Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Automatic change detection in multiple pigmented skin lesions

Malignant melanoma is the rarest and deadliest of skin cancers causing three times more deaths than all other skin-related malignancies combined. Fortunately, in its early stages, it is completely curable, making a total body skin examination (TBSE) a fundamental procedure for many patients. Despite the advances in body scanning techniques, automated assistance tools for TBSEs have not received due attention. This fact is emphasized in our literature review covering the area of computerized analysis of PSL images. Aiming at the automation of TBSEs, we have designed and built a total body scanner to acquire skin surface images using cross-polarized light. Furthermore, we have developed an algorithm for the automated mapping of PSLs and their change estimation between explorations. The initial tests of the scanner showed that it can be successfully applied for automated mapping and temporal monitoring of multiple lesions
Primary and hTERT-Transduced Mesothelioma-Associated Fibroblasts but Not Primary or hTERT-Transduced Mesothelial Cells Stimulate Growth of Human Mesothelioma Cells

Pleural mesothelioma (PM) is an aggressive malignancy that develops in a unique tumor microenvironment (TME). However, cell models for studying the TME in PM are still limited. Here, we have generated and characterized novel human telomerase reverse transcriptase (hTERT)-transduced mesothelial cell and mesothelioma-associated fibroblast (Meso-CAF) models and investigated their impact on PM cell growth. Pleural mesothelial cells and Meso-CAFs were isolated from tissue of pneumothorax and PM patients, respectively. Stable expression of hTERT was induced by retroviral transduction. Primary and hTERT-transduced cells were compared with respect to doubling times, hTERT expression and activity levels, telomere lengths, proteomes, and the impact of conditioned media (CM) on PM cell growth. All transduced derivatives exhibited elevated hTERT expression and activity, and increased mean telomere lengths. Cell morphology remained unchanged, and the proteomes were similar to the corresponding primary cells. Of note, the CM of primary and hTERT-transduced Meso-CAFs stimulated PM cell growth to the same extent, while CM derived from mesothelial cells had no stimulating effect, irrespective of hTERT expression. In conclusion, all new hTERT-transduced cell models closely resemble their primary counterparts and, hence, represent valuable tools to investigate cellular interactions within the TME of PM.
Efeito do uso combinado de bisfosfonato e enxerto xenógeno na reparação óssea alveolar: estudo histomorfométrico

Os bisfosfonatos tem sido associados a ocorrencia de osteonecrose maxilar (MRONJ, medication-related osteonecrosis of the jaw), condicao que tem, entre os fatores de risco para sua ocorrencia, as intervencoes cirurgicas dos ossos maxilares, principalmente as exodontias. Por outro lado, o uso de xenoenxerto para preenchimento alveolar apos exodontia tornou-se procedimento frequente, com evidencias clinicas de sua capacidade em melhorar as condicoes locais do sitio cirurgico com vistas a reabilitacao oral. O presente estudo teve por objetivo investigar o efeito do uso combinado de bisfosfonato e enxerto xenogeno (Bio-Oss®Collagen) no reparo osseo alveolar apos exodontia. Sessenta ratos foram distribuidos em cinco grupos de acordo com o tratamento recebido: acido zoledronico (grupo 1) e alendronato (grupo 2), ambos com xenoenxerto; acido zoledronico (grupo 3) e alendronato (grupo 4), ambos sem xenoenxerto; e grupo-controle (grupo 5). Todos os animais foram submetidos a exodontias, as maxilas foram dissecadas e analisadas por meio de exame macro- e microscopico. A frequencia de lesao da mucosa oral nao diferiu significativamente entre os grupos; entretanto essas lesoes foram significativamente menores no grupo-controle. A prevalencia de tecido conjuntivo fibroso foi maior nos grupos 2 (alendronato/Bio-Oss) e 5 (controle) do que nos grupos 3 (acido zoledronico) e 4 (alendronato). O grupo 4 (alendronato) teve maior quantidade de osso vital do que os grupos 1 (acido zoledronico/Bio-Oss), 3 (acido zoledronico) e controle. A quantidade de osso nao-vital foi maior nos grupos acido zoledronico com e sem Bio-Oss (1 and 3), sendo que, ao comparar-se esses dois grupos entre si, essa variavel foi maior no grupo 3. O grupo 3 exibiu mais infiltrado inflamatorio do que os grupos 2, 4 e 5 e maior quantidade de colonias microbianas do que os demais grupos. Infiltrado inflamatorio e colonias microbianas tiveram correlacao negativa com osso vital e positiva com osso nao-vital. Infiltrado inflamatorio e colonias microbianas exibiram correlacao positiva entre si. Conclusao: O preenchimento do alveolo pos-exodontia com Bio-Oss® Collagen nao evitou a ocorrencia de osso nao-vital e infeccao, mas foi capaz de diminuir a intensidade dessas variaveis nos ratos sob tratamento com acido zoledronico.
Enhancer in cancer pathogenesis and treatment

Abstract Enhancers are essential cis-acting regulatory elements that determine cell identity and tumor progression. Enhancer function is dependent on the physical interaction between the enhancer and its target promoter inside its local chromatin environment. Enhancer reprogramming is an important mechanism in cancer pathogenesis and can be driven by both cis and trans factors. Super enhancers are acquired at oncogenes in numerous cancer types and represent potential targets for cancer treatment. BET and CDK inhibitors act through mechanisms of enhancer function and have shown promising results in therapy for various types of cancer. Genome editing is another way to reprogram enhancers in cancer treatment. The relationship between enhancers and cancer has been revised by several authors in the past few years, which mainly focuses on the mechanisms by which enhancers can impact cancer. Here, we emphasize SE’s role in cancer pathogenesis and the new therapies involving epigenetic regulators (BETi and CDKi). We suggest that understanding mechanisms of activity would aid clinical success for these anti-cancer agents.
The Korean wave : Korean media go global

Introduction: Korean Media in a Digital Cosmopolitan World Youna Kim Part I: Power and Politics of the Global 1. Soft Power and the Korean Wave Joseph Nye and Youna Kim 2. The Korean Wave as Method: Inter-Asian Referencing Koichi Iwabuchi 3. Reconfiguring Media and Empire Oliver Boyd-Barrett Part II: Popular Media and Digital Mobile Culture 4. Korean Wave Pop Culture in the Global Internet Age: Why Popular? Why Now? Youna Kim 5. For the Eyes of North Koreans? Politics of Money and Class in Boys Over Flowers Suk-Young Kim 6. K-pop Female Idols in the West: Racial Imaginations and Erotic Fantasies Eun-Young Jung 7. Negotiating Identity and Power in Transnational Cultural Consumption: Korean American Youths and the Korean Wave Jung-Sun Park 8. Digitization and Online Cultures of the Korean Wave: "East Asian" Virtual Community in Europe Sang-Yeon Sung 9. Hybridization of Korean Popular Culture: Films and Online Gaming Dal Yong Jin 10. K-pop Dance Trackers and Cover Dancers: Global Cosmopolitanization and Local Spatialization Liew Kai Khiun Part III: Perspectives Inside/Outside 11. Cultural Policy and the Korean Wave: From National Culture to Transnational Consumerism Hye-Kyung Lee 12. Re-Worlding Culture? : YouTube as a K-pop Interlocutor Kent A. Ono and Jungmin Kwon 13. The Korean Wave as a Cultural Epistemic Anandam Kavoori 14. The Korean Wave and "Global Culture" Yudhishthir Raj Isar
Determination of soil grain size distribution by soil sedimentation and image processing

Over the last decades, advances in digital imaging, computational efficiency and digital storage capacity have moved many industries including manufacturing, pharmaceuticals and agriculture to adopt imaging and image processing to determine the distribution of size of their respective products. However, despite of the fact that image-based soil grain size assessment methods have advantages over traditional sieve and hydrometer tests, until recently image-based soil grain size assessment has lagged behind due to the inability of single camera-lens systems to capture the wide range of grain sizes typical of many soils. This research aims to determine soil grain size distribution with help of digital image processing techniques. The image processing techniques utilize ‘wavelet index’ (CA), ‘edge pixel density’ (EPD), and ‘peak of pattern spectrum’ (PPP) calibrated against the soil grain size in units of pixels per diameter (PPD). Since no image processing method currently exists for determination of grain size distribution of 3-dimensional assemblies of non-uniform sized particles, efforts were undertaken to finding a technique to rapidly segregate particles prior to imaging. The solution was an 8 ft. long square-sided glass sedimentation column. Following sedimentation through the water-filled column a camera is used to collect digital images of the segregated soil deposit. Image sections with the height of 256 pixels from the digital soil sediment image are image-processed for soil grain size indices at evenly spaced elevations from which the complete grain size distribution is assembled. The method is termed ‘sedimaging’. advised by Prof. Roman D. Hryciw ****** Everyone is invited*********
MENGAPA BOUNDARY CONTROL SYSTEMS TIDAK EFEKTIF?

Penelitian ini bertujuan mengevaluasi boundary system yang diterapkan oleh suatu perusahaan dan bagaimana boundary system tersebut dapat mengurangi risiko reputasi yang dapat membahayakan kemampuan perusahaan untuk menciptakan nilai bagi pelanggan, pemegang saham, dan karyawan. Penelitian ini menggunakan studi kasus mendalam di PT XYZ yang menghadapi kasus-kasus yang meningkatkan risiko reputasi. Pada penelitian ini, data yang digunakan adalah data kualitatif yang diperoleh melalui wawancara dan data sekunder seperti data/dokumen perusahaan dan data publik yang akan melalui tahapan/proses yang terdiri atas tahap pengumpulan data, kurasi data, penyajian data, dan kesimpulan. Berdasarkan hasil studi kasus, penerapan boundary system yang tidak sesuai dengan konsep levers of control dan Compliance Program yang tidak mendukung keefektifan dari penerapan Boundary System maka akan menyebabkan Boundary System tidak berjalan efektif.
THEORY OF INFORMATION IN CONSTRUCTION – IMPLEMENTATION IN CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURES EXPOSED TO EXTREME EVENTS

The Theory of Information in Construction based on the hypothesis that failures in critical infrastructures (C.I.) are the result of loss of control in the information system of the CI as a result of information overflow of the system. The theory is established on four phases: (I) Statistical analyses: Probability Density Function of incoming events (PDF), Cumulative Distribution Function (CDF), Power function expressing the magnitude of events, and Scatter analysis; (II) Information Constraint (IC) expressing the capacity if the system, (III) Control circuits (feed-back loops), and (IV) Artificial Intelligence, Machine learning, Artificial Neural Network. The hypothesis of the theory is that failures, deficiencies, accidents and cascading failures are the result of an overflow of information in the system beyond the system's Information Constraint (IC). A similar hypothesis also refers to the performance of critical infrastructures, exposed to extreme abnormal events, caused by extreme events such as climate change, terrorism and seismic events. The events put the critical infrastructures in an extreme situation causing high risk to the continuity of performance of the CI, affecting vital services to civil society. This paper proposes a novel method for multi-hazard risk assessment of overhead transmission lines (OTL) grid. The main objective is to estimate the annual risk using failure rates estimated from historical failure data and modify them by reanalysis data and a dynamic Bayesian scheme. For this purpose, a comprehensive database of power grid supply failures is gathered. ANN is implemented to predict the incoming events, assess the risk and propose preventive activities.
The trade-sustainability nexus: the evolution of the European Commission’s trade and sustainable development discourse from 1993 to 2022

ABSTRACT This paper provides an in-depth analysis of the European Commission’s trade and sustainable development discourse from 1993 to 2022. By employing a discursive institutionalist framework and examining a comprehensive corpus of over 1,400 press documents, this study traces the discursive process that has created both significant changes to, and persistent elements in, the Commission’s trade-sustainability agenda. The analysis reveals noteworthy shifts within the discourse, notably a transition from a primary concern with labour and human rights during the 1990s to an increased focus on economic development and poverty reduction in the early 2000s. This was followed by a discernible move towards more stringent differentiation among developing countries and an amplified emphasis on reciprocity. In recent years, we are witnessing a strong focus on environmental and climate protection, labour rights, and enforceability. The findings underscore the enduring presence of trade-sustainability ideas within EU trade policy and their gradual evolution over time, while contributing to the literature on the role of ideas in shaping the Union’s external policies.
Development of Measuring System using CSI on ITIL V3 for Improvement at Oil Palm Plantation Company

Many information technology services firms now offer services and consider software availability to be a critical component of achieving excellence and competing in the industry. The most crucial factor for customers is the quality of service, consumer needs, the state of the organization/company, and the present market should all be considered when improving their service. In this study, an ITSM analysis will be carried out at an oil palm plantation company based in West Kalimantan Province using ITIL framework V3 by focusing on continual service improvement, which largely relies on service measurement because a process must be measurable to be regulated and improved. To achieve continuous service improvement (CSI) throughout the service life cycle, we use the 7-step process to improve is used to establish and take care of the stages involved in identifying, defining, collecting, processing, analyzing, presenting, and implementing changes. The result of this analysis is CSF and KPI analysis that produce metrics, such as the average resolution time, the percentage of events allocated more than once, and the initial response time, then create a measurement system that is in accordance with the needs and can be used as a reference for the company's system assessment.
GWP-ASan: Sampling-Based Detection of Memory-Safety Bugs in Production

Despite the recent advances in pre-production bug detection, heap-use-after-free and heap-buffer-overflow bugs remain the primary problem for security, reliability, and developer productivity for applications written in C or C++, across all major software ecosystems. Memory-safe languages solve this problem when they are used, but the existing code bases consisting of billions of lines of C and C++ continue to grow, and we need additional bug detection mechanisms. This paper describes a family of tools that detect these two classes of memory-safety bugs, while running in production, at near-zero overhead. These tools combine page-granular guarded allocation and low-rate sampling. In other words, we added an"if"statement to a 36-year-old idea and made it work at scale. We describe the basic algorithm, several of its variants and implementations, and the results of multi-year deployments across mobile, desktop, and server applications.
Benchmarking assembly free nanopore read mappers to classify complex millipede gut microbiota via Oxford Nanopore Sequencing Technology

Millipedes are key players in recycling leaf litter into soil in tropical ecosystems. To elucidate their gut microbiota, we collected millipedes from different municipalities of Puerto Rico. Here we aim to benchmark which method is best for metagenomic skimming of this highly complex millipede microbiome. We sequenced the gut DNA with Oxford Nanopore Technologies’ (ONT) MinION sequencer, then analyzed the data using MEGAN-LR, Kraken2 protein mode, Kraken2 nucleotide mode, GraphMap, and Minimap2 to classify these long ONT reads. From our two samples, we obtained a total of 87,110 and 99,749 ONT reads, respectively. Kraken2 nucleotide mode classified the most reads compared to all other methods at the phylum and class taxonomic level, classifying 75% of the reads in the two samples, the other methods failed to assign enough reads to either phylum or class to yield asymptotes in the taxa rarefaction curves indicating that they required more sequencing depth to fully classify this community. The community is hyper diverse with all methods classifying 20–50 phyla in the two samples. There was significant overlap in the reads used and phyla classified between the five methods benchmarked. Our results suggest that Kraken2 nucleotide mode is the most appropriate tool for the application of metagenomic skimming of this highly complex community.
Reducing cognitive arousal and sleep effort alleviates insomnia and depression in pregnant women with DSM-5 insomnia disorder treated with a mindfulness sleep program

Abstract Objectives Combining mindfulness with behavioral sleep strategies has been found to alleviate symptoms of insomnia and depression during pregnancy, but mechanisms for this treatment approach remain unclear. The present study examined nocturnal cognitive arousal and sleep effort as potential treatment mechanisms for alleviating insomnia and depression via a mindfulness sleep program for pregnant women. Methods Secondary analysis from a proof-of-concept trial of 12 pregnant women with DSM-5 insomnia disorder who were treated with Perinatal Understanding of Mindful Awareness for Sleep (PUMAS), which places behavioral sleep strategies within a mindfulness framework. Data were collected across eight weekly assessments: pretreatment, six sessions, and posttreatment. Measures included the insomnia severity index (ISI), Edinburgh postnatal depression scale (EPDS), pre-sleep arousal scale’s cognitive factor (PSASC), and the Glasgow sleep effort scale (GSES). We used linear mixed modeling to test cognitive arousal and sleep effort as concurrent and prospective predictors of insomnia and depression. Results Most patients reported high cognitive arousal before PUMAS (75.0%), which decreased to 8.3% after treatment. All insomnia remitters reported low cognitive arousal after treatment, whereas half of nonremitters continued reporting high cognitive arousal. Both nocturnal cognitive arousal and sleep effort were associated with same-week changes in insomnia throughout treatment, and sleep effort yielded a prospective effect on insomnia. Lower levels of nocturnal cognitive arousal and sleep effort prospectively predicted reductions in depression. Conclusions The present study offers preliminary evidence that reducing sleep effort and nocturnal cognitive arousal may serve as key mechanisms for alleviating insomnia and depression via mindfulness-based insomnia therapy. ClinicalTrials.gov ID: NCT04443959
DeepCyberDetect: Hybrid AI for Counterfeit Currency Detection with GAN-CNN-RNN using African Buffalo Optimization

— Modern technology has made a big contribution to the distribution of counterfeit money and the valuation of it. This paper recommends a deep learning-based methodology for currency recognition in order to extract attributes and identify money values; machine learning's binary classification task of fake currency detection. One can train a model that can distinguish between real and fake banknotes if one has enough information about actual and fake notes. The vast majority of older systems relied on hardware and techniques for image processing. Using such strategies renders identifying fake currency more challenging and inefficient. The proposed system has suggested deploying a deep convolution neural network to figure out fake currency in order to solve the aforementioned issue. By analyzing the images of the currency, our technique finds counterfeit notes. The transfer-learned convolutional neural network is trained using data sets that represent 2000 different currency notes in order to learn the unique characteristics map of the currencies. After becoming familiar with the feature map, the network is capable of real-time phoney cash detection. It is surprising how well deep learning models perform in photo classification tasks. The Deep CNN model that has been created in the proposed approach helps in the detection of the fake note without really manually extracting the properties of photographs. The model trains from the data set produced during training, letting us to identify fake currency. In multiple instances, techniques for deep learning have been shown to be more effective. Thus, deep learning is used to boost currency recognition accuracy. Among the techniques used are the African Buffalo Optimization Approach (ABO), recurrent neural networks (RNN), convolutional neural networks, generative adversarial networks (GAN) for identifying bogus notes, and classical neural networks.
Examining the Interactive Effect of Advertising Investment and Corporate Social Responsibility on Financial Performance

This article explores the interactive effect of advertising investment and corporate social responsibility (CSR) on financial performance by selecting 2431 listed companies that participated in the professional evaluation of Hexun.com as the research sample, with a total of 12,471 observed values. The panel regression, analysis and hypotheses tests were conducted to examine the interactive effect of advertising investment and CSR on financial performance. There are four empirical findings. First, an advertising investment plays a significant role in improving corporate financial performance. Second, actively fulfilling CSR can effectively upgrade the financial performance of an enterprise. Third, different functional mechanisms will not change the positive impact of CSR on financial performance. Fourth, the interaction between advertising investment and CSR has a significant positive correction on financial performance. Combining the advertising investment with CSR they have a remarkable complementary effect on financial performance. Based on these findings, this article claims that to maximize the advertising effect, company managers should actively carry out business activities and conduct appropriate advertising investments from the perspective of CSR. In other words, to enhance the return on marketing activities and strengthen the promotion of financial performance by advertising investment, company managers should pay more attention to fulfilling CSR and take advantage of the reputational and social images generated by CSR to bring greater market value and financial growth.