Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Increasing the Oral Bioavailability of Poorly Water-soluble Valsartan Using Non-ordered Mesoporous Silica Microparticles

Aim: To evaluate the use of mesoporous silica SYLOID® 244 FP to increase the dissolution rate of valsartan, antihypertensive poorly water soluble, Biopharmaceutical Classification System Class II drug. Materials and Methods: Valsartan was adsorbed on and/or into SYLOID® 244 FP in the ratio of 1:0.5, 1:1, and 1:1.5 via a wetness impregnation method and then processed into tablet by direct compression. To investigate the interaction in between valsartan and SYLOID® 244 FP, X-ray powder diffraction (XRPD) and Fourier transform infrared studies were performed. To examine the effect of SYLOID® 244 FP on the solubility of drug, phase solubility study was performed. Optimization of the study was done using 32 full factorial designs where amount of SYLOID® 244 FP (X1) and volume of ethanol (X2) were selected as independent variables and solubility and % cumulative release were selected as dependent variables. Flowability and wettability of the valsartan-loaded powder were evaluated by bulk and tapped density and by the angle of repose, respectively. Physical stability tests of the valsartan and the valsartan-SYLOID® 244 FP matrix were observed by keeping it over a 1-month storage at 40°C and 75% ± 5% humidity. Results and Discussion: The drug excipient interaction study revealed the absence of crystalline form and presence of hydrogen bonds interaction in valsartan-loaded powder. The improvement in the dissolution rate of tablet containing valsartan-loaded matrix is due to the lack of valsartan in the crystalline form and large surface area of the SYLOID® 244 FP. Satisfactory results of physical stability tests of the valsartan and the valsartan-SYLOID® 244 FP matrix were observed. Correspondingly, the solubility of the valsartan-loaded matrix was increased up to 2.83 times. Conclusion: Study indicates that valsartan tablet prepared from drug-loaded silica may provide a feasible approach for the development of an oral formulation for this poorly water-soluble drug.
A study on assessment of risk of developing diabetes using IDRS ( Indian Diabetes Risk Score ) in the urban area of Jamnagar city

Diabetes as a non communicable disease is significant public health problem the prevalence rate all the world over is raising. Unfortunately more than 50% of the diabetic subjects in India remain unaware of their diabetes status, which adds to the disease burden. This underscores the need for mass awareness and screening programmes to identify and overcome the burden due to diabetes in India. Therefore present study was carried out with an aim to assess the risk of diabetes among undiagnosed individuals using IDRS (Indian Diabetes Risk Score). Present study was a cross sectional study. Pre-tested semi structured questionnaire based on IDRS was used in this study. The study was conducted on 500 individuals residing in urban area of Jamnagar city. In the present study, it was found that out of total 500 study subjects, 334 (66.8%) were in moderate risk category, 114 (22.8%) were in high risk category and 52 (10.4%) were in low risk category. It may be concluded that it is essential to implement the simple IDRS tool in the community for mass screening so that proper intervention can be carried out earliest to reduce the burden of diabetes.
Critical Review of Imperfect Forward Secrecy

We reviewed the claims made by Adrian et al., in [1] that precomputation of specific DH groups provides the NSA with the ability of mass surveillance of Internet communications and passively eavesdropping to large percentage of IPSec and TLS connections. We have independently reached essentially the same conclusions as Wouters in [2], namely, that the success rate of a hypothetical NSA attack on IPSec, would be much lower than the original estimate which appeared in [1]. More interestingly, we also checked the claimed statistics in [1] related to HTTPS connections (which was not checked by Wouters). These connections use the TLS protocol (or its predecessor SSL) to securely access HTTP servers on the Internet, and is of great interest to intelligence services since it protects access to search engines (such as GOOGLE), to email (such as GMAIL), to social networks (such as FACEBOOK), to financial information (such as CITIBANK and VISA) and to various services (such as ordering books on AMAZON or reserving airline tickets on EXPEDIA). Our independent tests show that even massive precomputation applied to all DH groups will have very limited success in passively breaking interesting HTTPS connections, which are used to access the most popular sites on the web. We have also found several methodological problems in the current implementation and interpretation of Internet wide HTTPS scans by based on the ZMap scanning software [3] used for generating the statistics shown in [1] and in the DROWN attack paper by Aviram et al., [4]. For example not implementing support of URL redirection caused many sites to be excluded from the scans, while not implementing host name validation cause mis-configured sites to be considered as valid sites that will be trusted by browsers. We have also reviewed the Snowden documents referenced by [1]. In those and other Snowden documents we have found clues that the NSA use other attack vectors to decrypt IPSec and TLS traffic. The recent Juniper and Cisco back-door revelations support this hypothesis.
Emerging Role of Flavonoids in Inhibition of NF-B-Mediated Signaling Pathway : A Review

Nuclear factor kappa B (NFB) proteins comprise of a family of structurally-related eukaryotic transcription factors. They were originally discovered in lymphocytes, but later found to be ubiquitously expressed in almost all animal cell types. In mammals the NFB family (also known as the Rel family) consists of five members: p50 (product of the NFB1 gene), p52 (product of the NFB2 gene), p65 (also known as RelA), c-Rel and RelB. NFB dimers exist in a latent form in the cytoplasm bound by I B inhibitory proteins. NFB-inducing stimuli (stress, cytokine, free radicals, UV radiation, oxidised LDL, bacterial or viral antigens) activate I B kinase complex that phosphorylates I B, leading to its ubiquitination and subsequent degradation. I B degradation expose the DNA-binding domain and nuclear localization sequence of NFB and permit its stable translocation to the nucleus and the regulation of target genes. The NFB signaling pathway plays a key role in inflammation, immune response, cell growth control and protection against apoptosis. Downregulation/inhibiton of NFB is regarded as a potential drug targets for therapeutic intervention in many diseases like cancer, inflammatory and autoimmune diseases. Many natural plant products have been found to downregulate NFB production, including curcumin, quercetin, green tea, and resveratrol. In this review we describe flavonoids as NFB inhibitors and their role in preventing NFB signaling pathway mediated disorders. _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Examining Barriers to Sustained Implementation of School-Wide Prevention Practices

The purpose of this study was to determine if an experimental five-item measure of barriers to implementing and sustaining school-wide prevention practices, the Assessment of Barriers to Implementation and Sustainability in Schools (ABISS), would relate to objective measures of school-wide positive behavioral interventions and supports (SWPBIS) implementation fidelity. The ABISS was administered to individuals in 704 U.S. schools implementing SWPBIS across 11 states, and scores were compared with school demographic variables and SWPBIS fidelity of implementation. Results showed acceptable model fit for the ABISS, partial measurement invariance, and statistically significant relations, after controlling for school demographic variables, with SWPBIS fidelity of implementation, except for schools implementing SWPBIS for 5 or more years. These patterns indicate substantial but decreasing relations of perceived barriers to implementation fidelity as schools continue to implement SWPBIS. Implications are discussed in terms of how assessment of perceived barriers can support implementation and sustainability of school-wide prevention practices.
Induction of tuber gene expression in solanaceous species by methyl jasmonate and wounding

Leaf pieces of in v/7/*o-cultured plantlets of the wild potato species Solanum brevidens Phil, were cocultivated with Agrobacterium tumefaciens that contained nptll and uidk genes on the disarmed plasmid pBI121. Independent transgenic shoots were regenerated from solidified and liquid medium that contained 50 mg-l"' kanamycin. Two Agrobacterium strains were investigated for transformation efficiency. GV2260, which contained p35SGUSINT, resulted in a 11% transformation frequency, compared with 1% using LBA4404. Transformation rates were 7% in liquid culture and 3% on solidified medium. All kanamycin-resistant, putatively transformed plantlets were confirmed positive by histochemical GUS assays. GUS activity in 22 independently transformed plants was
The Economics of Airport Congestion Pricing

This discussion paper resulted in a publication in the Journal of Urban Economics (2004). Volume 55, pages 257-277. Conventional economic wisdom suggests that congestion pricing would be an appropriate response to cope with the growing congestion levels currently experienced at many airports. Several characteristics of aviation markets, however, may make naive congestion prices equal to the value of marginal travel delays a non-optimal response. This paper develops a model of airport pricing that captures a number of these features. The model in particular reflects (1) that airlines typically have market power and are engaged in oligopolistic competition at different sub-markets; (2) that part of external travel delays that aircraft impose are internal to an operator and hence should not be accounted for in congestion tolls; and (3) that different airports in an international network will typically not be regulated by the same authority. We present an analytical treatment for a simple two-node network and some numerical results to illustrate our findings. Some main conclusions are that second-best optimal tolls are typically lower than what would be suggested by congestion costs alone and may even be negative, and that cooperation between regulators need not be stable but that non-cooperation may lead to welfare losses also when compared to a no-tolling situation.
New Local Thresholding Method for Soil Images by Minimizing Grayscale Intra‐Class Variance

Recent advances in imaging techniques offer the possibility of visualizing the three‐dimensional structure of soils at very fine scales. To make use of such information, a thresholding process is commonly implemented to separate the image into solid particles and pores. Despite the multitude of thresholding algorithms available, their performance is being challenged by the complexity of the soil structure. Experience shows that, to improve thresholding performance, existing methods require significant input from a skilled operator, making the thresholding subjective. In this context, this article proposes a new, operator‐independent thresholding technique based on the analysis of the intraclass grayscale variance. The method extends the well‐established Otsu technique, by applying first a preclassification of the voxels corresponding to the solid phase. Then, a threshold value is determined through minimization of the intraclass variance of the unclassified voxels. The method was implemented globally, then locally for a range of window sizes, with the optimal window size selected as that for which the standardized grayscale variances of the two voxel populations are equal. Results on the three‐dimensional soil images investigated suggest that the proposed method performs noticeably better than Otsu's method, and in particular is robust enough to variations in image contrast and soil structure. Tested on a synthetic image, the new method produces a misclassification of only 2% of voxels, compared to 4.9% with Otsu's method. These results suggest that the proposed method can be very useful in the analysis of images of a variety of heterogeneous media, including soils.
Beyond control : wider implications for the management of biological invasions

Summary 1. Government departments, environmental managers and conservationists are all facing escalating pressure to address and resolve a diversity of invasive alien species (IAS) problems. Yet much research to date is primarily concerned with quantifying the scale of the problem rather than delivering robust solutions and has not adequately addressed all stages of the invasion process, and only a few studies embrace the ecosystem approach. 2. Three successive steps, prevention, eradication and control, form the cornerstones of recommended best practices aimed at managing IAS. The goal of such actions is the restoration of ecosystems to preserve or re-establish native biodiversity and functions. 3. Prevention is widely promoted as being a more environmentally desirable strategy than actions undertaken after IAS establishment, yet is hindered by the difficulty in separating invasive from non-invasive alien species. Furthermore, the high number of candidate IAS, the investment required in taxonomic support and inspection capacity, and the expense of individual risk assessments may act against the net benefits of prevention. More rewarding avenues may be found by pursuing neural networks to predict the potential composition of pest assemblages in different regions and/or model
Approximate maximum likelihood decoding of block codes

Approximate maximum likelihood decoding algorithms, based upon selecting a small set of candidate code words with the aid of the estimated probability of error of each received symbol, can give performance close to optimum with a reasonable amount of computation. By combining the best features of various algorithms and taking care to perform each step as efficiently as possible, a decoding scheme was developed which can decode codes which have better performance than those presently in use and yet not require an unreasonable amount of computation. The discussion of the details and tradeoffs of presently known efficient optimum and near optimum decoding algorithms leads, naturally, to the one which embodies the best features of all of them.
Insult Acute Inflammation Activated macrophage Activated neutrophil BOne marrOW

Zimecki, Wroclaw (PL) (51) Int. Cl. A61K 38/40 (52) U.S. Cl. 514/6 Correspondence Address: (57) ABSTRACT Kurt S. Myers The method of the present invention provides a novel use of 7634 Braesdale lactoferrin to modulate the molecular events during devel Houston, TX 77071 (US) opment of autoimmune and/or neurodegenerative disorders in humans. More Specifically, the present invention is directed to the use of lactoferrin to treat or prevent age (21) Appl. No.: 10/140,380 related disorderS Such as Alzheimer's disease, multiple Scle
Sources of secondary microseisms in the Indian Ocean

Ocean waves activity is a major source of microvibrations that travel through the solid Earth, known as microseismic noise and recorded worldwide by broadband seismometers. Analysis of microseismic noise in continuous seismic records can be used to investigate noise sources in the oceans such as storms, and their variations in space and time, making possible the regional and global-scale monitoring of the wave climate. In order to complete the knowledge of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans microseismic noise sources, we analyse 1 yr of continuous data recorded by permanent seismic stations located in the Indian Ocean basin. We primarily focus on secondary microseisms (SM) that are dominated by Rayleigh waves between 6 and 11 s of period. Continuous polarization analyses in this frequency band at 15 individual seismic stations allow us to quantify the number of polarized signal corresponding to Rayleigh waves, and to retrieve their backazimuths (BAZ) in the time–frequency domain. We observe clear seasonal variations in the number of polarized signals and in their frequencies, but not in their BAZ that consistently point towards the Southern part of the basin throughout the year. This property is very peculiar to the Indian Ocean that is closed on its Northern side, and therefore not affected by large ocean storms during Northern Hemisphere winters. We show that the noise amplitude seasonal variations and the backazimuth directions are consistent with the source areas computed from ocean wave models.
Structure of synthetic K-rich birnessite obtained by high-temperature decomposition of KMnO4. I. two-layer polytype from 800 °C experiment

The structure of a synthetic potassium birnessite (KBi) obtained as a finely dispersed powder by thermal decomposition of KMnO4 at 800 °C was for the first time studied by single-crystal X-ray diffraction (XRD). It is shown that KBi has a two-layer cell with a = 2.840(1) A and c = 14.03(1) A and space group P63/mmc. In contrast to the structure model proposed by Kim et al. (Chem. Mater. 1999, 11, 557−563), the refined model demonstrates the sole presence of Mn4+ in the octahedral layers, the presence of 0.12 vacant layer sites per octahedron being responsible for the layer charge deficit. In agreement with X-ray absorption spectroscopy result, this layer charge deficit is compensated (1) by the presence of interlayer Mn3+ above or below vacant layer octahedra sharing three Olayer atoms with neighboring Mnlayer octahedra to form a triple-corner surface complex (VITC sites) and (2) by the presence of interlayer K in prismatic cavities located above or below empty tridentate cavities, sharing three edges wit.
Reversed Migration Trends and Local Labor Markets

We estimate the effects of the unprecedented decline in Mexican net migration from 2006 to 2012 on labor markets in Mexico among non-migrants. We use an instrumental variable strategy that isolates demand for Mexican labor in U.S. labor market and relies on historical migration patterns. We find that the decline in migration reduced employment for lower skilled men and increased wages for high skill men and women. We also find a decline in self-employment for men, a sign that informal markets did not absorb the increase in labor supply. Meanwhile, we find that women increasingly shift into salaried work, in line with a story in which reduced remittances leads remaining household members to seek higher paid work. JEL Classification: J21, J16, J31, O15.
Modelling Mean Albedo of Individual Roofs in Complex Urban Areas Using Satellite Images and Airborne Laser Scanning Point Clouds

Abstract. Knowledge of surface albedo at individual roof scale is important for mitigating urban heat islands and understanding urban climate change. This study presents a method for quantifying surface albedo of individual roofs in a complex urban area using the integration of Landsat 8 and airborne LiDAR data. First, individual roofs were extracted from airborne LiDAR data and orthophotos using optimized segmentation and supervised object based image analysis (OBIA). Support vector machine (SVM) was used as a classifier in OBIA process for extracting individual roofs. The user-defined parameters required in SVM classifier were selected using v-fold cross validation method. After that, surface albedo was calculated for each individual roof from Landsat images. Finally, thematic maps of mean surface albedo of individual roofs were generated in GIS and the results were discussed. Results showed that the study area is covered by 35% of buildings varying in roofing material types and conditions. The calculated surface albedo of buildings ranged from 0.16 to 0.65 in the study area. More importantly, the results indicated that the types and conditions of roofing materials significantly effect on the mean value of surface albedo. Mean albedo of new concrete, old concrete, new steel, and old steel were found to be equal to 0.38, 0.26, 0.51, and 0.44 respectively. Replacing old roofing materials with new ones should highly prioritized.
Adaptive Message Authentication Protocol for Performance Improvement in ZigBee Wireless Sensor Network

ZigBee is used as a low power and low rate wireless sensor network. Many applications utilize it for data transfer. It provides some security options, including message authentication, message encryption and defense against replay attack. The security algorithms used in the ZigBee are run for each packet transfer when the security mode is on. This study tested the impact of message authentication over the network performance in terms of the throughput and data packet delivery ratio. The message authentication leads to performance degradation for the network. The blocks of the message are encrypted by using Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm for authenticating in CBC-MAC algorithm. The performance of the network is improved over the original state when AES algorithm is replaced by MKP-AES algorithm and DMAC algorithm is used to parallelize the authentication. MKP-AES is tested within two and three secret keys. The network is simulated using NS-2 to measure the performance improvement.
Appliances Control in Virtual Reality using Leap Motion Somatosensory ( LMSS ) Controlled Switches

This involves the controlling of electrical appliances by virtual reality through Leap Motion Somatosensory (LMSS) module. The LMSS module accepts the gestures as inputs and produces the output of controlling various electrical appliances. Gesture recognition refers to recognizing the motion of the human parts like limbs, face etc. This work uses Unity 3D for the recognition and processing of gestures and LMSS based algorithm for detection of objects. At first the image is captured by the LMSS Module and it is processed by Unity 3D, if the preloaded gesture is matched with the existing gesture the data will be sent to the microcontroller, then the home appliances are controlled. The hardware module consists of LMSS Module, PIC microcontroller, electrical appliances, power supply and ZIGBEE module. This hardware module is communicated with simulation software using a USB to serial converter bus which comes along with driver software.
Work-related smartphone use, work–family conflict and family role performance: The role of segmentation preference

Is work-related smartphone use during off-job time associated with lower conflict owing to the blurring of the boundaries between work and family life? Or does it help employees juggling work and family demands? The present four-day quantitative diary study (N = 71 employees, N = 265–280 data points) aims to shed light on the relationship between daily work-related smartphone use during off-job time, and daily work–family conflict and daily family role performance, respectively. Moreover, individuals’ general segmentation preference is investigated as a potential cross-level moderator in the relationships between daily work-related smartphone use during off-job time and both work–family conflict and family role performance. Overall, the results of multilevel modelling support our mediated moderation model indicating that for integrators more frequent work-related smartphone use during off-job time is associated with better family role performance through reduced work–family conflict. For segmenters, smartphone use does not have any impact on work–family conflict and family role performance. These findings suggest that for integrators smartphone use during off-job time may be useful to simultaneously meet both work demands and family demands, which has the potential to reduce work–family conflict and enhance family role performance; whereas for segmenters no effects were found.