Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Readiness for technology : a readiness assessment for the implementation of a mHealth application within the ZGT Obesity Centre.

Aim: In this study the readiness of healthcare professionals as well as their perception regarding the organisational readiness of the Obesity Centre for the potential implementation of a mHealth intervention was assessed. Method: This thesis used a mixed method design consisting of semi-structured interviews and the Technology Readiness Index (TRI). Results: The overall TRI score was 3,3 on a scale ranging from 1 till 5. Most of the respondents were classified as skeptics (63%). Of the 27 respondents, six respondents were classified as explorers, 1 as an avoider and 3 as hesitators. From the interviews is became clear that societal and healthcare providers readiness was high and core, organisational, engagement and technological/organisational readiness was low. Conclusion: The healthcare professionals can be perceived as technology ready based on their TRI score. However, the majority of the professionals was identified as skeptic. It is therefore of importance to include the professionals in the development process of the mHealth application. Core readiness is low, indicating that professionals do not feel that change is necessary. Despite the fact that professionals perceive the Obesity Centre as ready for the implementation of mHealth, the low organisational and engagement readiness indicate that this is not the case.
Passiflora edulis peel intake and ulcerative colitis: Approaches for prevention and treatment

Inflammatory bowel disease is a chronic relapsing disease that affects millions of people worldwide; its pathogenesis is influenced by genetic, environmental, microbiological, and immunological factors. The aim of this study was to evaluate the effects of short- and long-term Passiflora edulis peel intake on the antioxidant status, microbiota, and short-chain fatty acids formation in rats with 2,4,6-trinitrobenzenesulphonic acid-induced colitis using two “in vivo” experiments: chronic (prevention) and acute (treatment). The colitis damage score was determined using macroscopic and microscopic analyses. In addition, the antioxidant activity in serum and other tissues (liver and colon) was evaluated. Bifidobacteria, lactobacilli, aerobic bacteria and enterobacteria, and the amount of short-chain fatty acids (acetic, butyric, and propionic acids) in cecum content were counted. Differences in the colon damage scores were observed; P. edulis peel intake improved serum antioxidant status. In the treatment protocol, decreased colon lipid peroxidation, a decreased number of aerobic bacteria and enterobacteria, and an improvement in acetic and butyric acid levels in the feces were observed. An improvement in the bifidobacteria and lactobacilli was observed in the prevention protocol. These results suggested that P. edulis peel can modulate microbiota and could be used as source of fiber and polyphenols in the prevention of oxidative stress through the improvement of serum and tissue antioxidant status.
Mitigation of septic shock in mice and rhesus monkeys by human chorionic gonadotrophin‐related oligopeptides

The marked improvement of several immune‐mediated inflammatory diseases during pregnancy has drawn attention to pregnancy hormones as potential therapeutics for such disorders. Low molecular weight fractions derived from the pregnancy hormone human chorionic gonadotrophin (hCG) have remarkable potent immunosuppressive effects in mouse models of diabetes and septic shock. Based on these data we have designed a set of oligopeptides related to the primary structure of hCG and tested these in models of septic shock in mice and rhesus monkeys. We demonstrate that mice exposed to lipopolysaccharide (LPS) and treated subsequently with selected tri‐, tetra‐, penta‐ and hepta‐meric oligopeptides (i.e. MTR, VVC, MTRV, LQGV, AQGV, VLPALP, VLPALPQ) are protected against fatal LPS‐induced septic shock. Moreover, administration of a cocktail of three selected oligopeptides (LQGV, AQGV and VLPALP) improved the pathological features markedly and nearly improved haemodynamic parameters associated with intravenous Escherichia coli‐induced septic shock in rhesus monkeys. These data indicate that the designed hCG‐related oligopeptides may present a potential treatment for the initial hyperdynamic phase of septic shock in humans.
Contingent valuation of "Green" tourism within Regional Natural Parks of Sicily: a willingness to pay analysis

“Green” tourism in Regional Natural Parks (RNPs) is an important element for local development and environmental conservation. As tourism production and consumption could harm the environment, therefore, it is necessary to improve the relationship between visitors and the environment. RNPs Authorities play a key role in establishing and managing environmental conservation policies that enable to keep under control the risk of harming environmental resources. A limitation to such activities is a lack of adequate financial resources. Introducing an entry fee to visit park areas could be a way to reach financial autonomy and enhance environmental policies. This paper analyses visitors' willingness to pay (WTP) within the main RNPs of Sicily throughout a contingent valuation (CV) method. The final outcome of this survey indicates that most visitors are willing to pay an entry fee in order to better protect the environment. Although there is no fee to visit RNPs at the moment, our results indicate that there is an opportunity to introduce an entry fee.
KAMPUNG DEVELOPMENT TOWARD SMART CITY

The city of Surabaya that formed from maritime activities to lead to trade and industrial activities will form settlements in the form of kampung. Kampung became an important part in the development of a city because this area became a place to grow and move most of the middle class population and below. However, the rapid development of the city of Surabaya towards the modern has resulted in the existence of the kampung in Surabaya increasingly recessive. Long-lived kampung like Kampung Kaliasin, pressed by the development of urban and socio-economic mobility, are experiencing worsening kampung conditions. The pressure from the surrounding environment is great. Not only social and economic issues, but also environmental issues (climate, sanitation, a forestation, etc.) are salient. The Surabaya City Government is attempting to address the problem through the concept of Smart City Surabaya. The question to be addressed here is how the development of the urban kampung, for example Kampung Kaliasin, is to proceed in the direction of Smart City Surabaya. The method used is descriptive and qualitative. The variables to be studied are aspects of smart city covering Smart Government, Smart Economy, Smart Life, Smart Living, Smart People, and Smart Mobility. These are analyzed in relation to the readiness of the city to develop toward Smart City Surabaya.
OPTIONS-ALLOCATION FUNDS-TRANSACTION COSTS

We study the efficiency of a Buy and Hold strategy, incorporating some options and seeking to super-duplicate a standard allocation policy. The replication strategy allows reducing transaction cost effects. The replication means optimizing two objective functions: MSE (Mean-squared Errors) and WMSE (Weighted Mean-squared Errors). Tests on portfolio efficiency concern, at first time, a long-term investor, and options are OTC (Out-TheCountry) and strike prices are approximate by a multiplicative binomial tree. At second time, the empirical evidence poses the case of a short-term investment, on CAC40 index and VX6 options of terms 6 months. Results prove the presence of Buy and Hold portfolios more efficient than an active allocation strategy. The optimal behaviour of the economic agent is a function of the number and the type of options introduced in the optimization problem.
Morphometric differences between the placental vasculature of non‐smokers, smokers and ex‐smokers

Summary. The aim of this study was to determine whether cigarette smoking during pregnancy has an adverse effect upon the placenta's capacity for gaseous exchange. Using recently developed stereological techniques, in conjunction with perfusion fixation, computer‐assisted measurements were made on the placentas of 15 non‐smokers, 15 moderate smokers, 15 heavy smokers and 13 ex‐smokers, 7 of whom stopped smoking during the course of the pregnancy. Compared with the placentas of non‐smokers and of those who stopped before pregnancy, it was found that the placentas of smokers and of those who stopped after conception exhibited a reduced capillary volume fraction, and an increased thickness of the villous membrane. Although they must impair gaseous exchange across the placenta, these changes were less severe than suggested by previously published reports. Nonetheless it is clear that in order to prevent these changes women should stop smoking before conception rather than during the course of a pregnancy.
The Cyclic News Filesystem: Getting INN To Do More With Less

When Usenet News servers were first implemented, the design principle of storing each Usenet article in a separate file appeared to be sound. However, the number of Usenet News articles posted per day has grown phenomenally in the past decade and shows no sign of abating. To stay ahead of the growth curve, Usenet administrators have been forced to buy faster machines, more RAM, and many more disk drives. Many of the performance limitations are caused by interactions with the underlying OS's filesystem, which is usually a Berkeley Fast Filesystem (FFS) derivative. The Cyclic News Filesystem (CNFS) was designed to avoid most of FFS's major problems when used with INN: synchronous file linking/unlinking and sequential scanning of directory files. Articles are stored within a relative handful of large files, either as regular files on top of a standard filesystem or as block disk devices. Articles are stored sequentially within each file, resuming at the beginning of the file when the end is reached. Disk activity is reduced by an order of magnitude.
Bone Marrow Stromal Cell Transplantation Attenuates Cognitive Dysfunction due to Chronic Cerebral Ischemia in Rats

Aims: This study was aimed to elucidate if bone marrow stromal cells (BMSC) could ameliorate cognitive dysfunction due to chronic cerebral ischemia when transplanted into the brain. Methods: The BMSC were harvested from green fluorescence protein (GFP)-expressing mice. Wistar rats were subjected to bilateral common carotid artery (CCA) ligation. The BMSC (4 × 105 cells) or vehicle were stereotactically injected into the right striatum 24 h after the insult. Cognitive function was evaluated with the Morris water maze task after 3 and 5 weeks. Histological analysis was performed after 6 weeks. Results: Cognitive function was significantly impaired in the vehicle-transplanted animals, when compared with the non-CCA-ligation animals. BMSC transplantation significantly improved it. The BMSC were widely distributed in the ischemic brain, including the neocortex, white matter and hippocampus, and some of them expressed the phenotypes of neurons, astrocytes and endothelium. They also significantly ameliorated white matter damage. Conclusions: These findings strongly suggest that the BMSC may have the potential to attenuate white matter injury and improve cognitive dysfunction due to chronic cerebral ischemia. The present results would shed light on the potential of a novel strategy, cell therapy against ischemia-related cognitive dysfunction.
Administration of fasudil, a ROCK inhibitor, attenuates disease in lupus-prone NZB/W F1 female mice

Accumulating evidence from murine studies suggests that the RhoA/ROCK pathway plays an important role in the development of autoimmune disorders. We previously demonstrated that ROCK inhibition ameliorates disease in MRL/lpr mice, a spontaneous model of lupus. This study aimed to explore the protective effects of the ROCK inhibitor fasudil in a distinct model of lupus, NZB/W F1 female mice, to assess the broad applicability of ROCK inhibition for the treatment of lupus. NZB/W F1 female mice were administered fasudil continuously in their drinking water starting at 18 or 24 weeks of age up until 44 weeks of age, or remained untreated. Fasudil treatment significantly improved survival and decreased proteinuria, particularly when treatment was started at 18 weeks. There was also a significant decrease in serum anti-dsDNA autoantibody production, glomerular IgG and C3 deposition, and glomerulonephritis. Analysis of the splenic lymphocyte compartment revealed reduced effector/memory CD4+ T cell and plasma cell numbers in fasudil treated mice while the frequency of other B cell and T cell subsets was unchanged. These results thus indicate that fasudil can ameliorate disease in NZB/W F1 female mice, suggesting that ROCK inhibition might be broadly effective for the treatment of lupus.
Automatic dismantling integrating optical flow into a machine vision-controlled robot system

In order to automatically run a dismantling task, first a workpiece has to be recognized and its pose has to be estimated. This step is solved by a model-based recognition process using the information from three stationary cameras. Our workpiece model could be extracted from CAD-data and consists of planar patches and circular features, where the circular features are suitable to model parts of connection elements like screws. Using the initial estimation of the workpiece pose we control the robot by evaluating the image sequence given by a camera mounted on the robot hand. We use a multi-level 3D tracking approach to continuously estimate the workpiece pose using an iterative extended Kalman-filter process and integrate velocity estimation based on optical flow. To provide enough computing power for real-time image processing, we combine our dedicated image processing hardware with a heterogeneous parallel computer. Our approach has been tested in numerous experiments on loosening screws with a powered screwdriver and dismantling a workpiece consisting of two blocks of different sizes connected by two screws.
Determinants of Vertical Integration: Investment Efficiency, Product Differentiation and Firm Size

This study examines the determinants of Merger and Acquisition (M & A) when manufacturing firms integrate with retailing firms. We examine a manufacturing duopoly in which each upstream firm sells the output to its exclusive retailing firm. In sequence of the timing of game, the strategic variables are set as Research and Development (R & D) investment, wholesale price by manufacturing firms and sales volume by retailing firms. The study concludes that degree of investment efficiency, product differentiation, and market size play important roles in vertical integration. Our conclusion shows that if product differentiation becomes greater, the vertical integration increases. Secondly, if the market size becomes larger, the vertical integration increases. Thirdly, the vertical integration increases when investment efficiency becomes higher. Our theoretical findings are also supported by the empirical results with the listed Japanese company data from 1996 to 2016.
DATA MINING AND KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION IN DOCUMENT PROCESSING FOR LAW FIRMS-A Survey

Streamlining document process and increasing efficiency are fundamental concerns for any organization. All the official documents have been processed manually but it seems very difficult if someone needs to have particular information from particular document. Data mining in document processing using various techniques, such as classification, clustering has been developed to handle the unstructured documents. This paper gives quick summary of some of the most important developments in data mining in document processing research. In this paper we have presented a survey which covers techniques and methods that promise to enable us to mine documents information from vast amount of databases. Our aim was mainly on machine learning techniques on the basis of their usage and importance for document mining.
Agriculture, Food and Jobs in West Africa

The food economy is the biggest employer in West Africa accounting for 66% of total employment. While the majority of food economy jobs are in agriculture, off-farm employment in food-related manufacturing and service activities is increasing as the food economy adapts to rapid population growth, urbanisation and rising incomes. Given the importance of the food economy in generating employment, its current structure and projected changes have major implications for the design of jobs strategies. This paper quantifies and describes the structure of employment in the food economy across four broad segments of activities: agriculture, processing, marketing and food-away-from home. It also examines some of the emerging spatial implications, in particular rural-urban linkages and rural employment diversification, which are related to the transformations that are reshaping this sector. Finally, it looks at policy considerations for designing targeted employment strategies that leverage the links between agricultural productivity, off-farm employment and rural-urban areas and ensure inclusiveness, particularly for youth and women.
Object-based change detection for individual buildings in SAR images captured with different incidence angles

Change detection of two SAR images captured with different incidence angles is a difficult task but may be important in urgent situations like earthquakes. This paper presents a simulation based algorithm to detect negative changes of buildings in two high resolution SAR images captured with different incidence angles. The analysis is supported by LiDAR data where individual wall models are extracted and are simulated to predict their shape in the SAR images. Afterwards, point signatures within the layover areas are extracted, converted to the same geometry, and are compared with a buffer change detection algorithm. The proposed method is tested for several buildings (in Munich city center) imaged in TerraSAR-X spotlight mode.
Activity of mutant sigma F proteins truncated near the C terminus

sigma F, the product of the spoIIAC gene of Bacillus subtilis, is homologous in amino acid sequence throughout most of its length with several other sigma factors of B. subtilis and Escherichia coli. However, 8 residues from the C terminus the homology abruptly breaks down, suggesting that the C-terminal tail of the protein may be dispensable. It is known that an amber mutation at the 11th codon (wild-type glutamine 245) from the C terminus abolishes the function of the sigma factor. We have now placed chain-terminating codons at the ninth codon (wild-type lysine 247), the eighth codon (wild-type valine 248), or the seventh codon (wild-type glutamine 249) from the C terminus. We have tested the resulting mutants for their capacity to sporulate and for their ability to transcribe from a promoter (spoIIIG) that is normally read by RNA polymerase bound to sigma F (E sigma F). The results indicate that a mutant sigma F lacking the terminal 7 residues functions almost normally, which suggests that glutamine 249 is dispensable. By contrast, lysine 247 is crucial for the activity of sigma F: deletion of the 9 C-terminal residues totally inactivates the protein. When the terminal 8 residues were deleted, placing lysine 247 at the C terminus, the transcriptional activity of the factor is reduced by about 80%: we attribute this effect to neutralization of the positive charge of lysine 247 by formation of a salt bridge with the -COO- terminus.
Phases amont de l'innovation : proposition d'une démarche d'analyse de besoin et d'évaluation de l'acceptabilité d'un produit

Aujourd’hui les entreprises doivent pouvoir offrir de nouveaux produits en continu prenant en consideration les nouvelles technologies disponibles afin de satisfaire des clients de plus en plus exigeants et diversifies. Il est donc primordial pour une entreprise de savoir quels sont les besoins des acteurs interesses par son produit. L’objectif de ce travail de doctorat est de proposer une nouvelle methode pour analyser le besoin pour aider les entreprises a mieux definir leurs nouveaux produits. La demarche proposee se decline en quatre phases : description de l’environnement et du fonctionnement des acteurs par la technique du RARe (Ressources, Activites, Resultats), determination des besoins par la realisation de quatre types d’operations sur les ressources de l’acteur puis evaluation et classification des besoins selon le modele de Kano et enfin comparaison de plusieurs concepts de produits. Pour y arriver, un travail de bibliographie sur la notion de besoin a ete realise. Cette recherche bibliographique nous a permis egalement de definir le cahier des charges d’une nouvelle methode d’analyse de besoin. Ceci a justifie le choix de la methode RARe, basee sur l’observation des activites de l’acteur, pour comprendre et identifier les besoins. Pour les classer, nous avons utilise le modele de Kano, qui distingue les differents besoins existants : basiques, de performance, attractifs et neutres. Nous avons mis au point un calcul d’indicateurs a l’aide d’une formulation matricielle permettant de classifier les besoins et de comparer des concepts de produits. Cette methode constitue donc un outil d’aide a la decision au debut du processus de conception
Effects of protonation state of Asp181 and position of active site water molecules on the conformation of PTP1B

In protein tyrosine phosphatase 1B (PTP1B), the flexible WPD loop adopts a closed conformation (WPDclosed) in the active state of PTP1B, bringing the catalytic Asp181 close to the active site pocket, while WPD loop is in an open conformation (WPDopen) in the inactive state. Previous studies showed that Asp181 may be protonated at physiological pH, and ordered water molecules exist in the active site. In the current study, molecular dynamics simulations are employed at different Asp181 protonation states and initial positions of active site water molecules, and compared with the existing crystallographic data of PTP1B. In WPDclosed conformation, the active site is found to maintain its conformation only in the protonated state of Asp181 in both free and liganded states, while Asp181 is likely to be deprotonated in WPDopen conformation. When the active site water molecule network that is a part of the free WPDclosed crystal structure is disrupted, intermediate WPD loop conformations, similar to that in the PTPRR crystal structure, are sampled in the MD simulations. In liganded PTP1B, one active site water molecule is found to be important for facilitating the orientation of Cys215 and the phosphate ion, thus may play a role in the reaction. In conclusion, conformational stability of WPD loop, and possibly catalytic activity of PTP1B, is significantly affected by the protonation state of Asp181 and position of active site water molecules, showing that these aspects should be taken into consideration both in MD simulations and inhibitor design. © Proteins 2013. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Linking Wolves and Plants: Aldo Leopold on Trophic Cascades

Abstract Aldo Leopold, perhaps best known for his revolutionary and poignant essays about nature, was also an eloquent advocate during the 1930s and 1940s of the need to maintain wolves and other large carnivores in forest and range ecosystems. He indicated that their loss set the stage for ungulate irruptions and ecosystem damage throughout many parts of the United States. We have synthesized the historical record on the potential effects of wolf extirpation in the context of recent research. Leopold's work of decades ago provides an important perspective for understanding the influence of large carnivores, via trophic cascades, on the status and functioning of forest and range plant communities. Leopold's personal experiences during an era of extensive biotic changes add richness, credibility, and even intrigue to the view that present-day interactions between ungulates and plants in the United States have been driven to a large degree by the extirpation of wolves and other large carnivores.