Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Rheometry of Pastes, Suspensions and Granular Materials – Application in Industry and Environment

material class of granular materials, where interactions such as impact and Coulomb friction govern the motion. Granular material flow is reviewed here in terms of the friction coefficient and the apparent "rheological" behavior. The flow behavior of the third material class, granular pastes, is explained as an extrapolation from the behavior of the two extreme cases described before. The last chapter (Chapter 7: Practical rheometrical techniques) gives an overview of existing devices and methods to obtain rheological data from various materials such as foods, cosmetics, environmental debris, sludges, slurries, and finally engineering materials (drilling fluids, concrete and glues, and paints). Covering experimental and theoretical aspects, "Rheometry of Pastes, Suspensions, and Granular Materials Application in Industry and Environment" provides both a valuable introduction to newcomers and background information on the jamming concept and recent developments of experimental tools and their interpretation. The book is very much recommended to scientists working in the area of suspension rheology and granular material.
The Dynamics of Savings Mobilisation in Lesotho

Abstract This paper provides a conceptual analysis of the dynamics of savings in Lesotho for the period 1960 to 2017. The study is motivated by the low and sometimes negative savings rate and the declining level of economic growth prevailing in Lesotho during the period from 1960 to 2017. The study analyses the behaviour of savings in Lesotho, using the savings trends for the country ever since it obtained independence in 1966. The study further examines the policies that the government of Lesotho has implemented in order to promote savings in the country. The government adopted a policy on rural savings and credit schemes as a means of promoting savings in Lesotho. The purpose of the policy is to improve access to credit for the rural population. The study has identified some challenges that impede savings mobilization in Lesotho. The major savings challenge in Lesotho is the lack of banking facilities in rural areas.
Changes in Amazonian Forest Biomass, Dynamics, and Composition, 1980–2002

© 2009 by the American Geophysical Union. All rights reserved. Long-term, on-the-ground monitoring of forest plots distributed across Amazonia provides a powerful means to quantify stocks and fluxes of biomass and biodiversity. Here we examine the evidence for concerted changes in the structure, dynamics, and functional composition of old-growth Amazonian forests over recent decades. Mature forests have, as a whole, gained biomass and undergone accelerated growth and dynamics, but questions remain as to the long-term persistence of these changes. Because forest growth on average exceeds mortality, intact Amazonian forests have been functioning as a carbon sink. We estimate a net biomass increase in trees > 10 cm diameter of 0.62 ± 0.23 t C ha -1 a -1 through the late twentieth century. If representative of the wider forest landscape, this translates into a sink in South American old-growth forest of at least 0.49 ± 0.18 Pg C a -1 . If other biomass and necromass components also increased proportionally, the estimated South American old-growth forest sink is 0.79 ± 0.29 Pg C a -1 , before allowing for possible gains in soil carbon. If tropical forests elsewhere are behaving similarly, the old-growth biomass forest sink would be 1.60 ± 0.58 Pg C a -1 . This bottom-up estimate of the carbon balance of tropical forests is preliminary, pending syntheses of detailed biometric studies across the other tropical continents. There is also some evidence for recent changes in the functional composition (biodiversity) of Amazonian forest, but the evidence is less comprehensive than that for changes in structure and dynamics. The most likely driver(s) of changes are recent increases in the supply of resources such as atmospheric carbon dioxide, which would increase net primary productivity, increasing tree growth and recruitment, and, in turn, mortality. In the future the growth response of remaining undisturbed Amazonian forests is likely to saturate, and there is a risk of these ecosystems transitioning from sink to source driven by higher respiration (temperature), higher mortality (drought), or compositional change (functional shifts toward lighterwooded plants). Even a modest switch from carbon sink to source for Amazonian forests would impact global climate, biodiversity, and human welfare, while the documented acceleration of tree growth and mortality may already be affecting the interactions of thousands of plant and millions of animal species.
ESTIMATION OF POLICY EFFECTS AND COUNTERFACTUAL DISTRIBUTIONS: AN APPLICATION TO FOOD SECURITY ANALYSIS IN MEXICO A Dissertation by PAUL ESTEBAN NAVAS ALBAN

The analysis of the effects of a policy and the factors that mediated those effects are among the core objectives of the economic science. The aim of this investigation is to present a recent methodological breakthrough in this field named distribution regression and to use it conjointly with causal analysis, to estimate the effects of a policy. The novelty relies in the estimation not only of the expectation of the difference between observed and counterfactual outcome, the usual Average Treatment Effect, but of the entire distribution of this counterfactual random variable and its distribution as a stochastic process. This estimation uses tools stemming from the field of Empirical Processes, to allow for the estimation of these counterfactual distributions, which will be supported with the methods of machine learning and causal analysis to tackle the problem of the causality structure among a set of variables and to attempt to justify the causal interpretation of the counterfactual distributions obtained. These new tools of policy analysis are applied to the 2012 avian flu outbreak in Mexico in July. The variable of interest in the analysis is the food security of the population, with the research question driving this application being whether there was a negative effect in the nutritional status of the population, in particular that of rural areas, once other factors such as household expenditure, educational status and others have been controlled for; estimating counterfactual distributions of what would have happened to the whole and to specific portions of the population had the outbreak not occurred finds that the average treatment effect is significant, both for the before and after comparison and for the rural and urban comparison in the
Production and Characterisation of Cork Pellets: An Alternative for Sustainable Energy Recovery

The cork industry presents itself as one of the most entrepreneurial in the Portuguese industrial sector, contributing significantly to the increase of exports. However, it is an industry in which the use of raw materials is maximised leaving a large volume of waste. The cork industry has tried to take advantage of these residues, mainly through direct energy recovery, despite the technical and safety difficulties presented by the use of such low density material, which complicates and hinders its transportation for industrial uses outside the area in which it is produced. The densification process opens new doors for such use and also for its storage, because it produces better results when compared with other more common products, such as wood sawdust or even forest and agricultural waste. Thus, cork pellets emerge as a safer and more easily transportable alternative for energy recovery from cork dust and other granulated types of cork waste, which offer the prospects for wider use. The results demonstrate that cork pellets have higher calorific value when compared with other biomass pellets; typically, approximately 19 MJ/kg with 2% volume of ashes, which is equivalent to that obtained from the combustion of pellets produced from combined forest and agricultural waste with a bulk density of 640 kg/m3, which offers real advantages in terms of logistics.
The Cytotoxic Effect of Methanolic Extract of Pyracantha coccinea M. Roemer Fruit on Hela cell line, Antioxidant Capacities and Total Phenol Contents of Methanolic and Aquatic Extract of this fruit

Fo r years the plants as a natural resource to be used for the treatment of cancer. But if the development of anticancer drugs from natural sources such as plants needs to screening tests. This study aimed to assess the cytotoxic effect of Pyracanthacoccinea fruit methanol extract on Hela cell line and evaluation of antioxidant properties and total phenolic content of methanol and aqueous extract of Pyracanthacoccinea fruit was done. Methods and materials: Hela cell culture medium RPMI - 1640 containing 10% fet al bovine serum were cultured with 5% CO2. Fruit of Pyracantha coccinea, after being dried, solvent and aqueous was extracted with methanol by maceration method. Cytotoxic effect of the extract in different concentrations was evaluated by MTT assay at 72 h ours. Pyracantha coccinea fruit was collected from Esfahan. Aqueous and methanol extracts preparation with soaking method. Antioxidant activity was determined by scavenging of DPPH assay. Als o this Pyracanthacoccinea fruit extracts were analyzed for total phenolic contents with Folin - Ciocalteu reagent. Gallic acid was used as a standard compound and the total phenols were expressed as mg gallic acid /g dry extract equivalents. result: the cytotoxicity of the methanol extract at a concentration of 800 µg/ml was higher than other concentrations. The total phenolic content and antioxidant properties of the methanol extract was higher than Aqueous extract.Conclusion: The results indicate a weak cytotoxic effects of the methanol extract of Pyracantha coccinea fru it . Antioxidant properties of aqueous and methanol extracts of this plant compared to standard antioxidant BHT was very weak. Also, high levels of total phenolics content in the extracts was not observed. Such research can screening the effective and in effective plant and extracts of different species plants and pave the way for the investigation of more than in the pharmacy.
Social policy in economic development: the case of health and old age insurance

This paper analyzes possible justifications for government interventions in health and old age insurance and illustrates the theoretical considerations by the case of Chile where a comprehensive social sector reform took place in the 1980s. It is shown that health insurances can suffer from adverse selection and risk selection as well as from moral hazard. In dealing with adverse selection and risk selection, governments can choose between social insurance and regulated private insurance, depending on the relative weight given to equity and efficiency. The problem of moral hazard can be diminished by various supply and demand side cost-sharing devices. With respect to old age security, the case for the system of forced savings prevailing worldwide mainly relies on the hypothesis that people tend to undersave for retirement. Among the possible pension schemes, funded systems are likely to have advantages over PAYG systems in that they improve efficiency.
Design and Implementation of Hybrid EC-RSA Security Algorithm Based on TPA for Cloud Storage

— Cloud storage is one among the service provided by Cloud computing within which information is maintained, managed, secured remotely and created available to users over a network. The user concerning about the integrity of data hold on within the cloud because the user’s data will be attacked or changed by outside attacker. Therefore, a new thought referred to as information auditing is introduced that check the integrity of knowledge with the assistance of an entity referred to as Third Party Auditor (TPA). The aim of this work is to develop an auditing scheme that is secure, economical to use and possess the capabilities like privacy conserving, public auditing, maintaining the information integrity together with confidentiality. It comprises 3 entities: data owner, TPA and cloud server. The data owner performs numerous operations like splitting the file to blocks, encrypting them, generating a hash value for every, concatenating it and generating a signature on that. The TPA performs the main role of knowledge integrity check. It performs activities like generating hash value for encrypted blocks received from cloud server, concatenating them and generates signature on that. It later compares each the signatures to verify whether or not the information stored on cloud is tampered or not. It verifies the integrity of data on demand of the users. To make sure data protection or security of cloud data storage at cloud end, security architecture is designed that secures the data using encryption/decryption algorithm where the proposed algorithm is a hybrid encryption algorithm that uses the concept of EC-RSA, AES algorithm and Blowfish algorithm along with SHA-256 for auditing purpose. Presented experiment results show that the proposed concept is reasonable, it enhancing efficiency about 40% in terms of execution time i.e. encryption as well as decryption time and security and providing confidentiality of cloud data at could end.
Single-molecule Fluorescence Study for the Effects of DNA Methylation on the Association and Dissociation Kinetics of Restriction Endonuclease and DNA

Single-molecule fluorescence study for the effects of DNA methylation on the association and dissociation kinetics of restriction endonuclease and DNA So Young Bak Department of Chemistry The Graduate School Seoul National University DNA methylation plays a great role both in eukaryotic and prokaryotic cells. In eukaryotes, it suppresses gene regulation, whereas in prokaryotes, specifically in bacteria, it protects the cell from invasion of foreign genes. Many studies have been carried out for the effect of DNA methylation at the ensemble level, but in this study, we investigated the effect of DNA methylation on DNA-protein interaction by single-molecule fluorescence to understand the interaction at the molecular level. We measured the association and dissociation rates of native as well as methylated DNA and found that the values converge to the corresponding ensemble rates. We were able to differentiate the kinetics of association, and dissociation and found that our result was consistent with the fact that DNA methylation interrupts the DNAprotein interaction, especially at a specific kinetic
Food Safety and Food Access: A Pilot Study

Objectives: This study was designed to evaluate the feasibility of testing the hypothesis that differences in neighborhood level food access may be associated with consumer exposure to food borne microbial contamination. Methods: This study was carried out in Baltimore MD in 2011 among selected neighborhoods defined as high or low food access. In each category, packages of chicken thighs and ground beef were purchased from small stores and supermarkets. We evaluated presence of E . coli and Staphylococcus aureus and also tested isolates for antimicrobial resistance. Results: Microbial contamination of both chicken and beef products was highly prevalent ( S . aureus - 13/32 for chicken and 14/32 for beef; E . coli 21/32 for chicken and 12/32 for beef). Small stores were more likely to sell food carrying these microbes as well as MDR strains of both E . coli and S . aureus , and chicken was more likely to carry E . coli as compared to ground beef. Conclusions: This is the first study of this hypothesis. While it is limited in size and in focus on one US city, the results indicate that further research is appropriate to examine neighborhood level risk factors for differential exposures to food borne microbes. Abbreviations : S . aureus ( Staphylococcus aureus ); E . coli ( Escherichia coli ), MRSA (methicilllin resistant Staphylococcus aureus ), MDR (multi-drug resistant), LFA (low food access), HFA (high food access). FDA (US Food and Drug Administration), USDA (US Department of Agriculture), CLSI (Clinical and Laboratory Standards Institute).
INTFANALIZATION OF FILMIC SCHEMATIC OPERATIONS IN RELATION TO INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES Cavrial palonion

ABSTRACT Two major hypotheses were tested in three experiments. The first hypothesis proposed that students can imitate and internalize filmic codes, to be used subsequently as covert schematized mediators. The second hypothesis was that subjects with low relevant aptitude scores would profit more than better able subjects from films which model for them schematic operations to be internalized. The subjects, 80 eighth-graders, were shown two operations--laying out solid objects and zooming in on details--in experimental conditions using either films or slides. Results confirmed that the internalization of schematic filmic codes is possible and leads to improved performance on related transfer tasks and ability tests and that low aptitude subjects, in particular, improved their ability to use the operations as covert mental skills.
Development of Sequence Based Molecular Diagnostic Test to Evaluate MDR and XDR in M. tuberculosis Patients from Western India

Globally, Tuberculosis is the most distress disease which remains as a major challenge from the standpoint of diagnosis, detection of drug resistance, and treatment. The increasing knowledge in molecular biology techniques has improved our understanding of the molecular mechanisms of drug resistance for the major first and second-line anti- tubercular drugs. Thus, rapid and accurate diagnosis of Tuberculosis would improve patient care and limit its transmission. This study is aimed to identify mutations in drug resistance genes of first and second line drugs against Mycobacterium tuberculosis by using polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and DNA sequencing methods. This study involves sputum samples of 20 patients diagnosed to have pulmonary tuberculosis. The genomic DNA from clinical isolates was isolated using simple boiling method. PCR amplification and DNA sequencing were performed for katG, inhA, ndh, kasA, pncA, embB, rrs, rpsL, rpoB, gyrA, gyrB and thyA genes. Sequence analysis was done using Bioedit, a bioinformatics tool. The isolates of Mycobacterium tuberculosis from western part of India were analyzed by DNA sequencing revealed total 29 mutations in first line drugs. Out of them, 5(25%) in rpoB at codon 516 and 531, 6(30%) in katG at codon 315, 8(40%) in rpsL at codon 43 & 88, 3(15%) in embB at codon 306 and 7(35%) in pncA at codon 195.No mutations in inhA, ndh, kasA and rrs genes were observed in our study. In the second line drugs, 2(10%) at codon 90 & 100% mutations at codon 95 in gyrA gene, and no mutation in gyrB and thyA genes were observed.
Technical and clinical analysis of ULDCT

4 Master Project Outline . 5 Paper . 6 Appendix I: Background. 23 Appendix II: METC protocol. 33 Appendix III: Study protocol . 34 Appendix IV: Score Forms . 35 References . 39
Dextran-immobilized curcumin: An efficient agent against food pathogens and cancer cells

Curcumin–dextran conjugate was synthesized by free radical grafting reaction between curcumin and dextran. The chemical characterization of the conjugate was obtained by Fourier-transform infrared and 1H-NMR (proton nuclear magnetic resonance) spectroscopy analysis, while the functionalization degree was determined by the Folin–Ciocalteu assay, finding a 22.93 mg of curcumin/g of dextran conjugate. Antioxidant activity of curcumin and curcumin–dextran conjugate was investigated employing DPPH• radical method, and IC50 (the half maximal inhibitory concentration) values of curcumin and the curcumin–dextran conjugate (Cur equivalents) were 86.6 ± 0.1 and 17.4 ± 1 µM, respectively. The presence of dextran into the curcumin–dextran conjugate improved radical scavenging activities of the curcumin. In addition, antimicrobial effect of curcumin and curcumin–dextran conjugate was evaluated against gram-positive (Listeria monocytogenes and Staphylococcus aureus) and gram-negative (Escherichia coli O157:H7 and Salmonella typhimurium) bacteria. According to our experiments, gram-positive microorganisms are more sensitive to these compounds than gram-negative ones. Curcumin–dextran is a more potent bacteriostat (S. aureus (minimum inhibitory concentration = 0.008 µg/mL), E. coli O157:H7 (minimum inhibitory concentration = 250 µg/mL), and S. typhimurium (minimum inhibitory concentration = 500 µg/mL)) and also a more potent bacteriosid against S. aureus and S. typhimurium than curcumin. The cytotoxic effects of the curcumin–dextran conjugate toward AGS, MCF-7, and normal fibroblast cell lines were determined at 48 and 72 h using an MTT assay. The results revealed the considerable antiproliferative effects of the curcumin–dextran conjugate in both AGS and MCF-7 cancer cells in comparison with fibroblast cells. This study shows that dextran as a versatile scaffold develops the biological activities of curcumin by covalent grafting and can be regarded in further bioapplications.
On the alignment of PNe and local magnetic field at the Galactic centre : magnetohydrodynamical numerical simulations

DFG thanks the European Research Council (ADG-2011 ECOGAL), and Brazilian agencies CNPq (no. 300382/2008-1), CAPES (3400-13-1) and FAPESP (no.2011/12909-8) for financial support. HM thanks CNPq grant 573648/2008-5 and FAPEMIG grants APQ-02030-10 and CEX-PPM-00235-12.
A discrete Markov model for earthquake occurrences in Southern Alaska and Aleutian Islands

A large number of stochastic models are currently available for the earthquake occurrence. The Markov model is applied to data from the area of southern Alaska (peninsula of Alaska and Shumagin islands) and the Aleutian Islands in order to investigate for great earthquake occurrence in space and time. The model defines a process in which successive state occupancies are governed by the transition probabilities of the Markov process. Each element pij , of the transition probability matrix represents the probability that the state is j at the time t+1, given that the state was i at the time t, and the probability can be written as: pij=Prob(Xt+1=j | Xt=i). The area of southern Alaska and Aleutian Islands is divided in three seismic zones that are defined as states in the present study. Thus the earthquakes, which migrate from zone to zone, i.e. from state to state, carry with them the number of the zone in which they occurred. In this way we can examine the genesis of the earthquakes in the investigated area in a quantitative way, through the transition probabilities of the defined process. A pattern for an east-west migration, in space and in time, of large (M >7.0) earthquakes is found. A two-state Markov model is applied in the three zones, which suggests periods of activity and quiescence. The application of this model makes it possible to establish whether in a specific time period a state is in an active or an inactive period and this is useful for seismic hazard analysis.