Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Digital transformation strategy in the public sector: A SEM-neural network model for IS users’ satisfaction

The process known as digital transformation is widely acknowledged as having fundamentally altered the ways in which corporations function. Many new opportunities have become available in the public sector as a result of the development of digital technologies. Previous academics have pointed out that organizational procedures and the quality of public services have both improved as a result of digital transformation. On the other hand, the success of information systems (IS) in the public sector is dependent on a number of different elements. It is widely acknowledged that the contentment of users is one of the most crucial prerequisites for digital transformation. The purpose of this article is to investigate the factors that influence the adoption of IS and the level of satisfaction experienced by its users in the public sector. The SEM Neural Network was used to analyze the data that was collected by 498 IS users from a wide variety of enterprises within the Greek public sector. The findings of this study are valuable for practitioners who design these systems because they help them enhance the effectiveness of their systems and think about these aspects while developing and utilizing them in the public sector. This is because the findings help practitioners improve the effectiveness of their own systems.
Persistent integration of reprogramming factors impairs the in vitro cardiogenic potential of induced pluripotent stem cells.

Induced pluripotent cells (iPSCs) were first generated by the laboratory of Takahashi and Yamanaka1 in 2006 by reprogramming somatic cells into pluripotent stem cells capable of differentiating into any cell type. In a landmark series of experiments, the Yamanaka laboratory transduced mouse fibroblasts with retroviruses coding 4 transcription factors, the so-called reprogramming factors, Oct4, Sox2, c-Myc, and Klf4. Germline transmission of murine iPS cells was reported in the following year.2,3 Shortly thereafter, human iPSCs were derived, opening new avenues for regenerative medicine with autologous patient-specific cells.4,5 Article see p 667 These early approaches of iPS cell production uniformly involved the introduction of reprogramming genes with retroviral or lentiviral vectors. Accordingly, the reprogramming genes irreversibly integrated into the host genome at multiple poorly defined sites. Interestingly, the expression of these genes was largely silenced after iPSC induction, thereby allowing differentiation in vitro and in vivo. Nonetheless, it was known right from the second round of mouse iPS articles in 20072,3 that there is low residual expression of transgenes in reprogrammed cells. Because of this concern, inducible expression systems were developed with reduced likelihood of aberrant reprogramming gene expression. In all of these early strategies, however, the integrated reprogramming vectors remained in the host genome and could in principle become reactivated over time. Indeed, the laboratory of Yamanaka demonstrated that tumors arise in mice generated from iPS cells, and that the c-myc transgene (a classical oncogene) is reactivated in the tumor …
Optimizing Blood Glucose Control through Reward Shaping in Reinforcement Learning

Achieving optimal blood glucose control is a complex challenge for individuals with diabetes, necessitating a delicate balance among insulin dosage, food consumption, physical activity, and stress management. This paper introduces an innovative approach utilizing reinforcement learning (RL) to develop personalized and effective strategies for blood glucose regulation. Specifically, we employ the state-of-the-art soft actorcritic (SAC) RL algorithm, which concurrently maximizes anticipated rewards and policy entropy. We devise an entropydriven reward function to incentivize diverse action exploration while ensuring a secure and consistent blood glucose profile. This reward function considers both the policy's entropy and the deviation of the blood glucose level from the target range, thus optimizing blood glucose control and minimizing the risk of complications. Our methodology is applied, trained, and assessed using a sophisticated blood glucose dynamics simulator based on the UVA/Padova model. The results demonstrate that our proposed method, SAC with entropy-based reward shaping (SAC+RS), outperforms a comparative approach, SAC with Magni's risk-based reward function (SAC+MRS), in terms of risk scores, glucose levels, insulin levels, and reward values.
Relationship of obesity and visceral adiposity with serum concentrations of CRP, TNF-alpha and IL-6.

OBJECTIVE To investigate the relationship between serum concentrations of the cytokines C-reactive protein (CRP), tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-alpha, and interleukin (IL)-6, and obesity and visceral adiposity. METHODS A cross-sectional study of 100 Korean adults free from pre-existing inflammatory disease or cancer was performed. Body mass index (BMI), waist circumference, and serum concentrations of CRP, TNF-alpha and IL-6 were measured. In 46 obese subjects, fat mass was assessed by bioimpedance analysis and abdominal fat distribution was determined by computerized tomography scan. RESULTS Overall, serum concentrations of CRP, TNF-alpha and IL-6 were significantly correlated with weight, BMI, waist circumference, hip circumference, and waist-hip ratio. In obese subjects, CRP and IL-6 were significantly correlated with BMI, waist circumference and visceral adipose tissue. Multiple regression analysis showed that CRP was significantly associated with BMI, whereas IL-6 was significantly related with visceral adiposity in obese subjects. CONCLUSIONS The positive associations of obesity and visceral adiposity with elevated cytokine levels suggest the importance of reducing obesity and visceral adiposity to prevent elevations in cytokine levels.
Improving Classification using IS-SMOTE on Imbalanced Heart Failure Data

Heart failure is a fatal cause of mortality globally. One in every four individuals is afflicted by and succumbs to heart disease. Given the considerable complexity of heart disease classification, this research primarily centers on the classification of heart failure patients and strives to predict heart failure survival with high accuracy. Because of class imbalance problem, the classification result is prone to bias towards the dominant majority class. An existing popular technique for handling class imbalance issues is the Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE). SMOTE gives equal importance to every minority instance of oversampling. Furthermore, a significant but unresolved problem is the generation of minority synthetic instances, the number of which is fixed at five for each instance. This creates overlapping samples between closer instances. In this research, a modified variant of SMOTE is proposed, namely, Instance Selection based SMOTE (IS-SMOTE), to mitigate the problem of SMOTE. In our proposed IS-SMOTE, oversam- pling rates are not fixed at five, and resembling instances are oversampled based on their distance from other instances. The closest instances are given maximum importance over the furthest ones and generate a smaller number of synthetic instances. The most difficult issues, particularly oversampling rates and figuring out how many neighbors there are for each sample in SMOTE, can be resolved by the proposed IS-SMOTE. ISSMOTE outperforms existing SMOTE in terms of average performance metrics, including Accuracy, Precision, Recall, and F-Score, across five base classifiers: SVM, GNB, RF, DT, and XGBoost, as demonstrated in experiments conducted on heart failure data.
Assessment of UAV Photogrammetric Mapping Accuracy in the Beach Environment

ABSTRACT Jeong, E.Y. ; Park, J.-Y. , and Hwang, C. -S. , 2018. Assement of UAV Photogrammetric Mapping Accuracy in the Beach Environment In: Shim, J.-S. ; Chun, I. , and Lim, H.S. (eds.), Proceedings from the International Coastal Symposium (ICS) 2018 (Busan, Republic of Korea). Journal of Coastal Research, Special Issue No. 85, pp. 176–180. Coconut Creek (Florida), ISSN 0749-0208. This study evaluated the accuracy of UAV photogrammetry for subaerial beach morphology. Beach is characterized by complicated morphology due to the influence of coastal processes and is mainly composed of monochromatic sandy sediments. Therefore, it is required to validate the applicability of UAV photogrammetry that finds matching points from geographical features within images to create the 3D topographic data. For the accuracy test, a beach site which consisted of both typical sandy beach characteristics at the beach face and tidal flat features at the intertidal zone, was selected. The vertical accuracy of both the fixed-wing and the rotary-wing UAVs were tested using various flight altitudes, image overlap percentages, and GCPs configurations. The accuracy of the photogrammetric surveying results were examined by comparing them to reference data measured by LiDAR. The flight altitude should be set in such a way that the captured images include more geographical features in the beach environment, especially in the tidal flat. When the UAV photogrammetry is performed at a flight altitude of less than 150 m and with over 70% overlap using GCPs of 50 m grid spacing in the beach, topography with a RMSE accuracy of less than 4.9 cm can be obtained. And, it is required to place at least 5 GCPs homogeneously within the area of 300 x 100 m for accurate beach mapping by UAV photogrammetric survey.
Judd-Ofelt analysis of $Nd(TTa)_{3}Phen-doped$ $6-FDA/Epoxy$ planar waveguides

The fluorescent complex $Nd(TTA)_{3}Phen$ (TTA=thenoyltrifluoroacetone, Phen = 1, 10-phenanthroline), was doped into the host material 6-FDA epoxy (6-fluorinated-dianhydride cured epoxy). The room-temperature absorption spectrum of $N^{3}$ transitions was experimentally obtained, with which the Judd-Ofelt model was applied to determine the Judd-Ofelt parameters. These parameters are used to calculate the emission probabilities of transitions and branching ratios of the $Nd_{3}$ from the excited-state $^{4}F_{3/2}$ to lower-lying manifolds. The radiative lifetime of $^{4}F_{3/2}$ was obtained from the emission probabilities. The results of the analysis indicate this Nd (III) complex doped polymer material is promising to be used in planar waveguide lasers and amplifiers.
Dental aesthetics perception and eating behavior in adolescence

Abstract Background: This correlational study explored the psychosocial aspects related to eating behavior in different age samples of adolescents in treatment from 0 to 60 months at the Clinic of Orthodontics and Dentistry of Messina, Messina, Italy. The aim of the study was to investigate the relationship between psychosocial impact, levels of self-esteem, and the possible connection with eating habits of adolescents under orthodontic treatment. Methods: Sixty-one adolescents, aged between 12 and 22 years (mean=15.6±2.8) participated to the study. Each adolescents was interviewed with the Eating Attitudes Test, the Rosenberg Self Esteem Scale, and the Psychosocial Impact of Dental Aesthetics Questionnaire. Results: Data did not show a direct connection between eating disorder and dental aesthetics, nevertheless, adolescents under orthodontic treatment, especially in the earliest phase of wearing braces, showed peculiar eating habits and underwent a higher psychological impact of dental aesthetics. Eating behaviors are strictly linked to global self-esteem. The processing of the results was made through the Student’s t-test and using Pearson’s correlation analysis. Conclusion: Increased knowledge of the psychological aspects involved in orthodontic treatment compliance may have positive effects in the relationship between adolescent patients and orthodontists. More attention should be paid to aspects that are often underestimated in clinical practice, thus, influencing the outcome of treatment and patient satisfaction, not only in terms of dental health, but also of mental health.
Correlates of Research Effort in Carnivores: Body Size, Range Size and Diet Matter

Given the budgetary restrictions on scientific research and the increasing need to better inform conservation actions, it is important to identify the patterns and causes of biases in research effort. We combine bibliometric information from a literature review of almost 16,500 peer-reviewed publications on a well-known group of 286 species, the Order Carnivora, with global datasets on species' life history and ecological traits to explore patterns in research effort. Our study explores how species' characteristics influenced the degree to which they were studied (measured as the number of publications). We identified a wide variation in intensity of research effort at both Family and Species levels, with some of the least studied being those which may need protection in future. Our findings hint at the complex role of human perspectives in setting research agendas. We found that better-studied species tended to be large-bodied and have a large geographic range whilst omnivory had a negative relationship with research effort. IUCN threat status did not exhibit a strong relationship with research effort which suggests that the conservation needs of individual species are not major drivers of research interest. This work is the first to use a combination of bibliometric analysis and biological data to quantify and interpret gaps in research knowledge across an entire Order. Our results could be combined with other resources, such as Biodiversity Action Plans, to prioritise and co-ordinate future research effort, whilst our methods can be applied across many scientific disciplines to describe knowledge gaps.
Noise induced oscillations in a second order circuit with nonvolatile memristor

The addition of a small amount of noise in nonlinear systems can play an important role, inducing transitions between dynamical regime and producing more complex dynamics. In this work, we present the analysis of a second order circuit with a nonvolatile memristive device, subject to additive noise perturbations. Memristive devices are two terminal elements suitable for implementing circuits with complex dynamic behaviors, that can be used to perform bio-inspired computational tasks. We show that, depending on noise intensity, the dynamic behavior of the system undergoes multiple qualitative changes. We use numerical simulations and nonlinear dynamics concepts to analyze these transitions.
Reduced Peripheral Skeletal Muscle Mass and Abnormal Reflex Physiology in Chronic Heart Failure

Background— The muscle hypothesis implicates abnormalities in peripheral muscle as a source for the stimulus to the symptoms and reflex abnormalities seen in chronic heart failure (CHF). We investigated the relationship between skeletal muscle mass (with dual-energy x-ray absorptiometry) and activation of the ergoreflex (a peripheral reflex originating in skeletal muscle sensitive to products of muscle work) in CHF patients and whether this rapport is affected by the progression of the syndrome. Methods and Results— We assessed 107 consecutive CHF patients (mean age, 61.9±10.9 years; 95% male; 25 cachectics) and 24 age-matched normal subjects (mean age, 59.0±11.1 years; 91% male). Compared with normal subjects, patients had a higher ergoreflex (in ventilation, 6.2±.6.1 versus 0.6±0.6 L/min; P<0.0001) and a reduction in muscle mass (51.9±10.0 versus 60.3±8.8 kg; P<0.001). The ergoreflex was particularly overactive in cachectics (P<0.05), accompanied by marked muscle mass depletion (P<0.0005). In CHF, ergoreceptor hyperresponsiveness in both the arm and leg correlated with reduced muscle mass, abnormal indexes of exercise tolerance (peak &OV0312;o2, &OV0312;e/&OV0312;co2 slope), ejection fraction, and NYHA functional class (P<0.0001). In the cachectic population, the ventilatory response from ergoreflex to arm exercise was strongly inversely correlated with arm (r=−0.65), leg (r=−0.64), and total (r=−0.61) lean tissues (P<0.001 for all). Multivariate analysis showed that these relationships were independent of NYHA class, peak &OV0312;o2, and &OV0312;e/&OV0312;co2 slope. Conclusions— Depleted peripheral muscle mass is associated with ergoreflex overactivity and exercise limitation in CHF, particularly in cachectic patients. The systemic activation of the muscle reflex system in CHF may reflect progression and deterioration of the clinical syndrome.
Quantifying the effect of ecological restoration on runoff and sediment yields

Ecological restoration can result in extensive land use transitions which may directly impact on water runoff and sediment loss and thus influence tradeoffs between multiple hydrological and soil ecosystem services. However, quantifying the effect of these transitions on runoff and sediment yields has been a challenge over large spatial scales. This study integrated and synthesized 43 articles and 331 runoff experimental plots in the Loess Plateau of China under natural rainfall to quantify the impacts of land use transitions on (a) runoff and sediment production, (b) runoff and soil loss reduction effectiveness, and (c) the tradeoffs between runoff and soil erosion. The effects of ecological restoration on runoff and sediment yields were quantified using a general mixed linear meta-regression model with a restricted maximum likelihood estimator on overall and individual ecological restoration types. The results showed that artificial grassland, forest, natural grassland, and shrubland had higher runoff and sediment reduction effectiveness. The annual runoff reduction effectiveness of the ecological restoration overall was 72.18% with the effects of artificial grassland, natural grassland, shrubland, and forest at 71.89%, 50.60%, 73.18%, and 73.08%, respectively. The annual sediment reduction effectiveness of the overall ecological restoration was 99.9% without a significant difference among the four land uses associated with ecological recovery. In addition, shrubland and forest significantly reduced sediment yields with relatively high runoff costs. Natural grassland was optimal for balancing water provisioning and soil conservation, and artificial grassland was second to natural grassland in this respect. Meanwhile, newly unmanaged abandoned land and cropland had relative weak functionality with regard to soil and water conservation. The implications of this study’s findings are discussed along with their potential to contribute to an improved understanding of the effects of ecological restoration on water supply and soil retention for the water-limited terrestrial ecosystem at a regional scale.
Asymptomatic carotid lesions add to cardiovascular risk prediction

Aim To show that subclinical atherosclerosis (subclinical-ATS) of carotid arteries [intima–media thickness (IMT) or asymptomatic carotid plaque (ACP)], may provide additional information for risk stratification, in asymptomatic patients, aged greater than 45 years, with a cluster of risk factors (RFs). Methods and results We studied 558 asymptomatic patients (235 males). RFs for atherosclerosis were assessed and the 10-year-risk was calculated according to the Italian risk score. Doppler ultrasound of carotid arteries identified the presence of IMT greater than 0.9 mm in 183 patients and ACP in 147 patients. One hundred and fifty-three patients developed cerebrovascular or cardiovascular (CV) events in the follow-up: 67 developed acute myocardial infarction, 39 developed angina, 25 had a stroke or transient ischemic attack, six died for CV events, and 16 underwent percutaneous or surgical revascularization. The incidence reflected the different risk profiles (4,14, and 20%, respectively). However, in patients with baseline subclinical-ATS the incidence of events increased to 35, 46, and 63%, respectively. In the multivariate analysis the incidence of events was significantly influenced by the presence of asymptomatic carotid lesions in each risk category. Conclusion In our experience, the incidence of CV events is enhanced in patients with subclinical-ATS. Increased IMT and ACP predict CV events and improve the risk stratification of asymptomatic patients aged greater than 45 years and with a cluster of RFs, in a long-term follow-up.
FlaA Proteins in Leptospira interrogans Are Essential for Motility and Virulence but Are Not Required for Formation of the Flagellum Sheath

ABSTRACT Spirochetes have periplasmic flagella composed of a core surrounded by a sheath. The pathogen Leptospira interrogans has four flaB (proposed core subunit) and two flaA (proposed sheath subunit) genes. The flaA genes are organized in a locus with flaA2 immediately upstream of flaA1. In this study, flaA1 and flaA2 mutants were constructed by transposon mutagenesis. Both mutants still produced periplasmic flagella. The flaA1 mutant did not produce FlaA1 but continued to produce FlaA2 and retained normal morphology and virulence in a hamster model of infection but had reduced motility. The flaA2 mutant did not produce either the FlaA1 or the FlaA2 protein. Cells of the flaA2 mutant lacked the distinctive hook-shaped ends associated with L. interrogans and lacked translational motility in liquid and semisolid media. These observations were confirmed with a second, independent flaA2 mutant. The flaA2 mutant failed to cause disease in animal models of acute infection. Despite lacking FlaA proteins, the flagella of the flaA2 mutant were of the same thickness as wild-type flagella, as measured by electron microscopy, and exhibited a normal flagellum sheath, indicating that FlaA proteins are not essential for the synthesis of the flagellum sheath, as observed for other spirochetes. This study shows that FlaA subunits contribute to leptospiral translational motility, cellular shape, and virulence.
Comparative study of a low-Z cone-beam computed tomography system

Computed tomography images have been acquired using an experimental (low atomic number (Z) insert) megavoltage cone-beam imaging system. These images have been compared with standard megavoltage and kilovoltage imaging systems. The experimental system requires a simple modification to the 4 MeV electron beam from an Elekta Precise linac. Low-energy photons are produced in the standard medium-Z electron window and a low-Z carbon electron absorber located after the window. The carbon electron absorber produces photons as well as ensuring that all remaining electrons from the source are removed. A detector sensitive to diagnostic x-ray energies is also employed. Quantitative assessment of cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT) contrast shows that the low-Z imaging system is an order of magnitude or more superior to a standard 6 MV imaging system. CBCT data with the same contrast-to-noise ratio as a kilovoltage imaging system (0.15 cGy) can be obtained in doses of 11 and 244 cGy for the experimental and standard 6 MV systems, respectively. Whilst these doses are high for everyday imaging, qualitative images indicate that kilovoltage like images suitable for patient positioning can be acquired in radiation doses of 1–8 cGy with the experimental low-Z system.