Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Greenhouse Vegetable Market Development Based on the Supply Chain Strategy in the Republic of Uzbekistan

In the context of a need to expand the export potential of greenhouse vegetables of Uzbekistan, the goal of this research was to develop an approach to determining development strategies for greenhouse businesses in Uzbekistan on the international vegetable market. By means of correlation and regression analysis and a method of expert assessment, a system of indicators has been determined that quantitatively and qualitatively defines the competitiveness of Uzbek greenhouse businesses on the international vegetable market. A data array has been formed by standardized values of indicators for Uzbekistan in 2012â€“2018 aggregated annually (the time series was seven observations). The analytic hierarchy process by [1] and Fibonacci numbers have been used to develop models for comparative assessment of competitive advantages and to calculate an integrated index of countriesâ€™ competitiveness on the global greenhouse vegetable market. Based on the indices of competitiveness and world vegetable prices, a matrix of countriesâ€™ strategies on the international vegetable market has been formed. This matrix has testified that greenhouse businesses in Uzbekistan are positioned in a trade-off area with an overcharging strategy. The results obtained have allowed the authors to identify key threats to the sales of vegetables and to develop practical recommendations for expanding the export potential of greenhouse businesses in Uzbekistan on the international vegetable market.
Assessing Fitness for Military Enlistment: Physical, Medical, and Mental Health Standards

The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) faces short-term and long-term challenges in selecting and recruiting an enlisted force to meet personnel requirements associated with diverse and changing missions. The DoD has established standards for aptitudes/abilities, medical conditions, and physical fitness to be used in selecting recruits who are most likely to succeed in their jobs and complete the first term of service (generally 36 months). In 1999, the Committee on the Youth Population and Military Recruitment was established by the National Research Council (NRC) in response to a request from the DoD. One focus of the committee's work was to examine trends in the youth population relative to the needs of the military and the standards used to screen applicants to meet these needs. When the committee began its work in 1999, the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force had recently experienced recruiting shortfalls. By the early 2000s, all the Services were meeting their goals; however, in the first half of calendar year 2005, both the Army and the Marine Corps experienced recruiting difficulties and, in some months, shortfalls. When recruiting goals are not being met, scientific guidance is needed to inform policy decisions regarding the advisability of lowering standards and the impact of any change on training time and cost, job performance, attrition, and the health of the force. Assessing Fitness for Military Enlistment examines the current physical, medical, and mental health standards for military enlistment in light of (1) trends in the physical condition of the youth population; (2) medical advances for treating certain conditions, as well as knowledge of the typical course of chronic conditions as young people reach adulthood; (3) the role of basic training in physical conditioning; (4) the physical demands and working conditions of various jobs in today's military services; and (5) the measures that are used by the Services to characterize an individual's physical condition. The focus is on the enlistment of 18- to 24-year-olds and their first term of service.
Automated Kidney Segmentation in 3D Ultrasound Imagery, and its Application in Computer-Assisted Trauma Diagnosis

Automated Kidney Segmentation in 3D Ultrasound Imagery, and its Application in Computer-Assisted Trauma Diagnosis Mahdi Marsousi Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering University of Toronto, 2016 Due to the limitations of emergency healthcare/technology, blunt abdominal bleeding causes a large number of preventable deaths each year. To save a trauma patient’s life, a rapid diagnosis is required, which is not always available in emergency situations. This is the thesis of this PhD research that a computer-assisted algorithm based on 3D ultrasound imagery, as a portable imaging modality, provides a systematic solution to facilitate rapid diagnosis of trauma patients in emergency situations by first responders (ie. paramedics). 3D ultrasound imagery, which is a portable imaging system, is selected as the preferred imaging modality for trauma diagnosis, because it can be carried to the location of emergency situation. Therefore, by eliminating the need of moving an unstable patient to an imaging room, rapid trauma diagnosis is achievable. Compared to 2D sonography, 3D ultrasound imaging facilitates automated detection and localization of internal organs. This is essential, specifically in the sense that ultrasonographers are not always present at emergency situations. Hence, a computer-assisted solution is essential to guide first responders to perform trauma diagnosis using a 3D ultrasound device. An abdominal bleeding has a high tendency to align around the right kidney. The right-upperquadrant view of sonography shows the entire kidney shape, and therefore, it is considered as the most relevant internal view to trauma diagnosis. Paramedics usually lack proper knowledge to find the rightupper-quadrant view, to detect the kidney shape, and to detect an internal bleeding using an ultrasound imaging device. Hence, computer-assisted algorithms are required to perform these tasks. The focus of this thesis is to introduce automated methods to detect and segment the kidney shape. The detected kidney shape will be used for two purposes: (a) it is used to calculate the ultrasound probe’s misalignment with respect to the right-upper-quadrant view, which is used to guide the operator to move the probe toward the correct alignment on the patient’s body; (b) the detected kidney shape is used to initialize the kidney segmentation process, and thereby, an automated kidney segmentation approach is achieved. The kidney segmentation output can be used to automatically detect an internal bleeding.
Global Dynamic Molecular Profiles of Stomatal Lineage Cell Development by Single-Cell RNA Sequencing

The regulation of stomatal lineage cell development has been extensively investigated. However a comprehensive characterization of this biological process based on single-cell transcriptome analysis has not yet been reported. Here, we performed RNA-seq on over 12,844 individual cells from the cotyledons of five-day-old Arabidopsis seedlings. We identified 11 cell clusters corresponding mostly to cells at specific stomatal developmental stages with a series of new marker genes. Comparative analysis of genes with the highest variable expression in these cell clusters revealed three transcriptional networks that regulate the development of mesophyll and guard cells, as well as the differentiation from protodermal to guard mother cells. We investigated the developmental dynamics of marker genes via pseudo-time analysis which revealed potential interactions between them. The identification of several novel marker genes suggests new regulatory mechanisms during development of stomatal cell lineage.
Deceiving Two Masters: The Effects of Financial Incentives and Reputational Concerns on Reporting Bias

We study managers’ decisions to bias financial reports if these reports are used by capital and labor markets to learn about firm value and managerial talent. If managers have private information on their financial and reputational incentives, we identify interactions in the capital and labor markets’ use of reports: The reception of reports in one market motivates reporting bias, which reduces value relevance and price e ffici ncy in the other market. This interaction changes established results and has implications for financial reporting standard setters: We characterize environments where capital market efficiency can be improved by eliminating information on managerial talent from financial reports – even if this information is relevant for investors. This is particularly the case if there is high uncertainty about managers’ reputational concerns and if talent uncertainty represents a small part of the overall fundamental uncertainty.
Phytochemical and antibacterial properties of Diodia scandens and Phyllanthus amarus on staphylococci isolated from patients in tertiary hospitals in Nigeria

Background: The rapidly growing use of herbal drugs or supplements in complementary and alternative medicine as substitute for orthodox medicine both in developed and developing countries is fast gaining ground. Aim: This study evaluated both qualitative and quantitative phytochemical constituents of Diodia scandens and Phyllanthus amarus vis-a-vis their synergistic effects on clinically isolated staphylococci. Methods: A total of 200 wounds and burns samples were obtained from patients in the accident and emergency unit of different tertiary hospitals. Staphylococci were isolated and characterised using standard microbiological procedures. Whole plants of D. scandens and P. amarus were Soxhlet extracted with absolute ethanol. The phytochemical analysis was carried out using standard methods. Also, the minimum inhibitory concentration and bactericidal effect of the combined extracts were determined. Results: The phytochemicals present in D. scandens include saponin (6.58%), tannin (2.27 mg/100g), alkaloids (10.53%) and phytin phosphorus (1.80 mg/g), while phytochemicals in P. amarus include saponin (9.99%), tannin (5.82 mg/100g), alkaloids (9.67%) and phytin phosphorus (2.44 mg/g), revealing their antibacterial properties and phytonutrients. The combination study showed that a synergistic effect exists between the two plants on the isolates tested compared with individual extracts alone at the concentrations used. Conclusion: It is noteworthy that the traditional use of these plants was not only confirmed but the combination of D. scandens and P. amarus also proved more effective as antibacterial agent compared with a previous study on the same plants using single determination.
New product co-creation through practice-based innovation: a case study

In an increasingly competitive environment which facilitates rapid changes in consumers' preferences and needs, an organization's ability to acquire and exploit knowledge is of vital. Hence, through continuous interaction with both users and external stakeholders, an organization should be able to simultaneously utilise the knowledge obtained through everyday work experiences (practice-based), and knowledge updated by research advances (research-based), to remain connected with the market's needs and trends. Practice-based knowledge enables organizations to draw stimulus from information collected by employees through interactions with stakeholders and clients during their everyday working practice. Recently, social product development (SPD) has received increasing attention from scholars and practitioners who have acknowledged it to be a new, and more efficient route through which to improve products through the optimization of the knowledge acquisition process. As part of the SPD approach, organizations must rely on what has been termed 'mass collaboration'.
Statistical models to capture protein-RNA interaction footprints from truncation-based CLIP-seq data (Statistische Modelle zur Detektion von Protein-RNA Interaktionen aus trunkierungsbasierten CLIP-seq Daten)

Protein-RNA interactions play an important role in all post-transcriptional regulatory processes. High throughput detection of protein-RNA interactions has been facilitated by the emerging CLIP-seq (crosslinking and immunoprecipitation combined with highthroughput sequencing) techniques. Enrichments in mapped reads as well as base transitions or deletions at crosslink sites can be used to infer binding regions. Singlenucleotide resolution techniques (iCLIP and eCLIP) have been achieved by capturing high fractions of cDNAs which are truncated at protein-RNA crosslink sites. Increasing numbers of datasets and derivatives of these protocols have been published in recent years, requiring tailored computational analyses. Existing methods unfortunately do not explicitly model the specifics of truncation patterns and possible biases caused by background binding or crosslinking sequence preferences. We present PureCLIP, a hidden Markov model based approach, which simultaneously performs peak calling and individual crosslink site detection. It is capable of incorporating external data to correct for non-specific background signals and, for the first time, for the crosslinking biases. We devised a comprehensive evaluation based on three strategies. Firstly, we developed a workflow to simulate iCLIP data, which starts from real RNA-seq data and known binding regions and then mimics the experimental steps of the iCLIP protocol, including the generation of background signals. Secondly, we used experimental iCLIP and eCLIP datasets, using the proteins’ known predominant binding regions. And thirdly, we assessed the agreement of called sites between replicates, assuming target-specific signals are reproducible between replicates. On both simulated and real data, PureCLIP is consistently more precise in calling crosslink sites than other state-of-the-art methods. In particular when incorporating input control data and crosslink associated motifs (CL-motifs) PureCLIP is up to 13% more precise than other methods andwe show that it has an up to 20% higher agreement across replicates. Moreover, our method can optionally merge called crosslink sites to binding regions based on their distance and we show that the resulting regions reflect the known binding regions with high-resolution. Additionally, we demonstrate that our method achieves a high precision robustly over a range of different settings and performs well for proteins with different binding characteristics. Lastly, we extended the method to include individual CLIP replicates and show that this can boost the precision even further. PureCLIP and its documentation are publicly available at https://github.com/skrakau/PureCLIP.
A HoloLens Framework for Augmented Reality Applications in Breast Cancer Surgery

This project aims to support oncologic breast-conserving surgery by creating a platform for better surgical planning through the development of a framework that is capable of displaying a virtual model of the tumour(s) requiring surgery, on a patient’s breast. Breastconserving surgery is the first clear option when it comes to tackling cases of breast cancer, but the surgery comes with risks. The surgeon wants to maintain clean margins while performing the procedure such that the disease does not resurface. This calls for the importance of surgical planning where the surgeon consults with radiologists and presurgical imaging such as Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). The MRI prior to the surgical procedure, however, is taken with the patient in the prone position (face-down) but the surgery happens in a supine position (face-up). Thus mapping the location of the tumour(s) to the corresponding anatomical position from the MRI is a tedious task which requires a large amount of expertise and time given that the organ is soft and flexible. For this project, the tumour is visualized in the corresponding anatomical position to assist in surgical planning. Augmented Reality is the best option for this problem and this, in turn, led to an investigation of the application capability of the Microsoft HoloLens to solve this problem. Given its multitude of sensors and resolution of display the device is a fine candidate for this process. However, the HoloLens is still under development with a large number of limitations in its use. This work tries to compensate for these limitations using the existing hardware and software in the device’s arsenal. Within this masters thesis, the principal questions answered are related to the acquiring of data from breast mimicking objects in acceptable resolutions, discriminating between the information based on photometry, offloading the data to a computer for post-processing in creating a correspondence between the MRI data and acquired data, and finally retrieving the processed information such that the MRI information can be used for visualizing the tumor in the anatomically precise position. Unfortunately, time limitations for this project led to an incomplete system which is not completely synchronized, however, our work has solidified the grounds for the software aspects toward the final goals set out such that extensive exploration need only be done in the imaging side of this problem.
Rôle des récepteurs aux oxystérols LXRs (Liver X Receptors) dans la dissémination métastatique du cancer de la prostate

La prise en charge clinique du cancer de la prostate est complexe. L’identification des elements et alterations genetiques impliques dans la progression de la maladie est donc capitale. Les alterations metaboliques representent des changements cles vis-a-vis de la croissance de la cellule tumorale. Parmi ces modifications, l’augmentation du metabolisme du cholesterol est frequemment observee au sein de differentes pathologies tumorales, dont le cancer de la prostate. En lien, des etudes epidemiologiques associent l’enrichissement du cholesterol avec une augmentation de l’incidence, la progression et l’agressivite de la maladie. Les recepteurs nucleaires aux oxysterols LXRs (Liver X Receptors) constituent des regulateurs majeurs de l’homeostasie du cholesterol, et differents travaux recents mettent en evidence leur potentiel anti-proliferatif et pro-apoptotique dans differentes lignees cellulaires du cancer de la prostate. En association ces travaux de these demontrent, dans un modele murin d’adenocarcinome prostatique PTEN-dependant, une activation endogene et constitutive des LXRs en reponse a une augmentation du taux de cholesterol intra-prostatique, principale source des ligands oxysterols. L’invalidation additionnelle des LXRs dans ce contexte conduit a une augmentation importante de la croissance tumorale et a la dissemination metastatique, notamment expliquee par une deregulation de la voie du TGFβ et de la transition epithelio-mesenchymateuse. L'ensemble de ces resultats place les LXRs comme des cibles therapeutiques prometteuses.
A divide‐by‐3 planar power divider with >30 dB isolation

A new three‐way planar power divider, based on recombinant structure and multisection impedance transformers achieving equal division ratio and high isolation is presented. The new design structure comprises of unequal impedance multisections, and achieves higher isolation than planarized Wilkinson dividers and smaller structure than recombinant designs. The divider is completely modeled analytically using transmission line theory, followed by verification through simulation and measurements. With an overall size of 23.5 mm × 29 mm, the divider demonstrates a bandwidth from 1.8 GHz to 2.8 GHz with measured 20 dB isolation bandwidth of 43%, peak isolation of 31 dB, insertion loss of 4.99 ± 0.5 dB and return loss better than 13 dB at 2.4 GHz. The planar structure, small size and highest reported isolation at 2.4 GHz, makes the design suitable for MMICs, antenna feed networks and power amplifier applications.
Break-even method of investment analysis

Break-even analysis is a useful tool to study the relationship between fixed costs, variable costs and returns. A break-even point defines when an investment will generate a positive return and can be determined graphically or with simple mathematics. Break-even analysis computes the volume of production at a given price necessary to cover all costs. Break-even price analysis computes the price necessary at a given level of production to cover all costs. To explain how break-even analysis works, it is necessary to define the cost items. Fixed costs, incurred after the decision to enter into a business activity is made, are not directly related to the level of production. Fixed costs include, but are not limited to, depreciation on equipment, interest costs, taxes and general overhead expenses. Total fixed costs are the sum of the fixed costs. Variable costs change in direct relation to volume of output. They may include cost of goods sold or production expenses such as labor and power costs, feed, fuel, veterinary, irrigation and other expenses directly related to the production of a com modity or investment in a capital asset. Total variable costs (TVC) are the sum of the variable costs for the specified level of production or output. Average vari able costs are the variable costs per unit of output or of TVC divided by units of output. Total fixed costs are shown in Figure 1 by the broken horizontal line. Total fixed costs do not change as the level of production increases. Total variable costs of production are indicated by the broken line sloping upward, which illustrates that total variable costs increase directly as production increases. The total cost line is the sum of the total fixed costs and total variable costs. The total cost line paral lels the total variable cost line, but it begins at the level of the total fixed cost line. The total income line is the gross value of the output. This is shown as a dotted line, starting at the lower left of the graph and slanting upward. At any point, the total income line is equivalent to the num ber of units produced multiplied by the price per unit. The key point (break-even point) is the intersec tion of the total cost line and the total income line (Point P). A vertical line down from this point shows the level of production necessary to cover all costs. Production greater than this level generates positive revenue; losses are incurred at lower levels of produc tion.
Electrochemical Response Transductions of Graphenated-Polyaniline Nanosensor for Environmental Anthracene

A graphenated–polyaniline (GR-PANI) nanocomposite sensor was constructed and used for the determination of anthracene. The direct electro-oxidation behavior of anthracene on the GR-PANI modified glassy carbon electrode (GCE) was used as the sensing principle. The results indicate thatthe response profile of the oxidation of anthracene on GR-PANI-modified GCE provides for the construction of sensor systems based onamperometric and potentiometric signal transductions. A dynamic linear range of 0.12100 μM anthracene and a detection limit of 0.044 μM anthracene were established for the sensor system. Keywords—Electrochemical sensors, environmental pollutants, graphenated-polymers, polyaromatic hydrocarbon.