liquid crystals by surfaces is crucial for applications. It determines the director configuration in the bulk, its stability against defects and electro-optical switching scenarios. The conventional planar alignment of rubbed polymer layers can be locally flipped to vertical by irradiation with a focused ion beam on a scale of tens of nanometers. Results: We propose a digital method to precisely steer the liquid crystal director tilt at polymer surfaces by combining micrometer-size areas treated with focused ion beam and pristine areas. The liquid crystal tends to average the competing vertical and planar alignment actions and is stabilized with an intermediate pretilt angle determined by the local pattern duty factor. In particular, we create micrometer-sized periodic stripe patterns with this factor gradually varying from 0 to 1. Our optical studies confirm a predictable alignment of a nematic liquid crystal with the pretilt angle continuously changing from 0° to 90°. A one-constant model neglecting the difference between the elastic moduli reproduces the results quantitatively correctly. Conclusion: The possibility of nanofabrication of polymer substrates supporting an arbitrary (from planar to vertical) spatially inhomogeneous liquid crystal alignment opens up prospects of “imprinting” electrically tunable versatile metasurfaces constituting lenses, prisms and q-plates.
A Comparison of Rule Extraction Techniques with Emphasis on Heuristics for Imbalanced Datasets

3 List of Tables . 5 List of Figures . 6 Chapter 1: Introduction . 9 1.1: Brief overview of the database: Saginaw Bay II . 9 1.2: Problem Discussion . 10 1.3: Objective and purpose of the study . 13 Chapter 2: Literature Review . 15 2.1: Ecological Databases . 15 2.2: Imbalance . 16 2.3: Outliers.18 2.4: SMOTE . 20 2.5: Artificial Neural Networks . 23 2.6: TREPAN . 25 Chapter 3: Methododlogy and Results . 28 3.1: Activity Flowchart . 28 3.2: Preprocessing data . 29 3.3: Traditional Techniques . 39 3.4: Artificial Neural Networks . 43 3.5: TREPAN . 53 Chapter 4: Summary . 59 References . 61 Appendix A: Artificial Neural Network Results . 67 Appendix B: Traditional Techniques Results . 71 Appendix C: Surface Generation Results . 87 Appendix D: TREPAN Results . 98
Automatic Arabic Text Summarization Based on Fuzzy Logic

The unprecedented growth in the amount of online information available in many languages to users and businesses, including news articles and social media, has made it difﬁ-cult and time consuming for users to identify and consume sought after content. Hence, automatic text summarization for various languages to generate accurate and relevant summaries from the huge amount of information available is essential nowadays. Techniques and methodologies for automatic Arabic text summarization are still immature due to the inherent complexity of the Arabic language in terms of both structure and morphology. This work attempts to improve the performance of Arabic text summarization. We propose a new Arabic text summarization approach based on a new noun extraction method and fuzzy logic. The proposed summarizer is evaluated using EASC corpus and benchmarked against popular state of the art Arabic text summarization systems. The results indicate that our proposed Fuzzy logic approach with noun extraction outperforms existing systems.
GIS-based Land Surface / Subsurface Modeling : New Potential for New Models ?

Many soil erosion and non-point source pollution models have been combined with geographic information systems (GISs) to capitalize on the spatial analysis and display capabilities of these new software tools and provide regional soil erosion and non-point water quality assessments during the past decade. These models and the GIS software were developed by different groups of scientists (at different times and places) and the potential benefits and limitations of this integration warrant closer scrutiny. This paper addresses these data integration issues at two levels: (1) the input data requirements and role of GIS in providing these data for six popular land surface/subsurface models (USLE, ANSWERS, AGNPS, CMLS, LEACHM and TOPMODEL) are reviewed, and (2) the types of research that will be required to build stronger links between GIS and land surface/subsurface models and the potential for building new and improved GIS-based models in the future are examined. The effect of data resolution (i.e., the number and size of units used to represent model inputs) and input data estimation methods on model results is emphasized because: (1) the GIS-based applications vary widely in terms of the data structures and methods used to organize the spatially distributed model inputs, and (2) the development of new GIS-based methods for estimating model inputs will promote the development of new and improved environmental models. Introduction Recent GIS-based Land Surface/Subsurface Modeling Applications New Potential for New Models? References Cited
Report Assembly in Time and Space Reveals Enemy Escape in a Western Palearctic Insect Community

GrahamN. Stone,1,11,* Konrad Lohse,1,11 James A. Nicholls,1 Pablo Fuentes-Utrilla,1 Frazer Sinclair,1,2 Karsten Schönrogge,2 György Csóka,3 George Melika,4 Jose-Luis Nieves-Aldrey,5 Juli Pujade-Villar,6 Majide Tavakoli,7 Richard R. Askew,8 and Michael J. Hickerson9,10,11 1Institute of Evolutionary Biology, University of Edinburgh, The King’s Buildings, West Mains Road, Edinburgh EH9 3JT, UK 2Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, CEH Wallingford, Maclean Building, Benson Lane, Wallingford OX10 8BB, UK 3Department of Forest Protection, Forest Research Institute, 3232 Mátrafüred, PO Box 2, Hungary 4Pest Diagnostic Laboratory, Plant Protection & Soil Conservation Directorate of County Vas, Ambrozy setany 2, 9762 Tanakajd, Hungary 5Departamento de Biodiversidad,MuseoNacional de Ciencias Naturales (CSIC), José Gutiérrez Abascal 2, 28006 Madrid, Spain 6Departament de Biologia Animal, Facultat de Biologia, Universitat de Barcelona, Avinguda Diagonal 645, 08028 Barcelona, Spain 7Lorestan Agricultural and Natural Resources Research Center, Khorramabad, Lorestan, PO Box 348, Iran 8Le Bourg, St. Marcel du Périgord, 24510 Sainte-Alvère, France 9Biology Department, Queens College, City University of New York, 65-30 Kissena Boulevard, Flushing, NY 11367, USA 10Ecology, Evolutionary Biology, and Behavior Doctoral Subprogram, The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, 365 Fifth Ave, New York, NY 10016, USA
Placing Wikimapia: an exploratory analysis

ABSTRACT Wikimapia is a major privately owned volunteered geographic information (VGI) project to collect information about places. Over the past 10 years, Wikimapia has attracted hundreds of thousands of contributors and collected millions of data points, including towns, restaurants, lakes and tourist attractions (http://wikimapia.org). Unlike OpenStreetMap, Wikimapia adopts a ‘placial’ perspective, favouring rich descriptions over detailed geometries and encouraging the collection of textual and visual content about places with approximate footprints. In this article, we first trace the origin and development of Wikimapia as a for-profit project, intimately linked with search engine advertising. Drawing on an in-depth interview with a former developer, we analyse project’s data model and characteristics of its community. As Wikimapia discussions are rife with copyright issues, we discuss the project’s intellectual property, as well as its strategies for quality management. Second, we focus on the popularity of the project, which is crucial to the longevity and sustainability of VGI projects. Using behavioural data from Google Trends, we trace a geography of Interest in Wikimapia, comparing with that in OpenStreetMap, from a temporal and spatial perspective. While OpenStreetMap attracts more interest in high-income countries, Wikimapia emerges as relatively more popular in low- and middle-income countries, countering the received notion of VGI as a Global North phenomenon. Our study suggests that Wikimapia’s popularity is steadily declining.
THE SEMANTICS OF ‘-TA ’ IN JAPANESE FUTURE CONDITIONALS

This paper contends that the so-called past tense morpheme -ta in Japanese is associated with either [+exclude context time] or [+exclude context world] (after Iatridou 2000) when used in the main clause of a sentence. When the latter is used in the consequent (i.e., the main clause) of a conditional, the entire conditional receives a true counterfactual interpretation in that the antecedent is presupposed to be false. On the other hand, when the former is used in the consequent of a conditional, the entire conditional is an epistemic conditional about a past time. What this means is that if -ta is used in the consequent of a conditional and points to a future time, the entire conditional must be a counterfactual conditional about the future time. In other words, this occurrence of -ta must be associated with [+exclude context world]. At least in Japanese, this occurrence of -ta with the [+exclude context world] feature must be interpreted in such a way that it is truly counterfactual. That is, the “future counterfactual sentences” of the type under discussion do not say that the proposition in the antecedent is unlikely to be true; it says instead that it is false. This type of interpretation closely resembles that of the English two-past counterfactuals that refer to future situations (e.g., If John’s son had been born tomorrow (instead of yesterday), John would have been ecstatic. ) In this article, I will argue for the position according to which the Japanese “past tense” morpheme -ta is capable of excluding the context world in the consequent of counterfactuals in the strict sense. This vindicates Iatridou’s (2000) general proposal about the duality of past tense in natural language. For whatever reason, English requires both past tense and the perfect (=past perfect) to produce the same effect when a conditional talks about a fictitious future situation. *This article benefited from presentations of earlier versions of this article on various occasions. In particular, I thank audiences of the presentations at National Institute of Informatics (Tokyo, Japan), Tsukuba University, Kyoto University, and Tohoku Gakuin University. In particular, I am grateful to Chris Tancredi, Makoto Kanazawa, James Higginbotham, Setsuko Arita, Yukinori Takubo, Stefan Kaufmann, Yoshiki Mori, Koichi Takezawa, and Kiyomi Kusumoto for their comments and conversations. I am also indebted to Sabine Iatridou and Shigeru Miyagawa for the discussions we had on conditionals at MIT. Finally, I thank Luka Crnič for his detailed written comments on a near-final version of this manuscript. All remaining errors and inadequacies are mine. © 2014 Toshiyuki Ogihara. In: Luka Crnič and Uli Sauerland (eds.), The Art and Craft of Semantics: A Festschrift for Irene Heim, vol. 2, MITWPL 71, pp. 1–21
Method CRISPR / Cas 9 screening using unique molecular identifiers

Loss-of-function screening by CRISPR/Cas9 gene knockout with pooled, lentiviral guide libraries is a widely applicable method for systematic identification of genes contributing to diverse cellular phenotypes. Here, Random Sequence Labels (RSLs) are incorporated into the guide library, which act as unique molecular identifiers (UMIs) to allow massively parallel lineage tracing and lineage dropout screening. RSLs greatly improve the reproducibility of results by increasing both the precision and the accuracy of screens. They reduce the number of cells needed to reach a set statistical power, or allow a more robust screen using the same number of cells.
THE PERFORMANCE OF ISLAMIC BANKS AND MACROECONOMIC CONDITIONS

The recent financial meltdown has made manifest the need to search for an alternative financial system that is more resilient. Theoretically, the principles underlying Islamic banking and finance promise a more stable system. According to these principles—which originate in the SharÊÑah—Islamic banks should focus on feasible economic investments, undertake transactions backed by real assets and finance potentially productive activities. Hence, in principle, they are insulated from speculative and unproductive activities, and their performance is not subject to the same macroeconomic forces as that of their conventional counterparts. However, empirical evidence that supports the claim that the performance of Islamic banks is not related to the external economic environment is very limited. Accordingly, the motivation of this study is to fill in the gap by providing empirical evidence as to whether the performance of Islamic banks depends more on their internal conditions rather than external factors. Using global Islamic banks’ data and applying the standard panel data approach, our findings point that the performance of Islamic banks depends more on bank specific characteristics such as capital, asset quality and liquidity while macroeconomic factors do not significantly influence Islamic banks’ profits. This lends support to the theoretical assertion that Islamic bank performance does not rely heavily on the macroeconomic environment.