Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Insulin Can Delay Neutrophil Extracellular Trap Formation In Vitro—Implication for Diabetic Wound Care?

Simple Summary Diabetes is a globally developing disease. Diabetic patients suffer from several side diseases, including impaired healing abilities. In general, every injury is characterized by an immediate immune response at the wound site. Neutrophils are the first immune cells arriving at the fracture site, to defend the body against pathogens. However, neutrophils may also induce tissue damage. By releasing their DNA together with proteins, so-called neutrophil extracellular traps (NETs), they can induce an overshooting inflammation and directly harm tissue, especially during wound healing. Some anti-diabetic drugs were already found to influence this process but for one of the major treatments of diabetes, insulin, nothing is known so far. We found that insulin can modulate the process of NET formation and instead induce the anti-bacterial capacity of neutrophils. Thus, insulin may be a tool to improve diabetic wound healing by regulation of NET formation. Abstract Diabetes is a worldwide evolving disease with many associated complications, one of which is delayed or impaired wound healing. Appropriate wound healing strongly relies on the inflammatory reaction directly after injury, which is often altered in diabetic wound healing. After an injury, neutrophils are the first cells to enter the wound site. They have a special defense mechanism, neutrophil extracellular traps (NETs), consisting of released DNA coated with antimicrobial proteins and histones. Despite being a powerful weapon against pathogens, NETs were shown to contribute to impaired wound healing in diabetic mice and are associated with amputations in diabetic foot ulcer patients. The anti-diabetic drugs metformin and liraglutide have already been shown to regulate NET formation. In this study, the effect of insulin was investigated. NET formation after stimulation with PMA (phorbol myristate acetate), LPS (lipopolysaccharide), or calcium ionophore (CI) in the presence/absence of insulin was analyzed. Insulin led to a robust delay of LPS- and PMA-induced NET formation but had no effect on CI-induced NET formation. Mechanistically, insulin induced reactive oxygen species, phosphorylated p38, and ERK, but reduced citrullination of histone H3. Instead, bacterial killing was induced. Insulin might therefore be a new tool for the regulation of NET formation during diabetic wound healing, either in a systemic or topical application.
The IgA of hares (Lepus sp.) and rabbit confirms that the leporids IgA explosion is old and reveals a new case of trans-species polymorphism

Background Immunoglobulin A (IgA) is the mammalian mucosal antibody, providing an important line of defense against pathogens. With 15 IgA subclasses, the European rabbit has an extremely complex IgA system, strikingly more complex than most other mammals, which have only one IgA or, in the case of hominoids, two IgA subclasses. Similar to the two hominoid primate IGHA genes, the expansion of the rabbit IGHA genes appears to have begun in an ancestral lagomorph since multiple IgA copies were found by Southern blot analysis for the genera Sylvilagus, Lepus, and Ochotona. Results To gain a better insight into the extraordinary lagomorph IgA evolution, we sequenced, for the first time, expressed IgA genes for two Lepus species, L. europaeus and L. granatensis. These were aligned with the 15 rabbit IgA isotypes, and evolutionary analyses were conducted. The obtained phylogenetic tree shows that the Lepus IgA sequences cluster with and among the rabbit IgA isotypes, and the interspecies and intraspecies nucleotide genetic distances are similar. A comparison of the amino acid sequences of the Lepus and rabbit IgA confirms that there are two trans-species polymorphisms and that the rabbit and Lepus sequences share a common genetic pool. In fact, the main differences between the studied leporids IgAs reside in the characteristics of the hinge region. Conclusion The Lepus IgA sequences we have obtained strongly suggest that the great expansion of the leporid IGHA genes occurred in a common ancestral species and was then maintained in the descendants. A strong selective pressure caused the extraordinary expansion of the IGHA genes but then subsided, leading to the maintenance of the acquired polymorphisms in the descendants, with little subsequent divergence. This is a unique evolutionary pattern in which an ancient gene expansion has been maintained for approximately 18 million years.
Parameter Sensitivity in Rank-Biased Precision

Rank-Biased Precision (RBP) is a retrieval evaluation metric that assigns an effectiveness score to a ranking by computing a geometricly weighted sum of document relevance values, with the monotonicly decreasing weights in the geometric distribution determined via a persistence parameter p. Despite exhibiting various advantageous traits over well known existing measures such as Average Precision, RBP has the drawback of requiring the designer of any experiment to choose a value for p. Here we present a method that allows retrieval systems evaluated using RBP with different p values to be compared. The proposed approach involves calculating two critical bounding relevance vectors for the original RBP score, and using those vectors to calculate the range of possible RBP scores for any other value of p. Those bounds may then be sufficient to allow the outright superiority of one system over the other to be established. In addition, the process can be modified to handle any RBP residuals associated with either of the two systems. We believe the adoption of the comparison process described in this paper will greatly aid the uptake of RBP in evaluation experiments.
EXPLORING CHALLENGES IN UTILIZING ENGLISH RESOURCES FOR RESEARCH AND ITS REMEDIES

ABSTRACTThis qualitative study aimed to investigate students' problems in using English resources as research references at Universitas Islam Negeri (UIN) Sumatera Utara. Data were collected through observations, interviews, and focused group discussions (FGD). The instruments complementing the techniques include observation forms, interviews, and FGD question lists. Furthermore, the study used WhatsApp on a smartphone to record, confirm, and ensure the validity of data about the subjects. The findings showed that English department students at UIN Sumatera Utara had difficulties searching for research resources, understanding texts from international journals, and lacking skills in writing scientific papers. Therefore, intensive writing practices would enhance writing skills, perception, and knowledge of when to pursue assistance. It is recommended that the university establish an academic writing center and offer writing consultation. The center may regularly organize writing workshops to guide searching, using references, and structuring the manuscript.ABSTRAKPenelitian ini bertujuan untuk menginvestigasi permasalahan yang dihadapi oleh mahasiswa dalam menggunakan sumber-sumber berbahasa Inggris sebagai rujukan dalam penulisan karya ilmiah di Universitas Islam Negeri (UIN) Sumatera Utara. Penelitian yang menggunakan pendekatan kualitatif ini menggunakan berbagai tehnik pengumpulan data diantaranya observasi, wawancara dan Focus Group Discussion (FGD). Adapun instrumen yang digunakan dalam pengumpulan data adalah form observasi, daftar wawancara, dan daftar pertanyaan FGD. Untuk merekam proses wawancara, peneliti menggunakan Smartphone untuk merekam, mengkonfirmasi, dan memastikan validitas data tentang masalah yang diteliti. Hasil penelitian ini menunjukkan bahwa mahasiswa Pendidikan Bahasa Inggris di UIN Sumatera Utara mengalami kesulitan dalam menelusur sumber-sumber penelitian dan dalam memahami teks dari jurnal internasional, serta kurangnya keterampilan dalam menulis karya ilmiah. Oleh karena itu, praktek penulisan karya ilmiah secara intensif perlu dikembangkan untuk meningkatkan keterampilan menulis, persepsi mahasiswa, dan pengetahuan mahasiswa tentang kapan saatnya mereka membutuhkan bantuan penulisan. Universitas seyogyanya membangun sebuah pusat penulisan akademik dan memberikan konsultasi penulisan. Pusat penulisan akademik ini juga dapat menyelenggarakan workshop secara reguler dengan memberikan bimbingan dalam penelusuran dan pemanfaatan sumber-sumber referensi serta bimbingan penyusunan naskah karya tulis ilmiah. How to Cite: Farhain, F.N. , Lubis, Y. , Siregar, D. Y. (2023). Exploring Challenges in Utilizing English Resources for Research and its Remedies. IJEE (Indonesian Journal of English Education), 9(2), 1-22. doi:10.15408/ijee.v10i1. 30517
Hodge Decomposition of Paired Comparison Flows in Click-through Data

Hodge theory, as a powerful technique which bridges over analysis, geometry and topology, was recently introduced to data analysis in metric spaces [1] and statistical ranking [2]. When applied to ranking problem, a combinatorial version of Hodge Theory leads to an orthogonal decomposition of pairwise comparison flows into three components: one is the gradient of a global score function which can be used to rate the candidates, the other two describe the inconsistency of pairwise comparison data, locally and globally respectively. Through this decomposition, one not only obtains a global ranking score, but also gets two measurements on how consistent are the raters in pairwise comparisons. Pairwise comparison models for user’s clicks have been made popular due to Joachims’ work [3]: the user’s clicks, can derive implicit pairwise comparisons between the clicked and the skipped webpages, which is shown to reflect user’s preference over documents and the relevance of query vs. document. In this report, we study an application of combinatorial Hodge theory to the pairwise comparison models for click data based on Joachims’ work. Our purpose is to investigate both the global ranking of the relevant documents and the nature of inconsistency within user’s preference. Our studies show that it is not a proper way to directly apply Joachim’s models on typical industrial data collected from a commercial search engine, which tends to revert the order of search engines and thus leaves a larger deviation from Human Rating Scores even than random ranking. Most of the inconsistency in user’s preference is of local scale, consisting of those webpages targeted by different interest groups. Such a result suggests to explore novel models to exploit click data for web search ranking. Key Word: Hodge Theory, Search Ranking, Pairwise Ranking
User Association and Power Allocation in Multi-Connectivity Enabled Millimeter-Wave Networks With Limited Backhaul

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) communication has been recognized as a key technology to improve the rate performance of the next-generation wireless networks. However, the mmWave signals suffer from severe path loss and penetration attenuation due to the extremely high frequency characteristics. As a result, a massive number of small base stations (SBSs) would be deployed in mmWave networks to provide seamless coverage. To overcome obstacle blockages, the multi-connectivity technology that enables a user to associate with multiple SBSs simultaneously has been proposed by 3GPP, which brings new challenges to resource allocation. This paper investigates the joint user association and power allocation problem in such a multi-connectivity enabled mmWave network aiming at maximizing the system sum rate while considering the backhaul capacity limit and users’ individual rate requirements. The optimization problem is highly non-convex and NP-hard to solve. By decoupling it into user association subproblem and power allocation subproblem, we first propose a novel swapping algorithm on top of the classic many-to-many matching scheme to perform user association, and then apply the difference of convex functions (D.C.) programming approach to transform the non-convex power allocation subproblem into a convex one and solve it by an iterative algorithm. Simulation results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed multi-connectivity user association and power allocation schemes over the existing ones.
Exploring Superconductivity and Pseudogap using High Resolution Scanning Tunneling Microscopy

A correct theory of the high temperature cuprate superconductors must describe not only superconductivity, but also the parent phase from which it develops. To this end, it is important that experiments be done both below and above the superconducting transition temperature. For mainly experimental reasons, however, the majority of measurements on cuprates using scanning tunneling microscopy are done below the transition temperature. Here I will present measurements which overcome these difficulties and have been taken across the entire doping-temperature phase diagram. In particular, we find that for overdoped Bi2Sr2CaCu2O8+δ, the spectral gap and its temperature evolution are well described in a d-wave BCS context, with local nanoscale variation. However, the temperature scale, on average, exceeds the bulk Tc of the material. Second, we find that the underdoped spectrum is characterized by two distinct energy scales, and can be best understood as arising from separate contributions from superconductivity, at low energies, and pseudogap, at high energies. The high energy portion of the spectrum continues to couple to the disorder, while the low energy portion develops a universal d-wave behavior, suggesting that the energy scale for superconductivity has saturated below optimal doping. Finally, we find periodic modulations of the local density of states at all dopings, which exist all the way up to the pseudogap temperature T ∗. These modulations cannot be accounted for by impurity scattering, and are most likely associated with a short range stripe order as they show strong enhancement near a hole concentration of 1/8. Importantly, this means that this order cannot be the cause of the psuedogap, which increases with underdoping even below 1/8 doping. Our measurements suggest an alternative scenario in which pseudogap is a prerequisite for a number of possible orderings, including the Mott insulator, fluctuating stripe order, and superconductivity. The competition between these phases over different portions of the Fermi surface and different patches in real space leads to the complex phase diagram of the hole doped cuprates. iii
Explaining WeightedCircuit Constraint Filtering

We study the travelling salesman problem (TSP) in the context of constraint programming. We propose a new ﬁltering rule for the Circuit constraint based on the cuts used in the state-of-the-art exact TSP solver Concorde . We also propose to explain the ﬁltering of the WeightedCircuit constraint based on the 1-tree relaxation of Held and Karp.
Complexity of Computing the Shapley Value in Partition Function Form Games

We study the complexity of computing the Shapley value in partition function form games. We focus on two representations based on marginal contribution nets (embedded MC-nets and weighted MC-nets) and five extensions of the Shapley value. Our results show that while weighted MC-nets are more concise than embedded MC-nets, they have slightly worse computational properties when it comes to computing the Shapley value: two out of five extensions can be computed in polynomial time for embedded MC-nets and only one for weighted MC-nets.
Evaluation of Schottky barrier height on 4H-SiC m-face for Schottky barrier diode wall integrated trench MOSFET

We proposed an Schottky barrier diode wall integrated trench MOSFET (SWITCH-MOS) for the purposes of shrinking the cell pitch and suppressing the forward degradation of the body diode. A trench Schottky barrier diode (SBD) was integrated into a trench gate MOSFET with a wide shielding p+ region that protected the trench bottoms of both the SBD and the MOS gate from high electrical fields in the off state. The SBD was placed on the trench sidewall of the plane (m-face). Static and transient simulations revealed that SWITCH-MOS sufficiently suppressed the bipolar current that induced forward degradation, and we determined that the optimum Schottky barrier height (SBH) was from 0.8 to 2.0 eV. The SBH depends on the crystal planes in 4H-SiC, but the SBH of the m-face was unclear. We fabricated a planar m-face SBD for the first time, and we obtained SBHs from 1.4 to 1.8 eV experimentally with titanium or nickel as a Schottky metal.
Optimization on Wear Behavior of Al-12Si Alloy Reinforced with ZrC Nano Particle using Factorial Design

This paper evaluates the specific wear rate and friction coefficient of ZrCnano particle reinforced with Al-12Si metal matrix composites produced by powder metallurgy. The reinforcement percentage was 5 wt. % and 10 wt. %. The result showed that with the increase of ZrCnano particles into the matrix decrease the specific wear rate respectively. The result also showed that with the increase of ZrCnano particles into the matrix decrease the friction coefficient. The tribologicalbehavior of composites was studied by SEM and pin on disc apparatus. As input parameters such as reinforcement, load and sliding distance were modeled by applying general 23 factorial designs. As response parameter, specific wear rate was obtained experimentally by a set of pin-on-disc tests. Screening design is employed for evaluation of interactions between response parameter and input parameters. The specific wear rate showed various results depending on the initial values of parameters. The results showed that all parameters had significant effects on the specific wear rate and friction coefficient at 95% confidence level.
Science Arts & Métiers (SAM)

The thermomechanical behavior of Shape Memory Alloys (SMAs) is described by many micromechanical and phenomenological models. The first ones have material parameters whose physical meaning is based on the crystallography of the phase transformation related to the studied alloy. In contrast, phenomenological models often have material parameters whose physical meaning is not obvious and that makes them difficult to identify, some of which are based on mathematical considerations. In this paper, we propose to use the formulation of the phenomenological model of Chemisky et al., and to consider the particular case of a superelastic SMA. In this case, the constitutive equation should be easily expressed analytically through the strain tensor as a function of applied load direction and material parameters. The behavior is then characterized by a complete and proportional loading. This analytical model contains 7 material parameters, 1 related to the elasticity and 6 to the phase transformation. Based on several isothermal tensile tests at various temperatures, material parameters of this model are identified using the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm and an analytical calculation of the sensitivity matrix. Their physical meaning and their influence on the thermomechanical behavior of the studied alloy are highlighted and discussed.
Moringa oleifera leaf extract ameliorates early stages of diabetic nephropathy in streptozotocin-induced diabetic rats

Diabetic nephropathy (DN) is a long-term complication of diabetes mellitus. The characteristic of early-stage DN is glomerular hyperfiltration that has been linked to renal fibrosis. In this study, we investigated the effect of Moringa oleifera leaf extract (MOE) on DN in streptozotocin (STZ)-induced DN rats. Rats were injected with 50 mg/kg STZ to establish the DN model. Four weeks after receiving an injection of STZ, DN rats were administered distilled water, MOE (100 or 200 mg/kg body weight/day), dapagliflozin (1 mg/kg body weight/day), or combinations of these for further 8 weeks. DN rats exhibited significantly increased blood glucose (504.00 ± 28.41 mg/dl), proteinuria (192.85 ± 41.23 mg/24 hour), albuminuria (6.68 ± 1.54 mg/24 hours), blood urea nitrogen (47.14 ± 5.18 mg/dl), and creatinine clearance (5.64 ± 0.35 ml/minute) ( p < 0.05) together with significantly increased malondialdehyde and decreased superoxide dismutase and catalase ( p < 0.05). Administration of MOE could significantly reduce the high blood glucose, impaired renal function, and oxidative stress parameters of DN rats ( p < 0.05). Histological examination of kidneys showed a thickening of the glomerular basement membrane and an increase in the mesangial matrix; all of these pathological changes were improved by MOE administration. The mRNA expression of transforming growth factor-beta 1 (TGF-β1) and collagen type IV were significantly increased in the kidney tissue of DN rats but were significantly downregulated in MOE -treated rats ( p < 0.05). MOE could alleviate DN plausibly due to its activities in reducing blood glucose, oxidative stress, and fibrosis formation by downregulating the expression of TGF-β1 and collagen type IV genes. MOE may be useful as an alternative or supplementary medicine for treatment of DN.
European Journal of Educational Research Investigating the Implementation of Universal Design for Learning in Greek Secondary and Second Chance Schools through Teachers' Reflections Dayle Learning

: In the last decades, the notion of universal design for learning (UDL) has gained prominence in the Greek educational scene (former government plan in education, projects based on UDL). This educational philosophy is essentially a necessary inclusive practice given the new conditions, the extreme heterogeneity of the student population due to socio-political and economic factors, and the exceptional circumstances due to COVID-19 pandemic. The UDL aims to ensure access and equity in learning for all learners despite differentiating characteristics. With our study, we seek to investigate whether teachers in secondary and second chance schools (SCS) are ready to implement UDL, what their expectations are, what obstacles they face, and the results of implementation through their records in reflection journals, a practice that is fully consistent with the context of UDL. article: Markou, P., & Díaz -Noguera, M. D. Investigating the implementation of universal design for learning in Greek secondary and second chance schools through teachers' reflections Dayle learning. European of Educational