Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Transforming News Journalism from Newspapers into Online Media Outlets in Kosovo

Abstract The development trend of online journalism in Kosovo continues with great strides in relation to newspaper journalism. Some newspapers are continuing to survive and still on market despite the decline of readers as part of a worldwide trend of readers moving to online platforms. This study will analyze the content of journalistic texts in newspapers and online media, measuring their core values. This study is about the transformation, namely the change of journalism standards from traditional media (newspapers) to online media. Journalism theorists argue that the standards of journalism should be the same in newspapers and online media. But the practice in Kosovo is completely different. The main hypothesis of this study is that professional standards in online journalism in Kosovo have fallen; in newspaper journalism, however, there is still a high level of professionalism in writing and reporting. To test these two hypotheses, texts from two newspapers and two online media shall be analyzed. Therefore, the analysis will be done on texts from “Zëri” and “Koha Ditore” newspapers, and their online versions, “zëri. info” and “koha.net”.
The Impact of a Mass Rapid Transit System on Neighborhood Housing Prices: An Application of Difference-In-Difference and Spatial Econometrics

Abstract This study discusses the impact of the mass rapid transit (MRT) system’s construction and operation on neighborhood housing prices. Estimations were conducted by considering the spatial dependence of housing prices and using a difference-in-difference (DD) method that incorporated the spatial lag model and spatial error model. The empirical results indicated that the coefficient of the interaction variable of the MRT’s range of influence and commencement time of construction was -0.079, reaching the 10% significance level. Hence, when MRT construction began, housing prices in the experimental group decreased by 7.9% as compared to the control group. A possible reason for these findings is that the “dark age” of urban traffic, air pollution, and noise brought about by MRT construction negatively affected housing prices. With regard to MRT operations, the coefficient of the interaction variable of the MRT’s influence range and service commencement time did not reach the level of significance, indicating that housing prices within the MRT’s influence range were not significantly affected when the MRT’s service began. This might be due to the fact that the psychological expectations of the increase in housing prices had already been realized during the planning, announcement, and construction phases.
The dynamic nature of ageing: novel findings, therapeutic avenues and medical interventions

Abstract Ageing is one of the most complex and difficult problems for humans to face and for science to solve. Although human senescence was viewed as a passive and uncontrollable process of deterioration over time with little or no genetic regulation, the concept that ageing is caused by both genetic and environmental factors is now generally accepted, even though it remains difficult to distinguish between ageing sensu stricto and the effects of age-related diseases. Empirical data show that mechanisms of ageing are highly conserved during evolution. Moreover, it has been established that there are specific molecular ‘instructions’ for ageing, which suggests that a better understanding of the molecular biology of ageing will open new possibilities regarding future interventions. The complexity of ageing diminishes the possibility that any general theory will completely explain this metaphenomenon. Likewise, it is highly unlikely that any medication can stop or reverse human senescence. Nevertheless, ageing as a dynamic and malleable metaphenomenon can be modulated by a variety of influences. The concept of the shrinkage of the homeo-dynamic space with age, i.e. homeostenosis, is especially interesting and intriguing as it shows that novel therapeutic approaches and rational strategies can help delay the onset of the ageing-associated pathologies by enhancing the homeodynamic capabilities of the body. The aim of this article is to present current data from evolutionary and molecular gerontology and discuss them within the ambit of this review which is devoted to the dynamic, emergent and plastic nature of human ageing and implications for future interventions.
A proposed algorithm for analysing heart sounds and calculating their time intervals

Abstract Heart sounds play a crucial role in the clinical assessment of patients. Stethoscopes are used for detecting heart sounds and diagnosing potential abnormal conditions. However, several parameters of the cardiac sounds cannot be extracted by traditional stethoscopes. This paper presents a proposed algorithm based on peaks detection. Besides its ability of filtering the heart sounds signals, the time intervals of these sounds in addition to the heart rate were calculated by the proposed algorithm in an efficient way. Signals of the heart sounds from two sources were used to evaluate the efficiency of the algorithm. The first source was the data recorded from 14 participants, whereas the second source was the free data set sponsored by PASCAL. The algorithm showed different performance accuracy for detecting the main heart sounds based on the source of the data used in the study. The accuracy was 93.6% when using the data recorded from the first source, whereas it was 76.194% for the data of the second source.
New agents in treatment of metastatic renal cell carcinoma

go raka nerki na konwencjonalne metody leczenia trwają poszukiwania nowych leków. Immunoterapia, bazująca na interferonie alfa, uznawana za nieformalny standard postępowania w leczeniu systemowym choroby uogólnionej nie satysfakcjonuje pacjentów ani prowadzących terapię lekarzy. Dzięki żmudnym badaniom i zastosowaniu nowoczesnych technik biologii molekularnej ustalono, że dużą rolę w powstawaniu raka nerki, jego wzroście, proliferacji i tworzeniu przerzutów odgrywają szlaki metaboliczne, związane z receptorami błonowymi dla czynników wzrostu. Newralgiczną składową kompleksów enzymatycznych są białka o aktywności kinaz tyrozynowych. Stały się one nowym celem terapeutycznym. Wydaje się, że w niedługiej przyszłości stanowić będą alternatywę dla cytokin, a w przypadku niepowodzenia immunoterapii na nich opierać się będzie leczenie II rzutu. Najlepiej poznanymi i najbardziej zaawansowanymi w procesie badań klinicznych są CCI-771 (temsirolimus), Avastin (bevacizumab), BAY 439006 (sorafenib) i SU 011248 (sunitinib). Dwa ostatnie są już zarejestrowane do leczenia chorych na raka nerki. Praca jest krótkim przeglądem literatury dotyczącej tych preparatów ze szczególnym uwzględnieniem doświadczeń klinicznych.
Age and sex specific variations in body composition in Indian urban Bengali Hindu children, adolescents and young adults aged 7–21 years

Abstract Childhood and adolescent obesity is a public health concern worldwide. However, little attention has been paid on status of overweight and body composition of Indian Bengali urban middle and high SES population. The objective was to determine the prevalence of overweight and body composition status by age and sex in children, adolescents and young adults. This cross-sectional study was carried out among 4194 unmarried school and college students (1999 males and 2195 females) aged 7–21 years belonging to the Bengali Hindu Population in Kolkata, India. The survey period was from 1999 to 2011. Anthropometry of participants were measured. Age and sex specific ≥85 percentile of body mass index (BMI) for children (<18 years of age) and BMI ≥23 kg/m2 (≥18 years of age) for adults were used to define overweight. Fat percent, upper arm fat area (UAFA) and upper arm muscle area (UAMA) were estimated. Simple linear regression was performed to check trend of changes with age. The overall prevalence of overweight was 14.8% in both sexes. Mean fat percent was higher in females than males (23.5% vs 13.5% respectively; p<0.001) and it increased by 0.18% (0.02) in males and 0.56% (0.02) in females per year (both p<0.001). UAMA gradually increased with age in both sexes and increasing rate per year was by 2.07 (0.04) cm2 in males and 1.19 (0.04) cm2 in females (both p<0.001). However, UAFA increased by 0.41 (0.03) cm2 and 0.90 (0.03) cm2 every year in males and females respectively (both p<0.001). Sum of biceps, triceps, subscapular and suprailliac skinfolds increased by 1.66 (0.06) mm and 0.5 (0.07) mm per year in females and males respectively (both p<0.001). Overall prevalence of overweight was the same in both sexes but adipose tissue was higher and muscularly was lower in females than males.
Convergence and growth – conflicting goals of economics policy – A case study of Georgia

Abstract Over the years, it has been the subject of discussions whether efficiency-oriented interventions contribute to an equity distribution of wealth across regions and whether equity orientation is a source of inefficiency. While efficiency refers to the maximization of growth in the national economy, convergence-oriented policy is focused on equalizing the level of development at interregional level. The case of Georgia was studied as a developing country facing various challenges in terms of economic growth and regional divergence. This article provides an overview of the economic development trends taking place in the regions of Georgia and reveals the high level of divergence within the country. A logarithmic model was created and used to run simulations to predict the possible results of convergence-oriented policy in Georgia. In order to make the forecast we estimated GDP per capita and average growth rates in all the Georgian regions. Use of the model allowed us to answer two main questions: (1) If the last 5 and 10 year average growth rates are maintained, how long will it take for the poorest region to converge to the wealthiest one? (2) What should be the minimum growth rate in the poorest region for the upcoming 5, 10 and 20 years in order to converge to the wealthiest capital? Results of the calculations showed that convergence between regions can only be achieved by slowing down economic growth in relatively wealthier regions and by focusing on the development of the poorest ones. The results of the study revealed that the convergence process will be faster for the regions with medium or big cities and growth centres. Therefore, creating competitive growth centres would be a reasonable regional policy objective to promote fast economic growth and future convergence without redirecting the growth process from more developed areas to lagging ones.
Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings : breastfeeding and weaning in the past.

Citation for published item: Halcrow, Si an E. and King, Charlotte L. and Millard, Andrew R. and Snoddy, Anne Marie E. and Scott, Rachel M. and Elliott, Gail E. and Gr ocke, Darren R. and Buckley, Hallie R. and Standen, Vivien G. and Arriaza, Bernardo T. (2017) 'Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings : breastfeeding and weaning in the past. ', in Breastfeeding : new anthropological approaches. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, pp. 155-169.
Effect of Laparoscopic Roux-En-Y Gastric Bypass on Metabolic Syndrome and GLP-1 Hormone

Background: An enlarged incretin response after Roux-en-Y gastric bypass (RYGBP) has been proposed to promote weight loss and obesity-related comorbid conditions amelioration especially type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM). The dramatic amelioration of T2DM following RYGBP could be accounted for by changes in glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) secretion. The objective of the study is to evaluate the effect of RYGBP as a metabolic surgery on metabolic syndrome parameters and on fasting serum GLP-1 after one year in 30 patients with BMI of 35-39 Kg/m 2 . This aimed to prove that a metabolic surgery should be able to resolve one or more of the metabolic syndrome parameters without causing any undue weight loss. Methods: The selected group of patients had different degrees of glucose tolerance: normal glucose tolerance (NGT, n=9), impaired glucose tolerance (IGT, n=9), and type 2 diabetes (n=12). This study was done to determine the changes of GLP-1, BMI, insulin resistance before and 1 year after RYGBP. Results: A high significant increase in serum GLP-1was recorded in the three included groups. Moreover, high significant decrease in fasting glucose from 145.3 to 99.2 mg/dl ,associated with significant decrease in fasting insulin from 16.1to11. 3 μIu/liter, in all these three groups ,postoperatively, along with a high significant decrease in Homeostasis Model of Assessment Insulin Resistance(HOMA-IR). All other metabolic syndrome components improved significantly postoperatively, including dyslipidemia, hypertension, and obesity. Conclusion: Our study supports that RYGBP is associated with alterations in glucose kinetics leading to improvement of type II DM. We consider RYGBP as a proposed treatment for type 2 diabetes. www.jmscr. igmpublication.org Impact Factor 3.79 ISSN (e)-2347-176x
Maintenance of Long-Living Smart Contracts

—In recent years, blockchains became widely known for offering immutable and trust-free storage of arbitrary information. Blockchains also leverage smart contracts, a concept for executing program code for modifying the blockchain state. While the characteristics of a blockchain, especially immutability, enable reliability in a trust-free environment, it hinders the maintenance of smart contracts itself. With the increasing number, size, and lifetime of smart contracts, they could be considered to be long-living software. Therefore, it might become necessary to apply common techniques from software engineering to maintain smart contracts. However, updating smart contracts residing within the immutable blockchain data raises an interesting challenge. In this work, we analyze whether the assumption of smart contracts being long-living is true, study how immutable smart contracts are maintained in practice and elaborate the challenges appearing due to these maintenance practices.
Colour vision in diabetes

Diabetes Mellitus (DM) has become one of the most important metabolic diseases that reduces one’s quality of life and doubles the risk of early death. Amongst the major complications linked to DM, diabetic retinopathy (DR) leads to gradual loss of vision and blindness. DR is now the second cause of certifiable blindness among the working age adults in the UK. The lifetime costs to the UK government are calculated to be up to £327,000 per person, with almost 50% of these costs being attributed to loss of productivity caused by visual impairment and blindness. The UK is one of the leading countries in the implementation of DR screening programmes. The latter rely heavily on fundus imaging and grading using trained experts and subsequent referral to hospital for further clinical examination and evaluation depending on the grade of retinopathy. It is now known that subtle, structural changes in the retina that are linked to diabetes can precede detectable vascular changes. The former can affect one’s colour vision and this offers the potential of using changes in chromatic sensitivity as an early biomarker of retinal disease. The first part of this thesis focuses on measuring chromatic sensitivity using the colour assessment and diagnosis (CAD) test in diabetic subjects with varying degrees of retinopathy. The severity of colour vision loss is graded in comparison to other factors that are normally linked to diabetes, such as the type, grade, control methods and duration. The results of this study reveal losses of both red / green and yellow / blue chromatic sensitivity in patients with diabetes, but the correlation with factors, normally associated with high risk of diabetes is low. The results from this study do, however, show that the magnitude of chromatic sensitivity losses correlates with the severity of diabetic retinopathy. The second, related study examines the effectiveness of intravitreal injection of a dexamethasone implant (Ozurdex) in patients with diabetic macular oedema (DMO) in stabilising and reducing loss of visual function and in particular the reduction in chromatic sensitivity up to 24 weeks. This treatment demonstrated efficacy in the treatment of chronic DMO and DMO which is resistant to anti-VEGF treatment. The results show that intravitreal treatment with Ozurdex causes improvement is visual acuity, central retinal thickness and significant improvement in red / green chromatic sensitivity.
In-Vitro Effect of Steroids on Melanoma Cell Growth—A Prelude to Melanoma Treatment?

Skin is not only a target organ for various sex steroids and hormones, but also an endocrine organ, which produces sex steroids. It has been suggested by Nikolakis et al. that impairment in skin steroidogenesis may result in inflammatory or autoimmune or other skin disorders. Melanoma is one such skin disease or disorder, which is believed to be caused by UV rays. But, epidemiological, clinical, in-vivo and in-vitro studies suggested the involvement of steroids in the regulation of melanoma growth. However, these studies either did not identify the steroid involved or did not relate to the protective function of the steroid in menstruating females in melanoma, as reported by the clinical studies. In this context, our studies with mouse and human melanoma cell lines showed that female sex steroid progesterone not only inhibited melanoma cell growth, but also affected adhesion and migration functions. In addition, our studies also showed that the effect of progesterone was not a toxic or spurious, but a specific effect on melanoma cells. Hence, our in-vitro studies along with previous other studies subscribed to the idea proposed earlier by Slominski et al. that modulation of local steroids could be a new therapeutic approach for treatment of skin disease or disorder, melanoma.
Book Reviews

Aylin Orbasli, Tourists in Historic Towns: Urban Conservation and Heritage Management, London and New York: E. & F.N. Spon, 2000, ix + 210 pp., 89 figs, 1 table. ISBN 0-419-25930-9. Over the last decade we have witnessed numerous books being written on the subject of urban tourism, including several which focus on tourism management. Orbasli’s book is unique, however, in that it is the first to concentrate on aspects of urban conservation as a result of tourism. Another point to this book’s credit is the fact that, for the first time, the issue of tourism in cities that are located in developing countries is being seriously addressed, as opposed to case studies mainly from Europe and North America. This provides a refreshing and important new approach from the research perspective. However, it should be stated that despite its title, the book does not deal with tourists in historic towns, but with tourism in historic towns and its impact on the urban environment. The book contains almost ninety good-quality black-and-white photographs, which contribute a great deal to the book since they highlight several of the issues under discussion. Maps and diagrams, however, are missing. This is a great pity since maps of the cities under discussion, as well as updated empirical data presented in tables, could have contributed considerably to this book. Despite the advantages of this interesting book, a series of problems affect its overall quality, principally:
THE OCHANINE k-INVARIANT IS A INVARIANT

FOR (8m + 2)-dimensional closed Spin-manifolds, one can define on the one side the finite set of Brown-Kervaire invariants, and on the other side Ochanine’s invariant k. Both are Z/Zvalued invariants of Spin-bordism, where the first are defined cohomologically as the Arf-invariant of certain quadratic refinements of the intersection form on H4m+1(M; E/2), and the second can be defined as a KO-characteristic number which by the real family index theorem has an analytic interpretation as the mod 2 index of a twisted Diracoperator. Ochanine showed that these invariants agree on the class of Spin-manifolds, for which all Stiefel-Whitney numbers containing an odd-dimensional Stiefel-Whitney class vanish. On the other hand, it is not difficult to construct two different Brown-Kervaire invariants in dimension 34. We show here (Theorem 7.1) that Ochanine’s invariant is in fact a Brown-Kervaire invariant; in particular, it vanishes if H4m+ ‘(M; Z/2) = 0, and is an invariant of the Spin-homotopy type (Corollary 7.3). This result is in analogy to the Hirzebruch signature theorem and can be considered as a Z/Zvalued cohomological index theorem for the above operator. The proof uses the integral elliptic homology of Kreck and Stolz (which in particular characterizes invariants with a multiplicativity property in WP2-bundles) and the theory of Kristensen about secondary cohomology operations (which gives a Cartan formula necessary for the computation of certain secondary operations in I-UP’-bundles).
Rapunzel Syndrome: Sonography and Computed Tomography of Trichobezoar

Bezoars are the accumulation of ingested materials. Different types of bezoars can occur in human and their name reflects the ingested material, such as vegetable or fruit fiber (phytobezoar) and milk curd (lactobezoar). The most common type of bezoar is trichobezoar, which is made of hairs (1, 2). Trichobezoars are formed in the stomach but sometimes may pass through the pylorus into small intestines (Rapunzel Syndrome). The name came after Grimm Brothers’ fairy tale in 1812 about a 12-year-old maiden who lowered her long hair from a tower to let her prince climbing up the tower and rescue her. The syndrome was discovered for the first time by Vaughan in 1968 and since then approximately 30 cases have been reported in the literature (1-4). Case RepORT
An Efficient Convolutional Neural Network for Remote-Sensing Scene Image Classification

: Deep neural networks are providing a powerful solution for remote-sensing scene image classification. However, a limited number of training samples, inter-class similarity among scene categories, and to get the benefits of multi-layer features remains a significant challenge in the remote sensing domain. Many efforts have been proposed to deal the above challenges by adapting knowledge of state-of-the-art networks such as AlexNet, GoogleNet, OverFeat, etc. However, these networks have high number of parameters. This research proposes a five-layer architecture which has fewer parameters compared with above state-of-the-art networks, and can be also complementary to other convolutional neural network features. Extensive experiments on UC Merced and WHU-RS datasets prove that although our network decreases the number of parameters dramatically, it generates more accurate results than AlexNet, OverFeat, and its accuracy is comparable with other state-of-the-art methods.
Spam Mail Scanning Using Machine Learning Algorithm

: Emails are used in professional and personal level as a way of communication. With the passage of time emails are used for advertisement, spreading virus and fraud email for plaguing users of the internet. These type of unsolicited emails are categorized as spam and other legitimated emails are categorized as ham. Over the year several machine learning algorithms are used to predict emails category. In this paper we reflect on the classifier which is good for text classification. We evaluate machine learning algorithm on spam emails detection and outcomes shows naï ve Bayes algorithm gives effective accuracy and precision using WEKA and our email management system which utilize php-ml library hosted by GitHub. Also comparative study with SVM and previous existing system in terms of accuracy and dataset used.