Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Pattern of Tuberculosis in Elderly Patients in Egypt

Background and study aim: Tuberculosis (TB) is one of the most prevalent and grave of all humanoid contagious diseases and is still a major infectious disease worldwide. The geriatric population in developed countries represents a big reservoir of tuberculosis infection across all racial and sex subsets. We aim in this study to assess the pattern of TB in elderly patients in Qena governorate in Egypt. Patients and methods: All patients aged 50 years and above who were diagnosed with TB have been included in the study. The patients were evaluated regarding the incidence rate: for new cases, and relapse cases (pulmonary and extra pulmonary). Results: The mean age of included patients was 41.18 years and 51.3% of the studied patients were male. Regarding residence we found 54.7% of patients live in rural areas and 45.3% in urban. 82.9% of the patients were tuberculin positive. As regard chest x-ray finding we found: normal in 17.1% of patients, 17.1% bilateral, 25.6% right upper lobe 16.2% whole right lung, 10.3% left upper lobe, 6% left lower lobe, 3.4% right lower lobe, 2.6% pleural effusion and 1.7% whole left lung. In the present study we found that 81.2% of patients had pulmonary TB and 18.8% had extra pulmonary TB.Conclusion: The study documents important variances in clinical and radiological findings of pulmonary TB in geriatric patients. Sputum analysis for AFB remains a significant, easy and cheap method for diagnosis, but might not be continuously supportive in early diagnosis.
A User Experience Evaluation of the use of Augmented and Virtual Reality in Visualising and Interpreting Roman Leicester 210 AD ( Ratae Corieltavorum )

An earlier paper presented to the ATINER Visual Performing Arts Conference in 2013 entitled “Augmented Reality iPhone/iPad App Development to Visualise Roman Leicester (Ratae Corieltavorum) described the research, design and development of a GPS location based mobile app which showed 3D reconstructions of buildings and objects in Roman Leicester (Ratae Corieltavorum) focusing on the period around 210 A.D. This development was part of the Virtual Romans project which began in 2008 whose aim was to explore the potential for using creative technologies to present life in Roman Leicester. In this follow on paper we describe the launch of the app and its subsequent evaluation with museum visitors in 2014. The results of the evaluation indicate that GPS inaccuracies can lead to low immersion, inconvenience and a reduced visitor experience. However the results also indicate that these digital technologies can be particularly engaging and exciting for children in terms of heritage interpretation. Acknowledgments: Our special thanks to Andrew Newman Senior Lecturer in Museum Studies at the University of Newcastle who was Yanan’s supervisor during this evaluation research. Many thanks also to Laura Hadland at the Jewry Wall Museum in Leicester and Richard Buckley at the University of Leicester who provided all the historical advice. Additional thanks to Gerardo Saucedo, Dave Everitt, Russell White, Lee Dennis, Emily Baines, Ryan Chen and Stella Zhao at De Montfort University who all contributed to the app’s development. 1 Virtual Romans Web site: http://bit.ly/1PqwHRD, Virtual Romans App: http://apple.
Object representations are biased toward each other through statistical learning

ABSTRACT The visual system is remarkably efficient at extracting regularities from the environment through statistical learning. While such extraction has extensive consequences on cognition, it is unclear how statistical learning shapes the representations of the individual objects that comprise the regularities. Here we examine how statistical learning alters object representations. In three experiments, participants were exposed to either random arrays containing objects in a random order, or structured arrays containing object pairs where two objects appeared next to each other in fixed spatial or temporal configurations. After exposure, one object in each pair was briefly presented and participants judged the location or the orientation of the object without seeing the other object in the pair. We found that when an object reliably appeared next to another object in space, it was judged as being closer to the other object in space even though the other object was never presented (Experiments 1 and 2). Likewise, when an object reliably preceded another object in time, its orientation was biased toward the orientation of the other object even though the other object was never presented (Experiment 3). These results demonstrated that statistical learning fundamentally shapes how individual objects are represented in visual memory, by biasing the representation of one object toward its co-occurring partner. Importantly, participants in all experiments were not explicitly aware of the regularities. Thus, the bias in object representations was implicit. The current study reveals a novel impact of statistical learning on object representation: spatially co-occurring objects are represented as being closer in space, and temporally co-occurring objects are represented as having more similar features.
Arbitrarily shaped particles in shear flow

Particle motion in shear flow plays an important role in many industrial as well as biomedical applications. In order to study the motion of differently shaped particles within a shear flow, the incompressible Navier–Stokes and the rigid-body-dynamics equations are solved coupled together by means of an implicit iterative approach. An immersed boundary method is used to take into account the presence of moving particles within the fluid domain, without having to regenerate or deform the computational grid. The method has been validated at first by computing flows past a fixed and an oscillating circular cylinder at various values of the Reynolds number (Re). Then, the motion of three differently shaped particles immersed within a low-Re Couette and planar Poiseuille flow has been studied to ascertain their lateral migration and orientation behavior: regardless of their initial position, the neutrally buoyant particles are observed to migrate toward an equilibrium position, depending on the type of the flow. Finally, numerical solutions are presented to understand the influence of increasing Re upon the lateral migration and orientation behavior of the elliptic particle immersed in a Couette flow.
Posture estimation for improved photogrammetric localization of pedestrians in monocular infrared imagery

Target tracking complexity within conventional video imagery can be fundamentally attributed to the ambiguity associated with actual 3D scene position of a given tracked object in relation to its observed position in 2D image space. Recent work, within thermal-band infrared imagery, has tackled this challenge head on by returning to classical photogrammetry as a means of recovering the true 3D position of pedestrian targets. A key limitation in such approaches is the assumption of posture – that the observed pedestrian is at full height stance within the scene. Whilst prior work has shown the effects of statistical height variation to be negligible, variations in the posture of the target may still pose a significant source of potential error. Here we present a method that addresses this issue via the use of Support Vector Machine (SVM) regression based pedestrian posture estimation operating on Histogram of Orientated Gradient (HOG) feature descriptors. Within an existing tracking framework, we demonstrate improved target localization that is independent of variations in target posture (i.e. behaviour) and within the statistical error bounds of prior work for pedestrian height posture varying from 0.4-2.4m over a distance to target range of 7-30m.
Physiological Functions of 70% Ethanol Extracts of 6 Edible Flowers in Vitro: A Comparative Study

The physiological functions of 70% ethanol extracts of 6 edible flowers of different colors—Chrysanthemum morifolium (Chry., yellow), Rosa miniature (Rosa, red), Dendrobium phalaenopsis (Dend., purple), Viola x wittrockiana cv. fluna (Fluna, white), Viola x wittrockiana cv. pansy (Pansy, orange), and Primula x juliana (Prim., blue)—were evaluated in vitro. Anti-oxidant activity was evaluated based on the DPPH radical scavenging activity. Anti-diabetic activity, anti-hypertensive activity, and anti-adiposity activity were evaluated based on α-amylase/α-glucosidase, ACE, and lipase inhibitory activity, respectively. The extracts showed 2 - 3-fold higher anti-oxidative activity than α-tocopherol, which was not in accordance with their polyphenol content and colors. The anti-diabetic activity of the extracts showed a unique pattern: the extracts from Rosa and Dend. showed only α-amylase inhibitory activity, where as those of Chry. and Prim. selectively showed α-glucosidase activity. The extracts from Fluna and Pansy showed both α-amylase and α-glucosidase inhibitory activity. Except for the extract from Dend. , the ACE inhibitory activity of the extracts was relatively high, and that of Chry. showed the highest inhibition with an IC50 value of 69.1 ng/mL. None of the extracts showed inhibitory activity of lipase. These results suggested that daily consumption of the edible flowers used in this study would help prevent diabetes and hypertensive diseases.
Validation of a new SAFRAN-based gridded precipitation product for Spain and comparisons to Spain02 and ERA-Interim

Abstract. Offline land surface model (LSM) simulations are useful for studying the continental hydrological cycle. Because of the nonlinearities in the models, the results are very sensitive to the quality of the meteorological forcing; thus, high-quality gridded datasets of screen-level meteorological variables are needed. Precipitation datasets are particularly difficult to produce due to the inherent spatial and temporal heterogeneity of that variable. They do, however, have a large impact on the simulations, and it is thus necessary to carefully evaluate their quality in great detail. This paper reports the quality of two high-resolution precipitation datasets for Spain at the daily time scale: the new SAFRAN-based dataset and Spain02. SAFRAN is a meteorological analysis system that was designed to force LSMs and has recently been extended to the entirety of Spain for a long period of time (1979/1980–2013/2014). Spain02 is a daily precipitation dataset for Spain and was created mainly to validate regional climate models. In addition, ERA-Interim is included in the comparison to show the differences between local high-resolution and global low-resolution products. The study compares the different precipitation analyses with rain gauge data and assesses their temporal and spatial similarities to the observations. The validation of SAFRAN with independent data shows that this is a robust product. SAFRAN and Spain02 have very similar scores, although the latter slightly surpasses the former. The scores are robust with altitude and throughout the year, save perhaps in summer when a diminished skill is observed. As expected, SAFRAN and Spain02 perform better than ERA-Interim, which has difficulty capturing the effects of the relief on precipitation due to its low resolution. However, ERA-Interim reproduces spells remarkably well in contrast to the low skill shown by the high-resolution products. The high-resolution gridded products overestimate the number of precipitation days, which is a problem that affects SAFRAN more than Spain02 and is likely caused by the interpolation method. Both SAFRAN and Spain02 underestimate high precipitation events, but SAFRAN does so more than Spain02. The overestimation of low precipitation events and the underestimation of intense episodes will probably have hydrological consequences once the data are used to force a land surface or hydrological model.
Do Tax Cuts Increase Consumption? An Experimental Test of Ricardian Equivalence

This paper tests whether the Ricardian Equivalence proposition holds in a life cycle consumption laboratory experiment. This proposition is a fundamental assumption underlying numerous studies on intertemporal choice and has important implications for tax policy. Using nonparametric and panel data methods, we find that the Ricardian Equivalence proposition does not hold in general. Our results suggest that taxation has a significant and strong impact on consumption choice. Over the life cycle, a tax relief increases consumption on average by about 22% of the tax rebate. A tax increase causes consumption to decrease by about 30% of the tax increase. These results are robust with respect to variations in the difficulty to smooth consumption. In our experiment, we find the behavior of about 62% of our subjects to be inconsistent with the Ricardian proposition. Our results show dynamic effects; taxation influences consumption beyond the current period.
Offshoring and Relative Labor Demand from a Task Perspective

This paper provides new evidence on how offshoring shifts relative labor demand for tasks at the industry level. A novel theoretical mechanism, based on sorting of heterogeneous workers into occupations with task dependent offshoring cost, guides estimation. Cost shares of tasks are linked to offshoring in a panel estimation using German data for 1998-2007. It is shown that offshoring shifts home country relative labor demand towards more complex tasks with higher relocation cost. This demand shift holds when controlling for an industry's skill composition and is particularly strong for offshoring to non-OECD countries.
Dust in the wind.

Background: Structure matching plays an important part in understanding the functional role of biological structures. Bioinformatics assists in this effort by reformulating this process into a problem of finding a maximum common subgraph between graphical representations of these structures. Among the many different variants of the maximum common subgraph problem, the maximum common induced subgraph of two graphs is of special interest. Results: Based on current research in the area of parameterized computation, we derive a new lower bound for the exact algorithms of the maximum common induced subgraph of two graphs which is the best currently known. Then we investigate the upper bound and design techniques for approaching this problem, specifically, reducing it to one of finding a maximum clique in the product graph of the two given graphs. Considering the upper bound result, the derived lower bound result is asymptotically tight. Conclusion: Parameterized computation is a viable approach with great potential for investigating many applications within bioinformatics, such as the maximum common subgraph problem studied in this paper. With an improved hardness result and the proposed approaches in this paper, future research can be focused on further exploration of efficient approaches for different variants of this problem within the constraints imposed by real applications. Background Introduction Of the many challenging problems related to understanding the biological function of DNA, RNA, proteins, and metabolic and signalling pathways, one of the most important is comparing the structure of different molecules. The hypothesis is that structure determines function and therefore it should follow that molecules with similar structure should have similar function. Evaluating the similarity of structures can be reduced to a comparison of a set of abstracted graphs if the biological structures can be abstracted as graphs. from Symposium of Computations in Bioinformatics and Bioscience (SCBB06) in conjunction with the International Multi-Symposiums on Computer and Computational Sciences 2006 (IMSCCS|06) Hangzhou, China. June 20–24, 2006 Published: 12 December 2006 BMC Bioinformatics 2006, 7(Suppl 4):S6 doi:10.1186/1471-2105-7-S4-S6 <supplement> <title> <p>Symposium of Computations in Bioinformatics and Bioscience (SCBB06)</p> </title> <editor>Youping Deng, Jun Ni</editor> <note>Research</note> <url>http://www.biomedcentral. com/content/pdf/1471-2105-7-S4-info.pdf</url> </supplement> © 2006 Huang et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Practical applications of sperm selection techniques for improving reproductive efficiency

Several selection techniques are available for processing spermatozoa. Apart from sperm washing to remove seminal plasma, only “swim-up” and colloid centrifugation have been used to any extent to prepare spermatozoa for in vitro fertilization, and only colloid centrifugation has been used to prepare sperm samples for artificial insemination. Single-layer centrifugation (SLC) through a species-specific colloid has been shown to be effective in selecting spermatozoa with good motility, normal morphology and intact chromatin in a range of species. This method is less timeconsuming than swim-up, and has been scaled-up to allow whole ejaculates to be processed in a practical manner. The applications of SLC are as follows: to improve sperm quality in insemination doses or in samples for in vitro fertilization, to increase the shelf life of normal sperm doses, to remove pathogens (viruses, bacteria), to improve cryosurvival by removing dead and dying spermatozoa before freezing or after thawing, to select spermatozoa for intracytoplasmic sperm injection, and to aid conservation breeding.
Techniques in oscillatory shear rheology

Linear and nonlinear rheological response of complex fluids is of great interest. Oscillatory techniques are commonly used to analyz e the complex fluid rheological behaviour. In this chapter, approach based on larg e mplitude oscillatory shear (LAOS) is reviewed. Initially, oscillatory shear bas ed on small strains is presented along with a brief discussion on relaxation time spec trum. Subsequently, key observable features of LAOS are shown with example experime ntal observations on selected materials. Various applications for which LAOS is being investigated has been described through these examples. Materials such as polymer melts and solutions, emulsions, b lends, biological gels, micellar solutions etc are being investigated for the ir nonlinear response at large amplitudes during LAOS. In addition to the general res ponse during LAOS, specific material functions being proposed in the literatur e are discussed. Finally, an example of bulk oscillatory flow is discussed in the context o f LAOS behaviour of complex fluids.
iProblems - An Integrated Instrument for Reporting Design Flaws, Vulnerabilities and Defects

In the current demonstration we present a new instrument that provides for each existing class in an analyzed system information related to the problems the class reveals. We associate different types of problems to a class: design flaws, vulnerabilities and defects. In order to validate its usefulness, we perform some experiments on a suite of object-oriented systems and some results are briefly presented in the last part of the demo.
A Black Box Validation Strategy for Self-adaptive Systems

Self-adaptive systems are able to operate autonomously by reconfiguring themselves for changing context conditions and tasks. This capability requires a process of decision making that can only be partially hard-coded. Some parts of the logic are the result of reasoning and, thus, implicit to the system designer or user. In consequence, the quality of the systems functionality has to be extensively validated before delivery. During the validation, firstly, the response of adaptation decisions as a result of environment change has to be examined. Secondly, it is necessary to check the interaction of adaptation and non-adaptationrelated behavior. The management of all this information is expensive. Therefore, we propose an approach that separates environment change, functionality and adaptation concerns using expressive models. The models are executed by a simulator and validated against the real behavior of the system under test. We illustrate the complete approach using an example SAS operating a domestic service robot. Our design process and the proposed modeling principles equip engineers with a toolset that allows them to face the challenging complexity of self-adaptive system validation. Keywords—self-adaptive systems; service robots; model-based testing; simulation; feedback loops
Preparation, Characterization and Photocatalytic Activity of Nano -sized Pure and Metal-Doped TiO 2 and ZnO and their Uses in Water treatment

Pure and doped nanoparticles M-ZnO and M / -TiO2 with various metal ions (M=Ag, Cu, Fe, Ti and M / =Zn and Cu) were prepared by both precipitation and sol-gel methods. All samples well characterized by XRD, SEM, FT-IR and UV-vis. spectroscopy techniques. Photo catalytic activities towards a degradation of methyl orange (M.O) and chemical oxygen demand (COD) were studied for the samples investigated. XRD results showed the formation of pure anatase and wurtzite structure for TiO2 and ZnO samples, respectively . The crystallite sizes lie in the range of 9-21 nm for TiO2 and 10-30 nm for ZnO samples. The optical study showed a shif t in the optical absorption edge to longer wavelength with decreasing in the band gap energy of doped-TiO2 and doped-ZnO. The doped-TiO2 and doped-ZnO showed higher photocatalytic activity compared to that of both pure TiO2 and ZnO. COD tests were done for all samples and showed a highest COD value for the Cu doped TiO2.
Original Article Lowering intracellular chloride concentration promotes endothelial cells apoptosis by increasing ROS generation derived from mitochondria

] i ) is involved in several pathological process of cardiovascular disease. However, the role of [Cl ] i in endothelial cells apoptosis remains unknown. Therefore, this study aims to test the function of [Cl ] i in human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVECs) apoptosis induced by lipopolysaccharide (LPS). Cell viability and apoptosis were assessed by CCK-8 assay and flow cytometry. Western blot was used to detect the mitochondria-dependent pathway. Mitochondrial membrane potential (MMP) was measured by a membrane-permeant dye JC-1. Moreover, reactive oxygen species (ROS) generation was determined by 2’,7’-dichlorofluorescin diacetate (H 2 DCF-DA). Our results showed that LPS significantly induced a decrease of cell viability and [Cl − ] i both dose-dependently and time-dependently in HUVECs. Compared with control, treatment with LPS induced cell injury and apoptosis, concomitantly with declined Bcl-2/Bax ratio, depressed MMP, increased cytochrome c release and cleaved caspase-9 and -3 protein expressions, which were all signifi cantly potentiated in HUVECs cultured in low Cl medium. However, lowering [Cl ] i -induced reactive oxygen species (ROS), cell injury and apoptosis were inhibited by mitochondrial electron transport complex inhibitor rotenone. In conclusion, decrease of [Cl ] i promotes LPS-induced HUVECs apoptosis via increasing ROS generation derived from mitochondria, suggesting modulation of [Cl ] i is a novel approach to prevent endothelial cells apoptosis.