Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Relationship between placenta weight and birth weight at the Federal Medical Centre, Yenagoa

Corresponding Author Email: kotingolucky2009@yahoo.com Undisputedly, the placenta and umbilical cord have been considered to fundamentally contribute to perinatal outcome. Unfortunately, robust reports on this in our setting are lacking. The objective of this study was to determine the relationship between the placenta weight and birth weight of the neonate at term pregnancy in a Tertiary Hospital in the Niger Delta. This was a cross sectional study of labour ward patients in the Obstetrics and Gynaecology Department of Federal Medical Centre, Yenagoa, Nigeria, conducted from 1st of April 2017 to the 1st of August 2017. Data on maternal age, parity, gestational age at delivery, mode of delivery, birth weight, freshly delivered untrimmed placental weight and birth weight were collected from four hundred and eighty-six (486) parturients who met the inclusion criteria and were recruited consecutively. The data was processed using SPSS windows version 22.P value < 0.05 was considered statistically significant. The mean age of respondents was 28.6 + 5 years. The mean placenta weight was 543 g + 79 and birth weight was 3096 g + 600. The mean Placenta – Birth Weight Ratio (PBWR) was 17.5%. Placenta weight was positively correlated with birth weight (P<0.05). There was positive relationship between placenta weight and birth weight which was negligible notwithstanding. However, careful examination of the placenta and baby at birth is recommended.
A turnout like in 2009 but with many “Europes” within the EU

The European Parliament (EP) elections that took place between the 22nd and the 25th of May 2014 (depending on the country) have gained a much higher relevance than in the past. This can be understood by looking at how many European citizens turned out to choose their representatives at the EP. In the field of electoral studies, EP elections have always been considered as a second-order elections (Reif and Schmitt, 1980), i.e., elections in which the stakes are lower (or are perceived as lower) compared to general elections (in which the formation of the national government is at stake). As a consequence, turnout is lower compared to national elections. As already mentioned in a previous article,2 over time, there has been a decrease in the turnout: in 1979, 62% of the voters went to the polls while 43% turned out in 2009, with a decrease of 19 percentage points. The first figure of these elections is that this decreasing trend in the turnout has stopped. In the entire European Union, the turnout has been 43.1%, which is almost identical to the percentage in 2009 (see Figure 1). This figure represents already a signal of how these EP elections have triggered an interest among EU citizens. However, the average figure at the EU level might conceal very different situations. It is therefore necessary to look at the turnout in the single EU countries and to compare it with the 2009 percentages. Table 1 shows turnout rates for each EU country in 2009 and 2014, in addition to the difference in the turnout between the two elections. The first figure is the high heterogeneity, ranging from countries with very low levels of
Phenol biodegradation by bacterial strain O-CH1 isolated from seashore

phenol and phenolic compounds are among the most recognized environmental pollutants which exist in industrial wastewater and enter the biological cycles due to the solubility in water. Bioremediation is one of the cost-effective and Eco-friendly methods for phenol removal. In this study, the most effective phenol-degrading bacterial strain was isolated and identified from the shores of the Oman Sea by 16S rDNA. The optimal conditions of various factors, such as pH, temperature, carbon to nitrogen ratio and salinity for the phenol biodegradation, were determined using the experimental design based on Taguchi method with L9 array (34). Ability of the isolated strain (Halomonas elongata strain O-CH1) in degradation of different phenol concentrations was analyzed. The optimum operating conditions for phenol removal were determined in pH value of 8, temperature of 35 ˚C, carbon to nitrogen ratio of 100:30 (g/L) and salinity of 35 (g/L). In these conditions, 97% of the phenol was removed from the mediums. According to the optimization results, salinity and pH were the most influential factors in the biodegradation of phenol. The O-CH1 was able to grow and degrade phenol at concentrations of 250 mg/L to 1500 mg/L. Considering the high potential of this strain for phenol degradation, determining the optimal conditions for the biodegradation and its efficacy at high concentrations of phenol, the findings in this study can be used in the biological treatment of phenolic wastewater.
Sedentary Behavior and Physical Activity in University Students: A Pilot Study.

The effectiveness of physical activity as primary and secondary prevention strategy of several chronic diseases is well documented. Sedentary behavior , a factor that has been recently introduced, is associated with these disorders and seems to act independently of the level of physical activity. Sedentary behavior refers to activities that do not increase energy expenditure substantially above the resting level. Increased levels of sedentary behaviors, independent of physical activity levels, are associated with increased risk of obesity, metabolic syndrome, cardiovascular mortality and all cause mortality. We analyzed the sedentary behavior in a local university population of a group of students from the University of Flores (n = 425). The sedentary behavior and the level of physical activity were studied using the self reporting questionnaire GPAQ. We found that the sedentary behavior is a variable with a heterogeneous response. Sedentary behaviors were more frequent in women, yet the differences were non-significant. Sixteen percent of students had high levels of sedentary behaviors and, simultaneously, low levels of physical activity, with higher risk of chronic diseases. Further surveys are needed about sedentary behaviors during work, motorized transportation and spare time in the general population.
High expression levels of TLR9 and PD-L1 indicates a poor prognosis in patients with angioimmunoblastic T-cell lymphoma: a retrospective study of 88 cases in a single center

Background: The role of TLR9 expressed by tumor cells in evading immune surveillance was confirmed. PD-L1 expression in tumor cells plays a key role in tumor immune escape, which is associated with poor prognosis. However, the clinical relevance of TLR9 and PD-L1 expression in angioimmunoblastic T-cell lymphoma (AITL) has not been evaluated. Materials and methods: In this study, we identified differentially expressed genes in AITL samples by bioinformatic analysis, and we first examined TLR9 and PD-L1 expression by immunohistochemical staining in patients with AITL and compared these data with clinical features and survival time. Results: It was found that the expression of PD-L1 and multiple TLRs was higher in AITL than normal T-cell samples, and TLR9 and PD-L1 expression displayed complex interactions by bioinformatic analysis. The rates of TLR9 and PD-L1 high expression were 69% and 50%, respectively. High expression of either TLR9 or PD-L1 indicated a poor survival rate for patients with AITL. Multivariate analysis further confirmed that high expression levels of TLR9 and PD-L1 were unfavorable prognostic factors for AITL. We further found inferior overall survival in AITL with clinical features of ECOG status ≥ 2, advanced-stage, elevated serum LDH levels, elevated serum β2-MG levels, and high IPI score. Conclusion: TLR9 and PD-L1 expression may be a novel predictor of prognosis for patients with AITL and may serve as potential therapeutic strategy.
Molecular Mechanism of Matrine from Sophora alopecuroides in the Reversing Effect of Multi-Anticancer Drug Resistance in K562/ADR Cells

Multidrug resistance is the main obstacle to current chemotherapies. In this study, we evaluated the reversing effect of matrine, the principal alkaloid derived from Sophora alopecuroides, on chemoresistant leukemia K562/ADR cells. Matrine in a range of the nontoxic concentration was employed in the whole study. IC50s of cancer medicines were tested using WST-8 assay. Drug export and apoptotic rates were examined using flow cytometry. The mRNA and protein expressions were quantified by quantitative real-time PCR and western blotting, respectively. Our data indicated that matrine had potent reversal properties augmenting cytotoxicity of cancer medicines on K562/ADR cells as well as apoptotic rates induced by doxorubicin. Moreover, matrine inhibited drug-exporting activity and expression of ATP-binding cassette subfamily B member 1 (ABCB1) on both mRNA and protein levels. That might result from inhibited NF-kappa B activation, which also led to restored intrinsic apoptosis. These findings suggest that matrine in the nontoxic concentration can suppress ABCB1 drug transport and facilitate the intrinsic apoptosis pathway through the inhibiting effect on NF-kappa B and has the potential to become an efficient sensitizer for anticancer drug resistance.
Interaction for Task Instruction and Learning

This chapter considers the qualities of human interaction and learning that will be most effective and natural to incorporate into any interactive task learning agent, and focuses specifi cally on the interactions involved in learning from explicit instruction. At the center of this interaction is a process that brings the common ground between a teacher agent and a learner agent into alignment. Errors or misalignments to this common ground drive the interactive learning process. The importance of timing is highlighted as is the dynamics of an interaction, as a communication channel itself, in this
Seasonal Analysis of Selected Philippine Economic Time Series by Jade

The importance of seasonality in econometric modeling of economic time series has been downplayed by analysts of business cycles. This paper seeks to determine the validity of the assumption of independence between seasonal and cyclical components for Philippine economic time series. Some issues relating to seasonal unit roots, changing seasonality, nonlinearity and structural change in Philippine economic time series are addressed. Results from test for seasonal integration and seasonality are mixed. However, graphical measures and prior observations by analysis tend to provide support to the result that most Philippine economic time series do not exhibit stability in their seasonal patterns. Using a modeling framework accounting for both nonlinearity and structural change, it was found that moist economic time series exhibiting linked seasonal and cyclical behavior tend to cater to the domestic market whereas those with independent seasonal and cyclical components may have been insulated by their greater exposure to the global economy.
Automated Variability Classification and Constant Stars in the Kepler Database

We have monitored hundreds of stars at 30-minute cadence as part of our Cycles 1-4 Kepler Guest Observer programs. Our initial sample was chosen largely by their GALEX colors (i.e. “UV bright”), so we anticipated that it would contain a large number of spotted stars. In fact, the sample also contained pulsating A and F stars, pulsating red giants, and a substantial fraction of stars that showed no variability at all on any timescale. Visual inspection of the light curves alone generally is not adequate to determine the cause or even the level of variability, so we developed sophisticated tools to automatically classify stars using various windowing and power spectrum tests. We present preliminary results and discuss the detection limits for variability in the Kepler database.
Development of a PerfOlmance Appraisal Instrument for Pharmacy Technicians At Wal-Mart Stores

To complete a performance appraisal correctly it imperative that recipient know what is being required. This is important because if a pharmacy technician does not know what tasks need to be completed in order to keep the pharmacies running, it becomes difficult to appraise the behavior when necessary. Currently, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has a standardized performance appraisal that is used for all locations. This presents a challenge because not every location performs the same tasks resulting in an inaccurate annual performance appraisal for the pharmacy technicians. A customized performance appraisal will provide the necessary tasks that each pharmacy technician should be performing on a regular basis. With the tasks noted beforehand, the performance appraisal will be easier complete. 2
Photochemical transformation of residential wood combustion
emissions: dependence of organic aerosol composition on OH
exposure

Residential wood combustion (RWC) emits large amounts of gaseous and particulate organic aerosol (OA). In the atmosphere, the emission is transformed via oxidative reactions, which are under daylight conditions driven mainly by hydroxyl radicals (OH). This continuing oxidative ageing produces secondary OA and may change the healthand climate-related properties of the emission. However, it is not well known how the composition of RWCoriginated OA changes as the function of OH exposure. In this work, emissions from two modern residential logwood combustion appliances were photochemically aged in an oxidation flow reactor (OFR) with various OH exposure levels, reaching up to 6× 1011 s cm−3 (equivalent to 1 week in the atmosphere). Gaseous organic compounds were analysed by proton transfer reaction time-of-flight mass spectrometry (PTR-ToF-MS), while particulate OA was analysed online by a high-resolution soot particle aerosol mass spectrometer (SP-HR-ToF-AMS) and offline by in situ derivatization thermal desorption–gas chromatography–time-of-flight mass spectrometry (IDTD-GC-ToF-MS). Photochemical reactions increased the mass of particulate organic carbon by a factor of 1.3–3.9. The increase in mass took place during the first atmospheric equivalent day of ageing, after which the enhancement was independent of the extent of photochemical exposure. However, ageing increased the oxidation state of the particulate OA linearly throughout the assessed range, with 1H : C/1O : C slopes between −0.17 and −0.49 in van Krevelen space. Ageing led to an increase in acidic fragmentation products in both phases, as measured by the IDTD-GC-ToF-MS for the particulate and PTR-ToFMS for the gaseous phase. For the gaseous organic compounds, the formation of small carbonylic compounds combined with the rapid degradation of primary volatile organic compounds such as aromatic compounds led to a continuous increase in both the O : C and H : C ratios. Overall, the share of polycyclic aromatic compounds (PACs) in particles degraded rapidly during ageing, although some oxygensubstituted PACs, most notably naphthaldehydic acid, increased, in particular during relatively short exposures. Similarly, the concentrations of particulate nitrophenols rose extensively during the first atmospheric equivalent day. During continuous photochemical ageing, the dominant transformation mechanisms shifted from the initial gas-phase functionalization/condensation to the transformation of the particuPublished by Copernicus Publications on behalf of the European Geosciences Union. 6358 A. Hartikainen et al.: Photochemical transformation of residential wood combustion emissions late OA by further oxidation reactions and fragmentation. The observed continuous transformation of OA composition throughout a broad range of OH exposures indicates that the entire atmospheric lifetime of the emission needs to be explored to fully assess the potential climate and health effects of RWC emissions.
Modeling using Term Dependencies and Term Weighting in Information Retrieval Systems

The process of information retrieval has become a fact of life because of the great growth of the internet and information. In this paper, retrieval models are discussed. These models are classified according to two different mathematical modeling approaches: term dependency models and term weighting models. Some models assume term independence, while others consider this dependency relation. On the other hand, term weighting is a method that tries to index the document in an effective way. The aim of this paper is to discuss and evaluate different information retrieval models which employ both terms dependence/independence, as well as term weighting.
Critical Practice Gaps in Oncology: Implications for Development of Effective CME to Meet Accelerating Educational Needs

September 2015 Clinical Care Options’ (CCO) recently published outcomes and needs assessment data demonstrated a dramatic negative “awareness shift” of key treatment information among both hematologists and oncologists. Practicechanging data are now emerging so quickly, and in such great volume, that treating oncologists do not learn about new agents and integrate the latest data until much later in the drug development process and, in many cases, not until well after agents have been approved for use.
Block Ciphers on GPU: Integration and Evaluation of the improvement

In this report we implement three symmetric block ciphers (AES, Serpent and Twofish) on CUDA, then measure and analyze the improvement in performance achieved. The idea is to run the encryption/decryption function in parallel on a high number of input blocks using CUDA threads. Then measure the speed up gained from this implementation and compare between the three block ciphers.
Chapter 2 Probability

Writing a brief commentary on three of Terry Speed’s papers in probability brings to mind many memories from a time now almost forty years away. Two of these papers were written while Terry worked as a Lecturer in Sheffield, and during this period my encounters with Terry were very frequent. The third paper was written after Terry had already moved on to Perth. These were times “when we were very young”, and there was a great deal of excitement about new developments in probability. One of the main sources of inspiration was Volume 2 of Introduction to Probability Theory and its Applications by Feller [8], which had come out sixteen years after the publication of Volume 1 [7], and was then followed five years later by an expanded Second Edition. Feller was a master in making probability theory look like it were a collection of challenging puzzles, for which one, if only sufficiently clever, could find an elegant solution by some ingenious trick that actually made the original problem look like it had been trivial. Feller’s books offered also a large number of examples leading to potentially important applications. This idea of making probability a tool for practical mathematical modeling was gaining ground in other ways, too. An important move in this direction, in 1964, was founding, at the initiative of Joe Gani, of the Applied Probability journals. The Department of Probability and Statistics in Sheffield, also Gani’s creation, was a hub of these developments and it attracted a number of young talents to its circles from around the world, Terry being one of them. Another source of inspiration at the time was ‘the general theory of stochastic processes’, which was represented, most importantly, by the French and the Russian schools of probability. The key figure behind this in France was Paul-André Meyer and his book Probability and Potentials [10] was one of the favorites in Terry’s impressive home library in Sheffield. (A sign of Terry’s interest in the works coming from the French school is that he translated into English J. Neveu’s book Martingales à temps discret [11], which appeared in 1975 with the title Discrete Pa-
A NUMERICAL METHOD FOR THE CONVECTION-DIFFUSION EQUATION

In this project a numerical method has been designed for the coupling of a spherical and cubic grid while preserving a second order error accuracy. This is done to make accurate simulations of the many processes in nature that rely on mass or heat transfer between a solid surface and an adjacent fluid. The solid surface is often enlarged by dispersing the solid as many particles into the liquid, and a single particle can be approximated to be spherical. The rectangular 2D domain, consisting of a circular notch as particle along one side was discretized in a fine spherical grid near the particle and a coarse rectangular grid on the whole domain. A higher resolution near the particle is needed as the result of high Schmidt numbers in fluid systems (Sc = 1000) and thus strong concentration gradients are to be expected near the particle. On the particle a first order reaction is imposed by a homogeneous Robin boundary condition. If discretized with the same second order accuracy, no difference in error convergence should be expected. Only for high Damkohler numbers, i.e. the ratio between the reaction rate and the diffusion rate, the increased gradients at the particle could result in minor problems. Those could be solved by enlarging the finer spherical grid. The coupling between the grids was done by bilinear interpolation of the flux values. To arrive at this way of coupling, simulations were done first on a 1D diffusion equation. Multiple interpolation methods were tested, but while keeping in mind that interpolation of higher order is very difficult to perform in higher dimensions, linear interpolation was chosen as the best option. And because linear interpolation was performed on flux values, a second order error convergence was still found. Moving on to 2D, also convection-diffusion equations were solved on an easier total rectangular domain and it was found that when discretized with a second order method, the fluid flow had no influence in the error behaviour.
Parallelized Pipeline for Whole Genome Shotgun Metagenomics with GHOSTZ-GPU and MEGAN

Metagenome techniques allow analyses of microorganisms and their genes present in a given environment without isolation and culture. Thus, metagenomics has become a broadly applied tool to study various environments and elucidate the relationship between diseases and the host microbiota. With continuous improvement in the performance of genome sequencers, the number of sequence reads generated has increased exponentially; thus, methods for the efficient processing of such large numbers of sequences are required. To this end, we developed the pipeline system, GHOSTMEGAN, to speed up the processing of large-scale whole genome shotgun metagenome analysis, which integrates the sequence homology search tool GHOSTZ-GPU and the analyzing tool MEGAN. Assuming a cluster-type computer with a job scheduling system, the multi-node parallel processing of GHOSTZ-GPU and MEGAN was pipelined. Performance evaluation of GHOSTMEGAN with a whole genome sequence dataset, the oral metagenome demonstrated that execution of 128 nodes in parallel, which required 15 h on a single node, could be completed in only 20 min, thereby achieving about 45 times faster calculation. This pipeline is expected to greatly accelerate the field of metagenomics and broaden its application potential.
Three Dimensional Unsteady Flow of Blood in Arteries with Multiple Stenoses

-In this study, three dimensional unsteady blood flow in arteries with two axisymmetric stenoses of dilation of 25% has been numerically analyzed. Using computational fluid dynamics techniques, hemodynamic factors such as velocity, pressure and streamline pattern are investigated. The problem is solved by finite volume method. Numerical simulation is prescribed using the CFD software’s Fluent and Gambit. Low pressure and high velocity are observed in the regions of stenoses. This is an indication to the interruption of blood flow. Detection and quantification of multiple stenoses serve as the root for surgical interference. These techniques based on computer flow study are important for understanding the relationship between hemodynamic parameters and hazard of rupture. Keywords--Multiple Stenoses, Computational Fluid Dynamics, Hemodynamics, Numerical simulation, Finite Volume Method