Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Physico-chemical and nutritional properties of wheat-sorghum-soybean composite flours and their biscuits.

The present study assessed the effect of supplementation of wheat flour with sorghum and soy flour (full fat) at different levels of substitution, on the physico-chemical and nutritional properties of flour blends and their biscuits. The water absorption capacity of flour blends increased significantly (p< 0.05) while their gluten contents decreased significantly as the level of substitution of wheat flour with non-wheat flours increased. A positive and significant correlation was found between the gel consistency of the raw flours and the spread ratio of the biscuits. The protein, crude fat, crude fibre and ash content of soybean and wheat sorghum soybean composite flours and their biscuits was significantly (p< 0.05) higher while their carbohydrate and starch contents were significantly (p< 0.05) lower than control. The mean energy content of wheat- sorghum- soybean composite flour biscuits (515.28 Kcal/100g) was significantly (p< 0.05) higher than that of control biscuits at a marginally higher cost. The supplemented and control biscuits had good keeping quality and could be stored in polythene bags without any adverse changes in their organoleptic traits upto 60 days at room temperature.
What smells? Developing in‐field methods to characterize the chemical composition of wild mammalian scent cues

Abstract Olfactory cues play an important role in mammalian biology, but have been challenging to assess in the field. Current methods pose problematic issues with sample storage and transportation, limiting our ability to connect chemical variation in scents with relevant ecological and behavioral contexts. Real‐time, in‐field analysis via portable gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC‐MS) has the potential to overcome these issues, but with trade‐offs of reduced sensitivity and compound mass range. We field‐tested the ability of portable GC‐MS to support two representative applications of chemical ecology research with a wild arboreal primate, common marmoset monkeys (Callithrix jacchus). We developed methods to (a) evaluate the chemical composition of marmoset scent marks deposited at feeding sites and (b) characterize the scent profiles of exudates eaten by marmosets. We successfully collected marmoset scent marks across several canopy heights, with the portable GC‐MS detecting known components of marmoset glandular secretions and differentiating these from in‐field controls. Likewise, variation in the chemical profile of scent marks demonstrated a significant correlation with marmoset feeding behavior, indicating these scents’ biological relevance. The portable GC‐MS also delineated species‐specific olfactory signatures of exudates fed on by marmosets. Despite the trade‐offs, portable GC‐MS represents a viable option for characterizing olfactory compounds used by wild mammals, yielding biologically relevant data. While the decision to adopt portable GC‐MS will likely depend on site‐ and project‐specific needs, our ability to conduct two example applications under relatively challenging field conditions bodes well for the versatility of in‐field GC‐MS.
Achievement Goal Orientation Profiles and Performance in a Programming MOOC

It has been suggested that performance goals focused on appearing talented (appearance goals) and those focused on outperforming others (normative goals) have different consequences, for example, regarding performance. Accordingly, applying this distinction into appearance and normative goals alongside mastery goals, this study explores what kinds of achievement goal orientation profiles are identified among over 2000 students participating in an introductory programming MOOC. Using Two-Step cluster analysis, five distinct motivational profiles are identified. Course performance and demographics of students with different goal orientation profiles are mostly similar. Students with Combined Mastery and Performance Goals perform slightly better than students with Low Goals. The observations are largely in line with previous studies conducted in different contexts. The differentiation of appearance and normative performance goals seemed to yield meaningful motivational profiles, but further studies are needed to establish their relevance and investigate whether this information can be used to improve teaching.
Asymptomatic Left Ventricle Systolic Dysfunction

Heart failure is a common debilitating illness, associated with significant morbidity and mortality, rehospitalisation and societal costs. Current guidelines and position statements emphasise the management of patients with overt symptomatic disease, but the increasing prevalence of congestive heart failure underscores the need to identify and manage patients with early left ventricular dysfunction prior to symptom onset. Asymptomatic left ventricular systolic dysfunction (ALVSD), classified as stage B heart failure, is defined as depressed left ventricular systolic function in the absence of clinical heart failure. Early initiation of therapies in patients with presumed ALVSD has been shown to lead to better outcomes. In this article, the authors clarify issues surrounding the definition and natural history of ALVSD, outline clinical tools that may be of value in identifying patients with ALVSD and highlight potential opportunities for future investigations to better address aspects of our understanding of this complex syndrome.
The Influence of Transactional Leadership on Organization Innovativeness (OI) Mediated by Organizational Learning Capability (OLC) in Medium Small Enterprise Kendari City

This study aims to explain the relationship between transactional leadership and organization innovativeness through organizational learning capability as a mediator. This research was conducted at UKM (Small and Medium Enterprises) in the City of Kendari, Southeast Sulawesi. The purposive sampling technique was applied in this study with 125 respondents. The findings in this study are that transactional leadership does not have a significant direct effect on organizational learning capability, but has a positive and significant direct effect on organization innovativeness. The results revealed that organizational learning capability has a very large positive and significant direct effect on organizational innovation, business organizations are expected to maximize their learning processes to create innovations to maintain and develop their existence in the future.
Recursive State of Charge and State of Health Estimation Method for Lithium-Ion Batteries Based on Coulomb Counting and Open Circuit Voltage

The state of charge (SOC) and state of health (SOH) are two crucial indicators needed for a proper and safe operation of the battery. Coulomb counting is one of the most adopted and straightforward methods to calculate the SOC. Although it can be implemented for all kinds of applications, its accuracy is strongly dependent on the operation conditions. In this work, the behavior of the batteries at different current and temperature conditions is analyzed in order to adjust the charge measurement according to the battery efficiency at the specific operating conditions. The open-circuit voltage (OCV) is used to reset the SOC estimation and prevent the error accumulation. Furthermore, the SOH is estimated by evaluating the accumulated charge between two different SOC using a recursive least squares (RLS) method. The SOC and SOH estimations are verified through an extensive test in which the battery is subjected to a dynamic load profile at different temperatures.
Evaluation of long-term oncological outcomes of colon cancer resections in octogenarian and nonagenarian patients

Aim: To investigate the long-term oncologic results of patients older than 80 years who were operated on for colon cancer in our clinic. Material and Methods: All patients who were operated on for colon cancer in our clinic between 2006 and 2013 were included. Data were collected retrospectively by chart review. The final status of the patients was obtained by questionnaires answered by patients or patients’ relatives. Patients were divided into two groups according to their age, over 80 years of age and under 80 years of age, respectively. The following data were compared between groups; gender, pathological data, oncological treatment, one-year survival, disease-free survival and 5-year overall survival. Results: A total of 188 patients were included. There were 13 (6.9%) patients over 80 years of age. The expected 5-year survival rate under the age of 80 was 77.4%, while it was 46.2% for over the age of 80 (p = 0.001). The 5-year disease-free survival was calculated as 77% for under 80 years and 38.5% for over 80 years (p = 0.001). In the postoperative first year, 8 (4.6%) patients under 80 years of age and 1 (7.7%) of patients over 80 years of age died. Nine of 13 (69.2%) patients over 80 years of age died during follow-up. Conclusion: : In the light of the findings of our study, it can be said that the first 1-year survival rate of patients older than 80 years was similar to the younger patients, but they had worse survival rates in the longer term.
Documenting the first record of the Unicorn leatherjacket filefish Aluterus monoceros (Tetraodontiformes: Monacanthidae) from the marine waters of Odisha coast, Bay of Bengal, India

The unicorn leatherjacket filefish Aluterus monoceros (Linnaeus, 1758) belonging to family Monacanthidae inhabits in the coastal waters of Indo-West pacific, western India to Andaman Sea. For the first time, three specimens of this species were caught in the Odisha coast, Bay of Bengal, India. The morphological characteristics of the collected specimens are given and its geographical distribution have been reviewed based on available literatures.
Implementing Sustainable Human Resources Practices: Leadership Style Matters

Findings of a positive relationship between high-performance work systems (HPWSs) and organizational performance indicate that an investment in a set of well-configured HR practices can promote strategic organizational goals. However, recent strategic human resource management (SHRM) research indicates that the positive link between HPWSs and performance might not hold universally across organizations because of poor implementation of the adopted HR systems. Drawing on leadership literature, we address this implementation problem by focusing on the moderating effect of frontline managers’ three leadership styles on the association between HPWSs and employees’ perceived support for innovation. Data collected in mainland China (429 employees on 66 work teams in 14 firms) showed that some leadership styles had significant moderating effects on that association and, subsequently, on team effectiveness. The findings contribute to the SHRM literature by demonstrating the importance of frontline managers’ leadership styles in the effective implementation of HPWSs to promote organizational innovation and team effectiveness.
Mini review on phenol biodegradation in Antarctica using native microorganisms

Though Antarctica has once been considered as the most pristine land on earth, however, recently many literatures concluded that it is not a zone free from anthropogenic pollutants, which have been mostly associated with long-range atmospheric transport and deposition in the area. Numerous organic pollutants including phenol have been classified as the priority pollutants by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA) due to their high toxicity. The increased level of phenol concentration in the Antarctic environment poses a significant risk to the aquatic as well as terrestrial lives and public health due to its persistence, biomagnification and accumulation in the food chain. Therefore, bioremediation actions are significant to overcome this problem. Phenol degradation at cold climate needs the use of microorganisms that has the ability to thrive and function at low temperatures as well as withstand the toxicity of phenol. The utilisation of native microbes as phenol-degraders has proven the effectiveness of bioremediation even though phenol has anti-microbial properties. This paper discusses the sources and toxicity of phenol, existence and effect of phenol on the Antarctic environment, the potential method for eliminating phenol from the environment and suggestion for future prospect.
On the use of stabilization techniques in the Cartesian grid finite element method framework for iterative solvers

Fictitious domain methods, like the Cartesian grid finite element method (cgFEM), are based on the use of unfitted meshes that must be intersected. This may yield to ill‐conditioned systems of equations since the stiffness associated with a node could be small, thus poorly contributing to the energy of the problem. This issue complicates the use of iterative solvers for large problems. In this work, we present a new stabilization technique that, in the case of cgFEM, preserves the Cartesian structure of the mesh. The formulation consists in penalizing the free movement of those nodes by a smooth extension of the solution from the interior of the domain, through a postprocess of the solution via a displacement recovery technique. The numerical results show an improvement of the condition number and a decrease in the number of iterations of the iterative solver while preserving the problem accuracy.
Association of Polymorphic Markers of Leu28Pro Gene APOE and T-786C Gene ENOS3 in Diabetic Nephropathy in Uzbek Nation

The aim of the present study was to determine the association of association of the Leu28Pro polymorphic markers of the APOE gene, T-786C of the NOS3 gene with the development of diabetic nephropathy, 129 patients with type 2 diabetes were examined. Patients in the main group: 65 patients with a disease duration of up to 10 years, without diabetic nephropathy (33 patients) and with diabetic nephropathy (32 patients), 64 patients with diabetes lasting more than 10-20 years, with no diabetic nephropathy (31 patients) and diabetic nephropathy (33 patients). Genotyping was carried out by polymerase chain reaction. The study showed the association of the Pro allele and the Leu/Pro genotype of the APOE gene and the C allele and the CC genotype of the NOS3 gene with a risk of developing diabetic nephropathy in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus in the studied Uzbek nation.
Self-Supervised Denoising Autoencoder with Linear Regression Decoder for Speech Enhancement

Nonlinear spectral mapping-based models based on supervised learning have successfully applied for speech enhancement. However, as supervised learning approaches, a large amount of labelled data (noisy-clean speech pairs) should be provided to train those models. In addition, their performances for unseen noisy conditions are not guaranteed, which is a common weak point of supervised learning approaches. In this study, we proposed an unsupervised learning approach for speech enhancement, i.e., denoising autoencoder with linear regression decoder (DAELD) model for speech enhancement. The DAELD is trained with noisy speech as both input and target output in a self-supervised learning manner. In addition, with properly setting a shrinkage threshold for internal hidden representations, noise could be removed during the reconstruction from the hidden representations via the linear regression decoder. Speech enhancement experiments were carried out to test the proposed model. Results confirmed that the proposed DAELD could achieve comparable and sometimes even better enhancement performance as compared to the conventional supervised speech enhancement approaches, in both seen and unseen noise environments. Moreover, we observe that higher performances tend to achieve by DAELD when the training data cover more diverse noise types and signal-tonoise-ratio (SNR) levels.
Establishment and Identification of Cytoplasmic Male Sterility in Brassica napus by Intergeneric Somatic Hybridization

Exploitation of novel cytoplasmic male sterility(CMS)is a main approach for widening the cytoplasmic genetic background of hybrid oilseed rape and avoiding epidemic risk in oilseed rape production.In this study,symmetric somatic hybrids between Brassicanapus var.Zhongshuang4 and Sinapis arvensis(Yeyou18)were produced by protoplast fusion.Two of the six established hybrids were male sterile showing trace or no pollen release upon flowering with non-or slightly extended stamens.Using Zhongshuang4 as a recurrent parent to pollinate the male sterile plants,the ratio of male sterile plants increased with the number of backcrosses.As early as in BC3 generation,most of the sterile families had nearly 100%sterile plants.Up to BC4 generation,the male sterility became stable and no fertility segregation was observed.All F1 progenies from tested crosses using restorer and maintainer lines of Polima CMS were 100%sterile,indicating that the established CMS by somatic hybridization is different from Polima CMS.The origin of the cytoplasm and potential use of this hovel CMS in oilseed rape breeding were discussed.Key wotds:Oilseed rape,Protoplast fusion,Cytoplasmic male sterility,Sinapis arvensis
An aggregate homotopy method for solving unconstrained minimax problems

ABSTRACT In this paper, an aggregate homotopy method is proposed to solve unconstrained minimax problems. The homotopy mapping is constructed by the linear homotopy and the aggregate function for the objective function, and the homotopy parameter is also used as the smoothing parameter of the aggregate function. Under some general assumptions, the existence and global convergence of a smooth homotopy path are proved for almost all starting points in or a ball set, and a stationary point of the unconstrained minimax problem can be obtained. A path-following procedure is introduced to numerically trace the homotopy path. When the smoothing parameter becomes small enough, an alternative strategy of the path-following procedure is given to reduce the ill-conditioning of the aggregate function, it uses the Newton method to solve a nonlinear system, which is derived from the first order optimality conditions for the unconstrained minimax problem. Numerical results show that the proposed method is efficient and robust.
The Identification and Characterisation of Novel Proteins and Metabolic Signalling Pathways that Regulate TRAIL-Induced Apoptosis

i The Identification and Characterisation of Novel Proteins and Metabolic Signalling Pathways that Regulate TRAIL-Induced Apoptosis By Gemma Robinson MRC Toxicology Unit, University of Leicester, Hodgkin Building, PO BOX 138, Lancaster Rd, Leicester, LE1 9HN TNF-related apoptosis inducing ligand (TRAIL) is a putative anti-cancer cytokine that is relatively specific for transformed cells however Mantle Cell Lymphoma (MCL) is resistant. TRAIL induces apoptosis through formation of a Death-Inducing Signalling Complex (DISC) and the successive activation of a caspase cascade. Therefore, the aims of this thesis were two-fold: firstly to examine the known and novel protein components of the DISC through mass spectrometry analysis and second to determine how cellular metabolism, specifically glucose-deprivation, influences TRAIL-induced apoptosis. A tagged variant of TRAIL was used to capture the DISC from a TRAIL-sensitive MCLderived cell line (Z138) allowing for its purification and subsequent proteomic analysis by mass spectrometry. From this study, it was found that the transferrin receptor (TFR1) may interact with the DISC, specifically with the TRAIL-receptors, where it potentially modulates TRAIL-induced apoptosis and/or receptor-mediated endocytosis. In addition, it was observed that the known DISC component FADD was present in sub-stoichiometric amounts compared to caspase-8 and this permitted the identification of a novel DISC structure based on caspase-8 chain formation. In parallel to this, glucose-deprivation studies were performed, which showed that, in the absence of glucose, Z138 cells was less sensitive to TRAIL-induced apoptosis. Furthermore, these cells also showed a reduced sensitivity to both ABT-737 and x-ray radiation. As a result, proteomic, ultra-structural and gene profiling studies were performed on Z138 cells cultured in the absence of glucose, which demonstrated a switch towards an antiapoptotic/pro-survival phenotype.
Feudal Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning for Traffic Signal Control

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising technique for optimizing traffic signal controllers that dynamically respond to realtime traffic conditions. Recent efforts that applied Multi-Agent RL (MARL) to this problem have shown remarkable improvement over centralized RL, with the scalability to solve large problems by distributing the global control to local RL agents. Unfortunately, it is also easy to get stuck in local optima because each agent only has partial observability of the environment with limited communication. To tackle this, we borrow ideas from feudal RL and propose a novel MARL approach combining with the feudal hierarchy. Specifically, we split the traffic network into several regions, where each region is controlled by a manager agent and the agents who control the traffic signals are its workers. In our method, managers coordinate their high-level behaviors and set goals for their workers in the region, while each lower-level worker controls traffic signals to fulfill the managerial goals. By doing so, we are able to coordinate globally while retain scalability. We empirically evaluate our method both in a synthetic traffic grid and real-world traffic network using the SUMO simulator. Our experimental results show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art in almost all evaluation metrics commonly used for traffic signal control.
Flexible Hierarchical Gaussian Mixture Model for High-Resolution Remote Sensing Image Segmentation

The Gaussian mixture model (GMM) plays an important role in image segmentation, but the difficulty of GMM for modeling asymmetric, heavy-tailed, or multimodal distributions of pixel intensities significantly limits its application. One effective way to improve the segmentation accuracy is to accurately model the statistical distributions of pixel intensities. In this study, an innovative high-resolution remote sensing image segmentation algorithm is proposed based on a flexible hierarchical GMM (HGMM). The components are first defined by the weighted sums of elements, in order to accurately model the complicated distributions of pixel intensities in object regions. The elements of components are defined by Gaussian distributions to model the distributions of pixel intensities in local regions of the object region. Following the Bayesian theorem, the segmentation model is then built by combining the HGMM and the prior distributions of parameters. Finally, a novel birth or death Markov chain Monte Carlo (BDMCMC) is designed to simulate the segmentation model, which can automatically determine the number of elements and flexibly model complex distributions of pixel intensities. Experiments were implemented on simulated and real high-resolution remote sensing images. The results show that the proposed algorithm is able to flexibly model the complicated distributions and accurately segment images.