Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Alcohol mixed with energy drink (AMED): A critical review and meta‐analysis

The purpose of this systematic review and meta‐analysis was to critically review the (1) prevalence of alcohol mixed with energy drink (AMED) consumption, (2) motives for AMED consumption, (3) correlates of AMED consumption, and (4) whether AMED consumption has an impact on (a) alcohol consumption, (b) subjective intoxication, and (c) risk‐taking behavior.
Dependency networks extractions from textual sources — A case study in criminology

The identification and assessment of data is one of the crucial challenges within any scientific discipline. Due to the size, complexity of data, and its internal contradictory information, there are several challenges, which need to be fully addressed to ensure the advance of Data Science and its applications. This work focuses on an automatic approach to extract, identify and discover knowledge focusing on the creation on Dependency Networks (DN). These are powerful modelling tools to navigate throughout data and allow to determine how concepts influence one another. The main motivation of this work is to propose a method to facilitate the decision making and knowledge discovery process. The validation of the proposed approach will demonstrate the potential of this work, specifically focussing on Criminology.
Twelve months of implementation of health care performance‐based financing in Burkina Faso: A qualitative multiple case study

Abstract To improve health services' quantity and quality, African countries are increasingly engaging in performance‐based financing (PBF) interventions. Studies to understand their implementation in francophone West Africa are rare. This study analysed PBF implementation in Burkina Faso 12 months post‐launch in late 2014. The design was a multiple and contrasted case study involving 18 cases (health centres). Empirical data were collected from observations, informal (n = 224) and formal (n = 459) interviews, and documents. Outside the circle of persons trained in PBF, few in the community had knowledge of it. In some health centres, the fact that staff were receiving bonuses was intentionally not announced to populations and community leaders. Most local actors thought PBF was just another project, but the majority appreciated it. There were significant delays in setting up agencies for performance monitoring, auditing, and contracting, as well as in the payment. The first audits led rapidly to coping strategies among health workers and occasionally to some staging beforehand. No community‐based audits had yet been done. Distribution of bonuses varied from one centre to another. This study shows the importance of understanding the implementation of public health interventions in Africa and of uncovering coping strategies.
Continuous Change in Membrane and Membrane-Skeleton Organization During Development From Proerythroblast to Senescent Red Blood Cell

Within the context of erythropoiesis and the possibility of producing artificial red blood cells (RBCs) in vitro, a most critical step is the final differentiation of enucleated erythroblasts, or reticulocytes, to a fully mature biconcave discocyte, the RBC. Reviewed here is the current knowledge about this fundamental maturational process. By combining literature data with our own experimental evidence we propose that the early phase in the maturation of reticulocytes to RBCs is driven by a membrane raft-based mechanism for the sorting of disposable membrane proteins, mostly the no longer needed transferrin receptor (TfR), to the multivesicular endosome (MVE) as cargo of intraluminal vesicles that are subsequently exocytosed as exosomes, consistently with the seminal and original observation of Johnstone and collaborators of more than 30 years ago (Pan BT, Johnstone RM. Cell. 1983;33:967-978). According to a strikingly selective sorting process, the TfR becomes cargo destined to exocytosis while other molecules, including the most abundant RBC transmembrane protein, band 3, are completely retained in the cell membrane. It is also proposed that while this process could be operating in the early maturational steps in the bone marrow, additional mechanism(s) must be at play for the final removal of the excess reticulocyte membrane that is observed to occur in the circulation. This processing will most likely require the intervention of the spleen, whose function is also necessary for the continuous remodeling of the RBC membrane all along this cell's circulatory life.
Effects of aluminium nitride silane-treatment on the mechanical and thermal properties of polybenzoxazine matrix

A new kind of polymer composite, produced from the typical polybenzoxazine and 0–30 wt-% native and silane-treated aluminium nitride (T-AlN), was investigated. The mechanical tests revealed a significant increase in the microhardness and flexural properties upon adding the T-AlN particles compared to that obtained from the untreated ones. By adding 0–30 wt-% T-AlN, the tensile moduli were accurately reproduced by the Halpin-Tsai and Nielsen models. At 30 wt-% T-AlN, dynamic mechanical analysis showed a significant increase in the storage moduli and the glass transition temperature (Tg), reaching 3.2 GPa and 217°C, respectively. The thermal stability of these materials was significantly improved upon the addition of the T-AlN fillers. These improvements are attributed to the high thermal and mechanical properties of the fillers and their good dispersion and adhesion in and to the matrix as revealed by a morphological analysis.
Quality Upgrading, Trade, and Market Structure in Food Processing Industries

In this paper the heterogeneous firms and trade literature is extended by integrating quality of inputs and outputs in a food and agricultural setting, along with an analysis of how the ability to translate capability into higher product quality is critical in evaluating the cut-offs for food processing firms to enter domestic and export markets. Specifically, it is found that the direction of change in the domestic market cut-off, due to an increased ability to raise quality, is sensitive to key parameters of the capability distribution; while for the export market cut-off the direction of change depends on the fixed costs of entry into and rents from exporting. These hypotheses are then tested for using panel data for Chilean food processors.
Changes of perceived control after kidney transplantation: a prospective study

AIMS The aim of this study was to determine if kidney transplantation is associated with increases of perceived control and how changes of perceived control affect the course of psychological distress until 1 year after transplantation. BACKGROUND Low levels of perceived control are associated with reduced well-being among dialysis patients. DESIGN Prospective longitudinal cohort study. METHODS Perceived control (Mastery Scale) and psychological distress (GHQ-12) were prospectively assessed before (T0; n = 470) and three (T1; n = 197), six (T2; n = 210) and twelve (T3; n = 183) months after transplantation. Differences between T1 and T0 perceived control were used to stratify the sample into three groups (control gain, stable control and control loss). Socio-demographic and clinical variables, including complications, were examined as potential correlates and the course of psychological was distress compared across groups. Data were collected between July 2008 - July 2013. RESULTS Perceived control showed a small increase overall, with 35·1%, 50·0% and 14·9% reporting gain, stable level and loss respectively. Patients with secondary schooling were overrepresented in the control loss group. The course of psychological distress varied across perceived control change groups, with patients in the control gain group experiencing a significant reduction in psychological distress. CONCLUSION A considerable number of patients report increased levels of perceived control after transplantation that are associated with a subsequent decrease in psychological distress. Results emphasize the importance of perceived control and could inform interventions to facilitate well-being after kidney transplantation.
The evolution of antibiotic resistance is linked to any genetic mechanism affecting bacterial duration of carriage

aOxford Big Data Institute, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK; bDepartment of Infectious Disease Epidemiology, Imperial College, London, UK; cShoklo Malaria Research Unit, Mahidol-Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit, Faculty of Tropical Medicine, Mahidol University, Mae Sot, Thailand; dCentre for Tropical Medicine and Global Health, Nuffield Department of Medicine, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK; eCenter for Communicable Disease Dynamics, Department of Epidemiology and Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
Developing video games with elementary adaptive artificial intelligence in unity: An intelligent systems approach

Video games have increasingly demonstrated a great deal of audiovisual realism, in par with the massive performance improvement of computer systems. At the same time, their Artificial Intelligence (AI) component falls short in terms of realism because it is usually based on non-adaptive methods. Adaptive AI mechanisms can help increase video game realism allowing the game to adapt in real-time to the game progress and the user behavior. Following a short overview of the progress of AI in video games in the past years, this paper highlights the creation of modern video games with basic and elementary adaptive game AI using the Unity game development framework. Particular emphasis is on the details of the AI component. First, a shooter game with basic AI is created. Finally, an action-adventure video game is created featuring elementary case-based adaptive AI. The objective in this game is to create enemies which are able to perceive changes in the environment and adapt their strategies accordingly. Proposed AI practices can migrate into relevant real world applications, such as video surveillance and intrusion detection systems, mission critical autonomous networked patrolling and/or save and rescue robots, vision and hearing assistive applications, intelligent video and behavioral analytics to detect and predict threats etc.
Regulation of Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor and Growth Factor Signaling Pathways by Tyrosine Phosphatase Shp2 in the Retina: A Brief Review

SH2 domain-containing tyrosine phosphatase-2 (PTPN11 or Shp2) is a ubiquitously expressed protein that plays a key regulatory role in cell proliferation, differentiation and growth factor (GF) signaling. This enzyme is well expressed in various retinal neurons and has emerged as an important player in regulating survival signaling networks in the neuronal tissues. The non-receptor phosphatase can translocate to lipid rafts in the membrane and has been implicated to regulate several signaling modules including PI3K/Akt, JAK-STAT and Mitogen Activated Protein Kinase (MAPK) pathways in a wide range of biochemical processes in healthy and diseased states. This review focuses on the roles of Shp2 phosphatase in regulating brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) neurotrophin signaling pathways and discusses its cross-talk with various GF and downstream signaling pathways in the retina.
Discriminative Partition Sparsity Analysis

Effective dimensionality reduction has been an attractive research area for many large-scale vision and multimedia tasks. Several recent methods attempt to learn optimized graph-based embedding for fast and accurate applications. In this paper, we propose a novel linear unsupervised algorithm, termed Discriminative Partition Sparsity Analysis (DPSA), explicitly considering different probabilistic distributions that exist over the data points, meanwhile preserving the natural locality relationship among the data. Specifically, the Gaussian mixture model (GMM) is first applied to partition all samples into several clusters. In each cluster, a number of sparse sub-graphs are computed via the ℓ1-norm constraint to optimally represent the intrinsic data structure. Such sub-graphs are demonstrated to be robust to data noise, automatically sparse and adaptive to the neighborhood. All the sub-graphs from the clusters are then combined into a whole discriminative optimization framework for final reduction. We have systematically evaluated our method on three image datasets: USPS digital hand-writing, CMU PIE face and CIFAR-10 tiny image, showing its accurate and robust performance for image classification.
Effect of filament fineness on comfort characteristics of moisture management finished polyester knitted fabrics

Clothing comfort is an important aspect for any garment used for sportswear and leisurewear. Every human being sweats during different kinds of activities. An important feature of any fabric is how it transports this water out of the body surface so as to make the wearer feel comfortable. Hence, wetting and wicking properties are critical aspects during wearing of clothes. Polyester micro-fibers have twin characteristics of durability and comfort. The usage of continuous filament micro-denier polyester yarn for sportswear and leisurewear clothing has a practical significance in clothing comfort. In this study, polyester filament yarn were taken and made into single jersey knitted fabrics. Five different fabrics were made from 150 denier polyester yarns constituting different number of filaments, namely, 34 filaments, 48 filaments, 108 filaments, 144 filaments, and 288 filaments. Moisture management finish was applied to the five types of single jersey knitted fabrics and the effect of filament fineness on comfort characteristics of moisture management finished polyester knitted fabrics was analyzed to achieve suitability for making sportswear. From the tests, it was observed that the fabric containing 108 filaments in yarn gives better wetting, higher wicking, and optimum moisture vapor transmission. A new test method was introduced to find out the transverse wicking behavior of the fabrics. Filament fineness and surface area of yarn play a vital role in deciding the comfort characteristics of the fabric, as also moisture management finish treatment which enhances it.
Combinatorial Modeling and Test Case Generation for Industrial Control Software Using ACTS

Combinatorial testing has been suggested as an effective method of creating test cases at a lower cost. However, industrially applicable tools for modeling and combinatorial test generation are still scarce. As a direct effect, combinatorial testing has only seen a limited uptake in industry that calls into question its practical usefulness. This lack of evidence is especially troublesome if we consider the use of combinatorial test generation for industrial safety-critical control software, such as are found in trains, airplanes, and power plants. To study the industrial application of combinatorial testing, we evaluated ACTS, a popular tool for combinatorial modeling and test generation, in terms of applicability and test efficiency on industrial-sized IEC 61131-3 industrial control software running on Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC). We assessed ACTS in terms of its direct applicability in combinatorial modeling of IEC 61131-3 industrial software and the efficiency of ACTS in terms of generation time and test suite size. We used 17 industrial control programs provided by Bombardier Transportation Sweden AB and used in a train control management system. Our results show that not all combinations of algorithms and interaction strengths could generate a test suite within a realistic cut-off time. The results of the modeling process and the efficiency evaluation of ACTS are useful for practitioners considering to use combinatorial testing for industrial control software as well as for researchers trying to improve the use of such combinatorial testing techniques.
A THEORETICAL ANALYSIS OF BANK RELATIONSHIP Shyam

This paper analyses the banking relationship between branch manager and loan officer of a bank branch using two theoretical approaches Agency Theory and Trust Theory. The analysis is performed across five dimensions of the business relationship between branch manager and loan officer – supervisor subordinate relationship, delegation of authority, assumption of risk in lending, goal congruence and mutual dependence. It is concluded that Trust theory is better descriptor of the banking relationship between branch manager and loan officer as compared to Agency theory because Trust theory can explain situations involving multifaceted relationship such as one between branch manager and loan officer using stakeholders perspective.
An autotrophic H2 -oxidizing, nitrate-respiring, Tc(VII)-reducing Acidovorax sp. isolated from a subsurface oxic-anoxic transition zone.

Increasing concentrations of H2 with depth were observed across a geologic unconformity and associated redox transition zone in the subsurface at the Hanford Site in south-central Washington, USA. An opposing gradient characterized by decreasing O2 and nitrate concentrations was consistent with microbial-catalysed biogeochemical processes. Sterile sand was incubated in situ within a multilevel sampler placed across the redox transition zone to evaluate the potential for Tc(VII) reduction and for enrichment of H2 -oxidizing denitrifiers capable of reducing Tc(VII). H2 -driven TcO4 (-) reduction was detected in sand incubated at all depths but was strongest in material from a depth of 17.1 m. Acidovorax spp. were isolated from H2 -nitrate enrichments from colonized sand from 15.1 m, with one representative, strain JHL-9, subsequently characterized. JHL-9 grew on acetate with either O2 or nitrate as electron acceptor (data not shown) and on medium with bicarbonate, H2 and nitrate. JHL-9 also reduced pertechnetate (TcO4 (-) ) under denitrifying conditions with H2 as the electron donor. H2 -oxidizing Acidovorax spp. in the subsurface at Hanford and other locations may contribute to the maintenance of subsurface redox gradients and offer the potential for Tc(VII) reduction.
Multiview Alignment Hashing for Efficient Image Search

Hashing is a popular and efficient method for nearest neighbor search in large-scale data spaces by embedding high-dimensional feature descriptors into a similarity preserving Hamming space with a low dimension. For most hashing methods, the performance of retrieval heavily depends on the choice of the high-dimensional feature descriptor. Furthermore, a single type of feature cannot be descriptive enough for different images when it is used for hashing. Thus, how to combine multiple representations for learning effective hashing functions is an imminent task. In this paper, we present a novel unsupervised multiview alignment hashing approach based on regularized kernel nonnegative matrix factorization, which can find a compact representation uncovering the hidden semantics and simultaneously respecting the joint probability distribution of data. In particular, we aim to seek a matrix factorization to effectively fuse the multiple information sources meanwhile discarding the feature redundancy. Since the raised problem is regarded as nonconvex and discrete, our objective function is then optimized via an alternate way with relaxation and converges to a locally optimal solution. After finding the low-dimensional representation, the hashing functions are finally obtained through multivariable logistic regression. The proposed method is systematically evaluated on three data sets: 1) Caltech-256; 2) CIFAR-10; and 3) CIFAR-20, and the results show that our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art multiview hashing techniques.
Implementation of lane detection algorithm for self-driving car on toll road cipularang using Python language

Self-Driving Car research problem requires several sub-topics that need to be discussed more deeply. Such as Deep Learning, Computer Vision, Fusion Sensor, Localization, Control, until Path Planning. All of them are fusion of several fields of study. This paper discusses the results of implementation of lane detection algorithm on toll road Cipularang as parts of self-driving car system. Video image taken using action camera mounted on top of the vehicle, with 1280×720 resolution. Average speed of the vehicle is 100 km per hour. Programming language of image processing using Python 3. Image processing method are a combination of methods of colour region, line selection, canny edge detection, and Hough transform. The result shows this algorithm needed to be add some method that can changing the parameters during day and night adaptively. Because constant parameters can only be used in the same lighting conditions. Overall the implementation method in Python Language can successfully detect the road lane with an accuracy above 90 percent.
Coral bleaching in Okinawa, 1980 vs 1998

The author has witnessed two coral bleaching events taken place at Sesoko and Okinawa islands in 1980 and 1998. Although the final reports of the 1998 event are not accessible, the author tries to make some comparisons among the events according to his own report on the 1980 event (Yamazato 1981) and his personal experiences of the 1998 event. Coral bleaching in 1980 around Sesoko Island, Okinawa, Japan appears to have been a local event, while that of 1998 was much more extensive affecting all islands of the Ryukyu Islands and Southern Kyushu. Abnormally high surface temperatures were observed on the reef flat during daytime low tide in the summer of 1980, while it was observed continuously throughout the summer of 1998, affecting not only coral reef waters but also coastal waters both day and night. In 1980, over 40% of coral colonies bleached once and about 10% died, the rest of the bleached corals recovered by the following January. In the 1998 event, according to visual observations of the author made on the same reef section, almost 90% of corals and soft corals bleached and died, with only a few colonies of a few species that recovered. In addition to these personal observations, some results of new surveys are presented and comparisons between the two events are made.
Voltage-dependent K+ currents and underlying single K+ channels in pheochromocytoma cells

Properties of the whole-cell K+ currents and voltage-dependent activation and inactivation properties of single K+ channels in clonal pheochromocytoma (PC-12) cells were studied using the patch-clamp recording technique. Depolarizing pulses elicited slowly inactivating whole-cell K+ currents, which were blocked by external application of tetraethylammonium+, 4-aminopyridine, and quinidine. The amplitudes and time courses of these K+ currents were largely independent of the prepulse voltage. Although pharmacological agents and manipulation of the voltage-clamp pulse protocol failed to reveal any additional separable whole-cell currents in a majority of the cells examined, single-channel recordings showed that, in addition to the large Ca++- dependent K+ channels described previously in many other preparations, PC-12 cells had at least four distinct types of K+ channels activated by depolarization. These four types of K+ channels differed in the open- channel current-voltage relation, time course of activation and inactivation, and voltage dependence of activation and inactivation. These K+ channels were designated the Kw, Kz, Ky, and Kx channels. The typical chord conductances of these channels were 18, 12, 7, and 7 pS in the excised configuration using Na+-free saline solutions. These four types of K+ channels opened in the presence of low concentrations of internal Ca++ (1 nM). Their voltage-dependent gating properties can account for the properties of the whole-cell K+ currents in PC-12 cells.