Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Holistic Approach to the Evaluation of the Montado Ecosystem Using Proximal Sensors

The Montado is a silvo-pastoral system characterized by open canopy woodlands with natural or cultivated grassland in the undercover and grazing animals. The aims of this study were to present several proximal sensors with potential to monitor relevant variables in the complex montado ecosystem and demonstrate their application in a case study designed to evaluate the effect of trees on the pasture. This work uses data collected between March and June 2016, at peak of dryland pasture production under typical Mediterranean conditions, in twenty four sampling points, half under tree canopy (UTC) and half outside tree canopy (OTC). Correlations were established between pasture biomass and capacitance measured by a commercial probe and between pasture quality and normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) measured by a commercial active optical sensor. The interest of altimetric and apparent soil electrical conductivity maps as the first step in the implementation of precision agriculture projects was demonstrated. The use of proximal sensors to monitor soil moisture content, pasture photosynthetically active radiation and temperature helped to explain the influence of trees on pasture productivity and quality. The significant and strong correlations obtained between capacitance and pasture biomass and between NDVI and pasture nutritive value (in terms of crude protein, CP and neutral detergent fibre, NDF) can make an important contribution to determination of key components of pasture productivity and quality and implementation of site-specific pasture management. Animal tracking demonstrated its potential to be an important tool for understanding the interaction between various factors and components that interrelate in the montado ecosystem and to support grazing management decisions.
Recommendations for the Design of Serious Games in Neurodegenerative Diseases

The use of Serious Games (SG) in the health domain is expanding. In the field of Neurodegenerative Diseases (ND) such as Alzheimer’s Disease, SG are currently employed to provide alternative solutions for patients’ treatment, stimulation, and rehabilitation. The design of SG for people with ND implies collaborations between professionals in ND and professionals in SG design. As the field is quite young, professionals specialized in both ND and SG are still rare, and recommendations for the design of SG for people with ND are still missing. This perspective paper aims to provide recommendations in terms of ergonomic choices for the design of SG aiming at stimulating people with ND, starting from the existing SG already tested in this population: “MINWii”, “Kitchen and Cooking”, and “X-Torp”. We propose to rely on nine ergonomic criteria: eight ergonomic criteria inspired by works in the domain of office automation: Compatibility, Guidance, Workload, Adaptability, Consistency, Significance of codes, Explicit control and Error management; and one ergonomic criterion related to videogame: the game rules. Perspectives derived from this proposal are also discussed.
Bioactive Glass Scaffolds with Hierarchical Structure and their 3D Characterization

Bone tissue has evolved into hierarchical three-dimensional structures with dimensions ranging from nanometres to metres. The structure varies depending on the site in the body, which is dictated by the loading environment. Medically, bone is one of the most replaced body parts (second only to blood) but replicating these complex living hierarchical structures for the purpose of regenerating defective bone is a challenge that has yet to be overcome. A temporary template (scaffold) is needed that matches the hierarchical structure of native bone as closely as possible that is available ‘off the shelf’ for surgeons to use. After implantation the scaffold must bond to bone and stimulate not only three dimensional (3D) bone growth, but also vascularisation to feed the new bone. There are many engineering design criteria for a successful bone scaffold and bioactive glass foam scaffolds have been developed that can fulfil most of them, as they have a hierarchical porous structure, they can bond to bone, and they release soluble silica species and calcium ions that have been found to up-regulate seven families of genes in osteogenic cells. Other ions have also been incorporated to combat infection and to counteract osteoporosis. Their tailorable hierarchical structure consists of highly interconnected open spherical macropores, further, because the glass is sol-gel derived, the entire structure is nanoporous. The macropores are critical for bone and blood vessel growth, the nanopores for tailoring degradation rates and protein adsorption and for cell attachment. This chapter describes the optimised sol-gel foaming process and how bone cells respond to them. Whatever type of scaffold is used for bone regeneration, it is critically important to be able to quantify the hierarchial pore structure. The nanopore size can be quantified using gas sorption, but to obtain full information of the macropore structure, imaging must be done using X-ray microtomography and the resulting images must be quantified via 3D image analysis. These techniques are reviewed.
Pinning Group Consensus-Based Distributed Coordination Control for Active Distribution Systems

For an active distribution system (ADS) that integrates high levels of distributed generators (DGs), the control dimension of such a wide and dynamic set of resources would become overwhelming. This study proposes a novel pinning group consensus (PGC)-based distributed coordination control to simplify ADS control by using the virtual clusters building block concept. A given ADS is rethought as coupled small virtual clusters, including virtual microgrid clusters and virtual power plant clusters; accordingly, the ADS can be coordinated by controlling a small number of selected pinning agents instead of a huge number of DGs. The predefining of the PGC values for these pinning agents, which comprehensively considers both clusters features and DG capacities, is the most distinguishing work for the proposed control scheme and can lead to effective global coordination in a distributed manner. Simulation cases under normal/disturbed/emergency conditions verify the effectiveness and advantages of the proposed scheme.
Background, current role, and potential applications of radiogenomics

With the genomic revolution in the early 1990s, medical research has been driven to study the basis of human disease on a genomic level and to devise precise cancer therapies tailored to the specific genetic makeup of a tumor. To match novel therapeutic concepts conceived in the era of precision medicine, diagnostic tests must be equally sufficient, multilayered, and complex to identify the relevant genetic alterations that render cancers susceptible to treatment. With significant advances in training and medical imaging techniques, image analysis and the development of high‐throughput methods to extract and correlate multiple imaging parameters with genomic data, a new direction in medical research has emerged. This novel approach has been termed radiogenomics. Radiogenomics aims to correlate imaging characteristics (ie, the imaging phenotype) with gene expression patterns, gene mutations, and other genome‐related characteristics and is designed to facilitate a deeper understanding of tumor biology and capture the intrinsic tumor heterogeneity. Ultimately, the goal of radiogenomics is to develop imaging biomarkers for outcome that incorporate both phenotypic and genotypic metrics. Due to the noninvasive nature of medical imaging and its ubiquitous use in clinical practice, the field of radiogenomics is rapidly evolving and initial results are encouraging. In this article, we briefly discuss the background and then summarize the current role and the potential of radiogenomics in brain, liver, prostate, gynecological, and breast tumors.
MEG Fields from Normal Readers and Individuals with Dyslexia During Language Tasks

MEG data were acquired during three different language processing tasks [picture naming (PN), verb generation (VG), and a matching task] from 8 normal readers and 8 subjects diagnosed with dyslexia. Analysis of the amplitude differences in the evoked responses during the latencies 0-600 ms were analyzed utilizing MR-FOCUSS, a technique that is capable of imaging simultaneous activity in multiple cortical structures. Cortical activation maps during PN and VG displayed activity in the superior temporal gyrus (STG) and planum temporale during 150-350ms after onset of stimuli and the lateral prefrontal cortex (PFC) during 300-600ms after onset of stimuli. Increased bilateral activation was found in the subjects with dyslexia during the latencies 200-350 ms after onset of VG stimuli. Same word matching tasks gave less neuronal activation in superior temporal gyrus (STG) between 200-320 ms compared to the wrong word tasks in all subjects. Subjects with dyslexia had less focal activation in superior temporal gyrus (STG) compared to normal readers in all matching conditions.
Pharmacokinetics of tapentadol in laying hens and its residues in eggs after multiple oral dose administration

ABSTRACT 1. The aim of the study was to evaluate the pharmacokinetics (PKs) of tapentadol (TAP), a novel opioid analgesic, in laying hens after intravenous (IV) and oral (PO) administration and to quantify the concentrations of TAP residues in eggs. 2. Twenty healthy laying hens were divided into three groups: A (n = 6), B (n = 6) and C (n = 8). The study was conducted in two phases. Groups A and B received TAP by IV and PO routes at the dose of 1 and 5 mg/kg, respectively. 3. No visible adverse effects were observed after administration of the drug. TAP plasma concentrations were detectable up to 4 h following administration. Following IV administration, TAP plasma concentrations were only higher than the minimal effective concentration (148 ng/ml) reported for humans for 1 h. After single PO administration, plasma concentrations of TAP would not conform to software algorithms and the PK parameters were not calculated. TAP concentration following multiple PO doses at 5 mg/kg for 5 d was found to be higher and more persistent (12 h vs. 7 h) in yolk compared with albumen. 4. This is the first PK study on the novel atypical opioid TAP in laying hens. Further studies are required to investigate the analgesic efficacy and actual effective plasma concentration of TAP in this species.
A GA Based Measurement Method for Discontinuous Curve Fitting

Discontinuous curve fitting is the task of finding a suitable function which is best fitting to a given set of data points. Once the expression forms of function and of error are determined, curve fitting is regarded as an optimization problem. In this paper, a measurement method is proposed to optimize curve fitting problem. The proposed method is based on genetic algorithm, namely GAOCF (GA based Optimizer for Curve Fitting). The main advantage is that the proposed GA based method can skip the local optimum solutions, and find out better solution in a huge searching space. Consequently, some arc data will be used to verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the GA based measurement method proposed in this paper.
Effect of post-GBE strain-sensitisation on corrosion resistance of grain boundary engineered 304 austenitic stainless steel

Control of grain boundary microstructure for grain boundary engineering (GBE) is effective to prevent intergranular corrosion by disconnection of corrosive random boundary network resulting from the introduction of coincidence site lattice boundaries during the frequent formation of annealing twins in bulk austenitic stainless steels. Since the practical use of austenitic stainless steels often includes straining and heating processes, such as forming, annealing and welding, the processes after the GBE treatment could degrade the optimised grain boundary microstructure and the high corrosion resistance of grain boundary engineered (GBEed) austenitic stainless steels. Therefore the present study examined the effects of post-GBE strain-sensitisation on grain boundary microstructure and corrosion resistance of a GBEed 304 austenitic stainless steel produced by a single-step thermomechanical processing for GBE. The results showed that the grain boundary microstructure was changed apparently and the corrosion resistance gradually decreased in the GBEed steel with an increase in post-GBE strain followed by sensitisation, but the GBEed steel maintained significantly higher corrosion resistance during the post-GBE strain-sensitisation than the equivalently strain-sensitised base steel.
Damage Localisation in Thin Panels Using Elastic Wave Propagation Method

In this paper algorithm for damage localisation in thin panels made of aluminium alloy has been proposed. Mentioned algorithm uses Lamb wave propagation methods and geometrical approach for damage localisation. Elastic waves are generated and received using piezoelectric transducers. Excited elastic waves propagate and reflect from panel boundary and discontinuities existing in the panel. Wave reflection can be registered through the piezoelectric transducers and used in signal processing algorithm. Processing algorithm consists of two parts: signal filtering and extraction of damage location. The first part is used in order to remove noise from received signals. Second part allows to extract arrival time of waves reflected from discontinuity, very often called Time Of Flight (TOF). Localisation algorithm uses pairs of transducers from a concentrated transducers configuration. Using signals from pair of transducers two times of reflection can be extracted from received signals. Because coordinates of transducers are well known ellipse can be constructed based on extracted times of waves reflections. Damage lies one ellipse but it is not known exactly where. Therefore one ellipse is not enough to localise a discontinuity. In order of proper damage localisation more ellipses must be used. In this purpose signals received by larger number of transducers pairs are used in damage localisation algorithm. Points of ellipses intersections allow to indicate localisation of damage. Described signal processing algorithm has been coded in the MATLAB® environment. In this work experimental results has been presented.
Orthogonal Faster Than Nyquist Transmission for SIMO Wireless Systems

This paper proposes a novel and simple orthogonal faster than Nyquist (OFTN) data transmission and detection approach for a single input multiple output (SIMO) system. It is assumed that the signal having a bandwidth $B$ is transmitted through a wireless channel having $L$ multipath components. Under this assumption, the current paper provides novel OFTN transmission and symbol-by-symbol detection approach that exploits the multiplexing gain obtained by the inherent characteristics of multipath components of wideband channels. In doing so, the proposed design achieves a higher transmission rate than the existing orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) approach. It is also shown that the capacity gap between the proposed approach and that of OFDM increases as the number of receiver antennas increases for fixed $L$. The superiority of the proposed approach has been shown theoretically and confirmed via numerical simulations.
Sulfadoxine-Pyrimethamine–Based Combinations for Malaria: A Randomised Blinded Trial to Compare Efficacy, Safety and Selection of Resistance in Malawi

Background In Malawi, there has been a return of Plasmodium falciparum sensitivity to chloroquine (CQ) since sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine (SP) replaced CQ as first line treatment for uncomplicated malaria. When used for prophylaxis, Amodiaquine (AQ) was associated with agranulocytosis but is considered safe for treatment and is increasingly being used in Africa. Here we compare the efficacy, safety and selection of resistance using SP or CQ+SP or artesunate (ART)+SP or AQ+SP for the treatment of uncomplicated falciparum malaria. Methodology and Findings 455 children aged 1–5 years were recruited into a double-blinded randomised trial comparing SP to the three combination therapies. Using intention to treat analysis with missing outcomes treated as successes, and without adjustment to distinguish recrudescence from new infections, the day 28 adequate clinical and parasitological response (ACPR) rate for SP was 25%, inferior to each of the three combination therapies (p<0.001). AQ+SP had an ACPR rate of 97%, higher than CQ+SP (81%) and ART+SP (70%), p<0.001. Nineteen children developed a neutropenia of ≤0.5×103 cells/µl by day 14, more commonly after AQ+SP (p = 0.03). The mutation pfcrt 76T, associated with CQ resistance, was detected in none of the pre-treatment or post-treatment parasites. The prevalence of the pfmdr1 86Y mutation was higher after treatment with AQ+SP than after SP, p = 0.002. Conclusions The combination AQ+SP was highly efficacious, despite the low efficacy of SP alone; however, we found evidence that AQ may exert selective pressure for resistance associated mutations many weeks after treatment. This study confirms the return of CQ sensitivity in Malawi and importantly, shows no evidence of the re-emergence of pfcrt 76T after treatment with CQ or AQ. Given the safety record of AQ when used as a prophylaxis, our observations of marked falls in neutrophil counts in the AQ+SP group requires further scrutiny. Trial Registration Controlled-Trials.com ISRCTN22075368
500+ Times Faster than Deep Learning: (A Case Study Exploring Faster Methods for Text Mining StackOverflow)

Deep learning methods are useful for high-dimensional data and are becoming widely used in many areas of software engineering. Deep learners utilizes extensive computational power and can take a long time to train– making it difficult to widely validate and repeat and improve their results. Further, they are not the best solution in all domains. For example, recent results show that for finding related Stack Overflow posts, a tuned SVM performs similarly to a deep learner, but is significantly faster to train.This paper extends that recent result by clustering the dataset, then tuning every learners within each cluster. This approach is over 500 times faster than deep learning (and over 900 times faster if we use all the cores on a standard laptop computer). Significantly, this faster approach generates classifiers nearly as good (within 2% F1 Score) as the much slower deep learning method. Hence we recommend this faster methods since it is much easier to reproduce and utilizes far fewer CPU resources. More generally, we recommend that before researchers release research results, that they compare their supposedly sophisticated methods against simpler alternatives(e.g applying simpler learners to build local models).
Exploring Low-Cost, Internet-Free Information Access for Resource-Constrained Communities

Rural developing regions are often defined in terms of their resource constraints, including limited technology exposure, lack of power, and low access to data connections (leading to an inability to access information from digital or physical sources), as well as being amongst the most socio-economically disadvantaged and least literate in their countries’ populations. This article is focused around information access in such regions, aiming to build upon and extend the audio-based services that are already widely used in order to provide access to further types of media. In this article, then, we present an extended exploration of AudioCanvas—an interactive telephone-based audio information system that allows cameraphone users to interact directly with their own photos of physical media to receive narration or description. Our novel approach requires no specialist hardware, literacy, or data connectivity, making it far more likely to be a suitable solution for users in such regions.
Dislocation pinning in a low-dose neutron irradiated Al-Mg-Si industrial alloy

Abstract The effects of neutron irradiation on Al 6063, pre-exposed at 300 K to thermal fluences up to 8 ′ 1022 n cm−2 and fast fluences up to 4 ′ 1022 n cm−2, are studied by mechanical spectroscopy. The internal friction and dynamic shear modulus spectra as a function of temperature show variations which are strongly dependent on the dose. The 480 K internal friction peak of the unirradiated alloy (attributed in a previous work to solute dragging by dislocations) shifts to higher temperatures after irradiation. This peak shift is interpreted in terms of dislocation pinning by irradiation-induced clusters. The shear modulus increases by 15% at low doses and remains stable during thermal cycling in the range 300–550 K. It is shown that this hardening cannot be explained solely by dislocation pinning; an additional direct bulk effect of interstitials and clusters created by thermal neutrons is proposed to account for it. Complete recovery in the shear modulus is observed for higher doses after thermal cycling.
In situ Electrical measurements in Transmission Electron Microscopy

In the present thesis the combination of real-time electricalmeasurements on nano-sampleswith simultaneous examination by transmission electron microscope (TEM) is discussed. Application of an electrical current may lead to changes in the samples thus the possibility to correlate such changes with the corresponding I-V measurements is very important. Using the TEMalong with in-house built sample holder and measurement setup, some important results were obtained. Firstly, current induced grain growth in polycrystalline Pt nanobridges (14 nm thick, 200 nm wide and 300 nm long) was investigated. Direct correlation was found between the evolution of the grain size and the change in the resistance. Secondly, the electromigration in Pt and Pd nanobridges was studied by in situ TEM technique. The material transfer during direct and reverse EM process in Pd bridges with different geometry was followed in-situ using scanning TEM. Further, the results of application of the Helium Ion Microscope (HIM) as a sculpting tool for nano-scaled samples are presented. We discuss the possibility to combine modification of the sample by the focused heliumion beam with local heating of the specimens. Heating is facilitated by using MEMS based heaters developed in-house. The detailed analysis of the modified samples was carried out with FEI Titan transmission electron microscope (TEM) operated at 300 kV. With the proposed method it is also possible to carry out the electrical measurements on a wide range of materials such as metallic and semi-conductor nanowires, nanobridges, nanopatricles and novel materials such as graphene.
Boosting ART uptake and retention among HIV‐infected pregnant and breastfeeding women and their infants: the promise of innovative service delivery models

With the rapid scale‐up of antiretroviral treatment (ART) in the “Treat All” era, there has been increasing emphasis on using differentiated models of HIV service delivery. The gaps within the clinical cascade for mothers and their infants suggest that current service delivery models are not meeting families' needs and prompt re‐consideration of how services are provided. This article will explore considerations for differentiated care and encourage the ongoing increase of ART coverage through innovative strategies while also addressing the unique needs of mothers and infants.