Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Medical and social risk factors for cardiovascular disease among elderly and old people

Background: Ageing is a natural biological process, manifested in a gradual decrease in the adaptive capacity of the organism. The causes of social alienation among elderly people have a multifactorial nature. Stroke is a very dangerous disease since it disrupts the work of the most important organ - the brain. The problem of stroke prevention has been particularly relevant in the past decade. Aims and Objectives: The research was conducted to study the state of medical and social risk factors for the development of cardiovascular disease among elderly and old individuals. Materials and Methods: This study was conducted among 2481 individuals over employable age. Of this number, in 84 patients with ischemic stroke individual risk factors were studied. Their health was characterized by a high incidence of cardiovascular diseases (CVD) and severe disability. The main types of pathology among elderly and old people are CVD. Results: The main factor leading to the development of stroke, especially recurrent, is arterial hypertension in combination with ischemic heart disease, heart failure, cardiosclerosis, and paroxysmal atrial fibrillation. Conclusions: Recurrent stroke is characterized by increasing cognitive dysfunction against the background of worsening mental and motor disorders of the heterogeneous nature, which defines a high degree of disability due to stroke.
Financial Notes Reporting Quality - A Conceptualization and Empirical Analysis of Financial Reporting Quality Using the Example of Notes Reporting on Intangible Assets Under IFRS

For many years, international financial reporting – and in particular the notes reporting – has been criticized in practice and academia for failing to provide information that is appropriate for its intended users. This criticism points to deficits with regard to the content and presentation and, thus, to the overall quality of the notes reporting. However, this criticism is predominantly anecdotal in nature as there is, as yet, scarcely any valid scientific evidence that supports these claims. This work addresses this research gap by elaborating what (notes) reporting quality is, what dimensions it consists of (conceptualization), how these dimensions can be measured (operationalization) and how they are empirically manifested (empirical evidence). For the latent construct of (notes) reporting quality, a formative measuring instrument to be used in an integrative content analysis is developed with which both dimensions of (notes) reporting quality – a content dimension (e.g., relevance) and a formal dimension (e.g., diction/readability) – can be measured and analyzed. This measuring instrument is validated both theoretically (argumentative reflection) and empirically (testing of hypotheses derivable from the underlying theories). The subsequent analysis of the notes reporting quality of a representative sample of German firms reveals that the above-mentioned criticism is well founded. Furthermore, the results point out both what specific deficits exist and where. The results of this work – the conceptualization, the operationalization and the empirical evidence – together form a starting point for developing, in the context of the (notes) reporting and its quality, valid insights/knowledge in research, ‘best practice’ solutions in practice and conceptually sound and target-oriented solutions in regulation.
PUBLIC HEALTH EFFECT OF HEAVY METALS POLLUTION ON SOME BIOCHEMICAL PARAMETERS IN DOMESTIC BIRDS : CAMP2 VILLAGE IN AKAMKPA LOCAL GOVERNMENT AREA OF CROSS RIVER STATE

1. Department of Biochemistry, Federal University of Agriculture, Abeokuta, Ogun State 2. Department of Biochemistry, University of Calabar, Cross River State. Manuscript Info Abstract . Manuscript History Received: 30 November 2019 Final Accepted: 31 December 2019 Published: January 2020
Employee isolation and telecommuter organizational commitment

In light of the increasing popularity of telecommuting, this study investigates how telecommuters' organizational commitment may be linked to psychological and physical isolation. Psychological isolation refers to feelings of emotional unfulfillment when one lacks meaningful connections, support, and interactions with others, while physical isolation refers to physical separation from others. ,An online survey was used to collect data from 446 employees who telecommute one or more days per week. ,The results of this study indicate that telecommuters' affective commitment is negatively associated with psychological isolation, whereas their continuance commitment is positively correlated with both psychological and physical isolation. These findings imply that telecommuters may remain with their employers due to perceived benefits, a desire to conserve resources such as time and emotional energy, or weakened marketability, rather than emotional connections to their colleagues or organizations. ,Organizations wishing to retain and maximize the contributions of telecommuters should pursue measures that address collocated employees' negative assumptions toward telecommuters, preserve the benefits of remote work, and cultivate telecommuters' emotional connections (affective commitment) and felt obligation (normative commitment) to their organizations. ,Through the creative integration of the need-to-belong and relational cohesion theories, this study contributes to the telecommuting and organizational commitment literature by investigating the dynamics between both psychological and physical isolation and telecommuters' organizational commitment.
Resource-Based Product and Process Innovation Model: Theory Development and Empirical Validation

Using a resource-based approach to innovation, this study proposes an alternative innovation model to the existing market-based Product Life Cycle (PLC) model. In particular, this study explores how the attributes of corporate strategic resources affect product and process innovation patterns. This study covers the development of new theory, as well as the empirical validation of the innovation model proposed in this study. Based on survey data from 257 chief operations officers in the United States, the ‘resource-based innovation model’ was tested and validated through various analytical methods, such as clustering, discriminant, and structural equation modeling analysis. The main findings are that (1) companies relying on both knowledge-based resources (KBR) and property-based resources (PBR) tend to focus on product and process innovation at the same time, (2) companies relying heavily on KBR tend to centralize their efforts for process innovation rather than product innovation, (3) companies with low reliance on KBR and PBR tend to minimize R&D efforts in product and process innovation, and (4) in a dynamic market condition, process innovations serves as order winners, while product innovations serves as order winners in a stable market. This research contributes to the operational management literature by proposing a new resource-based innovation algorithm that helps to understand innovation phenomena that are difficult to explain through the lens of the PLC-based innovation paradigm.
The Capacity of Private Information Retrieval With Private Side Information Under Storage Constraints

We consider the problem of private information retrieval (PIR) of a single message out of <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$K$ </tex-math></inline-formula> messages from <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$N$ </tex-math></inline-formula> replicated and non-colluding databases where a cache-enabled user (retriever) of cache-size <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$S$ </tex-math></inline-formula> possesses side information in the form of uncoded portions of the messages where the message identities are unknown to the databases. The identities of these side information messages need to be kept private from the databases, i.e., we consider PIR with private side information (PSI). We characterize the optimal normalized download cost for this PIR-PSI problem under the storage constraint <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$S$ </tex-math></inline-formula> as <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$D^{*}=1+\frac {1}{N}+\frac {1}{N^{2}}+ {\dots }+\frac {1}{N^{K-1-M}}+ \frac {1-r_{M}}{N^{K-M}}+\frac {1-r_{M-1}}{N^{K-M+1}}+ {\dots }+\frac {1-r_{1}}{N^{K-1}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>, where <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$M$ </tex-math></inline-formula> is the number of side information messages and <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$r_{i}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> is the portion of the <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$i$ </tex-math></inline-formula>th side information message that is cached with <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\sum _{i=1}^{M} r_{i}=S$ </tex-math></inline-formula>. Based on this capacity result, we prove two facts: First, for a fixed memory size <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$S$ </tex-math></inline-formula> and a fixed number of accessible messages <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$M$ </tex-math></inline-formula>, uniform caching achieves the lowest normalized download cost, i.e., <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$r_{i}=\frac {S}{M}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>, for <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$i=1, {\dots }, M$ </tex-math></inline-formula>, is optimum. Second, for a fixed memory size <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$S$ </tex-math></inline-formula>, among all possible <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$K-\left \lceil{ {S} }\right \rceil +1$ </tex-math></inline-formula> uniform caching schemes, the uniform caching scheme which caches <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$M=K$ </tex-math></inline-formula> messages achieves the lowest normalized download cost.
Effects of the Exercise Program on Blood Biochemical Values Change of Chronic Kidney Disease Patients in Northern Taiwan

Problem statement: Exercise is an essential component of care for CKD patients. This study examined the effect of exercise program on blood biochemical values in CKD patients. Approach: A total of 94 subjects diagnosed with CKD by a nephrology outpatient clinic at a medical center in northern Taiwan participated in this quasi-experimental study. Subjects were randomly divided into an experimental group (n = 45) or a control group (n = 49). Experimental group subjects agreed to join a 3month exercise program. Both groups completed the pretest and posttest of blood biochemical data which obtained from patient medical files. Data were analyzed using analysis of covariance. Results: The preexercise cholesterol values (from 198.03±43.52 to 160.97±37.39 mg/dl) of the experimental group differed significantly from their postexercise values. However, changes in red blood cell count, hemoglobin, hematocrit, and blood sugar were all insignificant in the experimental group. No significant change in any of these items was detected in the control group. The cholesterol value of the experimental group (158.75 mg/dl) was significantly lower than that of the control group (177.29 mg/dl) after applying analysis of covariance, using the pretest results of both groups as the covariate. Conclusions: The exercise program was found to reduce cholesterol levels in CKD patients effectively, to encourage more patients to do exercise regularly, and to offer clinical nursing staff an approach to encourage and teach CKD patients to exercise.
Anticancer activity, phytochemical screening and acute toxicity evaluation of an aqueous extract of Aristolochia longa L.

Aristolochia longa (Aristolochiaceae) is widely used in traditional medicine. The present study was carried out to investigate the cytotoxic activity and the acute toxicity of an aqueous extract of A. longa roots. Also, the phytochemical composition of the extract was evaluated. The cytotoxic effects of the aqueous extract in triple negative breast cancer MDA-MB-231 and HBL-100 cell lines was evaluated by MTT assay. A. longa roots were screened for the presence of phytochemical constituents using the standard qualitative phytochemical procedures. The acute oral toxicity (5000 mg/kg limited dose test) was evaluated. Our results showed that both cells were inhibited in a dose-dependent manner by A. longa aqueous extract. The IC 50 of A. longa aqueous extract was estimated after 72h treatment at 40μg/ml and 97μg/ml in HBL100 and MDA-MB-231 cell lines, respectively. A. longa aqueous extract at a concentration of 500μg/ml suppressed effectively the cell growth of HBL100 and MDA-MB-231 cells. TLC analysis revealed the presence of flavonols, flavones and/or flavonoid glycosides as major compounds in the extract. Results of the acute toxicity study suggest the non-toxicity of the A. longa aqueous extract to the liver. Interestingly, the renal function was not affected by the extract administration at 5000mg/kg. A. longa aqueous extract could be toxicologically safe when administered orally in rats in a single dose. A. longa could be considered as a promising and safe source for developing novel therapeutics against breast cancer. Keywords: Aristolochia longa, breast cancer, phytochemical, acute toxicity, TLC.
Neuroembryology of the Acupuncture Principal Meridians: Part 2. The Trunk

Abstract Background: Accumulating evidence from anatomical, physiologic, and neuroimaging research shows that Classical acupuncture points stimulate nerve trunks or their branches in the head, trunk, and extremities. The first part of this article demonstrated that, in the extremities, Principal meridian distributions mirror those of major peripheral nerves there and that Classical acupuncture points are proximate to peripheral nerves there. These relationships were demonstrated to be consistent with the linear neuroembryologic development of the extremities. Objective: The aim of Part 2, is to provide anatomical and physiologic data that corroborates a neuroanatomical basis for the Principal meridians in the trunk, and that are consistent with the lateral folding in the early fetal neuroembryologic development that forms the trunk region. Methods: Adobe Photoshop software was used to apply Classical acupuncture points and Principal meridians as layers superimposed on neuroanatomical images of the trunk r.
Predicting geographic location from genetic variation with deep neural networks

Most organisms are more closely related to nearby than distant members of their species, creating spatial autocorrelations in genetic data. This allows us to predict the location of origin of a genetic sample by comparing it to a set of samples of known geographic origin. Here we describe a deep learning method, which we call Locator, to accomplish this task faster and more accurately than existing approaches. In simulations, Locator infers sample location to within 4.1 generations of dispersal and runs at least an order of magnitude faster than a recent model-based approach. We leverage Locator’s computational efficiency to predict locations separately in windows across the genome, which allows us to both quantify uncertainty and describe the mosaic ancestry and patterns of geographic mixing that characterize many populations. Applied to whole-genome sequence data from Plasmodium parasites, Anopheles mosquitoes, and global human populations, this approach yields median test errors of 16.9km, 5.7km, and 85km, respectively.
Energy and Latency Aware Resource Management for Solar Powered Cellular Networks

There is an increasing need to power cellular base stations (BSs) using solar energy in many parts of the globe. This is primarily because of the high cost of running these base stations on traditional power sources such as diesel due to a lack of reliable grid availability in those areas. Apart from the high cost, increasing diesel consumption also causes harm to the environment due to its increasing global carbon footprint. Using solar energy powered base stations is a highly promising solution to address these issues. One of the main areas of concern for solar powered cellular networks is to precisely manage the resources, namely, the available spectrum and energy so as to avoid power outages and to maintain an acceptable QoS for the end users. This article gives an overview of the challenges faced in resource management for solar powered base stations and presents state-of-the-art resource management strategies for both grid-connected and off-grid solar powered base stations.
Field-Based Tests for the Assessment of Physical Fitness in Children and Adolescents Practicing Sport: A Systematic Review within the ESA Program

High levels of physical fitness (PF) can positively affect both health and cognitive function, thus monitoring its levels in youth can help increase health and quality of life in adult populations later on. This systematic review aims to identify PF field-based tests used in young European populations practicing sport to find tools that are adequate for the considered target involving a new battery within the Enriched Sport Activities (ESA) project. The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) statement was followed. In the 83 identified articles, the main tests used were: vertical/horizontal jumps (for muscular strength/power); push-ups, running at maximum effort, sit-ups (for muscular strength/endurance); multistage non-intermittent and intermittent tests (for aerobic endurance); sit and reach (for flexibility); sprinting and agility T-tests (for speed and agility, respectively); 10 × 5 m shuttle run (SR) (for both speed and agility). Few studies assessed coordination, reaction time, power, and balance. Although the selected tests are widely used and validated, they do not determine all PF aspects and do not reflect sport-specific features. A final decision was made for the inclusion of the following tests: standing broad jump, seated medicine ball throw, 20 m SR test, 30 m sprint, Illinois test, and a new test, i.e., the crunning test, to assess different skill-related components at once. The use of this combination of tests allows for the assessment of all PF components and can help planning effective training programs and cultivate sporting talent.
A Simple Survey on Attitude of Computer Science Diploma Students towards STEM

This article reported a simple survey on diploma students’ attitudes towards science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) objectively to get an initial impression of students taking a STEM-related diploma program. The targeted respondents were diploma students pursuing computer science programs in a Malaysian public university. A quantitative approach using a quantitative survey was used in which data were systematically elicited from 16 male and 17 female students using a questionnaire containing Likert-scale items. The questionnaire consists of three constructs: attitude toward science (8 items), attitude toward technology and engineering (8 items), and attitude toward mathematics (8 items). All constructs use a 5-point Likert scale for the response scale (1 = strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree). Descriptive analysis showed that the respondents’ attitude ranged between moderately to highly positive towards STEM with no significance different variation between genders across the STEM fields. Interestingly, they also had, generally, moderate consideration for careers in STEM fields (the average values ranged between 27.2% and 42.4%) with male respondents had very low agreements (18.7%) to consider careers related to technology and engineering fields. Such results were a bit discouraging as the respondents were all pursuing a diploma in computer science. Thus, more efforts are needed by the university to give more exposures and experiences to refine the students’ attitude during their study, to boost their confidence and interest to pursue a career suitable with their diploma certificates.
Locomotion of a multi-link non-holonomic snake robot with passive joints

Conventional approaches in prescribing controls for locomoting robots assume control over all input degrees of freedom (DOFs). Many robots, such as those with non-holonomic constraints, may not require or even allow for direct command over all DOFs. In particular, a snake robot with more than three links with non-holonomic constraints cannot achieve arbitrary configurations in all of its joints while simultaneously locomoting. For such a system, we assume partial command over a subset of the joints, and allow the rest to evolve according to kinematic chained and dynamic models. Different combinations of actuated and passive joints, as well as joints with dynamic elements such as torsional springs, can drastically change the coupling interactions and stable oscillations of joints. We use tools from nonlinear analysis to understand emergent oscillation modes of various robot configurations and connect them to overall locomotion using geometric mechanics and feedback control for robots that may not fully utilize all available inputs. We also experimentally verify observations and motion planning results on a physical non-holonomic snake robot.
Advances in Imaging Diagnostics for Spray and Particle Research in High-Speed Flows

Measurements of high-pressure sprays and particle fields in high-speed flows have been very challenging for the existing instrumentation. Deformed drops or solid particles significantly limit the range of experimental methods that can be applied for detailed, quantitative measurements. We developed advanced microscope imaging equipment and diagnostic methods to characterize fast-moving droplets or particles. We designed illumination systems based on high-power light-emitting diode (LED) and incoherent laser devices capable of short, intense light pulses. We compared their characteristics and performance separately, as well as their interaction within a complete line-of-sight microscope imaging system. The optical design of the microscope setup was optimized via ray tracing simulations showing high energy losses for LED illumination compared to laser radiation, as confirmed experimentally. The energy transmission measurements provided guidance about the pulse energy density necessary to maximize camera response and signal-to-noise ratio. Characterization testing supported that both illumination systems are valid options for microscopy applications, with an advantage to LED for image quality and resolution performance, but a strong limitation to distance, where the multi-beam laser system demonstrated its superiority.
INTERFERON-β 1A, AN IMMUNOMODULATOR IN RELAPSING REMITTING MULTIPLE SCLEROSIS PATIENTS. THE EFFECT ON PRO-INFLAMMATORY CYTOKINES

Interferon-β was the first disease-modifying therapy used for recurrent-remissive multiple sclerosis, with an intricate mechanism of action. The objectives of the current study were identifying the cytokine profile in recurrent-remissive multiple sclerosis serum samples, both naïve and after one year of Interferon-β1a treatment, in order to study the mechanism of action. 37 recurrent-remissive multiple sclerosis patients and 37 healthy subjects were included. Serum levels of 15 cytokines were evaluated for the recurrent-remissive multiple sclerosis patients in the beginning of the study and after one year of treatment, respectively at the beginning for healthy subjects. The recurrent-remissive multiple sclerosis lot had at the beginning significantly higher levels of interleukin (IL)-10, IL-17F, IL-23, IL-31, sCD40L, TNF-α and “cytokine signature” compared to healthy controls. Treatment with Interferon-β1a significantly reduced the levels of IL-23, IL-31, sCD40L, tumour necrosis factor (TNF)-α and cytokine signature. IL-21 and TNF-α positively correlated with the activity of the disease (relapses, disability). The serum levels of the pro-inflammatory cytokines are higher in naïve recurrent-remissive multiple sclerosis patients compared to healthy controls. Treatment with Interferon-β significantly decreases the inflammatory profile.