Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Platelet-Activating Factor Reduces Caspase-3 Activity and Enhances Embryo Development in the Sea Urchin (Lytechinus variegatus)

Introduction: Understanding early embryonic growth and development in the sea urchin model is beneficial for understanding similar events for human embryos Many environmental and external factors impact embryo growth/development and physiological processes, such as apoptosis. Furthermore, several endogenous molecules impact embryo development such as embryo-derived growth factors, e.g. platelet-activating factor (PAF). PAF is a potent signaling phospholipid produced by human gametes and early embryos and is required for fertilization and subsequent development. Exogenous PAF has been used for enhanced fertilization and embryo development, however, the mechanism and process by which PAF improves development has not been fully elucidated. In other systems, PAF modulates apoptosis activity, both by inhibition and activation. Therefore, this study utilized the sea urchin to investigate PAF’s extent of action during early embryo development. Methods: Two-cell stage sea urchin embryos were cultured (20 embryos/replicate; 6 replicates per treatment group) in synthetic sea water (50mL) and in the presence or absence (control group) of 10-7M PAF. Following a 24-hour culture period at 22oC, embryo development was recorded and caspase-3 activity, one measure of apoptotic activity, was assessed by monitoring cleavage of DEVD-AMC peptide substrate. Cleavage of the DEVD-AMC peptide by sea urchin embryonic extracts was determined by measuring fluorescence at 360/405nm by detecting absolute fluorescence (reported in AFU) over time (once per minute for a total of 30 minutes). Results: There was a significant (P<0.01) difference in overall embryo development between sea urchin embryos cultured in PAF (99.2%) versus controls (89.2%). The PAF group (55.8%) had significantly (P<0.01) more late-stage (gastrula) embryos than the control group (16.7%). There was also a significant difference (P<0.05) in caspase-3 enzyme activity between sea urchin embryos cultured in PAF (1.25 [AFU/minute]) versus controls (2.19 [AFU/minute). Conclusion: Exogenous PAF introduced to the sea urchin embryo resulted in reduced caspase-3 activity and higher stages of development. Moreover, sea urchin embryos exposed to PAF exhibited lower levels of apoptosis, as demonstrated by the significantly lower rate of substrate cleavage by extracts. Further studies will elucidate the mechanism by which PAF reduces apoptosis to promote early embryonic development. *Correspondence to: William E. Roudebush, PhD; Department of Biomedical Sciences, University of South Carolina School of Medicine Greenville, Greenville, South Carolina 29605 USA, Tel: 864-455-9833; E-mail: roudebus@ greenvillemed.sc. edu
Factors Affecting Customers’ Experience in Mobile Banking of Bangladesh

Bangladesh is a densely populated country of the world. More than 170 million people live in this country. Mobile banking is a very important and new phenomenon in Bangladesh. In recent years, mobile banking has got highest importance by the customers in the country as it provides immense scope for consumers for banking transactions at any time with the option to access bank’s facilities anywhere of the country. It is a subset of electronic banking, the use of which is increasing day by day in Bangladesh. Hence, this paper aims at indentifying the factors that influence the customer experience in mobile banking in Bangladesh. This study is based on a survey of 231 mobile banking customers of nine private commercial banks of Bangladesh. Literature review identified some factors related to mobile banking like convenient and responsive system, transaction speed and accuracy, reliability, transaction security in ATM booth and technological difficulty that affect customers’ experience in mobile banking systems etc. Both descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyze the data. Descriptive statistics were used to describe the present situation of the mobile banking systems in Bangladesh.
On Nodal Encounter Patterns in Wireless LAN Traces

In this work we study WLAN traces from five different sources and focus on investigation of encounter patterns between users. We find that typical wireless LAN users encounter with a small portion of the whole population (no more than 60% in all traces, and on average between 1.88% to 6.70%). Total encounters of MNs follow BiPareto distribution. These few encounters are sufficient to build a connected relationship network, which is a Small World graph. We further investigate the potential of node-to-node information diffusion, and find that the richness of encounter pattern provides a reliable platform on which information diffusion without infrastructure is feasible and robust.
ICTCP: Incast Congestion Control for TCP in Data-Center Networks

Transport Control Protocol (TCP) incast congestion happens in high-bandwidth and low-latency networks when multiple synchronized servers send data to the same receiver in parallel. For many important data-center applications such as MapReduce and Search, this many-to-one traffic pattern is common. Hence TCP incast congestion may severely degrade their performances, e.g., by increasing response time. In this paper, we study TCP incast in detail by focusing on the relationships between TCP throughput, round-trip time (RTT), and receive window. Unlike previous approaches, which mitigate the impact of TCP incast congestion by using a fine-grained timeout value, our idea is to design an Incast congestion Control for TCP (ICTCP) scheme on the receiver side. In particular, our method adjusts the TCP receive window proactively before packet loss occurs. The implementation and experiments in our testbed demonstrate that we achieve almost zero timeouts and high goodput for TCP incast.
Compact emergency lamp using power LEDs

This paper presents a compact emergency lamp using light emitting diodes (LEDs). The goal is to develop a compact and low cost electronic circuit to drive and control the current of LEDs arranged in a single enclosure. The proposed idea allows using the same equipment in the daily activities, supplied by mains, and under a possible failure of it. The proposal aims energy saving, high luminous efficacy and high useful life when replacing traditional emergency lighting systems, using fluorescent lamps by LEDs. The use of E-27 socket (the same used in traditional incandescent lamps), provides the advantage of easy installation, with the simple replacement of the lamp without any change in the electrical installation. To supply the LEDs by mains and by battery a Buck and a Boost converter were employed. The converters work without electrolytic capacitors which has advantages such as reducing of size and cost of the circuit and increasing the driver's useful life. The battery can be composed of three rechargeable Ni-MH batteries (1.2 V) or a Li-Ion battery (3.6 V). The design complies with the Brazilian standard and international standard for emergency lighting systems. The complete circuit was implemented and the experimental results show a satisfactory behavior of the lamp.
Privacy Preservation via Beamforming for NOMA

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) has been proposed as a promising multiple access approach for 5G mobile systems because of its superior spectrum efficiency. However, the privacy between the NOMA users may be compromised due to the transmission of a superposition of all users’ signals to successive interference cancellation (SIC) receivers. In this paper, we propose two schemes based on beamforming optimization for NOMA that can enhance the security of a specific private user while guaranteeing the other users’ quality of service (QoS). Specifically, in the first scheme, when the transmit antennas are inadequate, we intend to maximize the secrecy rate of the private user, under the constraint that the other users’ QoS is satisfied. In the second scheme, the private user’s signal is zero-forced at the other users when redundant antennas are available. In this case, the transmission rate of the private user is also maximized while satisfying the QoS of the other users. Due to the non-convexity of optimization in these two schemes, we first convert them into convex forms, and then, an iterative algorithm based on the Concave–Convex Procedure is proposed to obtain their solutions. The extensive simulation results are presented to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed schemes.
Reports from the survey of the Dakhleh Oasis, western desert of Egypt, 1977-1987

1. Geography, geology, geochronolgy and geoarchaeology of the Dakhleh Oasis region: an interim report (Maxine R. Keindienst, Charles S. Chrucher, Mary M.A. McDonald and Henry P. Schwarcz) 2. A note on the late Cretaceious vertebrate fauna of the Dhkhleh Oasis (Charles S. Churcher) 3. Soil fungi from Eastern Dakhleh Oasis (John C. Krug and K. Shah Khan) 4. Flora, vegetation and palaeobotany of the Dakhleh Oasis (James C. Ritchie) 5. Pleistocene archaeolgoy and geoarchaeology of the Dakhleh Oasis: a status report (Maxine R. Kleindienst) 6. Late Pleistocene prehistory in the Dakhleh Oasis (Marcia F. Wiseman) 7. Neolithic cultural units and adaptations in the Dakhleh Oasis (Mary M.A. McDonald) 8. Holocene faunas of the Dakhleh Oasis (Charles S. Churcher) 9. Notes on the recent fauna of the Dakhleh Oasis (Alan F. Hollett and Charles S. Churcher) 10. Pharaonic Egyptians in the Dakhleh Oasis (Anthony J. Mills) 11. Pathologically slender human long bones from the Dakhleh Oasis (Peter G. Sheldrick) 12. Conservation, preservation and presentation of monuments and objects in the Dakhleh Oasis () 13. Kellis, the architectural survey of the Romano-Byzantine town at Ismant el-Kharab (James E. Knudstad and Rosa A. Frey) 14. Pottery manufacture in the Dakhleh Oasis (Colin A. Hope) Appendix I Dakhleh Oasis Prject Bibliography Appendix II List of Archaeological sties indexed by the Dakhleh Oasis Project Appendix III List of prehistoric archaeological localities surveyed (M.R.Kleindienst, M.M.A. McDonald, M.F. wiseman and A.L. Hawkins)
An Asymmetric Three-Level Neutral Point Diode Clamped Converter for Switched Reluctance Motor Drives

An asymmetric three-level neutral point diode clamped converter for switched reluctance motor drives is proposed in this paper. The modulation method, the dc-link voltage balancing algorithm, and the current control scheme of this converter are presented. The proposed three-level converter is compared with the conventional two-level asymmetric half-bridge converter in terms of cost, current ripple, noise, and power losses. Compared to the conventional two-level converter, the proposed three-level converter has much lower current ripple, lower noise, and higher efficiency. The effectiveness of the proposed converter is verified by both simulation and experimental results.
Representativity of samplings by automatic vacuometric samplers in combined sewer: case of Opur

In order to analyse the representativity of samplers taken on the sites of the OPUR, 2 approaches were followed: theoretical and experimental. The theoretical approach has permit to respect 7 criteria out of 9 recommended at the time of the choice and the installation of an automatic sampler. The experimental tests showed a satisfactory homogeneity of concentrations in the various sections of measurement, a good representativity of samplings when the pipes are clean a contamination of samples by clogging of samplings pipes because of erosion of biofilms, an influence of temperature and shelf life on the samples intended for the analysis of ammonium and dissolved parameters. The contamination will be eliminated by samplings wastewater then clean water before each measurement campaign and by setting out of the water of samplings pipes. All the analyses will be carried out immediately.
A Survey on Airport Detection on Remote Sensing Images using Deep Convolutional Neural Network

: This survey analyzed the use of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in providing a solution for the problem of airport detection in remote sensing images (RSIs). In recent years, Deep CNNs is mostly used in many applications undertaken in the area of computer vision. Researchers generally detect airport detection as a pattern recognition problem, in which first distinctive features are extracted, and then one of the classifier is adopted to detect airports. As per the research in various field CNNs not only ensure a tuned feature vector, but also gives better classification accuracy. The method proposed in this paper first detects various regions on RSIs using Line Segment Detection algorithm and then uses these candidate regions to train CNN architecture with Matconv-net tool. The CNN model used has five convolution and three fully connected layers. Normalization and dropout layers were employed in order to build efficient architecture. A data augmentation strategy was used to reduce overfitting. Many experiments were performed to evaluate the performance of CNNs.
Comparaison du TTR (Time in Therapeutic Range) des INR des patients traités par warfarine versus fluindione

Introduction : La Maladie Thrombo-Embolique Veineuse (MTEV) et la Fibrillation Atriale non valvulaire sont deux pathologies necessitant une anticoagulation pour lesquelles la warfarine et surtout la fluindione sont le plus utilisees en France avec un INR cible entre 2 et 3. Le pourcentage de temps pendant lequel les patients se situent dans cette fourchette - le TTR (Time in Therapeutic Range) - permet d'evaluer la qualite du controle de l'anticoagulation. L’objectif principal de notre etude etait de comparer le TTR des patients traites par warfarine avec ceux traites par fluindione. Methodes : Etude retrospective, analytique et observationnelle. Les resultats d’INR de chaque patient etaient extraits aupres de la base de donnee du laboratoire Gen-Bio de Clermont-Ferrand durant la periode du 1er janvier au 31 decembre 2017. Le recueil des donnees a ete anonymise. Les criteres d’inclusion etaient tout patient traite par warfarine ou fluindione ayant un objectif d’INR entre 2 et 3. Le TTR a ete calcule pour chacun des patients selon la methode Rosendaal afin de pouvoir faire la comparaison. Resultats : Au total 5153 patients ont ete inclus. Les patients du groupe warfarine etaient plus âges de 2 ans (p<0,001). Dans les 2 groupes les hommes etaient plus nombreux (p=0.). Le TTR des patients traites par warfarine etait de 71,7% et celui des patients traites par fluindione etait de 71,6%. Les patients de moins de 40 ans du groupe warfarine avaient un TTR superieur a ceux du groupe fluindione (80,1% versus 63,9% ; p=0.) 29% des patients des deux groupent realisaient moins de 6 tests sanguins (p=0.) dans l’annee responsable d’un moins bon TTR (p=0.) Conclusion : Il n’existe pas de difference significative sur l’equilibre de l’INR entre la warfarine et la fluindione sauf chez les hommes et les patients de moins de 40 ans.
Musanga cecropioides (Urticaceae) stem-bark mitigates sodium valproate –induced pantoxicity derangement in albino rats

Sodium valproate (SVPA) is indicated for the management of partial and generalized epilepsy with major limitation of pan‐toxicity. Musanga cecropioides stem‐bark (MCS) is used in ethnomedicine for multiple health benefits. The aim of the study was to test the ameliorative effect of MCS extract on SVPA‐induced damage in rodent. The rats were administered with SVPA (500 mg/kg b.w. followed by MCS (50, 100, and 200 mg/kg b.w.) and reference drug, vinpocetine (25 mg/kg b.w.) orally and sub‐acutely. The protective effects of MCS extract on their weights, hematological, biochemical, lipid, kidney and electrolytes profiles parameters were examined. Following rats sacrifice, the liver, kidney and lungs were subjected to histopathological analysis. The study indicated that SVPA significantly up‐regulated the liver function enzymes (P< 0.001), lipid profile (P< 0.01‐0.001), kidney function (P< 0.05–0.01) and electrolytes (P< 0.01–0.001) biomarkers and elicited gross alterations of measured indices. However, this effects were dose dependently reversed by MCS extract with higher hepatoprotective percentages, for liver enzymes (77‐261%), lipid profiles (74–133%), electrolytes (59‐169%) and kidney function (82–154%) compare to vinpocetine values of 63–103%, 80‐ 127%, 70–161% and 27‐78%, respectively. No significant alteration in hematology and relative organ weights. The effect on histopathology corroborated biochemical study. Vinpocetine exhibit no therapeutic effect on the histopathological alteration of liver and kidney but only on the lungs. The presence of potential active ingredients in MCS extract confirms it as an alternative adjunctive therapy in abrogating SVPA – induced pan‐toxicity derangement in rats.
Model-driven statistical arbitrage on LETF option markets

In this paper, we study the statistical properties of the moneyness scaling transformation, which adjusts the moneyness coordinate of the implied volatility smile in an attempt to remove the discrepancy between the IV smiles for levered and unlevered ETF options. We construct bootstrap uniform confidence bands which indicate that the implied volatility smiles are statistically different after moneyness scaling has been performed. An empirical application shows that there are trading opportunities possible on the LETF market. A statistical arbitrage type strategy based on a dynamic semiparametric factor model is presented. This strategy presents a statistical decision algorithm which generates trade recommendations based on comparison of model and observed LETF implied volatility surface. It is shown to generate positive returns with a high probability. Extensive econometric analysis of the LETF implied volatility process is performed including out-of-sample forecasting based on a semiparametric factor model and a uniform confidence bands' study. These provide new insights into the latent dynamics of the implied volatility surface. We also incorporate Heston stochastic volatility into the moneyness scaling method for better tractability of the model.
Assessment Supporting the Use of Outcropping Rock Evolutionary Intensity Measures for Prediction of Liquefaction Consequences

This study evaluates a variety of intensity measures (IMs) for predicting the liquefaction-induced residual settlement and tilt of shallow-founded structures. We use data from both numerical and physical (centrifuge) models of soil-foundation-structure systems. The relative quality of these IMs is quantified in terms of efficiency, sufficiency, and predictability. We consider both scalar and vector-valued IMs and evaluate the relative performance of IMs recorded at different locations (outcropping rock, within rock, far-field, and foundation) from nonlinear and equivalent-linear simulations. Cumulative absolute velocity (CAV) at outcropping rock is the optimum IM for predicting foundation settlement, while either outcropping rock CAV, peak ground velocity, or peak incremental ground velocity is optimum for predicting permanent foundation tilt. Vector IMs offer improvements to efficiency and sufficiency but may be impractical to predict.
Effects of the synbiotic on the growth performance, immune response and resistance to infectious myonecrosis virus in white shrimp (Litopenaeus vannamei)

A feeding trial was conducted to examine the effects of dietary administration of the probiotic Vibrio alginolyticus SKT-b and the prebiotic oligosaccharide extracted from sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas L) on growth performance, immune response, and disease resistance of the white shrimp. The white shrimp (0.54±0.04 gram) were divided into five groups, Kand K+ (not given the synbiotic); A (probiotic 0.5 % and prebiotic 1%); B (probiotic 1 % and prebiotic 2%); C (probiotic 2 % and prebiotic 4%). After 30 days of feeding trial, the white shrimp were infected with IMNV (except treatment K-). The results of the study showed that white shrimp as the experimental animals which given feed supplemented with synbiotic had increased daily growth rate (DGR), and decreased feed conversion ratio (FCR). Moreover, synbiotic also increased total haemocytes count (THC), phenoloxydase activity (PO), and resistance to infectious myonecrosis virus (IMNV). Under experimental conditions, a combination of probiotic (2%) and prebiotic (4%) had the highest synergistic effect on enhancing growth, immunity, and disease resistance of white shrimp.
Simulations and measurements of wave propagations in curved road tunnels for signals from GSM base stations

This paper presents a ray-tube tracing method for wave propagations in curved tunnels. The waves from a transmitting antenna are modeled with many ray tubes, and those ray tubes are traced by including multiple reflections and diffractions from curved structures. Measurements for signals in curved road tunnels from GSM900/1800 base stations have been performed and are compared with those obtained from the ray-tube tracing method.
Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

Even bad code can function. But if code isnt clean, it can bring a development organization to its knees. Every year, countless hours and significant resources are lost because of poorly written code. But it doesnt have to be that way.Noted software expert Robert C. Martin, presents a revolutionary paradigm with Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship. Martin, who has helped bring agile principles from a practitioners point of view to tens of thousands of programmers, has teamed up with his colleagues from Object Mentor to distill their best agile practice of cleaning code on the fly into a book that will instill within you the values of software craftsman, and make you a better programmerbut only if you work at it.What kind of work will you be doing? Youll be reading codelots of code. And you will be challenged to think about whats right about that code, and whats wrong with it. More importantly you will be challenged to reassess your professional values and your commitment to your craft. Clean Code is divided into three parts. The first describes the principles, patterns, and practices of writing clean code. The second part consists of several case studies of increasing complexity. Each case study is an exercise in cleaning up codeof transforming a code base that has some problems into one that is sound and efficient. The third part is the payoff: a single chapter containing a list of heuristics and smells gathered while creating the case studies. The result is a knowledge base that describes the way we think when we write, read, and clean code.Readers will come away from this book understandingHow to tell the difference between good and bad codeHow to write good code and how to transform bad code into good codeHow to create good names, good functions, good objects, and good classesHow to format code for maximum readability How to implement complete error handling without obscuring code logicHow to unit test and practice test-driven developmentWhat smells and heuristics can help you identify bad codeThis book is a must for any developer, software engineer, project manager, team lead, or systems analyst with an interest in producing better code.