Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Evaluation of Effect of Ethanol Extracts of Moringa oleifera and Cajanus cajan Leaves on Lipid Profiles in Alloxan Induced Diabetic Albino Rats

The study was designed to evaluate the effect of ethanol extract of Moringa oleifera and Cajanus cajan leaves on lipid profiles in alloxan induced diabetic albino rats. Diabetes was induced in three groups of rats, one group was not treated while two groups were treated orally with M. oleifera and C. cajan ethanol leaf extracts at 200,400 and 800 mg/kg body weight once for seven days respectively. One group was not induced and received feed and distilled water only. The lipid profiles were determined from blood plasma by spectrophotometeric method. Twenty four albino rats were grouped into A, B, C and D. Group C and D were further subdivided into C C , C , D , D and D respectively. Diabetes was induced in all the groups, except 1, 2 3 1 2 3 group A (positive control). Group B (negative control) was induced and was not treated while Group C and D were treated with ethanol extract of M. oleifera and C. cajan leaves which were given orally to the rats once daily for seven days at varying concentration of 200,400 and 800 mg/kg body weight. The result of the study showed that there were significant (P<0.05) reductions in the mean body weights. The result revealed that a significant (P<0.05) decrease in the total cholesterol level in albino rats treated with ethanol extracts of M. oleifera and C. cajan leaves except in 200 mg/kg body weight where no significant (P>0.05) decrease was observed. A significant (P<0.05) increase was also observed in HDL-C level in albino rats treated with ethanol extracts of M. oleifera and C. cajan leaves except in 200 mg/kg body weight where a significant (P<0.05) decrease was recorded with C. cajan. The result also revealed that there was significant (p<0.05) decrease in the LDL-C level in albino rats treated with C. cajan extracts except in 800 mg/kg body weight where no significant (P>0.05) decrease was observed while a significant (p<0.05) increase was observed in LDL-C level in rats when Moringa oleifera ethanol leaf extract was administered. The result also showed a significant (p<0.05) increase in triglyceride level in albino rats treated with ethanol extracts of M. oleifera leaf while no significant (p<0.05) increase was observed in triglyceride level in the group treated with C. cajan leaf extract. The result indicates that Moringa oleifera and Cajanus cajan leaves may be useful in the management of cardiovascular disease.
Circuit Topologies, Modeling, Control Schemes, and Applications of Modular Multilevel Converters

Modular multilevel converters have several attractive features such as a modular structure, the capability of transformer-less operation, easy scalability in terms of voltage and current, low expense for redundancy and fault tolerant operation, high availability, utilization of standard components, and excellent quality of the output waveforms. These features have increased the interest of industry and research in this topology, resulting in the development of new circuit configurations, converter models, control schemes, and modulation strategies. This paper presents a review of the latest achievements of modular multilevel converters regarding the mentioned research topics, new applications, and future trends.
Fluorescent Staining Method for Bacterial Endospores

We have developed a quick, simple technique for the fluorescent staining of bacterial endospores. This technique was developed using Bacillus subtilis endospores. Our technique requires minimal sample heating so it can safely be carried out entirely in a glove-box. The endospores stain diagnostically as an oval with a standard fluorescent nucleotide stain, acridine orange.
Diabetes Mellitus and its Complications in a Hungarian Population

The aim of this study was to examine the disease characteristics and complications of diabetes mellitus in patients in a Hungarian rural community. Data relating to age, sex, date of onset of diabetes, fasting blood glucose values and all diseases associated with diabetics were retrieved from the medical records of patients. Almost six percent (5.7%) of the population has diabetes mellitus. The percentage of Type I diabetic patients in this population was 5.8 percent. The prevalence of diabetes was slightly but not significantly higher in females than in males. The mean age of the diabetic population was 52.1 ± 11.3 for male and 53.47 ± 15.7 for the female patients. The peak age of onset of diabetes mellitus was in the sixth decade of life. The mean fasting blood sugar value was 10.64 ± 0.6 and 10.57 ± 0.5 mmol L−1, in male and female diabetic patients (n = 103), respectively. Diabetic patients presented with many signs and symptoms in the general practice setting. The findings of this study showed that diabetics present with many disease conditions and signs and symptoms in the general practice setting. Many of these conditions are known to be associated with diabetes while others are not. As a result of the adverse effects of diabetes mellitus on the cardiovascular system and on body metabolism as a whole, the damage and morbidity caused by diabetes mellitus may have been underestimated. The results of this study have shed light on the unrecognised complications of diabetes mellitus.
3D Polarized Channel Modeling and Performance Comparison of MIMO Antenna Configurations With Different Polarizations

We propose a three-dimensional (3D) polarized MIMO channel model, which takes into account 3D power angular spectrum and comprehensive propagation characteristics of electromagnetic waves excited by polarized antennas. Based on the model, we derive a close form expression of the spatial correlation as a function of the physical parameters representing both characteristics of arbitrary antennas and propagation environment in 3D space. The spatial correlation expression allows to use the Von Mises Fisher (VMF) distribution, resulting in a more accurate and general channel model. Through simulation, we evaluate and compare performance, in terms of the spatial correlation and capacity, of 2 × 2 MIMO configurations with different polarizations, i.e., V/V, V/H, and slanted ±45° polarizations, as a function of critical input parameters including elevation angle, antenna orientation, antenna spacing, cross-polarization discrimination (XPD), and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The effect of the parameters on the performance is analyzed, and verified in certain cases through the literature.
Genome Sequence of Clostridium butyricum Strain DSM 10702, a Promising Producer of Biofuels and Biochemicals

ABSTRACT Clostridium butyricum strains have been considered promising producers of biofuels and biochemicals, such as hydrogen, butanol, butyric acid, and 1,3-propanediol. Here, we present a 4.59-Mb assembly of the genome sequence of DSM 10702 (VPI 3266), a type strain of C. butyricum.
Precocious Initiation into Smoking, Alcohol Use, and Gambling among Children with Conduct Problems

Objective: Adolescent participation in risky and addictive behaviours, such as smoking, substance use, and gambling has the potential to lead to many serious problems. The presence of conduct problems (CPs) and early initiation into risky and addictive behaviours have been independently shown to be associated with adolescent and young adult smoking, drinking, and gambling. Nevertheless, the relation between early initiation into risky and addictive behaviours and CPs remains to be explored among pre-adolescents. Our study aims to examine the prospective relation between CPs in early primary school and pre-adolescent initiation into smoking, alcohol use, and gambling. Method: Our study used data from participants in an ongoing prospective, longitudinal study at the Université de Sherbrooke to examine cigarette, alcohol, and gambling initiation among primary school-aged boys and girls with CPs. Children were recruited between the ages of 6 and 9 years from several low socioeconomic status public schools in diverse geographical regions of Quebec. Initiation into cigarettes, alcohol, and gambling was measured 1 year later. Results: Children with CPs were found to be at greater risk for early initiation into smoking, alcohol, and gambling. These effects remained even once other known risk factors, such as poor parental supervision and child effortful control, were controlled for. Conclusions: These results suggest that CPs present in early elementary school can predict early initiation in to potentially addictive behaviours among boys and girls. Implications for targeted preventive intervention are discussed.
Shilling Attacks Against Memory-Based Privacy-Preserving Recommendation Algorithms

Privacy-preserving collaborative filtering schemes are becoming increasingly popular because they handle the information overload problem without jeopardizing privacy. However, they may be susceptible to shilling or profile injection attacks, similar to traditional recommender systems without privacy measures. Although researchers have proposed various privacy-preserving recommendation frameworks, it has not been shown that such schemes are resistant to profile injection attacks. In this study, we investigate two memory-based privacy-preserving collaborative filtering algorithms and analyze their robustness against several shilling attack strategies. We first design and apply formerly proposed shilling attack techniques to privately collected databases. We analyze their effectiveness in manipulating predicted recommendations by experimenting on real data-based benchmark data sets. We show that it is still possible to manipulate the predictions significantly on databases consisting of masked preferences even though a few of the attack strategies are not effective in a privacy-preserving environment.
Public Attitudes and Beliefs About Living Kidney Donation: Focus Group Study

Background With the rising prevalence of end-stage kidney disease worldwide, the proportion of the general community who might subsequently be called upon to consider living related kidney donation is also increasing. Knowledge about the attitudes and beliefs among the general public about living kidney donation is limited. We aimed to describe public perspectives on living kidney donation. Methods Participants were recruited from three states in Australia to participate in 12 focus groups (n=113). Transcripts were analyzed thematically. Results We identified six themes: expected benefits (saving and improving life, societal gain, donor satisfaction, reassurance and control), consciousness of donor risks (compromised health, lifestyle limitations, financial consequences, relationship tensions, devastation), social precariousness (fear of the unknown, exploitative connotation, recipient deservingness, protecting conscience, potential regret), upholding fairness (equal access to transplantation, reciprocity, prevent prejudice, donor safety net), decisional autonomy (body ownership, right to know, valid relationships), and assumed duty of care (facilitate informed decision-making, safeguard against coercion, ensure psychological safety, justifiable risk, objectivity, warranted disclosure). Conclusion The expected benefits for recipients bolster public support for living kidney donor transplantation; however, ethical dilemmas and concerns for the donor instilled ambivalence about living donation. Protecting equity and autonomy, and an implicit trust in health professionals to protect donors and recipients mitigated some of these uncertainties. Developing interventions, practices, and policies that address community skepticism and values may promote awareness and trust in living kidney donation.
Broadly Reactive and Highly Sensitive Assay for Norwalk-Like Viruses Based on Real-Time Quantitative Reverse Transcription-PCR

ABSTRACT We have developed an assay for the detection of Norwalk-like viruses (NLVs) based on reverse transcription-PCR (RT-PCR) that is highly sensitive to a broad range of NLVs. We isolated virus from 71 NLV-positive stool specimens from 37 outbreaks of nonbacterial acute gastroenteritis and sequenced the open reading frame 1 (ORF1)-ORF2 junction region, the most conserved region of the NLV genome. The data were subjected to multiple-sequence alignment analysis and similarity plot analysis. We used the most conserved sequences that react with diverse NLVs to design primers and TaqMan probes for the respective genogroups of NLV, GI and GII, for use in a real-time quantitative RT-PCR assay. Our method detected NLV in 99% (80 of 81) of the stool specimens that were positive by electron microscopy, a better detection rate than with the two available RT-PCR methods. Furthermore, our new method also detected NLV in 20 of 28 stool specimens from the same NLV-related outbreaks that were negative for virus by electron microscopy. Our new assay is free from carryover DNA contamination and detects low copy numbers of NLV RNA. It can be used as a routine assay for diagnosis as well as for elucidation of the epidemiology of NLV infections.
Full measurement of the stokes parameters of a light beam using on-chip silicon nanoantennas

Beam polarimetry is a versatile tool in optical technology enabling the measurement of the light polarization state. In this work, we demonstrate an on-chip polarization analyzer working at telecom wavelengths that allows for a direct measurement of the Stokes parameters of an incoming plane wave. The analyzer consists of three silicon nanoantennas coupled to three waveguides (having six outputs) so that each nanoantenna responds to a certain polarization state by changing the amount of optical power coupled to each waveguide as well as the direction of propagation along the coupled waveguide.
Large and noisy vs small and reliable: combining 2 types of corpora for adjective valence extraction

This work investigates a possibility of combining two different types of corpora to build a valence lexicon for French adjectives. We complete adjectival frames extracted from a Treebank with statistical cues computed from a large automatically parsed corpus. This experiment shows how linguistic knowledge and large amount of annotated data can be used in a complementary manner.
Validating the MetaTheory of Programming Languages

We report on work in progress in building an environment for the validation of the meta-theory of programming languages artifacts, for example the correctness of compiler translations; the basic idea is to couple property-based testing with binders-aware functional programming as the meta-language for specification and testing. Treating binding signatures and related notions, such as new names generation, α-equivalence and capture-avoiding substitution correctly and effectively is crucial in the verification and validation of PL (meta)theory. We use Haskell as our meta-language, since it offers not only a very expressive type system, but various libraries for both random and exhaustive generation of tests [7, 8, 13], as well as for binders [16]. We validate our approach on benchmarks of mutations presented in the literature [2,10] and some examples of code “in the wild”. In the former case, not only did we very quickly (re)discover all the planted bugs, but we achieved that with very little configuration effort with comparison to [10]. In the second case we located several simple bugs that had survived for years in publicly available (academic) code. We believe our tool adds to the increasing evidence of the usefulness of property-based testing for semantic engineering of programming languages, in alternative or prior to full verification.
An integrated coil driver with discrete control and power efficient ASK modulation for transcutaneous power transmission

An Integrated feedback controlled coil driver for transcutaneous power transmission was implemented in a high voltage 0. 18μm CMOS process. The coil driver was compensated using a discrete switched-capacitor controller for reducing the compensation capacitor area. Different methods to reduce the on-resistance of the coil driver switch had also been investigated. When compared to the previous design, the figure of merit for measuring the effectiveness of generating coil current was improved over 2.5 times. ASK modulation on the coil current was achieved by switching on or off an off-chip capacitor. Power increase during ASK modulation was reduced by 49.4% when compared to the previous design.
A cache replacement policy based on re-reference count

The cache replacement policy is a major factor which determines the effectiveness of memory hierarchy. The replacement policy affects both the hit rate and the access latency of the cache. It decides the cache block to be replaced to give room for the incoming block. The replacement policy has to be chosen in such a way that the cache misses are reduced. Last level cache misses causes hundreds of stall cycles due to the need for main memory access. So last level cache misses are given more priority over L1 cache misses. The traditional cache replacement policy used is Least Recently Used (LRU) policy. LRU policy favors workloads having cyclic access pattern which fit in cache, but it exhibit thrashing behavior for memory-intensive workloads that does not fit in the available cache. Hence, many replacement policies were proposed to improve the miss rate for last level caches while maintaining low hardware overhead and minimum design changes. Here a novel replacement policy which is a variation of LRU Insertion policy (LIP) based on re-reference count is proposed. The promotion policy in LIP is modified to implement the new policy which is based on the re-reference count. The proposed replacement policy was implemented and performance comparisons of the replacement policies were done on Gem5 simulator using cpu2006 benchmarks. Under this policy, the memory intensive workload mcf attains 64% improvement in L2 cache miss rate over LRU policy.
Acceleration-insensitive fully-decoupled tuning fork (FDTF) MEMS vibratory gyroscope with 1°/HR BIAS instability

This study presents the design and implementation of a single-axis MEMS vibratory gyroscope with reduced coupling error and enhanced vibration resistance. Features of this study are (1) exploiting the fully-decoupled mechanism to minimize the coupling error between the operating modes; (2) introducing the tuning fork architecture combined with specific coupler designs to enhance the vibration resistance; (3) a compact structural design with small footprint (2mm ×2mm). Measurement results show a reduced coupling error signal of near 126°/s, and the acceleration sensitivity is below 1.5°/s/g. Moreover, the angular rate sensitivity is 1.25mV/°/s and the non-linearity is 0.68% within +300°/s. Contributed to the reduction of the coupling error and external vibration interference, the FDTF gyroscope achieved a bias instability of 1°/hr and the ARW of 7.2°/hr/°Hz.
TOMO3D: 3-D joint refraction and reflection traveltime tomography parallel code for active-source seismic data—synthetic test

We present a new 3-D traveltime tomography code (TOMO3D) for the modelling of active-source seismic data that uses the arrival times of both refracted and reflected seismic phases to derive the velocity distribution and the geometry of reflecting boundaries in the subsurface. This code is based on its popular 2-D version TOMO2D from which it inherited the methods to solve the forward and inverse problems. The traveltime calculations are done using a hybrid ray-tracing technique combining the graph and bending methods. The LSQR algorithm is used to perform the iterative regularized inversion to improve the initial velocity and depth models. In order to cope with an increased computational demand due to the incorporation of the third dimension, the forward problem solver, which takes most of the run time (∼90 per cent in the test presented here), has been parallelized with a combination of multi-processing and message passing interface standards. This parallelization distributes the ray-tracing and traveltime calculations among available computational resources. The code's performance is illustrated with a realistic synthetic example, including a checkerboard anomaly and two reflectors, which simulates the geometry of a subduction zone. The code is designed to invert for a single reflector at a time. A data-driven layer-stripping strategy is proposed for cases involving multiple reflectors, and it is tested for the successive inversion of the two reflectors. Layers are bound by consecutive reflectors, and an initial velocity model for each inversion step incorporates the results from previous steps. This strategy poses simpler inversion problems at each step, allowing the recovery of strong velocity discontinuities that would otherwise be smoothened.
SVM-based Human Detection Combining Self-quotient ε-filter and Histograms of Oriented Gradients

This paper describes a noise robust SVM-based human detection combining self-quotient ε-filt r (SQEF) and histograms of oriented gradients (HOG). Although human detection combining HOG and SVM is a powerful approach, as it uses local intensity gradients, it is difficult to handle noise corrupted images. To handle noise corrupted images, we introduce self-quotient ε-filter (SQEF), and implement it in human detection combining HOG and SVM. SQEF is an advanced self-quotient filter (SQF), and can clearly extract features from the images not only when they have illumination variations but also when they are corrupted with noise. The new approach gives a robust human detection from noise corrupted images using the data trained by intact images without noise.
A motion based approach for audio-visual automatic speech recognition

The research work presented in this thesis introduces novel approaches for both visual region of interest extraction and visual feature extraction for use in audio-visual automatic speech recognition. In particular, the speaker‘s movement that occurs during speech is used to isolate the mouth region in video sequences and motionbased features obtained from this region are used to provide new visual features for audio-visual automatic speech recognition. The mouth region extraction approach proposed in this work is shown to give superior performance compared with existing colour-based lip segmentation methods. The new features are obtained from three separate representations of motion in the region of interest, namely the difference in luminance between successive images, block matching based motion vectors and optical flow. The new visual features are found to improve visual-only and audiovisual speech recognition performance when compared with the commonly-used appearance feature-based methods. In addition, a novel approach is proposed for visual feature extraction from either the discrete cosine transform or discrete wavelet transform representations of the mouth region of the speaker. In this work, the image transform is explored from a new viewpoint of data discrimination; in contrast to the more conventional data preservation viewpoint. The main findings of this work are that audio-visual automatic speech recognition systems using the new features extracted from the frequency bands selected according to their discriminatory abilities generally outperform those using features designed for data preservation. To establish the noise robustness of the new features proposed in this work, their performance has been studied in presence of a range of different types of noise and at various signal-to-noise ratios. In these experiments, the audio-visual automatic speech recognition systems based on the new approaches were found to give superior performance both to audio-visual systems using appearance based features and to audio-only speech recognition systems.