Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Experimental Investigation of the Effects of Spoiler Design on Aerodynamic Drag Coefficient on Truck Trailer Combinations

In this study, surface pressure and drag force measurement was measured at 6 different free flow velocities on a heavy vehicle model, consisting of truck and trailer, placed in the wind tunnel. The aerodynamic drag coefficient were determinated for three different models which are unspoiler model, the standard spoiler and new design spoilers model. As a result of wind tunnel tests, the effects of spoiler design on the aerodynamic drag coefficient was defined. The experimental studies were performed on 156000- 844000 Reynolds number. In experimental studies, kinematic similarity was provided and blocking effects were neglected. In the dynamic similarity condition, the independence of Reynolds number was used. The pressure coefficient distributions on the vehicle were determined with the experiments of pressure measurement. The pressure coefficient was found to be high at the top of the trailer which is higher than truck and on the front bumper. % 11.37 the aerodynamic improvement was obtained by new spoiler design according to the model 2 with standard spoiler.
Etude de l'asymptotique du phénomène d'augmentation de diffusivité dans des flots à grande vitesse

En application, on souhaite generer des nombres aleatoires avec une loi precise (methode de Monte Carlo par chaines de Markov - MCMC (Markov Chaine Monte Carlo)). La methode consiste a trouver une diffusion qui a la loi invariante souhaitee et a montrer la convergence de cette diffusion vers son equilibre avec une vitesse exponentielle. L’exposant de cette convergence est le trou spectral du generateur. Il a ete montre par Chii-Ruey Hwang, Shu-Yin Hwang-Ma, et Shuenn-Jyi Sheu qu’on peut agrandir le trou spectral, en rajoutant un terme non-symetrique au generateur auto-adjoint (souvent utilise en MCMC). Ceci correspond a passer d’une diffusion reversible (en detailed balance) a une diffusion non reversible. Un moyen de construire une diffusion non-reversible avec la meme mesure invariante est de rajouter un flot incompressible a la dynamique de la diffusion reversible.Dans cette these, nous etudions le comportement de la diffusion lorsqu’on accelere le flot sous-jacent en multipliant le champ des vecteurs qui le decrit par une grande constante. P. Constantin, A.Kisekev, L.Ryzhik et A.Zlatos (2008) ont montre que si le flot etait faiblement melangeant alors l’acceleration du flot suffisait pour faire converger la diffusion vers son equilibre en un temps fini. Dans ce travail, on explicite la vitesse de ce phenomene sous une condition de correlation du flot. L’article de B. Franke, C. -R.Hwang, H. -M. Pai et S. -J. Sheu (2010) donne l’expression asymptotique du trou spectral lorsque le flot sous-jacent est accelere vers l’infini. Ici aussi, on s’interesse a la vitesse avec laquelle le phenomene se manifeste. Dans un premier temps, nous etudions le cas particulier d’une diffusion du type Ornstein-Uhlenbeck qui est perturbee par un flot preservant la mesure gaussienne. Dans ce cas, grâce a un resultat de G. Metafune, D. Pallara et E. Priola (2002), nous pouvons reduire l’etude du spectre du generateur a des valeurs propres d’une famille de matrices. Nous etudions ce probleme avec des methodes de developpement limite des valeurs propres. Ce probleme est resolu explicitement dans cette these et nous donnons aussi une borne pour le rayon de convergence du developpement. Nous generalisons ensuite cette methode dans le cas d’une diffusion generale de facon formelle. Ces resultats peuvent etre utiles pour avoir une premiere idee sur les vitesses de convergence du trou spectral decrites dans l’article de Franke et al. (2010).
Advancing Donald Schön's Reflective Practitioner: Where to Next?

Abstract In 1983, Donald Schön published his seminal work, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. The book emerged during the peak of the Design Methods movement, when works like L. Bruce Archer's Systematic Method for Designers and Herbert A. Simon's The Sciences of the Artificial argued for recognizing design processes as scientific inquiries. Coincidentally, Schön posited an alternative view to rationalizing design processes, called professional artistry, which is implicit professional knowledge. Using protocol studies in various disciplines, he demonstrated that professionals reflect-in-action while working and, as a result, learn and produce knowledge through doing (knowing-in-action). Since the 1980s, design theorists, researchers, and professionals have used Schön's work enthusiastically to articulate that designers learn more about their design process and design project as they design. Forty years after publication, The Reflective Practitioner continues to serve many design researchers as a foundation of learning from the experience of their design processes. However, this theory has limitations that must be recognized and addressed to stay relevant today. The Reflective Practitioner was written for individuals, whereas nowadays, designers often work in teams. The next step is to consider how individual reflections are shared and learned with other designers so that the team benefits from its collective reflective practices.
U.S. Undergraduate Business Students and Short-term Study Abroad: An Exploratory Study on Cross-cultural Development

ABSTRACT Employers are continually looking for graduates who show an understanding of people with diverse cultures, languages, and religions. The purpose of this exploratory study was to examine how participation in study abroad enhanced the interculturality of undergraduate business students. Participants included two cohorts of U.S. students participating in a short-term biennial study abroad program in China. The data were student’ scores on The Intercultural Effectiveness Scale (IES), a 52-item Likert scale spanning nine dimensions: continuous learning, self-awareness, exploration, interpersonal engagement, world orientation, relationship development, hardiness, positive regard, and emotional resilience. The IES was completed pre and post trip. Additional data were collected from the students’ open-ended journals that they wrote while participating in the study abroad program. Quantitative findings revealed that mean scores increased significantly between Time 1 (pre trip) and Time 2 (post trip) for most dimensions of the IES. Qualitative findings showed that three main themes impact student experiences: Travel, Memories, and Culture. Additional qualitative findings revealed that the Enjoyment and Challenges that students experience as part of a formal study abroad curriculum enhanced attainment of learning outcomes.
Ethical Guidelines and Practices for Pakistani Television Journalists Reporting on Domestic Violence

ABSTRACT This project investigates the ethical frameworks in place for Pakistani television news journalists reporting cases of domestic violence. It also examines the provision and structure of training for Pakistani media professionals to support accurate and balanced reporting of such violence. The research comprised in-depth semi-structured interviews with a small group of television journalists. The findings reveal that there was no formalized code of ethics guiding how journalists represent incidents of this crime, its victims, or perpetrators. Moreover, it was revealed that due to a paucity of formal professional development opportunities, journalists negotiate the challenges of reporting domestic violence on-the-job, resulting in instances of irresponsible reporting practices.
On minimising tumoural growth under treatment resistance

Drug resistance is a major challenge for curative cancer treatment, representing the main reason of death in patients. Evolutionary biology suggests pauses between treatment rounds as a way to delay or even avoid resistance emergence. Indeed, this approach has already shown promising preclinical and early clinical results, and stimulated the development of mathematical models for finding optimal treatment protocols. Due to their complexity, however, these models do not lend themself to a rigorous mathematical analysis, hence so far clinical recommendations generally relied on numerical simulations and ad-hoc heuristics. Here, we derive two mathematical models describing tumour growth under genetic and epigenetic treatment resistance, respectively, which are simple enough for a complete analytical investigation. First, we find key differences in response to treatment protocols between the two modes of resistance. Second, we identify the optimal treatment protocol which leads to the largest possible tumour shrinkage rate. Third, we fit the ”epigenetic model” to previously published xenograft experiment data, finding excellent agreement, underscoring the biological validity of our approach. Finally, we use the fitted model to calculate the optimal treatment protocol for this specific experiment, which we demonstrate to cause curative treatment, making it superior to previous approaches which generally aimed at stabilising tumour burden. Overall, our approach underscores the usefulness of simple mathematical models and their analytical examination, and we anticipate our findings to guide future preclinical and, ultimately, clinical research in optimising treatment regimes.
Adaptative Laboratory Evolution reveals biofilm regulating genes as key players in B. subtilis root colonization

Root-associated microorganisms play an important role in plant health, such as plant growth-promoting rhizobacteria from the Bacillus and Pseudomonas genera. Although bacterial consortia including these two genera would represent a promising avenue to efficient biofertilizer formulation, we observed that B. subtilis root colonization is decreased by the presence of P. fluorescens and P. protegens. To determine if B. subtilis can adapt to the inhibitory effect of Pseudomonas on roots, we conducted adaptative laboratory evolution experiments with B. subtilis in mono-association or co-cultured with P. fluorescens on tomato plant roots. Evolved isolates with various colony morphology and stronger colonization capacity of both tomato plant and A. thaliana roots emerged rapidly from the two evolution experiments. Certain evolved isolates had also a better fitness on root in presence of other Pseudomonas species. Whole genome sequencing revealed that single nucleotide polymorphism (SNPs) in negative biofilm regulator genes ywcC or sinR were found in all independent lineages, suggesting their involvement in enhanced root colonization. These findings provide insights into the molecular mechanisms underlying B. subtilis adaptation to root colonization and highlight the potential of directed evolution to enhance beneficial traits of PGPRs.
ColabDock: inverting AlphaFold structure prediction model for protein-protein docking with experimental restraints

Prediction of protein complex structures and interfaces potentially has wide applications and can benefit the study of biological mechanisms involving protein-protein interactions. However, the surface prediction accuracy of traditional docking methods and AlphaFold-Multimer is limited. Here we present ColabDock, a framework that makes use of ColabDesign, but reimplements it for the purpose of restrained complex conformation prediction. With a generation-prediction architecture and trained ranking model, ColabDock outperforms HADDOCK and ClusPro not only in complex structure predictions with simulated residue and surface restraints, but also in those assisted by NMR chemical shift perturbation as well as covalent labeling. It further assists antibody-antigen interface prediction with emulated interface scan restraints, which could be obtained by experiments such as Deep Mutation Scan. ColabDock provides a general approach to integrate sparse interface restraints of different experimental forms and sources into one optimization framework.
Serotonergic Modulation of the BNST-CeA Circuit Promotes Sex Differences in Fear Learning

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is characterized by intense fear memory formation and is diagnosed more often in women than men. Here, we show that serotonin differentially affects fear learning and communication in the extended amygdala of male and female mice. Females showed higher sensitivity to the effects of pharmacologically increasing serotonin during auditory fear conditioning, which enhanced fear memory recall in both sexes. Optogenetic stimulation of dorsal raphe terminals in the anterior dorsal bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (adBNST) during fear conditioning increased c-Fos expression in the BNST and central nucleus of the amygdala (CeA), and enhanced fear memory recall via activation of adBNST 5-HT2C receptors in females only. Likewise, in females only, serotonin stimulation during learning enhanced adBNST-CeA high gamma (90-140Hz) synchrony and adBNST-to-CeA communication in high gamma during fear memory recall. We conclude that sex differences in the raphe-BNST-CeA circuit may increase risk of PTSD in women.
Dynamic ventral disc contraction is necessary for Giardia attachment and host pathology

Giardia lamblia is a common parasitic protist that infects the small intestine and causes giardiasis, resulting in diarrhea, vomiting, weight loss, and malabsorption. Giardiasis leads to cellular damage, including loss of microvilli, disruption of tight junctions, impaired barrier function, enzyme inhibition, malabsorption, and apoptosis. In the host, motile Giardia trophozoites attach to the duodenal microvilli using a unique microtubule organelle called the ventral disc. Despite early observations of disc-shaped depressions in microvilli after parasite detachment, little is known about disc-mediated attachment mechanisms and there little direct evidence showing that parasite attachment causes cellular damage. However, advancements in in vitro organoid models of infection and genetic tools have opened new possibilities for studying molecular mechanisms of attachment and the impact of attachment on the host. Through high-resolution live imaging and a novel disc mutant, we provide direct evidence for disc contraction during attachment, resolving the long-standing controversy of its existence. Specifically, we identify three types of disc movements that characterize contraction, which in combination result in a decrease in disc diameter and volume. Additionally, we investigate the consequences of attachment and disc contractility using an attachment mutant that has abnormal disc architecture. In a human organoid model, we demonstrate that this mutant has a limited ability to break down the epithelial barrier as compared to wild type. Based on this direct evidence, we propose a model of attachment that incorporates disc contraction to generates the forces required for the observed “grasping” of trophozoites on the host epithelium. Overall, this work highlights the importance of disc contractility in establishing and maintaining parasite attachment, leading to intestinal barrier breakdown.
Machine Learning Made Easy (MLme): a comprehensive toolkit for machine learning–driven data analysis

Background Machine learning (ML) has emerged as a vital asset for researchers to analyze and extract valuable information from complex datasets. However, developing an effective and robust ML pipeline can present a real challenge, demanding considerable time and effort, thereby impeding research progress. Existing tools in this landscape require a profound understanding of ML principles and programming skills. Furthermore, users are required to engage in the comprehensive configuration of their ML pipeline to obtain optimal performance. Results To address these challenges, we have developed a novel tool called Machine Learning Made Easy (MLme) that streamlines the use of ML in research, specifically focusing on classification problems at present. By integrating four essential functionalities, namely Data Exploration, AutoML, CustomML, and Visualization, MLme fulfills the diverse requirements of researchers while eliminating the need for extensive coding efforts. To demonstrate the applicability of MLme, we conducted rigorous testing on six distinct datasets, each presenting unique characteristics and challenges. Our results consistently showed promising performance across different datasets, reaffirming the versatility and effectiveness of the tool. Additionally, by utilizing MLme’s feature selection functionality, we successfully identified significant markers for CD8+ naive (BACH2), CD16+ (CD16), and CD14+ (VCAN) cell populations. Conclusion MLme serves as a valuable resource for leveraging machine learning (ML) to facilitate insightful data analysis and enhance research outcomes, while alleviating concerns related to complex coding scripts. The source code and a detailed tutorial for MLme are available at https://github.com/FunctionalUrology/MLme. Key Points MLme is a novel tool that simplifies machine learning (ML) for researchers by integrating Data Exploration, AutoML, CustomML, and Visualization functionalities. MLme improves efficiency and productivity by streamlining the ML workflow and eliminating the need for extensive coding efforts. Rigorous testing on diverse datasets demonstrates MLme’s promising performance in classification problems. MLme provides intuitive interfaces for data exploration, automated ML, customizable ML pipelines, and result visualization. Future developments aim to expand MLme’s capabilities to include support for unsupervised learning, regression, hyperparameter tuning, and integration of user-defined algorithms.
Human vagus nerve fascicular anatomy: a microCT segmentation and histological study

Background Previous research has revealed the logical mapping of fascicles in both human somatic and pig vagus nerves, but the organization of fascicles within the human vagus nerve remains largely unknown. Understanding its fascicular arrangement would significantly advance our knowledge of the autonomic nervous system and facilitate studies and application of selective vagus nerve stimulation to avoid off-target effects. The purpose of this study was to trace the thoracic branches of human vagus nerves, investigate their fascicular organization, and analyze the nerves histologically and morphologically. Methods Both left and right vagus nerves were dissected from human cadavers, preserving the cardiac, recurrent laryngeal, and pulmonary branches. The nerves were prepared, scanned using microCT, and the fascicles segmented and traced from their branching points. Histology and immunohistochemistry were performed for morphological analysis and validation of the microCT segmentation. The data was then analyzed and compared between nerves. Results The organization of the cardiac, pulmonary, and recurrent laryngeal fascicles was observed for a short distance from their entry point into the nerves. Initially, left vagus nerves showed merging of cardiac and pulmonary fascicles, while the recurrent laryngeal fascicles remained separate. In right vagus nerves, the cardiac fascicles merged with both pulmonary and recurrent laryngeal fascicles. MicroCT imaging limitations prevented visualization and tracing of fiber organization within merged fascicles. Immunohistochemistry and morphological analysis revealed that right vagus nerves were larger and had more fascicles than the left and fascicle counts varied along the nerve, indicating anastomoses. The superior cardiac branch was separate from other fascicles near the VNS cuff placement. Conclusions It is possible that organ-specific fibers may still retain some spatial organization despite most fascicles being merged at cervical level. However, fiber tracing and in vivo studies could provide valuable information beyond microCT to resolve this further. The separate superior cardiac fascicles offer potential for targeted neuromodulation of the heart, benefiting conditions like myocardial infarction, heart failure, and atrial fibrillation. Overall, the study provides insights into the morphology and anatomy of human vagus nerves. Our findings thereby contribute to the development of selective vagus nerve stimulation strategies for more precise autonomic regulation.
Genotypic and Phenotypic Diversity of Kluyveromyces marxianus Isolates Obtained from the Elaboration Process of Two Traditional Mexican Alcoholic Beverages Derived from Agave: Pulque and Henequen (Agave fourcroydes) Mezcal

Seven Kluyveromyces marxianus isolates from the elaboration process of pulque and henequen mezcal were characterized. The isolates were identified based on the sequences of the D1/D2 domain of the 26S rRNA gene and the internal transcribed spacer (ITS-5.8S) region. Genetic differences were found between pulque and henequen mezcal isolates and within henequen mezcal isolates, as shown by different branching patterns in the ITS-5.8S phylogenetic tree and (GTG)5 microsatellite profiles, suggesting that sub-strate and process selective conditions may originate different K. marxianus populations. All the isolates fermented and assimilated inulin and lactose and some henequen isolates could also assimilate xylose and cellobiose. Henequen isolates were more thermotolerant than pulque isolates which in contrast presented more tolerance to the cell wall-disturbing agent calcofluor white (CFW) suggesting that they had a different cell wall structure. Additionally, depending on their origin, the isolates presented different maximum specific growth rates (µmax) patterns at different temperatures. Concerning tolerance to stress factors relevant for lignocellulosic hydrolysates fermentation, tolerance limits were lower at 42 than 30°C except for glucose and furfural. Pulque isolates were less tolerant to ethanol, NaCl, and Cd. Finally, all the isolates could produce ethanol by simultaneous saccharification and fermentation (SSF) of a corncob hydrolysate under laboratory conditions at 42°C.
L'Apport Mutuel de la Combinaison des Tâches d'Interconnexion de Données et d'Alignement d'Ontologies pour l'Alignement Expressifs

Résumé Plusieurs méthodes ont été proposées pour abor-der les tâches d’interconnexion de données et d’alignement d’ontologies, qui sont généralement traitées séparément. Dans cet article, nous pré-sentons DICAP , un algorithme qui permet leur collaboration mutuelle. Les expériences réalisées montrent que l’ajout de relations owl : sameAs ré-sultant de l’interconnexion de données permet de découvrir des correspondances ontologiques sup-plémentaires. De plus, la présence de correspon-dances ontologiques permet l’extraction de règles de liage supplémentaires et discriminantes.
Partitioned Computation for Fluid-structure Interaction with Rigid Body Motion

We present a new computational framework for fluid-structure interaction problems that involve rigid body motion. Based on a partitioned strategy, the fluid and structural dynamics are computed separately, and the solutions communicate at the interface. The immersed boundary method is employed to handle the fluid-structure interaction, and the direct-forcing technique is utilized to calculate the interaction force. In particular, the rigid body motion is directly and explicitly incorporated into the formulation and computation of the structural dynamics. We demonstrate our methodology by numerically simulating the motion of single and multiple rigid circular discs interacting with nonlinear viscous flow.
Image matching lost and found system

The lost and found procedure provides a platform for lost item owners to seek and retrieve the lost item seamlessly. Though the procedure has been widely adopted by transport and property management personnel, the processes of identification and classification of the items require lots of cost and manpower. The usage of image matching and classification models is an approach to boost the efficiency of the process. Therefore, this project is aims to provide a solution by implementing a interactive and user-friendly web application with image matching and classification model.The project is on schedule. Our team have completed the web application design and implementation that intergrated with image matching and tagging models.