Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
effect of n-acetylcysteine in COPD patients with different microsomal epoxide hydrolase genotypes

Background: The role of the antioxidant N-acetylcysteine (NAC) in the treatment of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) has not been clarified as yet. In early studies, we found that the proportion of smokers with COPD having extremely slow/slow microsomal epoxide hydrolase (EPHX1) enzyme activity is significantly higher than that in healthy smokers. The purpose of this study was to evaluate whether different EPHX1 enzyme activity is related to differential therapeutic effects of treatment with NAC in COPD. Methods: A total of 219 patients with COPD were randomly allocated to an extremely slow/ slow EPHX1 enzyme activity group (n = 157) or a fast/normal EPHX1 enzyme activity group (n = 62) according to their EPHX1 enzyme activity. Both groups were treated with NAC 600 mg twice daily for one year. The main study parameters, including forced expiratory volume in one second (FEV 1 ), St George’s Respiratory Questionnaire (SGRQ), and yearly exacerbation rate, were measured at baseline and at 6-month intervals for one year. Results: Both FEV 1 and SGRQ symptom scores were improved after treatment with NAC in the slow activity group when compared with the fast activity group. Further, changes in FEV 1 and SGRQ symptom score in patients with mild-to-moderate COPD were more significant than those in patients with severe-to-very severe COPD. The yearly exacerbation rates were reduced in both groups, but the reduction in the slow activity group was significantly lower than in the fast activity group. Conclusion: NAC treatment in COPD patients with extremely slow/slow EPHX1 enzyme activity improves FEV 1 and the SGRQ symptom score, especially in those with mild-to-moderate COPD, and polymorphism in the EPHX1 gene may have a significant role in differential responses to treatment with NAC in patients with COPD.
Phthalates in the food chain: measuring and modelling human exposure and impact on public health

Phthalates are organic lipophilic compounds that are principally used as plasticiser to increase the flexibility of plastic polymers. Other applications are a.o. the use of phthalates in printing inks and lacquers. Human exposure to phthalates mainly occurs via food ingestion and can induce adverse health effects. In this study, the presence of eight phthalate compounds – dimethyl phthalate (DMP), diethyl phthalate (DEP), diisobutyl phthalate (DiBP), di-n-butyl phthalate (DnBP), benzylbutyl phthalate (BBP), di(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate (DEHP), dicyclohexyl phthalate (DCHP) and di-n-octyl phthalate (DnOP) – was investigated in 400 food products, divided over eleven groups, and packages sold on the Belgian market. For this purpose, suitable extraction techniques were developed and validated for four different matrices, namely high-fat foods, low-fat food products, aqueous-based beverages and packaging materials. The instrumental analysis was performed by means of gas chromatography-low resolution-mass spectrometry with electron impact ionisation (GC-EI-MS). A wide variety of phthalate concentrations was observed in the different groups. DEHP was found in the highest concentration in almost every group. Moreover, DEHP was the most abundant phthalate compound, followed by DiBP, DnBP and BBP. This survey is part of the PHTAL project, which is the first project that discusses phthalate contamination on the Belgian food market.
REST Journal on Data Analytics and Artificial

: The rapid development in the hardware and the software gives rise to data growth. This data growth has numerous impacts, including the need for a larger storage capacity for storing and transmitting. Data compression is needed in today’s world because it helps to minimize the amount of storage space required to store and transmit data. Performance measures in data compression are used to evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of data compression algorithms. In recent times, numerous data compression algorithms are developed to reduce data storage and increase transmission speed in this internet era. In order to analyses how data compression performance is measured in terms of text, image, audio, and video compressions. This survey presents discussion made for important data compression parameters according to their data types.
Image Enhancement Focusing on Hazy and Non-uniform Illumination Images

This paper presents a unified method for fast single image enhancement without using any extra information. Adopting a linear combination model of direct attenuation and un-uniform illumination, we describe a unified approach to handle such degraded images with a strategy that gracefully bridges the gap between those two extremes. The proposed approach simultaneously dehazes images and enhances sharpness by means of individual treatment of the RGB component of the residual images. Simulation results on a variety of outdoor degraded images demonstrate that the proposed method achieves short computation time and good restoration for visibility and color fidelity.
Connectivity of overland flow by drainage network expansion in a rain forest catchment

Soils in various places of the Panama Canal Watershed feature a low saturated hydraulic conductivity (Ks) at shallow depth, which promotes overland‐flow generation and associated flashy catchment responses. In undisturbed forests of these areas, overland flow is concentrated in flow lines that extend the channel network and provide hydrological connectivity between hillslopes and streams. To understand the dynamics of overland‐flow connectivity, as well as the impact of connectivity on catchment response, we studied an undisturbed headwater catchment by monitoring overland‐flow occurrence in all flow lines and discharge, suspended sediment, and total phosphorus at the catchment outlet. We find that connectivity is strongly influenced by seasonal variation in antecedent wetness and can develop even under light rainfall conditions. Connectivity increased rapidly as rainfall frequency increased, eventually leading to full connectivity and surficial drainage of entire hillslopes. Connectivity was nonlinearly related to catchment response. However, additional information on factors such as overland‐flow volume would be required to constrain relationships between connectivity, stormflow, and the export of suspended sediment and phosphorus. The effort to monitor those factors would be substantial, so we advocate applying the established links between rain event characteristics, drainage network expansion by flow lines, and catchment response for predictive modeling and catchment classification in forests of the Panama Canal Watershed and in similar regions elsewhere.
Vietnam Journal of Catalysis and Adsorption

Characterization of a tetradentate ONNO Schiff base ligand namely (1, 1′ - (pyridine-2, 3-dimethyliminomethyl) naphthalene-2, 2′ -diol) and hereafter denotes as “SL″ and selected metal complexes including Mn( II), Fe(II), Co(II) and Cd(II) as a central metal was studied. In this paper, the calculation was done to determine the magnetic exchange of the studied molecules, Schiff base complexes via DFT calculations. Using the ZORA approach with the BP86 functionals and appropriate basis set def2-tzvp and Coulomb fitting, the optimized geometries were obtained with reliable accuracy and precision. The dipole moment was calculated. The EPR parameters were also reported.
BILINGUAL SENTIMENT ANALYSIS ON MALAYSIAN SOCIAL MEDIA USING VADER AND NORMALISATION HEURISTICS

This research addresses a number of important issues involved in performing Sentiment Analysis (SA) on Malaysian Social Media (SM), including an analysis of bilingual or mixed language, choice of sentiment lexicon, normalisation heuristics, and the use of public datasets. This work is the first to quantify the level of language mixing in informal Malaysian text. Analysis of the 2M tweet Malaya dataset revealed a significant level of English sentiment content in Malaysian social media (13.5%), demonstrating the neccessity of a bilingual approach to Malaysian Sentiment Analysis. Significant patterns in noisy Malaysian SM text were identified and heuristics for normalising them were devised. The popular and effective English lexicon-based SA system VADER ( Valence Aware Dictionary and sEntiment Reasoner ) was translated to Malay using automatic and manual methods, with the combination of English and Malay VADER yielding a bilingual SA system. A subset of the Malaya dataset was both corrected and extended from two to three classes in order to properly test the bilingual SA system. Bilingual VADER with normalisation heuristics was able to achieve an impressive level of performance on a three-class problem (accuracy=0.71, mean F1=0.72), as compared to Malay VADER alone and several popular machine learning-based algorithms.
Star Wars: The Empirics Strike Back

Journals favor rejection of the null hypothesis. This selection upon tests may distort the behavior of researchers. Using 50,000 tests published between 2005 and 2011 in the AER, JPE, and QJE, we identify a residual in the distribution of tests that cannot be explained by selection. The distribution of p-values exhibits a camel shape with abundant p-values above 0.25, a valley between 0.25 and 0.10 and a bump slightly below 0.05. The missing tests (with p-values between 0.25 and 0.10) can be retrieved just after the 0.05 threshold and represent 10% to 20% of marginally rejected tests. Our interpretation is that researchers might be tempted to inflate the value of those almost-rejected tests by choosing a "significant" specification. We propose a method to measure inflation and decompose it along articles' and authors' characteristics.
ITEM DEVELOPMENT FOR SOCIAL TAGGING IN THE STUDY OF USAGE IN SOCIAL MEDIA COMMUNITY

Recent research has shown that extensive use of tagging in social media or better known by social metadata leads to emergent semantics. Much has been learnt in recent years about how to capture the data provided by taggers for the purpose of visibility and needs to trending that beneficial as marketing for businesses and public or targeted engagement such as social media community. However, little progress has been made on other issues, such as understanding the usage of tagging within specified community. which is essential for, among others, identifying social media usage relationships between concepts, this study intended to address that void. Starting from a review of metadata definitions to social media users, introduce validity of items created for the framework, applying partial least squares structural (PLS) to measure the level composite reliability, variance inflation factor (VIF), and Heterotrait-monotrait ratio (HTMT) of items of social metadata dimension. Evaluation are done by comparing with grounded measures. Results suggest that the generality of tags in social tagging systems as social metadata can be approximated with simple measurement of the newly created items. The discussion of the results leads to discovery of major findings entrench with the hypothesises.
Religious Moderation of Syafa’ah Darussalam Islamic Boarding School Denpasar Bali in the Midst of the Majority of Hindu Society

Religious moderation in pesantren can start from the open mindset of kiai as the most inﬂuential leader in pesantren. Furthermore, kiai guides students and all pesantren residents to do the same attitude. Evidence of moderate attitudes can be read from the willingness to accept differences in background in society. Pondok Pesantren Syafa’ah Darussalam Denpasar stands in the middle of a hindu majority community, making this pesantren interact intensely with them on a daily basis. It takes intelligence in interacting in the midst of the many issues of intolerance in Indonesia to foster harmonious relations between pesantren residents and the surrounding community who are Hindus. The good relationship between pesantren and local residents has been built by the founder of Pondok Pesantren Syafa’ah Darussalam since its inception. This paper aims to explain the form and efforts to build good relations between pesantren and local residents who are Hindus. Phenomenological strategies are used as instruments of obtaining and managing data on the nature of an individual’s experience of a particular event. This research found that the existence of a universal pesantren program, such as maintaining environmental cleanliness, as an effort to build harmonious relationships.
Users Opinion Mining of Tiktok Shop Social Media Commerce to Find Business Opportunities for Small Businesses

Social media commerce rapidly grew during the world-changing of covid 19. The long duration of using social media provokes users to make purchases online through social media. TikTok - the most popular social media downloaded - provides their user a social media commerce experience, namely TikTokShop. The TikTok shop opened the window of opportunity for small business growth. Small business owners could maximize the potential use of TikTok shops by understanding more about TikTokShop. This research is concern to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of TikTok shop as a social media commerce platform by applying data mining. Opinion data is collected from Twitter and processed using the Naïve Bayes algorithm to test the sentiment of TikTok shop users. These positive and negative opinions are then classified and transformed with a SWOT analysis to find out the strengths and weaknesses of Tiktok Shop. This research contributes to analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of the social media commerce platform Tiktok Shop as a reference for users and platform developers. Users can see and position themselves using the platform to get optimal benefits. For platform developers, the results of this research contribute to providing insights for maximizing the features that meet the user's expectations. © 2023 Little Lion Scientific.
Gas hydrates, free gas distribution and fault pattern on the west Svalbard continental margin

SUMMARY A 3-D tomographic analysis of seismic velocity and attenuation fields is presented with the purpose to analyse the intimate relation of gas hydrates and free gas distribution with the fault pattern. The 3-D, four-component seismic data have been acquired offshore western Svalbard. The analysis of the subbottom topography of the base of the stability field of gas hydrates (indicated by the bottom simulating reflector) and the thickness of the underlying free gas bearing zone suggest a fault-induced compartmentalization of the gas reservoir. The proposed fluid and gas circulation scheme assumes deep sourced warm fluids moving upwards mainly along high permeability faults and fractures below the gas hydrate stability zone. Faults change from being a pathway of fluid flow to being barriers to fluid flow in the hydrate stability zone. Consequently, below the hydrate stability zone free gas is transferred from the permeable faults to non-faulted (but fault-bounded) sediments, where it accumulates below the base of the hydrate stability zone, producing a significantly thicker free gas layer. The tomographic approach is therefore proposed as an effective procedure to provide detailed information on 3-D P- and S-wave velocity and attenuation distribution in marine sediments and specifically to examine the details of the distribution of the gas hydrates and of the free gas, for which the dependence on the Vp, Vs and Qp is now fairly well known.
Population, Forest Degradation and Environment: A Nexus

In order to examine the trend and impact of relationship between growth of forest resource and population in West Bengal, a province of India, in the time series data for every ten-year from 1901-1991 this study suggests that the increase of population to forest land in West Bengal is alarming, because the ability of the forest to satisfy the demands is limited by the extent of forest resource of the state. The increasing population in West Bengal makes a negative impact on the forest. Though this impact is not highly significant at present, the long run relationship between density of population and forest area leads to substantial damage of the forest resource causing acute environmental problem of the state in future. Similarly, soil erosion, which is the only natural factor to damage forest resource in West Bengal, has some significant effect, though not highly. Keeping in view of such problems community forest management programme like social forestry or joint forest management seems to a positive step for protecting environmental problem.
A Survey of Blockchain: from Theory to NFT Applications

: The blockchain technology that has emerged in recent years has the characteristics of distributed ledgers, immutability, traceability, programmability, and security, providing new ideas and opportunities for the development of the digital economy. Non-Fungible tokens, due to their immutability and decentralization based on blockchain, have brought new trading models to the digital encryption industry and have had a significant impact on the recognition rights of digital assets. So this article introduces the basic concepts and characteristics of Non-Fungible tokens and blockchain, discusses the impact of blockchain on Non-Fungible tokens, introduces the properties, protocols, and ecosystems of Non-Fungible tokens, and finally looks forward to the future development trends of Non-Fungible tokens.
Effects of computerized decision support in the context of a performance-based incentive intervention on maternal and neonatal health-worker performance in Upper East Region, Ghana: A qualitative study of professional perspectives

Background Computerized decision support systems (CDSS) and performance-based incentives (PBIs) can improve health-worker performance. However, there is minimal evidence on the combined effects of these interventions or perceived effects among maternal and child healthcare providers in low-resource settings. We thus aimed to explore the perceptions of maternal and child healthcare providers of combined CDSS-PBI support on performance in twelve primary care facilities in Ghana’s Upper East Region. Methods We conducted a qualitative study drawing on semi-structured key informant interviews with 24 nurses and midwives, 12 health facility managers, and 6 district-level staff familiar with the intervention. We analysed data thematically using deductive and inductive coding in NVivo 9 software. Results Interviewees suggested
Evidence and implications of an extensive early Mesozoic rift basin and basalt/diabase sequence beneath the southeast Coastal Plain

Regional seismic reflection profiles across the Georgia and South Carolina Coastal Plain provide a detailed view into the internal structure and stratigraphy of the buried Triassic-Jurassic South Georgia basin. Reflection data indicate that the basin is a complex composite of smaller, individual basins which vary drastically along strike. These basins are relatively wide along north-south profile (maximum >100 km) but appear to be more restricted along strike. In cross section, the basins are asymmetric, being typically bounded on their south sides by an interpreted north-dipping master normal falult. The thickness of interpreted basin fill below the Cretaceous-Tertiary overlap also varies drastically, locally reaching 6 km. Analysis and correlation of the reflection profiles, when integrated with drill-hole and offshore reflection data, suggest the presence of an areally extensive basalt flow and/or diabase sill sequence of probable Early-Middle Jurassic age, covering a large part of the Triassic-Jurassic South Georgia basin. The sequence is traceable on seismic reflection profiles across much of the South Georgia basin and may extend as far as from western Georgia to offshore South Carolina. The implied areal extent of this sequence would be more than 100,000 km 2 , ranking it among the great basalt flows and/or sills of the world. On seismic reflection profiles over the South Georgia basin, the basalt/diabase sequence is also important in marking a "post-rift" unconformity which separates tilted and apparently faulted lower Mesozoic rift-related strata below from a thinner, more widespread, and generally unfaulted sequence above. This configuration is interpreted to mean that basalt extrusion and/or hypabyssal intrusion occurred after the main episode of Late Triassic-Early(? ) Jurassic normal faulting and associated localized subsidence ("syn-rift" phase) and prior to a later, Jurassic episode of more widespread uniform subsidence ("post-rift" phase) accompanied by relatively minor normal faulting. This two-stage evolutionary sequence is analogous to that of many rift basins throughout the world and suggests a hypothesis that the South Georgia basin was an area of incipient crustal spreading associated with the early formation of the central Atlantic Ocean.
Talaromyces amestolkiae - A Potential Phosphate Solubilizer Isolated from Rhizosphere Soil of Medicinal Plants

: In the present study, 13 PSF were isolated and screened by Pikovskaya’s media from 15 rhizosphere soil samples of different medicinal plants and labeled as PSF1 to PSF13. The in-vitro study confirms PSF10 has more phosphate solubilizing potential and was identified as Talaromyces amestolkiae; morphologically and confirmed by molecular characterization. The 18s rRNA sequence was deposited at GenBank, NCBI (MN904859). PSF 10 has good results in SI (3.21) and reduced pH in culture filtrate (3.8 from 6.89), colour change of Bromophenol blue indicator to yellow on an agar plate and Bromocresol purple indicator to yellow in broth to acidic condition, TA (30.16g/L) and 45µg of phosphate was found in the culture broth. It produces siderophore and IAA. Due to the maximum phosphate solubilization efficiency of the fungus, Talaromyces amestolkiae compared to other fungal isolates it can be recommended for the development of phosphate solubilizing biofertilizers used in agricultural fields.
An Evaluation of Alternative Image Classification Techniques for the Identification and Mapping of Tropical Savanna Landscape in Northern Australia

Abstract Landsat MSS, TM and SPOT XS imageries were used in conjunction with unsupervised, supervised and hybrid classilication techniques to classify land cover types in semi‐arid savannas of Mathison Pastoral Station in the Katherine region of northern Australia. Accuracy assessment was based on field data from 246 ground survey sites over a 745‐km2 study area. Of 14 land cover classes identified by traditional mapping means, all combinations of imageries and classification techniques differentiated at least seven land cover types. The overall accuracy for these classifications ranged between 43% and 67%. SPOT XS image delivered the best accuracy followed by TM and MSS; unsupervised classification performed better than supervised and hybrid methods. User's and producer's accuracy of individual land units ranged from 0% to 100%. Riparian woodlands, woodland on limestone slopes, shrubland on clay plains, woodland on limestone plains and shadows were the best‐mapped classes. The land units that were associated with undulating hills were not mapped accurately. However, incorporation of a digital elevation model (DEM) in a GIS improved the overall accuracy. The user's and producer's accuracy of dominant land cover types were also enhanced. The classification results and the efficacy of the techniques at Mathison were similar to those found for a nearby semi‐arid area (Kidman Springs) about 200 km from Mathison. However, the overall accuracy was lower at Mathison than at Kidman Springs. Spectral classification masks were developed from the SPOT XS and TM imageries at Kidman Springs, and were applied to classify SPOT XS and TM imageries at Mathison. Initial results showed that the classification mask could be successfully extrapolated to map dominant land cover types but only with moderate accuracy (50%).