Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Efficacy of Social Media to Promote Green Technology Use

Global warming has become a major threat to life, yet very little information systems research has been conducted to help sustain the environment. The purpose of this single qualitative case study was to explore if social media can be used to increase the use of green technology, thus reducing the cost of environmental sustainment. Twelve green energy professionals working in the United States were recruited from LinkedIn. These green energy professionals were selected because their LinkedIn profiles indicated they worked in the green industry. The summary of the integrated sustainability framework, which served as the conceptual framework for this research, is that firms have to include green practices in their business processes, extend green culture to their customers, be innovative, and increase their green market share for the environment to be sustained. Data were collected from participants via phone using structured interviews. Using Stake’s data analysis process and member checking, key themes regarding social media increasing the use of green technology included awareness, education, and reach. Key themes regarding the benefits of green technology outweighing the cost included cleaner, cheaper, and profitable. The results of this study could contribute to positive social change by encouraging humans to use more green technology through social media in order to combat the threat of both global warming and climate change.
Effects of high tibial osteotomy compared with unicondylar knee arthroplasty on the surgical site wound infection and pain in patients with medial knee osteoarthritis

Abstract This study aims to comprehensively compare the effects of unicondylar knee arthroplasty (UKA) and high tibial osteotomy (HTO) on wound infection and pain in patients with medial knee osteoarthritis. A computerized search was conducted in Embase, PubMed, Google Scholar, China National Knowledge Infrastructure, Cochrane Library and Wanfang databases, from database inception to October 2023, for studies comparing UKA and HTO for medial knee osteoarthritis. Studies selection, data extraction and study quality evaluation were independently conducted by two researchers. Stata 17.0 software was employed for data analysis. Overall, 10 studies involving 870 patients with medial knee osteoarthritis were included. It was found that the UKA group had significantly lower wound visual analogue scale scores compared to the HTO group (SMD = ‐0.53, 95%CI: −0.87 to −0.20, p < 0.001). The incidence of wound infection in the UKA group was higher than in the HTO group (OR = 1.92, 95%CI: 0.65–5.69, p = 0.240), and the incidence of complications was lower (OR = 0.89, 95%CI: 0.52–1.54, p = 0.684), though these differences were not statistically significant. This study indicates that UKA is effective in alleviating postoperative wound pain in medial knee osteoarthritis. However, the rates of postoperative wound infection and complications are comparable to those of HTO. Clinicians should consider factors such as patient age and disease severity in making individualized treatment decisions.
Genome-Wide Identification and Co-Expression Networks of WOX Gene Family in Nelumbo nucifera

WUSCHEL-related homeobox (WOX) genes are a class of plant-specific transcription factors, regulating the development of multiple tissues. However, the genomic characterizations and expression patterns of WOX genes have not been analyzed in lotus. In this study, 15 NnWOX genes were identified based on the well-annotated reference genome of lotus. According to the phylogenetic analysis, the NnWOX genes were clustered into three clades, i.e., ancient clade, intermediate clade, and WUS clade. Except for the conserved homeobox motif, we further found specific motifs of NnWOX genes in different clades and divergence gene structures, suggesting their distinct functions. In addition, two NnWOX genes in the ancient clade have conserved expression patterns and other NnWOX genes exhibit different expression patterns in lotus tissues, suggesting a low level of functional redundancy in lotus WOX genes. Furthermore, we constructed the gene co-expression networks for each NnWOX gene. Based on weighted gene co-expression network analysis (WGCNA), ten NnWOX genes and their co-expressed genes were assigned to the modules that were significantly related to the cotyledon and seed coat. We further performed RT-qPCR experiments, validating the expression levels of ten NnWOX genes in the co-expression networks. Our study reveals comprehensive genomic features of NnWOX genes in lotus, providing a solid basis for further function studies.
Peripapillary retinal nerve fibre layer thinning, perfusion changes and optic neuropathy in carriers of Leber hereditary optic neuropathy-associated mitochondrial variants

Background We investigated Leber hereditary optic neuropathy (LHON) families for variation in peripapillary retinal nerve fibre layer thickness and perfusion, and associated optic nerve dysfunction. Method A group of LHON-affected patients (n=12) and their asymptomatic maternal relatives (n=16) underwent examination including visual acuity (VA), visual-evoked-potential and optic nerve imaging including optical coherence tomography (OCT) and OCT angiography of the peripapillary retinal nerve fibre layer (RNFL). A control sample was also examined (n=10). The software imageJ was used to measure perfusion by assessing vessel density (VD), and statistical software ‘R’ was used to analyse data. Results The LHON-affected group (n=12) had significantly reduced peripapillary VD (median 7.9%, p=0.046). Overall, the LHON asymptomatic relatives (n=16) had no significant change in peripapillary VD (p=0.166), though three eyes had VD which fell below the derived normal range at 6% each, with variable VA from normal to blindness; LogMAR median 0, range 0–2.4. In contrast, RNFL thickness was significantly reduced in the LHON-affected group (median 51 µm, p=0.003), and in asymptomatic relatives (median 90 µm, p=0.01), compared with controls (median 101 µm). RNFL thinning had greater specificity compared with reduced perfusion for optic nerve dysfunction in asymptomatic carriers (92% vs 66%). Conclusion Overall, reduced peripapillary retinal nerve fibre layer perfusion was observed in those affected by LHON but was not reduced in their asymptomatic relatives, unlike RNFL thinning which was significantly reduced in both groups versus controls. The presence of RNFL changes was associated with signs of optic neuropathy in asymptomatic relatives.
INDOOR AIR QUALITY: THE SAMPLES OF ILGARINI AND MANTAR CAVES

Caves provide natural attractions for tourism and other socio-economic activities as tourists are most of the time motivated to visit natural attractions to appreciate the wonders of nature. However, visiting caves may cause some important health problems such as inhalation of some harmful gases and increased levels of carbon (IV) oxide (CO2) which may exceed the critical level during such visits. In literature there is big gap about caves air conditions which were located in Turkey. In this paper, Ilgarini and Mantar caves were selected because of potentially high touristic activities. The aim was to measure the caves’ temperature, relative humidity and the amount of CO2 that would influence the air quality. To achieve the stated objectives, the Ilgarini and Mantar caves were visited during August 2012. The measurements were made by means of a portable air measurement apparatus in various corners of the caves 20 metres apart. The results have revealed that the indoor temperatures, relative humidity and the amount of CO2 changed considerably in comparison with the values obtained outside the caves. These results may seem to infer that when touristic activities take place especially during visits, the indoor air quality may change giving rise to some health problems such as headache, dizziness, throat and nose irritation, sneezing, coughing, tears, due to the effect of the increasing amount of CO2. Keywords; Caving, Air quality, Ilgarini and Mantar Caves. ÖZ Bu çalışmanın amacı rekreasyon ve turistik etkinlikler açısından büyük önem taşıyan Ilgarini ve Mantar Mağaraları’nın iç ortam hava kalitesini sıcaklık, nem ve CO2 değerleri açısından ölçmektir. Bu amaçla anılan mağaralara 2012 yılının Eylül ayında bir ziyaret gerçekleştirilmiştir. Ziyaret sürecinde Portatif Hava Kalitesi Ölçüm Cihazı yardımı ile mağaraların farklı bölümlerinde ölçümler gerçekleştirilmiştir. Her 20 metrede gerçekleştirilen ölçüm sonuçları mağaraların iç ortamlarının dışarıya göre sıcaklık, nem ve CO2, bakımından büyük farklılıklar gösterdiğini ortaya koymuştur. Bu sonuç, anılan mağaralara özellikle grup halinde yapılacak ziyaretlerde bazı sağlık sorunlarının yaşanma olasılığının var olduğu biçiminde yorumlanabilir. Nitekim mağaralara gruplar halinde yapılan ziyaretler, mağara içerisindeki iç ortam hava kalitesinin düşmesine, buna bağlı olarak baş ağrısı, baş dönmesi, boğaz ve burun tahrişi, burun akıntısı, öksürük ve göz akıntıları gibi rahatsızlıklara sebep olabilmektedir. Bu durum özellikle astım vb. hastalığı bulunan ziyaretçiler için önemli büyük bir önem taşımaktadır. Anahtar sözcükler: Mağaracılık, İç Ortam Hava Kalitesi, Ilgarini, Mantar Mağaraları 1 This study has been presented as an oral presentation during the I. Eurasia International Tourism Congress: Current Issues, Trends, and Indicators (EITOC-2015) which is held between 28-30 May, 2015. The manuscript has been reviwed and tanslated into English. Social Sciences Studies Journal (SSSJournal) 2018 Vol:4 Issue:16 pp:1165-1176 sssjournal.com Social Sciences Studies Journal (SSSJournal) sssjournal.info@gmail.com 1166
Epidemiology of tuberculosis among children in Beijing, China, 2012–2021

Data on epidemiology trends of paediatric tuberculosis (TB) are limited in China. So, we investigated the clinical and epidemiological profiles in diagnosed TB disease and TB infection patients at Beijing Children’s Hospital. Of 3 193 patients, 51.05% had pulmonary TB (PTB) and 15.16% had extrapulmonary TB (EPTB). The most frequent forms of EPTB were TB meningitis (39.05%), pleural TB (29.75%), and disseminated TB (10.33%). PTB patients were significantly younger and associated with higher hospitalization frequency. Children aged 1–4 years exhibited higher risk of PTB and TB meningitis, and children aged 5–12 years had higher risk of EPTB. The proportion of PTB patients increased slightly from 40.9% in 2012 to 65% in 2019, and then decreased to 17.8% in 2021. The percentage of EPTB cases decreased from 18.3% in 2012 to 15.2% in 2019, but increased to 16.4% in 2021. Among EPTB cases, the largest increase was seen in TB meningitis. In conclusion, female and young children had higher risk of PTB in children. TB meningitis was the most frequent forms of EPTB among children, and young children were at high risk of TB meningitis. The distribution of different types of EPTB differed by age.
Modelling the impact of design rainfall on the urban drainage system by Storm Water Management Model

Abstract Flood modelling is an effective way to manage the stormwater network in cities. It aims to understand and predict the behaviour of stormwater network so that it can test and evaluate effective solutions to structural and operational problems. So simulation modelling stays a preoccupation for building a successful hydraulic modelling in urban areas. This study investigates the impact of the design rainfall on the hydraulic modelling results for the Azzaba stormwater network located in the North-East of Algeria by using the Storm Water Management Model (SWMM). Four scenarios of design rainfall events were compared for 10, 25 and 50-year return periods, where we used double triangle and composite curves for the design rainfall event definition. The results show the impact of the choice of design rainfall on the behaviour of the stormwater network, from which the results of simulation by the double triangle method for the short durations represents a great risk on the probability that the stromwater network can overflow and flood the city, with a difference in peak discharge estimated at 62.97% and 58.94% for 2 h and 3 h events compared to the peak discharge simulated by the composite rainfall method.
Dry matter yield, nutritive value and tiller density of tall fescue and perennial ryegrass swards under grazing

Alternative pasture species with the potential to supply quality forage during summer feed shortages, such as tall fescue (TF), are of interest to dairy farmers. A paddockscale study was undertaken to compare performance of TF managed on a shorter rotation similar to perennial ryegrass (RG) (TF-RG) with TF managed on a longer rotation more consistent with its morphology of 4 live leaves/tiller (TF-TF), and with RG (RG-RG). Accumulated dry matter (DM) yields were similar for the three treatments. Patch grazing was observed during the first spring, with more long patches in TFTF than in either TF-RG or RG-RG. Sown-species leaf area index (LAI) was greater in TF-TF compared with TF-RG and RG-RG (2.25, 1.56 and 0.90, respectively; P<0.05). The proportions of grass weeds were higher in the TF-RG (P<0.05) compared with TF-TF and RG-RG treatments (302, 207 and 164 g/kg DM, respectively). A soil fertility gradient with distance along the paddock away from the farm race was recorded, with Olsen P declining at 0.130 mg/kg/m with distance from the farm race. Tiller density, LAI and yield of sown species and total yield sampled were all positively correlated with Olsen P. Overall, this study highlights the importance of managing TF pastures according to its specific growth habits. However, attaining longer grazing rotations under field conditions whilst trying to maintain cow intakes, is likely to continue to prove elusive.
Landscape Change and Trade in Ancient Greece: Evidence from Pollen Data

In this paper we use pollen data from a number of sites in southern Greece and Macedonia to study long-term vegetation change in these regions from 1000 BCE to 600 CE. Based on insights from environmental history, we interpret our estimated trends in the regional presence of cereal, olive, and vine pollen as proxies for structural changes in agricultural production. We present evidence that there was a market economy in ancient Greece and a major trade expansion several centuries before the Roman conquest. Our results are consistent with auxiliary data on settlement dynamics, shipwrecks, and ancient oil and wine presses.
Ultraviolet A split-dose therapy, a novel approach to improve the aminolevulinate-based photodynamic therapy of skin lesions

Topical aminolevulinate-based photodynamic therapy (ALA-PDT) is an effective method for treating skin lesions such as multiple actinic keratoses (AK). The major side effect of ALA-PDT is the pain experienced during the treatment. Management of treatment-related pain still remains a considerable challenge in patients. Further optimization of the treatment protocol including light source, dose and duration therefore seems crucial to try and alleviate pain. Previous data from this laboratory have demonstrated that ALA-treated human skin fibroblasts become highly sensitive to Ultraviolet A (UVA, 320-400nm)-induced cytotoxicity. In the present study, we provide further evidence that ALA-PDT with UVA is also effective in photokilling of human skin keratinocyte HaCaT cells despite their known resistance to UVA. The UVA-mediated damage in ALA-treated skin cells may be due to rapid release of potentially harmful transit labile iron (LI) in cells that in conjunction with increased generation of singlet oxygen (1O2) and other reactive oxygen species (ROS) by endogenously accumulated Protoporphyrin IX (PPIX) further exacerbate the oxidative damage in skin cells leading to cell death. We therefore hypothesized that by using UVA as the light source and by fractionating the dose applied into two short pulses with 1h dark interval, the ALA-treated skin cells could be further sensitized to UVA-induced damage, since the first dose of UVA would trigger the formation of ROS and extensive release of LI which in turn would intensify the damage caused by the second challenge dose of UVA. By using a series of UVA split-dose combinations, we could demonstrate that applying short pulses of UVA radiation to ALA-treated skin cells is a fast and efficient way to promote cell death. Furthermore the results of this project highlighted the importance of the first UVA dose in determining the efficiency of cell killing following the second UVA dose. The critical role of iron in exacerbating the UVA-induced damage of ALA-treated cells was confirmed with experiments showing that iron loading of cells with hemin prior to ALA-treatment could further sensitise the keratinocytes to very low doses of UVA. The damaging effects of short pulses of low UVA doses following ALA-treatment can be exploited to provide a rapid mean to improve the effectiveness of ALA-PDT of skin lesions while reducing considerably the therapy time and the discomfort/pain associated with prolonged high intensity visible light treatments.
Efficient Single Correspondence Voting for Point Cloud Registration

3D point cloud registration is a crucial task in a variety of fields, including remote sensing mapping, computer vision, virtual reality, and autonomous driving. However, this task is still challenging due to the challenges of noise, non-uniformity, partial overlap, and repeated local features in large scene point clouds. In this paper, we propose an efficient single correspondence voting method for large scene point cloud registration. Specifically, we first propose an efficient hypothetical transformation prediction method called SCVC, which determines the 5 degrees of freedom of the transformation through one correspondence, and then uses Hough voting to determine the last degree of freedom. This algorithm can significantly improve the accuracy of registration in both indoor and outdoor scenes. On the other hand, we propose a more robust transformation verification function called VDIR, which can obtain the optimal registration result of two raw point clouds. Finally, we conduct a series of experiments that demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on four real-world datasets: 3DMatch, 3DLoMatch, KITTI, and WHU-TLS. Our code is available at https://github.com/xingxuejun1989/SCVC.
Governance and regulatory strategies beyond the state: stakeholder participation and the ecological restoration of Ogoniland

ABSTRACT In June 2016, the Nigerian government finally launched the massive ecological restoration programme of Ogoniland in the Niger Delta. This restoration programme is based on the 2011 United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Environmental Assessment of Ogoniland Report which found that the ecological and consequential damages caused by oil exploration activities in Ogoniland were severe and virtually unparalleled elsewhere in the world. The state-based regulatory system had failed over the years to ensure the restoration of Ogoniland. The report therefore recommended that the ecological restoration of the said environment (which, according to UNEP, could ‘prove to be the world’s most wide-ranging and long-term oil clean-up exercise ever undertaken’) be driven broadly by a multi-stakeholder governance approach. This UNEP proposed partnership between state and non-state actors represents a good example of environmental governance beyond the state aimed at long-term eco-restoration. This article is therefore a contribution to the discourse on emerging trends in eco-restoration governance strategies by providing a critical analysis of the UNEP-led multi-stakeholder participatory approach to eco-restoration governance in Ogoniland. It critically appraises the potency of UNEP’s stakeholder-driven governance model as a requirement for a successful eco-restoration exercise, especially against the backdrop of, and as a better alternative to, the traditional state-driven approach.
Function-Assigned Masked Superstrings as a Versatile and Compact Data Type for k-Mer Sets

The exponential growth of genome databases calls for novel space-efficient algorithms for data compression and search. State-of-the-art approaches often rely on k-merization for data tokenization, yet efficiently representing and querying k-mer sets remains a significant challenge in bioinformatics. Our recent work has introduced the concept of masked superstring for compactly representing k-mer sets, designed without reliance on common structural assumptions on k-mer data. However, despite their compactness, the practicality of masked superstrings for set operations and membership queries was previously unclear. Here, we propose the f-masked superstring framework, which additionally integrates demasking functions f, enabling efficient k-mer set operations through concatenation. When combined with the FMS-index, a new index for f-masked superstrings based on a simplified FM-index, we obtain a versatile, compact data structure for k-mer sets. We demonstrate its power through the FMSI program, which, when evaluated on bacterial pan-genomic data, achieves memory savings of a factor of 3 to 10 compared to state-of-the-art single k-mer-set indexing methods such as SBWT and CBL. Our work presents a theoretical framework with promising practical advantages such as space-efficiency, demonstrating the potential of f-masked superstrings in k-mer-based methods as a generic data type.
A Scalable Adaptive Quadratic Kernel Method for Interpretable Epistasis Analysis in Complex Traits

Our knowledge of the contribution of genetic interactions (epistasis) to variation in human complex traits remains limited, partly due to the lack of efficient, powerful, and interpretable algorithms to detect interactions. Recently proposed approaches for set-based association tests show promise in improving power to detect epistasis by examining the aggregated effects of multiple variants. Nevertheless, these methods either do not scale to large numbers of individuals available in Biobank datasets or do not provide interpretable results. We, therefore, propose QuadKAST, a scalable algorithm focused on testing pairwise interaction effects (also termed as quadratic effects) of a set of genetic variants on a trait and quantifying the proportion of phenotypic variance explained by these effects. We performed comprehensive simulations and demonstrated that QuadKAST is well-calibrated. Additionally, QuadKAST is highly sensitive in detecting loci with epistatic signal and accurate in its estimation of quadratic effects. We applied QuadKAST to 53 quantitative phenotypes measured in ≈ 300, 000 unrelated white British individuals in the UK Biobank to test for quadratic effects within each of 9, 515 protein-coding genes (after accounting for linear additive effects). We detected 32 trait-gene pairs across 17 traits that demonstrate statistically significant signals of quadratic effects ( accounting for the number of genes and traits tested). Our method enables the detailed investigation of epistasis on a large scale, offering new insights into its role and importance.