Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A learning object ontology repository to support annotation and discovery of educational resources using semantic thesauri

Open educational resources are currently becoming increasingly available from a multitude of sources and are consequently annotated in many diverse ways. Interoperability concerns that naturally arise can often be resolved through the semantification of metadata descriptions, while at the same time strengthening the knowledge value of resources. SKOS can be a solid linking point offering a standard vocabulary for thematic descriptions, by referencing semantic thesauri. We propose the enhancement and maintenance of educational resources’ metadata in the form of learning object ontologies and introduce the notion of a learning object ontology repository that can help towards their publication, discovery and reuse. At the same time, linking to thesauri datasets and contextualized sources interrelates learning objects with linked data and exposes them to the Web of Data. We build a set of extensions and workflows on top of contemporary ontology management tools, such as WebProtégé, that can make it suitable as a learning object ontology repository. The proposed approach and implementation can help libraries and universities in discovering, managing and incorporating open educational resources and enhancing current curricula.
The effects of resistance elastic bands exercises on salivary IgA and salivary cortisol levels in elderly women

This study investigated the effect of a resistance exercise program using elastic bands for the enhancement of immune function and prevention of metabolic disorders, as measured by levels of salivary cortisol (sCor) and salivary immunoglobulin A (sIgA). Twenty-two elderly women were divided into an exercise group (77.91 ± 1.41 y) and a control group (78.73 ± 1.51 y). The exercise group performed resistance exercises with an elastic band at a frequency of 3 times/week and 60 min/day for 4 months. Physical fitness and levels of sCor and sIgA compared between before and after the exercise program. A significant increase in the number of lifts made in a lift dumbbell test was observed after the exercise program for both the left (p<0.05) and right (p<0.01) arms, indicating an improvement in upper limb muscular endurance. The number of steps on a 2 min walking in place test was also significantly increased following the exercise program (p<0.01), indicating improved cardiorespiratory function. Levels of sCor and sIgA reduced following the exercise program, but not by a statistical significance. A negative, but not significant, correlation was find between sIgA and sCor levels. In conclusion, the resistance exercise program using elastic bands conducted in our study improved the physical fitness. However, the exercise durations were too short to achieve a meaningful reduction of stress factors and improvements in the immune function. In future research, duration and intensity of exercise is modified to achieve greater improvements in the immune function of elderly people.
An Authentication Method Independent of Tap Operation on the Touchscreen of a Mobile Device

At the present time, mobile devices such as tablet-type PCs and smart phones have widely penetrated into our daily lives. Therefore, an authentication method that prevents shoulder surfing is needed. We are investigating a new user authentication method for mobile devices that uses surface electromyogram (s-EMG) signals, not screen touching. The s-EMG signals, which are generated by the electrical activity of muscle fibers during contraction, are detected over the skin surface. Muscle movement can be differentiated by analyzing the s-EMG. In this paper, a series of experiments was carried out to investigate the prospect of an authentication method using s-EMGs. Specifically, several gestures of the wrist were introduced, and the s-EMGs generated for each motion pattern were measured. We compared the s-EMG patterns generated by each subject with the patterns generated by other subjects. As a result, it was found that each subject has similar patterns that are different from those of other subjects. Thus, sEMGs can be used to confirm one’s identification for authenticating passwords on touchscreen devices.
Biotechnological potential of microbial consortia and future perspectives

Abstract Design of a microbial consortium is a newly emerging field that enables researchers to extend the frontiers of biotechnology from a pure culture to mixed cultures. A microbial consortium enables microbes to use a broad range of carbon sources. It provides microbes with robustness in response to environmental stress factors. Microbes in a consortium can perform complex functions that are impossible for a single organism. With advancement of technology, it is now possible to understand microbial interaction mechanism and construct consortia. Microbial consortia can be classified in terms of their construction, modes of interaction, and functions. Here we discuss different trends in the study of microbial functions and interactions, including single-cell genomics (SCG), microfluidics, fluorescent imaging, and membrane separation. Community profile studies using polymerase chain-reaction denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis (PCR-DGGE), amplified ribosomal DNA restriction analysis (ARDRA), and terminal restriction fragment-length polymorphism (T-RFLP) are also reviewed. We also provide a few examples of their possible applications in areas of biopolymers, bioenergy, biochemicals, and bioremediation.
Emerging Association Between Parathyroid Hormone and Anemia in Hemodialysis Patients

Anemia is a common complication of chronic kidney disease (CKD). There are various causes of renal anemia such as decreased production of erythropoietin, resistance to erythropoietin, shortened survival of red blood cells, and bone marrow fibrosis. Secondary hyperparathyroidism (SHPT) is a less recognized, but potentially significant cause of renal anemia in CKD patients. Parathyroid hormone (PTH) has been regarded as a uremic toxin that has multiple adverse effects, and its elevated levels have been associated with renal anemia in hemodialysis patients. Moreover, recent clinical studies have shown that the treatment of SHPT using either vitamin D receptor activators, calcimimetics, or parathyroidectomy leads to improvement of anemia, supporting the role of PTH in renal anemia. Emerging data have also indicated the involvement of bone‐derived fibroblast growth factor 23 in renal anemia. This review summarizes recent insights into the role of PTH in renal anemia and discusses the importance of treating SHPT in improving the control of renal anemia in hemodialysis patients.
Graph Based Semi-Supervised Learning Approach for Tamil POS tagging

Parts of Speech (POS) tagging is an important pre-requisite for various Natural Language Processing tasks. POS tagging is rather challenging for morphologically rich languages such as Tamil. Being low-resourced, Tamil does not have a large POS annotated corpus to build good quality POS taggers using supervised machine learning techniques. In order to gain the maximum out of the existing Tamil POS tagged corpora, we have developed a graph-based semi-supervised learning approach to classify unlabelled data by exploiting a small sized POS labelled data set. In this approach, both labelled and unlabelled data are converted to vectors using word embeddings and a weighted graph is constructed using Mahalanobis distance. Then semi-supervised learning (SSL) algorithms are used to classify the unlabelled data. We were able to gain an accuracy of 0.8743 over an accuracy of 0.7333 produced by a CRF tagger for the same limited size corpus.
DEGRADATION OF AZO DYE AND ELECTRICITY GENERATION USING YEAST MEDIATED MICROBIAL FUEL CELL

In the present study, the efficiency of yeast mediated microbial fuel cell (MFC) was investigated towards degradation of Trypan blue (azo dye) and electricity generation. Five yeast strains viz. SC1, SC2, SCD1, SCD2, and SCD3 were isolated from different sources. The internal resistance of yeast isolates was tested using ferric oxide reduction method. To maximize the power density of MFC, NaCl was added to the medium and NaCl tolerance of yeast strains was tested. Among the five isolates, SC1 and SCD2 showed maximum ferric oxide reduction and NaCl tolerance. Initially, 5 % of SC1 and SCD2 yeast culture were inoculated in wastewater containing azo dye (100 µg/ml) in a H-type MFC chamber and 250 ml conical flask used as a control. Increased growth of yeast strain in MFC chamber was noted compared to conical flask culture. The data of electricity generation was taken for 15 days and electricity generation was measured using the multimeter. Maximum electricity generation was noted in SC1 (950mV) followed by SCD2 (750mV). In addition, SC1 could degrade azo dye more efficiently than SCD2. Therefore, it may be concluded thatSC1 yeast mediated MFC can be used as a potential technology for electricity generation and degradation of azo dye in wastewater.
Hermansky-Pudlak Syndrome and Chediak-Higashi Syndrome: Disorders of Vesicle Formation and Trafficking

Summary The rare autosomal recessive metabolic disorders Hermanky-Pudlak syndrome (HPS) and Chediak-Higashi syndrome (CHS) share the clinical findings of oculocutaneous albinism and a platelet storage pool deficiency. In addition, HPS exhibits ceroid lipofuscinosis and CHS is characterized by infections and an accelerated phase. The two disorders result from defects in vesicles of lysosomal lineage. Of the two known HPS-causing genes, HPS1 has no recognizable function, while ADTB3A codes for a subunit of an adaptor complex responsible for new vesicle formation from the trans-Golgi network. Other HPS-causing genes are likely to exist. The only known CHS-causing gene, LYST, codes for a large protein of unknown function. In general, HPS appears to be a disorder of vesicle formation and CHS a defect in vesicle trafficking. These diseases and their variants mirror a group of mouse hypopigmentation mutants. The gene products involved will reveal how the melanosome, platelet dense body, and lysosome are formed and trafficked within cells.
Hedgehog signaling pathway in colorectal cancer: function, mechanism, and therapy

Colorectal cancer (CRC) is one of the most common gastrointestinal cancers worldwide. It is a complicated and often fatal cancer, and is related to a high disease-related mortality. Around 90% of mortalities are caused by the metastasis of CRC. Current treatment statistics shows a less than 5% 5-year survival for patients with metastatic disease. The development and metastasis of CRC involve multiple factors and mechanisms. The Hedgehog (Hh) signaling plays an important role in embryogenesis and somatic development. Abnormal activation of the Hh pathway has been proven to be related to several types of human cancers. The role of Hh signaling in CRC, however, remains controversial. In this review, we will go through previous literature on the Hh signaling and its functions in the formation, proliferation, and metastasis of CRC. We will also discuss the potential of targeting Hh signaling pathway in the treatment, prognosis, and prevention of CRC.
PCPA: A Practical Certificateless Conditional Privacy Preserving Authentication Scheme for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Vehicle ad hoc networks (VANETs) is a promising network scenario for greatly improving traffic efficiency and safety, in which smart vehicles can communicate with other vehicles or roadside units. For the availability of VANETs, it is very important to deal with the security and privacy problems for VANETs. In this paper, based on certificateless cryptography and elliptic curve cryptography, we present a certificateless signature with message recovery (CLS-MR), which we believe are of independent interest. Then, a practical certificateless conditional privacy preserving authentication (PCPA) scheme is proposed by incorporating the proposed CLS-MR scheme. Furthermore, the security analysis shows that PCPA satisfies all security and privacy requirements. The evaluation results indicate that PCPA achieves low computation and communication costs because there is no need to use the bilinear pairing and map-to-point hash operations. Moreover, extensive simulations show that PCPA is feasible and achieves prominent performances in terms of message delay and message loss ratio, and thus is more suitable for the deployment and adoption of VANETs.
A study of vehicular desynchronization for platooning application

Platooning is a challenging application because it requires a frequent rate of beaconing. Performance of traditional Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance method (CSMA/CA) on IEEE 802.11p is unable to satisfy for platooning needs due to unbounded delay especially under high channel load. Several researches about platooning are involved with medium access control (MAC) layer modification in a protocol stack and/or does not support variable number of vehicles and/or have a single point of failure. In this paper, we propose to use a vehicular desynchronization TDMA-based protocol over off-the-shelf IEEE 802.11p, while supporting vehicles joining and leaving a platoon and having no single point of failure. We recommend a range of parameters that are suitable for the platooning application. Our evaluation shows that using our suggested parameters, the vehicular desynchronization protocol could support a high-frequency beaconing with up to 16 vehicles at 100 Hz beaconing.
Reinforcement Learning on Resource Bounded Systems

Recent advancements in reinforcement learning have made the field interesting to academia and industry alike. Many of these advancements depend on deep learning as a means to approximate a value function or a policy. This dependency usually relies on high performance hardware (e.g., a graphics processing unit, GPU) and applications of deep learning are often limited to domains where a substantial amount of time is allowed for a prediction to be made or an action to be chosen. Although these criteria cover many important use cases, the growing popularity of the “Internet of Things,” wearable electronics, and the advancement of myoelectric prosthetic limbs presents a rapidly growing real-time domain of resource bounded systems that are not properly suited for deep learning yet could still benefit from the application of reinforcement learning. Furthermore, many of these systems are limited by the physical space they must occupy. This restricts the size of the hardware and thereby the computational and memory resources that can be used. Despite these restrictions, demand for prompt actions from receptive systems continues
The Temporal Logic of Two-Dimensional Minkowski Spacetime with Slower-Than-Light Accessibility Is Decidable

We work primarily with the Kripke frame consisting of two-dimensional Minkowski spacetime with the irreflexive accessibility relation 'can reach with a slower-than-light signal'. We show that in the basic temporal language, the set of validities over this frame is decidable. We then refine this to PSPACE-complete. In both cases the same result for the corresponding reflexive frame follows immediately. With a little more work we obtain PSPACE-completeness for the validities of the Halpern-Shoham logic of intervals on the real line with two different combinations of modalities.
Lethal and sublethal effects of chlorantraniliprole on Spodoptera cosmioides (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae).

BACKGROUND The Spodoptera cosmioides (Walker, 1858) population has increased in Bacillus thuringiensis Berliner (Bt) soybean crops in Argentina. As there are no registered products for its control, the recommended insecticides for S. frugiperda are used. The aim of this study was therefore to determine the lethal concentration (LC) of chlorantraniliprole and its sublethal effects on the biological and reproductive functions of S. cosmioides, an emerging soybean pest in Argentina. RESULTS An ingestion toxicity bioassay showed that chlorantraniliprole was active against larvae of the second instar, and after 48 h of exposure LC50 was 0.054 µg mL-1 H2 O. In the study of sublethal effect, chlorantraniliprole induced changes in the life cycle of exposed S. cosmioides, which required more time to complete all stages of development (larval, pupal and adult stages). Pupal weight was also higher in larvae exposed to sublethal concentrations of chlorantraniliprole. Adult fecundity was decreased: the number of eggs laid by each adult female moth, as compared with control females, was two (LC15 ) and eight (LC30 ) times lower. CONCLUSION These results indicate that chlorantraniliprole has toxicity against S. cosmioides larvae. Sublethal effects on the biological and reproductive performance of this species can help optimize integrated pest management programs. © 2018 Society of Chemical Industry.
Soft X-Ray Luminosity and Photospheric Magnetic Field in Quiet Sun

We use full-disk soft X-ray data from Yohkoh and Kitt Peak daily magnetograms to study the coronal irradiance and photospheric magnetic field remote from active regions between 1991 November and 1998 December. For every image of our data set we extract three areas 4° × 4° in size centered at N00° W00°, N50° W00°, and S50° W00° and compute X-ray irradiance and unsigned magnetic flux for each of these areas. Between 1991 (active Sun) and 1996 (quiet Sun) the X-ray irradiance at the heliographic center decreased by more than a factor of 7, while the magnetic flux decreased by only a factor of 2. A similar tendency is observed for our high-latitude samples. Apart from the cycle-related variations, all three areas of quiet Sun exhibit significant nonperiodic changes in X-ray irradiance. These variations occur on 9-12 month intervals and clearly correlate with changes in sunspot activity. Similar variations are present in the total X-ray irradiance averaged over the solar disk. By contrast, the magnetic fluxes from the photosphere beneath these same areas show no corresponding variations on this time scale. In our opinion, coronal heating models based on the reconnection of quiet-Sun magnetic elements (variously called chromospheric network, "magnetic carpet," or "salt and pepper" field) can at best account for a minimal contribution to heating the million-degree corona observed by the Yohkoh soft X-ray telescope. We conclude that the X-ray irradiance in the quiet Sun (at least in the Yohkoh temperature range, >2 MK) is primarily associated with the strong magnetic fields of active regions, not with weak photospheric fields. The association, however, is not direct. We interpret the enhanced X-ray irradiance above the quiet Sun not as a result of the coronal "canopy" formed by the active-region magnetic field above the quiet-Sun areas, but as the large-scale relaxation process in the corona triggered by the evolution of active regions. To further support this conclusion, we show examples of active and quiet hemispheres in 1996 with similar weak-field properties but greatly different global X-ray emission and a pronounced change in X-ray irradiance over the entire visible hemisphere that was associated with the emergence of a single small active region.
Genome-wide analysis of WRKY transcription factors in wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) and differential expression under water deficit condition

Background WRKY proteins, which comprise one of the largest transcription factor (TF) families in the plant kingdom, play crucial roles in plant development and stress responses. Despite several studies on WRKYs in wheat (Triticum aestivum L.), functional annotation information about wheat WRKYs is limited. Results Here, 171 TaWRKY TFs were identified from the whole wheat genome and compared with proteins from 19 other species representing nine major plant lineages. A phylogenetic analysis, coupled with gene structure analysis and motif determination, divided these TaWRKYs into seven subgroups (Group I, IIa–e, and III). Chromosomal location showed that most TaWRKY genes were enriched on four chromosomes, especially on chromosome 3B. In addition, 85 (49.7%) genes were either tandem (5) or segmental duplication (80), which suggested that though tandem duplication has contributed to the expansion of TaWRKY family, segmental duplication probably played a more pivotal role. Analysis of cis-acting elements revealed putative functions of WRKYs in wheat during development as well as under numerous biotic and abiotic stresses. Finally, the expression of TaWRKY genes in flag leaves, glumes, and lemmas under water-deficit condition were analyzed. Results showed that different TaWRKY genes preferentially express in specific tissue during the grain-filling stage. Conclusion Our results provide a more extensive insight on WRKY gene family in wheat, and also contribute to the screening of more candidate genes for further investigation on function characterization of WRKYs under various stresses.
TEMPERATURE DEPENDENT SOLUBILITY STUDIES OF BRIGATINIB IN SOME PURE SOLVENTS USEFUL IN DOSAGE FORM DEVELOPMENT

In the current study, thermodynamic dissolution of brigatinib in six pure solvents namely, water, ethanol, isopropyl myristate (IPM), poly(ethylene glycol)-400 (PEG-400), dichloromethane (DCM) and ethyl acetate (EA) at (298.2-323.2 K) temperature and 0.1 MPa atm. pressure were carried out using flask shaking technique. The mole-fraction solubility of brigatinib was obtained greatest in IPM (6.09 × 10-2) and least in water (3.12 × 10-6) at 298.2 K. Experimentally obtained solubilities values of brigatinib were regressed using adapted Apelblat equation with root mean square deviations in the range of 1.91 to 4.67 in all solvents and similar trends were observed with increased the temperature. The solubility data generated in this investigation could be helpful for investigator for analysis/dosage form development of brigatinib.
INTANGIBLE ASSETS - SUSTAINABLE ECONOMIC FACTORS AND NEW CREATORS OF VALUE

The concept of value existed since trade was invented and used in all fields. Economists have tried different ways to define the common denominator subjective estimation of a good size. Studying the economic value of an asset has preoccupied economists at the early days of this discipline, trying to estimate the value of an individual and then extend to \r\n goods that can be changed. Over time how to create and measure value had several forms: from profit indicators (economic and financial profitability, etc.) to indicators based on cash flow (cash flow, CFROI - Cash Flow Return on investment -cash return on investment, etc.) or indicators of value (EVA - Economicâ Value Added - Economic Value Added, MVA - Market value added - Market value added, etc.). Value creation is the most important goal for a company, and the development of economy and human society will bring new ways of creating value that is in step with time. The new ways of creating value refer to human capital, intellectual capital, information, goodwill, etc., which gives the opportunity to contribute to the sustainable development of society and thus to value creation. It is the result of a complex management of all aspects of the business. "Sustainability" means property of a system, where the emphasis is on maintaining a particular state of the system over time. Classification- M41, Q56, D46, G14.