Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Managing Multiple Sclerosis: Treatment Initiation, Modification, and Sequencing

Abstract Recent therapeutic advances in the management of multiple sclerosis (MS) have raised questions about the selection of appropriate patient candidates for various treatments and, if the plan is to move from one treatment to another, the appropriate sequencing of these therapies. The selected approach should provide optimal disease management without limiting future therapeutic options based on safety concerns, and recognize potential future treatments and the possibility of combination therapies. Additional challenges include incorporation of patient needs and preferences into the overall therapeutic approach, in order to ensure optimal outcomes in the short and long term. The objective of this manuscript is to provide an overview of what is currently known regarding the impact of various therapies for MS on future therapeutic choices (sequencing). In this context, we reviewed the available evidence in support of various treatments and, based on the presence of disease activity, suggested a scheme for switching or escalating therapy with the main focus on sequencing of therapeutic approaches. RÉSUMÉ Prise en charge de la sclérose en plaques du début d’un traitement à sa modification : considérations par rapport aux séquences thérapeutiques envisagées. Des avancées thérapeutiques récentes dans la prise en charge de la sclérose en plaques (SP) ont soulevé des questions relatives à la sélection appropriée de patients en regard avec divers traitements. Dans l’hypothèse où l’on opterait pour une série de traitements, il y a aussi lieu de se questionner quant à la séquence la plus appropriée. À cet égard, toute approche thérapeutique devrait pouvoir fournir une prise en charge optimale de la maladie sans pour autant exclure d’autres traitements futurs en raison de préoccupations en matière de sécurité. Toute approche thérapeutique devrait aussi reconnaître l’existence de traitements potentiels et la possibilité de combiner des traitements. D’autres défis additionnels incluent notamment le fait d’incorporer les besoins et préférences des patients dans une approche d’ensemble afin d’assurer, à court et à long terme, une évolution optimale de leur état de santé. L’objectif de cette étude est donc de fournir un aperçu de l’état actuel des connaissances en ce qui a trait aux impacts des divers traitements de la SP quant à de futurs choix thérapeutiques (leur séquence). Dans cette perspective, nous nous sommes penchés sur des données probantes au sujet de ces divers traitements. Une fois des cas de SP détectés, nous avons suggéré un plan de modification ou d’intensification des traitements en mettant l’accent sur leur séquence.
Satisfaction with laboratory services among patients attending outpatient departments of regional referral hospitals in Dar es salaam, Tanzania

Introduction: Patient satisfaction is one of the key determinants for clinical outcome, compliance to medical treatment, and therefore health status. Satisfaction to laboratory service satisfaction can significantly enhance patients‟ quality of life and enable health service providers to determine specific problems of clients. Monitoring client‟s satisfaction in clinical laboratory is therefore an important and useful for quality and service improvement. Moreover, knowing factors associated with such satisfaction can be an entry point towards improving it. Despite such importance, only handful evidence is available, and none is from Tanzania. Therefore, this study evaluated patients‟ satisfaction and factors associated with satisfaction with laboratory services among patients above 18 years attending regional referral hospital laboratories in Dar es salaam, Tanzania. Methodology: This descriptive cross-sectional study design was conducted in the three regional referral hospitals in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The three referral hospitals are Amana, Temeke and Mwananyamala referral regional hospitals. The study included a total of 406 patients aged 18 years and above attending the laboratory from the Outpatients department (OPD). Data was collected using face to face interviews. The sampling frame used to pick the participants was the list of patients who needed laboratory service per each day of the data collection in the hospital. The systematic sampling method was used to get the study participants for each hospital. Thus, since the number of questionnaires to be filled in each day was 20 (basing on 20 minutes estimated time of completion of one interview), the sampling interval was calculated by dividing the number of patients in need of laboratory services per day by number of questionnaire to be filled per day. After obtaining the sampling interval, the first study participant was selected randomly. Thereafter the calculated sampling interval (n th ) was used to pick the subsequent patients to be interviewed. Dependent variable was patients‟ satisfaction while independent variables included sociodemographic, socioeconomic, and facility characteristics. Data analysis were conducted using descriptive and logistic regression analyses to address the specific objectives using SPSS version 20 software. P-value <0.05 was considered as statistically significant.
Centrosome amplification disrupts renal development and causes cystogenesis

Centrosome number is tightly controlled to ensure proper ciliogenesis, mitotic spindle assembly, and cellular homeostasis. Centrosome amplification (the formation of excess centrosomes) has been noted in renal cells of patients and animal models of various types of cystic kidney disease. Whether this defect plays a causal role in cystogenesis remains unknown. Here, we investigate the consequences of centrosome amplification during kidney development, homeostasis, and after injury. Increasing centrosome number in vivo perturbed proliferation and differentiation of renal progenitors, resulting in defective branching morphogenesis and renal hypoplasia. Centrosome amplification disrupted mitotic spindle morphology, ciliary assembly, and signaling pathways essential for the function of renal progenitors, highlighting the mechanisms underlying the developmental defects. Importantly, centrosome amplification was sufficient to induce rapid cystogenesis shortly after birth. Finally, we discovered that centrosome amplification sensitized kidneys in adult mice, causing cystogenesis after ischemic renal injury. Our study defines a new mechanism underlying the pathogenesis of renal cystogenesis, and identifies a potentially new cellular target for therapy.
A Physical Unclonable Function based on Capacitor Mismatch in a Charge-Redistribution SAR-ADC

A Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) using capacitor mismatch in a standard successive approximation register analog-to-digital converter (SAR-ADC) as the entropy source is demonstrated in 65nm CMOS. SAR-ADCs are readily available in many system-on-chips, making the hardware overhead of the proposed PUF almost negligible. The inherent process variation of metal-oxide-metal (MOM) capacitors is harnessed through a charge redistribution operation which is sampled by the voltage comparator. To enhance the stability of the PUF output, soft response generation and dynamic thresholding techniques were adopted. Finally, we verify that performing the enrollment operation at a lower operating voltage can ensure that PUF responses are stable at the nominal supply voltage used during authentication.
Application of porcine gastrointestinal organoid units as a potential in vitro tool for drug discovery and development

The gastrointestinal tract (GI) is a crucial part of the body for growth and development and its dysregulation can lead to several diseases with detrimental effects. Most of these diseases lack effective treatment, occurring as a result of inappropriate models to develop safe and potent therapies. Organoids are three‐dimensional self‐organizing and self‐renewing structures that are composed of a cluster of different cells in vitro that resemble their organ of origin in architecture and function. Over recent years, organoids have been increasingly used to study developmental biology, disease progression, i.e., cancer, tissue engineering and regenerative medicine and other biological processes. Owing to their complex nature and ability to retain the morphological and molecular patterns of their tissue‐of‐origin, they have great potential as alternative tools/models for drug screening, development and biomarker discovery. Using a species with similar genetic homology to humans as a source of organoids, such as the porcine model may offer huge translational relevance. This review focuses on the culture and establishment of porcine organoid units and their potential use and application as in vitro models to further the science of drug discovery, by overcoming current limitations of established two‐ and three‐dimensional models. It also highlights the translational application of using porcine organoids as a model of different disease contexts.
LATENCY AND THROUGHPUT COMPARISON BETWEEN IPTABLES AND NFTABLES AT DIFFERENT FRAME AND RULE-SET SIZES

Firewalls are one of the most common security tools used in computer networks. Its purpose is to prevent unwanted traffic from coming in to or out of a computer network. In Linux, one of the most common server operating system kernels available, iptables has been the go-to firewall for nearly two decades but a proposed successor, nftables, is available. This project compared latency and throughput performance of both firewalls with ten different rule-set sizes and seven different frame sizes using both linear look-ups and indexed data structures. Latency was measured through the round-trip time of ICMP packets while throughput was measured by generating UDP traffic using iPerf3. The results showed that, when using linear look-ups, nftables performs worse than iptables when using small frame sizes and when using large rulesets. If the frame size was fairly large and rule-set fairly small, nftables was often performed slightly better both in terms of latency and in terms of throughput. When using indexed data structures, performance of both firewalls was very similar regardless of frame size or rule-set size. Minor, but statistically significant, differences were found both in favour of and against nftables, depending on the exact parameters used.
Purity oscillations in Bose-Einstein condensates with balanced gain and loss

In this work we present a new generic feature of PT-symmetric Bose-Einstein condensates by studying the many-particle description of a two-mode condensate with balanced gain and loss. This is achieved using a master equation in Lindblad form whose mean-field limit is a PT-symmetric Gross-Pitaevskii equation. It is shown that the purity of the condensate periodically drops to small values but then is nearly completely restored. This has a direct impact on the average contrast in interference experiments which cannot be covered by the mean-field approximation, in which a completely pure condensate is assumed.
New deformable human brain atlas for computer-aided diagnosis

Modern software-based image analysis techniques enable accurate detection of the size and shape of various brain lesions. In order to estimate the real load caused by the lesions also their neuro-anatomical location should be taken into account. Therefore deformable brain atlases appear to be essential tools when new image diagnostics methods are developed and tested. We have developed deformable brain atlas software for research and diagnosis. The atlas is used to compare patient brain images with a segmented reference brain image so that it is possible to identify the patient neuroanatomical structures. The atlas software comes with image processing tools for transforming CT or MR image sets into atlas- compatible volume image format. The reference image is deformed to match the patient image, and the segmented neuroanatomical regions of the atlas image can then be blended with the patient image.
Impedance Measurement of Batteries under load

The impedance of a lithium battery at a single state-of-charge (SoC) is obtained from the current and voltage response of the cell. Making this measurement is important in order to understand cell characteristics. There exist some impedance analysers which can make suitable measurements at a single SoC. Measuring this impedance at multiple SoC is slow and tedious especially at lower frequencies. We present a new method which computes the impedance over a range of SoC while simultaneously varying the SoC. The proposed method produces reliable data even when the device under test is behaving non-linearly. The data obtained from this measurement is validated by comparing impedance data obtained at different SoC from a cell under no load.
Unhate Company of Benetton and Corporate Reputation

Organizations struggle for positive corporate reputation to affects buying behavior and brand loyalty positively. To get this result, many corporations are producing ads which look like each other: Esthetically perfect, using digital effects, showing healthy and beautiful/handsome people in spectacular places, and fate happiness shows… But Benetton did create advertisements to make people talk, to develop citizen consciousness. This study is about the Benetton’s most recently lunched advertisement company named UNHATE. Researcher will discuss the ads from the corporate reputation, brand image, and from the advertisement philosophy of Benetton.
Computer-aided Instruction and Institutional Effectiveness of Federal Polytechnic in North Central Nigeria

The study investigated the relationship between computer aided instruction and institutional effectiveness of Federal Polytechnics in the North Central Geo-Political Zone. Correlation design was adopted for the study. Stratified random sampling technique was used to select 1000 respondents comprising of Heads of Departments, Examination officers, library and Information Technology officers, Chief Lecturers, Students and Executives of Student Union Governments. The research instruments used for the study were Questionnaires; Computer Aided Instruction Questionnaire (CAIQ) and Institutional Effectiveness Questionnaire (IEQ). The instruments were validated by the experts of computer science and science education. Split-half reliability method was used to determine reliability index of 0.62 and 0.64 for CAIQ and IEQ respectively after subjecting to Spearman ranking order statistics at 0.05 significance level. Three research questions and four hypotheses were generated to guide the study. Descriptive statistics was used to answer the research questions while Pearson product moment was used to test all the hypotheses. The result shows that there is low significant relationship between computer aided instruction and institutional effectiveness of Federal Polytechnics in North Central Nigeria. It was however recommended that adequate computer accessories should be provided for effective teaching and learning processes in the polytechnic. Also, adequate computer and utilization training should be given to all lecturers in order to develop computer based instruction for the effectiveness of the instruction in North Central Nigeria.
Income-contingent loan with personal insurance policy: an empirical assessment using Spanish data

ABSTRACT We propose an Income Contingent Loan that defers the payment of university fees and charges a fixed proportion of gross income for 30 years or until the debt is written off. Under these conditions, some participants in the scheme will have insufficient income to fully repay their loan balances. The deficit will be covered by the taxpayer, who ultimately bears the risk of investing in higher education. We then propose to transfer this risk to the student by adding a mandatory personal insurance policy to the individual loan. We calculate the premium required for the system to break even in Spain when everybody pays the insurance cost. Alternatively, the payment of the premium can be deferred, adding it to total debt. Then, some participants in the scheme will have insufficient income to even pay the insurance cost, and the premium needs to be increased to maintain the sustainability of the program. Although these mechanisms imply redistribution towards borrowers who end up being low earners, we show that middle-income individuals contribute a higher proportion of their incomes to covering for those unable to repay. To provide the system with more internal progressivity, we propose to impose a minimum period of repayment.
Rainfall and social disputes in Iran

Water crisis and, particularly, drop in rainfall in Iran are not only an environmental matter but also a security issue. This paper tries to draw attention to the substantial social consequences of climate change in Iran and particularly addresses whether precipitation scarcity from 2007 to 2014 has a conflict-making effect in the province of Iran using the system GMM model. We show that rainfall shortage and the Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI), as an index of drought, could stimulate the propensity for individuals to engage in disruptive activities in provinces of Iran.
FloWatcher-DPDK: Lightweight Line-Rate Flow-Level Monitoring in Software

In the last few years, several software-based solutions have been proved to be very efficient for high-speed packet processing, traffic generation, and monitoring, and can be considered valid alternatives to expensive and non-flexible hardware-based solutions. In this paper, we first benchmark heterogeneous design choices for software-based packet monitoring systems in terms of achievable performance and required resources (i.e., the number of CPU cores). Building on this extensive analysis we design FloWatcher-DPDK, a DPDK-based high-speed software traffic monitor we provide to the community as an open source project. In a nutshell, FloWatcher-DPDK provides tunable fine-grained statistics at packet and flow levels. Experimental results demonstrate that FloWatcher-DPDK sustains per-flow statistics with 5-nines precision at high-speed (e.g., 14.88 Mpps) using a limited amount of resources. Finally, we showcase the usage of FloWatcher-DPDK by configuring it to analyze the performance of two open source prototypes for stateful flow-level end-host and in-network packet processing.
Mining relationships among knowledge, attitude, and practice of drivers using self-organizing map and decision tree: The case of Bandar Abbas city taxi drivers

Background and Objectives: Traffic accidents are the leading causes of fatal or nonfatal work-related injuries in many countries. Analyzing influencing factors on knowledge, attitude, and practice of drivers is a topic of interest for policymakers to decrease traffic accident injury victims. Materials and Methods: In this article, a two-stage data mining approach was presented for determining the mining relationships among knowledge, attitude, and practice of drivers. In the first stage, because of existing multidimensional practice variables, self-organizing map neural network was utilized to automatically arrange drivers into two safe and unsafe driving practice clusters. In the second stage, a decision tree was used to model relationships among knowledge and attitude of drivers and practice clusters. The authors' designed questionnaires were used to collect data in 235 male taxi drivers of Bandar Abbas city in Iran regarding the drivers' knowledge and attitude toward traffic regulations. The driving practices were assessed using a prepared checklist. Results: The most important attribute affecting practice of drivers was the maximum safe speed in the city. Conclusions: The results of this investigation showed that drivers' knowledge toward traffic regulations had a dramatic impact on safe driving practices. Levels of drivers' education can influence practice of drivers.
Adaptive control of nonlinear system based on QFT application to 3-DOF flight control system

Research on unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) became popular because of remote flight access and cost-effective solution. 3-degree of freedom (3-DOF) unmanned helicopters is one of the popular research UAV, because of its high load carrying capacity with a smaller number of motor and requirement of forethought motor control dynamics. Various control algorithms are investigated and designed for the motion control of the 3DOF helicopter. Three-degree-of-freedom helicopter model configuration presents the same advantages of 3-DOF helicopters along with increased payload capacity, increase stability in hover, manoeuvrability and reduced mechanical complexity. Numerous research institutes have chosen the three-degree-of-freedom as an ideal platform to develop intelligent controllers. In this research paper, we discussed about a hybrid controller that combined with Adaptive and Quantitative Feedback theory (QFT) controller for the 3-DOF helicopter model. Though research on Adaptive and QFT controller are not a new subject, the first successful single Adaptive aircraft flight control systems have been designed for the U.S. Air Force in Wright Laboratories unmanned research vehicle, Lambda [1]. Previously researcher focused on structured uncertainties associated with controller for the flight conditions theoretically. The development of simulationbased design on flight control system response, opened a new dimension for researcher to design physical flight controller for plant parameter uncertainties. At the beginning, our research was to investigates the possibility of developing the QFT combined with Adaptive controller to control a single pitch angle that meets flying quality conditions of automatic flight control. Finally, we successfully designed the hybrid controller that is QFT based adaptive controller for all the three angles.
A Useful Methodology to Convert the Smartphone Metal Cover Into an Antenna Booster for NFC Applications

A useful method to transform the smartphone metal cover into an antenna booster for near-field communication (NFC) antenna installed in a full metal cover (FMC) smartphone is proposed. In this proposed work, by properly embedding a series capacitor into a meticulously selected location within the metal cover, strong coupling between the NFC antenna coil and the metal cover will be generated, which mitigates the reverse eddy current induced on the metal cover. Because of that, the performance of the NFC antenna (located below a narrow horizontal slot-loaded metal cover) is substantially improved, as compared to a reference stand-alone NFC antenna in free-space conditions. To verify this proposed methodology, an ordinary single-turn coil reference NFC antenna 1 (ref 1) and a 3-turn coil reference NFC antenna 2 (ref 2) are initially designed via simulation, followed by the conducting of several typical experiments on these two reference antennas. Finally, the two reference prototype NFC antennas that have utilized this method for a single horizontal slot-loaded FMC are also certified by the Europay, MasterCard, and Visa (EMV) test.